“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.
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New York Times Editorial: Now We’re Talking
The thousand-mile journey to comprehensive immigration reform has begun, as you might expect for Washington, with a single memo. Eight senators, four from each party, released it on Monday: a statement of principles behind a deal to overhaul the system in one big bill. It calls for more border and workplace enforcement, more visas for needed workers and legalization – with a path to citizenship – for 11 million undocumented immigrants.
The statement lacks specifics and leaves a lot of room for disappointment and retreat. But what’s encouraging is that it exists at all. No longer does the immigration debate consist of two groups yelling across a void. No longer is the discussion hopelessly immobilized by Republicans who have categorically rejected any deal that includes any hint of “amnesty.”
Richard (RJ) Eskow: As Federal Prosecutors Cash In, Big Bankers Go Unpunished
We needed heroes after the financial crisis. Instead we got bureaucrats, compromisers, and perhaps something much worse. Federal law enforcement officials, our “thin gray line” against banker crime, were charged with restoring the balance of justice and reducing the threat of future crises. Seems they had other things on their minds.
Now the Administration’s first-term posse is riding off into the sunset. The most visible departure is Deputy Attorney General Lanny Breuer. Remember those submissive or avaricious sheriffs in the old Westerns, the ones who were always letting the bad guys run wild ? “Sorry, Ma’am, I’d like to help you and the boy but there ain’t nothin’ I can do.” That’s Breuer, whose shattered credibility and extreme reluctance to prosecute has become the stuff of legend.
But he’s not the only one. Meet the senior partners in a firm that be more aptly named “Covington, Burling, and Justice.”
You often cannot evaluate a person’s character until they are under pressure. Their response to substantive criticism reveals an important aspect of character. While we learn the most from substantive criticism, the process is almost always painful. For people in positions of power, the substantive criticism is particularly vital and useful because far too often people fail to “speak truth to power.” They fear being excluded from the debate and marginalized should they criticize the false statements that the powerful make in order to maintain and extend their power. [..]
Journalists constantly face the ethical issue of whether to speak truth to power. They need access to the powerful to do their jobs. Journalists also want to be viewed as “serious” and the powerful often define as “unserious” any journalist who criticizes the powerful and the myths that the powerful spread in order to maintain and exploit their power. Far too often, journalists decide against speaking truth to power. This self-censorship is particularly damaging because it is invisible to the public and because it inherently degrades the journalist’s integrity.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Urgency of Growth
If you care about deficits, you should want our economy to grow faster. If you care about lifting up the poor and reducing unemployment, you should want our economy to grow faster. And if you are a committed capitalist and hope to make more money, you should want our economy to grow faster.
The moment’s highest priority should be speeding economic growth and ending the waste, human and economic, left by the Great Recession. But you would never know this because the conversation in our nation’s capital is being held hostage by a ludicrous cycle of phony fiscal deadlines driven by a misplaced belief that the only thing we have to fear is the budget deficit.
John Nichols: Priebus Is What Happens When a Party Loses Its Self-Respect
The Republican National Committee has retained Reince Priebus as party chairman, keeping the failed leader in a position previously occupied by Mark Hanna, Lee Atwater and Haley Barbour.
Even as he accepted his new term, Priebus acknowledged that he and his minions have led their party far from the American mainstream. “We have to build better relationships in minority communities, urban centers and college towns,” he admitted in his acceptence speech. [..]
Priebus was not reelected to build a multiracial, multiethnic party that embraces diversity and seeks to deliver a message of opportunity for all. The whole point of his chairmanship has been to combat the politics of inclusion that Republicans decry Barack Obama for practicing.
That has placed the once honorable Republican Party on the wrong side of history, and of American progress.
Harold Meyerson: Employees? Consumers? Feh!
The Republican war on the NLRB and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Should the Supreme Court uphold it, last Friday’s decision by three Reagan-appointees to the D.C. Circuit Appellate Court appears at first glance to rejigger the balance of power between Congress and the president. The appellate justices struck down three recess appointments that President Obama had made to the five-member National Labor Relations Board during the break between the 2011 and 2012 sessions of Congress partly on the grounds that Congress wasn’t formally in recess, since one and sometimes two Republicans showed up to nominally keep it in session for the sole reason of denying Obama the right to recess appointments. Two of the three justices went further, ruling that the president can’t really make recess appointments at all. [..]
The real issue here is who Obama appointed, and to what agencies. The recess appointments he made in the 2011-2012 break were to the NLRB (two Democrats, one Republican) and the directorship of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray). Obama had sent these nominations to the Hill, but invoking the 60-vote supermajority rule, Republicans refused to consider them. They made clear that their problem with Cordray wasn’t Cordray; it was that they opposed the very existence of the Bureau, which had been created as part of Dodd-Frank in 2010. The idea of an agency that represented financial consumers solely-as opposed to other agencies like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Controller of the Currency-struck them as a terrible idea. They proposed to amend the act by reconstituting the bureau as an agency, with multiple board members, that represented banks’ interests as well as their consumers. In short, they proposed a house divided against itself.
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