“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.
Joe Cirincione: British Budget Collapse Foreshadows Cuts to Come in U.S. Defense Budget
Great Britain’s cuts, particularly to its nuclear forces, are the canary in the defense budget mine. Just as massive deficits forced the conservative UK government to cut deep into its military programs, the United States will soon have to choose: update its force structure or cling to obsolete Cold War posture?
The UK may have waited too long to make the cuts. It is now forced to cut military personnel by 10 percent, and scrap an aircraft carrier and the entire fleet of Harrier jump jets (a very versatile, though very dangerous, fighter jet in which I once flew).
Less controversial is the plan to delay a decision on building a new generation of nuclear-armed submarines to replace the four existing Trident subs, each armed with 16 missiles carrying a total of 48 hydrogen bombs per sub.
Johann Hari: The Tea Party’s Wildest Dreams Come True — in Britain. The Result? Disaster
Margaret Thatcher is lying sick in a private hospital bed in Belgravia — but her political children have just pushed her agenda further and harder and deeper than she ever dreamed of. The government of David Cameron just took the Tea Party’s deepest fantasies — of massive budget cuts, introduced immediately — and imposed them on Britain. When was the last time Britain’s public spending was slashed by more than 20 percent? Not in my mother’s lifetime. Not even in my grandmother’s lifetime. No: It was in 1918, when a conservative-liberal coalition said the best response to a global economic crisis was to rapidly pay off this country’s debts. The result? Unemployment soared from six percent to 19 percent, and the country’s economy collapsed so severely that they lost all ability to pay their bills, and the debt actually rose from 114 percent to 180 percent. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain said, “but it does rhyme.”
George Osborne, the finance minister, has just gambled Britain’s future on an extreme economic theory that has failed whenever and wherever it has been tried. In the Great Depression, we learned some basic principles. When an economy falters, ordinary people — perfectly sensibly — cut back their spending and try to pay down their debts. This causes a further fall in demand and makes the economy worse. If the government cuts back at the same time, then there is no demand at all, and the economy goes into freefall. That’s why virtually every country in the world reacted to the Great Crash of 2008 — caused entirely by deregulated bankers — by increasing spending, funded by temporary debt. Better a deficit we repay in the good times than an endless depression. The countries that stimulated hardest, like South Korea, came out of recession first.
Bob Cesca: The Republican Swindle About ‘Obamacare and Stimulus’
If you happen to be a swing voter who’s considering the Republican slate next month, you’re being tricked. That’s not to say you’re an idiot, but the Republicans are doing an excellent job masking over what they really stand for, and millions of Americans seem to be falling for it.
The Republican strategy for this midterm election is simple: Treat voters like easily manipulated hoopleheads. The GOP and its various apparatchiks are spending untold millions of dollars, much of it from anonymous donors and, perhaps, even some illegal foreign donors, in order to play out this nationwide swindle. They’re investing heavily on the wager that Americans are so kerfuffled by the slow-growth (but growth nevertheless) economy that they’re willing to buy any line of nonsense as an alternative solution.
Regarding that nonsense, just about every GOP solution and every GOP idea reveals either a hilariously obvious contradiction or an utterly transparent hypocrisy. Say nothing of unchecked awfulness like Southern Strategy race-baiting or bald-faced lies. But it doesn’t seem to matter much because they’ve buried most of it under heaping piles of inchoate outrage and fear. Just like always. It’s not unlike the 2000s all over again. They’re engaging in the same bumper sticker sloganeering and myopic agitprop, but with updated content for 2010.
David Weigel: Nobody Is Safe
How Republicans are forcing Democrats to spend money in previously “safe” districts.
Here are two numbers that show the depth of the Democrats’ problems this year. The first is $40,248. That’s how much Rep. Barney Frank’s Republican opponent raised in 2008. The second is $200,000. That’s how much Barney Frank just loaned his current campaign for re-election.
Frank’s opponent is Sean Bielat, a first-time candidate half Frank’s age, and if he doesn’t win this race it hardly matters. As of Sept. 30 he had raised $613,419. He’s built local and national fan bases. He’s pinned Frank down, when in a typical year Frank could do a quick threat assessment, realize just how safe he is in his suburban Massachusetts district, and dole out money to fellow Democrats.
“It’s lights out as far as [Frank] helping other candidates,” said Lisa Barstow, Bielat’s campaign spokesperson. “Democrats have relied on him for largesse to help them in their own races. He hasn’t had a serious challenge in 20 years. So this is going to have a significant effect on Republican races.” Oh, and on Frank’s personal loan: “Nothing could be more delightful!”
Michael Moore: Michigan Blues
I have a rule of thumb that’s served me well my whole life: whenever corporate executives begin talking about how they support “free markets” and “competition,” check to see if you still have your wallet.
