Last week’s SCOTUS hearing on the Voting Rights Act provided us with yet another reminder about an important factor to consider in voting for president: the quality of Supreme Court justices our top office holder is likely to appoint.
Presidents, after all, max out after two four-year terms, while ...
As we go into Oscar weekend, the favorite for Best Picture seems to have cheering agents in everyone’s medicine cabinet.
They have scary medicinal names like amoxapine and ariprazole, but are better known by their patented brands like Asendin and Abilify–names that, like the drugs, are intended to ...
For Asian Americans, the best thing about the 2013 State of the Union may have been that outgoing Energy Secretary Steven Chu was given a somewhat left-handed parting gift by the president, who named Nobel Laureate Chu “designated survivor.” He was the smartest man not in the room. What a way to pad...
If you just got the invite to that racist Asian-themed party last week at Duke University (I know it was in your spam box), don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything. It was the same old racist fare, standard ching-chong stuff–people dressed in sumo gear and rice paddy hats and showing off their racist ...
Immigration advocate and AALDEF 2013 Justice in Action award honoree Jose Antonio Vargas tweeted from the Super Bowl: “Can’t find an electrical socket to charge iPhone here at Superdome! More tweet soon.”
I tweeted back: “No wait, you’ll blow a fuse!”
It was that kind of game.
Nothing quite worke...
At the Fred T. Korematsu Day celebration in San Francisco on Sunday, most of the honorees had passed on and were represented by their scions.
But I managed to sit next to one of the originals, 98-year-old Mabel Fong.
If you’re Asian American, you likely know Korematsu — the man who fought the U.S....
The mug of my first cup of coffee on this day reads “Ebenezer Baptist Church–where the dream began.”
I got it while in Atlanta recently when I visited Dr. King’s church and the eternal flame that marks his gravesite.
So now I can say, it’s 49 years after the Civil Rights Act, and all I’ve got is t...
I was floored this morning when I happened to see former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (Asian America’s governor?) plugging his new movie on “FOX and Friends.” Given the big stories of the day (the Lance Armstrong interview, Manti Te’o, the upcoming Obama inaugural), one of Fox’s blond c...
With the Obama administration mirroring the Bush administration when it comes to the extension of wiretapping and surveillance laws, it seems that any die-hard believer in democracy must add to his or her list of New Year’s resolutions.
In 2013, make this the year you FOIA yourself.
To FOIA is to ...
The formal name for it is the “American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012,” but I don’t know anyone who feels all that relieved after what informally should be named “The Imperfect Compromise to Avoid the Fiscal Cliff of 2012.”
The president signed H.R.8 yesterday, but it could have been so much more.
W...
So how does anyone really understand the GOP’s side on the Fiscal Cliff talks?
I wouldn’t get too wrapped up with it, if I were you.
Imagine John Boehner as Grandmaster Flash rapping, “Don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge.”
And then maybe, because you know he’s really doing some form of poli...
As the details of Newtown come trickling in, now is the time for a little perspective and personal reflection.
Once upon a time, I wrote a satirical piece on gun violence in America.
I’m a typical common sense American. (You can tell by my commentaries, can’t you?) When it comes to guns, I love th...
This week, President Obama said right-to-work laws were actually “the right to work for less money.”
I can relate.
Emil For Real knows the power of right-to-work laws.
That was my DJ name circa 1974 in Texas, a classic right-to-work state.
But I wasn’t in some burg outside of George Bush’s ranch...
If a picture tells a thousand words, maybe it’s good that we have that photo of Ki Suk Han desperately trying to pull himself off a New York subway track as a train approached him.
It’s really all you need to know about American society right now.
You don’t need the metaphor of a fiscal cliff. Tha...
California’s Asian Americans seem in synch with an approach that would tax the wealthy. A new post-election poll this week showed that 65 percent of Asian American voters supported an initiative that would raise taxes on those over $250,000 in income to fund public education. Another 76 percent supp...
If you’re one of the fantasists out there salivating over the Thanksgiving trailers of the upcoming film, “The Hobbit,” then you’re probably turning a blind eye to the news that 27 animals died in the production of the movie.
Twenty-seven. That’s 3 horses, 6 goats, 6 sheep, and 12 chickens.
The mo...
Hmmm….Petraeus rhymes with “Betray us”?
I don’t think he did, but it sounds like the mindset of the highly decorated, super-achieving general who found himself undressed in e-mails.
It’s reported he’s so guilt-ridden for his lack of discretion that he has done the honorable thing in his mind.
He’...
For the GOP, election night on Tuesday was like a political version of Hurricane Sandy.
It left a Romney-led party trounced and bewildered, staring at a brand new landscape it had failed to prepare for —
a totally new American electorate, rich in diversity and growing in number.
Politics isn’t ju...
If you are suffering from what I call “pollsy,” the state of being bombarded by one campaign poll after another, do yourself a favor. Ignore most of them. Save your energy for the only one that counts. On Tuesday, November 6, the general election takes place, and it could be the most important vote ...
Baseball is still America’s pastime, though the final game of the World Series on Sunday may have been eclipsed by the fear of Hurricane Sandy, as well as the public’s love of that other game, the brutish football. Indeed, Sandy’s enormity, claiming lives, destroying property, and leaving millions w...
