“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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New York Times Editorial Board: The Best Lawyers Money Can Buy
The United States Supreme Court decides cases involving the nation’s most pressing legal issues, affecting the daily lives of hundreds of millions of Americans – and yet so much about its functioning is shrouded in mystique and exclusivity. The court’s front doors are locked and its vast “public” plaza is off-limits to protesters. Alone among the branches of government, it refuses to televise its proceedings, even though its gallery can seat only 250 members of the public.
As a new report by Reuters shows, this exclusivity extends even to the types of cases the court agrees to hear. [..]
As troubling as the court’s shrinking bar is the justices’ matter-of-fact acceptance of it. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told Reuters: “Business can pay for the best counsel money can buy. The average citizen cannot. That’s just a reality.” Justice Antonin Scalia admitted to rejecting cases based on the quality of the briefing, not on the legal issue they raised. “I have voted against what would be a marginally granted petition when it was not well presented,” he said.
It’s not unreasonable for the justices to want to spend their time on arguments made by the best advocates. Nor is there anything wrong with the country’s top lawyers demanding top dollar for their skill and hard work. And corporations surely may spend what they wish to litigate on behalf of their interests. But when these forces are combined, the biggest cost of all may fall on regular Americans, for whom justice at the highest court in the land becomes less accessible every day.
Michael Winship: It’s a Wonderful Life, Comrade
The Hollywood Christmas classic was once accused of hiding a subversive Communist message.
A number of years ago, I was telling a longtime city dweller friend of mine yet another story about the small, upstate New York town in which I grew up.
Simultaneously baffled and captivated, he said, “I think you were born and raised in Bedford Falls,” the fictional burg at the center of Frank Capra’s classic Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” [..]
Which makes it all the crazier that when the movie first came out, it fell under suspicion from the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as Communist propaganda, part of the Red Scare that soon would lead to the blacklist and witch hunt that destroyed the careers of many talented screen and television writers, directors and actors. [..]
Since then, the movie has been more than redeemed as it slowly became a sentimental and beloved holiday perennial. And if anything, its portrayal of a villainous banker has been vindicated a thousand fold as in the last seven years we’ve seen fraudulent mortgages and subsequent foreclosures, bankers unrepentant after an unprecedented taxpayer bailout and unpunished after a mindboggling spree of bad calls, profligacy and corkscrew investments that raked in billions while others suffered the consequences.
It’s a wonderful life, alright, but not if you’re homeless or unemployed tonight, not it your kids are hungry and you can’t pay for heat. There are still a lot of Mr. Potters in the world. We know who you are and we’ll keep calling you out. God rest ye merry, gentlemen.
These are Dickensian times, when charity is rationed by politicians and pundits callously dismiss the poor as a burden best forced by hunger to grab at bootstraps and pull themselves upward.
Charles Dickens wrote of such times in 1843.
But surely he would have recognized 2014, a year that began with the Congress of the wealthiest nation in the world locked in debate over cutting funds for nutrition programs that serve those who are in need. The cuts were approved and, as the year progressed, so there came the announcements that tens of thousands of Americans would no longer have access to food stamps.
Food stamp cuts in a land of plenty are just one measure of the cruelty of the moment. There are also the threats to cut benefits for the long-term unemployed and to restrict access to welfare programs, which come even as Congress delivers another holiday-season “wish list” to the banking behemoths that have figured out how to crash economies and still profit.
Amy Goodman: Mark Udall Can Make History by Releasing the Torture Report
Mark Udall, the outgoing Democratic senator from Colorado, may be a lame duck, leaving office in less than a week. But his most important work in the Senate may still be before him. For the week he remains in office, he still sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He worked on that committee’s epic, 6,700-page, still-secret report, the “Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” otherwise known as the torture report. The intelligence committee has recently released a heavily redacted declassified executive summary of the report, in which new, gory details of the torture conducted during the Bush/Cheney administration have been made public for the first time.