That’s because no one — not Karl Marx, not Fidel Castro, not your niece who owns the only lemonade stand on the block — hates competition more than corporations. The whole goal of a corporation is to crush all the competition. When corporate executives start pushing for “free market policies,” what they mean is a government that lets them become a monopoly.
Don’t believe me? Well, count how many corporate CEOs (and Republican politicians) stand up and cheer for the Obama administration today:
The Justice Department sued Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan on Monday, asserting that the company, the state’s dominant health insurer, had violated antitrust laws and secured a huge competitive advantage by forcing hospitals to charge higher prices to Blue Cross’s rivals.
The civil case appears to have broad implications because many local insurance markets, like those in Michigan, are highly concentrated, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans often have the largest shares of those markets. […]
Dahlia Lithwick: Would You Like To Leave a Message?
Why Ginni Thomas made that weird phone call to Anita Hill
The only question left to ponder, at the bizarre news of Ginni Thomas’ “olive branch” phone call to Anita Hill, seeking an apology for “what you did with my husband” (not to but with-never mind) is: Why?
The cynic in me believes that there is no gender/race dispute the Tea Party is not willing to exploit for recruitment purposes, that reminding us all of the ugliest moment in American identity politics is no accident just two weeks before an election. The realist in me wonders whether Mrs. Thomas possibly believed this would stay private. She’s a brilliant tactician and a superb communicator: She couldn’t possibly have expected that ham-fisted attempt at reconciliation would have gone unreported.
But the depressive in me suspects that Ginni Thomas simply doesn’t care what any of us think of her attempt to reach out and touch someone she hates. Why would she? She and her husband long ago passed a point at which they worry about how they will be portrayed in the mainstream press. They stopped reading it years ago. They both live in a world in which the facts of Hill v. Thomas don’t matter. There are no facts. There are just “our” beliefs and “their” beliefs, just as there is “our” media and “theirs” and “our” Civil War history and “theirs.” To criticize either Thomas has always been to join in the imagined conspiracy against them.
.
Robert Sheer: Obama Hires a Hustler
One day as Wall Street was crashing, President George W. Bush had the temerity to plaintively ask his treasury secretary, Henry Paulson: “How did this happen?” Paulson, who headed Goldman Sachs before taking the Treasury job, remarks in his memoir: “It was a humbling question for someone from the financial sector to be asked–after all, we were the ones responsible.”
That’s an honest enough admission about the culpability of the financial community in bundling the toxic derivatives packages still disastrously undermining the economic health of the nation. Even more startling was Paulson’s admission in his memoir that he, at the time he was advising the president, still did not know that home mortgages were at the heart of those troubling securities that his former company had marketed to others with such wild abandon.
Were President Barack Obama to ask that question about the origins of this crisis of Tom Donilon, one of his closest aides whom he recently appointed to the critical job of national security adviser, Donilon would find it even more awkward to invoke the defense of ignorance. As the chief lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005, he was far more intimately involved than Paulson in the manufacturing of this crisis. He successfully pressured Congress to give Fannie Mae the green light to speed past any sound regulation. Indeed, had Congress endorsed the barest semblance of regulation of the Fannie Mae-led housing scam, it would have been stillborn instead of being a very much alive Frankenstein creation.
June Thomas: Bring On the Pain
Will Britain’s massive spending cuts drive Brits onto the streets?
To call the speech British finance minister George Osborne made to the House of Commons Wednesday afternoon “highly anticipated” does the term a disservice. Shortly after the Conservatives formed a government with the Liberal Democratic Party in early May, Osborne announced that he would outline his plans to cut $130 billion from the budget on Oct. 20. The early months of the new administration were conducted in the shadow of this impending “comprehensive spending review.”
The cuts announced today were massive-for details, see the BBC’s summary-but because the media had spent the summer predicting where the ax would fall, many commentators focused on the strategy rather than the size. Writing in the Guardian, Jackie Ashley said, “It’s the oldest game in the book: for a couple of weeks before the chancellor’s statement, swamp the media with scare stories … and hey presto, George Osborne, in denying all these rumours today, can try to make it look as though Christmas has come early.”
Other columnists in the liberal Guardian declared that the government had chosen to kick Britain’s lamest dogs. Said Jonathan Freeland, “The cold, hard political calculation is that it makes more sense for the coalition to hit the poorest and weakest-by making swingeing cuts to welfare-than to whack the middle class or the powerful.” Meanwhile, Osborne “pacified other more crucial voting blocs”-the elderly and other sympathetic groups who know how to mount a heartstring-tugging protest. Aditya Chakrabortty agreed; he reckoned Osborne’s “strategy for achieving his spending cuts is to pick losers”-to minimize the impact on groups that know how to lobby or wield political influence.
Recent Comments