“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”.
Laurence Tribe: Games and Gimmicks in the Senate
ON Wednesday President Obama, using his power to make recess appointments, named Richard Cordray as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A few hours later, he used the same power to appoint three new members to the National Labor Relations Board, acting to overcome unprecedented Senate encroachment on his duty to appoint executive officials. The president’s right to do so is clearly stated in the Constitution: the recess appointments clause empowers him to “fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”
However, since the twilight years of the George W. Bush administration, the Senate has tried to nullify this power by holding “pro forma” sessions every three days, during what no one doubts would otherwise be an extended recess. In these sham sessions, manifestly serving only to circumvent the recess appointment safety valve, a lone senator gavels the Senate to order, usually for just a few minutes; senators even agree beforehand that no business will be conducted.
Paul Krugman: Bain, Barack and Jobs
America’s recovery from recession has been so slow that it mostly doesn’t seem like a recovery at all, especially on the jobs front. So, in a better world, President Obama would face a challenger offering a serious critique of his job-creation policies, and proposing a serious alternative.
Instead, he’ll almost surely face Mitt Romney.
Mr. Romney claims that Mr. Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. For example, he told Fox News: “This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is two million jobs that he lost as president.” He went on to declare, of his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”
But his claims about the Obama record border on dishonesty, and his claims about his own record are well across that border.
10 current words and phrases that my kid may never know because they might end up as relics of a lost vernacular, starting with “civil liberties.”
By far, the laziest, most vapid articles annually published during this post-holiday season are lists of the past year’s top 10 words and aphorisms. Admittedly, the sloth of such an endeavor tempts me. But as a new dad obsessed with my 1-year-old son’s future, I think I’ve got a more worthy list to add to the pile-one of current words and phrases that my kid may never know because they might end up as relics of a lost vernacular.
Here are those harrowing 10. I hope I’m wrong but fear I’m not.
New York Times Editorial: A Leaner Pentagon
With his new defense strategy, President Obama has put forward a generally pragmatic vision of how this country will organize and deploy its military in the 21st century, while also addressing its deep fiscal problems.
It is based on the idea that the country must be smarter and more restrained in its use of force – a relief after President George W. Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq. It will mean a significant reduction in the size of the Army and Marine Corps. But it doesn’t minimize the fact that the world is a very dangerous place and says the country must still be ready to fight a major land war – although one lasting for years would require another buildup.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Sweet Victories: Lessons for 2012
As we head into 2012, there are a lot of questions about where the Occupy energy will go from here. I’m confident it will move in powerful directions-fighting unjust foreclosures and evictions, exploring alternative banking, taking on outrageous student debt, countering the corrosive role of corporate money in politics, and allying in new ways with the growing ranks of poor Americans.
But there are also tangible-maybe not sexy or systemic-reforms that make a real difference in people’s lives and speak to OWS principles, and would benefit from its energy and activism. In 2011, two victories on paid sick leave offer something to build on as we work towards an economy that is more just and fair. Connecticut became the first state to guarantee this common sense protection for working people; and Seattle joined San Francisco and Washington, DC as the only cities with paid sick leave on the books.
Richard Reeve: America’s 5 Political Parties
It would seem that the United States has a five-party system right now. What was done in Iowa last Tuesday could unravel in New Hampshire, but whatever happens next, the United States is more politically fractured than it has been in decades.
Iowa is the beginning but has never been the bellwether of presidential campaigns. Too white, too rural, only 5.7 percent unemployment, and all that. But hard ideological lines shone through the Iowa results, even if the state had caucuses rather than an all-out primary, which means most of the folks who showed up were not only ordinary American citizens but also activists to some degree.
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