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”.

Paul Krugman: The Texas Omen

These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.

Wait – Texas? Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that “we have billions in surplus”? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.

And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting – the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending – has been implemented most completely. If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere.

Eugene Robinson: In Dallas, defusing a sociological bomb: Wrongful convictions

Race still matters in America, and justice is not completely blind. Anyone who believes otherwise should examine the case of Cornelius Dupree Jr., who was ruled innocent Tuesday after spending 30 years in prison – almost his entire adult life – for a brutal carjacking and rape that he did not commit.

Dupree is just the latest of 21 inmates from the Dallas area, almost all of them black, who have been exonerated since a 2001 Texas law permitted DNA testing of the evidence against them. At least another 20 convicts from other parts of the state have similarly been cleared of their crimes. Imagine the wrongs that could be righted if every state had a law like the one in Texas – and if every jurisdiction saved years-old evidence the way Dallas does.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Three Little Words: How Bill Daley Can Be Your Next Hero

Here’s a suggestion for Bill Daley, three simple words that could turn everything around for the President and his party: Be Joe Kennedy.

Progressives were appalled when FDR appointed that noted stock market manipulator Joe Kennedy to be the first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Kennedy had a reputation as a ruthless and unscrupulous master of insider trading. He was a master of the reckless and speculative financial instruments of his day, the early 20th Century equivalents of CDOs and mortage-backed securities. But Kennedy took his job seriously, went after the sharks ferociously, and help stabilize the capitalist system so effectively that it remained sound for another seven decades.

William Pfaff: Economic Suicide

Is it a case of murder, or has the Western economy deliberately, if unwittingly, attempted suicide and nearly succeeded?

John Maynard Keynes was not just talking about defunct economists when he wrote that the world is commonly ruled by dead ideas, its leaders the slaves of the past. He said, “Indeed the world is ruled by little else.” If he were alive today, he could name management consultants and business gurus among those responsible for the economic crisis of the present day.

As 2011 begins, people still talk about the crisis of the Western economy as though we have been the victims of a blight from nowhere, like Haitians in a hurricane or blackbirds in Arkansas. No individual is held guilty for anything-certainly none of the leaders of finance or business who insisted that markets know best, or the political leaders who empowered them.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: The House of Professors

Edmund Burke, one of history’s greatest conservatives, warned that abstractions are the enemy of responsible government.

“I never govern myself, no rational man ever did govern himself, by abstractions and universals,” Burke wrote. “A statesman differs from a professor in a university; the latter has only the general view of society; the former, the statesman, has a number of circumstances to combine with those general ideas.”

Alas for all of us and for American conservatism in particular, the new Republican majority that took control of the House on Wednesday is embarked on an experiment in government by abstractions. Many in its ranks pride themselves on being practical business people, but they behave as professors in thrall to a few thrilling ideas.

Their rhetoric is nearly devoid of talk about solving practical problems-how to improve our health care, education and transportation systems, or how to create more middle-class jobs.

Instead, we hear about things we can’t touch or see or feel, and about highly general principles divorced from their impact on everyday life.

John Nichols: ‘Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Whistleblower?’: White House Targets ‘Insider Threats’ Among Federal Workers

The Obama administration is asking federal agencies to monitor employees with an eye toward identifying “insider threats” who might reveal “classified” information that the government is trying to keep from the American people.

The White House Office of Management and Budget this week circulated a memorandum to senior federal officials that urges them to use psychiatrists and sociologists to assess-among other “signals”- the “grumpiness” of federal employees who have access to classified documents. (After years of battering by conservatives who claim that government workers can do nothing right, and with Obama talking up a pay freeze for federal employees, what government worker isn’t grumpy these days?)

The memo is the latest move by the administration-which has been scrambling to prevent more revelations like those exposed by WikiLeaks-to safeguard classified documents and data.

David Sirota: Ted Williams and the Triumph of American Dream Propaganda

Thanks to near-ubiquitous national media coverage, you probably know by now that Ted Williams was a homeless and jobless man who is now being offered fairly major media jobs because he had the random luck of becoming a YouTube sensation. This is certainly a heartwarming story, and we should all be genuinely happy for Williams. It’s a blessing when anyone is lifted out of such destitution.

However, there’s a dark side to all this. No, not about Williams (who himself rightly acknowledges that this is like “hit[ting] a million dollar lottery” and not typical of anything), but about the phenomenon Williams has inadvertently come to represent. . . . . . .

What’s so galling about this particular instance of American Dream triumphalism is the most famous player now involved: The Cleveland Cavaliers. As Cleveland’s ABC affiliate reports, the NBA team owned by Quicken Loans’ CEO has now “offered Williams full-time voiceover work” and “offered to pay a mortgage on a home” for him. The ABC affiliate — like the rest of the media — hasn’t bothered to point out what The Nation magazine’s Dave Zirin has previously noted: namely, that Quicken Loans has been one of the major banks throwing people out of their homes during the foreclosure crisis. Yes, that’s right: The same company that is bragging about offering a single homeless man a job is the same predatory subprime firm that is making many people homeless — and none of the media covering the story have mentioned that. All we get are stories about how wonderful and generous the Cavs and Quicken Loans are for making their offer to Williams.