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Warning of "growing signs of weakness" from front-runner Joe Biden's presidential campaign, Sen. Cory Booker on Wednesday offered up a solution for Democrats searching out an understudy: himself.

"To those Democrats who are looking for an alternative right now," Booker said at the National Press Club in Washington, "I want to make the case today very directly: look no further."

"That's what it will take to win next sprint and then to beat Donald Trump in the fall," Booker said. "I'm prepared to do that, I'm building a campaign to do that, and I'm the only one in this race who has proven I can do that."

Since his resounding victory in the South Carolina primary, Biden has snagged over 40 endorsements from members of Congress and governors. On Monday, Sen. Cory Booker offered his support, a day after Biden's campaign announced that he secured the backing of another former rival of his in the Democratic presidential race, California Sen. Kamala Harris.

There have been 14 party primaries without an incumbent running since 1980. The leader in endorsements from members of Congress and governors this long after the Iowa caucuses have won 11 out of 14 of them (79%). This success rate undersells Biden because the people winning in endorsements who went on to lose were trailing in the national polls.

Since his resounding victory in the South Carolina primary, Biden has snagged over 40 endorsements from members of Congress and governors. On Monday, Sen. Cory Booker offered his support, a day after Biden's campaign announced that he secured the backing of another former rival of his in the Democratic presidential race, California Sen. Kamala Harris. No candidate has lost when ahead in the national polls and endorsements at this point, as Biden is right now. There have been 14 party primaries without an incumbent running since 1980. The leader in endorsements from members of Congress and governors this long after the Iowa caucuses have won 11 out of 14 of them (79%). This success rate undersells Biden because the people winning in endorsements who went on to lose were trailing in the national polls.

In the last month, we have witnessed a barrage of mass shootings across the United States. In each of three shootings -- in Indianapolis, Boulder, and Atlanta -- we learned that the suspects bought guns legally. Even worse, we learned after each of the three shootings that family members and friends had been concerned about these young men.

These checks are not exhaustive enough and the suspects in the recent shootings in Indiana, Boulder and Atlanta sailed through this system, even though they had documented personal struggles, mental health histories or family members and friends who flagged them as unwell.

Canada's federal licensing system is a big reason for this disparity. Buying a gun in Canada is like getting a driver's license. You have to apply for a Possession and Acquisition License (PAL) -- a process that involves a variety of background checks with a minimum 28-day waiting period for new applicants who do not have a valid firearms license. You have to take a safety training course. You have to provide personal references who can vouch for your character. You have to renew the license every five years or else you can be charged with unauthorized possession under the Firearms Act and Criminal Code.

And then there were 12. On Monday, Cory Booker, the US senator from New Jersey, became the latest contender to drop out of the Democratic presidential primary. The field is still very big, but it has narrowed in one meaningful sense: it was once historically diverse, but with Booker out, just three candidates of color remain, only one of whom, the former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, is black.

It will take place in Iowa, which is 91% white. Every single candidate on stage will be white, too

Yesterday, pundits reiterated that critique, and there was renewed discussion, too, of Iowa’s place at the top of the primary calendar, which earns the state disproportionate attention every four years. “The whiteness of [the] donor class and early states really matters,” Astead W Herndon, a politics reporter for the New York Times, tweeted. “Their vision of electability impacts viability.”

over the previous weeks, the phrase educate yourself had become a cliché.

I don’t have a problem with the idea that Americans have a responsibility to study the history of racism in their country. Indeed, I think that Black Lives Matter have performed a public service in forcing many to consider how their fellow citizens continue to be hurt by its persistent effects today

The problem is that those who claim the right to tell others to educate themselves place so much emphasis on who ought to be educated, and so little emphasis on who is doing the educating—and this turns what could be an opportunity for real intellectual engagement into an occasion for moral grandstanding.

The Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental regulations has intensified a growing civil rights battle over the deadly burden of pollution on minorities and low-income people.

Black, Latino and disadvantaged people have long been disproportionately afflicted by toxins from industrial plants, cars, hazardous housing conditions and other sources.

Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, recently said: “Civil rights have to include, fundamentally, the right to breathe your air, plant tomatoes in your soil. Civil rights is the right to drink your wate

Dutch publisher Meulenhoff had announced Rijneveld, winner of the International Booker prize, as the translator of the Joe Biden inaugural poet’s forthcoming collection, The Hill We Climb, last week

Journalist and activist Janice Deul led critics with a piece in Volkskrant asking why Meulenhoff had not chosen a translator who was, like Gorman, a “spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black”.

