“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 Timme: Is Obama really going back to war with a worse legal rationale than Bush? He still won’t say
Whatever the administration’s tortured and torture architect-approved logic for combatting Isis, one thing is clear: the public isn’t allowed to see it
It was equal parts ironic and tragic watching US Secretary of State John Kerry testify before the Senate Foreign Relations committee this week, as he shamelessly made the case for a war without end against Isis. It was the same place he sat 43 years ago, as a young soldier, bravely and eloquently calling for an end to American fighting in Vietnam, his generation’s endless war – the same war that led to Congress passing the War Powers Resolution, the law the Obama administration has now decided it can completely disregard.
As with much of the White House’s secret and possibly illegal march back to Iraq and beyond, almost every aspect of Kerry’s testimony on Wednesday was riddled with holes. The Obama administration’s case for intervention begins and ends with the fantastical idea that it thinks it can use a law passed 13 years ago – before Isis even existed, and meant for the perpetrators of 9/11 – to start a war that White House officials freely admit will last for years, yet is aimed at a group that virtually all intelligence analysts agree is not an imminent threat to the United States.
Jess Zimmerman: The 1% has bought its own internet. What’s next? Words with Rich People?
If Internet Platinum Reserve is surprising, it’s only because we’ve been trying to fool ourselves that the web is a populist haven, over here at Poor People Online
In one of the best moments of the genius webcomic Achewood, occasional protagonist Ray – a Scottish Fold cat who is also a wealthy playboy – goes on eBay while high and impulsively types, in the search bar, WHAT’S THE BEST THING YOU GOT? The screen blinks, then lights up with the message “Welcome to eBay Platinum Reserve.” [..]
Proponents of net neutrality worry about this happening for real. Or at least they worry about a future in which a small handful of monopoly-happy telecoms are able to throttle access to any website that doesn’t make them money or provide lower-paying customers with slowed and restricted service. Net neutrality boosters want government regulation to dictate that all sites and customers get the same treatment, rather than splitting the web into “slow lanes” and “fast lanes” along financial lines. Internet pinkos don’t want rich people to have better internet.
Well, it’s too late. Rich people already have better internet. Mercifully, cable modems are fairly common these days – remember when the best you could afford was DSL? – so for now, the rich don’t necessarily get faster internet. But they do get Internet Platinum Reserve.
The movement for devolution must not be reduced to a party political squabble or an anoraks’ debate
“The state of our union is strong.” Those are the words uttered with ritual regularity by a US president delivering his annual address to the nation. What, though, is the state of our union, nearly a century older than the Americans’ and questioned this week as never before? You could say it has emerged from yesterday’s vote in Scotland with its strength renewed, reaffirmed not by the whisker foreseen by the closing opinion polls but by an unarguable 10-point margin. What’s more, after weeks of speculation over the future of David Cameron, it was the advocate of independence, Alex Salmond, who resigned today. Earlier, one of his lieutenants had admitted that independence would now be shelved for a generation.
But the relief of unionists, like the heartbreak of yes campaigners, should be tempered. For there is another way of looking at the verdict that came as Thursday night turned into Friday morning. Independence used to command the support of a stubborn third of Scots, and no more. Yet yesterday 45% voted to repudiate British sovereignty, to end this arrangement once and for all. When close to half the population of a nation inside a union wants to break away, the state of that union is not strong. It is fragile.
Anne Fleming Taylor: When You Abuse Someone, It’s Never a Private Matter
I finally watched the Ray Rice video, the one of the Baltimore Ravens star running back decking his wife in an elevator. If you haven’t seen it, do, and then decide whether you agree with the victim that this is a private matter between her and her husband. Really? In what universe is knocking someone else out a private matter?
What if he had hit a friend or a stranger? It would have been laughable to suggest the assault deserved a ring of privacy and that the cops shouldn’t be called and justice pursued. But because the woman was his fiancée, now spouse, she was calling her knockout a family matter.
We do a strange dance with the issue of privacy. We have a kind of love-hate relationship with it. We have jettisoned it in so many ways, with our daily tweets and techno-bytes of self-revelation, the constant Instagraming and messaging. Yet we cling to it on some level – like a curtain to draw around ourselves when we wish.
Patriarchy makes good use of the issue of privacy. Behind that curtain – or those elevator doors – it can still swagger and intimidate and hurt. Then, if the victim refuses to press the case, the state is reluctant to intervene. There is a presumption that it is entirely their business – the couple’s – to sort out.
Joe Nocera: Getting It Wrong
Roger Goodell Speaks for the N.F.L. and Says Nothing
I turned on ESPN about 15 minutes before Roger Goodell’s Friday afternoon news conference. There was a round table of analysts and reporters, led by Bob Ley, the journalist who covers the serious side of sports for the network. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought they were prepping for a coming news conference by a politician in trouble rather than the commissioner of the National Football League. [..]
You would have thought that if Goodell were going to hold a news conference he would have something more to say than that he was sorry and that he was going to consult experts – things he has said before. Stunningly, he didn’t, which became even clearer when reporters started asking questions. [..]
The truth is that the N.F.L. has had a domestic violence problem for years, which Goodell and the league have largely tolerated. The Ray Rice video put that tolerance on vivid display. That is the fact that Goodell can’t say out loud – and why instead he says nothing at all.
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