“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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Jeremy Carp: Secret laws are a threat to American democracy
Last week, the Obama administration signaled that it would finally declassify a secret memo detailing its justification for using drones to kill U.S. citizens living abroad. The announcement came just hours before the Senate voted to confirm David Barron, the memo’s author, as President Barack Obama’s newest judicial appointee.
Earlier this month, a handful of senators to block Barron’s confirmation unless the memo was made public, once again calling into question the government’s reliance on undisclosed legal authorities, or “secret law,” to justify its covert and often controversial actions.
While the White House’s move to release the drone memo is a step forward in bringing transparency to the administration’s legal reasoning, it’s just one piece in a much larger puzzle. All three branches of government rely on the secret interpretation of law – a trend that should give all Americans cause for concern. [..]
Americans have a right to know that their publicly elected leaders are not playing by a hidden rulebook. In a time of political gridlock and extreme partisanship, it’s not enough to ask the public to believe that their secret interpretations of law are in the public’s best interest. We need transparency to know that the rules on the books are not being undermined by another set of secret laws.
David Cay Johnston: The wages of low pay
On a recent evening during my book tour, a Seattle audience listened in shocked silence as a pediatrician spoke of treating a dangerously unhealthy child suffering from serious neglect.
Dr. Tao Sheng Kwan-Gett, welcoming the crowd to a lecture I was about to give on inequality, said he asked the child’s mother question after question about basics every parent should know. Again and again the mother had no answers. She just did not know the condition and activities of her child.
As Kwan-Gett spoke, his voice rose in cold fury, his face flushed with anger at the callousness of this awful excuse for a parent. Finally, he said he asked the mother directly how she could be so uncaring.
Abruptly, the doctor’s voice turned soft as he recounted the mother’s response. She and her husband worked such long hours at such below-minimum-wage pay that they were always desperate for sleep. They were barely able to pay the rent. Their choice was between neglecting their child and living on the streets, where life is nasty, brutish and often short. [..]
The price we pay today for low wages is as big as it is easy not to notice. Unless we change our public policies, that price will explode as a significant number of children grow up without proper care and diet, and with no reason to believe their own initiative will make their lives any better.
In Seattle the local business and political leadership, while far from united, is about to take a major step toward ending stories like Kwan-Gett’s. Seattle is going to lead America in moving toward a livable minimum wage, one that makes sure everyone who works full time is not mired in poverty.
There are good reasons the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission should block Comcast’s $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. The merger will concentrate too much market power in the hands of one company, creating a telecommunications colossus the likes of which the country has not seen since 1984 when the government forced the breakup of the original AT&T telephone monopoly. [..]
By buying Time Warner Cable, Comcast would become a gatekeeper over what consumers watch, read and listen to. The company would have more power to compel Internet content companies like Netflix and Google, which owns YouTube, to pay Comcast for better access to its broadband network. Netflix, a dominant player in video streaming, has already signed such an agreement with the company. This could put start-ups and smaller companies without deep pockets at a competitive disadvantage.
Joe Nocera: What Did The Framers Really Mean?
Three days after the publication of Michael Waldman’s new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” Elliot Rodger, 22, went on a killing spree, stabbing three people and then shooting another eight, killing four of them, including himself. This was only the latest mass shooting in recent memory, going back to Columbine.
In his rigorous, scholarly, but accessible book, Waldman notes such horrific events but doesn’t dwell on them. He is after something else. He wants to understand how it came to be that the Second Amendment, long assumed to mean one thing, has come to mean something else entirely. To put it another way: Why are we, as a society, willing to put up with mass shootings as the price we must pay for the right to carry a gun? [..]
The surprising discovery is that of all the amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights, the Second was probably the least debated. What we know is that the founders were deeply opposed to a standing army, which they viewed as the first step toward tyranny. Instead, their assumption was that the male citizenry would all belong to local militias. As Waldman writes, “They were not allowed to have a musket; they were required to. More than a right, being armed was a duty.”
Thus the unsurprising discovery: Virtually every reference to “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” – the second part of the Second Amendment – was in reference to military defense. Waldman notes the House debate over the Second Amendment in the summer of 1789: “Twelve congressmen joined the debate. None mentioned a private right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting or for any purpose other than joining the militia.”
Stephen W. Thrasher: States are falling for marriage equality. Which will be the last one standing?
History does not judge well the last people to end discrimination, and it’s getting more and more difficult to stop doing the right thing
States have been falling for marriage equality so fast this week it’s hard to come up with the right analogy to express the speed. How fast have they been falling – like dominoes, in a parlor game with the rather high stakes of American civil rights? Like flies, dying in a swarm over the rotting carcass of discrimination?
Or like tears dripping from the face of National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown, whom I watched bawl his head off two years ago in the galley of the New York Senate, during the vote that made same-sex marriage legal in the Empire State? [..]
When I started writing this article, Oregon was the 17th state to fall; in the middle of my draft, Pennsylvania became the 18th – the second in less than 24 hours, and the fourth federal decision for marriage equality (rendered by judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents) in just the last month.
And the beat, as Cher herself would say, goes on.
Andrew Leonard: The Internet as we know it is dying
How Facebook and Google are killing the classic Internet and reinventing it in their image
It was a week of rage, nostalgia and despair on the Internet.
Sure, you could say that about any week on the Internet. But last week delivered some prime material. Check out this gamer exploding in fury at the rumor that Google – “The King Midas of Shit!” – might buy the hugely popular streaming gamer site Twitch TV. Or this sad note from the founder of the venerable “community weblog” MetaFilter explaining why a Google-precipitated decline in advertising revenue had forced him to lay off three much beloved staffers. Or this diatribe from a Facebook manager, savaging the current ]state of the media https://www.facebook.com/mhuda…
All is not well on the Web. While the particulars of each outburst of consternation and anger vary significantly, a common theme connects them all: The relentless corporatization and centralization of control over Internet discourse is obviously not serving the public interest. The good stuff gets co-opted, bought out, or is reduced to begging for spare change on the virtual street corner. The best minds of our generation have been destroyed by web metrics, dragging themselves across a vast wasteland in search of the next clickbait headline. [..]
It’s a big mess. The last two lines of the Facebook rant are “It’s hard to tell who’s to blame. But someone should fix this shit.”
That’s easier said than done.
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