Tag: 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”

Paul Krugman: Leaving Children Behind

Will 2011 be the year of fiscal austerity? At the federal level, it’s still not clear: Republicans are demanding draconian spending cuts, but we don’t yet know how far they’re willing to go in a showdown with President Obama. At the state and local level, however, there’s no doubt about it: big spending cuts are coming.

And who will bear the brunt of these cuts? America’s children.

Now, politicians – and especially, in my experience, conservative politicians – always claim to be deeply concerned about the nation’s children. Back during the 2000 campaign, then-candidate George W. Bush, touting the “Texas miracle” of dramatically lower dropout rates, declared that he wanted to be the “education president.” Today, advocates of big spending cuts often claim that their greatest concern is the burden of debt our children will face.

In practice, however, when advocates of lower spending get a chance to put their ideas into practice, the burden always seems to fall disproportionately on those very children they claim to hold so dear.

Robert Kuttner: The Left Edge of the Possible

My friend, the late Mike Harrington, used to describe his politics as “on the left wing of the possible.” It’s a fine aspiration. But if anything, economic problems have become more politically intractable since Mike died in 1989.

Scanning the various economic ills afflicting our Republic and its citizens, it’s evident that nearly all of the solutions lie beyond what is currently deemed thinkable in mainstream politics — beyond the left edge of the possible.

It’s not that my own views and values have become more radical in two decades. What has changed is that the American political center has shifted further to the right, while the twin assault on the good society by the private financial system and the organized right has become more intense.

Dana Milbank: Scott Walker’s unprincipled rigidity

“He’s not one of us.”

That phrase, uttered in the fourth minute of what Scott Walker believed to be a private phone conversation, tells you everything you need to know about the rookie governor of Wisconsin.

Walker thought he was talking to a patron, conservative billionaire David Koch, but thanks to the amateurish management that seems to be a hallmark of his governorship, he was instead being punked by an impostor from a liberal Web site.

“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”.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: Christiane Amanpour will be reporting live from Tripoli, Libya on the historic and violent struggle for control of the oil-rich nation.

Jake Tapper will host the roundtable with Governor Jan Brewer (R-AZ), Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA), Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) and Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), to discuss the federal and state budget crises and constituent responses to the shortages.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer will interview with N.J. Governor Chris Christie

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Dan Rather, HDNet Global Correspondent, Savannah Guthrie, NBC News White House Correspondent, Trish Regan, CNBC Anchor and Correspondent and John Heilemann, New York Magazine National Political Correspondent.

They will discuss these questions:

Is “Cuts” — Not “Jobs” — The New Winning Four-Letter Word?

Will Oil-Fueled Inflation Ruin Obama’s Economic Recovery?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) gives an exclusive interview and an interview with Senator John McCain (R-AZ), ranking member of the Armed Services Committee from Cairo.

The round table guests are former head of the RNC, Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS); chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO); host of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” Lawrence O’Donnell; president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka; and editorial board member and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Kim Strassel who will discuss the the economic and budget crisis..

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Guests are Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (I-CT) and Sen. John McCain of Arizona (R-AZ) discussing the Middle East. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) will discuss the national budget battle. Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Gov. Dan Malloy (D-CT) will talk about budgets on the state level. Economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office will give their insight on the Middle East crisis and the economy

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: War criminal Paul Wolfowitz gives his perspective on Libya and the role the United States needs to play. Fareed will give his view on the events. Economist and NY Times best selling author Michael Lewis will look back at the the world financial crisis.

Am I the only one who will be sleeping through this crap?

“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”

Charles M. Blow: The G.O.P.’s Abandoned Babies

Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children’s welfare. They can’t be “pro-life” when the “child” is in the womb but indifferent when it’s in the world. Allow me to illustrate just how schizophrenic their position has become through the prism of premature babies.

Of the 33 countries that the International Monetary Fund describes as “advanced economies,” the United States now has the highest infant mortality rate according to data from the World Bank. It took us decades to arrive at this dubious distinction. In 1960, we were 15th. In 1980, we were 13th. And, in 2000, we were 2nd.

Laura Flanders: Crushing Workers in Wisconsin Has National Effects

So that’s what they mean by from welfare to work. First you go force the poorest Americans into the workforce, then you go after their bargaining power. Wisconsin has long been the eye of this storm.

“We have an environment in Wisconsin in which any poor family can climb out of the despair of poverty and pursue the American dream.”

