“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 Board: Speaker John Boehner Quits the Arena
Speaker John Boehner’s shocking decision to resign from Congress is a sorry measure of how far right-wing extremism has immobilized the Republican Party and undermined the process of healthy government. [..]
With Mr. Boehner’s decision to retreat and the right wing claiming victory over his ouster, some Republicans seem to think the right wing might drop the Planned Parenthood fight and approve a budget extension bill this month in order to concentrate on the looming leadership fight. This, of course, would be the height of hypocrisy since far-right Republicans have been howling that defunding Planned Parenthood is a matter of life and death.
Now it seems they might welcome a way out of the cliff-hanging scenario they created, since opinion polls indicate that voters would blame the Republicans for any government shutdown.
If nothing else, this intramural brawl makes it ever clearer that congressional Republicans are incapable of governing themselves, much less the nation.
Eugene Robertson: Pope Francis Elevates the Discourse on Capitol Hill
“God bless America” sounds banal coming from politicians but profound when spoken by the shepherd of 1.2 billion souls. In his historic address to Congress, Pope Francis delivered a blessing of encouragement, not admonition – and spoke powerfully about the hot-button issues that keep our political leaders mired in bitter gridlock.
The pope’s words drew warm applause. I wish I could be optimistic that they also touched our leaders’ hearts. [..]
So much of our political life is sour and conflictive. Francis’ message is optimistic and embracing. He reminds us of something elemental but easily forgotten: our common humanity.
With his intellect, charisma, moral authority and irresistible smile, Francis challenges us to remember that whatever our political or theological differences, we are all in this together. For those paying attention, he has shown how to raise our political discourse from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Do you want to live in a country where Internet Service Providers can slow down and censor your internet traffic at will, where the NSA has vastly more power than it does today and where end-to-end encryption may be illegal? Then Jeb Bush is the Republican presidential contender for you: he has positioned himself as the anti-internet candidate in an election where internet rights have never mattered more.
A lot of the White House candidates have made worrying comments about the future of surveillance and the internet – from Chris Christie’s bizarre vow to track 10 million people like FedEx packages, to Hillary Clinton’s waffling on encryption backdoors – but Jeb Bush’s deliberate campaign to roll back internet rights is the perfect storm of awful. {..]
Too often internet and privacy rights get relegated to the end of the table when election season rolls around. But the issues have never been more mainstream – NSA reform and net neutrality rules, unthinkable eight years ago, are all of a sudden inevitable. And the idea that Jeb Bush wants to take those rights away and saddle the internet with yet more corporate control and government surveillance is disturbing, to say the least.
Greg Gonsalves: Martin Shkreli Is Just a Tiny Part of a Huge Problem
Americans were outraged over his 5,000 percent price hike of a life-saving drug. They should see what Big Pharma has in store.
This week, the Internet’s object of hate was Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old hedge-funder turned CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who jacked up the price of Daraprim, an old drug used to treat parasitic infections in the immunosuppressed, from $13.50 to $750 per pill. At first, Shkreli seemed to relish the controversy, taking to Twitter and various talk shows to defend his actions. But his tone-deaf justifications and brash, antagonistic tweets only fueled the backlash. Shkreli was denounced on Twitter as “human garbage,” “a monster,” and “a sociopath.” Politicians from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump called him out, and even the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association of America (PhRMA) disassociated itself from him. Within a few days, Shkreli vowed to reduce the price of the drug-although that did not stop Internet activists from doxing Shkreli by posting his OK Cupid profile, home address, and phone number.
It’s tempting to declare that the Internet triumphed over Shkreli and, in turn, the pharmaceutical industry, but in reality the whole episode is only a tiny skirmish in a long-running battle that drug companies have been waging against the American people. Sadly, the American people are losing the fight-badly-and haven’t paid much attention to the hosing they are getting.
Wenonak Hauter: China Cap-and-Trade Program Not What the Climate Needs
The reported move by China to enact a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions will not begin to solve our climate crisis. Pollution trading signifies a dangerous reliance on the market to address a problem that only a decisive move away from fossil fuels and to renewables can truly solve.
Through a system of ‘credits’ and dubious and unverifiable offsets, cap-and-trade programs essentially create a commodity out of pollution, allowing for financial corporations to profit from polluting industries.
Furthermore, scrutiny of such programs show they don’t work. A recent analysis of the Joint Implementation (JI) program enacted under the Kyoto Protocol in Europe found that only 14 percent of the claimed greenhouse gas reduction offsets under the program were even ‘plausible.’ The offset program resulted in the equivalent of about 600 million additional metric tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.
Hugh McMillan: Private Water and Fracking, a Dubious Duo
Last week, I got to be a fly on the wall at Shale Insight 2015 in Philadelphia, the annual conference of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which includes companies working at all stages of gas drilling, fracking, processing and distribution As you can imagine, I heard some concerning things I while there, but among the more revealing “break-out sessions” was a love-fest between the oil and gas industry and private water industry, sponsored by American Water, the largest private water company in the country.
American Water has aggressively privatized water systems in Pennsylvania and sees dollar signs in the fracking industry’s relentless thirst for water – up to 10 million gallons of water to frack some wells. [..]
Though this partnership may be great if your goal is to generate profits, it is not in the best interest of Pennsylvania residents, who are concerned with ensuring safe affordable water for generations to come.
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