For Father of the Year, my nomination goes to David Goldman. Hands down. In fact, for his persistence in tilting at windmills and challenging a foreign government to regain custody of his son and bring him home, Goldman should be named Father of the Last Five Years.
'Tis the season of peace on Earth and good will toward men. Yet you wouldn't know it from the screed from the conservative radio talk show host who recently charged into the immigration debate with gums flapping.
Sometimes, a film is so powerful that it haunts you long after you've left the theater. Usually, it's because of the weight of the message.
When I speak to college students, I always push two messages: If you work hard, take risks, leave your comfort zone and never give up, you can do anything you want to in life; and part of life is competition, because no matter what you want, you can bet that someone else wants it too.
In the early 1990's, I was listening to the Rush Limbaugh radio show when a young man from Youngstown, Ohio, called in to complain about... well, life.
President Obama deserves an A+ for his agenda for education reform. His decision to nominate Arne Duncan as U.S. education secretary was inspired, and his comments on holding the system accountable are honest, refreshing and insightful.
Have you ever seen 47 million people hold their breath and hope for the best?
Thanks to Joe, Kanye, Serena, and other misfits, a lot of people are talking about how society is undergoing a rash of rudeness.
The Obama administration actually has me feeling sorry for the Central Intelligence Agency. This week, the administration hit the CIA with both barrels.
In order to diagnose what ails President Obama's push for health care reform, we need less heated rhetoric and more "Cool Hand Luke."
For Father of the Year, my nomination goes to David Goldman. Hands down. In fact, for his persistence in tilting at windmills and challenging a foreign government to regain custody of his son and bring him home, Goldman should be named Father of the Last Five Years.
'Tis the season of peace on Earth and good will toward men. Yet you wouldn't know it from the screed from the conservative radio talk show host who recently charged into the immigration debate with gums flapping.
Sometimes, a film is so powerful that it haunts you long after you've left the theater. Usually, it's because of the weight of the message.
When I speak to college students, I always push two messages: If you work hard, take risks, leave your comfort zone and never give up, you can do anything you want to in life; and part of life is competition, because no matter what you want, you can bet that someone else wants it too.
In the early 1990's, I was listening to the Rush Limbaugh radio show when a young man from Youngstown, Ohio, called in to complain about... well, life.
President Obama deserves an A+ for his agenda for education reform. His decision to nominate Arne Duncan as U.S. education secretary was inspired, and his comments on holding the system accountable are honest, refreshing and insightful.
Have you ever seen 47 million people hold their breath and hope for the best?
Thanks to Joe, Kanye, Serena, and other misfits, a lot of people are talking about how society is undergoing a rash of rudeness.
The Obama administration actually has me feeling sorry for the Central Intelligence Agency. This week, the administration hit the CIA with both barrels.
In order to diagnose what ails President Obama's push for health care reform, we need less heated rhetoric and more "Cool Hand Luke."
For the last two weeks, Americans have been divided into two feuding camps: "Team Gates" and "Team Crowley." But after Thursday, those terms seem antiquated.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor cruised through her confirmation hearings without a scratch.
Sixteen years ago, after I wrote a memoir about my experience as a Latino in the Ivy League, I got a call from a retired Jewish obstetrician who saw his reflection in my words.
The advocates of comprehensive immigration reform have a message for their opponents: "Game on!"
With Iran suffering a political earthquake, allow me to put in a good word for meddling.
To think there are some people who still argue that the law shouldn't categorize some offenses as hate crimes and allow for enhanced criminal penalties.
Listen closely. I'm going to say three words that you don't often hear from columnists: I was wrong. What's more, I've never been so pleased to be proven wrong.
Things really have changed with the Obama presidency -- starting with the process for nominating a Supreme Court justice.
On the prickly subject of immigration raids, the judicial branch is moving in the right direction. And the executive branch is moving in all directions.
The Obama administration forgot the first rule in a crisis: Never send Vice President Joe Biden to calm people's fears.
The Obama administration forgot the first rule in a crisis: Never send Vice President Joe Biden to calm people's fears.
For someone who insists he is personally opposed to torture, President Obama has a rhetorical knack for it.
President Obama doesn't speak Spanish. But after his trip Thursday to Mexico City to meet with President Felipe Calderon, it's clear that the two leaders speak the same language.
The Obama administration's stance on immigration reform is like a never-ending telenovela with multiple plot twists --sometimes more than one in the same news cycle.
Friday's new unemployment figures will underscore the fact that millions of Americans are either out of work or afraid they could end up that way.
A lot of Americans are wondering: Is it safe to travel to Mexico? It depends where you go, and what your intentions are once you get there.
Here's the good news: Authorities say that fewer illegal immigrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that arrests along the U.S.-Mexico border in the last five months are down 24 percent from the same period last year.
You may have heard the rumor that, as a result of a bloody drug war that has claimed more than 7,000 lives since January 2007, Mexico is on the verge of being declared a "failed state."
Obviously, President Obama has a lot on his plate: two wars, an ailing economy, the mortgage crisis and more. But that doesn't relieve him of the obligation to serve up his plan for immigration reform.
We have a deal. This week, House and Senate leaders agreed on a $789 billion stimulus package intended to jumpstart the economy, create millions of jobs, and alleviate some of the financial anxiety suffered by individuals and businesses.
