Here's a video made by Lyn Goldfarb and Dustin Slaughter of Congressional District 33 North for Change/ Obamawood. In it, volunteers, including me, talk about why a public option at the very least is the only way forward on health care reform.

Thanks to Lyn Goldfarb and Carol Newton of CD33 North for Change for this information.

October 15, twelve people were arrested in an act of civil disobedience at Blue Cross Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, protesting the health care insurance profiteering at the expense of providing for the health care...

Twelve strangers -- a cross-section of ages, races, professions and tax brackets -- assembled Monday of last week in the lobby of the Westwood office building where Dianne Feinstein has her L.A. headquarters. We were there to share our personal stories with the senator's District Director, Trevor J. Daley, and...

On June 10, 2009, it was my great honor to deliver the keynote address at the Yale School of Music's biennial Music Educators Symposium. I got to pay tribute to 51 of the best music educators from public schools around the United States. Dean Robert Blocker,...

(Continued from last week.)

We live in an abundant society that allows us room to search for meaning and the search for meaning becomes a multi-billion-dollar industry. Richard Florida's besteller, The Rise of the Creative Class, reveals how the "organization man" of the 1950s has given way to a...

"Don't hold us in suspense!" After I published my first Huffington Post piece, "President Obama's Arts," on October 21, 2008, readers wanted to know what had happened to Mordecai Santiago - the ten-year-old boy from the Hell's Kitchen projects who had a great talent for the piano,...

Why has President-elect Obama selected famous homophobe and creationist, Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, to deliver the invocation on Inauguration Day? Understandably, gay and civil rights groups are expressing their outrage at the choice. On the surface, the decision does appear a cynical political ploy to win...

I like to think it was Chaka Kahn that blared over the loudspeaker at my cousin's wedding reception in Cimigiano, Tuscany, two towns over from where our grandmother had entered this world in 1914. I strained to hear my cousin's other 90-year-old grandmother shouting over the music, saying that, not...

November 4 was the happiest day life, so far. I imagine Inauguration Day may feel at least as good. 21 months ago, I felt like Cassandra in The Aeneid, whose prophesies fell on deaf ears. "Barack Obama will be President. Mark my words," I said, greeted often by laughs, scoffs...

At 10 years old, Mordecai Santiago was already the toughest kid at the 52nd Street Project, the renowned Hell's Kitchen not-for-profit where I volunteered as an academic tutor and arts educator. Though diminutive in stature and "held back" in school, Mordecai wielded an authority beyond his years with children and...