Last month I announced my plans to close down this site. Today I want to take a moment to update you on the status of that transition. On Friday, December 28, two weeks from today, I will post my last daily commentary on the site. After that, the site will remain open, at least until the end of February 2008, but I will no longer post articles everyday. I will continue to write about the presidential race and other important issues as circumstances warrant. My goal is to post at least one article per week. And I plan to continue...

It would have been easy to write about politics today. But with so much going on in the presidential campaign, I figure everybody else will be talking about that already. So today I decided to take a little pop culture diversion. Anybody who has ever read this website in January knows how much I love American Idol. Although the last two winners have disappointed me, the show itself continues to entertain every year. So last night when I turned on the television and decided not to go to the gym, I was looking for something to keep my interest....

I am sad to report today that my colleague Tom Morgan, a legendary journalist, has passed away. Tom was a native of St. Louis and during his career he served as a reporter and editor at the New York Times, Washington Post and Miami Herald. He came to my attention in the 1990s after he had become the first openly gay president of the National Association of Black Journalists. I did not know Tom well, but I admired and respected him immensely. An attractive, well-built man with a serious journalistic pedigree, he left a strong impression on me the...

Kenneth Winfrey Reports As I think over the past year, I am glad to say that I feel that I’ve had a wonderful year. Despite the disappointments, there were many precious moments of realization and countless others where I feel that I was blessed with the gifts that life on Earth has to offer. I feel that I have learned a great deal during this year, especially from writing on this site. And while I fancy myself as a writer, I am not able to describe fully my gratitude for the experience this site has provided for me. My life...

The world has been on edge for months as it watches the elections in the U.S., Russia and Pakistan, three very different nuclear powers. This morning in Pakistan, the election campaign took a dramatic turn as former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the first female political leader of a modern Muslim nation, was assassinated at a campaign rally. Pakistan has been an ally to the United States in the war on terror, but some suspect that the Pakistani government has not done enough to rein in Al Qaeda. Bhutto, a Harvard-educated leader, emerged from exile earlier this year and returned...

We made it. This is the last daily post I will make on the site. Of course I will continue to write on the blog during the next few months, especially about the presidential campaign. But you will notice that the site will begin to change starting today. The first change you will see is the URL address for this page. The new address will move from keithboykin.com to keithboykin.com/blog/archives. The main address for the site will remain the same, but the keithboykin.com URL will soon point to a different entry page. We are also in the process of redoing...

Nathan Hale Williams Reviews Star Jones is smart! Very smart. I have always admired that about her. She’s so smart she did exactly what I told her to do to revive her career. Well, I actually never spoke to her personally, but she has followed my instructions to a tee. And, it seems like it has worked out for her…so far. Roughly one year after her abrupt departure from The View, Ms. Jones (ne’ Reynolds) today returned to daytime television with her eponymous show, Star Jones. Ironically, she has returned to Court TV, which is the network where she launched...

Yesterday Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finally took the advice that almost everyone in Washington had given him and resigned. In the process, he left behind a cloud of doubt and suspicion over the Justice Department. His announcement came just a week after the resignation of White House political director Karl Rove, in the same month as the retirement notice of White House press secretary Tony Snow, and less than a year from the departure of embattled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And it took place on the same day when Senator Larry Craig, a prominent Republican from Idaho, acknowledged that he...

One day last summer I was walking home from the gym in Harlem when I noticed a young shirtless man walking slowly in front of me. He was walking with the familiar side-to-side swagger of young men in hip hop as I followed far behind. By the time I approached him, I realized the reason he was walking so slowly. His pants were sagging so far down that the full length of his boxer shorts were exposed. He must have heard my footsteps as I approached from behind because he turned around just as I got closer. He scowled a...

Seventeen days ago, Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Kenneth Pollack, a director of research at Brookings, wrote a controversial op-ed in the New York Times called "A War We Just Might Win." The two men had just returned from an 8-day trip in Iraq where they met with American and Iraqi officials. They came home to declare something close to victory. "We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms," they wrote. "As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the...