“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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Michael Winship: Congress Is a Confederacy of Dunces
Already we’re deep into September and Congress has reconvened in Washington, prompting many commentators to compare its return after summer’s recess to that of fresh-faced students coming back to school, sharpening their pencils, ready to learn, be cooperative and prepared for something new.
This, of course, is where the analogy crumbles.
For this particular Congress to cooperate and do something new would require a miracle on the order of loaves and fishes — perhaps Pope Francis can do something about that when he’s on the Hill next week. His Holiness may be the only hope.
What’s happening is just the latest virulent iteration of the strategy with which the Republicans have infected Congress from the night Barack Obama became president. Make governing impossible (as the old P.J. O’Rourke saying goes, “The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”). Shut down democracy, if that’s what it takes. Keep from happening anything that helps and protects the 99 percent or threatens the plutocracy.
Linda Sarsour: Ahmed Mohamed is just one example of the bigotry American Muslims face
Parents like me send our children to school every weekday morning entrusting the adults there to educate them and to cultivate, encourage and promote innovation and creativity among them. More importantly, I trust that my children are protected from any harm – not arrested and interrogated without my presence or that of an attorney by law enforcement officers for trying to intellectually impress the very adults we ask them to trust and with whom they spend most of their days. [..]
But as much as I am outraged at the treatment this young boy endured, I’m dumbfounded at the ignorance of the adults in his school including the police who literally cannot tell the difference between a clock, a bomb and a “fake bomb”, let alone the kind of kid who might bring any of the above. What message does Ahmed’s treatment by his own teachers send to American Muslim students, aspiring inventors, innovators and engineers? We have spent billions of dollars promoting the math and sciences in schools across the United States – but I guess the people who designed those outreach efforts didn’t mean for Muslim kids to take the bait.
The only plausible explanation for a teacher at a school chartered for innovation to respond to a student’s invention with incarceration is that the student was Sudanese American and Muslim, and the teacher, like many Americans, had been saturated with anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamophobia.
Even if Donald Trump goes away, the Republican Party isn’t climbing out of the fever swamps anytime soon.
Luckily for the GOP, most people had probably tuned out by the time last night’s interminable Republican debate hit the two hour and 50 minute mark, when it reached peak craziness. That was when Donald Trump repeated his claim that childhood vaccines cause autism, invoking an employee’s child who “went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”
This would have been a good time for someone on the stage to stand up for reality, on an issue where they could count on some degree of conservative support. After all, in a recent poll,
After all, in a recent poll, 57 percent of self-described conservatives said that kids whose parents refuse vaccination shouldn’t be allowed to attend public school. One would think there would be ideological space for someone to whack Trump for parroting left-leaning B-list entertainers like Jenny McCarthy. Instead, the exchange left viewers with the sense that everyone on stage thought Trump had a point. [..]
What is clear, however, is that even if Trump goes away, the Republican Party isn’t climbing out of the fever swamps anytime soon. There were two figures on stage who made occasional gestures towards rationality. Rand Paul criticized militarism and the war on drugs. John Kasich came out against shutting down the government over Planned Parenthood, and insisted that it’s not realistic to promise to tear up the Iran nuclear agreement on day one of a new administration. In a CNN poll taken shortly before the debate, their combined support was 5%. Nothing that happened last night seems likely to change that.
Amy B. Dean: Universal pre-K is the next great public policy crusade
High-quality pre-kindergarten should concern everyone – not just liberals
A clear majority of Americans agree: high-quality preschool should be guaranteed by the public, just as our primary and secondary schools are. It’s an idea that Democrats are hoping to add to their legacy – something to stand along aside Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and the Earned Income Tax Credit as lasting institutions in American life. But it’s also a policy that even business-minded Republicans have reason to support. Not only does it provide a cost-effective educational intervention for our kids; it also gives their parents the freedom to participate in the job market.
On July 7, Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania introduced legislation to Congress proposing state-run pre-kindergarten programs that would be freely available to families earning less than $48,000 a year. Unfortunately, Casey’s bill, which was an amendment to No Child Left Behind, has stalled on Capitol Hill. However, at the state level, several Republican governors have already gotten behind their own proposals, creating bipartisan support for an issue whose time has come.
Robert Reich: Why We Must Fight the Attack on Planned Parenthood
On Thursday, right-wing extremists in the U.S. House of Representatives will vote to try to defund Planned Parenthood, one of the nation’s largest providers of women’s health care and family planning services.
Planned Parenthood is under attack and it’s up to all of us to fight back. Any society that respects women must respect their right to control their own bodies. There is a strong moral case to be made for this — but this video isn’t about that. This is about the economics of family planning — which are one more reason it’s important for all of us to stand up and defend Planned Parenthood. [..]
Public investments in family planning — enabling women to plan, delay, or avoid pregnancy — make economic sense, because reproductive rights are also productive rights. When women have control over their lives, they can contribute even more to the economy, better break the glass ceiling, equalize the pay gap, and much more.
Jeb Lund: Donald Trump owns this election. All we can do is lean into the weirdness
If the 2012 presidential election was the first real internet election, this one seems destined to be the first viral one. The viral plane is one of pseudo-real, pseudo-crowdsourced, pseudo-communication, in which some “content” takes control of everyone’s consciousness despite the fact that few if any of us overtly care for or respect the thing. Virality is housed in a place beyond our objections, and saturates us all.
All of this is to say that this is the Trump election, whether he wins or not. Our politics is now simply a reality television show and a clickbait article mashed together, and it may be better for all of us, psychologically, if we just play along.
The structure of Wednesday’s debates reveals the truth of this thesis: it was a two-tiered phenomenon of pseudo-elimination created by the pseudo-metrics of polling, which is dependent less on any rigor about the subjects’ engagement with policy and far more on their reactive engagement with whatever’s flared up and infected us all digitally.
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