“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 Freedom to Choose Birth Control
In response to a phony crisis over “religious liberty” engendered by the right, President Obama seems to have stood his ground on an essential principle – free access to birth control for any woman. That access, along with the ability to receive family planning and preventive health services, was at the foundation of health care reform. [..]
Nonetheless, it was dismaying to see the president lend any credence to the misbegotten notion that providing access to contraceptives violated the freedom of any religious institution. Churches are given complete freedom by the Constitution to preach that birth control is immoral, but they have not been given the right to laws that would deprive their followers or employees of the right to disagree with that teaching.
Richard D. Wolff: This Is No Bailout for Main Street America
In reality, a $25bn mortgage deal with banks is a drop in the ocean – given US homeowners’ $700bn of negative equity.
Big announcements of breakthrough legislative deals during election campaigns should be taken with huge grains of salt. Generally more rhetoric than reality, they sometimes contain real concessions made by politicians seeking votes. So it is with Thursday’s Washington announcement of $25bn to help homeowners. Something significant is happening, but it lies below the surface of the headlines.
Typically, modern governments intervene in two ways when – as has been true since 2007 – free-enterprise capitalist economies produce particularly bad versions of their recurring economic “downturns”. One economic policy is aptly called “trickle down” economics. It involves throwing heaps of money at the top of the economic pyramid – to mammoth banks, insurance companies, and other corporations at or near economic collapse. Policy-makers hope that such help for these institutions will revive their activity and thereby trickle down – as credit and orders for medium-sized and small businesses, and then, finally, to jobs and maybe wage increases for the majority of workers.
The right has picked a fight on this issue because religiosity is a convenient partisan cudgel to use against Democrats in an election year. Despite that, some Democrats and even some liberals have embraced their logic. The thinking inside the Beltway seems to be that religious voters will turn against Democrats unless the White House drops the basic idea that insurance should cover contraception.
Time will tell on the political impact of this fight, but the relevant political context here is more than just a 2012 measure of Catholic bishops’ influence on moral issues. It’s also this year’s mainstream Republican embrace of an antiabortion movement that no longer just marches on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade to criminalize abortion; it now marches on the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, holding signs that say “The Pill Kills.”
William Rivers Pitt: When Clint Eastwood Mocks You, You’re Officially Screwed
I ain’t happy
I’m feeling glad
I got sunshine
In a bag
I’m useless
But not for long
The future
Is coming on…– Gorillaz, “Clint Eastwood”
You know the wheels have come off the GOP wagon when the Republicans feel compelled to accuse Clint Eastwood of being a shill for the president, but that is precisely what has transpired. Eastwood, who is nobody’s Democrat by any stretch of the imagination, starred in a stirring Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler about the resurgence of Detroit’s auto industry that was, in essence, a gravel-voiced pep talk for all of America. Speaking personally, the commercial made me want to run full-tilt through a stone wall…and then buy a Chrysler, which is quite a confession, as I pride myself on being utterly immune to advertising.
Reaction from the Republican Right was both swift and hilarious. Apparently, and according to the GOP, Dirty Harry is a dirty liberal hippy socialist communist who hates America and is in the pocket of our birthplace-questionable president…but the GOP found itself struggling to be coherent in its critique.
Paul Krugman: The Whole Truth – and Nothing but
The criterion, according to Politifact, seems to be that a fact isn’t a fact if it helps a Democratic narrative. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 24, President Obama said: “In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.”
Which is just true. Period. But Politifact initially rated it as only “half true” because he was “essentially taking credit for job growth.” He didn’t actually take credit – and even if he had, a fact is still a fact. I do not think that word means what Politifact thinks it means.
Robert Reich: The Sad Spectacle of Obama’s Super PAC
It has been said there is no high ground in American politics since any politician who claims it is likely to be gunned down by those firing from the trenches. That’s how the Obama team justifies its decision to endorse a super PAC that can raise and spend unlimited sums for his campaign.
Baloney. Good ends don’t justify corrupt means.
I understand the White House’s concerns. Obama is a proven fundraiser – he cobbled together an unprecedented $745 million for the 2008 election and has already raised $224 million for this one. But his aides figure Romney can raise almost as much, and they fear an additional $500 million or more will be funneled to Romney by a relative handful of rich individuals and corporations through right-wing super PACS like “American Crossroads.”
David Graeber: Concerning the Violent Peace-Police: An Open Letter to Chris Hedges
In response to “The Cancer in Occupy,” by Chris Hedges.
I am writing this on the premise that you are a well-meaning person who wishes Occupy Wall Street to succeed. I am also writing as someone who was deeply involved in the early stages of planning Occupy in New York.
I am also an anarchist who has participated in many Black Blocs. While I have never personally engaged in acts of property destruction, I have on more than one occasion taken part in Blocs where property damage has occurred. (I have taken part in even more Blocs that did not engage in such tactics. It is a common fallacy that this is what Black Blocs are all about. It isn’t.)
I was hardly the only Black Bloc veteran who took part in planning the initial strategy for Occupy Wall Street. In fact, anarchists like myself were the real core of the group that came up with the idea of occupying Zuccotti Park, the “99%” slogan, the General Assembly process, and, in fact, who collectively decided that we would adopt a strategy of Gandhian non-violence and eschew acts of property damage. Many of us had taken part in Black Blocs. We just didn’t feel that was an appropriate tactic for the situation we were in.
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This article is dated today, but apparently it’s been going on since January 1.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.s…