“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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Dean Baker: Wall Street Rocks!
trevor Timm: Journalism is not terrorism. Criticism of the government is not violence
In a huge win for press freedom, a UK court of appeal ruled that the detention of journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, under the Terrorism Act violated his human rights as a journalist. Perhaps more importantly, though, the court rebuked the government’s unprecedented and dangerous definition of “terrorism” that would have encompassed all sorts of actions regularly made by law-abiding citizens.
Miranda was detained and interrogated for almost nine hours without a lawyer at Heathrow airport in 2013 while returning to his home in Brazil after visiting Academy award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras in Germany. He was assisting her and Greenwald’s reporting on the Snowden documents; Greenwald was working for the Guardian at the time.
The court overruled a part of a prior ruling, making clear that “the stop power [under the Terrorism Act], if used in respect of journalistic information or material is incompatible” with the European convention on human rights.
Scott Lemeiux: Deportation policy and the Republican party’s future are now up to the court
The US supreme court – already sent to issue momentous opinions in cases involving abortion rights and public sector unions in the middle of a presidential election campaign – just added another the hottest of hot-button issues to its docket on Monday: immigration.
And though the court will nominally decide whether President Obama’s major executive action on immigration – which limited the deportation of undocumented immigrants to those with felony convictions and without dependents with the right to remain – was legal, the decision is a potential time bomb for the Republican Party, whose elites remain concerned about their shrinking demographic base.
The root of the political fight which the court must now consider was a November 2014 announcement by President Obama of an executive action on immigration, called Deferred Action to Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (Dapa). The policy was a response to a dilemma created by congressional policy: immigration statutes have made large numbers of people potentially subject to deportation, but the legislature has provided the executive branch with the resources to actually deport only a fraction.
Robert Reich: Who Lost the White Working Class?
Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats?
The conventional answer is Republicans skillfully played the race card.
In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party.
Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,” being soft on black crime (“Willie Horton”), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action).
The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims — with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.”
All true, but this isn’t the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class.
Thomas B. Edsall: The Price of Republican Orthodoxy
In the week after the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino that left 14 dead, both the House and Senate voted on legislation to ban the sale of guns and explosives to people on the F.B.I.’s consolidated terrorist watch list. [..]
Who could be against a bill to keep pistols, rifles, assault weapons and such commercially available explosives as Tannerite, ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, and potassium chlorate out of the hands of those on the terrorist list?
The answer is 53 of 54 Senate Republicans and every one of the 241 House Republicans, who voted on Dec. 2 and Dec. 10, respectively, against taking up legislation to ban those on the F.B.I. list from buying explosives or guns.
On one level, Republican votes against restrictions on weapons sales to terrorism suspects reflect the power of the National Rifle Association and the more extreme Gun Owners of America. These two groups have a tight grip on the Republican Party.
On another level, these votes illuminate a conservative orthodoxy that dominates Republican politics. In some way, this orthodoxy is analogous to the liberal orthodoxy known as political correctness.
Aditya Chakrabortty: We’ve been conned by the rich predators of Davos
As metaphors go, this one takes some beating. This week, some of the richest people on Earth will gather high up a snowy mountain in the world’s biggest tax haven. Most will have paid big money to attend the three-day meeting in Davos: the most exclusive memberships cost somewhere in the region of £100,000 each. From there, they will relay thoughts on global risks and opportunities to the ski-jacketed press corps. They will talk about gender inequality and technological innovation. The message will go out: however turbulent the global economy, it is being capably stewarded.
These are our economic elites as they want the rest of us stuck on the flatlands below to see them: big-thinking, well-intentioned, hard-working – and thoroughly meritocratic. This is also how they justify the mammoth rewards they enjoy: we sweat for it; we’re worth it. The follow-up is usually only implied, but it is the one that underpins the entire system: put in enough hours and this could be you.
Set against that promise the finding from Oxfam that 62 billionaires have more wealth than half the world’s population – 3.5 billion people – share between them.
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