“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.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
John Conyers: Best Way to Save Medicare, Offer it to Everyone
Medicare is arguably one of the nation’s most successful and cherished public insurance programs. The program covers approximately 47 million elderly and disabled Americans, and helps pay for hospital, physician visits, and prescription drugs. It is truly hard to argue with success.
The traditional Medicare program, coupled with a supplemental private insurance policy, covers most of our seniors’ medical bills, with far less co-pays and out-of- pocket costs than private insurance.
Therefore, proposals to privatize Medicare – like Rep. Paul Ryan’s – have been met with such fierce opposition, because it was revealed in the national media that privatization meant much higher out-of-pocket costs for seniors. National polls have shown strong general support for maintaining Medicare or even increasing funding for it.
Glen Greenwald: The Always-Expanding Bipartisan Surveillance State
When I wrote earlier this week about Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article on the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers, the passage I hailed as “the single paragraph that best conveys the prime, enduring impact of the Obama presidency” included this observation from Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin: “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state.” There are three events — all incredibly from the last 24 hours — which not only prove how true that is, but vividly highlight how it functions and why it is so odious. First, consider what Democrats and Republicans just jointly did with regard to the Patriot Act, the very naming of which once sent progressives into spasms of vocal protest and which long served as the symbolic shorthand for Bush/Cheney post-9/11 radicalism . . .
Next we have a new proposal from the Obama White House to drastically expand the scope of “National Security Letters” — the once-controversial and long-abused creation of the Patriot Act that allows the FBI to obtain private records about American citizens without the need for a subpoena or any court approval — so that it now includes records of your Internet activities. . .
Most critically, the government’s increased ability to learn more and more about the private activities of its citizens is accompanied — as always — by an ever-increasing wall of secrecy it erects around its own actions.
As newly resigned International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn (aka DSK) hunkers down in his jail cell, IMF news has fallen into two categories. The first involves salacious details of his alleged attempted rape, and the second, questions about whether his absence will keep the IMF from its main focus of constructing pro-bank bailout packages for Greece, Portugal and other struggling European countries. Both categories miss the devastation the IMF causes, regardless of who heads it.
Meanwhile, the global economic assault caused by the misguided IMF and EU notion that public spending cuts and national infrastructure fire sales should be enacted to make up for bank rampages marches on. Rather than clamping down on banks and working on debt reduction strategies, bailout loans remain designed to keep banks solvent, investors shielded from loss, and outside buyers interested.
Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis: Obama Should Follow His Own Advice on the ‘Moral Force’ of Non-Violence
Given that President Obama daily authorizes the firing of hellfire missiles and the dropping of cluster bombs in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, it was awful odd seeing him wax eloquent this week about the “moral force of non-violence” in places like Egypt and Tunisia. But there he was, the commander-in-chief of the largest empire in history, praising the power of peaceful protest in countries with repressive leaders backed by his own administration.
Were we unfamiliar with his actual policies – – more than doubling the troops in Afghanistan, dramatically escalating a deadly drone war in Pakistan and unilaterally bombing for peace in Libya — it might have been inspiring to hear a major head of state reject violence as a means to political ends. Instead, we almost choked on the hypocrisy.
David Sirota: Turning the Camera on the Police
What’s good for the police apparently isn’t good for the people — or so the law enforcement community would have us believe when it comes to surveillance.
That’s a concise summary of a new trend reported by National Public Radio last week — the trend whereby law enforcement officials have been trying to prevent civilians from using cellphone cameras in public places as a means of deterring police brutality.
Oddly, the effort — which employs both forcible arrests of videographers and legal proceedings against them — comes at a time when the American Civil Liberties Union reports that “an increasing number of American cities and towns are investing millions of taxpayer dollars in surveillance camera systems.”
Peter Tatchell: One Year in Jail, Bradley Manning is a Hero
Blowing the whistle on war crimes is no crime.
On 26 May, Private Bradley Manning will have been held in US military detention without trial for one year. He faces a battery of charges, including “aiding the enemy” – a crime punishable by execution under US law.What was Manning’s crime? As well as allegedly releasing classified diplomatic cables that exposed the hypocrisy of top US officials, it is alleged that he blew the whistle on war crimes and cover-ups by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. If this is true, the man is a hero. He is a defender of democracy and human rights. His actions are based on the principle that citizens have a right to know what the government is doing in their name.
Manning should not be in prison. The charges against him should be dropped. Instead, the US should put on trial those who killed innocent civilians and those who protected them.
Harvey Wasserman: Fukushima’s Apocalyptic Threat Demands Immediate Global Action
Fukushima may be in an apocalyptic downward spiral.
Forget the corporate-induced media coma that says otherwise…or nothing at all.
Lethal radiation is spewing unabated. Emission levels could seriously escalate. There is no end in sight. The potential is many times worse than Chernobyl.
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