“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”
Paul Krugman: Ludicrous and Cruel
Many commentators swooned earlier this week after House Republicans, led by the Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan, unveiled their budget proposals. They lavished praise on Mr. Ryan, asserting that his plan set a new standard of fiscal seriousness.
Well, they should have waited until people who know how to read budget numbers had a chance to study the proposal. For the G.O.P. plan turns out not to be serious at all. Instead, it’s simultaneously ridiculous and heartless.
How ridiculous is it? Let me count the ways – or rather a few of the ways, because there are more howlers in the plan than I can cover in one column.
New York Times Editorial: It’s Not Really About Spending
If the federal government shuts down at midnight on Friday – which seems likely unless negotiations take a sudden turn toward rationality – it will not be because of disagreements over spending. It will be because Republicans are refusing to budge on these ideological demands:
No federal financing for Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions. Instead, state administration of federal family planning funds, which means that Republican governors and legislatures will not spend them.
• No local financing for abortion services in the District of Columbia.
• No foreign aid to countries that might use the money for abortion or family planning. And no aid to the United Nations Population Fund, which supports family-planning services.
• No regulation of greenhouse gases by the Environmental Protection Agency.
• No funds for health care reform or the new consumer protection bureau established in the wake of the financial collapse.
Political moderates and on-the-fencers have had it easy up to now on budget issues. They could condemn “both sides,” and insist on the need for “courage” in tackling the deficit.
Thanks to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget and the Republicans’ maximalist stance in negotiations to avert a government shutdown, the days of straddling are over.
Ryan’s truly outrageous proposal, built on heaping sacrifice onto the poor, slashing scholarship aid to college students and bestowing benefits on the rich, ought to force middle-of-the-roaders to take sides. No one who is even remotely moderate can possibly support what Ryan has in mind.
Eugene Robinson: Trumped by Political Failure
In political terms, who has the most to lose from this appalling brinksmanship over a federal government shutdown? House Speaker John Boehner? President Obama? Senate Democrats? Tea party Republicans?
The clear answer is all of the above, plus American democracy itself. As proof, we need look no further than a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll indicating that Donald Trump is running second behind Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination.
Donald Trump.
William Rivers Pitt: A Festival of Dumb
Every time I think I’ve seen everything, politically speaking, a new wave of nonsense comes crashing ashore and bowls me right over. Today’s installment features a game of budgetary chicken being played among the Tea Partiers in the House, the Democrats in the Senate, and an alarmingly conciliatory Obama administration. If someone doesn’t blink by midnight on Friday, the federal government will shut down and a great deal of fresh Hell will be unleashed.
Just a few short weeks ago, the concept of a government shutdown seemed remote. The GOP proposed a broad swath of brutal and highly dubious budget cuts crafted by a raft of right-bent House freshmen who are looking to placate the “Keep-Your-Damn-Government-Hands-Off-My-Medicare” wing of their party’s base…which is grimly amusing, considering that a key element of their spending plan involves the slow and certain annihilation of Medicare itself.
House Speaker Boehner is looking more orange than usual while tip-toeing
Ari Berman: GOP Would Shut Down Government Over EPA, Planned Parenthood
A deal to prevent a government shutdown has yet to be reached, and the clock is ticking ominously toward a shutdown on Friday. After a late-night meeting between President Obama, Harry Reid and John Boehner, sources said a tentative agreement was reached to cut around $34.5 billion in fiscal year 2011-12, according to the Huffington Post (the specifics of the cuts remain secret). But the sticking point concerns GOP “riders” focused on hot-button issues unrelated to the deficit, such as defunding family planning services at Planned Parenthood and preventing the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions-two highlights of the budget passed by House Republicans in February.
Just yesterday, the Senate rejected the House Republicans’ EPA provision, and would almost certainly do the same regarding the Planned Parenthood amendment, which saves only $330 million but targets much-needed services for low-income families, such as preventative healthcare and cancer screenings (for more on the Title X program, read this primer from HHS). “We’re on the runway now and waiting for the speaker to come in for a landing,” Senator Chuck Schumer said today. “We have an agreement in principle…. We pretty much have a consensus on the cuts and numbers…. Ideological riders that have nothing to do with the deficit are standing in our way.”
Richard (RJ) Escow: What the President Should Have Said About J.T. Henderson — and Other ‘Real People’
Last night the President took a lofty, almost disinterested stance regarding budget deadlock in Congress. He seemed to chastise Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner equally, focusing on the consequences of a shutdown and ignoring the consequences of making a bad deal to avoid a shutdown.
A Federal shutdown would have “real consequences for real people,” said the President, mentioning one “real” person by name: J.T. Henderson of Louisville, Kentucky.
So let’s talk about J.T. Henderson – and about all the other J.T. Hendersons who are just as real, and just as important, as our friend in Louisville. You’d be surprised how many there are.
Johann Hari: We’re not being told the truth on Libya
The most plausible explanation is that this is a way of asserting raw Western power and trying to arrange the fallout in our favour
Most of us have a low feeling that we are not being told the real reasons for the war in Libya. David Cameron’s instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to jump on a plane and tour the palaces of the region’s dictators selling them the most hi-tech weapons of repression available. Nicolas Sarkozy’s instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to offer urgent aid to the Tunisian tyrant in crushing his people. Barack Obama’s instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to refuse to trim the billions in aid going to Hosni Mubarak and his murderous secret police, and for his Vice-President to declare: “I would not refer to him as a dictator.”
Yet now we are told that these people have turned into the armed wing of Amnesty International. They are bombing Libya because they can’t bear for innocent people to be tyrannised, by the tyrants they were arming and funding for years. As Obama put it: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different”. There was a time, a decade ago, when I took this rhetoric at face value. But I can’t now. The best guide through this confusion is to look at two other wars our government is currently deeply involved in – because they show that the claims made for this bombing campaign can’t be true.
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