Jamelle Bouie

Last night, closing his assertive speech on the American Jobs Act, President Obama made a promise. “This plan is the right thing to do right now, and you should pass it,” he said to the joint session of Congress, “And I intend to take that message to every corner of this country.” This morning, Obama […]

This, from the front page of the Drudge Report, is just unambiguously racist: Get it? Because black people are lazy, shiftless moochers, they are naturally ecstatic about President Obama’s forthcoming push for renewed payroll tax cuts and unemployment insurance. On a related note, a July survey from the Pew Research Center found a large uptick […]

If there’s anything impressive about Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign, it’s the extent to which he’s convinced the world of his moderation. For example, here’s the first sentence of The New York Times’ write-up on his recently released economic plan: “Jon M. Huntsman Jr. again showed himself on Wednesday to be an ideological outlier in the […]

Between his defense of the scientific consensus and his willingness to denounce the GOP’s brinksmanship on the debt ceiling, it seemed safe to describe former Utah governor and ambassador to China Jon Huntsman as a conservative representative of the reality-based community. If Huntsman’s jobs plan is any indication, that assessment was off-base. Here are the […]

As a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry’s claim to fame is his devotion to states’ rights. Under Perry, Texas has pushed the federal government for greater autonomy in the operation of programs like Medicaid, where states are responsible for delivering services and hewing to federal mandates. Perry has also […]

At The Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz castigates local and national media for overhyping Hurricane Irene: Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. […] Every producer knew that to abandon the coverage even briefly—say, to cover the continued fighting in Libya—was […]

It’s Friday! Which means another round of bad news for the economy. In this case, the Commerce Department has revised its assessment of economic growth for the second quarter. At the time, economists had estimated 1.3 percent growth for the quarter – sluggish, but an improvement over the first quarter, when the economy grew by […]