Tag: Opinion

“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: Dumbing Deficits Down

Like anyone who writes regularly about what passes for economic and fiscal debate in American politics, I’ve developed a strong tolerance for nonsense. After all, if I got upset every time powerful people were illogical and/or dishonest, I’d spend every waking hour in a state of raging despair.

Yet there are still moments when I find myself saying, “They can’t really be that stupid,” or maybe, “They can’t really think the rest of us are that stupid.” And I had one of those moments reading about a recent conference on national health policy, which featured a bipartisan dialogue among Congressional staffers.

According to a column in Kaiser Health News, Republican staffers jeered at any and all proposals to use Medicare and Medicaid funds better. Spending money on prevention was no more than a “slush fund.” Research on innovation was “an oxymoron.” And there was no reason to pay for “so-called effectiveness research.”

Bob Herbert: The Master Key

The United States is not racked with the turmoil that is shaking the Arab world, or the tragic devastation that has hit Japan. We are not in a state of emergency. We’re in a moment when it is possible to look thoughtfully at the American landscape and take rational steps to ensure a better, more sustainable future.

But we’re not doing that. The big news out of Washington this week was Representative Peter King’s Muslim witch hunt. Policy makers at all levels of government are talking austerity – sometimes sensibly, but most often mindlessly. Creative ideas regarding energy, education, jobs and so forth have trouble even getting a hearing.

Robert Reich Emulating Clinton’s ‘Move to the Right’ Perilous for Obama

Why Obama Isn’t Fighting the Budget Battle

In the next week the action moves from Wisconsin to Washington, where the deadline looms for a possible government shutdown over the federal budget. President Obama has to take a more direct and personal role in that budget battle  – both for the economy’s sake and for the sake of his reelection. But will he? Don’t count on it.

Worried congressional Democrats say the President needs to use his bully pulpit to counter defections in Democatic ranks, such as the ten Democrats and one allied Independent who on Wednesday voted against a Senate leadership plan to cut $6.2 billion from the federal budget over the rest of fiscal year 2011. They want Obama to grab the initiative and push a plan to eliminate tax breaks for oil companies and for companies that move manufacturing facilities out of the country, and a proposal for a surtax on millionaires.

Most importantly, they’re worried the President’s absence from the debate will result in Republicans winning large budget cuts for the remainder of the fiscal year – large enough to imperil the fragile recovery.

But Obama won’t actively fight the budget battle if the current White House view of how he wins in 2012 continues to prevail.

“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: Governor Walker’s Coup D’Etat

Governor Scott Walker and his Wisconsin senate Republicans have laid bare the motives for their coup d’etat. By severing the financial part of the bill (which couldn’t be passed without absent Democrats) from the part eliminating the collective bargaining rights of public employees (which could be), and then doing the latter, Wisconsin Republicans have made it crystal clear that their goal has had nothing whatever to do with the state budget. It’s been to bust the unions.

That’s no surprise to most people who have watched this conflict from the start, but like any coup its ultimate outcome will depend on the public. If most citizens of Wisconsin are now convinced that Walker and his cohorts are extremists willing to go to any lengths for their big-business patrons (including the billionaire Koch brothers), those citizens will recall enough Republican senators to right this wrong.

Eugene Robinson: Peter King’s Modern-Day Witch Hunt

“There is nothing radical or un-American in holding these hearings,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) claimed Thursday as he launched his McCarthyite probe of American Muslims. He could not have been more wrong. If King is looking for threats to our freedoms and values, a mirror would be the place to start.

Here’s why. Imagine a young man, a Muslim, who changes in troubling ways. His two best friends become concerned, then alarmed, as the young man abandons Western dress, displays a newfound religiosity and begins to echo jihadist rhetoric about the decadence of American society. Both friends suspect that the young man has become radicalized and might even attempt some kind of terrorist attack.

One friend is Muslim, the other Christian. Does the Muslim friend have a greater responsibility than the Christian to contact the authorities? By the logic of King’s witch hunt, he does.

