“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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Trevor Timm: More people than ever oppose the NSA practices Edward Snowden revealed. Why should he spend his life in prison?
The justice system would never allow Snowden to present a real defense at trial. That’s just one reason to give him amnesty
The Guardian’s riveting video interview with Edward Snowden this week ended with one of the biggest unresolved question in the debate over Snowden’s decision to leak classified information about the NSA to journalists more than a year ago: what will happen if and when he can ultimately return to the United States?
Alan Rusbridger: Are you confident that if you went back to the US and were tried in front of a jury of your peers that you would be acquitted?
Edward Snowden: I think it would be very difficult to find any 12 Americans in the United States right now who would uniformly agree that the last year’s revelations about the NSA’s unconstitutional surveillance programs did not serve the public interest.
It’s hard to disagree with Snowden’s characterization. The reporting on the Snowden files has ]led to a sea change http://www.theguardian.com/com… in public opinion about privacy and, more than a year later, opposition to some of the NSA’s most controversial practices is at an all-time high. [..]
The top humans rights official at the United Nations praised Snowden’s actions this week and suggested that he should not be forced to stand trial in the US. It’s time for those in the US media and the DC establishment to do the same. Why, at the same time we are having a historic debate that so directly affects democracy, would we allow the citizen who is responsible for that debate to serve decades in jail?
David Sirota: A Local Fight for the Future of the Internet
The business lobby often demands that government get out of the way of private corporations, so that competition can flourish and high-quality services can be efficiently delivered to as many consumers as possible. Yet, in an epic fight over telecommunications policy, the paradigm is now being flipped on its head, with corporate forces demanding the government squelch competition and halt the expansion of those high-quality services. Whether and how federal officials act may ultimately shape the future of America’s information economy.
The front line in this fight is Chattanooga, Tennessee, where officials at the city’s public electric utility, EPB, realized that smart-grid energy infrastructure could also provide consumers super-fast Internet speeds at competitive prices. A few years ago, those officials decided to act on that revelation. Like a publicly traded corporation, the utility issued bonds to raise resources to invest in the new broadband project. Similarly, just as many private corporations ended up receiving federal stimulus dollars, so did EPB, which put those monies into its new network.
Last Monday, a chartered flight took 38 mothers and children, who had been held in a detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, to San Pedro Sula in Honduras. That’s a tough town of drug dealers, violence and children soldiers, sometimes called “The Murder Capital of the World.”
The deported Hondurans are among the flood of women and children, including 57,000 unaccompanied children, from Central America who have been entering the United States illegally. They are all classified as “illegal immigrants,” meaning they are seeking family and better lives in our country. If they were called “refugees,” that is people fleeing violence or war, they would be kept in refugee camps, like more than 16 million unfortunates in 125 countries around the world, from Pakistan with 1.6 million to Madagascar with just nine. If internally displaced persons, such as Syrians on the run from war and Palestinians in camps in the Occupied West Bank, are included, that number of displaced people rises to more than 50 million.
Faiza Patel: Post-9/11 overreach of secret federal court must end
Greenwald scoop on surveillance of Muslims brings Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into question
After weeks of hints and previews, National Security Agency muckraker Glenn Greenwald reported on the agency’s surveillance of five American Muslim men who seem more like political activists than terrorists. The story raises new questions about whether the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) can be trusted to serve as a bulwark against government overreach.
It’s no secret that, in the last decade, law enforcement agencies such as the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have targeted American Muslims for surveillance in the places where they gather, such as mosques and student groups. But to target an individual for electronic surveillance, law enforcement must typically convince a magistrate that there is probable cause to believe that she has engaged or is about to engage in criminal activity. We trust that our courts will not issue a warrant for our private communications without reason. As a lawyer working on surveillance issues, I am careful about where I conduct sensitive conversations. But I have never seriously believed that a judge would sign off on a warrant to monitor my emails or phone calls.
This story changes my calculus. It appears that the FISC authorized the surveillance of most of the men Greenwald named. The standard for such an order is more malleable than the familiar probable-cause yardstick. For an American citizen or legal permanent resident, the government must demonstrate probable cause to believe that he or she is an “agent of a foreign power.”
Aaron Cantú: The growing criminalization of homelessness
How developers and politicians create urban ‘social hygiene campaigns’
As the number of homeless people in America’s major cities has increased, so have ordinances criminalizing homelessness and pushing homeless families and individuals into the criminal justice system. Criminalization has become a tactic with which politicians have reconfigured cities to serve wealthier citizens and tourists, at the considerable expense of the poor. These politicians are rarely challenged, and developers, businesses and city officials have partnered with police and private security forces to “cleanse” urban spaces by any means necessary.
A new report from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty found the number of cities imposing penalties for camping, begging, sleeping, sitting or eating in public has risen sharply in the last two years. There are now laws against feeding the homeless in over 50 cities. Ordinances prohibiting sleeping in cars – specifically targeted at the destitute – have more than doubled nationwide since 2011. In Denver the City Council passed a controversial “urban camping ban” in 2012 to clear space for the continued development of its downtown into a “millennial playground,” complete with nightclubs, restaurants and a miniature-golf course. Honolulu’s mayor told The New York Times he had renewed a crackdown on the homeless because tourists “want to see their paradise … [not] homeless people sleeping.” And Phoenix announced the creation of “a new organization focused on downtown’s revitalization,” while at the same time launching an initiative to arrest street people with misdemeanor warrants.
This crackdown is happening without equally forceful measures to develop the nation’s supply of affordable housing, which has fallen by 12.8 percent since 2001 because of fewer subsidies for federal housing. The U.N. Human Rights Committee even condemned the trend as “cruel, inhuman, [and] degrading” in a recent report on the United States.
Philip Pilkington: The fight to reform Econ 101
Economics is a dismal nonscience, but it need not remain that way
During the last weekend of June, hundreds of students, university lecturers, professors and interested members of the public descended on the halls of University College London to attend the Rethinking Economics conference. They all shared a similar belief: that economics education in most universities had become narrow, insular and detached from the real world.
For a brief period after the financial crisis of 2008, the shortcomings of the economics profession and the way it is taught were recognized. Many economists offered up mea culpas of various kinds and conceded that since they did not foresee the biggest economic event since the Great Depression, there was probably something seriously wrong with the discipline. But as time passed and many economies began to experience gradual, somewhat muted recoveries, the profession regained its confidence.
Joe Conason: [Border Crisis Tests Religious Faith-and Some Fail Badly Border Crisis Tests Religious Faith-and Some Fail Badly]
Flamboyant piety has long been fashionable on the political right, where activists, commentators and elected officials never hesitate to hector us about their great moral and theological rectitude. Wielding the Scriptures like a weapon, these righteous right-wingers are always eager to condemn the alleged sins of others but reluctant to examine their own. They seem to spend far more time in posturing and preening than spiritual reflection. Rarely does anyone call them out on their failures to fulfill their proclaimed devotion, because, in this country, that is considered rude.
But occasionally something happens that separates the people of faith from the sanctimonious fakers. With thousands of defenseless children now gathered on America’s southern border, seeking asylum from deprivation and deadly violence, something like that is happening right now.
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