Tag: Opinion

Punting the Pundits

Punting the Punditsis 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”.

Eugene Robinson: Now casting: A few good GOP candidates

With the nation transfixed by the daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the first GOP presidential debate transpired last week with relatively little notice. For Republicans, that’s the good news.

The bad news is that for those who did pay attention, the debate brought to mind – and I’m just trying to be honest here, folks – the famous bar scene from “Star Wars.” At times the dialogue sounded like a faltering attempt at interplanetary communication. Can anyone seriously imagine Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Ron Paul or Gary Johnson as president? Will anyone forgive Tim Pawlenty for joining such a motley crew?

Back on Earth, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the elimination of bin Laden was good not only for national security, the interest of justice and the public mood, but for President Obama’s political prospects as well. He’s not unbeatable in 2012, but at the moment you’ve got to like his chances.

Dana Milbank: Muskets in hand, tea party blasts House Republicans

Poor Paul Ryan and John Boehner.

Ryan, chairman of the House budget committee, proposed budget cuts so severe his plan has been described as a suicide note. Boehner, the House speaker, rushed the budget to passage before Republicans grasped the potential fallout from their vote to replace Medicare.

Yet even this was not enough for the tea party.

On Monday morning, tea party leaders from around the country gathered at the National Press Club for a news conference denouncing Boehner and Ryan in terms normally reserved for that most loathsome of creatures, the Democrat.

“Instead of a fighter for U.S. taxpayers, Mr. Boehner has been a surrenderist, if that’s a word,” proclaimed William Temple, chairman of the Tea Party Founding Fathers. “It seems House Speaker John Maynard Boehner and his fellow RINOs – Republicans In Name Only – like to spend other peoples’ money just as much as the Democrats.”

Glen Greenwald: Bin Laden’s Death Doesn’t End His Fear-Mongering Value

On Friday, government officials anonymously claimed that “a rushed examination” of the “trove” of documents and computer files taken from the bin Laden home prove — contrary to the widely held view that he “had been relegated to an inspirational figure with little role in current and future Qaeda operations” — that in fact “the chief of Al Qaeda played a direct role for years in plotting terror attacks.”  Specifically, the Government possesses “a handwritten notebook from February 2010 that discusses tampering with tracks to derail a train on a bridge,” and that led “Obama administration officials on Thursday to issue a warning that Al Qaeda last year had considered attacks on American railroads.”  That, in turn, led to headlines around the country like this one, from The Chicago Sun-Times:

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The reality, as The New York Times noted deep in its article, was that “the information was both dated and vague,” and the official called it merely “aspirational,” acknowledging that “there was no evidence the discussion of rail attacks had moved beyond the conceptual stage”  In other words, these documents contain little more than a vague expression on the part of Al Qaeda to target railroads in major American cities (“focused on striking Washington, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago,” said the Sun-Times):  hardly a surprise and — despite the scary headlines — hardly constituting any sort of substantial, tangible threat.

But no matter.  Even in death, bin Laden continues to serve the valuable role of justifying always-increasing curtailments of liberty and expansions of government power.  From Reuters (h/t Atrios):

Sen. Schumer proposes “no-ride list” for Amtrak trains

Dean Baker: The Big Retailers Versus the Big Banks: It Makes a Big Difference

The battle of the “swipe fees” has been hard to miss the last few weeks. The big banks are spending millions of dollars on TV, radio and Internet ads telling us that the government should not limit the fees that they charge on debit cards transactions. On the other side, a coalition of major retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Target, has been funding a comparable campaign to stop the bank gouging.

It may seem as though the public has little at stake in this battle between big banks and big retailers, but that is not true. In this case, Wal-Mart is on the side of the angels; small businesses and consumers will win if they prevail. This is an important battle in its own right, but even more important as a lesson in effective politics.

The basic story here should be a policy no-brainer. There are two major debit card networks, Mastercard and Visa, who essentially are the market. Together, they control more than 90 percent of the debit card market.

Robert Weissman: The US Chamber of Commerce in Wonderland

It’s a good rule of thumb: If the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the trade association for large corporations — is whipped up about something, there’s probably good reason for the public to strongly back whatever has sent the Chamber into fits.

Well, the Chamber is apoplectic over a modest Obama administration proposed executive order that would require government contractors to reveal all of their campaign-related spending.

This is a case where the rule of thumb works. The proposed executive order would provide important information about campaign spending by large corporations, and work to reduce the likelihood that contracts are provided as payback for campaign expenditures. You can urge the administration to stand up to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by signing the petition here.

The U.S. Chamber is of course no stranger to using exaggerated rhetoric to advance its positions. But its opposition to the Executive Order is astounding even by the standards of the Chamber.

Peter Dreier: How Do Wrong Economic Ideas Become Conventional Wisdom?

The ideas of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) are making a comeback, in large part due to Glenn Beck, who has touted the libertarian economist and philosopher’s views on his TV show. The essence of Hayek’s views — spelled out in his most well-known book, The Road to Serfdom — is that government stifles freedom and liberty. With a few exceptions, he viewed almost any governmental intervention in economic affairs as a slippery slope toward totalitarian socialism. No wonder that Beck has been hawking Hayek.

Now comes Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative political scientist, who uses the pages of the New York Times Book Review to hawk his own version of government-bashing. Unfortunately, Fukuyama, who claims to be something of a student of Hayek’s ideas, hasn’t done his homework.

In his review of the new edition of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, published in the Review on Sunday (May 8), Fukuyama off-handedly comments that three of Hayek’s ideas “have become broadly accepted by economists.” But it so happens that economists don’t agree on these three ideas. Moreover, the policy conclusions that Fukuyama draws happen to be untrue.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Economic Security President: Four Ways to Be “Bold” and “Gutsy” on the Home Front

The post-bin Laden afterglow is fading. Those video clips of his home movies seem like scenes from a reality show, not glimpses of an Existential Threat. It’s the master terrorist as an addled Ozzy Osbourne, minus the Beverly Hills couturiers and groomers. And while a few people might wait for bin Laden to sing Ozzy’s “Iron Man” — “Nobody wants him/He just stares at the world, planning his vengeance” — our attention-deficit nation is getting ready to move on.

