“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”.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Russia’s Great December Evolution
On December 10, in what one Russian blogger called “The Great December Evolution”-a play on the Bolsheviks’ Great October Revolution-tens of thousands of people protested peacefully in central Moscow. It was the most striking display of grassroots democracy and activism since the early 1990s. Police showed restraint, and Moscow’s mayor even provided free bus rides to protesters who had arrived at the wrong location. “Everything is flowing and changing,” a Russian friend e-mailed me Sunday night. [..]
The air of infallibility Putin has enjoyed-and counted on -for the past decade is deflated.
Also gone is the nearly unconditional support most Russians had not just for Putin but for the system he has built and presided over in the past decade. That system, at least in the popular thinking, and according to legitimate polls, brought stability and prosperity after the chaos and poverty of Yeltsin’s 1990s. But for many Russians, especially younger ones, those days are a fading memory and the quest for political and free speech rights is sharpening. The involvement of so many young people in Moscow’s protests is, as one journalist put it, “a game-changer….All at once, a generation understood it has two options: to leave the country, or to start the struggle.”
Amy Goodman: Climate Apartheid
Despite the pledges by President Barack Obama to restore the United States to a position of leadership on the issue of climate change, the trajectory from Copenhagen in 2009, to Cancun in 2010, and, now, to Durban reinforces the statement made by then-President George H.W. Bush prior to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the forerunner to the Kyoto Protocol, when he said, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.”
The “American way of life” can be measured in per capita emissions of carbon. In the U.S., on average, about 20 metric tons of CO2 is released into the atmosphere annually, one of the top 10 on the planet. Hence, a popular sticker in Durban read “Stop CO2lonialism.” [..]
So it seems U.S. intransigence, its unwillingness to get off its fossil-fuel addiction, effectively killed Kyoto in Durban, a key city in South Africa’s fight against apartheid. That is why Anjali Appadurai’s closing words were imbued with a sense of hope brought by this new generation of climate activists:
“[Nelson] Mandela said, ‘It always seems impossible, until it’s done.’ So, distinguished delegates and governments around the world, governments of the developed world, deep cuts now. Get it done.”
Vulnerable Women and Contraception: Obama Turns Clock Back Nearly 100 Years
“For a woman to ‘ask her physician’ for a safe and effective contraceptive presupposed that she had a physician, that she could afford a contraceptive, and that the physician would be willing to give it to her, regardless of her marital status.”
These are the words of the historian Sheila Rothman, writing about the setbacks Margaret Sanger faced in the 1920s and 1930s in trying to realize her vision of making birth control widely available to all women, including the poorest-and about the ultimate “ownership” of contraceptive services during that era by physicians. Sanger’s original vision was a fleet of clinics, to be run by public health nurses. But as Rothman and others have documented, when she attempted to open such clinics, she experienced repeated arrests and the closures of her facilities, as contraception was then illegal. In the years leading up to the 1965 Supreme Court Griswold decision, which legalized birth control for married persons, only physicians were legally permitted to provide such services, and as the quote from Rothman implies, this situation put poor women at a tremendous disadvantage.
Rothman’s critique, written in the 1970s about events in the ’20s and ’30s, is remarkably relevant to today’s leading reproductive controversy: the Obama administration’s overruling of the FDA decision to allow over-the-counter status of Plan B, an Emergency Contraceptive product, for young women under the age of seventeen. If one substitutes “teenager” for “woman” and “Plan B” for “a safe and effective contraceptive” in Rothman’s quote, one can readily appreciate how, once again in America’s longstanding reproductive wars, the needs of the most vulnerable are willfully neglected.
Laura Flanders: What a Difference an Occupation Makes
It was never a genuine question. Money media prattled on about Occupy Wall Street’s supposedly ineffable demands the same way they batted aside the end capitalism signs to wonder what the Seattle protesters had on their minds. That said, the Occupy movement has always been more about doing than demanding and this week, OWS stepped it up another notch.