So said former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, singing his own praises to the Heritage Foundation back in the early ’90s.  By the time Bill Clinton ended the federal welfare program in ’96, Wisconsin’s W-2 program had already cut off AFDC entitlements and forced poor moms to work for benefits. That pushed thousands of poor women into the labor market. Average wages were around $7 an hour; homelessness rose, as did the number of children in foster care; Milwaukee’s black infant mortality rate went up 37 percent, and as soon as the ’90s bubble burst, unemployment and poverty swelled.

Robert Reich: The Republican Shakedown

You can’t fight something with nothing. But as long as Democrats refuse to talk about the almost unprecedented buildup of income, wealth, and power at the top — and the refusal of the super-rich to pay their fair share of the nation’s bills — Republicans will convince people it’s all about government and unions.

Republicans claim to have a mandate from voters for the showdowns and shutdowns they’re launching. Governors say they’re not against unions but voters have told them to cut costs, and unions are in the way. House Republicans say they’re not seeking a government shutdown but standing on principle. “Republicans’ goal is to cut spending and reduce the size of government,” says House leader John Boehner, “not to shut it down.” But if a shutdown is necessary to achieve the goal, so be it.

The Republican message is bloated government is responsible for the lousy economy that most people continue to experience. Cut the bloat and jobs and wages will return.

“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: Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.

Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad – specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.

As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular – in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” – Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s – and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”

New York Times Editorial: Stopping Qaddafi

Unless some way is found to stop him, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya will slaughter hundreds or even thousands of his own people in his desperation to hang on to power.

Libyans have shown extraordinary courage, and some members of the military may also be turning against the regime. We don’t know if they will be able to bring the dictator down by themselves. We are sure they need more support than they have been getting from the United States and other Western democracies.

It took President Obama four days to condemn the violence. Even then, he spoke only vaguely about holding Libyan officials accountable for their crimes. Colonel Qaddafi was never mentioned by name.

Eugene Robinson: It’s time to get tough with Libya

The U.S. and other nations have more options than Obama seems to think.

President Obama pledged that “the entire world is watching” the horror in Libya, but watching isn’t nearly enough. There is much more that world leaders – beginning with Obama – urgently must say and do.

The world’s censure means nothing to Col. Moammar Gaddafi, the dictator who vows to die rather than surrender the power he has held for four decades. At this point, the long-running debate about whether Gaddafi is mostly diabolical or mostly deranged is irrelevant. Despite his incoherent ramblings, he clearly is fighting not just for power but for his life.

Anika Rahman: Poor Women Pay the Price in the Right’s War on Women’s Health

On Friday, February 18, the U.S. House of Representatives dealt a crushing blow to the health and well-being of millions of women across America: in a 240-185 vote, the the House approved H.R. 1 — also known the Pence Amendment — which would prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funding for any purpose, including providing basic preventive health care to women and families. Consider it a slap in the face to women in general, especially to low-income women who have nowhere else to turn for their primary health care.

At present, Planned Parenthood provides nearly four million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, 830,000 breast exams, more than a million Pap tests, and helps prevent more than 612,000 unintended pregnancies each year. Annually, three million women and men in the United States visit Planned Parenthood affiliate health centers for trusted health care services and information; for some of those clients, largely those that are low-income, the nurses and doctors at Planned Parenthood are the only health care providers they ever see.

“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”

Priceless

Dafna Linzer How I Passed My U.S. Citizenship Test: By Keeping the Right Answers to Myself

Last month, I became an American citizen, a tremendous honor and no easy accomplishment, even for a Canadian. After living here for 12 years, I thought I knew everything. Then I learned how we mint Americans.

After years of steep filing fees and paperwork (including one letter from Homeland Security claiming that my fingerprints had “expired”), it all came down to a test. I passed, and, my fellow Americans, you could too-if you don’t mind providing answers that you know are wrong.

Friends told me I didn’t need to study, the questions weren’t that hard. But I wanted to and so for months I lugged around a set of government-issued flashcards, hoping to master the test. I pestered my family and friends to quiz me. Sometimes I quizzed my sources. I learned things (there are 27 amendments to the Constitution) and they learned things (there are 27 amendments to the Constitution). But then we began noticing errors in a number of the questions and answers.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: The Mayor Rahm Mystery

Mayor Rahm. It will be a hoot. It could even be good for Chicago.

And in a way he has never had to do before, Rahm Emanuel will finally reveal who he really is.

One of the many dramas of a Rahm mayoralty-roll over, Fiorello LaGuardia-will be its status as a controlled (or, perhaps, uncontrolled) experiment in how a brilliant political operative translates campaigning skills into governing achievement. Bill Clinton was an elected official who happened to be one of the country’s smartest consultants. Rahm Emanuel is the go-to adviser who happens to be good at running for office.

