“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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New York Times Editorial Board: Guns, Anger and Nonsense in Oregon
It is a familiar claim by many Second Amendment defenders — and, during the Obama administration, an increasingly popular one — that unfettered gun rights are necessary to protect American citizens against the threat of a tyrannical government.
In addition to being a misreading of history, the claim is amusing hyperbole to those who have suffered under real-life tyrants. But this week’s armed standoff at a federal wildlife sanctuary in eastern Oregon is showing how far a small, determined band of antigovernment zealots with lots of big guns will go to make their potentially deadly point.
Patrick L. Smith: He’s made the Middle East worse: Let’s be honest, Obama bears as much responsibility for this mess as predecessors who shaped them
It is all there now for us to see. Decades of cynical, poorly devised policy in the Middle East, vacant of any principle our indispensable nation purports to advance, return as we speak to bite our president and his foreign policy cliques on their backsides. The shambles that now ensues serves them right, absolutely.
With the sudden ignition of smoldering hostilities between Iran and Saudi Arabia last weekend—the Iranians managing this more correctly than the Saudis—at last the veil drops to expose the gross duplicity, not to say stupidity, of Washington’s alliances in the region. At last we can talk about the unclothed emperor. And it is our responsibility to do so.
One would never argue that the chaos into which the Middle East now descends is all President Obama’s doing. It is not, by a long way. The music simply stopped on his watch, and it is he who is left to grope for a chair. No solicitude and no empathy, however. The bitter reality is that our hope-and-change president, as a drone-addicted assassin signing death warrants on a routine basis, bears as much responsibility for the messes he now confronts as any of those predecessors who shaped them.
Amanda Marcotte: Debbie Wasserman Schultz is wrong: Young women care about their reproductive rights
It’s widely believed, by both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters, that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is in the bag for Clinton. If so, she really needs to stop trying to help, because her “help” often seems indistinguishable from trying to sabotage Clinton.
The most recent example comes courtesy of The New York Times Magazine, which published Ana Marie Cox’s interview with Schultz that featured this unfortunate exchange:
Do you notice a difference between young women and women our age in their excitement about Hillary Clinton? Is there a generational divide? Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided.
Say what? Presumably Schultz is referring to the fact that women under 30 are more likely to be supporting Sanders than Clinton, but if so, her argument makes no kind of sense at all. Sanders and Clinton may differ on many issues, but one place where their views are identical is with regards to reproductive rights. Both candidates have a 100% rating from NARAL and both candidates speak out loudly and boldly and completely unapologetically about their support for a woman’s right to choose abortion or access contraception. There’s no reason to think that Sanders would be less avid about protecting the right to choose if he’s elected President.
Heather Digby Parton: Rahm Emanuel won’t fix anything: His tepid police reforms ignore Chicago’s dark history of abuse & torture
Yesterday, Salon’s Daniel Denvir published an extensive report on the history of police lying and the blue wall of silence in Chicago. Coming as it does in the context of recent revelations about the Laquan McDonald shooting and the allegations of a cover up it shows just how pervasive these practices are in America’s third largest city.
Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, has been under intense pressure to institute serious reforms, with protests in the streets and even in front of his house. On December 30, he came out with a plan to institute the retraining of officers in the use of force. He promised a full set of reforms, saying:
“That requires us to give them the right guidance, the right training, and the right culture, to prevent abuses. Willful misconduct and abuse cannot and will not be tolerated.”
Those were nice words, but whatever trust the public had in the mayor has been so eroded by recent events that his plan was met with more skepticism than enthusiasm. As part of his reform, Emmanuel also proposed to double the number of tasers available to officers from 700 to 1400, apparently in the hope that this will reduce the number of police shootings.
Jeb Lund: Presidential hopeful Gary Johnson is no Libertarian. He’s a pro-pot Trump
In an exclusive interview with Reason on Wednesday, former New Mexico governor and former Republican Gary Johnson announced that he will again seek the Libertarian party presidential nomination in order to, among other things, ban Muslim women from wearing burqas.
Are we France now? Do we tell Lafayette that we are here?
I’m not a Libertarian, but I’m familiar with the schtick: its purpose in American politics is to decouple the Republican goal of ending taxation on the wealthy and eliminating pro-labor regulation from the party’s sex policing, religious outrage and marginal-group “othering” that makes Republicans actually electable.
So Hayek only knows what Johnson is doing; his position undermines the entire Libertarian brand. You’re supposed to tell college kids that the invisible hand of the market will totally never result in their living in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis but, even if it did, you could wear whatever you wanted and smoke weed at the time. You’re not supposed to tell them that the government is going to impose a dress code and undermine religious freedoms.
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