Punting the Pundits

“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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

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Trevor Timm: Republicans have no interest in peace. The Iran talks proved that

A small part of the Middle East may soon be off limits to US bombing and killing, so naturally Republicans and their neocon allies are furious.

The tentative Iran deal announced on 3 April, in which Western leaders and the Islamic republic agreed on strict limits to Iran’s nuclear program, was hailed by many as a breakthrough, given that it could avert yet another US-led war in the Middle East. So almost immediately, it was denounced by key conservative members of Congress, neocons, and Republican presidential candidates, whose unquenched thirst for blood almost always outweighs their supposed commitment to peace. [..]

When neocons like Bolton come out of the woodwork to denounce the chance for peace with Iran, it’s always amusing to remember the people most responsible for helping the country to start its nuclear energy program: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They pushed President Ford to sign a deal to sell Iran nuclear material in 1976, but somehow that’s never brought up when Fox News is calling Iran “the devil”.

There’s still a long way to go this deal can become a signed pact, but given that the terms were better than expected, the Obama administration seems to have finally done something that could have lasting positive impact on the Middle East.

Joan Walsh: The right’s “cake” insanity: You won’t believe how it’s trying to deflect the Indiana backlash

“Cake is speech.”

That’s what Indiana Baptist pastor Tim Overton told NPR’s Steve Inskeep Thursday morning, defending his state’s controversial “religious freedom” law. I thought it was so funny, I immediately tweeted it.

But as the day went on, it became clear that Overton’s argument wasn’t some fringe theory: It’s shaping up as a core tenet of one “compromise” approach to religious freedom laws that’s under consideration, in the wake of the backlash to the Indiana law, which Overton fervently supported as written. It’s at the heart of the fix to the law Jeb Bush pushed Wednesday night with pro-gay rights Republican donors. [..]

For the far right, of course, even Indiana’s compromise is going too far. (Santorum is “disappointed” in his “dear friend” Mike Pence.) My friend Greg Sargent thinks it’s progress that some space has opened up within the GOP to at least debate these issues, and I guess that’s true. But the religious freedom argument should be simple: If your religion tells you it’s wrong to be gay, then don’t have gay sex, or get gay married. It’s amazing to watch Bush and others contort themselves to make floral arranging and cake baking a form of religious expression, to pander to the far right, though it’s not likely to work. This debate will get sillier before it’s settled.

Heather Digby Parton: Religious right’s next crusade: What they want to throw women in jail for now

It’s been heartening to see such a strong reaction to Indiana’s new law enabling bigotry against gay people over the past few days. A bright light is now shining on the cleverly framed “Religious liberty” movement and it’s going to be politically risky in the future for any officials to use the Supreme Court’s “Hobby Lobby” invitation to social conservatives to use a religious liberty doctrine to allow businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians. This is very good news. The Big Money Boyz decided that it was bad for business and the only people to whom conservative leaders listen more closely than the members of the religious right are the leaders of corporate America.

Unfortunately, as you will undoubtedly recall, the Hobby Lobby decision, which for the first time granted religious status to a corporation, wasn’t actually about gay rights. It was about denying female employees health insurance coverage for contraception due to the employers religious objection. (The employee’s beliefs were not deemed to be relevant.) So far, there hasn’t been much outcry against that in Indiana or elsewhere. Indeed, in Indiana the clock has been turned so far back on women’s rights that they are now imprisoning women for having abortions. Yes, you read that right.

David Sirota: Wall Street Democrats are on notice: Andrew Cuomo, Rahm Emanuel and the party’s new civil war

For those pining for a Democratic Party that tries to represent more than the whims of the rich and powerful, these are, to say the least, confusing times. [..]

It would be easy to conclude that the status quo is winning Democratic politics – but a series of high-profile elections shows the trends are markedly different outside the national political arena.

Two years ago, the era of billionaire Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Wall Street-worshiping city politics ended when populist Democrat Bill de Blasio and a slate of progressive city councilors backed by New York’s Working Families Party were swept into office promising to increase taxes on millionaires and fund universal pre-kindergarten. A year later, New York’s conservative Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his $40 million campaign war chest couldn’t muster two-thirds of the Democratic primary vote against an unknown progressive opponent named Zephyr Teachout. Though Cuomo was ultimately reelected, he was humiliated, and his future prospects have been significantly diminished.

Now comes Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel has shuttered schools, handed out big corporate subsidies, blocked a financial transaction tax and pushed for cuts to city workers’ retirement benefits. He made the old corporate Democratic assumption, betting that he could easily win reelection by simply spending opponents into the ground.

Lambasted as “Mayor 1 Percent,” Emanuel has been forced to champion more progressive policies to try to appease the Democratic base – he suddenly backed a $13 minimum wage and signed an ordinance compelling developers to pony up more cash for affordable housing. His underfinanced opponent Garcia still may lose the April 7th election, but in a city that has for decades been under the thumb of corporate Democrats’ political machine, a deeper victory for progressives has already happened.

Maarcy Wheeler: FBI’s brazen terrorism lie: What the Boston Marathon bombing trial reveals about America’s deluded terror narrative

Close to the end of the March 25 testimony in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial for his role in the April 25, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the government submitted a series of exhibits with chats from the defendant. One described (pdf) wanting President Obama to win the Presidential election as the “lesser of two evils” but asserting “killing Muslims is the only promise Obama or Mitt Romney] will fulfill.” One [joked (pdf) about sex even while discussing studying the Quran. Another described transferring from UMass Dartmouth (in reality, Dzhokhar was already failing out), joking about transferring to an Ivy League school, but ending by saying “I wanna bring justice for my people.” These were chats with no context, simply read by an FBI agent, without even any guidance about with whom Dzhokhar was chatting.

About the only one that made sense was one from December 25, 2012 that read “Doing something with Tamerlan,” Dzhokhar’s older brother who would go on to be killed in a police shoot out after the attack. “I’ll hit you up in a bit bro.”

But when the defense tried to introduce related chats, noting how religious Tamerlan had become and explaining that the older brother had influenced Dzhokhar so much he had been sober for a month, the witness said he wasn’t sure it was about Dzhokhar’s older brother.

It was just an example of the degree to which the prosecution in the marathon trial are cherry picking narrowly from the complex cultural world of Dzhokhar, a Chechen immigrant who grew up steeped in American culture in Cambridge, MA.

Sen. Bernie Sanders: The Political Revolution We Desperately Need

The good news is that the economy today is much better than it was six years ago when George W. Bush left office. The bad news is that, despite these improvements, the 40-year decline of the American middle class continues. Real unemployment is much too high, 35 million Americans continue to have no health insurance and more of our friends and neighbors are living in poverty than at almost any time in the modern history of our country.

Meanwhile, as the rich become much richer, the level of income and wealth inequality has reached obscene and unimaginable levels. In the United States, we have the most unequal level of wealth and income distribution of any major country on earth, and worse now then at any other time since the 1920s. Today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent of our nation owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and one family owns more wealth than the bottom 42 percent. In terms of income, 99 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent. [..]

Clearly, the struggle to create a nation and world of economic and social justice and environmental sanity is not an easy one. But this I know: despair is not an option if we care about our kids and grandchildren. Giving up is not an option if we want to prevent irreparable harm to our planet.

We must stand up and fight back. We must launch a political revolution which engages millions of Americans from all walks of life in the struggle for real change. This country belongs to all of us, not just the billionaire class.

Please join the grass-roots revolution that we desperately need.