While watching this week’s Western Republican Debate in Las Vegas via CNN, I kept looking for Asian American faces, if not content.
After all, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are the fastest growing minority group in Nevada, rising 116 percent since the 2000 Census to more than 242,000 people...
Sometimes I think the biggest barrier to democracy is the franchise itself, voting.
I mean everything from the physical act of casting a ballot (whether it be using a black marker, an old fashioned voting machine, or the infamous pinpricking of chads), all the way to the reading of the directions a...
Watching on TV this weekend, I saw a video clip of the 700 arrests made on the Brooklyn Bridge. In a quick five-second shot, I saw at least one Asian American face among the protestors.
Was it yours?
Prior to this weekend, the “Occupy Wall Street” protest had received scant treatment in much of th...
Texas Governor Rick Perry’s blessing and curse is he’s George W. Bush’s protege.
If you liked the cowboy boots on W., you’ll love them on Perry. He’s got real dung on those Tony Llamas.
On the other hand, if you regret eight years of deceitful leadership under an intellectually-challenged W., you’...
Any time government-sanctioned discrimination ends in America is cause for celebration.
That’s the real reason for the big hurrah over the official death of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
But the military is trying to undersell it. “I will be astonished if this is a disruptive chan...
Where’s the Flip Cam when you need it? Imagine this scene: 78-year-old Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sliding down an emergency chute as she evacuates a troubled jet at D.C.’s Dulles Airport.
On her way down, do you think she said, “Weeeeeeeee….”?
We need something like that chute to es...
I had dinner there a number of times. I’d seen the view. I just can’t imagine people leaping from the World Trade Center towers.
For me, that’s the lingering and most horrific image of 9/11. A distressed person in silhouette, taking wing, dropping from the sky in free fall, praying for a soft landi...
There’s a hard way and an easy way.
And in the end Goodwin Liu took the easy way.
Who could blame him after the nearly two years of being a political football in Washington?
Today, Liu, the embattled yet eminently well-qualified Asian American legal scholar who couldn’t get a fair shake at the U....
This week began with rebels taking Tripoli. From the sound of it, President Obama loves a revolution:
“Your courage and character have been unbreakable in the face of a tyrant,” Obama said to the Libyan people on Monday. “An ocean divides us, but we are joined in the basic human longing for freedom...
David Chiu, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, is in New York Friday to seek funds for his San Francisco mayoral run.
I’m actually surprised he’s doing it.
He’s already raised more money than any other candidate to date by far.
Maybe he’s just getting in sync with being a career...
If you’re depressed over the debt downgrade from Standard & Poor’s, relax.
America needn’t act like an Asian American student who got her first B in math.
You still got into Brown, right? See, it’s not even that bad. And you’re still great in violin AND piano.
Time for a little perspective.
Keep...
After the debt ceiling deal was announced, I kept thinking about a phrase that is said about Asian Americans, a minority in every sense of the national political calculus, especially after our concerns aren’t addressed.
That phrase: “Where are they going to go?”
So after the deal was announced, I ...
Asian Americans as a group are known both for their political anonymity and scarcity. So anyone who can claim to be the first Chinese American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives is a big deal.
Someone should have told that to David Wu.
Maybe he could have hit on Tiger Mom and not her ki...
Rupert Murdoch’s in a fog.
These days, at least from his testimony, the guy can’t tell the difference between a phone hack and a hack writer.
But we do know for some time now he’s been suffering from a kind of Deng-y fever. That would be Deng-y as in Wendi Deng, the 80-year-old tycoon’s wife of tw...
To this day, affirmative action as public policy–giving qualified minorities a chance to compete for college admissions, public jobs, and contracts–is not just a sentimental throwback. It remains the noble, magnanimous, and right thing to do.
But in a time with 14 million unemployed, few jobs in ge...
As I set off my Chinese fireworks on the Fourth of July, thinking about freedom and independence and what it means to be American, I also had Jose Antonio Vargas on my mind.
I hope he was celebrating the freedom of the truth with some vigor.
Just over two weeks ago, Vargas, 30, set off some firewo...
My 14-year-old daughter marched with the PETA float in San Francisco’s Pride parade Sunday, wearing a “Vegan Pride T-shirt” and passing out stickers and pamphlets to the thousands of onlookers.
Not all of them were gay, of course. But most were and it had a real impact on my daughter.
“Boy, there ...
President Obama seems intent on stretching the limits of our Orwellian disbelief. So here comes the $1 billion dollar question ($1 billion being the projected cost by September this year for whatever it is we’re doing in Libya): Are we at war in that country or not?
The official answer: Drones aren...
I’ve got my call into Ronald Madis Ebens. I’ve found him, heard his voice, and left my message on his answering machine. And when he calls me back, maybe he’ll say something to make us all feel better.
I’m not holding my breath.
It will be 29 years on June 19th. On that day in 1982, Ebens, a then ...
Scott Pelley begins his tenure this week as the anchor of the show that bears his name, “The CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley.” But I’m wondering, what if his name were Scott Pellicito or Scott Pelley Woo?
I do congratulate Scott on his new role and wish him well. In fact, he’s an old colleague f...
