“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”.
Gail Collins: Housebound for the Holidays
Right now, you are probably asking yourself: What exactly is going on with Congress? What’s all this yelling about a tax increase? Also, are they shutting down the government again? Because I was really planning to spend my Christmas camping out in a national park.
Good news! Congress did not shut down the government this month. It was sort of dancing around the idea, but the country has grown so inured to this kind of behavior that nobody paid any attention.
Then our lawmakers moved on to a crisis over the payroll tax, unemployment compensation and Medicare. On which they totally dropped the ball.
Robert Reich: The Defining Issue: Not Government’s Size, but Who It’s For
The defining political issue of 2012 won’t be the government’s size. It will be who government is for.
Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government.
But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn’t about government’s size. The cynicism comes from a growing perception that government isn’t working for average people. It’s for big business, Wall Street, and the very rich instead.
In a recent Pew Foundation poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.
Few journalists have greater influence on U.S. foreign policy, particularly regarding the Middle East, than New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. But his tortured obit of a column this week on the official end of the neocolonialist disaster that has been the Iraq occupation reminds one that the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner often gets it wrong.
Was the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which he did so much to encourage, a “wise choice”? Friedman hides behind one of his trademark ambiguities: “My answer is twofold: ‘No’ and ‘Maybe, sort of, we’ll see.’ I say ‘no’ because whatever happens in Iraq, even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.”
Aside from the stunning amorality of assessing the cost of war from the standpoint of the royal “we,” Friedman seems wildly optimistic about what the invasion has wrought. On a day when Iraq’s prime minister, a Shiite, demanded that the leader of the Kurds arrest the Sunni vice president, Friedman celebrated the unity of the three groups as “the most important product of the Iraq war.” He blamed the failure of the U.S. occupation to accomplish more, in roughly equal measure, on “the incompetence of George W. Bush’s team in prosecuting the war,” “Iran, the Arab dictators and, most of all, Al Qaeda,” which he seems surprised to report “did not want a democracy in the heart of the Arab world.”
Richard D. Wolff: Occupy the Corporation
Imagine a democratic alternative to police evictions of Occupy encampments across America’s cities and towns. What if the decision to evict or not had been made by referendum? Voters could have determined whether to continue the long overdue public debates over inequality, injustice and capitalism that were launched and sustained above all by the Occupy encampments.
But that never happened in a society where private corporations own parks, lots and other possible Occupy sites. The corporate shareholders and boards of directors of those sites – a tiny minority of the population – could shut down Occupy encampments by invoking property rights. That tiny minority never wanted a national debate that questioned its disproportionate wealth and power. Private property enabled a minority with 1 percent of the wealth and income to make decisions affecting everyone regardless of what a 99 percent majority might want.
Eric Altman: Governor Cuomo Is Still Governor One Percent
As 2011 slips into history, it appears a safe bet that despite tough competition, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has walked away with this year’s coveted award for “stupidest and most offensive analogy made by a non-Republican candidate or a journalist not covering said candidate.” Asked why, when he was being forced to lay off thousands of city and state workers, cut the pensions of countless others, and reduce aid to mass transit and education, he insisted on fighting tooth and nail to kill the so-called millionaire’s tax on the state’s highest earners-a tax, by the way, that would have ensured an additional $4 billion for such needs, and that was favored by 72 percent of respondents in an October poll-Cuomo replied, “The fact that everybody wants it, that doesn’t mean all that much.” Cuomo then recalled that his father, Mario Cuomo, famously opposed the death penalty despite strong majority support. “Reporters would say, ‘Well, people want it,'” Cuomo added. “And the point was, you know, we don’t elect-you can’t just have as a governor a big poll-taking machine, right?” So Andrew Cuomo’s willingness to thwart the will of the majority and stick a thumb in the eye of his own party on behalf of the interests of multimillionaires and billionaires-literally, the “1 percent”-is somehow analogous to the lonely, brave and extremely costly political stand his father took on behalf of condemned prisoners on death row.
Theresa Brown: Looking for a Place to Die
THE patient was a fairly young woman and she’d had cancer for as long as her youngest child had been alive. That child was now walking and talking and her mother’s cancer had spread throughout her body to the point where there were no more curative options. Aggressive growth of the disease in her brain had stripped her of her personality and her memories. [..]
No one could say for sure how long she would live, but continued hospital care was clearly pointless. Nor could she go home: she needed more attention than her family could provide. Everyone – her physician, the husband, the palliative care team, we nurses – agreed she needed inpatient hospice care, and that it should be provided close to home.
The problem was, she had no place to go. There was a hospice facility near her house, but it would accept her only if she would die within six days.
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