The Notion

Twitter Tweaks Social Media with New Lists Feature

By Ari Melber

Twitter, the over-hyped, under-appreciated social network for sharing chit-chat and links, just launched a tool enabling users to create their own lists on the site. The Journal explains the basics:

The new feature allows Twitter users to organize the people they follow and streamline their feeds. Others can then follow their lists, sparing them the time of hunting for individual Twitterers with shared interests

So what, right?

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October 30, 2009

Reparations?

By Leslie Savan

Even without George W. Bush's debut in Fort Worth as a motivational speaker (see Stephen Colbert swoon over the speech here), this past week has been full of reminders of 43. On Wednesday, President Obama walked out onto the North Lawn of the White House to plant a tree where, one year earlier, Bush had tried to plant a Scarlet Oak. Bush's tree "didn't take," so Obama shoveled a few symbolic spadefuls of dirt over the roots of a Linden tree, asked assembled reporters whether it looked nice, and walked back into the Oval Office.

Sometime after midnight, 44 caught a quick helicopter ride out to the Dover Air Base to stand, wind-whipped and slender, as the bodies of 18 Americans killed in Afghanistan were off-loaded from a C-17 in their flag-draped coffins. It was the first time in eight years of war that a President has greeted our returning dead. Obama flashed a neat, palm-down right-hand salute, which cameras recorded matter-of-factly, as if images of respect for the returning dead were an everyday affair.

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October 29, 2009

Palin's Pet Has Taliban Ties?

By Laura Flanders

One week before Election Day, the special election to fill a vacant House seat in New York's North Country is heating up. It's a three-way split, pitting a Republican, a Democrat, and a Conservative against one another. It's close.

And the conservative on the ticket has the kind of support the Democrat running against him must love.

Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman has already received the backing of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the anti-public-spending Club for Growth. On Monday he was endorsed by another beauty: Dana Rohrabacher, the senior Orange County (CA) Republican who began his career as a speechwriter for President Reagan. Said Rohrabacher "We don't need Tweedle-Dum or Tweedle-Dee, we need Hoffman. He's not afraid to stand up and speak the truth."

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October 29, 2009

Centrist Democrats = Corporate Sellouts

By Ari Berman

Every time I hear about Joe Lieberman's latest apostasy, I think, Oy vey! There he goes again. More Joementum.

Remind me why we still call this guy a Democrat? Sure, Lieberman caucuses with Democrats in the Senate--Joe is nothing if not opportunistic and who wants to be part of a lowly Republican minority?--but I think he forfeited his right to call himself one when he almost became John McCain's VP and campaigned stridently against an Obama presidency. Yet somehow he managed to keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Gotta love those Senate Democrats--they always find a way to reward someone for stabbing them in the back. See Baucus, Max.

Following Lieberman's threat to filibuster a public option, every paper played up the story of how the "centrists" are now rebelling. Watch out, the centrists are coming! "Centrists unsure about Reid's public option," the Washington Post reported today. Let's get real. These holdouts are not centrist Democrats; they are corporate Democrats, which should be an oxymoron. They'll do whatever the healthcare industry wants and use their red state constituents as an excuse to do so. Only Lieberman is from Connecticut, one of the bluest states in the country. So what's his excuse?

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October 28, 2009

Assessing the Opt-Out - A Lessson from the Abortion Debate

By Eyal Press

So the public option isn't quite dead yet. Democrats – Harry Reid, no less – showed some spine. Progressive advocacy groups are ecstatic. Conservatives are aghast.

But before anyone on the left (or right) gets too excited, it's worth taking a clear-eyed look at what the "opt-out" actually entails. As the ever-shrewd Ezra Klein has observed, "It is a compromise, and a conservative one at that."

The option of a government-run plan will apparently only be offered to people who don't rely on employer-based insurance, and only in some states. Is this an improvement over the status quo? Certainly. Is it a formula for universal coverage? At least in the short-term, it's more likely to bring about a patchwork system in which less affluent people in more conservative states end up being denied choices that individuals who happen to live in places like Boston and New York enjoy.

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October 27, 2009

Here Come the Unions

By Esther Kaplan

View a slideshow of images from the showdown in Chicago here.