Glenn Greenwald: The “Bush-Tortured” Excuse for Indefinite Detention

Earlier this week, I wrote about the fictitious excuse being offered to justify why Obama is continuing the indefinite detentions and military commissions which defined the Bush/Cheney Guantanamo detention scheme:  it’s Congress’ fault.  Today we have a new excuse:  it’s Bush’s fault.  Because Bush tortured some of the detainees, this reasoning goes, Obama is incapable of prosecuting them, yet because many of those detainees are Terrorists and/or Too Dangerous to Release (even though they can’t be convicted of anything), he has no real choice but to keep imprisoning them without charges.  Here are the NYT Editors — even as they criticize Obama’s indefinite detention policy — making this case, one frequently heard from Obama supporters offering excuses for his policy of indefinite detention:

   [T]he Obama administration has still chosen to accept the concept of indefinite detention without trial, which represents a stain on American justice. The president made that acceptance clear in a speech in May 2009. To some degree, he was forced into it by the Bush administration’s legacy of torture and abuse, which made some important cases impossible to prosecute.

snip

There’s a serious moral flaw in the NYT‘s reasoning, and two even worse empirical flaws with this excuse-making for indefinite detention.   There are several compelling reasons why the use of torture-obtained evidence is barred by every civilized country for use in prosecution, and has been barred for decades if not centuries.  A primary reason is because the most basic norms of Western morality demand that torture not be rewarded, which is what happens when the fruits of it are admissible in court to prosecute people.  Those who say that Obama is justified in imprisoning people without charges because the evidence against them was obtained via torture and is thus unusable in court are repudiating this long-standing Western moral principle by justifying imprisonment based on evidence obtained by coercion (we know they’re guilty because of the evidence we got from torture, so we have to detain them).

“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”

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: What Wisconsin Democrats can teach Washington Democrats

Consider the contrast between two groups of Democrats, in Wisconsin and in the nation’s capital.

Washington Democrats, including President Obama, have allowed conservative Republicans to dominate the budget debate so far. As long as the argument is over who will cut more from federal spending, conservatives win. Voters may think the GOP is going too far, but when it comes to dollar amounts, they know Republicans will always cut more.

In Wisconsin, by contrast, 14 Democrats in the state Senate defined the political argument on their own terms – and they are winning it.

By leaving Madison rather than providing a quorum to pass Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on collective bargaining for public employees, the Wisconsin 14 took a big risk. Yet to the surprise of establishment politicians, voters have sided with the itinerant senators and the unions against a Republican governor who has been successfully portrayed as an inflexible ideologue. And in using questionable tactics to force the antiunion provision through the Senate on Wednesday, Republicans may win a procedural round but lose further ground in public opinion.

Robert Reich: The Birth of the People’s Party

Look at the outrage in Madison, Wisconsin. Look at the crowds in DesMoines, Iowa. Look at the demonstrations in Indiana and Ohio and elswhere around America.

Hear what they’re saying: Stop attacking unions. Stop making scapegoats out of public employees. Stop protecting the super-rich from paying their fair share of the taxes needed to keep our schools running.

Stop gutting the working middle class.

Noam Chomsky: The Cairo-Madison Connection

On Feb. 20, Kamal Abbas, Egyptian union leader and prominent figure in the Jan. 25 movement, sent a message to the “workers of Wisconsin”: “We stand with you as you stood with us.”

Egyptian workers have long fought for fundamental rights denied by the U.S.-backed Hosni Mubarak regime. Kamal is right to invoke the solidarity that has long been the driving force of the labor movement worldwide, and to compare their struggles for labor rights and democracy.

The two are closely intertwined. Labor movements have been in the forefront of protecting democracy and human rights and expanding their domains, a primary reason why they are the bane of systems of power, both state and private.

The trajectories of labor struggles in Egypt in the U.S. are heading in opposite directions: toward gaining rights in Egypt, and defending rights under harsh attack in the U.S.

