The Nation: The Beat

Bill Moyers Tells a Tale of Two Quagmires: Vietnam & Afghanistan

John Nichols — 2009-11-21T09:34:31-05:00

Bill Moyers, who was at the side of President Lyndon Johnson at the time when disastrous decisions were being made to escalate the U.S. presence in the quagmire that was Vietnam, used his experience to speak Friday night to President Barack Obama about what could be an equally disastrous decision to escalate the U.S. presence in the quagmire that is Afghanistan.

"Our country wonders this weekend what is on President Obama's mind," Moyers began, at the opening of a remarkable hour of television. "He is apparently, about to bring months of deliberation to a close and answer General Stanley McChrystal's request for more troops in Afghanistan. When he finally announces how many, why, and at what cost, he will most likely have defined his presidency, for the consequences will be far-reaching and unpredictable. As I read and listen and wait with all of you for answers, I have been thinking about the mind of another president, Lyndon B. Johnson."

The presidential adviser turned journalist, who will retire his "Bill Moyers Journal" television program in April, then turned to decades old tapes that were recorded as Johnson was making the decision to surge hundreds of thousands of additional soldiers into a war that would kill almost 60,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese.

House Rebels Force Fed Audit, Real Economy Onto Agenda

John Nichols — 2009-11-20T10:21:32-05:00

The secretive Federal Reserve, former lair of "masters of the universe" like Alan Greenspan and Tim Geithner and current engine of a Wall-Street-first, Main-Street-last "recovery," is being set up by the Obama administration and Congressional leaders to get more powers.

That's a bad idea.

But it will be made a little less bad if Congress establishes some oversight over the largely-unaccountable institution.

Senate Health Bill Rejects Anti-Choice Extremes

John Nichols — 2009-11-19T09:28:51-05:00

The Senate healthcare bill unveiled Wednesday night by Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, is not exactly the cure for all of what ails America.

But the 2,074-page document significantly expands access to medical care for Americans who currently lack coverage, contains a modest public option, bars discrimination by insurers against Americans with pre-existing medical conditions and gets remarkably good marks from the Congressional Budget Office.

In many respects, Reid's "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" is a better bill than the House measure.

GM "Recovery" Strategy: Close Plants, Lay Off Workers

John Nichols — 2009-11-18T14:55:09-05:00

The headlines declare that General Motors is "recovering."

Despite continuing to lose money at what historically would have been identified as an astronomical rate, the auto company is losing less money and doing so at a slower pace than was the case a year ago.

So Obama administration aides now say they are "encouraged" by what the New York Times refers to as "signs of life" on the part of a company that many thought had "problems (that) were too big and numerous to fix."

Congress Can Move Now to Prevent Layoffs, Plant Closings

John Nichols — 2009-11-17T10:01:31-05:00

Recognizing the social, economic and political threat posed by double-digit unemployment numbers, and by the prospect that those numbers are continuing to rise, key Democratic senators are proposing an innovative two-year plan to spend as much as $600 million to avert layoffs.

The plan to support so-called "work-share" strategies -- where firms keep workers on the job with reduced hours and state programs then step in to fill the pay gap -- is a classic government intervention. Yet it has won the backing not just of progressive economists but of a top economic adviser to Republican John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.

Unfortunately, this smart alternative to layoffs has yet to earn the embrace of an Obama administration that -- despite a growing sense of urgency on the part of the president who has scheduled a December 3 forum on job creation and a cross-country "economic recovery tour" -- remains far too resistant to immediate and necessary responses to the unemployment crisis.

Democrats to Obama: Get Out of Afghanistan

John Nichols — 2009-11-16T11:12:59-05:00

The California Democratic Party speaks with an loud voice in national politics.

It is, by any reasonable measure, the biggest party in the biggest state in the nation.

And it is a well-organized, forward-looking organization that since the 1950s has had a tradition of delivering vital messages from the base to national Democratic leaders. Indeed, in the 1960s, California Democrats were among the first and loudest critics of President Lyndon Johnson's decision to expand the war in Vietnam. They were not merely opposed to the war; they were worried, wisely, that committing resources, governing energy and political capital to an unwise and unnecessary war would undermine the ability of an otherwise popular Democratic president to deliver on his ambitious domestic agenda.

Palin: Obama's "Downright Evil," But Hillary's O.K.

John Nichols — 2009-11-15T10:52:08-05:00

It is fair to say that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin would rather go vegan than say something nice about President Obama.

The 2008 Republican nominee for vice president has, in many senses, become the face of anti-Obama sentiment, referring to the president's policies as "downright evil" and picking up on tea-party talk about the president leading American down the red road to socialism. She has even gone so far in her campaigning against healthcare reform to suggest that "Obama's 'death panel'" might have targeted her Down Syndrome baby.

And Palin's new book, 'Going Rogue: An American Life' takes the Obama-as-threat-to-babies theme even further, renewing her 2008 campaign-trail charge that Obama engages in the "real extremism" of wanting to do in "babies born alive after botched abortions."

No, Sarah Palin Is Not the Next Ronald Reagan

John Nichols — 2009-11-13T03:36:52-05:00

Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue: An American Life' (HarperCollins) is being pitched by her publisher as "one ordinary citizen's extraordinary journey."

That's about right.

Palin is ordinary -- remarkably, overwhelmingly, mind-numbingly ordinary.

Obama Gets It: Tackling Unemployment is Job 1

John Nichols — 2009-11-12T11:27:03-05:00

The No. 1 issue facing the country is unemployment.

President Obama and Congress have been too slow to recognize that fact and to act upon it.

But that seems to be changing -- now that the official jobless rate has spiked to 10.2 percent.

To Save Journalism, Return to Founding Principles

John Nichols — 2009-11-12T10:57:29-05:00

This fall we are highlighting thinking about the future of journalism on The Nation's website, starting with a video from 2009 Nation/Campus Progress Student Journalism Conference. In it, I discuss the collapse of old media as a platform for serious news reporting and commentary and the failure -- so far -- of new media to come up with functional models for producing journalism sufficient to meet the requirements of citizens in a democracy.

After running through the details of the current crisis, which is seeing the loss of more than 1,000 journalists a month to layoffs and downsizings, the shuttering of international and Washington bureaus at the most rapid rate in the nation's history and the closures of Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers, I argued for government intervention to promote diverse and competitive media that provides citizens with the information they need while highlighting the best and boldest ideas of the political left and right.

That argument is, of course, a reprise of the thinking of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who at the founding of the United States established postal subsidies and a host of related initiatives to develop and sustain and free and competitive press. It leads to the core conclusion: "The corporate sector and the private foundation sector will not or cannot solve this current crisis. If there is to be journalism in the 21st century, there must be government intervention -- and it must be the same sort of intervention as we had at the founding of the American experiment."