“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: E Pluribus Unum
It’s that time of year – the long weekend when we gather with friends and family to celebrate hot dogs, potato salad and, yes, the founding of our nation. And it’s also a time for some of us to wax a bit philosophical, to wonder what, exactly, we’re celebrating. Is America in 2013, in any meaningful sense, the same country that declared independence in 1776?
The answer, I’d suggest, is yes. Despite everything, there is a thread of continuity in our national identity – reflected in institutions, ideas and, especially, in attitude – that remains unbroken. Above all, we are still, at root, a nation that believes in democracy, even if we don’t always act on that belief.
And that’s a remarkable thing when you bear in mind just how much the country has changed.
Glen Ford: Obama Visits Mandela’s Old Cell, But Won’t Free His Own Political Prisoners
Obama sees no irony in making a pilgrimage to Nelson Mandela’s place of political imprisonment, while holding 80,000 human beings in solitary confinement. “Racist South Africa’s treatment of Mandela and his co-revolutionists was downright benign and enlightened, compared to fate of U.S. prisoners who are deemed a threat to the prevailing order.”
“Obama has no sympathy, however, for political prisoners of any race in his own country.”
President Barack Obama, a man of infinite cynicism, made a great show of going on pilgrimage to Nelson Mandela’s old prison cell on Robben Island, where the future first Black president of South Africa spent 18 of his 27 years of incarceration. With his wife and daughters in tow, Obama said he was “humbled to stand where men of such courage faced down injustice and refused to yield…. No shackles or cells can match the strength of the human spirit,” said the chief executive of the unchallenged superpower of mass incarceration, a nation whose population comprises only 5 percent of humanity, but is home to fully one-quarter of the Earth’s prison inmates.
The surge in fracked gas is headed for export and won’t boost the nation’s energy independence.
Big Oil’s frackers are wrapping their shameless profiteering in our flag.
In shale fields across the country, you’ll see fracking rigs festooned with Old Glory, and they even paint some of their rigs red, white, and blue.
This ostentatious patriotic pose is part of the industry’s cynical PR campaign to convince you and me that its assault on our health, water, air, and economic future should be mindlessly saluted, rather than questioned. [..]
Joel Dyer, editor of the Boulder, Colorado Weekly, has peeked behind their-star spangled curtain. The investigative digger uncovered what he called “one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on America.”
H. Gilbert Welch: Diagnosis: Insufficient Outrage
RECENT revelations should lead those of us involved in America’s health care system to ask a hard question about our business: At what point does it become a crime?
I’m not talking about a violation of federal or state statutes, like Medicare or Medicaid fraud, although crime in that sense definitely exists. I’m talking instead about the violation of an ethical standard, of the very “calling” of medicine.
Medical care is intended to help people, not enrich providers. But the way prices are rising, it’s beginning to look less like help than like highway robbery. And the providers – hospitals, doctors, universities, pharmaceutical companies and device manufactures – are the ones benefiting.
Juan Cole: Egypt’s “Revocouption” and the Future of Democracy on the Nile
The argument over whether what happened in Egypt on Wednesday, July 3, was a coup or a revolution is really an argument over the legitimacy of the actions taken. If it was a revolution, it was perhaps a manifestation of the popular will, and so would have a sort of Rousseauan legitimacy. If it was merely a military coup against an elected president, then it lacks that legitimacy.
In fact, there certainly was a popular revolutionary element to the events, with literally millions of protesters coming out on Sunday and after, in the biggest demonstrations in Egyptian history. You can’t dismiss that as merely a coup d’etat from on top by a handful of officers.
But on Wednesday there was also a military coup, provoked by the officer corps’ increasing dissatisfaction with President Muhammad Morsi as well as a determination not to stand by as the country threatened to devolve into chaos, as rival street crowds confronted one another.
Tim Radford: A Warming Climate Will Alter the Soil That Feeds Us
Global warming may be about to change the ground under our feet – and perhaps not in a good way. It could be about to affect one of the most important communities on the planet: the tiny microbes that make life possible for the rest of creation, according to new research by scientists in the US and Spain.
Cyanobacteria are almost everywhere, have been around for the whole of life’s 3.5 billion-year history, and fix nitrogen from the atmosphere to fertilise plants and feed animals.
They are so common, and so numerous, that they form collectives that can be picked up by hand, and be seen even from space. As photosynthesisers, these blue-green algae also deliver the oxygen to keep the animal world on the move.
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