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”.

Robert Reich The Shameful Attack on Public Employees

In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they’ve earned.

But now the right is going after public employees.

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work — sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees — to call them “faceless bureaucrats” and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican’s Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that’s too big.

Glenn Greenwald: Why Government Censorship of US Media is Unnecessary

In this week’s New Yorker, Peter Maass — who was in Iraq covering the war at the time — examines the iconic, manufactured toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, an event the American media relentlessly exploited in April, 2003, to propagandize citizens into believing that Iraqis were gleeful over the U.S. invasion and that the war was a smashing success.  Acknowledging that the episode demonstrated that American troops had taken over the center of Baghdad, Maas nonetheless explains that “everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television — victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq — was a disservice to the truth.”

Working jointly with ProPublica on this investigation, Maass describes the hidden, indispensable role the U.S. military played in that event — which has long been known — though he convincingly argues that the primary culprit in this propaganda effort was the Americans media.  That is who did more than anyone to wildly distort this event.  As usual, the Watchdog Press not only happily ingests and trumpets pro-government propaganda, but does so even more enthusiastically and uncritically than government spokespeople themselves.

The reason there’s so little government censorship of the press in America is because it’s totally unnecessary; why would the government even want to censor a media this compliant and subservient?  Recall the derision heaped upon the media even by Bush’s own former Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, for being “too deferential” to administration propaganda.  As soon as an entity emerges that provides genuinely adversarial coverage of the U.S. Government — such as WikiLeaks, whistleblowers, or isolated articles exposing its malfeasance — the repressive measures come fast and furious.  But in general, it’s no more necessary for the U.S. Government to censor the American media than it would be for Barack Obama to try to silence Robert Gibbs.

Laura Flanders: Constitutional Lessons For the New Congress

Republican lawmakers who read the Constitution out loud as their very first act in the new Congress better bask in their Tea Party glow because they’re certainly not going to be feeling the love from Constitutional scholars.

It’s true, this nation’s founders were like most of those Congresspeople — mostly propertied, white and male; but their vision of government couldn’t be more different.

As scholar Lew Daly points out in Dissent, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams weren’t Hooverites. To the contrary, they pushed the idea that property and power should be widely distributed — even redistributed. In their day, “starve the beast” meant starve the elites, those monarchs and mega money men who’d concentrate power and undermine democracy.

Richard (RJ) Eskow the Inquisitor Goes to Hollywood

What’s the worst thing about Darrell Issa’s debut as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee? It could be his relentless, Gloria Swansonish, “I’m ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille” self promotion. It might be his manic insistence that he’ll conduct “hundreds” of investigations, or his letters to lobbyists offering to put his new powers at their disposal. Or maybe it’s his “hang ’em first and try ’em later” attitude toward the administration. It’s certainly ironic that his first act as head of the committee that investigates misuse of government funds seems to have been… to misuse government funds.

Sure, they’re all bad. But the worst of all may be this: Issa’s making it clear that he’ll use his position to cover up Wall Street’s role in destroying the economy, and that he’ll resist any attempts to rein in the corporate misbehavior that puts us all at risk. That’s a shame: Issa once seemed like a fair-minded, independent voice, and he could have made an important contribution in his new position. Instead he’s becoming a tinpot Torquemada bent on harassing and punishing anyone who tries to thwart corporate America’s will.

John Nichols: Robert Gibbs Is Out! Maybe Now This White House Will Learn to Communicate

Against competition from the likes of Ari Fleischer and Mike McCurry, it is tough to suggest that Robert Gibbs was the worst White House press secretary in modern times. Then again, the spokesman for an administration that admits it cannot seem to get its message across on even the most basic levels, would have to be in contention for the title.

Certainly, few press secretaries have ever done more harm to a president they could so easily have helped.

Gibbs, who announced today that he will exit his position in early February, following in the footsteps of much of the rest of the team that came to the White House from the 2008 campaign, was never a particularly good communicator. A bland and forgettable player during a long presidential run when the focus was almost exclusively on the candidate, Gibbs emerged shortly after the election as the face of the new administration. That proved to be politically disastrous for the president. Thin-skinned and prone to attacking friendly critics, he did more than anyone except former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to create and expand the progressive “enthusiasm gap” that so harmed Democrats in the 2010 election cycle.

Ari Berman: Rahm Redux: Top Banker for Obama Chief of Staff?

Rahm Emanuel is off running for mayor of Chicago, but his ghost may soon be making a return to the White House in the form of fellow Chicagoan Bill Daley, who President Obama is considering naming as Rahm’s replacement. The post is currently filled by low-key Obama aide Pete Rouse.  

Daley, brother of outgoing Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, was Commerce Secretary under Bill Clinton, the chief architect of NAFTA, chairman of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, a top adviser/fundraiser for the Obama campaign and, most recently, Midwest chairman of JP Morgan Chase. He shares the corporate centrism of Emanuel and, when it comes to economic issues, may be worse. AFL-CIO head John Sweeney once said that Daley stood “squarely on the opposite side of working families.”

Peter Rothberg: Stand Up to Boehner

In remarks to the National Right to Life Committee Annual Convention in Pittsburgh, PA last June, Rep. John Boehner argued that “when “life takes a backseat to other priorities – personal comfort, economics – freedom is diminished.”

Beyond this politicking, Boehner’s anti-choice record is long. He has cast 142 votes on abortion and other reproductive-rights issues. All 142 were anti-choice, including:

   Voting twice against the Family and Medical Leave Act.

   Voting eight times against clinic protection for women and doctors.

   Voting for the dangerous Stupak abortion-coverage ban in health reform.

   Voting twice to deny federal funding of abortion care to survivors of rape and incest.

Now, after taking his oath of office as the new Speaker of the House this morning, Boehner is the most powerful anti-choice politician in America, and is leading the effort to repeal the new health-care law and, eventually, eliminate abortion coverage for women.

Jim Hightower: Playing With Economic Dynamite

By gollies, America is still an exporting powerhouse. In fact, the good ol’ U.S.A. is No. 1 in the world in exports! Our corporate leaders, backed by Republicans and Democrats alike in Washington, are now routinely exporting America’s most precious goods — our jobs, factories, technologies and middle-class opportunities.

With unemployment and underemployment devastating millions of families in our country, perhaps you’ve assumed that U.S. corporations simply aren’t hiring these days. Nonsense. They added 1.4 million jobs last year alone — overseas.

For example, more than half of Caterpillar’s new hires in 2010 were in foreign countries. Many more of this giant’s jobs are headed offshore in the near future, for Caterpillar, which was once an iconic American brand, has recently invested in three new plants in China. It’ll not only manufacture tractors and bulldozers there, but it’ll also begin to ship its design work and technology development jobs to China.

Bradley Day: The climate movement is in desperate need of renewal

If a jury that received extensive education on climate change could not vindicate the Ratcliffe activists, then who will?

In the final weeks of 2010, 20 individuals – including myself – went on trial after being accused of conspiring to shut down the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power station. Today we received our sentences. The jury were presented with a wealth of evidence, not seeking to disprove the charge, but to justify it.

Despite hearing terrifying evidence from some of world’s leading climate change experts; learning of the millions of pounds spent in their local area as a result of extreme weather conditions; listening to gut-wrenching testimonies from flood victims across the globe; and observing senior politicians explain our crippling democratic deficit, the jury went on to deliver a unanimous guilty verdict.

Since the verdict, many messages of support have appeared on the trial’s campaign Facebook page. While these were uplifting, I felt a little unease at comments proclaiming the jury as “appalling”, “shameful”, “shortsighted”.