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 Kuttner: Zero Hour for Social Security

As I have previously warned–and I hope I’m wrong–President Obama seems on the verge of needlessly cutting America’s most valued social program and the one that best differentiates Republicans from Democrats. This is part of a vain effort to appease deficit hawks in his own party and on Wall Street, as well as Republicans who are utter hypocrites when it comes to deficits–increasing them as long as the purpose is tax cuts but then turning around and demanding program cuts in order to reduce the deficits they created.

All the choreography is in place for the president to embrace Social Security cuts in his upcoming State of the Union address.

Cutting Social Security is financially needless–the program is in sound shape for the next 27 years. It has nothing to do with the current deficit. It will be solvent indefinitely if we can get some wage growth going again. Failing that, we should raise the lid on income taxed, so that millionaires pay the same rate as regular people. For more detail, see ourfiscalsecurity.org.

Chris Hedges: Even Lost Wars Make Corporations Rich

Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice.

The moratorium on anti-war protests in 2004 was designed to help elect the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry. It was a foolish and humiliating concession. Kerry snapped to salute like a windup doll when he was nominated. He talked endlessly about victory in Iraq. He assured the country that he would not have withdrawn from Fallujah. And by the time George W. Bush was elected for another term the anti-war movement had lost its momentum. The effort to return Congress to Democratic control in 2006 and end the war in Iraq became another sad lesson in incredulity. The Democratic Party, once in the majority, funded and expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Barack Obama in 2008 proved to be yet another advertising gimmick for the corporate and military elite. All our efforts to work within the political process to stop these wars have been abject and miserable failures. And while we wasted our time, tens of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani civilians, as well as U.S. soldiers and Marines, were traumatized, maimed and killed.

Bob Herbert: A Flood Tide of Murder

By all means, condemn the hateful rhetoric that has poured so much poison into our political discourse. The crazies don’t kill in a vacuum, and the vilest of our political leaders and commentators deserve to be called to account for their demagoguery and the danger that comes with it. But that’s the easy part.

If we want to reverse the flood tide of killing in this country, we’ll have to do a hell of a lot more than bad-mouth a few sorry politicians and lame-brained talking heads. We need to face up to the fact that this is an insanely violent society. The vitriol that has become an integral part of our political rhetoric, most egregiously from the right, is just one of the myriad contributing factors in a society saturated in blood.

According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, more than a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were killed. That figure includes suicides and accidental deaths. But homicides, deliberate killings, are a perennial scourge, and not just with guns.

David Weigel: There Will Be Guns

Arizona’s response to the Gifford shooting: Only guns can stop gun violence.

Arizona’s legislature began its new session on Monday, guns in tow. At a rally outside of the state Capitol, a 73-year-old Tea Party activist named Arthur Olivas, Jr. was photographed wearing a holstered pistol. Anyone who blamed the Tea Party for the slaughter outside of a Tucson Safeway, he said, didn’t understand the movement and didn’t understand gun rights.

The Tea Party Senate is off to a solid start. On day one, Sen. Jack Harper was moving H.B. 2001, legislation that would allow community college faculty members to carry concealed weapons on campus.

Amanda Marcotte: Giffords Shooting Raises Questions About Mental Health Care

The problems with our mental health systems in the U.S. are just part of a larger problem with health care in general—people fall through the cracks, diseases that could have been prevented or minimized with early interventions instead fester and become bigger, more expensive problems down the road, and we don’t do enough to connect the available services with the patients in need.  This is something that Rep. Giffords understands.  Giffords supported health care reform because she understands that a universal system actually saves us money (and grief) through the “ounce of prevention” method. Giffords is also a supporter of Planned Parenthood, which provides an excellent model for patching up holes in health care access, both by being low cost but also by having a recognizable brand that points people in need in the right direction.

If a community college student with poor access to health care needs contraception, she knows who to call: Planned Parenthood.  We need something like that for people who find themselves in need of mental health services.  Unfortunately, the push towards cuts for social services means that we’re running away from and not towards that goal. Take the state of Arizona, where all this went down. Mental health services were cut by $36 million in 2010, a 37 percent budget cut.  That’s introducing a lot more cracks to an already cracked system.  And it’s increasingly looking like Loughner is one of the people who fell through the cracks in the system.  

John Nichols: Tom DeLay Is Finally Rewarded for His Years of Public Service: With a Jail Sentence

No one did more to corrupt the public life of the country during the Bush-Cheney era than the cruelest and most crooked of their henchmen, Thomas Dale “Tom” DeLay, the Republican Majority Leader turned the U.S. House of Representatives into a cesspool of pay–to-play politics and the elections of his home state of Texas into empty charades.

“DeLay’s brand of politics was one of reckless disregard for the American people. By funneling illegal corporate money into Texas state elections, he helped elect Republican candidates to the Texas Legislature, which led to the tainted redistricting of his state,” says Tom “Smitty” Smith, the director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, which with the group Texans for Public Justice waged the long campaign to hold the former Majority Leader to account.

The evidence of DeLay’s wrongdoing was so clear, and his the Republican fixer’s defense was so lame, that there was never much doubt that he would be convicted.

Sophie Meunier: French Fried? The G20 Will Soon Find Out How “American” Sarkozy Really Is

French President Nicolas Sarkozy meets with Barack Obama in Washington today, ostensibly to discuss the agenda for the upcoming G8 and G20 summits, both of which France presides over this year. Sarkozy has much to gain from this opportunity to showcase France as the first country ever to head both international forums simultaneously. Should the United States be concerned?

After all, despite Sarkozy’s sincere love of the United States, the objectives he has laid out for the June G8 summit in Deauville and November G20 summit in Cannes look like a typically French frontal assault against Washington. France’s stated ambition is no less than a brand new international monetary system -throw in also the regulation of commodities markets and the renovation of global economic governance for good measure. The underlying analysis behind this ambitious objective is that international financial instability comes from the privilege of the dollar as reserve currency. Eliminating this privilege, the argument goes, would also better reflect the new multipolar economic reality. Absent a world currency to replace the dollar and serious competition from the euro and the yuan, a revamping of the international monetary system would start with an increased role for the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights.