September 2010 archive

No, George, we don’t miss you at all.

“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.

Jimmy Breslin: Jimmy Breslin on the National Mood

There are these sudden loud noises in the hotel kitchen, one, two, three, probably a tray falling, and then there is so much screaming and a hand holding a gun high in the air and Robert Kennedy, who had walked into the gun, is on the floor with his eyes seeing nothing. On this June night in 1968 he has just won a Presidential primary and suddenly he is fit only for a gravedigger’s dirt.

It happens this way when the claws of madness swipe through the sky. In 1919 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called it for all time, and crashingly so today, when he wrote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

And now in New York they are turning an empty lot of the old World Trade Center and a mosque that isn’t built and probably never will be, into national fear. Omaha fights the mosque in Manhattan! Some foamer named Jones says he burns the Koran, and he actually is treated as news. All day on television yesterday you had the aimless babbles of this Beck, who looks like he eats Bibles.

h/t to Gaius Publius @ AMERICA blog, yes, Breslin is a national treasure.

Frank Rich: Freedom’s Just Another Word

Among the few scraps of news to emerge from Barack Obama’s vacation was the anecdote of a Martha’s Vineyard bookseller handing him  an advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom.” The book has since rocketed up the Amazon best-seller list, powered by reviews even more ecstatic  than those for Franzen’s last novel, “The Corrections.” But I doubt that the president, a fine writer who draws sustenance from great American writers, has read “Freedom” yet. If he had, he never would have delivered that bloodless speech on Tuesday night.

What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address  was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what “Freedom” mainlines to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St. Paul to Washington during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic time what Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” did for the cartoonish go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what “The Great Gatsby” did for the ominous boom of the 1920s. The heady intoxication of freedom is everywhere in “Freedom,” from extramarital sexual couplings to the consumer nirvana of the iPod to Operation Iraqi Freedom itself. Yet most everyone, regardless of age or calling or politics, is at war – not with terrorists, but with depression, with their consciences and with one another.

This mood has not lifted and may be thickening as we trudge toward Year 10 in Afghanistan. But Obama only paid it lip service. It’s a mystery why a candidate so attuned to the nation’s pulse, most especially on the matter of war, has grown tone deaf in office. On Tuesday, Obama asked the country to turn the page on Iraq as if that were as easy as, say, voting for him in 2008. His brief rhetorical pivot from the war to the economy only raised the question of why the crisis of joblessness has not merited a prime-time Oval Office speech of its own.

259 Stories served.  37 per day.

This is actually the hardest diary to execute, and yet perhaps the most valuable because it lets you track story trends over time.  It should be a Sunday morning feature.

• Sunday 8/29
• Monday 8/30
• Tuesday 8/31
• Wednesday 9/1
• Thursday 9/2
• Friday 9/3
• Saturday 9/4

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

September 5 is the 248th day of the year (249th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 117 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1882, the first Labor Day was celebrated in NYC with a parade of 10,000 workers. The Parade started at City Hall, winding past the reviewing stands at Union Square and then uptown where it ended at 42nd St where the marcher’s and their families celebrated with a picnic, concert and speeches. The march was organized by New York’s Central Labor Union and while there has been debate as to who originated the idea, credit is given to Peter McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor.

It became a federal holiday in 1894, when, following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland  put reconciliation with the labor movement as a top political priority. Fearing further conflict, legislation making Labor Day a national holiday was rushed through Congress unanimously and signed into law a mere six days after the end of the strike. The September date was chosen as Cleveland was concerned that aligning an American labor holiday with existing international May Day celebrations would stir up negative emotions linked to the Haymarket Affair. All 50 U.S. states have made Labor Day a state holiday.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Police on alert as Pakistan suicide attack victims buried

by Maaz Khan, AFP

2 hrs 58 mins ago

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

Since this Summer’s Egg/Salmonella scare and past warnings and recalls about E. Coli contaminations, this article has some very helpful tips and advice on food safety on a tight budget.

