“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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Paul Krugman: Seriously Bad Ideas
One thing we’ve learned in the years since the financial crisis is that seriously bad ideas – by which I mean bad ideas that appeal to the prejudices of Very Serious People – have remarkable staying power. No matter how much contrary evidence comes in, no matter how often and how badly predictions based on those ideas are proved wrong, the bad ideas just keep coming back. And they retain the power to warp policy.
What makes something qualify as a seriously bad idea? In general, to sound serious it must invoke big causes to explain big events – technical matters, like the troubles caused by sharing a currency without a common budget, don’t make the cut. It must also absolve corporate interests and the wealthy from responsibility for what went wrong, and call for hard choices and sacrifice on the part of the little people.
George Zornick: The Case Against Fast Track
The day is upon us: After months of increasingly heated debate, the House of Representatives will vote Friday on granting fast-track trade authority to President Obama and his successors in the White House. The Senate has already passed fast-track legislation, and if it gets through the House this week, it makes the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership a near-lock to pass sometime later this year.
For that to happen, Republicans will have to hold defections to a minimum, because only around 20 Democrats are expected to vote for the bill. Why has fast track raised such consternation among labor groups, economists, and progressive activists?
We’ve tried to distill all the basic objections here. The White House and leading Republicans have had ample forums to make their case for fast track, and plenty of outlets have duly presented the pro-trade arguments. But here’s the case against fast track.
Remember-this just concerns the actual granting of trade promotion authority, which is what Congress is considering Friday. Objections to the actual TPP pact are far more voluminous, and for another day.
In 2003 the CIA captured a Pakistani named Majid Khan, took him to an overseas black site, and began to torture him. According to Khan, interrogators beat him, waterboarded him, and hung him from a beam naked for days. He spent most of one year in the dark. They threw ice water on him, deprived him of sleep, and subjected him to “violent enemas.” Even his memories of the abuse were not his own; the CIA has considered recollections of interrogation to be classified information, thus forbidding detainees from speaking or writing publicly about their experiences. Notes taken by Khan’s lawyers were finally cleared for release in May, and were reported by Reuters last week.
The grisly new details of Khan’s treatment indicate that we are still far from a public accounting of the full extent of the CIA’s interrogation tactics, much less accountability for the officials involved. But there is new movement in the Senate to reinforce the prohibition on torture, so that the CIA cannot do to others what it did to Khan.
Amy Kapczynski and Judith Resnik: No Fast Track for Unfair Trade Deals
This week, the House of Representatives faces a critical question: Should it endorse “fast track” approval of trade deals negotiated by the president? A massive new trade agreement — the Trans-Pacific Partnership (“TPP”) — hangs in the balance. The agreement is shrouded in secrecy because under national security provisions, its text is classified. We do know that the agreement will be between the US and eleven other countries. From draft chapters released on WikiLeaks, we also know enough to want to slow down — not to speed up — deliberation on the treaty.
According to the leaks, a key aspect of the TPP will be the provision of “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS). The name sounds innocuous, but its content puts at risk core elements of the American legal system — America’s commitment to open courts and equal treatment.
Domestic investors, along with ordinary people, bring claims to court when they believe that they have been harmed by government action. But under the ISDS provisions, thousands of foreign companies would gain the right to opt-out of the public court system and instead to use private, ad hoc arbitral tribunals to challenge any number of US laws that the companies argue harms their profitability.
Ari Berman: A Voter-Fraud Witch Hunt in Kansas
In fall 2010, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach held a press conference alleging that dead people were voting in the state. He singled out Alfred K. Brewer as a possible zombie voter. There was only one problem: Brewer was very much alive. The Wichita Eagle found the 78-year-old working in his front yard. “I don’t think this is heaven, not when I’m raking leaves,” Brewer said.
Since his election in 2010, Kobach has been the leading crusader behind the myth of voter fraud, making headline-grabbing claims about the prevalence of such fraud with little evidence to back it up. Now he’s about to become a lot more powerful.
On Monday, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a bill giving Kobach’s office the power to prosecute voter-fraud cases if county prosecutors decline to do so and upgrading such charges from misdemeanors to felonies. Voters could be charged with a felony for mistakenly showing up at the wrong polling place. No other secretary of state in the country has such sweeping prosecutorial power, says Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.
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