Significantly, while the President’s overall approval rating jumped 11 percent after the killing, his economic approval fell and reached a new low: Only 34 percent approved of his handling of the economy, while 55 percent disapproved.

Jonathan Capehart: Jonathan Capehart

Oh, so you thought we were done with all this birther craziness? Ha! Not a chance. On Friday, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) released his birth certificate in a fit of pique and silliness over a newspaper getting his middle name wrong. Well, it was a little bit more involved than that.

Jindal threw his support behind a birther bill currently making its way through the state legislature that would require those who want to run for national office to show proof of U.S. birth in order to be on the Louisiana ballot. Last month, Baton Rouge newspaper the Advocate ran an editorial saying, “Piyush Amrit Jindal is the last man in America who should give his blessing to a birther bill.” Amen to that, since Jindal is the son of two immigrant parents whose journey from India to the United States was chronicled by the Times-Picayune.

But “Amrit” isn’t the governor’s middle name. Ticked off, Jindal released his long-form birth certificate to prove it.

Punting the Pundits

Punting the Punditsis 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”.

Glen Greenwald: U.S. Tries to Assassinate US Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki

That Barack Obama has continued the essence of the Bush/Cheney Terrorism architecture was once a provocative proposition but is now so self-evident that few dispute it (watch here as arch-neoconservative David Frum — Richard Perle’s co-author for the supreme 2004 neocon treatise — waxes admiringly about Obama’s Terrorism and foreign policies in the Muslim world and specifically its “continuity” with Bush/Cheney).  But one policy where Obama has gone further than Bush/Cheney in terms of unfettered executive authority and radical war powers is the attempt to target American citizens for assassination without a whiff of due process.  As The New York Times put it last April:

   It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said.  A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president. . . .

That Obama was compiling a hit list of American citizens was first revealed in January of last year when The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest mentioned in passing at the end of a long article that at least four American citizens had been approved for assassinations; several months later, the Obama administration anonymously confirmed to both the NYT and the Post that American-born, U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was one of the Americans on the hit list.

Ross Douthat: Whose Foreign Policy Is It?

I have never agreed with anything this man has written until now

For those with eyes to see, the daylight between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been shrinking ever since the current president took the oath of office. But last week made it official: When the story of America’s post-9/11 wars is written, historians will be obliged to assess the two administrations together, and pass judgment on the Bush-Obama era.

The death of Osama bin Laden, in a raid that operationalized Bush’s famous “dead or alive” dictum, offered the most visible proof of this continuity. But the more important evidence of the Bush-Obama convergence lay elsewhere, in developments from last week that didn’t merit screaming headlines, because they seemed routine rather than remarkable.

One was NATO’s ongoing bombing campaign in Libya, which now barely even pretends to be confined to humanitarian objectives, or to be bound by the letter of the United Nations resolution. Another was Friday’s Predator strike inside Pakistan’s tribal regions, which killed a group of suspected militants while the world’s attention was still fixed on Bin Laden’s final hours. Another was the American missile that just missed killing Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who has emerged as a key recruiter for Al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate.

Imagine, for a moment, that these were George W. Bush’s policies at work.

John Nichols: How Town Hall Protests Against Paul Ryan’s Plan Changed the Medicare Debate

Paul Ryan claims the protests heard so very loud and clear during the House Budget Committee chair’s town hall meetings in April had no influence on his thinking about Medicare.

Perhaps Ryan really does have a tin ear.

But the outcry over his plan to mess with Medicare, heard in Wisconsin communities from Milton to Kenosha, and at spring recess sessions in the districts of Republican freshmen from Pennsylvania to Florida, obviously influenced other Republicans.

Images from Kenosha – a historic factory town in Ryan’s district, where hundreds of people showed up to criticize his scheming to cut benefits for working Americans while giving billionaires and multinational corporations new tax breaks – were featured nationally on broadcast network news shows.

Cable news programs focused intense attention on the story. MSNBC’s Ed Schultz devoted much of a program last week to the outcry. (In addition to a blistering analysis of the congressman’s proposal by the host, this writer provided some on the ground reporting from Kenosha, including details of a brief interview with Ryan, who was typically dismissive of the popular discomfort with his plan.) But other networks — even Fox — at least touched on the congressman’s troubles.

The reporting was noticed in Washington where, last week, GOP leaders began almost immediately to distance themselves from Ryan’s plan to use Medicare funds to enrich the private insurance firms that have donated so generously to his campaigns.

Stephen L. Goldstein: “Shock Doctrine” Economics Ruining America

WARNING: Reading Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” will disturb your sleep and haunt your waking hours. If you’re a real American, it will make you want to scream – and do something to put “the bad guys” in their place. Everyone – especially Milton-Friedman, free-market lovers like Kingsley Guy – should read “Shock.” If enough people do so, it could save the country. If they don’t, our democratic/representative government and capitalism will be permanently replaced by the un-American, corporate-socialist state that has already taken hold – and it will be our own fault.

For 50 years, laissez-faire economist Friedman and his apostles at the University of Chicago have spread a doctrine based upon “the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending,” according to Klein. Even worse is how they do it: For Friedman and his minions, widespread disasters (natural and man-made) are opportunities to make money. While victims are really or figuratively bleeding, too shocked to realize what’s happening, in cahoots with lapdog governments, they impose “deregulation, privatization, and cutbacks” on economies as the formula for recovery. Promising prosperity for all, they deliver widespread poverty and oppression.

Brent Blackwelder Obama Should Back Off Risky Nuclear Loan Guarantees

Well before the catastrophe at Fukushima began unfolding, a familiar word was heard in discussions about plans to build a new generation of reactors in this country. That word: risk.

With President Barack Obama and Congress pushing ahead with efforts to offer up federal construction loan guarantees totaling $54.5 billion, what was the risk of taxpayers getting stuck holding the bag in the event these nuclear projects defaulted? And, why should taxpayers even be expected to assume such a risk?

