(In which a wax Bill Cosby and the promise of a third kidney brighten the darkest days of the year)

Not only was I not expecting much this Christmas, I was pretty much just bracing myself to survive the storm of the holidays and then work on repairing the ship...

Alright, when I first heard of his latest petty, self-serving publicity stunt I yelled at the TV and hurled a perfectly good clementine against the wall. But I'm calmer now and I'm not mad at him for wielding power.

I'm mad at the administration for not wielding power.

When...

First, if I were in the Obama Administration I would be steaming that that no one seems to care that during their first few months in power they managed to steer the world economy away from almost certain catastrophic ruin. That single act alone had more of a positive impact...

What to learn from how hard the slog has been to enact meaningful health care reform? In the beginning the White House assumed that all parties would can the theatrics and act like adults. It invited Big Pharma and the insurance cartel to the White House assuming that public shame...

When I heard that the president of the United States called someone a "jackass," I cheered. This is exactly the kind of human, non-Spock-like outburst Obama needs to do much more of to better connect with the vast majority of the American people.

Sure, everyone in the world, even...

All right. So the Dems have been swiftboated again. The Republicans throw out a series of outlandish lies worthy of a grade-school playground (whole-scale granny-cide, John Kerry ate human flesh while patrolling the Mekong Delta) and the Democrats try to just laugh it off. The Dems chortle, "Who would ever...

It wasn't looking very good. Democrats seemed to be retreating into their default position -- fetal -- in the wake of this latest sustained Republican tantrum. It seems as if after so many years in captivity (the Reagan/Bush years), Democrats, now not only freed but supposedly in control, still carry...

An ad I'd like to see to drive home the urgent need for health insurance reform would proclaim, in the baldest way, that the health-insurance industry is burning through lobbying money now to protect their obscene profits for prosperity. According to John Harwood of the New York Times, they spent...

Two forces will finally win health care for all Americans by defeating the vested interests, their lobbyists and the politicians captured by their campaign contributions: The People and the president.

Americans who have been following the issue took for granted the logical imperative of changing a foundering system. We...

Although some have decried Professor Gates as overreacting, I know, from personal experience, that what he did was an act of courage. As black boys our very earliest lesson about race and our place in America is that the police judge us as guilty until proven innocent. This is especially...

When I moved back to New York with my school-aged kids four years ago I was worried about throwing them into the New York City public school system. All they knew was their progressive private school on the westside of LA.

Instantly, however, they flourished at P.S. 87. I...

My stomach churns at writing the headline above but there is some truth to O'Reilly's statements about Michael Jackson and the black community's response to his death. Of course the whole truth is complicated and right now it is fitting to focus on the family's grief and the undeniable power...

Faced with a sharp drop in its endowment and a $15 million deficit the society which operates the Bronx Zoo announced what it called a realignment intended to make it "meaner, leaner and greener."

Dear Director of the Bronx Zoo:

First I would like to say...

Nothing gets the right wing's panties in a bunch more than a hyper-qualified person of color. And if that person happens to have a vagina...? Fuggedaboutit. Judge Sotomayor (a law school classmate of my mother's) was summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton, and editor of the...

I curse my girlfriend for making me watch last season of The Bachelor. I fear that the architecture of my brain has been forever altered by that crap. Jason Mesnick was a single dad like me and being Jewish, the first minority, so I sympathized with him (until he turned...

The president's decision not to release more images of past torture was the right, real-world call. As noble as full transparency may seem, in this case it never should have been on the table in the first place. At least not now. Promise access to historians, say even as early...

In Thomas Friedman's column in the New York Times today he falls into the same traps of moral relativism that were so disastrously wrong for him in the run up to the war in Iraq. Back then he excused the previous administration of lying us into a costly, clumsy...

What moral scale could the administration and Harry Reid possibly be using for not wanting to adequately and immediately determine which former government officials either sanctified or urged the CIA to torture? If these same former officials had sexually harassed their subordinates or falsified travel reports and pocketed even just...

They ran such a supremely pragmatic and logical campaign that the way the administration is now handling this banking crisis continues to baffle. While they have touted a new era of openness -- literally opening the doors of the White House to the public on the day of the inauguration...

The President is still more popular than George Clooney but after the A.I.G. mess and if the current bank bailout plan -- written by Wall Street insiders for Wall Street insiders -- doesn't turn the economy around, then he will need to again ask us, the taxpayers, to cough up...