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”

Robert Reich: Why the Democrats Should Never Have Started Paying Ransom to Avoid a Shutdown

It’s called ransom. That’s what Republicans are demanding from the White House and congressional Democrats for not pulling the plug on the government.

Problem is, when you pay ransom once, you’re almost begging to pay it again. And that’s exactly the pickle the Obama administration is finding itself in.

In order to avoid a shutdown last week and buy time until March 18, the White House agreed to more spending cuts for the remainder of this fiscal year than it originally put on the table. Now, in order to get past March 18, Republicans want even more. Democrats have offered to cut an additional $10.5 billion but Republicans want $61 billion. The White House is hinting it’s ready to compromise further.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: When Murdoch wins, citizens lose

We tend to measure the influence of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in terms of the reach of Fox News or the circulation of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. But it is actually local television stations on which Murdoch has built his empire and increased his stranglehold on access to information.

He has done so, in large part, by taking advantage of a 1999 change in FCC rules that allowed a single company to own more than one television station in the same market. That arrangement, known as a duopoly, lets big conglomerates such as News Corp. buy up stations, reduce their staffs and consolidate newsrooms. Murdoch now has nine duopolies. According to Santa Clara University’s Allen Hammond, a staggering 109 duopolies were created between 2000 and 2006.

The problem isn’t just that control over the airwaves becomes concentrated; it’s that such consolidation often results in the gutting of local news coverage. Duopoly owners tend to duplicate their local coverage and reduce the amount of airtime dedicated to community news. The subsequent lack of coverage gives local governments a free pass to operate without any real media scrutiny.

Bob Herbert: Flailing After Muslims

It has often been the case in America that specific religions, races and ethnic groups have been singled out for discrimination, demonization, incarceration and worse. But there have always been people willing to stand up boldly and courageously against such injustice. Their efforts are needed again now.

Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island, appears to harbor a fierce unhappiness with the Muslim community in the United States. As the chairman of the powerful Homeland Security Committee, Congressman King has all the clout he needs to act on his displeasure. On Thursday, he plans to open the first of a series of committee hearings into the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the bogus allegation that American Muslims have failed to cooperate with law enforcement efforts to foil terrorist plots.

Laura Flanders: Philanthro-Feudalism Is the Future!

China’s new economic plan is a relic of the past. It focuses on raising standards of living. How quaint!

When China’s leaders unveiled their latest five-year plan recently, they revealed that their focus is on lowering inequality, investing in railroads, highways and hospitals and expanding domestic demand through income subsidies. Fancy that!

Those old world Chinese just don’t seem to get it, that the modern way is the American way: deregulate, concentrate wealth in the top 1 percent and then make sure those at the top don’t pay taxes!

Treated well enough, the rich will fund desperately-needed things like cancer research. Just look at David Koch. Keep government regulators’ hands off his cancer-causing formaldehyde, and he’ll happily put $100 million toward a new Institute for (some) Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (As long as it’s named after him.)

Daphne Eviatar: New Obama Admin Procedures Import Troubling Aspects of Afghanistan Detention Review to Gitmo

Given that this is an additional process of review – additional to the right of habeas corpus, or review by a federal court, that the Supreme Court has said the law already requires – it’s arguably a step forward. Although it represents an unfortunate acceptance by the Obama administration of the entire concept of long-term administrative detention based on some ill-defined concept of dangerousness, at least it gives prisoners another opportunity to defend themselves.

But is this a real step forward, or merely a dance around the requirements of due process?

The Administration’s decision to assign prisoners “personal representatives” rather than lawyers, and to allow continued indefinite detention based on classified evidence, reflects a serious limitation in the new order that parallels the problems I’ve previously pointed out about the review system in Afghanistan.

Amy Goodman: Don’t Ice Out Public Media

 The aspen grove on Kebler Pass in Colorado is one of the largest organisms in the world. Thousands of aspen share the same, interconnected root system. Last weekend, I snowmobiled over the pass, 10,000 feet above sea level, between the towns of Paonia and Crested Butte. I was racing through Colorado to help community radio stations raise funds, squeezing in nine benefits in two days. The program director of public radio station KVNF in Paonia dropped us at the trailhead, where the program director of KBUT public radio in Crested Butte and a crew of station DJs picked us up on snowmobiles to whisk us 30 miles over the pass.

 Now that the Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives, one of their first acts was to “zero out” current funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Furthermore, Rep. Doug Lamborn from Colorado Springs has offered a bill to permanently strip CPB funding. Lamborn told NPR, “We live in a day of 150 cable channels-99 percent of Americans own a TV, we get Internet on our cell phones, we are in a day and age when we no longer need to subsidize broadcasting.”

 But public broadcasting was established precisely because of the dangers of the commercial media. When we are discussing war, we need a media not brought to us by weapons manufacturers. When discussing health-care reform, we need a media not sponsored by insurance companies or Big Pharma.

Christopher Hayes: Will Federal Regulators Crack Down on Oil Speculation?

While the Labor Department’s announcement last Friday that US employers had created 192,000 new jobs seems to confirm that the American economy is indeed showing signs of life, the adjective most observers have used to describe its recovery is “fragile.” The reasons are obvious: unemployment is still staggeringly high, household debt and underwater mortgages continue to put a drag on demand, and impending budget cuts by state and federal government could push unemployment back up and the economy back towards contraction.

But arguably the biggest threat to recovery is the price of oil. If oil prices in particular, and commodities in general, begin to rise, those trends will almost certainly constrain demand and consumer confidence at exactly the moment they are most needed. This week oil traded at $104.42 a barrel, up 7 percent from last week and at its highest since the September 26, 2008, close at $106.89. And we know from recent experience the oil prices (along with all sorts of other commodities) can skyrocket with little warning. Cast your memory back to the summer of 2008, before the financial crisis and in the heat of the presidential campaign. That summer, oil hit $147 a barrel and gas hit above $4 a gallon; airfare went through the roof and nearly every single major carrier came very close to declaring bankruptcy. Food prices shot up as well, with wheat trading up 137 percent year over year in July 2008, and corn 98 percent. Famine and food riots spread throughout the globe.

Sarah Posner: Meet Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, Star Witness in Peter King’s Anti-Muslim Show Trial

Although Representative Peter King (R-NY) hasn’t officially announced the witness list for Thursday’s hearing on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response,” a leaked list confirms that his star witness will be Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. An Arizona physician and founder of the nonprofit American Islamic Forum for Democracy, Jasser is a favorite in the cottage industry created to hype the threat of “creeping Sharia law.” He’s frequently presented as a representative of-and advocate for-“true” moderate Islam.

Unlike more wild-eyed anti-Muslim agitators like Frank Gaffney (with whom Jasser has collaborated) and Pamela Geller, Jasser comes across as calm, sober and professional. He gained notoriety in 2008, with the release of the Clarion Fund film The Third Jihad, which claimed that a fifth column of Muslim extremists have infiltrated America with the intent of establishing a theocratic state. The star of the film, Jasser helped promote the claim that has ricocheted all over the right-that a single document written by a lone Muslim Brotherhood member in the early 1990s proves that American Muslim charities and advocacy groups are part of a plot to subvert the Constitution and America and install an Islamic theocracy.