“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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John Nichols: Teachers to Education Secretary Arne Duncan: Please Quit
Given the choice between Republicans who are explicitly committed to doing away with collective bargaining rights and Democrats, public-sector labor unions tend to back Democrats at election time.
But that does not mean that unions are always satisfied with Democratic Party policies-or with Democratic policymakers.
This is especially true with regard to education debates. There are certainly Democrats who have been strong advocates for public schools. But there are also Democratic mayors, governors, members of Congress and cabinet membeWar in Afghanistan: Enough Is Enoughrs such as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who have embraced and advanced “reforms” that supporters of public schools identify as destructive. [..]
Former US Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, who has emerged as a leading champion of public education, refers to Duncan as “one of the worst Secretaries of Education”- arguing that “Duncan’s policies demean the teaching profession by treating student test scores as a proxy for teacher quality.
Teachers are pushing back against Duncan and those policies.Former US Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, who has emerged as a leading champion of public education, refers to Duncan as “one of the worst Secretaries of Education” – arguing that “Duncan’s policies demean the teaching profession by treating student test scores as a proxy for teacher quality.
Teachers are pushing back against Duncan and those policies.
Rep. Alan Grayson: War in Afghanistan: Enough Is Enough
At the end of George Washington’s second term as President, in his 1796 farewell address to a grateful nation, Washington urged America to avoid foreign entanglements. [..]
Following the 9/11 attacks, we defeated an entrenched hostile military force in Afghanistan, playing defense, with fewer than 1000 U.S. Special Forces troops. We did so in barely a month. The battle was over, and the war was won Then our hubris-ridden military-industrial complex, led by a bellicose President who had gone AWOL himself from May 1972 to October 1973 and spent his entire presidency trying to make up for it, occupied that 12th-century nation with between 10,000 and 35,000 troops. Under President Obama, our occupying army then multiplied, to 100,000 soldiers.
Recently, President Obama announced a policy to “end the war” in Afghanistan by maintaining something like 9999 American troops there, for a long time to come. That’s the same number of American soldiers who occupied Afghanistan in the first place.
If you think that stationing just under 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan means that the war is over, then Big Brother has a few words for you: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.”
There are two sets of laws here: one designed for dissidents, political activists and Muslims – and another for everybody else
What do a Republican candidate, a military veteran, a civil rights activist and a professor have in common? They are all American Muslims – and all have been subject to pervasive surveillance by the NSA and FBI.
A report published by The Intercept on Wednesday reveals that the two agencies used secretive procedures designed to catch terrorists and spies to monitor the email accounts of prominent American Muslim leaders. Among the documents supplied by Edward Snowden, a spreadsheet titled “FISA recap” contains 7,485 email addresses apparently monitored between 2002 and 2008. (The report also clearly documents how biased training by the FBI leads to biased surveillance, and that calling Muslims “ragheads” is everyday lingo at federal law enforcement agencies.)
These revelations demonstrate that there are two sets of laws in the United States: one designed for dissidents, political activists and American Muslims – and another for everybody else. But nobody is safe when one group is singled out: if our government can simply decide with little or no oversight to monitor the personal email account of an American Muslim Republican military veteran, then it can decide to monitor any of our emails, too. That should strike fear into the heart of every American who values our freedoms.
Jessica Valenti: Hillary Clinton must reject the stigma that abortion should be legal but ‘rare’
Agreeing with anti-choice activists on even that single word hurts women and the cause of reproductive rights
I support abortion rights. Being pro-choice means a lot of different things to me – among them, that abortion should be safe, legal, accessible, subsidized and provided with empathy and non-judgement.
You may have noticed a word missing there.
“Safe legal and rare” first became a pro-choice rallying cry during the Clinton administration, and has been invoked by media-makers and politicians like – even President Obama has called the mantra “the right formulation” on abortion. It’s a “safe” pro-choice answer: to support abortion, but wish it wasn’t necessary.
And it’s a framing that Hillary Clinton – perhaps the next president of the United States – supports.
But “safe, legal and rare” is not a framework that supports women’s health needs: it stigmatizes and endangers it.
Robert Creamer: Why Collective Bargaining Is a Fundamental Human Right
The ability for ordinary working people to organize and collectively bargain over their wages and working conditions is a fundamental human right. It is a right just as critical to a democratic society as the right to free speech and the right to vote.
Over the last 30 years many in corporate America and the big Wall Street banks have conducted a sustained attack on that human right. Unionization dropped from 20.1 percent of the workforce in 1983 to 11. 3 percent in 2013 — and the results are there for everyone to see.
During that period productivity and Gross Domestic Product per capita both increased by roughly 80 percent in America. But the wages of ordinary Americans have remained stagnant. Virtually all of the fruits of that increased productivity have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
No wonder the gang on Wall Street opposes unions.
Michelle Chen: Obama’s new plan for detained migrant children militarizes immigration policy
Mass deportation will never address the underlying human rights crisis unfolding south of the US-Mexico border
President Obama vowed to do more for the nation’s children: boosting funding for early education, expanding subsidized childcare programs for working families – and now, asking for billions of dollars to kick tens of thousands of children out of the country. That last bit is reserved for a special group of kids, of course: the ones who came up to the border seeking to escape violence and economic devastation in their hometowns, to find family members, to seek shelter and for a chance at a decent life. And amid their pleas for recognition as refugees, the president is working with lawmakers to make them disappear.
If the White House and Congress wanted to begin to deal comprehensively with the “border crisis”, they would not be prioritizing “alien removal” but rather investing in emergency legal aid to these children, working to reunite them with their families whenever possible and granting them broad humanitarian relief as refugees.
But instead, on Tuesday the White House requested $3.7bn in additional funding to launch a border “surge” to facilitate the legal process for the child migrants – with the ultimate aim of expediting deportations. And Obama has even suggested making these children easier to deport by altering existing laws that provide special protections and legal reprieve for children crossing the border from Central America.
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