“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”.
New York Times Editorial: The Price of Intolerance
It’s early yet for a full accounting of the economic damage Alabama has done to itself with its radical new immigration law.
Farmers can tally the cost of crops left to rot as workers flee. Governments can calculate the loss of revenues when taxpayers flee. It’s harder to measure the price of a ruined business reputation or the value of investments lost or productivity lost as Alabamians stand in line for hours to prove their citizenship in any transaction with the government. Or what the state will ultimately spend fighting off an onslaught of lawsuits, or training and deploying police officers in the widening immigrant dragnet, or paying the cost of diverting scarce resources away from fighting real crimes.
A growing number of Alabamians say the price will be too high, and there is compelling evidence that they are right. Alabama is already at the low end of states in employment and economic vitality. It has long struggled to lure good jobs and shed a history of racial intolerance.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Will Moderates Defeat Moderation?
The deficit that should most worry us is a deficit of reasonableness. The problems the United States confronts are large but not insoluble. Yet sensible solutions that are broadly popular can’t be enacted.
Why? Because an ideological bloc that sees every crisis as an opportunity to reduce the size of government holds enough power in Congress to stop us from doing what needs to be done.
Some of my middle-of-the-road columnist friends keep ascribing our difficulties to structural problems in our politics. A few call for a centrist third party. But the problem we face isn’t about structures or the party system. It’s about ideology-specifically a right-wing ideology that has temporarily taken over the Republican Party and needs to be defeated before we can have a reasonable debate between moderate conservatives and moderate progressives about our country’s future.
The video of the UC Davis police officer pepper-spraying Occupy Davis protesters not only shows a trampling of First Amendment rights
As we grapple with this vandalism of the First Amendment, we should ask ourselves this: What if there had been no cameras on hand? What if we had only the word of the protesters and their sympathizers that this happened versus the word of authority figures that it did not? Is it so hard to imagine the students’ claims being dismissed, the media attention being a fraction of what it is, the public’s outrage falling along predictable ideological lines and these cops getting a walk?
That’s worth keeping in mind as legislators and law officers around the country move to criminalize the act of videotaping police in the performance of their duties.
David Sirota: Cities, the new hydrofracking victims
Despite devastating health risks, both parties are pushing to allow more drilling near urban areas
On the relatively rare occasions that city folk and suburbanites previously had to think about oil and gas drilling, many probably conjured images of grasshopper-esque rigs dotting remote landscapes like Wyoming’s mountain range, Alaska’s tundra or Oklahoma’s wind-swept plains. Most probably didn’t equate drilling with the bright lights of their big city, but they should have because urban America is fast becoming ground zero for the same fights over energy that have long threatened the great wide open.
With our nation’s still unquenchable (and still highly subsidized) thirst for fossil fuels, the false comfort of NIMBY-ism and the fairy-tale notions of “safety in numbers” is quickly vanishing in our cities, as controversial oil and gas exploration projects creep into metropolitan areas. Incredibly, this geographic trend is accelerating just as new drilling techniques are evoking serious concerns about excessive air pollution and about adverse effects on limited water supplies – problems that have plagued rural energy-producing regions for decades, but are sure to be even worse as they hit densely populated areas.
Mark LeVine: Not exactly deja vu all over again
As protesters continue to occupy Tahrir square, and the military continues the crackdown with impunity, divisions erupt.
As Egypt prepares for elections, Tahrir Square is a similacrum of its old self.
The world’s largest experiment in the effects of long term exposure to toxic tear gas seems, for the moment, to be winding down, as Egyptians prepare to vote for the first post-Mubarak cabinet. The SCAF and its political allies and bedfellows clearly hope that, as the smoke clears, enough Egyptians outside of Tahrir and other centres of protest will ignore the often grotesque violence visited on pro-democracy protesters and vote in a government that will reinforce – or at least not challenge – the decades-old patrimonial system.
That is surely what is behind this cruel experiment, with the Brotherhood leadership deciding it’s better to be an observer rather than a test subject.
But in the square, the effects of constant tear gas exposure on test subjects can now be documented, and while it’s produced a lot of injuries, strange flus and sheer exhaustion, it has only hardened attitudes against the SCAF and increasingly towards any political group that is perceived as having sold out the protesters.
Eugene Robinson: Romney Still Waiting for GOP Love
Moderator Wolf Blitzer opened Tuesday’s Republican debate by introducing himself and adding, for some reason, “Yes, that’s my real name.” A few moments later, the party’s most plausible nominee for president said the following: “I’m Mitt Romney, and yes, Wolf, that’s also my first name.”
But it’s not. Mitt is the candidate’s middle name. His first name is Willard.
And people wonder why this guy has an authenticity problem?
The debate, held at Washington’s historic DAR Constitution Hall, was focused on foreign policy. The subject matter seemed to offer Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, the opportunity to highlight his experience and perhaps begin consolidating his sudden front-runner status. But if he expected to dance rings around the others in the minefields of international politics, he was mistaken.
Michael Winship: DC as ATM: Newt, the Ultimate Beltway Swindler
You maybe should think twice when even Jack Abramoff thinks you’re beneath contempt. Not that Newt Gingrich cares.
Abramoff, America’s favorite convicted influence peddler, told NBC’s David Gregory that presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Gingrich is one of those “people who came to Washington, who had public service, and they cash in on it. They use their public service and access to make money.”
Newt, he continued, is “engaged in the exact kind of corruption that America disdains. The very things that anger the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and everybody who is not in a movement and watches Washington and says why are these guys getting all this money, why do they go become so rich, why do they have these advantages?”
Why indeed? Granted, Abramoff’s in the middle of his promotion tour of confession and attempted redemption, a pot obscenely eager to call his kettle and former mentor black — especially if it sells books. But Casino Jack does have a point.
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