“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”
Paiul Krugman: The Truth, Still Inconvenient
So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.
But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.
Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers – who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data – had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.
New York Times Editorial: An Epidemic of Rape for Haiti’s Displaced
Life after Haiti’s earthquake has been especially difficult and dangerous for displaced women and girls. In addition to the ongoing crises of homelessness and cholera, a chronic emergency of sexual violence prevails in the settlements where hundreds of thousands still live, well over a year after the disaster.
Groups of Haitian women have been struggling to defend themselves, banding together to prevent assaults and now taking their case to a wider world. At a hearing March 25 in Washington before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a grass-roots group, Kofaviv, joined other human-rights advocates in pressing for an end to what they called a rape epidemic. The police, they said, rarely patrol inside unlighted camps or investigate attacks. Victims live in constant fear and shame while attackers go unpunished.
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: The end of progressive government?
So far, our nation’s budget debate has been a desultory affair focused on whether a small slice of the federal government’s outlays should be cut by $33 billion or $61 billion, or whatever.
But Americans are about to learn how much is at stake in our larger budget fight, how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots.
David White:Wholesale Robbery in Liquor Sales
Imagine if Texas lawmakers, in a bid to protect mom-and-pop bookstores, barred Amazon.com from shipping into the state. Or if Massachusetts legislators, worried about Boston’s shoe boutiques, prohibited residents from ordering from Zappos.com.
Such moves would infuriate consumers. They might also breach the Constitution’s commerce clause, which limits states from erecting trade barriers against one another. But wine consumers, producers and retailers face such restrictions daily.
Last month, Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, introduced a bill in the House that would allow states to cement such protectionist laws. It should appall wine snobs, beer swillers and even teetotalers. In this case, the law would protect not small stores and liquor producers, but the wholesale liquor lobby.
Michelle Chen: Do Western Strikes in Libya Betray Peaceful Revolt Everywhere?
Is the Arab Spring already coming to an end? The foreign intervention in the rebellion in Libya has clouded the rosy vision of nonviolent, youth-led uprisings that had enchanted activists around the world. Will the surge of grassroots pro-democracy solidarity hit a dead end in the streets of Tripoli, as a nebulous armed insurrection aligns with U.S. and European forces?
The speech President Obama gave to belatedly justify the NATO-led intervention makes the same appeals to “universal” humanitarian principles that George W. Bush raised to make the case for war in Iraq. Obama’s words also betrayed typical selectivity in Washington’s decisions on whose humanity to protect, and at what cost.
Robert Dreyfuss: Afghans and Floridians: Extremism Builds Extremism
If we’re going to war against religious extremists-and let’s face it, crazies-it’s a toss-up whether to invade Florida or Afghanistan. I’m not in favor of either one, but the United States has picked Afghanistan, leaving the crazies in Florida a free hand.
Deranged violence is spreading across Afghanistan in the wake of Koran burnings in Florida. The fact that it’s happening might signal to American policymakers that bringing democracy to Afghanistan, at least anything that looks like the system that prevails in the United States, is not happening. It might not be a clash of civilizations, but when a population is so reactionary and vulnerable to religious extremism, they’re not likely to march in docile fashion to the ballot box, even when encouraged to do so by 100,000 US troops.
Robert Kuttner: Changing the Tone in Washington
My fellow Americans,I ran for president to do two things — to change the tone of bitter partisanship in Washington, and to accomplish constructive economic change so that more Americans can share the blessings of prosperity.
I need to speak candidly to you tonight. Despite my best efforts, I find that I cannot do both things. You see, it takes two to compromise.
I understand why many Americans voted against my party — the Democrats — last November. Recovery from the worst recession in 75 years was, and is, too slow.
It’s understandable that many people who had high hopes in 2008 felt those hopes dashed in 2010. The president’s party normally loses some seats in his first off-year election, especially in hard economic times, and these times have been more difficult than most.
Those of you who voted for the opposition had every right to do so. But the vast majority of Americans did not vote to slash public spending on children, university students, the elderly, the disabled, the sick, and people who are unemployed through no fault of their own. You did not vote to blame the recession on nurses, teachers, police and fire-fighters or to punish them for the sins of Wall Street.