Before those critical questions were satisfactorily addressed, we were sadly reminded of the other definition of risk when it comes to nuclear energy. The toll of Fukushima won’t be known for years, but assuredly the cost, both human and financial, will be huge.

As public debate over nuclear safety once again flares up – with industry’s familiar assurances that “it can’t happen here” – let’s not allow the financial risks inherent in this energy choice to be overlooked.

Michelle Chen; Watchdogs Probe Labor Abuses in China’s Tech Industry

Never underestimate the power of a good public shaming. Western electronics firms were mortified in 2010 by reports of gruesome suicides of young workers in China, employed by the multinational tech giant Foxconn. Since the company runs a network of plants that churn out glistening gadgets for Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard, the suicides scandalized tech brands that often market themselves as hip and progressive.

The months of damage control that followed led to promises to reform wages and working hours and to establish less Dickensian, more worker-friendly factory conditions. But has all that bad publicity (encapsulated most recently in a sensational theatrical production) paid off for workers?

This week watchdog groups have released a report to kickstart a global campaign to call attention to ongoing labor issues. The “Time to Bite Into a Fair Apple” campaign hopes to keep the pressure on both Chinese authorities and multinational firms to fulfill promises to make the manufacturing system more humane for hundreds of thousands of young Chinese workers.

Allison Kilkenny: NY Teachers Vow ‘Wisconsin-Style’ Protest

New York teachers are vowing to protest in the wake of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to layoff thousands of educators.

“Mr. Mayor, it’s not going to happen, and enough is enough!” shouted Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, as he whipped up a roaring crowd at the UFT’s spring conference in midtown New York.

A ballroom-full of educators rose to their feet, clapping and chanting, “Enough is Enough.”

A surprise guest, Wisconsin State Sen. Jon Erpenbach, the man who led 13 fellow lawmakers out-of-state in order to block Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation, received a standing ovation from the crowd.

The UFT, along with many other unions, plan to draw tens of thousands of supports for the May 12 march from City Hall and other sites to Wall Street to oppose Bloomberg’s cuts and demand the big banks start paying their fair share.

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

Punting the Punditsis 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: Joining Christiane this week are:

President Obama’s National Security Advisor, Tom Donilon to defend the killing of OBL;

Former Secretary of State under George W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice to defend Pres Bush not killing OBL and torturing everyone under the pretext of finding the elusive one;

Liz Cheney, Co-Founder of Keep America Safe, Tom Ricks of Foreign Policy Magazine and The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright discuss whether this successful mission changes the torture debate and if Pakistan is a credible partner in the fight against terrorism;

And finally a round table of guests, including Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper, Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Martha Raddatz and Senior Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas join Christiane and George Will to discuss the very latest on how the Obama administration is moving forward after taking out Bin Laden

On Bill Maher’s Real Time, he ran a video from his show in 2007 where Christiane said OBL was hiding in a mansion in Pakistan. Somebody in the CIA should have asked her. Ya think.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Scheiffer’s guests are  Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense discussing what’s next in the war on terror And what’s the future of U.S.-Pakistan relations.

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Helene Cooper, The New York Times White House Correspondent, Rick Stengel, TIME Managing Editor, David Ignatius, The Washington Post Columnist and

Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times Pentagon correspondent tackling what else but

After bin Laden, What’s Our Biggest Threat Now?

How Fast Can We Leave Afghanistan?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: This week Mr. Gregory has achieved an all time low in assembling a group of war crime and Bush apologists that include: Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and Former Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani who will discuss if the world is safer.

Seriously, could this be worse?

Also White House National Security Adviser Tom Donilon to do some more explaining.

The round table guests are: Bob Woodward, Katty Kay, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Mike Murphy

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Tom Donilon is gonna need to rest his vocal cords. The only other guest discussing OBL will be Senate Foreign Relations Ranking Member, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN).

NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen will discuss Libya and former Congressman Tom Davis and former Obama White House aide Anita Dunn will talk about other political happeings.

Something else happened besides killing OBL?

If you’re a Mom, Happy Mother’s Day, go back to bed. Everyone else pamper a Mom.

Glenn Greenwald: The Osama Bin Laden Exception

When I first wrote about the bin Laden killing on Monday, I suggested that the intense (and understandable) emotional response to his being dead would almost certainly drown out any discussions of the legality, ethics, or precedents created by this event. That, I think, has largely been borne out, at least in the U.S. (one poll shows 86% of Americans favor the killing, though that’s hardly universal: a poll in Germany finds 64% view this as “no reason to rejoice,” while 52% believe an attempt should have been made to arrest him; many European newspapers have harshly criticized U.S. actions; and German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s declaration of happiness over bin Laden’s death provoked widespread criticism even in her own party). I expected — and fully understand — that many people’s view of the bin Laden killing is shaped first and foremost by happiness over his death.

But what has surprised me somewhat is how little interest there seems to be in finding out what actually happened here. We know very little about the circumstances of bin Laden’s killing, because the U.S. government has issued so many contradictory claims, which in turn contradict the reported claims of those at the scene. When I wrote about this on Monday, I said that the use of force would be justified if, as the U.S. Government claimed, he was violently resisting his capture. But that turned out to be totally false. It’s now beyond dispute that bin Laden was unarmed when killed and there was virtually no violent resistence in the house. Still, the range of possibilities for what actually happened is vast — everything from he was lunging for his AK-47 to he was already captured when shot (in front of his family) to the order from the start was to kill, not capture, him — and I personally don’t see how it’s possible to assess the justifiability (or legality) of what took place without knowing which of those are true.

David Sirota: The High Cost of Cheap War

It seems only fitting that in the very month the Terminator sci-fi franchise predicted the rise of militarized artificial intelligence, the Guardian of London reported on a British Ministry of Defence analysis warning that drone warfare may be creating an “incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality.”

The report’s life-imitating-Skynet idea of robots ultimately making combat decisions is certainly scary-but still a bit fantastical. The more frightening part of the analysis was its look at how roboticized war may already be prompting governments to “resort to war as a policy option far sooner than previously.”