Udall is angry about the U.S. torture program. He is angry about the heavy redaction of the executive summary, and the CIA and White House interference in the intelligence committee’s oversight work. He wants the full report made available to the public. While it is still secret, Udall could release the classified document in its entirety. To understand how, it helps to go back to 1971, the release of the Pentagon Papers and a senator from Alaska named Mike Gravel.
Syreeta McFadden: We declared in 2014 that black lives matter because we saw how often they didn’t
The great divide between black and white America will continue to insist upon itself. Racialized income inequality, the lingering effects of housing discrimination and persistent school segregation fuel the separation of communities, or at least prevent us from mixing, meeting and socializing interracially which, in turn, fuels indifference and the false narrative of a colorblind society.
Were we truly so naive to believe that post-racial America was a real thing?
We are past the point where any of us should be satisfied with flat conversations around racisms – structural or interpersonal. We are past the point that we can deflect. It’s time that we ask harder questions of ourselves and entertain – even demand – difficult answers. We shouldn’t have to have another march from Ferguson to Jefferson City to assert the personhood of black Americans in 21st century America. We can’t be afraid to talk honestly about the brutal legacy of slavery or its phantom effects that pervade every aspect of our society. We can’t be afraid to acknowledge racism for fear of being labeled racist.
We can’t rely on the reality of the Obama presidency to substitute for the deep, authentic work of interrogating who we really are, and the depths of our racial fears and biases. We cannot have to march in the streets for another year, and another, to remind America that black lives matter.
Nicholas Phillips: Missouri showed off America’s worst in 2014. Are we really this damn divided?
Missouri lore has it that in 1899, the state’s congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver averred in a speech, “Frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.”
That’s the homespun skepticism that earned Missouri its unofficial nickname – the stuff of license plates: the Show-Me State. Folks here in the middle of America pride ourselves on a preference for facts over foolishness, deeds over declarations. But what Missourians lack is a robust self-skepticism – the ability to admit that we are wrong, or plain don’t know. And in the tumult of the past year – whether from faith- and fear-based state laws that even our most backward southern neighbors won’t enact, or the unrest and police violence in the streets of Ferguson – that character flaw was laid bare. In 2014, Missouri showed itself, and the nation, at its most benighted. [..]
More than 120 years ago, Missouri’s greatest writer and sage, Mark Twain, wrote, “Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world – and never will.”
If Missouri or any other American state with similar conflicts – racial, religious, political, whatever – have any hope of healing, it lies with those who are serious and sturdy enough to ditch their petrified opinions, to embrace complexity and to absorb facts that make them uneasy. The power-elite must do it. The strong young leaders of the Ferguson protests must keep pushing them to do it, and keep doing it themselves. We’ll all be served by a healthy self-skepticism.
Sonali Kolhatkar: The Sony Hack Revealed How Hollywood Fails Us All
Whether or not North Korea was really behind the devastating Sony hack, and whether or not the U.S. government orchestrated North Korea’s Internet outage in retaliation, one thing is clear: The incident has exposed Hollywood’s serious race problem yet again. People of color are barely visible on our screens, while women’s roles are generally foils for men. When minorities and women are present, the film industry usually relies on racist and sexist tropes.
I have not seen “The Interview”-Sony Pictures Entertainment’s targeted film about a foolhardy assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that supposedly irked the Guardians of Peace hacker group so much, it motivated the members to devastate Sony’s servers. But even simply watching the trailer reveals that the film’s premise is perfectly in line with standard Hollywood fare that serves up comedies through the eyes of self-effacing white men whose harebrained schemes and screwball antics are expected to make audiences wish they were dumb enough to be so hip.
Pop culture defines how we as a society view ourself. It also reflects and informs our implicit biases against one another. And it has remained far behind the times. As the hue of our society continues to diversify, our TV and movie screens remain largely the domain of straight, white men.
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