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Mr. Gingrich,
For this you still owe our children an apology:
“Some of the things they could do is work in a library, work in the front office, some of them frankly could be janitorial; what if they clean up the bathrooms, what if they mopped the floors, what if in the summer they repainted the school; what if in the process they were actually learning to work, learning to earn money; if they had their own money, they didn’t have to become a pimp or a prostitute or a drug dealer. [If] they had the dignity of work and learned how to be around adults who actually wanted to mentor them and help them. This is not a casual

Heavy medieval silence drapes over a Portuguese village built in the 15th century on the banks of the River Duoro. Sun rays bounce off rivers that seem to run through every city in the country. Decorative ceramic tiles line the walls of otherwise simple buildings.
This is the Portugal of Jose Saramago.
Despite his love of this country, Saramago, the Nobel-Prize-winning writer, had a complicated relationship with his

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had a very bad week. His narrow victory in the Iowa primary, on further counting, became a narrow loss to former Senator Rick Santorum. One of the candidates splitting the anti-Romney conservative vote, Texas Governor Rick Perry, dropped out and endorsed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. If it matters, Sara Palin said she also would vote or

As 2011 came to its close, many of us watched the annual rituals at Times Square on our flat-screened televisions. Around the country, songs were sung and parties enjoyed, but I wonder how many of us or our children remembered that December 31st is Watch Night. It was on this date in 1862 that Blacks in this nation, freeborn and enslaved, crowded into churches and other buildings, or huddled as families at home waiting for the event scheduled to happen on the first day of 1863. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order freeing many of the nation’s slaves was to take

I’m officially wearing my grandmother’s panties.
If you’re a female, and you live long enough, it will happen to you.
I never thought, when I was very young and knew everything and had tight skin all over my body, I would one day wake up in the middle of the night starring down at a roll of belly fat and would find myself wearing white cotton panties the size of circus tents.
When I was just a little kid — maybe back in the very, very late ’50s — I have memories of my sweet matronly grandmother (preparing to get dressed in the early morning) laying her panties on her bed alongside her soft cotton floral dress and roll-up hose. I remember staring at those panties thinking you could house a family of raccoons in there. The elastic alone could stretch to Montana.
When did I become my grandmother? She was barely 50 at the time, but in my child-like mind, my grandmother could have been 65 or 70 or whatever “old” was back then. She dressed her age (kind of like Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffith Show), and I never — not once — saw her wear slacks or

Governments Should Support Rights, Not Abusive Allies
(Cairo) – Many democracies have allowed their ties with repressive allies to temper their support for human rights in the Arab Spring protests, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2012. For reasons of principle and long-term interest, governments should stand firm with the people of the Middle East and North Africa when they demand their basic rights and work to ensure the transition to genuine democracies.
The 676-page report, Human Rights Watch’s annual review of human rights practices around the globe, summarizes major rights issues in more than 90 countries, reflecting the extensive investigative work carried out in 2011 by Human Rights Watch staff. On events in the Middle East and North Africa, Human Rights Watch said that firm and consistent international support for peaceful protesters and government critics is the best way to pressure the region’s autocrats to end abuses and enhance basic freedoms. A principled insistence on respect for rights is also the best way to help popular movements steer clear of the intolerance, lawlessness, and revenge that can threaten a revolution from within, Human Rights Watch said.
“The people driving the Arab Spring deserve strong international support to realize their rights and to build genuine democracies,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights

Could Newt Gingrich’s humiliation of Mitt Romney in South Carolina, if repeated in Florida, lead to a brokered convention? Chatting here with Keith Olbermann about the possibilities.
(Current TV, 1/21)

This Blogger’s Books from
The Politics of Life: 25 Rules for Survival in a Brutal and Manipulative World
by Craig Crawford
Attack the Messenger: How Politicians Turn You Against the Media (American Political Challenges)
by Craig Crawford

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There are many things I worry about when it comes to childcare. During my maternity leave, I couldn’t figure out who would take care of my daughter if she didn’t get into the one place we’d applied to while I was pregnant. (She didn’t.) Then, we found an appealing alternative — aka a daycare with a spot — and I was concerned about leaving my baby somewhere that didn’t even have a waitlist. And, much more than that, I was terrified about leaving a 12-week-old somewhere at

