“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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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Want a Feisty Way to Fight Foreclosures?
The difference between a sweet victory and a dubious one is often a matter of perspective. Take the housing market which, we’re told, is recovering, albeit slowly and in fits and starts. This represents a trend, an upward-heading line on a chart, and a victory of sorts for the economy. But is it really a victory for the people?
The “housing market” that’s represented by that upward-heading line still comprises millions of underwater mortgage-holders (between 6 and 16 million, depending on who you ask), many of whom are now locked into a David-versus-Goliath battle against creditors that are trying to foreclose and evict them. On this level-where “housing” becomes “houses,” where rates of foreclosure become, for victimized families, “foreclosures”-an overall victory for the market doesn’t mean a whole lot. A trend, that is, has trouble enumerating the individual data points and stories that make it up. To make this dubious victory for the housing market a sweet victory for homeowners, the Home Defenders League, using an innovative concept called Local Principal Reduction, is fighting to write happy endings to some of those stories.
Zoë Carpenter: Obama Administration Takes a Step Toward Drilling in the Atlantic
The Obama administration recommended on Thursday that private companies begin searching for oil and gas reserves off the Atlantic Coast, an area that has been closed to drilling for decades. More than 3 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 312 trillion cubic feet of natural gas may lie in the area, which extends from Delaware to Cape Canaveral, Florida. [..]
The prospect of new activity in the Atlantic, even if years or decades away, raises a question that environmentalists have found themselves asking often lately: How does the administration reconcile its commitment to fighting climate change with its long standing support for expanded oil production? Obama’s approach to climate is largely focused on reducing demand for fossil fuels, by promoting investment in renewables and tightening emissions standards for power plants and motor vehicles. (If Congress could ever put a price on carbon, that also would affect demand.) The implicit assumption of Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy is that policies intended to discourage consumption will be effective even if fossil fuels become more readily available.
Here’s one solution to the league’s fumbling of race and free speech: replace incognito on-field secrets with a giant hot mic
Lately, I’ve been following an NFL rules-change proposal to dock a team 15 yards – the league’s harshest yardage penalty – should officials hear its player use the word “nigger” or other racial slurs. This proposal, like so many attempts to curb “hate speech”, comes from a place of genuine concern and legitimate grievance. It originates with the Fritz Pollard Alliance, named for the league’s first black coach, and John Wooten, who heads the group, has argued passionately for it as a way to peel back some of the more gruesome attitudes that characterize the modern industrial-sports complex.
But backlash against the idea has been swift, fiery and disproportionate. ESPN devoted an hour-long special to the issue. It’s spawned countless op-eds and been weighed in on by pretty much every player or sportswriter with a Twitter account and an opinion. Those responses run a spectrum from compassionate doubtfulness and raised-eyebrow irony (the league will consider punishing “nigger” but not “Redskins”?) to angry dismissal. Media critic, cornerback and Super Bowl champion Richard Sherman turned the intent of the rule on its head, reasonably concluding that actual enforcement of the rule would penalize black players and itself be “almost racist”.
Holly Baxter: It’s time to kick the high-protein diet habit – before it kills you
Veggies, tuck into your hummus with glee – it’s now almost impossible to deny that eating too much meat, dairy and eggs is unhealthy
According to the latest study into protein consumption, it turns out that this theory may well have something to it. The National Health and Nutrition Survey has been collating data on 6,381 people across the US, and found that diets rich in animal protein (as opposed to protein routinely taken from plant sources) could be as harmful to health as other vices such as smoking. Those under the age of 65 who regularly consume a lot of meat, eggs and dairy are four times more likely to die of cancer or diabetes – although it’s worth noting that, if you make it to 66, beginning to eat a high-protein diet for your remaining years is a better shout than sticking with the steamed kale. [..]
Ultimately, it makes no difference whether you did it for the love of fluffy lambs in spring or deep-seated narcissism combined with a fierce survival instinct: the fact is you should probably eat less meat. You may well have to face a couple of awkward questions over a bowl of hummus, but hey, we all have our crosses to bear. And so, for the love of the NHS, please consign your well-thumbed paleo book to the dustbin. Because it turns out that you may be taking its simpering promises to make you thinner literally at your own peril.
Leslie Savan: MSNBC and Its Discontents
Lately, MSNBC seems to be waking up every few mornings to find a celebrity rattlesnake in its boot. First, Bill Maher said MSNBC was obsessed with Chris Christie and that Bridgegate had become its Benghazi. Then Alec Baldwin took to the cover of New York magazine to denounce his former network for running “the same shit all day long.” “The only difference” between shows, Baldwin wrote, “was who was actually pulling off whatever act they had come up with.”
MSNBC killed Baldwin’s Friday night talk show after only five weeks when the actor made a homophobic remark, which he contends in New York wasn’t homophobic at all. He also calls Rachel Maddow, whom he suspects was behind his ouster, a “phony.” But such Hollywood hairballs, coming on the heels of a series of apologies, anchor defenestrations and schedule rejiggering, could make a casual viewer wonder, Could there be buried in Baldwin’s bruised ego a critique of the network worth listening to? And is Maher right that MSNBC is in danger of becoming the Fox News of the left?
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