“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”.
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Amanda Marcotte: Sorry, John McCain, But Anti-Choicers Are Judged on Actions, Not Words
This video of John McCain on Fox News Sunday morning is getting a lot of traction, because it seems like he’s telling Republicans to back off their opposition to abortion rights.
But as with Bobby Jindal before, if you actually listen to what he’s saying, he’s not actually telling Republicans to make substantial changes to either what policies they advocate for or even necessarily telling them to tone down their actual passion for stripping women of their reproductive rights. He’s just telling them to be quiet about it, and hope the voters don’t notice.
Ana Marie Cox: Fiscal cliff hype and the future of Grover Norquist’s taxpayer pledge
The renewal of President Obama’s mandate showed Americans favour a more complex solution to US debt than just ‘no’ to taxes
There are many the similarities between Los Angeles and Washington, DC (the most true one having to do with DC being “Hollywood for ugly people), but the hullabaloo around the “fiscal cliff” – technically, a snorefest of sequestration agreements – brings to mind the importance of raising the stake every time you make a sequel. Just as the non-specific excitement of “Star Wars: A New Hope” gave way to the menace of “The Empire Strikes Back”, and then the personal vengeance promised by “The Return of the Jedi”, so must the muscular comity of the “supercommittee” morph into a joined-at-the-hip leap off the “fiscal cliff” – which, itself, in the manner of all trilogies, is followed by more of the same but with bigger explosions: that is, “Taxmaggedon.” [..]
If nothing else, Washingtonians’ hyperbole has proven another LA maxim: violence is good for ratings. More Americans followed the debate over the sequestration package than they did the Petraeus’ own euphemistic scandal. Or at least, that’s what they told Pew Research.
(Yes, that Cherie Blair. TMC)
All over the world, the infrastructure of justice is failing women. In some cases, it is the laws themselves that legitimise discrimination – whether on property rights, freedom of movement or women’s control over their own bodies. In many more societies, however, the problems stem from a justice system which fails to recognise the informal and often unconscious bias against women. [..]
It is not enough to put the right laws in place to root out discrimination, important as this is. We also have to find the commitment, knowledge and resources to enforce them fairly. And crucially, we need to change attitudes, though that can be harder to bring about than changes in the law. Yet one often leads to the other and both are needed to deliver real change throughout society.
So what is working? It is important to note the progress around the world and how it is being achieved.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Governor Cuomo’s Choice
Democrats are still celebrating big Election Day victories, and not just in the White House. The party took back many state legislative seats seized by Tea Partiers in 2010, and added to majorities in already blue states. In California and Illinois, Democrats achieved legislative super-majorities, removing some of the last obstacles to enacting a progressive agenda in two of our largest states. [..]
Which brings us to the current conundrum. One would have thought that a Democratic governor would have worked hard to reverse the Tea Party’s 2010 gains in his state. You’d think he’d be working even harder to ensure that no renegade legislators “flip” to the GOP. You would hope that a governor with his eyes on the White House would prefer to cooperate with the diverse progressive legislators of the Democratic/Working Families Party majority rather than the all-white, nearly all-male moderate-to-conservative GOP minority.
Annette Bernhardt and Dorian Warren: The Missing Living Wage Agenda
Now that the election is over, our hope is that we can finally move beyond the vacuous invocations of an imaginary middle class where everyone is in the same boat. It’s time to get real about the concrete policies needed to take on the multiple inequalities that run deep through the U.S. labor market. And we’re not talking about the “skills mismatch,” another red herring routinely flung into this debate by both sides (including by President Obama as recently as the last week of the campaign).
What we’re talking about is a broad, multi-year agenda to give America’s workers a living wage and voice on the job and to take on the continuing exclusion of workers of color, immigrants, and women from good jobs. The media may have discovered inequality last year with the surprise emergence of Occupy Wall Street, but in truth, there is a 30-year backlog of policies to fix the extreme maldistribution of wages and opportunity in the labor market.
Isabeau Doucet: Canada, The Surprise ‘Pariah’ of the Kyoto Protocol
Some Canadians doubt whether their country should have any say in negotiating the second Kyoto protocol after it became the only nation to reject the first one
Of all the delegations in the room in Doha, the Canadians adopt the lowest profile. Some question whether they should be there at all: The country’s first and only Green party MP, Elizabeth May, said: “Having Canada in the room negotiating to weaken the second Kyoto, when we have already signalled that not only will we not be participating in taking on new targets in the second period but we’re legally withdrawn from the protocol, should make us pariahs.”
“I can’t imagine how anybody would want us in the room.”
Canada’s current greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are 23% over the country’s Kyoto protocol target, and federal government estimates place Canada 28.8% over the target by 2014. Canada is the only country to have repudiated Kyoto, the sole legally binding international policy tool to date to deal with the emissions, and ranks just behind the US and Australia in the table of worst global emitters per capita.
This is because of Canada’s size, its cold climate and its resource-based economy, especially the energy-intensive, carbon-emissions-heavy oil boiled from large swaths of bitumen know as the Alberta tar sands.
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