“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 the Democrats Should Never Have Started Paying Ransom to Avoid a Shutdown

It’s called ransom. That’s what Republicans are demanding from the White House and congressional Democrats for not pulling the plug on the government.

Problem is, when you pay ransom once, you’re almost begging to pay it again. And that’s exactly the pickle the Obama administration is finding itself in.

In order to avoid a shutdown last week and buy time until March 18, the White House agreed to more spending cuts for the remainder of this fiscal year than it originally put on the table. Now, in order to get past March 18, Republicans want even more. Democrats have offered to cut an additional $10.5 billion but Republicans want $61 billion. The White House is hinting it’s ready to compromise further.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: When Murdoch wins, citizens lose

We tend to measure the influence of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in terms of the reach of Fox News or the circulation of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. But it is actually local television stations on which Murdoch has built his empire and increased his stranglehold on access to information.

He has done so, in large part, by taking advantage of a 1999 change in FCC rules that allowed a single company to own more than one television station in the same market. That arrangement, known as a duopoly, lets big conglomerates such as News Corp. buy up stations, reduce their staffs and consolidate newsrooms. Murdoch now has nine duopolies. According to Santa Clara University’s Allen Hammond, a staggering 109 duopolies were created between 2000 and 2006.

The problem isn’t just that control over the airwaves becomes concentrated; it’s that such consolidation often results in the gutting of local news coverage. Duopoly owners tend to duplicate their local coverage and reduce the amount of airtime dedicated to community news. The subsequent lack of coverage gives local governments a free pass to operate without any real media scrutiny.

Bob Herbert: Flailing After Muslims

It has often been the case in America that specific religions, races and ethnic groups have been singled out for discrimination, demonization, incarceration and worse. But there have always been people willing to stand up boldly and courageously against such injustice. Their efforts are needed again now.

Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island, appears to harbor a fierce unhappiness with the Muslim community in the United States. As the chairman of the powerful Homeland Security Committee, Congressman King has all the clout he needs to act on his displeasure. On Thursday, he plans to open the first of a series of committee hearings into the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the bogus allegation that American Muslims have failed to cooperate with law enforcement efforts to foil terrorist plots.

“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”

Lucinda Marshall: The Imperative Of Women’s Human Rights

Reflections On The 100th Anniversary Of International Women’s Day

This year marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.  It is a time to celebrate the lives of women and to renew our commitment to women’s human rights throughout the world.

That it is even necessary to have such a day should give us pause.  There is not, after all, an International Men’s Day.  But the truth is that while women may be half of the world’s population, they most assuredly are not equal stakeholders when it comes to human rights and empowerment.

Here in the U.S., women’s reproductive health rights are under sustained siege as never before.  In the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Sudan women are raped with impunity.  In Mexico and Guatemala, thousands of women have gone missing and been brutally murdered and the perpetrators roam freely.  Honor killings continue to be a huge problem in the Middle East and female genital mutilation is still a common practice in many parts of Africa.  In southeast Asia and eastern Europe, women are trafficked into sexual slavery.  In India there are dowry murders.

Widney Brown: Sidelining Egyptian Women after the Uprising

All the members of the committee writing Egypt’s new constitution are men.

A century ago, more than a million people marched in streets across Europe on the first International Women’s Day. They called for an end to discrimination and for women to have the same rights as men to work, vote, and shape their countries’ futures.

A hundred years later, women across the globe are still much more likely than men to be poor and illiterate. We earn only one-tenth of the world’s income for doing two-thirds of the work. Women produce up to 80 percent of the food in developing countries, but own only 1 percent of the land in those nations.

In many countries, we’re still told what we can do and even what we can wear. Women in Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, and Iran face harassment if they don’t observe conservative religious dress codes. Muslim women in France and some parts of Spain now break the law there if they don traditional attire.

Women campaigning for their liberation are often met with derision, abuse, or worse. In Russia, the Philippines, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, and Nepal, leading activists have recently been murdered for speaking out. In China, Bangladesh, India, Zimbabwe, and many other countries, they are routinely detained and tortured.

