obamanos
GRITtv: Should We Do Away With the Senate?
With the election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat, Democrats in DC seemed to give up on getting any major legislation passed. 59 votes (well, 58 and Joe Lieberman) was just not good enough. The blame has been flying -- it's Obama's fault, Rahm Emanuel's, Harry Reid's -- but what if the problem simply is the Senate? What can we change? Would eliminating the filibuster -- the so-called "nuclear option" back when Republicans were suggesting it -- be enough, or is the Senate, with its two-Senators-per-state-regardless-of-population mandate, just too fundamentally undemocratic? We ask the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, author of OBAMANOS!: The Rise of a New Political Era, Lawrence Lessig, Harvard professor and author of a new Nation cover story on the subject, and Nancy Scola of the Personal Democracy Forum.
Email this pageGRITtv: Drinking the Obama Kool-Aid with Hendrik Hertzberg
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.
GRITtv: Who Asks the Real Questions?
The biggest media news this week came last night when it was announced that Lou Dobbs would be leaving his CNN program. Yet there were plenty of other questions to ask this week about news coverage, and Jon Stewart can't be the only one critiquing the major media outlets. Rose Aguilar, of Your Call Radio, John R. MacArthur, president and publisher of Harper's magazine, Dan Gross, columnist at Newsweek, and Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker look at the media's biggest hits and misses of the past week.
