Last week, I wrote a blog post entitled "How to Talk About Gun Violence," and it attracted a respectable number of comments, almost entirely from the all-guns-all-the-time crowd. Insights ranged from "History eludes you" to "It's a PERSON who used the gun," to my personal favorite, "The bed...

If there's one thing about the gun debate that everyone seems to agree on, it's that we're going to have a national conversation on the subject. Great news! I've been a gun control advocate for 30-plus years, and believe me -- it's lonely. I'd love to have a meaningful dialogue...

A show of hands: When you first scanned the headline about the horrific, heart-breaking killings at the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo., how many of you, when you saw the number of dead and wounded, thought the story was about a suicide bomber abroad, or...

Momentum appears to be building towards legalizing same-sex marriage in New York, right? After all, a Siena poll conducted last month found that 58 percent of the state's registered voters support it, with only 36 percent opposed. Top executives from firms such as Morgan Stanley, Thompson Reuters and...

"Gridlock, for lack of a better word... is good." If those words didn't spring from Gordon Gekko's lips, it was only because he was a 1980's fictional robber baron on Wall Street, instead of a real Republican pol in 2010. As everyone who's seen "Wall Street" or this much-viewed clip...

It may seem unlikely in the summer of oily coastlines and persistent unemployment, but Wednesday, June 16, could well be remembered as a day of renewed optimism, at least in the annals of civil rights. Why? Because this is when closing arguments have been scheduled for Perry vs. Schwarzenegger, the...

Remember the Milgram experiment of the early '60's? The trial of Adolph Eichmann had started three months earlier, and a Yale psychologist wanted to test whether the Nazi war criminal and his followers shared the same sense of morality (or lack of it). What he famously found was that a...

The Obama administration has pursued bipartisanship for so long without success that I'm ready to find the concept debunked on Snopes.com. Could it be any more obvious that the GOP leadership's current strategy is to deny the president a legislative victory -- of any kind, even if it means doing...

Thanks to George Clooney, I woke up with a smile on my face this morning. I know -- how many times has some woman said that? In this case, though, it was because I was thinking about the moving, beautifully-coordinated and executed "Hope for Haiti Now" telethon he launched. The...

It's official: New Yorkers aren't entitled to the same freedoms that residents of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and after New Year's, New Hampshire can take for granted. I refer, of course, to the right of all the state's citizens to marry the individuals they love, and to enjoy the thousand...

Until this week, it probably would have been hard for most Americans to answer the question, "What do Kanye West, Serena Williams and a formerly obscure congressman from South Carolina have in common?" But now we know: They've all become over-emotional in public and displayed some very bad behavior. But...

To hear a lot of Republicans with microphones lately, you'd think that America's foundation is a big pile of hardware -- specifically, guns. On Sonia Sotomayor's last day of Congressional hearings, Senator Tom Coburn seemed to imply that if slaves had only been armed, they wouldn't have been slaves, as...

Lately, if I turn on the news and I'm in one of my more mordant moods, I start wondering why the NRA hasn't launched a lucrative travel channel show. They could start each segment with "Today's shooting comes to you from..." and do a travelogue on this particular American locale,...

The news that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnson have split up has been confirmed for a few days now, and so far, I haven't heard any conservative outrage directed at this very public unwed mother who chose to bring a child into the world without benefit of heterosexual marriage....

With each leak from Katie Couric's Sarah Palin interview, the damning evidence that the governor is supremely unfit for the VP job -- or any public office -- approaches flood level. If you're looking for consistency in this topsy-turvy world, look no further. She says she's well-situated "as Putin rears...

How have Obama supporters gotten any work done this week? Ever since Sarah Palin was trotted out on to the national stage, I must have received a dozen viral e-mails about her on a daily basis. These have included the Eve Ensler piece from these pages, the one about the...

In the short week and a half that Sarah Palin's been on the national stage -- though sure, it feels like an eternity -- she's brought tens of millions of Americans together and animated them to wage a no-holds-barred fight to take back the presidency. I'm talking, of course, about...

Yesterday on MSNBC's Morning Joe, the eponymous Joe Scarborough and his colleague Mika Brzezinski were having an intellectual smack-down over Hillary's emblematic gas tax holiday scheme, and whether it grew from the candidate's desire to help the little guy or her own political future. Personally, I think it's the...

As the mother of a 13-year-old girl, I couldn't resist trying to use the Miley Cyrus media tempest du jour as an opportunity to engage in one of those much-heralded parent-child teaching moments. So this morning, between bites of breakfast, I tried to engage my daughter in sharing her...