“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
Trevor Timm: Can you tell the difference between Bush and Obama on the Patriot Act?
Dick Cheney and George W Bush were widely condemned by Democrats for their baseless fear-mongering to pressure members of Congress into passing expansive surveillance laws that infringed on American’s civil liberties. Unfortunately, with parts of their Patriot Act set to expire on Monday, the Obama administration is playing the very same game that its own party once decried hyperbolic and dishonest – even after a Justice Department report released last week concluded that the expiring section used to collect Americans’ phone records in bulk has never been vital to national security.
See if you can tell the difference between the Obama administration’s statements about the renewal of the Patriot Act and those from the Bush administration when they wanted Congress to renew some of the controversial mass surveillance authorities they passed after 9/11.
Dave Johnson: Fast Track Hits House Next Week; Clinton Must Speak Up
The House is expected to vote on fast track trade promotion authority as soon as next week. If it passes, the corporate-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a done deal — even though it is still secret. Why is presidential candidate Hillary Clinton still silent on this? [..]
There is no question that TPP is on the wrong side of this, and will result in even more hardship for the very people Clinton says she is campaigning to help. Fast Track preapproves TPP and the vote is coming up very, very soon.
Staying on the fence on this one is a mistake. By staying on the fence she risks being remembered as “No-Position Clinton” on the issue that matters most.
Critics of the way President Obama is dealing with the Islamic State should be required to specify what alternative steps they would take-and how their strategies would make a difference.
Republican presidential candidates are unanimous in charging that Obama’s handling of Iraq and Syria has been all wrong. But when pressed to lay out a specific plan of action and explain why they believe it would work better than what Obama is doing now, they tend to mumble and look for ways to change the subject.
Oh, there’s no shortage of tough-guy rhetoric that sounds as if it were stolen from a big-budget Hollywood action movie. Actually, some of it was stolen from a big-budget Hollywood action movie: Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., appropriates Liam Neeson’s signature line from the movie “Taken,” shifts it from the first-person singular to the plural, and declares to terrorists, “We will look for you, we will find you and we will kill you.” [..]
Eventually, one hopes, some candidate will come up with credible alternatives to Obama’s Mideast policies. So far, not even close.
George Zornick: The Push for Debt-Free College Is Hitting the Big Time
When we last checked in with the activist push to make debt-free college part of mainstream Democratic politics, a little over one month ago, it was off to an impressive start. Three Democratic Senators and a handful of House members had signed on to bicameral resolutions championing the idea, including high-ranking Democrats like Steve Israel and Chris Van Hollen.
More members signed on in the following weeks, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), which is spearheading the effort, announced Wednesday that nine more Democratic Senators joined as co-sponsors. This brought the total to twenty in the Senate-close to half the caucus-and sixty overall.
That’s a pretty stunning level of support behind an idea that basically didn’t exist in formal terms six weeks ago.
Joan Walsh: GOP trolls set a dangerous trap for Dems: Why zombie centrism would doom the party
A dumb argument that Obama has dragged his party too far left would be laughable — except some Dems believe it too
Former Bush advisor Peter Wehner is stuck in the 1980s, and he thinks the country should remain stuck there, too. His bewildering New York Times op-ed, “Have Democrats moved too far left?” (no question mark needed; he clearly believes they have), would be laughable – except some centrist Democrats share his nostalgia for the Reagan era, and his loathing of Elizabeth Warren-style liberalism.
Wehner uses a tired template worn out by Mitt Romney to no avail in 2012: Barack Obama is more liberal than the centrist, sensible Bill Clinton, and the country is going to reject him and the party he’s led off the deep end. That didn’t work out for Romney, and it won’t go well for Wehner and the GOP. [..]
There are in fact real battles within the Democratic Party over the issues of economic opportunity, most notably on trade. But the notion that Democrats have moved farther left than the GOP has moved right is laughable. In the Obama years, Republicans haven’t just repudiated liberalism, they’ve repudiated their very own policies – on the individual mandate for health insurance, cap and trade approaches to climate change, immigration reform, the earned income tax credit, infrastructure spending.
In the meantime, we’ve had a 35-year experiment in Republican policies on crime, opportunity and poverty – and they’ve failed. Welfare reform didn’t end either poverty or single parenthood. Mass incarceration criminalized more than a generation of black men, further destroying their communities. And the Bush tax cuts didn’t create jobs; they led to record deficits and came with the worst crash since the Great Depression.
Marcy Wheeler: The Benghazi outrage we actually should be talking about
Newly revealed documents show how the CIA stood by as arms shipments from Libya enabled the rise of ISIS
What did the CIA know and when did they know it?
That’s the real question that ought to be raised by a recently declassified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, obtained by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The August 2012 document describes how the U.S. ended up on the same general side in the Syrian Civil War as Al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIS. “AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning,” the report explained. Meanwhile, “[w]estern countries, the Gulf states, and Turkey are supporting” rebel efforts against the Assad regime in a proxy war, putting them on the same side as, if not working together with, the terrorists now overrunning Iraq. [..]
Two months after the report laying out AQI support for the rebels – another of the documents obtained by Judicial Watch shows – the DIA provided a detailed description of how weapons got shipped from Benghazi to Syria, presumably for rebel groups. “During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the [Qaddafi] regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012,” the report explained, “weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya, to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria.”
The report obtained by Judicial Watch says that the weapons shipments ended in “early September of 2012.” But note what event this second report conspicuously does not mention: The Sept. 11 attack on the State Department and CIA facilities in Benghazi at the same time that the flow of weapons stopped.
Recent Comments