Tag: Politics

Paul Rieckoff, an Iraq War veteran, Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), was a guest on The Rachel Maddow Show. He spoke with Ms. Maddow about the false message the White House is sending about the end of the combat mission in Iraq and the needs of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.  

“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.

Eugene Robinson: Note to Democrats: Tea Party’s not over till it’s over

Not to spoil the fun, but Democrats shouldn’t take the Republican Party’s bitter internal warfare — and the inexperienced, flaky candidates who’ve emerged from the fray — as any kind of reassurance about November. Try as it might, the GOP probably can’t defeat itself. Not this year, anyway.

I don’t mean that the battle between the Republican establishment and the take-no-prisoners Tea Party insurgency is inconsequential. When Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party favorite, won the Senate primary in Delaware on Tuesday, my first reaction was that this one result almost guarantees that the Democratic Party’s majority in the Senate is safe.

On reflection, I think “almost guarantees” should be downgraded to something like “makes it likely.” And in moments of existential despair, I fear that she might actually win.

Leave it to Jon and company to point out how the Democrats can “F” up a sure thing. Given the fact that O’Donnell has a 16% chance of winning, that is still 16 percentage points too many. Good luck to Democrat Chris Coons.  

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the t 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.

Joseph E. Stiglitz: Fixing America’s Broken Housing Market

NEW YORK – A sure sign of a dysfunctional market economy is the persistence of unemployment. In the United States today, one out of six workers who would like a full-time job can’t find one. It is an economy with huge unmet needs and yet vast idle resources.

The housing market is another U.S. anomaly: there are hundreds of thousands of homeless people (more than 1.5 million Americans spent at least one night in a shelter in 2009), while hundreds of thousands of houses sit vacant.

Indeed, the foreclosure rate is increasing. Two million Americans lost their homes in 2008, and 2.8 million more in 2009, but the numbers are expected to be even higher in 2010. Our financial markets performed dismally — well-performing, “rational” markets do not lend to people who cannot or will not repay — and yet those running these markets were rewarded as if they were financial geniuses.

None of this is news. What is news is the Obama administration’s reluctant and belated recognition that its efforts to get the housing and mortgage markets working again have largely failed. Curiously, there is a growing consensus on both the left and the right that the government will have to continue propping up the housing market for the foreseeable future. This stance is perplexing and possibly dangerous.

Robert Scheer: After Summers Comes the Fall

When will the president give Lawrence Summers his pink slip? He can thank him for his years of service and use the excuse that his top economic adviser wants to spend more time with his family. I don’t care how he sugarcoats it. But Summers deserves the same fate as the millions of workers laid off because of the banking debacle he helped cause, the dire consequences of which he has done precious little to mitigate.

It was Summers who, as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which opened the floodgates to the toxic mortgage-backed derivatives that still haunt the economy. The Federal Reserve now holds $2 trillion in junk securities it took off the books of banks. But the financiers who packed those devilish derivatives still hold a huge amount, and the houses they unload every time the housing market shows faint signs of stabilizing keep the economy in the doldrums.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the t 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.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Enough with the partisan posturing

Will the 2010 election campaign provide us with a debate worthy of a great nation in trouble? The early harbingers aren’t good. The pundit herd has already declared the election over, with only the scope of the Democratic reverses yet in question. The two parties are gearing up for a fierce debate on whether to extend the Bush tax cuts to everyone including the wealthiest 2 percent or merely to everyone except the very rich.

We can’t afford this partisan posturing. Fifteen million Americans are unemployed. Poverty is up. One in four homes is under water, worth less than what is owed on it. Voters deserve a serious debate about what is to be done. And what are the choices that the two parties present?

Eugene Robinson: Christine O’Donnell’s win is the GOP’s loss

When you ride a tiger, you go wherever the tiger wants to go – even off a cliff.

The Republican Party – viewed less favorably by voters than even the Democrats, according to polls – has been planning to win in November by harnessing the energy and passion of the Tea Party movement. But tonight’s stunning result in Delaware demonstrates that the Tea Party will go wherever it chooses, heedless of Republican strategists’ grand design.

