“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”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
The New York Times Editorial: Mr. Romney Reinvents History
Mitt Romney wrapped the most important speech of his life, for Thursday night’s session of his convention, around an extraordinary reinvention of history – that his party rallied behind President Obama when he won in 2008, hoping that he would succeed. “That president was not the choice of our party,” he said. “We are a good and generous people who are united by so much more than divides us.”
The truth, rarely heard this week in Tampa, Fla., is that the Republicans charted a course of denial and obstruction from the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated, determined to deny him a second term by denying him any achievement, no matter the cost to the economy or American security – even if it meant holding the nation’s credit rating hostage to a narrow partisan agenda.
Cenk Uygur: The Real Convention Is at Cracker Bay
One of the reasons this Republican convention has been so deathly dull is that the real action isn’t at the convention. It’s at Cracker Bay. That’s the name of the yacht where the Romney team just hosted 50 partiers, including some of his top donors. This was one of about a dozen events outside of the convention where they had private meetings with donors giving more than $1 million dollars to his campaign. Over $1 million a piece. Now, where do you think the real policy gets made?
You think Mitt Romney gives a damn what a delegate thinks? The only delegates that matter were on that yacht. They call this group the “Victory Council.” This is made of people who are literally millionaires and billionaires and who dictate what Mitt Romney’s positions will be. He’s a legendary flip-flopper, but if you want to know what he really thinks you had to be on that boat.
I built this column.
I built it all by myself in this second American century.
I built it after seeing banners at the Republican National Convention saying, “Build, Baby, Build!” So I decided to drill down and see what I could find.
I found I needed a laptop that somebody else had built, somewhere outside the United States, somewhere like China, where there’s a lot of building going on. Naturally enough I discarded the computer in horror because I believe in building things myself from the ground up, just like my role-model Mom told me. She, by the way, was from Sicily and came via Wales to the United States, where she built a small business.
Now, that’s the last time I’m going to mention foreign countries in this self-built column. Real Americans know the rest of the world does not exist. The rest of the world is just a bad fantasy the other party has.
John Nichols: Mitt Romney: His Party Is the Problem
Who knew that Mitt Romney was such a fan of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign?
“How many days have you woken up feeling that something really special was happening in America?” Romney told thousands of Republican delegates, alternates and hangers-on Thursday night. “Many of you felt that way on Election Day four years ago. Hope and Change had a powerful appeal.”
Speaking of the “fresh excitement about the possibilities of a new president” Americans felt upon Obama’s election, the man who will now seek to prevent the Democratic president’s reelection told the 40th Republican National Convention about how much he had hoped Obama would succeed “because I wanted America to succeed.”
But it wasn’t just that citizens wanted America to succeed. As Romney noted: “Every family in America wanted this to be a time when they could get ahead a little more, put aside a little more for college, do more for their elderly mom who’s living alone now or give a little more to their church or charity… This was the hope and change America voted for.”
In this, Romney was right.
Laura Flanders; The Bushwomen. They’re Back.
There she is, just the woman I was thinking of, on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Except she isn’t apologizing for her role unleashing the GOP’s “war on women.” She is writing about terrorism and the Clean Air Act. What I’d wanted someone to ask Christine Todd Whitman about was the day at the 1996 RNC, when she helped coronate today’s extremist GOP.
Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman is usually described in the money media with the words “moderate” and “pro-choice” glued firmly to her name. Republican in a pro-choice state, she’s on the record saying that abortion is “a personal decision between a woman and her doctor,” and the government has no business telling a woman what to do. (That used to be the conservative position.) She’s held up by pro-choicers as a tragicomic victim, abandoned by her party, but the fact is, Whitman’s done more to help the vicious wing of the GOP than she ever did to stop the backlash.
Richard Dreyfuss: US Sells Three-Fourths of Worldwide Arms
Here’s the opening phrase of a scare story in the Washington Post from this weekend:
China’s arms exports have surged over the past decade… [..]
China doesn’t even show up as a blip on the screen. The Post buries in the piece that China is “the sixth-largest arms exporter in the world.”
So dominant is the United States in worldwide arms trafficking that-get this!-US arms sales to a single country, Saudi Arabia, totaled $33.4 billion last year. That amount surpassed the entire total of US arms sales to all countries in the world in 2009, $31 billion. A commentary by a Wall Street analysis site notes happily: “The news confirms how critical defense, airplane, and agricultural exports are to the overall American trade balance.”
Recent Comments