“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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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty will help neither workers nor consumers
“China wants to write the rules for the world’s fastest-growing region … We should write those rules,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union address. To sell Congress on giving him authority to “fast track” consideration of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade and investment treaty with 12 nations that has been under negotiation for five years, the president argues it is vital that “we” write the rules. The real question, of course, is what does he mean by “we”? [..]
How do trade treaties that undermine workers, cost jobs and create a private, corporate global arbitration system get through Congress? The answer, of course, is the corporate lobby that writes the rules mobilizes big money and armies of lobbyists to drive them through. Most Democrats oppose the treaties, but the Wall Street wing of the party tends to support them. Conservatives would naturally oppose secretive global panels that can force taxpayers to pay damages to companies, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable round up votes to get the treaty passed.
So remember, when the president argues that it is vital that “we” write the rules, “we” means not the American people, but corporate and financial interests.
President Obama has dramatically called inequality the defining challenge of our time. But the reason the 1 percent capture virtually all of the income growth in this society, the reason working families are struggling simply to stay afloat, is that the rules are rigged by the powerful to favor themselves. Our trade policies are clear examples of that. America’s middle class will continue to sink until “we” means the American people, not Wall Street and the corporate lobby.
Jessica Valenti: Don’t stress out. Our kids are just fine when their mothers work late
Some welcome news for working moms: you can stay late at the office tonight and your kid will be just fine.
A new study published this April in the Journal of Marriage and Family (pdf) shows that the widely-held belief that young children do better when their mothers spend significant time with them is actually wrong: kids are okay no matter how many hours mom works.
In fact, the stress of trying to live up to unrealistic parenting standards is likely more detrimental to children than a lack of time spent together. The so-called Mommy Wars aren’t just hurting women – they’re hurting kids, as well. [..]
But, despite the neverending guilt mothers are expected to feel for working outside the home, the results of the study showed that the amount of time parents – mothers, in particular – spend with young children doesn’t have a statistically significant impact on their development or well-being.
The tech industry, hovering constantly one buzzword away from self-parody, is a hostile environment for mockery. So why are tech companies such zealous April Fools participants, second only perhaps to my cousin, who once pranked my grandmother by snail mail because she’d been warned not to believe anything he said on the phone on 1 April?
This year’s tech industry April Fools’ pranks started sliding out a day in advance. Maybe companies couldn’t bear to keep their jokes under wraps, or maybe they thought they’d sucker more people with a 31 March-dated press release. How else do you explain that, one day before 1 April, we already had Google Panda (a huggable version of Siri), the Samsung Galaxy BLADE edge (which turns your phone into a cleaver), and PACMaps, which merges PacMan with Google Maps. As usual, tech companies are falling all over each other to roll out a gag product, though this is the first time I’ve noticed them being so eager that they bring them out a day early. As usual the offerings are mildly funny, mildly annoying and only barely distinguishable from actual real-life products offered for sale. [..]
Behind the light-heartedness of today’s jokes is a tiny blip of menace: today’s satire is often tomorrow’s reality. On April Fools’ Day we look disconcertingly into our secret cravings and into the future of consumerism, and what we see isn’t all that implausible. No wonder nobody laughs all that hard.
Michelle Goldberg: Indiana Just Sentenced a Woman Convicted of Feticide to Twenty Years in Prison
Indiana’s law allowing discrimination against gay people is not the only reason that the state deserves our opprobrium. It’s also about to become the first state to imprison a woman for what it says is the death of a baby born after an attempted abortion.
On Monday, 33-year-old Purvi Patel, an unmarried woman from a conservative Hindu family who bought abortion drugs online, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the crimes of feticide and neglect of a dependent. It was not the first time that feticide laws, passed under the guise of protecting pregnant women from attack, have been turned against pregnant women themselves. Indiana, after all, was also the state that jailed Bei Bei Shuai, an immigrant who tried to commit suicide by poisoning herself while pregnant, and whose baby later died. But the Patel case is still a disturbing landmark. “Yes, the feticide laws in other states have been used to arrest and sometimes punish the pregnant women herself,” says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which advised Patel’s defense. “This is the first time it’s being used to punish what they say is an attempted self-abortion.” [..]
Indiana strengthened its feticide law in 2009, after a pregnant woman who was shot during a bank robbery lost the twins she was carrying. Under the statute, feticide applies in cases where a “person…knowingly or intentionally terminates a human pregnancy with an intention other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus.” There is an exemption for legal abortion, but no explicit one for self-abortion. Reproductive rights activists like Paltrow have long contended that such laws, championed by conservatives, are a sneaky way of eroding abortion rights, and the Patel case shows that they are right. We’ve reached a point where desperate women who end their pregnancies before viability are going to prison.
Linda Greenhouse: The Supreme Court’s Death Trap
You wouldn’t know it from the death penalty proceeding about to take place in the Boston Marathon case, or from Utah’s reauthorization of the firing squad, or the spate of botched lethal injections, but capital punishment in the United States is becoming vestigial.
The number of death sentences imposed last year, 72, was the lowest in 40 years. The number of executions, 35, was the lowest since 1994, less than half the modern peak of 98, reached in 1999. Seven states, the fewest in 25 years, carried out executions.
California has the country’s biggest death row, with more than 700 inmates. Many more of them die of natural causes – two since mid-March – than by execution. Last July, a federal district judge, Cormac J. Carney, concluding that California’s death penalty had become “dysfunctional,” “random” and devoid of “penological purpose,” declared it unconstitutional (pdf); the state is appealing.
In 2008, two years before he retired, Justice John Paul Stevens renounced the death penalty. His nuanced opinion (pdf) in Baze v. Rees (pdf) rewards rereading. No current justice has taken up the call. I’m not so naïve as to predict that a majority of the Supreme Court will declare the death penalty unconstitutional anytime soon. But the voice of even one member of the court could set a clarifying marker to which others would have to respond. And it just might over time point the way to freeing the court – and the rest of us – from the machinery of death.
Elise Czajkowski: Can Trevor Noah fill Jon Stewart’s big shoes for ‘Indecision 2016’?
This morning, Comedy Central officially announced 31-year-old South African comedian Trevor Noah as the third host of its flagship late-night show, The Daily Show. Noah has been slowly working his way up the ladder of US comedy over the last few years, with his own Showtime special and appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Late Show with David Letterman. When he joined The Daily Show back in December as an international correspondent, it seemed like a forward-thinking move on the part of the network. But it’s a big jump to take over from Jon Stewart, whose wry voice has become a pillar of American satire. [..]
Noah’s presence should an international flavour to the show, hopefully breaking it out of its obsession with the 24-hour news channels and petty Washington bickering. It was Stewart who swung the show sharply towards politics when he took over in 1999; there’s no reason that Noah couldn’t change the direction once again.
Stewart hasn’t officially announced his leaving date, confirming that it will be sometime in 2015. Noah’s tour schedule has him booked at shows in the UK as late as 22 October, which means he’s probably not to take over the chair until late in the year. Between then and now, he’s got a lot of studying to do.
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