November 2014 archive

“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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

New York Times Editorial Board; In Red and Blue States, Good Ideas Prevail

The Democratic brand did not fare well, to put it mildly, in congressional and governors’ races on Tuesday. Most were contests of political blame, driven by ideological hatred for President Obama. But when the ballot offered a choice on an actual policy, rather than between candidates with a D or R next to their names, voters made notably liberal decisions in both red and blue states.

On at least six high-profile and often contentious issues – minimum wage, marijuana legalization, criminal justice reform, abortion rights, gun control and environmental protection – voters approved ballot measures, in some cases overwhelmingly, that were directly at odds with the positions of many of the Republican winners.

William Pfaff: How Ronald Reagan and the Supreme Court Turned American Politics Into a Cesspool

The dominating significance of the mid-term American legislative elections just finished has been the occasion’s dramatic confirmation of the corruption of the American electoral system. This has two elements, the first being its money corruption, unprecedented in American history, and without parallel in the history of major modern western democracies. How can Americans get out of this terrible situation, which threatens to become the permanent condition of American electoral politics?

The second significance of this election has been the debasement of debate to a level of vulgarity, misinformation and ignorance that, while not unprecedented in American political history, certainly attained new depths and extent.

This disastrous state of affairs is the product of two Supreme Court decisions and before that, of the repeal under the Reagan Administration, of the provision in the Federal Communications Act of 1934, stipulating the public service obligations of radio (and subsequently, of television) broadcasters in exchange for the government’s concession to them of free use in their businesses of the public airways.

Mark Udall’s loss is a blow for privacy, but he can go out with a bang: ‘leak’ the CIA torture report

Trevor Timm, The Guardian

Wednesday 5 November 2014 00.46 EST

America’s rising civil liberties movement lost one of its strongest advocates in the US Congress on Tuesday night, as Colorado’s Mark Udall lost his Senate seat to Republican Cory Gardner. While the election was not a referendum on Udall’s support for civil liberties (Gardner expressed support for surveillance reform, and Udall spent most of his campaign almost solely concentrating on reproductive issues), the loss is undoubtedly a blow for privacy and transparency advocates, as Udall was one of the NSA and CIA’s most outspoken and consistent critics. Most importantly, he sat on the intelligence committee, the Senate’s sole oversight board of the clandestine agencies, where he was one of just a few dissenting members.

But Udall’s loss doesn’t have to be all bad. The lame-duck transparency advocate now has a rare opportunity to truly show his principles in the final two months of his Senate career and finally expose, in great detail, the secret government wrongdoing he’s been criticizing for years. On his way out the door, Udall can use congressional immunity provided to him by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause to read the Senate’s still-classified 6,000-page CIA torture report into the Congressional record – on the floor, on TV, for the world to see.

There’s ample precedent for this. In 1971, former Senator Mike Gravel famously read the top-secret classified Pentagon Papers for three hours before almost collapsing and then entering thousands of pages more into the record after he couldn’t speak for any longer from exhaustion.

Not for nothing, but the Mike Gravel has actually published with us.

So you think all sand is the same?  Not quite.

Why Sand Is Disappearing

By JOHN R. GILLIS

NOV. 4, 2014

The sand and gravel business is now growing faster than the economy as a whole. In the United States, the market for mined sand has become a billion-dollar annual business, growing at 10 percent a year since 2008. Interior mining operations use huge machines working in open pits to dig down under the earth’s surface to get sand left behind by ancient glaciers. But as demand has risen – and the damming of rivers has held back the flow of sand from mountainous interiors – natural sources of sand have been shrinking.

One might think that desert sand would be a ready substitute, but its grains are finer and smoother; they don’t adhere to rougher sand grains, and tend to blow away. As a result, the desert state of Dubai brings sand for its beaches all the way from Australia.

And now there is a global beach-quality sand shortage, caused by the industries that have come to rely on it. Sand is vital to the manufacturing of abrasives, glass, plastics, microchips and even toothpaste, and, most recently, to the process of hydraulic fracturing. The quality of silicate sand found in the northern Midwest has produced what is being called a “sand rush” there, more than doubling regional sand pit mining since 2009.

But the greatest industrial consumer of all is the concrete industry. Sand from Port Washington on Long Island – 140 million cubic yards of it – built the tunnels and sidewalks of Manhattan from the 1880s onward. Concrete still takes 80 percent of all that mining can deliver. Apart from water and air, sand is the natural element most in demand around the world, a situation that puts the preservation of beaches and their flora and fauna in great danger. Today, a branch of Cemex, one of the world’s largest cement suppliers, is still busy on the shores of Monterey Bay in California, where its operations endanger several protected species.

