“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”
Pual Krugman: American Thought Police
Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”
So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Midwest’s new class politics
The battle for the Midwest is transforming American politics. Issues of class inequality and union influence, long dormant, have come back to life. And a part of the country that was integral to the Republican surge of 2010 is shifting away from the GOP just a few months later.
Republican governors, particularly in Wisconsin and Ohio, denied themselves political honeymoons by launching frontal assaults on public employee unions and proposing budgets that include deep cuts in popular programs.
Doyle McManus: Obama’s nuanced call to arms in Libya
The Obama administration says the goals of its bombing campaign in Libya are crystal clear, but it has tied itself in knots trying to explain them.
This isn’t a war, White House spokesman Jay Carney said last week, “it’s a time-limited, scope-limited military action.”
“What we are doing is enforcing a [United Nations] resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis and setting up a no-fly zone,” said national security aide Ben Rhodes. “Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end. But … we are not getting into an open-ended war, a land invasion in Libya.”
Clear enough for you?
Patrick Cockburn: Every Tyrant Makes the Same Mistake in the Arab Uprisings
The despots who have ruled the Arab world for half a century are not giving up without a fight. In the southern Syrian city of Dara, security forces last week machine-gunned pro-democracy protesters in a mosque, killing 44 of them, and then faked evidence to pretend they were a gang of kidnappers. In the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, a few days earlier, snipers firing from high buildings shot dead or wounded 300 people at a rally demanding the President step down.
In Syria and Yemen, state-sponsored violence has proved counter-effective. Protesters were enraged rather than intimidated. A remarkable aspect of the Arab uprisings is that ruler after ruler is making the same mistakes that brought down Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Local tyrants, from Muammar Gaddafi in Libya to Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, behave as if they had joined a collective political suicide pact whereby they alternate mindless violence and inadequate concessions in just the right quantities to discredit themselves and undermine their regimes.
John Nichols: In Lawless Fitzwalkerstan, a Constitution Officer Refuses to Bend to a Royal Governor’s Dictate
The fear that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Republican allies such as state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald are turning Wisconsin into the American equivalent of a lawless “rogue state”-dubbed “Fitzwalkerstan” by state Rep. Mark Pocan, the former co-chair of the powerful Legislative Joint Finance Committee-was being taken more seriously Sunday. Walker’s lieutenants have announced that they would begin implementing the governor’s draconian anti-union power grab, despite the fact that a judge has issued an order blocking the law from going into effect.
Dane County Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi had issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking publication of the anti-union law until the courts could weigh multiple questions about the legislature’s actions and the law itself. But Walker’s minions are now claiming that steps taken Friday by the state’s Legislative Reference Bureau to prepare for publication of the bill are an authorization to begin implementing it.
“Upon the advice of my legal counsel, the Department of Administration will begin the process of implementing [the law] as we are required to do the day after a bill is lawfully published,” claimed Walker’s Department of Administration secretary Mike Huebsch.
The problem is that bill has not been lawfully published.
David Sirota: A New Red Dawn
The 1984 film “Red Dawn” fantasized about a group of American teenagers called the Wolverines who valiantly repelled an invasion of foreign communists. For its mix of dystopia and hope, the movie became such an enduring cultural touchstone that U.S. military leaders honored it by naming their 2003 effort to apprehend Saddam Hussein “Operation Red Dawn.” Amid the triumphalism, however, we missed the fact that the invaders started winning – a fact that none other than “Red Dawn’s” 2011 remake underscores.
That’s the subtext of a Los Angeles Times report this week about MGM taking “the extraordinary step” of digitally removing fictional Chinese villains from the $60 million film “lest the leadership in Beijing be offended.” Why the fear of upsetting such an odiously anti-democratic government? Because movie executives worry that a film involving a negative message about China “would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower, one of the fastest-growing and potentially most lucrative markets for American movies.”
Jim Hightower: Rich Get Richer With New Congress
Change is not the same thing as progress. In fact, change can be the exact opposite. It can be regressive, as we’re now learning from — where else? — Congress.
A flock of tea party-infused Republicans has certainly changed the political dynamic there, and exultant GOP leaders are claiming that they are now the voice of “The People.” But most people won’t find themselves represented by this change, much less see it as progress.
That’s because the newcomers in Congress, whether Republican or Democrat, tend to live high up the economic ladder, way out of touch with the people they’re representing. Indeed, 40 percent of newly elected house members are millionaires, as are 60 percent of new senators.
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