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On Hardball Monday, MSNBC contributor Michelle Bernard said the U.S. is on the verge of experiencing a “genocide” of young black men. Bernard was on the program with the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson to discuss the ongoing unrest in Ferguson, Mo., following the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Bernard, who is black, said her 11-year-old son had asked her recently if someone was going to shoot him, as was the case with Brown. ADVERTISEMENT “I don’t have an answer that is palatable to be able to look my children in the face and say there are people in this...

The Associated Press Stylebook states that in reports referring to a person’s age, the figure for the age number should be used. It also states that reports should “use man or woman for individuals 18 and older.” Why, then, are AP reports on the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown solely referring to him as a “teen” and “teenager”? ADVERTISEMENT “Don’t know’ if Missouri teen shot with hands up,” reads one AP headline from Monday. “County autopsy: Unarmed teen shot 6 to 8 times,” reads another. And an excerpt from yet another AP story, emphasis added: “Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon lifted...

<p>Looters in Ferguson, Mo., were met with little police resistance Friday night and store owners say they were forced to protect their businesses with their own guns, Fox2Now.com reported.</p> <p>"I think the first message is to remind all law enforcement that they are hired to serve and protect and if they’re going to sit back and watch looting, they're not serving us; they’re not protecting us," Pastor Robert White told the station.</p>

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry devoted much of her show Saturday to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown and the unrest that has followed in Ferguson, Missouri. But perhaps the most moving part of her broadcast came when she looked at the hundreds of other unarmed black men who are killed by police every year. ADVERTISEMENT Harris-Perry began by solemnizing reading off just some of the names of those men before arriving at Michael Brown. “In the past decade alone, these men and hundreds of others have lost their lives to police,” she said. She cited a recent story that said local...

FERGUSON, Missouri — Reporters trying to cover the renewed chaos in this town faced a new threat on Friday: the demonstrators themselves. Print, video and photo-journalists were all repeatedly and aggressively threatened and harassed when attempting to photograph or videotape any of the looting or property destruction. Many of the demonstrators expressed concern about being identified by police or told reporters that the looting was none of their concern. Police largely remained on the sidelines on Friday and into the dawn hours of Saturday morning as demonstrators descended on a number of businesses in Ferguson — pulling alcohol, lottery tickets,...

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan Thursday ordered the Internal Revenue Service to come up with new answers after IRS employees contradicted sworn testimony about damage to Lois Lerner’s hard drive. Sullivan ruled that “the IRS is hereby ORDERED to file a sworn Declaration, by an official with the authority to speak under oath for the Agency, by no later than August 22, 2014″ on four issues: the IRS’ attempted recovery of Lerner’s lost emails after her computer allegedly crashed, bar codes that could have been on the hard drive, IRS policies on hard drive destruction, and information about an...

Protesters and members of the New Black Panther Party took over what was supposed to be Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson’s press conference Thursday regarding the ongoing unrest in the St. Louis suburb. A crowd gathered inside the Ferguson fire department as New Black Panther Party leader Hashim Nzinga addressed the crowd, mostly focusing his anger on President Barack Obama. “This is a shame that as we speak the president of United States is talking to Russia, he’s talking to China, he’s talking to North Korea, he’s talking to Iraq and the Middle East about treating their people better,” he...

The number of Obamacare enrollments for top health insurer Aetna is plummeting, according to a report from Investor’s Business Daily. Aetna’s enrollment reached 720,000 by May 20, after the final end to the the extended open enrollment period. But by the end of June Aetna had less than 600,000 paying customers, IBD reports, and the company expects paying customers to fall to “just over 500,000″ by the end of 2015. That would be a drop of just under 30 percent from the May sign-up numbers — the last time the Obama administration released its official Obamacare enrollment tally. Aetna’s reported...

It’s one thing for Democrats running in red parts of the country to sound like Republicans on the campaign trail. It’s another when Democrats running in purple or even blue territory try to do so. Yet that’s what’s happening in race after race this season. Faced with a treacherous political environment, many Democrats are trotting out campaign ads that call for balanced budgets, tax cuts and other more traditionally GOP positions. Some of them are running in congressional districts that just two years ago broke sharply for President Barack Obama. The Republican-flavored ads provide an early glimpse of how Democrats...

Oscar-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams has died at age 63, according to police in Marin County, Calif. The full statement is below. On August 11, 2014, at approximately 11:55 a.m, Marin County Communications received a 9-1-1 telephone call reporting a male adult had been located unconscious and not breathing inside his residence in unincorporated Tiburon, CA. The Sheriff’s Office, as well as the Tiburon Fire Department and Southern Marin Fire Protection District were dispatched to the incident with emergency personnel arriving on scene at 12:00 pm. The male subject, pronounced deceased at 12:02 pm has been identified as Robin...

