“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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New York Times Editorial: Echoes of the Superpredator
Remember “superpredators”? Nearly 20 years ago, they prowled into the American consciousness – a menacing new breed of children, born of crack-addled mothers and absent fathers, and programmed solely for murder and mayhem. [..]
Of course, the superpredator predictions were completely unfounded, as Mr. DiIulio himself later admitted. “Thank God we were wrong,” he said in 2001, from his comfortable post in the Bush White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Juvenile crime, like all crime, was in fact declining(PDF) throughout the 1990s.
Two decades later, it’s easy to look back in judgment, but it would be a mistake to think the nation has fully moved beyond that mind-set. Many states continue to punish juveniles as harshly as they can, even though the Supreme Court has held in a series of landmark rulings(pdf) since 2005 that young people are “constitutionally different” from adults.
Paul Krugman: Three Expensive Milliseconds
Four years ago Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, abruptly canceled America’s biggest and arguably most important infrastructure project, a desperately needed new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Count me among those who blame his presidential ambitions, and believe that he was trying to curry favor with the government- and public-transit-hating Republican base.
Even as one tunnel was being canceled, however, another was nearing completion, as Spread Networks finished boring its way through the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. Spread’s tunnel was not, however, intended to carry passengers, or even freight; it was for a fiber-optic cable that would shave three milliseconds – three-thousandths of a second – off communication time between the futures markets of Chicago and the stock markets of New York. And the fact that this tunnel was built while the rail tunnel wasn’t tells you a lot about what’s wrong with America today.
What the agency’s denial isn’t telling you: it didn’t even need know about the bug to vacuum your privacy and store it indefinitely
The American intelligence community is forcefully denying reports that the National Security Agency has long known about the Heartbleed bug, a catastrophic vulnerability inside one of the most widely-used encryption protocols upon which we rely every day to secure our web communications. But the denial itself serves as a reminder that NSA’s two fundamental missions – one defensive, one offensive – are fundamentally incompatible, and that they can’t both be handled credibly by the same government agency. [..]
It’s exactly the kind of bug you’d expect NSA to be on the lookout for, since documents leaked by Edward Snowden confirm that the agency has long been engaged in an “aggressive, multi-pronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies”. In fact, that effort appears to have yielded a major breakthrough against SSL/TLS way back in 2010, two years before the Heartbleed bug was introduced – a revelation that sparked a flurry of speculation among encryption experts, who wondered what hidden flaw the agency had found in the protocol so essential to the Internet’s security.
Daniel G. Newman: Campaign fundraising is bribery
The bribery allegations against California state Sen. Leland Yee expose the folly of the U.S. Supreme Court’s logic in its April 2 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, which struck down restrictions on the amount of money individuals may donate to federal campaigns in an election cycle.
The only legitimate reason to set limits on funding politicians’ campaigns, according to the court’s majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, is explicit trades of campaign dollars for action – quid pro quo corruption. The court pointedly dismissed “the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner ‘influence over or access to’ elected officials” as a reason to limit campaign donations.
The way our broken political system works, though, is that the chief place to raise money for campaigns is from industries and interest groups that want something from government. Influence is purchased all the time, whether in explicit quid pro quo trades or not, and such influence peddling just as bad for democracy as bribery. The real scandal in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., is not the occasional lawbreaking; it’s what’s legal.
Gar Alperovitz: Growth for growth’s sake will kill us all
Moral and ecological truths are challenging economic doctrines
One economic fact is held to be self-evident: that the future well-being of the United States requires economic growth – preferably, as much of it as we can muster. Despite wildly divergent policy recommendations, this basic assumption is made clear and explicit by everyone from the fiscally conservative Club for Growth to the left-leaning Center for American Progress. In the boardroom of the Federal Reserve, at the negotiating table for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and on the shale fields of North Dakota, our national economic policy is built on the unshakable conviction that the only way to grow the middle class is to grow the economy – by any means necessary.
Aside from the fact that the top 1 percent has taken most of the gains of growth, leaving the rest of society in virtual stalemate for three decades, there is a profound problem with this solution. Indeed, it’s time to face an ecological truth that makes the traditional assumption increasingly untenable, as unpopular and difficult as this conclusion might be: Growth isn’t always possible. Nor is it necessarily desirable.
Justin Elliott and Jesse Eisinger: Long After Sandy, Red Cross Post-Storm Spending Still a Black Box
Following Superstorm Sandy, donors gave $312 million to the American Red Cross. How did the aid organization spend that money?
A year and a half after the storm, it’s surprisingly difficult to get a detailed answer.
Red Cross officials told ProPublica the organization has spent or committed $291 million on Sandy through the end of February 2014. But the organization has not given a breakdown showing how, where, and when the money was spent.
“The Red Cross is too big and too important to be allowed to be this secretive,” said Doug White, a charity expert who has written extensively on nonprofit finances.
White said such a lack of transparency is common among charities. Like other non-profits, the Red Cross is required to disclose only top-line numbers on its fundraising and spending, which it publishes in an annual report and a standard tax filing.
But the Red Cross stands out both for the scale of its operations and the unique role it plays in domestic disasters.
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