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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Lawrence Lewis (Turkana): The war in Afghanistan enters Joseph Heller territory

Earlier this month, it was reported that one of the largest U.S. government contractors in Afghanistan was being fined nearly $70 million for having “knowingly and systematically overcharged the U.S. government.” But just two months after a whistleblower revealed the Louis Berger Group’s deliberate and systematic overcharging, the U.S. Agency for International Development awarded the company a new joint contract worth $1.4 billion. That seemingly large fine turned out to be but a minor business expense.

The one part of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan that is going very well is the contracting. Not the results of the contracting, the money being made off it. Less than two weeks ago came this news:

U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of international forces in Afghanistan, has ordered a dramatic expansion in contracting. Other than asking a brigadier general to investigate problems with military contracts, so far he’s failed to address their flaws.

   A McClatchy investigation has found that since January 2008, nearly $200 million in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers construction projects in Afghanistan have failed, face serious delays or resulted in subpar work. Poor recordkeeping made it impossible for McClatchy to determine the value of faulty projects before then. The military tries to recover part of a project’s cost, but in many cases, the funds were already spent.

McClatchy’s investigation also found that the Corps accepts bids that don’t cover such obvious costs as security or the contractor’s profit margin. One might think security costs in Afghanistan would be significant. One might think a contractor’s profit margin should be a factor when considering whether to send said contractor piles of taxpayers’ cash. Remember that whole deficit thing? Apparently, the Corps doesn’t. And, of course, it gets even worse. . . .

It’s hard to verify who is whom. It’s hard to verify where the billions of U.S. tax dollars are going. It’s hard to verify what exactly is supposed to be accomplished by continuing the war. It’s hard to verify the existence of an exit strategy and it’s hard to verify the existence of an exit date.

To be continued.

Joe Conason: Iran’s Best Friends on Capitol Hill

Nuclear weapons treaties are like currency exchange rates-always vitally important to the national interest but often stunningly dull, not to say impenetrable. Yet Washington has suddenly been jolted awake by Republican threats to stall if not kill the Obama administration’s New START treaty.

The irony is that by doing so, they would do little to protect American security while providing moral support to Iran, North Korea and any other rogue regime seeking to arm itself with nukes.

By reducing the bilateral limits on deployed warheads and delivery systems, and by modernizing the verification and monitoring system contained in the original START treaty, the new agreement achieved a breakthrough in arms control and improved U.S. relations with Moscow. The equally important strategic objective, however, was to establish a renewed bilateral commitment to arms control that would strengthen the international effort to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.

Dahlia Lithwick and David Weigel: Life After Russ

Defenders of civil liberties look for a new champion to replace Russ Feingold.

n an upset that seemed impossible in June and inevitable by October, Sen. Russ Feingold lost his bid for re-election. Three weeks later, disappointment lingers for some 1,020,860 Wisconsin voters and at least one ACLU lawyer in Washington. “I’m still in denial,” says Laura Murphy, who first met Feingold in the 1990s and is now on her second tour as director of the ACLU’s Washington office. “I have vivid memories of long conversations with him in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. He was the only person willing to offer amendments or speak out at all against the USA Patriot Act.” . . . .

One of the reasons it’s become more politically palatable to attack the government on civil liberties is that Feingold made it so. We sometimes forget that, as well. Most coverage of Feingold’s defeat has centered on the ironic fact that it happened after his campaign-finance-reform legislation was gutted last winter by the Supreme Court. But Feingold is perhaps most famous for being the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. With his defeat, the civil liberties community now finds itself facing a simple yet daunting task: Find another Russ Feingold.

Robert Kuttner: Backbone, Please

The media are infatuated with the idea that excessive partisanship is symmetrical (‘If only the Republicans and the Democrats would meet each other halfway, the nation’s ills would be solved’). There are two problems with this formulation. Firstly, the Republicans and Democrats aren’t playing the same game. So if the Democrats meet the Republicans half way, the Republicans only demand that they do it again. Secondly, the solution to what ails the economy is somewhere to the left of most Democrats — not midway between, say, President Obama and Mitch McConnell. The economy will be fixed only with more public investment, more progressive taxation, and more regulation.

Joseph A. Palermo: Stupid Politics From a Smart Administration

The Democratic Party lost its spine the moment it decided to cash in on all that corporate political money. If we don’t reverse Citizens United and get the money out of our political system all of the other progressive causes don’t stand a chance. A real breakthrough would be to unite Left and Right, the progressives and the Tea Partiers in a shared effort to get the money out of the politics — we might disagree on almost every other issue, but buying and selling politicians and rigging elections with corporate cash should be an area where there is common ground. And if Obama starts triangulating Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich should run in the primaries. The Democratic Party at that point will have nothing to lose.

Merton and Joan Bernstein: Washington Post Budget Hocus Pocus

Possibly the most amazing aspect of the Commission on Fiscal Responsibity’s drive to reduce the federal “deficit” are proposals by its chairs and others to cut benefits payable by Social Security, although the program pays its own way and has generated robust annual surpluses, now totaling $2.4 trillion and projected to reach $4.2 trillion. Those assets will enable Social Security to pay its promised benefits in full until 2037 and about 75% thereafter. Two measures that draw strong support in polls — extending the payroll tax to higher pay and slowly increasing the payroll tax rate (1/20th of 1 percent per year for 20 years is one version) — would fully fund the program for 75 years. The program’s own modest shortfall — about 27 years away — is easily fixed with these proposals that the public supports.

Moreover, Social Security does not and, indeed, cannot add to the federal deficit: It is permitted to pay benefits only to the extent it has funds on hand and is prohibited from borrowing. Nonetheless, the November 24 Washington Post presented summaries of three “bi-partisan plans to reduce the deficit” which propose multiple Social Security benefit reductions. The commission co-chairs propose to cut benefits for the top 50% of earners (which hits many with quite modest incomes) and to raise retirement age (another benefit cut); both benefit cuts and raising retirement age poll badly. And, despite assurances by reduction advocates that those already retired and nearing retirement would be spared, all three plans would soon trim the annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) formula. Advocates claim that a new “chained” COLA would more accurately reflect price increases by taking account of consumer substitution of less costly items in the “basket” used to measure price changes; a favorite illustration is switching from meat to chicken.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Can Obama fight the GOP’s blame game?

Can we govern ourselves in the next two years? Do Republicans have any interest in accomplishments that might even indirectly benefit President Obama?

These questions hang over Tuesday’s meeting between the president and congressional leaders, an encounter that could set the tone for the next two years.

Grounds for optimism are thin. The most striking aspect of Republican behavior since their party’s electoral triumph is a haughty assumption that the voters rejected everything Obama represents and that he ought to capitulate on all fronts right now. Anyone who fails to see things this way just doesn’t “get” it.

So certain are the president’s opponents that they and only they represent the will of the nation that they feel empowered to undercut Obama even on issues related to our nation’s security.