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”.
Ari Berman: The Bank Lobby Steps Up Its Attack on Elizabeth Warren
On May 24 Elizabeth Warren was back on Capitol Hill testifying before Congress, defending her brainchild, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a key element of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. Warren is a major celebrity in Washington, an Oklahoma-born Harvard law professor who’s done more than anyone since Ralph Nader to put consumer protection on the national agenda. The room was packed with reporters, consumer advocates and lobbyists. GOP Representative Patrick McHenry, who chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, could barely hide his disgust for the CFPB and Warren, accusing her of lying to Congress and frequently interrupting her answers. “In a few short weeks,” McHenry warned ominously, “the bureau will become a powerful instrument in the hands of progressive regulators.”
In part because it’s one of the strongest aspects of Dodd-Frank, the CFPB has become a favorite target of Republican attacks, right up there with George Soros, ACORN and Planned Parenthood. It’s been called “one of the greatest assaults on economic liberty in my lifetime” (Representative Jeb Hensarling) and “the most powerful agency ever created” (Representative Spencer Bachus). The Wall Street Journal opinion page denounced Warren and the bureau three times in one week in March. And the bureau hasn’t even officially launched!
Glen Greenwald: The WH/Politico Attack on Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh has a new article in The New Yorker arguing that there is no credible evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons; to the contrary, he writes, “the U.S. could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago — allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimates of the state’s military capacities and intentions.” This, of course, cannot stand, as it conflicts with one of the pillar-orthodoxies of Obama foreign policy in the Middle East (even though the prior two National Intelligence Estimates say what Hersh has said). As a result, two cowardly, slimy Obama officials ran to Politico to bash Hersh while hiding behind the protective womb of anonymity automatically and subserviently extended by that “news outlet”:
the Obama administration is pushing back strongly, with one senior official saying the article garnered “a collective eye roll” from the White House . . . two administration officials told POLITICO’s Playbook that’s not the case. . . . a senior administration official said. . . . “There is a clear, ongoing pattern of deception” from Iran . . .”the senior administration official added” . . . And a senior intelligence official also ripped Hersh, saying his article amounted to nothing more than “a slanted book report on a long narrative that’s already been told many times over” . . .
Dutifully writing down what government officials say and then publishing it under cover of anonymity is what media figures in D.C. refer to as “real reporting.” …
Big Brother got even bigger under the first “Brotha” president, Barack Obama. Government also became even more secretive. “The Obama Justice Department says that only the executive branch has the power to determine what information courts ought to have” – a novel doctrine that wreaks havoc with the rights of people accused of crimes, especially whistleblowers. The death of Osama bin Laden, says Obama’s Attorney General, makes the Patriot Act even more vital to national security. “Perhaps we were better off when bin Laden was still alive.”
The state security apparatus which came into being during the Bush administration is now supported just as strongly, if not more so, under president Barack Obama. There has been no let up, no change in course for a system which becomes stronger with each passing day and which faces almost no political opposition.
John Nichols: Pro-Choice, Anti-Choice, Mitt Romney Cannot Be Serious
The New Hampshire Democratic Party has got the number of the newly-announced candidate who will not be the Republican nominee for president.
The party is distributing t-shirts that feature “The Two Sides of Mitt Romney.”
On the front the shirts read:
“Mitt Romney:
Pro-Individual Mandate
Pro-Recovery Act
Pro-Immigration Reform
Pro-Cap and Trade
Pro-Gay Rights”On the back they read:
“Mitt Romney:
Anti-Individual Mandate
Anti-Recovery Act
Anti-Immigration Reform
Anti-Cap and Trade
Anti-Gay Rights”All true.
But Romney’s biggest flip-flop is not mentioned.
In 1994, when he was mounting a serious challenge to Democratic incumbent Edward Kennedy in a Massachusetts U.S. Senate contest, Romney tried on a number of issues to position himself as a reasonably liberal alternative to the veteran senator. This was especially true on the question of abortion rights, where Romney did not merely offer a soft pro-choice line like “Roe v. Wade is settled law” or “I support the current law.”
Bill McKibben: Three Strikes and You’re Hot: Time for Obama to Say No to the Fossil Fuel Wish List
In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades — those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebody saying.
But those nostalgic for an earlier day, take heart. The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.
There’s a pickaxe in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, one of the world’s richest deposits of coal. If we’re going to have any hope of slowing climate change, that coal — and so all that future carbon dioxide — needs to stay in the ground. In precisely the way we hope Brazil guards the Amazon rainforest, that massive sponge for carbon dioxide absorption, we need to stand sentinel over all that coal.
Vincent Iacopino: A Memo on Torture to John Yoo
The former Bush administration official continues to defend the indefensible: his authorization of a disastrous policy of abuse
Whether torture helped lead to the killing of Osama bin Laden or not, the beating of John Yoo’s tell-tale heart has compelled him to speak. His preemptive rush, in a recent op-ed article for the Wall Street Journal, to vindicate the Bush administration’s torture policies that he and Jay Bybee created betrays his guilt for approving one of the most reprehensible policies in US history – a policy of systematic torture that not only failed to provide actionable intelligence, but undermined the security of the United States.
In the infamous torture memos of 2002, Yoo and Bybee, authorized “enhanced interrogation” techniques (EITs), acts previously recognized by the US as torture – and the same torture methods used on US soldiers to obtain false confessions during the Korean war. In 131 pages of memos, the two justice department legal counsels redefined torture in a manner that required medical monitoring of all EITs, but failed to provide any meaningful provisions to detect medical evidence of torture as defined by them. Moreover, their “good faith” defence against criminal liability for torture rested on two presumptions, that interrogators would not exceed the severe physical and severe and prolonged mental pain thresholds for torture as defined by Yoo and Bybee, and, even if they did, that it would not constitute torture unless these physical and psychological harms were the precise objectives of the interrogators.
Peter Custers: Fears of Depleted Uranium Use in Libya
EIDEN, The Netherlands – The pattern of deception to gain legitimacy for war in the eyes of the public by now is familiar. In the middle of March, Western powers led by the U.S., Britain and France initiated actions of war against Muammar Gaddafi’s government of Libya. The start of war was preceded by a publicity offensive in which the Libyan leader was depicted as a madman.
The war was defended on the grounds that the Libyan people needed to be protected against their dictator via a ‘no-fly’ zone, and the public was made to believe the West exclusively aimed at defending the humanitarian interest of Libya’s population. Now, concerns among the Western public over Libyan events have thinned. The need to camouflage war aims has concomitantly decreased.
Time to highlight some of the long-term implications of the Western intervention. A sound, but difficult test case is the West’s use of depleted uranium weapons. Though U.S. and British officials have so far denied their employment over Libya, from the very start of the intervention to overthrow Gaddafi speculation has been rife that ammunitions used by the U.S. and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) contain ‘depleted’ uranium. What to make of these stories?
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The brand-new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is preparing to open up next month. This is in spite of pressure from U.S. Senate Republicans to block them. The agency is the consequence of last year’s Dodd-Frank Act. It wants insight as to which non-bank financial industries they should focus on. Here is the proof: CFPB considers which non-bank industries to regulate