Is Bill Sparkman -- the 51-year old US Census fieldworker found hanged in rural southeastern Kentucky with the word "Fed" scrawled across his chest -- a victim of hate crime directed at Uncle Sam? Or the casualty of drug-related violence in a struggling pocket of America?

To date, nobody knows...

At the White House tonight, Bam, James, and Skip are resolving America's race problem. Over a BEER.

Not a Pomegranate 'Tini. Not a Creole Julep. Not a Cape Cod. Not a Gin Rickey. And definitely not a White Lady (1 oz gin, 1 oz orange liqueur, 1 oz lime...

The threesome -- or Man Date -- between the President, Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley, and Skip Gates bears the slight fingerprints of David Axelrod.

The President's 2008 campaign put a premium on comforting skittish white voters to look past Obama's skin color and...

Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD?
A: Nigger

Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge

These two jokes come to my mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest. The...

Frank Ricci just wanted to ace his firefighters exam.

He rallied to overcome dyslexia and "several learning disabilities." He spent more than $1,000 to purchase study materials and to pay his neighbor to read them on tape to him. And never mind the 8 to 13 hours a day he...

"The American Dream of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's groceries."

This comment comes not from Paul Krugman or a lefty think tank, but from a discharged GI writing his hometown newspaper in Lockport, NY, during the winter...

President Obama has chosen one tough, intellectually dazzling, judicially seasoned woman as his Supreme Court pick.

If confirmed, the Princeton (summa cum laude) and Yale Law School standout, would bring more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any justice in 100 years, and more overall judicial experience...

Fine-tuning the treacly, Baby Boomer, 60s-holdover race coverage it excels at, the New York Times tells us "Voices Reflect Rising Sense of Racial Optimism" (Sunday, May 3, A1).

"I go to a gym where there are a number of black people," Mr. Schmidt, a white man, chirps. "We don't...

Ever been to those "The Future of Journalism" media panels? They sound more like "Old Scribes Mourn the Past" panels. And the panelists invariably look like Statler & Waldorf, the two old Muppets sitting in the opera box seats.

The Journalism Establishment has a tough time seeing new media as...

Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Barack Obama's "evil twin," his racial Alter Ego: Eric Holder.

Barack avoids discussing race like the plague - ever hear the words "el Barrio," "reparations," "Asian math whiz" escape his lips? But his Attorney General just unleashed a racial tongue lashing on Americans.

Holder called America...

The New York Times just dutifully explained how entry-level workers in the fine-art auction world -- perky, white sorority types/trust-fund girls -- are weathering the recession. One girl chirps that she doesn't mind that Christie's has substituted lavish catered soirees for potluck suppers.

The recession has hidden benefits...

"The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common...

"Is it The End of White America?," The Atlantic asks this month.

As if. Not even close. But The Atlantic's smart, timely article raises incisive questions about race in these heady times.

Today is just the time to give the King holiday an extreme makeover.

The black-white racial...

Channel surfing on the treadmill at the New York Health and Racquet Club, paying for pastrami at the corner Deli, and checking the weather on-line, I'm bombarded by the visages of 15-year-old Shawn Hornbeck and 13-year-old Ben Ownsby, even three weeks after their recovery from abduction in Kirkwood,...

At a packed Generation Engage/Demos non-partisan forum preceding the State of the Union, wordsmith William Safire wisely predicted one of the President’s biggest applause lines: “We need to resolve the status of illegal immigrants without animosity and without amnesty.” Carefully chosen words, indeed. Newly confronted by Democratic power, and scrambling...

The Washington Post scooped the major other dailies on the Pentagon's closely guarded review of the War in Iraq. The review boils down the military's options to three: "Go Big," "Go Long," "Go Home."

"Go Big" - aka The McCain option - involves a significant troop increase. "Go...

Barely after the sun rises tomorrow morning, party apparatchiks will dissect the voting data to determine who captured politics' golden chalice -- suburban and exurban white voters -- and how.

Who are these folks? According to Finding Exurbia, a fascinating new study from the Brookings Institution, exurban counties have: