• Radio and television personality
• Lesbian activist
• Claims that the Iraq War is an illegitimate endeavor of the Republican Party
• Advocates congressional de-funding of the Iraq War
• Supports socialized medicine
• Seeks to help the Democratic Party increase its influence in America

Born in April 1973, Rachel Maddow hosts The Rachel Maddow Show on Air America Radio and hosts her own nightly news-talk program on MSNBC television. She is also a lesbian activist.

After attending Castro Valley High School in California, Maddow earned a degree in Public Policy from Stanford University in 1994. The following year she received a Rhodes scholarship, and she went on to obtain her doctorate in Philosophy from Lincoln College at the University of Oxford. She currently resides in New York City with her partner, artist Susan Mikula.

Maddow started her political activism with a focus on AIDS and HIV. In 2000, she and a group of friends interrupted Vice President Al Gore's announcement that he would run for President by shouting and unfurling a sign that read "AIDS Drugs for Africa."

Maddow's broadcasting endeavors began when she won a contest held by an Amherst, Massachusetts radio station that was seeking a new on-air personality. After taking a leave of absence to finish her doctoral dissertation, she returned to radio because, "like an addict," she craved the public attention that radio afforded her.

In March 2004 Maddow was hired by the newly created Air America, where she hosted the program Unfiltered, along with Chuck D and Lizz Winstead. Maddow confesses that Air America had "no business" hiring her, and that she "forced" them into employing her by being tenacious and faking connections (Maddow's ex-girlfriend pretended she had been in Air America program host Al Franken's class at Harvard, and she brought him tapes of her broadcasts). By April 2005, Maddow had secured her own two-hour program, The Rachel Maddow Show, which in 2008 was expanded to a three-hour show.

Maddow characterizes her radio program as a "mixture of information, analysis and entertainment," featuring "commentary [that] can include parody songs and making fun of people, or, you know, ranting in my dungeon."

During the 2006 midterm election season, Maddow appeared as a regular panelist on the MSNBC television program Tucker (hosted by Tucker Carlson). Two years later, in January 2008, she became a political analyst for MSNBC, a position that earned her a spot as a panelist for the election-coverage program Race for the White House; she also began doing regular commentary on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. In August 2008, it was announced that Maddow would be replacing legal commentator Dan Abrams on MSNBC's prime-time 9 p.m. time slot.

Maddow believes that television punditry has been traditionally a "white-male dominated" profession, but that the field of candidates in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary helped create opportunities for a more diverse spectrum of commentators:

"…I think that it actually does matter that - Amen - we had this long, interesting, raving extravaganza of a Democratic primary this year with a white woman [Hillary Clinton] and a black man [Barack Obama] as the two major contenders. I think that it created sort of an affirmative-action impulse for pundits, which has been great."

In addition to her radio and television jobs, Maddow has written occasional blogs for the Huffington Post since September 2006. Her writing style is characterized by irreverence and sarcasm. In a January 2007 entry, for instance, she likened President Bush's low approval ratings to "the national approval ratings for herpes lesions," and urged readers to turn Bush's upcoming 2007 State of the Union Address into a drinking game: "If the president is caught on camera kissing any member of Congress -- drink once. If the person he's caught kissing is Joe Lieberman again, gargle your drink and try to make yourself barf a little."

In a September 2007 blog titled, "Three Things You Should Shut Up About: The Lazy Politician's Guide to Winning the Gratitude of Your Nation Forever," Maddow offered this suggestion for ending the Iraq War:

"If American troops are in a combat zone, and the money that pays for their bullets and gas and MREs [Meals Ready-to-Eat] is drying up, they must be withdrawn from the battlefield. What kind of psychopath would keep American troops in a war zone without the funding to supply them? No one's that evil, and if they are, we'll deal with them when they do it. Ending funding for the war ends the war, period."

Depicting the Iraq War as an illegitimate endeavor of the Republican Party, Maddow implored Democrats:

"Repeat after me: 'This is a Republican war and I will not own it, I will end it. This is a Republican war and I will not own it, I will end it.'"

In July 2007 Maddow wrote an AlterNet blog titled "Republicans Celebrate Their Whiteness," which portrayed the Republican Party as an entity steeped in racial exclusivity and elitism. Like many of Maddow's blog entries, it was written in an informal style with little attention to traditional rules of punctuation, capitalization, spelling, etc.:

"Republican candidates for president ... are in a bit of a SPOT when it comes to the policy stuff that americans care about right now. Americans are mad about iraq, our health care sucks, rich people are getting wwwwwwwwwway waaaay rich while everybody else is sinking or barely swimming, we're worried about the environment and global warming and everything. The republican candidates.... NOT ON the right side of any of those issues. It's a problem. What DO the republicans have going for them? well, they're WHITE guys."

Maddow favors socialized medicine generally, and advocates the imposition of a cigarette tax to fund the SCHIP health insurance program for children specifically.

She also supports equal marriage rights for homosexual couples, though she adds that many gay men and lesbians maintain loving relationships "that aren't dependent on the social-approval stamp that we call marriage." "We've come up with ways that we honor and acknowledge and respect each other's relationships without this one single hoop that everybody has to jump through to become an official couple," says Maddow. "I like that about us.... I'm for marriage rights in terms of what I want the laws to be, but personally, in terms of how I culturally feel about my community and us losing something when we gain those marriage rights, I'm ambivalent."

One of the most-often-recurring themes of Maddow's commentary is the notion that Republicans and conservatives are prone to be racists, and that Republican political leaders consequently seek to exploit racial fears and prejudices among their voting base.

Maddow's primary political objective is to help the Democratic Party increase its influence in America. "I think the more power the Democrats gain, the better off progressive radio and progressive media is," she says. "…[T]he closer we get to retaking the country, the closer we get to overtaking the traditional media in terms of content and influence."