In case you missed it, extremist gun rights advocates have lately been claiming that this is a women’s rights issues — that unrestricted gun ownership is the best and only way to fight violence against women. Not, for instance, passing the Violence Against Women Act and actually prosecuting violence against women. Anyway…. Here’s me debating the subject on America Live with Megyn Kelly:
Video courtesy of Mediaite and Fox News.
From my latest essay for the Fox News opinion page:
When my great, great grandparents came to America from Europe a century ago, they didn’t get in line. They just got on a boat.
They didn’t get visas in their home countries or secure jobs in their new homeland. They just got on a boat carrying few possessions but their hearts and minds overflowing with abundant faith in the vision of opportunity for all enshrined in America’s founding documents and evolving history ever since.
You can read the full essay here.
Here’s a clip from a segment on Fox & Friends, aired January 26, 2013, in which I address Charles Krauthammer’s assertion that President Obama is undoing the legacy of President Reagan:
I poured my heart out to the President in my latest essay for Salon:
I’m not sure what has depressed me the most. First you abandoned the progressive priorities on which you campaigned, from closing Guantanamo to prosecuting bank fraud to addressing climate change. Then you embraced reactionary policies, from drone strikes to spending cuts to record deportations of immigrants. Then, just when you might think that those first two were a potentially brilliant rope-a-dope strategy to divide and conquer conservative opposition so that you had the political capital to stand firm on other issues, you failed to recognize the entrenched nature of the more-extremist-than-ever Republican Party and got rolled over and over again.
But every damn time — from health care to the stimulus to the tax cuts to the debt ceiling –time and time again, I swore it would be different. That this time you would stand up for single payer or stand firm against the Keystone pipeline or make clear once and for all that entitlement cuts are off the table. Every damn time I got my hopes up. And most of the time I was disappointed. Not because I don’t understand the pragmatism and compromise necessary in politics, but because you seemed to loosen your grasp on the core principles and promises that must go hand-in-hand with such compromise.
You can read the entire essay here.
If you’re in the Westchester area, come here me moderate a discussion with Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men on Sunday, January 27 from 7:00 – 9:00pm at the Riverdale Y.
Tickets can be purchased here.
Bill Clinton warned a group of Democratic donors not to condescend toward Americans in parts of the country where gun culture is prevalent. I discuss Clinton’s remarks in the following video, in which I guffaw — and then make some good points about gun culture and violence prevention:
If you’re in the New York area, come join the Women, Action & the Media mentoring series this Wednesday, Jan 23 featuring… ME! I’ll be dishing out career advice and other pearls of wisdom you won’t want to miss.
Details via the Facebook event page here.
Heard about the idea to mint a trillion dollar coin to avoid our nation defaulting on it’s debts? Here’s my explanation for the Fox News opinion page — and my $0.02:
Is this idea crazy? Yes, that’s the point.
As Terry Goodkind, Ayn Rand enthusiast and author of “The Pillars of Creation” put it, “When the whole world is crazy, it doesn’t pay to be sane.”
Although in the case of the trillion dollar coin, the insanity might be worth quite a lot, actually.
You can read the entire essay here. It’s a fun one!
In an essay for ColorLines examining the upsides and downsides of increased diversity in the new Congress, I write:
This is not tyranny of the majority; right wing conservative white men are no longer the majority in America. House Republicans represent a tyranny of the minority. Their ideological dominance is eroding as quickly as their demographics. Their current power and influence is merely an historical vestige. House Republicans are the appendix of the political body—useless but still able to rupture.
You can read the entire essay here.
Here’s the video from my latest appearance on Imus in the Morning, debating the unsinkable Bernie McGuirk:
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