“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”.
Bob Herbert: How Many Deaths Are Enough?
Approximately 100,000 shootings occur in the United States every year. The number of people killed by guns should be enough to make our knees go weak. Monday was a national holiday celebrating the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While the gun crazies are telling us that ever more Americans need to be walking around armed, we should keep in mind that more than a million people have died from gun violence – in murders, accidents and suicides – since Dr. King was shot to death in 1968.
We need fewer homicides, fewer accidental deaths and fewer suicides. That means fewer guns. That means stricter licensing and registration, more vigorous background checks and a ban on assault weapons. Start with that. Don’t tell me it’s too hard to achieve. Just get started.
Katrina vanden Heuvel Putting Poverty on the Agenda
“There is definitely a story going untold,” says Melissa Boteach, manager of Half in Ten, a national campaign to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years. “When you have 1 in 7 Americans living in poverty. 1 in 5 children living in poverty-including 1 in 3 African-American children and Latino children-and it’s not on America’s radar, something’s very wrong.”
Indeed it is the shame of our nation that a record 47 million people now live below the poverty line-$22,400 for a family of four-and a stunning 1 in 3 Americans are living at less than twice that threshold. And yet we hear so little about this crisis in the mainstream media and Congress, where it seems off the radar not only for the GOP, but even for some of our progressive allies.
But the grim truth is that many of the same structural problems that are making life a struggle for the middle-class-and resulted in the first “economic recovery” in 2003-2007 where productivity rose, but median income declined and poverty worsened-are also leading to record numbers of poor people. From 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent. Our economy is super-sizing the wealthy, while producing large quantities of low-wage jobs, unemployment and underemployment, and services are eroding. So the work of those who are waging today’s war on poverty comes with a very different frame.
Eugene Robinson: Palin’s egocentric umbrage
In the spirit of civil discourse, I’d like to humbly suggest that Sarah Palin please consider being quiet for a while. Perhaps a great while.
At the risk of being bold, I might observe that her faux-presidential address about the Tucson massacre seemed to fall somewhat flat, drawing comparisons to the least attractive public moments of such figures as Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. I could go so far as to observe that Palin almost seemed to portray herself as a collateral victim. Surely a former governor of Alaska – who served the better part of an entire term – would never seek to give the impression that she views any conceivable event, no matter how distant or tragic, as being All About Sarah.
Yet this is the unfortunate impression that Palin’s videotaped peroration seems to have left. I am at a loss to recommend any course of corrective action other than an extended period of abstinence from Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.
Isabeau Doucet: Baby Doc’s return haunts Haiti
The return of former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier at a critical moment for Haiti’s shaky democracy cannot bode well
Port-au-Prince, Haiti – The return to Haiti of former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier on Sunday has brought a chilling new element of chaos an insult to a country already in the grips of a democratic crisis. Baby Doc’s return forces obvious questions about the continued forced exile of twice-democratically elected and overthrown Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose political party, Fanmi Lavalas, still the most popular party in Haiti, was excluded from running in the recent elections.
Duvalier’s return demonstrates that the popular movement that overthrew him, uprooted his Macoutes, disbanded his army and elected the country’s first and only mass-based government, has itself, for the time being at least, been put safely out of action: broken, divided, misrepresented, discredited.. . . . .
What is certain is that Baby Doc’s return is merely the starkest manifestation yet of a basic political fact: after the interlude of 1990-2004, Haiti has once again become a de facto dictatorship. Its affairs are at the mercy of the international community, and this latest, so-called democratic election is double-speak for a process that effectively ensures the near-total disempowerment, exclusion and pacification of the Haitian people.
Eric Stoner: The Tragic US Strategy in Afghanistan
Either the administration has deluded itself or it can’t muster the courage to tell the American public the truth
Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If that doesn’t accurately describe the more than nine-year-old U.S. war in Afghanistan, I don’t know what does.
The results of the surge of tens of thousands of additional troops into the “graveyard of empires” are now evident. More soldiers, humanitarian workers, and civilians were killed in 2010 than any year since the United States invaded. One tally put the dead at more than 10,000 last year alone.
At least 120,000 Afghans have also been driven from their homes due to the violence over the last year and a half. I visited Charahi Qambar in December, the largest of some 30 camps for the internally displaced around Kabul, and was horrified by the living conditions there. These refugees call simple mud huts home and lack adequate access to food, clean water, education, or work. The most vulnerable, especially the children, often die from the cold during the bitter winters.
Chris Matthews: What Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could teach Washington today
A vigorous debate over the role of government is always at the heart of our democracy. Since the shootings in Arizona, however, many have said that our partisan ferocity is unhealthy.
So it seems like a good time to reflect on Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. It would serve us well to understand how these very different politicians managed to temper their philosophical divide with a public, and sometimes personal, cordiality.
About this time of year three decades ago, Reagan went to the Capitol to deliver the State of the Union address. His designated “holding room” was the speaker’s ceremonial office just off the House floor. I was a senior aide to the speaker, and I thought a little kidding was in order.
“Mr. President, welcome to the room where we plot against you,” I said.
“Oh, no, not after 6,” he replied. “The speaker says that here in Washington we’re all friends after 6.”
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