Glen Ford:Torturing Detroit’s Kids for Racist Fun and Profit

Corporate America and its servants in the Democratic and Republican parties care nothing for the education of Black, inner city school children, and the proof is in Detroit, for all to see. The State of Michigan, controlled, like every other state in the country, by business interests, has ordered Detroit to close down half of its public schools, and increase class sizes to 60 students. That’s double the number that any respectable educator considers suitable for classroom work, and tantamount to a declaration that Detroit’s public school students will not be provided an education. In a modern society, this is the equivalent of declaring Detroit – an overwhelmingly Black metropolis – a failed state.

This racist outrage is blamed on a $327 million school budget deficit, just as when the public schools were decimated twice before in recent years, eliminating 79 schools and reducing enrollment to about 84,000 students. Many of those public schools were then sold to private charter school companies. With every assault on public education, charter schools multiplied. Now 54,000 Detroit students attend charter schools, and even before the current crisis, the corporate enemies of public education were gleefully predicting that charters would overtake public school enrollment by around 2015 – which would make Detroit the second major American city in which charters outnumber public schools.

“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”

The Triangle Shirtwaste Factory Fire changed so much, not just fire codes but safety regulations and work conditions for women. Its significance now in light of the right wing attacks on labor is even more important. We now have all their names. The 100th Anniversary of this tragedy is March 25.

New York Times Editorial: The Fire That Changed Everything

In The Times’s grim, vivid account on March 26, 1911 – the day after the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire – these words appear: “The victims who are now lying at the Morgue waiting for some one to identify them by a tooth or the remains of a burned shoe were mostly girls from 16 to 23 years of age.” There were 146 victims in all, 129 of them women.

Nearly a century later, the names of the last unidentified victims have been discovered, thanks to the work of a historian named Michael Hirsch. They are Maria Giuseppa Lauletti, Max Florin, Concetta Prestifilippo, Josephine Cammarata, Dora Evans and Fannie Rosen, all buried together beneath a single monument in the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. This completes the roll of the dead in one of the city’s worst and most important fires.

Wednesday is turning into Ladies’ Day. The guys are below the fold

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Elizabeth Warren’s Battle

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)-the people’s agency and cop on the beat to protect consumers-is now a reality. Its website is live, you can sign-up for updates, and check out a sleek Arrested Development-style video narrated by Ron Howard that explains the bureau’s mission.

But as Elizabeth Warren made clear in a speech at the Consumers Union 75th anniversary celebration last week, the battle to establish a strong and independent CFPB is far from over.

Amy Goodman: Uprisings: From the Middle East to the Midwest

As many as 80,000 people marched to the Wisconsin state Capitol in Madison on Saturday as part of an ongoing protest against newly elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to not just badger the state’s public employee unions, but to break them. The Madison uprising follows on the heels of those in the Middle East. A sign held by one university student, an Iraq War vet, read, “I went to Iraq and came home to Egypt?” Another read, “Walker: Mubarak of the Midwest.” Likewise, a photo has circulated in Madison of a young man at a rally in Cairo, with a sign reading, “Egypt supports Wisconsin workers: One world, one pain.” Meanwhile, Libyans continue to defy a violent government crackdown against masses seeking to oust longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, and more than 10,000 marched Tuesday in Ohio to oppose Republican Gov. John Kasich’s attempted anti-union legislative putsch.

Just a few weeks ago, solidarity between Egyptian youth and Wisconsin police officers, or between Libyan workers and Ohio public employees, might have elicited a raised eyebrow.

Amanda Marcotte: Does the Media Finally Get That Anti-Choice Is About Far More Than Abortion?

The mainstream media has always, shall we say, struggled to understand that the anti-choice movement is anti-contraception, anti-STD prevention, and anti-sex education.  It just doesn’t fit the official narrative, which posits that anti-choicers are somehow “pro-life,” people who are deeply invested in fetal life, but who, for some mysterious reason, mostly don’t extend their concern for life into opposition to war or support for life-saving health insurance reform.  Even in explicitly pro-choice media outlets, the narrative tends to be about abortion, without little acknowledgment that attacks on contraception are part of the larger agenda of the anti-choice movement, even as news stories about abstinence-only and conscience clauses keep trickling out.

“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”

Robert Reich: The Coming Shutdowns and Showdowns: What’s Really at Stake

Wisconsin is in a showdown. Washington is headed for a government shutdown.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker won’t budge. He insists on delivering a knockout blow to public unions in his state (except for those, like the police, who supported his election).

In DC, House Republicans won’t budge on the $61 billion cut they pushed through last week, saying they’ll okay a temporary resolution to keep things running in Washington beyond March 4 only if it includes many of their steep cuts – among which are several that the middle class and poor depend on.

