“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”.
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day. Scroll down for the Gentlmen
Daphne Eviatar: Detention without end, amen
In a time of austerity, and with the planned drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, you might expect congressional proposals to reduce the military’s footprint around the world. You’d be wrong.
Instead, the defense spending bill passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee and now heading for a vote in the full Senate would dramatically expand the U.S. military’s role in counterterrorism – potentially inciting more attacks on U.S. interests.
At the same time, it would very likely undermine the ability of our best-trained experts in counterterrorism to investigate, prosecute and bring to justice international terrorists from all over the world.
In addition, this defense authorization bill marks the first time since the McCarthy era that Congress has sought to create a system of military detention without charge or trial – including U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil.
(emphasis mine)
Dana Goldstein: New Public Health Report Underscores: Long Live the Condom
For women in the developing world, few public health strategies have the potential to be as transformative as increasing the rate of male condom usage.
This truth-more controversial than it sounds-is hammered home today by a New York Times report on a new study that found injectible hormonal birth control, such as Depo-Provera, can double a woman’s risk of contracting HIV from her male partner, even as it prevents pregnancy. This catch-22 is unacceptable. Expanding women’s economic and political power means empowering girls and women to avoid three all-too-common fates: early marriage, unintended pregnancy and HIV infection.
We can all look forward to higher quality trolls in comments courtesy of the New York Fed (assuming we don’t have them already) thanks to a more thorough blogosphere/social media monitoring program the Fed is planing to launch (hat tip reader Tom via TPM):
New York Fed Social Media Request for Proposal
The idea that the Federal Reserve is somehow lacking in share of voice in academic and popular discourse is laughable. I’ve gotten estimates from credible sources that the Fed now funds a full 1/4 of all graduate school research in economics. Bernanke, FOMC Board members, and the various regional Fed presidents have ready access to the media and take frequent advantage of it. Fed staffers regularly publish papers, some of which are appallingly close to propaganda as it is (a recent one I did not have the energy to shred tried to argue that foreclosures didn’t result in lower living standards. Fortunately, a New York Times op ed, “Foreclosures are Killing Us” effectively debunked it).
Amy Goodman: Policing the Prophets of Wall Street
The Occupy Wall Street protest grows daily, spreading to cities across the United States. “We are the 99 percent,” the protesters say, “that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”
The response by the New York City Police Department has been brutal. Last Saturday, the police swept up more than 700 protesters in one of the largest mass arrests in U.S. history. The week before, innocent protesters were pepper-sprayed in the face without warning or reason.
That is why, after receiving a landmark settlement this week from the police departments of Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as the U.S. Secret Service, my colleagues and I went to Liberty Square, the heart of the Wall Street occupation, to announce the legal victory.
Maureen Dowd: Man in the Mirror
The unlikely femme fatale from Jersey sashayed into a Trenton news conference and broke a lot of hearts. (Not Snooki’s or Barry’s, of course.)
Watching Chris Christie hold forth for an hour, it’s hard to know whether you want to hug him or slap him. There’s something both lovable and irritating about the man.
It’s not the puffed up body that’s off-putting. It’s the puffed up ego.
John Nichols: With Obama Veering Corporate On Trade, Democrats Need to ‘Distinguish Themselves From the President’
Barack Obama’s approval rating is hovering around 40 percent, falling as low as 38 percent in a recent Gallup survey and 39 percent in the latest McClatchey-Marist poll.
That’s bad. But it gets worse.
The new ABC News/Washington Post poll says that 55 percent of Americans now expect that whoever wins the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 to take the presidency. Only 37 percent believe Obama will win.
That’s really bad. And the numbers from the battleground states are even more unsettling, A new Quinnipiac survey of Florida voters finds that only 39 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the presidency, while 57 percent disapprove. Only 41 percent of those surveyed say they think the president should be reelected.
Polls are transitory. The president’s numbers can and probably will improve, especially if he stays focused on the message he has been delivering in recent days: invest in job creation, establish fairer tax policies that make the rich pay their share, defend Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
But his decision to submit free-deals with South Korea, Columbia and Panama to Congress — deals that are opposed by organized labor and that even Obama-friendly analysts say threaten U.S. manufacturing jobs — could undo any progress for the president, especially in battleground states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Wisconsin. Congressman Mike Michaud, D-Maine, says flatly that Obama’s move is not going to go over well with working people. “Does (Obama) want to create jobs at home with the American Jobs Act, or does he want to offshore them to places like South Korea? At a time of nine percent unemployment, I know what my constituents would prefer,” says Michaud. “There’s something wrong with this picture and the American people see right through it.”
Matt Stoller: Justice Democrats take on big banks
If you look, you can find a few Democrats who have been staging their own version of Occupying Wall Street. Three state attorneys general are now taking a wrecking ball to the party’s key policy axis: the bank bailouts. Each has pledged to investigate possible fraud in the securitization of trillions of dollars of mortgages – and made significant legal moves that suggest they are serious about doing so.
In the process, they have placed themselves squarely in the middle of a multitrillion-dollar fight over the nature of the financial system and the future of the Democratic Party.
In 2008, Barack Obama seemed to represent the party’s future – with his legion of shiny young organizers, his multimillion-person email list and his promise of structural changes to the political order. Today, his administration looks tired and brittle, trapped among a surly country, dissatisfied supporters, a still creaky banking system and a brutal reelection climate.
Recent Comments