Author: Isaiah J. Poole
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An Honor For \’A Born-Again American\’
Norman Lear was the too-rare Hollywood producer who could get television audiences to laugh heartily and think deeply at the same time. Television shows like \”All in the Family,\” \”The Jeffersons\” and \”One Day At a Time\” not only entertained but enriched by tackling delicate subjects like race, gender and other social issues in ways…
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An Historic Mobilization of Progressive Power
One of the underappreciated success stories of 2008 is the growing ability of the progressive movement to accumulate resources and use them to push toward a set of common goals. That was on clear display at a news conference here at the Take Back America conference, where union, women\’s, Latino, youth and grassroots organizations laid…
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Lessons from the 1960s for 21st-Century Change
In the heat of the 1960s civil rights movement, Rev. Jesse Jackson was a young lieutenant to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Roger Wilkins was a White House insider. But reflecting on their different vantage points at the Take Back America conference, they have come to the same conclusion about how the civil…
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\”This Is Our Time\”: Progressives Poised to Win
A rattled Wall Street. Families imperiled by record foreclosures and rising unemployment. A stymied Congress. A five-year war in Iraq that continues to take lives. The Take Back America conference launched Monday amid some of the most dismal headlines in years, and yet the movement is closer than ever to being able to dramatically change…
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Take Back America? Yes We Can, If…
On the eve of this year\’s \”Take Back America\” conference, that phrase is no longer a rallying cry to a distant goal—it is something that now, more than ever, progressives can concretely and imminently accomplish. The signs are everywhere, according to the report the Campaign for America\’s Future released Wednesday, \”Progressives Rising—2008: A Sea-Change Election.\”…
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Fiddling While the Economy Burns
You would think that after the latest dismal jobs report that the Bush administration would stop the spinning. But, no. For two straight months, the Bureau of of Labor Statistics confirms, the economy has been losing jobs, and most acutely the kinds of jobs, such as in manufacturing and construction, that can sustain a middle-class…
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Sour Notes on Social Security
Like an “American Idol” reject, John McCain keeps warbling George W. Bush’s greatest flops. The latest is Social Security privatization, a proposal so roundly rejected by the American people when Bush tried to foist it on the nation in 2005 that even a solidly Republican and sycophant Congress couldn’t swallow it. But the Arizona Republican…
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One in Nine: Conservatism\’s Strange Fruit
One in 100 is bad enough. One in nine is a full-blown national tragedy — one aided and abetted by conservative ideology. You know, if you\’ve read today\’s headlines, that the \”one in 100\” figure represents the percentage of American adults now serving time in prison, according to a study by the Pew Center on…
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Where\’s the Love for Our Veterans?
The nation’s legions of homeless or near-homeless veterans make a mockery of all of those “support the troops” bumper stickers and other symbols of faux patriotism conservative blowhards like to flaunt — which is why right-wing mouthpiece Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel has invested so much in the effort to convince his viewers…