“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”.
Paul Krugman: When Industry Pollutes, We All Pay a Steep Price
Economics professors Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn and William Nordhaus have a new paper in the latest edition of the American Economic Review that should be a major factor in how we discuss economic ideology. It won’t, of course, but let me lay out the case anyway.
In their paper, “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy,” what Muller, Mendelsohn and Nordhaus do is estimate the cost imposed on society by air pollution, and allocate it across industries. The costs being calculated, by the way, don’t include the long-run threat of climate change; they’re focused on measurable impacts of pollution on health and productivity, with the most important effects involving how pollutants – especially small particulates – affect human health, and use standard valuations on mortality and morbidity to turn these into dollars.
New York Times Editorial: Chipping Away at Gridlock
A small but significant blow for progress in the Senate was struck Thursday evening when Democrats voted to prohibit one of the many delaying tactics that keep the chamber tied up in pointless partisan arguments. It was a long way from desperately needed filibuster reform, but it showed that sufficiently frustrated senators can take action to prevent the Senate from being a total dead weight.
Unlike the House, the Senate has long safeguarded the rights of its minority party to prevent a simple majority from swiftly bulldozing bills into law. Any senator has the right to prolong debate on an issue, unless 60 senators vote to cut off a filibuster, a move known as cloture. Then there is a limit to the amendments that can be introduced.
Washington – It’s not often that a sound bite from a Democratic candidate gets so under the skin of my distinguished colleague George F. Will that he feels moved to quote it in full and then devote an entire column to refuting it. This is instructive.
The declaration heard ’round the Internet world came from Elizabeth Warren, the consumer champion running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Warren argued that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” that thriving entrepreneurs move their goods “on the roads the rest of us paid for” and hire workers “the rest of us paid to educate.” Police and firefighters, also paid for by “the rest of us,” protect the factory owner’s property. As a result, our “underlying social contract” requires this hardworking but fortunate soul to “take a hunk” of his profits “and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Eugene Robinson: Occupy the Moment
Washington – Occupy Wall Street and its kindred protests around the country are inept, incoherent and hopelessly quixotic. God, I love ’em.
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We have no shortage of politicians in this country. What we need is more passion and energy in the service of justice. We need to be forced to answer questions that sound simplistic or naive — questions about ethics and values. Detailed policy positions can wait.
At some point, these protest encampments will disappear — and, since the nation and the world will not have changed, they’ll be judged a failure. But I’ve got a hunch that this likely judgment will be wrong. I think the seed of progressive activism in the Occupy protests may grow into something very big indeed.
Agnès Catherine Poirier: Can Marine Le Pen Win in France?
The handshake is firm, the eye contact direct, the voice deep and strong; there is no doubt she is her father’s daughter. Marine Le Pen also shares with papa Jean-Marie-the longtime leader of France’s extreme-right National Front, who retired last December at 82-the physicality of a menhir, those monumental stone megaliths one finds in Brittany and Cornwall. The blue-eyed blonde is as tall as she is large; she is une force de la nature.
Ben Adler: Another Racial Misstep for Perry?
After the Washington Post revealed that Rick Perry’s family hunting property had a racist name you would think the Perry campaign would be on their best behavior where racial politics are concerned. You’d be wrong.
On Friday Rick Perry’s wife Anita will visit Bob Jones University, the Christian college school in Greenville, South Carolina to have lunch with students and faculty. BJU has an unpleasant recent history regarding race. It did not admit any black students until 1971, and it did not admit unmarried black students until 1975. Fearing that it would lose its tax-exempt status due its racist policies, in 1975 BJU admitted unmarried black students. But it simultaneously adopted rules banning inter-racial dating.
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