“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”.
George Zornick: Civil Disobedience on Tar Sands Begins Outside the White House
The largest act of civil disobedience by environmentalists in decades began outside the White House this morning, as more than seventy activists were arrested at the north gates during a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline, which if approved by the administration would carry 900,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
The activists, who sat down at the gates at 11 am holding large banners reading “Climate change is not in our national interest,” were warned three times by US Park Police to move along, and were handcuffed and removed after they refused. More than 2,000 people have pledged to be arrested outside the White House every day until September 3, in daily installments of seventy-five to 100 people.
Kevin Gosztola: US Park Police Seek to Intimidate Oil Pipeline Protesters
A major two-week action involving daily sit-ins at the White House against the granting of a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline began Saturday. Just over seventy people were arrested. The action continues today, as over thirty plan to engage in civil disobedience at the White House again.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, Gus Speth, Lt. Dan Choi, Jane Hamsher and many other fine activists came together at 10:30 am on Saturday morning. They all participated in a rally in Lafayette Park. Following the rally, a carefully orchestrated civil disobedience action took place with more than seventy people lining up in front of the White House.
Libya, a tiny country of deserts with some oil wells, was never a particularly important country, strategically, unless you’re an historian of the Roman Empire, when Libya was the empire’s breadbasket, or of Italian imperialism. In 1969, when Muammar Qaddafi and Abdul Salam Jalloud-who, it seems, recently defected in advance of the deluge-seized power, they were less-than-well-schooled copies of the then-fading Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, who was Qaddafi’s inspiration. Unfortunately, Qaddafi took power as an Arab nationalist at the end of nationalism’s heyday, and never quite figured out to reinvent himself. For a time, he tried to portray himself as the harbinger of the Third Way, halfway between capitalism and communism, but if that inspired anyone at all, it was Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who then tried to invent their own version of the Third Way.
And now Qaddafi is gone. A leader who was probably mentally deranged during most or all of his reign, given to mood swings and paranoid outbursts, is no more. That can’t be bad, as far as the long-suffering population of Libya is concerned.
New York Times Editorial: Homeowners Need Help
Neither Congress, nor federal regulators, nor state or federal prosecutors have yet to conduct a thorough investigation into the mortgage bubble and financial bust. We welcomed the news that the Justice Department is investigating allegations that Standard & Poor’s purposely overrated toxic mortgage securities in the years before the bust. We hope the investigative circle will widen.
But a lot more needs to be done to address the continuing damage from the mortgage debacle.
Tens of millions of Americans are being crushed by the overhang of mortgage debt. And Congress and the White House have yet to figure out that the economy will not recover until housing recovers – and that won’t happen without a robust effort to curb foreclosures by modifying troubled mortgage loans.
Mazher Ali: Let’s ‘Make Them’ End the Great Recession
We can no longer allow a hopelessly unreasonable minority in a severely corrupted system to dictate the terms of our economy.
Did you breathe a sigh of relief when President Barack Obama signed the debt deal into law earlier this month? If not, you weren’t the only one.
Raising the national debt ceiling may have forestalled an immediate U.S. default and credit collapse, but the deal will do absolutely nothing to address the real problems of our time: stubbornly high unemployment and a suffocating economy. Recovering from this Great Recession and achieving longer-term stability require a broad, informed, and unified movement to battle the corporate-backed powers that are waging economic war on working Americans.
Karen Greenberg: Crisis of Confidence: How Washington Lost Faith in America’s Courts
As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the unexpected extent of the damage Americans have done to themselves and their institutions is coming into better focus. The event that “changed everything” did turn out to change Washington in ways more startling than most people realize. On terrorism and national security, to take an obvious (if seldom commented upon) example, the confidence of the U.S. government seems to have been severely, perhaps irreparably, shaken when it comes to that basic and essential American institution: the courts.
If, in fact, we are a “nation of laws,” you wouldn’t know it from Washington’s actions over the past few years. Nothing spoke more strikingly to that loss of faith, to our country’s increasing incapacity for meeting violence with the law, than the widely hailed decision to kill rather than capture Osama bin Laden.
Beth Wellington: The Myth of Mountaintop Removal Mining
Big Coal says it’s a tough choice: we can have prosperity and jobs or a pristine environment, but not both. That’s a Big Lie
CNN correspondent Soledad O’Brien’s recent piece on mountaintop removal (MTR) in the Appalachian mountains has the troubling title, “Steady job or healthy environment: what [sic] would you choose?”
How about we choose both?
In any case, MTR does not, despite industry claims, deliver employment to offset its environmental damage. It’s simply a win-win for Big Coal and its political supporters, and a lose-lose for ordinary people who live in mining areas. Whatever the industry would have you believe, basing an economy on coal is not a sustainable development plan. A study by the Appalachian Regional Commission noted the effects of mining on employment in Central Appalachia:
“As employment in Central Appalachia’s mining sector has declined over time…many counties that were already typically experiencing relatively poor and tenuous economic circumstances…have been unable to successfully adapt to changing economic conditions.”
Recent Comments