Editor's Cut

Around The Nation

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

I'm writing from Moscow so I'll keep this short, but I wanted to extend a welcome to Greg Mitchell, who we brought aboard this week to launch a new blog, Media Fix. Greg is a long-time contributor to The Nation and a friend of the magazine. As he wrote in a welcome post, his affiliation with The Nation goes back to the 1970s. Greg is best known for his nine books, his years editing Editor and Publisher, and his recent contributions to politics blogs like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post. It was unfortunate to see Editor and Publisher change hands this past winter, but we are very glad to have Greg, who will blog for us daily on the intersections between politics and media.

Media Fix won't officially launch until April, when we unveil a redesign of TheNation.com. Until then what you should do is follow Greg on Twitter, @MediaFixBlog, where he is previewing the blog as kind of a "twitter feed on steroids," bringing commentary throughout the day on the best, worst and most essential stories from print, radio, tv and online media. There is so much media out there today-- some under the radar and some over-blown--and we believe Greg is the perfect tour guide, and TheNation.com the perfect platform. Follow Greg today, and join me in welcoming him to The Nation.

Also two videos of note. Matt Duss wrote our cover story this week, Attack of the Cheneys. Here is a video he did with the Center for American Progress. What are we seeing in the latest arguments from neoconservatives? How does Liz Cheney fit into all of this? And where do you see the future of the Cheney ideology? Watch here:

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March 18, 2010

Supreme Power

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

The Citizens United campaign finance decision by the Court's conservative judicial activists is a dramatic assault on American democracy and a real threat to the prospects of an Obama reform presidency.

Tensions between the Court and the Administration rose even higher last week, when Chief Justice John Roberts criticized President Obama for expressing his disagreement with the Citizens United decision during the State of the Union address. Roberts called Obama's comments "very troubling."

"What is troubling is that this decision opened the floodgates for corporations and special interests to pour money into elections--drowning out the voices of average Americans," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs shot back.

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March 12, 2010

Around The Nation

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

If you haven't seen our exchange about last week's cover story, "The Wrong Kind of Green," I encourage you to take a look. It features responses from many of the organizations profiled, and -- along with some great letters to the editor -- opens up some interesting lines for debate about the best approach to ending climate change. Read the forum here.

A few other highlights, shout-outs and pieces of news this week:

Chris Hayes Sits In for Maddow...

MSNBC could never replace Rachel Maddow, but our DC Editor Chris Hayes did her justice in his turn at the anchor chair on Tuesday. Hayes guest-hosted Maddow's MSNBC show, using the hour to tackle issues including healthcare, immigration reform and consumer financial protection. Here is one of the best segments from the night, about Bart Stupak and his crusade to deny abortion rights - or tank healthcare reform:

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March 12, 2010

Help Schools by Helping the Poor

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

This excerpt is cross-posted from the WashingtonPost.com

Diane Ravitch's one-eighty on American education will surely catch the attention of those involved with the upcoming overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act. Once an ardent supporter of NCLB, Ravitch has completely changed her mind. According to the New York Times, "Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself." Ravitch has realized, it would seem, that the reams of data NCLB's standardized testing generated haven't actually changed American education for the better but simply reemphasized the pre-NCLB notion that, indeed, too many American children are getting left behind by an inadequate educational system.

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March 10, 2010

If Only Financial Reform Really Were Funny

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

This piece is cross-posted from the WashingtonPost.com, where Katrina vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column.

In a hilarious video plug for the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, the popular comedy Web site funnyordie.com gathers Saturday Night Live's famed presidential impersonators -- from Chevy Chase to Will Farrell -- to advise a slumbering Barack Obama (Fred Armisen). Dana Carvey, reprising Daddy Bush, tersely sums up the whole shebang about financial reform:

"What you gotta understand is that we got a regulatory issue here. We gotta regulate that or we're gonna get more bubbles. Gonna get bigger, larger, then pop, money goes to the weasels."

Got that right. After the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, financial reform isn't a luxury. And it shouldn't be a partisan issue. Everyone from the tea partiers to Volvo-driving liberals has a stake in shutting down the casino and getting the big banks under control.

