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.

Thomas L. Friedman: Third Party Rising

“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” said the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. Indeed, our two-party system is ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or high-aspiration in confronting our problems. We simply will not be able to do the things we need to do as a country to move forward “with all the vested interests that have accrued around these two parties,” added Diamond. “They cannot think about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations,” where each one’s gains are seen as the other’s losses.

We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.

“If competition is good for our economy,” asks Diamond, “why isn’t it good for our politics?”

We need a third party on the stage of the next presidential debate to look Americans in the eye and say: “These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.”

Dean Baker and Sarita Gupta: Tax Breaks Are Not Sufficient to Restore Employment

There is a depressing complicity among much of the political leadership about the recession. Many politicians seem prepared to accept that we will have sky-high rates of unemployment for the indefinite future. Projections from the Congressional Budget Office and other authoritative forecasts show the situation improving little over the next few years.

At the moment, this means 15 million people unemployed, 9 million under-employed and millions of other workers who don’t even get counted because they have given up hope of finding a job and stopped looking. It is outrageous that we have this situation today. Allowing high unemployment to continue for years into the future is unacceptable.

We know how to get the unemployment rate down.

Part of the story should include programs like the Local Jobs for America Act that will save and create jobs in areas of high unemployment. This will be a way to give young people a decent start to their working careers in areas like Detroit where the youth unemployment rate is close to 50 percent. These workers can help maintain and clean-up parks, schools, and other public facilities.

paradox: TARP Was Not the Bank Bailout

My immense, incredulous dismay with the US journalism corps amazingly grew this morning–even after yet another incredibly rancid evolution from James O’Keefe that even CNN can’t report on–for the New York Times completely blew the bank bailout story,  acting as if TARP was all there was to the bailout evolution and that the US taxpayer really wasn’t on the hook for all that much money.

Earth to Jackie Calmes and your incompetent editor: TARP did not bail out the big banks, the Federal Reserve did. After Congress so stupidly authorized $750 billion in the Fall of 2008 Treasury Secretary Paulson simply panicked–probably because $750 billion was not nearly enough to stop the meltdown-and ran to Federal Reserve chairman Bernanke, who secretly authorized the backing of $2 trillion dollars in “tired assets” to our felony crook financial lizards from the limitless coffers of the Federal Reserve.

A very angry Senator Sanders trying to get the truth-openly snubbed by Bernanke at a hearing as if he were a bathroom attendant-accomplished one of the most amazing legislative feats of Obama’s first term and got an audit of the Fed passed for this sickeningly secret and furtive giveaway to crooks. The audit is still compromised, it’s time frame is too limited and the web site listing of all the banks who Benny bailed out won’t be published until December 1, until after the election.

Frank Rich: The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell

ALL it took was some 30,000 Republican primary voters  in a tiny state to turn Christine O’Donnell into the brightest all-American media meteor since Balloon Boy. For embattled liberals, not to mention the axis of Comedy Central, “Saturday Night Live” and Bill Maher, she’s been pure comic gold for weeks: a bottomless trove of baldfaced lies, radical views and sheer wackiness. True, other American politicians have dismissed evolution as a myth. Some may even have denied joining a coven. But history will always remember her for taking a fearless stand against masturbation, the one national pastime with more fans than baseball.

Yet those laughing now may not have the last laugh in November. O’Donnell’s timely ascent in the election season’s final lap may well prove a godsend for the G.O.P.

At first some Republicans had trouble figuring this out. On primary eve, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee badmouthed O’Donnell’s “disturbing pattern of dishonest behavior.” On election night, Karl Rove belittled her “nutty” pronouncements and “checkered background” on Fox News. But by the morning after, bygones were bygones. The senatorial committee’s chairman, John Cornyn, rewarded O’Donnell’s “dishonest behavior” with an enthusiastic endorsement and a big check. A sweaty Rove reversed himself so fast you’d think he’d been forced to stay up all night listening to Glenn Beck’s greatest hits at top volume in a Roger Ailes re-education camp.

Dana Milbank: Tea Party may snuff out a chance to shrink government

If Tea Party adherents were serious about shrinking the federal government, they would have put down their picket signs, abandoned their defense of Christine O’Donnell’s  phony résumé and crowded into Room 608 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building last week.

There, 18 Democrats and Republicans sat around a conference table to work on what may be the last hope for gaining control of government spending.

This wasn’t about shouting slogans, waving posters that call the Democrats socialists, or giving voice to Glenn Beck conspiracy theories. Rather, they were poring over the arcana of gas royalty computations, user fees, federal leases and performance-linked funding formulas. The good news: The members of President Obama’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform are nearing agreement on a mixture of tax and spending policies that would put the country back on a path to solvency. The bad news: Nobody thinks their proposals have a chance of becoming law.

Nicholas D. Kristof: At Risk From the Womb

Some people think we’re shaped primarily by genes. Others believe that the environment we grow up in is most important. But now evidence is mounting that a third factor is also critical: our uterine environment before we’re even born.

Researchers are finding indications that obesity, diabetes and mental illness among adults are all related in part to what happened in the womb decades earlier.

One of the first careful studies in this field found that birth weight (a proxy for nutrition in the womb) helped predict whether an adult would suffer from heart disease half a century later. Scrawny babies were much more likely to suffer heart problems in middle age.

That study, published in 1989, provoked skepticism at first. But now an array of research confirms that the fetal period is a crucial stage of development that affects physiology decades later.

Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation. Pregnant women in low-income areas tend to be more exposed to anxiety, depression, chemicals and toxins from car exhaust to pesticides, and they’re more likely to drink or smoke and less likely to take vitamin supplements, eat healthy food and get meticulous pre-natal care.

David Weigel: Blowing Up Stuff

How Citizens United’s latest movie, Battle for America, tries to motivate conservative voters.

It’s hard to count the explosions. Battle for America has the sort of pyrotechnics that would make Michael Bay worry about the viewers’ retinas. Some buildings implode as fireballs tumble out the windows. Others crumble into clouds of dust and rubble. A group of dinosaurs, minding their own business, scrambles away from a meteor that causes a mushroom cloud, bringing them all to extinction.

All of this is in the service of a very sober argument about the failures of the 111th Congress.

Joe Conanson: In the Obama era, right-wing militias flourish

That much-mocked DHS study of potential right-wing violence turns out not to have been so far-fetched after all  

When exploiting public fear of Islam, as so many Republicans have chosen to do in this election cycle, a favorite tactic is to treat “American Muslim” as a synonym for “homegrown terrorist.” But the threat of jihadi attack is not the only form of violent extremism that worries law enforcement officials. According to an extensive investigation  by Barton Gellman posted Thursday on the Time magazine website, they are deeply concerned about the growing prospect of violence from the far right.

Last spring, conservatives angrily denounced a Department of Homeland Security study of the violent potential of the revived militia movement as a political abuse by the Obama administration — and forced DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano as well as the White House to back away from the report. But Gellman’s reporting shows that top officials at the FBI and other agencies are in fact deeply concerned over that possibility. While they don’t expect a mass militia assault on Washington or on federal officials in the countryside, they worry about what a deranged loner, armed and trained by a militia group, might do when he becomes impatient waiting for the right-wing revolution. As they listen to the furious rhetoric emanating from organizations such as the Ohio Defense Force, they search nervously for any sign of the next Timothy McVeigh.