Category: Wade Rathke
Republican resistance, state by state
by Wade Rathke February 26, 2021 Little Rock After four years of Twitter torture, I understand how people seem to be following every little cough and sneeze in Washington these days, crossing their fingers for…
Wilbur Mills sunk in the Tidal Basin
by Wade Rathke February 25, 2021 Little Rock. Wilbur Mills moved me to Arkansas in 1970. He didn’t reach out and offer me a job to work for him or anything like that. Quite the opposite….
Georgia reveals the Trump Tribute
by Wade Rathke February 24, 2021 Atlanta Big news in Atlanta was the seeming flipflop by former Senator David Perdue on his commitment to run in two years to reclaim the seat he recently lost…
Amazing Grace for 500,000 Covid dead
by Wade Rathke February 23, 2021 Atlanta I was driving in what I hoped was post-rush hour traffic in Atlanta after 6pm. I had the local public radio station on, which was interrupted by an…
One Hundred Years
by Wade Rathke February 22, 2021 Atlanta In my family we always knew when George Washington’s birthday hit the calendar. It would be February 22nd. Before Abraham Lincoln on February 12th and Washington on the…
Father Vincent O’ Connell deserves better than a smear
by Wade Rathke Thursday, February 18, 2021 New Orleans This was random. A friend and comrade got it in her mind to memorialize Father Vinnie O’Connell, one of the rare and now vanished labor priests,…
Climate, obits, and frozen pipes
by Wade Rathke February 17, 2021 New Orleans I called a friend in Houston to see how bad the snow and ice had hit them. He said they were among the lucky ones and didn’t…
Inciting to riot
by Wade Rathke February 15, 2021 Pearl River Predictably, former President Trump was acquitted in his latest impeachment trial. It has always been important to him to set records, and he notched a couple of…
No veritas in O’Keefe’s Project Veritas
New Orleans The scurrilous, criminal provocateur, James O’Keefe, and his have finally been reined in after a dozen years of mayhem and damage. Ironically, they are being hobbled by a new sheriff in the public…
Income Ceiling on Benefits for the Rich
by Wade Rathke February 10, 2021 New Orleans For the record, I’m clear that the government needs to give more lower income families cash, and they need to do it pretty darned quick. At the…
More cash transfers, please and pronto
by Wade Rathke February 9, 2021 New Orleans Way back when the pandemic was over there, and then over here, and the shutdown of peoples’ lives and work began, can you remember in the first…
Anne Fenney
by Wade Rathke February 8, 2021 Pearl River I didn’t know Anne Fenney, but I stayed in her house. I’m not sure how that counts in degrees of separation, but I would mark it as pretty…
Little “d” democracy in action
by Wade Rathke February 7, 2021 Pearl River There’s no question democracy is under attack all around the world, and, sadly, we are all engaged in a battle to protect the semblance of it that’s…
Organizing in the Year of the Plague
by Wade Rathke January 28, 2021 New Orleans The Year End / Year Begin meeting is a tradition and vital piece of planning, reflection, and celebration with our ACORN family of organizations. This one was…
Are We Living in a Failed State?
by Wade Rathke January 27, 2021 New Orleans The inauguration was hardly a week ago, and the honeymoon is already over. Ok, you’re right. There was absolutely no honeymoon ever! Who is surprised? Probably no…
Recruiting techniques for extremists and supremacists
by Wade Rathke January 26, 2021 New Orleans In the wake of the January 6th days of rage at the US Capitol there’s a lot of buzz about the rise of rightwing extremists. The head…
The roots of “Stop the Steal” in the attack on ACORN
by Wade Rathke Sunday, January 24, 2021 New Orleans The arc of justice is long, but when people see it coming, they don’t stay silent. First, a text from the most devoted Times’ reader and…
Replacing lead service lines – perfect infrastructure project
by Wade Rathke January 22, 2021 New Orleans Recently, Social Policy was lucky enough to have fifty contributors offer ideas suggesting priorities for the new Biden administration. There were some amazing recommendations, and we’ll dig…
Boebert’s Colorado 3rd District isn’t that Safe
by Wade Rathke January 22, 2021 Pearl River ewly-minted Congresswoman Boebert sees herself as the right’s answer to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and the so-called Squad of progressive women in Congress. She unseated five-term Republican representative Scott Tipton…
In like a lion, out like a lamb
by Wade Rathke January 21, 2021 New Orleans It’s January, not March, but watching the Trump exit from Washington still summons the old “in like a lion, out like a lamb.” He said he would…
Let’s prepare a Texas welcome for the NRA
by Wade Rathke New Orleans I realize that talking about guns and their giant conservative enabler, the National Rifle Association, will have many of you thinking that we’re talking about the siege at the US Capitol…
Crowd chaos underlines differences in Instigators versus Organizers
by Wade Rathke January 19, 2021 Pearl River The post-mortem on the Capitol mob scene has been bizarrely interesting from an organizing perspective. A lot of it has been more about name-calling than analysis. This…
Mr. Transactional, Mitch McConnell
by Wade Rathke January 15, 2021 Little Rock To follow politics in Washington these days, we don’t need a telescope, we need a Geiger counter. Some of the mischief is crystal clear, but way too…
The confused, fragmented and leaderless red-right
by Wade Rathke January 14, 2021 Little Rock Once you breakout of metro Atlanta and hit interstate 20, the hills start rolling towards Birmingham, and then interstate 22 moves through northern Alabama towards Tupelo until…
