“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”
New York Times Editorial: The Abuse of Private Manning
Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been imprisoned for nine months on charges of handing government files to WikiLeaks, has not even been tried let alone convicted. Yet the military has been treating him abusively, in a way that conjures creepy memories of how the Bush administration used to treat terror suspects. Inexplicably, it appears to have President Obama’s support to do so.
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Far more troubling is why President Obama, who has forcefully denounced prisoner abuse, is condoning this treatment. Last week, at a news conference, he said the Pentagon had assured him that the terms of the private’s confinement “are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards.” He said he could not go into details, but details are precisely what is needed to explain and correct an abuse that should never have begun.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Who’s Afraid of Elizabeth Warren?
The attacks on Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) just keep coming, fast and furious, facts be damned.
The CFPB will be “powerful, hard-nosed and unaccountable,” warns Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard. The agency “will decide its own budget,” its “rulings can’t be vetoed,” and it “will be almost impossible to challenge” in court.
“Who in the world would consider it appropriate to have one person appointed to set the rules for the entire financial industry?” wonders Senator Bob Corker.
The Wall Street Journal describes Warren’s “ideological agenda that banks are the villains of the credit crisis while distributing cash to homeowners who will presumably be grateful on Election Day 2012.”
Jim Hightower: The Corporate-GOP Attack on America’s Middle Class
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s autocratic attempt to abrogate the democratic right of public employees to bargain with their governmental bosses is not wearing well with the public. Recent polls show that a mere one-third of Wisconsinites favor his blatantly political power play, and that if he had told voters in the last year’s election that he intended to do this, he would’ve lost.
After only one month in office, Walker’s approval rating has plummeted. He’s become a national poster boy for right-wing anti-union extremism–so out of step that even democracy fighters in Egypt are jeering him.
Yet, Walker is but one of a flock of far-right, corporate-crested Republican governors and Congress critters who’re waging an all-out class war on unionized workers. It’s a shameful effort to bust the wage structure and legal protections that support America’s already endangered middle class.
Dean Baker: The Key to Rebuilding Workers’ Power: Unrig the Rules
The battle in Wisconsin over the rights of public-sector workers holds the potential to reawaken workers across the country to demand their fair share of the economic pie. This could be an important turning point. However, if workers are to make real progress they must move to alter the rules of the game. These rules have been deliberately rigged against them over the last three decades.
The most obvious of these rules are those governing the rights to unionize, such as those that Gov. Walker directly attacked in Wisconsin. However, this is just part of the story. Unionization has become almost impossible in the private sector, since companies routinely fire workers engaged in an organizing drive.
Daphne Eviatar: Obama Gets Pushed Out of His Comfort Zone — and Pushes Back
The news on Sunday that State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was forced to resign for his frank comments about the treatment of Bradley Manning is sparking lots of justifiable criticism. The question is, why would the administration do something so “ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid”?
Those are, of course, the exact words that Crowley used to describe the treatment of Manning, the Army private suspected of leaking secret government documents to WikiLeaks, now imprisoned at the Marine Brig at Quantico. Although the Pentagon and State Department have themselves acknowledged that the leaks haven’t actually endangered national security, they’ve been treating Manning as if he’s a hardened terrorist.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Wisconsin Governor’s Allies Ran a Toxic Bailout Bank… and Got Rich
People in Wisconsin are pulling their money out of Marshall & Ilsley (M&I) Bank because they know it’s been helping their Governor’s crusade against public employees and the middle class.
They might also like to know that M&I’s executives ran one of the most conspicuous dumping sites for toxic financial waste in the country. And that the same executives are about to get very rich, even though TARP rules supposedly don’t allow big bonuses for underwater bankers like the leadership at M&I.
These executives didn’t just contribute to Scott Walker’s campaign. They also helped the governor avoid the press — and his own constituents — by letting him use their bank’s underground tunnel, which leads directly from its parking lot into the Capitol Building in Madison. Using it for this purpose may have been a violation of the bank’s own Code of Business Ethics.
That tunnel’s not just a convenient way to help a political crony. It’s also one heck of a metaphor.
Richard Wolff: What’s Left of the American Left?
There’s no denying its historic decline, but the left does not lack for issues. It needs only organization.
“In contradiction” best describes the American left today. On the one hand, it is fragmented and dispirited, feeling itself distant from the tumble of daily US politics and acutely disgusted by its many-layered corruptions. It hardly knows itself as a part of society, so deep runs its alienation. After all, leftists, too, are affected by the mass media’s wishful pretense that the American left has simply disappeared and the extreme right’s paranoid caricatures that recycle 1950s McCarthyism. [ AP Photo/Wisconsin State Journal, John Hart)]
And yet, the US left is actually quite strong and getting stronger by the minute. Very many young people find far more meaning in the left social criticisms of Jon Stewart, Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert than they do in the stale Republican or Democratic activities that those popular comedians mock. The devotees of much current popular music want and respond to lyrics rich with social criticism. The assaults of the right in the US on access to abortion, on civil rights and civil liberties, on the separation of church and state, and on immigrants, are less and less suffered in silent resentment and increasingly opposed by a revived left criticism and activism. From the mass mobilizations of immigrants to the outpouring of support for the embattled public employees in Wisconsin to the gatherings of support for Planned Parenthood, the US left’s size, depth and diversity are evident.
Bob Herbert: The Sport Needs to Change
Dave Duerson was once a world-class athlete, a perfect physical specimen whose pro football career included Super Bowl championships with the Chicago Bears and New York Giants. Friends and former teammates would tell you that he was also a bright guy – a graduate of Notre Dame with a degree in economics and, at least for awhile, a successful businessman.
When he shot himself to death in his South Florida home last month, the despondent Duerson, who was 50, fired the bullet into his chest rather than into his head. He did not want to further damage his brain. As he explained in text messages and a handwritten note, the former all-pro safety wanted his brain tissue studied, presumably to determine whether he had been suffering from a devastating degenerative disease that is taking a terrible toll on what appears to be an increasing number of pro football players and other athletes.
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