Of course, had you looked, you wouldn't really have seen Saul Alinsky (he died in 1972), but, I'm here to tell you, you would have seen Alinsky's ghost, hovering behind the backs of President Obama, and his estimable companion, The Rev. Al Sharpton.

As President Obama and Rev....

As she made clear Tuesday morning in an interview with CBS's Gayle King, the clear-headed and brilliant, knows-what-she-wants-at-all-times Michelle Obama is no kind of stereotypical "angry black woman." In fact, Michelle Obama is no kind of (publicly) angry woman of any kind. Quite to the contrary (her "MO":...

I've now had a few days to cool-down since the announcement of President Obama's decision, made by his Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, to deny over-the-counter, morning-after emergency medicine ("Plan B") to teenagers under age 17 (many of whom are sexually-active).

Good thing, too. The time...

So, what have we got in this latest reproductive rights crisis? The one where the Catholic bishops and the president are debating and deciding what rights we American women will have? Well, sadly, ad nauseum, and once again, what we've got is no woman sitting at the decision-making table.

What...

Tuesday night.

And then my faith in the American people, especially in the Mississippi people, was redeemed.

My friend Jodi Jacobson, editor of RH Reality Check, pointed-out Wednesday morning that while the "egg-as-person" amendment, Initiative 26, was roundly defeated by Mississippi voters yesterday, Initiative 27, the "voter...

In a national radio address on February 23, 1934, Huey Long unveiled his "Share Our Wealth" plan, a program designed to provide a decent standard of living to all Americans by spreading the nation's wealth among the people.

Long proposed capping personal fortunes at $50 million each...

Not only is all politics local, all politics is personal. And no issue, with the possible exception of preservation of the State of Israel as a Jewish state, is more personal to most American Jewish women voters than reproductive rights, including access to legal abortion.

So much so...

School has begun in earnest for us girls enrolled in the school of politics. So, girlfriends, sit-up straight and pay attention, for these two school days and nights are likely to teach us more than we may learn during any other two anytime soon.

Why? Well, last night we had...

Drew Westen's brilliant piece in Sunday's New York Times, about character traits of President Obama, and how they may explain his disappointing actions, took me back to some notes I made, earlier this year.

My notes recorded the notion that Barack Obama's seeming shortcomings as a President may...

Occasionally, this stuff gets personal, real personal.

That's because though I typically write about people I know, or have worked with, and about events of which I have some personal knowledge, it's rare that the story I tell is about family, or might-as-well-be-family, (the latter so-called because we have...

In this week when Michele Bachmann announced her presidential candidacy; Sarah Palin didn't deny presidential ambitions; and Christine LaGarde became the first female president of the World Bank, it strikes me that it's worth considering why women, of every kind, run for significant public...

For the last day or so, male political pundits have been obsessing about what Sarah Palin wants with her bus tour.

I just read Huffington Post writer Jon Ward and then listened to Brian Williams and Chuck Todd sputter about this.

How dare Palin not...

So, I know most of the time I sound like the political equivalent of the "skinny bitch" of the diet world, ragging on you all about what to do, albeit politically, not nutritionally.

But today, as the political message mavens say, I'm going positive. For, today, I'm taking Beyonce...

Sitting by my television set watching the news and thumbing my Blackberry, I wrote this note to Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood, on the morning after.

Cecile: Seems like from now on you're going to have to say I'm woman, and I'm proud. Proud to be a...

The budget battle that turned on funding for Planned Parenthood, on the heels of Michele Bachmann's announcement that she will likely form a presidential exploratory committee, along with the passing of Geraldine Ferraro, marked the end of an important chapter of American women's political history, and the beginning of another,...

In this month, Women's History Month, Rahm Emanuel, Mayor-elect of the City of Chicago, has the opportunity to make history, but of a sort he may not yet have contemplated, of a sort that could make all the difference to our (women's) world, not to mention to his.

Indeed, as...

As to what Chicago women should do/should worry about/should scream and holler about, now that Rahm is to be our mayor, well, as the proverbial expression goes: there's good news and there's bad news.

At the outset of this campaign, I wrote "Rahmbo, Rahmno: The Case for...

"I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it." --Barack Obama, Tucson

Will something good come of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords? Hard to say, as timid public officials continue to tiptoe around the issue of gun control....

Throughout the 111th Session of Congress debate over healthcare reform, I kept screaming and hollering in these pages about the willingness of Democrats, including the President, to deal away the right to choose. By the time the health care bill hit the President's desk, the Democratic-controlled Congress had done just...

I never thought Rev. Meeks wanted to be Mayor, really.

First, he dilly-dallied. Then, he claimed that the only way he could or would do it would be to remain as pastor of his church, clearly an untenable idea to anyone with a serious understanding of the voting electorate...