“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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Heather Digby Parton: They’re already trying to steal 2016: Inside the GOP voting-rights scheme intended to derail democracy
Ever since African-American men were granted the right to vote with the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, programs were enacted to make it impossible for them to exercise the franchise. And needless to say, the passage of the 19th Amendment 50 years later, which opened the franchise to women, only resulted in even more programs to deny African-Americans their ability to vote in many states. All of this was quite legal under the states’ rights doctrine until the 1960s, when President Johnson and Congress finally passed the Voting Rights Act, which put the federal government in charge of monitoring the election processes of jurisdictions that were proven to have discriminated in the past. Trying to keep racial and ethnic minorities from voting is as American as apple pie. [..]
These people play a very long game. But it’s unlikely they will be able to suppress the Latino vote forever. Their hostility may be intimidating to an older generation but the new generation is not going to accept this. And there are a whole lot of young Americans of Hispanic descent. If they vote, this right-wing program will finally fail and fail spectacularly. And it will likely take the whole Republican agenda down with it. These young Americans will never identify with such a party. These conservative bigots are sowing the seeds of their own demise.
Amanda Marcotte: Message for Donald Trump: Being good to your daughter doesn’t give you a pass for treating other women like trash
The standard move these days, when a male public figure stands accused of sexism, is to deploy female family members to the media to explain that they believe their male relative is the bee’s knees that anyone who thinks otherwise is simply making stuff up. A man can oppose women’s basic reproductive rights, say sexist stuff in public, or even be accused of raping dozens of women, but the women in his life say he’s nice to them, so who are you to say otherwise?
Now Donald Trump’s camp is using this trick, putting his daughter, Ivanka Trump, that he has with his first wife out in public to declare that her father is no sexist. Ivanka told People that her father is “highly gender-neutral”. [..]
It’s a weak argument. Donald Trump does, indeed, hate a lot of people. He is a hateful man. (Though she’s right this is clearly what appeals about him to his supporters.) Being a sexist is exactly one of the subroutines you expect of a man whose inclination towards the world is to bellow hate at everyone he perceives as slightly different or who challenges his worldview. No one doubts, for instance, that Trump is probably more forgiving of the women in his life for daring to have body functions he disapproves of, like menstruation or urination, that he has castigated Megyn Kelly and Hillary Clinton for having. But that doesn’t change that fact that it’s incredibly to shame women for having female bodies in the first place, no matter what it is they have supposedly done to offend you.
David Dayen: Warren Buffett is a phony: Every liberal’s favorite billionaire is actually cut-throat, not cuddly
When the Democratic Party wants to prove to the nation – or maybe to the media – that they have non-threatening, common-sense, middle-America values and ideas, they turn to the Oracle of Omaha. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t map culturally as a liberal. He’s rich! He’s a businessman! He’s from flyover country! And yet he wants to pay a higher tax rate than his secretary! (Mind you, he doesn’t right now, but his heart is in the right place, I suppose.)
Because this narrative is forged in steel, it doesn’t seem to bother any Democratic strategist that their go-to supporter has spent the past couple of years evading taxes, ripping off poor people and minorities, and throwing up roadblocks to renewable energy. Warren Buffett the cuddly icon doesn’t match Warren Buffett the ruthless capitalist, but they’re the same person. And the question Democrats must ask themselves is: At what point do they stop swooning over this guy?
Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway owns Clayton Homes and Vanderbilt Mortgage, the nation’s largest mobile-home empire and its companion predatory lender. An investigation by the Seattle Times and BuzzFeed over the weekend detailed Clayton and Vanderbilt’s schemes.
Daniel Denvir: The American criminal justice system is guilty of killing Tamir Rice
The decision to not indict officers in Tamir Rice’s death has understandably sparked outrage. But if the officers didn’t commit a crime, then the conclusion to be drawn is actually far more radical and serious: institutionalized policing practices and policies killed a 12-year old child.
Even Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney Timothy J. McGinty readily concedes that Rice should never have been shot dead. McGinty found, however, that Cleveland Police Officers Timothy Loehmann (the shooter) and Frank Garmback (the police car driver) did not commit a crime because they reasonably (if in retrospect falsely) believed that Rice posed a dangerous threat: they had a report that a man was pointing a gun at people; Rice’s pellet gun looked like the real thing; and a video shows that he was reaching for it.
That last point is disputed. Roger Clark, a policing expert retained by the Rice family, found that the 1.7 seconds it took for Officer Loehmann to shoot Rice, after jumping from his car, was nowhere near enough time for Rice to pull the gun, or for the officers to have issued any intelligible commands — let alone for Rice to have responded to those commands.
But if McGinty’s argument is accurate — that the two officers reasonably believed that Rice posed a threat — that absolves neither the Cleveland Police Department nor American policing as a whole. To the contrary, it indicts them: if the officers followed policy in confronting and then killing Rice, something is horribly wrong.
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