I'm a teacher, author and a mom -- not always a perfect mom, but one who has learned from her mistakes and can offer insight into the keys to academic success. I taught middle school tweens in the Los Angeles Unified School District for several years and just published a...

I can't remember ever watching a revolution on television, witnessing the might of a million people blanketing the darkness, raising their candles to demand a voice. With the much-applauded departure of former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, the world stage beckons new leaders with new thinking. Into the void comes a...

Jane Harman's consultant Harvey Englander, the guy who advises union-busting hotels near the LA airport, stole a clip from my cable television ad for single-payer health care to put me in a bubble in another cable television commercial. While I'm bouncing around in this bubble, a Swift Boating narrator announces...

Autism is one of life's many mysteries that leaves children, later adults, often enclosed in a world of their own. A cousin of mine is autistic. He can paint huge watercolor canvasses and audit classes at Harvard, but he cannot talk to you, nor look you in the eye, nor...

My brilliant young cousin -- we'll call her Linda Pearl -- works as a rocket scientist at a local aerospace plant a few miles from LAX. Linda Pearl considers herself one of the lucky college grads who landed a job in the space end of the aerospace industry. Some of...

Blogger and breast cancer survivor Jane Hamsher rightfully and righteously laments the 12-year monopoly protection on biologics -- miracle drugs made from living matter -- folded into the current health insurance reform bill. Conversely, Big Pharma must be clinking its Martini glasses, passing the Sherry, and luxuriating in guaranteed...

Let's thank Congressman Anthony Weiner, our single payer champ, for taking to the streets of New York again, this time to protest the Social Security Administration's policy decision to freeze the cost of living adjustment (COLA) on Social Security benefits. Unlike last year, when seniors and the disabled received a...

One of the many frustrations for advocates of single-payer health care is the relentless drive to marginalize us, not only by conservatives but also by members of our own party.

Case in point: the accounting arm of Congress, the Congressional Budget Office, has yet to perform...

The Clean Energy bills navigating their way through the Senate and House sound good at first.

Consider the sales pitch:

• Create clean energy jobs.
• Achieve energy independence.
• Reduce global warming.

Who can argue with such lofty goals? Not you, not me -- not unless we look at...

How ironic that I made my decision to challenge Jane Harman in 2006 after watching her Meet the Press interview in which she lambasted the New York Times for breaking the story about the Bush administration's massive illegal wiretapping. "Oh my God," I told my husband, who was doing Sunday...

Dear Senator Obama:

Thank you for graciously reinstating and welcoming all California delegate hopefuls, including me, Marcy Winograd, and many others who helped build the Progressive Caucus in the California Democratic Party. (Scroll for Obama campaign letter explaining the re-instatement)

We are thrilled you embrace our support.

Grassroots anti-war...

By dusk on Wednesday, the California Obama campaign had purged almost all progressive activists from its delegate candidate lists. Names of candidates, people who had filed to run to represent Obama at the August Democratic Party National Convention, disappeared, not one by one, but hundreds at a time, from the...

There she was -- Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee -- telling Meet the Press (Feb. 12, 2006) that she wished she'd been a lot smarter during her private briefings on Bush's illegal wiretaps. When journalist Tim Russert asked her if she regretted not raising reservations...