“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: Divided We Fail
Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?
Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?
No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.
New York Times Editorial: No Justification
Two years ago, when a splintered Supreme Court approved lethal injection as a means of execution in Baze v. Rees, Justice John Paul Stevens made a prophecy. Instead of ending the controversy, he said, the ruling would raise questions “about the justification for the death penalty itself.” Since then, evidence has continued to mount, showing the huge injustice of the death penalty – and the particular barbarism of this form of execution.
n the case of Jeffrey Landrigan, convicted of murder and executed by Arizona on Tuesday, the system failed him at almost every level, most disturbingly at the Supreme Court. In a 5-to-4 vote, the court’s conservative majority allowed the execution to proceed based on a stark misrepresentation.
Of the 35 states that allow the death penalty, all now execute by lethal injection. Most use a sequence of drugs that is supposed to provide a painless death, but when it is administered incorrectly it causes agony that amounts to torture. Veterinarians say the method doesn’t meet the standard for euthanizing animals.
Nicholas D. Kristoff: End the War on Pot
I dropped in on a marijuana shop here that proudly boasted that it sells “31 flavors.” It also offered a loyalty program. For every 10 purchases of pot – supposedly for medical uses – you get one free packet.
“There are five of these shops within a three-block radius,” explained the proprietor, Edward J. Kim. He brimmed with pride at his inventory and sounded like any small businessman as he complained about onerous government regulation. Like, well, state and federal laws.
But those burdensome regulations are already evaporating in California, where anyone who can fake a headache already can buy pot. Now there’s a significant chance that on Tuesday, California voters will choose to go further and broadly legalize marijuana.
Robert Reich: Halliburton and the Upcoming Election
Next Tuesday Americans will be deciding whether to hand over even more of our government to corporations that have been plundering America — such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wellpoint insurance, Massey Energy, and Halliburton, the giant oil services company.
Not every large corporation is irresponsible, of course, but plunderers that get away with it gain a competitive advantage over the more responsible, and thereby lead a race to the bottom.
Case in point: The staff of the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill has just revealed that Halliburton executives knew the cement it was using to seal BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well was likely to be unstable but didn’t tell BP or act on the information.
Michael Winsap: All They Ask for Is an Unfair Advantage
All they ask for is an unfair advantage. Open any newspaper, magazine or political web site and the coverage of corporate campaign largess, much of it anonymous, bedazzles the mind. There’s $75 million from the chamber, plus another $50 million or more in undisclosed donations to major conservative organizations – as reported by the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation – that include the American Action Network, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, the American Future Fund and the 60 Plus Association.
The progressive Campaign for America’s Future reports, “Americans for Prosperity brags that they’ll spend at least $45 million on the 2010 elections, while FreedomWorks plans to throw in another $10 million.” Both organizations, backed by right-wing billionaire David Koch, are major funders of “all things Tea Party.” . . . .
All the big donors ask for is an unfair advantage. You may recall the story, usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw, of how he propositioned a fellow dinner guest, asking if she would sleep with him for a million pounds.
She agreed, and then Shaw asked if she would do the same for ten shillings. “What do you take me for?” she angrily replied. “A prostitute?”
“We’ve established the principle,” Shaw rejoined. “Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
With this election, Congress may establish once and for all that Shaw’s is the only principle left that it still embraces, as long as the price is right.
Peter White Foreclosuregate Explained: Big Banks on the Brink
In the wake of mounting public outrage, attorneys general of 50 states and the District of Columbia have launched a joint investigation into what financial writers are calling “Foreclosuregate.” Industry spokespersons have downplayed the controversy surrounding foreclosure mills and “robo-signers.” Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase are conducting internal reviews of thousands of foreclosures, but say they believe all the underlying facts in their foreclosures are true and that any potential issues will be quickly addressed. . . .
Meanwhile, investigations are underway not only by the states’ attorneys general, but also by federal banking regulators, the US Justice Department and the Securities Exchange Commission. A number of lawsuits have been filed in Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi, and other states, and all this attention may force banks to renegotiate their loans with more affordable terms for borrowers.
But banks are not heading down that path, instead, they are redoing questionable foreclosure papers they hope will pass muster in court. . . .
Only time will tell how the foreclosure scandal plays out. Federal regulators say their investigation won’t be completed before the end of the year. And several foreclosure experts agree with Madigan that the fight over foreclosures is just beginning.
Howard Fineman: Inside The Democrats’ Post-Election Strategy For Congress
With the enemy at the gates, and facing heavy casualties, Democrats in Congress are preparing to do what any beleaguered army does: head for the hills and leave booby-traps behind. The bigger the margin Republicans pile up next Tuesday, the less likely it is that the Democrats will be able to — or want to — do much when Congress reconvenes. They will want to do the minimum, pushing the toughest decisions on taxes, spending and debt forward to a newer, presumably more Republican, 112th Congress. It may be the only fun they’re going to have.
Eugene Robinson: Restore sanity? Too late for the Tea Party
With their “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” this weekend, political satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are late to the party. This weird campaign has been Comedy Central all along.
The main source of hilarity has been the Tea Party movement and its candidates, quite a few of whom give every indication of being several sandwiches short of a picnic. Whether they win or lose – and yes, there remains the possibility that some might actually be elected – they leave us with mondo-bizarro moments that may require years of psychoanalysis for our collective political psyche to purge.
Cenk Uygur: What Obama Is Missing
Now, the reason I’m writing a piece critical of Obama at this point is because I just saw an excellent interview Jon Stewart had with him on The Daily Show. In fact, I thought it was the best interview of the president I have ever seen (my detailed analysis of the interview is here).
Stewart got him to address real, substantive criticism of his record for the first time. Almost everyone else that has interviewed him has either wildly misstated the case or challenged him from the right. Stewart asked all of the right questions. And the answers were very informative. This is what I learned.
Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t get it. He’s not alone; almost the entire Washington media doesn’t understand what the hell we’re talking about when we say change. . . .
The real issue isn’t whether you changed some provisions and didn’t change others; it’s whether you changed the system or not. That’s the change we were looking for.
Dana Milbank: On the Daily Show, Obama is the last laugh
On Comedy Central, the joke was on President Obama Wednesday night.
The president had come, on the eve of what will almost certainly be the loss of his governing majority, to plead his case before Jon Stewart, gatekeeper of the disillusioned left. But instead of displaying the sizzle that won him an army of youthful supporters two years ago, Obama had a Brownie moment.
The Daily Show host was giving Obama a tough time about hiring the conventional and Clintonian Larry Summers as his top economic advisor. . . .
Obama wore a displeased grin as Stewart diagnosed, with high accuracy, the administration’s condition: “The expectation, I think, was audacity going in there and really rooting out a corrupt system, and so the sense is, has [the] reality of what hit you in the face when you first stepped in caused you to back down from some of the more visionary things?”
“My attitude is if we’re making progress, step by step, inch by inch, day by day,” Obama said, “that we are being true to the spirit of that campaign.”
“You wouldn’t say you’d run this time as a pragmatist? It wouldn’t be, ‘Yes we can, given certain conditions?'”
“I think what I would say is yes we can, but — ”
Stewart, and the audience, laughed at the “but.”
Obama didn’t laugh. “But it’s not going to happen overnight,” he finished.
Try shouting that slogan at a campaign rally, dude.
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