ben jealous

Highlights from the 102nd NAACP Convention in Los Angeles, including bites from the organization's chairman and president Ben Jealous.

The news today from Japan is that the leak at the Fukushima Daichii nuclear power plant has been stopped but the crisis is far from over. Radiation levels remain high even outside the evacuation zone, contaminated fish are turning up, and the government seems to be insisting on business as usual, according to Aileen Mioko Smith. Aileen is executive director of Green Action Japan, and spent time studying the impact of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, and she joins us via Skype to give us the latest on Japan's crisis. "Paul Ryan's roadmap, which I call the roadmap to ruin, is really an astonishing document that really doubles down on pretty much every single one of the negative economic decisions of the past thirty years that have gotten us into the mess we're in today," says Heather McGhee, Washington bureau director of Demos. Laura caught up with Heather at Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West's Fight Back Teach-In on April 5 to talk budget concerns. Keep an eye out for our in-depth interview with Frances and Cornel later this week! "We intend in this moment when diversity is increasing and prosperity is decreasing, to ensure that our country makes the right choice. There are indeed two choices. One choice is that you attack diversity and you distract people from the economy. Some folks have made that choice. The other is that you embrace diversity and you attack poverty," says Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP. Laura spoke with Ben at the We Are One rally in Newark, New Jersey and discussed the way conservative attacks on women, unions, immigrants, and more are all part of the same strategy, as well as the settlement of a lawsuit the NAACP filed against Wells Fargo. Distributed by Tubemogul.

Election 2010: it just keeps getting weirder. Now that the primaries are mostly over, a motley crew of Tea Partiers and abstinenceaholics are taking aim at Congress, and some of what they have to say is hilarious--or would be, if these weren't the nominees of one of the two major parties in the U.S., and the other party hadn't managed to alienate a good chunk of its base. Lizz Winstead joins guest host John Fugelsang to look--and laugh--at Jim DeMint, Christine O'Donnell, Meg Whitman, and more as we get closer and closer to voting time. The One Nation rally this past weekend was intended to offer an alternative to anger and hate, to give progressives a way to come together to organize around the issue most pressing to nearly all Americans: the economy and jobs. The idea was the brainchild of Ben Jealous, the youngest leader of the nation's oldest and largest grassroots civil rights organization, the NAACP, along with George Gresham of 1199 SEIU. They don't intend for this to be a one-time rally, either, and Jealous sat down with Laura while they were both in Washington to discuss the rally, strategies for moving forward, the current political climate, and just what happened with Shirley Sherrod.

We hear a lot about "post-racial" politics these days--the election of Barack Obama supposedly has led us into a post-racial age, but have we really seen anything change? Not much, notes Kimberle Crenshaw, co-founder of the African-American Policy Forum, and it's not really new either. But a lack of a sense of history is another symptom of today's politics, and Crenshaw notes that even black elected officials and candidates sometimes fall victim. Crenshaw joins Laura in studio for a look at black tea party candidates, the troubles facing Adrian Fenty and other black mayors, and the problem with claims of "reverse racism."