By STAR PARKER, Scripps Howard News Service

The National Urban League has just issued its annual State of Black America report. It provides a troubling statistical snapshot of where blacks stand today in our country.
Like Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, I'm concerned. But after concern, we part company. We have very different ideas of what it is we should be concerned about.

It says something about the dismal state of affairs in our country today by what outrages folks.

From what I see, the Republican National Committee representatives who picked Michael Steele as their new chairman made a mistake. I think Steele ought to step aside.

Blacks are not given enough credit for being trendsetters in America.
Blacks started playing the blues, jazz, and R&B, then the rest of America started playing them. Blacks discovered the politics of victimhood, then the rest of America started catching on.

I share President Obama's concerns about education. We certainly need to do a better job, particularly in our low-income communities.
But, from what I see so far, we're on very different pages regarding how to think about the problem.
For Obama, the solution to everything seems to be government and spending. But in improving education, more of neither seems to work.

I share President Obama's concerns about education. We certainly need to do a better job, particularly in our low-income communities.
But, from what I see so far, we're on very different pages regarding how to think about the problem.
For Obama, the solution to everything seems to be government and spending. But in improving education, more of neither seems to work.

As our new political leadership leads us into the fiscal twilight zone, is it too much to ask for a little honesty as they do it?
The day after President Obama unveiled his plan to bail out distressed mortgage holders, Treasury Secretary Geithner and Housing Secretary Donovan wrote an op-ed in USA Today explaining it.

A travesty of justice has occurred in Oakland, California. But realities surrounding this local issue point to how the economic crisis in our nation is symptomatic of and flows from a deeper fundamental moral crisis.

Six years ago I wrote a book called "Uncle Sam's Plantation." I wrote the book to tell my own story of what I saw living inside the welfare state and my own transformation out of it.
I said in that book that indeed there are two Americas. A poor America on socialism and a wealthy America on capitalism.

The Obama administration, completing its first full week, wasted no time getting priorities in order. First, issue formal apologies to the world, and then begin advancing massive, intrusive government at home.