Punting the Pundits

“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”.

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New Tork Times Editorial Board: Congress Rushes to Aid the Powerful

Congress can’t pass a budget or control guns or confirm judges on time, but this week members of both parties found something they could agree on, and in a big hurry: avoiding blame for inconveniencing air travelers. The Senate and House rushed through a bill that would avert furloughs to air traffic controllers, which were mandated by Congress’s own sequester but proved embarrassing when flights began to back up around the country.

Then lawmakers scurried out of town, taking a week’s vacation while ignoring the low-income victims of the mandatory budget cuts, who have few representatives in Washington to protest their lost aid for housing, nutrition and education. Though they are suffering actual pain, not just inconvenience, no one rushed to give them a break from the sequester, and it is clear that no one will.

Charles M. Blow: The Morose Middle Class

The Middle Class is in a funk, its view of the future growing dim as fear rolls in like a storm.

An Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll released Thursday found that while most Americans (56 percent) hold out hope that they’ll be in a higher class at some point, even more Americans (59 percent) are worried about falling out of their current class over the next few years. In fact, more than eight in 10 Americans believe that more people have fallen out of the middle class than moved into it in the past few years.

The poll paints a picture of a group that is scared to death about its station in life.

Eugene Robinson: Stains on a Legacy

In retrospect, George W. Bush’s legacy doesn’t look as bad as it did when he left office. It looks worse.

I join the nation in congratulating Bush on the opening of his presidential library in Dallas. Like many people, I find it much easier to honor, respect and even like the man-now that he’s no longer in the White House.

But anyone tempted to get sentimental should remember the actual record of the man who called himself The Decider. Begin with the indelible stain that one of his worst decisions left on our country’s honor: torture.

Tim Radford: Fast-Moving Climate Zones Speed Extinction

LONDON-As global temperatures rise, climate zones will shift at greater speed, according to new research in Nature Climate Change.

If greenhouse gas emissions carry on increasing, then about 20% of the land area of the planet will undergo change – and the creatures that have made their homes in what were once stable ecosystems will have to adapt swiftly, or face grim consequences. [..]

Such fears are not new: in the past two decades biologists and ecologists have repeatedly warned that vulnerable species were at risk from climate change.

But vulnerable species are at risk anyway, just from pollution, habitat destruction and the spread of humanity across the habitable globe. What Dr Mahlstein and her colleagues have done is to look at geography’s mosaic of climates and landscapes and measure the rates of change in these.

David Sirota: A Cronkite Moment for the Blowback Era

“The stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”-Reverend Jeremiah Wright

In 2008, the hysterical backlash to the above comment by Barack Obama’s minister became a high-profile example of one of the most insidious rules in American politics: You are not allowed to honestly discuss the Central Intelligence Agency’s concept of “blowback” without putting yourself at risk of being deemed a traitor to country.

Now, five years later, with America having killed thousands of Muslim civilians in its drone strikes and wars, that rule is thankfully being challenged-and not by someone who is so easily smeared. Instead, the apostate is one of this epoch’s most revered journalists-and because of that, we will see whether this country is mature enough to face one of its biggest national security quandaries.

Richard Reeves: Bipolar Nation: The Rich Get Richer

Times are tough. Do the numbers: Chief executive officers (CEOs) of the country’s biggest companies experienced pay increases of a minuscule 15 percent in 2012, compared with the 28 percent their pay rose in 2011.

Only 15 percent. Ah! I’m sure they’ll make it up in bonuses and stock options this year. The rich will get richer and the poor will get porridge, cold porridge.

Those statistics are from GMI, Global Market Insite. Meanwhile, the earnings of workers (adjusted for inflation) declined by 2 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.