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.

David Sirota: From Uprising to Hostile Takeover … and Back Again

Death Panels. Witchcraft. Birthers. Islamophobes. Tea partiers. Obama text messages. Palin robo-calls. TV commercial after TV commercial after TV commercial. And now, at the end of this $4 billion We-Didn’t-Start-the-Fire-worthy vaudeville known as the 2010 election, what do we have to show for it? That’s right, a new House speaker with the politics of Newt Gingrich and the skin complexion of a Syracuse mascot.

If after this soul-crushing extravaganza you find yourself shell-shocked, that’s understandable. If you are confused, that’s understandable, too, considering the contradictions.

A president who helped corporate interests gut the very proposals he was elected on-health care reform, Wall Street regulation and economic stimulus-was suddenly berated for being anti-business and for overreaching. An anti-Establishment/anti-corporate/anti-NAFTA/anti-government tea party ended up electing to the Senate a congressman’s son (Rand Paul), a pharmaceutical lobbyist (Dan Coats), a Bush trade representative (Rob Portman) and a corporate chieftain whose business was propped up by government grants (Ron Johnson). Meanwhile, a country that twice rejected Bush Republicans in favor of Democrats suddenly returned those same Republicans to power

Sen, Bernie Sanders: MSNBC’s Disgrace

It is outrageous that General Electric/MSNBC would suspend Keith Olbermann for exercising his constitutional rights to contribute to a candidate of his choice. This is a real threat to political discourse in America and will have a chilling impact on every commentator for MSNBC.

We live in a time when 90 percent of talk radio is dominated by right-wing extremists, when the Republican Party has its own cable network (Fox) and when progressive voices are few and far between.

At a time when the ownership of Fox news contributed millions of dollars to the Republican Party, when a number of Fox commentators are using the network as a launching pad for their presidential campaigns and are raising money right off the air, it is absolutely unacceptable that MSNBC suspended one of the most popular progressive commentators in the country.

Is Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz next? Is this simply a ‘personality conflict’ within MSNBC or is one of America’s major corporations cracking down on a viewpoint they may not like? Whatever the answer may be, Keith Olbermann should be reinstated immediately and allowed to present his point of view.

Johann Hari: America is now officially for sale

It’s the Tea Party spirit distilled: pose as the champion of Joe America, while actually ripping him off

The laws and policies of the legislature of the United States of America are now effectively on e-Bay, for sale to the highest bidder. Are you a Wall Street boss who wants to party like it’s 2007? Are you a Big Coal baron who wants to burn, baby, burn? Are you an insurance company that wants to be able to kick sick people off your rolls? Meet John Boehner, the most powerful Republican and soon-to-be Speaker of the House. But – of course! – you already have.

Here’s an example of how you have worked together. In 1995, the House was going to finally repeal subsidies for growing tobacco, because an addictive cancer-causing drug didn’t seem like the most deserving recipient of tax-payers’ cash – until Boehner walked the floor of the House handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to his fellow elected representatives. They changed their minds. The subsidy stayed. Explaining his check-dispensing, Boehner says: “It’s gone on here for a long time.” So get your bids in: the House is open for business.

James K. Galbraith: It Was the Banks

Bruce Bartlett says it was a failure to focus. Paul Krugman says it was a failure of nerve. Nancy Pelosi says it was the economy’s failure. Barack Obama says it was his own failure – to explain that he was, in fact, focused on the economy.

As Krugman rightly stipulates, Monday-morning quarterbacks should say exactly what different play they would have called. Paul’s answer is that the stimulus package should have been bigger. No disagreement: I was one voice calling for a much larger program back when. Yet this answer is not sufficient.

The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.

Dean Baker: Peter Orszag and the Drive to Cut Social Security

Peter Orszag, President Obama’s former budget director, seems determined to cut Social Security. Like most people involved in this quest he is prepared to leave the facts behind and is quick to resort to name calling.

He begins his column by telling readers:

“The budget deficit figured prominently in much of the discussion surrounding yesterday’s election.”

This is partly true since the media tend to prominently feature the views of people who discuss the budget deficit in all contexts, but it is absolutely false insofar as the implication is that the deficit was an important factor in the Democrats’ defeat. All the polls show that high unemployment was the major factor in the Democrats’ loss; the deficit was at most a minor issue.

Orszag goes on to tell readers that progressives should be happy to see Social Security reform on the agenda since:

“the key issue progressives had been concerned about – individual accounts within Social Security – has been definitively won in their favor (for now).”

It might have been helpful if Orszag had used names, since I don’t know any progressives who have this as their “key issue.” The progressives who are most visible on this issue have been concerned about a Social Security benefit that is already small by international standards being made still smaller.  . . .

Eugene Robinson: A Speaker Who Stood Out

Losing elections is an occupational hazard for politicians, so there’s no need to get all weepy about the Democratic officeholders who suddenly find themselves with more time to spend with their families. It would be more appropriate to shed a tear or two for the future of the country, what with the tea party brigade coming to town. Then again, I was pretty gloomy after the 1994 midterms and yet it turned out that the world did not actually end.

President Obama still has the ability to set the nation’s agenda-and also the power of the veto, in case of emergency. Harry Reid is still Senate majority leader-and after the way he punched and scrapped his way to victory, who wants to mess with him? As for John Boehner, he’ll soon learn that his new job requires a more extensive vocabulary than “no.”

But amid the wreckage of Tuesday’s GOP rampage, there’s one person for whom I feel awful: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She’s losing her job not because she does it poorly, but because she does it so well.

Mike Lux : The One Thing

There’s all the usual post-election palaver that happens after a Democratic loss: Republican and right-wing triumphalism, the pro-corporate wing of the Democratic party and conventional wisdom pundits arguing that Democrats should “turn to the center” (by which they mean the Washington center — cutting Social Security, doing more trade deals, not antagonizing Wall Street — as opposed to what the center is for voters), and progressives arguing that Obama should stand strong on Democratic values and not cave to the Republican agenda. There’s also a classic dynamic where some Democrats are urgently calling on people not to attack each other or the president, to try to keep the party from looking like it is in disarray, and others wanting to really engage in that old centrist versus left debate and critique.

Shamus Cooke: The Democrats Prepare to Move Right

On the eve of the Republican-dominated mid-term election, working people were told to vote Democrat to prevent a “truly dangerous” Republican party from taking power. There is an element of truth in this: the Republican Party has been sprinting to the far right for decades, to the point where they are incapable of speaking sensibly about political issues.

But in a close second place in this rightward scramble are the Democrats, who’ve spent decades racing into the arms of the corporations that dominate both political parties unchallenged.

This mad dash to the right did not stop at the midterm election; the Democrats are preparing to unleash their hidden second wind, kept from public view until after the elections.

The first step to the right occurred in the commentary over the lost elections. The Democrat’s fake analysis about why they lost will push them to “correct their mistakes.”

Contrary to all evidence or common sense, the Democrats now claim that their agenda was “too progressive” while in power, to be fixed by shifting even further to the right. In effect, the Democrats are now agreeing with the Tea Party’s analysis of the Obama Administration.