“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”.
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day
Ruth Marcus: Extremism in the pursuit of judges
In Newt Gingrich’s America, states that balked at desegregating their schools could have ignored the Supreme Court with impunity.
In Gingrich’s America, if the Supreme Court struck down the individual mandate to obtain health insurance, a reelected President Obama would be free to ignore the ruling and order the mandate enforced.
These are not far-fetched extrapolations of Gingrich’s views. They derive directly from his arguments for curbing the power of what he views as a “grotesquely dictatorial” judiciary.
At the center of his critique is Cooper v. Aaron, the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1958 ruling ordering the desegregation of the Little Rock schools, and rejecting Arkansas officials’ defiance of the mandate to desegregate.
Amy Goodman: Bradley Manning and the Fog of War
Accused whistle-blower Pvt. Bradley Manning turned 24 Saturday. He spent his birthday in a pretrial military hearing that could ultimately lead to a sentence of life … or death. Manning stands accused of causing the largest leak of government secrets in United States history.
More on Manning shortly. First, a reminder of what he is accused of leaking. In April 2010, the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks released a video called “Collateral Murder.” It was a classified U.S. military video from July 2007, from an Apache attack helicopter over Baghdad. The video shows a group of men walking, then the systematic killing of them in a barrage of high-powered automatic fire from the helicopter. Soldiers’ radio transmissions narrate the carnage, varying from cold and methodical to cruel and enthusiastic. Two of those killed were employees of the international news agency Reuters: Namir Noor-Eldeen, a photojournalist, and Saeed Chmagh, his driver.
Renowned whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers that helped end the war in Vietnam and who himself is a Marine veteran who trained soldiers on the laws of war, told me: “Helicopter gunners hunting down and shooting an unarmed man in civilian clothes, clearly wounded … that shooting was murder. It was a war crime. Not all killing in war is murder, but a lot of it is. And this was.”
When President Obama was elected more than three years ago, many progressives had great expectations for what would follow. Many wanted to believe that one person, in one flying presidential leap, could transform the mess our political system had become. That he, alone, could deliver.
Three years later, progressives have learned the hard way that this isn’t, and never will be, the case. Democratic presidents succeed at advancing progressive causes when independent progressive movements push them to do so. Success at the ballot box is not a victory in and of itself. True victory comes when vibrant, sustainable movements create an energy around ideas that the White House has to chase. Those movements can be built on hope, but they are sustained with engagement of the kind that can outlast any given battle, any given term and any given presidency.
Maureen Dowd: Separation of Newt and State
Just when you thought Newt couldn’t get any more grandiose, he leaps in to save freedom of religion in the most religiously free place on earth.
On his Web site Tuesday, he urgently vowed to establish a White House commission “On Day One” of his presidency (heaven forefend) “to examine and document threats or impediments to religious freedom in the United States.”
Watching his numbers falling in Iowa, he doubled down on his unconstitutional assault on “activist judges,” saying he would investigate “the extent to which courts throughout the U.S. are undermining the First Amendment and misconstruing the historical basis for religious freedom in America.”
Donna Smith: Un-Happy Holidays for Seniors and the Disabled – Here’s Your Donut
It isn’t sugar plums dancing in their dreams for America’s seniors and disabled who are covered by the Medicare program. It’s donuts. Donut holes into which many fall at this time of the year as they reach the maximum limits of the first tier of “Part D” prescription drug benefits.
I watched my 67-year-old husband trudge up the driveway on a recent morning as I pulled away. He had just showed me the printout of his drug costs for the year. He’s reached the Medicare Part D donut hole by using more than $3,000 in prescription benefits. He is disheartened because his costs tripled at just the time of the year when grandfathers like to be thinking about other things instead of how to manage the cost of their prescriptions or which drugs can be cut in half and still do some good to get through to January 1 and a new benefit year.
Michelle Chen: With Anti-Immigrant Law, Alabama is Again Ground Zero for Civil Rights
It’s not often that human rights and business profits line up on the same side of a political debate, but Alabama is a special place. The Cotton State was not only ground zero for some of the worst abuses under Jim Crow; it was also the flashpoint for early struggles that fused economic empowerment with civil rights, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Today, Alabama is once again a focal point for racial and class struggles, ignited by an anti-immigrant law that tests our definitions of economic citizenship in a world of fluid borders.
The law, HB 56, mirrors many of the “copycat” anti-immigrant bills that have gone viral in state legislatures from Arizona to Indiana. It would impose onerous identification requirements that encourage police to arrest and detain anyone who couldn’t present the right papers. Although some of the harsher provisions were blocked by a federal court earlier this year, the legislation (signed into law in June) still threatens to further demonize immigrants and to crystallize the racist ideology driving a two-tier economy, where the privileges of the elite are subsidized by the vicious exploitation of the 99 percent.
Laura Flanders: Singing the Recall Carol in Wisconsin
Solidarity singers faced down a new set of state policies intended to regulate and put a price on assembly and free speech at the Wisconsin state capitol, Monday.
Solidarity sing-alongs began at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison on March 11, 2011, and they’ve continued at noon every weekday since. Last Friday, the Capitol supposedly set up new rules for access to state buildings, the new policy requires permits for gatherings of 100 or more outside the Capitol, while permits are needed for gatherings inside of four or more people. Both need to be applied for seventy-two hours in advance of the event and there’s a $50 charge per hour, per police officer deployed. Solidarity Sing-Along participants say the policy is directed specifically at their singing, but at noon Monday the singers were there-in unusually large numbers and high spirits-encouraged by news that in just one month, more than half a million signatures have been gathered to recall Governor Scott Walker.
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