Christine O’Donnell’s victory over Rep. Mike Castle in the Senate primary is a huge political story. How huge? This one race, in one of the nation’s smallest and least populous states, comes pretty close to wiping out the possibility of the Republicans taking control of the Senate in November.

That’s because any reasonable scenario giving the GOP a Senate majority involves capturing the Senate seat that used to belong to Vice President Biden. Castle, a veteran congressman, would have been favored to win – perhaps easily – in the general election. He is Delaware’s kind of Republican: fiscally conservative but moderate on social issues. He’s pro-choice and he favors gun control, in keeping with the attitudes and values of his state.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the t 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.

Dean Baker: The Soft Bigotry of Incredibly Low Expectations: The Case of Economists

In a country with almost 15 million people out of work, it is amazing that any economists still have jobs. This one is their fault first and foremost. Economists are supposed to know about the economy and provide advice on how to avoid disasters before they happen and help us recover from the bad things happen in spite of good advice.

The economics profession has not done well on this simple scorecard. Remarkably, rather than improve their game, economists are now busy dampening down expectations so that the public will not hold them responsible for the state of the economy.

Towards this end, a group of Fed economists recently put out a new studyclaiming that it was impossible for economists to recognize the $8 trillion housing bubble before it wrecked the economy. In effect, they argued that economists should not be blamed for this failure because:

“The state-of-the-art tools of economic science were not capable of predicting with any degree of certainty the collapse of U.S. house prices that started in 2006.”

This raises the obvious question: if economists can’t see an $8 trillion housing bubble, what can they see? This is bit like the firehouse where everyone sits around calmly sipping their coffee as the school across the street burns down. Completely missing the largest financial bubble in the history of the world is pretty inexcusable, even if economists continue to make excuses.

Bob Herbert: A Recovery’s Long Odds

We can keep wishing and hoping for a powerful economic recovery to pull the U.S. out of its doldrums, but I wouldn’t count on it. Ordinary American families no longer have the purchasing power to build a strong recovery and keep it going.

Americans are not being honest with themselves about the structural changes in the economy that have bestowed fabulous wealth on a tiny sliver at the top, while undermining the living standards of the middle class and absolutely crushing the poor. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have a viable strategy for reversing this dreadful state of affairs. (There is no evidence the G.O.P. even wants to.)

Robert Reich, in his new book, “Aftershock,” gives us one of the clearest explanations to date of what has happened – how the United States went from what he calls “the Great Prosperity” of 1947 to 1975 to the Great Recession that has hobbled the U.S. economy and darkened the future of younger Americans.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the t 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.

Paul Krugman: China, Japan, America

Last week Japan’s minister of finance declared that he and his colleagues wanted a discussion with China about the latter’s purchases of Japanese bonds, to “examine its intention” – diplomat-speak for “Stop it right now.” The news made me want to bang my head against the wall in frustration.

You see, senior American policy figures have repeatedly balked at doing anything about Chinese currency manipulation, at least in part out of fear that the Chinese would stop buying our bonds. Yet in the current environment, Chinese purchases of our bonds don’t help us – they hurt us. The Japanese understand that. Why don’t we?

Some background: If discussion of Chinese currency policy seems confusing, it’s only because many people don’t want to face up to the stark, simple reality – namely, that China is deliberately keeping its currency artificially weak.

Robert Reich: The Two Categories of American Corporation — and Why it Matters

Some giant American corporations depend on a buoyant American economy and a world-class industrial base in the United States. Others are far less dependent. What comes out of Washington in the next few years will reflect which group has most political clout — especially if Republicans take over the House and capture more of the Senate this November.

The first group includes national telecoms like Verizon and AT&T that need a prosperous America because most of their sales are here. Same with finance companies like Bank of America and Travelers Insurance whose business strategy has been built around U.S. consumers. Ditto for certain giant chains like Home Depot. Naturally, all these companies were especially hard hit by the Great Recession and its devastating impact on American consumers.

The second group includes companies like Coca Cola, Exxon-Mobil, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and McDonald’s, that get substantial revenues from their overseas operations. Increasingly this means China, India, and Brazil. Ford and GM are still largely dependent on US sales but becoming less so. GM sold more cars in China last year than in the US. Not surprisingly, American companies that are less dependent on American consumers have been showing the biggest profits.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the t 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.

