“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.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Mike Lux: The Heart of Darkness
Democrats are still reeling from our political losses, and the DC political class is still obsessed with the re-positioning dance, but at the heart of everything else, at the center of everything that matters, are these bleak economic facts driving our politics. The sooner Democrats stop worrying about being center or left, and start focusing on how to get the middle class out of its economic black hole, the sooner our politics start getting fixed. Period. End of story. The heart of our political darkness is the heart of the middle class’ economic darkness.
Valerie Plame Wilson: START Treaty Must Not Be Derailed
For me, the most bittersweet moment watching the new movie Fair Game comes when it shows my clandestine CIA work involving nuclear counterproliferation. I remain passionate about the issue of preventing rogue states and terrorist organizations from ever procuring a nuclear weapon. Since resigning from the agency however, I realize that much of what I had been doing may only have served to delay the inevitable. My thinking on proliferation has therefore evolved considerably, and I now believe that the best way to ensure our national security for the long term is to move to achieve the goal of total, global elimination of nuclear weapons.
Laura Flanders: Solving the Irish Crisis
The financial crisis in Ireland is leading to a political crisis on the heels of a bailout and more “austerity measures.” The coalition that currently rules is falling apart, the Green Party detaching from the prime minister’s Fianna Fail party, and elections loom.
But just as in colonial days, the “Irish problem” is really a problem from outside. Ireland wouldn’t need “help” if it hadn’t been robbed by multinationals.
To be fair, its own government turned over its pockets to be picked. Ireland’s corporate tax rates are some of the lowest in the EU and its loopholes allow foreign companies to use Ireland’s well-educated and health-insured workforce, while giving the least possible back. Americans are linked to the problem — every time we GOOGLE we’re using a company that’s avoiding taxes at home in the United States and in other, higher-rate European countries by setting up in Ireland, and shuttling profits in and almost tax-free out.
John Nichols: Chalmers Johnson and the Patriotic Struggle Against Empire
With one word, “blowback,” Chalmers Johnson explained the folly of empire in the modern age.In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, true American patriots-as opposed to the jingoists and profiteers whose madness and greed would steer a republic to ruin-needed a new language for a new age.
They got it from Johnson. His 2000 book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Macmillan), gave currency to the old espionage term-which referred to the violent, unintended consequences of covert (and sometimes not so covert) operations that are suffered even by superpowers such as the United States-and became an essential text for those who sought to explain the attacks and to forge sounder and more responsible foreign policies for the furture.
Johnson, who has died at age 79, was no liberal idealist. He was the an old Asian hand who had chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California-Berkeley from 1967 to 1972 and then served as president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute. In other words, he was a man of the world who knew how the world worked. And what he tried to explain, to political leaders and citizens, was that the old ways of empire building (and maintaining) no longer worked in an age of instant communications, jet travel and doomsday weaponry.
Bob Herbert: A Gift From Long Ago
Kennedy’s great gift was his capacity to inspire. His message as he traveled the country was that Americans could do better, that great things were undeniably possible, that obstacles were challenges to be overcome with hard work and sacrifice.
I don’t think he would have known what to make of the America of today, where the messages coming from the smoldering ruins of public life are not just uninspiring, but demeaning: that we must hack away at the achievements of the past (Social Security, Medicare); that we cannot afford to rebuild the nation’s aging infrastructure or establish a first-class public school system for all children; that we cannot bring an end to debilitating warfare, or establish a new era of clean energy, or put millions of jobless and underemployed Americans back to work.
Richard Cohen: Attack on Michelle Obama shows Palin’s ignorance of history
Sarah Palin teases that she might run for president. But she is unqualified – not just in the (let me count the) usual ways, but because she does not know the country. She could not be the president of black America nor of Hispanic America. She knows more about grizzlies than she does about African Americans – and she clearly has more interest in the former than the latter. Did she once just pick up the phone and ask Michelle Obama what she meant by her remark? Did she ask about her background? What it was like at Princeton? What it was like for her parents or her grandparents? I can offer a hint. If they were driving to Washington, they slowed down and stopped where the sign said “colored” – and the irritated Palins of the time angrily hit the horn and went on their way.
Mark Ruffalo: When Truth Is Scarier Than Fiction
It sounds like a crazy conspiracy — too extreme to be true. Flaming tap water, dead animals, secret chemical formulas, mysterious illnesses afflicting whole communities, and people afraid to speak up.
The November 11th episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation brought viewers to a small town taken over by — industrial gas drilling. The storyline in “Fracked” follows the investigators as they attempt to uncover the truth behind two murders, but end up discovering a much bigger crime: an industry destroying people’s lives with no accountability.
Although the story told on CSI is fictional, the parallels to real life are stark. In Colorado, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and several other states, the method of gas drilling called hydraulic fracturing has wreaked havoc on people’s lives. Across the country hydraulic fracturing has been linked to many cases of water so polluted with gas that you can actually light it on fire.
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