Political Junkie Podcast

Amazon is a top recruiter of retired workers who need extra income to survive. Photo credit: Tada Images/ Shutterstock.com We are all thinking about the aging process this week. Unless the standard bearers of our two major political parties change, as a nation we may be doomed to talk about aging—and who is too old to work-- for the next five months. If—heaven forfend—Republican Donald J. Trump wi...

The south and east facade of St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C., where historian Regina Kunzel’s archive of writing by incarcerated queer patients originated. Photo credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/ Wikimedia Commons In the mid-twentieth century, United States homosexuality and gender crossing was punishable in the law, and was understood by psychiatrists as a men...

Photo credit: Janusz Pienkowski/ Shutterstock It was May 12, 2009. A crowd had assembled at the White House for a program billed as “An Evening of Poetry & Music & The Spoken Word.” Barack Obama, the first Black President of the United States, and his wife Michelle, had been in residence for less than five months. I doubt that anyone remembers who else performed that night. But the next day, the h...

Hannah Arendt (left) and Mary McCarthy in the early 1970s: close friends, they were two of the very few women identified as “New York Intellectuals.” Photo credit: Unknown/ Wikimedia Commons Picture this: it’s 1936, the depths of the Great Depression in New York City, and you are a bright, Jewish, first-generation American man. You are a teenager, maybe even as young as fifteen or sixteen, from th...

Sojourner Truth, copyright by Nell Irvin Painter, 2022: reprinted with permission of the artist. On July 21, 2023, amid a culture war manufactured by Republican party activists, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech in Jacksonville, FL. The occasion? A set of standards for teaching African American history just issued by the Florida Board of Education that evaded or denied much of what we kno...

The situation comedy Leave it to Beaver , which ran from 1957 to 1963, was one of many half-hour comedies that idealized the American post-war suburbs, always portraying them as uniformly white and a refuge where children got into “scrapes”—but not real trouble. From left: Hugh Beaumont (Ward), Tony Dow (Wally), Barbara Billingsley (June), Jerry Mathers (Theodore AKA "Beaver"). Photo credit: ABC/...

It’s the summer of 1978, three years after the end of an American war in Vietnam that Joan Baez and other musicians had lifted their voices to oppose. On this day, Baez is giving a live, outdoor concert in Norway. Bantering with an audience of young Norwegians, she smiles to a happy, shirtless youth and segues into her next number : “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Canadian Robbie Robertson,...

If you have ever attended one of former President Donald Trump’s rallies, seen one on TV, or even just watched Fox News regularly, you may have seen people wearing tee shirts that have “Gays for Trump” written on the front. Did you think they were planted by the campaign? Or that any gay, lesbian, or transgender person who supported the current Republican Party was deluded? Or a simpleton? I’ll be...

Content warning: this podcast discusses sexual assault and other forms of violence. We begin this episode with Pramila Patten, the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. She is discussing an international investigation of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists stormed over Israel’s border and triggered the current and devastating war in Gaza. The most damaging attack...

That was a small portion of the State of the Union speech that President Joe Biden gave on the evening of February 7, 2023. By the time many of you listen to this episode, Biden will have delivered his 2024 message to Congress, one that is widely expected to lay out his agenda for a second term and provide a compelling argument for the voters to give him a Democratic House and Senate to work with....

The first cases of Covid-19 were diagnosed in late December 2019, near a lab in Wuhan, China that may or may not have been responsible for accidentally releasing the virus into the wild. The disaster that took shape around the world in the following weeks was like watching someone fall from a skyscraper in slow motion. The first case of Covid-19 in the United States was diagnosed on January 20, 20...

If you are my age, you remember exactly where you were when defense attorney Johnny Cochrane delivered his closing statement in The People v. O.J. Simpson , a 1994 murder trial that captured the nation’s imagination. Simpson, a former star National Football League running back, actor, and celebrity was on trial for the gruesome murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldma...

