As the graduation season winds down the strains of "Pomp and Circumstance" are fading, the mortarboards and robes are coming off, and the after-parties will soon be over. When the new college grads wake up, many will be in a new world.

Welcome to Debtorville.

The number of U.S. adults...

Women (and not a few men) were outraged this week about a Bleeding Zombie Target Ex-Girlfriend sold on Amazon for $84. The life-sized 3-D underwear-clad female head and torso dummy featured huge breasts and blonde hair, with blood gushing from the mouth and bloody stubs where the hands should be....

With the next election 18 months away, senators who bucked 90 percent of the public on the recent vote to expand background checks for gun buyers probably think time will fade the memory for voters.

But if anything, it's energized the overwhelming majority that favors more controls. The vote...

Michael Pollan, the food guru who gave us The Ominivore's Dillemma, has a new book out this week. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, is an exploration of how earth, fire, water, and air eventually result in food -- real food, not the "food-like products" found...

The Masters Golf Tournament is in full swing, and for the first time in history two women --Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore -- will be watching the greens in those yucky green jackets they have to wear to signal they're members of the Augusta National Golf Club. This year is...

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, but women are still way behind men in earnings.

April 9 is the date when U.S. working women finally catch up to the amount men earned by last December 31. That's because the gender...

One of the best new books to hit the market in the last month is also one of the best old books -- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. Revolutionary when it came out in 1963, the book helped unleash the activism that became the "women's liberation" movement...

Women's History Month is upon us, and we're once more reminded that over the last half century, the roles of women have changed more than any other sector of society. But did you know that the most transformative social movement of the 20th century -- the women's movement -- has...

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances. If you think fact that after 225 years the Constitution still does not guarantee women equal rights with men is a grievance in need of redressing, then you...

President Obama thrilled women's groups with an inaugural speech that not only highlighted Seneca Falls, site of the first women's rights conference in 1848, but also mentioned the long-sought goal of pay equity. But equity of another sort -- cabinet choices -- is still on the front burner for advocates,...

January 2013 marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in the United States. But history tells us that abortions have been performed as long as women have been able to get pregnant, and the U.S. is no exception....

Been out shopping in the past couple of weeks? If the answer is yes, you know consumers are mobbing stores to snap up mountains of plastic soon-to-be-junk from toy stores and big boxes.

Do kids really need more stuff? And what's the message we're sending? Like it or not,...

Congress is likely to remain in session until Christmas Eve -- wrangling over the looming sequester and expiration of the Bush tax cuts. The country doesn't have enough money, or doesn't spend it right, or the rich have too much of it, or the middle class doesn't have enough, or...

The blame game in the Republican ranks over which candidate(s) or what tactics lost the election is likely to go on for quite some time. But the rest of the country is moving on -- the election is over. President Obama won. Now it's payback time for those who put...

Last week was "women's week" in the presidential debate, and the candidates fought over the girls in their stump speeches and at every stop afterwards. But Monday's face-off moves on to foreign policy, so the women in the binders and the equal pay issue will likely be tossed in the...

In 2006 George W. Bush famously declared "I am the Decider" when talking about the fate of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It's becoming increasingly clear that we have a new decider majority - women -- when it comes to the fate of the presidential candidates. Until the first disastrous...

To say the Roberts Supreme Court hasn't been kind to women would be an understatement. In 2007, it overruled six lower federal courts in upholding a ban on one abortion procedure with no exception for the health of the woman. The same year the Court overturned 40 years...

Whether you're a Democrat, Republican,Tea-partier, liberal, conservative, or in-between, you're experiencing an election season unlike any in U.S. history. That's because the rules on political spending have changed in a billion dollar way.

In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled in the now-infamous Citizens United decision that corporations must be treated...

On Labor Day 2012 the country is still recovering from the worst recession of modern times. Unemployment is stuck above 8 percent, and many of the jobs that have come back are lower level than the ones lost.

But Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, the first Latina to...

August 26 is a day proclaimed each year by the U.S. presidents -- Democrat and Republican alike -- as Women's Equality Day. It commemorates the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote on an equal basis with men in 1920. But voting did not carry with it equal rights...