“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”.
Verlyn Klinkenborg: John Lennon
I don’t remember how I heard that John Lennon had been shot. Thirty years ago, on a warm December night in Manhattan, it was suddenly, in the air, on the street – with only a brief, grim gap between news of the shooting at the Dakota, on 72nd Street and news of his death at Roosevelt Hospital. I called my brother in California and then sat in the stairwell of a building at 27th and Third, numb and grieving, like everyone else.
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We remember what we remember of Lennon, and of that night. When I was young, he was the only adult that mattered outside my family – the Beatle of Beatles. I loved his wit; his irony; his “Help!”; his urgent, reedy voice; his unceasing transformations. Like everyone else who loved him, I can’t help grieving, even now, for all the transformations we lost 30 years ago when John Lennon was only 40.
John Nichols: Organizing for America Sacrifices Credibility, Harms Obama, By Talking Up Misguided Assault on Public Employees
Organizing for America, the online community of campaigners for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run that evolved into a Democratic National Committee-aligned “activist” network is undermining its own credibility — and, ultimately, harming the president– by attempting to gin up support for Obama administration initiatives that Obama backers did not support in 2008 and do not support now.
While OFA, the succesor organization to the “Obama for America” campaign organization, was a disappointing player during the health care and banking reform debates, it has now begun to inflict actual harm – not just to progressive ideals but to the long-term prospects of maintaining what remains of Obama’s political base.
OFA, so silent on the compromise the Obama administration is trying to gin up to extend tax breaks for the rich, has found something it is for: cutting the pay of federal workers.
Julian Assange: The truth will always win
In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”
His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.
Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.
I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.
These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.
ulian Assange turned himself in Tuesday — he’s been arrested and is being held without bail in London ahead of a hearing on extradition to Sweden. The head of the “stateless” news-leak organization WikiLeaks is accused of sexual assault –and let’s be clear, he should face the charges. But since when is Interpol [the investigative arm of the International Criminal Court at The Hague] so vigilant about violence against women? If women’s security is suddenly Interpol’s priority — that’s big news!
Tell it to hundreds of women in US jails and immigration detention centers — who charge that they can’t get justice against accused rapists — or women in the US military (two of out three of whom allege they’ve experienced assault.) In Haiti hundreds of unprosecuted cases of rape in refugee camps could use some of Interpol’s attention.
Howard Fineman: Obama Channels Reagan, and Risks Becoming Carter
WASHINGTON — As President Obama channels Ronald Reagan he risks turning himself into Jimmy Carter.
By staking his next two years on hundreds of billions of dollars of new or renewed tax cuts — none of them tied directly to compensating cuts in government spending — Obama is alienating his own Democratic base in a way that could make him what Carter was: a one-term, ineffective “outsider” president.
Back in 2007 and 2008, when he was a presidential candidate, Obama expressed surprising admiration for Reagan’s game-changing, tax-cutting presidency.
Johann Hari Julian Assange Has Made Us All Safer — and Been a Great Gift to US National Security
Every one of us owes a debt to Julian Assange. Thanks to him, we now know that our governments are pursuing policies that place you and your family in considerably greater danger. It’s only because of his leaks that we know the US government has secretly launched war on yet another Muslim country, sanctioned torture, kidnapped innocent people from the streets of free countries and intimidated the police into hushing it up, and covered up the killing of 15,000 civilians — five times the number killed on 9/11. Each one of these acts has increased the number of jihadis. We can only change these policies if we know about them — and Assange has given us the black-and-white proof.
Each of the WikiLeaks revelations has been carefully weighed to ensure there is a public interest in disclosing it. Of the more than 250,000 documents they hold, they have released fewer than 1000 – and each of those has had the names of informants, or any information that could place anyone at risk, removed. The information they have released covers areas where our governments are defying the will of their own citizens, and hiding the proof from them.
Paul Rieckhoff: A Military Pay Freeze? Our Troops Shouldn’t Pay the Price for the Recession
After 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, our troops are coming home from war to a difficult economy, staggering foreclosure rates and high unemployment. Now, if Washington gets its way, they’ll also face their lowest pay raise in decades. Nice. So as investment bankers get hefty bonuses on Wall Street, a Marine Corps Sergeant in Fallujah would get a minimal pay increase, or in the worst circumstances, a pay freeze.
According to new reports, the President is expected to propose a 1.4% raise for the military in 2011 – the lowest pay raise for service members since 1962, when no raise was given. His proposal comes as the White House is seeking ways to reduce the growing U.S. deficit and pull the economy out of the worst recession we’ve seen in decades.
In the last three years, active duty pay has increased between 3.4 percent and 3.9 percent. As the largest new veterans organization and as a member of The Military Coalition (TMC), we at IAVA know that in the midst of two wars, military pay is not a place to start freezing or cutting to pull us out of the recession.
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