“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.
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel: There’s Finally Momentum Behind Paid Sick Leave
Last week, the Supreme Court upheld a core provision of the Affordable Care Act, quashing the Republican Party’s latest attempt to gut the law through the judicial system. At issue in the case, King v. Burwell, was the government’s ability to provide subsidies to help millions of working Americans purchase health insurance through the federal exchange. Yet, as too many middle-class families know, health insurance is only one of the costs associated with getting sick. For more than 40 million workers who currently lack paid sick leave, another pressing concern is how to afford taking time off.< [..]
To appreciate the momentum for paid sick leave, however, it’s necessary to understand how we got here. The recent passage of multiple laws in rapid succession belies a long struggle to get politicians to take up the cause, even within the ranks of the Democratic Party. Indeed, a closer examination reveals the anatomy of a legislative movement and demonstrates how grassroots pressure can turn what some considered a fringe issue into a political juggernaut.
Wendy R. Davis: Texas women got a reprieve from the state’s anti-abortion law. It might not last
Until I exhaled on Monday, I hadn’t realized that I had been holding my breath.
Like so many people, I spent part of my weekend tearing up as I looked at post after post on social media of committed, loving partners’ marriage photos with a renewed sense of hope that sometimes, “right” actually wins – but then there was the fitful sleep of Sunday night because, still pending before the US supreme court, was a case that would have meant the closure of almost all of Texas remaining reproductive health clinics.
The supreme court had to decide whether the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision to allow the full enforcement of HB2 – Texas’ sweeping anti-abortion law – could stand pending the final outcome of appeals in the case. If they sided with the lower court, it would have forced all but nine of the original 41 clinics in the state to close as of 1 July. With Monday’s stay of the circuit court’s ruling came reason to breath … if only for a little while.
But hundreds of thousands of Texas women await two more decisions in the case: whether the US supreme court will hear the appeal and, if it does, whether it will strike down the challenged provisions of HB2. Reading the supreme court’s majority opinion in the Obergefell same sex marriage case issued on Friday, I feel reason to hope: its findings, rooted in the concepts of equal protection and individual autonomy, ought to extend to reproductive rights as well.
New report sheds light on the covert tactics used to shape public opinion about what we eat
At the turn of the last century, the father of public relations, Edward Bernays, launched the Celiac Project, whose medical professionals recommended bananas to benefit celiac disease sufferers. Those pitched on the sweet fruit’s miraculous properties didn’t know the project was actually created for the United Fruit Co., the largest trader of bananas in the world.
The creation of front groups – independent-sounding but industry-backed organizations – as a public relations strategy dates at least as far back as Bernays’ day. But a new report by Kari Hamerschlag, a senior program manager at the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth; Stacy Malkan, a co-founder of the food industry watchdog U.S. Right to Know; and me shows that such tactics are continuing with ever more scope and scale today.
Zoë Carpenter: The Next Tactic in the Right’s Fight Against Gay Marriage? ‘Religious Liberty’
As a jubilant crowd at the Supreme Court celebrated Friday’s 5-4 ruling that same-sex couples have a right to marry, moans of impotent fury emanated from conservatives in and out of the Court. “The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie,” Justice Antonin Scalia fumed in his dissenting opinion. In his own dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the Court should not worry about human dignity: “Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved,” he wrote. Justice Samuel Alito, also dissenting, fretted that homophobes now “will risk being labeled as bigots.”
Among the field of Republican presidential candidates, the responses ranged from outrage to resignation; none embraced the ruling. Some were quick to throw red meat to the conservative base, ignoring yet another thing the GOP supposedly learned after getting crushed in 2012. But a few of the more serious candidates, who have read the polls and know that aggressive opposition to gay marriage spells trouble in a general election, tried to shift the focus to one of the next issues in the marriage debate, which Nan Hunter explores in detail here-the attempt to frame discrimination as the exercise of “religious liberty.”
Michelle Chen: Shouldn’t Home Care Workers Earn a Living Wage?
Healthcare workers in Massachusetts got good news twice this past week. First, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and its insurance exchange rules-a system expected to add some 360,000 Massachusetts residents to the healthcare rolls. On Friday, about 35,000 workers who are providing disability and senior care through state programs got a major pay raise. Their new wage of $15 an hour puts Massachusetts personal-care assistants at the helm of the low-wage workers’ movement known as the Fight for 15.
George Gresham, president of the home care workers’ union, 1199 SEIU, said in the announcement of the deal, ‘”It is a moral imperative that all home care and healthcare workers receive $15 per hour, and Massachusetts is now a leader in this effort.”
The wage agreement was brokered over several months of talks between the union and Governor Charlie Baker’s administration, for a contract covering one of the country’s largest unionized home care workforces. The raise in the hourly base pay, set to increase from the current $13.38 to $15 by 2018, will cover a majority of the state’s home care workforce, who provide an array of household services, such as daily social support and medical assistance, to seniors and people with disabilities, and now heads for a union ratification vote.
Leslie Savan: In the Wake of Charleston, Fox News Is Perplexed on Just What the Confederate Flag and the N-Word Mean
It’s been quite a week for racist symbols. It took the murder of nine black churchgoers at the hands of a killer steeped in Confederate and apartheid logos and logic, but politicians have started removing rebel flags and other symbols of Dixie from places we’d thought they were nailed to (like Alabama’s capitol grounds, and South Carolina’s, where the Stars and Bars will need a two-thirds majority vote of both houses to come down).
There is even an “Et tu?” quality to the defenestration, since it has often been Republican politicians and corporations like Walmart who have suddenly realized that these symbols can be hurtful “to some.”
And the Charleston murders have galvanized a US president to publicly say the n-word to explain why not ever saying it in public does not magically end racism-anymore, he might have added, than electing a black president does.
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