“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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Paul Krugman: Money Makes Crazy
Monetary policy probably won’t be a major issue in the 2016 campaign, but it should be. It is, after all, extremely important, and the Republican base and many leading politicians have strong views about the Federal Reserve and its conduct. And the eventual presidential nominee will surely have to endorse the party line.
So it matters that the emerging G.O.P. consensus on money is crazy – full-on conspiracy-theory crazy.
Right now, the most obvious manifestation of money madness is Senator Rand Paul’s “Audit the Fed” campaign. Mr. Paul likes to warn that the Fed’s efforts to bolster the economy may lead to hyperinflation; he loves talking about the wheelbarrows of cash that people carted around in Weimar Germany. But he’s been saying that since 2009, and it keeps not happening. So now he has a new line: The Fed is an overleveraged bank, just as Lehman Brothers was, and could experience a disastrous collapse of confidence any day now.
Zoë Carpenter: FBI Director on Police Violence: ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’
About halfway through what was billed as a groundbreaking speech on race and policing, FBI director James Comey reached for the wisdom of musical theater. “I am reminded of the song ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’ from the Broadway hit, Avenue Q,” he mused. He went on to quote the lyrics. “You should be grateful I did not sing that,” he joked.
That bit of levity summed up the rest of Comey’s speech, which amounted largely to an excuse for systemic discrimination by law enforcement. He received praise for being “bold” in addressing the subject, in comparison to other law enforcement leaders; that’s a pretty low bar. “I worry that this important and incredibly difficult conversation about race and policing has become focused entirely on the nature and character of law enforcement officers, when it should also be about something much harder to discuss,” Comey said. That “something,” he explained, is America’s history of racism, and the “unconscious bias” that “we all-white and black-carry…around with us.” [..]
That’s not a conversation that Comey controls, however. People around the country are keeping it going, and they’re spending less time talking about “seeing one another” than about what can actually be done, right now. Police accountability measures are pending in more than a dozen states. In Washington, DC, activists with the #DCFerguson movement are organizing against the use of “jump outs,” a policing tactic that involves plainclothes officers in unmarked cars descending suddenly to conduct stop and frisks.
“We all have work to do-hard work, challenging work-and it will take time,” Comey said in closing. “So let’s begin.” But he has arrived late to an ongoing discussion, and few are waiting for him to catch up.
Yesterday, an outspoken white atheist murdered three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We don’t yet know for sure whether this was a hate crime or whether the killer, Craig Stephen Hicks, had some other motivation; police have said the crime may have grown out of a dispute over parking. We do know that had Hicks been a Muslim and his victims atheists, few would be waiting for all the facts to come in before declaring him a terrorist. We know that there would be the usual calls for other Muslims to condemn the killings, coupled with the usual failure to take note of the many Muslims who did. And we know that demands for Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins to distance themselves from Hicks are largely facetious, because no one really blames them. Violence perpetrated by Muslims is almost always seen as part of a global conspiracy, whereas white men like Hicks are usually seen as isolated psychopaths.
There is, of course, some truth there. An organized jihadist movement exists; an organized cadre of terroristic atheists does not. Yet in the United States, Islamophobia has been a consistent motivator of violence. Hicks’s killing of Yusor Mohammad, her husband, Deah Shaddy Barakat, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, should not be treated like a man-bites-dog story, a reversal of the usual pattern of terrorism. After all, Muslims in the United States are more often the victims of ideological violence than the perpetrators of it.
Maria Margaronis: The New Greek Government Refuses to Agree to Unpayable Debts
At times the conflict between Greece and the rest of the Eurozone looks like a duel to the death. Last night, a seven-hour meeting of Europe’s finance ministers about Greece’s immediate funding needs ended in tetchy silence. There was no common statement; there wasn’t even (to borrow Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’s phrase after his meeting last week with Germany’s Wolfgang Schaeuble) an agreement to disagree. On Twitter, Greece-watchers tried to come up with ways to marry Greece’s request for a bridge loan with the Eurozone’s insistence on an extension to the bailout memorandum, which the new governing party Syriza has promised to repudiate. Pier? Pontoon? Causeway? Schrödinger’s memorandum, simultaneously dead and alive?
Semantics will play an important part in any eventual solution, which will involve compromises and face-saving wording for both sides. But semantics can’t be all of it-something the Eurozone ministers may not yet have understood. The Syriza government is not just pushing for a better deal-they’re refusing to keep on playing the same self-destructive game, piling debt on unpayable debt tied to impossible conditions. The aim is to reclaim democracy and political possibility-and with them, human lives-from the failed and fatal dogmas of austerity. In this they are backed by 70 percent of the Greek people, twice the proportion that voted for them. Eighty percent also want to stay in the eurozone. The desire-perhaps quixotic, perhaps grandiose, but born of suffering and necessity-is not to abandon Europe but to change it.
Leslie Savan: Finally, Someone Pays for Iraq War Lies – Brian Williams
Everybody’s been asking whether Brian Williams can return as anchor of NBC Nightly News after his six-month suspension for exaggerating an attack on a helicopter ferrying him and an NBC camera crew to a military bridge site in Iraq back in 2003. It’s the big celebrity question of the week, totally replacing our collective wonderment over that weird hat Pharrell Williams (no relation) wore during his Grammys performance last weekend.
But just peaking above the surface in the past couple days is a far more important question: Will the media, prodded by what they’ve judged to be Williams’s “lies,” finally begin to question their own role in boosting the far more serious lies that led to hundreds of thousands of actual deaths in the Iraq war?
Jon Stewart, as usual, saw the ironies. After cracking some gentle jokes at his friend’s expense, Stewart allowed that he’s happy the media is piling on Bri Wi because ” finally someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq war.”
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