Politics

Were supporters of North Carolina Amendment One to honestly acknowledge what the amendment will definitely do, as well as what it might do, they'd be fighting for a losing proposition.

Tom Friedman's column today calls for re-thinking American capitalism by striking a series of "grand bargains," and as usual his analysis of what stands in the way of such grand bargains bears no relationship to the realities of American politics.

He had not been specifically asked about blacks and he was speaking in Iowa, a state whose population is less than four percent African American and one in which -- though blacks are over-represented on government assistance rolls -- the vast majority of individuals on public assistance are white.

If you can't see the well-coiffed world that Romney sees through his rose-tinted glasses, the least you can do is keep it to yourself. Like Richie Rich, Mitt Romney is the poor little rich boy, unfairly maligned merely because he's better than you are.

Though the overwhelmingly negative response to Brisbane was warranted, the episode itself illustrates the degree to which major political forces have already succeeded in bending the mainstream media to its will.

The GOP's attack on regulation is part of a larger attempt to discredit the idea that government can play a positive role in people's lives. That attack is itself based on a fantasy -- that in the absence of government, human action would yield generally optimal outcomes for society as a whole.

What's bracing to see in 2011 is that facts themselves represent the same impediment for conservatives that political correctness did two decades ago -- as an appalling constraint on the right's God-given right to unabashed condemnation.

Occupy Wall Street is a nascent phenomenon, whose future relevance to American politics, if any, is unknown. But it's already served as a useful window into the psychology of much of our gatekeeper media.

We live in a time when the irresistible force that is the machinery of death on the one hand and the immovable object that is the indifference to the fate of the least among us on the other -- conspired in the execution of Troy Davis.

Since the civil rights era, most Americans would like to believe that public policy is no longer directed at perpetuating racism and, on the contrary, works to ameliorate it where it still exists. But policy instruments remain that deepen ethnic and racial differences.

The egregious mis-characterization of Obama's outlook has profound consequences for our nation's well-being. Three areas in particular warrant scrutiny.

Many factors are conspiring to reinforce and intensify a fundamental rift in Americans' political self-identification based on deep-seated personality characteristics.