The New Republic

The most depressing place to be on the day Saddam Hussein’s statue fell in Baghdad was probably the ballroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, D.C. This was the site of the largest Democratic campaign event to take place during the three-week war with Iraq, a candidate forum hosted by the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). READ MORE >>

Al Sharpton is a world-class bullshitter. In a devastating 1996 review in these pages, Jim Sleeper noted that Sharpton's first autobiography, Go and Tell Pharaoh, included lies about his age (36 at the time, not 38), his residence (Englewood, New Jersey, not Brooklyn, New York), and even his motivation for writing the book (Sharpton attributed it to his 1991 stabbing; Sleeper showed that Sharpton hatched the idea months before that). READ MORE >>

"You want to know about the awakening? This is the awakening." Ginny Gong, a manager in the Montgomery County culture and recreation department, is crowded into the wood-paneled school board chamber in Rockville, Maryland. Squeezed into the aisles around her are a Vietnamese financial analyst from Lockheed Martin, a Chinese administrator from the National Institutes of Health, and about a dozen other activists. READ MORE >>

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"I'M ON THE record. D'ya hear me? I'm on the record. Dov Hikind is a self-anointed power broker and kingmaker. He's a political cross-dresser. He's not a man of enormous scruples or morals. He looks for a parade and runs to the front of it and declares he's leading it. He's a craven opportunist--d'ya hear me? An insufferable egomaniac." READ MORE >>

During the past decade, an academic movement called critical race theory has gained increasing currency in the legal academy. Rejecting the achievements of the civil rights movement of the 1960s as epiphenomenal, critical race scholars argue that the dismantling of the apparatus of formal segregation failed to purge American society of its endemic racism, or to improve the social status of African Americans in discernible or lasting ways. The claim that these scholars make is not only political; it is also epistemological. READ MORE >>

Twentieth Avenue in Bensonhurst starts in the Hudson River, where it's called Gravesend Bay, only a couple of miles from the Atlantic Ocean. You can see the ocean across the Belt Parkway, but Bensonhurst rarely looks. The neighborhood focuses inland, toward the hub of 86th Street, with its railway track suspended some sixty feet above the road, and beyond all the way down to 50th. READ MORE >>