Author: Isaiah J. Poole

Jonathan Powers remembers well President Bush’s infamous speech four years ago today in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln. At the time, Powers was a captain in the 1st Armored Division and was preparing for a deployment to Baghdad. “I was a believer,” he told me during a brief conversation…

Jonathan Powers remembers well President Bush’s infamous speech four years ago today in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln. At the time, Powers was a captain in the 1st Armored Division and was preparing for a deployment to Baghdad. “I was a believer,” he told me during a brief conversation Monday. …

More than 3.5 million people will receive health insurance and 2.7 million people will receive pension benefits if Congress passes the Employee Free Choice Act, according to a report released Monday by the Campaign for America’s Future. The study, which is also broken down by state, underscores the importance of the fight in the Senate…

In little more than a decade after President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” President Ronald Reagan led the nation in the equivalent of a helicopter evacuation from the epicenter of the fight.  Reagan and his band of conservatives also so poisoned the political discussion about poverty that even today many progressives dare not…

Celebrities spewing racist drivel get the headlines and the outrage, but largely out of the public eye the Bush administration has been doing something far more damaging to victims of discrimination than the utterance of a few vile slurs. In its classic Grover Norquist way, the Bush administration is shrinking the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission so,…

The rate at which infants are dying has begun to creep upward in several Southern states. This is an entirely predictable—and deadly—outcome of a systematic squeezing of federal and state health programs under conservative rule. The report in The New York Times Sunday  that outlined some of the effects of cuts in federal and state health…

Today on TomPaine.com I offer my take on the Don Imus controversy, as well as that of Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who writes on another critical aspect of the flap for AlterNet. Yes, it\’s well-worn ground, but there are a couple of points that I thought it was important to stress. First, Imus\’ slur against the…

A coalition of activists leading the opposition to the war in Iraq is refusing to give an inch to President Bush, who today unleashed more venom at Democrats for doing what a majority of voters want: a responsible withdrawal from Iraq. One member of that coalition, Americans United for Change, announced a campaign targeting two…

Another Bush administration official has been caught fixing scientific reports for the benefit of White House cronies and ideological soul mates. The culprit this time is one Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary for the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Department of the Interior. This is no surprise except in the brazenness of her…

There is more evidence today that the Bush administration’s economic policies are widening the gap between the rich and the poor. University of California at Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Picketty of the Paris School of Economics released two studies this week, one looking at income and another looking at tax policy. The bottom…