“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.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: The Silence of the Elites
Nero’s fiddling while Rome burned may be nothing compared to the folly of Washington and Wall Street’s inaction while the world economy teeters on the verge of global depression. No wonder the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have spread across the world. By raising a din, they might wake folks up.
Last week, yet another filibuster by Republican senators blocked even a debate on President Obama’s jobs bill, which is already modest in the extreme. More than half of the bill would simply avoid making things worse – extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance, and trying to limit layoffs of teachers and police officers next year. Without the extensions, the cuts in government spending and hikes in taxes would reduce an estimated 2 percent of GDP from growth next year – at a time when the economy is already near a standstill.
Daphne Eviatar: Underwear Bomber’s Plea Underscores Law Enforcement’s Key Role Fighting Terrorism
In the days after the so-called “underwear bomber” tried to take down a plane over Detroit on Christmas 2009, critics of the Obama adminstration were all over the national news decrying the decision to read the would-be bomber his Miranda rights and try him in a U.S. federal court.
When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty last week to the attempted murder of 289 passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit, those critics were noticeably silent.
That’s likely because the guilty plea, coming just one day after the start of his trial, underscores the point many of us have been making for years now: U.S. federal courts are the most effective place to try terrorism suspects.
Americans may not be quick-studies in the art of revolution, and yes, it did seem to take forever for unemployed and underemployed US workers, college students and white collar “professionals” to “get” that US jobs lost weren’t coming back – at least not in this corporate-owned lifetime — or that the “American Dream,” as we once understood it was effectively dead, but once we “got it,” we really did get it.
Now that we’ve caught up with the “Arab spring” and the “European summer,” the “American autumn” (notice I resisted the urge to call it the “American fall”) is undeniably and seriously under way.
Thanks in large part to the resourcefulness and intelligence of the protesters themselves, this 21st century American Revolution isn’t looking like it’s ready to go down without a fight. And when that fight comes, it threatens to rock all that is held sacred in the unholy world of corporate greed and excess.
Anne Landman: BP’s Gulf of Mexico PR, One Year Later
Finger-pointing over the Deepwater Horizon disaster resumed recently after the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Coast Guard issued a joint report (pdf) which concluded all three corporate participants in the calamity — BP, Transocean Ltd. and Halliburton — were at fault. The report concluded all three companies violated federal laws and safety regulations by “failing to take necessary precautions to keep the Macondo well under control at all times.” The report also found all three companies were “jointly and severally liable for the failure to comply with all applicable regulations.” That means all three companies are mutually responsible for the accident, and each can be held singly responsible for the entire debacle. The report parsed blame among the companies for sloppy materials and workmanship, inadequate training, failure to properly assess risk and conduct proper testing, failure to abide by stop-work work policies after multiple anomalies were discovered, and so on.
Mary Elizabeth King: The Search for a Message
As the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) phenomenon grows, it has been expressing many truths, even while struggling to find a single over-arching message. The search for captions, slogans, and themes that illuminate the changes sought is characteristic of civil resistance campaigns. This is not merely branding, but a way to sharpen the concrete results that can result from such a dramatic outpouring of human aspiration, emotion, energy, protest, and yearning. Some observers have grown impatient with the evolving messaging coming out of OWS, but, historically, slogans have often often changed as a campaign proceeds.
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Remembering that successful movements in East Germany, South Africa, and Serbia saw their messages evolve and diverge should prompt us to have patience with the messaging from OWS. History suggests that not having “one demand” from the outset is no reason to consider this movement uncommonly disorganized, or irrelevant. Still, messages penetrate best when lucid and simple. Messaging aids recruitment, helps to expand constituencies, and signals to sympathizers how they can help. It can pitch grievances that need regulatory reforms. It can appeal to potential defectors within targeted institutions. Those of us involved in civil resistance have as one of our most important of tasks communicating with the people that we want to reach.
Maureen Dowd: Anne Frank, a Mormon?
At an appearance at George Washington University here Saturday night, Bill Maher bounded into territory that the news media have been gingerly tiptoeing around.
Magic underwear. Baptizing dead people. Celestial marriages. Private planets. Racism. Polygamy.
“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ”
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