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.

Elizabeth Galewski Women – Still a Menace?

“DANGER! Woman’s Suffrage Would Double the Irresponsible Vote. It is a MENACE to the Home, Men’s Employment and to All Business.”

I stumbled upon a poster with these headlines while doing research for the 90th anniversary of women’s right to vote, which is on Aug. 26. The rest of the poster shows a sample ballot and explains that the (responsible male) voter should “Be sure and put your cross (x) in the square after the word ‘no’ as shown here.” A drawing of a hand points a finger at the sample ballot’s “no” box, which is checked.

Presumably, the Responsible Vote had required this kind of careful guidance. At least, the “Progress Publishing Co.,” which printed it, thought so.

Uncovering this gem of a poster resulted in a moment of high hilarity for me at the Wisconsin Historical Society. I could not resist pulling a librarian over and showing it to him. “I must, I simply must,” I told him, “get this as an electronic file.”

Today, it almost seems hard to believe that only 90 years ago, women did not have the right to vote. How could withholding this basic right from half of the population possibly have been justified?

Dahlia Lithwick: In Ken We Trust

Why do Ken Cuccinelli’s legal opinions always match his personal ambitions?

It must be Wednesday, because Virginia’s hyperactive Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, is back in the news. Of course, he was also in the news on Tuesday, on Monday, and last Friday. Religious displays on public land, abortion, immigration, climate change. Is there a single issue from the culture wars over which Cuccinelli hasn’t picked a fight? But that’s one of the perils of treating one’s elected office like a Fox News show: If Cuccinelli isn’t launching five national ideological battles per week, his ratings might slip. And so ever onward he trudges, devoting his every working day to treating the Commonwealth like it’s the Lord’s Disneyland.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Tuesday’s tutorial: a GOP too far right

Republicans are in the midst of an insurrection. Democrats are not. This vast gulf between the situations of the two parties — not some grand revolt against “the establishment” or “incumbents” — explains the year’s primary results, including Tuesday’s jarring outcomes in Florida and Alaska.

The agitation among Republicans is not surprising, given the trauma of the final years of George W. Bush’s presidency. After heavy losses in 2006 and 2008, it was natural that GOP loyalists would seek a new direction.

Liberals who saw Bush’s presidency as a failed right-wing experiment thought Republicans would search for more moderate ground, much as Britain’s Tories turned to the soothing leadership of David Cameron to organize their comeback. But this expectation overlooked the exodus of moderates over the past decade, which has shifted the balance of power in Republican primaries far to the right.

Dean Baker: Senator Simpson: He’s Not Just Offensive, He’s Ignorant

Former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, the co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit commission, has sparked calls for his resignation after sending an offensive and sexist note to Ashley Carson, the executive director of the Older Women’s League. While such calls are reasonable — Simpson’s comments were certainly more offensive than remarks that led to the resignation of other people from the Obama administration — the Senator’s determined ignorance about the basic facts on Social Security is an even more important reason for him to leave his position.

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he key facts on Social Security are not hard to understand. The shortfall is relatively minor and distant. Most retirees have little income other than their Social Security, and most workers would find it quite difficult to stay at their jobs in their late 60s or even 70. We might have hoped that Senator Simpson understood these facts at the time when he was appointed to the commission, but we should at least expect that he would learn them on the job.

His determined ignorance in the face of the facts is the most important reason why he is not qualified to serve on President Obama’s commission. Someone who is co-chairman of such an important group should be able to critically evaluate information, not just insult and demean his critics.

Bob Cesca: The Summer of Republican Race-Baiting

Earlier this year, Republican Party chairman Michael Steele admitted that the GOP has engaged in Southern Strategy politics: employing racial, anti-minority code language and fear-mongering as a means of energizing the party’s white Christian base.

This is a fact. The Southern Strategy is real, though it’s no longer exclusively “southern.”

There’s no disputing its widespread use. Come to think of it, for Steele to “confess” to the the GOP’s use of the Strategy makes it seems as though it was previously a secret. It wasn’t. Fact: the Republican Party routinely tweaks white fear, paranoia, prejudice and resentment in order to win votes and score political points at the expense of demonized minority groups. They engage in stereotyping and misinformation and they rarely, if ever, use the “n-word” these days, though they might as well. After all, as the Strategy goes, blacks and minorities aren’t voting Republican anyway, so… let fly.

Robert Scheer They Go or Obama Goes

Barack Obama and the Democrats he led to a stunning victory two years ago are going down hard in the face of an economic crisis that he did nothing to create but which he has failed to solve. That is somewhat unfair because the basic blame belongs to his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who let the bulls of Wall Street run wild in the streets where ordinary folks lived. And there was universal Republican support in Congress for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that produced this debacle.

