Punting the Pundits

“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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

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Bill de Blasio: Don’t Soul-Search. Stiffen Your Backbone.

It’s a time-honored tradition.

After months of covering the midterm elections through a prism of polls and tactics, pundits will shift their focus to the defeated party’s so-called season of “soul-searching.”

As a Democrat, I’m disappointed in last Tuesday’s results. But as a progressive, I know my party need not search for its soul — but rather, its backbone.

The truth is that the Democratic Party has core values that are very much in sync with most Americans. [..]

So where do Democrats go from here?

The 2016 presidential election is two years off, but will have a huge impact on the lives of America’s middle-class and poor. Democrats simply cannot rely on shifting demographics and a badly damaged Republican brand to hold the White House and help countless Americans who are struggling.

We must demonstrate, from coast to coast, that we are a party dedicated to lifting people out of poverty; one committed to building a bigger and more durable middle-class; one that is unafraid to ask a little more from those at the very top — the wealthy individuals and big corporations who have not only rebounded from the depths of the Great Recession, but who’ve accumulated record new wealth.

Trevor Timm: Watch out: the US government wants to pass new spying laws behind your back

Dangerous cybersecurity legislation would allow Google and Facebook to hand over even more of your information to the NSA and FBI

Never underestimate the ability of the “do-nothing” US Congress to make sure it passes privacy-invasive legislation on its way out the door. In December 2012, the Senate re-upped the NSA’s vast surveillance powers over the holidays when no one was paying attention. In December 2013, Congress weakened video-rental privacy laws because Netflix asked them to and nobody noticed.

Now, as the post-election lame-duck session opens on Wednesday in Washington, the Senate might try to sneak through a “cybersecurity” bill that would, as the ACLU puts it, “create a massive loophole in our existing privacy laws”. The vague and ambiguous law would essentially allow companies like Google and Facebook to hand over even more of your personal information to the US government, all of which could ultimately end up in the hands of the NSA and the FBI.

The House already passed a version of this bill earlier in the year, and the White House, despite vowing to veto earlier versions, told reporters an “information sharing” cybersecurity bill was on its list of priorities for the lame-duck session (while NSA reform is not).

David Cay Johnston: A ray of sunlight on secretive corporate welfare

Tell the Government Accounting Standards Board you want full disclosure on tax subsidies for corporations

Each year billions of your state and local tax dollars get diverted from public coffers for corporate subsidies. Just how much you are forced to pay for corporate welfare could soon move from the darkness of official secrecy into the light – but only if you act now.

A proposed rule requiring state and local governments to disclose the total amount of property tax and some other abatements in any year is being considered by the little-known private rule-making body known as the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB).

In 44 states, laws let county, city and other local officials grant tax reductions or exemptions to companies, often with little disclosure and no accountability. Exemptions from taxes benefit thousands of companies, from online retailer Amazon to shampoo maker Zotos International.

The proposal is tepid and narrow, but far better to let in a ray of light than to allow these deals the cover of total darkness in which they are typically carried out.

Dean Baker: Obama should devote final years to changing economic conversation

Intransigent Republican Congress and pro-austerity know-nothings need to have their views challenged

Presidents are rarely able to accomplish much in the last two years of a second term. Tuesday’s election results guaranteed that President Barack Obama will not be able to accomplish anything legislatively in the remainder of his term. The Republicans will demand that he surrender his firstborn just to get an undersecretary through the Senate approval process.

If Obama recognizes this reality, perhaps he can take the opportunity to spend his remaining years more constructively by permanently transforming the shape of the economic debate in the United States and overseas. [..]

By making it very clear that Obama can accomplish nothing by working with Congress, the elections last week put him in a situation where he has nothing to lose. This gives him the opportunity to step away from the Washington political nonsense and try to permanently change the nature of economic debates domestically and internationally.

If he succeeds, he will have done an enormous service to the country and the rest of the world. He can create a political environment in which his successors can talk honestly about the country’s economic problems and then work to fix them.

Scott Lemieux: In a divided America, partisan and race-based redistricting are indistinguishable

When the vast-majority of minority voters identify as Democrat, drawing Congressional lines based on party affiliation will have a racial component

One of the most profane parts of American democracy is the act of gerrymandering – which is to say, redrawing the boundaries of congressional districts less to reflect population shifts than to ensure the electoral results your party prefers. But like the word “fuck”, we’ve become so inured to gerrymandering that even in its ugliest incarnation – the “motherfucker” of all gerrymandering, if you will, racial gerrymandering – the scourge hardly registers as an epithet at all.

At the US supreme court on Wednesday, in a seemingly boring case about the particulars of this most insidious problem, chief justice John Roberts said he understood that states “have to hit this sweet spot between those two extremes without taking race predominantly into consideration”.

In other words, redrawing district boundaries to benefit Republicans over Democrats in party gerrymandering is totally legal (the “sweet spot”). Redrawing them to disenfranchise black voters instead of white voters are both a disgusting misuse of political power and illegal racial gerrymandering … even if the results – the diminution of minority voters’ electoral power – are the same. But then again, using semantics to avoid addressing racism is exactly the problem with a conservative Roberts court that has been gutting voter rights for going on two years now.

Jeb Lund: A flu shot won’t make Ebola go away, but it might kill our anti-doctor hysteria

Finally, something anti-vaxxers and smug liberal elitists can agree upon

Last month, I became a father for the first time, and with parenting has come a slew of unanticipated responsibilities. Did you know that you have to shop for a pediatrician? I had hoped someone looked at Google Maps and assigned the one closest to you. (They don’t.)

So with a new baby in hand and Ebola and annual flu shots in the news, I found myself asking a bunch of unfamiliar baby doctors a question I never thought I’d have to ask a medical professional: “How do you feel about vaccines?”

My first prospective doctor looked at me, bit her lip and squirmed, so I bailed her out and said, “Look, don’t get me wrong: herd immunity is extremely my shit.” She visibly relaxed then because conversations like that – and about Ebola – often turn rapidly and radically in the opposite direction. [..]

This is the state of our science conversation: hyped non-dangers, self-created unnecessary dangers, being wrong about the facts both coming and going. Polls still suggest that Ebola is a greater threat and that the authorities are deliberately doing less than they can to fight it; meanwhile, the measles have reached a 20-year high and parents are saying, Screw it, let’s roll the dice on Madison and Tyler getting some – at least it’ll be something to write about in that 17-page brick of a Christmas form letter we’ll send out printed in Comic Sans.