“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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Heidi Moore: Why I’m not watching the Sochi Olympics
My boycott may not change the world, but it’s the only economic decision I can live with. Consumers do have some power
The Sochi Olympics have barely started, but their beginnings are, to say the least, inauspicious. Besides the alarming problems on the women’s downhill skiing and men’s slopestyle snowboarding courses, threats of avalanches and potential terrorism and widespread complaints from journalists about dubious plumbing, the political and moral underpinnings of the games are falling apart. There are vocal protests of Russia’s highly objectionable recent rules shutting down gay rights, its longtime battle with free speech, using poison darts for the mass killing of stray dogs, and allegations of environmental abuses. [..]
But we have power too: the power of the dollar, the power of our eyeballs and viewership. The International Olympic Committee is selling us to sponsors and television networks; they are making a very big bet that we will show up. The networks have spent billions over the years for the Olympics. The IOC sold the 2012 rights to NBC for $1.2bn. NBC paid $775m for the rights to the Sochi Olympics.
But what if we don’t show up? Suddenly, the financial picture changes. That is the power that consumers have.
Mythbusting: Russia, Putin and why the Sochi Olympic Games matter
The Winter Olympics in Sochi have given western journalists no end of fodder for outrage and absurdity – at the cost of accuracy. Despite the just concern about gay rights and entertaining tweets about Sochi’s half-built hotels, a number of persistent stories about Russia and its dissidents could use a little clearing up.
To that end, consider the following […]
But terrorism in Putin’s Russia is real and storied, from the theater hostage crisis in 2002 to the Moscow metro bombings in 2010 and the Volgograd bombings last December. Despite the sweeping measures Putin has taken, warlords, secret police and the System have proven tenuous protections at best. Sochi is a chance to show off that these tactics do work, and by extension that Putinism, despite its $51bn price tag here, also works. Putinism doesn’t work, of course, but because everyone wants a safe, triumphant Olympics, everyone has to root for Russia while figuring out ways to protest its practices.
In other words, Russia matters whether the world likes it or not, and it will keep finding ways to matter. For every stereotype that fits the bill, there’s another that defies it. Russia is a strange, remarkable country that’s endured horrific wars and oppression while also creating some of the world’s greatest achievements in art and science.
It has produced Chekhov, Tchaikovsky and a men’s police choir singing Daft Punk. It’s complicated, so let’s treat it that way.
“The U.S. worked hard to create the American dream of opportunity. But today, that dream is a myth.” -Economist Joseph Stiglitz, Financial Times
If you follow the financial news, you already know that the American people are on an epic downer. [..]
Pessimism, pessimism, and more pessimism. It’s like the whole country is on the brink of despair. Maybe Phil Graham was right, after all. Maybe we are just a nation of whiners. But I kind of doubt it. What’s really going on can be summed up in one word: Frustration. People are frustrated with the government, frustrated with their jobs, frustrated with their shitty, stagnant wages, frustrated with their droopy incomes, frustrated with their ripoff health care, frustrated with living paycheck to paycheck, frustrated with their measly cat-food retirement plan, frustrated with their dissembling, flannel-mouth president, frustrated with the fact that their kids can’t find jobs, and frustrated with the prevaricating US media that keeps palavering about that delusional chimera called the American Dream.
What dream? The dream that America is the land of “land of opportunity”?
David Sirota: Congress Suffers From Selective Deficit Disorder
“Cognitive dissonance” is the clinical term used to describe stress that arises from holding contradictory beliefs. In politics, this term is a misnomer, because while many lawmakers, operatives and activists present oxymoronic views, many of them don’t appear to feel any stress about that. When it comes to budgetary matters, such a lack of remorse translates into something even worse than cognitive dissonance-something more akin to pathology. It is what I’ve previously called Selective Deficit Disorder-and it was hard to miss in the last few weeks.
In Washington, for instance, the disorder was on prominent display in Congress’s new farm bill. Citing deficit concerns, House Republicans crafted the bill to include an $8 billion cut to the federal food stamp program. Yet, the same bill increased massive subsidies that disproportionately benefit wealthy farmers and agribusinesses. In all, the conservative American Enterprise Institute reports that under the bill, annual subsidies could increase by up to $15 billion.
In this textbook episode of Selective Deficit Disorder, deficits were cited as a reason to slash a program that serves low-income Americans. However, those same deficits were suddenly ignored when it came to handing over billions to a corporate special interest.
Joe Conason: What Republicans Hope You Don’t Know and Never Find Out
Listening to Republicans in Congress wailing incessantly about our spendthrift culture raises a nagging question: What would they do, besides talking, if they actually wanted to reduce federal deficits and, eventually, the national debt?
First, they would admit that President Barack Obama’s policies, including health care reform, have already reduced deficits sharply, as promised. Second, they would desist from their hostage-taking tactics over the debt ceiling, which have only damaged America’s economy and international prestige. And then they would finally admit that basic investment and job creation, rather than cutting food stamps, represent the best way to reduce both deficits and debt-indeed, the only way-through economic growth. [..]
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it is Republican voters, misinformed by Fox News, who most fervently and consistently insist on these mistaken ideas, with 85 percent telling pollsters that the deficit has increased. Less than a third of Democrats gave that answer. But nearly 60 percent of independent voters agree with the Republicans on that question, and only 30 percent of Democrats understand the truth-an implicit repudiation, as The Huffington Post noted, of the president’s political decision to prioritize deficit reduction rather than job creation.
Eugene Robinson: Sibling Rivalry Not Fit For a King
Nothing will ever tarnish the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who transformed a nation. But his squabbling heirs seem to be trying their best.
I realize these are harsh words for a family that has suffered more than most. But King’s sons and daughter need to be reminded-yet again-that their father’s words and deeds belong not just to his descendants but to history as well. The King siblings have a responsibility not to treat this precious inheritance like some shiny knickknack someone found in the attic.
In the latest round of internecine warfare, Martin Luther King III and Dexter King have filed a lawsuit seeking to compel their sister, Bernice King, to hand over their father’s Nobel Peace Prize medal, which he received in 1964, and the Bible he carried with him whenever he traveled.
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