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.

Paul Krugman: Downhill With the G.O.P.

Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

I’ve always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America’s two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic. And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.

Banana republic, here we come.

On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt – 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade – about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

New York Times Editorial: Tea Party’s Big Money

Tea Party supporters and their candidates like to imagine themselves as insurgents, crashing the barricades of Washington to establish a new order of clean and frugal government. In earthbound reality, many of the people pulling the Tea Party’s strings are establishment Republican operatives and lobbyists. Some have made money off the party for years.

One example is Sal Russo, a gun-for-hire who has worked for former President Ronald Reagan, former Gov. George Deukmejian of California, former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, former Gov. George Pataki of New York, and many other Republicans. As The Times reported on Sunday, Mr. Russo saw a sure thing last year, establishing a group called the Tea Party Express to support candidates in the midterm elections and raise cash at the same time.

Robert Reich: GM Has No Business Using Our Money On Campaign Contributions

General Motors has given $90,500 to candidates in the current election cycle, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Hmmm? Last time I looked, you and I and every other U.S. taxpayer owned a majority of GM. That means some of the money we’re earning as GM owners is being used to influence how we vote in the upcoming mid-term election.

To put it another way, we taxpayers are paying some people (GM executives) to tell us how we should vote for another group of people (House and Senate candidates) who will decide how our taxes will be used in the future.  

GM spokesman Greg Martin justifies the expenditure as a competitive necessity. “We’re not going to sit on the sidelines as our competitors and other industries who have PACS are participating in the political process,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, now that we taxpayers own GM, it’s in our interest that GM use our money to affect how we vote, lest we mistakenly decide to support candidates who, once in office, enact legislation that helps GM’s competitors and not GM.

David Sirota: What the Pot Legalization Campaign Really Threatens

Here’s a fact that even drug policy reform advocates can acknowledge: California’s 2010 ballot initiative to legalize marijuana does, indeed, pose a real threat, as conservative culture warriors insist. But not to public health, as those conservatives claim.

According to most physicians, pot is less toxic-and has more medicinal applications-than a legal and more pervasive drug like alcohol. Whereas alcohol causes hundreds of annual overdose deaths, contributes to untold numbers of illnesses and is a major factor in violent crime, marijuana has never resulted in a fatal overdose and has not been systemically linked to major illness or violent crime.

So this ballot measure is no public health threat. If anything, it would give the millions of citizens who want to use inebriating substances a safer alternative to alcohol. Which, of course, gets to what this ballot initiative really endangers: alcohol industry profits.

That truth is underscored by news this week that the California Beer and Beverage Distributors is financing the campaign against the legalization initiative. This is the same group that bankrolled opposition to a 2008 ballot measure, which would have reduced penalties for marijuana possession.

Eugene Robinson: The Party of Nonsense

The Republicans were doing pretty well for themselves as the Party of No. So why did they decide to rebrand themselves as the Party of Nonsense?

   All right, I’m being slightly disingenuous. Inquiring minds demanded to know just what the GOP proposed to do if voters entrusted them with control of one or both houses of Congress. But if the “Pledge to America” unveiled Thursday is the best that House Republicans can come up with, they’d have been better off continuing to froth and foam about “creeping socialism” while stonewalling on specifics.

   The problem with the Pledge is that the numbers don’t remotely add up. The document is such a jumble of contradictions that it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly pass muster with anyone who survived eighth-grade arithmetic-unless, perhaps, the Republicans have something in mind that they’re not prepared to talk about quite yet.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Tempest in a Very Small Teapot

Washington – Is the tea party one the most successful scams in American political history?

Before you dismiss the question, note that word “successful.” Judge the tea party purely on the grounds of effectiveness and you have to admire how a very small group has shaken American political life and seized the microphone offered by the media, including the so-called liberal media.

But it’s equally important to recognize that the tea party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers.

Yes, there is a lot of discontent in America. But that discontent is better represented by the moderate voters who expressed quiet disillusionment to President Obama at the CNBC town hall meeting on Monday than by tea party ideologues who proclaim the unconstitutionality of the New Deal and everything since.

Dana Milbank: The GOP breaks its ‘Pledge to America’

It took the Republicans just three minutes to violate their Pledge to America.

In a lumber yard near Dulles International Airport Thursday morning, House Republicans handed out copies of their pledge, which, among other things, promises to rein in an “arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites.”

Yet moments after taking the stage to face the cameras, Republican leaders appointed themselves arrogant elites. They compared themselves to the founding fathers and likened their actions at Tart Lumber Co. to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.