As a child I remember my family in the summer visiting the beach close to where my father took the train to work.  Though it was late afternoon the powdered sand would be so hot as to induce a cool numbing of your feet even as they baked while you raced down to the water.  When my Dad arrived he would fire up one of the public grills with Kingston (not a troll at all was he) and we’d have hambugers and hotdogs.  After dinner (What?  Touch water less than 30 minutes after you’ve eaten?  Do you want to drown of cramps?) my sister and I would go to the playground across the parking lot (considerably cooler than the sand) to play on the tall swings, and the high slide, the big Monkey Bars, and the human powered Merry-Go-Round until we felt dizzy and sick, and most especially the fiberglass animals on top of springs that you could rock in three dimensions.

I’m not sure why this amused me, but it did.

My late Uncle called the History Channel The War Channel because of it’s steady drumbeat of World War II documentaries and other celebrations of armed conflict which, along with the “Great Man” theory of history, Marx shows us is a mere outgrowth of underlying economic dynamics.

Not that he was a Marxist, nor am I.  I’m a proud Anarcho-Syndicalist and we kick Marxist butt from here to Barcelona.

Anyway among the objects of their fascination are guns of every shape, size, and description because big explosions are good Television.

Just what about bigger do you not understand?

So I’m a factoid factory about firearms even though I do not now and never have owned one (though I do have a dusty old NRA Pro Marksman certificate which attests I can hit a sheet of paper if it gets close enough to threaten me).

For the purposes of today’s story we’ll start off with the mechanics of basically every gun until 1808.

Now we all have this vision of a frontiersman in his coonskin cap carefully pouring powder from his Powder Horn into the Pan of his Kentucky Long Rifle, lowering the Frizzen and putting the Hammer on Half Cock, putting the Stock on the ground and pouring more powder from his Horn into the Muzzle, grabbing a Patch of cloth and a lead Ball from his pouch and carefully seating them in the Barrel, and finally pulling out his Ramrod and tamping it all down, returning Ramrod to its sleeve, then raising the Rifle, pulling the Hammer to Full Cock, aiming, and firing.

That’s completely wrong.

It actually matters a great deal just how much powder you use and if you want consistent results (and incidentally a gun that doesn’t blow up in your face) you’ll monitor that quantity quite carefully.

In fact since the 1500s most militaries haven’t used loose powder at all.

Well, except for priming the Pan and at that they’d have carefully crafted quills which they would dip like a cooking measure into flour to procure the desired amount.

Instead they have used a paper cartridge which has powder and ball enclosed in a waxed or oiled paper wrapper.  You tear off the seal (usually just a twist like a candy) of the powder end an pour that down the Barrel.  Then you seat the Ball end of the cartridge (with paper replacing the Patch) and ram that down.  The waxing not only contributes to waterproofing the powder (let’s keep it dry Democrats) but also makes it easier to slide down the Ball.  Rumours that the British were using Lard and Tallow to grease their cartridges was one of the proximate causes of the Sepoy Rebellion.

Still, it’s a pain in the ass.

Starting in 1808 we see the emergence of cartridges designed for Breech loading using Percussion Caps for ignition.  While many designs used paper and other self consuming material to contain the charge it was eventually found that Brass would expand to prevent leakage of the propellant into the Breech while maintaining enough integrity to be easily extracted to accept the next round, and they were waterproof to a large extent.

Plastics

By now you’ve heard all the panic about 3-D printed guns and frankly there’s a lot to be worried about.  They are 100% plastic and don’t show up on metal detectors.  They’re made of commonly available materials by reasonably ($400) priced machines according to specifications easily downloaded off the Internet.  All this technology is thoroughly dual purpose and essentially unregulatable.

Until now the only problem has been that they are single shot and have a tendency to blow up because the Barrel and Breech are not quite strong enough.

A machinist from Pennsylvania has solved that problem (well, the blow up part at least, but that’s the key).  Instead of using a Brass cartridge he uses a Steel one to contain the detonation at its highest pressure point.

Now his is machined and takes about an hour a round to make, but you can reload it and the design could just as easily be stamped (if you have an industrial stamping machine, Kalashnikovs are stamped for instance).

