“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: Springtime for Toxics
Here’s what I wanted for Christmas: something that would make us both healthier and richer. And since I was just making a wish, why not ask that Americans get smarter, too?
Surprise: I got my wish, in the form of new Environmental Protection Agency standards on mercury and air toxics for power plants. These rules are long overdue: we were supposed to start regulating mercury more than 20 years ago. But the rules are finally here, and will deliver huge benefits at only modest cost.
So, naturally, Republicans are furious. But before I get to the politics, let’s talk about what a good thing the E.P.A. just did.
Matt Taibbi: A Christmas Message From America’s Rich
It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.
True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.
But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.
Just in time for Christmas, PolitiFact delivered a big, fat gift to the Republican Party and its efforts to end Medicare. Sure, this gift was wrapped in a tissue-thin veneer of objectivity and held together by a transparently weak ribbon of a qualifier-it was missing the phrase “as we know it”-but when PolitiFact slapped a brazen “Lie of the Year” bow on top, all pretense pretty much disappeared.
The reaction to such a gross distortion, one that no doubt will be featured in GOP campaign ads throughout the general election next fall, was swift and full-throated:
Here’s the inestimable Pierce on its general “pissantery.”
Here’s Jonathan Cohn with an healthcare policy rebuttal.
Here’s Dave Wiegel talking about how the “lie” actually has its origins in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal.
John Nichols: A Conservative Christmas Carol of Scrooge, Marley, Gingrich and Romney
There is something painfully fitting about the fact that the race for the GOP presidential nomination is hitting its peak during the Christmastide. The open disdain for the least among us, for the toilers in the vineyards, for strangers that has been expressed by Newt “End Child Labor Laws” Gingrich, Mitt “Corporations Are People Too” Romney and their immigrant-bashing, union-hating compatriots has given the 2012 race a distinct 1843 character.
In her exceptional new biography of Charles Dickens, Claire Tomalin explains that the novelist’s tale of that latter year, A Christmas Carol, was “Dickens’ response to the condition of the working class.” And she is right, up to a point. But A Christmas Carol is, as well, Dickens’s response to those who would blame the conditions imposed by economic inequality on children who have not taught themselves how to “rise.”
In seeking to awaken a spirit of charity in his countrymen, Dickens called attention to those who callously dismissed the poor as a burden and the unemployed as a lazy lot best forced to grab at bootstraps and pull themselves upward.
New York Times Editorial: Fairness for Home Care Aides
Evelyn Coke spent 20 years as a home care aide helping the elderly and the sick, but she did not live to see fair labor laws applied to her work.
In a case that went to the Supreme Court in 2007, Ms. Coke, who died in 2009, sued her employer for years of unpaid overtime and lost, 9 to 0. This month, President Obama invoked Ms. Coke’s memory when he announced that the Labor Department had finally proposed changes to the provisions on which the court had based its decision.
At issue in Ms. Coke’s case was a 1975 labor rule that defined home care aides as “companions,” a class of workers that does not qualify for federal minimum wage and overtime protections. Ms. Coke’s lawyer, Craig Becker, argued that the rule was supposed to apply only to occasional domestic workers, like baby sitters, not home care aides – one of the nation’s fastest-growing occupations and one whose duties often include feeding, bathing and dressing clients. But the justices said that only Congress or the Labor Department could change the rule, not the court.
Ilyse Hogur: When GOP Walks, Dems Must Move From Blame to Fight
Congress officially adjourned for the year yesterday when Representative Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA) brought down the gavel and declared class dismissed until January 2012. When Democrats protested that the majority had not allowed a vote on the bipartisan Senate deal to avoid raising the payroll tax on 160 million American workers, the GOP cut the microphones and cameras so Americans could not hear their protestations. This remarkable move prompted C-SPAN-responsible for filming the sessions so Americans can keep tabs on their lawmakers-to publicly exonerate themselves, tweeting, “C-SPAN has no control over the U.S. House TV cameras-the Speaker of the House does.”
It’s as if Speaker Boehner thinks that by shutting down the cameras, turning off the lights and going home, the movie is over. Only-to state what’s obvious to anyone who is not in the DC fog-this “movie” is a real-life nightmare for too many Americans. If this were a screenplay, this move would be a perfect way to wrap up the year defined by hyper-partisan gridlock. Cutting the C-SPAN feed that offers at least some transparency to Congress’s machinations puts an exclamation point on the ruthless serial political brinkmanship that now stands in for the business of governing the country.
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