“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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Paul Krugman: The Inflation Obsession
Recently the Federal Reserve released transcripts of its monetary policy meetings during the fateful year of 2008. And, boy, are they discouraging reading.
Partly that’s because Fed officials come across as essentially clueless about the gathering economic storm. But we knew that already. What’s really striking is the extent to which they were obsessed with the wrong thing. The economy was plunging, yet all many people at the Fed wanted to talk about was inflation. [..]
Historians of the Great Depression have long marveled at the folly of policy discussion at the time. For example, the Bank of England, faced with a devastating deflationary spiral, kept obsessing over the imagined threat of inflation. As the economist Ralph Hawtrey famously observed, “That was to cry ‘Fire, fire!’ in Noah’s flood.” But it turns out that modern monetary officials facing financial crisis were just as obsessed with the wrong thing as their predecessors three generations before.
Robert Kuttner: Wall Street’s Tea Party
Governor Jan Brewer’s veto of a bill that would have allowed discrimination against gays on religious grounds is only the latest example of the tension between the corporate and fundamentalist right. She acted because business elites feared that the measure would be bad for the state’s economy.
The alliance between the fundamentalist far right and the business elite was always a bizarre marriage of convenience. The Wall Street gang tends to be relatively liberal on social and lifestyle issues, the very issues where the conservative base detests godless liberals. Many Tea Party Republicans, meanwhile, embody a kind of rightwing economic populism that doesn’t have much use for investment bankers.
Until now, the likes of Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers have held this bastard alliance together. But despite the wishes of Wall Street to defend business-friendly GOP incumbents, the Tea Party faction is mounting credible primary challenges against at least five entrenched Republican senators, most notably Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Thad Cochran of Mississippi.
International law is suddenly very popular in Washington. President Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by accusing Russia of a “breach of international law.” Secretary of State John Kerry followed up by declaring that Russia is “in direct, overt violation of international law.”
Unfortunately, during the last five years, no world leader has done more to undermine international law than Barack Obama. He treats it with rhetorical adulation and behavioral contempt, helping to further normalize a might-makes-right approach to global affairs that is the antithesis of international law.
Leo W. Gerard: Rights Only for the Right People
All those rights Americans cherish, those fundamental human and political freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution, Republicans contend those aren’t really inalienable rights or anything solid or permanent like that.
See, according to the GOP, some Americans are sub-citizens who don’t deserve rights equal to those enjoyed by, well, the right-wing. Republicans think they’re right, and anyone who disagrees doesn’t deserve rights.
Republicans managed to highlight that perverse plank in their political platform over the past several weeks as they proposed – and sometimes actually passed – legislation limiting the fundamental rights of specific groups of American citizens. That includes gay Americans, African-Americans, and Americans who are members of labor unions. Right-wingers sought to seize from these Americans their rights to vote, protest and live free from discrimination.
Joe Glenton: Rape and sexual assaults in the military need more than ‘kangaroo court’ justice
Informal and unaccountable ‘in-house’ procedures mean hundreds of allegations go unquestioned
The foreign secretary, William Hague, has called for an end to the use of sexual violence in war as part of the fine and timely crusade he has taken up alongside movie star Angelina Jolie. An inquest into the death of corporal Anne-Marie Ellement, a military policewoman who killed herself in 2011 after claiming she was raped by army colleagues, has fixed a spotlight on the issue of sexual violence within the British military. Today the coroner found Ellement killed herself in part due to bullying in the army and the effects of alleged rape. It has also emerged that of 200 allegations of rape and sexual assault between 2011 and 2013 in the military, there have only been 27 convictions.
To begin to understand the British military on any level it is best to start with a round of myth busting. Let us dispense with the idea that the British military is in a meaningful sense a slightly quaint but essentially harmonious family. Healthy families do not regularly inflict acts of sexual violence upon each other, and in the British forces rapes and sexual assaults seem to have become something of a banality. No comparable professional group in the UK appears to rival the military for rates of colleague-on-colleague sexual violence. I would argue this stems from a poisonous mix of unchallenged sexism, unaccountable power and an archaic military justice system.
Dan Gillmor: Snowden made cyber-geek nightmares true. Can ‘private’ be normal again?
The NSA leaks created everyday interest in products built to protect. At a security pow-wow turned sour, that’s a good thing
In the nearly nine months since the Edward Snowden revelations began on this website, some of the most jaw-dropping surveillance news has involved a company called RSA, which for years has been one of the top computer security firms in the world. Boiled down, RSA is alleged to have weakened a core element of a widely used encryption product at the behest of the National Security Agency, receiving $10 million in the process of providing a “back door” for government snooping. [..]
It’s too early to tell whether this incompetence – or betrayal, take your pick – will hit RSA and its $51bn parent company, EMC, where it should: on the bottom line. And despite a boycott by some scheduled speakers here, the RSA conference was well-attended. As one security expert who’s expressed contempt for the company’s behavior told me, it’s still his best chance to catch up, face-to-face, with other top people in this still burgeoning field.
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