“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 : It’s All Benghazi
So Representative Kevin McCarthy, who was supposed to succeed John Boehner as speaker of the House, won’t be pursuing the job after all. He would have faced a rough ride both winning the post and handling it under the best of circumstances, thanks to the doomsday caucus – the fairly large bloc of Republicans demanding that the party cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, or kill Obamacare, or anyway damage something liberals like, by shutting down the government and forcing it into default.
Still, he finished off his chances by admitting – boasting, actually – that the endless House hearings on Benghazi had nothing to do with national security, that they were all about inflicting political damage on Hillary Clinton.
But we all knew that, didn’t we?
I often wonder about commentators who write about things like those hearings as if there were some real issue involved, who keep going on about the Clinton email controversy as if all these months of scrutiny had produced any evidence of wrongdoing, as opposed to sloppiness.
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Medea Benjamin: The Doctors Without Borders bombing is a symptom of foreign occupation
The Kunduz bombing is a symptom of the underlying disease of foreign occupation. The prescription requires that President Obama keep to the timeline of withdrawing US troops by the end of 2016. The US military presence will not create long-term peace and stability in Afghanistan. On the contrary: as long as US troops are there, militants will fight to oust them. [..]
The American people have long soured on continued military involvement there. Responding to public sentiment, President Obama promised to cut the current force of 10,000 US troops in half by 2016. In March, however, the president announced he would slow the pace of the troop withdrawal and now – with the resurgence of the Taliban – there is a call by many Congressional representatives to keep the troops there for years to come. There is even talk of sending more troops.
That is not the way forward. As Kunduz has shown, US involvement is not the answer to the instability and violence in Afghanistan. Now, what is needed most, are answers about this horrific bombing. And that must start with an independent investigation.
Many politicians held their nose and voted for the USA Freedom Act in June, hoping that the Snowden revelations would recede into the distance with the modest NSA reform bill’s passage. How wrong they were: the Snowden effect continues to ripple throughout the world on matters of privacy and law and it’s possible this second wave is only beginning.
On Tuesday, in a landmark decision, the European Court of Justice invalidated the “safe harbor” provision between the United States and Europe that allowed large tech companies like Google and Facebook to move large amounts of private Europeans’ data into servers in the United States. The case was brought by privacy activist and lawyer Max Schrems after the initial stories about the NSA’s Prism program. As the New York Times reported, the court “made it clear that American intelligence agencies had almost unfettered access to the data, infringing on Europeans’ rights to privacy.”
Benjamin Spoer: We need a public health approach to gun violence
It worked for automobiles and tobacco; it can work for guns
In his address to the nation after the Oct. 1 mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, President Barack Obama asked the media to compare the number of gun deaths in the U.S. to the number of deaths caused by terrorism. While edifying, his comparison didn’t go far enough. Each year guns kill more Americans (including deaths by suicide) than Parkinson’s disease and hypertension, and they kill nearly as many as liver disease and cirrhosis, which would rank guns as the 13th leading cause of death nationwide. Even more disturbing, researchers believe mass shootings, like the one in Roseburg, are contagious, and many in the media have begun to refer to an epidemic of mass shootings.
Gun violence is a public health crisis. Consequently, it’s time to address these shootings and gun violence as a whole using public health tools. The best tool we have is to reduce the number of people exposed to gun violence, and the best example of how to do that comes from the automobile safety movement of the 1960s.
Susan Watson: Alabama’s DMV Shutdown Has Everything to Do With Race
Don’t believe a word of it: It’s all about race.
Despite state officials’ quick denial that the closing of 31 Alabama DMVs has nothing to do with race, it is a fact that the closures – mostly in poor, majority black counties – disproportionately hurts Black voters. Period.
Fifty years ago in Selma, the civil rights movement won a hard fought battle to gain the right to register to vote. It took bloodshed in the streets, lives lost, a march to Montgomery, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act to make sure that African-American citizens had the right to vote. It was all about race.
Unfortunately, some things in Alabama never change. When it comes to making sure people can vote, the state of Alabama has on its hands an avoidable problem. Our legislature passed an unnecessary law that put excessive burdens on citizens by requiring them to get a photo ID in order to exercise their fundamental constitutional right to vote – despite the well-known fact that in-person voter fraud is rare.
Janet Redman: Walking the Talk? World Bank Rhetoric on Climate Undermined by Financing It
At least in rhetoric, World Bank leadership has acknowledged for a quarter century that “the possible risks [of global warming] are too high to justify complacency or evasion.” The Bank itself has cautioned that unabated climate change threatens to reverse hard-earned development gains – and that the poorest countries and communities will suffer the consequences first and worst. The Bank has become increasingly visible at global climate summits and officials regularly comment on the need for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting the climate and making a transition to low-carbon development. However, a sober review of its lending practices reveals the Bank is undermining the cause it purports to champion.
We compared World Bank energy sector financing through the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and International Development Assistance (IDA) for two five-year time periods: 2000 to 2004 and 2010 to 2014.
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