Vegetarians need not suffer with veggie burgers and tofu hot dogs. Pack vegetables in foil packets, ready to throw on the fire, and accompany them with romesco, the pungent Catalan sauce thickened with nuts.

Peter Daou points out that the White House is bringing Paul Krugman to tears with its political strategy that has been a failure:

Look: early on the administration had a political theory: it would win bipartisan legislative victories, and each success would make Republicans who voted no feel left out, so that they would vote for the next initiative, and so on. (By the way, read that article and weep: “The massive resistance Republicans posed to Clinton in 1993 is impossible to imagine today.” They really believed that.)

This theory led to a strategy of playing it safe: never put forward proposals that might fail to pass, avoid highlighting the philosophical differences between the parties. There was never an appreciation of the risks of having policies too weak to do the job.

And then it led the administration to keep claiming that the legislation it had gotten through was just right, long past the point when it was obvious that the policies were inadequate.

(emphasis mine)

Keeping the same failed strategy and repeating the same mistake is just absurd. It is a given that when you are so far down in the polls that it time for something daring, yet, as Jonathan Cohn points out, “it depends on who’s talking”:

It’s always nice to be validated, especially by an Author I respect as much as Glenn Greenwald–

(P)erhaps the most significant result of Simpson’s candor is that Obama loyalists and Beltway media voices are now forced to publicly defend Social Security cuts, because Simpson’s comments have prematurely dragged out into the open what has been an open secret in Washington but was supposed to be a secret plot for everyone else until the election was over.  The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait recently decreed, in response to the Simpson controversy, that “liberals should be open to Social Security cuts as part of a balanced package of deficit reduction.”  And in The Washington Post today, both the Editorial Page and Dana Milbank  defend Simpson and call for cuts in Social Security (Milbank even defends cuts in aid to wounded veterans).  That Social Security must be cut is not only a bipartisan consensus among the GOP and “centrist” Democratic wing, but at least as much, among the Beltway media establishment.

But it’s not just good policy, it’s also good politics.  You see, unlike the Obamabots and Institutional Democrats, I actually care about electoral victory–

I certainly have not seen eye-to-eye with Bob Shrum on political strategies over the years.  So when we’re both beating the same drum with the same urgency at the same time, it’s somewhat unusual.

But we both agree that President Obama and the Catfood Commission threaten the electoral chances of every Democrat running for office this November.

Shrum has a piece in The Week in which he echoes Ed Kilgore and others Democratic strategists in pointing out that the Democrats don’t have an issue to run on this November.  Like them, he says that saving Social Security could be the issue that saves their seats as well.

But Shrum is willing to utter the uncomfortable truth that Kilgore ignores:  it is deeply, deeply cynical and unconvincing for the Democrats to be out there castigating the GOP for wanting to do the very thing that the White House is privately telling journalists they themselves plan to do by way of the Catfood Commission after the election.

They are just sycophantic liars.

“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.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair sits down with “This Week” anchor Christiane Amanpour for an exclusive interview.

The “Round Table” with the usual suspects: George Will, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and Mary Jordan of The Washington Post who will discuss the whether the new round of peace talks finally lead to progress in the Middle East.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests will be Laura Tyson, Former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Mark Zandi, Moody’s Analytics, Chief Economist Gretchen Morgenson, NYT Assistant Business and Financial Editor Nancy Cordes, CBS News Capitol Hill Correspondent and Jim VandeHei, Politico Executive Editor.

The Chris Matthews Show: This weeks guests will be Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Columnist Howard Fineman,

Newsweek Senior Washington Correspondent, Michael Duffy, TIME Magazine, Assistant Managing Editor and , Norah O’Donnell, MSNBC, Chief Washington Correspondent. They will discuss if democrats lose big this fall will All fingers point at President Obama Himself? and

the top five Republicans definitely running for President.