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: Rare and Foolish

Last month a Chinese trawler operating in Japanese-controlled waters collided with two vessels of Japan’s Coast Guard. Japan detained the trawler’s captain; China responded by cutting off Japan’s access to crucial raw materials.

And there was nowhere else to turn: China accounts for 97 percent of the world’s supply of rare earths, minerals that play an essential role in many high-technology products, including military equipment. Sure enough, Japan soon let the captain go.

I don’t know about you, but I find this story deeply disturbing, both for what it says about China and what it says about us. On one side, the affair highlights the fecklessness of U.S. policy makers, who did nothing while an unreliable regime acquired a stranglehold on key materials. On the other side, the incident shows a Chinese government that is dangerously trigger-happy, willing to wage economic warfare on the slightest provocation.

Sherrod Brown: For Our China Trade Emergency, Dial Section 301

TEN years ago this fall the Senate sold out American manufacturing. By a vote of 83 to 15, it established so-called permanent normal trade relations with China, paving the way for that country to join the World Trade Organization. As a result, Chinese imports to the United States fell under the same low tariffs and high quotas as those from countries like Canada and Britain.

Today, though, our trade relations with China are anything but normal. The 2000 agreement’s proponents insisted it would enable a billion Chinese consumers to buy American products. Instead, our bilateral trade deficit has increased 170 percent, largely because China has undermined free-market competition through illegal subsidies and currency manipulation.

Unless the administration takes punitive steps in response to China’s unfair trade practices, the American economy – and the American worker – will continue to suffer.

Sherrod Brown, a Democratic senator from Ohio, is a member of the President’s Export Council and the author of “Myths of Free Trade.”

Glenn Greenwald: How propaganda is disseminated: WikiLeaks Edition

This is how the U.S. government and American media jointly disseminate propaganda: in the immediate wake of some newsworthy War on Terror event, U.S. Government officials (usually anonymous) make wild and reckless — though unverifiable — claims. The U.S. media mindlessly trumpets them around the world without question or challenge. Those claims become consecrated as widely accepted fact. And then weeks, months or years later, those claims get quietly exposed as being utter falsehoods, by which point it does not matter, because the goal is already well-achieved: the falsehoods are ingrained as accepted truth.

I’ve documented how this process works in the context of American air attacks (it’s immediately celebrated that we Killed the Evil Targeted Terrorist Leader who invariably turns out to be alive and then allegedly killed again in the next air strike], while the [dead are always, by definition, “militants”); with covered-up American war crimes, with the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman frauds — the same process was also evident with the Israeli attack on the flotilla — and now we find a quite vivid illustration of this deceitful process in the context of WikiLeaks’ release of Afghanistan war documents. . . .

John Nichols: Obama is Wrong, the Republicans are Right

The Obama administration’s Department of Justice is seeking to overturn the world-wide injunction against enforcment of the noxious “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. . . .

There have been lots of objections. But the loudest complaints are coming from Republicans. Not, unfortunately, all Republicans. But the Log Cabin Republicans — the gay and lesbian group that secured the injunction from a federal judge — are mounting the defense of the injunction. . . .

The Log Cabin lawyer is right: legally, logically and morally. The Department of Justice does have a responsibility to enforce the law, even when the law is objectionable. But it does not have a responsibility to defend a policy that a federal judge has soundly and unequivocally identified as an assault on the Constitution that violates the basic premises of a free and just society.

Tom Brokaw: The Wars That America Forgot About

IN what promises to be the most contentious midterm election since 1994, there is no shortage of passion about big issues facing the country: the place and nature of the federal government in America’s future; public debt; jobs; health care; the influence of special interests; and the role of populist movements like the Tea Party.

In nearly every Congressional and Senate race, these are the issues that explode into attack ads, score points in debates and light up cable talk shows. In poll after poll, these are the issues that voters say are most important to them this year.

Notice anything missing on the campaign landscape?

How about war? The United States is now in its ninth year of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest wars in American history. Almost 5,000 men and women have been killed. More than 30,000 have been wounded, some so gravely they’re returning home to become, effectively, wards of their families and communities.

Fareed Zakaria: When North Korea falls . . .

