“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: Gov. Cuomo’s Budget
New York’s lawmakers passed a $132.5 billion budget before the April 1 deadline, a rare event. That is, on the whole, a political win for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who cut $10 billion out of it.
But the way he chose to do it will bring unnecessary pain to the less fortunate across the state, while allowing some of the richest residents to escape their share of the burden of a recession-era budget. Tellingly, legislators passed the 2011-12 budget behind locked doors early Thursday after angry protesters chanted in the Capitol corridors on Wednesday.
Andy Worthington: Mocking the Law, Judges Rule that Evidence Is Not Necessary to Hold Insignificant Guantánamo Prisoners for the Rest of Their Lives
If I was an American lawyer who had fought for many years to secure habeas corpus rights for the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba – in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge to rule on my captors’ reasons for slinging me in a legal black hole and leaving me to rot there forever – the latest news from the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. (also known as the D.C. Circuit Court) would make me sick in a bucket rather than believing any longer that the law – the revered law on which the United States was founded – can bring any meaningful remedy for the prisoners at Guantánamo.
Treated as punchbags without rights when first picked up, mostly in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the 172 men still held at Guantánamo are still treated with scorn by the administration of Barack Obama, the standard bearer of “hope” and “change,” who promised to close Guantánamo and to do away with “the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, [where] we have compromised our most precious values.” Instead, however, Obama has revealed himself to be nothing more than a hollow man whose ability to read from an autocue made him look caring, clever and capable when that was exactly the antidote we needed to eight years of Bush and Cheney.
Joe Conason: Why the Reckless Republicans Win
Scarcely any news story induces sleep as swiftly and surely as congressional budget negotiations-a topic that features politicians bickering loudly over huge dollar amounts that lack meaning for most people, while their public posturing reflects little of what is actually going on in the back channels.
But it is also the story of a Republican minority within a minority that is getting its way because nobody else in Washington is reckless enough to promote a government shutdown.
Reckless is the proper way to describe the Republicans’ position, because their demands clearly have so little to do with real fiscal and economic responsibility-and so much to do with satisfying the most extreme elements in their base.
John Nichols: An April 5 Judicial Vote is First Electoral Test of Wisconsin Movements
A hand-painted sign highlighting the April 5 state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin declares: “This May Be the Most Important Vote You’ll Ever Cast!”
That’s a bold claim.
But it won’t be dismissed by many observers of the six-week long struggle between Governor Scott Walker and the public-employee unions he seeks to dismantle with aggressive anti-labor legislation and tactics.
The Supreme Court election in Wisconsin — one of a number of Midwestern states that elect jurists, in keeping with the progressive tradition that said all powerful officials should be accountable to the people — will provide the first real measure of the strength of the mass movements that have developed to challenge Walker, his agenda, and his political allies.
David Sirota: Lessons of Libya
Launched almost exactly a quarter-century after Ronald Reagan first bombed Tripoli, America’s new war in Libya was guaranteed to be yet another fist-pumpin’, high-fivin’ remake of a big-budget 1980s action movie-the kind of scripted, stylized “Top Gun”-like production that gets audiences to cheer wildly and ask few questions.
Almost three weeks in, Operation Odyssey Dawn has no doubt delivered on that promise: It has a blockbuster $100-million-per-week budget, a comic-book-grade villain in Col. Moammar Gadhafi and the modern media’s obedient transcription of U.S. government pronouncements.
Glen Garvin: Libya feels like deja vu all over again
A couple of weeks before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, I was having dinner with an American diplomat who had considerable experience in the Middle East. He warned me that the war would be a long, drawn-out mess.
“You don’t think we can defeat Saddam Hussein’s army?” I asked in surprise.
“That’s the easy part,” he replied. “His men will break and run. It’s what comes after that that worries me.”
Without Saddam’s boot on its throat, he warned, Iraq would dissolve into an anarchic hellhole of sectarian religious warfare and ethnic strife, while an ambitious Iran moved to fill the regional power vacuum left behind. In other words, he pretty much predicted everything that has happened in the last eight years.
Gail Collins: Donald Trump Gets Weirder
Donald Trump has run faux campaigns for president before, flirting with the Democrats and independents. This time, he’s playing a conservative Republican. By 2016, he’ll probably be talking about his affinity for the Alaskan Independence Party or the Whigs.
And, of course, he’s suddenly a birther. “This guy either has a birth certificate or he doesn’t,” he said of President Obama. “I didn’t think this was such a big deal, but, I will tell you, it’s turning out to be a very big deal because people now are calling me from all over saying: please don’t give up on this issue.”
It was a perfect vocalization of the New York Street: People are calling me up! Don’t believe everything you hear, unless it comes over the phone.
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