Punting the Pundits

“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”.

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New York Times Editorial Board: An Opening for States to Restrict Guns

To listen to the insistent harangues of many gun-rights advocates, one might imagine that the Second Amendment prohibits almost any regulation of firearms.

Fortunately, a majority of the Supreme Court disagrees. On Monday, the court declined to hear a challenge to a Chicago suburb’s law banning semiautomatic assault weapons and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.[..]

It was the 70th time since 2008 that the Supreme Court has declined to consider a lawsuit challenging a federal, state or local gun regulation. This creates a big opportunity for Americans to put pressure on their state and local leaders, especially since Congress refuses to approve even uncontroversial measures like universal background checks for gun sales, which are supported by nearly nine in 10 Americans. Until that changes, states and cities have the constitutional authority and moral obligation to protect the public from the scourge of gun violence.

Trevor Timm: Weak encryption won’t defeat terrorists – but it will enable hackers

After months and months of telling the American public that cybersecurity was the nation’s number one priority and that it’s “impossible to overstate” the threat from hackers, the FBI director and many senators spent Wednesday calling for a law that would indisputably weaken online security for everyone.

In the name of fighting terrorism, and emboldened by the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, the FBI director Jim Comey was in front of Congress again trying to scare Americans about the supposed dangers of encrypted messaging apps that are used by billions of people. [..]

Bizarrely, Comey told the Senate that whether or not tech companies decide to introduce backdoors in their encryption is “not a technical issue” but it’s a “business model question”. That’s a strange thing to say since a large group of the world’s leading computer scientists wrote a paper explaining that it is a technical issue, and that you can’t create a backdoor without making everyone’s communications more vulnerable to all sorts of hackers, whether they be private criminal elements or foreign governments.

David Dayen: The Only Question Clinton and Sanders Need to Answer

How would they handle our divided government better than Obama has?

Republican success in the 2010 elections allowed them, in most cases, to draw congressional maps to their advantage. As a result it’s extremely likely that the next president, if he or she is a Democrat, will see control of Congress in the hands of the opposite party for at least an entire first term. That makes Democratic candidates’ pronouncements on taxes or health care or education or regulatory policy nice to know, but less vital than how they would manage divided government.

We can see how critical this question is through the example of the current Democrat in the White House. The Obama administration has staked out multiple strategies in the five years since Republicans regained at least one house of Congress. Initially, Obama tried active involvement, partnering with Republicans to try to get things he wanted. That backfired during the disastrous 2011 negotiations over the debt limit, which resulted in the destructive Budget Control Act, a huge win for the Republican vision of limited government. The deal generated trillions of dollars in spending cuts, and an artificial budget cap that endures to this day, even as Congress and the White House have attempted to limit the damage from sequestration.

Scott Lemieux: Affirmative Action is back in court. Arguments against it made no sense

American conservatives have been engaged in a long war against the constitutionality of affirmative action at public universities and other institutions. The latest battle reached the US supreme court on Wednesday, as the justices once again heard oral arguments in Fisher v University of Texas, the challenge to the school’s affirmative action program.

Supporters of what is still frequently a necessary policy have reason to be pessimistic. Meanwhile, students who have benefited (or are perceived to have benefited from) such programs have reason to be outraged, after US supreme court justice Antonin Scalia essentially argued that they might not be equipped to profit from admittance to certain high-quality institutions. [..]

As the 5th circuit court of appeals observed in its opinion upholding the UT affirmative action program, Fisher almost certainly would not have been admitted even if UT used strictly race-neutral admissions criteria. The argument that colleges should not even consider the racial diversity of its student body in order to give white applicants with poor qualifications a very slightly better chance doesn’t strike me as a very compelling one.

And I must have missed Scalia condescendingly suggesting that Fisher would have been better off at a less-demanding school.

Richard Gere: Tibet is the canary in the coal mine

It was Dec. 10, 1989, and the Dalai Lama had just emerged from his Oslo hotel in the winter dusk after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I was among supporters from all over the world waiting there to celebrate a symbolic moment — the first global recognition not only of this humble monk in exile but also of his cause, his land and the people and wisdom culture of Tibet. [..]

One of the reasons the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Dalai Lama was for his promotion of global interdependence and protection of the environment. In his acceptance speech, he said, “Both science and the teachings of the Buddha tell us of the fundamental unity of all things. This understanding is crucial if we are to take positive and decisive action on the pressing global concern with the environment.”

This vision has never been needed more, as governments attempt to forge a global treaty to limit carbon emissions and bring financial assistance to the poor, who will be the worst hit by a threat that is potentially more catastrophic than any war or disaster ever known.