As the weekend began, I had the good pleasure of talking to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee in a social setting (the Asian Law Caucus 40th anniversary dinner). I’ll say this for the Mayor. He’s far more charming and charismatic than the mainstream’s portrayal of him as some milk-toast bureaucrat.
Still,
I guess U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. thought racial profiling just wasn’t sexy enough for the Supreme Court.
Or maybe it was too obvious.
And then I suppose when you get to the high court, you want to impress the justices with the finer points of constitutional law, which leads you t
Here’s a trend I call “false hope” for xenophobes: What if all the foreign-born and their offspring actually pick up and go home?
Well, it’s not quite happening in such massive numbers that the Tea Party will choke on its good cheer. But it is happening enough to notice. I’m not talking about peopl
Modern racism has evolved with the eruption of D.C. Councilman Marion Barry.
Can one still say overtly racist things about Asian Americans and get away with it?
Sure you can. And Barry’s exhibit A.
As he celebrated yet another landslide primary victory with supporters last week, Barry’s made a fe
Next time a stupid disc jockey makes a joke about an Asian American’s accent or when someone goes to the buck-tooth “ah-so” route to describe an Asian immigrant, please don’t laugh and say, “Where’s your sense of humor, bud?”
Instead, remember our Asian American of the moment, One L. Goh.
Goh is t
My dear mother hated broccoli. She was healthy without it. She lived among the hipsters in San Francisco’s SOMA district, only her perch was the senior housing at Clementina Towers. Mom never had much money. But boy, did she have health care.
“My health is my wealth,” she was fond of saying, and wh
After the Dharun Ravi verdict, suddenly I’m nostalgic for the days when a noose was a noose, a hood was a hood, and a hate crime was a hate crime.
Was there ever a doubt in that grand old formula? Add one person of color. One protected minority. Voila. Justice.
We know how to fight all that.
But
It’s not exactly the southern headline the Romney campaign wanted to wake up to the morning after. But a win is a win in–American Samoa, where it’s not true Romney got to count the big Samoans twice.
At least now maybe Romney, who has already sung a tune on the campaign trail, can adopt a theme son
Lady Gaga is all gaga about bullying, which she’s trying to elevate in our consciousness as tantamount to human rights abuse.
A bit far-fetched for some, but not for me.
What is bullying but racism without color?
To a bully, race doesn’t matter. The name of the game is the expression of power and
The most hateful rhetoric of Tuesday night came from the mouth of a white male, probably late 20s-mid 30s, who was part of a CNN focus group in Ohio, a key state in next week’s Super Tuesday voting.
The man seemed to be a Santorum supporter, but he was more adamant about one thing: electability.
O
Once again I watched the Oscars waiting for a Sacheen Littlefeather moment. You’ll remember her (unless you think Christopher Plummer is the name of someone to call to fix that problem in the bathroom).
Littlefeather is the Native American activist enlisted by Marlon Brando to accept his Oscar the
We were all having so much fun, too. But that’s no excuse for racism.
I was wondering when someone would use a “Chink in the Armor” reference.
I’m sure many Asian Americans thought about it too. But only the most screwed up Asian American self-hater would use it in public to describe the basketbal
Maybe they should take down all the “NO MSG” signs in Chinese restaurants around New York.
MSG officially stands for Madison Square Garden, and MSG is saying “YES!” in a big way to our new national Asian American hero, Jeremy Lin.
Playing in the NBA on a hapless Knicks team with all its injured mi
A prior engagement on the West Coast meant I couldn’t get to the AALDEF dinner in New York City last week. So let me give my own award to AALDEF honoree Fareed Zakaria for an excellent interview Sunday with George Soros on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS show.
It’s not every day you see someone elicit suc
A Super Bowl victory means New York is now home to a world-class football team. (It’s primarily in Jersey, but who’s to quibble?)
Coach Tom Coughlin, the man everyone wanted fired mid-season, is now seen in a new light–as a victorious leader.
As the former NFL analyst and coach John Madden liked t
In politics, when the going gets rough, the tough get dirty and divisive. Even though voters say they don’t like to see it, when a campaign is desperate to have a victory, going negative really works.
Florida was so nasty, we can’t even call what they were throwing mud. It was fecal.
And now that
After all the countless GOP debates, last night we really needed to see someone act presidential and remind us why this whole campaign process is important.
And who else but a president can reassure a nervous country about its well-being, its economic stature, its place in the world?
In an address
I don’t care about Romney’s taxes. If H&R Block didn’t do them for him, he made too much money, and he likely paid less tax proportionately than any of us.
Indeed, to make $43 million over two years, paying $6.2 million in taxes, with $7 million to charities, puts Romney at an effective rate of 14%
Now that we are in primary season, it’s pretty clear: The GOP doesn’t have a real answer to President Obama.
The party’s once and future front-runner Mitt Romney is imploding. His hair is in place, but he’s imploding.
And the new momentum guy is the retread Newt Gingrich. Gingrich so undeniably re
Jerry Yang, Chief Yahoo and quintessential Asian American internet entrepreneur, is no longer wildly shrieking the brand.
Instead, the words from Yang’s lips are whatever you say when something doesn’t work out, or you don’t find something.
What’s the opposite of “Eureka” that rhymes with Mitt?
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