Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

The TGIF edition.

Joseph Stiglitz:

This year will be bleak. The question we need to be asking now is, how can we enhance the likelihood that we will eventually emerge into a robust recovery?

Paul Krugman: Obama is absolutely right about the diagnosis, but falls short of applying the cure.

Whatever the explanation, the Obama plan just doesn’t look adequate to the economy’s need. To be sure, a third of a loaf is better than none. But right now we seem to be facing two major economic gaps: the gap between the economy’s potential and its likely performance, and the gap between Mr. Obama’s stern economic rhetoric and his somewhat disappointing economic plan.

Kathleen Parker: The cognitive dissonance of conservative orthodoxy and reality gives me a headache.

Here's a paradoxical thought to get you started: We have to increase taxes and federal programs to save the capitalist system.

Make it go away.

EJ Dionne:

It has been so long since Congress needed to pass a huge and urgent package of spending increases and tax cuts that few people understand how the politics of such a thing might work.

David Brooks:

Maybe Obama can pull this off, but I have my worries. By this time next year, he’ll either be a great president or a broken one.

And we Villagers will take both sides so as to be proven right, regardless.

Howard Fineman: A Bumpy Start (A monograph on how the Villagers will keep score.)

Added: Nate Silver: The public says yea to Obama's stimulus plans (A monograph on how the public will keep score.)

Peter Bergen:

The war on terror, sometimes known as the "Global War on Terror" or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels.

James Phillips and George E. Bisharat: What's Israel trying to accomplish in Gaza? A debate.

Jay Bookman:

The border between a necessity and a mistake isn’t as clearly marked as the border between nations. So when Israeli troops crossed the line that separates Israel from Gaza this week, they may also have strayed across the line into a mistake.