Author: Isaiah J. Poole

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is spearheading a new campaign that obscures the facts about the practical impact of opening up new lands to oil drilling. You may have already seen the ads while surfing the Web: \”Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less.\” Don\’t be fooled. It\’s spearheaded by \”American Solutions for Winning the Future,\”…

The propaganda machine supporting school vouchers, headquartered in the office of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, is determined not to let the facts get in the way of conservative ideological spin. The press release for a report released Monday on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program—a masterfully euphemistic name for a program that uses public funds to…

McClatchy Newspapers is scheduled on Sunday to release a major investigation of the facts behind the detention of some 66 people in Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan by the U.S. government. It will bolster one inescapable conclusion: President Bush, by sanctioning a policy that not only denies due process to people it deems terrorist suspects…

What we\’ve been calling e. coli conservatism is a major factor in the salmonella outbreak in tomatoes that has led to at least 228 illnesses and one suspected death. The outbreak took place several months after the Food and Drug Administration, the agency responsible for policing the produce supply, released its \”food protection plan\” that…

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is on a path to finish the job Hurricane Katrina started, destroying the public infrastructure that served, however imperfectly, poor and working-class New Orleans residents. Jindal, the young wunderkind who is being touted as conservatism\’s rising new star, has openly embraced some of the most extreme components of the right\’s agenda,…

Here\’s a question for the town hall debates that Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain are talking about having: What will you do to reign in oil speculators who are profiteering off the pain of working class families by dealing in the dark, unregulated corners of global financial markets? This issue must rise to the…

Just as amusement parks build roller-coaster rides with ever more dramatic dips and twists, the Bush administration and conservative lawmakers have succeeded in building a roller-coaster economy where family incomes are exposed to sharper drops and turns. It\’s no fun. That reality is exposed in a new briefing paper by the Economic Policy Institute, in…

Pledging to not liberalize trade with Cuba remains for most candidates one of the de facto requirements for getting elected, and even though any thinking person can easily grasp the utter silliness of arguments for the status quo. (Remind me again: How did more than four decades of a trade embargo succeed in democratizing Cuba?)…

It is, as our co-director Robert Borosage pointed out this week, ludicrous on its face. House Republicans, coming out of their weekly caucus on Wednesday, started touting their latest slogan, \”the change you deserve,\” and they are being virtually laughed out of the room. In the meantime, Republicans are engaging in a degree of hand-wringing…

It does not take much to understand why a hard-core Republican district in Mississippi would elect a Democrat to the House of Representatives by a nine-point margin. Mississippi is a state under particularly serious economic stress, a point brought home in a report released this week by the Campaign for America\’s Future. \”The Stress Test\”…