Deep within every human heart, there is the desire to be good. We all want to find and be our best selves, to go to bed each night at peace with who we are and how we acted that day. We want to be the kind of person we ourselves would want as a friend: trustworthy, dependable, fair. Yet often we fail — ourselves and others — in ways both small and significant.
What can lift this burden and restore our humanity is confession, a word that I use often in my new book, “The Art of Confession.” In my own religious tradition, Catholicism, the word “Confession” has a very specific

There are many things I worry about when it comes to childcare. During my maternity leave, I couldn’t figure out who would take care of my daughter if she didn’t get into the one place we’d applied to while I was pregnant. (She didn’t.) Then, we found an appealing alternative — aka a daycare with a spot — and I was concerned about leaving my baby somewhere that didn’t even have a waitlist. And, much more than that, I was terrified about leaving a 12-week-old somewhere at

This week, Rick Perry closed out his presidential run while Newt Gingrich’s second ex-wife claimed he’d wanted an open marriage — and President Obama brought down the house at the Apollo by revealing his heretofore hidden inner-Al Green. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, unable to counter the hardening narrative that he’s a tone deaf, out of touch mega-millionaire, didn’t help matters with his response to being asked about his tax returns. When you are being booed for lack of financial transparency by a GOP debate crowd, odds are you’ve probably royally screwed up.
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Source:Associated Press
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MIAMI — Chris Bosh and LeBron James are allowing Dwyane Wade to simply focus on recovery.Bosh scored 30 points, James added 28 points and nine rebounds and the Miami Heat remained unbeaten without Wade in the lineup this season, defeating the Philadelphia 76ers 113-92 on Saturday night.Mario Chalmers scored 11 for Miami, which outrebounded Philadelphia 52-31 and moved into a tie with Orlando for first in the Southeast Division. The Heat are 6-0 this season without Wade, who missed his third straight game with a sprained right ankle. And with him out this week, the Heat have downed three division leaders — San Antonio, the Los Angeles Lakers and now the 76ers.”We looked at this as a huge week, a huge opportunity for us to get on a roll,” James said.Lou Williams scored 22 points and Evan Turner added 16 for Philadelphia, which has lost eight of nine against Miami since the start of last season, including a five-game defeat in the opening round of last season’s playoffs.”They were ready tonight,” Sixers coach Doug Collins said. “They were very, very sharp from the start. We hung around and fought there a little bit. They wore us down.”Bosh came into the night needing 12 points to reach 12,000 for his career. When Bosh scores at least 20 points, the Heat are 7-0 this season — so maybe it was fitting that he helped seal the win early in the fourth. He scored eight of Miami’s first 11 points in the final period, the burst capped by a 20-foot jumper with 9:04 left to give Miami a 92-73 lead, then its largest of the night.”We believe in our offense,” Bosh said. “We feel that when we move the ball, when we get stops first and then we’re out in the open court in transition and being aggressive, we feel that we cannot be stopped.”Philadelphia answered by scoring the next eight points, a 3-pointer by Jrue Holiday with 6:43 left getting the margin down to 11, but the outcome was never in serious doubt. Bosh reached the 30-point mark with a driving dunk with 4:44 left, giving Miami a 98-84 lead.Andre Iguodala had a season-low four points for the 76ers. When James plays, his teams — including his time in Cleveland — are 16-1 in their last 17 meetings with Philadelphia, and Iguodala has played in all 16 of those 76ers defeats.”We’re going to have some good games ahead with that team,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said.The Sixers came in allowing 86.7 points per game, the second-best mark in the NBA. But Miami has had a knack for putting up big numbers against the league’s top defensive clubs, and that trend continued. After Philadelphia, the next five teams on the points-per-game-allowed list entering Saturday were Dallas, Indiana, the Los Angeles Lakers, Boston and Atlanta.Miami has beaten them all in this young season, putting up at least 98 points against every one. The only team on that list left for the Heat to face is No. 1 Chicago, which visits Miami next Sunday.”Championship is on our mind and in order to do that, we’re going to have to beat the best teams,” Bosh said.Wade remains day-to-day, though is improving, Spoelstra said.The Sixers played again without center Spencer Hawes, who missed his third straight game with a left Achilles’ strain, and their big-man woes got no better. Rookie Nikola Vucevic, who started in Hawes’ place, strained his left knee midway through the third quarter. He was helped into the Philadelphia locker room, unable to put any weight on the leg, but after a relatively quick examination it was determined that Vucevic, if needed, could return.But by then, the Sixers’ chances were slim, at best.Moments after the team announced Vucevic’s status, Bosh made a pair of free throws, pushing Miami’s lead — which was only six when the rookie got hurt — up to 88-71 with 10 minutes left.”When a team like this gets on a run and the crowd is getting into it, sometimes things just don’t go your way,” Turner said.Vucevic finished with 13 points and nine rebounds. Elton Brand scored 12 and Holiday had 10 for Philadelphia.The Heat wore their third uniform in as many home games, a white outfit trimmed in magenta, orange and black — paying homage to the 1971-72 ABA’s Miami Floridians. Heat players even took on new identities and looks for the game program: James, photographed holding a disco ball and wearing an oversized wig, was “Clarence `Shonuff’ McGee,” for example.Miami will wear the same uniforms again Sunday against Milwaukee.Game notes Wade’s six games missed matches his total from last season. … Philadelphia’s improvement over last season is no surprise, Collins’ history. At his first three NBA coaching stops, his team won an average of six more games in his second season than they did in his first. … Bosh, Tim Duncan and Blake Griffin are the only three active players averaging 20 points and nine rebounds per game in their careers.
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Women in America cannot achieve our full economic and personal fulfillment as long as the concentration of wealth and power in the top 1% continues to stifle democratic voices and progressive policies. Citizens United reform – where we disclose donors, reform campaign finance laws, and amend the Constitution to enshrine the value that people are people and corporations are not – is our surest path forward to equality.
Until Citizens United, American politics was premised on the Constitutional promise of one person one vote. The beauty of our democracy lies in the American value of equality: if you vote, you have a seat at the table. If you speak, you have a chance to persuade