The dynamic is not surprising-nations will inevitably be more willing to use warfare as a foreign policy tool if they possess instruments limiting the cost of waging war. By letting kids in Las Vegas drop remote-controlled bombs on kids in Pakistan, Yemen and now Libya, drones are one of those instruments. But they are only one of many. Indeed, while President Obama preposterously claimed this week that most Americans “know well the costs of war,” it’s quite the opposite: Most Americans have been insulated from those costs-and it’s no coincidence that as we’ve become more insulated, we’ve happily waged more frequent wars.

Joe Conason: Tough Enough

It is always a happy moment when Americans are reminded of our country’s greatness, especially when we are so often warned about its imminent decline-and the elimination of Osama bin Laden, fanatical murderer of thousands of Christians, Jews and Muslims, was certainly such a moment.

Especially for those of us who were living in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as those who died and their families, justice was finally done. From now on, the heroic pantheon associated with that infamous date will include not only the police officers, firefighters and rescue workers of 9/11, but the Navy SEALs and the military and intelligence officers who avenged them.

Everyone who feels pride and satisfaction in bin Laden’s fate must also acknowledge the bold action and sound priorities of President Obama, who has coolly and cleanly fulfilled a promise he made during his campaign. Maintaining the nation’s dignity and his own, he has handled the aftermath of the mission with precise correctness and stayed focused on the policy goals that guide his administration.

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”

Robert Reich: Why Washington Should Pay Attention to the Economy Here and Now

After a week of non-stop Osama Bin Laden, Washington is now returning to the battle of the budget deficit and debt ceiling.

All over Capitol Hill Republicans and Democrats are debating spending caps and automatic triggers, and whether to begin them before or after Election Day.

But if you don’t mind my asking, what about the economy? I’m not talking about the economy five or ten years from now, when projections show the federal budget wildly out of control or when foreigners might start dumping dollars.

I’m talking about the here and now economy – the one Americans are living in day to day.

Peter Rothberg: Help Defeat The ‘No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act’

Extremists in the House of Representatives won a vote to approve an anti-choice bill yesterday that would effectively end all insurance coverage of abortion-related services, and even “redefine rape.” The final vote was 251 to 175 with seventeen Democrats joining the entire Republican caucus.

As an excellent post at Mother Jones by Nick Baumann detailed, H.R. 3 would sharply reduce access to safe, legal abortions for women in this country by virtually eliminating insurance coverage for abortions. The redefinition of rape could be used to block women who were victims of incest involving statutory rape from using Medicaid to pay for an abortion. And in some cases, the bill would force women who were sexually assaulted into the hellish scenario of proving to IRS agents that they were victims of “forcible rape” or incest.

Mark Engler: Taboo Economics

I have a proposal: Let’s double US government funds devoted to promoting renewable energy. Let’s expand allocations for foreclosure prevention to help another million Americans keep their homes. Let’s launch a $10-billion infrastructure programme to repair crumbling roads and bridges. Let’s double the number of new maths and science teachers that President Obama hopes to train, bringing the total to 200,000. And let’s hire back all of those police officers fired by the city of Camden, New Jersey – already among the most dangerous places in the country before budget constraints compelled it to dismiss half of its police force in December.

While we’re at it, let’s reduce the deficit by about $40 billion.

This proposition is not voodoo economics. It is taboo economics. All of these things could be accomplished by trimming US military spending by just 10 per cent. Some of these suggestions (teacher training, Camden cops) are trifling items by the standards of Pentagon budgeting, together accounting for less than the cost of a single Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet.

Robert Naiman: Now is the Time for a Full Afghanistan Withdrawal

After OBL: McGovern/Jones Push for Real Withdrawal Plan

Following the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the floodgates opened in Washington this week for reconsideration of U.S. plans to continue the open-ended war in Afghanistan.

Now Representatives Jim McGovern and Walter Jones have introduced the “Afghanistan Exit and Accountability Act,” bipartisan legislation that would require the President present to Congress a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and a clear end date for the war. It would require the President to submit quarterly reports to Congress on the progress of troop withdrawal, as well as the human and financial costs of continuing the war. The President would also have to report how much money U.S. taxpayers would save if the war were brought to an end in six months, instead of five, ten, or twenty years.

Andy Worthington: The Unjustifiable Defense of Torture and Guantánamo

With the reported assassination of Osama bin Laden, one of the most alarming responses has been a kind of casual and widespread acceptance that the death of America’s number one bogeyman would not have been achieved without the use of torture, and without the existence of Guantánamo.

This is wrong on both fronts, as Jane Mayer of the New Yorker explained in response to an early manifestation of the story, put out by torture apologists Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol.

Steve Rendall: Right-Wing Political Violence: More Terror, Less Coverage

On the morning of January 17 in Spokane, Washington, city workers found a backpack with a bomb that was set to go off along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. An FBI official (Spokane Spokesman Review, 1/19/11) called the bomb “a viable device that was very lethal and had the potential to inflict multiple casualties.” Another official told the Associated Press (1/19/11), “They haven’t seen anything like this in this country…. This was the worst device, and most intentional device, I’ve ever seen.”

On March 9, Kevin Harpham, a white supremacist with past links to the neo-Nazi National Alliance, was arrested and charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and possessing an improvised explosive device. The device contained shrapnel dipped in rat poison, which can enhance bleeding (Hate Watch blog, 3/10/11), and was set on a park bench where its impact would be directed toward marchers.

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: Fears and Failure

From G.D.P. to private-sector payrolls, from business surveys to new claims for unemployment insurance, key economic indicators suggest that the recovery may be sputtering.

And it wasn’t much of a recovery to start with. Employment has risen from its low point, but it has grown no faster than the adult population. And the plight of the unemployed continues to worsen: more than six million Americans have been out of work for six months or longer, and more than four million have been jobless for more than a year.

It would be nice if someone in Washington actually cared.

Dean Baker: Why Does Senator McCaskill Want to Bankrupt Our Children?

