“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”.
Juan Cole: Protest Backroom Deal to Extend Un-Patriot Act til 2015
There’s an action alert by a supporter of Rand Paul over at Firedoglake saying that an attempt will be made at 5 pm on Monday in the Senate to extend the misnamed ‘PATRIOT Act’ for four years. There will be an attempt to get unanimous consent for the extension, with just a motion to which there should be no objections.
Rand’s alert says,
“The surveillance state’s ability to snoop through your business records, pry into your library book checkouts, monitor so-called “lone wolfs,” and spy on your personal communications through roving wiretaps will be extended until 2015, which “coincidentally” is not an election year.”
Here is a similarly urgent ACLU alert.
The vote is part of a deal between majority leader Harry Reid and his Republican colleagues to sidestep debate and rush the legislation through, which is becoming a worrisomely common procedure as the Democrats continue to abdicate their responsibilities to the Constitution, as Glenn Greenwald has elegantly explained.
Robert Kuttner: Beware Greeks Bearing Banks Beware Greeks Bearing Banks
After every financial debacle or war, there is a huge political struggle over whether creditors and financial speculators get to stand in the way of an economic recovery. When the creditors win, ordinary people who had nothing to do with the crisis are typically the victims. Today, the entire political elite is in the austerity camp, and those who argue that creditors should take some losses so that the rest of the economy can grow are mostly ignored.
This is the common theme to the issue of mortgage relief to spare American homeowners millions of foreclosures, the question of whether the US should sacrifice Medicare and Social Security on the altar of deficit reduction, and the punishment being visited upon small European economies such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland.
Washington – “I want to make sure every House Republican is protected from some kind of dishonest Democratic ad. So let me say on the record, any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood, because I have publicly said those words were inaccurate and unfortunate.”
A grateful nation thanks you, Newt Gingrich. The presidential campaign is just starting, and already you’ve given us a passage that will live in infamy — forever — in the annals of American political speech. Your delightful quotation shall be filed under “fiascos” and flagged with a cross-reference to “utter nonsense.”
Mark Weisbrot: The IMF after DSK
Now that Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned from his position as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it is worth taking an objective look at his legacy there. Until his arrest last week on charges of attempted rape and sexual assault, he was widely praised as having changed the IMF, increased its influence and moved it away from the policies that – according to the fund’s critics – had caused so many problems for developing countries in the past. How much of this is true?
Strauss-Kahn took the helm of the IMF in November of 2007, when the IMF’s influence was at a low point. Total outstanding loans at that time were just $10bn, down from $91bn just four years earlier. By the time he left this week, that number had bounced back to $84bn, with agreed-upon loans three times larger. The IMF’s total capital had quadrupled, from about $250bn to an unprecedented $1tn. Clearly, the IMF had resources that it had never had before, mostly as a result of the financial crisis and world recession of 2008-2009.
E. J. Dionne, Jr: Lessons for the media, the bishops and John Boehner
It’s likely you didn’t hear much about the controversy over House Speaker John Boehner’s recent commencement speech at Catholic University. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that Boehner’s critics were civil and respectful. The media, it turns out, don’t cover you much if you are civil and respectful. This would be the same media that regularly disparage incivility and divisiveness in politics.
And the story broke from the stereotypical narrative the media like to impose on Christians in general, and Catholics in particular. If the headline is “Conservative Catholics Denounce Liberal Politician on Abortion,” all the boilerplate is at the ready. But when the headline is “Catholic Progressives Challenge Conservative Politician on Social Justice,” this is something new and complicated. It’s far easier to write the 10th story of the week about Newt Gingrich.
Oh yes, and there is also a problem for those bishops who barely murmur when a Catholic politician departs from the church’s teachings on social justice but think that even the mildest deviation on abortion is enough to keep a public figure off a Catholic campus. As a result, they feed the distorted media narrative about what the church believes.
New York Times Editorial: Chilling Echoes From Sept. 11
As the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania draws near, one of the main recommendations of the 9/11 Commission remains unfulfilled: the creation of a common communications system that lets emergency responders talk to one another across jurisdictions.
The problem was laid bare in the tragic cacophony at the World Trade Center, where scores of firefighters perished as police and fire officials couldn’t communicate on antiquated radio systems before the second tower fell.
Four years later during Hurricane Katrina, emergency workers from across the nation faced the same dangerous problem. They had to resort to running handwritten notes to warn of shifting conditions.
Brian Moench: America Becoming an Idiocracy
In the 2006 satirical science fiction comedy, Idiocracy, the protagonist Joe Bauers, “Mr. Average American”, is selected by the Pentagon for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakens 500 years in the future, to discover a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive and their only hope for survival.
With the Republicans bullying their way through state and federal legislation, the movie has become prophetic to the point where the only thing that isn’t believable is that this devolution will take another 500 years. Idiocracy already has its living, fire-breathing poster child, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the ranking Republican and former chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
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