“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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Richard (RJ) Eskow: As Congress Adjourns, GOP Declares ‘Omission Accomplished’
Our long national nightmare is over — for the moment. Congress has adjourned for summer recess after a session which can safely be described as “historic,” both for its historic lack of accomplishment and the historically low regard in which it is now held by the public.
But let’s be clear: This shameful record is not an example of “government failure.” It is a demonstration of what happens when people who are opposed to government, for reasons of both ideology and self-interest, are given positions of power within it and do not face a sufficiently eloquent and well-organized opposition.
Doing nothing is not a bug for Republicans in Congress. It is a feature.
They appear to be evolving from a rhetorically extreme but ultimately self-interested body — a phenomenon which is disturbing in its moral implications but at least somewhat predictable in its behavior — into something else altogether: a rhetorically extreme group that actually believes its rhetoric.
Sooner or later that will force the GOP’s Democratic opponents to confront the question: What do they believe in, and what will they do to achieve it?
Dean Baker: Inflation Hawks: The Job Killers at the Fed
Discussions of inflation and Federal Reserve Board policy take place primarily in the business media. That’s unfortunate, because these discussions can have more impact on the jobs and wages of most workers than almost any other policy imaginable.
The context of these discussions is that many economists, including some in policy making positions at the Fed, claim that the labor market is getting too tight. They argue this is leading to more rapid wage growth, which will cause more inflation and that this would be really bad news for the economy. Therefore they want the Fed to raise interest rates.
The part of this story that few people seem to grasp is that point of raising interest is to kill jobs. If that sounds like a bizarre accusation to make against responsible people in public life then you need to pick up an introductory economics text.
The story line there is that we get inflation if too many people are employed. There are all sorts of ways of making the story more complicated, and many people get PhDs in economics doing just that, but the basic point is a simple one: at lower rates of unemployment workers have more bargaining power and are therefore able to push up their wages.
The stark admission by the CIA’s inspector general that the agency had broken into a classified computer network used by its overseers at the Senate Intelligence Committee violates the core principle of separation of powers of governmental branches enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Along with the CIA’s illegal rendition, detention, and torture of suspected terrorists and the NSA’s secret monitoring of Americans’ phone traffic, it shows that U.S. spy agencies are in danger of going rogue and need to be severely disciplined. Such intelligence organizations are supposed to defend the republic and not undermine it.
The situation could not be better summed up than by Senator Mark Udall (D-CO), a member of Senate Intelligence Committee and proponent of stronger congressional oversight of the intelligence agencies, when he called for CIA Director John Brennan’s resignation over the matter: “The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into the Senate Intelligence Committee computers. This grave misconduct not only is illegal but it violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers.” The checks and balances system of the U.S. Constitution, uniquely American and one of the main breaks against government run amok, is severely undermined when congressional oversight of the executive branch is impeded, as it was in this case.
Scott Lemieux: We almost certainly execute innocent people with cruelty. This isn’t justice
Recent events have revealed a fundamental truth about capital punishment in the United States: lethal injections administered by the states have an alarming tendency to torture people to death. There were terribly botched executions in Florida in 2006 (revealed this year) , in Oklahoma in April and then last month in Arizona, where Joseph Wood took two hours to die and had to be injected 15 times with an “experimental” cocktail of drugs.
And yet, as horrifying as these torturous executions are, some people dismissed the horrors by noting that there was no doubt about the guilt of the condemned. But it would be unwise to assume that everyone condemned to death is guilty of a terrible crime: a ]new report from the Marshall Project http://www.washingtonpost.com/… explains how, only a decade ago, Texas executed a man who was almost certainly innocent – and did so in a way that makes it enormously unlikely that he was the only innocent man to die in the state’s high-volume execution chambers.
Norman Solomon: Obama’s War on Journalism Coming to a Head
A Supreme Court ruling against NYT reporter James Risen, who is refusing to reveal sources, leaves the Department of Justice with a serious decision to make on whether it will finally defend press freedoms or continue its attack on them.
Ten months after the Committee to Protect Journalists issued its scathing report “The Obama Administration and the Press,” journalists and potential whistleblowers continue to face unprecedented surveillance and legal jeopardy. The report, authored by Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post, remains grimly up to date as it describes “the fearful atmosphere surrounding contacts between American journalists and government sources.”
The US Department of Justice seems determined to intensify that fearful atmosphere-in part by threatening to jail New York Times reporter James Risen, who refuses to name any source for the disclosure in his 2006 book State of War that the CIA bungled a dumb and dangerous operation with nuclear weapons blueprints in Iran.
The government is now prosecuting a former CIA employee, Jeffrey Sterling, for allegedly leaking that information to Risen. Attorney General Eric Holder may soon decide whether he wants to imprison Risen for not capitulating. The Freedom of the Press Foundation calls it “one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades.”
Chris Lehmann: The Obama White House’s latest brand of data mining
If press secretary Jay Carney becomes a Silicon Valley flack, it would be only a logical extension of his previous gig
Former White House spokesman Jay Carney, reliably attuned to the tenor of our times via his long zeitgeist apprenticeship at Time magazine, is reportedly on the brink of a new career in Silicon Valley’s great disruption industry. Some tech observers have pegged him as the likeliest candidate to head up Apple’s communications juggernaut. (And some, well, haven’t.) Others see him as the dream flack for Uber, the upstart ride-sharing app that’s now muscling traditional cabbies out of their livelihoods in tech-savvy metropolises across the country while frantically seeking to indemnify itself from litigation involving safety lapses, regulatory trespasses and less savory practices.
Wherever the administration’s smirking, spike-haired lead media handler lands, no one should be surprised by reports of his pursuit of Big Tech rather than Wall Street or K Street – and not simply because the San Francisco Peninsula has become a center of wealth and power to rival and at times surpass its East Coast competition. Barack Obama’s White House has long and loudly advertised its weakness for smart technological fixes to stubborn policy quandaries, from the launch of drone warfare to gadget-happy bids to improve sluggish public school performance. The National Security Agency surveillance scandal is (along with much else) exhaustive testimony to the permanent high-tech intoxication of our national security state. If George W. Bush’s White House reflected the MBA presidency, its successor represents the rise of the venture capital presidency.
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