Republicans say “we’ve” been spending too much, and they’re determined to end the spending with a scorched-earth policies in the states (Republican governors in Ohio, Indiana, and New Jersey are reading similar plans to decimate public unions) and shutdowns in Washington.

There’s no doubt that government budgets are in trouble. The big lie is that the reason is excessive spending.

New York Times Editorial: The Dirty Energy Party

President Obama has decided that the failure of last year’s comprehensive climate bill does not have to mean the death of climate policy. Instead of imposing a mandatory cap and stiff price on carbon emissions, as the bill would have done, the president is offering a more modest approach involving sharply targeted and well-financed research into breakthrough technologies, cleaner fuels and more efficient cars and trucks.

This is all part of a broader investment-for-the-future strategy that he outlined in his State of the Union address, and it all makes sense as a way of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, creating more green jobs and reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil.

Bob Herbert: At Grave Risk

Buried deep beneath the stories about executive bonuses, the stock market surge and the economy’s agonizingly slow road to recovery is the all-but-silent suffering of the many millions of Americans who, economically, are going down for the count.

A 46-year-old teacher in Charlotte, Vt., who has been unable to find a full-time job and is weighed down with debt, wrote to his U.S. senator, Bernie Sanders:

“I am financially ruined. I find myself depressed and demoralized and my confidence is shattered. Worst of all, as I hear more and more talk about deficit reduction and further layoffs, I have the agonizing feeling that the worst may not be behind us.”

“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”

Democracy does not end on Election Day. That’s when it begins.  Citizens do not elect officials to rule them from one election to the next. Citizens elect officials to represent them, to respond to the will of the people as it evolves.

Paul Krugman: Wisconsin Power Play

Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker – demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday – Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”

It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did – after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.

Bob Herbert: The Human Cost of Budget Cutting

John Drew believes, quaintly, that we are our brother’s keeper.

President Obama does not seem to believe this quite as strongly. And, of course, many of the Republicans in Congress do not believe it at all.

Mr. Drew is the president of Boston’s antipoverty agency, called Action for Boston Community Development, which everyone calls ABCD. In today’s environment, people who work with the poor can be forgiven if they feel like hunted criminals. Government officials at all levels are homing in on them and disrupting their efforts, sometimes for legitimate budget reasons, sometimes not.

The results are often heartbreaking.

Robert Fisk: These Are Secular Popular Revolts – Yet Everyone is Blaming Religion

Our writer, who was in Cairo as the revolution took hold in Egypt, reports from Bahrain on why Islam has little to do with what is going on

Mubarak claimed that Islamists were behind the Egyptian revolution. Ben Ali said the same in Tunisia. King Abdullah of Jordan sees a dark and sinister hand – al-Qa’ida’s hand, the Muslim Brotherhood’s hand, an Islamist hand – behind the civil insurrection across the Arab world. Yesterday the Bahraini authorities discovered Hizbollah’s bloody hand behind the Shia uprising there. For Hizbollah, read Iran. How on earth do well-educated if singularly undemocratic men get this thing so wrong? Confronted by a series of secular explosions – Bahrain does not quite fit into this bracket – they blame radical Islam. The Shah made an identical mistake in reverse. Confronted by an obviously Islamic uprising, he blamed it on Communists.

Bobbysocks Obama and Clinton have managed an even weirder somersault. Having originally supported the “stable” dictatorships of the Middle East – when they should have stood by the forces of democracy – they decided to support civilian calls for democracy in the Arab world at a time when the Arabs were so utterly disenchanted with the West’s hypocrisy that they didn’t want America on their side. “The Americans interfered in our country for 30 years under Mubarak, supporting his regime, arming his soldiers,” an Egyptian student told me in Tahrir Square last week. “Now we would be grateful if they stopped interfering on our side.” At the end of the week, I heard identical voices in Bahrain. “We are getting shot by American weapons fired by American-trained Bahraini soldiers with American-made tanks,” a medical orderly told me on Friday. “And now Obama wants to be on our side?”

“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”.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joins Christine in a “This Week” exclusive discussing the uprisings and unrest in the Middle East and the spending showdowns in Wisconsin and the fight over federal spending in Congress that could end in a shut down of the federal government

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: This weeks guests are Rep. Paul Ryan, (R-WI), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), House Budget Committee Ranking Democrat and David Sanger, New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent.

Plus, reports from CBS News correspondents in the Middle East

The Chris Matthews Show: This weeks guests are Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent, Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post Senior Political Editor, John Harris, Politico

Editor-in-Chief, and Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Columnist.