That is what people should be asking Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill along with her fellow senators who are advocated strict caps on government spending. The idea being pushed by Senator McCaskill, together with Tennessee Senator Bob Corker and several other prominent senators, would limit federal spending to 20.6 percent of GDP. It would require difficult-to-obtain super-majorities to exceed this cap. Spending would be cut across a variety of programs if the cap is not reached.

This proposal is hugely deserving of ridicule for a variety of reasons. First, it operates from a blatantly wrong premise — that government spending has grown out of control.

New York Times Editorial: Could It Have Been the Polls?

All but seven House Republicans voted for a budget plan last month that would eliminate Medicare’s guarantee to the elderly. It was always bad policy. But now that the vote has proved to be wildly unpopular, the party is suddenly running in the opposite direction.

On Thursday, Dave Camp, a Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he was no longer interested in pushing a plan that could not win support among the Democrats who control the Senate. Speaker John Boehner said Mr. Camp was just being realistic. Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, suggested the proposal would probably not be a part of the debt-limit talks that began Thursday because President Obama “excoriated us” for the Medicare plan.

These Republican leaders are trying to make it sound as if they were shocked by the Democratic opposition. In fact, their real surprise was how much bitter resistance the Medicare idea encountered among voters – the ones they claim share their fervent desire to dismantle much of the federal government.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Find True Centrism in the People’s Budget

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) People’s Budget ~ the strongest rebuke to the Robin Hood in reverse “Ryan Budget” that was passed by the best Republican House Citizens United can buy ~ is receiving some well deserved national attention as the budget debate now moves to the Senate.

The Nation immediately recognized the sense and sanity of the progressive plan to create a budget surplus in ten years–through tax fairness, bringing troops home, and investing in job creation, and others are now praising its strengths too.

“The Courageous Progressive Caucus Budget,” writes The Economist.  “Mr. Ryan has been fulsomely praised for his courage. The Progressive Caucus has not. I’m not really sure what ‘courage’ is supposed to mean here, but this seems precisely backwards.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman describes the People’s Budget as “the only major budget proposal out there offering a plausible path to balancing the budget… unlike the Ryan plan, which was just right-wing orthodoxy with an added dose of magical thinking-[it] is genuinely courageous because it calls for shared sacrifice.”

George Zornick: The GOP Jobs Plan That Wasn’t

It’s been over three months since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and strengthened their caucus in the Senate. The central premise of the GOP midterm campaign was that it could create badly needed jobs-the Republican National Committee drove a bus through the lower 48 states emblazoned with the slogan: “Need a Job? Fire Pelosi!”

Now, after focusing its initial legislative efforts on repealing “ObamaCare,” pushing Tea Party-backed dreams like a balanced budget amendment, and fighting to strip regulatory agencies of their authority, the GOP has finally released a job plan…that consists of a balanced budget amendment, the repeal of Obamacare, and several assaults on regulatory authority.

Eugene Robinson: Torture Is Still Torture

It wasn’t torture that revealed Osama bin Laden’s hiding place. Finding and killing the world’s most-wanted terrorist took years of patient intelligence gathering and dogged detective work, plus a little luck.

Once again, it appears, we’re supposed to be having a “debate” about torture-excuse me, I mean the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, that were authorized and practiced during the Bush administration. In fact, there’s nothing debatable about torture. It’s wrong, it’s illegal, and there’s no way to prove that the evidence it yields could not have been obtained through conventional methods.

Leslie Savan: Torturism, the New Birtherism

Like the death of bin Laden, the death of birtherism was a long time coming, but when it finally came, it was swift and dramatic: President Obama rappelled down to the birther level to release his long-form birth certificate; at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner three days later, Obama and wingman Seth Myers broke down Donald Trump’s extraordinarily well-guarded ego, with jokes; and within hours, simply by announcing that bin Laden was dead, Obama sent Trump’s verkakte ideas to go sleep with the fishes.

If the narcissistic real estate mogul had become a 3-D avatar for the Obama-hating Republican base, you have to wonder where all their resentment and anger, augmented now by humiliation, go now?

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”

John Nichols: Paul Ryan Gets an Earful as Tour Bombs

KENOSHA, WI – Paul Ryan, the smooth-if-not-always-substantive congressman, is the darling of the D.C. talk shows. The House Budget Committee chair, chosen by GOP House leaders to respond to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, is the prime pitchman for the Wall Street lobbying agenda on everything from privatization of Social Security to tax cuts for the rich. During Congress’ spring break, he took his show on the road.

Ryan, R-Janesville, may have thought that his carefully crafted sales pitch for pulverizing Medicare would play perfectly in Paddock Lake and Milton and Kenosha – Wisconsin towns where the congressman expected to be greeted with cheers for a conquering hero from inside the Beltway.

As it happens, hundreds of Ryan’s constituents were turned away from the town hall meetings, which were packed to capacity long before their starting time. But the crowds that did get in to the sessions did not exactly come to hail their congressman as an American idol.

Dahlia Litwick: Still Stupid, Still Wrong, Still Immoral

Why the death of Osama Bin Laden shouldn’t change our views about torture-or of the people who approved it.

Do we have to have another big national debate about torture? Really, do we have to? Headlines like this one, in the New York Times no less, inform us that the Osama Bin Laden raid has “revived” the arguments over the “value of torture.” That’s strange, because until now, the only people “reviving” the debate over the wonders of torture were the same people whose names are actually on the torture memos or who were in the room when torture methods were being approved. This does not constitute a “debate.” A better term would be self-serving propaganda.

Still, the subject of illegally torturing people for information appears to be open for discussion yet again. So before I rehearse my argument, allow me to suggest that the only reason we are having this discussion at all is because we have tortured people. That’s the problem with doing stupid things: You spend the rest of your life trying to convince yourself that maybe they weren’t so stupid after all. Had we not water-boarded prisoners eight years ago, nobody would be making the argument that water-boarding “worked.” The reason you don’t order up torture in the first place is that once you do, it stays on the menu for years.