In the introduction to this episode, we begin with some false and partially false claims. Listeners should know that aborting a viable, healthy fetus in the third trimester is a vanishingly rare event, and that this has never been either best medical practice, nor has abortion been guaranteed under federal law in the United States after 24 weeks. And despite a talking point that has been repeated...

On June 10, 2020, grassroots calls to defund the New York City Police Department, initiated in Minneapolis, Minnesota, following the police murder of George Floyd, grew louder. That morning, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  explained why to Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos. The NYPD’s $6 billion budget dwarfed the funds set aside for all other city functions. That, she exp...

You just heard an anthem sung by members of the Merze Tate Explorers , a non-profit, grassroots organization founded in 2008 for girls in the sixth through twelfth grade. Like other youth groups embedded in communities of color, the organization introduces girls to mentors, exposes them to career and college opportunities and, most importantly, funds travel and study abroad that wealthier students...

By the time he was four, the little boy began to notice that he could see less of the world. Had he not been born into a working-class African American family, or lived in the rural panhandle of Florida, the child might have had his condition diagnosed and treated. However, Jim Crow segregation and poverty prevented that. By 1937, the seven-year-old, now living and attending classes at the Florida...

You remember that morning. It was November 9, 2016, and defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had gotten even less sleep the night before than the rest of us. In fact, things had started falling apart early on election night. Confirmed political junkies like me saw the look on James Carville’s face in the hour after the polls closed in Florida, listened to his uncharacteristically clippe...

We had a feedback issue on this recording. We managed to eliminate most of it, but if you hear a squeak, or a bit of distortion, that’s us—not your equipment. More importantly, the show is about gun violence. If this is a trigger, you may want to skip this episode. Before September 11, 2001, the cultural moment that everyone my age and older had in common—the sharing of confidences that begins wit...

This episode begins with a 1994 exchange between a teenage American voter and sitting President William Jefferson Clinton. Running against an incumbent, Republican George W. Bush, in 1992, Clinton wanted to emphasize his youth. He played the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show , and appeared on MTV as part of the cable music channel’s youth voter initiative, “Choose or Lose.” In a town hall-style s...

You probably recognize the tune this episode begins with: it’s “ The Song of the Volga Boatmen ,” sung by Leonid Kharitonov and the Red Army Orchestra at Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow in 1965. It’s a folk song, originally sung by Russian barge haulers, or burlaks working on the Volga River in the 19th century. These peasants, in teams, literally hauled barges down the river, like beasts of burden, ea...

The peaceful march in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 6, 2020, was organized by a chapter of the Black Lives Matter network to protest the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was one of numerous protests held around the United States and the world to protest Floyd’s death. But organizers also insisted on not treating this one murder as an isolated incident. Instead...

At various points in this episode, we discuss sex and sexuality, AIDS, mental illness, and suicidal ideation. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or thoughts of self-harm, you can dial 988. Or you can call the National Hotline for Mental Health Crises and Suicide Prevention at 1-800-273-TALK (8255.) For more information about AIDS prevention and treatment, you can go to HIV.gov or plann...

The cartoon ad for retired General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s presidential run, “I Like Ike,” was created in 1952 by a Disney employee. It was part of a campaign designed by the advertising agency BBDO and paid for by "Citizens for Eisenhower," an independent group run by lawyer and New York politician Herbert Brownell.   “I Like Ike” was a one-minute spot, distributed in the campaign's last two we...

As we saw in the last episode, women were engaged in passionate activism to achieve gender equality by 1970. But unlike grassroots radical feminist groups, the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other organizations like the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), had begun to look to state legislatures, Congress, and the courts to rectify the injustices women encounter...

In 1970 Marlene Sanders, a legendary woman journalist, and Emmy-award-winning correspondent produced and reported an ABC News feature about the women's liberation movement . Sanders began her career in an entry-level job in 1955 at WNEW-TV in New York, and she worked her way up to become the producer of the show, an almost unprecedented achievement for a woman in television then. After that, Sande...