“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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Robert Sheer: The Good Germans in Government
What a disgrace. The U.S. government, cheered on by much of the media, launches an international manhunt to capture a young American whose crime is that he dared challenge the excess of state power. Read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and tell me that Edward Snowden is not a hero in the mold of those who founded this republic. Check out the Nuremberg war crime trials and ponder our current contempt for the importance of individual conscience as a civic obligation.
Yes, Snowden has admitted that he violated the terms of his employment at Booz Allen Hamilton, which has the power to grant security clearances as well as profiting mightily from spying on the American taxpayers who pay to be spied on without ever being told that is where their tax dollars are going. Snowden violated the law in the same way that Daniel Ellsberg did when, as a RAND Corporation employee, he leaked the damning Pentagon Papers study of the Vietnam War that the taxpayers had paid for but were not allowed to read.
E. J. Dionne: The Third Political Branch
We prefer to think of the Supreme Court as an institution apart from politics and above its struggles. In the wake of this week’s decision gutting the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, its actions must now be viewed through the prism of the conservative movement’s five-decade-long quest for power.
Liberals will still win occasional and sometimes partial victories, as they did Wednesday on same-sex marriage. But on issues directly related to political and economic influence, the court’s conservative majority is operating as a political faction, determined to shape a future in which progressives will find themselves at a disadvantage.
It’s amazing to watch the bully pulpit, with all the power of this president’s ability to command words, focus on the greatest crisis of our generation. I applaud the President for tackling climate change in his speech on Tuesday. It’s the most important issue we face. Reducing coal pollution, increasing energy efficiency, stimulating more renewable energy-it’s about time. Especially because Dr. Hansen and other climate scientists have shown that time is running out.
However, all the good that President Obama will do with his reductions in CO2 from power plants will be undone by his embrace of fracked gas. It is clear that he does not have the right information on fracked gas. His administration has allowed the gas industry to influence far too much of this process. In March, the President called a meeting to discuss his pending climate plan. The group of 14 energy-industry leaders-nine were CEOs of energy companies-included the head of the oil and gas giant Anadarko; Southwest Gas; Edison Electric Institute; FedEx, which pushes a switch to gas vehicles; and former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, a longtime booster of gas.
Ana Marie Cox: Wendy Davis showed Texas’ GOP boys how to filibuster and respect women
‘Unruly gals’ like Davis are responsible for nearly everything good in Texas, including stopping the latest abortion ban
Sometime around midnight last night, a female state senator in Texas stood up under the capitol dome and asked a version of the single most important question that can be asked in a democracy: “At what point does a female senator need to raise her voice to be heard over the male colleagues in the room?”
There are a lot of other versions of this question – “What do the oppressed have to do in order move the wheels of justice?” – but only one answer: Make some noise. Make a lot of noise. Noise draws scrutiny, and it is the enduring legacy of American democracy that injustice fully exposed does not stand. Yesterday’s supreme court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act illustrated that civil rights progress must be jealously guarded, but it did not invalidate the century’s worth of evidence that the arc of history bends toward justice.
Charles M. Blow: Joining Together in Justice
Proponents of equality have reason to both cheer and cry this week.
This week, in a series of rulings, the Supreme Court lay bare once more a continuing divide in this country about the role and limits of government in ensuring – or denying – equality.
In the University of Texas at Austin affirmative action case, the Voting Rights Act case and the same-sex marriage cases, the court drew a line between policies that explicitly articulate exclusion and those that implicitly and effectually remedy exclusion – both current and historical.
Proponents of racial diversity were on the losing end of those rulings, and same-sex marriage proponents were on the winning end.
Gary Younge: On the Voting Rights Act, the Color-Blind Have Been Led by the Blind
The supreme court thinks racism no longer exists at the polls. The actions of Republican legislators prove otherwise
One of the greatest cheers at an otherwise lacklustre Republican convention in Tampa last year was for Condoleeza Rice, who gave a glowing autobiographical account of her achievements in the third person. “A little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham,” she said, “the segregated city of the south where her parents cannot take her to a movie theater or to restaurants, but they have convinced her that even if she cannot have a hamburger at Woolworths, she can be the president of the United States if she wanted to be, and she becomes the secretary of state.”
All mention of what it took to make such a life possible is an inconvenience. The children who were jailed, set upon by dogs and drenched by fire hoses in her home town, so that integration could become a reality, are irrelevant. The people who were killed because they registered to vote, marched against humiliation or just wouldn’t shut up when they were told to – so that a black female secretary of state was even plausible, let alone possible – do not fit. Condi made it because she worked hard. Maybe her kindergarten friend, Denise McNair, would have made it too. We’ll never know because she was bombed to death by those opposing integration while studying at Sunday school. Segregation was fickle that way.
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