“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”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
The New York Times Editorial Board: Europe Moves Ahead on Internet Rules
American government officials and corporate executives are fond of reminding the world that the United States created the Internet. But right now Europe is taking the lead in protecting what makes the Internet great: its openness.
On Thursday, the European Parliament voted for rules that would restrict Internet service providers from blocking or slowing down services like Skype and Netflix on their networks.
These rules, which still need the approval of European governments before they can be enacted, stand in stark contrast to the situation in the United States. Congress has refused to enact strong anti-blocking rules and courts have twice struck down the Federal Communications Commission regulations in this area.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: McCutcheon, the Majority, and the Challenge of Our Time
The Supreme Court’s McCutcheon ruling will be remembered as a decisive battle in a determined and wealthy minority’s war against the popular will. It is not the first such battle, nor will it be the last. And the people will continue to lose — unless and until the rules of engagement are changed.
One compelling way to look at this ruling is by contrasting its immediate and long-term effects with the American people’s aspirations for their government. They are at cross purposes. Even before this ruling, 64 percent of those polled believed that our country’s economic rules unfairly favor the rich. This ruling will rig the game even further. [..]
Previous generations rose to the urgency of their moments: to end slavery, to give women the vote, to rebuild after the Great Depression, to establish civil rights and end wars. Today’s ruling points us to the defining struggle of today’s generation — a struggle for democracy itself. This defeat could ultimately lead to victory — if we respond to the urgency of the moment.
Declassifying the CIA’s Bush-era atrocities will prove what we already knew. Now comes the part we must never forget
Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee will finally vote on whether to make public a disputed report on years of torture conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency. They should vote to declassify this landmark document, as much for what it will remind us as that which we can never know.
Even if only parts of the 6,300-page investigation would ever see the light of the day (and under CIA supervision at that), it would reportedly provide valuable evidence that waterboarding and other methods applied by the Bush administration provided no key information in the hunt of Osama bin Laden – indeed, that America’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques “yielded little, if any, significant intelligence” at all. [..]
It is about time we knew that Bush-era torture didn’t work as well as we were told. But it is also time we had a more rational discourse on the practice and “legitimacy” of torture.
Sadhbh Walshe: The heir, the judge and the homeless mom: America’s prison bias for the 1%
A DuPont trust-fund creep gets probation. A black woman looking for a job cries in jail for a week. Something’s wrong here
In 2009, when Robert H Richard IV, an unemployed heir to the DuPont family fortune, pled guilty to fourth-degree rape of his three-year-old daughter, a judge spared him a justifiable sentence – indeed, only put Richard on probation – because she figured this 1-percenter would “not fare well” in a prison setting. [..]
Far too often, we give far too little consideration to the consequences of a prison term on the life a poor defendant. At least the public is starting to pay attention to cases like that of Shanesha Taylor, who has been charged with felony child abuse in Scottsdale, Arizona, because she left her two small children alone in a car for a little over an hour to attend a job interview. Taylor was taken straight to jail, where she languished for over a week. Her children were put in the custody of Child Protective Services, where they remain. Obviously leaving two small children unattended in a car was an ill-advised thing to do, but under the circumstances Taylor may simply have exercised the least bad option available to her. [..]
n its devastating report, the Sentencing Project lists 10 concrete measures that would help eliminate some of the more obvious inequalities in the system, from scaling back the war on drugs to eliminating mandatory minimum sentences to abolishing the death penalty. But until we recognize that bias permeates the system at every level – however unconscious or unintended – meaningful change will elude us.
John Soltz: The Military-Civilian Divide on Gun Laws, and Ft. Hood
With news that another shooting tragedy has hit Ft. Hood, my heart is breaking for the families of those who were wounded and killed by a gunman who is said to have purchased a gun, off-base, brought it on to the base, and unleashed carnage. While many details are still unknown, it is too early to talk about what may have triggered this incident and what, specifically, could have stopped it. [..]
The Department of Defense would be wise to do a feasibility study on whether we could search all people coming into base, especially if civilian laws don’t get much stronger on guns. It may cost us a ton of money to conduct such searches, but until the civilian world figures out its issue with easy access to guns, protecting our troops would be worth every cent.
In the end, we’ll soon know all the details about this latest tragic shooting, and may know more about Ivan Lopez’s situation. But, generally speaking, until civilian law matches military law on guns, we unfortunately must brace ourselves for the possibility of more of these tragedies.
Mark Rufallo and Wenonah Hauter: Fracking Exports Will Leave U.S. Communities in the Dark
Last month, thirty Senate Democrats — members of the “climate caucus” — stayed Up All Night on the Senate floor to speak out about climate change. This was an important moment to highlight the most critical environmental issue of our time. What was not mentioned however, was the massive threat to our planet posed by exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) extracted through the increasingly controversial process known as “fracking.” Yet legislation authored by one of their own — Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) and a House bill by Congressman Cory Gardner (R-CO), would tear down barriers to the export of LNG, potentially spurring a massive increase in fracking, exacerbating the problems the senators spoke out against.
Ever since the crisis in Ukraine erupted, the oil and gas industry and its friends in Congress have been pushing exports of gas. While many justifications have been offered to explain this push for LNG exports, in reality, this has nothing to do with lofty foreign policy objectives and everything to do with the oil and gas industry using a crisis to ram its agenda through Congress — shock doctrine style. It calls to mind the Bush Administration’s use of the tragedies of September 11 to justify invading Iraq, and the Obama administration’s use of the mortgage crisis to bail out the financial sector.
Recent Comments