Tragically, the international community largely ignores these facts. Women’s inequality is treated as a regrettable but inevitable reality.

Michelle Chen: The Republican Attack on Women’s Health Goes Global

What does a congressperson from Ohio have in common with a 16 year-old sex worker in Cambodia? They’re both symbols of the perverse political stalemate in Washington, D.C., that threatens to set back the struggle for women’s equality around the world.

The year that girl was born, a conference of world leaders vowed to eliminate many of the worst forms of gender oppression. Last week, officials and civil society groups convened again at the United Nations to take stock of all the ways the international community has fallen short of its promises on women’s health, education and political and economic empowerment. And on Capitol Hill, the GOP is pushing budget cuts that would make sure the promise remains broken.

It’s not a coincidence that conservatives in Congress are fighting a two front war on women: attacking women’s rights across the Global South and killing Roe v. Wade at home. Conservatives are exploiting the budget process to defund Title X, the primary federal funding vehicle for family planning reproductive health services for women. Cutting these funds would leave many poor women with no local clinic or social service agency to get the guidance they need to make informed choices about sex and pregnancy.

“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”

David Swanson: Manchurian Senators

People are doing journalism and the Washington Post is pissed. How to respond? Apparently the answer arrived at by Post editors is to just give up on any Americans who have been informing themselves and target those Americans who believe anything that super important people say. How else to explain an op-ed full of documented lies and published last Friday over the byline of two Democratic senators, Carl Levin and Jack Reed?

The headline was “The Surge Afghanistan Still Needs.” Surge is not code for food or peace or environmental restoration or a moment’s relief from the attentions of the world’s oil, gas, and power addicts. Surge, in ignorant-American-newspaper-readerspeak is a term denoting the comical pretense that a criminal and genocidal invasion and occupation can be redeemed by escalating it. The term was coined in reference to Iraq, that hell on earth where pro-democracy demonstrators are now being murdered by the government that 20 years of war and sanctions built, even as that government demands reparations payments for recent US destruction.

Laurence Lewis: Democrats Are Ceding the Entire Traditional Democratic Economic Ideology

On Thursday, we got this news:

   President Obama on Wednesday intervened in a partisan brawl that threatens to shut down the government, inviting congressional leaders of both parties to sit down with Vice President Biden and work out a compromise to fund federal programs through the end of the fiscal year.

The official statement called for a “bipartisan” approach. There seems to be a presumption that no one has been paying attention the past couple years, because the only people that still believe in bipartisanship are also likely the holdouts on Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. The way it actually works is that every time the word is mentioned, Democrats give ground on core principles while Republicans have to accept that they get only some, but not all, of what they want. The administration’s framing of its role also is interesting. Republican administrations tend to think of themselves as partisan, representing the core values of their party. This administration seems to think of itself as a mediator between partisans. Triangulation you can believe in.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: How Boehner is playing the Democrats

Richard Nixon espoused what he called “the madman theory.” It’s a negotiating approach that induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down to avoid the wreckage your rage might let loose.

House Republicans are pursuing their own madman theory in budget negotiations, with a clever twist: Speaker John Boehner is casting himself as the reasonable man fully prepared to reach a deal to avoid a government shutdown. But he also has to satisfy a band of “wild-eyed bomb-throwing freshmen,” as he characterized new House members in a Wall Street Journal interview last week by way of comparing them fondly to his younger self.

Thus are negotiators for President Obama and Senate Democrats forced to deal not only with Republican leaders in the room but also with a menacing specter outside its confines. As “responsible” public officials, Democrats are asked to make additional concessions just to keep the bomb-throwers at bay.

“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: Ms. Amanpour will have an exclusive interview with Sen. John McCain about the revolt in Libya and why he thinks a “no-fly” zone should be enforced. Also a discussion withe guests Daily Beast and Newsweek Editor in Chief Tina Brown, Egyptian writer and activist Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, Zainab Salbi of Women to Women International and Sussan Tahmadebi of the International Civil Society Action Network for Women’s Rights, Peace and Security who will discuss how women are changing the Muslim world.

