Rachel is all over the prison-industrial complex

[JBoy]

Gov. Brewer is a scandal-in-waiting.

[Frustratedlady]

1. What a great report. I wonder what Brewer's big mouth supporters think now?

This should be interesting, but I hope that reporter is careful...like no planes or driving alone.

[valerief]

2. That Highground group is the lowest and reporter Loew is high-minded. nt

[mucifer]

3. Before Rachel was a media personality she was a prisoner's rights activist.

From an article in "The Nation"

Maddow grew up in the Bay Area; she came out just before college in 1990 and became an AIDS activist at the epicenter of the epidemic. She earned a degree in public policy from Stanford before beginning work with ACT UP and the AIDS Legal Referral Panel. But Maddow had trouble breaking into treatment activism, which was then the rock-star world of AIDS policy. "It was boys' land," she says. "I knew like two women total who were doing treatment activism. And I didn't totally get it. I'm not like Barbie--'Math is hard!'--but it was a techie world, and I didn't feel like I could be all that helpful."

What she discovered instead was the nexus of the radical prison reform movement of the '70s and modern AIDS activism. It was an area where Maddow felt progress--like allowing secure hospices to take dying prisoners--was possible. "Dying behind bars?" she says fourteen years later. "Wicked expensive. And wicked stupid. And also mean. So let's make the hospices get what they want and also do the right thing!"

In 1995 Maddow traveled as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, where she began a doctorate in political science, focusing on the intersection of the AIDS and prison movements. She moved back to the United States to finish her dissertation, crashing with friends in Western Massachusetts. "I wanted to live somewhere where I'd be unhappy," she explains. "And I have no interest in New England, hate winter, don't like the country, not fond of animals." More than a decade later, Maddow still divides her time between her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, and an apartment in Greenwich Village, both of which she shares with her girlfriend, artist Susan Mikula. The couple have been together for almost ten years, and Maddow calls their relationship "my proudest accomplishment."

After defending her dissertation, Maddow picked up work on AIDS in prison again, as well as a series of odd jobs, from cleaning buckets at a coffee bean factory to being a handyman who didn't know how to fix anything. As part of her patchwork career, she attended an open audition to replace the "news girl" at the local radio station. She got the job and took a shine to the airwaves. When Air America launched in 2004, Maddow lobbied the network to bring her aboard. It did, hiring her to co-host Unfiltered with Chuck D and Lizz Winstead. When the show was canceled a year later, Maddow got her own two-hour weekday slot. "They had no business hiring me," Maddow says of the flier Air America took on her. "As it turned out, it worked out for them. I mean, I hope it did. I hope they're happy!"

http://www.thenation.com/article/rachel-maddows-life-and-career

[David Zephyr]

4. Good for Rachel.

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[rhett o rick]

5. We could sure use a couple more Maddow's. nm