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A few quick hits before the weekend:
• I'll be on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday morning, as part of the weekly news roundtable. I'll be on with George Will, Bush-Cheney strategist Matthew Dowd and Cokie Roberts discussing the news of the week. Expect some interesting discussion - Will and I agree about the dangers of escalation in Afghanistan but not much else, and likely topics include healthcare reform and the President's overnight Olympic lobbying trip to Copenhagen. Check the This Week website or local listings for airtime in your community. We'll have video at TheNation.com on Monday.
• The Nation's net movement correspondent Ari Melber will be on Joy Behar's new program on CNN/Headline News Monday night at 9PM EST. We're big fans of Joy here and expect her show will be lively.
• If you're in New York City, Brave New Films has extended their premiere run of their new film, Rethink Afghanistan. I'm part of a forum at the opening tonight, headlined by Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. Rethink Afghanistan is an important film and a clear indictment of escalation and Rep. McGovern has been a courageous leader on this critical issue. I hope you can catch a screening. Here's the full schedule.
• For some context on healthcare, we had the opportunity to sit down with Investigative Journalist and Blogger Marcy Wheeler, of Firedoglake.com, and ask her how progressives can still win a robust public option. Marcy had some choice words for the "Baucus Bill," one of the healthcare reform bills now moving through the Senate (she calls it the "Max Tax" after its lobbyist-tainted author) but also offers some hope and some perspective on what the Senate is up to and what the bills up for discussion really do. It's short, insightful and you can watch it right here:
Finally, a welcome to The Nation's new art critic, Barry Schwabsky. Barry is part of a long and distinguished lineage of art critics for The Nation. He's been writing for us since 2005, and his essays accomplish what may be the hardest task for any critic: writing that is both provocative inside the arts world and engaging to The Nation's audience at large. He's written for Artforum, the London Review of Books, and Art in America. He's the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art; Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting; and most recently a collection of poems, Book Left Open in the Rain. He's a gifted scholar and a great writer--we're lucky to have him. He'll be writing monthly--here's his latest essay.
That's all for today. As always you can follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/katrinanation, and leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Thoughts on politics, current affairs, riffs and reflections on what’s in the news and what’s not--but should be.
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Don't agree with George Will TOO much on Sunday, Ms vanden Heuvel....
he's already "in Dutch" with the neo-cons!
Posted by Mask at 10/02/2009 @ 10:48am
Glad to see you'll be on This Week this weekend. Escalation in Afghanistan looks like a bad move. Pressure on Karzai to stop the corruption is probably what Afghanis' most want. What we need is a good intelligence network in the country.
Posted by Buddy33 at 10/02/2009 @ 10:56am
I hope we can get a discussion on This Week about WHY we are in Afghanistan --I won't hold my breath.
Wouldn't it be great if we could divulge on national broadcast tv some of the intricasies of pipeline politics?
Here's an excerpt from Pepe Escobar's scintillating new piece at TomDispatch:
"Oil and natural gas prices may be relatively low right now, but don't be fooled. The New Great Game of the twenty-first century is always over energy and it's taking place on an immense chessboard called Eurasia. Its squares are defined by the networks of pipelines being laid across the oil heartlands of the planet. Call it Pipelineistan. If, in Asia, the stakes in this game are already impossibly high, the same applies to the "Euro" part of the great Eurasian landmass -- the richest industrial area on the planet. Think of this as the real political thriller of our time.
The movie of the week in Brussels is: When NATO Meets Pipelineistan. Though you won't find it in any headlines, at virtually every recent NATO summit Washington has been maneuvering to involve reluctant Europeans ever more deeply in the business of protecting Pipelineistan. This is already happening, of course, in Afghanistan, where a promised pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India, the TAPI pipeline, has not even been built. And it's about to happen at the borders of Europe, again around pipelines that have not yet been built.
If you had to put that Euro part of Pipelineistan into a formula, you might do so this way: Nabucco (pushed by the U.S.) versus South Stream (pushed by Russia). Be patient. You'll understand in a moment.
Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 12:16pm
cont.
At the most basic level, it's a matter of the West yet again trying, in the energy sphere, to bypass Russia. For this to happen, however -- and it wouldn't hurt if you opened the nearest atlas for a moment -- Europe desperately needs to get a handle on Central Asian energy resources, which is easy to say but has proven surprisingly hard to do. No wonder the NATO Secretary General's special representative, Robert Simmons, has been logging massive frequent-flyer miles to Central Asia over these last few years."
