The Beat

MoveOn Referendum: With Obama or Not?

By John Nichols

MoveOn, the online activist community that played such a critical role in building opposition to the Bush administration and in paving the way for its replacement by the Obama administration, is asking members whether it should now support President Obama's health-care reform legislation.

The MoveOn "team" admits in an email to the group's roughly 5 million members that Obama's proposal is "definitely not the bill most of us hoped for at the start of this fight." But, they add, "it does do some important things."

That's reasonable, as is the review of comments from MoveOn members who support and oppose the reform legislation as it currently stands.

Read More »

March 9, 2010

Kucinich's Health Reform Dissents Merit Consideration

By John Nichols

Long before Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi began talking up health care reform as a top priority for the Democratic Party, Congress and America, Dennis Kucinich was doing so. Indeed, the former Cleveland mayor, Ohio legislator, two-time presidential candidate and now senior U.S. House members has across the past 35 years been one of the country's steadiest proponents of real reform of our broken health-care system.

So Kucinich's questioning of the reform legislation being advanced by President Obama and House Speaker Pelosi is neither casual nor uninformed.

The congressman from Ohio knows the intricacies of the health-care debate as well as any key player in Washington. And he objects to the compromises contained in the measure the president and the speaker are whipping House Democrats to support. "This bill doesn't change the fact that the insurance companies are going to keep socking it from the consumers," says Kucinich, who argues that, "The insurance companies are the problem and they are getting a bailout."

Read More »

March 8, 2010

Iceland Busts the Banksters

By John Nichols

What if Americans had been asked whether they wanted to bail out big bankers and Wall Street speculators?

How many would have voted "no"?

A measure of patriotism feeds the hope that they would have made their opposition known as resoundingly as have the voters of Iceland, who on Saturday rejected demands by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands -- working hand-in-hand with the rapaciuous International Monetary Fund -- that the people of the tiny island nation cover losses triggered by the failure of a private bank.

Read More »

March 6, 2010

Why Is Barack Obama Writing GOP Talking Points?

By John Nichols

If you want to know where conservatives in Congress get all their ridiculous talking points about how dysfunctional the federal government is, how incapable the public sector is when it comes to doing anything right and, above all, how worthless federal employees are, we've tracked down the source.

It's not Rush Limbaugh.

It's not Michael Steele.

Read More »

March 5, 2010

Michael Foot and the Defense of a Free Press in Wartime

By John Nichols

Michael Foot, the British journalist, author and parliamentarian who has died at age 96, was a comrade and hero of this writer for three decades.

The former Labour Party Leader is worthy of all the tributes that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (who hails her former rival as a "great parliamentarian" and man of "high principle") and so many others are bestowing upon his memory. (As always, Tony Benn says it best.)

But I will remember Foot, above all, for his uncompromising defenses of civil liberties -- especially the freedom of the press.

Read More »

March 3, 2010

A Cautious Obama Sort Of Suggests Reconciliation

By John Nichols

President Obama did not mention the "r" word.

But the president did say, in his much-anticipated speech on the urgency of health-care reform, that: "I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform."

If Republican remain in the "party-of-no" position they have maintained since the start of the health-care debate, however, it is going to take more than Obama's belief to get the "up-or-down" vote he desires.

Read More »

March 3, 2010

Romney on Palin: "Be Careful... She Has a Rifle"

By John Nichols

A good case can be made that Sarah Palin is a younger, slightly smarter and significantly more outdoorsy Dick Cheney.

But Mitt Romney is taking the comparison of the former Alaska governor and the former Vice President a little too far.

Romney, who prefers that he be the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, is joking about how his potential rival is--like Cheney--armed and potentially dangerous.

Read More »

March 3, 2010

Calling Ron Paul! Calling Ron Paul! Fed Alert! Fed Alert!

By John Nichols

The word on Capitol Hill is that Senators Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, and Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, are scheming to lose the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) -- the office that President Obama and progressive reformers have proposed to protect Americans from the rapacious abuses of big banks and credit card companies -- within the Federal Reserve bureaucracy.

That would be a little like placing chicken protective services under the aegis of Reynard the Fox -- although, in fairness to carnivorous mammals, foxes pose far less of a threat to chickens than the banker-friendly Fed does to working Americans who might be trying to pay off a home loan or avoid a hidden credit-card fee.

According to The Hill newspaper, Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chair, is seriously considering a plan to overcome partisan gridlock that has held up an overhaul of the financial-services industry by handing off consumer protection to the Fed.

Read More »

March 2, 2010

Like Crist-Rubio for GOP, Lincoln-Halter Race Could Define Dems

By John Nichols

Most major media in the United States has given up on covering politics as if it mattered. From talk radio to talk television to the Washington bureaus of too many of our dying newspapers, the coverage of the 2010 election cycle is framed in one of two ways:

A. A fight between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats.

B. A fight between conservative Republicans and Tea Party Republicans to decide who will get to vanquish the liberal Democrats in November.

Read More »

March 1, 2010

Paterson's "Realistic" Exit Has Democrats Sighing With Relief

By John Nichols

The decision of embattled New York Governor David Paterson to quit his bid for a full term is exceptionally good news for Democrats--not just in New York but nationally.

Rocked by scandals, including the recent revelation that he had personally meddled in a domestic violence dispute involving a top aide, the governor decided to drop his 2010 bid--although, according in the he will not resign the governorship.

"I am being realistic about politics," Paterson explained. "Today I am announcing that I am ending my campaign for governor of the state of New York."

Read More »

February 26, 2010