Dear Jolly Old St. Nick,

You have a problem: You are obese. You are a role model for kids and parents, representing the ideal of goodness and kindness in the world. Yet the example you set in taking care of yourself is anything but good. Sure, you appear jolly and...

Last week 2.4 million of you watched MTV's new reality series Jersey Shore. If you haven't seen this show yet, you need to get your Armani Exchange'd ass on the couch and witness America's most recent obsession: the subculture of the self-proclaimed "Guido."

This sector of the Italian American population...

For several years, the LAPD has had to live with the embarrassment of operating under the supervision of a federal judge, this stemming from a corruption scandal that involved everything from cops planting evidence to even shooting unarmed individuals. The so-called Rampart scandal is what brought William Bratton on a...

Can athletes make a difference? Lisa Leslie hopes she can. As a four-time Olympic gold medal winner and three-time WNBA Most Valuable Player, arguably the WNBA's all-time brightest star and most transcendent personality, she is trying to shed light on a host of causes, some others have pitched passionately (like...

As a writer, the first thing you learn from your peers is how to blame other people. In television, we've not only convinced ourselves that nothing is our fault, but we've managed to convince everyone else that TV executives are crass idiots who ruin our genius with their stupid notes....

The Schwarzenegger Administration and the California Department of Public Health have embraced the holiday season with a new set of proposed rules that will abandon low-income women and increase the likelihood their breast cancer will be undiagnosed, which can lead to increased disease and death.

According to the California Cancer...

They didn't have to be here. I'm sure they had better things to do. Certainly more profitable meetings on their agendas.

But they gave their morning to 100 students at Venice High School. A hundred students who most people don't give the time a day. Heck, most people don't notice...

The progressives in our country are growing impatient as common sense solutions are pushed aside and labeled extremist; the pragmatists among us are concluding that patience is no longer a virtue, but just a waste of time.

As a naturalized citizen, I hold dual citizenships, and dual political...

Wolfgang Puck and Ferrari drivers, take note: The Los Angeles you know and love is changing.

A serious foodie culture (I'm talking Kogi, not Kobe) has exploded in the five years since I moved to LA. I credit the LA Weekly's Pulitzer Prize-winning food columnist Jonathan...

Growing up on the right coast, to me, California was a Beach Boys soundtrack. After all, the West Coast had the sunshine and the girls all looked so tan. In fact, on my first trip out here with three friends packed into a smallish, oldish, brokenish mini-sub compact, it seemed...

Its been a long time since I've contributed to The Huffington Post. For various reasons, but mostly because I've been involved with work and yelling at my kids to do their homework.
About two years ago, it dawned on my husband and me that we could no longer afford...

Poor Tiger Woods. There must be something wrong with him. What man isn't satisfied with billions of dollars from endorsements, a beautiful model wife and a brand new baby? Ranking at #1 and recently named Athlete of the Decade would be any man's dream of the perfect life, or so...

Man, I can not wait for weed to be legal. Not that I really care that much about its (legal) availability, I just can't take hearing about medical marijuana anymore. I remember that day at the Civic Center in San Francisco, circa 1993, when some dude walked up to me...

"Mayor Aboutaleb of Rotterdam has only been in office a year but he has represented his City with distinction for a long time. I first met him over a year ago, when the Dutch ambassador brought him to my office and told me that he (Aboutaleb) would be the next...

Last weekend a friend asked me if I could get together to discuss a script she was working on. Apologetic, I told her I couldn't because I had tickets to the opera. She visibly winced, as if I had mentioned a dreaded gynecological procedure. "I'm so sorry", she said, shooting...

It is the Thomas Beltran case all over again, two years later and in Redondo Beach. Many of you may remember what happened in the case of Thomas Beltran - the 30-year veteran teacher at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica who sexually assaulted several of his female junior high...

When I first came to LA from New York back in 1995, I was part of an investigative team for CNN charged with spending the network's money in an effort to determine whether anyone other than O.J. could have slaughtered his former wife and her friend.

Needless to say, that...