ABC News anchors Diane Sawyer, David Muir and Sharyn Alfonsi will discuss jobs and manufacturing in the US. The publisher and real-estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, Chrystia Freeland of Reuters and United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard will discuss how America can generate more jobs in a competitive global economy.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer:Mr, Schieffer’s guests are Sen. Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader (R-KY), Sen. John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (D-MA) and Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist.

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent, Rick Stengel, TIME Managing Editor, Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post Senior Political Editor and Norah O’Donnell, MSNBC Chief Washington Correspondent who will discuss these questions:

Is America Still Number One?

Will Establishment Republican Hopefuls For 2012 Pander To The Far Right?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Mr. Gregory has two exclusive interviews with White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). The round table guests will be Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson and New York Times columnist and author of the new book “The Social Animal,” David Brooks.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Sunday’s guests will include Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. National Security Adviser, and Dr. Ali Errishi, the former Libyan Immigration Minister to discuss Libya. Also, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) looking at potential 2012 contenders for the White House. Finally, Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has planned hearings on the radicalization of Muslims in America. He’ll join us to explain what he’s hoping to learn. Also joining us will be Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: The schedule for this Sunday was not available at the time this diary was published.

The other Pundits are below the fold

“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”

Eugene Robinson When Cuts Don’t Cut It

After slamming Democrats for not focusing on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” Republicans have decided to ignore their own winning message in favor of “cuts, cuts, cuts.” This is bad economics-and bad politics.

If you don’t believe me, read a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, published Thursday, that has what should be sobering news for Republicans who keep telling us that their radical assault on the size and scope of government has the support of “the American people.”

It doesn’t, according to the survey-not even philosophically. When asked whether government, in general, is trying to do too much or not doing enough, 51 percent said government should do more. That’s not exactly a mandate for slashing federal, state and municipal programs and trying to turn public employees into a caste of untouchables.

Bob Herbert: College the Easy Way

The cost of college has skyrocketed and a four-year degree has become an ever more essential cornerstone to a middle-class standard of living. But what are America’s kids actually learning in college?

For an awful lot of students, the answer appears to be not much.

A provocative new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” makes a strong case that for a large portion of the nation’s seemingly successful undergraduates the years in college barely improve their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing.

Gregg Mitchell Bradley Manning and the Tomb of the Well-Known Soldier

Ten  months after he was arrested for allegedly leaking classified material, including diplomatic cables, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was very much in the news this week — with the military bringing 22 new charges against him, including “aiding the enemy” (unspecified) to being stripped naked for seven hours at the prison the past two nights.  His supporters and attorney David Coombs continued to charge that the conditions of his confinement were overly harsh and punitive, while the Pentagon continues to deny that.

With Manning gaining wide attention now, it’s worth recalling that three months ago he was largely forgotten. How did so much change?  Here’s some background if you have just tuned into Manning’s case recently:

“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: How to Kill a Recovery

The economic news has been better lately. New claims for unemployment insurance are down; business and consumer surveys suggest solid growth. We’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole, but at least we’re climbing.

It’s too bad that so many people, mainly on the political right, want to send us sliding right back down again.

Before we get to that, let’s talk about why economic recovery has been so long in coming.

New York Times Editorial: Foreclosure Follies

Recent price data show home values at nearly their lowest levels in the postbubble era, and a coming tide of foreclosures means prices will drop further. Seven million families have lost their homes so far, and another three million foreclosures are expected through 2012.

The ongoing crash is further evidence that the government’s antiforeclosure efforts have fallen short and America’s struggling homeowners need more help.

So what are House Republicans proposing? They want the government to get out of the antiforeclosure business altogether and leave homeowners to fend for themselves. The result would be hundreds of thousands of additional foreclosures and steeper price declines.

Glenn Greenwald: Bradley Manning Could Face Death: For What?

