Gabriel Arana

(AP Photo/Press TV) American hikers Shane Bauer, left, Sarah Shourd, center, and Josh Fattal, sit at the Esteghlal Hotel in Tehran, Iran. Iran announced today that one of the three Americans jailed for more than a year will be released Saturday to mark the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

On this week’s podcast from The American Prospect, Ann Friedman, Jamelle Bouie, and Tim Fernholz talk about Ground Zero mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s interview on CNN, the scheduled Quran burning at a Florida church, and rising income inequality. Listen Now: To download the mp3 directly, click here. Articles mentioned in this podcast: “The United […]

Mark Schmitt says Republicans caused our economic uncertainty, but progressives have answers: And as a political theme, “uncertainty” is also brilliantly evasive. Republicans who are willing to advocate specific and massive spending cuts, like Rep. Paul Ryan, and those who prefer vagueness, which are all the others, seem to agree that we need more certainty. […]

Dana Goldstein says Obama‘s election showed how much the country has changed, but his governing has shown how much it hasn’t: The urge to romanticize the 2008 presidential election is almost overpowering for progressives. Although the Democratic primaries were grueling, they seemed to validate the diversity of the party’s coalition. Flooding the streets on election […]

(AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) President Barack Obama delivering remarks on the economy at Cuyahoga Community College West Campus in Parma, Ohio. The president assailed the Bush tax cuts and put forth his own plan to invigorate the flagging economy.

Tim Fernholz asks whether the recession will ever be over: The Reinharts found that economic growth lags for years after a financial crisis ends. Advanced economies in particular feel the effect on their labor markets, with each that has faced a post-World War II financial crisis seeing higher unemployment after the crisis than before. This, […]

Rebecca Ruiz says government can help childcare providers become well-paid professionals: Despite their meager incomes, the women who provide daily care to the nation’s children — 95 percent of workers in the field are female — are increasingly expected to provide their charges with quality learning experiences. Research has shown that early-childhood learning is a […]

Stephen Franklin says some of the worst worker abuses are in food-processing and farming — where government is a huge purchaser: You would think that after many decades of farmworker abuse and increased public awareness of such conditions, life would be far better today for the Florabeth de la Garzas who harvest and process what […]

(AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Chicago Mayor Richard Daley during a news conference in Chicago. Today, Daley announced he would not run for re-election after serving as Chicago’s mayor for 20 years.

Ann O’Leary says there is well-established legal authority for much stronger presidential action to promote good jobs: The authority for presidential executive orders was addressed by the courts only in 1952 when the Supreme Court struck down President Harry Truman‘s executive order in which he seized the country’s steel mills to avoid a threatened strike […]