“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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Heater Digby Parton: “Radicals of a different sort”: How the reactionary right is plotting to steal the White House
Conservatives sincerely believe the nation is better off if certain people are making decisions and those people are qualified by the fact that they have money and property. As founder John Jay is said to have quipped, “the owners of the country ought to be the ones to run it.” But inconveniently for them, we do have a democracy and today the GOP is facing a serious demographic challenge, which makes it almost imperative that they find a way to stop Hispanics, young people and African-Americans from voting in big numbers or they simply will not be able to win national elections. One might expect them to take a second look at that ideology and see if maybe it could use some revision for the 21st century, but that’s a problem too. This ideology, which confers “freedom” in degrees commensurate with how much money you have, is fundamental to their beliefs and is not easily changed.
Fifty years ago brave civil rights activists in the streets and a president and other officials who knew the moment for change had arrived put justice and equality ahead of a property owner’s right to discriminate and the state’s right to deny the vote to their citizens. It was a radical move, necessitating a serious challenge to federalism. Unfortunately, the story did not end there. Millhiser reminds us at the end of his piece that Johnson and company may have been radicals in their time but today the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts overturned much of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and Sen. Rand Paul, who lugubriously proclaims that liberty is never harder for him than when his philosophical integrity forces him to support the constitutional rights of racist property owners over everyone else’s, is running for president.
Those people are radicals of a different sort and they stand ready to overturn and subvert progress wherever they find it.
Jess Zimmerman: Our relationship with the internet will always be inseparable from commerce
The commerce aspect of the web is inscribed in its DNA: “www” and “.com” go together in our minds, no matter what’s in the middle. Even with new and upcoming options like .republican, .party, .sucks and .wang (none of which I am making up), the extension .com, originally “commercial,” will always mean “the internet” for anyone born in the last four decades.
The history of online commerce is the history of the web in miniature, because everything we do online is commerce of a sort. We pay for our wishes in money or attention or data – but we always pay.
The web first made it slightly easier to find what we desired, whether that was goods or information or social connection. By connecting with people who wanted the same things we wanted, we could share hints and leads and tips more widely than ever before. Then it became much easier, even without the middleman; now, it is nearly effortless to find something to buy or something to know. One cost, at the risk of sounding like a scold, was loss of value. The precious became commonplace – for goods, but also for interpersonal connections and knowledge.
At a moment when everybody in Washington is talking about e-mails, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley (D) wants to talk about Wall Street reform. Indeed, while Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail address at the State Department has created a media frenzy and overshadowed other issues, the past week brought additional news in the Democratic primary: O’Malley is almost certainly running for president. And he’s determined to make his voice heard despite some pundits dismissing his ability to mount a “credible” challenge to Clinton for the party’s nomination.
The swirl of controversy surrounding Clinton has not only called her inevitability into question but also given much of the media an excuse to focus on optics rather than policy coverage, which is just one of the reasons O’Malley’s emergence is a positive development. A contested Democratic primary will be good for the country, good for the party, good for democracy and good for driving issues that might otherwise be ignored into the election.
Michelle Chen: Immigrant Workers Are Being Deported for Getting Injured on the Job
Leopoldo Zumaya stumbled while pruning a tree in 2004 and fell into a legal black hole. The apple picker’s broken leg got him promptly booted out of his work camp. And though he fought for the compensation he was entitled to, ultimately he received only a fraction of what a worker with immigration papers could have gotten under Pennsylvania state law.
According to Zumaya’s legal testimony, “The insurance company refused to pay for my workers’ compensation benefits when they found out from my employer that I was undocumented.” Without adequate workers’ compensation coverage or other benefits, he stated, “I have not been able to see a doctor, receive medication or undergo physical therapy.”
Like many products of the global economy, the undocumented immigrants who work in every US industry are treated like disposable goods, tossed away once worn out or damaged. But before an international commission this week, workers showed the scars that can’t be wiped away: the uncompensated damage wrought under a legal regime that renders them invisible.
Katie McDonough: Ambivalent about kids or terrified of going broke? What our lack of paid family leave means for young people
The United States is among the only advanced economies in the world without a paid leave policy in place. President Obama signed a memorandum in January directing federal agencies to allow workers to take up to six weeks paid leave, and called on Congress to follow suit. But with Republicans threatening to block the confirmation of Loretta Lynch over an antiabortion amendment and writing bizarre letters to foreign governments, timely congressional action on paid leave is more of a drug hallucination than viable agenda item.
Congress remains at peak disaster, leaving the possibility of paid leave for American workers largely with the states. Which brings us to New York. Despite widespread public and bipartisan political support for some version of the policy, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said that the issue is more window dressing than anything. According to Cuomo, state lawmakers just don’t have the “appetite” for it.
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