“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”.
Robert Kuttner: What Now for the Democrats?
Let’s imagine the political possibilities of the next two years and beyond. So far, President Obama’s response to the drubbing of the mid-term has confirmed the progressive community’s worst fears. Astonishingly, he still seems to believe the following:
The American people care more about bipartisan compromise and budget cuts than about ending the economic crisis.
If he just compromises a little more, the Republicans might still meet him halfway.
The recipe for economic recovery has something to do with reducing the short term federal deficit.All three of these premises are disastrously wrong — as politics and as economics.
Dan Froomkin: On Jobs, Robert Rubin Points In The Wrong Direction Again
WASHINGTON — On a morning when dire unemployment numbers underscored the desperate and urgent need to jump-start the job market, shameless financial arsonist Robert Rubin was hosting a massive exercise in distraction.
The job market is suffering from a terrible cyclical shortfall in aggregate demand brought upon by the financial crisis and the Great Recession, but Rubin wanted to talk about long-term structural issues affecting employment — like the need to reduce the budget deficit, or change corporate tax rates. His is a Wall Street agenda, not a Main Street agenda.
The setting was a policy conference hosted by Rubin’s pet think tank, the Hamilton Project, and its strange bedfellow, the liberal Center for American Progress.
As Clinton administration Treasury Secretary, Rubin presided over the nearly-fatal deregulation of the financial industry, then went on to make $126 million nearly driving Citigroup into bankruptcy, making him arguably one of the men most responsible for causing the financial crisis. But it was so lucrative for him that he can underwrite events like this one.
Thom Hartmann: Tax Cut Lies: The Day The News Died
The New York Times today jumped on board with a classic Frank Luntz “Big Lie.”
Democrats in the House and Senate put forth a bill that would reduce taxes on the first quarter-million, and then, when that failed, the first million dollars of income for every single American. . . .
WASHINGTON – The Senate on Saturday rejected President Obama’s proposal to end the Bush-era tax breaks on income above $250,000 for couples and $200,000 for individuals, a triumph for Republicans who have long called for continuing the income tax cuts for everyone.
What? “Republicans who have long called for continuing the income tax cuts for everyone”??
EVERYONE would have gotten a tax cut under the Democrats’ proposal. Every single taxpayer in America, from the street-sweeper to Bill Gates. Everyone!
Jane Hamsher: UAW Gets 800 Jobs for Endorsing Obama’s NAFTA-Style Korea Trade Deal, Which Will Cost 159,000 US Jobs
Last night the United Auto Worker’s Union, which was bailed out by American taxpayers two short years ago, announced they were endorsing the Obama administration’s NAFTA-style free trade agreement with South Korea and would act as liberal “postage stamp” for the deal.
UAW President Bob King decided to endorse trade pact despite strong opposition from his staff.
The UAW then joined with Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Tom Donahue of the US Chamber of Commerce and John Engler of the National Association of Manufacturer in congratulating Obama on reaching the deal with South Korea.
Earlier in the day, the White House invited interested parties to a briefing where they announced the NAFTA-style trade pact. They embargoed the story until 7pm, however, so that it could be released in the dark of night.
David Samuels: The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange
Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks — and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.
Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies — but probably not for long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan – “a vicious antiwar type,” an enraged Nixon called him on the Watergate tapes — has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration.
Alice Cherbonnier: Why We Can’t Trust the WSJ’s “Opinion” Section
The Wall Street Journal’s failure to edit Karl Rove’s misleading column on taxes is a case in point.
Where can the public turn today for accurate reporting? It used to be said that the Wall Street Journal’s news reporting was impeccable because the power elite who read it would never forgive it for providing false information. Even those not among that exalted universe also once counted on the WSJ, especially during the pre-Murdoch era. This is not to say that the WSJ’s editorial and opinion pages were similarly stellar back then, but since it was understood the paper had a certain viewpoint (pro-business, anti-tax, laissez-faire), one expected the articles on those pages to contain cherry-picked facts; after all, that’s what such sections are for. At the least, though, one could believe the facts themselves-however they may have been twisted or misinterpreted to make a point-were solid, not squishy.
The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists lays out a journalist’s responsibilities. Among them: ” Deliberate distortion is never permissible.” Admittedly this Code of Ethics is voluntary, as there is no licensing or policing of journalists or columnists, nor is there any requirement for a particular sort of education or experience. Journalists must police themselves, and the public’s job is to slam them when they don’t.
Robert Greenwald and Derrick Crowe: Blowing Billions on War While American Workers Go Under
When asked by USA Today’s pollsters last week, sixty-eight percent of Americans said we worry that the cost of the Afghanistan War hurts our ability to fix problems here in the U.S. This week, we learned just how right we were about that. Friday’s terrible jobs report shows that a crushing 9.8 percent of us are unemployed. And, millions of us are about to lose our lifeline because Congress refuses to extend unemployment insurance benefits. We’re spending $2 billion per week — per week! — in Afghanistan while millions of people face going hungry during the holidays.
Do our elected officials not get it? We’re drowning out here, and the administration is throwing money that could put Americans back to work at a failed war on the other side of the planet. In fact, that’s where the president was when the jobs report came out this morning — in Afghanistan, talking about “progress” again.
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