Under consideration are these questions:

Will Obama and the GOP Jump off the Cliff Together on a Sweeping Debt Package?

Can Republicans Convince Chris Christie To Take On Obama?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: The budget fight in Congress is discussed with guests Assistant Majority Leader Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and member of the Senate Budget Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

The United States ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice discusses how the protests  and unrest in the Middle East are affecting US policy in the region

On the roundtable to discuss budget reforms are former governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm (D), former congressman from Tennessee, Harold Ford (D), Republican strategist, Ed Gillespie and CNBC’s Rick Santelli.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) discusses the budget and reform. The ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar discussing the Middle East Also, an interview with former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

And finally, with President’s Day around the corner, we’ll close with interviews with two former commanders-in-chief.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: An exclusive interview with billionaire, George Soros plus Fareed’s take on the Middle East conflicts, the Muslim Brotherhood and a look at the art from Baghdad

“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”

Warning: While I disagree with Mr. Milbank that Medicare is a “major driver” of our debt crisis. the rest of his column is, well, both hysterically funny and ironically saddening. That said Do Not Eat or Drink While Reading

One other short comment, today’s Pundits were prolific and prophetic. The decision who to put above the fold was not easy

Dana Milbank: Serious budget cutting? The House has other fish to fry.

To say that our lawmakers are carping at trifles gives them too much credit. In fact, they are carping at carp.

“Asian carp [are] one of the world’s most rampant invasive species,” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, proclaimed on the House floor, 35 hours into the debate over budget cuts. “Weighing up to 100 pounds, spanning over six feet and eating half their body weight daily, Asian carp have the ability to decimate fish populations indigenous to the Great Lakes.”

That certainly stinks for Great Lakes fish and Great Lakes fishermen. But if you think the federal budget will be balanced on the backs of the Asian carp, you’re all wet. And that’s what makes Camp’s carping emblematic of the current debate over budget cuts. The whole exercise is less about improving the nation’s fiscal balance than about parochial concerns and political volleys.

FSM, I wish this was snark. It’s not

Michael Winsap: Across the US, GOP Lawmakers Build States of Denial

Forced at gunpoint this weekend to clean out a lot of old paper files in anticipation of some home improvements, I ran across some articles and obituaries I had saved following the death, a little more than five and a half years ago, of the late, great Ann Richards, former governor of Texas.

One of them related the story of how Governor Richards was approached by the ACLU, which was disturbed by the presence of a Christmas crèche on the grounds of the state capitol in Austin. “You know,” she replied, “that’s probably as close as three wise men will ever get to the Texas Legislature, so why don’t we just let them be.” . . . . .

This comes to mind in the wake of this week’s release of “Texas on the Brink,” a pamphlet published annually by the Texas Legislative Study Group, a group of Democratic state lawmakers. According to their research, much of it corroborated by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Texas Legislative Budget Board, in 2011, “Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured children in the nation. Texas is dead last in the percentage of residents with their high school diploma and near last in SAT scores. Texas has America’s dirtiest air… Those who value tax cuts over children and budget cuts over college have put Texas at risk in her ability to compete and succeed.”

Over the years, such statistics and other damned shenanigans have led many to debate whether Texas is indeed the rightful landlord of the nation’s worst statehouse. As someone with a mother’s Lone Star blood flowing through his otherwise anemic northeastern veins, I write this with no small amount of perverse pride. But in the last couple of weeks a lot of other states have been giving Texans a run for their money.

John Nichols: ‘First Amendment Remedies’: How Wisconsin Workers Grabbed the Constitution Back From the Right-Wing Royalists

When Democratic members of the Wisconsin State Senate walked out on Capital on Thursday – denying the Republican majority quorum that was necessary to pass the legislation — they were attacked by Walker and his cronies.  The governor called the boycott a “stunt” and claimed the Democrats were disrepecting democracy.  

After all, Walker’s backers noted, the governor and his Republican allies won an election last Novembe  

That is true.  

But Wisconsin’s greatest governor, Robert M. La Follette, declared: “”We have long rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results. Now, there is nothing mysteriously potent about the forms and names of democratic institutions that should make them self-operative. Tyranny and oppression are just as possible under democratic forms as under any other. We are slow to realize that democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle. It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can even be nearly approximated.”  

La Follette’s point, apparently lost on Walker, is that democracy does not end on Election Day. That’s when it begins.  Citizens do not elect officials to rule them from one election to the next. Citizens elect officials to represent them, to respond to the will of the people as it evolves.

(emphasis mine)

Please read below the fold, there is so much more to consider