The following was originally posted on Huffington Post for the 4th of July in 2007. With the recent discharge of West Point graduate and Arabic linguist First Lt. Dan Choi from the New York National Guard for the high crime of wanting to serve his country openly, the piece...

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. And if you're South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford it's better to be lucky than a "good boy."

Sanford was looking at being fodder for the tabloids on a Jon and Kate level after getting busted fresh from an Argentine love tryst....

Reactionary conservatives are smiling through the racial apocalypse. To them race baiting is a joke, as "humorist" Rush Limbaugh will tell you when he's calling Mexicans "stupid." Or it's a matter of semantics when they claim that Sonia Sotomayor is a "racialist" which, far as I can tell, is the...

Old white guys can be a funny bunch, can't they? The same anti-same-sex marriage, anti-affirmative action cadre can flower into the biggest supporters of "equality" the minute they get a whiff of minority empowerment.

To that end, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is accusing Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor...

There's been much hand wringing over the decline and potential total implosion of the New York Times. But, really, is there any news organization that would benefit more from being wrested from its family control and given new ownership than the Times?

The so-called "paper of record" has been, since...

Here's what we know about minorities in America: their names are too hard to pronounce, they're responsible for bringing in the Swine flu -- as devastating as that was -- and they single-handedly caused the financial meltdown.

But here's the upside to minority population growth: America is the...

Every Black History Month there's always one contrarian (at least one) who pipes up with some snidism such as: "Why do blacks get a month? Why don't we just give everybody a month?" If by "everybody" the cynics mean people of ethnicities whose heritage is not otherwise sufficiently taught in...

When the Department of Homeland Security issued an intelligence assessment characterizing returning military vets as potential domestic terrorists, conservatives went ape...crap. Rep. John Boehner said the report was offensive and demanded that the DHS apologize to veterans. Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis said the DHS was "engaging in political and...

The Civil Rights Movement in America has, unfortunately, never been short of martyrs.

Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Dr. King, Vincent Jen Chin, Matthew Shepard... Just a sampling of those who, in dying, helped push America toward greater social acceptance of "others."

Add to the list 18 year old Angie...

Empty of better ideas -- of any ideas -- of how to remain relevant, the reactionary wing of the conservative movement has chosen to quit faking respectability and get back to doing what they do best: cranking up the hate to eleven.

This is the week we have lived:

A new study by the Pew Hispanic Center finds that enrollment in suburban schools by minority students has seen explosive growth.

The study authored by Richard Fry reports that "the student population of America's suburban public schools has shot up by 3.4 million in the past decade." Ninety-nine percent...

The meme going around like a bad cold is that President Obama relies "too much" on teleprompters. A line so oft repeated it's officially reached the point of late-nite pop culture status.

What makes this kind of nontroversial attack slick is that, different from easily proved instances of excessive...

With all the focus directed toward President Obama's Tonight Show appearance, and also with the likes of Eric Holder, Michael Steele and Richard Parsons making headlines, their positions of prominence tend to mask a harsh reality of this severe economic downturn: it's black men who've been the most beaten down...

From the time that "Family Values" became an empty phrase regularly trotted around the political arena with all the reverence of the last surviving soldier of a war that was never actually fought, the totality of the family which occupies the White House has reached the same level of curiosity...

If you said Kabbalah, you spend too much time reading People magazine. If you said Muslim, you've probably read the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies "first comprehensive study of the Muslim American community and its habits, perspectives and beliefs."

Comprehensive is pretty much the word....

We come to the end of another Black History Month.

Eric Holder, the Nation's first black Attorney General, spent February demonstrating he owned the stones to call out Americans for being "in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards" when it comes having the tough discussion on race and...

Freshly minted Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele gave an interview with the Washington Times in which he detailed his plans for making the GOP relevant again. Says Steele:

"We need messengers to really capture that region - young, Hispanic, black, a cross section ... We want to convey...

Shangri-la and Brigadoon and Bipartisan. Three mythical places. One of which few Republicans have seemingly ever heard. Because if there is one thing we can take from the first weeks of the "New" Washington, it's that the (liberal) Democrats are incompetent (old news, really) and the Republicans are disingenuous when...

On the heels of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announcing the nominees for their 81st shindig, there were the usual nontroversies over who was named and who was ignored.

Among all that, Hollywood trade paper Variety noted that Robert Downey Jr.'s nod for Best Supporting Actor...

Considering all the price gouging going on with hotel rooms in DC, Obama's inauguration is apparently history in the making. But as we observe this epic, monumental, never-been-done-before achievement, what exactly are we celebrating? If Toni Morrison is to be believed, William Jefferson Clinton "white skin notwithstanding," was our first...