“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.
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Gail Collins: Arms and the Women
Women in the military are going to get to serve in combat. They killed the Equal Rights Amendment to keep this from happening, but, yet, here we are. And about time. [..]
Women now make up almost 15 percent of the American military and their willingness to serve made the switch to an all-volunteer Army possible. They’ve taken their posts with such seamless calm that the country barely noticed. The specter that opponents of the E.R.A. deemed unthinkable – our sisters and daughters dying under fire in foreign lands – has happened over and over and over. More than 130 women have died and more than 800 have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. The House of Representatives includes a female double-amputee in the person of the newly elected Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a former military pilot who lost both her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq.
We’ve come a long, sometimes tragic, heroic way.
Josh Barro: Did Republicans Create a Budget Monster?
After much bluster about the debt limit, Republicans are offering an extension until May at a small price: Both houses must pass a budget resolution, which the Democratic-controlled Senate has not done for several years. Republicans are excited to force Senate Democrats on the record with a budget plan that will surely show years of red ink to come. But before they celebrate, they should think for a second about how politically ugly this year’s House budget is sure to be. [..]
Republicans think forcing Democrats to pass a budget that is laden with spending and deficits will be to their political advantage. But the reason large deficits persist is that the things you can do to shrink deficits tend to be even less popular than deficits themselves — especially if you insist on a deficit-reducing plan that also cuts taxes on the wealthy.
So, if you want to see the most politically explosive budget that passes a house of Congress this April, don’t look to the Senate. Look to the House.
In his review of Jared Diamond’s new book, David Brooks is appropriately horrified by the stories of tribal women who were left to die rather than be cared for by their communities. He’s so horrified, in fact, that he seems to reject Diamond’s core thesis that these tribespeople have something to teach us about ourselves. [..]
When he was done writing that review Brooks went back to one of his primary preoccupations, which is pushing for Medicare cuts. [..]
In column after column, Brooks has insisted that our national spending on Medicare is unsustainable. He defended the Romney/Ryan voucher plan, which would place arbitrary limits on how much would be spent to provide health care for our elderly (but not on how much profit could be made from their treatment). He also misrepresented the plan to make its case, which wasn’t very civil of him.
Dean Baker: Four More Years of ‘It Could Have Been Worse’
There have been two momentous events in the last week. Of course President Obama’s swearing in for a second term is a big deal, even if somewhat less historic than his inauguration back in 2009. The other big event was the release of the Federal Reserve Board’s transcripts from the 2007 meetings of the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC). [..]
Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke (he was governor during most of the run-up), and the rest also seemed oblivious to the extent to which the housing market was driving the economy. There was little appreciation of the fact that an unsustainable building boom and surge in consumption driven by ephemeral housing wealth were the major factors driving the economy in the years 2002-2007.
The 2007 transcripts show that this crew was still oblivious even as the economy was beginning to collapse all around them. This is the captain and crew of the Titanic planning their stay in New York after the ship had already hit the iceberg.
John Nichols: GOP Version2013: Battling Not Just Democrats but Democracy
On a day when most Americans were focused on the stirring second inaugural address of President Barack Obama – and on the broader majesty of the transference of an election result into a governing mandate – Republican state senators in Virginia hatched an elaborate scheme to rig the electoral system against democracy.
Prevented by an even 20-20 divide in the chamber from gerrymandering Senate districts to favor one party or the other, the Republicans knew that their only opening to draw lines that favored their candidates in this fall’s off-year elections would be if at least one Democrat were missing. Inauguration Day gave them an opening, as an African-American senator, a veteran of the civil rights movement, was in Washington to recognize the beginning of the new term of the nation’s first African-American president. [..]
After doing the dirty deed, the Republican senators adjourned their Rev. Martin Luther King Day session not in honor of the civil rights icon but “in memory of General Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson.”
Welcome to GOP Version2013.
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Reagan Is Obama’s Touchstone
To understand how Barack Obama sees himself and his presidency, don’t look to Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Obama’s role model is Ronald Reagan-and that is just what Obama told us before he was first elected.
Like Reagan, Obama hopes to usher in a long-term electoral realignment-in Obama’s case toward the moderate left, thereby reversing the 40th president’s political legacy. The Reagan metaphor helps explain the tone of Obama’s inaugural address, built not on a contrived call to an impossible bipartisanship but on a philosophical argument for a progressive vision of the country rooted in our history. Reagan used his first inaugural to make an unabashed case for conservatism. Conservatives who loved that Reagan speech are now criticizing Obama for emulating their hero and his bold defense of first principles.
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