“An incomprehensible choice, in my view and that of many others who expressed their pain, frustration, anger and disappointment via social media,” wrote Deul. “Isn’t it – to say the least – a missed opportunity to [have hired] Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for this job? They are white, nonbinary, have no experience in this field, but according to Meulenhoff are still the ‘dream translator’?”

Like you, I’m sure, I love America, but the love has changed. I started out with the child version: America is the greatest and most powerful country on earth.

It draws from a cerebral root. We’re a people of texts. We tend to study and restudy just a few key texts, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address and Letter from a Birmingham Jail. These texts contain ideas we assent to, but also ideals that warm our hearts.

This conflict takes place not only in marches but also in school boards, in the humdrum daily acts of civic participation. Wartime heroism is not the high-water mark of American patriotism. Writing a dissenting comment about this column is.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. began his 2020 presidential campaign by losing, and then losing some more

Mr. Biden is now facing President Trump in a contest dominated by a global pandemic and a summer of unrest over police killings of Black Americans.

Mr. Biden’s year got off to a rocky start. In February, Iowans dealt him his first setback with a fourth-place finish in the state’s caucuses, and New Hampshire’s primary a week later went even worse. He finished in fifth place — and fled the state before the results came in.

President Trump was fully aware of how severe the coronavirus was back in February, even as he was publicly downplaying it.

Short everything.

declining to answer a question from Senator Cory Booker — and others from various Democrats — on whether it was “wrong to separate children from their parents to deter immigrants from coming to the United States.”

Donald Trump Is a 1960s Technology Critic’s Worst Nightmare

“American Presidential campaigning will never be the same again.” This was the Milwaukee Journal’s response, in 1960, to an event that has since become the stuff of political legend.

Rarely are worst-case-scenario fears about emerging technologies realized. The written word certainly diminished the oral tradition, for example, but it didn’t dull human intellect as Socrates feared.

‘Clarity is more important than money’

After winning the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1972, John Berger spoke out against the award’s historic roots in Caribbean exploitation: “This is why I have to turn this prize against itself.”

Gripping and inconsistent myths swirl about him. In one telling, Malcolm is a hate-filled bigot, who through religion came to see the kinship of all. In another he is the self-redeemer, a lowly pimp become an exemplar of black chivalry. In still another he is an avatar of collective revenge, a gangster whose greatest insight lay in changing not his ways, but his targets. The layers, the contradictions, the sheer profusion of Malcolm X’s public pronouncements have been a gift to seemingly every contemporary black artist and intellectual from Kanye to Cornel West.

For me, he embodied the notion of an individual made anew through his greater commitment to a broad black collective.

I thought back on the debate running from Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and I knew a final verdict had been reached. Who could look on a black family that had won the votes, if not the hearts, of Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina, waving to their country and bounding for the White House, and seriously claim, as Malcolm once did, that blacks were not American?

From a $15 national minimum wage to Medicare for all to free college tuition, Sanders’s opponents have embraced policies that were considered radical when he first proposed them during the 2016 campaign

there’s another policy realm where Sanders may find it easier to carve out a distinctly lefty niche: America’s relationship to the rest of the world.

In 2016, foreign policy was the area where Sanders distinguished himself least.

the book did not surprise me, as such, but it still stunned, shocked, and disgusted me. You simply cannot unread it, or banish what is quite obviously true from your mind

It helps explain more deeply the rants of Pope Francis about so many of his cardinals, especially his denunciations of “Pharisees” and “hypocrites,” with their sexual amorality and their vast wealth and power. “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life,”

The only tiny consolation of the book is the knowledge that we now have a pope — with all his flaws — who knows what he’s dealing with, and has acted, quite ruthlessly at times, to demote, defrock, or reassign the most egregious cases to places where they have close to nothing to do

The lobbyists’ message is simple: The Affordable Care Act is working reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed by Republicans or replaced by Democrats with a big new public program. More than 155 million Americans have employer-sponsored health coverage. They like it, by and large, and should be allowed to keep it.

Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers can increase premiums with a person’s age, and older people who do not qualify for subsidies face the highest premiums on the insurance exchange. For a 60-year-old in Charlotte, N.C., the average premium for a midlevel silver plan is more than $1,100 a month; in Phoenix, it is nearly $1,000 a month.

Beyond their desire to preserve the status quo, coalition members have done well by the Affordable Care Act. Many participants, such as the American Medical Association, the pharmaceuticals lobby and the hospital association, backed the A.C.A. from the start, banking that more insured Americans would mean more customers. The hospitals saw the health law’s Medicaid expansion as a lifeline as they struggled with the uninsured working poor.