Now perhaps you think this a radical breakthrough, yes in some respects, not so much in others.  Behold the Colt Paterson 1836–

The revolvers came with spare cylinders and the practice of the day was to carry spare cylinders loaded and capped for fast reloading.

Yup, and that was without smokeless powder in a basically Ball and Cap design.

Technologically this is essentially a dead end.  Plastics with the requisite characteristics and the machines to create them will continue to evolve but don’t be too worried, even today if you know what you’re doing you can construct a fully automatic AR-15 out of a $35 receiver you can buy unregistered over the Internet and some “spare” parts.

Are you ready for the Zombie Apocalypse yet?

The Bullet That Could Make 3-D Printed Guns Practical Deadly Weapons

By Andy Greenberg, Wired

11.05.14

As 3-D printed guns have evolved over the past 18 months from a science-fictional experiment into a subculture, they’ve faced a fundamental limitation: Cheap plastic isn’t the best material to contain an explosive blast. Now an amateur gunsmith has instead found a way to transfer that stress to a component that’s actually made of metal-the ammunition.

Michael Crumling, a 25-year-old machinist from York, Pennsylvania, has developed a round designed specifically to be fired from 3-D printed guns. His ammunition uses a thicker steel shell with a lead bullet inserted an inch inside, deep enough that the shell can contain the explosion of the round’s gunpowder instead of transferring that force to the plastic body or barrel of the gun. Crumling says that allows a home-printed firearm made from even the cheapest materials to be fired again and again without cracking or deformation. And while his design isn’t easily replicated because the rounds must be individually machined for now, it may represent another step towards durable, practical, printed guns-even semi-automatic ones.

“It’s a really simple concept: It’s kind of a barrel integrated into the shell, so to speak,” says Crumling. “Basically it removes all the stresses and pressures from the 3-D printed parts. You should be able to fire an unlimited number of shots through the gun without replacing any parts other than the shell.”

Last week, for instance, Crumling shot 19 rounds from a 3-D printed gun of his own design created on an ultra-cheap $400 Printrbot printer using PLA plastic. (He concedes his gun isn’t completely 3-D printed; it uses some metal screws and a AR-15 trigger and firing hammer that he bought online for a total of $30. But he argues none of those parts affected the gun’s firing durability.) Though the gun misfired a few times, it didn’t suffer from any noticeable internal damage after all of those explosions. Here’s a time lapse video that shows 18 of those shots.

…

Crumling’s steel-shelled rounds seem to control their explosions well enough to protect printed guns created with even the very cheapest printing techniques. “This guy has refined 3D printed firearms such that they can be reliably printed on very low end 3-D printers,” says Sullivan. “It’s so brilliantly simple. I love it.”

Science and Technology News and Blogs

• The Trouble With Facebook’s Tor Link, By Richard Adhikari, Tech News World
• Buried treasure: Bidding begins on cartridges from Atari landfill, by Kyle Orland, Ars Technica
• US net neutrality advocates plan Hungary-style protests, by John Ribeiro, PC World
• EFF seeks to legalize online DRM circumvention in abandoned games, by Andy Chalk, PC Gamer
• Is String Theory the basis for quantum mechanics? Here’s the answer… in English, By Aaron Mamiit, Tech Times
• In This Image, Two Photons Interact. Here’s Why It’s Groundbreaking., by George Dvorsky, io9
• If You Want to Survive a Black Hole Encounter, Bring a Friend, By Phil Plait, Slate
• How a giant impact formed Vesta’s “belt”, By Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, Astronomy Magazine
• ISS Avoids a Near Shave With Space Junk, By Damon Poeter, PC Magazine
• No More Soviet-Era Rocket Engines for NASA Freight Haulers, By Justin Bachman, Business Week
• Ah-choo! Expect higher grass pollen and allergen exposure in the coming century, Science Codex

Science Oriented Video!

The Obligatories, News, and Blogs below.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

November 6 is the 310th day of the year (311th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 55 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1860, Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th President of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois.

Lincoln received 1,866,452 votes, Douglas 1,376,957 votes, Breckinridge 849,781 votes, and Bell 588,789 votes. The electoral vote was decisive: Lincoln had 180 and his opponents added together had only 123. Turnout was 82.2%, with Lincoln winning the free Northern states. Douglas won Missouri, and split New Jersey with Lincoln. Bell won Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and Breckinridge won the rest of the South. There were fusion tickets in which all of Lincoln’s opponents combined to form one ticket in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, but even if the anti-Lincoln vote had been combined in every state, Lincoln still would have won a majority in the electoral college.

