News & Features

"Mali has been taken over, the northern part of Mali, by al-Qaida-type individuals. We have in — in Egypt a Muslim Brotherhood president…." With those words, spoken Monday night by Barack Obama's Republican challenger Mitt Romney just 40 seconds in the last of three debates, Africa was placed at the center of U.S. foreign policy and international security. The radical and pro-al Qaeda sect, Ansar Eddine, and the umbrella group of Tuareg tribal militias known as the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) have since December 2011 worked together to gain control of Timbuktu and most of northern Mali.

The attempted assassination of Malala Yousufzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani girl being treated in a hospital in Britain after she was shot in the head by the Taliban Oct. 9 for championing girls’ education, has united her country like few other incidents in recent memory. That's according to Khushbakht Shujat, a member of Pakstan’s National Assembly from the MQM party, who spoke with NAM editor Viji Sundaram.

In the thousands of years of known human history, every level of brow has been used to discuss fatherhood. Bill Cosby, Louis C.K. and Dr. Spock occupying the highbrow spectrum, Hitler’s Dad, Danny Tanner and Cronus  slumming it in the lower levels and  Hamlet’s pater familias, the former King of Denmark, somewhere in the middle (he could have hugged the Prince of Denmark once or twice, maybe that would have cut the brooding in half, I am on team Fortinbras). I have been a dad for three years and in the immortal words of Vonnegut, so it goes.

It was precisely at the end of eight years of the most recent Republican presidency that the country was brought down to its knees financially. How can a party take a healthy budget surplus, and in just eight years, convert it into the most disastrous financial meltdown seen in over 70 years—if indeed it were the party of wealth creation? (A blind worship of tax cuts even through a costly preemptive war was one factor.) Wealth and enterprise are synonymous with Indian-Americans. Ditto for Jewish Americans, another very prosperous and enterprising community. If the Republican Party were truly the better choice on these counts, why have these two—the wealthiest demographic groups in America—consistently aligned with the Democratic Party? 

Some experts are calling it a tie, while snap polls anoint President Obama as the winner. But the more accurate reading of the second presidential debate is to say simply: Mitt Romney lost. Yes, Obama was “much improved” as one CNN pundit put it, but his re-energised avatar would have been less impressive without Romney’s help. The former governor of Massachusetts committed five key unforced errors that determined the outcome of the debate, each revealing a different (and un-electable) Mitt Romney.

As President Obama and Mitt Romney squared off in the second presidential debate, New America Media editors posed 10 questions that have largely gone unasked -- and unanswered – in their campaigns: The Federal Poverty Line (FPL) masks U.S. poverty at a time when more Americans are struggling to make ends meet. What will you do to see that government figures are more honest--such as the new measure by the National Academy of Science? And what would you say to the growing numbers of people who aren't considered poor enough to qualify for assistance, but who are struggling just to get by?

In a September 12-16 poll Romney trailed Obama by eight points among likely voters. In a post-debate poll, Obama lags four percentage points behind Romney. What's sent the likes of Andrew Sullivan into an even greater hysterical frenzy is the fact that Romney has erased Obama's gender advantage. Women are evenly divided (47 percent) between the two. Last month Obama had an 18 point lead over Romney among women. Reuters found Romney and Obama tied at 45 percent each among likely voters. Obama still leads by five points among registered voters in Gallup's latest tracking poll, which averages seven days of data.

As the vice presidential debate’s referee, Martha Raddatz of ABC News is getting high marks almost all around for regaining a modicum of respect for the media, following Jim Lehrer’s limpid performance in the first presidential debate. What’s being widely missed by the ringside scorekeepers, however, is that while Raddatz is getting a pass for dwelling too much on foreign policy — after all, her colleagues allow, she is a foreign correspondent -- she badly flubbed the portion of the debate devoted to entitlement programs.