“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”
John Nichols: Paul Ryan Gets an Earful as Tour Bombs
KENOSHA, WI – Paul Ryan, the smooth-if-not-always-substantive congressman, is the darling of the D.C. talk shows. The House Budget Committee chair, chosen by GOP House leaders to respond to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, is the prime pitchman for the Wall Street lobbying agenda on everything from privatization of Social Security to tax cuts for the rich. During Congress’ spring break, he took his show on the road.
Ryan, R-Janesville, may have thought that his carefully crafted sales pitch for pulverizing Medicare would play perfectly in Paddock Lake and Milton and Kenosha – Wisconsin towns where the congressman expected to be greeted with cheers for a conquering hero from inside the Beltway.
As it happens, hundreds of Ryan’s constituents were turned away from the town hall meetings, which were packed to capacity long before their starting time. But the crowds that did get in to the sessions did not exactly come to hail their congressman as an American idol.
Dahlia Litwick: Still Stupid, Still Wrong, Still Immoral
Why the death of Osama Bin Laden shouldn’t change our views about torture-or of the people who approved it.
Do we have to have another big national debate about torture? Really, do we have to? Headlines like this one, in the New York Times no less, inform us that the Osama Bin Laden raid has “revived” the arguments over the “value of torture.” That’s strange, because until now, the only people “reviving” the debate over the wonders of torture were the same people whose names are actually on the torture memos or who were in the room when torture methods were being approved. This does not constitute a “debate.” A better term would be self-serving propaganda.
Still, the subject of illegally torturing people for information appears to be open for discussion yet again. So before I rehearse my argument, allow me to suggest that the only reason we are having this discussion at all is because we have tortured people. That’s the problem with doing stupid things: You spend the rest of your life trying to convince yourself that maybe they weren’t so stupid after all. Had we not water-boarded prisoners eight years ago, nobody would be making the argument that water-boarding “worked.” The reason you don’t order up torture in the first place is that once you do, it stays on the menu for years.
The killing of Osama bin Laden has, as The New York Times notes, re-ignited the debate over “brutal interrogations” — by which it’s meant that Republicans are now attempting to exploit the emotions generated by the killing to retroactively justify the torture regime they implemented. The factual assertions on which this attempt is based — that waterboarding and other “harsh interrogation methods” produced evidence crucial to locating bin Laden — are dubious in the extreme, for reasons Andrew Sullivan and Marcy Wheeler document. So fictitious are these claims that even Donald Rumsfeld has repudiated them.
But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know. Nobody has ever denied that. In terms of the tactical aspect of the torture debate, the point has always been — as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said — that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them. The fact that one can point to an instance where torture produced the desired answer proves nothing about whether there were more effective ways of obtaining it.
Jim Hightower: GOP House Chooses Big Oil Over Granny
Now, let’s check today’s sports scores: 4, 10.7 and 21-and-a-half.
Those tallies are from the oil league, and the winner, of course, is the league’s powerhouse, ExxonMobil.
Four, as you might have guessed, is the $4 that Exxon is siphoning out of your wallet these days for 1 gallon of its petrol.
Next comes 10.7. That’s the $10.7 billion in profits that this oil giant has soaked up in just the first three months of this year – a new record, not achieved by any managerial genius, increased productivity or improvement in customer service, but solely by the jack-up in gasoline prices.
Finally, 21-and-a-half. This is the big score made by Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s CEO. The chief pulled down $21.5 million in personal compensation last year, making him the highest paid executive in the oil league and one of the most richly paid CEOs in the entire country.
Jill Richardson: I Never Promised You an Organic Garden
A story has been developing over the past month involving lies, toxic sludge, Hollywood celebrities, and poor, inner city school children. It centers around the Environmental Media Association (EMA), a group of environmentally conscious Hollywood celebs, and the “organic” school gardens they’ve been volunteering at for the past past couple years. Stars like Rosario Dawson, Amy Smart, Emmanuelle Chriqui, and Nicole Ritchie have generously adopted Los Angeles schools, visiting the schools and helping the children garden. What the celebs didn’t know is that their organization’s corporate donor – Kellogg Garden Products – sells both organic compost and soil amendments and ones made from sewage sludge. Seventy percent of Kellogg’s business is products made from sewage sludge. Sewage sludge is not allowed on organic farms and gardens.
In late March, the Center for Media & Democracy (CMD) wrote to EMA, alerting them that Kellogg products contain sludge, which may jeopardize the safety and the organic status of the gardens. As a result of the letter, John Stauber, founder of CMD, then met with Ed Begley, Jr., famous environmentalist and EMA board member, who was concerned about the possibility that sludge was used on the gardens.
Jeff Biggers: Arizona’s New Civil Rights Movement
Arizona’s Manufactured Crisis Turns into a Moral Crisis: Why Tucson’s Ethnic Studies Students Can’t Wait
Stumbling further into the quagmire of a national public relations disaster, drastic new measures by the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) officials have turned the “manufactured crisis” over the Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies Program into a troubling moral crisis for the city-and the country.
As Tucson school officials appear to unravel daily with increasing controversy, Mexican American Studies (MAS) students and UNIDOS activists are now emerging as the calmest standard-bearers of civil discourse for the community.
Jim Goodman: Wisconsin’s Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker campaigned as the “nice guy” who carried his lunch in a brown paper bag, a regular guy who just wanted to cut state spending. That, apparently resonated with the electorate. After the election, Wisconsin met the real Scott Walker.
Governor Walker stated that Wisconsin was broke, yet in his first month in office he signed tax cuts for corporations that would put the state $117 million deeper in the hole. This caught the attention of the Wall St. Journal who exposed his “we’re broke” story as mere political grandstanding.
I’m sure he did want to cut spending, but apparently not on his corporate friends. Walker is clearly far more interested in making political hay than he is in sound fiscal policy.
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