This month marks the 39th anniversary of the passage of Roe v. Wade and an opportunity to resolve to either enhance or repeal the laws that ensure a woman’s right to choose, depending on which side of the issue you support. For me, it is a time of reflection, to remember the lives of women in the U.S. and in faraway places, whose courage touched my life when they came to me for

In a desolate Karoo village, three characters — two Afrikaners and one English South African — play out a timeless battle: small-minded fears versus artistic flights of freedom. Anthol Fugard’s powerful examination of destiny, love and race, set against the backdrop of 1974 South Africa, is a potent reminder that the dramas of daily life can fuel exhilarating theater.
Now at the American Airlines Theater, the Roundabout’s revival of The Road To Mecca is a beautifully staged and acted drama. It opens in Miss Helen’s (Rosemary Harris) home – awash in red paint and glitter. This warm abode houses a sweet, understated elderly woman, known for her massive cement lawn sculptures of owls, camels and people, all pointing

Visually stunning and boldly unorthodox, Beasts of the Southern Wild spins a fearsome and intoxicating tale of life beyond the borders of civilization, celebrating the sheer animal hardiness of the human species and raising troubling questions about what we sacrifice when we choose comfort and safety over courage and freedom.
The film’s protagonist, a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhan Wallis), lives in circumstances that would cause polite society’s hyperprotective, germophobic parents to break out in hives. She resides in a trailer elevated above the flood-prone ground, alone but for the company of her “pets” — a motley collection of pigs, chickens and other farm animals with whom she shares her meals. Her mother is nothing more than a memory, but her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), is real enough — he lives in his own ramshackle abode, closeby enough that Hushpuppy can hear him ring his makeshift dinner bell when “feedin’ time” comes around.
If that sounds grim, it’s not — not really. Wink, Hushpuppy and the other residents of The Bathtub — a lush, lawless bayou set beyond the levees of a New Orleans-like city — wouldn’t trade their life of Dionysian self-exile for anything as mundane as heat or hot

