Punting the Pundits

“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.

Glenn Greenwald: What political courage looks like

The toxic right-wing campaign to impose a Muslim-free zone around Ground Zero intensified today, while Democrats — following in the cowardly footsteps of Senate Majority “Leader” Harry Reid, whose book is one of the most ironically titled in history — ran faster and faster away from the controversy.  New York Governor David Paterson made it known  that he wants to meet with Park 51’s developers to encourage them to move to a new site.  One Democratic official, Rep. Michael Arcuri of New York, actually attacked his GOP challenger, Richard Hanna, for having bravely broken with his own party to support the project; Arcuri’s Gingrich-replicating attacks caused Hannah, one of the few Republicans in the nation to have defended Park 51, to reverse position by arguing today that it should move.  And it is hard to imagine anyone surpassing Rep. Anthony Weiner in the cowardice department after the unbelievably vapid, incoherent letter he issued, ostensibly setting forth his views on this matter (stringing together words randomly chosen from the dictionary would likely create more meaningful sentences than the ones Weiner wrote).

Aside from Michael Bloomberg’s impassioned, principled speech  in defense of Park 51 — and, if one wants to be generous about it, Barack Obama’s initial, voluntary defense of the religious freedom values at stake — there have been very few commendable acts in this dispute.  Until now.

Joan Walsh: Dr. Laura’s pity party

The angry radio quitter is another right-winger who misunderstands the First Amendment and loves playing victim

So Dr. Laura Schlessinger told CNN’s Larry King Tuesday night that she’s giving up her radio show, after being criticized for an on-air flameout in which she abused a black caller and used the word “nigger” 11 times. “I want to regain my First Amendment rights,” she told King. “I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I’m sort of done with that.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel: It’s about Main Street, not the mosque

Pundits and politicians are working themselves into hysteria over a mosque near Ground Zero. But this election won’t be about mosques in Manhattan. It won’t even be about the deficit, really. It will be about manufacturing on Main Street, and which party can talk effectively about the progressive solutions Americans desire.

Not surprisingly, polls from Gallup to the Wall Street Journal show Americans are worried most about the economy and jobs. And a just-released poll  — from progressive outfits Campaign for America’s Future and Democracy Corps with sponsorship from MoveOn.org Political Action and two labor unions — gives a more detailed look at what voters are looking for. Respondents, in particular the “rising American electorate” — youth, single women and minorities that constitute a majority of voters and are President Obama’s most supportive base — support bold steps for renewing the economy.

Thomas L. Friedman: Really Unusually Uncertain

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a chance to speak with senior economic policy makers in America and Germany and I think I’ve figured out where we are. It’s like this: things are getting better, except where they aren’t. The bailouts are working, except where they’re not. Things will slowly get better, unless they slowly get worse. We should know soon, unless we don’t.

It is no wonder that businesses are reluctant to hire with such “unusual uncertainty,” as Fed chief Ben Bernanke put it. One reason it is so unusual is that we are not just trying to recover from a financial crisis triggered by crazy mortgage lending. We’re also having to deal with three huge structural problems that built up over several decades and have reached a point of criticality at the same time.

And as Mohamed El-Erian, the C.E.O. of Pimco, has been repeating, “Structural problems need structural solutions.” There are no quick fixes. In America and Europe, we are going to need some big structural fixes to get back on a sustained growth path – changes that will require a level of political consensus and sacrifice that has been sorely lacking in most countries up to now.

Harold Meyerson: Rebuilding the Democratic brand with jobs

So how do the Democrats defend and improve their brand? Is there a type of governmental activism that still retains public support — and actually extricates us from the deepest hole we’ve been in since the ’30s?

There is. If the Democrats focused on boosting manufacturing, with a corollary upgrade to our infrastructure, they’d tap into the only area in which the public wants a more activist government

Several recent polls have called the Democrats’ attention to what should have been obvious to them: That helping America regain its industrial preeminence is one government activity that wins support across the board. One recent survey  by Democratic pollster Mark Mellman found 78 percent support for having a “national manufacturing strategy,” while 92 percent said they supported infrastructure improvements using only American-made materials. Another survey from Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg found 52 percent of respondents preferred government investment “in the future,” while just 42 percent favored the alternative course of large spending cuts.

Robert Wright: Why Not to Bomb Iran

Has the Atlantic magazine become a propaganda tool – “a de facto  party to the neoconservative and Israeli campaign to initiate a global war with Iran”? That question was being discussed last week on The Atlantic’s own Web site, among other places, after the magazine unveiled a cover story saying that Israel is likely to bomb Iran within a year.

The article wasn’t an argument for bombing, just a report on Israel’s state of mind. So why all the outrage – why, for example, did Glenn Greenwald of Salon title his slashing assessment of the Atlantic article “How Propaganda Works: Exhibit A”?

In part because the author of the article is Jeffrey Goldberg, who has previously been accused of pushing a pro-war agenda via ostensibly reportorial journalism. His 2002 New Yorker piece claiming to have found evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda is remembered on the left as a monument to consequential wrongness. And suspicions of Goldberg’s motivations only grow when he writes about Israel. He served in the Israeli army, and he has more than once been accused of channeling Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

Eduard Freisler: Satisfaction, at Last

IN a stadium in Prague, 20 years ago today, a hundred thousand people, including my father and me, saw something we were not supposed to see. For decades it had been forbidden. The music, we were told, would poison our minds with filthy images. We would be infected by the West’s capitalist propaganda.

It was a cool August night in 1990; the Communist regime had officially collapsed eight months earlier, when Vaclav Havel, the longtime dissident, was elected president. And now the Rolling Stones had come to Prague.

I was 16 then, and to this day I recall the posters promoting the concert, which lined the streets and the walls of the stadium: “The Rolling Stones roll in, Soviet army rolls out.”