Nation in the News | The Nation

Far from ending Bush-era policies of extraordinary rendition and torture that outraged liberals, Democratic President Obama has developed them further, Nation correspondent Jeremy Scahill said during the second part of a Democracy Now! interview about his new book, Dirty Wars.

"There are ways in which Obama pushed the Cheney agenda far beyond what a President McCain or a President Romney would have been able to do, because he had his base of supporters," Scahill said.

—Alec Luhn

Read an excerpt from Scahill’s new book at TheNation.com.

Anwar al-Awlaki's Denver-born son Abdulrahman was, like his father, killed by American forces. The lesson from Abdulrahman's story, says Nation correspondent Jeremy Scahill, is that the US can aim "targeted strikes" at anyone—with impunity. "It’s the most horrific form of pre-crime," Scahill says. "They don’t know the identities of the people that they’ve been killing, they don’t know whether they’ve been involved in any activity, they are killed for who they might be or who they might one day become." Scahill joins Democracy Now! for a special hour-long segment on his new book, Dirty Wars.

—James Cersonsky

Read an excerpt from Scahill's new book at TheNation.com.

Under the axe of sequestration, 140,000 families are set to lose housing assistance, mainly through cuts to Section 8 vouchers. "We're moving in the wrong direction from a collective perspective," The Nation's Greg Kaufmann says. "Half of the recipients are people with disabilities or seniors, the other half are families with children"—and, as is, only one in four families who are eligible for vouchers actually receive them. Kaufmann joins The Melissa Harris-Perry Show to discuss the impending crisis and what the big banks have to do with it. 

—James Cersonsky

For more on the budget, housing and homeless, read Kaufmann's analysis in "This Week in Poverty."

Try as the austerity-mongers did to take it away, you'll still get your mail on Saturdays. What does this victory mean for the future of public services in America? "Union members and people in the community—community activists—organized and rallied over the last two months across this country," Nation writer John Nichols says. "The lesson here when we talk about chained-CPI, when we talk about any of these other fights, is, we can beat them." Nichols joins Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan on The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann (15 minutes into the above clip) to round up the winners, losers and lessons from the fight.

—James Cersonsky

In Arizona, a new law prevents students from advocating for themselves. Read Maxwell Love's take.