End quote.
The article goes on to describe the fact that Russia --Gazprom-- is right now spending $20 billion to build natural gas pipelines under the Baltic and Black Seas to supply Europe. They are both set to be completed by 2015 (the first --under the Baltic Sea to Germany-- is set to be delivering the goods by 2011).
This has players in Europe as well as the US in a fairly apoplectic state. Europe would like to develope its own pipeline ("Nabucco" after the opera by Verdi) but the negotiations through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Austria are highly complex and the pipeline may be delayed indefinitely.
But it would be so easy if we could simply gain access to central Asian (Caspian Sea basin) natural gas and oil and send it via Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan to western markets. Thus Russia would not have an iron grip on the tap.
Good luck with that America. Of course, we could bypass the whole sordid mess if we simply decided to make Iran a preferrred partner and negotiated in good faith with them --look at a map people. Yeah right, that'll happen.
Over Tel Aviv's dead body.
Peace out, ~B
Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 12:16pm
And another thing...
While I much appreciated the Nation cover piece by William R. Polk --it's a superb look at the difficulties an occupation faces in Afghanistan's fractured tribal societies-- it is simply naive of any of us to believe that Obama is likely to take it into genuine account since he has already referred to Afghanistan as "a war of necessity" thus tying his own hands. Not that it probably mattered since powerful interests are determined that we stay in "Af-Pak" and Obama can likely do nothing to divert them. This is ultimately a deal with the devil, folks.
I've already posted a first draft of this cri de coeur at Dreyfuss. Since this is perhaps a more appropriate forum I'll repost it here:
THE CRISIS: On the Irony of Obama, the Abject Failure of the Left, and the Elephant in the Room
I ran into it again the other day --someone on a Nation blog claiming that "I, for one, am still going to give Obama a chance". The blogger goes on to imply that she was not one of those angry types who wanted to "hold Obama's feet to the fire" immediately out of the gate. How did this meme get started anyway?
It was The Nation magazine itself that stated –in its endorsement of Obama a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away--that (paraphrased) "We endorse Obama on the condition that a progressive movement must rise up around Obama, and provide the support he will absolutely require if any significant change is to occur." So there it is in the simplest terms.
Yet, from the very beginning it seems that getting progressives to rally around (and push) this president has been mostly an exercise in futility --no offense to those who are currently working their tails off to get an authentic fire started.
Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 12:39pm
From the very beginning, it shouldn't have mattered what our progressive opinions of Obama were –whether we believed he was a corporate sell-out , that he was a savior sent from God, or something in between--the meme that should have mattered was that the time to act was now. Instead it appears that "now" is now history.
This is, absolutely, the tragedy of our time. The great irony of Obama is that his "hope" is leaving us hopeless, and his "change" is emptying our pockets of political willpower. He has -- advertently or inadvertently-- disarmed us with his charm.
Allow me to splash some potent fuel on our anemic fire:
"Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment -- a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.
The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.
Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 12:39pm
The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable -- and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.
Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.
Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.
It's a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that's what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players -- from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus -- found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up.
Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 12:39pm
Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.
We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad."
~Matt Taibbi, "Sick and Wrong" –Rolling Stone, Sept. 3, 2009
As much as I value The Nation as a resource and a refuge, it's been equally evident that the magazine is not pulling its weight in this epic battle of our era. Where is the rumbling editorial voice calling for a mass march on Washington DC for single-payer and/or a robust public option? Glenn Beck can assemble 70,000 misguided morons, and we don't have the voice or cojones to muster even a fraction of the millions of unemployed and uninsured who are about to be fed into Max Baucus's black-smoke-belching, Mega-Corporate Meat Grinder?
The Nation has a presence in the national "mainstream" media, but its voice has yet to be heard by millions of Americans who desperately need to hear a lion's roar on their behalf. If you roar it, they will rise. Don't tell me, "We don't do that here", or "That's not our role". Balderdash. If progressives don't grab the bullhorn, the next one to do so won't be as inept (or nonviolent) as Glenn Beck. Bet on it.
Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 12:39pm
Enter the Elephant
Closing on a more profound (or perhaps confounding) note, what we are now undergoing --see Arundhati Roy's outstanding, "What Have We Done To Democracy?", The Nation, 9/28-- is a crisis in democracy ultimately due to a crisis in capitalism, in turn derived from a crisis in how we perceive what it means to be "human". This is the proverbial riddle, wrapped in an enigma, engulfed by a conundrum.
