“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.
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Wednesday is Ladies’ Day
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Katrina vanden Heuvel; Protecting the command structure instead of the victims
‘Tis the season for scandals – real and manufactured – in Washington. But if our elected officials are searching for a real scandal, maybe they should start with the officer leading the Air Force’s anti-sexual assault initiative who was charged with sexual battery this month. Or the sergeant in Texas who allegedly forced a subordinate into prostitution. Or the 26,000 sexual assaults that happened in our military last year alone.
This epidemic has festered for far too long. At this moment, an American female soldier in a war zone is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. Under the current military justice system, victims must sometimes report a rape to their own rapist. Unmarried victims raped by married men can be charged with adultery, while the rapist goes free.
Heidi Moore: The New Farm Bill is an Economic Disaster
Just when you think Congress can’t get any dumber, it crafts a $1tn farm bill that harms the poor and promotes unhealthy food
The US Congress, its approval rating still near all-time lows, is reinforcing its own record of stupefyingly short-sighted lawmaking with what may be the most harmful piece of economic legislation in America in years: the $1tn 2013 farm bill.
It should be called the 2012 farm bill – or, officially, the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012 – because the habitually sluggish group of lawmakers in Washington were too busy in 2012 to pass it. Campaigning for office and ginning up the fake fiscal cliff crisis occupied a lot of time, so lawmakers passed an extension of the $650bn 2008 farm bill for another year. That set an expiration date of September 30 this year. The delayed timing, however, is the least of the problems with it.
President Obama’s recent speech on national security fell short when it came to addressing drones.
Obama sounded like the president his supporters had hoped for: the constitutional law scholar, the solemn decision-maker and the former community activist who, at heart, would always be more interested in connecting with the world’s hopes than its fears. It is unclear whether the reality of America’s drone wars will catch up with the best of Obama’s rhetoric, and if tighter legal constraints will lead to fewer drone strikes against a shorter list of enemies.
On the secrecy count, however, it is all too apparent that the Administration is not prepared to go far enough in the direction of reform. Though the President has repeatedly pledged transparency, in his speech he failed to signal that basic facts – including how many people have been killed by drone strikes and who they are – will become public. Nor did the President commit to independent investigations of the dozens of credible reports of civilian deaths from past drone strikes.
Moira Herbst: The Bank Bailout Cost US Taxpayers Nothing? Think Again
Don’t buy the line that the 2008 bailout gamble paid off. The banks have politicians and taxpayers firmly in their pockets
Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report (pdf) with what seemed like good news: the bailout of 2008 – which fronted $700bn in taxpayer funds to prop up the financial institutions that brought the economy to the brink – ended up cheaper than expected. The price tag was revised down to $21bn from $24bn.
The picture was even rosier once you looked past how much it cost to bailout General Motors and insurance giant AIG. The cost of the bank bailout alone is, in fact, projected to be “almost nothing”, as Politico’s Morning Money blog put it. So insignificant was the harm done to taxpayers that Politico put “bailout” in quotation marks. [..]
This is the line the banks and the US Treasury would like us to swallow. It is, of course, totally false. The bailout cost us plenty, and continues to do so. Sadly, it is the gift that keeps on giving to the very banks that drove our economy over a cliff – and took trillions in housing wealth, retirement funds and millions of jobs with it.
Sheila Bapat: Student Debt Is a Women’s Issue
Because student debt affects a large swath of Americans who struggle to build wealth over the course of their careers, it is primarily discussed as a class and an economic stimulus issue. But student debt is also an issue of particular importance for women. According to earnings statistics, women get far less bang for their buck out of higher education. Recent proposals to reduce student debt could benefit women over the course of their lives-but they may not go far enough.
Women make up the majority of higher education students, yet they earn far less than men with the same degrees. For the past several years women have outnumbered men in undergraduate and master’s programs, and as of 2010 women outnumber men in PhD programs as well. With respect to the two most expensive degrees, law and medicine, in 2009-10 women comprised 45 percent of law school classes, and as of 2011 they made up 48 percent of medical school graduates. This NPR piece from 2010 discusses how even though women are earning more engineering, math, and science PhDs than they were in previous years, women still experience wage disparities in these fields after graduation. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) found in a study last year that the student loan repayment burden is higher for women than for men for a variety of reasons, including the gender pay gap, which begins right after college graduation.
Rachel Smolker: Genetically Engineered Trees and Glowing Synthetic Plants? No Thanks
his week in Asheville, N.C., the IUFRO “Tree Biotechnology” conference will meet. And the attendees will be met: by protests. Public opinion is unequivocally opposed to genetically engineered trees. When the South Carolina-based tree engineering company, ArborGen recently applied for deregulation of their freeze tolerant eucalyptus, APHIS responded by filing a “notice of intent” to conduct an environmental impact statement, and opened up for public comments on ArborGen’s petition. The comments the received were overwhelmingly negative by a vast majority.
Similarly, when ArborGen filed for permission to field test their frankeneucalyptus back in 2010, more than 17,500 comments opposing the tests were submitted, while only 39 were favorable. In spite of the abysmal approval ratings, USDA granted permission to field test the trees and then again granted permission to allow some plots to go to flower. A lawsuit was filed against USDA by a coalition of groups (Global Justice Ecology Project, Dogwood Alliance, Center for Food Safety, Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity). In an article published in Biomass Magazine, spokesperson for the Biotechnology Industry Organization credited the suit as “… a hindrance to biomass development, as they discourage investment… It is creating a huge barrier.”
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