“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.
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Republicans will now taste their bitter harvest
In the early 3rd century B.C., after King Pyrrhus of Epirus again took brutal casualties in defeating the Romans, he told one person who offered congratulations, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” In his more sober moments, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), about to achieve his lifelong ambition of becoming Senate majority leader, may wonder whether he, too, has achieved a pyrrhic victory.
Republicans are still crowing about the sweeping victories in 2014 that give them control of both houses of Congress. They will set the agenda, deciding what gets considered, investigated and voted on. Their ideas will drive the debate.
But Republicans have no mandate because they offered no agenda. Republicans reaped the rewards of McConnell’s scorched-earth strategy, obstructing President Obama relentlessly, helping to create the failure that voters would pin on the party in power. But the collateral damage is that the “party of ‘no’ ” has no agreement on what is yes. Instead of using the years in the wilderness to develop new ideas and a clear vision, Republicans have used them only to sharpen their tongues, grow their claws and practice their backhands.
Sarah Jaffe: The secret to raising the minimum wage may be to stop trusting Democrats
Voters said yes to wage increases at the ballot box – even in the most conservative places. What now?
In too many places, elected Democrats have failed – with or without Republican obstruction – to stand up for working people, especially when it comes to raising the minimum wage.
But if you think it’s weird that voters turned out last week to support liberal ballot initiatives like minimum-wage increases and paid sick-time laws – even in red states like Arkansas and Alaska – while simultaneously casting their ballots for all those Republican legislators and governors, think again: the devil is really in the details – and the GOP just pulled a fast one on worker’s rights. [..]
The “minimum wage economy” is all too real for far too many people, many of whom long ago lost hope that the politicians for whom they’re supposed to take time off work (and, in many cases, forfeit pay) to elect will do anything for them – and turnout was the lowest since World War II. But a minimum-wage ballot initiative seems like a relatively easy sell for Americans, and this year’s election results indicate that many people don’t even think of it as much of a partisan issue anymore.
It all began taking shape back in March of 2013, when Sandra Steingraber – the noted biologist, author, educator and advisor of Americans Against Fracking – and 11 other courageous individuals were arrested for blockading the entrance to a natural gas compressor station on the banks of Seneca Lake, in the environmentally sensitive Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. These so-called “Seneca Lake 12” were simply doing what countless other Americans have done over generations when they knew their health and safety were threatened, when their elected leaders weren’t there to help, and when they had no other choice: they stood up for their neighbors, their families and themselves, and were hauled off to jail. Sandra spent 10 days behind bars after defiantly refusing to pay a fine.
The narrative of the Seneca Lake 12 is becoming all too familiar, as concerned residents across the nation are often finding no legal means of resistance against the incessant development of dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure spurred on by fracking. Thanks to the decimation of campaign finance laws by the U.S. Supreme Court, state and federal politicians have become increasingly bought off by the unlimited wealth of the oil and gas industry. As such, pleas from desperate local officials and community groups to reject hazardous infrastructure projects fall on deaf ears.
Amanda Marcotte: If anti-feminists believe false rape accusations are common, why don’t they warn men to protect themselves?
Having read, sadly, a shocking number of people who engage in rape apology, one of the weirdest things about it is how the same person can simultaneously argue 1) that rape isn’t real but is simply women getting revenge because they didn’t get a post-one-night-stand phone call and 2) that women only have themselves to blame if they’re victimized because they partied/willingly had sex/wore something slutty. This seems like a contradiction to me because if women aren’t actually under real threat of rape, why would they have to take precautions? If rape isn’t a thing that happens, then there’s no reason to be careful.
But the contradiction really goes deeper than that, I realized upon reading about Lincoln University president Robert R. Jennings’s lecture to young women about their supposedly awful behavior around men. Jennings was trotting out the usual rape-isn’t-real-but-it’s-on-women-to-stop-the-thing-we-don’t-call-rape contradictory argument, but his argument really drove home how nonsensical it all is.
Maya Schenwar: Prisons Are Destroying Communities and Making All of Us Less Safe
Isolation does not “rehabilitate” people. Disappearance does not deter harm. And prison does not keep us safe.
“Prison,” writes Angela Davis, “performs a feat of magic.” As massive numbers of homeless, hungry, unemployed, drug-addicted, illiterate, and mentally ill people vanish behind its walls, the social problems of extreme poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, drug addiction, illiteracy, and mental illness become more ignorable, too. But, as Davis notes, “prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.” And the caging and erasure of those human beings, mostly people of color and poor people, perpetuates a cycle in which large groups are cut off from “mainstream society” and denied the freedoms, opportunities, civic dignity, and basic needs that allow them a good life.
In many jails and prisons, incarcerated people are tossed into a dank, dungeon-like solitary confinement cell when they are determined to have “misbehaved.” It’s dubbed “the Hole.” Isolated and dark, it shuts out almost all communication with fellow prisoners and the outside. Guards control the terms of confinement and the channels-if any-by which words can travel in and out. The Hole presents a stark symbol of the institution of prison in its entirety, which functions on the tenets of disappearance, isolation, and disposability. The “solution” to our social problems-the mechanism that’s supposed to “keep things together”-amounts to destruction: the disposal of vast numbers of human beings, the breaking down of families, and the shattering of communities. Prison is tearing society apart.
Stephennie Mulder: The blood antiquities funding ISIL
The sale of illegal antiquities is now estimated to be ISIL’s second-largest revenue stream after oil.
Recently, in an exclusive event at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Secretary of State John Kerry stood – with perhaps unintended irony – before the facade of the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur to back an initiative to track losses of Syrian and Iraqi antiquities, including the destruction of monuments and looting of precious objects from archaeological sites.
Kerry blamed “barbaric” practices of groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), who profit by sponsoring highly organised groups of looters who sell the objects, fresh from the ground, to middlemen.
But one might ask: Who buys them?
It’s politically advantageous to blame ISIL. But it is another barbarism, one that unfolds in the hushed and elegant showrooms of antiquities merchants and auction houses in the Middle East, Europe and the United States, that is the true engine of this commerce.
Antiquities trafficking is a booming business in Syria and Iraq, and not only ISIL is to blame. Syrian government forces have been filmed piling delicately carved funerary statues from Roman-era Palmyra into the back of a pick-up truck, and at the ancient site of Apamea, a capital of the successors to Alexander the Great, the sudden appearance of a vast, lunar landscape of over 4,000 illegal excavation holes indicate it was also looted while under the army’s control.
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