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”

Dean Baker: Right to Work: Representation Without Taxation

Part of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting agenda is including a “right to work” rule for public-sector employees. Several other Republican governors are considering similar measures for both the public and private sectors. Insofar as they succeed, these right-to-work measures will seriously weaken the bargaining power of workers.

“Right to work” is a great name from the standpoint of proponents, just like the term “death tax” is effective for opponents of the estate tax, but it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. It is widely believed that in the absence of right-to-work laws workers can be forced to join a union. This is not true. Workers at any workplace always have the option as to whether or not to join a union.

Ari Berman: Civil War in the GOP? Top Republican Supports Government Shutdown

Last week National Journal asked Democratic and Republicans “insiders” in Washington whether a government shutdown would be in their party’s best interest politically. Fifty-six percent of Democrats said yes, while 65 percent of Republicans said no.

Tim Pawlenty, the ex-governor of Minnesota and likely 2012 GOP presidential candidate, evidently is not one of those Republicans. In an interview with Think Progress over the weekend after his speech at the Tea Party Patriots summit in Phoenix, Pawlenty welcomed the idea of an imminent government shutdown.

Greg Mitchell: When ‘The Age of Wikileaks’ Began, One Year Ago, With ‘Collateral Murder’

Exactly three months ago,  I started live-blogging when a major story broke, as I’d done previously in a few cases. But a funny thing happened with WikiLeaks’ “Cablegate” release: The story, and the reader interest, did not go away after a couple of days-as the cables kept coming out, the controversies spread, and Julian Assange became a household name in America.

One week passed, then another. I started labeling it The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog and giving it a number, e.g. “Day 20.” Then “30.” Echoing the early days of Nightline during the Iran crisis in the late-1970s, I wrote that like America then I was being held “hostage.”  Now it’s day 93 and counting.

But with the arrival of March, another marker to note:  It’s now been a year since WikiLeaks began processing a massive leak, for which Pvt. Bradley Manning, in his Quantico cell in near-isolation,  stands accused.

John Nichols: This is NOT What Democracy Looks Like: Silencing Dissent In Wisconsin

First Governor Scott Walker announced that he was attaching to a budget-repair bill a scheme to eliminate most collective bargaining rights for state, county and municipal employees in Wisconsin. In the same measure, he proposed to restructure state government so that he would be able to consolidate decision-making authority over cuts in health programs and selling off public assets in his office.

The people objected, big-time, generating the largest protests in the state’s history. They even filled the Capitol with thousands of police officers, firefighters, state employees, teachers, students and their allies.

Then Governor Walker’s allies forced the bill through the state Assembly, holding an early morning vote open for so short a time – 17 seconds – that the majority of Democrats were unable to participate.

“With having just a 17-second roll call, they silenced their legislators, but far more important the people we represent,” said Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The GOP Plan to Cut Social Security … Starting Right Now

Call it a “general strike” … from above. Republicans in Congress are trying to paralyze the government with their new budget bill, using a “disrupt and defeat” strategy to prevent it from delivering services promised to the the nation’s citizens and required under current law. It’s fiscal sabotage, plain and simple. Will people fight back?

The GOP’S first attack is on Social Security, slashing its budget in order to deprive people of vitally needed services. While the “austerity economics” crowd talks disingenously about future Social Security cuts in the coming decades, they’re actually trying to cripple its activities starting right now.

Jeff Biggers; Legislators Are Going to Unbelievable Lengths to Gouge Clean Water Laws and Cozy Up to Big Coal

Big Coal’s backlash over the EPA crackdown on future mountaintop removal operations went from denial and anger to the outright absurd last week, as state legislatures conjured their own versions of a sagebrush rebellion and the new Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed a sheath of regulatory gutting amendments to its budget bill.

On the heels of its Tea Party-backed coal rallies last fall, the dirty coal lobby couldn’t have paid for a better show. As millions of pounds of ammonium nitrate fuel oil explosives continued to detonate daily in their ailing districts and affected residents held dramatic sit-ins to raise awareness of the growing health crisis in the central Appalachian coalfields, Big Coal-bankrolled sycophants fell over themselves from Virginia to Kentucky to West Virginia, and in the halls of Congress, to see who could introduce the most ridiculous and dangerous bills to shield the coal industry.

Brendan Fisher: What Else Is in Walker’s Bill?

While news coverage has focused on how Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill attacks the state’s 300,000 public sector workers (and by extension, the entire middle class), the law is increasingly recognized as an attack on the poor. It curtails (and perhaps eliminates) access to the Medicaid programs relied upon by 1.2 million Wisconsinites, limits access to public transportation, and hinders rural community access to broadband internet. The bill keeps the poor unhealthy, immobile, and uninformed.

Governor Walker and the GOP have said they will not balance the state’s alleged “budget deficit” by raising taxes and increasing revenue. Instead, they will focus on decreasing expenditures in a way that disproportionately impacts the poor and middle class. At an event at Wisconsin Law School on February 24, former U.S. Solicitor of Labor and professor emeritus of law Carin Clauss said “we have to acknowledge that we are imposing what amounts to a de facto tax hike” on the poor.” She noted that “this bill will kick people off medicare, require increased payments into health and pension funds,” and “could hamstring mass public transport,” all of which decrease take-home pay and increase costs for poor- and middle- class Wisconsinites.

Carl Pope: There Goes the Fig Leaf

Perhaps you read that the oil industry is already gearing up its campaign-contribution machine, with the American Petroleum Institute (API) announcing that for the first time it will start making direct contributions to candidates, instead of leaving that task to its individual member companies. But you almost certainly overlooked the fact that in making the announcement, API stripped the fig leaf that, since the end of the 19th century, has enabled both corporations and politicians to pretend that giving a public official money to run a political campaign was somehow not bribery.

The crucial admission came from Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs, who announced the new strategy this way: “At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate.” You might not have taken particular note of his statement because (if you are like most Americans, most reporters, and most politicians or donors) you already assume that campaign contributions influence policy choices, and that senators, congressmen, governors, state legislators, and city council members are all more responsive to the needs, concerns, and views of those who give them money than they are to the desires of the rest of us. It’s almost a “duuuh” moment.