On December 6, OccupyYourHomes joined with local community organizers to take on the housing crisis. In twenty-five cities, protesters interrupted house auctions, blocked evictions and occupied foreclosed homes. In East New York they moved Alfredo Carrasquillo, Tasha Glasgow and their two children into a foreclosed home that had stood empty for three years. I attended the action Tuesday and couldn’t drag myself away. Even as the rain drizzled and the temperature sank, I watched the numbers of protesters grow and thought of the many, many members of underfunded community groups I’ve spoken to over the years. Among those, Community Voices Heard, New York Communities for Change, Picture the Homeless, Organize for Occupation, VOCAL-NY and Reclaim the Land. They talked on GRITtv about toxic loans and targeted neighborhoods, forced foreclosures, fear and the general lack of national interest.
Karen Greenberg: How Terrorist ‘Entrapment’ Ensnares Us All
When the government gets in the business of playing along with terror plots, it’s not just justice that suffers – but our safety
Two weeks ago, Jose Pimentel was arrested as an alleged terrorist bomb-maker as a result of an NYPD sting. Within hours of the arrest, his attorney raised the prospect of a possible entrapment defense. Last month, when Mansour Arbabsiar was indicted for trying to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on behalf of Iran, he, too, was the subject of a sting, in this case by the FBI, and he claimed entrapment. These are but the latest iterations of dozens of terrorism cases that have come through the system with varying degrees of “entrapment” claims by the defense at the time of arrest. The Fort Dix case from New Jersey in 2007, and the more recent instances of the sole terrorism suspects in Portland, Washington, DC and Baltimore are among the many cases in which some sort of entrapment was alleged (at least, at the outset).
This is a problem in a counterterrorism world where law enforcement relies on preventive stings as its main strategy. By definition, the strategy precludes a defense. Legally, entrapment is mostly about the suspect’s predisposition because the other element of entrapment, inducement by the government to commit the crime, is usually not disputed. Thus, if the government can show that the defendant was inclined to the crime, then the entrapment-by-inducement defense cannot prevail in court. In a terrorism case, the fact of being willing to commit an act of terrorism is seen as predisposition, no matter how much of a Catch-22 this may be. As a result, lawyers rarely choose to mount the defense.
Mary Bottari FOX News, OWS, Banksters, and Bombs
Last week, tragedy was averted when savvy security at Deutsche Bank (DB) in Frankfurt, Germany, spotted a suspicious package and sequestered a letter bomb intended for the DB CEO. This was the second time Deutsche Bank was attacked in this manner. In 1989, their CEO was killed by a bomb later traced to violent extremists in Germany’s Red Army Faction.
Scanning the horizon for someone to blame for the latest attack on Germany’s largest bank, FOX news pundit Dan Gainor worked “the Internets.” Did he detail Deutsche Bank’s track record of making friends by ripping off consumers and foreclosing on their homes? Did he mention that Deutsche Bank stirred public ire when it was bailed out by multiple governments, including two billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve? Did he even bother to notice that it was widely reported that an Italian anarchist group had already claimed responsibility for the attack?
No. In his piece on FOX News, “Left, Obama Escalate War on Banks Into Dangerous Territory,” Gainor decided to go after the bank-busting activists at the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, specifically our BanksterUSA.org site, because the Bankster masthead is riddled with bullet holes.
Miriam Pemberton: Military Spending is the Weakest Job Creator
Even before the supercommittee’s demise, the defense industry and its Pentagon and congressional allies were making preemptive strikes on the next phase: the automatic cuts, half of them from defense, that are supposed to follow the supercommittee’s failure. And with national unemployment rates stuck near 9 percent, the effect of these cuts on jobs has loomed large in their sights.
The largest defense industry trade association, the Aerospace Industries Association, recently funded a study predicting $1 trillion in military cuts over 10 years would add 0.6 percent to the national unemployment rate. The Pentagon then funded its own study that conveniently rounded that prediction up to an even 1 percent.
The glaring flaw in these studies is that they make claims about the effect on the economy as a whole as if these military cuts were being made in a vacuum.
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