“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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New York Times Editorial: Turn the Volume Down on Drug Ads
Watching television these days means sitting through ads for drugs to ease pain, induce sleep, overcome sexual dysfunction, alleviate depression, ease urinary tract symptoms and more. Some patients say the ads are helpful, but many doctors warn that they are often misleading.
The American Medical Association’s House of Delegates voted this month in favor of a ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs and medical devices. Its officers argued that such advertising “inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate.”Only two nations in the world, the United States and New Zealand, allow consumer drug ads.
Paul Krugman: Europe the Unready
Thanksgiving as we know it dates not to colonial days but to the middle of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln made it a federal holiday. It is, in other words, a celebration of national unity. And our national unity is indeed something to be thankful for.
To see why, consider the slow-motion disaster now overtaking the European project on multiple fronts. [..]
And for a long time the project worked very well, as Europe grew steadily more prosperous, peaceful, and free. But how would the process deal with setbacks? After all, the European project was creating ever-growing interdependence without creating either the institutions or, despite elite hopes, the sense of political legitimacy that would be needed to manage that interdependence if things went wrong.
Which brings me to the disasters.
At first sight, the financial crisis, the refugee crisis, and the terrorist attacks might not seem to have anything in common. But in each case Europe’s ability to protect itself turns out to have been undermined by its imperfect union
Eugene Robinson: The GOP’s self-inflicted wounds
As the leading Republican presidential candidates rant and rave about deporting 11 million immigrants, fighting some kind of world war against Islam, implementing gimmicky tax plans that would bankrupt the nation and other such madness, keep one thing in mind: The party establishment brought this plague upon itself.
The self-harming was unintentional but inevitable — and should have been foreseeable. Donald Trump and Ben Carson didn’t come out of nowhere. Fully half of the party’s voters didn’t wake up one morning and decide for no particular reason that experience as a Republican elected official was the last thing they wanted in a presidential candidate.
The insurrection that has reduced Jeb Bush to single-digit support while Trump and Carson soar is nothing more than the understandable reaction of the jilted. Republican leaders have spent the years of the Obama presidency inflaming GOP base voters with extreme rhetoric and wooing them with empty promises. The establishment won its goal — electoral gains in Congress and many statehouses — but in the process may have lost the party.
Jon Quealy: If ‘Life Must Go On,’ Say Groups, France Must Lift Ban on Climate Protests
Ahead of international climate talks which are about to begin in Paris, an international coalition of NGOs, political figures, and civil society groups on Thursday demanded French President François Hollande lift the ban on protests and marches and said officials, despite recent violence, cannot proclaim a “commitment to democracy and freedom” while simultaneously suspending “democracy and freedom.”
In a letter addressed to Hollande, which has also taken the form of an online petition that anyone can sign, the climate justice leaders expressed understanding for how the recent violence in Paris—also mirrored in attacks in Beirut, Ankara, Bamako, and over the skies of Egypt—has made the security situation tense, but indicated the effort to shut down large scale protests is both short-sighted and counter-productive.
Thor Benson: Why Government Access to Encrypted Messages Won’t Make Us Safer
Since the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, the question of whether the terrorists behind the massacre were using encryption to cover their trail has been the subject of widespread speculation.
Just as they did after 9/11, current and former officials in the United States and abroad have predictably cited the Paris tragedy as a reason to increase government surveillance powers—this time by granting the National Security Agency, the CIA and other intelligence agencies back-door access to encrypted information. [..]
But as Truthdig has explained before, back-door access to encrypted apps is a bad idea and would not work. Many who rely on encryption, like investigative journalists, aid workers, lawyers and political dissidents around the globe, need their privacy protected. Furthermore, installing a back door for one officially sanctioned entity may very well mean that a malicious entity can find the same door and gain access.
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