“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”
David Sirota: Six Sadistic Proposals From State Government
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that states are the “laboratories of democracy.” Oft repeated over time, the aphorism has helped impart legitimacy to the rough and tumble of state lawmaking. We’ve heard “laboratory” and we’ve imagined staid scientists in white coats rigorously testing forward-thinking theories of societal advancement.
It’s certainly a reassuring picture-but there is a darker side of the metaphor. States are indeed laboratories. The problem is that today, those laboratories are increasingly run by mad scientists.
We’re not talking about the usual Dr. Frankensteins trying to bring alive new corporate giveaways through harebrained cuts to social services (though there are those, too). We’re talking about true legislative sadists looking to go medieval on America. Behold just six of the most telling examples.
Eric Boehlert: Note to NPR: Fight Back
Why Fox News Will Keep Bullying NPR Until They Stand Up and Push Back
In the wake of the James O’Keefe smear campaign against NPR, which arrived in the form of dishonestly edited undercover tapes (does O’Keefe know any other form?), public radio host Ira Glass expressed dismay that nobody was “fighting back” against the right-wing attacks. “I find it completely annoying, and I don’t understand it,” said Glass.
Instead of fighting back against the right-wing attacks led by Fox News, NPR hit the panic button last week. It prematurely condemned a colleague and got busy “rolling bodies out the back of the truck,” as the New York Times’ David Carr put it, referencing the public sacking of CEO Vivian Schiller and senior fundraiser Ron Schiller, who was featured in the O’Keefe tapes. Both were made sacrificial lambs for the O’Keefe stings; lambs that were sacrificed before the full truth about theunethical tapes were revealed.
Note to NPR: If you don’t stand up, the bullying is never going to stop.
Robert Naiman: The UN Security Council Has Not Authorized Regime Change in Libya
It’s a great thing that the Obama administration has resisted calls for unilateral US military action in Libya, and instead is working through the United Nations Security Council, as it is required to do by the United Nations Charter.
Now, the administration needs to follow through on this commitment to international law by ensuring that foreign military intervention remains within the four corners of what the UN Security Council has approved. If it does not, and instead Western powers take the view that we now have a blank check to do whatever we want, the certain consequence will be that it will be much more difficult to achieve Security Council action in a similar situation in the future, and those who complain that the Security Council is too cautious will have only themselves to blame.
Alexander Cockburn: Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask, “It’s happened there; can it happen here?”
Along much of California’s coastline runs the “ring of fire,” which stretches round the Pacific plate, from Australia, north past Japan, to Russia, round to Alaska, down America’s West Coast to Chile. 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes happen round the ring.
The late great environmentalist David Brower used to tell audiences, ” Nuclear plants are incredibly complex technological devices for locating earthquake faults.”
John Dickerson: You Can’t Be Serious
Why politicians are always accusing each other of lacking seriousness.
It’s hard to take anyone seriously in politics these days. It’s not that the politicians have gotten sillier-though an outbreak is always possible; it’s that they talk about being serious so much, the word has lost all meaning.
Washington is obsessed with measuring seriousness. President Obama’s televised discussion of his NCAA bracket proved he isn’t a serious leader. House conservatives said GOP leaders weren’t serious enough about cutting the deficit. Senate Republicans leveled that charge against their Democratic counterparts.
This call for seriousness is often itself not a serious charge. What most of the criticisms actually mean is “My opponent doesn’t believe something I’d like him to.” The outbreak of such talk comes at just the moment that more precise language would be helpful. The debate over short- and long-term budget deficits is about priorities. You can’t start that debate, or work through it effectively, if the words used to convey the relative importance of things are all gummed up.
David Weigel: The Recall State
How Wisconsin politics became a national model for partisanship and acrimony.
If your taste in politics tends toward the partisan and the absurd, there may be no better place for you in America right now than Wisconsin. There is no state with more acrimony or more members of opposite parties staring daggers at each other. After Republicans passed Gov. Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill without any Democrats present, Wisconsin Democrats turned their party into a 24/7 machine armed to recall as many Republican senators as they can. Wisconsin Republicans, meanwhile, are aiding ad hoc groups of Tea Party activists who are trying to pull the same thing on Democrats.
There are 16 senators, of both parties, who are vulnerable to recalls, and 20 official committees distributing recall petitions. If any of the petitions are valid, there will be general elections in those districts, incumbents defending against new challengers. If any of the efforts succeed, there will probably be elections in June.
Paul Krugman: All Aboard the Collectivist Train
Columnist George Will wrote a piece recently for Newsweek on President Barack Obama’s high-speed rail initiative that was truly bizarre.
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It is astonishing to see Mr. Will – who is not a stupid man – embracing the sinister progressives-hate-your-freedom line with regard to train travel.
Of the three modes of mechanized transport I use, trains are by far the most liberating. Planes are awful: there is usually a long wait to clear security, then you have to sit with your electronics turned off during takeoff and landing, and there’s no place to go if you want to stand up. Cars? Well, aside from traffic jams, the problem with cars is that you have to drive them, which prevents you from doing anything else.
But on a train I can read, listen to music, surf the Web or go to the cafe. So I prefer to take the train when possible, even if the trip is a couple of hours longer, because it’s much higher-quality time.
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