Editor's Cut

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

Around The Nation

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

I wrote last week about our new audio features, including The Breakdown with Christopher Hayes. We've added a partner on The Breakdown: Professor Jay Rosen's great new project, ExplainThis.org. ExplainThis.org is "a user-driven assignment desk for journalists doing explanatory work." Readers go to ExplainThis.org, ask questions they think aren't being covered, and the questions are sorted, ranked and then answered by experts and journalists. The Nation has been involved in several efforts over the last year to crowd-source some of the questions posed to those in power: We partnered with Personal Democracy Forum on their "Ask the President" effort, and I've been involved in the effort to make the President's "question time" a regular event.

In our partnership with ExplainThis.org, we're taking it a step further--offering the wisdom of our DC Editor and the platform of our new audio feature, The Breakdown, to users at ExplainThis.org. They have set up a page for the project that you should all visit-- ExplainThis.org/TheBreakdown. The idea is simple: Some of the questions Chris will answer each week will still come from Twitter and email. But others we'll take directly from ExplainThis.org/TheBreakdown< /a>, where users can engage in some discussion about the podcast each week. I hope you'll check it out.

This week's The Breakdown is an important one. Chris, along with blogger and journalist Marcy Wheeler, look at the architects of the Bush-era torture memos and ask if anyone, anywhere, will ever be held accountable. Listen here:

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February 26, 2010

Debating the Web

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

My longtime colleague and friend Micah Sifry over at Personal Democracy Forum sent me a sharp and smart note after reading my latest Washington Post column.

I think he makes an important and valid point, though I'm still unsure how the "Streisand effect" mitigates what seems to me an interesting point by Hornaday. In the WP column, I simply wanted to raise some questions about the value of the Web; start a debate if you will. I didn't intend to offer conclusive answers. But Micah's note is a thought-provoking one, and makes me better understand the many good reasons to respect the web's democratizing role in our rapidly-changing media ecology.

Micah Sifry writes:

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February 25, 2010

Bipartisan Blather

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Bipartisanship is back as the next new thing in Washington. The White House is convening its bipartisan televised gabfest on health care on Thursday. Last week, the President introduced the co-chairs of his bipartisan commission on the deficits. By calling it quits and going home, Evan Bayh somehow earned wall to wall coverage for his plea for working together. Former Clinton pollster Douglas Schoen tells the Wall Street Journal that Democratic salvation will come by following Bill Clinton's example when he adopted "the bulk of Republican ideas on taxes, spending and welfare reform."

Before the two Davids--Broder and Gergen--enshrine this as conventional wisdom, a small dose of common sense is needed. First this is the sound of one hand clapping. Last I looked, it took two--as in bi--parties to do something bipartisan. Well, Republicans aren't playing. The sentiment at the Tea Party and CPAC conventions on the right was more akin to a lynch mob than a negotiating team. And the right's commissars--led by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin-- are intent on purging any Republican legislators who dare stray from the gospel, much less traffic with the other side.

That sentiment is echoed by the Republican congressional leadership, now scrambling to prove their zealotry. Republican legislators championed the idea of a bipartisan commission on deficit reduction--until Barack Obama endorsed it. Then even co-sponsors of the measure joined in torpedoing it in the Senate. House Republican leader John Boehner's initial precondition for attending the bipartisan summit on health care was that the president "scrap" the legislation that has passed the House and the Senate and "start over." His compromise was to agree to come to the summit to expose the Democratic plan and demand that they agree to start over. This is like the Iranians telling the US they are willing to negotiate about nukes with no preconditions, if the US agrees first to scrap its nuclear arsenal.

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February 23, 2010