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In Rick Perry’s most recent Christmas-themed campaign video, “Strong,” he wonders how it’s possible that Obama has allowed gay people to serve openly in the military, while at the same time, children cannot openly celebrate Christmas and/or pray in schools.
It’s a unique analogy. But what you might not know is that Perry went through a host of others before his campaign managers insisted he settled on this one.
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Sara Paretsky is a game-changer. In 1982, Sara came out with her first V. I. Warshawski novel, Indemnity Only, now celebrating its 30th year in

There’s nothing better than chocolate, right? Or is there? Foodies have figured out that everyone’s favorite candy gets even better when combined with some surprising ingredients. Here are our top 10 favorite crazy chocolate recipes.
More ridiculous foodie top 10 lists from Endless Simmer.
10.
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Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse–Adlai Stevenson
DC talking heads have come close, but have not quite grasped the disgraced Newt Gingrich’s essential character.
George Will referred to him as the ultimate politician for rent. Paul Krugman responded that he is the type whom stupid people consider smart. Supporters have called him a visionary, a man of ideas, a bold crusader, a brilliant man laid low by his sordid personal

Thrillers and spy tales have devolved in movies to a hash of slice’n'dice editing, prefabricated plots and outlandish action and gunplay that makes all espionage into James Bond or, worse, a video game.
Which is why Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is such a welcome relief. Like the John Le Carre novel on which it is based, this quietly devious film is less about the reveal at the end – though it makes those count – than in exploring the nooks and crannies of a drab, ruthless world filled with people whose paranoia would seem ridiculous, if it weren’t also justified.
Director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) manages to stylize the visual part of the story just enough to make it seem slightly foreign. Yet this is a movie whose visuals – slow, steady, lovingly patient – also inform the sensibility of the story and the time period.
Specifically, this is 1973 London, in a corner of the city where the swinging ’60s never laid a glove. MI6 is housed in a dark, labyrinthine headquarters known as the Circus, but there’s nothing festive about

When Irfan Baig checked in for a flight from Memphis to Chicago a full 90 minutes before departure, he had no idea it was going to be such a bumpy flight — or that he’d never get airborne.
In addition to having checked in well ahead of flight time, Baig had a confirmed seat assignment and was actually sitting in his seat when an American Airlines employee appeared and chose three passengers to boot off the plane. “When I inquired why I was picked out of the 100-plus passenger list, I was told I was one of the last to check in,” the Seattle-based software engineer recalls. “Really? Ninety minutes ahead?” Worse still, American only gave him a $250 travel voucher, when he was entitled to a cash payment.
Oh, airlines. But there’s some good news about the airlines’ policies concerning involuntary denied boarding (IDB to airline geeks, getting bumped to you and

This article was originally published on patch.com.
Our nation’s largest political disconnect lies with the very groups of people that should be building partnerships together to move this country forward — adults and youth.
Since day one of elementary school, have been told the common clich: “You are the future.” However, what exactly defines “the future?” Is the future when students graduate from college? Or when they begin driving? Or when I wake up the next morning? Many young people are changing the conversation and asking: How about right this moment? In fact, the Search Institute’s Teen Voice 2010 found that 80 percent of teens have at least one cause that matters to them, yet only 22 percent are comfortable with sharing their ideas with adults. From this information, one could conclude that teens are not comfortable sharing their ideas with

A “gentleman’s agreement” is not so easy — not when it comes to Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper and Fredric March. Criterion has released the sublime Design for Living on DVD and Blu-ray, Ernst Lubitsch’s sublime, soulful and very, very sexy Pre-Code masterpiece. I was thrilled to write the accompanying essay/booklet for this release, and you can read a portion of it here:
Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living (1933) is what sexy should be–delightful, romantic, agonizing ecstasy. And it’s not just sexy but also revolutionary, daring, sweet, sour, cynical, carefree, poignant, and so far ahead of its time that one could cite it as not only a pre-Code masterpiece but also a prefeminist

Crack open a People magazine or flip through the entertainment section of any publication and expect to be accosted by pictures of the celebrity de jour sporting Manola Blahniks and toting a Prada. But then come the holidays, when the pricey handbag is swapped for a metal ladle, and the demigods seem to congregate at homeless shelters. Are their intentions real? Actually, does it matter?
This is not just a Hollywood problem — we see it every day at high schools. Colleges want to see a well-rounded resume and high schools recognize

