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Emily Y., Emily B., Hanna, and Jessica: You’re all so on point with your observations of Sarah Palin. Like Emily Y., I would like to see her go away, but not before I add my voice to the chorus of why I believe she is a fraud. I watched Palin on Oprah yesterday afternoon. I wanted to hear what she had to say, since I have no intention of ...

Emily, When you say: “Surely the general doesn't mean that in our quest for diversity in the military, we embrace fanatics in our midst,” you're surely not suggesting, are you, that military generals would purposely sacrifice the lives of dozens of soldiers, simply for the sake of political correctness? I mean, there is a middle ground ...

Amen, Emily, the “lurking discomfort, in some kitchens out there, with having an African-American president,” that you speak of is no longer lurking, and it certainly has moved out of the kitchen and into the open. And it’s getting full-throated endorsement and encouragement from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michelle ...

Nina, like you, I love a good revenge story, especially one as empowering as MC Roxanne Shanté’s story. I was struck not by her awkwardness in the video (I actually thought she was pretty poised for a 14 year old), but by how innocent and unsophisticated hip hop videos seemed back then. I mean, she was fully clothed and in an argyle sweater, ...

Noreen, you make a good point about Sec. Clinton’s reaction to a Congolese man who asked her about Bill Clinton's thoughts on a potential loan from China to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet I’m hard pressed to believe that many people in the Washington cocktail set would be so impolitic, or clueless, to exhibit anything remotely close to ...

Thanks, Samantha, for pointing out a tendency by some white people to show, as you say, a “reflexive defense mechanism” whenever another white person, usually one in a position of power, is accused of showing racism. Coming from me, a black person, similiar sentiments are often dismissed as biased. But aren't the white people defending ...

Whew Willa, you offer some tricky psychoanalysis here. None of us can say what the Jacksons were thinking on that stage with Paris, or what they were trying to project to the YouTube audience. What we can safely say is that despite being a dysfunctional family, they are clearly a family in grief. I think it’s unfair to try to interpret their ...

Jessica, I saw nothing cruel or exploitative about allowing Paris Jackson to speak about her dad and I’m inclined to believe the Jackson family didn’t force her to do so. According to several news reports, Janet Jackson was slated to speak but let Paris speak instead because she wanted to say something about her father. I watched the whole ...

Emily, I agree with you that Jenny Sanford should stop talking to the media. When a husband describes his affair with another woman not as a regrettable indiscretion but as “a love story” and refers to said woman as his “soul mate” and to his wife as someone he’s trying to fall back in love with, does it not beg the question: Why is Jenny ...

I'm truly heartbroken. MJ was my very first love. I wrote him letters through his fan club when I was a girl, of course never imagining that his cute baby-face would eventually morph into something that looked like a laboratory creation. I loved him through my teen years and even stuck with him through high school and into my first years of ...