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March 9, 2010

The Rightwing Witch Hunt Against ACORN

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

After 18 months of screaming headlines and attacks vilifying the anti-poverty group ACORN--attacks reminiscent of a New McCarthyism that threatened the group's very existence--it's clear now that this was a right-wing witch-hunt which, sadly, too many Democrats and the mainstream media failed to fact-check.

In December, the Congressional Research Service cleared ACORN of allegations of improper use of federal funding and voter registration fraud. The latest to weigh-in on the controversy is Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. After a four-month investigation Hynes declared "no criminality has been found" with regard to the conduct of three ACORN employees in the infamous and--turns out--misnamed "pimp-prostitute" video.

In fact, a law enforcement source told the New York Daily News that the unedited version of the video which caused all the outrage "was not clear."

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March 8, 2010

Around The Nation

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

The Nation has moved quickly to embrace emerging platforms like Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter, the magazine has over 26,000 followers, and we see it as a way to engage with our readers and reach new audiences. We were thrilled, then, to win our first ever "Shorty Award" on Wednesday, in the "politics" category. The awards recognize excellence in short form journalism and commentary, and voters chose The Nation as the standout among all the political media on Twitter. For America's oldest news weekly to be honored for the world's newest platform is an honor. Congratulations to our web and Twitter team! You can follow us at twitter.com/thenation.

Also this week:

The Breakdown with Chris Hayes ...

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March 5, 2010

On Religion and Reconciliation

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Secularism of the Senate notwithstanding, "reconciliation" is at root a religious concept, an article of faith central to Christian theology. This perhaps explains why, at this point in the health care brouhaha, cantankerous Republicans have chosen to perch their high horse at such a precarious altitude.

As one of the Seven Sacraments, reconciliation is about as close to bedrock as one can get in the Roman Catholic tradition and indeed, it is one of the better-known--if not fully understood--foundations of Catholic doctrine. Also known as penance, forgiveness, and confession, reconciliation is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, "The action of restoring humanity to God's favour, esp. as through the sacrifice of Christ; the fact or condition of a person's or humanity's being reconciled with God." The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, "It is called the sacrament of Reconciliation, because it imparts to the sinner the love of God who reconciles." For Catholics, the quintessential reconciliation was Christ's crucifixion, that ultimate penance paid by mankind to deliver itself to the bosom of the Creator. The act of confessing one's sins to a priest--and the subsequent absolution--is a smaller recapitulation of this seminal event.

In Washington, we can see senatorial reconciliation as a sacrament of returning lawmakers back to the good graces of the electorate. No mundane piece of parliamentary procedure, then, the reconciliation of health-care reform is a necessary step for a wayward legislative body that for too long has been totally out of touch with its higher authority; i.e., those pesky voters. In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 37 percent of respondents said that Congress was most responsible for the health-care hold-up, compared to the 5 percent who blamed President Obama (56 percent place equal responsibility on both).

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March 3, 2010

The Deficit Hawks' Road to Ruin

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

This piece is cross-posted from the WashingtonPost.com, where Katrina vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column.

In the face of this Great Recession, the Senate's recently passed $15 billion jobs bill is more like a sick joke than a serious legislative initiative.

We have lost more than 8.4 million jobs since December 2007. One out of five Americans is now unemployed or underemployed. More than six people are seeking jobs for every one that's available. In low-income communities the jobless rates are not those of a recession but of another depression, and the Economic Policy Institute estimates that child poverty will rise to 27 percent overall, and to over 50 percent for African American children, in the next year or two.

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March 2, 2010

Van Jones's Second Chance

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

This piece is cross-posted from the WashingtonPost.com, where Katrina vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column.

Van Jones, who resigned from the White House Council on Environmental Quality last fall in the face of a coordinated smear campaign by conservative activists, has reemerged from his self-imposed exile. He'll be teaching at Princeton University and taking up a senior fellowship at the Center for American Progress, where he will head a "green opportunity initiative."

And today, Jones will accept the NAACP President's Award from Benjamin Jealous, who mounts an eloquent defense of Jones in an op-ed.

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February 26, 2010