Karen Finney

While there is much to celebrate in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act recently passed by Congress and signed by President Obama, the rights of one group of Americans remain inadequately protected: the women and men in our armed forces who are victims of military sexual trauma. 

Apparently even the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court makes factual errors.

We’ve all been there — that awful day of reckoning in the summer when one finally has to accept that the bikini purchased in the winter doesn’t fit because you just didn’t lose those “extra” pounds as you’d planned. 

Under the guise of toughness, Republican members of Congress have used the Benghazi attack and nomination hearings for the leaders of the Defense and State departments and the CIA to re-adjudicate the war in Iraq, rehash personal disagreements, open old wounds and grandstand in service of presidential aspirations rather than focus on the myriad of relevant questions about current national security and defense issues. At the same time, the implications of recommendations made by an independent investigation of the incident, led by former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and conducted within weeks of the assault, have been largely ignored.

Perhaps the White House was hoping that releasing a photo of President Obama skeet shooting would create reasonable doubt for some in dispelling the latest round of conspiracy theories, while making the rest of the skeet conspiracy theorists appear as ridiculous as the birthers. 

Congressional Republicans are getting credit for temporarily abandoning their insistence on holding America’s economy hostage.

Recent polls show an increasing majority of Americans support improved gun-safety laws.

If we accept the behavioral premise that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” in the gun debate, we must also recognize our role in ensuring that every person who chooses to exercise his or her Second Amendment right does so responsibly. 

Republican leaders like to attack President Obama for “leading from behind” on foreign policy

On a conference call two weeks before the 2012 election, Obama campaign senior advisor David Axelrod said, “We know what we know and they know what they know, and I’m confident that we’re going to win this race, and we’ll know who is bluffing and who isn’t in two weeks.” Turns out Team Romney wasn’t bluffing, though: like Mitt Romney’s policy positions, the campaign’s polling wasn’t just based on bad math, it was bad math based on bad assumptions— assumptions based on severely flawed internal polling data from Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, whose models appear to have been blinded by outdated assumptions about the American electorate. In the end, they ignored mountains of contrary data and failed to effectively gauge who would show up at the polls on Election Day 2012.