“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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Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial – and Kerry is wrong
Edward Snowden is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time, and he knows what I learned more than four decades ago: until the Espionage Act gets reformed, he can never come home safe and receive justiceSnowden would not get a fair trial – and Kerry is wrong
Edward Snowden is the greatest patriot whistleblower of our time, and he knows what I learned more than four decades ago: until the Espionage Act gets reformed, he can never come home safe and receive justice
John Kerry was in my mind Wednesday morning, and not because he had called me a patriot on NBC News. I was reading the lead story in the New York Times – “US Troops to Leave Afghanistan by End of 2016” – with a photo of American soldiers looking for caves. I recalled not the Secretary of State but a 27-year-old Kerry, asking, as he testified to the Senate about the US troops who were still in Vietnam and were to remain for another two years: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
Paul Krugman: Cutting Back on Carbon
Next week the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce new rules designed to limit global warming. Although we don’t know the details yet, anti-environmental groups are already predicting vast costs and economic doom. Don’t believe them. Everything we know suggests that we can achieve large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at little cost to the economy.
Just ask the United States Chamber of Commerce.
O.K., that’s not the message the Chamber of Commerce was trying to deliver the report it put out Wednesday. It clearly meant to convey the impression that the E.P.A.’s new rules would wreak havoc. But if you focus on the report’s content rather than its rhetoric, you discover that despite the chamber’s best efforts to spin things – as I’ll explain later, the report almost surely overstates the real cost of climate protection – the numbers are remarkably small.
This is a response to the criticisms — which I interpret as requests for additional information — that were published in the Financial Times (FT) on May 23, 2014 (see FT article here. See also the other two articles published by the FT on May 23, 2014: here and there. See also my short response published here in the FT. Unfortunately I was given limited time to submit this response, so I could not address specific points; what follows is a longer response). These criticisms only refer to the series reported in chapter 10 of my book Capital in the 21st century, and not to the other figures and tables presented in the other chapters, so in what follows I will only refer to these series. [..]
Let me also say that I certainly agree that available data sources on wealth inequality are much less systematic than what we have for income inequality. In fact, one of the main reasons why I am in favor of wealth taxation, international cooperation and automatic exchange of bank information is that this would be a way to develop more financial transparency and more reliable sources of information on wealth dynamics (even if the tax was charged at very low rates, which everybody could agree with).
Dean Baker: Why Is It So Acceptable to Lie to Promote Trade Deals?
It’s not polite to use the “L” word here in Washington, but it’s hard not to be more than a bit disgusted with the frequency with which trade pacts are sold as great engines of job creation and economic growth, when they clearly are not. The latest offender in this area is Bruce Ackerman, a Yale Law professor.
In a Washington Post column Ackerman called on President Obama to push for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP), which he described as, “opening the path for job-creating opportunities for workers on both continents.” Really, what evidence does Professor Ackerman have for this assertion?
Norman Solomon: An Assault from Obama’s Escalating War on Journalism
In a memoir published this year, the CIA’s former top legal officer John Rizzo says that on the last day of 2005 a panicky White House tried to figure out how to prevent the distribution of a book by New York Times reporter James Risen. Officials were upset because Risen’s book, State of War, exposed what — in his words — “may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA.”
The book told of a bungled CIA attempt to set back Iran’s nuclear program in 2000 by supplying the Iranian government with flawed blueprints for nuclear-bomb design. The CIA’s tactic might have actually aided Iranian nuclear development.[..]
But more than eight years later, the Obama White House is seeking a different form of retribution. The people running the current administration don’t want to pulp the book — they want to put its author in jail.
The Obama administration is insisting that Risen name his confidential source — or face imprisonment. Risen says he won’t capitulate.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation calls the government’s effort to force Risen to reveal a source “one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades.”
Sadhbh Walshe: We have entered the golden age of pot. The US government should get with it
You can’t build a marijuana business in the 22 states where it’s legal if the Department of Justice is cracking down and Congress does next to nothing. This is ludicrous
To look from afar, or talk to people up close, we have entered the golden age of marijuana legalization. The city of Seattle celebrated its state’s first anniversary of legal pot last December by allowing a public “bring your own bud” event under the Space Needle. In Colorado, pupscale cannabis-themed dinner parties http://news.yahoo.com/colorado… where food is paired with weed in the same way it has traditionally been paired with wine, are all the rage. [..]
But where there is buzz, there is nearly always a buzzkill: as far as the federal government is concerned, marijuana remains a schedule-one drug on a par with heroin, LSD and crack cocaine and is subject to the same severe criminal sanctions. Early Friday, the House of Representatives voted, 219-189, to support a bipartisan amendment that helps bridge this divide by prohibiting the federal government from spending more taxpayer money to interfere with state medical marijuana laws – by way of DEA raids on legal operations.
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