The core issue for the economy is the continued cost of a housing bubble made possible only after what Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers back then trumpeted as necessary “legal certainty” was provided to derivative packages made up of suspect Alt-A and subprime mortgages. It was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Senate Republican Phil Gramm drafted and which Clinton signed into law, that made legal the trafficking in packages of dubious home mortgages. In any decent society the creation of such untenable mortgages and the securitization of risk irrationally associated with it would have been judged a criminal scam. But no such judgment was possible because thanks to Wall Street’s sway under Clinton and Bush the bankers got to rewrite the laws to sanction their treachery.

Jim Hightower Wall Street’s Connected Lobbyists

Congress finally passed a moderate reform package to tighten regulations on the banksters of Wall Street. Of course, the banksters howled, protesting even the meekest of reforms – but the package is now the law, so that’s that.

Right? Uh … no.

What Congress passed is a 2,300-page compendium of concepts, leaving the real decision-making about the details of financial regulation in the hands of the Federal Reserve, the SEC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and other regulatory agencies.

In other words, the game is still on for Wall Street lobbyists! So they’re presently mounting a furious blitz on the rule-writing regulators, still trying to weaken or even kill many of the reform ideas passed by Congress.

To weasel their way inside, the financial giants have reached into the agencies themselves to hire away nearly 150 regulators, luring them with fat salaries to switch sides and become industry lobbyists.

For the banking powers, these insiders-turned-outsiders are well worth the big bucks, for former regulators have long, personal relationships with those in the agencies who’re filling in the blanks left by Congress. If nothing else, these newly minted lobbyists are much more likely to get their phone calls returned by their former colleagues than a stranger would.

Robert Weissman and Tyson Slocum Here’s What’s Wrong With BP’s Trust Fund

President Barack Obama’s forceful demand that BP accept liability for the damage it caused in the Gulf was a highlight of the administration’s handling of the BP disaster.

Yet, like virtually everything else connected with the BP catastrophe, it looks like the initial positive reports obscured troubling realities.

Yes, BP is creating a $20 billion trust fund. But with the trust fund terms now public, it is evident that there are serious problems that the administration must demand be fixed.

BP’s scheme enlists the government as a virtual partner in its Gulf oil and gas production, and the company uses that partnership to shield itself from punishment. It is likely to give the government a financial incentive to become an even bigger booster of offshore oil drilling in the Gulf – the Minerals Management Service’s fatal flaw at the time of the BP disaster. BP seems to have structured the fund largely to limit its liability in civil cases and escape accountability.

First, the trust fund appears to be capped at $20 billion – contrary to what fund administrator Ken Feinberg has said was his understanding of BP’s plans.

Even worse, the $20 billion is to be drawn down not just by Feinberg-ordered payments to those suffering economic harm from the oil gusher, but by reimbursements for state and local response, natural resource harms and payments pursuant to class action and other civil action awards.

This arrangement leaves substantially less than $20 billion to compensate individuals and businesses for their economic losses – most likely leaving them shortchanged.

Gail Colllins: The Trends of August

Since this is possibly the most depressing August in the history of summer, I feel compelled to point out a brighter side of the news.

The big trend among Republicans is voting out the incumbent, even if said incumbent is a Republican. In their primaries, the Democrats tend to go for the status quo. This makes sense, since the Republicans are looking for a way to show they’re angry, angry, angry while the Democrats are too terrified of the Republicans to do anything but hunker down.

In response, the Republican establishment is in identity denial. John Boehner is vowing that if his party wins a majority in the House, he will run things differently than either Nancy Pelosi or her Republican predecessor, the evil dictator John Boehner. And of course, Senator John McCain just notched up a triumph in Arizona, running against Senator John McCain.

The Democrats aren’t much better – unless you think it’s a good plan for Robin Carnahan, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Missouri, to be calling her opponent “the very worst of Washington” for supporting the same financial services bailout that President Obama and most of the Democrats in Congress backed. Really, the way these people are fleeing their parties, you’d almost think neither side has any clue of what to do to resuscitate the economy.

Instead of running as part of a group with a shared ideology and agenda, candidates run biography ads that stress their sterling character. A deprived childhood is always good. Kendrick Meek, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Florida, ran as the son of a struggling single mother even though his particular single mother was also the local congresswoman. And did you know John Boehner used to mop the floor of his dad’s bar when he was 11?

Timothy Egan: Building a Nation of Know-Nothings

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?