“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”.
Robert Reich: Free Enterprise on Trial
Mitt Romney is casting the 2012 campaign as “free enterprise on trial” – defining free enterprise as achieving success through “hard work and risking-taking.” Tea-Party favorite Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina says he’s supporting Romney because “we really need someone who understands how risk, taking risk … is the way we create jobs, create choices, expand freedom.” Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donahue, defending Romney, explains “this economy is about risk. If you don’t take risk, you can’t have success.”
Wait a minute. Who do they think are bearing the risks? Their blather about free enterprise risk-taking has it upside down. The higher you go in the economy, the easier it is to make money without taking any personal financial risk at all. The lower you go, the bigger the risks.
Bill McKibben: Agitators in the Oilsands Debates are Working for Oil Companies
I’ve been visiting Canada all my life, but I’m a little worried about my upcoming trip.
In late March I’m supposed to come to Vancouver to give a couple of talks. Youth Action Canada invited me to come, to speak to college students from across the country; I’m also planning to do a benefit for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. But now I read that Joe Oliver, the country’s natural resources minister, is condemning “environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block” the Northern Gateway pipeline from the oilsands of Alberta to the Pacific.
I think he’s talking about people like me. I’ve spent much of the last year helping rally opposition to the Key-stone XL pipeline from the oilsands to the Gulf of Mexico. I was arrested outside the White House in August, and emceed the demonstration that brought thousands of people to circle the White House in November. When I come to British Columbia, I’ll urge everyone I meet to oppose the Gate-way project. In fact, Youth Action is paying me to come. And the money will end up at 350.org, the international climate change campaign, helping fight projects like Gateway around the world.
From all evidence, the issue of economic justice isn’t going away. Break the news gently to Mitt Romney, who seems apoplectic that the whole “rich get richer, poor get poorer” thing is being discussed out loud. In front of the children, for goodness’ sake.
“You know I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms,” he told the “Today” show’s Matt Lauer last week. “But the president has made this part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach.”
Actually, those blasts weren’t comimg from President Obama. That was Romney’s competition for the Republican nomination, sounding like a speakers’ lineup at an Occupy Wall Street rally.
Charles M. Blow: Newt Gingrich and the Art of Racial Politics
I’ll spare you the video. TMC
That’s the way I like to spend my Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: watching Newt Gingrich sneer at Juan Williams, a black man, for having the temerity to ask him if his condescending remarks about the work ethic of poor black people are indeed condescending:
Juan Williams: Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also say poor kids lack a strong work ethic and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed as at a minimum as insulting to all Americans but particularly to black Americans?
Newt Gingrich: No, I don’t see that (applause).
Gingrich went on to say that the children would be “getting money, which is a good thing if you’re poor. Only the elites despise earning money.”
The first implication here is that elites are liberals, not men like Gingrich – whose net worth The Los Angeles Times has estimated to be $6.7 million, who was a history professor, who was paid $1.6 million dollars by Freddie Mac for “advice,” and who had a half million dollar line of credit at Tiffany’s.
If Gingrich isn’t among America’s elite, the word no longer has meaning.
New York Times Editorial: Taxes and Transparency
Barack Obama released his tax records when he ran for president in 2008. So did Richard Nixon in 1968. In fact, so did George Romney in that same campaign.
But, in 2012, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and onetime chief executive of a private equity firm, is still hedging about whether he will do so.
Candidates for the presidency are not legally required to release their tax records, but they generally have for many years now – because American voters have a right to know how the men and women who want to be president make their money.
Barry Lando: Iran, the U.S. and Israel: Blind Man’s Bluff
In a perilous spiral of assassinations, threats and counterthreats, leaders in Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran keep ratcheting up the tension. What is most alarming about the situation is that the principal players and their advisers are engaged in an incredibly dangerous three-way game of blind man’s bluff.
None of them expresses a real understanding of the others-their motives, their concerns or their likely reactions. That’s true even for Israel and the United States: Though the U.S. risks being sucked into any conflict between Israel and Iran, the Obama administration is currently forced to guess what its supposed allies in Israel are planning.
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