Faiz Shakir is a vice president at American Progress and serves as editor-in-fhief of ThinkProgress.org and The Progress Report. He has previously worked as a research associate for the Democratic National Committee, as a legislative aide to Senator Bob Graham on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and as a communications aide in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. He is co-author of Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform and the author of a chapter entitled “Blogging the Election” in The Change We Need. His writings have been published in the Jerusalem Post, Florida Today, and Salon, and he has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, and CNBC.
Shakir appeared as a guest commentator on the 8 July 2011 edition of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, discussing Michele Bachmann's signing of Robert Vander Plaats' "Marriage Vow," which seeks to outlaw pornography in every form and to install a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman, as well as including a clause claiming that "slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President," and Bachmann's blithe attitude toward the fact that increases in unemployment also increase her chances of getting elected.