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”

Bob Herbert: Separate and Unequal

One of the most powerful tools for improving the educational achievement of poor black and Hispanic public school students is, regrettably, seldom even considered. It has become a political no-no.

Educators know that it is very difficult to get consistently good results in schools characterized by high concentrations of poverty. The best teachers tend to avoid such schools. Expectations regarding student achievement are frequently much lower, and there are lower levels of parental involvement. These, of course, are the very schools in which so many black and Hispanic children are enrolled.

Eugene Robinson: Those Useful Tyrants

Anyone looking for principle and logic in the attack on Moammar Gadhafi’s tyrannical regime will be disappointed. President Barack Obama and his advisers should acknowledge the obvious truth: They are reacting to the revolutionary fervor in the Arab world with the arbitrary “realism” that is a superpower’s prerogative.

Faced with an armed uprising by democracy-seeking rebels, Gadhafi threatened to turn all of Libya into a charnel house. The United States and its allies responded with overwhelming military force that is clearly intended to cripple the government and boost the revolt’s chances of success.

Thus begins our third concurrent Middle East war. No one has the slightest idea how, or when, this one will end.

Joe Conason: What’s So Scary About NPR?

While there is much stupid behavior to be found among politicians on both sides of the aisle during the embarrassing budget debate, few incidents have been more revealing than the latest Republican attempt to defund National Public Radio. The NPR budget line is minuscule and meaningless; the current “scandal” surrounding NPR is a fake and a diversion; and the repeated complaint that public radio is “liberally biased” is likewise false and fraudulent.

It has been decades since NPR-one of the least-slanted and best-reported news sources in the country-depended for a significant part of its revenue on federal funding. The amount that congressional Republicans suddenly decided to ax on an “emergency” basis, around $5 million, represents not only a tiny fragment of the network’s own financing but obviously an even more infinitesimal fraction of the federal deficit. So when Republican leaders claim that they are trying to be fiscally responsible by cutting NPR, while they insist on funding defense projects that the Pentagon doesn’t want, the lie detector jumps off the table.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: The Human Cost of Slashonomics

An important new initiative from Half in Ten, a national campaign to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years, and the Coalition on Human Needs, is putting a face on irresponsible “slash and burn” deficit reduction by showing how it would damage real lives. The organizations are collecting people’s stories so that the cruel consequences of draconian cuts to key federal programs are plain to see.

Consider the story of Carolyn, who was in her 40s when her husband of 25 years left her with two daughters. She had never received any kind of assistance and describes turning to her local community action agency as “the hardest thing I had ever done.” Her fears were quickly allayed as she “was treated with respect and was never made to feel like a drain on society.” She enrolled in a workforce development program that helped her with tuition and books while she attended community college.

“I went to college five days a week and spent the weekend working, so I never had a day off,” writes Carolyn. “When I graduated I became a Registered Nurse, able to support myself and my family. I couldn’t have done it without the Federal Workforce Development Program and the supportive services the local Community Action Agency provided.”

Robert Alvarez: Safeguarding Spent Fuel Pools in the United States

A drained spent fuel pool in the U.S. could lead to a catastrophic fire that would result in long-term land contamination substantially worse than what the Chernobyl accident unleashed.

As this photograph shows, the spent fuel pools at Units 3 and 4 at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex are exposed to the open sky and might be draining. The radioactive dose rates coming off the pools appear to be life-threatening. Lead-shielded helicopters trying to dump water over the pools/reactors could not get close enough to make much difference because of the dangerous levels of radiation.

If the spent fuel is exposed, the zirconium cladding encasing the spent fuel can catch fire – releasing potentially catastrophic amounts of radiation, particularly cesium-137. Here’s an article I wrote in January 2002 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about spent fuel pool dangers.

In October 2002, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire – serving at that time as her state’s attorney general-organized a group letter to Congress signed by her and 26 of her counterparts across the nation. In it, they requested greater safeguards for reactor spent-fuel pools. The letter urged “enhanced protections for one of the most vulnerable components of a nuclear power plant – its spent fuel pools.” It was met with silence.

Selma James: With Aristide’s Return Comes Hope

We don’t know how Haiti will react to an election that excluded his party, but the former president will take his cue from the people

The return of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his family to Haiti ends seven long years of campaigning – the 92% of voters who elected him had never accepted his overthrow in 2004 by a US-backed military coup. They risked their lives against a UN occupation that killed and brutalised thousands to demand his return. And last Friday he flew back from South Africa, where he had been living in forced exile, to a rapturous welcome in Port-au-Prince.

I was one of those waiting to greet him at his modest house, from where he was kidnapped seven years ago. Some of the waiting crowd were former political prisoners, others were visiting from exile. Yet others, disheartened after so many defeats – dictators, coups, hurricanes, earthquake, then cholera – had returned from Haiti’s diaspora.

We listened on transistor radios for news of his arrival. Finally Aristide’s plane had landed, and he was addressing supporters in a number of languages. He was back on Haitian soil two days before the fraudulent election from which his party has been excluded.

Laura Flanders: Stopping Walker’s Steamroller In Wisconsin

The night that the Wisconsin Senate Republicans got together and forced through Scott Walker’s union-busting bill, many Wisconsinites cried foul. The state’s open-meetings law required more notice unless there was a true emergency.

Last week, a Republican-appointed judge ruled with the protesters that the session that passed the bill may have  violated the law, which requires 24 hours notice on a vote. Judge Maryann Sumi put a stay on the bill, blocking its implementation. Teachers and other state employees retain their union rights.

The people of Wisconsin, I told the Left Forum on Friday, stopped a steamroller. Their willingness to fight, to keep showing up in greater and greater numbers, not only held off the bill but put the GOP in a place where they were desperate enough that they violated the law. They inspired the fight back in other states-Indiana’s state Democrats are still out of state, holding up a vote on a similar bill.

Allison Kilkenny: Everyone Has a Stake in US Uncut’s Fight

This weekend, US Uncut chapters in Georgia, New York, Washington, Pennsylvania and California staged actions (a much larger nationwide protest is planned for March 26. Thus far, thirty cities have signed up). I spoke with Kevin Shields, the founder of US Uncut Philadelphia about the protest and also his wish to close the divides between three groups: members of the lower classes, US Uncut’s predominately white movement and minority communities and also domestic efforts and the anti-austerity resistances in other countries.

A senior in high school, Shields decided to start his own US Uncut chapter simply because the need to protest is in his DNA. “For me, protesting and getting involved in activism is just something you do. If you don’t do it, you’re really missing out, and you’re participating in your own exploitation. So when I saw this, I thought, okay, I’ll do that.”

He tells me what happened at Saturday’s protest. It’s a familiar story for the newer branches of US Uncut: a small, peaceful protest during which the activists staged a “teach-in.”