“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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New York Times Editorial: Closing Off Abortion Rights
For the last several years, opponents of abortion rights have cloaked their obstructionist efforts under all manner of legitimate-sounding rationales, like protecting women’s health. This has never been more than an insulting ruse. Their goal, of course, is to end all abortions, and lately they’re hardly trying to pretend otherwise. [..]
The Texas law is only one part of the intensifying nationwide effort to make getting an abortion as difficult as possible, a strategy that always hits poor women hardest. In 26 states, women must wait for a period of time, usually 24 to 48 hours, before going through with the procedure. That number will grow when Tennessee’s new waiting-period law goes into effect in July, and again with the expected signing of a Florida bill. These laws are often paired with a two-visit requirement, making abortions that much more unattainable for women who cannot take the time off from work, especially if they must travel long distances multiple times. [..]
Meanwhile, for millions of women across Texas and the rest of the country, particularly those who are poor or live in rural areas, reproductive freedom is more elusive now than at any time since before Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.
Bruce Fein: Rand Paul Is Right: Republican Neocons Created ISIS
Senator Rand Paul is spot on.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was created and is fueled by Mr. Paul’s lobotomized neocon rivals.
In other words, to paraphrase Walt Kelly’s Pogo about the Vietnam War, Mr. Paul’s foreign policy detractors have met the enemy, and they are them!
With the predictability of the sun rising in the East and setting in the West, power vacuums in primitive political cultures give birth to extremists–religious or otherwise. There are no exceptions. Ruthlessness and fanaticism flourish in a Hobbesian state of nature. [..]
Notwithstanding Lindsey Graham and fellow neocons, I would wager not a single American has lost a wink of sleep worrying about ISIS attacking the United States.
Of them all, only Rand Paul has earned the accolade of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If…
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…you’ll be a Man my son.”
Finally! At last! Bipartisan collaboration in Washington — and what a beaut! President Obama, the Republican Party, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, K Street lobbyists and giant multinational companies are all singing “Kumbaya” and working together to shove through Congress the fast-track legislation that will grease the wheels for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. [..]
On Digby’s Hullaballo blog, the pseudonymous Gaius Publius reports that the fast-track bill may also lead to another deal called the Trade in Services Agreement — TISA — that could remove regulation of everything from financial services to telecommunications to official checks and balances, leaving citizens and consumers at the mercy of unfettered greed.
WikiLeaks has released some of the proposed agreement’s chapters and what’s revealed, Gaius Publius writes, “should have Congress shutting the door on Fast Track faster and tighter than you’d shut the door on an invading army of rats headed for your apartment.”
Rep Keith Ellison: The link between police tactics and economic conditions cannot be ignored
The fatal encounter between Officer Wilson and Michael Brown on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri didn’t take place in a vacuum. Freddie Gray wasn’t the first black man thrown in the back of a van in Sandtown. Eric Garner wasn’t selling loosie cigarettes for fun. Harsh police tactics in black communities and a history of high rates of unemployment and poverty go hand in hand. [..]
Leaders in Washington and around the country should have responded to the growing crisis in African American neighborhoods by creating jobs, repairing infrastructure, avoiding bad trade deals that offshored good-paying jobs in many urban areas and investing in our kids. Instead Congress and state legislatures built prisons, passed trade agreements that sent jobs overseas, gave police weapons designed for warzones and passed laws that increased de facto segregation.
Robert Reich: How to Make the Economy Work for the Many, Not the Few #8: Make the Polluters Pay Us
Instead of investing in dirty fuels, let’s start charging polluters for poisoning our skies – and then invest the revenue so that it benefits everyone.
Each ton of carbon that’s released into the atmosphere costs our nation between $40 and $100, and we release millions of tons of it every year.
Businesses don’t pay that cost. They pass it along to the rest of us–in the form of more extreme weather and all the costs to our economy and health resulting from it.
We’ve actually invested more than $6 trillion in fossil fuels since 2007. The money has been laundered through our savings and tax dollars.
This has got to be reversed.
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