Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Visual source: Newseum

NY Times editorial:

Default is theoretically possible, though public outrage over the mess would likely compel Congress to raise the debt limit before then. The best approach, the most sensible and mature, would be to pass a clean and timely increase.

However, nothing sensible or mature is on the horizon. Republicans have vowed to extract more heedless spending cuts in exchange for their votes to raise the debt limit. To that end, they seem likely to demand changes to the budget process, like a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, or spending caps.

Stephen L. Goldstein talks about

Wealth care vs. health care.

That choice will frame the debate for the 2012 election. As a result, President Barack Obama has already won his second term, and Democrats will recapture majorities in both houses of Congress. Everything until then is a delicious denouement, when tea party extremists will have turned the Republican Party into a blip on the political screen ? and Kingsley Guy will beg to become a Democrat.

Whiz kid wannabe, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., will be the unwitting savior of the Democratic Party and cause of his party's humiliating defeat. He issued his penny-pinching "Path to Prosperity" before the president spoke about our debt and deficit. For the unveiling, image consultants gave the Wisconsonite a new hairdo to soften his usual menacing part and ghoulish gaze, but they couldn't change the mean-spirited, elitist strategy to which he committed Republicans: Adi�s ? Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid; Hola ? tax cuts for the drowning-in-money.

Recently, when Kingsley and I were interviewed by Thomas Roberts on MSNBC, I mentioned the obscenity of extending trillion-dollar tax cuts to the richest Americans while bleeding the middle class. But Kingsley saw nothing wrong.

Gail Collins:

Right now you?re probably asking yourself: How are all the angry new governors doing?

Great! Fear and loathing may abound, but it?s business-friendly fear and loathing. In Ohio and Wisconsin, angry new governors John Kasich and Scott Walker are taking economic development out of the hands of state bureaucrats and giving the job to new quasi-private entities that will be much more effective and efficient.

In Florida, where the Legislature did all that in the 1990s, the angry new governor Rick Scott has a bold plan to improve economic development by creating a State Department of Commerce that will be much more effective and efficient.

Dana Milbank on the conservative nutters eating their own. It's so bad even the Villagers have noticed.

Two from the NY Times Room for Debate:

David O. Sears:

Racial resentment more strongly affected evaluations of his opponents, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, than it had before the campaign or since. And it more strongly affected evaluations of Obama?s issue positions on taxes and health care than it had before. The campaign in 2008 was the most racialized in recent history, despite little explicit reference to it during the campaign.

How is that relevant to the birthers? Consider three powerful principles in political psychology: strong prior attitudes can powerfully influence responses to an unfamiliar issue, especially if authoritative sources associate the issue with such attitudes, and if the new issue is inherently ambiguous.

Party identification and racial resentment are perhaps the two most strongly held contemporary political attitudes. But one might protest, no authoritative sources associate Obama with foreign birth. Wrong. The New York Times and other mainstream media are not considered authoritative sources to most birthers, especially compared with many low-level conservative political operatives, or their like-minded social networks.

If you were a birther, would you trust your neighbor who spends his evenings on the Internet and watching Fox News, or the Times? All of us have heard of forged official documents, from under-aged college students? faked id?s to illegal aliens? stolen social security numbers. Why not Obama?s birth certificate?

James T LaPlant:

We often ask why do people believe weird or silly things? It can provide them with comfort and consolation in a world that appears increasingly complex, globalized and difficult to understand.

I would also conclude that basic ignorance is at play. A poll of North Carolina voters in 2009 by Public Policy Polling found that 26 percent did not believe Obama was born in the U.S., and 20 percent were unsure. A question later in the poll asked if Hawaii was part of the United States.: 5 percent of respondents said no and 3 percent were unsure.

This is a story Daily Kos covered years ago, right down to the dangers for the GOP in being led by their fringe. This clip is Contributing Editor David Waldman from July 2009:

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/3QHQs_-3nmo/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up

political news articles nj politics california senators politics news headlines