“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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Dean Baker: New York Times Budget Reporting Looks Like RT on Ukraine
RT, the Russian government-owned English-language television network, has been the butt of much humor in recent days. It has mindlessly repeated Russian propaganda surrounding the events in Ukraine. The ridicule is well-deserved. News organizations are supposed to inform readers about the world, not make stuff up. Unfortunately, much of the U.S. media deserve comparable ridicule when it comes to budget reporting.
While news outlets don’t just invent numbers on the budget, it would not be much of a change for the worse if they did. The news stories that we saw following the release of President Obama’s budget followed the same practice we have seen in budget stories for decades. They threw very large numbers at readers that no one understands.
Robert L. Borosage: Common Sense Takes Courage: The CPC Budget
Today, the Congressional Progressive Caucus released its annual budget proposal — the “Better Off Budget” (link not yet available). Budgets are numbing, grist for geeks, not citizens. This budget is no exception, detailing row after row of numeric projections. Produced in conjunction with the Economic Policy Institute, it is a technician’s document, based on a sound economic model.
But amid the numbers, budgets display our values, what we consider important, what we consider fair, how we address our future. Taken together, the blizzard of numbers provides a pointillist portrait of the society we would build.
And here, the CPC budget offers a vivid contrast both to the course plotted by the Republican House budgets of Rep. Paul Ryan and the cautious course followed by the White House. It is a testament to the vision of CPC co-chairs Rep. Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva, and the work of many members including Reps. Jan Schakowsky, Jim McGovern, and Rep. Jim McDermott.
OVER the next decade, approximately five billion people will become connected to the Internet. The biggest increases will be in societies that, according to the human rights group Freedom House, are severely censored: places where clicking on an objectionable article can get your entire extended family thrown in prison, or worse. [..]
Much of the fight against censorship has been led by the activists of the Internet freedom movement. We can join this open source community, whether we are policy makers, corporations or individuals. Money, coding skills or government grants can all make a difference.
Given the energies and opportunities out there, it’s possible to end repressive Internet censorship within a decade. If we want the next generation of users to be free, we don’t see any other option.
Norman Solomon: The Feinstein Syndrome: ‘The Fourth Amendment for Me, But Not for Thee’
Who knows, soon we might see headlines and cable TV shows asking: “Is Dianne Feinstein a whistleblower or a traitor?”
A truthful answer to that question could not possibly be “whistleblower.” It may already be a historic fact that Senator Feinstein’s speech on March 11, 2014, blew a whistle on CIA surveillance of the Senate intelligence committee, which she chairs. But if that makes her a whistleblower, then Colonel Sanders is a vegetarian evangelist. [..]
While Dianne Feinstein has a long and putrid record as an enemy of civil liberties, transparency and accountability, it’s also true that thieves sometimes fall out — and so do violators of the most basic democratic safeguards in the Bill of Rights. Some powerful “intelligence” scoundrels are now at each other’s throats, even while continuing to brandish daggers at the heart of democracy with their contempt for such ideals as a free press, privacy and due process. The responsibility for all this goes to the very top: President Obama.
Robert Scheer: Feinstein v. the CIA: A Moment of Truth
It was a truly historic moment on Tuesday when Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA’s continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our Constitutional division of power. By blatantly concealing what Feinstein condemned as “the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed,” the spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the agency’s outrages have finally aroused the senator’s umbrage. [..]
But clearly the lady has by now had enough, given the CIA’s recent hacking of her Senate committee’s computers in an effort to suppress a key piece of evidence supporting the veracity of the committee’s completed but still not released 6,300- page study that the CIA is bent on suppressing.
Sean McElwee: Six Ways America Is Like a Third World Country
Although the U.S. is one of the richest societies in history, it still lags behind other developed nations in many important indicators of human development — key factors like how we educate our children, how we treat our prisoners, how we take care of the sick and more. In some instances, the U.S.’s performance is downright abysmal, far below foreign countries that are snidely looked-down-upon as “third world.” [..]
America is a great country, and it does many things well. But it has vast blind spots. The fact that nearly 6 million Americans, or 2.5 percent of the voting-age population, cannot vote because they have a felony on record means that politicians can lock up more and more citizens without fear of losing their seat. Our ideas of meritocracy and upward mobility blind us to the realities of class and inequality. Our health care system provides good care to some, but it comes at a cost — millions of people without health insurance. If we don’t critically examine these flaws, how can we ever hope to progress as a society?
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