“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 vnaden Heuvel: The GOP Still Doesn’t Get It on Iraq
During a friendly interview on Fox News, a Republican presidential hopeful from Florida was asked a simple question: Was it a mistake to go to war in Iraq?
“No, I don’t believe it was. The world is a better place because Saddam Hussein doesn’t run Iraq,” he said, adding, “Hindsight is always 20/20, but we don’t know what the world would look like if Saddam Hussein was still there.”
That interview took place in March; the candidate was Sen. Marco Rubio. [..]
The uproar on the right was especially remarkable given that hawkish foreign policy has become something of a litmus test in the Republican primary. At the recent South Carolina Freedom Summit, Rubio summed up his strategy toward global terrorism by quoting Liam Neeson’s character from the movie “Taken”: “We will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill you.” In addition, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker-who previously suggested that his crackdown on Wisconsin’s public-sector unions prepared him to take on the Islamic State-told the crowd that the United States needs “a leader who is willing to take the fight to them before they take the fight to us.”
Britney Cooper: White America’s Waco insanity: The shocking realities it ignores about racism & violence
The response to the Twin Peaks shootout says everything you need to know about how white privilege really works
Malcolm X was different. His unflinching honesty about the evils of white racism made even King, formidable orator that he was, scared to debate Malcolm in public. Though he eventually toned down his rhetoric about the people that he was known to refer to as “white devils,” he never backed down from holding white people accountable for their investment in and perpetuation of white supremacy. For instance, in a 1963 public conversation and debate with James Baldwin, Malcolm X told him, “Never do you find white people encouraging other whites to be nonviolent. Whites idolize fighters. …At the same time that they admire these fighters, they encourage the so called ‘Negro’ in America to get his desires fulfilled with a sit in stroke, or a passive approach, or a love your enemy approach or pray for those who despitefully use you. This is insane.”
And indeed we did get a front row seat to such insanity this week, when three biker gangs in Texas, had a shootout in a parking lot that left nine people dead and 18 people injured. More than 165 people have been arrested for their participation in this thuggish, ruggish, deadly, violent, white-on-white street brawl but there has been no mass outcry from the country about this. Though these motorcycle gangs were already under surveillance because of known participation in consistent and organized criminal activity, as Darnell Moore notes at Mic, “the police didn’t don riot gear.” Moore further notes that “leather and rock music weren’t blamed,” and there hasn’t been any “hand-wringing over the problem of white-on-white crime.”
The Republican vision for America is disastrous. Do Democrats have an alternative?
Anyone who donated to Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 or has given money to support a liberal Congressperson is regularly bombarded with fundraising emails from the Democratic Party. Their consistent focus: the overwhelming imperative of stopping the Republicans.
A recent blast from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office warns, “House Republicans just passed a budget that would hit middle class families hard.”
And when Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy, the Democratic National Committee sent an email, studded with ominous photos of Republican presidential candidates, reading, “She’s In For 2016 … So We Need To Know Right Now … Are You?”
But what, exactly, are we supposed to be in for?
Other than vague bromides about “the middle class” and “our values,” it is not clear what the Democratic Party offers as an alternative to conservative ideology. The true believers at the base accept this weak tea because the Republicans are so extreme. But the rallying cry of “stop the other guys” is hardly going to inspire the unconverted.
Gwen Moore: Food stamps for filet mignon? Hardly, despite what paternalistic politicians say
Americans on programs like Snap and Tanf are becoming the target of punishing policies that robs them of their dignity
When you’re trying to feed your family and stretch a dollar, steaks and short ribs don’t make it to your grocery list. As one of nine siblings in a low-income household in Wisconsin, my mother made a habit of buying inexpensive stewing meat for us. These tough cuts of beef came in handy when shopping on a budget, but if Missouri lawmakers have their way, stewing meat will be off the menu for the working class.
Republican State Representatives have recently introduced legislation (pdf) that would regulate the kind of groceries one can purchase with taxpayer money, banning sales with food stamps for “cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak.”
Impoverished Americans and the social safety net programs they depend on have increasingly become the target of forced political paternalism. Politicians at the local, state and federal levels have set behavioral standards as a condition to receive public assistance, ranging from ridiculous to outright unconstitutional. Implemented under the guise of fiscal responsibility and self-sufficiency, efforts to regulate the activities of low-income Americans have emerged all over the country.
Zoë Carpenter: ‘I’m Going to Call a Drone and…Kill You’ and 9 Other Insane Things Lindsey Graham Has Said
The field of Republican presidential contenders does not want for hawks. Marco Rubio is already talking about attacking Iran. Jeb Bush has stacked his foreign policy team with his brother’s neoconservative advisers, including Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz. Scott Walker wants to be “a leader that is willing to take a fight to them before they take the fight to us.” Even Rand Paul has proposed to increase defense spending. (As for the other side, Hillary Clinton has plenty of questions v] to answer about her [support for military intervention.)
Now the flock is about to get a candidate to out-hawk all the others: South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who is expected to announce his bid for the White House on June 1. “I’m running because I think the world is falling apart; I’ve been more right than wrong on foreign policy,” he said Monday on CBS This Morning.
Graham’s foreign policy is essentially a philosophy that force can solve most problems. He pushed aggressively for the invasion of Iraq, for putting boots on the ground in Libya, and for military intervention in Syria. Graham isn’t unique for trying to peddle violence-it’s the fear he uses to market military action that makes him stand out. From his claims that Saddam Hussein was “flat-out lying” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that “chemical weapons in Syria today means nuclear weapons in the US tomorrow,” to his assertion that ISIS “will open the gates of hell to spill out on the world,” Graham’s track record is a long, terrifying trail of hyperbole.
Karen Hansen-Kuhn: Trade Rules Create Obstacle Course for a Better Food System
There were some decidedly Kafkaesque aspects of the Congressional debate this week on Fast Track legislation, designed to speed through the passage of secret trade deals that could have a serious impact on our food system. At first, the Senate refused to approve a bill to limit debate on Fast Track. Then, when the Senate did approve that bill, it turned out the real debate over Fast Track wouldn’t be happening in the Senate at all, but rather in the House (but not yet). [..]
So much of the debate on free trade agreements is about unmasking the corporate agenda in what appear to be obscure legal texts. “Free trade” agreements are for the most part not about trade at all. Writing about Investor-State Dispute Settlement (included in both TPP and TTIP) in The Guardian this week, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz commented, “Rules and regulations determine the kind of economy and society in which people live. They affect relative bargaining power, with important implications for inequality, a growing problem around the world. The question is whether we should allow rich corporations to use provisions hidden in so-called trade agreements to dictate how we will live in the 21st century.”
These rules matter for our food system as well. Whether it’s the GMO labeling law in Vermont, limits on eggs produced in battery cages in California, or ambitious efforts to connect farmers, eaters and decision-makers in food policy councils across the country, people are taking action to create new rules to rebuild our broken food system. On those issues, the bottom line is that trade deals create new obstacles to change.
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