Punting the Pundits

“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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New York Times Editorial Board; Congress Can Stop Privacy Abuse

Over the last three years, several measures were introduced in Congress that would have helped reduce or eliminate the abuses of communications surveillance revealed this week. Every one of them was voted down.

Most members of Congress, it turns out, had received the usual bland assurances from counterterrorism officials that the authority granted to the government under the Patriot Act and related laws were absolutely necessary to prevent an attack on the United States, and that domestic spying activities must remain top secret. Proposals to bring greater transparency to these activities, or to limit their scope, were vigorously opposed by the Obama administration. (The Justice Department argued in a court filing in April that there must be no public disclosure of the extent of domestic data collection.) [..]

Now that this practice has been disclosed, it’s time for Congress to take action. The first step has to be ending the secrecy that makes it impossible for lawmakers or other officials to discuss, even in general terms, what the government is doing.

Gail Collins: Intelligence for Dummies

Question for the day: Do you feel more secure or less secure, now that you know the government is keeping a gargantuan pile of information about everybody’s telephone calls in the name of national security? [..]

I wouldn’t rely on Congress to keep things under control. It’s really up to the president. As a candidate, Obama looked as if he would be great at riding herd on the N.S.A.’s excesses. But if he has ever seriously pushed back on the spy set, it’s been kept a secret. Meanwhile, the administration scarfs up reporters’ e-mails and phone records in its obsessive war against leaks. [..]

Do you remember how enthusiastic people were about having a president who once taught constitutional law? I guess we’ve learned a lesson.

Eugene Robinson: The End of the Right of Privacy?

Someday, a young girl will look up into her father’s eyes and ask, “Daddy, what was privacy?”

The father probably won’t recall. I fear we’ve already forgotten that there was a time when a U.S. citizen’s telephone calls were nobody else’s business. A time when people would have been shocked and angered to learn that the government is compiling a detailed log of ostensibly private calls made and received by millions of Americans.

David Sirota; Rethinking American Exceptionalism

“American exceptionalism” is perhaps the most misunderstood phrase in politics. If, like the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, we define “exceptionalism” as “the condition of being different from the norm”-then it’s certainly true that America is exceptional. But we rarely stop to ask: Should we always want to be exceptional?

The assumption in our culture is yes-but it’s not always so clear-cut when you consider the key ways we are exceptional in comparison to other industrialized countries.

Mohamed A. El-Erian: The Policy Absurdity of the Monthly Jobs Report

There is one thing worse than addressing a problem with imperfect solutions. It is not addressing the problem when better solutions are available. Yet this is what seems to happen every month in reaction to the highly-watched employment report.

This morning’s data confirmed the central message of prior monthly reports: the jobs picture is improving, but not fast enough given the damage created by the Great Recession — especially for those of us who worry about unemployment problems getting structurally embedded into the economic system and, thus, becoming even much harder to solve.

Paul Rieckhoff: Why Veterans Still Need to Hear From the President on the Backlog

Veterans appreciate hearing White House Press Secretary Jay Carney say, in response to a reporter’s question, that the president is ‘deadly serious’ about reducing the VA disability claims backlog — because this is deadly serious to the veterans community.

Yet, the hundreds of thousands of brave veterans waiting for claims deserve to hear directly from the president.

Although it is great to hear that the president is taking this issue seriously, the president needs to address many unanswered questions, [..]