“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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New York Times Editorial Board: President Obama’s Dragnet
Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.
Those reassurances have never been persuasive – whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism – especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.
Paul Krugman: The Spite Club
House Republicans have voted 37 times to repeal ObamaRomneyCare – the Affordable Care Act, which creates a national health insurance system similar to the one Massachusetts has had since 2006. Nonetheless, almost all of the act will go fully into effect at the beginning of next year.
There is, however, one form of obstruction still available to the G.O.P. Last year’s Supreme Court decision upholding the law’s constitutionality also gave states the right to opt out of one piece of the plan, a federally financed expansion of Medicaid. Sure enough, a number of Republican-dominated states seem set to reject Medicaid expansion, at least at first.
And why would they do this? They won’t save money. On the contrary, they will hurt their own budgets and damage their own economies. Nor will Medicaid rejectionism serve any clear political purpose. As I’ll explain later, it will probably hurt Republicans for years to come.
In February, the Administration succeeded in blocking a challenge to its surveillance policies by arguing that any confirmation of such programs would put American lives at risk. Now that the case is dismissed, they have simply acknowledged the program. The decision is Clapper v. Amnesty International, No. 11-1025, and it is a true nightmare for civil liberties. The Supreme Court rejected the standing of civil liberties groups and citizens to challenge the Obama Administration’s surveillance programs. President Obama has long been criticized for his opposition to such lawsuits and his Justice Department has continued a successful attack on the ability of citizens to challenge the unconstitutional actions of their government in the war on terror. The 5-4 opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. insulates such programs from judicial review in yet another narrowing of standing rules. [..]
Now we can see the inevitable consequence of this secret court and the Administration’s surveillance program. The Administration is creating a massive databank for all calls, including calls within the United States. This surveillance program is the result of a sense of political immunity reflected in this Administration. With some Democrats blindly following this President, there appears no concern over excessive surveillance or the ever-expanding security state. It is the final evidence of how Obama has truly crippled the civil liberties movement in the United States.
Kristen Breitweiser: Hey America — ‘Can You Hear Me Now?!’ Obama, Verizon, and Executive Power Run Amok
Today’s news relating to the Verizon data and records siege speaks volumes about this president and his absolute abuse of power.
And when coupled with Eric Holder’s abuses regarding the targeting of journalists and whistleblowers, Obama’s positioning of John Brennan at CIA and James Comey at FBI, along with Obama’s shift of drone warfare from CIA to DOD, which will now conveniently enable drones to operate within our borders, we all should be very, very scared. Because dissent, discussion, debate can no longer exist with this sort of omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent government.
In short, the deck is stacked against us.
John Nichols: The Senate’s Next Feingolds Must Step Up to Defend Privacy Rights
Russ Feingold is no longer in the US Senate.
And that is unfortunate.
No one took more seriously the duty to defend privacy rights than the civil libertarian senator from Wisconsin, who served for the better part of two decades as the essential member of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee – and who cast the only Senate vote against the Patriot Act because of the threat he recognized to the guarantees outline in the Fourth Amendment.
But with the report by The Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA has been tracking every call by Verizon business customers, and with the New York Times report that a National Security Agency program took e-mails and other information from companies that included Google, Apple and Facebook, it is important to recognize that there are a few new Feingolds in the Senate.
Richard Seymour: Obama’s Verizon Phone Records Collection Carries on Bush’s Work
In opposition, he criticised policies allowing phone calls to be monitored; in office, he has continued and even extended them
Barack Obama built up much of his electoral base as a critic of George W Bush’s policies, from war to surveillance. In office, he has pursued many of the same policies even more vigorously, and nowhere is this more true than in his hoarding of executive power. The administration’s collection of phone records data, and its legal defences thereof, illustrate the problem acutely. [..]
The conventional liberal critique of such practices is prudential. As the liberal writer Stephen Holmes argued, secrecy undermines security by allowing the state to conceal and perpetuate errors. It removes the necessity to have plausible reasons for one’s policies, so that eventually one stops having plausible reasons. These strictures apply even more in the case of emergencies. Holmes evoked the image of an emergency room, in which medical staff are having to cope with life-threatening situations; unless their behaviour is governed by certain rules, medical staff will be prone to error.
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