Glen Greenwald: The Illogical Torture Debate

The killing of Osama bin Laden has, as The New York Times notes, re-ignited the debate over “brutal interrogations” — by which it’s meant that Republicans are now attempting to exploit the emotions generated by the killing to retroactively justify the torture regime they implemented. The factual assertions on which this attempt is based — that waterboarding and other “harsh interrogation methods” produced evidence crucial to locating bin Laden — are dubious in the extreme, for reasons Andrew Sullivan and Marcy Wheeler document. So fictitious are these claims that even Donald Rumsfeld has repudiated them.

But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know. Nobody has ever denied that. In terms of the tactical aspect of the torture debate, the point has always been — as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said — that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them. The fact that one can point to an instance where torture produced the desired answer proves nothing about whether there were more effective ways of obtaining it.

Jim Hightower: GOP House Chooses Big Oil Over Granny

Now, let’s check today’s sports scores: 4, 10.7 and 21-and-a-half.

Those tallies are from the oil league, and the winner, of course, is the league’s powerhouse, ExxonMobil.

Four, as you might have guessed, is the $4 that Exxon is siphoning out of your wallet these days for 1 gallon of its petrol.

Next comes 10.7. That’s the $10.7 billion in profits that this oil giant has soaked up in just the first three months of this year – a new record, not achieved by any managerial genius, increased productivity or improvement in customer service, but solely by the jack-up in gasoline prices.

Finally, 21-and-a-half. This is the big score made by Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s CEO. The chief pulled down $21.5 million in personal compensation last year, making him the highest paid executive in the oil league and one of the most richly paid CEOs in the entire country.

Jill Richardson: I Never Promised You an Organic Garden

A story has been developing over the past month involving lies, toxic sludge, Hollywood celebrities, and poor, inner city school children. It centers around the Environmental Media Association (EMA), a group of environmentally conscious Hollywood celebs, and the “organic” school gardens they’ve been volunteering at for the past past couple years. Stars like Rosario Dawson, Amy Smart, Emmanuelle Chriqui, and Nicole Ritchie have generously adopted Los Angeles schools, visiting the schools and helping the children garden. What the celebs didn’t know is that their organization’s corporate donor – Kellogg Garden Products – sells both organic compost and soil amendments and ones made from sewage sludge. Seventy percent of Kellogg’s business is products made from sewage sludge. Sewage sludge is not allowed on organic farms and gardens.

In late March, the Center for Media & Democracy (CMD) wrote to EMA, alerting them that Kellogg products contain sludge, which may jeopardize the safety and the organic status of the gardens. As a result of the letter, John Stauber, founder of CMD, then met with Ed Begley, Jr., famous environmentalist and EMA board member, who was concerned about the possibility that sludge was used on the gardens.

Jeff Biggers: Arizona’s New Civil Rights Movement

Arizona’s Manufactured Crisis Turns into a Moral Crisis: Why Tucson’s Ethnic Studies Students Can’t Wait

Stumbling further into the quagmire of a national public relations disaster, drastic new measures by the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) officials have turned the “manufactured crisis” over the Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies Program into a troubling moral crisis for the city-and the country.

As Tucson school officials appear to unravel daily with increasing controversy, Mexican American Studies (MAS) students and UNIDOS activists are now emerging as the calmest standard-bearers of civil discourse for the community.

Jim Goodman: Wisconsin’s Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker campaigned as the “nice guy” who carried his lunch in a brown paper bag, a regular guy who just wanted to cut state spending. That, apparently resonated with the electorate. After the election, Wisconsin met the real Scott Walker.

Governor Walker stated that Wisconsin was broke, yet in his first month in office he signed tax cuts for corporations that would put the state $117 million deeper in the hole. This caught the attention of the Wall St. Journal who exposed his “we’re broke” story as mere political grandstanding.

I’m sure he did want to cut spending, but apparently not on his corporate friends. Walker is clearly far more interested in making political hay than he is in sound fiscal policy.

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”

Wednesday is Ladies” Day. Scroll down for the Gentlemen.

Katrina vanden Heuvel Keep Your Hands Off My Medicare!

It’s been a common refrain of politicians in Washington for as long as the capitol has been unpopular: “It’s good to get outside the Beltway, good to go get back to the real America.” But in recent days that cliché might feel a bit stale for Republican House members, who voted last month for Representative Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. Inside the Beltway, Ryan is called “courageous,” a “visionary,” a “serious man,” for having the bravery to put forth a budget that pays for tax cuts for the wealthy by ending Medicare as we know it. Back home in his district, he’s becoming known as the leader of the most serious assault on seniors since President Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security.

In April, Ryan was greeted, not with the outsized praise of New York Times columnist David Brooks at his town hall in Milton, Wisconsin, but instead, with sustained boos. On Friday, according to Politico, he asked police to remove a man from his town hall because the man refused to stop yelling about the impact the Ryan budget would have on Medicare.

Steph Sterling: They’re Forcing “Forcible Rape” On Us Again

In February, a firestorm erupted over efforts by anti-choice Members of Congress to narrow the long-standing “rape” exception to the ban on the use of federal funds for abortion.  Hailed by Speaker John Boehner as one of the top priorities for the new Congress, H.R. 3 allowed federal funding for abortion only in circumstances where the woman could prove she was the victim of “forcible” rape, taking us back to a time when just saying ‘no’ wasn’t enough.

The public was rightly outraged, and House Republicans were forced to delete the offending language from the bill. The public assumed that the issue had been put to rest.

Not so:  operating under the radar and far from public view, these anti-choice Members found another, more devious way to narrow the rape exception and exclude some of the most vulnerable rape victims from receiving the care they need.

Laura Flanders: Is BP Too Big To Fail?

Now to the opposite of cuts. Over a year after the biggest oil spill in US history and even as criminal investigations continue, BP is still receiving millions of dollars in government contracts.

That’s according to a new story by Jason Leopold at Truthout, who notes that only last week Air BP, a division of the oil company responsible for the oil spill causing problems in the Gulf of Mexico, was awarded a $42 million contract to supply fuel to Dover Air Force Base.

