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”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.

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Katrina vanden Heuvel: [The case for gun liability laws The case for gun liability laws]

Knives. Automobiles. Cold medicine. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Coffee.

What do these items have in common?

They’re all held to a higher safety standard than firearms.

Because of product-liability law, manufacturers must equip them with proper warnings, limitations and built-in designs that enhance their safety.  [..]

When the government is worried that you might use that second bottle of NyQuil to cook meth, it’s not unreasonable to ask why someone needs to buy 15 assault rifles in one sitting.

Ana Marie Cox: Choice, for women, is not about biology. It’s about basic equality

The battle over abortion rights is simply a flashpoint in women’s pervasive experience of being deprived of control of our destinies

One of the most frustrating things about being “pro-choice” is the assumption that the only choice we care about has to do with our bodies. Really, the choices we’re talking about have to do with preserving, or expanding, all of the choices available to women. The choices we make about our bodies, yes, but also choices about our time, our minds, our emotions, our money, our thoughts, our votes and our voices.

There is not a woman reading this right now that hasn’t experienced a reminder, probably quite recently, maybe even today, that her choices are more limited than a man’s. This week, I asked the Twitter universe for examples of this – examples of how women don’t have the options that men do in all kinds of situations. Some of the answers were funny, a lot were serious, all of them meant something.

Zoë Carpenter : Congress Renews Efforts to Curb NSA Surveillance

These days it’s difficult to imagine Congress’s return to the business of governance. Still, several lawmakers have refocused their attention on the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices, suggesting that the resolve to reform did not die down during the August recess or the crises that followed. At least a dozen bills aimed at the NSA’s spying powers are pending in Congress, and key committees will hold hearings in the next two weeks. [..]

One of the greatest lessons to be drawn from the Church Committee is of the significant role Congress can play in investigating and challenging abuses of civil liberties by the government. While the committee’s tangible legacy was the laws that, for a while at least, curtailed domestic spying, it was the information made public through exhaustive hearings that made legislative action possible. These revelations were not about only domestic spying but also the assassination of foreign leaders and other shocking examples of executive overreach. Whether Congress will crack down on the intelligence community is one question; whether it will make room for a broader debate about the power of America’s surveillance state is another matter entirely.

Sadhbh Walshe: Michael Douglas blasts the US penal system at the Emmys. He’s exactly right

Cameron Douglas epitomises how the war on drugs caused US prisons to explode while doing almost nothing to thwart drug use

Michael Douglas caused a few ripples on Sunday night when he picked up an Emmy award for his performance as Liberace in the film, Behind the Candelabra. Aside from gently ribbing his co-star Matt Damon and thanking his estranged wife Catherine Zeta Jones, Douglas gave a shout out to his eldest son, Cameron, who is in currently being held in solitary confinement in a federal penitentiary.

“I’m hoping I’ll be able and they’ll allow me to see him soon,” Douglas told the audience before explaining to reporters backstage that he has begun to question the system that is preventing him from even visiting his incarcerated son. You can hardly blame the veteran actor for his disenchantment with America’s penal system as his son’s case pretty much epitomizes the futility of sending a person who is addicted to drugs into a bleak and lonely institution where drugs are readily available and treatment is not.

Elizabeth Drew: The Stranglehold On Our Politics

Most of the electorate can’t be bothered with midterm elections, and this has had large consequences–none of them good–for our political system and our country. Voting for a president might be exciting or dutiful, worth troubling ourselves for. But the midterms, in which a varying number of governorships are up for election, as well as the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate, just don’t seem worth as much effort. Such inaction is a political act in itself, with major effects. [,,]

The citizens of a state have it within their power to press for such changes in the nature of their state governments and the consequent effects on their immediate lives as well as the functioning of the nation’s political system. By rousing themselves to vote, they could have a stronger voice in filling state offices that may not seem so exciting but are highly consequential. Is it possible that the off-year elections could be taken almost as seriously as the presidential ones? The radicalism of the right has become so extreme that it may have unintentionally provided an impetus in that direction.

In the end only the members of the electorate can restore the institutions and procedures that make our democratic system work, starting with the next chance they get.

Donna Smith: Weaponized Profits: The US Health Care System

Many people who advocate for an improved and expanded Medicare for all for life health system in the US tend to vilify the for-profit, private insurance industry and big Pharma but ignore the atrocities committed by almost every other segment of the system. If we are to fix what ails the US health care system, we will have to get a whole lot more honest about all of the factions that lift profit-making above all else when engaging in the delivery of health care services.

And no matter what Congress does or does not do with the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare, until those of us being most grossly effected by our dysfunctional, profit-first health care system get honest about all the players and their roles in that dysfunction, we will continue to tinker around the edges and watch the numbers of health care dead and broke climb ever higher.