“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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Jonathan Turley: Nixon has won Watergate
This month, I spoke at an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal with some of its survivors at the National Press Club. While much of the discussion looked back at the historic clash with President Nixon, I was struck by a different question: Who actually won? From unilateral military actions to warrantless surveillance that were key parts of the basis for Nixon’s impending impeachment, the painful fact is that Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be.
Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an “imperial presidency” with unilateral powers and privileges. In 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition. The success of Obama in acquiring the long-denied powers of Nixon is one of his most remarkable, if ignoble, accomplishments.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Holder Says Leak Required “Very Aggressive Action”… Bank Crimes, Not So Much
Apparently it never occurred to Attorney General Eric Holder that the Associated Press might be “too big to fail.” If it had,then his Justice Department probably never would have investigated it.
The AP isn’t just any news agency. It’s the largest one in the United States and one of the three largest in the world, along with Great Britain’s Reuters and Agence France-Presse. And it is, understandably enough, angry.
So are journalists who work for other outlets, along defenders of a free press and supporters of an informed citizenry. Journalists must be free of direct or implied intimidation if democracy is to work properly. And yet, correspondents who cover this Administration will often admit privately that they do feel intimidated.
Dean Baker:
Cutting Social Security and Not Taxing Wall Street
As we move toward the fifth anniversary of the great financial crisis of 2008, people should be outraged that cutting Social Security is now on the national agenda, while taxing Wall Street is not. After all, if we take at face value the claims made back in 2008 by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, Wall Street excesses brought the economy to the brink of collapse.
But now the Wall Street behemoths are bigger than ever and President Obama is looking to cut the Social Security benefits of retirees. That will teach the Wall Street boys to be more responsible in the future. [..]
The basic story is very simple. Wall Street bankers have a lot more political power than old and disabled people who depend on Social Security. That is why President Obama is working to protect the former and cut benefits for the latter.
John Nichols: Dems to DOJ: ‘Very Troubled,’ ‘Inexcusable,’ ‘No Way to Justify This’
When John Lindsay was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1958, the Republican lawyer from Manhattan arrived on Capitol Hill as a man on a mission. “Often alone on the House floor,” recalled Nat Hentoff, “Lindsay wielded the Bill of Rights against its enemies.” [..]
Around the time that Lindsay was elected mayor of New York, California Democrat Don Edwards, a former FBI agent, arrived to take up the fight. For three decades, Edwards checked and balanced not just Republicans but Democrats who failed to recognize the rights of citizens and the essential role of a watchdog press. [..]
We remember Lindsay and Edwards because of the standard they set. They understood that the defense of the Bill of Rights in general, and freedom of the press in particular, must never be compromised by partisanship.
That’s why it was so very important when, after it was revealed that the Department of Justice had obtained the phone records of Associated Press journalists, both Patrick Leahy and Bob Goodlatte spoke up.
Robert Sheer; Elizabeth Warren, a Great Investment
Elizabeth Warren does great email. One payoff of my pittance of a contribution to her grass-roots funded campaign — I regret not contributing more — is that I am regularly alerted by the new Massachusetts senator to the favoritism of our Congress toward Wall Street.
That’s how I was reminded this week that Congress is about to let the interest rate charged for new student loans double to 6.8 percent at a time when the too-big-to-fail banks that caused the Great Recession continue to be bailed out at the rate of 0.75 percent. Yes, the banks pay less than 1 percent for money that we the taxpayers lend them. I know that such statistics are thought to be boring, but as Warren explained, the rate that students will have to pay “is nine times higher than the rate at which the government loans money to the big banks.”
Dave Johnson: News Media Should Clearly Inform Public About Obstruction, Filibuster
A NY Times editorial says Republicans need public pressure to get them to stop obstructing … everything. Meanwhile NY Times and other news coverage tends to obscure the source and extent of the problem and the damage it is doing to the country. Just months after a decisive election the country is paralyzed, the will of the people is thwarted and the information required to mobilize the pubic to take needed action is not forthcoming.
On Sunday, May 12, the NY Times ran an editorial, Who Can Take Republicans Seriously? The editorial concluded: “Only when the Republican Party feels public pressure to become a serious partner can the real work of governing begin.”
But news reports, even in the NY Times, tend to obscure the source of the obstruction, often even omitting the very words “filibuster” and “obstruction.”
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