Barack Obama

Tea Party: a Nation of Islam for White People?
Jenean McBrearty offers a response to JoAnn Wypijewski’s “Outside a Tea Party“: While in graduate school in the 1980s, I was often alone in empty halls after undergrads had left. One day I saw suited young black men along a stairwell, and heard doings upstairs. It was a meeting of The Nation of Islam. Being…

Obama’s Nobel: A Jewish Conspiracy to Combat Space Nazis
At last, someone presents a justification for Obama’s Nobel Prize I can get behind: Fighting Nazis on the moon.

Ghosts of Cairo
Anthea Butler hears the ghost of Malcolm X in Obama’s Cairo speech. “So the past isn’t over until we understand it,” writes poet Lawrence Raab in his new book, The History of Forgetting, “which is one of the reasons / ghosts keep appearing.” Obama’s speech will not allow them to rest, says Alexander Cockburn. “There…

The Supreme Love and Revolutionary Funk of Dr. Cornel West, Philosopher of the Blues
(A version of this article first appeared in the May 28, 2009 Rolling Stone.) Cornel West is a slender man, but he hugs like a sumo wrestler: crouch, grab, wrap and squeeze. “I want to love everybody,” West tells me not long after he greets me at his Princeton University office with a bear hug…

Unusual Suspects
Dan Gilgoff explains why the Sotomayor nomination hearings may not be so predictable after all on his U.S. News and World Report blog, God and Country. In The Guide, the magazine of gay travel, entertainment, politics, and sex, veteran religious right watcher Doug Ireland notes that Obama’s rightward moves on matters of concern to Christian…