Punting the Pundits

“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”

David Swanson: Manchurian Senators

People are doing journalism and the Washington Post is pissed. How to respond? Apparently the answer arrived at by Post editors is to just give up on any Americans who have been informing themselves and target those Americans who believe anything that super important people say. How else to explain an op-ed full of documented lies and published last Friday over the byline of two Democratic senators, Carl Levin and Jack Reed?

The headline was “The Surge Afghanistan Still Needs.” Surge is not code for food or peace or environmental restoration or a moment’s relief from the attentions of the world’s oil, gas, and power addicts. Surge, in ignorant-American-newspaper-readerspeak is a term denoting the comical pretense that a criminal and genocidal invasion and occupation can be redeemed by escalating it. The term was coined in reference to Iraq, that hell on earth where pro-democracy demonstrators are now being murdered by the government that 20 years of war and sanctions built, even as that government demands reparations payments for recent US destruction.

Laurence Lewis: Democrats Are Ceding the Entire Traditional Democratic Economic Ideology

On Thursday, we got this news:

   President Obama on Wednesday intervened in a partisan brawl that threatens to shut down the government, inviting congressional leaders of both parties to sit down with Vice President Biden and work out a compromise to fund federal programs through the end of the fiscal year.

The official statement called for a “bipartisan” approach. There seems to be a presumption that no one has been paying attention the past couple years, because the only people that still believe in bipartisanship are also likely the holdouts on Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. The way it actually works is that every time the word is mentioned, Democrats give ground on core principles while Republicans have to accept that they get only some, but not all, of what they want. The administration’s framing of its role also is interesting. Republican administrations tend to think of themselves as partisan, representing the core values of their party. This administration seems to think of itself as a mediator between partisans. Triangulation you can believe in.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: How Boehner is playing the Democrats

Richard Nixon espoused what he called “the madman theory.” It’s a negotiating approach that induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down to avoid the wreckage your rage might let loose.

House Republicans are pursuing their own madman theory in budget negotiations, with a clever twist: Speaker John Boehner is casting himself as the reasonable man fully prepared to reach a deal to avoid a government shutdown. But he also has to satisfy a band of “wild-eyed bomb-throwing freshmen,” as he characterized new House members in a Wall Street Journal interview last week by way of comparing them fondly to his younger self.

Thus are negotiators for President Obama and Senate Democrats forced to deal not only with Republican leaders in the room but also with a menacing specter outside its confines. As “responsible” public officials, Democrats are asked to make additional concessions just to keep the bomb-throwers at bay.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Huckabee wrong on single moms

Last week Mike Huckabee’s presidential ramp-up took a Quaylian detour when he denounced Oscar winner Natalie Portman for her out-of-wedlock pregnancy.  Suggesting that Portman and other unmarried Hollywood stars glamorize single motherhood, he claimed, “Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care.”

This is the kind of story I would typically ignore, but I agreed to talk with Lawrence O’Donnell about it on Friday night because Huckabee’s  recycled and inaccurate attack on single motherhood was personally irritating to me.

I know a bit about single parenting. Although my father was always a part of my life, my parents were not married and my mother was the primary caretaker and breadwinner.  She managed this as a white woman raising an interracial child in the South in the 1970s.  She rarely made a wage equal to her male counterparts and often had to navigate a difficult racial environment. It was not an easy task socially, financially, or emotionally. It was certainly not glamorous. I am sure my mom would have liked much more personal and financial support.  My mother worked extremely hard, was always present, and never left my sister or me feeling deprived. I didn’t even know how economically marginal we truly were until I got to college and saw what wealth looked like for the first time.

Robert Perry: Bush’s Interrogators Stressed Nudity

Consortiumnews.com Editor’s Note: The disclosure that Army Pvt. Bradley Manning was subjected to seven hours of forced nudity on Wednesday – amid new pressures aimed at getting him to identify others involved in the WikiLeaks case – recalled how the Bush administration used nudity and other abusive tactics to break down “war on terror” detainees. In 2004, the CIA told President George W. Bush’s lawyers how useful forced nudity was for instilling “learned helplessness” in prisoners, though the repeated emphasis on nudity took on a lewd and sadistic quality, as Robert Parry reported in this article from the archives:

The CIA shared with George W. Bush’s Justice Department the details of how an interrogation strategy – with an emphasis on forced nudity and physical abuse – could train prisoners in “learned helplessness” and demonstrate “the complete control of Americans.”

The 19-page document, entitled “Background Paper on CIA’s Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques” and dated Dec. 30, 2004, contains repeated references to keeping suspected al-Qaeda captives – called “high-value detainees” or HVDs – naked as part of the strategy for breaking down their resistance.

The first of several “specific conditioning interrogation techniques” lists “Nudity. The HVD’s clothes are taken and he remains nude until the interrogators provide clothes to him.” [Underline in original.]

Rhonda Garelick: High Fascism

AS I left a Paris cafe the other night, instead of the usual “Bonsoir, Madame,” the waiter called after me, “Happy Fashion Week!” as if we were all celebrating a national holiday.

Maybe we were. Fashion is more than business in France: it’s a mythology, a secular religion, a source of national pride, especially during Fashion Week, when the country recalls its history as the birthplace of haute couture.

In recent days, though, in response to the anti-Semitic diatribe by Christian Dior’s creative director, John Galliano, the French have been recalling a far more ominous chapter in their history.