The budget debate that has dominated the headlines has emphasized numbers — mind numbing numbers. Will Congress cut $70 billion dollars, or $50 billion dollars, or $100 billion dollars? But let me tell you, this budget debate is not just about numbers.
It’s about whether kids who are eligible for Head Start are denied places in the classroom. Whether community health centers shut down. Whether students who want a chance to go to college are denied Pell Grants. Whether our families have safe drinking water and pure food. Whether Americans who are unemployed through no fault of their own lose their health insurance. And whether the most affluent Americans get still more tax cuts.
Although the Republican Party is increasingly captured by the Tea Party, I just don’t believe most Americans voted for these slash and burn cuts that will only harm our economy.
We have done our best to find a middle ground. But the opposition party keeps moving the goal posts on us.
No sooner do we come to terms over a compromise to keep the government open than the price goes up. The price of keeping the government, it turns out, is to cripple the government and the services that it provides. Deep cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next.
Well, not while I’m president. I am here to say tonight that we are not going to balance the budget on the backs of kids, or elderly Americans, or sick people, or working families.
Last December, we reluctantly compromised with the Republicans in order to extend unemployment insurance and help working Americans in other ways. Their price was two more years of tax cuts for the very wealthiest of Americans. The cost was over $125 billion — or more than the cost of spending cuts now being demanded.
Frankly, if anyone should be tightening their belts in these circumstances, it is the most fortunate among us. But the increase in the deficit caused by those tax cuts is now being use as the pretext to slash government help to everyone else.
That’s not right. So don’t make the mistake of thinking that this debate is about who has the sharpest knife for cutting deficits. It’s about how we cut deficits, about whose belt is to be tightened, and how we get the economy back on track.
If the Republicans had been sincere about wanting to hold down deficits, they never would have demanded those tax giveaways as their price for aiding the unemployed.
Not only are the Tea Party Republicans demanding crippling cuts in public services. They have also larded up the budget bill with so called riders that have nothing do with the budget.
They would ban funding for the new bureau of consumer financial protection, and other regulatory agencies charged with keeping banks from repeating the abuses that got us into this mess.
They would ban funding for the Affordable Care Act, meaning insurance companies once again could deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.
They would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating toxic substances like mercury, Dioxin, and arsenic in certain industries.
They would block the Department of Education from cracking down on well documented abuses on the part of for-profit colleges that deceive hard working students and their parents.
They would get rid of federally-funded family planning services, which also includes screening for breast and cervical cancer.
Most Americans do not support these policies. And as much as I want compromise and civility in Washington, I am not a damned fool.
Americans deserve to know just how extreme these ideas are. And if the far right wants to threaten to shut down the government if we don’t accept these radical ideas, that’s a fight I’m prepared to have.
So I will continue my efforts to change the tone in Washington. But sometimes that requires firmness in the face of reckless destruction.
I want you to know, this is not about the “partisan bickering” that the press loves to decry. The far right is trying to show its supporters that it can be tough enough to shut down the government. But I can be just as tough on behalf of working American families, who have already suffered enough.
This is the leader I thought I was voting for. Judging by his performance so far, I was wrong.
Obama’s tactics could be one way for him to win re-election. He puts himself above party, hangs progressive Democrats out to dry, and lets Republican recalcitrance move the political center further and further to the right. When he eventually gets a budget deal, it doesn’t matter to him that it is mostly on Republican terms. He wins points for keeping the government open.
John Nichols: Manning Marable: A Public Intellectual in the Service of Democracy
Many tributes will be paid in coming days to our friend and comrade from so many struggles, Manning Marable. The accolades will be rich in sentiment and content, the praise high, and appropriately so.
The great historian of the African American political experience who as a Columbia University professor helped to establish the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and the Center for Contemporary Black History,” Marable was an academic heavyweight whose scholarship earned international recognition-and whose new book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which will be published Monday by Viking, will reconfirm his status as a groundbreaking historian. His death Friday at age 60, after a long battle with lung disease, was brutally timed, as the diligent scholar’s greatest moment of national prominence was about to arrive with the publication of a biography not just of a man, Malcolm X, but of movements and the transformation of a nation.
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