On Fox News recently, I debated the right of women everywhere — including employees of public purpose, religiously-affiliated institutions — to have access to contraception.
I said:
“Conservatives are always interested in individual choice, until it comes to individual choices that they don’t seem to like. Look, 98 percent of American women in this country, including Catholic women of reproductive age, use contraception.”
Here’s the video clip:
In case you don’t regularly devour the TV news industry insider site… they picked up my interview with Role/Reboot. Check it out.
You can read the story here.
The incredible Nicole Rodgers, founder and head of the visionary Role/Reboot site examining gender roles and norms in our society, interviewed me about my new role as a Fox News Contributor. You can read the entire interview here.
This is my favorite excerpt:
Nicole Rodgers: Some on the right are organizing campaigns to smear you, and attack Fox News for hiring you. Does that kind of thing bother you, or is having a thick skin part and parcel of being the lone liberal on a conservative news network? Do you ever feel threatened in any way?
Sally Kohn: Usually it cracks me up. Who knew I was so powerful? Most of it I find fascinating more than anything—the smear pieces about me that point out I was once at a meeting with so-and-so and allege that I must agree with everything that person has ever done. It’s bizarre.
Then some of the hate mail is more disconcerting. The sheer amount of it that isn’t just critiquing my ideas but me as a person—laden with sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism—is shocking. Anyone who thinks discrimination is dead in America should read my inbox! But I assume that for every one hateful person out there, there are at least a hundred more reasonable people who appreciate my points.
Read the entire interview, including a fun piece about what my daughter thinks about me being on TV, at the Role/Reboot site here.
With the Susan B. Komen Foundation’s pink ribbons tied up in knots this past week by a public relations disaster, and Republicans apparently convinced that global warming was simply an attempt by Al Gore to crack a joke, so-called “pink washing” and “green washing” are no longer as attractive to big businesses looking to varnish their public record. And so it was a convenient but very telling move when, just yesterday, the nation’s largest gay rights organization announced that Lloyd Blankfein would be its first “national corporate spokesperson” for marriage equality.
Mr. Blankfein, when not promoting the rights of same sex couples to wed, is better known for his role as head of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street mega-firm that has made billions by divorcing families from their homes and retirees from their life savings.
My favorite part is when Blankfein says, “Equality is just good business.” This from the man who, in 2010 in the middle of a financial downturn that he helped create, took home $13.2 million dollars in compensation — or more than 266 times the median American household income of $49,445 for the same year. Put another way, in 2010, Mr. Blankfein earned more in a day-and-a-half than ordinary Americans earned in an entire year.
Oh, but you say, he’s running a successful business. Alas, Goldman’s 2010 earnings were down 37% from 2009 and in 2010, the firm paid $550 million to settle a Securities and Exchange Commission fraud suit charging that Goldman misled investors by selling misleading dud mortgage securities — betting against their own clients to make money on the housing market’s collapse. And in 2011, the Federal Reserve fined and rebuked Goldman for so-called “robo-signing” foreclosures, a mechanized process riddled with errors that wrongfully kicked millions of Americans out of their homes.
Meanwhile, pre-crash, Blankfein’s compensation in 2007 was a whopping $68.5 million. It seems inequality and injustice are very much the core of Blankfein and Goldman’s business practices.
But there’s no evil that cannot be undone by a You Tube video of a smiling, jacketless Wall Street executive, right?
Further rattled by the very popular, populist uprisings of Occupy Wall Street, it’s no surprise that Lloyd Blankfein is trying to repair his and his firm’s image by playing activist. And no doubt his support for marriage equality is both genuine and long-held. What is surprising is the willingness of the often disappointing but still modestly principled Human Rights Campaign to celebrate Blankfein as a gay rights hero when he has been so consistently and rightfully disdained as a villain on so many other justice issues of our time. I doubt that millions of gay families facing foreclosure are relieved that Lloyd Blankfein supports them being carried over the threshold of homeless shelters.
Howdy, folks. I will be away from writing and television until February 6th. No, I’m not telling you where I’m going. Suffice it to say, it will be neither sunny nor warm. I look forward to some time away from the circus that is the Republican Party and the feigned-populism that is Barack Obama. But I’m sure, when I come back, we can pick up right where we left off.
In which I take Newt Gingrich to task for triggering the inherent racial biases of voters — while, mysteriously, talking about people needing to “put food on their families”. Huh???
Here’s a fun clip from my latest appearance on FoxNews.com LIVE online:
A pre-emptive response to the State Of The Union address. Funny thing about facts…
Those who are ideologically predisposed to criticize President Obama contort themselves to overlook inconvenient facts.
The fact is that, under President Obama’s leadership, we have seen 22 straight months of private sector job growth.
While Republicans are accusing the President of being a job killer, the fact is that President Obama has created 3.2 million new private sector jobs. More private sector jobs were created in 2011 in America than any year since 2005.
Oddly, Mitt Romney wants to claim credit for a hundred thousand jobs that were created after his Bain investment (and not count the many more jobs he killed but Republicans refuse to be honest about President Obama’s record of creating jobs and, slowly but surely, bringing our economy back from the brink.
My favorite part:
These baseless smears may fire up a small fringe of the anti-Obama Republican base, but the fact of the matter is most Americans care about results and character.
Voters can tell the difference between a president who is making progress turning the economy around and being honest about the obstacles he’s facing versus desperate presidential contenders who want to sling nothing but mud to distract from their decades of failed leadership that put our country in this crisis.
For a special, print section of it’s Arena, Politico asked if the State Of The Union address is still useful. I responded, in part:
Given the unprecedented sabotage and stonewalling on the part of Republicans in Congress, we might as well question whether we even need the presidency anymore!
In all the back and forth about the Obama Administration decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline permit, there’s been little coverage of the fact that oil industry repeatedly misrepresented the project — exaggerating the jobs that would be created and hiding the impact on fuel prices.
For instance:
1. Keystone XL Would Not Reduce Foreign Oil Dependency
The oil to be sent through Keystone XL pipeline was never destined for US markets. In its own presentation to investors about the proposed pipeline extension, TransCanada (the company behind Keystone XL) boasted that most if not all of the extracted and refined oil would be exported — sold in oversees markets where oil fetches a higher price (and thus turns a higher profit for the company).
and:
3. Keystone XL Overstated Number of Jobs to be Created
In 2008, TransCanada’s original permit application to the State Department said the Keystone XL pipeline would create “a peak workforce of approximately 3,500 to 4,200 construction personnel” in temporary jobs building the pipeline. By 2011, now facing growing opposition to the pipeline, TransCanada had inflated these numbers (using undisclosed formulas) to 20,000. Supporters of the proposal, backed by big oil, have since trumpeted these trumped up numbers.
Read the other four reasons the pipeline was a bad deal for our economy and our nation here.
