Just when you thought your opinion of the
Nation of Islam (NOI) and its reality-challenged leaders couldn't
fall any lower, you find yourself clearing a space in the basement
of… more
Probably the only thing the defense and the
prosecution sides in the Mumia Abu-Jamal case would agree on is that the burden lies with
the defense team to win him a retrial. Under the governing federal statute, the defense
has to provide clear and convincing evidence that there was such endemic unfairness at the
… more
Depending on who's doing the talking, convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal is
either a race-maddened psychopath cynically manipulating the gullible into helping him get
away with murder, or an innocent artist and revolutionary railroaded onto death row by the
racist forces of oppression.
In 1904, a group of New York nuns delivered 40 mostly Irish but entirely Catholic orphans to a remote Arizona mining town to be adopted by local
Catholics. What happened next is the subject of historian Linda Gordon's compelling new
book: For their act of Christian charity, the nuns were rewarded with near-lynching and
public vilification of an intensity… more
George W. Bush's symbolic
gestures to the Texas Latino community have gone a long way. But will the approach work in
states like California?
On Sept. 2, Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush
gave a major educational policy speech to the Latin Business Association in Los Angeles.
… more
One day the Democratic Party may wake up and wonder
where all the black people have gone. While blacks over 50, especially older black women,
remain solidly Democratic, the young are increasingly alienated from politics in general
-- and from the Democratic Party in particular.
Now that high-profile black Republicans like… more
It
was the headline -- "White man gets mayoral nomination in Baltimore" -- that got
the Washington Post into so much hot water last month that its ombudsman, R. Shipp, felt
obliged to issue this odd mea culpa
[The headline] reveals a heightened sensitivity… more
One minute, you're tooling along the bustling
superhighways of downtown Houston with its sleek office towers and important-looking
people driving fancy cars. Then you exit at Scott Street, enter the Third Ward Bottoms,
and head back in time -- back to those old sepia photos of the Mississippi Delta, circa
1940.
If you happen to be an employer, a First
Amendment absolutist or a trash-talking loser, life became a bit more difficult last week.
That's because the California Supreme Court forbade the future
use of racial slurs in a workplace that has already been found by a court to be a hostile
environment… more
