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.

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New York Times Editorial: The Pentagon’s Dangerous Views on the Wartime Press

The Defense Department earlier this summer released a comprehensive manual outlining its interpretation of the law of war. The 1,176-page document, the first of its kind, includes guidelines on the treatment of journalists covering armed conflicts that would make their work more dangerous, cumbersome and subject to censorship. Those should be repealed immediately. [..]

A spokesman for the National Security Council declined to say whether White House officials contributed to or signed off on the manual. Astonishingly, the official pointed to a line in the preface, which says it does not necessarily reflect the views of the “U.S. government as a whole.”

That inane disclaimer won’t stop commanders from pointing to the manual when they might find it convenient to silence the press. The White House should call on Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to revise this section, which so clearly runs contrary to American law and principles.

Paul Krugman: G.O.P. Candidates and Obama’s Failure to Fail

What did the men who would be president talk about during last week’s prime-time Republican debate? Well, there were 19 references to God, while the economy rated only 10 mentions. Republicans in Congress have voted dozens of times to repeal all or part of Obamacare, but the candidates only named President Obama’s signature policy nine times over the course of two hours. And energy, another erstwhile G.O.P. favorite, came up only four times.

Strange, isn’t it? The shared premise of everyone on the Republican side is that the Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front. Yet the candidates on that stage had almost nothing to say about any of the supposed disaster areas.

And there was a good reason they seemed so tongue-tied: Out there in the real world, none of the disasters their party predicted have actually come to pass. President Obama just keeps failing to fail. And that’s a big problem for the G.O.P. – even bigger than Donald Trump.

Robert Borosage: Change Must Come

The contrast between the Republican disarray and the continued economic growth has rekindled a celebratory sense among Democrats. President Obama heads into his last months in office having, in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s formulation, “failed to fail” the way market fundamentalists predicted. He notes that Obama’s jobs record stacks up with that of Reagan’s “Morning in America” that conservatives tout as the gold standard. The jobs report also strengthened pressure on the Federal Reserve to begin raising interest rates – slowly and cautiously – around September. That too would signal that the economy has finally recovered and its time to unwind emergency measures.

But what is roiling American politics is the simple reality that most Americans are a long way from celebrating a recovery that most haven’t enjoyed. In area after area, this economy is failing Americans. [..]

The reality is that the rules have been rigged. The very structures of this economy – from its trade and tax policies to its corporate governance to the assault on workers to the starvation of public investment in everything from decent schools to modern infrastructure – are skewed to favor profits over wages, the few over the many. This won’t get changed by politics as usual. Getting the growth we need for full employment and for lifting people into the middle class will require fundamental reforms. And, as Sanders noted, that is the debate that Republicans failed to address. Their circus is drawing a big crowd, but the show appalls.

Robert Reich: The Outrageous Ascent of CEO Pay

The Securities and Exchange Commission just ruled that large publicly held corporations must disclose the ratios of the pay of their top CEOs to the pay of their median workers.

About time.

For the last thirty years almost all incentives operating on American corporations have resulted in lower pay for average workers and higher pay for CEOs and other top executives.

Consider that in 1965, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers.

Now, the ratio is over 300 to 1.

Not only has CEO pay exploded, so has the pay of top executives just below them.

Robert Kuttner: Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, And the Power of Disruption

It was a good week for disruptive innovation. Three protestors affiliated with Black Lives Matter shut down Bernie Sanders yet again, this time at a Seattle rally Saturday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump escalated his disruptive impact on the Republican presidential field, with a post-debate remark implying that Fox reporter Megyn Kelly was menstruating when she asked him provocative questions, fittingly, about his coarse put-downs of women.

The two forms of disruption invite comparison.

BLM is disrupting the most progressive candidate in the Democratic field. Why? Because in the year since the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the issue of systemic violence against blacks has still not broken through to become a first-tier issue, even among liberals.  [..]

Trump is a caricature of things that more mannered Republicans have been getting away with for years. He smokes out what the Republicans really stand for. No wonder they are worried. “An out of control car driving through a crowd of Republicans.”

Trump isn’t nice. Neither is Black Lives Matter. The Democrats should be grateful for the form of creative disruption being visited upon them.