“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.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past [https://thestarshollowgazette.com/tag/Punting%20the%20Pundits “Punting the Pundits”].
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Dean Baker Federal Government as Employer: High Road or Bottom Feeder?
The federal government has long been a model employer. It often has taken the lead in providing workers with benefits like on-site child care, paid family leave, and flexible work-time options in addition to more standard benefits like health care insurance and pensions. After seeing that these sorts of benefits could be provided at a reasonable cost, private employers often follow suit. Usually the first private adopters are large firms, but if the largest firms can provide benefits without too much disruption, smaller firms are likely to go this route as well, in part to be able to compete for workers.
Through this mechanism, the labor practices of the federal government can have a substantial impact on the larger labor market, even without legislation by Congress mandating specific practices.
Mary Turck: Local Elections Matter
Today is Election Day in the U.S., but Americans will stay home in droves. Why? Because these are local elections, not the every-four-years presidential circus or even the even-year elections of senators, members of Congress, state legislators and most governors. Local elections matter, but with the media focused on the 2016 presidential candidates, voters may not realize the high stakes in the thousands of local races. [..]
Local governments decide on a wide range of issues that affect the daily lives of their residents. City, county, school board and other local government elections often carry immediate consequences for constituents. Among other things, local officials make decisions about schools, transportation, business development, zoning and housing, law enforcement and courts and taxes.
Chelsea E. Manning: Fisa courts stifle the due process they were supposed to protect. End them
The US intelligence community is in a very poor position to be trusted with protecting civil liberties while engaging in intelligence work. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you’re a skilled intelligence professional, everything looks like a vital source for collection.
Members of the intelligence community are, it’s true, under immense stress to prevent a devastating national catastrophe. I understand a little of how that feels: while working as an analyst in Iraq, thousands of military personnel, contractors and local civilians were dependent on our ability to effectively understand the threats we were facing, and to explain them to US military commanders, the commanders of Iraqi forces and the civilian leadership of both nations.
Les Leopold: How Did We Become Incarceration Nation?
Our political and media elites should be ashamed of themselves. It’s taken nearly 20 years for them to realize that we are the largest police state in the world — that we have more prisoners than China or Russia both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population.
This Rip Van Winkle awakening is now leading to handwringing calls for the release of minor “offenders” and rethinking the arrest of people for selling cigarettes on street corners or “driving while black.”
Incredibly, the head of the FBI frets that a new crime wave may result from being too mindful about preventing overt, racist police brutality — the so-called Ferguson Effect. But of course, he has no explanation for how the “home of the free” became a gulag.
Lauren Carasik: US may be complicit in war crimes in Yemen
The conflict in Yemen has been overshadowed by the crisis in Syria, though the former accounted for more deaths by explosions than any other conflict during the first seven months of this year.
Eight months after Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies began an aerial campaign against the Houthi rebels, the civilian death toll continues to mount. More than 5,600 people, including 2,615 civilians and 500 children, have been killed since March. The vast majority of civilian deaths are attributable to coalition airstrikes. [..]
Complicit in the growing humanitarian disaster is the United States and its unchecked arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf allies. The Barack Obama administration agreed to transfer more than $64 billion in weapons and services to members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) during its first five years. On Oct. 20, the U.S. government approved an $11.25 billion deal to sell warships to Saudi Arabia, ignoring calls from human rights activists to refrain from selling certain military equipment in light of the civilian toll it is inflicting. In continuing to provide weapons, intelligence and logistical support to Riyadh, including precision rockets and internationally banned cluster munitions, the U.S. is contributing to Yemen’s suffering.
Recent Comments