On Tuesday morning, in Chicago, the unions came to town. It was the final day of the rolling protest dubbed The Showdown in Chicago, a confrontation with the American Bankers Association, whose members had gathered for their annual meeting. With a crowd estimated at 5,000, it was without a doubt the largest demonstration against Wall Street's ravages since the economy crashed a year ago.

From the desperate manufacturing sector came members of the Sheet Metal Workers and the Machinists and the Steelworkers. From the collapsed housing market came the Carpenters and the Painters and the Insulators. There were laid off workers from shuttered factories – Republic Doors and Windows, whose battle over severance pay was captured in Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Quad City Die Casting, whose hundred employees all lost their jobs with far less fanfare last month. Pulling up the rear, a large contingent of garment workers from Hart Marx, suit makers to the president, who successfully fought off a shutdown threatened by creditor Wells Fargo, saving some 3,500 jobs. And, of course, a vast purple army from the Service Employees Union, SEIU.

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October 27, 2009

How Many Experts Declared Public Option Dead?

By Ari Melber

As the Senate moves towards including some form of public option in health care reform, it is worth remembering all the Washington "experts" who already declared the public option dead.

The list is long, distinguished, sometimes surprising and, thanks to the open source web, the list is growing. A diarist at DailyKos, "BrookylnBadBoy," just began counting. It ranges from bearish Senators (Kent Conrad) to Republican operatives (Brad Blakeman, Dana Perino) to sympathetic progressives (Nate Silver, Jane Hamsher) to, naturally, a long list of professional pundits (Klein, Gergen, Cillizza, Brooks, O'Donnell, Krauthammer, O'Reilly). You can add to your own nominations over at "Daily Kos," or here in our comments section.

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October 27, 2009

Bankers and Their Victims

By Esther Kaplan

Day two of the Showdown in Chicago, a three-day-long protest against big banks, began a bit dismally for The Nation. An email from American Bankers Association spokesman John Hall informed us that our press credentials had been revoked. The reason? Because we'd arrived early to cover a protest outside the ABA's annual meeting at the Sheraton Hotel the night before, he told us, ABA officials believed us to be "moles for the protesters."

Alas. That meant I wouldn't have the chance to hear how there's a silver lining to every recession -- I'm sorry, recovery -- through such workshops as "Strategies for Acquiring Troubled Banks" (this is, after all, the first year since 1992 when more than a hundred have failed in a single year) and "NonInterest Income," no doubt rich with tips on how to increase revenue through hiking fees on checking accounts, credit cards, and overdraft protection. Nor could I learn how to roll back socialism in "Unwinding Government Intervention," or sort through the puzzling link between record unemployment and depressed spending in "The Impact of the Recession on Consumer Preferences and Behavior." Worst of all, I'd miss Newt Gingrich's keynote speech in which, it was promised, he would "strike an optimistic tone."

It turns out Newt didn't exactly have his finger on the pulse, anyway.

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October 26, 2009

Bombings in Baghdad Threaten DC's Security.

By Laura Flanders

The 'Beneath the Presidency' Routine

By Adam Howard

The far right's latest attack line on President Obama is not as subtle as they think it is. By calling his administration's war of words with Fox News "beneath the presidency" --conservatives hope to add fuel to the fire of a potent and potentially racist, ideological effort to delegitimize the president. They've employed this tactic earlier but less histrionically when Obama became the first sitting president to appear on The Tonight Show and again when he courted the 2016 Olympics for Chicago, but it's really taken off with regards to the Fox News fight.

Whether you believe the president is right or wrong to challenge Fox News (I happen to agree with Slate's Jacob Weisberg, I believe he's right), it's pretty petty and profoundly ironic that the very people who excused George W. Bush's frequent malapropisms, carefree warmaking and authorization of torture as bold leadership now hope to marginalize Obama for publicly rebuking Fox News. As Amanda Terkel of Think Progress points out:

Bush also called a New York Times reporter "a major league asshole" -- and never apologized. In fact, Bush never gave the NYT a single interview throughout his presidency. The White House frequently went after NBC News, and Perino has admitted that they essentially froze out MSNBC "towards the end."

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October 25, 2009