“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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Emma Brockes: Christmas Day is supposed to be dull. Enjoy the novelty of utter boredom
Don’t catch up on Serial. Do as God intended and watch a war documentary with your extended family as time slows to a crawl
How to keep your Christmas spirit when all about you are losing theirs – it’s an annual conundrum, particularly as you get older and less inclined to make any effort whatsoever. The War on Christmas, as anyone not watching “The Nativity: Facts, Fictions and Faith” on Fox News at this very moment is well aware, isn’t prosecuted by a lose collective of socialists, atheists and “alternative” religions. No, the real war is being fought by the forces of Christmas capitalism, those which burn joy out of the season with the intensity of a Star Wars lightsaber (25% off until New Year’s Day – just enter code YOURKIDHASTOOMANYTOYSALREADY).
It is pointless, in these circumstances, to look back fondly on the days when the only shops open on Christmas Day were the emergency pharmacy and a single paper shop two towns over, inspiring the kind of bulk-buying the week before that gave Christmas the quality of a well-stocked but still quite panicky siege. [..]
Anyway, I’m not just talking about presents. We are gathered here today to discuss the texture of this holiday as a whole. The entire point of Christmas is that it’s supposed to be boring; you get an hour of excitement first thing and then the day devolves into an endless cycle of cooking, small talk, snoring relatives, over-heated rooms with no escape and – in England, at least – the Queen’s Speech, an annual lowlight that reminds you of the virtue of every other day of the calendar year when you are not made privy to Her Majesty’s thoughts.
Then comes the slow, dull glide into evening, with its massive sense of anticlimax – like the worst Sunday-night-before-school feeling, tinged with senses of loss, aging and the terrible, terrible transience of it all.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Wall Street Had a Merry Christmas — the New Year’s Still Up For Grabs
They’re calling it a “Christmas gift” for Wall Street. Last week the Federal Reserve announced that it’s giving U.S. banks yet another extension on the “Volcker Rule” provision in the Dodd/Frank financial reform bill. As a result of this latest decision, banks won’t have to comply until mid-2017.
The Dodd/Frank bill was passed in 2010.
Banks wanted a delay because they claimed they needed the time to prepare. Does anybody really think the nation’s largest and most powerful financial institutions need seven years to restructure the casino-like aspect of their operations? It would be easier to imagine them doing in seven days — at least if there were money to be from it.
What’s really going on? For one thing, every year that the rule is delayed is another year the banks can maximize their earnings. But the game may be even deeper than that. The Fed delay makes a kind of sense — if you believe Congress plans to revoke the Volcker Rule altogether.
The Interview may be released after all, but just because a Hollywood studio got hacked doesn’t mean it can censor Twitter, the news media and sites across the web
After a pre-Christmas week full of massive backlash for caving to a vague and unsubstantiated threat by hackers supposedly from North Korea, Sony has reversed course and decided it will allow The Interview to be shown after all – thus all but ending what Senator John McCain absurdly called “the greatest blow to free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime probably”.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s unequivocally good news that North Korea (or whoever hacked Sony) won’t succeed in invoking a ludicrous heckler’s veto over a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen, but there are far greater threats to our freedom of speech here in the United States. For example, Sony itself.
Lost in the will-they-or-won’t-they controversy over Sony’s potential release of The Interview has been the outright viciousness that Sony has unleashed on some of the biggest social-media sites and news outlets in the world. For the past two weeks, the studio has been trying to bully these publishing platforms into stopping the release of newsworthy stories or outright censoring already-public information contained in the hacked emails, despite a clear First Amendment right to the contrary.
Robert Reich: The Government Problem
Some believe the central political issue of our era is the size of the government. They’re wrong. The central issue is whom the government is for.
Consider the new spending bill Congress and the President agreed to a few weeks ago.
It’s not especially large by historic standards. Under the $1.1 trillion measure, government spending doesn’t rise as a percent of the total economy. In fact, if the economy grows as expected, government spending will actually shrink over the next year.
The problem with the legislation is who gets the goodies and who’s stuck with the tab.
For example, it repeals part of the Dodd-Frank Act designed to stop Wall Street from using other peoples’ money to support its gambling addiction, as the Street did before the near-meltdown of 2008.
Tim Arnold: America Has Lost Its Soul
We Americans wave our nation’s flag and crow our national anthem, self-assured, full of pride, assuming our jingoistic clattering will continue to fool the world that we are an honorable nation. Instead, we are exposing ourselves as pretenders to the democratic values our forefathers defined for us.
“America, who are we?” asks Charles Blow in his NY Times op-ed piece: “Are we – or better yet – should we be – a nation that tortures detainees, or targets and kills American citizens with drones, or has broad discretion to spy on the American public.” [..]
Dick Cheney is a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with America today. But he’s not alone, not by far.
Are we the nation who’s “have’s” have established the widest financial gap with the “have not’s” in our country’s recent history, with no end in sight – once again enabled by our congress to make it even wider? The upper 1% now holds more dollars than the lower 42%! Is this really us?
Mike Lux: A Progressive Populism That Works
There is a lot of talk in Democratic party circles about populism (which among Democrats is generally of a more progressive nature) vs centrism. All three terms — progressive, populism, and centrism — are thrown around way too loosely by pundits who rarely know what they are talking about. For some, it all boils down to the differences (stylistically as well as substantively) between Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. For others, it is a debate about whether Democrats should talk about growth or inequality — a recent report from Benenson Strategy Group and SKDKnickerbocker ominously warned that swing voters want the focus to be on growth rather than inequality. Some pundits talk about whether Democrats should be pro-business or more for income distribution.
Even though I happily identify myself as a proud populist progressive, I think these kinds of pundit-driven definitions don’t do much to build a winning message or agenda for either Democrats or the progressive movement. I think we need a populism that doesn’t just repeat old formulas but answers voters’ real concerns about progressive policies. Here’s what I think a winning populist progressive program entails:
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