“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”.
Paul Krugman: Eating the Irish
What we need now is another Jonathan Swift.
Most people know Swift as the author of “Gulliver’s Travels.” But recent events have me thinking of his 1729 essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which he observed the dire poverty of the Irish, and offered a solution: sell the children as food. “I grant this food will be somewhat dear,” he admitted, but this would make it “very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.”
O.K., these days it’s not the landlords, it’s the bankers – and they’re just impoverishing the populace, not eating it. But only a satirist – and one with a very savage pen – could do justice to what’s happening to Ireland now.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: The GOP: Gobbling Up Our Blessings
Thanksgiving may be a time to give thanks for our blessings, but in Washington, the resurgent Republican conservatives want needy Americans to have fewer of them. The new Republicans have the same old leaders – and their passion hasn’t changed. It isn’t about offering a hand up to the afflicted – it’s about handouts to the connected.
In the lame-duck session now convened until the end of the year, Republicans have continued their strategy of obstruction – opposing the New START treaty, opposing repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” opposing consideration of immigration reform, opposing even passage of appropriations for the current year. Their passion is focused on getting one thing done. They will run through the wall to extend the extra tax cuts enjoyed by those, largely millionaires, earning more than $250,000 a year.
Forget about deficit reduction. According to Republicans, these tax cuts – costing an estimated $700 billion over the next decade – need not be balanced by spending cuts, or “paid for” in the Washington parlance.
Robert Reich: Sarah Palin’s Presidential Strategy and the Economy She Depends On
Monday night, Sarah Palin watched from the audience as daughter Bristol danced on ABC. Twenty-three million other Americans joined her from their homes. Tuesday, the former vice-presidential candidate started a 13-state book tour for her new book, “America By Heart,” which has a first printing of 1 million. Her reality show on TLC, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” is in its third week. Last Sunday she was the cover story in the New York Times magazine.
It’s all part of The Palin Strategy for becoming president in 2012 – or 2016 or 2020.
Nicholas D. Kristof: Bless the Orange Sweet Potato
As we all prepare to gain a few pounds over Thanksgiving, I promise not to be a buzz kill wagging my finger about starva … well, never mind. You see, this is that rarest of birds: a happy column about hunger.
And our hero, appropriate for this season, is a high-tech and heroic version of the vitamin-packed, orange-fleshed sweet potato. Along with a few other newly designed foods, it may help save hundreds of thousands of children’s lives each year.
If there’s any justice in the world, statues may eventually be erected of this noble root, the Mother Teresa of the dinner plate. But, first, the back story. We think of starvation as a shortage of calories, but researchers are finding that the biggest reason people die of malnutrition is simply lack of micronutrients.
Paul Krugman: Economics: Not Nice, Not Fair, Not Pretty
Whenever I mention that World War II ended the Great Depression, I get a lot of mail accusing me of being a warmonger.
Allow me to make a point: Economics is not a morality play. It’s not a happy story in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished.
The market economy is a system for organizing activity – a pretty good system most of the time, though not always – but not according to any moral significance.
The rich don’t necessarily deserve their wealth, and the poor certainly don’t deserve their poverty.
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: The Thanksgiving Wars? No Thanks
Happy Thanksgiving. That is not a political sentiment. Yet this year, everything seems partisan and even this most unifying of national holidays has become an occasion for ideological warfare.
The idea now popular in conservative circles is that all past interpretations of Thanksgiving are tainted either by malign forms of multiculturalism-did those white colonists really need help from the Indians to get their act together?-or by dangerous inclinations to socialism
David Coleman: Pat-Downs Hit Middle America Where It Counts
The recent outrage expressed by white males and females over intrusive airport pat-downs may have an upside. At least at the nation’s airports, non-minority airline passengers who seek to board an airplane are being sensitized to the indignities that are a routine part of the lives of some men of color who merely walk or drive down a street.
Robert Scheer: Fail and Grow Rich on Wall Street
Welcome to the brave new world of post-bailout capitalism. The Commerce Department announced Tuesday that corporate profits are at their highest level in U.S. history, and the Fed released minutes of an early November meeting in which officials predicted a stagnant economy and continued high unemployment.
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