“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”
Frances Fox Piven: The real threat of Glenn Beck’s fantasies
It’s harm not to myself, but to American democracy that I fear from the Fox News host’s paranoid theories of social collapse
When the process of governing is incomprehensible, manipulation and propaganda thrives. The strange stories that Glenn Beck creates with his chalkboard gain traction with Americans, who are made anxious by the large changes that have overtaken the United States, including the election of a black president and the increasing racial diversity of the population, deindustrialisation and the decline of American power abroad, as well as cultural changes in sexual and family norms.
By telling simple fairy tales that trace these big and complex changes to the machinations of particular people, Beck makes the changes comprehensible in a way, and also makes the people who are presumably responsible the targets of his listeners’ frustration and outrage. Partly because it is utterly irrational, and partly because it is an effort to bully and intimidate his political opponents, this is dangerous for democratic politics.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Needed: New national security thinking
The popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen reveal some uncomfortable truths about this country’s foreign policy. The Obama administration – caught between not wanting to abandon Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a cruel dictator who has been a loyal ally, and wanting to guide or support a popular uprising that will define the future – is caught in a replay of a scene we see over and over again.
America unfurls the flag of democracy and human rights rhetorically, but we ally ourselves with “stability” – that is, all too often, with dictatorship: Cuba’s Batista, Nicaragua’s Somoza, Chile’s Pinochet, South Africa’s apartheid regime, Egypt’s Mubarak, Iran’s shah, Indonesia’s Suharto, the Philippines’ Marcos and many more. When the people finally revolt, we flounder, usually concerned more about shoring up the existing regime than supporting democracy.
Katherine Gallagher: George Bush: no escaping torture charges
Sooner or later, Bush will step into a country where he will be prosecuted for authorising the abuses of the ‘war on terror’
Late last year, former US President George W Bush recounted in his memoir, Decision Points, that when he was asked in 2002 if it was permissible to waterboard a detainee held in secret CIA custody outside the United States, answered “damn right”. This “decision point” led to the waterboarding of that person 183 times in one month. Others were waterboarded, as well.
Waterboarding is torture. In the past, the US prosecuted and convicted Japanese officials who waterboarded US and allied prisoners. US Attorney General Eric Holder has unequivocally stated that waterboarding is torture.
The United States is under an absolute obligation under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) to investigate, prosecute and punish torturers. And yet, here was the former president of the United States admitting he authorised torture. And nothing.
Jim Hightower: Obama, Inc.
With Daley and Immelt on board, our president is waltzing with the devil.
When you dance with the devil, never fool yourself into thinking that you’re leading.
That would be my 50-cents-worth of advice to President Barack Obama as he remakes his presidency into a Clintonesque corporate enterprise. Following last fall’s congressional elections, he immediately began blowing kisses to CEOs and big business lobbyists, and he’s now filled his White House dance card with them.
First came Bill Daley, the Wall Street banker and longtime corporate lobbyist. In early January, Obama brought him to the White House ball to be his chief-of-staff, gatekeeper, and policy coordinator.
Then Obama tapped Jeffery Immelt to lead his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is supposed to “encourage the private sector to hire [Americans] and invest in American competitiveness.” This is a bizarre coupling, for as General Electric’s CEO, Immelt was a leader in shipping American factories and jobs to Asia and elsewhere. Today, fewer than half of GE’s workers are in our country.
Amy Goodman: Egypt’s Youth Will Not Be Silenced
“In memoriam, Christoph Probst, Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl” reads the banner at the top of Kareem Amer’s popular Egyptian dissident blog. “Beheaded on Feb. 22, 1943, for daring to say no to Hitler, and yes to freedom and justice for all.” The young blogger’s banner recalls the courageous group of anti-Nazi pamphleteers who called themselves the White Rose Collective. They secretly produced and distributed six pamphlets denouncing Nazi atrocities, proclaiming, in one, “We will not be silent.” Sophie and her brother Hans Scholl were captured by the Nazis, tried, convicted and beheaded.
Kareem Amer, who spent four years in prison in Egypt for his blogging, has disappeared off the streets of Cairo after leaving Tahrir Square with a friend, according to cyberdissidents.org. The group assumes Amer is now among the hundreds of journalists and human-rights activists snatched by the regime of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, and has launched a campaign to demand his release.
Dana Milbank: Arianna Huffington’s ideological transformation
Did Arianna Huffington just sell out her fellow progressives?
In the literal sense, she undoubtedly has: The sale of Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million (including a large pile of cash going to Huffington herself) means this powerful liberal voice is formally joining the “corporate media” its writers have long disparaged.
There are also some indications that she has sold out in the ideological sense and committed the Huffington Post to joining the mainstream media – the evil “MSM” of “HuffPo” blogger ire. Announcing the deal, she and her new boss went out of their way to say that the new Huffington Post would emphasize things other than the liberal politics on which the brand was built.
Jason Linkins: New Jersey Legislature To Join The New Trend Of Dismantling Successful Education Programs
If you are a habitual watcher of the Colbert Report, you probably caught the segment a few weeks ago where he ridiculed the recent decision of the Wake County, N.C. school board to dismantle a successful school program that had achieved schools of high performance, high economic diversity, and high parent satisfaction, because…well, because they are idiots, mainly. But now they have some compatriots in the New Jersey state legislature who want to do similar damage to their own school system. Over at Wonk Room, Pat Garofalo runs down the gory details:
According to a report in the Newark Star-Ledger, Republicans in the New Jersey legislature want to cut New Jersey’s preschool program from a full day to a half day, and send the money they save to richer, suburban school districts
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