“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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New York Times Editorial Board: The Koch Cycle of Endless Cash
It’s not enough, apparently, that some of the wealthiest Americans spend millions to elect their candidates to Congress. Now they are using their fortunes to lobby Congress against any limits on their ability to buy elections.
Koch Companies Public Sector, part of the industrial group owned by a well-known pair of conservative brothers, has hired a big-name firm to lobby Congress on campaign-finance issues, according to a registration form filed a few weeks ago. The form doesn’t say what those issues are, but there are several bills in the House that would reduce the role of anonymous big money in campaigns, and restrict the kinds of super PACs and nonprofit groups that the Koch brothers and others have inflated with cash.
Richard Reeves: What Can We Do in Iraq? Nothing!
Taking a couple of shots at President Obama over the latest round of war in Iraq, House Speaker John Boehner said last week: “This has been building for weeks.”
How about centuries, Mr. Speaker? Sunni Muslims and their Shiite “brethren” have been fighting over this bloody turf since the seventh century. [..]
From the time of the Crusaders until last week, we have had occasional success in ignoring Islam or trying our best to put Muslims inside borders we have drawn, or done our best, intentionally or accidentally, to set them to fighting each other and leaving us alone. If it weren’t for oil and Israel, we could be in an ignoring phase. And we are almost always in ignorant phases. [..]
That is the way of the world. We have seen this before. In March of 1973, American troops withdrew from South Vietnam, leaving our local allies to take over that war. Two years later the North Vietnamese reached Saigon, as the ISIS has reached the suburbs of Baghdad. Do you think we should have gone back and resumed the war in Southeast Asia? That would have been nuts, and it is nuts to go back into Iraq.
The Republican Party’s reliance on tea party support is like an addict’s dependence on a dangerous drug: It may feel good at first, but eventually it eats you alive.
No House majority leader had ever been ousted in a primary before Eric Cantor’s shocking defeat on Tuesday. Republicans who tell themselves it was Cantor’s own fault-he lost touch with his Virginia district, he tried to have it both ways on immigration, he came to be seen as part of the Washington establishment-are whistling past the graveyard.
Cantor didn’t just lose, he got clobbered. His opponent, college professor Dave Brat, spent just $200,000 on the race-not much more than Cantor’s $5 million campaign spent on meals at steakhouses. Yet a powerful incumbent, running in a district whose boundaries were custom-designed for his benefit, lost by an incredible 11 percentage points.
There can be no doubt that the tail is now wagging the dog. The tea party should no longer be thought of as just a faction of the GOP. It’s calling the shots.
Michelle Chen: If colleges didn’t waste your tuition, we wouldn’t need new student loan reform
Saddling students with unsustainable debts is only a symptom of the deeper erosion within higher education
But while college is prohibitively costly for many students, and student loan reform merely papers over widening economic gap, full public funding for higher education is well within the government’s financial reach. An analysis by the advocacy group Strike Debt, for example, shows that for less than $13bn in additional federal funds, the government could theoretically “make every single public two- and four-year college and university in the United States tuition free for all students”. This would involve both straightforward changes to existing federal subsidy programs (particularly cutting support for notoriously substandard for-profit colleges) and a more fundamental political challenge: getting Washington to recognize that education is an entitlement, not a loan.
The state owes students a deeper debt than they owe the state – the cost of massive educational disinvestment and an economy broken by a generation of financial recklessness.
David Sirota: Al Gore’s Warnings About Inequality and Democracy
Inequality and democracy are the kind of topics you may expect to hear about at a political convention, but not necessarily at a tech industry conference. And so former Vice President Al Gore’s discussion at Nashville’s tech-focused Southland Conference this week could be viewed in context as a jeremiad spotlighting taboo truths about tech culture and philanthropic traditions.
Discussing the economy, Gore lamented that “we have rising levels of inequality and chronic underinvestment” in public programs. He reminded the crowd that when “95 percent of all the additional national income in the U.S., since the recovery began in ’09, goes to the top one percent, that’s not an Occupy Wall Street slogan, that’s a fact.”
Gore may have been alluding to the tech economy becoming a significant driver of that inequality.
Suzanne Goldenberg: Will Hillary Clinton please stand up and break the highest glass ceiling already?
In her new book, as on the campaign trail, she avoids serious talk about the impact of a female president. It’s not a hard choice at all – it’s the easy way out
Hillary Clinton is only a few pages into her new memoir, Hard Choices, when she throws out a hint that she, as a woman running for the White House, would run differently than a man.
She says there is no way she would ever give in to the sexist impulses of Obama campaign aides and attack another candidate – Sarah Palin, in this case – just because she is a woman. [..]
So it’s fair to assume that Clinton – six years removed from her first run for the White House, and two years away from her next (assuming she is running) – has a lot she wants to say about negotiating the treacherous terrain of women and power.
Except that she doesn’t say it.
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