Punting the Pundits

Punting the Punditsis 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.

Dahlia Lithwick: Privacy Rights Inc.  

Your right to personal privacy is shrinking even as Corporate America’s is growing.

Look. Nation. You can go ahead and anthropomorphize big corporations all you want. Pretend that AT&T has delicate feelings and that Wal-Mart has a just-barely-manageable phobia of spiders. But before we extend each and every protection granted in the Bill of Rights to the good folks at ExxonMobil, I have one small suggestion: Might we contemplate what’s happened to our own individual privacy in this country in recent years? That the government should have more and more access to our personal information, while we have less and less access to corporate information defies all logic. It’s one thing to ask us to give up personal liberty for greater safety or security. It’s another matter entirely to slowly take away privacy and dignity from living, breathing humans, while giving more and more of it to faceless interest groups and corporations.

Paul Krugman: The Mortgage Morass

The story so far: An epic housing bust and sustained high unemployment have led to an epidemic of default, with millions of homeowners falling behind on mortgage payments. So servicers – the companies that collect payments on behalf of mortgage owners – have been foreclosing on many mortgages, seizing many homes.

But do they actually have the right to seize these homes? Horror stories have been proliferating, like the case of the Florida man whose home was taken even though he had no mortgage. More significantly, certain players have been ignoring the law. Courts have been approving foreclosures without requiring that mortgage servicers produce appropriate documentation; instead, they have relied on affidavits asserting that the papers are in order. And these affidavits were often produced by “robo-signers,” or low-level employees who had no idea whether their assertions were true.

David Swanson: Rule of Law Is Alive and Well Outside the United States

The World Justice Project on Thursday published a “Rule of Law Index,” and there’s no easy way to say this. Let me put it this way: as when rankings on education, infant mortality, work hours, lifespan, retirement security, health, environmental impact, incarceration rates, violence, concentration of wealth, and other measures of quality of life come out, it is time once again for we Americans to shout “We’re Number One!” more loudly than ever. Because, of course, we’re not. . . .

New York Times Editorial: Dithering on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

The Obama administration professes to oppose the odious and misguided policy of banning gay soldiers from serving openly in the military. So it was distressing to hear that the Justice Department plans to appeal a federal court order that the military immediately stop enforcing the law that is used to drum out gay service members once their sexual orientation becomes known. We believe the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law was wrong from the day it was passed 17 years ago. But, in any case, circumstances have changed radically. As Judge Virginia Phillips pointed out when she ruled it unconstitutional, the original premises for the policy have been proved wrong, and there is no longer any good reason for continuing to ruin people’s lives by enforcing it.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the policy should not be lifted abruptly because there are unresolved questions like whether straight and gay soldiers should share barracks and whether the military should pay benefits to partners of gay service members.

He said he wanted to wait until a review of practices and policies was submitted on Dec. 1.

There is no need to wait. The answer to both questions is: Yes. It would be a disaster if the military replaced this misbegotten policy with official segregation and discrimination.

 David Sirota: Why It’s So Hard to Slash the Bloated Pentagon Budgets

Beware the sophistry of budget talking points — especially those seeking to deter any criticism of defense spending.

That’s the lesson of these last few weeks, as Establishment Republicans desperately try to thwart both progressives and tea party conservatives who are pressuring Congress to reduce Pentagon bloat.

The latest talking point du jour has been around in one form or another for years. It asks us to forget that A) America spends more on defense than every other major nation combined and B) the Pentagon, whose annual budget is now approaching World War II levels in inflation-adjusted terms, has lost track of trillions of taxpayer dollars. In light of those troubling truths, we are nonetheless urged by Beltway Republicans to focus on the fact that defense spending is “4.9 percent of our gross domestic product, significantly below the average of 6.5 percent since World War II,” as a recent Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed.

That widely circulated article, aimed squarely at grassroots conservatives, was jointly written by three of the most influential Republican think tanks in Washington — the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Foreign Policy Initiative. And like clockwork, the “percentage of GDP” nugget went from their pen to the GOP’s well-oiled media machine.

Joe Conason: A Generation of Termites

When American politicians talk about the legacy we are leaving to the next generation, their usual theme is financial deficits, as if there were no other kind. Figured on a per capita basis, the real and imputed debt that today’s children will assume someday as taxpayers can seem daunting. But what our political leaders rarely even attempt to calculate is the other debt that we are leaving to our heirs-a decayed and inadequate infrastructure that doesn’t deserve to be compared with what earlier generations bequeathed to us.

