“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”
New York Times Editorial: The Right to Sue Over Wiretapping
Federal authorities have always made it difficult to bring a legal challenge against the government’s warrantless wiretapping enterprise that was set up by the Bush administration in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Because the wiretaps were secret, no one could know for certain if they were being tapped, so the government urged judges to throw out lawsuits for lack of proof of real harm.
That strategy was halted on Monday when a federal appeals court said that civil liberties and journalism groups challenging an eavesdropping law could pursue a suit trying to get the government’s wiretapping declared illegal. In an important ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reinstated a lawsuit that a federal district judge had thrown out in 2009.
The new decision might lead to a significant – and far too long delayed – legal review of the statute.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: The cost of Libyan intervention
It will be 17 years next month since the West made the decision not to intervene in the Rwandan genocide, allowing more than 800,000 people to be slaughtered in just 100 days. Seventeen years later, President Obama has ordered military action in concert with the United Nations, to stop a new humanitarian crisis, this time in Libya, after the urging of a handful of aides. Among them were Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on the Rwandan genocide, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who was part of the team that failed to act in 1994.
According to reports, they advocated intervention to prevent massacres ordered by Moammar Gaddafi in the city of Benghazi and elsewhere. The threat of massacre, by all accounts, appeared to be imminent.
Rwanda’s upcoming anniversary, though, is not the central one that comes to mind. In a grim coincidence of history, President Obama ordered “Operation Odyssey Dawn,” establishing a no-fly zone in Libya, to begin on March 19, exactly eight years after President Bush began his shock and awe campaign in Iraq.
Maureen Dowd: Fight of the Valkyries
They are called the Amazon Warriors, the Lady Hawks, the Valkyries, the Durgas.
There is something positively mythological about a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities and show him the way to war. And there is something positively predictable about guys in the White House pushing back against that story line for fear it makes the president look henpecked.
It is not yet clear if the Valkyries will get the credit or the blame on Libya. But everyone is fascinated with the gender flip: the reluctant men – the generals, the secretary of defense, top male White House national security advisers – outmuscled by the fierce women around President Obama urging him to man up against the crazy Qaddafi.
How odd to see the diplomats as hawks and the military as doves.
Robert Reich: The Republicans’ Big Lies About Jobs (And Why Obama Must Repudiate Them)
And if all others accepted the lie which the party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became the truth.
– George Orwell, 1984 (published in 1949)
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was in town yesterday (specifically, at Stanford’s Hoover Institute where he could surround himself with sympathetic Republicans) to tell this whopper: “Cutting the federal deficit will create jobs.”
It’s not true. Cutting the deficit will creates fewer jobs. Less government spending reduces overall demand. This is particularly worrisome when, as now, consumers and businesses are still holding back. Fewer government workers have paychecks to buy stuff from other Americans, some of whom in turn will lose their jobs without enough customers.
But truth doesn’t seem to matter. Republicans figure if their big lies are repeated often enough, people will start to believe them.
Richard (RJ) Escow: Lockboxes and Lunchboxes: Krauthammer vs. Social Security
Charles Krauthammer wants you to know two things: There’s no “lockbox” for Social Security and there’s no such thing as a free lunch. He’s wrong about Social Security, but first things first: Let’s do lunch.
Here’s Krauthammer last Thursday, rebutting White House Budget Director Jack Lew: “There is no free lunch.” And here’s Krauthammer in 2004, in a piece called “Tax and Drill”: “There is no free lunch.” And in 2009, writing about the health care bill: “…(I)n medicine, as in life, there is no free lunch.”
snip
There may be more Krauthammer “free lunch” references out there, but I have to stop. I’m getting hungry.
Bill McKibben: Reliably, Irredeemably Wrong: The US Chamber of Commerce
What if I told you I’d found a political group that for a hundred years had managed to be absolutely right on every crucial political issue? A political lodestone, reliably pointing toward true policy north at every moment.
Sorry. But I have something almost as good: a group that manages to always get it wrong. The ultimate pie-in-the-face brigade, the gang that couldn’t lobby straight.
From the outside, you’d think the US Chamber of Commerce must know what it’s doing. It’s got a huge building right next to the White House. It spends more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. It spends more money on lobbying that the next five biggest lobbyists combined. And yet it has an unbroken record of error stretching back almost to its founding.
Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis: Instead of Bombing Dictators, Stop Selling Them Bombs
“In 2009 alone, European governments — including Britain and France — sold Libya more than $470 million worth of weapons, including fighter jets, guns and bombs. And before it started calling for regime change, the Obama administration was working to provide the Libyan dictator another $77 million in weapons, on top of the $17 million it provided in 2009 and the $46 million the Bush administration provided in 2008.”
When all you have is bombs, everything starts to look like a target. And so after years of providing Libya’s dictator with the weapons he’s been using against the people, all the international community – France, Britain and the United States – has to offer the people of Libya is more bombs, this time dropped from the sky rather than delivered in a box to Muammar Gaddafi’s palace.
If the bitter lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything, though, it’s that wars of liberation exact a deadly toll on those they purportedly liberate – and that democracy doesn’t come on the back of a Tomahawk missile.
Jon Walker: Libya Reminds Us Almost No One in Washington Cares About Deficits
The Hill is reporting that the cost of our latest war military action in Libya could effectively wipe out all the deficit reduction House Republicans are trying to squeeze of out of cuts to domestic programs.
U.S. military operations in Libya could wipe out a significant chunk of the budget cuts won by congressional Republicans in recent weeks, defense analysts say.
GOP leaders have trumpeted enacted spending reductions that amount to more than $285 million per day since the beginning of March.
But defense analysts say the Pentagon could be burning through more than $100 million per day in Libya, putting those budget savings at risk.
If we are actually so “broke”-as the deficit hawks like to claim-that we can no longer afford to give heating assistance to poor Americans in the winter or fund immunizations, there would be no way we could afford another conflict that isn’t vital to American security. Nor would we be able to afford the highly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost almost three times as much as all the cuts sought by House Republicans.
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