The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point. Poor people do not shut down factories... Poor people didn't decide to use 'contract employees' because they cost less and don't get any benefits.

Guns do kill. Unlike cars, that is all they do.

Those who think of freedom in this country as one long, broad path leading ever onward and upward are dead damned wrong.

Those who imagine polygamy to be handy cover for promiscuity are apparently off the mark. If polygamists share one quality, it is that, polygamy aside, they are extraordinarily strait-laced.

There is more hooey spread about the Second Amendment. It says quite clearly that guns are for those who form part of a well-regulated militia, i.e., the armed forces including the National Guard. The reasons for keeping them away from everyone else get clearer by the day.

Rush Limbaugh's pathetic abuse of logic, his absurd pomposity, his relentless self-promotion, his ridiculous ego - now those, friends, are appropriate targets for satire.

I am one of those people who are out of touch with their emotions. I tend to treat my emotions like unpleasant relatives - a long-distance call once or twice or year is more than enough. If I got in touch with them, they might come to stay.

In Congress, there are some who are unashamed to aspire to eloquence, even to scholarship, but the only state legislator I ever knew who would not join in the mispronounceciation of a word for the sake of camaraderie with her fellows was former State Senator and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

One of the things I said was that I had been in great hopes that I would become a better person as a result of confronting my own mortality, but it actually never happened. I didn't become a better person.

The Internet goes doot-doot-doot - it goes sideways. There's nothing hierarchical about it. And the best thing about it is also the worst thing about it, which is there are no gatekeepers on the Internet. Consequently, there's a whole lot of bad information on the Internet. But I think that sorts itself out over time.

I've always found it easier to be funny than to be serious.

Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that.

The Federal Reserve system obviously doesn't work anymore - they keep lowering the federal discount rate, and all that happens is that the banks are making a fortune, and the old folks' CDs are getting chewed up.

Satire is a weapon, and it can be quite cruel.

What is satire if not a marriage of civil disobedience to a laugh track, a potent brew of derision and lack of respect that acts as a nettle sting on the thin skin of the humourless?

I do not celebrate the appointment of women to high positions in regimes where cruelty is a favored tool of governance by a patriarchy; if they accept, they are nothing short of foot soldiers of that patriarchy and the violence it has instituted.

I left my husband a year after 9/11. Not because he was an American and I an Egyptian, nothing to do with culture or religion, nothing to do with 9/11. We brought out the worst in each other. But before we separated, we visited N.Y.C. one more time together for a friend's engagement, and we went to pay our respects at the site of the attacks.

I do not subscribe to a feminism that demands perfection or super heroic nobility of women. But I do insist that putting women at the service of patriarchy is no victory for us.

Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike.

As a U.S. citizen, I cherish the First Amendment.

As an Egyptian, I was glad to see the film 'Black Panther' embrace my country with its inclusion of the Ancient Egyptian goddess Bast as the deity of Wakandans. But considering the anti-black racism against the Nubian indigenous community and visitors in my country, I knew Egypt would not return the love.

The price of toppling Gadhafi will be steep. But Libyans will topple him, and in doing so, they will bring down with him the castles of fear our dictators thought they had fortified.

Banning hate speech doesn't end racism or antisemitism. Social pressure does that. It becomes socially unacceptable.

In the U.K., my mother had been the breadwinner. I'd seen my parents side by side. In Saudi Arabia, my mother was basically rendered disabled. She was unable to drive, dependent on my dad for everything. The religious zealotry was so suffocating.

Some forms of veil are justified by the idea that you're not tempting men. Well how about men just behaving and keeping their hands to yourselves? How about, instead of criticizing how I dress, respecting me and my right to the public space?

I wore the hijab - a form of dress that comprises a head scarf and usually also clothing that covers the whole body except for the face and hands - for nine years. Put more honestly, I wore the hijab for nine years and spent eight of them trying to take it off.

I detest the niqab and the burka for their erasure of women and for dangerously equating piety with that disappearance - the less of you I can see, the closer you must be to God.

I joke that one of the rare times Egyptians identify as African is when the national soccer squad is playing in the African Cup of Nations - and preferably winning it.

For years, despite my inner doubts, I represented to others my choice to veil as a feminist one.

A source of embarrassment for Libyans, Gadhafi has never been a joke: disappearances, a police state, zero freedom of expression, and poverty for at least a third of the population of country tremendously wealthy thanks to oil.

In Saudi Arabia - recognized as one of the worst violators of women's rights - women outnumber men on university campuses and yet are treated like minors who need a male guardian's permission to do the most basic things.

For years, successive Arab dictators have tried to keep discontent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict.

When Tunisians overthrew Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 29 days and Egyptians Hosni Mubarak in 18 days, it was an appropriate rebuke to dictators and Bin Laden.

When I first read Margaret Atwood's novel 'The Handmaid's Tale,' it was Saudi Arabia as I knew it that came to mind, not a dystopian future United States as in the new television adaptation.

I'm no fan of Sarkozy, but I support a ban on face veils because they erase women from society and are promoted by an ultra-conservative ideology that equates piety with the disappearance of women.

To say that there is patriarchy in Arab culture is not denying women agency.

Authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism and militarism are inherently patriarchal and hierarchical.

I started off at a local newspaper called 'The Middle East Times,' which is no longer in existence. I remember one of the earliest stories that I wrote for them was a study about domestic violence in Egypt from a government-run research institute think tank.

We are fighting misogynists in every culture. My solution is to listen to the women in each community and amplify their voices.

When Mubarak does die, he will be remembered as the most bland of those military men turned dictators: compare him with Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar Sadat. The legacies most associated with him are a network of bridges and highways and 'stability.'

I am horrified by the moral amnesia that develops when a dictator dies.

As a feminist of Egyptian and Muslim descent, my life's work has been informed by the belief that religion and culture must never be used to justify the subjugation of women.

I have chosen not to have children.

My birth at the end of July 1967 makes me a child of the naksa, or setback, as the Arab defeat during the June 1967 war with Israel is euphemistically known in Arabic.

To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist texts on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything.

I believe at the heart of any revolution for social justice and human dignity are consent and agency, the unequivocal belief that I own my body - not the state, not the church/mosque/temple, not the street and not the family.

My brother, a cardiologist, was among thousands of Muslims visited by the FBI in November 2001 and forced to submit to special registration fingerprinting, his photo and information forever in Homeland Security's files.

Anti-black racism is not just an Egyptian problem. It exists in many parts of the Arab world.

It was precisely my love of the First Amendment that made me join sidewalk activists in 2010 to support an Islamic community center's right to open in Lower Manhattan.

Nothing protects women from the patriarchy of military regimes.