As Lincoln’s election became evident, secessionists made clear their intent to leave the Union. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina took the lead; by February 1, 1861, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed. The seven states soon declared themselves to be a sovereign nation, the Confederate States of America. The upper South (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas) listened to, but initially rejected, the secessionist appeal. President Buchanan and President-elect Lincoln refused to recognize the Confederacy. There were attempts at compromise, such as the Crittenden Compromise, which would have extended the Missouri Compromise line of 1820, and which some Republicans even supported. Lincoln rejected the idea, saying, “I will suffer death before I consent…to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege to take possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right.”

Lincoln, however, did support the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which had passed in Congress and protected slavery in those states where it already existed. A few weeks before the war, he went so far as to pen a letter to every governor asking for their support in ratifying the Corwin Amendment as a means to avoid secession.

America Remembers It Forgot To Vote

14 / 2 == 8

The real news and this week’s guests below.

In December 2012, the Wonkblog ran a story about the laws that would have passed the 111th and 112th Congress were it not for the filibuster. The House passed-or was considering-a number of bills that would have benefited the middle class and excited Democratic voters, but those bills were killed by “moderate” Democrats in the Senate. When liberals decried the practice of threatening to filibuster one’s own party, “pragmatic” Democrats said that we had to take what we could get and let the moderates do what they needed to protect their seats.

As a former (by compulsion) member it gives me great pleasure (in a schadenfreud way) to report that in the wake of last night’s debacle the Great Orange Satan is divided into roughly 4 camps.

The first, represented mostly by Mr. Moulitsas and those beholden to him by salary, contends that this is merely a bump in the road of inexorable demographic victory, only to be expected and predicted countless times by him and his “experts”.  Work harder, contribute more, go 2016 and Hillary Clinton!  Nothing to see here.

La, la, la, la, la.

The second group is the delusional suicidal types.  Those nasty voters.  How can they not recognize our vast accomplishments?  Don’t they realize the Republicans are evil?  Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil!  Voters is teh stoopid and until we get them to think gooder we are Doomed!  DOOMED!

This is my last post until the stoopid people think gooder.

The third group is the die hard Obots.  You see those spineless cowardly Democrats ran away from this good President and his tanking poll numbers and insurance mandates and Lilly Ledbetter (did we mention Lilly Ledbetter?) and all the other wonderful things he’s done like the Catfood Commission (sorry about your Social Security, those T-Bills aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on because we have to pay off these other T-Bills that Billionaires own), Bailing Out the Banksters (with no prosecutions), a Jobless Recovery fueled by easy money (not that there’s anything wrong with easy money) and Speculative Bubbles in the great FIRE casino, and being tough on Foreign Policy by increasing domestic spying, deporting more immigrants, killing citizens without due process, continuing our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and starting 7 or 8 new ones (it’s just a co-incidence that they’re all against Muslims, we’re not the racists, you are), and covering up W‘s torture regime.

Ingrates.

And finally there are what remains (on Daily Kos) of the democratic wing of the Democratic Party and their argument goes something like this-

Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.

Needless to say I sympathize most with the last.  As for “inexorable demographic victory”-

Obama Manages the Rare Triple Play of Bad Politics on Immigration

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Friday October 31, 2014 10:26 am

Politics is fairly simple. There are actually only a few ways to disappoint a group that cares about a particular issue. The simplest is you can fail to adopt the policy they want.

Second, you can be caught lying to them. This raises hopes only to crush them. That can feel even worse than knowing a politician has always been opposed in a principled way to your idea.

Third, you can make them feel not valued or listened to. Voters can still respect politicians they disagree with, but being treated poorly is different.

With his recent decision on immigration Obama managed to do all three at the same time. He failed to take executive action on immigration reform like most Latino voters wanted. He lied about it by promising action by the end of the summer. Finally, Obama broke this promise for what seemed to be purely political reasons. This sends a message that Latino voters aren’t valued and Democrats think they can be taken for granted. It is a statement about where a group fits in the priorities of the party.

The final sin is that it was ultimately ineffective.  It didn’t save a single seat.  Cowardice never does.

The stoopid voters say things like this-

To Angry Voters, Washington Comes Out the Biggest Loser

By ADAM NAGOURNEY, The New York Times

NOV. 4, 2014

When asked if her vote would change anything, Ms. Dempsey glanced back at the empty sidewalk leading to the polling place. “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know.”