Polls from major networks, researchers and newspapers agree: America’s in a bad mood. In just one week, polls found politicians of all stripes are hitting approval numbers with record lows. The president finds himself roughly as popular as a trip to the dentist. The entire Democratic Party gets the thumbs down. Oh, and so does the Republican Party. But it doesn’t stop there. Americans are also bummed out about the future in general, especially the economy. Things are so low that even an old favorite, sugar, polled poorly. (See the latest congressional polls from POLITICO's Polling Center) Pollsters say it...

OAK BLUFFS Mass. (Reuters) - President Barack Obama gave Americans an update on U.S. military strikes in Iraq on Saturday from a podium on the White House lawn with Marine One, the presidential helicopter, parked in the background. Four hours later, he offered an altogether different tableau: a golf game with friends at a lush course on Martha's Vineyard, the upscale Massachusetts island where the president and his family began a two-week vacation. The contrasting scenes, which quickly sparked some hostile commentary from critics, illustrate the dilemma of taking time off when you are the most powerful leader in the...

Jake Tapper grilled White House Deputy National Security Advisor Tony Blinken today over the perception that President Obama underestimated the threat of ISIS, citing in particular a quote in which Obama compared ISIS and other al-Qaeda groups to junior varsity teams wearing Lakers uniforms. ADVERTISEMENT Tapper said that “for months and months” people had warned about the threat ISIS posed “with no action, no serious action, by the White House.” He asked, “Was the intelligence not there? Why is it only now that you’re acting?” Blinken argued they’ve been “focused on this for well over a year,” and they had...

Only 28 percent of swing-voting independents support President Barack Obama’s immigration policies, while 59 percent oppose those policies, according to a new CBS poll, which also shows that GOP voters think immigration is a more important issue than Obamacare. That’s a big problem for Obama, as he heads into a critical election season while promising to impose an unprecedented national amnesty for several million illegals, in the face of opposition from Congress. GOP-leaning supporters already oppose his immigration policy, by 85 percent to 7 seven percent, while Democrats are split, with 33 percent disapproving and 56 approving of his immigration...

With Ebola claiming more than 900 lives and a handful people in America receiving tests for the deadly virus, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa is convening a hearing Thursday to examine the threat. “Around the country there is a heightened sense of concern. Hopefully we don’t go beyond the concern and containment is the key here,” Subcommittee Chairman Chris Smith (R-NJ) said during a C-SPAN interview Thursday morning. “We’re going to be talking about all things, including some of the potentially powerful drugs that might be able to overcome this horrific disease that just has such a high...

Not since Abraham Lincoln pondered his Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 has a president considered ordering a more sweeping adjustment to membership in the American community than the mass relief for illegal immigrants that President Obama is said to be contemplating. There is obviously no analogy between slavery and the disadvantages the undocumented face today. Among many other differences, the undocumented arrived voluntarily, searching, often successfully, for a better life. Also, they established residence unlawfully, for which there must be some reckoning. Still, the essentially permanent presence of some 11 million people whose labor and cultural contributions benefit the United States...

MSNBC reporter Chris Jansing claimed President Barack Obama’s keen interest in this week’s African leadership summit stems from the fact that “he’s from Kenya” — an assertion that took over ten minutes for her to reverse. Jansing spoke to MSNBC’s Joy Reid about the ongoing meeting of American and African leaders in Washington D.C. “The White House is clearly, I would assume, hoping this will be part of the president’s legacy, given his background,” Reid said. “Yeah, the fact that he’s from Kenya,” Jansing replied breezily. “And the fact that when he was elected there were expectations on the African...

Two words sum up the mood of the nation: Fed up. Six in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with the state of the U.S. economy, more than 70 percent believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, and nearly 80 percent are down on the country’s political system, according to the latest NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll. The frustration carries over to the nation’s political leaders, with President Barack Obama’s overall approval rating hitting a new low at 40 percent, and a mere 14 percent of the public giving Congress a thumbs up. “We’re in the summer of...

This week felt like déjà vu all over again for immigration activists who held hunger strikes ahead of Christmas break. The House and Senate, one of the least productive to ever set foot in the nation's Capitol, left Washington this week to go on vacation without bringing forward a vote on reform. Again. But activists aren't the only ones fed up with Congress’ inaction on immigration reform. The country's largest states—California, New York, and Texas—have been looking for ways to take matters into their own hands when it comes to granting rights to undocumented residents. In New York, State Senator...

Eric Holder does not shy away from being called an activist – in fact, the U.S. Attorney General considers the label an honor. “If you want to call me an activist attorney general, I will proudly accept that label,” Holder told journalist Juan Williams in an interview published at The Hill. “Any attorney general who is not an activist is not doing his or her job,” he continued, adding that “the responsibility of the attorney general is to change things [and] bring us closer to the ideals expressed in our founding documents.” Asked later about his response to critics who...