The Nation

If you've spent time in progressive circles these last nine months, you've certainly heard the "make me do it" story. The details bounce around, even the name of the president who allegedly said it (sometimes it's Johnson, most often it's Roosevelt), but the basic tale is this: the president is meeting in the Oval Office with an activist, a union president or a civil rights leader pushing a progressive cause. At the end of the meeting the president says, "OK, you've convinced me.

In the days between Christmas and New Year's Eve, Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, sat at his desk in Lower Manhattan and reached out to people who had lavished generous donations on his organization during the long, benighted tenure of George W. Bush. It was a heady moment: the era of Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales was winding to a close, and Barack Obama was about to assume office, having vowed to rescind some of his predecessor's more egregious assaults on civil liberties.

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered.

As we mark the end of the first year of the financial bailout, the public seems to regard the government's actions with a toxic combination of rage and confusion. People are pissed off but too bewildered to know what to do with that anger. The confusion isn't an accident. The government hasn't exactly been forthcoming about how it's made buckets of money available to the banking sector.

Margarine, margarine, 'I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.'" Poppy Tooker recalls the months of food shortages after Hurricane Katrina ripped the Gulf Coast apart. "I could not believe there was no butter." According to the New Orleans native, one unfortunate but little-noticed repercussion of the storm was the demise of dairy. As a food activist, she understood the heavily industrial process of butter churning, preservation, shipping and storage.

With the notable exception of handing over $700 billion to Wall Street last year, the United States Congress is not known for quick, decisive action. But recently, in a resounding bipartisan vote, members of both houses voted to deny federal dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Over the past fifteen years, ACORN and its affiliates have received on average about $3.5 million a year from the government, or approximately one-millionth of this year's budget.

The last ten minutes of Barack Obama's health care speech, invoking the legacy of Ted Kennedy and emphasizing concern for others as an essential part of "the American character," were powerful and affecting. Eschewing the professorial tone he has too often struck when discussing health care in recent months, Obama spoke instead about "large heartedness" and the "terror and helplessness" any parent would feel to have a sick child go without treatment because of money.