The best recent estimates by civil engineers and government experts indicate that we would have to spend well over $2 trillion during the next five years on roads, bridges, airports, railways, transit, sewers, waterways, ports, dams, parks and schools simply to maintain them in decent condition. Such estimates do not include the kind of modernizing improvements that the United States requires to remain competitive with other nations or to protect the global environment from disaster. But the political momentum appears to favor politicians who have no will to preserve-let alone better-the national inheritance that we have allowed to fall into sorry disrepair.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: ‘Crazy Carl’ and the Limits of Anger

NEW YORK-Having long been one of the proud tough guys of New York politics, Andrew Cuomo, the state’s attorney general, finds himself with a Republican opponent in this year’s governor’s race who makes him look like St. Francis of Assisi.

To call Carl Paladino brash and a loudmouth understates the case. The New York Daily News has taken to referring to the Republican nominee as “Crazy Carl,” and his latest series of outbursts demonstrated why.

Appearing before a group of Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn on Sunday, Paladino declared that he didn’t want children “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option-it isn’t.”

Then, in trying on the “Today” show on Monday to make things better, he made them worse. He spoke of how “disgusting” he had found a gay pride march he had seen, in which marchers “wear these little Speedos and they grind against each other.”

The venerable tabloid Daily News couldn’t resist the headline: “Carl Rages Against Guys in Speedos, Gay Grinding.”  

American politics has come to this?

Stanley Kutler: The Bipartisan Politics of Fear

Mercifully, the midterm election cycle is nearing its end. Both parties, we learn, are planning their “postmortem assessments.” The Daily Beast’s recent headline is a sign of the times: “Why Obama Can’t Lose in 2012.” Plan ahead.

For the past year, the media, reflecting disenchantment with Barack Obama, their very own rock star, have “predicted” huge Democratic losses for 2010. Like blackbirds who fly off the line (as Eugene McCarthy once said), the media follow in lock step. We have heard ad nauseam that Democratic losses are inevitable-the governing party always suffers a setback in the midterm elections-or so we are told. But it is not always so; and further, we can ask if the Democrats’ troubles are not so much about what they did, but rather, what they did not do.

The Rule of Law Index looks at 35 nations around the world, including seven in Western Europe and North America.

Joshua Holland: How Come Right-Wingers Aren’t Up in Arms About Wall St’s Assault on Private Property?

The Right will continue to defend the bankers, even if they undermine one of conservatism’s most cherished principles.

Ever since the financial crisis hit, conservatives — at places like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, joined by some prominent Tea Party groups — have fought tooth-and-nail to deflect new regulation of Wall Street’s wheeler-dealers. (In my new book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, I note that the Right, following the advice of conservative message-maker Frank Luntz, derided new regulations that Wall Street was fighting hard to kill as a “second bailout” of the big banks. It was a lie so bold that one couldn’t help but be impressed with their chutzpah.)

So there’s a certain amount of irony in new revelations that the banks, in their quest for easy profits, appear to have undermined one of the Right’s most important principles: the sanctity of property ownership.

“If you own something,” George W. Bush explained in a 2004 speech, “you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America, and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country.”

Naomi Prins: Why Is the White House Against Freezing Foreclosures in the Face of Rampant Fraud?

Treasury and Obama are facing huge financial pressure.

At first, there was a deafening silence from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke on the foreclosure front. It was as if they: 1) didn’t read the news; or 2) were afraid someone would notice afresh their incompetence in dealing with the ongoing housing crisis and deteriorating economy, while convincing everyone that the bank bailouts and subsidizations were good for us.

Last week, while Senator Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others in Congress were dispensing irate pre-election sound-bites, attorneys general across the country were gearing up for investigations. Banks were reluctantly announcing foreclosure moratoriums because it’s quarterly earnings season and uncertainty is bad for stock prices, and Geithner was defending TARP and mixing it up with China over the dollar. Meanwhile, the Fed was gearing up to buy more Treasuries, like some kind of rapacious alien that eats its progeny, because no one else wants our debt.

But that changed when Geithner came out of hiding yesterday with a stance. (Bernanke is still in hiding, but will support Geithner’s view soon.) Unsurprisingly, Geithner chose to side with the likes of conservatives and CNBC. Thus, his response to Charlie Rose when asked whether he supported banks in declaring a foreclosure moratorium was: “No, I wouldn’t say it that way.”