Your one stop pundit shop.
Eugene Robinson goes where no Republican dares to tread:
If the GOP takes control of one or both houses of Congress, voters will expect action to cut the federal beast down to size. All right, the 2010 budget was about $3.5 trillion. Where should the dragon-slayers begin to make meaningful cuts?
If you add up all the items generally thought of as mandatory -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, interest on the national debt -- you've already spent about two-thirds of the total. Add in the close to $700 billion spent for defense, which Republicans hold as sacrosanct, and you've spent four-fifths of the budget. This leaves just one-fifth for "discretionary" programs, many of which aren't discretionary at all. I doubt many Americans would want to risk going without food inspection, say, or air traffic control, or the FBI.
Michael Gerson performs amazing contortions to justify saying that President Obama said "some of the most arrogant words ever uttered by an American president."
Richard Cohen argues against hate crime legislation, saying it makes thought a crime. Oh, and he speculates that Tyler Clementi might have killed himself even if the secret webcast his roommate aired had been of him making out with a girl.
Bob Herbert:
The president and his party may have racked up one legislative victory after another — on the bank bailouts, the stimulus package, the health care bill, and so forth — but ordinary Americans do not feel as if their lives or their prospects are improving. And they don’t think it’s a public relations problem.
Tom Keane weighs in on the Massachusetts governor's race:
A CONFESSION: I’m really enjoying this governor’s race.
I know it’s wrong. There are serious issues at stake and people’s lives rest in the balance. We face a Morton’s Fork over the budget: increase taxes and kill the economy or cut to the bone and wipe out needed programs. The list of critical issues seems endless: health care coverage, wind power, education reform, casino gambling, business regulation, job creation, global warming, and transportation, to name but a few. These are difficult times and they call for somber reflection and thoughtful decisions. I just shouldn’t be having so much fun.
James Carroll on the implications of Pew Research Center's "US Religious Knowledge Survey."
Today, American religious ignorance is not just embarrassing; it’s dangerous. It matters less whether citizens can define Ramadan than whether they nurture core beliefs that reinforce intolerance and even violence. Religious meaning less concerns behavior one day a week than unexamined assumptions at work seven days a week. How do ideas of sacrifice, atonement, redemption, and self-righteous moralism affect us? I write as an American Catholic aware, for example, that a Christian theology that valorizes suffering as a road to salvation can all too readily sponsor the rush to war. “God wills it!’’ was the Crusader battle cry. But is that so? If the future is to culminate in a God-sanctioned apocalypse, as many Bible readers believe, why shouldn’t the present be bloody as well? Does monotheism mean there is only one truth? Are sacred texts to be taken literally, even if they spawn contempt for variously designated “others’’ (women, Jews, homosexuals, unbelievers)?
I am a religious person because I believe that religion can be a way of resisting violence. But that assumes a religion both self-critical and repentant for all the ways it keeps getting sucked into violence — especially with fantasies of a violent God. Today, Islam is on the hot seat because some Muslim nihilists cause mayhem in its name, but Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, Confucians — and those who adhere to the rationalist religion-of-no-religion — have all taken their turns with this bat, even if each of these traditions is based on the call to compassionate love. Tragedy consists in the ease with which that call is universally ignored. When the energy of faith goes bad, war comes fast and hard.
The Washington Times editorial board takes a stab at pretending that Ronald Reagan -- he of blessed memory who raised taxes multiple times and signed an immigration bill that offered amnesty and a path to citizenship -- would be at home in today's Republican/Tea Party. They fail.