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”.

Dean Baker: The Tax Deal and the Apocalypse

The proponents of the tax deal that President Obama and the Republicans negotiated last week have gotten out their TARP and Iraq War hysterics. All the important people are now telling us that if Congress doesn’t approve the package, it will be the end of the world!

To be an important person in Washington these days requires a solid record of failure. That is why we have 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or out of the labor force altogether. And those who got us into this disaster are still overwhelmingly the ones calling the shots. So, people who want a realistic assessment of what the defeat of this tax package means for the economy may not want to rely on the usual suspects.

As I have noted before, the major risk of this deal is that it would undermine Social Security. The deal temporarily lowers the Social Security tax by 2 percentage points. In principle, the tax rate will go back to its current rate after the end of next year.

However, several prominent Republicans have already made it clear that they will call the expiration of this tax cut a tax increase. And they will point out that it is an extremely regressive tax increase that disproportionately hits low- and moderate-income workers.

Naomi Wolf: J’Accuse: Sweden, Britain, and Interpol Insult Rape Victims Worldwide

How do I know that Interpol, Britain and Sweden’s treatment of Julian Assange is a form of theater? Because I know what happens in rape accusations against men that don’t involve the embarrassing of powerful governments. . . .

(But) for all the tens of thousands of women who have been kidnapped and raped, raped at gunpoint, gang-raped, raped with sharp objects, beaten and raped, raped as children, raped by acquaintances — who are still awaiting the least whisper of justice — the highly unusual reaction of Sweden and Britain to this situation is a slap in the face. It seems to send the message to women in the UK and Sweden that if you ever want anyone to take sex crime against you seriously, you had better be sure the man you accuse of wrongdoing has also happened to embarrass the most powerful government on earth.

Keep Assange in prison without bail until he is questioned, by all means, if we are suddenly in a real feminist worldwide epiphany about the seriousness of the issue of sex crime: but Interpol, Britain and Sweden must, if they are not to be guilty of hateful manipulation of a serious women’s issue for cynical political purposes, imprison as well — at once — the hundreds of thousands of men in Britain, Sweden and around the world world who are accused in far less ambiguous terms of far graver forms of assault.

Anyone who works in supporting women who have been raped knows from this grossly disproportionate response that Britain and Sweden, surely under pressure from the US, are cynically using the serious issue of rape as a fig leaf to cover the shameful issue of mafioso-like global collusion in silencing dissent. That is not the State embracing feminism. That is the State pimping feminism.

Rep. Rush Holt: Social Security Is Not a Bargaining Chip

Much has been discussed about the effect that the proposed tax-cut compromise between President Obama and Congressional Republicans would have on long-term debt and much has been discussed about how many jobs the proposed agreement would generate and when. Overall, although it would reduce the money withheld from an average American’s paycheck in 2011, it ultimately would increase the burden shifted onto that average American’s back for funding our government. Probably the greatest damaging effect, though, would result from the 2 percent reduction in payroll tax, an ingredient injected late in the negotiations last week.

The provision puts in jeopardy the long-term survival of Social Security – a centerpiece program that has been popular, efficient, and effective for 75 years. Sixty-four percent of seniors – nearly 22 million Americans – depend on Social Security for most of their livelihood. In 1935 most seniors lived below the poverty line, a fact hard to believe since Social Security has changed that. Also 16 million others – not in their retirement years – surviving spouses and children and people with disabilities depend on Social Security.

David Sirota: Is Virginia Court’s Health Ruling an Inadvertent Progressive Victory?

Over the past few hours, the mediasphere has been ablaze with talk that Republicans and their insurance industry backers supposedly won a huge victory with a Virginia court’s ruling that the mandate to buy private insurance is unconstitutional. On the policy merits, this seems to make no sense. At all. In fact, the Republicans pushing this court case may have inadvertently helped America take a progressive step on health care, if progressives can actually take advantage of the situation. Hear me out.

The mandate to buy insurance was always a huge giveaway to the private insurers. It guarantees them a pool of customers that will pad their profits for eternity, thus solidifying private insurance as the profit-taking middleman in the American health care system. The Virginia court, however, struck down the mandate but did not strike down the other mandates forcing the insurers to sell you insurance. For instance, the court ruling did not eliminate the mandate for insurers to sell you insurance despite your preexisting condition; did not eliminate the mandate for insurers to use a certain percentage of their revenues to provide health care services (rather than padding profits); and did not eliminate the mandate that ends lifetime caps on health care benefits.

D.D. Buttenplan: What Would I.F. Stone Think of WikiLeaks?

Although a radical pariah for most of his career, towards the end of his life America’s greatest investigative journalist, I.F. Stone, had become a kind of liberal talisman-a cuddly curmudgeon whose coke bottle glasses and wrinkly venerability made him safe for mainstream admiration. Because I.F. Stone’s Weekly-the one-man, four-page newsletter he published himself, exposing White House lies and Pentagon prevarications-was run out of his Washington basement, nowadays Stone is often called “the first blogger.” As his biographer, it’s a label I’ve always resisted, pointing out that Stone made a good living from his work, supporting a wife and three children thanks to thousands of subscribers who paid to read what he had to say. And though I’m often asked “What would Izzy have thought?” about various contemporary political phenomena, from the Tea Party to the rise of Hugo Chávez, in most cases the only honest answer is “Why don’t you break out the Ouija board and ask him yourself?”

