“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: The Widening Wealth Divide, and Why We Need a Surtax on the Super Wealthy
Let Santorum and Romney duke it out for who will cut taxes on the wealthy the most and shred the public services everyone else depends on.
The rest of us ought to be having a serious discussion about a wealth tax. Because if you really want to know what’s happening to the American economy you need to look at household wealth – not just incomes.
The Fed just reported that household wealth increased from October through December. That’s the first gain in three quarters.
Good news? Take closer look. The entire gain came from increases in stock prices. Those increases in stock values more than made up for continued losses in home values.
Paul Krugman: The Republican Party’s Long Decline Leads to Irrationality
The economist Brad DeLong notes that the Republican Party we now see in the primaries has been building for a couple of decades: “I went to Washington in 1993 to work for what we called Lloyd Bentsen’s Treasury as part of the sane technocratic bipartisan center,” Mr. DeLong wrote in a blog post on Feb 28. “And it took me only two months – two months! – to conclude that America’s best hope for sane technocratic governance required the elimination of the Republican Party from our political system as rapidly as possible … Nothing since has led me to question or change that belief – only to strengthen it.”
I can’t help thinking of my own decade-plus in the journalistic trenches. Early on in my tenure at The New York Times, I felt I had no choice but to point out the inconvenient truth that the official line of the commentariat was all wrong. George W. Bush was not a nice, blunt, honest guy who happened to be a conservative; he was a serial liar pursuing a hard-line agenda, who, among other things, deliberately misled the United States into war.
Good news, frustrated American citizens! Congress is not a clogged up, hidebound legislative slug after all.
Bills were flying through the Senate on Wednesday like great flocks of geese soaring into the turbines of a passenger jet.
First, the senators passed legislation that would keep all the federally financed highway programs from coming to a screeching halt when money runs out at the end of this month. (Completely unnecessary disaster averted!)
Then, the party leaders came to an agreement on easing a bottleneck of uncontroversial judicial nominations. (People with no enemies cleared for hiring!)
Jeremy Scahill: Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?
On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist. [..]
For many journalists in Yemen, the publicly available “facts” about how Shaye was “assisting” AQAP indicate that simply interviewing Al Qaeda-associated figures, or reporting on civilian deaths caused by US strikes, is a crime in the view of the US government. “I think the worst thing about the whole case is that not only is an independent journalist being held in proxy detention by the US,” says Craig, “but that they’ve successfully put paid to other Yemeni journalists investigating air strikes against civilians and, most importantly, holding their own government to account. Shaye did both of those things.” She adds: “With the huge increase in government air strikes and US drone attacks recently, Yemen needs journalists like Shaye to report on what’s really going on.”
Mark Weisbot: America’s Subversion of Haiti’s Democracy Continues
When the “international community” blames Haiti for its political troubles, the underlying concept is usually that Haitians are not ready for democracy. But it is Washington that is not ready for democracy in Haiti.
Haitians have been ready for democracy for many decades. They were ready when they got massacred at polling stations, trying to vote in 1987, after the fall of the murderous Duvalier dictatorship. They were ready again in 1990, when they voted by a two-thirds majority for the leftist Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, only to see him overthrown seven months later in a military coup. The coup was later found to have been organized by people paid by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
Theresa Brown: Hospitals Aren’t Hotels
YOU should never do this procedure without pain medicine,” the senior surgeon told a resident. “This is one of the most painful things we do.”
She wasn’t scolding, just firm, and she was telling the truth. The patient needed pleurodesis, a treatment that involves abrading the lining of the lungs in an attempt to stop fluid from collecting there. A tube inserted between the two layers of protective lung tissue drains the liquid, and then an irritant is slowly injected back into the tube. The tissue becomes inflamed and sticks together, the idea being that fluid cannot accumulate where there’s no space.
I have watched patients go through pleurodesis, and even with pain medication, they suffer. We injure them in this controlled, short-term way to prevent long-term recurrence of a much more serious problem: fluid around the lungs makes it very hard to breathe.
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