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”.
Ari Berman: Senate Republicans Block Yet Another Well-Qualified Obama Nominee
In April 2010, President Obama nominated Peter Diamond, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and MIT professor, to a seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. On three different occasions the Senate Banking Committee approved his nomination. Yet Republicans in the Senate, led by Alabama’s Richard Shelby, blocked his confirmation because they disagreed with his economic policy views. “Dr. Diamond is an old-fashioned, big government Keynesian,” Shelby said. Diamond, who finally had enough of the endless delay and partisan attacks, withdrew his nomination today, explaining why in a New York Times op-ed. “Last October, I won the Nobel Prize in economics for my work on unemployment and the labor market,” he wrote. “But I am unqualified to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve-at least according to the Republican senators who have blocked my nomination.”
The absence of a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the Fed at a time of economic crisis is particularly galling. L’affaire Diamond is a perfect illustration of how Senate Republicans have abused and warped Senate rules, which I blogged about last week. Diamond suffered the same fate as other well-qualified Obama nominees, like Goodwin Liu and Dawn Johnson, who Republicans stubbornly refused to confirm.
As I noted last week, of the 1,132 executive and judicial branch nominations submitted to the Senate by President Obama, 223 nominees have yet to receive a vote on the Senate floor, according to White House data. That means that nearly 20 percent of Obama nominees have been blocked by Senate Republicans.
Robert Shatterly: The Loneliness and Courage of Thomas Drake: A Whistleblower’s Journey
“As a student of history and politics, I firmly believe that we have reached a breaking point in this country, when the government violates and erodes our very privacy and precious freedoms in the name of national security and then hides it behind the convenient label of secrecy.
This is not the America I took an oath to support and defend in my career. This is not the America I learned about while growing up in Texas and Vermont. This is not the America we are supposed to be.” — Thomas Drake, from his acceptance speech of the 2011 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling
Thomas Drake tried to do everything right. He thought that the road he was on of government service was the same road that was consistent with his values.
Immediately after his first day on the job at the National Security Agency — September 11, 2001 — he began to see those roads diverge. For years he tried to straddle them — one foot on the road of loyalty to the NSA and procedural complaint, one foot on the road consistent with his oath to uphold the Constitution. Finally he had to choose or be ethically dismembered. He chose to blow the whistle on waste, fraud, and patent illegality at the NSA. He chose consistency with his ethical sense of Constitutional duty. He knew that illegal wiretaps and the obsessive secrecy to hide them was inconsistent with democracy and the rule of law.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a political careerist who has never taken one elected office without beginning to position himself to run for the next, made a wild play for the national stage just weeks after being sworn in last winter as a Republican governor with Republican majorities in both chambers of the Wisconsin legislature.
Using a supposedly minor “budget repair bill” as his vehicle, Walker proposed to scrap most collective bargaining rights for state, county and municipal employees and teachers, to radically restructure state government to concentrate power in the governor’s office and to use that power to limit access to healthcare for working families and seniors while bartering off public assets in no-bid deals with favored corporations.
Mike Lux: Our Economy’s Best Chance
The terrible wrongness of the Ryan budget plan combined with the strangest, craziest Republican presidential candidate field ever makes it rather obvious how important it is to get President Obama re-elected. To have extreme right Republicans (that seems to be pretty much all of them these days) control every branch of government would do even more damage now, as weakened economically as we are, than the 2003-2006 run they had with Bush and Congressional Republicans running everything — and think how ugly that was for the country. The good news is that Republicans are doing a very good job right now showing how bad they are, with this weak field of presidential hopefuls in all-out pander mode to the far right of their party, and the lockstep support for the Ryan budget showing how extreme they are — not just on Medicare but on a wide range of other major issues. And I feel good about many of the Obama team’s moves so far this cycle, especially creating Democratic unity around opposition to Ryan’s budget.
However, as is obvious to pretty much everyone who follows politics at all (and probably a fair share of people who don’t), the continued problems with our economic trajectory is going to remain a serious problem dragging down the president’s re-election chances. Conventional economists and D.C. politicos, who generally focus on fiscal policy to the exclusion of just about everything else, feel stymied because they feel like the economy needs another fiscal stimulus package, and they know that is the exact opposite direction that House Republicans want to go. As a result, most people in Washington have pretty much given up on improving the economy between now and the 2012 election, and are devising strategies for Obama around running without the background of an improving economy.
Ray McGovern: Gen. Keane Keen on Attacking Iran
Celebrating a golden anniversary reunion with classmates from Fordham College (class of 1961) on a perfect June day in New York should be a time of pure Gaudeamus Igitur and little or no stress.
I should have known better that to attend a long lecture by Jack Keane, a retired four-star general of Fordham Business School’s class of 1966. Actually, I did know better; but I went anyway. I felt I could risk going to hear Keane’s slant on the world because, prior to my upcoming Mediterranean cruise to Gaza, my cardiologist had pronounced my blood pressure under control. I felt as good, and energized, as 50 years ago.
Keane, now a member of Fordham’s Board of Trustees, has been the go-to general for the neoconservatives in recent years. He indicated that he was about to catch a flight to Europe where he would lobby leaders of the 41 NATO countries who, except for three, have been “unwilling to ask their people to sacrifice” in places like Afghanistan. (It seems never to have crossed his mind that most Europeans have long since concluded that the war in Afghanistan – aka Vietnamistan – is a fool’s errand, and that they are less susceptible to misleading rhetoric about the so-called War on Terror.)
Thomas Gallagher: Part of the Way With the WSJ
“America can be a superpower or a welfare state, but not both.” So says the Wall Street Journal in its editorial on “The Gates Farewell Warning.” Although you probably won’t have to read the article to know which side the paper came down on, we shouldn’t miss the significance of the newspaper of record of the world of capital acknowledging that a choice has to be made. After all, many people on the other side of the fence have been arguing that point for some time and largely been ignored.
As the lone Cabinet holdover from the Bush Administration, Defense Secretary Robert Gates already embodies the continuity that has caused some to speak of the “Bush-Obama War on Terror.” His current pre-retirement tour, where he warns of the hazards of reduced military spending, represents one final effort to solidify this legacy.
WSJ’s general aversion to government spending is well known, that is, its aversion to government spending that doesn’t disproportionately benefit its clientele. So far as spending on “new capabilities, from an air refueling tanker fleet to ballistic missile submarines” goes, however – well, if the government doesn’t buy this stuff, of course, no one will. And that would wreak havoc on our “free market economy,” wouldn’t it?
Richard (RJ) Eskow: It’s Not Just the Sex: Why John Edwards Matters
There’s a natural temptation to look the other way as the John Edwards story plays out. Don’t. This story matters. To use a time-honored phrase, “it’s not just about the sex.” The preternaturally pretty and youthful Edwards is the Dorian Gray of American politics. His story has a lot to teach us about our culture and the way we choose our leaders.
And like so many tales of power, it eventually leads back to Wall Street.
I’m a Celebrity Politician… Get Me Out of Here!
Want to know what’s wrong with our politics? He-e-e-re’s Johnny! Edwards is a political Charlie Sheen, a media superstar fueled by his own addictions and ego. Why didn’t we see it before? His story indicts the Usual Suspects, celebrity-driven campaigning and the media’s herd mentality. But it also shines an unflattering light on progressives, the Democratic Party, and many of us who take pleasure in thinking that we’re “better than” our broken political system.
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