According to conservative pundit Andrew Breitbart, “calling a person a racist is the worst thing you can call a person in this country.”

He offered the pronouncement up during a recent guest-spot on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. I’ve been going through my DVR’d episodes this weekend, and I finally caught this comment.

Breitbart was debating Georgetown’s Michael Eric Dyson during the telecast and arguing (it seems) that any and all invocations of racism are bogus. They simply end debates with a broad-brushed attempt at categorical demonization. Label someone a racist, he says, and you can silence them.

For instance, Maher called Rush Limbaugh’s antics racist, including the radio host’s giddy promotion of that “Obama, the Magic Negro” song. Breitbart took offense, calling the accusation utterly ridiculous. A liberal journalist coined the phrase, he responded. So, isn’t that...

Jonathan Krohn is a 14-year-old pundit and author of a new book on conservative values. If you haven’t seen his clips, they are worth checking out. I’ve been asking folks to give me their impression of him.

Some people think of him as precocious and inspiring, an example of what political activism and investment can look like even for the youngest (pre-voting) Americans.

Others are far more harsh, dismissing him as brainwashed, as a victim of “ideological child abuse” spouting little more than canned platitudes. His fans think he is injecting a wonderful new energy in the political landscape. Detractors say that he is simply too young and “affected” (one person’s pejorative take on his presentational style) to really have anything valuable to say about politics. The latter seems to harsh; the former too naively hopeful.

Last month, Khrohn gave a two-minute speech at the CPAC...

I’m still going through all the news I missed last week, and I’ve finally gotten caught up on the recent brouhaha that Jon Stewart caused by calling out CNBC, particularly Mad Money host Jim Cramer, for falling down on the job during the lead-up to the stock market’s current hemorrhaging.

Stewart lit into Cramer for being a “snake oil salesman” passing himself off as something more legitimate. If CNBC had done its job, Stewart railed, maybe people would have been better prepared for this crisis, maybe some of its sharpest edges could have been blunted.

Even if that is overstating the case and this was all unavoidable, Stewart maintains that CNBC should still be ashamed of its financial coverage during the weeks and months before the bottom dropped out of the market. He even characterizes their position as “complicit” with the more general irresponsibility that has dragged our...

Holder (image at Newsday.com)

One Brainstorm reader, gh, says that “Obama threw Eric Holder under the bus a few days ago for race-baiting.”

This weekend, The New York Times published an article that represented Obama’s take on Holder’s “nation of cowards” comment. Obama says that “if I had been advising my attorney general, we would have used different language.”

Obama did concede that Americans are “oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race” and “probably [need to] be more constructive in facing up to sort of the painful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.”

Here’s how the article ends:

Mr. Obama was asked whether he agreed with Mr. Holder. He hesitated for five seconds before responding.

“I’m not somebody who believes that constantly talking about race somehow solves racial tensions,” Mr. Obama said. “I think what solves racial tensions is fixing...

I’ve spent the last six days “on vacation” and purposefully off the grid with respect to following news stories in any real detail. Back to the grind today, however, and I have returned from my own private cave dwelling (and that’s only partly metaphorical, since I also visited an actual cave during one of those days) to find that Bernard Madoff is being defended by an attorney, Ira Sorkin, with “conflicts of interest” in need of waiving. Hunh?

Sorkin once invested a little under $20,000 with Madoff (in the 1990s). He also previously represented two would-be witnesses in the Madoff case. Moreover, Sorkin’s parents invested almost $1,000,000 with Madoff, money earmarked for their grandchildren’s trust funds. Ira Sorkin is the kids’ father and trustee of their trusts.

Why would Madoff want Sorkin in his corner and pleading his case? Is it supposed to humanize him, to show people that...

The incomparable Rush Limbaugh has started yet another partisan debate.

What does it mean to root for presidential failure from the other side of the political aisle.

Limbaugh says, unequivocally, that he wants Obama to fail. He wants the stimulus package to fail. Moreover, he thinks that any honest, red-blooded Republican should share that position.

Of course, other elected officials in the RNC have been asked to weigh in on Limbaugh’s provocative and seemingly inflammatory claim.

Some, like House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, have made no bones about the fact that they want to create some real distance between themselves and Limbaugh. “Nobody, no Republican, no Democrat, wants this president to fail,” he said on ABC’s This Week this weekend. “Nor do they want this country to fail or the economy to fail.” Period. Cantor is pretty clear and unequivocal.

New RNC head...

Duke University’s Mark Anthony Neal discusses “the greatest singer you’ve never heard,” Linda Jones.

In 1967, at the tender age of 22, Jones recorded a powerful song titled “Hypnotized.” Jones died in the early 1970s, but her singing style made quite an impression on subsequent generations of vocalists.

Neal wrote an intriguing essay on her ability to represent physical and emotional pain through her stylized and sophisticated vocalizations. Jones suffered from diabetes and painful diabetic seizures, and Neal uses Elaine Scarry’s Bodies in Pain as his inspiration for an argument about the extent to which Jones’s “harsh” and hypnotic sound represents her concerted attempt to render that pain acoustically and aesthetically.

Her singerly choices (her skillful attempts to “bend and break notes”), he says, demonstrate a profound recognition of language’s inadequacy as a mechanism ...

A lot of Brainstorm readers have already responded to Holder’s “nation of cowards” comment. I mentioned it in a blog post last week, and many people weighed-in on the matter.

Responses ran the gamut, from folks taking issue simply with his “volatile” and “insulting” word choice, to those challenging his entire assumption about the continuing significance of race/racism in a contemporary America that boasts its first African-American president (and his choice of America’s first African American attorney general).

There’s an anonymous post from perplexed, someone who “can’t imagine ‘nation of cowards’ being the kind of language that stimulates productive discussion among Americans of any hue.”

“We’re not just cowards; we’re racist cowards,” says (a decidedly less perplexed) Dan. “Correct diagnosis is the first step toward cure.”

“It is difficult to have a ‘conversation’ when as...

Does anyone want to hazard a guess about how long it’ll be before Obama-replacement Roland Burris steps down from his new post?

The new senator has been taking incredible amounts of heat for recent re-interpretations of his pre-selection ties to former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

As the federal government continues its investigation of Blagojevich, it also continues to speak to Roland Burris, who has been raked over the coals for some seemingly contradictory statements about his relationship to the disgraced governor.

Burris allegedly told the Illinois House committee (the same group that brought about Blagojevich’s impeachment) that he had never had any contact whatsoever with Blagojevich or his staffers — and that he certainly never toyed with the idea of “paying to play” for the vacated Obama seat.

But Burris just released an affidavit (a little earlier this month) ...

Eric Holder, President Obama’s recently confirmed pick for attorney general, the first African-American to hold the post, has caused quite a stir by calling Americans cowardly vis-a-vis their engagements (or not) with racial issues. I just caught wind of the controversy at my airplane’s depature gate this morning. We are about to board, but I just wanted to quickly ask people to weigh in on the matter.

Is Holder being too harsh?

Are Republicans being opportunistic/partisan in their critiques?

Are whites (and blacks) who claim to be insulted by Holder’s comments just too sensitive? Too committed to putting the postracial cart before the still-racist horse?

Are blacks (and whites) who second his claim just too invested in race? Differently hypersensitive?

I know where I stand. I just published a book about it, Racial Paranoia (Basic). I should also say that that book does...