So much for the new bipartisanship.
Because of circumstance, calamity and panic, President-elect Barack Obama's first days in office probably will be unlike anything experienced by other presidents in recent memory.
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is growing on me. You see, I like chutzpah and I don't mind chaos.
If controversies were sitcoms, the ruckus over Barack Obama's decision to have the invocation at his inaugural ceremony given by Rick Warren -- bestselling author and pastor of the 20,000-member Saddleback Church in Southern California -- would be the "Seinfeld" of the bunch. After all, it's about nothing.
More than 20 years ago, I got into an argument with a college roommate over affirmative action -- one I've thought about since President-elect Barack Obama began nominating people to serve in the Cabinet and White House staff.
How's this for a paradox: Just days after Americans made history by electing the first black president, seven teenage thugs in Patchogue, New York, pulled a shameful page from history by forming what one prosecutor called a "lynch mob."
The presidential election confirmed what many of us knew: We live in a remarkable and wonderful country, and Americans are an interesting and complicated people.
I thought liberals were supposed to be good-hearted, open-minded and non-judgmental.
For several weeks now, a friend -- who happens to be a fellow journalist with a good nose for news -- has been hounding me to be among the first columnists in the country to write about L'Affaire Edwards.
Last week, I wrote about what appears to be a ghastly hate crime in the small town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where teenagers allegedly beat to death a 25-year-old illegal immigrant named Luis Ramirez after spewing racial slurs and telling him to go back to Mexico.
Thanks to the history-making candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama, Americans find themselves at a defining moment in our politics.
In a recent commentary, I spelled out what bothers many Hispanics about the immigration debate. In response, many readers demanded to know -- for all my criticisms -- how I would go about fixing our broken immigration system. I thought they'd never ask.
On the question of whether recent immigrants assimilate as quickly as previous waves, many Americans exhibit short fuses -- and even shorter memories.
In a recent commentary, I wrote that, as a Mexican-American, the ugliness of the immigration debate offends me -- not as a Mexican, but as an American.
In an episode of the television show "Seinfeld," Jerry Seinfeld worries that his dentist has converted to Judaism so he can tell jokes about Jewish people. Someone asks Seinfeld, "And this offends you as a Jewish person?" No, he says, "it offends me as a comedian."
You must know what's really driving the immigration debate. It's the culture, stupid.
Score one for the knee-jerk naysayers. You know the type: those who find it easier to criticize proposed solutions to tough problems than to propose solutions of their own, which then could be criticized.
What turned out to be a life-changing week began, interestingly enough, with a lesson about misplaced priorities.
The wacky world of immigration reform is full of half-baked ideas, but none has the taste of having spent less time in the oven than letting local cops enforce federal immigration law.
A reader wrote in to complain about illegal immigration, not exactly a rare occurrence. He was concerned about his tax dollars paying for services for illegal immigrants.
Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15) gives all Americans the chance to gain insight into the nation's largest minority.
In politics, Hispanics are a bundle of contradictions.
Suddenly, I need sanctuary -- from presidential candidates who exploit tragedy to breathe life into their campaigns.
What if we offered illegal immigrants a path to citizenship that included a stint in the U.S. military?
There is nothing like coming home, and I got the chance to do that today thanks to an invitation to join in a lunch forum hosted by the Kenneth L. Maddy Institute at California State University, Fresno, which sets out to train new leaders.
I have taken my readers' advice. They're always suggesting interesting locales from which to report on the immigration issue. Like this: "Go back to Mexico!"
For more than a decade, I've written about the need to reform Social Security. And I've blamed older generations of Americans for not fixing a program they know is unsustainable into the future.
In the 1980s, San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros helped convene a gathering of Hispanic leaders to christen the time in which they were living: the Decade of the Hispanic.
In my travels, I'm often asked to explain who Latinos are and what their values entail. Sometimes, I have to begin by setting the record straight and correcting false impressions.
This is where we've arrived in this country: You have the constitutional right to burn an American flag, but you can get into trouble for simply flying a foreign one.
On October 12, Ruben Navarrette Jr. penned a pompous commentary for CNN.com ("Minutemen have a right to be idiotic"). His litany of name-calling and bogus accusations against The Minuteman Project membership places him solidly in the category of propagandist journalists who "spin" their stories to suit their bias -- valid facts and objectivity be damned.
What we have here is an attempt to intimidate.
When Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist sent me an angry e-mail calling me a racist a while back, I shrugged it off as a pot-kettle thing.
In tackling the immigration issue, Republicans in Congress really outdid themselves. Call it: "Immigration Reform for Dummies."
Do you feel safer than you did five years ago? Republicans hope the answer is yes and that you'll give them full credit. Of course, on a related note, they also hope you've developed full-fledged amnesia. They hope you've forgotten all about immigration reform and how the White House and GOP-controlled Congress were going to fix a broken system and seal a porous border -- things that make many Americans feel less safe and less secure.
Some longtime readers insist they have detected a leftward drift whenever I write about illegal immigration. They're wrong.
Immigration restrictionists can be so dishonest.
Exactly what does promoting the English language have to do with protecting borders and reforming immigration policy?
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