“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 Charlie Hebdo Massacre in Paris
The brutal terrorist attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Wednesday has badly shaken France. But the French have reacted with a fierce determination to defend their freedoms. President François Hollande, speaking from outside the magazine’s office a couple of hours after the murder of 12 people, was crystal clear: This was an assault, he said, on “the expression of freedom” that is the “spirit of the republic.” [..]
President Hollande has wisely appealed for national unity. His sentiments were echoed by former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who asked the public to avoid the temptation to “lump together” terrorists with Muslims, and he called for a united front against terrorism. Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris, expressed his community’s anguish over the attack. He did not mince words: “This is a deafening declaration of war,” he said.
Just days after the 9/11 attacks, an editorial in the newspaper Le Monde declared: “We are all Americans.” In France, “Je suis Charlie” – “I am Charlie” – has gone viral as the words to show solidarity with the victims at Charlie Hebdo. This attack was an assault on freedom everywhere. On Wednesday, the American Embassy in Paris put that message on its social media accounts.
Charles M Blow: Who Should Apologize in Police Conflict?
Patrick Lynch, the president of New York City’s largest police union, has once again called on Mayor Bill de Blasio to apologize to the police officers.
But this raises a real question: Apologize for what? Is the current tiff between the police and the mayor really just about protests and officers killed, or is it about something much bigger: diverging philosophies of basic fairness, the acquisition and application of power, and the structures of oppression demanding submission? [..]
It seems to me, in the New York standoff, that the mayor owes no apology for fighting to overturn stop-and-frisk, disclosing that he talked to his son about encounters with police officers, or being compassionate to protesters. That is the man New Yorkers elected.
This, to my mind, is an attack on him as an agent of change. It is a battle to see which arm has the most muscle: the one that wants to deny bias, explicit or implicit, in the exercise of its power while simultaneously clinging to that bias; or the one committed to questioning the power and acknowledging the bias. Eventually, we will have to wrestle with the question of which of those forces must win for us to be true and whole.
Tens of millions of people made New Year’s resolutions last week, but few were as creative as the one pushed through Congress yesterday. Apparently, the new Congress decided that its first order of business should be to go after workers who are no longer able to hold jobs due to injury or illness.
It did this in a technical move that is likely to escape the attention of most of the public. The Republican Congress voted to ban any reallocation of Social Security tax revenue between the retirement fund, designated for retirees and survivors, and the disability fund for disabled workers. This matters because the disability fund is projected to face a shortfall some time in 2016. If no steps are taken by that point, workers suffering from cancer, heart disease or other disabling conditions will see their benefits cut by almost 20 percent.
The easiest way to have addressed this problem would be to simply reallocate money between the funds, as has been done eleven times in the past. But the Republican Congress apparently felt that it would be better to hold disabled workers hostage in order to extract concessions on this or other programs.
Raúl M Grijalva: Why are Republicans so obsessed with their Keystone pipe dream? For 35 jobs?
The 114th Congress is officially underway, and in a move that speaks volumes about the Republican leadership’s agenda, the first order of business in the House and Senate is rubber-stamping the Keystone XL pipeline. The GOP is doing a big favor for Canadian oil interests by trampling the long-established process for making these important environmental decisions. In return, Americans get sharply increased risks to our climate and water quality. [..]
Building a pipeline that cuts clear across the country so a Canadian corporation can export dirty tar sands to the highest bidder is not in our national interest. We have an established process for approving these projects. That process has not yet concluded, so Republicans are trying to circumvent it. The question is why.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Time to Get Real on Jobs, Wages, and Growth
There’s been a lot of economic recovery talk lately, but most people will probably tell you that things still aren’t that great. Most Americans — 99 percent of them or so — are still struggling. Economic inequality is soaring, social mobility is declining, earnings at most income levels are stagnant or falling, and the percentage of working-age Americans who are actually working is at a record low.
And yet, as Republicans take control of the Senate and consolidate their lock on the House, they’re preparing to double down on the same policies that created this mess in the first place: austerity, taxation and deregulation.
How will Democrats respond? The economy has improved somewhat, but in an uneven and unstable way that has primarily benefited the wealthy. (And now the GOP’s even trying to take credit for that.) How will the Republicans’ opponents distinguish themselves: with clear and concrete ideas and proposals, or vague platitudes?
Robert Reich: Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is a Pending Disaster
Republicans who now run Congress say they want to cooperate with President Obama, and point to the administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, as the model. The only problem is the TPP would be a disaster.
If you haven’t heard much about the TPP, that’s part of the problem right there. It would be the largest trade deal in history – involving countries stretching from Chile to Japan, representing 792 million people and accounting for 40 percent of the world economy – yet it’s been devised in secret.
Lobbyists from America’s biggest corporations and Wall Street’s biggest banks have been involved but not the American public. That’s a recipe for fatter profits and bigger paychecks at the top, but not a good deal for most of us, or even for most of the rest of the world.
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