hendrik hertzberg

"What we are seeing is a dagger directed at the heart of our democracy, with this money," says Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, of the ongoing influx of corporate cash on election spending this cycle. She notes that this has been a $5 billion--with a B--election, with $1 billion spent just on the House, and no matter what Karl Rove tries to say, there is nowhere close to parity with spending from left-wing causes. Katrina and Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker join Laura in studio for a discussion of the money flooding the election cycle, and to consider ways to counter the corrupting influence of cash on our political system. Is there a way to save the 2010 elections? Distributed by Tubemogul.

Yet another coal miner was killed on the job this week, and journalist and author Jeff Biggers says that the situation has reached crisis level--that it's a war on miners. He also notes that abuse of the land and abuse of the people who work on it has always gone hand in hand, so as pressure for mountaintop removal and new coal mines mounts, so do safety violations--the latest being a story broken by NPR, that a methane gas monitor at the Little Big Branch mine, where 29 workers died in an explosion in April, had been deliberately shut down. Biggers joins us to fill us in on the latest news from coal country--and from D.C., where Lisa Jackson and the E.P.A. faced a unique protest.Every day, the story changes. Sarah Palin's the leader of the Republican party--except that she can't raise money. Eliot Spitzer is a disgrace (but has a TV show), and David Vitter can run for reelection on a "family values" platform. The NAACP wants the Tea Party movement to declare itself not racist, and suddenly the NAACP is racist. And we can't even get started on the BP disaster--mostly because BP won't let reporters near the scene of the crime. Who can make any sense out of all this? Thankfully, we have expert political observers Rebecca Traister of Salon.com and Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker join us in studio to try.

Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker describes himself as being "aboard the Obama express," and his new book collects his essays on the Obama generation and the way the campaign changed politics. A year into the administration, Hertzberg is still hopeful, though like many progressives he offers criticisms of the way the health care reform fight and others have been conducted. "During the campaign," he notes, "we agree to a fantasy" that electing a new president will change everything. Progressives should know better than to expect change so quickly, especially from a Senate hampered by the filibuster.