Dana Milbank: John Maynard Keynes, the GOP’s latest whipping boy

“In the long run we are all dead,” the great 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes once stipulated.

As usual, Keynes was right, and in this case it’s probably for the better: Keynes didn’t live to see the Republicans of 2010 portray him as some sort of Marxist revolutionary. . . . .

Or perhaps, more ominously, these Republicans know exactly what they are saying when they reject Keynesian intervention: that the government should do nothing to help the millions out of work or to rebuild confidence in the economy.

Glen Greenwald: America the Exceptional

Even for those who believe they’re inured to the absurdities of imperial irony, this is almost too extreme to process:

The New York Times, Wednesday:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information. . . .

   “To this date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture program has had his day in court,” [the ACLU’s Ben] Wizner said. . . . “If this decision stands, the United States will have closed its courts to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers.”

Yahoo! News, yesterday:  

Iraq to pay $400 million for Saddam’s mistreatment of Americans

   Iraq has quietly agreed to pay $400 million in claims to American citizens who say they were tortured or traumatized by Saddam Hussein’s regime after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

snip

But we invade, occupy and destroy Iraq — while severely abusing, torturing and killing their citizens — and then demand, as a condition for our allowing the end of crippling sanctions, that they fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to American torture victims, even though it all happened 20 years ago, under an Iraqi regime that no longer even exists.  They hate us for our Freedoms.

“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.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: This weeks guests are Austan Goolsbee, the newly appointed chair of the President’s Economic Council and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the Islamic Center, Park 51. The Round Table participants are George Will, Arianna Huffington, ABC News’ Senior Congressional Correspondent Jon Karl, and Kate Zernike of the New York Times and author of “Boiling Mad,” a new book about the Tea Party Movement, debating what should be done about the expiring the Bush tax cuts.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer will have an exclusive interview with Ohio Rep. John Boehner, the House Republican Leader. Later he will be joined by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Tom Kean, Co-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission and former New Jersey Governor

The Chris Matthews Show: Joining Mr. Matthews will be Dan Rather, HDNet Global Correspondent, Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, NBC News

Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and David Ignatius, The Washington Post Columnist. The questions they will tackle: Did President Obama overreact to the Florida pastor? and Is President Obama smart so take a hard left turn on taxes?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Mr Gregory will have an Senior White House Adviser David Axelrod who will discuss the Administration’s agenda and defends their record.

A second exclusive with Former Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani (R) on tis anniversary of 9/11

The Round Table guests are Fmr. Clinton White House Press Secretary, Dee Dee Myers, Author of the book, “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and the Future of Islam,” Reza Aslan, Republican Strategist, Mike Murphy and Political Director for Atlantic Media, Ron Brownstein.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: EXCLUSIVE! Nine years after 9/11 the country’s focus is on the intense debate over the wisdom of a proposed cultural center and mosque near Ground Zero and a controversial pastor in Florida who planned to burn copies of the Quran in the face of possible repercussions for the U.S. at home and abroad. We’ll have an exclusive conversation with a special Homeland Security panel. Candy speaks with Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano; Fmr. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff; and Fmr. Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Fran Townsend.

Then, the summer of recovery … that wasn’t. How will the struggling economy effect the midterm elections? Will the Democrats be able to retain control of both Houses? The view from both sides of the aisle: House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD); and Fmr. House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) and Fmr. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS)

Yeah, that’s balanced.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: It’s been 9 years since the September 11th attacks and Al-Qaeda is in shambles and on the run — largely thanks to the efforts of the U.S. and its partners in combating terror. Fareed offers his “take” on why now that we face a diminished enemy, it is time to reset the balance between security and liberty.

Then Fareed is joined by a panel of seasoned experts from both sides of the political aisle, including two former CIA operatives, to get their take. Are we safer? Did the U.S. overreact to 9/11. You’ll be surprised at what they say.

Next up, what in the world is the rush to get out of Iraq?

And, after that, a big GPS exclusive with the first high ranking official to leave the Obama administration. Peter Orszag, until recently one of Obama’s top economic advisers, talks about what can be done to fix America’s economic ailments.

And finally, a last look at a new way to show the Taliban that it’s “game over”.