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last 3 to 12 weeks of their lives.
People grow a lot when they are faced with their own

This week’s horrific story beneath the Hollywood Sign of decapitation, murder, and bloody execution is the latest layer of reality that appears when you look too closely at glamor mixed with the degradation of society. As far as I know dismembered body parts and a head in grocery bag are new to the Silver Screen Dream, but glitz has never been immune to bloody gore.
A picture might be worth a thousand words, but one word looms over Tinseltown that’s worth a thousand pictures — the iconic Hollywood sign.
Known round the world as America’s symbol of glamour, hope, fame and fortune, the HOLLYWOOD sign started out as an endorsement for a subdivision of homes called

Though the manifold problems of money pouring into our campaigns have become a source of daily news and mounting public backlash, the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission is an opportunity to review how this transformative decision was reached — the perfect storm of politicized jurisprudence, corporate entitlement, and a narrowly tilted bench.
As Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed such concern over corporate rights, one might think he was found as a boy abandoned, taken in, and raised by some corporations. It was Roberts who directed the narrow issue of FEC penalties over ads for Hillary: The Movie to be rewritten and re-argued as a much broader debate over the right for corporations to spend money freely on third party advertisements.
The murky reasoning in the 5-4 decision is a swirl of citations to numerous codes that apparently somehow offer sufficient paradox that a century of laws passed by lawmakers over generations of Congress that restrictions on the federal and state level had to be knocked down, leaving almost no sense of legal authority on the subject.
How has this decision stood, two years later? Well, people have literally been taking to the streets across the country in outrage over this decision and corporate influence on public

The picture on the Richard III poster shows the actor Kevin Spacey, mangled like a piece of John Chamberlain’s chrome sculptures, his left leg in a brace turned inward, his epaulets woefully off kilter, his dark glasses barely grazing his nose, his crown cocked like a smartass cartoon. At BAM where the Bridge Project’s stunning production of Shakespeare’s play is thus advertised, the image only begins to tell you what’s in his heart. Having just murdered Lady Anne’s father and husband, he woos her, Shakespeare’s language suggesting everything you can possibly do with a cane. Its noise announces Richard’s writhing gestures, producing dread and

It all started on a stage in Long Beach, Calif. in February 2010 with a few words and a thought: The world needs “childish” thinking. At my widely watched TED Talk two years ago (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design and is a prestigious conference and non-profit), I voiced an opinion that adults have a lot to learn from my generation. Through my work as a teacher, a student, author, activist and Huffington Post guest blogger, I see every day how true those words really

The Women Entrepreneurs Festival was held this week at ITP, the two-year graduate program at NYU where students earn a masters in the imaginative uses of technology. I’m on the faculty and the idea for a gathering of women entrepreneurs was the brainchild of Joanne Wilson (Gotham Gal) and me. Now we’ve both been going to tech conferences for about 25 years, and so in a good position to say that there’s something very different about this gathering. Joanne and I have been noodling this question and here are some reflections.
First, we called it a festival, not a

You’re married and you discover that your spouse is unfaithful. You’re devastated and consider getting a divorce. But, divorce doesn’t seem to be enough — shouldn’t someone pay for the anguish and shame the affair has caused you?
Yes, according to Louisiana State University law professor and tort expert William R. Corbett, whose 2001 paper, “A Somewhat Modest Proposal to Prevent Adultery and Save Families: Two Old Torts Looking for a New Career,” has been cited by dozens of researchers, most recently Shauna

As I write this Newt Gingrich is surging in the polls in South Carolina.
Yesterday the country watched or read about his ex-wife Marianne’s railings both against her ex-husband’s treatment of her. After 18 years of marriage he suddenly called her and said he wanted an “open marriage” so he could pursue his affair with then congressional aide Callista Bisek, now his third wife. Further, Marianne Gingrich claims, Newt was a hypocrite: He had no qualms giving speeches on the merits of family values while seeking a rather less conventional situation for himself.
How have the South Carolina voters reacted? Well, they appear to support Newt Gingrich who called the interview “trash” and obvious “despicable” exploitation on the part of ABC and the rest of the media to air it two days before a