Abbreviated pundit round-up

Visual source: Newseum

Jonathan Hari:

Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.

So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Khan, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a maid in a New York hotel room is ? rightly ? big news. But imagine a prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people. That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But that is left in the silence.

Ian Millhiser on Goodwin Liu's withdrawal from consideration as a federal appeals court judge:

Two lessons emerge from this debacle. Future presidents of both parties will learn that if they nominate someone with a body of published work ? no matter how moderate ? that work will inevitably contain out-of-context statements that can be used to embarrass the nominee and the White House. Thus, the lesson for presidents is clear: Don't nominate anyone who actually has had something to say about the Constitution.

Seattle Times editorial:

Giddy, brazen Republican deficit hawks somehow manage to avert their eyes from the cost of war, including the Afghan conflict running at $10 billion a month.

The Pentagon has spent $28 billion to build a national army in Afghanistan and wants $12 billion more. It would cost upward of $8 billion a year to maintain, The Washington Post reports. The nation's annual budget is $1.5 billion.

These numbers and the reluctance to confront them in Congress goes to the corporate heart of war as big business. If the GOP wants to take on government spending ? including discretionary spending ? look at lucrative military contracting and support for huge shadow armies.

Robert Dreyfuss:

The ultimate, perhaps, in hypocrisy? Though it?s widely been reported that the United States and Israel worked together to sabotage Iran?s nuclear program by means of a cyberattack, one using a computer worm called Stuxnet that wrecked as many as a thousand of Iran?s centrifuges, now the Pentagon says that if anyone does anything like that to us, it?s an act of war?and the United States might feel free to retaliate using military means.

Mona Eltahawy says the "virginity tests" used by Egypt's new rulers show the struggle for women's rights goes on:

And with the virginity tests, here is the [post-Mubarak supreme council of the armed forces] retracing that thin line between sex and politics again, in the hope of shaming women away from demonstrating. The council has already replicated many of the other sins that had Mubarak facing the wrong end of a revolution: military trials for civilians, detentions and torture (by military police now, state security then), and an intolerance of critics.

Roger Cohen  finds himself liking the Stanley Ann Dunham revealed in ?A Singular Woman,? Janny Scott?s biography of Barack Obama's mother. But what's with calling Obama's memoirs a "Bildungsroman"? Good grief.

William C. Goodfellow makes the case for exiling Muammar Gaddafi to Napoleon's last home, St. Helena. The Hague would be more just, he writes, but giving the dictator an out might prevent the kind of stubborn resistance that cost thousands of lives in Cote d'Ivoire.

Paul Krugman says we've already repeated the "mistake of 1937," turning away from fiscal stimulus toward budget balancing in 2010:

Yet worse things may soon happen.

On the fiscal side, Republicans are demanding immediate spending cuts as the price of raising the debt limit and avoiding a U.S. default. If this blackmail succeeds, it will put a further drag on an already weak economy. ?

Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it; we did, and we are. What we?re experiencing may not be a full replay of the Great Depression, but that?s little consolation for the millions of American families suffering from a slump that just goes on and on.

Dennis Prager lives in Los Angeles, so it can't be the snow that makes him a denier:

But the left should not laugh too loudly [at the failed Rapture]. The religious world has far fewer doomsday predictions than the left does. At least every few years, the secular-left frightens itself ? and tries to frighten everyone else ? about another doomsday scenario.

The most obvious current example is, of course, global warming. For years now, we have been told by the world's left-wing media that scientists are united in predicting that there will be worldwide catastrophe as a result of global warming caused by manmade carbon dioxide emissions. Oceans will rise so high that they will drown many of the world's great coastal cities; entire island-countries will disappear; vast areas of the world will dry up; and countries will fight one another for the little remaining fresh water.

Compared to the global warming scenario, I'll face the Rapture ? and I'm not even Christian.

Larry Kudlow, whose financial advice equals tossing a coin, says "big-government stimulus never works."  

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/YkVYs7-X_XA/-Abbreviated-pundit-round-up

texas political news data politic politic political news story political magazines