…

“I feel like I’m in that class of people that’s kind of getting left behind in this whirlwind,” said Etrulia Byrd, 37, a waitress from Anchorage.  “I’m in that economic class of people that works really, really hard and will probably never get too far ahead, barely makes it, and kind of gets punished for it.”

…

“There’s no such thing as a good politician, I’m sorry,” said Christi Miller, 43, an Obama supporter from Hot Springs, Ark.  “They may start out that way, but I think once you get in and once you get painted with bribes, and you have to take care of the people who contributed to you. … ” Her voice trailed off. “They would care if they were actually running for office for the right reasons,” she said. “They’re running for office for money and power.”

…

“Since they’ve allowed all the money in politics, it’s gotten much worse,” said Scott Hasson, 40, a photographer who lives in Denver. “Everyone says our vote matters, but until we can check the system and start taking a lot of that money out, I feel like it’s just power, people with money have the power.”

The Democrats are spineless and cowardly-

A Victory for the Left

By William Saletan, Slate

Nov. 4 2014 11:25 PM

Republicans won big in the 2014 elections. They captured the Senate and gained seats in the House. But they didn’t do it by running to the right. They did it, to a surprising extent, by embracing ideas and standards that came from the left. I’m not talking about gay marriage, on which Republicans have caved, or birth control, on which they’ve made over-the-counter access a national talking point. I’m talking about the core of the liberal agenda: economic equality.

…

Republicans picked up other liberal themes, too. They harped on the injustice of cutting Medicare, the importance of educational opportunity as “the great equalizer,” and the folly of gambling pension money in the stock market. They endorsed health care as a fundamental right, ridiculed the description of wealthy people as “middle-class,” and championed midnight basketball.

No, Republicans haven’t become liberals. They still hate taxes and blame everything bad on President Obama, Obamacare, and big government. But their focus on wage stagnation and class stratification reflects the economy and the political climate. And when you use egalitarian benchmarks to indict the opposition, those benchmarks endure. In the next election, Republicans, too, will be measured by median income, black unemployment, and what they pay women. They’ll have to account for the poverty rate, the tax burden on low-income people, and the widening gap between investors and laborers. It’s these underlying benchmarks, not the partisan composition of Congress, that signal the fundamental direction in which the country is heading.

Ahem-

No Scapegoats. Time to Face Facts.

by Dallasdoc, Daily Kos

Wed Nov 05, 2014 at 07:47 AM PST

So here we are once more.  Another electoral drubbing at the hands of the most cartoonishly evil, corrupt, inept gang of thugs politics has served up since the days of Mark Hanna.  And we’re all shocked.  How could this have happened?  How can we possibly have lost to these freakshow escapees yet again?  

It must be the fault of the voters, for being stupid.  Or the non-voters, for being too lazy and stupid to show up.  Or the media, for always being in the tank for the Republicans.  Or the purist progressives, because they said bad things about Obama.  Or Ralph Nader, for who the fuck knows anymore.  Yeah, those guys are to blame.

…

Progressives and liberals have long hitched their wagon to the Democratic party, maintaining the delusion that it’s still the party of the New Deal and the Great Society at heart.  I’ve done this too.  But the New Deal was eight decades ago.  Our view of the party is almost as outdated as that of old African Americans in the 1960s, who stuck with the Republican party because it was the party of Lincoln.  Actually, they had better contemporary justification than we do, at least until Nixon’s Southern Strategy.  The New Deal Democratic party is as dead as the Whigs.  Our latter-day version is one more vehicle of corporate influence:  the Goldman Division of America, Inc.  We are locked in phony battle with the Koch Division for spectacles of Potemkin democracy, which offer changes and choices that cost the owners of this country nothing and usually improve their quarterly numbers.  Nothing can be done anymore that doesn’t pay off billionaire sponsors first and last.

Our political system is comprehensively corrupt, and it is almost impossible to participate in it, certainly not as an officeholder, without wallowing in that corruption.  In Washington those who have held themselves apart can be counted on your fingers.  Both parties are creatures of this corruption, and their bases know it.  Ask any average American if they think politics is corrupt, and you’ll get a resounding “No shit!” nine times out of ten.  Conservatives know this as well as liberals.  It’s only devout party followers who seem blind to the obvious.

