“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 Brandeis Raushenbush: Tamir Rice and America’s Legal Crisis
Tamir Rice. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. These three names should be haunting the legal profession because to all too many in America, the names represent a violent rending of the fragile trust that the public has in law and justice in our country.
The recent non-indictment of the police officer involved in the death of Tamir Rice is the latest in a series of what can only be seen as legal roadblocks against those seeking justice for police killing of black Americans.
From my own lay legal understanding, an indictment is not the same as a conviction but an acknowledgement that there is enough evidence to proceed with a serious trial. To the average person looking at the simple facts of the case, there was enough evidence in each of these cases to proceed with a trial. And yet, here we are, shaking our heads, wondering how the pursuit of justice was thwarted yet again.
Dean Baker: Treating Global Warming Denialism Like a Sex Scandal
The Washington Post ran a column last week that blamed the baby boom generation for global warming. Even for the Post this was extraordinarily low. This is not an issue of defending my generation; it is a question of how bad policy persists. And the answer puts the blame far more on media outlets like the Washington Post than people born in the two decades after World War II. [..]
The media know how to press a case like this. They pursued Bill Clinton back in the late 1990s to get to the bottom of his relationship with Monica Lewinski. They repeatedly asked him at press conferences about the relationship, they pursued inconsistencies in his statements, and they followed up with questions to White House staff and political advisors. In short, they do know how to get to the bottom of a scandal when they try.
So let’s see the media attack something a little more important than a fling with a White House intern. How about a headline, “House Speaker Paul Ryan still has nothing to say on global warming: Says he is not sure on issue.” And of course, the follow-up, “Speaker Ryan refuses to talk to scientists about crisis facing planet.”
Eugene Robinson: How Donald Trump destroyed the Republican Party in 2015
History will remember 2015 as the year when The Republican Party As We Knew It was destroyed by Donald Trump. An entity called the GOP will survive — but can never be the same.
Am I overstating Trump’s impact, given that not a single vote has been cast? Hardly. I’m not sure it’s possible to exaggerate how the Trump phenomenon has torn the party apart, revealing a chasm between establishment and base that is far too wide to bridge with stale Reagan-era rhetoric. Can you picture the Trump legions meekly falling in line behind Jeb Bush or Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.)? I can’t either. [..]
Trump has given voice to the ugliness and anger that the party spent years encouraging and exploiting. He let the cat out of the bag, and it’s hungry.
The party might nominate Trump, in which case the establishment will have lost all control. Or party leaders might somehow find a way to defeat him, in which case they will have lost the allegiance of much of the base. In either event, the GOP we once knew is irredeemably a thing of the past.
Steven W. Thrasher: Tamir Rice was killed by white America’s irrational fear of black boys
Since it’s original sin of slavery, America has been obsessed with the fear of black men. Rather than atone for its own sins when it worried about what would happen when slavery ended, white supremacy projected its fears onto black America. It was this irrational, dangerous fear that led to the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.
Consider the results of a recent study, which found that merely hearing that someone had a “black-sounding” name made subjects assume a person was bigger than they actually were, revealing through science again how black men are unfairly presumed to be threats. An officer who arrived on the scene after 12-year-old Tamir had been shot thought “the male looked to be 19 or 20-years-old”.
Walter F. Mondale: America’s Empty Embassies
As the last year has demonstrated, America’s struggle to defend its national interests cannot be won by military force alone. Even as the campaigns against the Islamic State and the Taliban have faltered, American diplomats have made remarkable progress across a number of fronts, from climate change to checking Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Such success depends on making common cause with our allies, an effort led by America’s ambassadors. And yet, thanks to Senate politics, dozens of ambassadorial nominations have been delayed unnecessarily. At one point in 2014, nearly a quarter of the world’s countries lacked an American ambassador, and even today, despite some efforts to approve candidates, a dozen nominations have not received congressional action — including nominees to represent the United States in strategically vital countries like Mexico, Norway and Sweden.
Some of these are still early in the nomination process, but several have received overwhelming bipartisan support in committee, only to see their candidacy halted on the Senate floor.
Rebecca Caroll: I’ll never be able to buy a home. The super wealthy broke the system
The holiday season in New York City means invitations from colleagues and friends to parties at their newly renovated brownstones or apartments they’ve just bought in one of any number of rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The invitations are great, and the parties are lovely – but their home ownership never fails to ignite a fresh new sense of angst for those of us in our fourth decade of life who still don’t own a home and probably never will.
My husband and I do fine – we can (for now) afford to rent an apartment in one of the more appealing Brooklyn neighborhoods, where the average rent rose by 77% between 2000 and 2012. But we fall into both of the criteria that tend to keep home ownership out of reach for middle-income New Yorkers: we come from families who are unable to help financially in any way, much less with a down payment on a New York City apartment. And also, my son and I are black, which makes us, at least partially, a black family.
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