“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
Paul Krugman: Truth About Jobs
If anyone had doubts about the madness that has spread through a large part of the American political spectrum, the reaction to Friday’s better-than expected report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should have settled the issue. For the immediate response of many on the right – and we’re not just talking fringe figures – was to cry conspiracy. [..]
[..] The furor over Friday’s report revealed a political movement that is rooting for American failure, so obsessed with taking down Mr. Obama that good news for the nation’s long-suffering workers drives its members into a blind rage. It also revealed a movement that lives in an intellectual bubble, dealing with uncomfortable reality – whether that reality involves polls or economic data – not just by denying the facts, but by spinning wild conspiracy theories.
It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power.
The New York Times Editorial: The Cacophony of Money
Two-thirds of the $50 million spent on Mitt Romney’s behalf in Ohio has come from outside “super PACs” and other so-called independent groups, and yet Mr. Romney has lagged behind in all of the major Ohio polls. Hundreds of millions in third-party spending from unlimited checks, much of it from undisclosed donors, has also failed to give Mr. Romney a clear lead in any of the other swing states.
If Mr. Romney loses the presidential race – which is far from a sure thing – does that mean the big check writers will declare the process a waste of money and stay out of politics the next time around? Don’t count on it.
The issue is not what separates Romney and Obama, but how much they agree. This hidden consensus has to be exposed
Wednesday night’s debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney underscored a core truth about America’s presidential election season: the vast majority of the most consequential policy questions are completely excluded from the process. This fact is squarely at odds with a primary claim made about the two parties – that they represent radically different political philosophies – and illustrates how narrow the range of acceptable mainstream political debate is in the country.
In part this is because presidential elections are now conducted almost entirely like a tawdry TV reality show. Personality quirks and trivialities about the candidates dominate coverage, and voter choices, leaving little room for substantive debates.
But in larger part, this exclusion is due to the fact that, despite frequent complaints that America is plagued by a lack of bipartisanship, the two major party candidates are in full-scale agreement on many of the nation’s most pressing political issues. As a result these are virtually ignored, drowned out by a handful of disputes that the parties relentlessly exploit to galvanise their support base and heighten fear of the other side.
Robert Kuttner: Notes for Next Time
I was pleased to see the unemployment rate come down to 7.8 percent. But honestly, that’s not nearly good enough.
Too many of the jobs don’t pay a decent wage. And they won’t pay decently until we get unemployment down to about 4 percent, as it was in the 1990s.
Our kids are saddled with a trillion dollars of student debt, and they are going out into a very weak job market. 30 percent of recent college grads move back in with their parents.
Our retirees are facing an eroding pension system, and the loss of their home equity, as well as very low returns on their savings because the Federal Reserve has rightly lowered interest rates, as one strategy of cleaning up the financial mess that we inherited.
This is not a four-year problem. It is a three decades problem.
It is not a case of young versus old, but a case of the one percent — who are only getting wealthier — versus everyone else.
Thomas B. Edsall: Toe to Toe
For the past year, conservative and Republican groups have spent more than $138 million in a concerted attempt to turn voters against Barack Obama.
The big dog in the effort to drive up Obama’s negative job approval ratings, the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, has invested $82.5 million in independent expenditures, mostly for television ads. Restore Our Future hired Larry McCarthy, the media consultant who achieved both recognition and infamy for producing the Willie Horton commercial in 1988. Restore Our Future’s hope: to do to Obama what McCarthy did to Michael Dukakis.
So far in the campaign, the right has outspent the left on independent advertising by just over 3 to 1.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Romney’s Personality Shift
The strangest aspect of Wednesday night’s debate was Mitt Romney’s decision to change his tax policies on the fly. Having campaigned hard on a tax proposal that called for $5 trillion in tax cuts, he said flatly that he was not offering a $5 trillion tax cut.
“I don’t have a tax cut of the scale that you’re talking about,” Romney said, even though that is exactly the tax cut he has proposed.
Was Romney for his tax plan before he was against it?
Romney’s willingness to remake himself one more time brought into sharp relief a central flaw of his candidacy: Having campaigned as a moderate when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, he veered sharply to the right to win the Republican presidential nomination. Now, with the election just weeks away and polls showing him falling behind in the swing states, he has decided that he needs once again to sound moderate, practical and terribly concerned about the middle class — and that is the person he sought to be in Denver.
Recent Comments