You really can’t get more egg on your face than Barack Obama’s neoliberal Beltway apologists have after his big speech in Kansas. That’s because a portion of the speech reads as if the president were channeling the pundits’ nemesis, the political psychologist and consultant Drew Westen.
Last August 7 Westen’s essay, “What Happened to Obama’s Passion?,” landed in The New York Times like “a rhetorical nuke dropped on ground zero in the liberal heartland,” wrote the blogger Andrew Sprung at the time in a post titled, none too gently, “A Lover of Fairy Tales Casts Obama as Villain in Chief.”
Sprung’s title encapsulated the reaction to Westen by keepers of the neoliberal Beltanschaunng, or Beltway worldview, such as Fareed Zakaria and Jonathan Chait, who, as I showed at length right here, mocked what Chait called “Westen’s lengthy, attention-grabbing… parody of liberal fantasizing.”
Deriding appeals by Westen (and me, on July 29, in “How and How Not to Rate Obama’s Leadership Now”) for presidential story-telling like Teddy Roosevelt’s about the folly of de-regulating capitalism, they singled him out for imagining that, as Chait sneered, “every known impediment to the legislative process–special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, …. [the] settled beliefs of public opinion–are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech.”
“Americans pay hardly any attention to what presidents say, and what little they take in, they forget almost immediately,” explained Chait, too young, perhaps, to recall the Great Communicator, Ronald

I did exactly what the doctor told me to do. Unfortunately, I’m not feeling a bit better. Maybe even a little worse.
Last week,

The holidays are supposed to be all about comfort and joy, but they’re more often about discomfort and self-disgust, at least for women. Not only ’tis the season to shop ’til you drop, ’tis also the season to overindulge, then beat yourself up for overindulging. Joy to the world: There’s another way!
As promised in my previous blog, there are simple, effective ways to go easier on yourself and stop the downward eating spiral before it starts. For this post, I was ready to excerpt a few of my favorites from “The Self-Compassion Diet,” when I thought better of

The term “lifestyle disorder” had to be invented to describe hypertension.Almost no aspect of daily life — diet, sleep, exercise, work and stress — can be implicated.Your blood pressure responds to these things quite sensitively. This implies an optimistic attitude, because for many sufferers, a change in lifestyle serves as good prevention. But optimism is lost if lifestyle changes are not kept up for a lifetime. For millions of patients, the arrival of high blood pressure as they get older comes at a stage when prevention may be too little, too late.
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Visualization is courtesy of TheVisualMD.com
It took a while before lifestyle disorders were recognized for what they are, a product of "normal" living that turns out not to be normal so far as the body is

With no federal non-discrimination law and limited state protections, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI) has helped transform the American workplace for the better over the past 10 years. Released today, the 2012 CEI chronicles the remarkable advances that have taken place on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality (LGBT) in the workplace since 2002.
In the first year of the CEI, only 13 businesses achieved a top score. This year, 190 corporations, across industries, geographies and size, will receive a 100-percent score on significantly more stringent criteria, including 10 of the top 20 Fortune-ranked

Whether it’s on the runway or in a high fashion magazine spread, African inspired prints and head wraps seem to be everywhere these days. While I love seeing these beautiful fabrics getting the attention they rightly deserve, I can’t stand seeing them labeled as “tribal” and without any info on where the fabrics come from. So instead of buying African inspired pieces from major retailers like Forever 21, Anthropologie or ASOS, I went in search of a local line that used real African fabrics in creative and modern ways. Enter, Busayo, a gorgeous clothing line featuring Nigerian prints based in NYC and founded by designer Busayo Olupona.
I instantly fell in love with the entire collection, so I reached out to Busayo to set a lunch date and find a way we could

Who would have thought that Republican voters would prove so accepting of sin? At least when its committed by a white guy, like the serial philanderer Newt Gingrich, who betrayed not one but two wives while they were enduring serious medical difficulties.
In the latest New York Times/CBS poll of Iowa Republicans, alleged philanderer Herman Cain’s once impressive support shifts to the new front-runner, Gingrich, whose richer history of marital deceit is not a problem even for the self-described evangelical Christian voters who favor him over Mitt Romney by a ratio of 3-1.
It is the first time that I have felt sympathy for a candidate experiencing the prejudice directed at a practicing Mormon. Clearly the ultimate of “squeaky clean” doesn’t cut it for a presidential contender of that faith among Republican Christian “values voters,” even when he is compared with a sexual rou of Gingrich’s considerable

