Without a qualm, or a thought to the people's lives he was affecting, Governor Schwarzenegger signed an order yesterday to reduce government employees salaries to the minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, (which could affect 200,000 people) because of the budget stalemate. Luckily, State Controller John Chiang, who writes the...

Checks and balances. Have you ever thought about how amazing those two words are? In the simplest sense, writing checks and figuring out how much money you have left after you've written them. In the larger sense, if something is depleted or out of whack, something comes along to reestablish...

I have a theory that in order to be First Lady you have to have a cookie recipe.

Martha Washington had a cookie recipe: jumbals. (Jumbals have fallen out of fashion but they're a little like a pretzel made out of biscuit dough.)

Mary Lincoln had a cookie recipe:...

I never understand how something becomes a day (or a month, for that matter -- November is National Pomegranate month. April is Grilled Cheese Month.) Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday suddenly became Presidents' Day? And who picked the date of Memorial Day?

But I think we should all declare...

In Frank Rich's great Memorial Day column in the Sunday New York Times about South Pacific (and Iraq) is this stunning fact about our president which I missed so I'm reporting it here...and I quote...

"This month, in case you missed it, he (Bush) told an interviewer that he...

Repeat after me: Cindy Hensley McCain. Say it again: Cindy Hensley McCain. I don't know why but it sounds like Theresa Heinz Kerry to me.

I like Theresa Heinz Kerry. And I really like Heinz ketchup and I always wanted to write a piece about the 57 varieties of...

I have a theory that in order to be First Lady you have to have a cookie recipe.

Martha Washington had a cookie recipe: jumbals. (Jumbals have fallen out of fashion but they're a little like a pretzel made out of biscuit dough.)

Mary Lincoln had a cookie...

My mother thought organized religion was one of the problems with the world; this extended to the Girl Scouts and the PTA (a somewhat convenient belief for a mother of four, since you can't ask someone to go against their beliefs). She also believed that children shouldn't be allowed to...

I just want one of them, Hillary, Silda, to stand on the steps of the house, the White House, the Governor's Mansion and stamp their foot and say, "And another thing, I'm keeping the house."

Why do they show up? Why did Silda Spitzer appear at...

It was reported this morning that Maria Lauterbach, who has become known as the "pregnant, missing marine," is dead and it is one of the saddest stories I've ever heard.

There are so many things wrong with the story that it's hard to know where to begin. Yesterday, even before...

My mother made guacamole. Its key ingredients were avocadoes, diced onion, sour cream, and worcestshire sauce, (at least it didn't have mayonnaise like her famous cottage cheese dip, which also had worcestshire sauce) but it wasn't really like the guacamole that we make or serve today.

It was fabulous...

My daughter flew home from New York yesterday. I asked her what movie she watched on the plane.

"I didn't," she said.

"Why not?"

"It was eight dollars," she explained, "Virgin Domestic has put in individual screens at each seat and I didn't want...

It's not about over-abundance, although it sort of is. I'm not the kind of person who loads their plate up full to the brim -- in fact, I don't even like it when my food groups touch, although that's part of it, too, I guess, the fact that you can...

Read more strike coverage on the Huffington Post's writers' strike page.

I had a dream last night that I was living in a youth hostel in London or someplace like London (I have never lived in a youth hostel, not even for a night) and that the...

Did anyone watch Sara Taylor's testimony yesterday? It was riveting.

She was unflappable in some Nabisco-I've-been-eating Lorna Doones-my whole-life-and-I'm-the-girl-next-door-and-I'm really-pretty-and-I'm-smart-as-a-whip kind of way. And the senators were so apologetic that she'd been placed in this "difficult" situation by the White House and Mr. Fielding, made to walk a tight-rope,...

I think anyone who ever had a kid with anyone and is divorced from them, should send them a Mother's Day gift. Just because. Just because they should. No matter how contentious their relationship is, now. Even if, she threw him out to begin with. Even if he pays child...

It was 7:45 on an Oscar morning and my phone was ringing. It was my friend Holly Palance who has been my best friend (and still is) since we were teenagers.

"Oh my God," she said, "he just put on his tuxedo and it split right up the...

I feel bad for Mary Cheney. Her name never makes it into the headline. She's always "Vice-President's Lesbian Daughter...." or "Cheney's Gay Daughter", or "Cheneys Openly Gay Daughter", as in, today's news, "Vice-President's Lesbian Daughter is Pregnant."

Her name is Mary Cheney and I happen to respect her a...

For a moment, last night, I caught that rare infectious disease I get sometimes from watching television, I'm not sure what you call it, "hope", "optimism". It never lasts long. It's kind of like the 24-hour flu (or, in this case, the 4-hour flu) but there was Anderson Cooper on...

We were invited, a couple of days ago, to a conference call with Sherrod Brown, Democratic candidate for Senate in Ohio, Terry McAuliffe, and President William Jefferson Clinton. I couldn't figure out how I'd been put on this list since it certainly wasn't my deep pockets (although my husband and...