“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”.
New York Times Editorial: A Rockier Pathway to Work
Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people are desperate for new skills to pull them back into the job market, but when they visit a job-training center, they are often turned away. As Motoko Rich reported in The Times on Monday, Seattle’s seven centers had money to train only 5 percent of the 120,000 people who came in last year seeking new skills, and the numbers are similar elsewhere
The reason: drastic cuts to federal spending on training over the last six years, including $1 billion since the 2010 fiscal year. Even though training programs are already harder to get into than Ivy League universities, Republicans in the House want to put them even further out of reach.
Dean Baker: Obama and Romney Are Politicians, Not Visionaries
There is a dangerously painful story line that is being propagated about a presidential race between President Obama and Mitt Romney. The line is that this will be a contest over competing visions for the country. In this story the alternative visions are outlined in the competing budgets put forward by President Obama and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, which Governor Romney has embraced.
The story of competing visions is a cute fairy tale for people who don’t know anything about Washington and American politics. For adults who have not newly arrived from some foreign country, this line is just silly.
President Obama and Governor Romney are politicians, not philosophers. They have not made it to the top of the political ladder because of their grand visions of the future. They got their positions by appealing to powerful political actors who were able to give them the money and/or votes needed to get ahead.
Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law.
They spread money like manure on the campaign trails of key members of Congress. They unleash hordes of lobbyists on Capitol Hill, cozy up to columnists and editorial writers, spend millions on lawyers who relentlessly pick at the law, trying to rewrite or water down the regulations required for enforcement. Before you know it, what once was an attempt at genuine reform creeps back toward business as usual.
Dave Johnson: New Super-PAC Threatens to Destroy Candidates Who Side With the People Over Wall Street
Banks are pioneering a more cost-effective method of dealing with legislators who stand in their way.
A new super-PAC with the purpose of destroying elected officials who oppose the interests of the super-PAC’s founders rather than focusing on electing candidates who favor their interests demonstrates how the movement conservatives on the Supreme Court have fundamentally altered our system. A super – PAC is a political action committee with no limits on personal or corporate contributions and no limits on the amounts it spends. This system of unlimited corporate – and billionaire – spending for and against candidates was enabled by the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United that said corporations are “people” and the use of corporate money to influence elections is “speech.”
Felix Salmon: The Europe debate
Remember the Krugman vs Summers debate last year? That was fun, in its own way. But this year’s Munk Debate looks set to be simply depressing. The invitation has the details: the motion is “be it resolved that the European experiment has failed”. And I’m reasonably confident that the “pro” side – Niall Ferguson and Josef Joffe – is going to win.
That’s partly because Ferguson has the public-speaking chops to dismantle his meeker opponents, Peter Mandelson and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Ferguson is likely to go strongly for the jugular, while Mandelson and Cohn-Bendit will noodle around ineffectually, hedging their conclusions and sacrificing rhetorical dominance for the sake of intellectual honesty.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Real War on Youth: Esquire’s Dubious Achievements
In 2010 the men’s magazine Esquire enlisted Lawrence O’Donnell, along with a panel of Republicans and economically centrist Democrats, to duplicate the anti-Social Security efforts of the Simpson/Bowles Deficit Commission. Now the magazine is at it again, with an economically illiterate and deceptive piece about “generational conflict” called “The War on Youth.” Meanwhile the real war on youth is an assault on their employment prospects, education costs, and, yes, their future Social Security benefits. On two of those three fronts, Esquire is distracting its presumably youthful male readers from the real threats to their economic security. And on the third front, it’s fighting for the wrong army.
Recent Comments