But I.F. Stone would have loved WikiLeaks. This is, after all, the man who wrote: “Nothing makes life more interesting than outwitting censorship.” Julian Assange was still a teenage hacker when Stone died in June 1989, and the WikiLeaks founder’s motives and early influences are as much of a mystery as his personal life. But what WikiLeaks has achieved, in a remarkably short space of time, is nothing less than the Holy Grail of muckrakers from Ida Tarbell to I.F. Stone. Perhaps Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Brass Check was a pioneering exposé of media self-censorship, put it best: if a journalist could only “succeed in his efforts to make the people believe what ‘everybody knows’ then he will be recognized in future as a benefactor of his race.”

John Nichols: Sanders Filibuster Halted By Senate; Tax Deal Fight Now Focuses on House Challenge to Estate-Tax Exemption

n a display of how Washington insiders practice bipartisanship, most Senate Democrats voted with most Senate Republicans to deliver for the wealthiest Americans.

Senators from both parties, self-identified liberals and conservatives, united to end a filibuster by Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders, who has led the fight to block an Obama administration deal with congressional Republicans that extends tax breaks for billionaires and establishes estate-tax exemptions for millionaires.

Sanders conducted an 8.5 hour filibuster Friday, in which he outlined arguments against the agreement to trade a two-year extension of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, along with sweeping estate-tax exemptions, for a one year extension of benefits for unemployed workers.

On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, serving as floor manager for the deal cobbled together by the Obama administration and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, sought a cloture vote to end the filibuster and open debate on the plan.

Sixty votes were needed to end the filibuster. Reid secured an overwhelming 83.

Thom Hartman Medicare “Part E”- for Everybody

“The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”

– Lyndon Baines Johnson

There are two important reasons for having a strong social safety net, one based in sound economic policy and the other in our common humanity. So it’s no surprise that the countries that have strong social safety nets tend to have resilient economies and a higher quality of life.

Ultimately, social safety nets are about managing risk and unforeseen contingencies. On the one hand, there are the risks that we want people to take, such as starting a new business. On the other hand, there are unforeseen events that are so severe – like becoming paralyzed in an accident – that no one person (unless incredibly wealthy) could handle the expenses associated with them. In both cases, by setting up a social safety net that distributes the costs of responding to them across the wide spectrum of society, we minimize both the societal cost and the individual suffering.

David Weigel: Bipartisanship Now

Senators hold their noses and support the tax-cut deal.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., was angry, with an emphasis on “was.” Last week she told the Huffington Post that a tax-rate deal that benefited the wealthiest among us represented “moral corruptness.” On Friday, she joined Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for a lengthy filibuster-of-sorts, using some debate time to pound the podium once again about moral corruption.

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Yet on Monday, in a conversation with reporters before the vote on whether to let the tax deal proceed, Landrieu appeared calm. “I wasn’t outraged about the bill,” Landrieu said. “What was I outraged about?” “You were describing the deal that had been struck,” said Huffington Post’s Arthur Delaney. “Not the whole deal,” said Landrieu. “I was outraged about one portion of the deal. And I’m still outraged about it.” Landrieu counted off the tax-rate cuts that would benefit “the families of millionaires” and said the negotiators never should have included them. “That is what I object to. I did not say I was against the whole package.”

Dahlia Lithwick: Dream a Little Dream

Why the Cuccinelli health care win in Virginia matters more than you think.

There were no surprises today when federal district judge Henry Hudson issued his 42-page ruling in Virginia’s challenge to President Obama’s major health reform initiative. Last August, Hudson denied an early effort to have the lawsuit dismissed. Then in October, he thumped Department of Justice lawyers arguing before him. In his decision today, striking down the health law’s individual mandate-the provision requiring that by 2014 Americans must either purchase health insurance or face fines-Judge Hudson ruled exactly as he had telegraphed earlier. “No specifically constitutional authority exists to mandate the purchase of health insurance,” he wrote. The Obama administration claimed that its power lay in the commerce clause, which allows the federal government to regulate activities that affect interstate commerce, as well as several other constitutional provisions. But Hudson reviewed the case law and deemed otherwise: “An individual’s personal decision to purchase-or decline purchase-(of) health insurance from a private provider is beyond the historical reach” of the U.S. Constitution.

Hudson’s ruling does not come in a vacuum, although in many quarters it will be received as if it had. Depending on whether you refer to health reform as “Obamacare” or the “Affordable Care Act,” today’s decision was either the first well-deserved “pockmark” on the legislation or a wing-nut outlier, penned by a reliably conservative George W. Bush appointee.

To put today’s ruling in perspective, there are almost two dozen health care challenges still pending. Supporters of health care reform point out that two other federal courts have ruled that the legislation is perfectly constitutional. (A federal judge in Virginia recently upheld the law, as did a federal judge in Michigan last October.) It hardly warrants repeating that both were Clinton appointees. Given the partisan judicial split that Hudson’s ruling now produces, the most relevant observation about the constitutionality of health care reform today is that each side can continue to dismiss its opponents as having scored empty symbolic victories.