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: Their Own Private Europe

President Obama’s State of the Union address was a ho-hum affair. But the official Republican response, from Representative Paul Ryan, was really interesting. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

Mr. Ryan made highly dubious assertions about employment, health care and more. But what caught my eye, when I read the transcript, was what he said about other countries: “Just take a look at what’s happening to Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom and other nations in Europe. They didn’t act soon enough; and now their governments have been forced to impose painful austerity measures: large benefit cuts to seniors and huge tax increases on everybody.”

Johann Hari: How Can Conservatives Object to Protecting Gay Kids?

I am exhausted. I have spent all week trying to brainwash small children into being gay, by relentlessly inserting homosexuality into their math, geography and science lessons. Their little eyes widened when the gay algebra lesson started, but it worked: Their concept of “normal sexual behavior” has been successfully destroyed. It’s all part of the program brilliantly coordinated by the Homintern to imposed The Gay Agenda on Every Aspect of Life.

That, at least, is what you would believe if you had read some of Britain’s bestselling newspapers this week, or listened to some of our most prominent Conservative politicians. The headlines were filled with fury. The Conservative Member of Parliament Richard Drax said gays were trying to impose “questionable sexual standards” on kids, while a right-wing newspaper said we were mounting a massive “abuse of childhood.”

Here’s what is actually happening — with plenty of lessons for the U.S. A detailed study by the Schools Health Education Unit found that in Britain today, 70 percent of gay children get bullied, 41 percent get beaten up, and 17 percent get told at some point in their childhood that they are going to be killed. The evidence suggests the situation in the U.S. is just as bad.

Amy Wilentz: Haiti: Not for Amateurs

Lost in the uproar over the return of Jean-Claude Duvalier to Haiti and his to-ing and fro-ing from hotel to courthouse to hotel to mountain home, is the much more important political crisis. On election day in November, only 22.3 percent of Haiti’s eligible voters cast their ballots in what turned out to be an election plagued with fraud. The reason for the low turnout was apathy, coupled with the catastrophic loss of identity papers in the earthquake of January 2010. Given the miserable conditions of so many Haitians since the earthquake, the anemic turnout provided resounding evidence that Haitians don’t believe their vote matters.

And they are right. Many parties were kept out, including the popular party of Haiti’s first freely and fairly elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who has been living in exile in South Africa since a coup backed by the international community forced him from power in 2004. Many see post-Duvalier Haitian politics as a back-and-forth between the forces who support Duvalier, a prototypical right-wing strongman, and those who support Aristide, theoretically a leftist prodemocracy leader. Although this analysis is grossly simplistic, it is also partly true.

Ari Berman: At White House, Axelrod Outlines Obama’s Post-SOTU Strategy

Yesterday afternoon, I was fortunate to attend a roundtable discussion at the White House with Obama strategist David Axelrod and a small group of left-leaning reporters and bloggers. A day after the State of the Union Address, Axelrod offered few specifics of how the president planned to move forward on his call for new investments in technology, education and infrastructure alongside a five-year domestic spending freeze, but signaled there could be a major showdown with Congressional Republicans over how to fund the federal government in a few weeks, perhaps reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s clash with Newt Gingrich in 1995. (You can read the whole transcript over at Daily Kos).

While indicating that Obama will focus on cutting the deficit “in a responsible way” in the coming years, Axelrod also stressed that the president would not wholeheartedly embrace the rigid austerity politics currently being pushed by the GOP. “Dealing with spending is part of the equation, but it’s not the only part of the equation,” Axelrod said from the Roosevelt room. “And reducing the debt and dealing with spending is not in and of itself a growth strategy. And that’s where we may maybe have a philosophical difference [with Republicans].”

Robert Dreyfuss: Revolution in Egypt? Stay Tuned

Will revolution topple Egypt next? We’ll find out tomorrow. . . . . .

Needless to say, a revolution in Egypt-unlike in far less consequential Tunisia-changes everything. The entire Middle East balance, the Arab-Israeli issue, the stability of the oil-rich Persian Gulf states, and the future of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon are all tied to Egypt, which for a century has been the epicenter of the Arab world.

Serra Sippel: Ugandan Tragedy, Human Rights, and U.S. Foreign Aid

There are times when the words are hard to find, because the action they are needed to describe is so repugnant that any language in its entirety is insufficient.

A Ugandan gay rights activist, David Kato, was beaten to death with a hammer in his home yesterday, the result of a staggering climate of intolerance that has been fueled by local media, religious leaders and politicians, and in part by discriminatory U.S.-funded programs. There are other theories behind the murder: robbery and a personal dispute to name two. However, it is irresponsible and ignorant to exonerate from guilt the violent rhetoric towards homosexuals, and particularly David Kato, that has been running rampant in Uganda. While the U.S. has condemned egregious examples of rights-violating policies in Uganda, it still funds HIV interventions that are inherently anti-LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender) and anti-woman. They assume and reinforce the idea that everyone is heterosexual, everyone is going to get married, and everyone has control over when and with whom they and their partner have sex; ideas that are flat-out wrong and result in useless HIV interventions and rancid discrimination. There is no justification; personal belief and morality are not excuses for perpetuating HIV infection and stigma that leads to slaughter. It stops now.

Alaa Bayoumi: ElBaradei’s last stand

ElBaradei’s return to Egypt could offer the opportunity for a good alternative to the current leadership.

The return of Mohamed ElBaradei to Egypt a year ago and him joining the ranks of its political opposition created lots of expectations and frustration.

He has been seen as an agent for democracy, hope and change in a country ruled by dictatorships for decades.

Yet, many feel he may have wasted an opportunity and failed many Egyptians who believed in him.

Thus, when he announced yesterday that he is returning to Egypt from a trip to Europe to join the ongoing and unprecedented protests against the ruling regime, his announcement was met with initial scepticism.

Some of the activists who have been participating in the latest protests in the street and online have sharply criticised his attitude toward politics in Egypt.

Gamal Eid, the director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, an Egyptian human rights group, says

“whoever wants to be a leader of a democratic movement should be working among them. He cannot lead a real battle against corruption and authoritarianism by remote control or Twitter. People don’t forget who stood next to them and who deserted them when they were calling for democracy and fighting corruption.”

“My question to ElBaradei is if people started moving and taking by force their right for democracy, what is your role?”