Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Visual Source: Newseum

Frank Bruni says we need a serious debate born of smarter politics, but what we're seeing out of the straw and thunder in Iowa is anything but.

It?s time for nobler, smarter, more substantive politics. It?s past time, actually. But that?s not what Iowa presented.

...all of the Republican Party is running scared of its super-conservative faction in Congress and because the Republican nominating process rewards a rightward tilt. That remains true this election cycle, to the party?s and the country?s detriment. Obama is a flawed president confronting epic challenges; he needs to be drawn into a serious conversation with a Republican nominee who represents a plausible alternative, not with someone boxed into a corner.

David Swenson reminds us that mutual funds are not only subject to the whims of the market, they're subject to a drain that's there whether stocks are up or down.

Too often, investors believe that mutual funds provide a safe haven, placing a misguided trust in brokers, advisers and fund managers. In fact, the industry has a history of delivering inferior results to investors, and its regulators do not provide effective oversight.

The companies that manage for-profit mutual funds face a fundamental conflict between producing profits for their owners and generating superior returns for their investors. In general, these companies spend lavishly on marketing campaigns, gather copious amounts of assets ? and invest poorly.

Of course, giving more money to for-profit fund managers is exactly what the GOP means when they push the idea of privatizing Social Security. When the roller coaster calms down and we forget the swings of the past week, let's not forget that.

Neal Gabler points out that The Atlantic's "biggest ideas of the year," aren't particularly big, and certainly aren't original. They're tired restatements of simple observations, most of them decades old. Why? Because for all the data that slips past us every day, we're having a shortage of genuine fresh ideas.

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it?s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don?t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world ? a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can?t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding.

...

There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines. And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young ? a form in which ideas are more difficult to express.

We've gone from the age of William Buckley to the age of Glenn Beck. And while we might feel better about the people who (when the media allows) push progressive thoughts on the airwaves, when's the last time a genuinely new progressive vision was presented, rather than a defense of something articulated decades ago?

We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg pokes a hole in the idea that compromise will win the center by pointing out the obvious: there is no center.

... in 1976, Jimmy Carter won the presidency by the slimmest of margins, with 50.1 percent of the vote.

That year, 26.8 percent of Americans lived in ?landslide counties,? which voted either Democratic or Republican by 20 percentage points or more. By 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush split the popular vote, 45.3 percent of Americans lived in landslide counties. In 2008, the figure was 47.6 percent.

Not only is this political self-sort affecting the geography of where we live, it's shaping the organizations we belong to, how religion fits into our lives, how we build relationships. We're living custom lives where our every whim is catered to and our ideas are seldom tested.

It is no wonder, then, that the loudest voices reaching lawmakers are the most partisan, a dynamic that many say accounts for the rise of the Tea Party, whose adamant opposition to tax hikes is cited as the main stumbling block to political compromise in Washington.

Marketers, though, offer another explanation. Americans, they say, may profess an interest in compromise, as an abstract goal or principle. But they don?t want to make the trade-offs necessary to cut a deal.

David Weiman imagines a world in which the Tea Party repeals the New Deal.

So, what would a world without the New Deal look like?

It would be a fight for economic survival with no coordinated effort at recovery. ... Any who doubt the New Deal?s effectiveness need only look at the double-dip recession of 1937, after a conservative backlash in Congress scaled down relief spending. Without Roosevelt?s intervention, the economic recovery that lasted from 1933 to 1937 would have been weaker and shorter ? not unlike our own recovery after the Great Recession.

Ah, but the Republicans have spent the last seventy years building up a alternate history in which black is white, Nazis were liberal, and the New Deal actually caused the Great Depression. So don't expect any quarter from people whose soak-the-poor philosophy is unchanged in any weather.

Thomas Friedman takes a break from pushing the Just-Like-Me Party to notice that the Middle Class is getting screwed. It's almost as if he's discovering that the Flat Earth is a very un-level playing field. Almost.

George Will spends his column explaining what a huge failure JFK was in Berlin. Seriously. You can read it, or you could listen to the people of Berlin this week talking about the importance of Kennedy's visit and the staying power of his words. Your choice. If they still made the old Ace Doubles, Will's "How Kennedy lost the Cold War" articles would make a great flip-side to Pat Buchanan's Hitler was a nice guy we pushed too hard columns. The scary thing? Just like the "FDR caused the Great Depression" mythology, both of these fantasies have probably already become holy writ in bizarro-world Conservaville.

E. J. Dionne discusses the Iowa straw poll results and follows the conventional wisdom: good for Bachmann, bad for Pawlenty, so-so for Perry, Paul who? You really have to feel for the Paul supporters. What does their cranky, odd, but no crazier than the rest of 'em candidate have to do to get attention from the press? (Two words: meat dress)

Forget the face transplant. When it comes time to replace your kisser, just look to your ears.

Stem cells from human ears have successfully been grown into chunks of cartilage that could replace the synthetic materials currently used in surgery.

If you think the stock market is a new idea, think again.

Beneath your feet, plants and fungi are exchanging nutrients in a marketplace where generosity is rewarded and cheating punished. The two kingdoms were known to exchange nutrients at root level ? now, researchers have shown that they have evolved ways to enforce fair trading.

Wait a sec. Fair trading? I take it back. Our markets really are a new idea.

UPDATE: AP just announcing that Tim Pawlenty is dropping out of the competition for the GOP nomination. TPaw just relieved that he will no longer have to face those eyes at close range. Race for biggest embarassment continued to be Newt's to lose. Back to your regular programming...

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/cvw3h98ZtWc/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up

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