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Now, welcome to the award-winning Best of A Left by Jazz with clips today from Papa Ganda,

Counter-Spin, The Young Turks, This Week in Blackness, The David Pakman Show, and Democracy Now.

Mad Men is a period piece, but the show has some alarming parallels to the present.

In this essay, writer Sarah Jane Stratford, explains how madmen informs our current politics

and how scenes from the show have been a rallying cry for real-life political activists.

If you're an active Democrat, you've probably gotten the emails. No more madmen.

In the past year, the AFL's CIO has used madmen references in email subject lines to protest the lack of equal pay,

and a senator used madmen as a hook to push for birth control coverage.

Even President Obama named checked the show in his state of the union address.

And you know what a father does, too?

It is time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a madmen episode.

As the fictional characters in madmen have become national icons,

political organizers have harnessed the show's hypnotic power for real-life issues.

The show makes it clear how far women's rights have come since the 1960s,

and how much we still need to accomplish.

Madmen has been better than any number of traditional history lessons,

at immersing us in a world that, though superficially elegant and sexy,

is ultimately not desirable for anyone who, you know, believes in equality.

From its very first episode in 2007,

madmen addressed the issue of women's sexuality and reproductive rights.

...