“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Jim White: Douthat Stumbles Upon, Discards Truth to Promote Conservative Myth on Irish Economic Woes
Poor little Ross Douthat, this analysis gig of his is so hard, especially while the fantasy world of conservatism continues crashing all around him when his primary job is to keep that fantasy alive, at great cost to the real world. Today we find little Ross taking on the crash of the Irish economy. In flailing about for an explanation of what has happened to this former poster-child of Chicago economics run wild, Douthat briefly flirts with an accurate explanation of what went wrong, but then pays proper homage to his overlords by discarding the painfully obvious truth in favor of yet another conservative talking point that is easily demonstrated to be false.
When examining Ireland’s rapid economic growth just prior to the collapse, Douthat of course rushes immediately to tout conservatives’ wet dreams about growth. . .
Yup, it’s that nasty move toward “one world government” represented by the EU that is really to blame for Ireland’s woes. Poor little Ross can’t trouble himself with considering that if this explanation were true, all of the EU would be suffering just as badly as Ireland. So where are the staggering government debts in those EU countries that didn’t slash their taxes? Where are the failing banks in the EU countries that maintained more regulation? Maybe Ross can get back to us on those points.
Joe Conason: On Earmarks
It isn’t the earmarks, stupid.
Bullying Republican Senate leaders into a “voluntary” ban on earmarks may represent a political triumph for the tea party movement, but as a measure to reduce the federal deficit it is a meaningless substitute for real action. The facts about earmarks — and the deficit, for that matter — are so simple that even the dumbest birther should be able to understand.
Funds directed to specific projects by legislators — which is what earmarks are — account for around 1 percent of any annual budget, so they represent far too little money to substantially reduce the budget. Besides, banning earmarks won’t reduce the budget (or the deficit) anyway, because they are drawn from funds that have already been appropriated. . . .
It isn’t the stimulus, stupid. And it isn’t the bailouts, either. . . .
Proposals to reduce the deficit by impoverishing seniors, punishing middle-class families, and neglecting infrastructure and education will do more harm than good. The deepest problem in the U.S. economy is the gross tilt of income and wealth toward the very top and the distortion of policy to favor financial manipulation rather than real growth.
Perhaps it is time to listen again to the only president in recent memory who balanced four budgets and left a surplus for the Republicans to squander. He achieved those goals not by cutting spending, shutting down the government or ending welfare, but raising taxes on the wealthy in his first budget. There will be no progress toward fiscal balance and economic sanity until we acknowledge those facts — and stop listening to stupid.
Thom Hartmann: Michael Chertoff, Bend Over, Please…
During the time you’re reading these words, somewhere in the world somebody is getting onto or off an airplane with a few ounces of cocaine, heroin, or diamonds packed into a condom and stuffed up their rear.
The cocaine, heroin, or diamonds could just as easily be enough C4 plastic explosive to blow out the side of a plane, easily molded to fit into a condom.
Easily removed in an airplane lavatory and detonated. . . .
As Benjamin Franklin famously wrote on February 17, 1775 in his notes to the Pennsylvania Assembly, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
If we are serious about stopping Middle Eastern zealots from attacking us, instead of blowing up our own Fourth Amendment right to be secure in our persons, let’s stop blowing up Middle Eastern countries.
When the Obama administration pulls our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and works hard to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, then I’ll believe our government really cares about our safety.
Until then, it’s just theatre – with a few millions in profit for Chertoff and his friends.
David Swanson: The New War Congress: An Obama-Republican War Alliance?
To understand just how bad the 112th Congress, elected on November 2nd and taking office on January 3rd, is likely to be for peace on Earth, one has to understand how incredibly awful the 110th and 111th Congresses have been during the past four years and then measure the ways in which things are likely to become even worse.
Oddly enough, doing so brings some surprising silver linings into view.The most silvery of possible silver linings here may lie in the possibility of a reborn peace movement. George W. Bush’s new memoir actually reveals the surprising strength the peace movement had achieved by 2006. In that year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who was publicly denouncing any opposition to war, privately urged Bush to bring troops out of Iraq before the congressional elections. But that was the last year in which the interests of the peace movement were aligned with those of groups and funders that take their lead from the Democratic Party.
In November 2008, the last of the major funders of the peace movement took their checkbooks and departed. Were they at long last to take this moment to build the opposite of Fox News and the Tea Party, a machine independent of political parties pushing an agenda of peace and justice, anything would be possible.
Robert Kuttner: Saving Progressivism From Obama
My audacious hope is that progressives can move from disillusion to action and offer the kind of political movement and counter-narrative that the President should have been leading.
I doubt that it makes sense to run a left candidate against Obama in 2012. The history of these efforts is one of failure that only weakened the Democratic nominee, whether we recall Ted Kennedy’s doomed primary challenge to incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980, or Ralph Nader’s run in 2000.