What does it mean to be a good man? The question preoccupied venture capitalist Tom Matlack so much that he founded The Good Men Project. Called “a cerebral new media alternative” to traditional men’s magazines and a glimpse into “enlightened masculinity,” The Good Men Project is an online magazine featuring articles on a range of issues that impact men, from fatherhood, sex, and politics to ethics, war, and gender.
Matlack does not shy away from difficult subjects and considers The Good Men Project as much a social movement as a magazine. (The Web site is for-profit, but a collection of first-person essays released as a book by the Good Men Foundation will donate proceeds to the Boys and Girls Clubs, among other charities.) He’s also keen on offering alternatives to stereotypes about the American male. “Men are not Bud Light commercials,” he

Recently, mush-mouth Rush Limbaugh was up to his old moronic tricks chasing his tail and flapping his gums like a pigeon in its first bird bath. Wet winged, err right-winged and ignoring the fodder that is Herman Cain’s antics, he chose to pick on someone else? The First Fam — specifically Michelle Obama. Limbaugh explained the booing of the First Lady at a NASCAR event in Florida as the crowd’s frustration with her “screwy” expenditures and her “uppity-ism.” Uppity-ism?
Most (Black) folk know that historically Blacks where deemed as being “uppity” by Whites who thought they were trying to rise above their station in life.
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What about Brett?
First, a note on old friend Brett Favre and his interest/non-interest in joining the Bears…
When news broke on Monday that a source close to Favre said he would be “receptive to hearing from the Bears,” I laughed. I can see Brett and agent Bus Cook – both of them much smarter than their country folk image portrays – smiling at the other and saying, “Wanna start a little sh*tstorm?” The lure of Favre returning with the Packers’ rival Bears for the stretch run would be too great for fans and the media to ignore.
Through all of Brett’s retirement talk – I lived through it in Green Bay – I never thought he would actually retire, even when he announced that he was. His 2008 retirement was not about being done; it was a response to the lack of warmth he felt from the Packers front office. Instead of simply hearing “It’s up to you,” he wanted to hear “We really want you!” from the team, something he had heard in previous

The recent child sexual abuse allegations involving Jerry Sandusky and other university officials at Penn State have opened up the floor for policy makers, journalists, and others to debate whether or not laws should require all adults to report known or suspected cases of child abuse.
This debate is not new. However, with the topic of child sexual abuse in the nation’s spotlight, it may be the first time the issue has gotten this much public attention.
Currently, only 18 states have broad reporting laws that require all adults, not just professionals who work with children, to report suspected or known cases of

Jessica Colotl was a typical hardworking college student. She graduated from high school in Dekalb County, Georgia with a 3.8 GPA and was accepted to Kennesaw State University, where she was majoring in Political Science with hopes to go on to law school. To pay her way through school, she worked at night helping her mom clean office buildings in Atlanta. Somehow, she found time to found a Latina sorority at KSU and to volunteer in the local

(Originally published on SingleDadHouse.com)
It’s pretty simple, actually.
Divorced men want to make sure they get the best possible woman they can. We always wonder, Could I do better? Could I find someone who is a little prettier, a little smarter, a little younger, a little less demanding?
In other words, after a divorce or two, we’re careful shoppers. We don’t want to close the deal until we’re absolutely sure this woman is the one — meaning, we can’t do better. After all, we’ve been wrong before.
That may sound crass to women, but think of it this way: Do you want a man to settle for you? Do you want him to think, Well, she’s good enough? But she’s really not everything I’d envisioned.
If that’s the case, he’s more prone to leave the relationship if he meets someone

Now that December is here, you are probably thinking of visiting a beach, going skiing, or taking a well deserved stay-at-home break. Vacations can be wonderful experiences, but with them come unique hurdles for families of divorce.
Parents who are early on in the divorce process need to think carefully about their plans and tailor them for their children. What we want is fun for all.
The first vacation after a separation is challenging for all involved — especially the children. Vacations pose an additional need for adjustments for you, your estranged spouse, and your

No bankers have gone to jail, despite an overwhelming body of evidence indicating that a group of organized “banker gangs” conducted a widespread Wall Street crime wave that made them rich and threw millions into poverty. The Justice Department’s failure to act against these bankers is matched only by its declining credibility – a problem it only makes worse whenever it tries to defend itself.
An interview with an outgoing Justice official that was published today in the Wall Street Journal is merely the latest in a sad parade of weak excuses and implausible arguments, and it comes on the heels of Justice Department official Lanny Breuer’s poor 60 Minutes showing this week on the same topic.
Stop. Just