While Leopold was unable to confirm that that fuel was going to supply planes headed to Libya, what he did find was that the contract was given under “unusual and compelling urgency,” which means that the government found the need so important that they limited the bids.

Amy Goodman: Accomplish the Mission: Bring the Troops Home

On May 1, the U.S. president addressed the nation, announcing a military victory. May 1, 2003, that is, when President George W. Bush, in his form-fitting flight suit, strode onto the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln. Under the banner announcing “Mission Accomplished,” he declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

That was eight years to the day before President Barack Obama, without flight suit or swagger, made the surprise announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a U.S. military operation (in a wealthy suburb of Pakistan, notably, not Afghanistan).

The U.S. war in Afghanistan has become the longest war in U.S. history. News outlets now summarily report that “The Taliban have begun their annual spring offensive,” as if it were the release of a spring line of clothes. The fact is, this season has all the markings of the most violent of the war, or as the brave reporter Anand Gopal told me Tuesday from Kabul: “Every year has been more violent than the year before that, so it’s just continuing that trend. And I suspect the same to be said for the summer. It will likely be the most violent summer since 2001.”

Allison Kilkenny: Eighty-Nine Arrested Protesting Paul Ryan’s Medicaid Cuts

Capitol Police arrested eighty-nine disability rights activists on Monday following the group’s occupation of the Cannon House Office Building rotunda.

The disability rights group ADAPT staged the event to protest Representative Paul Ryan’s Medicaid cuts, which would force people with disabilities to live in nursing homes rather than in their own houses.

Additionally, the House-passed budget resolution would turn Medicaid into block grants and reduce the program’s spending by more than $700 billion over ten years.

New York Times Editorial: Party Like It’s 2013

Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee are having a campaign fund-raiser this week.

Starting on Wednesday, the committee’s majority is expected to pass bills to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the most important innovations in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The bureau has one purpose: to shield consumers from unfair, misleading and deceptive lending. The purpose of the Republican bills is twofold. One is to deprive the agency of the power to fulfill its mission. Another is to attract campaign money. As long as the Senate and White House are controlled by Democrats, the bills are unlikely to become law. But by advancing them in the House, Republicans can demonstrate how thoroughly they would dismantle reform if they controlled Washington and, in the process, rake in Wall Street donations.

Peter Rothberg: World Press Freedom Day

Nearly two decades ago, the UN General Assembly proclaimed May 3 as World Press Freedom Day as a reminder that free, independent press is essential to democracy and is a fundamental human right.

In honor of that occasion, the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has organized a conference today at the Newseum in Washington, DC, with a focus on how Internet and digital platforms are contributing to freedom of expression, democratic governance and sustainable development across the globe.

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”

Alex Seitz-Wald: Reagan Budget Director: “Absolutely” Raise Taxes, Just Like Reagan Did

As Washington considers ways to rein in the deficit, Republicans have obstinately demanded that any tax revenue increases be taken off the table, claiming that raising taxes during a down economy would doom the recovery. As evidence, they often point to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, claiming his massive 1981 tax cuts caused that decade’s economic boom. But this anti-tax position makes it almost impossible to do anything serious about the deficit, since – despite GOP talking points – the country has a revenue problem, not a spending problem. On ABC’s This Week today, Reagan’s own budget director, David Stockman, exposed the GOP tax cut “theology” for the ahistorical sham it is. Asked by Reuter’s Chrystia Freeland if the economy could “sustain” a tax increase, Stockman said “absolutely,” noting that the economy only recovered under Reagan once he raised taxes in 1982 after “cut[ting] taxes too much” the year before . . . .

William Rivers Pitt: My Alabama

When I was a toddler, we lived for a time in a small house in Tuscaloosa. At this moment, I have no idea if that house still exists. The tornadoes took so much, did so much damage, were so horrifically lethal. One of them came unimaginably close to my father’s home, and I was frantic until I heard from him. My step-brother has given himself over to the grisly work of recovery and clean-up, and flights of angels will sing his name when he is done. I wish I was there with him, but so many have volunteered to help that they have been turning people away. That is Alabama, too.

I am a Boston boy through and through, but the red clay of Alabama is still under my fingernails, and the boy I was is still there, lost in adolescence and memories yet to be. It is a place of singular beauty, my father’s home, like his father’s fathers before him. He is still there, as is the oak tree, and the rivers, and the old country road. The tornadoes didn’t take everything.

Alabama, you are in my prayers. We are all your sons and daughters today.

Jonathan Capehart: Trump deserved every lump at correspondents’ dinner

“TRUMP sat stone-faced at the WashPost table at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as Seth Meyers of ‘Saturday Night Live’ ripped him brutally. Definitely laughing at him, not with him. Was so awkward that some folks at his table stopped laughing and applauding.” From Politico Playbook on Sunday

Had I been at that table I would not have stopped laughing and applauding for one second. Donald Trump deserved no such courtesy.

Trump’s faux candidacy for the Republican nomination for president leads in some polls, thanks to his willful embrace of the disgusting, dangerous and racist birther conspiracy lie that President Obama was not born in the United States and, thus, the illegitimate occupant of the White House. And when that was proved wrong – again – last week by the release of Obama’s long-form birth certificate, Trump doubled down by questioning the qualifications of the president to go to Columbia and Harvard universities. This was another ugly insult in his ceaseless quest for attention.

E.J. Dionne Jr. Yes, we can turn the page

It seems appropriate that my wife and I got the news of the death of Osama bin Laden from our son last night. We had gone to bed early and he roused us to report what had happened.  It seemed a fitting way to get the news because the political consciousness of an entire younger generation of Americans – our son was 8 on Sept. 11, 2001, and our daughters are, respectively, two and five years younger – was so heavily shaped by the events of that day and all that came after.

