By Caryl Rivers

More and more American are moving to "hot," emotion-laden methods of getting news, and away from cool, more objective forms of information, and this fact has already begun to affect our politics.

Unlike newspapers, magazines and network newscasts, 24-hour cable, talk radio, the internet...

The Tea Party folks are hitting the road again, with their signs proclaiming that President Obama has plans to turn the US into a socialist state, that he's putting together death squads to murder Grannies and dispatching black helicopters to abduct those who disagree with him.

This does indeed...

The new buzz in the blogosphere is an old media chestnut: Unhappy Women.

A new study purporting to show that women are now more unhappy than men has drawn commentary like lemonade draws bees. And feminism is the suspected culprit.

On the New York Times Op Ed page, Ross...

The "Eden Myth," deeply rooted in American culture, is one of the reasons why health care has been hijacked by a vocal minority.

Perhaps as a result of American Exceptionalism--the idea that we have a unique and special place in the world--we too often view the past as the...

I have made a discovery. Barack Obama is an alien.

I unearthed this startling fact by watching the classic 1950s film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, which is, in fact, a documentary.

A space ship lands in Washington, and out steps Klaatu, a very tall, very cool, very graceful...

Why is Sarah Palin so popular? Because she is the Last Real American White Man.

She leaves the governorship of Alaska trailing vibrations of Natty Bumpo, Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan and Teddy Roosevelt. She shoots big critters like Moose, strides into the H20 in hip waders, has little use for...

I am writing this from Paris, where Nicholas Sarkozy's proposal to ban the burka in his country is still a hot topic.

Should he go ahead with the ban? My answer would be yes.

There is a huge difference between the headscarf that women wear to proclaim their religion and...

by Caryl Rivers

Do we need to bring back the wire hanger?

This ordinary household item was once a powerful symbol of the battle for choice. It represented desperate women who, before Roe V. Wade, died at the hands of back-alley abortions or in their own attempts to end an...

Is Elizabeth Edwards a green-eyed monster savaging her straying husband and his lover in her new book to satisfy her lust for vengeance?

That's the opinion of some prominent critics -- especially women -- who see Elizabeth, with little sympathy, as a woman scorned and out for payback.

Maureen Dowd...

by Caryl Rivers

Ever wonder why the Vatican and conservative Catholics are out of touch with what real people -including their religious brethren--are thinking?

Well, there's this: conservatives are throwing a hissy fit because the President of the United States is getting an honorary degree from Notre Dame,...

Sarah Palin is feisty, gives a dynamite speech, and the camera loves her--not surprising, since she's a dead ringer for Tina Fey. She's positioning herself to run for president in 2012--but why is she still pushing fossil fuels when much of corporate America is going green?

The Alaska governor has...

By Caryl Rivers

The media still can't get a handle on Michelle Obama.

There's a strange duality in the way in which she's presented--either Michelle-O as Jackie-O, the comfortable essence of traditional femininity, or as something more sinister, a Valkyrie in the guise of a traditional female.

Many...

Could FDR have succeeded with the New Deal if he had been operating in a 24-hour continuous news cycle?

The answer is probably not. FDR had plenty of critics, including influential newspapers, conservative Republicans, clerics who railed from pulpits against him as a radical socialist and anti-Semites...

Some people think Barack Obama can end the culture wars. In historical terms, that would be like predicting in year 50 of the Hundred Years War, that the light at the end of the tunnel was just ahead.

The Culture Wars will continue because it's just about all the right...

There has been much ado, and rightly so, about the fact that Barack Obama is the first African-American president.

Little has been made of the fact that he is also the first half-black, half white president. This is significant because Barack Obama looks like the future. We are fast becoming...

As the first internet president prepares to take office, it's time to ask whether the new media environment is a triumph of democracy or a Tower of Babel.

The answer is that it's a little of both. Thanks to the internet, voices and opinions not backed by wads of cash...

Who remembers the Hungarian revolution?

I do, for one. I was a teenager who watched in horror on my black-and-white TV as gallant young Hungarians went up against Russian tanks in beat-up old trucks in 1956. They waited in vain for American help. It never came, and the Iron Curtain...

Maybe it's time to bring back the working class heroine.

OK, she went to Wellesley and Yale Law School, but Hillary Clinton turned out to be a world-class campaigner when it came to lunch-bucket Democrats, the ones who seem to be eluding Barack Obama.

The race is just too...

In the near future, will American women be legally barred from using the most popular form of birth control, the pill? And could a doctor who prescribes an IUD for a woman go to jail? What about the woman herself? Could she do hard time for her intrauterine device?

Sound...

Barack Obama's halo has slipped, and I, for one, hope it just falls off. He's no longer Saint Barack, but a charismatic, inspiring politician, who can dodge and feint when he needs to, and that's all to the good.

But that fact has made some on the left very...