“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.
Maureen finally realizes this war is futile.
Maureen Dowd: Lost in a Maze
The waterfall of leaks on Afghanistan underlines the awful truth: We’re not in control.
Not since Theseus fought the Minotaur in his maze has a fight been so confounding.
The more we try to do for our foreign protectorates, the more angry they get about what we try to do. As Congress passed $59 billion in additional war funding Tuesday, not only are our wards not grateful; they’re disdainful.
Washington gave the Wall Street banks billions and in return, they stabbed us in the back, handing out a fortune in bonuses to the grifters who almost wrecked our economy.
Washington gave the Pakistanis billions and in return, they stabbed us in the back, pledging to fight the militants even as they secretly help the militants.
We keep getting played by people who are playing both sides.
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During the debate over war funding on Tuesday, Representative James McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, warned that we are in a monstrous maze without the ball of string to find our way out.
“All of the puzzle has been put together and it is not a pretty picture,” he told the Times Carl Hulse. “Things are really ugly over there.”
Yes, it’s what you can’t see and they won’t talk about that will bite us for years to come.
Thomas L. Friedman: Want the Good News First?
It is pretty much a tossup for me: Who poses a greater long-term threat to America’s Gulf Coast ecosystem: the U.S. Senate or BP? Right now, from what I’ve seen flying over the Louisiana coast at the mouth of the Mississippi, my vote is the U.S. Senate. BP at least seems to have finally gotten its act together and is cleaning up the oil spill. The Senate, in failing to pass even the most modest bill to diminish our addiction to oil and begin to mitigate climate change, has not even begun to do its job.
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Here’s the good news. Thanks to: the capping of the broken oil well; the cleanup efforts so far by a flotilla of shrimp boats converted to skimmers; the currents that have blessedly taken a lot of the spill away from the shore; the weathering process that is breaking down a lot of the crude into different compounds that dissolve, evaporate or get absorbed by microbes in the ocean; and the dispersants that have broken up the biggest oil slicks, there is less and less to see here on the surface. Walking along the beach on Grand Isle, the only inhabited barrier island on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, it appears that our worst fears have not materialized – so far.
So much for the good news. The bad news is what you can’t see that is happening under the ocean’s surface and the stuff you can see – the decades of degradation along the whole Gulf Coast from decades of unfettered development – that no one is talking about.
Psst, David, the Taliban live there. They aren’t going away.
David Ignatius: Little choice but to depend on Pakistan’s help in Afghanistan
In the almost nine years the United States has been fighting in Afghanistan, any thoughtful person who follows the war has had a recurring worry: Can America rely on Pakistan? Can our allies in that turbulent country close the Taliban’s havens along the border? And, for that matter, are the Pakistanis really trying?
The massive disclosure of war-related documents this week by Wikileaks raised a number of questions, but none more important than the Pakistan conundrum. Although the Obama administration has played down the leaks in general, senior officials agree that Pakistan’s ability to close the sanctuaries is an absolutely crucial issue.
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It’s usually a mistake to try to “call” a faraway conflict — up or down, success or failure — on the basis of fragmentary information. But right now, any observer would say that Afghanistan is going badly, that the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy hasn’t been proved and that the American public’s patience is dwindling.
That brings us back to closing the Taliban havens in Pakistan. It’s a measure of America’s strategic difficulty that this uncertain option with a reluctant partner may now offer the best possibility for reaching the “acceptable end state.”
No unfunded job spending, damn it, but $37 billion for a futile war. Let’s just fire more teachers.
Harold Meyerson: The job machine grinds to a halt
Ain’t no hiring. And ain’t likely to be any for a good long time
The problem isn’t merely the greatest downturn since the Great Depression. It’s also that big business has found a way to make big money without restoring the jobs it cut the past two years, or increasing its investments or even its sales, at least domestically.
In the mildly halcyon days before the 2008 crash, the one economic outlier was wages. Profit, revenue and GDP all increased; only ordinary Americans’ incomes lagged behind. Today, wages are still down, employment remains low and sales revenue isn’t up much, either. But profits are the outlier. They’re positively soaring.
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Another source of jobs would be public, and public-private, investment in infrastructure. As Michael Lind and Sherle Schwenninger of the New America Foundation have argued, building a new American infrastructure of roads, rail and broadband is not only an economic necessity but also the investment with the highest multiplier effect in creating new jobs. A U.S. infrastructure investment bank, such as that proposed by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), could leverage significant private capital to begin America’s rebuilding, though the idea has encountered rough sledding in (surprise) the Senate.
What won’t work as an economic solution — indeed, it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment — is blaming the unemployed for their failure to find jobs. There are now roughly five unemployed Americans for every open job, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s most recent calculations, and that ratio isn’t likely to decline much if we leave it to the corporate sector to resume hiring. Corporations have figured out a way to make money without resuming hiring. Their model is premised on not resuming hiring. If the public sector doesn’t fill the gap, the era of American prosperity is history.
Pointing out the fiscal responsibility of keeping the Bush tax cuts..for those who can least afford a tax increase. She’s got it half right. Entitlements aren’t the problem, Ruth.
Ruth Marcus: Why Congress should let the Bush tax cuts expire
The modern Republican argument about taxes seems to boil down to two principles, both misguided: Taxes can be reduced, but they can never be allowed to go up. And whatever level taxes are at, they are too high.
Think back to the beginning of the Bush administration tax cuts. It seems almost impossible to believe, but the argument then was that the budget surplus was too large. There was, or so President George W. Bush assured us, ample cash to cut taxes for everyone and protect the Social Security surplus and set aside $1 trillion over the next decade for “additional spending needs” and pay down the national debt.
“The people of America have been overcharged, and, on their behalf, I’m here asking for a refund,” Bush told Congress in February 2001.
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The real disagreement is over extending the high-end tax cuts, and on this even some supposedly fiscally responsible Democrats — I’m talking to you, Kent Conrad — have gone wobbly. The no-new-taxes-now crowd cautions against raising taxes in a recession — a fair point, except that there are more efficient ways to spur the economy than giving more money to those least likely to spend it. Alternatively, they cite — and inflate — the supposed impact on small business of raising the upper-end rates.
This would be more convincing if the Republican line were something other than “no new taxes, ever.” The economic and fiscal circumstances may change, but the prescription remains the same. And the patient is too ill to tolerate another dose of this quack
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