While no one pretends that the threat of terrorism has gone away, one would like to hope that the country can now turn a page, to use the phrase Barack Obama invoked so powerfully during the 2008 campaign.  It’s why I think young Americans were especially animated by the news of bin Laden’s death. They do not want to be the generation whose experience is characterized by their country’s engagement in what seems like an endless series of foreign wars.  But neither do they relish coming of age at a moment when so many speak of the possibility of American decline. The events in Pakistan are not so much a remedy as a sign of hope that the United States can avoid both fates.

Laura Flanders: Searching for Closure at Ground Zero

Hours after the attack on the Trade Towers in 2001 I walked down to the site. I returned there again last night and found a loud crowd shouting mostly the words “USA, USA,” in the darkness to a clutch of news cameras.

While different in almost every other respect, what I found on both occasions were people searching. A decade ago, dust still on their skin, people were looking for safety, for loved ones, for explanation. This time, with a whole lot more breath in their lungs, people were looking once again-for others to be with and for closure.

James Harris: Second-Class Students

In a recent interview, Oakland Unified School District Superintendent Tony Smith shared with me one of the most mind-numbing statistics I have ever heard: According to the Alameda County Health Department, a black child born in West Oakland will, on average, die 15 years before a white child born in the hills of Oakland.

“Surely this must be enhanced or inflated for shock value,” I said to Smith. “This can’t be real.”

“That is a real statistic that exposes serious inequity along racial lines in Oakland,” said Smith. We sat for a minute talking about our hopes for our children and our hopes for Oakland schools, but the statistic stung me with a viscous dose of reality, which quickly transformed into deep concern and doubt about Oakland’s education system.

Richard A. Clarke: Bin Laden’s Dead. Al Qaeda’s Not.

THE United States needed to eliminate Osama bin Laden to fulfill our sense of justice and, to a lesser extent, to end the myth of his invincibility. But dropping Bin Laden’s corpse in the sea does not end the terrorist threat, nor does it remove the ideological motivation of Al Qaeda’s supporters.

Often forgotten amid the ugly violence of Al Qaeda’s attacks was that the terrorists’ declared goal was to replace existing governments in the Muslim world with religiously pure Islamist states and eventually restore an Islamic caliphate. High on Al Qaeda’s list of targets was Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. The protesters of Tahrir Square succeeded in removing him without terrorism and without Al Qaeda.

Thus, even before Bin Laden’s death, analysts had begun to argue that Al Qaeda was rapidly becoming irrelevant. With Bin Laden’s death, it is even more tempting to think that the era of Al Qaeda is over.

Senator Lindsey Graham: Epic Fail! 20110502

I usually do not write about pure politics because many others here do it much better than I.  Whilst I keep up with politics, those of you who read my three regular, weekly series know that I am much more of and academic and a storyteller.  However, this is different.

He, and the despicable Sean Hannity have decided that it was wrong to give a proper burial, following the Muslim tradition, of Usama bin Laden was the wrong thing to do.  Nothing could be further from the truth, and I shall use their own favorite catch phrase to nail them.

Grahan and Hannity, and others of a similar mind, are drunk with the passion for revenge.  That is not supposed to be our way.  Justice, not revenge, is the American way, or at least is purported to be so.

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: Springtime for Bankers

Last year the G.O.P. pulled off two spectacular examples of bait-and-switch campaigning. Medicare, where the same people who screamed about death panels are now trying to dismantle the whole program, was the most obvious. But the same thing

happened with regard to financial reform.

As you may recall, Republicans ran hard against bank bailouts. Among other things, they managed to convince a plurality of voters that the deeply unpopular bailout legislation proposed and passed by the Bush administration was enacted on President Obama’s watch.

And now they’re doing everything they can to ensure that there will be even bigger bailouts in years to come.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: With Osama bin Laden Dead, It’s Time to End the War on Terror

In a dramatic, yet sober, Sunday night address to the American people, President Obama announced the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. He reminded us of the horror, the grief, the tragedy and senseless slaughter of September 11, 2001. He reminded us of how, in those grim days, “we reaffirmed our unity as one American family…and our resolve to bring those who committed this vicious attack to justice.”

The President spoke of how the capture and killing of bin Laden was the “most significant effort to date in our efforts to defeat Al-Qaeda. ” And he reaffirmed that this country will never wage a war against Islam. For that reason, Obama said, bin Laden’s “demise should be welcomed by all those who welcome peace and human dignity.”

His call to Americans to remember what unifies us, to remember that “justice has been done,” is a defining opening to seize. It is time to end the “global war on terror” we have lived with for this last decade. It is time to stop defining the post 9/11 struggle against stateless terrorists a “war.” And it is time to bring an end to the senseless war in Afghanistan that has cost this nation so much in lives and money.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: The GOP’s debt-ceiling silliness

Starting this week, the talk in our nation’s capital will be dominated by whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling – as if we have any choice but to pay off our obligations. It will be a colossally foolish and self-destructive battle, another sign of how fanaticism and ideological obsession are rendering our country ungovernable.

Republicans, joined, it seems, by some terrified Democrats, are trying to use the debt-limit vote to force cuts in spending that they could not win on the merits. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the government could face the possibility of defaulting. Even if default doesn’t happen, global markets could punish us by demanding higher interest rates on our debt.

The New York Times Editorial: The Economy Slows

The economy still needs help and, specifically, a sustained focus on jobs and income. Instead, policy makers are gearing up for deep spending cuts, ignoring the damage they are likely to cause. Last quarter, cutbacks by governments at all levels took a chunk out of overall growth. If cuts of similar or greater magnitude become the norm, the slow economic pace of the first quarter also could very well become the norm. It’s nice to believe slowing growth is transitory. But as long as spending, jobs and incomes are at risk and policy priorities are skewed, it’s hard to believe in a turnaround.

Peter Dreier: Banks Should Pay for Foreclosures

The epidemic of foreclosures that began in 2008 has been devastating America’s families, communities and the state economy.

Nowhere is this more true than in California, where one in five U.S. foreclosures has taken place. Since 2008, more than 1.2 million Californians have lost their homes, and the number is expected to exceed 2 million by the end of next year. More than a third of California homeowners with a mortgage already owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

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