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”

Ari Berman: The Obama Budget: Challenging or Appeasing the GOP?

In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama threaded the needle by calling for new investments in technology, education and infrastructure and a five-year domestic spending freeze. But those were just words. The president’s budget for 2012, released today, is the true reflection of what his priorities are.

The New York Times has posted a quick summary of what the budget does and does not do. The budget includes additional funds for education, high-speed rail, a national wireless network and a national infrastructure bank, which Democrats and Obama supporters will like. The document also rejects the advice of the administration’s deficit commission and does not tinker with Social Security or Medicare, which will no doubt anger deficit hawks in both parties. At the same time, the president is proposing painful cuts in heating assistance for low-income families, block grants for community development and Pell Grants for needy students-all things that Democrats would no doubt criticize if a Republican president proposed them.

John Nichols: On Civil Liberties, War, Crony Capitalism: Ron Paul Is Saying Some Things Democrats Should Be Saying

Texas Congressman Ron Paul may have been speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference that finished up over the weekend.

He may have been hinting to a cheering crowd that he will run again for the Republican presidential nomination-a prospect the crowd found appealing, as Paul won the conference’s straw poll with ten times as many votes as Sarah Palin.

That unsettled some CPAC attendees. The defenders of the conservative orthodoxies of the moment-as opposed to the Old Right stances Paul echoes-can’t figure out his appeal. To their view, he’s off-message on everything from the war on terror to Wall Street. And they dismiss his backers as hooligans.

But what unsettles mainstream conservatives ought to interest mainstream progressives.

Robert Reich: The Obama Budget: And Why the Coming Debate Over Spending Cuts Has Nothing to Do With Reviving the Economy

President Obama has chosen to fight fire with gasoline.

Republicans want America to believe the economy is still lousy because government is too big, and the way to revive the economy is to cut federal spending. Today (Sunday) Republican Speaker John Boehner even refused to rule out a government shut-down if Republicans don’t get the spending cuts they want.

Today (Monday) Obama pours gas on the Republican flame by proposing a 2012 federal budget that cuts the federal deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. About $400 billion of this will come from a five-year freeze on non-security discretionary spending – including all sorts of programs for poor and working-class Americans, such as heating assistance to low-income people and community-service block grants. Most of the rest from additional spending cuts, such as grants to states for water treatment plants and other environmental projects and higher interest charges on federal loans to graduate students.

Eugene Robinson: Freedom’s Just Another Word

Why don’t conservatives love freedom?

Judging by last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, that’s a fair question. As Egyptians overthrew the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak, politicians who spoke at the annual CPAC gabfest in Washington ranged from silent to grumpy on the subject.

Mitt Romney, perhaps the leading Republican presidential contender, gave a speech without once mentioning the upheaval in Cairo that may signal the most important geopolitical shift since the end of the Cold War. You’d think that anyone who wanted to be president would be paying attention and might have an opinion or two.

Bob Herbert: Reagan and Reality

Early in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, “Reagan,” you hear the voice of Ronald Reagan saying, “Someday it might be worthwhile to find out how images are created – and even more worthwhile to learn how false images come into being.”

Indeed. The image that many, perhaps most, Americans have of the nation’s 40th president is largely manufactured. Reagan has become this larger-than-life figure who all but single-handedly won the cold war, planted the Republican Party’s tax-cut philosophy in the resistant soil of the liberal Democrats and is the touchstone for all things allegedly conservative, no matter how wacky or extreme.

Dean Baker: The President as Storyteller-in-Chief

The celebrations surrounding the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth overlooked an important part of Reagan’s success: his ability to craft an image to serve as the focus of his political argument. When he was running for president in 1980 Reagan invented two great tales that highlighted the worldview he was selling to his supporters.

One of these tales was the story of the welfare queen. She drove to the welfare office in a Cadillac every month to pick up her welfare check. The other story involved a man who bought an orange with food stamps and then used the change to buy a bottle of vodka. Never mind that these stories were almost certainly not true: They crystallized an image of the world that Reagan campaigned against.

Unfortunately, in this respect President Obama is no Ronald Reagan. He has persistently refused to give the country a story of the economic downturn. As a result, the center and right have eagerly filled the void.

Laura Flanders: Outsourcing Potential, Forgetting Workers

“We need better intelligence, the kind that is derived not from intercepting a president’s phone calls to his mistress but from hanging out with the powerless.”

That was one of  columnist Nicholas Kristof’s lessons for US foreign policy drawn from Egypt’s revolution. In the New York Times this weekend he pointed out that American journalists and foreign policy experts alike missed the warning signs of what was coming in Egypt in part because they talk to the wrong people. Aha. That’s not exactly a revelation to consumers of independent media.