“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
New York Times Editorial Board: Lasting Damage From the Budget Fight
The budget crisis manufactured by Congressional Republicans will never succeed at halting health care reform, but it has already caused long-lasting harm. It will preserve the deeply damaging spending cuts, known as the sequester, that are costing jobs and hurting the lives of millions.
Most of the attention given to the House’s temporary spending resolution has focused on the provision in it to defund President Obama’s health law. The Senate plans to drop that wording, and, if the House doesn’t agree, the government will shut down on Tuesday. But even without the provision, the resolution itself is pernicious because it preserves through mid-December all the blunt and arbitrary sequester cuts that began in March, making it much less likely those cuts will be replaced with more sensible cuts and revenue increases for the rest of the 2014 fiscal year.
Gail Collins: Meet Dilly and Dither
This month, the pope made some sensible remarks about sex, and the president of Iran made some reasonable comments about nuclear weapons. Also, the Russians proved to be extremely helpful during an international crisis. Meanwhile, on the home front, our Congress appears too crazed by internal conflict to keep the lights on. [..]
Big deadline coming! In theory, by Monday, the House and Senate are supposed to have jointly approved 12 bills appropriating money for the various sections of government in 2014. The entire package should be a prudent rethinking of what various agencies really need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.
This is probably not going to happen because, as of today, the number of said bills passed by both bodies is zero.
There’s something profoundly despicable about a Justice Department that would brazenly violate the First and Fourth Amendments while spying on journalists, then claim to be reassessing such policies after an avalanche of criticism-and then proceed, as it did this week, to gloat that those policies made possible a long prison sentence for a journalistic source.
Welcome to the Obama Justice Department.
While mouthing platitudes about respecting press freedom, the president has overseen methodical actions to undermine it. We should retire understated phrases like “chilling effect.” With the announcement from Obama’s Justice Department on Monday, the thermometer has dropped below freezing.
Lateefa Simon: When will the US stop building more prisons?
I was once a teen mom with an arrest record and few options. I know from personal experience how a job can change a life
America’s prison crisis isn’t about a lack of space; it’s a systematic lack of opportunity in poor communities. We have failed as a society to understand what it takes for previously incarcerated people to live meaningful, productive lives – and to keep them out of prison in the first place.
It sounds deceptively simple, but my own experience – and a growing body of research – shows that one thing can help keep people from entering prison and prevent those released from going back: jobs. Employment opportunities give people a sense of purpose, help build confidence and foster strong social connections and pay the rent.
William Pfaff: Time for the West to Cease Intervention
We have today entered a new political-or politico-religious-period in which the Muslim peoples of the Middle East are seizing control of their own fortunes, a control lost as a result of the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, which, with its Arab Caliphate predecessors in Crusader times, traces back to the very origin of Islam in what now is Syria, Iraq and Arabia proper.
Few in the West seem to have grasped the significance of the fact that Muslims themselves have taken over the struggle against Islamic radicalism. The West did not start the war in Syria. Until chemical weapons were used in the war, it has had no direct implication in it, and feeble indirect ones, other than to assist the victims. It is the Syrians’ war, and that of the other Arabs who have chosen to take part.
Robert Sheer: Obama’s Friends in Low Places
That Barack Obama is such a kidder. No matter how awkward the moment, he’s got just the right quip to purchase some wiggle room. Remember when his old Chicago banking buddy Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, first ran into that bit of trouble over his bank’s “London Whale” derivative scam? That scheme has already lost $6 billion with close to $1 billion more piled on by the SEC in fines last week after JPMorgan admitted it broke the law. [..]
It should be remembered that this same Dimon, who appeared before a Senate committee wearing presidential cufflinks, once worked with Sanford Weill in engineering the reversal of the Glass-Steagall law to make Citigroup, a previously illegal merger of investment and commercial banks, possible. But despite his record as a leader in the radical deregulation of banking that caused all of the trouble, Obama turned to Dimon for direction on fixing the economy.
Recent Comments