SEOUL The most important lesson to have come out of the financial crisis is to worry about “black swans.” These are, in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s formulation, events that are unlikely but with the potential to cause major disruption. In geopolitics there is one such event that should have us all thinking hard — the collapse of North Korea.

Most of Washington’s attention has been devoted to the Pyongyang regime’s small nuclear arsenal. But perhaps a more likely scenario, and possibly one that would be even more disruptive, is a meltdown of the regime.

New York Times Editorial: In Climate Denial, Again

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling. With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate – including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning – accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: GOP’s election strategy lets others do its dirty work

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. The Republican Party is running a three-level campaign this year that gives its candidates a wealth of advantages — in flexibility, deniability and determination.  

At the first level are the party’s candidates, who can be as reasonable or as angry, as moderate or as conservative, as their circumstances require.

Next come the outside groups that refuse to disclose their donor lists. They are doing the dirty work of pounding their Democratic opponents in commercials for which no one is accountable. The Republican candidates can shrug an innocent “Who, me?” Deniability is a wonderful thing.

Joe Conanson: NPR poll: Republican midterm tide has crested

A new national survey of battleground districts strongly suggests that the Democrats aren’t quite dead just yet

While Democrats must still expect to lose dozens of House seats and several Senate seats on November 2, the earlier trend toward a massive Republican landslide may have been arrested, according to the latest NPR Battleground Poll  released Friday. Conducted jointly by Democratic pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Republican pollster Public Opinion Strategies, the NPR survey of voters in 96 most hotly contested districts indicates significant narrowing of the Republican lead since the public radio network’s last midterm survey in June.

Still warning of a likely shift in control of the House, the NPR polling team says that while the midterm is still “an ugly election” in the 86 Democratic-controlled districts that they surveyed, this election should no longer be considered a “death march” for Democrats. Their analysis highlights four important new developments:

First, in ten “battleground” House districts currently held by Republicans, the latest numbers suggest that the GOP will “lose a fair number” of those seats bedause their lead has been cut in half since June.

Joan Walsh: If Sarah Palin falls in a forest?

The GOP star is touring California, but no major Republican candidates are turning out for her

It’s strange to be aware that Sarah Palin is in California and no one I know seems to care much about it. Sure, my crowd is mostly Democrats, but I’m also thinking about GOP senate candidate Carly Fiorina and our would-be governor Meg Whitman. Both said they had other engagements this weekend — they’re washing their hair? — and that’s particularly hurtful coming from Fiorina. Palin’s May endorsement helped shore up the former HP CEO’s standing with party right-wingers, since Fiorina was a McCain surrogate in the state, and a real Tea Party candidate, Chuck DeVore, was in the race.

But Fiorina told reporters she wouldn’t be with Palin this weekend: “There are lots of people who’ve endorsed me that I don’t appear with.” Wow, that’s worse than Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller’s diss of Palin. I think Fiorina should expect some nasty mis-spelled email from Todd Palin, if not a moose-head in her bed.

Robert Cornwell: Crumbling America has a $2.2 trillion repair bill

Out of America: The US needs to update its roads, railways and airports – but recession and a shift to the right have put big infrastructure projects in jeopardy.

First, a tale of two rail tunnels. One of them is in Switzerland – the 35-mile Gotthard Base tunnel, the cutting of which was completed on Friday amid great national rejoicing, and which, when it opens for business in 2017, will be the longest of its kind in the world. It will have cost $10bn (£6.2bn), representing $1,300 of taxpayer’s money for every citizen in the land of William Tell. But it will bestow huge benefits not only on Switzerland, but on north-south freight and passenger traffic for all Europe.

The other rail tunnel is (or rather was) in New Jersey, and would have linked the Garden State to Manhattan, vastly improving clogged access to New York City, with long-term economic benefits to match. The project, 20 years in the planning, would have cost around $9bn, or roughly $1,000 for each inhabitant of one of the richest states in the US.

Alas, it is not to be. A few days ago, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey announced his state was pulling out, in effect dooming the tunnel even though digging has started and $500m has already been spent. The cost was simply too high, he declared; in these cash-strapped times, New Jersey had better things to spend its money on. And so you start to understand the silent crisis that is undermining America: the creeping decay of its public infrastructure.