Biodun Iginla

Reading Jane’s post Friday morning about the religious beliefs of candidates made me think of how my own Congressman, Keith Ellison, had to deal with religious controversy in his past and how he has been able to overcome it.

While a law student in 1989 and 1990, Ellison wrote several columns as Keith E.

The US invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. We’re coming up on the 5th anniversary of this invasion, a useless war that distracted from the war on terror, from the US focusing on Al-Qaeda (and the Taliban) in Afghanistan and in Waziristan, the autonomous Pashtun tribal region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is supposed to be hiding out with Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban.

On Thursday night February 21, 2008, angry Serbs broke into the U.S. Embassy and set fire to an office as rioters rampaged through Belgrade’s streets, putting an exclamation point of violence to a day of mass protest against Western support for an independent Kosovo. At least 150,000 people rallied in Belgrade, waving Serbian flags and signs proclaiming ”Stop USA terror,” to denounce the bid by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority to create

On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail establishes and demonstrates first and foremost, in general: how history emerges from places; from ordinary places; from neighborhoods; and from communities (the “place” as the ground (in the two basic senses of the word–(1) as the material floor of history (where people live their everyday lives) and (2) history as grounded in abstraction, the place forming

Here’s a recent brief history of Afghanistan either induced by the US and (the now defunct) Soviet Union’s direct involvement, or home-grown events that had ramifications for the US (and the Old Soviet Union):

In 1979: The Soviet Union occupies Afghanistan.

In 1980: Soviet troops install a puppet regime in Kabul.

In my post last week, I talked about how capitalism and technology, working for each other, produced a new regime that shattered the old pact between capital and labor, beginning in the mid-1970s. From then on, this new regime of capital began to lay the foundation for the age of the Internet that was to emerge about two decades later in the mid-1990s.

In the late-20th century and especially in the first decade of the 21st century, there have been impassioned and highly controversial debates about the merits and demerits of trade agreements like the World Trade Organization (WTO), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA)–which was simply called CAFTA before January 2004 and renamed after.

Much ink has been spilled and much airtime socked in mainstream media (MSM) about Barack Obama’s colorful (pun intended) biography in this election cycle. Much too much, in fact, that I won’t provide links. It’s simply out there and has become part of our quotidian narrative, lexicon, and vocabulary about Obama.

Quite a few feminist activists are not supporting Hillary Clinton in her bid for the presidency. And that may seem odd, given that she’s the first viable woman candidate to run for the White House. She remains highly suspect to her cohort: middle- and upper-middle-class educated and professional white women over 40 years old.

Identity politics is now back with a vengeance at the center of US politics. In the New Hampshire Democratic primary, belying all the polls and media accounts that had Obama ahead by as much as 13 points, Hillary Clinton’s unexpected victory opened up the historical antagonism between race and gender that has always haunted US politics.