“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 “Punting the Pundits”.
Paul Krugman: Despair, American Style
A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are “down on America,” and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political enemies look ever more at odds with reality.
Yet there is a darkness spreading over part of our society. And we don’t really understand why.
There has been a lot of comment, and rightly so, over a new paper by the economists Angus Deaton (who just won a Nobel) and Anne Case, showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans has been rising since 1999. This deterioration took place while death rates were falling steadily both in other countries and among other groups in our own nation.
Evan Greer: The clock is ticking on a time bomb that could blow up a free internet: the TPP
After years of secrecy, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement has finally been released to the public. The shadowy process and overreaching scope of the deal have sparked an international outcry; it’s been roundly condemned as an attack on worker’s rights, the environment, public health, small businesses and startups.
But perhaps the biggest concern is over the impact that it will have on the internet.
TPP is a legally binding pact negotiated between 12 countries, including the United States. Industry lobbyists and government bureaucrats huddled for months in closed-door meetings to draft and debate the deal while journalists, human rights advocates and tech experts were locked out. It can’t accurately be called a “trade deal”. Its 30 chapters and 6,194 pages cover a dizzying range of policy questions that have nothing to do with tariffs, imports or exports.
Bill Scher: Building On The Keystone Victory
President Obama’s decision to reject the permit for the Keystone oil pipeline is a major victory for the environmental movement, but as activist leaders fully recognize, killing one project is not enough to save the climate. Now is the time to use the momentum from the Keystone decision, and mobilize for a broad cap on carbon emissions and a massive investment in clean energy jobs.
Environmental leaders deserve credit for maintaining pressure despite long odds. A State Department analysis in January 2014 concluded the Canadian tar sands would be tapped whether or not the pipeline was built, leading many to believe approval was imminent. But activists challenged the report’s findings and the battle continued.
Public opinion never turned against the pipeline, and a bipartisan majority passed legislation earlier this year mandating the pipeline be built. But environmental voices still rang loud and Obama vetoed the bill.
Norman Solomon: The Digital Dog Ate Our Civil-Liberties Homework: “It’s Just the Way It Is”
Of all the excuses ladled out for the Obama administration’s shredding of the Fourth Amendment while assaulting press freedom and prosecuting “national security” whistleblowers, none is more pernicious than the claim that technology is responsible.
At first glance, the explanation might seem to make sense. After all, the capacities of digital tech have become truly awesome. It’s easy to finger “technology” as the driver of government policies, as if the president at the wheel has little choice but to follow the technological routes that have opened up for Big Brother.
Now comes New York Times reporter Charlie Savage, telling listeners and viewers of a Democracy Now interview that the surveillance state is largely a matter of technology: “It’s just the way it is in the 21st century.”
John Nichols: The Republican Debate Fiasco Is About to Get Dumb and Dumber
The Republican presidential debates, a mangled attempt at discourse that everyone is now complaining about, are going to get a whole lot worse. It is not the fault of inept or partisan moderators. It is not even the fault of inept or partisan candidates—although they do bear some responsibility for this rolling fiasco. It is the fault of the Republican National Committee and the media partners with which the RNC has cooked up an indefensibly arbitrary system for determining who can and who cannot debate.
The RNC and media outlets such as the Fox Business Channel, which will host the next debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday, have decided to rely on national polls to determine whether credible contenders for the presidency of the United States are afforded a forum or kicked to the curb. In so doing they have not merely affronted basic premises of American democracy; they have set up a scenario where the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan will have debates with fewer and fewer serious voices.
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