Sarah Kate Kramer

A day after four previously undecided state senators announced they would support a gay marriage bill in New York (three Democrats, one Republican), Governor Andrew Cuomo formally introduced a marriage equality bill in the last week of the legislative session.

I was really struck by the fact that they were really talking about economic policy issues, rather than a lot of the cultural issues they might have been talking about in the past....

It's a personal tragedy. I think he should heed the wisdom of the senior democratic leadership and permit politics now at this point to move on to other, more critical issues. I t...

You may recall that Newt Gingrich announced his campaign for the 2012 Presidential race over twitter.

Governor Cuomo's proposal to reign in dramatically rising pension costs by creating a new "tier" for new public union hires is coming late in the legislative game. With only six session days left and a lot of outstanding legislative priorities (rent regulation laws, property tax cap, same-sex marriage) both Democratic and Republican legislators said it would be difficult to get the bill enacted before June 20.

New York is a city of specialists from foodies to academics, laborers to shopkeepers. Every Wednesday, Niche Market will take a peek inside a different specialty store and showcase ...

Anthony Weiner isn't resigning post-sex-scandal, and he's far from the first to try to keep his office in the wake of public shaming. He might want to take lessons from this list of pols who got tangled up in sex-scandals and ended up bruised, but not destroyed. Here are eight political careers that went on despite scandal.

Raising Cain, y'all!

It begins with a fed-up yeoman.

This older, white, bearded farmer dumps some farm kudzu into his shed with a thud, and looks directly at the camera. "I want the government to work for me, the tax payer." Cue a drummer in the wild west, the rip of an electric guitar, and Herman Cain walks onto a stage.

The opposition and much of the international media has presented this as Syrian people: Democrats, against Tyrant. The Syrian government is presenting this as these are fundamentalist...

New York is a city of specialists from foodies to academics, laborers to shopkeepers. Every Wednesday, Niche Market will take a peek inside a different specialty store and showcase ...

Throughout the 2012 campaign season, It's A Free Country's political film critic Sarah Kate Kramer will be analyzing the videos released by political candidates, attack ads and other fun footage.

Even some of the freshman members of Congress do not seem to understand that raising the debt ceiling isn't only so you can borrow more money it's also that you can pay social securit...

Mayor Bloomberg presented gay marriage in moral terms Thursday in a speech intended to pressure State Senators into voting for a bill this term.  Speaking passionately and using blunt language, the Mayor posed a question to all state lawmakers:

New York is a city of specialists from foodies to academics, laborers to shopkeepers. Every Wednesday, Niche Market will take a peek inside a different specialty store and showcase ...

The Asian population in the five boroughs spiked 32 percent in the last decade, and New Yorkers of South Asian descent had a lot to do with it. Numbers from the Census Bureau show that Indian American numbers alone skyrocketed 77 percent in Manhattan to reach 25,857, and in the city over all there are now 192,209 people who identify as Asian Indian. In the next few weeks we'll have numbers on the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Nepali and Indo-Caribbean communities which have also been steadily rising. All of which raises an interesting question.

President Obama's speech on Middle East and North African policy at the State Department on Thursday wasn't earth-shattering. He tried to project consistency in the American approach to the domino-effect uprisings taking place all over the region. The President made an effort by using traditional metaphors insisting that the Arab spring is rooted in fundamental American values. Here are a few takeaways hidden in the pretty language:

New York is a city of specialists from foodies to academics, laborers to shopkeepers. Every Wednesday, Niche Market will take a peek inside a different specialty store and showcase the city's purists who have made an art out of selling one commodity.

We're dealing with the arithmetic of fear. Fear of the unknown, recreating fear inside the country which helped the government justify its rule, and fear of countries abroad, namely t...

New York is a city of specialists from foodies to academics, laborers to shopkeepers. Every Wednesday, Niche Market will take a peek inside a different specialty store and showcase t...

An East Village pop-up installation - known as the Lady Cheese Shop - recently lured foodies to tastings of three cheeses made from an unconventional source: human mothers.