“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”.
Glenn Greenwald: What WikiLeaks revealed to the world in 2010
Throughout this year I’ve devoted substantial attention to WikiLeaks, particularly in the last four weeks as calls for its destruction intensified. To understand why I’ve done so, and to see what motivates the increasing devotion of the U.S. Government and those influened by it to destroying that organization, it’s well worth reviewing exactly what WikiLeaks exposed to the world just in the last year: the breadth of the corruption, deceit, brutality and criminality on the part of the world’s most powerful factions.
As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing. The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them: WikiLeaks and (allegedly) Bradley Manning. A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon’s own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence — zero — that any of WikiLeaks’ actions has caused even a single death. Meanwhile, the American establishment media — even in the face of all these revelations — continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing NewTM in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National SecurityTM through its disclosures.
Gail Collins: The Tannenbaum Chronicles
This year, my favorite Christmas story involves Rachel Maddow’s mother. “A friend gave her a remote control for the Christmas tree,” said Maddow. It was the best present ever, liberation from a lifetime of crawling under the tree every morning and night to put in or pull out the plug.
And it turned Maddow’s mom into a combination Magi and missionary. She bought a slew of remotes and distributed them throughout the neighborhood like special-recipe cookies, along with instructions on exactly how to make them work.
The friend came to New York for the holidays with the Maddow family. For presents, she is giving everybody a Christmas tree in a box.
Another step forward for Christmas tree culture.
Charles M. Blow: Suffer the Little Children
As we celebrate this Christmas with the sound of tiny feet rushing toward a tree to rip open presents, let’s take a moment to consider the children less fortunate – the growing number who live in poverty in this country.
According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 42 percent of American children live in low-income homes and about a fifth live in poverty. It gets worse. The number of children living in poverty has risen 33 percent since 2000. For perspective, the child population of the country over all increased by only about 3 percent over that time. And, according to a 2007 Unicef report on child poverty, the U.S. ranked last among 24 wealthy countries.
This is a national disgrace.
Yet the reaction to this issue in some quarters is still tangled in class and race: no more welfare to black and brown people who’ve made poor choices and haven’t got the gumption to work their way out of them. The truth is, neither the problem nor the solutions are that simple.
Yes, the percentage of blacks, Hispanics and American Indians living in low-income homes is about twice that of whites and Asians. This raises unpleasant cultural questions that must be addressed. But that’s not the whole story. Despite the imbalance, white children are still the largest group of low-income children.
Johann Hari: The under-appreciated heroes of 2010
Who did we under-appreciate in 2010? In the endless whirr of 24/7 corporate news, the people who actually make a difference are often trampled in the stampede to the next forgettable news-nugget like Lady Gaga’s meat-dress. So in the final moments of this year, let’s look at a few people who deserved more of our attention.
Bob Herbert: Thinking of Aretha
Nineteen sixty-seven was a tough year in many respects – riots, protests, an unwinnable war – but I can’t think of it without thinking of the glory of Aretha Franklin, a woman in her mid-20s, introverted and somewhat shy, who sang soul and rock ‘n’ roll with the power and beauty of a heavenly choir.
Newark and Detroit went up in flames in 1967, and neither city was ever to recover. Muhammad Ali, a perfect physical specimen in his absolute athletic prime, was convicted of dodging the draft and stripped of his world heavyweight championship. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. endured a hurricane of criticism when he came out publicly against the war in Vietnam and called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
If you were lucky, you could close the door on the din, at least for a little while, and reach for the record album with the head and shoulder shot of Aretha positioned at a precarious angle on the cover. The album was called “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” and if you listened closely, if you paid attention, it would just thrill you, take you to a place of exquisite human feeling. A region of laughter and tears. Of love and joyous possibilities.
David Sirota: Faces of Economic Death
If you’ve turned on the tube these last few weeks, you’ve probably been a collateral casualty of the biggest televisual war of attrition in recent memory. No, I’m not talking about the scripted skirmishes between cable channels, nor am I referring to the Battle of Zombie Talking Points that ate most of our brains during the election. I’m talking about the now never-ending throwdown between two of the most in-your-face salespeople our mediascape has ever manufactured: Geico’s unnamed gecko and Progressive Insurance’s chipper saleswoman, Flo.
No doubt, you know them both-the green lizard’s smile and cockney accent feign earnestness while the aproned Flo goes for the same effect through the saccharine enthusiasm of an “Office Space” character. It’s mildly cute, but don’t be fooled: As the best-known avatars of the insurance industry, these two are aggressively competing for our cash through re-education-camp levels of repetition, hoping to harass us into buying their product.
Certainly, there’s nothing new about hard sells from TV charlatans. But these two represent something different, something apocalyptic-and I say that not merely because their maddening ubiquity has driven me to the brink of insanity. I say it because they are peddling the kind of commodity that offers little tangible worth, waging a fight that promises no valuable innovation, and representing a larger insurance and finance sector that’s hollowing out our economy.
John Nichols: Christmas, Congress and the Times That Try Men’s Souls
It would appear that several conservative Republican senators missed the reading from the Book of Matthew that goes: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
After learning that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, would be keeping the chamber in session in the days leading up to Christmas, with an eye toward securing passage of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), these Republican senators did not react by declaring their pride at being able to further the mission of the Prince of Peace by limiting the likelihood of nuclear war.
Instead, they grumbled that any Senate Majority Leader who messed with their Holiday shopping schedules must be a very poor Christian indeed.
Nicholas Jahr: Award Recognizes Uncompromising Change-Makers
As the freshly shellacked president cuts deals with a triumphant Republican Party, the annual Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship was awarded to two uncompromising activists: environmentalist Bill McKibben and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.
Awarded annually for the last decade by the Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation, this is the first time the prize has been given to two recipients.
“The times dictated that we’ve got to fight back,” says Gladys Rosenstein, who runs the Puffin Foundation with her husband Perry. Their choices of who to support this year were dictated by the causes under attack: the fight for women’s rights and against global warming. When it comes to the latter, Gladys notes, “they seem to think it’s a farce.”
Michelle Chen: Global Recession Turns Top-Tier Economies Upside Down
This year, the big list of who’s naughty and nice won’t come from Santa. The International Labour Organization has published its Global Wage Report 2010/11. It’s another reminder that workers should expect no glad tidings in the coming year as the recession continues to snowball around the globe.
It wasn’t all bad news. Wages are generally on an upward trendline. But in its analysis of national wage data sampled from 115 countries and territories, the ILO reports:
growth in average monthly wages slowed from 2.8 per cent in 2007, on the eve of the crisis, to 1.5 per cent in 2008 and 1.6 per cent in 2009. Excluding China from the aggregate, the global average wage growth drops to 0.8 in 2008 and 0.7 in 2009….
In particular… since the mid-1990s the proportion of people on low pay – defined as less than two-thirds of median wage – has increased in more than two-thirds of countries with available data.
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