“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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David Cay Johnston: The lethally high price of cheap oil
The incredibly cheap gasoline we enjoy comes at a stiff price, though the costs we bear are not so obvious as the figures posted at the pump. Now would be an excellent time to choose to pay a smart price, which includes a tax for carbon, because that which is cheap often proves very expensive in the long run. [..]
Heating oil and natural gas prices are also low right now, another boon to pocketbooks in the coming months, especially in the Midwest, Great Lakes and Northeast with their subfreezing winter temperatures.
Cheap gasoline and home heating fuels help explain why, despite a Congress focused on social issues instead of employment, the economy continues expanding with a record 69 months of private sector job growth totaling 13.7 million added jobs.
But just as every solution creates new problems, every drop in price comes with a cost.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Once again, California leads the way
At the Paris Climate Change Conference, the world’s nations are pledging their first real steps toward addressing catastrophic climate change. Yet in this country, Republicans in Congress are already vowing to block President Obama’s program, while their presidential candidates scorn scientists’ alarm. Even if Democrats hold the White House in 2016, inaction and obstruction will remain the order of the day in Washington.
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) says, “Somebody has to wake up the country to the real danger” and break the stalemate in Washington. And he is nominating himself to be that somebody.
Brown led a major delegation of state officials to Paris and garnered international attention, arguing that “the real source of climate action has to come from states and provinces. . . . We’re going to build up such a drumbeat that our national counterparts — they’re going to listen.”
Gary Younge: Donald Trump shows hate speech is now out and proud in the mainstream
Those who have been asking if it was necessary to take Donald Trump’s candidacy seriously finally have their answer.
The fact that he has topped almost every poll for the Republican nomination for the past four months was always being weighed against the obvious – he’s a buffoon, with a comb over as brazen, ridiculous and outlandish as his rhetoric. He has offended women, Mexicans, disabled people, Jews, Chinese and immigrants. [..]
The fact that his xenophobic binge has done little to damage his status among the Republican faithful says a great deal about the party. But the narrow question of what these outbursts do to his electoral prospects is secondary to the damage they are clearly doing to American political life.
Once discrimination on this scale enters the political market, it debases the currency of a democracy and leaves everything weaker and everyone more divided. He wouldn’t be the first political figure to make the transition from ridiculous to dangerous before the media and political elites realised the joke was really on them.
Kathy Kelly: The Danger of Care
Here in Kabul, I’ve been with fellow activists to see Khalid Ahmad, aged 20, who survived the U.S.’s October 3 attack on the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The attack killed 31 people and the U.S. is refusing to allow an independent investigation. Kunduz is about 210 miles from here. Two hospitals close to Kunduz couldn’t handle Khalid’s injuries, and so the relatives rushed him to the EMERGENCY hospital in Kabul where he is now recovering from a severe shrapnel injury to his spine. [..]
After events like the Kunduz attack, the U.S. military generally asserts that protection of civilians is impossible in wartime. This argument becomes the excuse for so seldom even making an attempt to protect civilians. When the U.S. government chooses to wage war, high principles are cited, vaunting the U.S. responsibility to protect U.S. people from harm. But the U.S. doesn’t acknowledge that innocent men, women and children will be killed, maimed, traumatized and displaced. The U.S. government refuses to undertake even a tiny fraction of the ongoing risk that the brave carers, the humanitarian relief workers in Kabul and Kunduz, have taken to protect the safety of people actually in need.
The choice to be perfectly safe or to be fully human now faces every person in the United States and in any country governed by countries waging wars on behalf of their supposed security. “If we care about people,” concludes Luca, “we cannot choose war.”
Jeb Lund: Donald Trump’s Muslim hatred doesn’t deserve a counter-argument
Addressing a crowd aboard the USS Yorktown on Monday, Trump repeated statements he’d made earlier in the day, calling for a ban on admitting any Muslims to the United States: Muslims wanting to vacation, Muslim Americans coming home from abroad, refugees, anyone. His call was either brilliant or awful, tactically speaking – which is to say, shallowly. Sometimes awful doesn’t need parsing.
Trump cannily recognizes that his extremism bedevils establishment Republicans. Publicly saying things a chunk of the conservative base yells at reruns of Cops is bad form. It mars the high-class brand. [..]
If there is one thing America has gotten very good doing, it’s the minimum. And telling Donald Trump to pound sand doesn’t even require leaving the spiritual couch. This once, we can pair our indolence to our nobility, cast a wary gaze at our growing to-do list, and then glance at this nearly criminal indecency and say no. I’m sorry. We don’t even have to say who we’re apologizing to.
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