The closest that the progressive movement came to realizing this strategy was of course in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson decided to abdicate in the face of mass protest. But in that tumultuous year, we had a surfeit of anti-war candidates and a real movement. Even so, we ended up with Richard Nixon. This year, it is hard to think of a plausible candidate (Howard Dean? Russ Feingold?) who could unseat Obama without further weakening the Democrats in the general election.
So our task is to step into the leadership vacuum that Obama has left, and fashion a compelling narrative about who and what are destroying America. Our movement needs the passion and single mindedness of the Tea Party movement, and it helps that we have reality on our side. If we do our jobs, we can move public opinion, discredit the right, and elect progressives to office. Even Barack Obama might embrace us, if only as a last resort.
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Calling the Bluff on Deficits
Ronald Reagan (bless his sense of humor) loved to say that the problem with his administration was that the right hand didn’t know what the far right hand was doing.
Something of that sort is happening among conservatives on the supposed urgency of closing the federal budget deficit.
On the near right is the preliminary proposal of the co-chairs of the president’s deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. It is a deeply conservative document that would make sharp reductions in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while also cutting and flattening income tax rates. As is, it would do a lot of harm, but at least it takes the deficit seriously.
Then there are Republicans in Congress whose top priority is to force through legislation making the Bush-era tax cuts for the best-off Americans permanent, thus expanding the deficit by about $700 billion over the next decade.
So on the one hand, we have to cut, cut, cut because fiscal catastrophe is looming. On the other, we have to make the problem worse by shoveling more money to the rich because … well, because taking care of those with tidy incomes is contemporary conservatism’s highest purpose.
Dean Baker: Compromise on Social Security and Medicare? Why My Center-Left Friends Are Wrong
In recent days several center-left blogger/columnists have suggested that progressives should be happy to cut a deal now on Social Security and other issues related to the budget. The argument is that the cuts being put forward by the commissions are not that onerous, they don’t involve privatization, and we could be facing much worse in the future.
While politics always requires compromise, this position misreads the economic and political landscape in four important ways.
1) The problem of the moment is unemployment. This really is a disaster for large segments of the population. That is not just a talking point.
2) The bad guy in this story is Wall Street. The financial sector is a cancer on the economy. This is precisely the moment when we should be on the attack, not running for shelter.
3) Health care costs are the real problem. This is not cheap rhetoric; health care is what needs to be fixed.
4) The overwhelming majority of the non-pundit population agrees with us.
The current economic situation really is a disaster for tens of millions of people across the country.
Ralph Nader: Bush’s Friend Barack
After nearly two years out, I can imagine George W. Bush writing his successor the following letter:
Dear President Obama:
As you know I’ve been peddling my book Decision Points and while doing interviews, people ask me what I think of the job you’re doing. My answer is the same: He deserves to make decisions without criticism from me. It’s a tough enough job as it is. But their inquiries did prompt me to write you to privately express my continual admiration for the job you are doing. Amazing! I say “privately” because making my sentiments public would not do either of us any good, if you know what I mean. . . . .
You have been such a great president-backing me on so many things-keeping most tax cuts and shelters, support for my oil and gas buddies (my base), big loan guarantees for nukes, keeping Uncle Sam from bargaining down pharma, expanding free trade, not going tough on China (my Daddy especially liked this one), avoiding class struggle rhetoric and so on.
You want to know how confident I am about you? Even though you called waterboarding “torture,” I proudly admitted approving its use to protect our country and its freedoms. Isn’t that really what the Presidency is all about, along with honoring our troops and the entire national defense efforts?
Semper fi-
George W. Bush
Wendall Potter: My Apologies to Michael Moore and the Health Insurance Industry
n advance of my appearance with Michael Moore on Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight on MSNBC (8 and 11 p.m. ET), I would like to offer an apology to both Moore and his archenemy, the health insurance industry, which spent a lot of policyholder premiums in 2007 to attack his movie, Sicko.
I need to apologize to Moore for the role I played in the insurance industry’s public relations attack campaign against him and Sicko, which was about the increasingly unfair and dysfunctional U.S. health care system. (I was head of corporate communications at one of the country’s biggest insurance companies when I left my job in May 2008.) And I need to apologize to health insurers for failing to note in my new book, Deadly Spin, that the front group they used to attack Moore and Sicko — Health Care America — was originally a front group for drug companies.
APCO Worldwide, the PR firm that operated the front group for insurers during the summer of 2007, was outraged — outraged, I tell you — that I wrote in the book that the raison d’être for Health Care America was to disseminate the insurance industry’s talking points as part of a multi-pronged, fear-mongering campaign against Moore and his movie. An APCO executive told a reporter who had reviewed the book that I was guilty of one of the deceptive PR tactics I condemned: the selective disclosure of information to manipulate public opinion.
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