The U.S. Army yesterday announced that it has filed 22 additional charges against Bradley Manning, the Private accused of being the source for hundreds of thousands of documents (as well as this still-striking video) published over the last year by WikiLeaks. Most of the charges add little to the ones already filed, but the most serious new charge is for “aiding the enemy,” a capital offense under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Although military prosecutors stated that they intend to seek life imprisonment rather than the death penalty for this alleged crime, the military tribunal is still empowered to sentence Manning to death if convicted.

Article 104 — which, like all provisions of the UCMJ, applies only to members of the military — is incredibly broad. Under 104(b) — almost certainly the provision to be applied — a person is guilty if he “gives intelligence to or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly” (emphasis added), and, if convicted, “shall suffer death or such other punishment as a court-martial or military commission may direct.” The charge sheet filed by the Army is quite vague and neither indicates what specifically Manning did to violate this provision nor the identity of the “enemy” to whom he is alleged to have given intelligence. There are, as international law professor Kevin Jon Heller notes, only two possibilities, and both are disturbing in their own way.

In light of the implicit allegation that Manning transmitted this material to WikiLeaks, it is quite possible that WikiLeaks is the “enemy” referenced by Article 104, i.e., that the U.S. military now openly decrees (as opposed to secretly declaring) that the whistle-blowing group is an “enemy” of the U.S. More likely, the Army will contend that by transmitting classified documents to WikiLeaks for intended publication, Manning “indirectly” furnished those documents to Al Qaeda and the Taliban by enabling those groups to learn their contents. That would mean that it is a capital offense not only to furnish intelligence specifically and intentionally to actual enemies — the way that, say, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen were convicted of passing intelligence to the Soviet Union — but also to act as a whistle-blower by leaking classified information to a newspaper with the intent that it be published to the world. Logically, if one can “aid the enemy” even by leaking to WikiLeaks, then one can also be guilty of this crime by leaking to The New York Times.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”

New York Times Editorial; The Hollow Cry of ‘Broke’

“We’re broke! We’re broke!” Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday. “We’re broke in this state,” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said a few days ago. “New Jersey’s broke,” Gov. Chris Christie has said repeatedly. The United States faces a “looming bankruptcy,” Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

It’s all obfuscating nonsense, of course, a scare tactic employed for political ends. A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more “broke” than a family with a mortgage or a college loan. And states have to balance their budgets. Though it may disappoint many conservatives, there will be no federal or state bankruptcies.

The federal deficit is too large for comfort, and most states are struggling to balance their books. Some of that is because of excessive spending, and much is because the recession has driven down tax revenues. But a substantial part was caused by deliberate decisions by state and federal lawmakers to drain government of resources by handing out huge tax cuts, mostly to the rich. As governments begin to stagger from the self-induced hemorrhaging, Republican politicians like Mr. Boehner and Mr. Walker cry poverty and use it as an excuse to break unions and kill programs they never liked in flush years.

Robert Reich: How Democrats Can Become Relevant Again (And Rescue the Nation While They’re At It)

Republicans offered Democrats two more weeks before the doomsday shut-down. Democrats countered with four. Republicans held their ground. Democrats agreed to two.

This is what passes for compromise in our nation’s capital.

Democrats have become irrelevant. If they want to be relevant again they have to connect the dots: The explosion of income and wealth among America’s super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of public services for the middle class and the poor.

Nicholas D. Kristof: Here’s What We Can Do to Tackle Libya

In 1986, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave an interview to a group of female foreign journalists. Then he invited them, one by one, into a room furnished with just a bed and television and propositioned them.

They rebuffed him, and after three successive rejections he got the message and gave up. But the incident reflects something important about Colonel Qaddafi that is worth remembering today: He’s nuts.

The Libyan “king of kings” blends delusion, menace, pomposity, a penchant for risk-taking – and possession of tons of mustard gas. That’s why it’s crucial that world powers, working with neighboring countries like Egypt and Tunisia, steadily increase the pressure while Colonel Qaddafi is wobbling so that he leaves the scene as swiftly as possible.