To catch a fleeting sense of what I mean, I direct readers to a sparkling gem by the splendid documentarian Adam Curtis, "The Century of the Self" (available online in streaming video). You see, we now inhabit the Great Age of Propaganda and the purveyors know the game intimately while the victims remain mostly unaware. Today, so much of importance at the higher levels of society revolves around marketing and public relations to the point where many (perhaps most) in our government have taken to the view that polished PR is primary, and effective action –i.e. policy-- is almost an afterthought. We've officially entered a grand Hall of Mirrors that renders the funhouse a welcome respite from distortion.
What needs to be shouted from the roof-tops is that we so easily fall victim to the treachery and trickery of propaganda. It's woven into the fabric of who we are, and the only potentially effective defense is for everyone to be aware of what is almost certainly our most profound weakness.
What needs to be "catapulted" is not the propaganda, but the very fact that we are --for all intents and purposes-- propaganda consuming machines. Only the intimate knowledge of that truth can begin to protect us from the lies.
Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 12:39pm
What needs to be "catapulted" is not the propaganda, but the very fact that we are --for all intents and purposes-- propaganda consuming machines. Only the intimate knowledge of that truth can begin to protect us from the lies. Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 12:39pm | ignore this person | warn this person
advertising works.
good post.
Posted by emile duBois at 10/02/2009 @ 1:32pm
"good post" ~Emile
Thanks very much for the compliment, Emile. It's actually kind of soothing to hear something positive from fellow bloggers. We all know there's enough negativity around these parts.
That fairly lengthy post originated as a ball of fiery energy on Wednesday afternoon. It felt pretty good to let it out.
It'd be even better if it had the power to effect something positive --something like the proverbial butterfly and the hurricane, but perhaps with a butterfly as an endpoint instead.
We can all dream. I highly recommend it.
Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 1:53pm
We can all dream. I highly recommend it.---Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 1:53pm
Unfortunately your last dream was John Edwards as Dem nominee....and us waking upto "Vice-President Palin" a heartbeat away.
Posted by Mask at 10/02/2009 @ 2:35pm
Don't agree with George Will TOO much on Sunday, Ms vanden Heuvel....
he's already "in Dutch" with the neo-cons!
Posted by Mask at 10/02/2009 @ 10:48am | ignore this person | warn this person
By the end, probably, of George's next round of Sunday morning talks, some of our visitors to this blog will have him caught and tagged as a "leftist" Trotskyite surrender-monkey, like Walter Cronkite and Robert McNamara.
Posted by schnellerheinz at 10/02/2009 @ 2:44pm
The barking misconception arrives.
No time or energy to rehash the whole string of arguments made...oh about two years ago now. But suffice it to say that any push for Edwards contained caveats and arrived well before ANYONE --incuding you, my little clueless one-- knew how badly Edwards had fucked up his chances.
Literally.
Much of life goes this same way, unfortunately. How were you conceived, Maskot? By turkey baster I presume.
Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 2:46pm
Posted by b_kool_66 at 10/02/2009 @ 2:46pm | ignore this person | warn this person
Posted by Mask at 10/02/2009 @ 2:35pm | ignore this person | warn this person
And in relation to Edwards--WTF??? Edwards, with his $$$$$$$$$$$$$$, can tag some MAJOR stuff. And "Rielle" Hunter bags this guy. I don't get it. Have you seen her pictures? Nothing to really write home about. And who has a name like "Rielle" anyway? That alone sends alarm bells.
Sorry.
Posted by schnellerheinz at 10/02/2009 @ 3:00pm
Just for Darlaloon who is so fond of quotes;
From the Durge Report; "THE EGO HAS LANDED AND THE WORLD REJECTS OBAMA: CHICAGO OUT IN THE FIRST ROUND."
Posted by BigPasture at 10/02/2009 @ 11:58pm
Well DuNcE glad you could get one more shot at Obama before you went to sleep. Though I didn't support him going to Copenhagen for other reasons,what would have been bad about Chicago getting that huge amount of economic activity in 5 years. Now let's get down to work and finish this process of health care reform.