Corrupt parties have to find ways to get their voters out, despite most of those voters knowing how corrupt they are.  It is almost impossible to make a positive, affirmative case for oneself when everybody knows your pockets are stuffed with cash.  Therefore, you have to point over there at how terrible the other guy is.  Hence we have almost exclusively negative campaigning.  Republicans are awfully good at this, and are bounded by neither truth, shame, nor basic human decency.  Democrats suck at it, despite having a lot more material to work with.  The problem for Democrats is that too many of the things they can truthfully say about the Republicans are just as true of them.  Want to point out how beholden Republicans are to the Kochs?  Yeah, just try it, when you’re getting so much “support” from Goldman Sachs or BP or Lockheed Martin.  Voters aren’t as stupid as most professional pols think they are.

…

The Democratic party will not change until it has absolutely no other choice.  The leadership has proven over and over again that it would rather lose to a Republican than permit a progressive Democratic insurgent to win a primary.  Losing to a Republican doesn’t threaten the leadership’s perks and position, for some unfathomable reason.  Seeing the Warren wing gain power within the party is a much more direct threat to most of their jobs, on the other hand.  The chimera of fighting the battle in the primaries is a lost cause:  they’ll make sure we lose.  When was the last time we won one?

When you come to visit at chez triv, I really do hope that you came to see me, because the house is in no shape for company. We’re an overcrowded house, and in our case, that means a cluttered one as well. We have up to four people on a computer in our dining room at a time. Me on a laptop on the dining room table, the same table that occasionally plays host to two sewing machines. Sewing machines that live in a corner when not in use. Seriously, there’s no room for anything.

I am constantly donating and throwing things away, but it doesn’t seem to make a dent. It’s not dirty, it’s just clutter, but I now realize why my mom used to freak out at us, and I don’t have the child-power here to put to work that she did. There were four of us all clamoring to get out of the house on a Saturday morning. I do not have that. I have Cleetus, who does the heavy cleaning, and Baboo, who straightens up, and does the dishes.

“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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

George Zornick: Republicans Just Took Over the Senate-Here’s Why That Sucks

When Iowa and North Carolina were called almost simultaneously a little before 11:30 Tuesday night, the seemingly inevitable became official: Republicans will control the Senate and thus the entire legislative branch.

On a variety of fronts, this new alignment is going to be hugely problematic for progressive governance-perhaps for governance, period. These will be the major flash points. The last one is the most important because it’s how the GOP will force Obama’s hand on most of the rest. [..]

8. Keeping the Government Open.

This is the big one, and the mechanism through which the GOP might be able to get many of the aforementioned policy wins. Before, the House GOP wasn’t able to clearly put forward its goals, particularly on things like the Ryan budget, because it got all garbled up in conference negotiations with the Senate. House members who wanted to avoid this conversation were fond of telling hard-liners that “we’re only one-half of one-third of the government,” so they had to compromise.

But that’s no longer true. With a deeply red Republican Congress and the word “mandate” dancing through the heads of many elected GOPers-and members of the media-it will be easy to force a simple showdown with Obama. Maybe Republicans go full-Ryan budget, which Obama certainly rejects, and there’s a government shutdown. Maybe they are smart about it and pass a really bad budget that’s just good enough for Obama to sign. Either way, it’s bad news for progressives.

Trevor Timm: Mark Udall’s loss is a blow for privacy, but he can go out with a bang: ‘leak’ the CIA torture report

The outgoing Senator and champion of civil liberties has one last chance to read the truth about American atrocities out loud, for the world to see – before it’s too late

merica’s rising civil liberties movement lost one of its strongest advocates in the US Congress on Tuesday night, as Colorado’s Mark Udall lost his Senate seat to Republican Cory Gardner. While the election was not a referendum on Udall’s support for civil liberties (Gardner expressed support for surveillance reform, and Udall spent most of his campaign almost solely concentrating on reproductive issues), the loss is undoubtedly a blow for privacy and transparency advocates, as Udall was one of the NSA and CIA’s most outspoken and consistent critics. Most importantly, he sat on the intelligence committee, the Senate’s sole oversight board of the clandestine agencies, where he was one of just a few dissenting members.

But Udall’s loss doesn’t have to be all bad. The lame-duck transparency advocate now has a rare opportunity to truly show his principles in the final two months of his Senate career and finally expose, in great detail, the secret government wrongdoing he’s been criticizing for years. On his way out the door, Udall can use congressional immunity provided to him by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause to read the Senate’s still-classified 6,000-page CIA torture report into the Congressional record – on the floor, on TV, for the world to see.