“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: One Bad Energy Subsidy Expires
Now that the most polarized and paralyzed Congress in memory has managed to kill one of its most resilient boondoggles – the three-decade-old, multibillion-dollar subsidy for corn ethanol – we hope it has not exhausted its resolve and will take a hatchet to other harmful energy subsidies, chiefly those it gives to fossil fuels.
The ethanol subsidy was allowed to expire last Saturday, a death blow that was all the more remarkable coming just a few days before the Republican caucuses in the cornfields of Iowa, where the subsidy has long been seen as untouchable.
The 45-cent-per-gallon tax credit for oil companies to blend ethanol into gasoline cost taxpayers $5 billion to $6 billion a year, deepening the budget deficit. It boosted corn prices and increased food prices generally by encouraging farmers to replace other crops with corn. Its environmental virtues were less than advertised. Billed as a lower-carbon replacement for fossil fuels, corn ethanol generated more carbon dioxide than gasoline after taking into account the emissions caused when new land was cleared to replace the food lost to fuel production.
Charles M. Blow: The G.O.P.’s ‘Black People’ Platform
As we’ve gotten around to casting votes to select a Republican presidential nominee, the antiblack rhetoric has taken center stage.
You just have to love (and despise) this kind of predictability. [..]
Racial politics play well for Republicans. Santorum and Paul finished second and third in Iowa. Time will tell if Gingrich rebounds. Playing to racial anxiety and fear isn’t a fluke; it’s a strategy that energizes the Republican base.
Kevin Phillips, who popularized the right’s “Southern Strategy,” was quoted in The New York Times Magazine in May 1970 as saying that “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”
“Uh huh.”
I know that this week you have been kicking yourself for not having paid more attention to Rick Santorum.
Me, too! How can we call ourselves informed citizens without a thorough grounding in the heart and mind of the man who almost won the Iowa caucuses? So, as a public service, I am concluding my job of reading books by all the Republican presidential hopefuls with the work of Rick Santorum.
So you won’t have to. Not that you were planning to anyway.
Dana Goldstein: A Decade of No Child Left Behind
As the No Child Left Behind Act turns 10 on Sunday, the bill’s future remains uncertain, with Congress and the Obama administration divided over how to update the controversial law. Meanwhile, NCLB has been largely irrelevant to two of the major trends in national education policy-making over the past three years: the push to tie teacher evaluation and pay to student achievement data, and the move toward a Common Core curriculum in math and English. (The main lever pushing those changes is the Obama administration’s deployment of billions of federal grant dollars to states that agree to adhere to those priorities.) Nevertheless, NCLB has had a profound effect on what students experience in the classroom and on the way the American public talks about its schools. Here is my assessment of how NCLB has changed American education over the past decade, both for the better and for the worse.
Ben Adler: Huntsman: The Better Foreign Policy Alternative to Paul
It’s been a popular conceit on the left that Ron Paul is the GOP’s “peace candidate,” with a superior foreign policy to not only his GOP opponents but President Obama. But there’s actually a Republican presidential candidate with a more sensible foreign policy than Paul’s: former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman.
Paul’s foreign policy has enormous flaws: namely a completely illiberal lack of interest in promoting democracy or human rights, opposition to all foreign aid and crazy conspiracy theories about the United Nations. Huntsman doesn’t harbor such batty ideas.
Danny Schechter: US Political News Is a Fool’s Game
“Game On” was Rick Santorum’s first comment after his “surge” was considered successful with a mere 30,000 votes in Ioway. He inadvertently gave the game away by calling it a game – which is what it is.
Only this game is not just about politics but about the media. Pseudo-events like this are what the media lives for: it provides something for them to do, and to feel important while doing it. It creates airtime for endless punditry, and a spectacle to liven up a dull Iowa winter.
For Iowans, it’s a chance to “participate” in something that sounds important; for media heads, it’s a routine of the news, a ritual. The media, in effect, provides an infomercial posing as real news.
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