Posted by whatozz at 10/03/2009 @ 08:31am
Yes, absolute kudos for b-kool.Ever since the 80's propagandizing has been the preferred mode of keeping the ill- informed and non-informed smugly blind and ignorant. It probably started well before that, especially in relation to Unions and the working class...morphed further by the non-taxed,"non-partsan" Religous Right and their vulnerable single-issue disciples. What it has propagated, however, is an electorate who continually undermines their own, and their childrens/grand-childrens hopes of ever again rising above that serfdom- continually reconstituted by the Nixons, Reagans, Falwells, Grahams, Bushes, Limbaughs, et al- while really coming to believe they are lucky if they have a job that earns over minimum wage...with no health insurance. Great Post b-kool!
Posted by garyaber@msn.com at 10/03/2009 @ 08:34am
Joan Crawford, meet Gloria Jones. Like Mommie Dearest, Gloria Jones takes her problems with alcohol out on her children. In this memoir, Kaylie Jones, the only daughter of Gloria and the novelist James Jones, recalls a lifetime at the mercy of her occasionally charming but usually drunken mother. Harrowing stuff, to say the least: when 8-year-old Kaylie confronts Gloria about forgetting to pick her up from school, her mother replies, "God, you're so neurotic!" If there is one constant in the daughter's relationship with her mother, it is that "fighting back was like throwing oil on fire." It's no surprise that as Kaylie Jones's turbulent young adulthood commences -- presaged by the death of her father when she is 16 -- she too turns to alcohol to calm the storm within. Years of wanton partying eventually lead Jones, by now a published novelist, to hit rock bottom. With the help of a friend, she makes a successful bid for sobriety. As admirable as this is, Jones's journey -- which includes a stable marriage, a daughter of her own and a transformative passion for tae kwon do -- never seems to move beyond a simplistic narrative of addiction and recovery. Couple this with her penchant for name-dropping and irrelevant boasts (she mentions, for instance, that her toddler scores "off the chart" on a verbal development test), and one gets the feeling that her confessional treatment doesn't quite add up to the whole truth.
Posted by meganbuskey at 10/03/2009 @ 11:40am
Hi b-kool, you are right, I just wanted to have hope, ya know? I actually agree with pretty much all of what you say, but its so depressing, I mean where do we start? Seriously, we do need a revolt, a million man and women march on Washington and and not just on health care but on the sell outs in Washington, I know this, but after 8 years of being sold down the river I just wanted to have some hope, even though I know nothing will change, I see and hear it every day, I know the truth, but for my children and their children, I wanted to have hope, jokes on me huh? Sigh..... .
Posted by Denise29 at 10/03/2009 @ 11:45am
Denise, keep pressuring your Reps with what you know is right. This is the time for us to say do it for us the people. No more of the support for big money,let's go.
Posted by whatozz at 10/03/2009 @ 4:10pm
Thanks whatozz, but do you really think it will help, g-d help us they are all bought.
Posted by Denise29 at 10/03/2009 @ 4:20pm
Talk about the money changers!
Posted by Denise29 at 10/03/2009 @ 4:21pm
Since as far back as Eisenhower, talking about the industrial complex we have been on a downhill slide. How do you even begin to stop that? So much evil, I know we have to keep fighting, but how?
Posted by Denise29 at 10/03/2009 @ 4:25pm
There are people that will fight for us,we just have to keep the pressure on our reps. What else do they do? Does Ron Paul like wqhat he does? He must because his son is getting ready to run for the Senate in Kentucky, So if yopu and I want to comment ,these guys want to be commented on. We have to keep talking and keep pushing back. If our guys are bad let's toss them, and get a better person. Always remember the facts speak for themselves,keep your eye on the discourse.
Posted by whatozz at 10/03/2009 @ 4:32pm
That I can do whatozz, I'm not as eloquent or as smart as most of the posters here, but, that, I can do, thanks.
Posted by Denise29 at 10/03/2009 @ 4:40pm
I admire the fight by the progressives but I believe you and your political supporters have to be completely honest with the American people. The public option to myself and many Americans is purley a vehicle towards the single payer system. It is being touted as creating competition when we all know the government never competes with private industry. If you wanted more competiton then just let insurance companies sell across state lines. So I dont understand why there is such a movement to hide the true goal of the public opton. If you favor the single payer system then admit it, be proud of it and lets have an honest debate..maybe Americans will favor the single payer..who knows.. but what Americans will never favor is deception. That is what the president fails to understand.
George Diaz, M.D. Chief, Division of Neurology MT sinai Medical Center Miami beach Florida
Posted by diazguma at 10/05/2009 @ 10:49am