Republicans have found a new scapegoat in the debate over health care reform. First it was the death panels. Now it is the fear mongering over "rationed care" that the debate over mammogram screening has raised. Recently, a federally appointed task force, the US Preventative Task Force, recommended...

My phone started ringing within minutes of Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Lower Manhattan, just blocks away from Ground Zero. I have represented the Lower Manhattan district for over four years as Chairperson of Community Board 1 and sit on several of the...

A truly alarming storm is brewing in the ongoing health care reform saga. Bipartisan Congressional opponents of abortion are explicitly threatening to vote no on any health care bill that does not explicitly prohibit abortion coverage.
Such a prohibition, if put into effect, would actually have the...

Imagine that you recently had a baby through a cesarean section and had planned on taking off a few years to stay at home to care for your new baby. Now with the economic recession forcing many women back into the workforce, you find that you too need to re-enter...

To date, the public outrage about David Letterman's affair(s) of the heart has been pretty minimal. Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times that "sexual harassment entails pressuring or penalizing a staffer or making the office atmosphere hostile" and she then concludes that since Stephanie Birkitt was promoted...

Women across the country should sound a collective sigh of dismay at the antiquated and frankly harmful comments recently made by former GE CEO Jack Welch.

Speaking at a human resources conference, of all places, where one expects to hear more gender friendly rubric, Welch proclaimed, "There's...

New York has become the first state to allow public money (in this case up to $10,000) to be offered to women who donate their eggs for stem cell research. While the move was heralded by many scientists and advocates, some proponents of stem cell research along with a...

There is one thing Governor Sanford, Senator Ensign and former Governor Spitzer have in common beside a propensity toward moral indiscretion, and that is they are all middle-aged men. When we look back at some of the most flagrant sexual scandals of political officials, we cannot help but see that...

As the protests in Iran over the recent election results continue, an opportunity for the United States to strongly support democracy and women's rights was sadly lost this week. This week President Barack Obama proclaimed that there was not much difference between Mir Hussein Mousavi and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when...

Recently Politico.com quoted former Bill Clinton advisor Lanny Davis as having said about the White House and Sonia Sotomayor's controversial statement from a speech she gave at Berkeley, "She misspoke. Every day that goes by that they don't say she misspoke and she used the wrong words ... they just...

Republicans are keeping up their attacks on Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Governor Huckabee forming a troika in calling for Pelosi's resignation because of her statements regarding enhanced interrogation methods and the CIA. These calls for her resignation truly stretch the bounds of credulity.

Let's look...

Today was not a great day for the war on terror. Hearing these two dueling speeches by the President and former Vice President did not advance our goal of uniting this country in a battle against the terrorists. The problem with former Vice President Dick Cheney's rhetoric is...

A new Gallup poll released this week found that a majority of Americans identify themselves as "pro-life." Specifically, 51% of Americans identify themselves as pro-life and 42% as pro-choice. This is the first time since Gallup began asking this question in 1995 that a majority of people have identified themselves...

Much is being made of the historic opportunity for President Barack Obama to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Souter. Articles are trumpeting the tremendous number of women judges and lawyers, without concomitantly questioning why we don't see more women at the top echelons of law...

Democrats and Republicans are rushing to see who can serve as the primary scapegoat for the populist rage-inducing AIG bonuses. In this case, however, both parties are equally culpable and, if this were a court of law, both parties would both be tainted by "unclean hands."
For Republicans,...

The deal that House and Senate Democrats, joined by 3 Republican Senators basically thrust Republican Senator Susan Collins into the position of the decider over the fate of the bill. Last time I looked, I don't recall that we elected Susan Collins to be our leader. But that is exactly...

With the Senate's passage of their version of the stimulus bill, now it is up to the House and Senate to hammer out a plan that bridges the differences between the two proposals. The House's approach pushes for more spending aid than the Senate's, while the Senate's bill places greater...

In a very disappointing move, in response to Republican distortion and hysteria, Congress has dropped from the economic stimulus bill, the Medicaid Family Planning State Option, a common sense proposal to provide basic health care to millions of women. The Republican push to decry necessary spending and just push for...

Upon hearing about Caroline Kennedy's abrupt withdrawal from contention for the New York Senate seat, a male political colleague remarked to me: "Shouldn't she have just stayed in the race like a man and faced being passed over?" The implication was that Kennedy was not going to be selected by...

I want to believe in the transformative power of President-elect Barack Obama's presidency, I really do. But here we are, days away from his Inauguration, and we are seeing the same old politics as usual play out in Washington over the President-elect's economic stimulus bill and his most recent appointments....