Jamelle Bouie

While liberals have been outraged about Arizona’s new immigration law, quite a few commentators have defended the measure as necessary. Usually the argument sounds something like this, “The federal government has punted the ball on immigration! Arizona receives a huge number of illegal immigrants had to do something to stem the tide! This is something.” [...]

Not that it matters, but I wanted to voice my full-throated support for this idea: As Reagan and Grant supporters duke it out over who should be on the $50 bill, not a single legislator has proposed a woman who could represent the 51 percent of the population that hasn’t been seen on our nation’s [...]

Or at least, he gets upset when political science research flies in the face of his biases and ideology. Here are his thoughts on the University of Washington’s recent study on racial resentment among Tea Party sympathizers: They won’t give it up. “Are Tea Partiers Racist?” asks a Newsweek.com headline, apparently written under the mistaken [...]

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell moves to step four of his plan to alienate everyone who didn’t vote for him: Gov. Bob McDonnell praised State Police Superintendent W. Stephen Flaherty today for reinstating a policy that allows State Police chaplains to invoke Jesus. Flaherty rescinded the policy two years ago, after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court [...]

Sarah Palin doesn’t think that there’s any “ability or opportunity” in Arizona’s new immigration law for racial profiling. Surprisingly, her Fox News colleagues disagree: One of the most objectionable things about Arizona’s law is the blatant racial profiling, but that doesn’t seem to phase most conservatives. Jonah Goldberg doesn’t see a problem with it. George [...]

I think George Will is trying to be clever here, but it really just comes off as incredibly obtuse and not a little bit racist: Non-Hispanic Arizonans of all sorts live congenially with all sorts of persons of Hispanic descent. These include some whose ancestors got to Arizona before statehood — some even before it [...]

My birthday was a few weeks ago, but if I could go back in time and make a different wish, I’d ask God — or whoever is responsible — to keep clueless columnists from comparing the Tea Party Movement to everything under the damn sun. For instance, here’s Anne Applebaum: Here is a riddle: What [...]

Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, isn’t too alarmed with the reach or scale of Arizona’s new immigration law: I support the Arizona law, but I’m also worried that it could lead to civil rights abuses. It seems that whenever government expands either its powers or its enforcement efforts, you should be worried that it [...]

My friend Alyssa is okay with the recently announced Monsters, Inc. sequel, but would rather see Pixar give the sequel treatment to The Incredibles: The Incredibles also is a movie about a standard-looking metropolis that’s secretly full of extraordinary people. But the questions The Incredibles raise about how talented people fit into and alter society [...]

Andrew Cohen’s praise for the far-sightedness of the Founding Fathers is typical of the genre. Whenever our contemporary politics are gridlocked, and whenever it seems that our system is incapable of working on behalf of future generations, we look at the Founders with envy, “Why can’t our leaders be as wise, or as prudent, or [...]