“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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Bill Moyers: Money Men Say, Voters Move Over, It’s Not Your Election!
David Brooks is a worried man.
Like many establishment Republicans, the conservative columnist for The New York Times sees the barbarians pouring through the gates and fears for both his party and the republic. Hail, Trump! Hail, Cruz! It’s enough to send a sober centrist dashing through the Forum in search of a cudgel.
There was Brooks on a recent edition of the PBS NewsHour, his angst spilling out across the airwaves like fog from a nightmare: “I wish we had gray men in suits,” he told Judy Woodruff, conjuring in some nostalgia-minded the courtly cabal of well-heeled businessmen who drafted war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president as a Republican.
“We don’t have that,” Brooks continued. “But the donor class could do something.”
Ah, yes. The donor class! Those deep pockets flung open even wider by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision just six years ago, permitting the richest of the rich to pour even more of their fortunes into control of our electoral process. Brooks was saying openly what many of them are thinking privately: Only we can save the party from the megalomania of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and protect our precious status quo.
Jessica Valenti: Bernie Sanders must deliver more than platitudes about abortion
When we talk about abortion, everything we say – and the way that we choose to say it – has an impact. And in a time when abortion is becoming legal in-name-only because it is largely inaccessible to much of the country thanks to anti-abortion activism and policies, the way that presidential candidates talk about abortion matters even more. [..]
While 44% of Americans consider themselves pro-life, only 19% believe that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. And according to a national survey of registered voters released this week by the National Institute of Reproductive Health, a whopping 83% believe health care providers should be allowed to “care for patients based on their best medical expertise without interference from politicians” and 63% think that the swath of state-level abortion restrictions are “heading in the wrong direction”.
When those surveyed were told about the kinds of hurdles women have to jump through to obtain abortions, they responded using words like “wrong”, “disgusted” and “unfair”.
Joe Conason: Citizens United Anniversary: How Anthony Kennedy Turned American Democracy Into an ‘Open Sewer’
This week marked the anniversary of the Citizens United decision, which exposed American democracy to increasing domination by the country’s very richest and most reactionary figures—modern heirs to those “malefactors of great wealth” condemned by the great Republican Theodore Roosevelt—so it is worth recalling the false promise made by the justice who wrote the majority opinion in that case.
Justice Anthony Kennedy masterminded the Supreme Court’s Jan. 21, 2010 decision to undo a century of public-interest regulation of campaign expenditures in the name of “free speech.” He had every reason to know how damaging to democratic values and public integrity that decision would prove to be.
Once billed as a “moderate conservative,” Kennedy is a libertarian former corporate attorney from Sacramento, who toiled in his father’s scandal-ridden lobbying law firm, “influencing” California legislators, before he ascended to the bench with the help of his friend Ronald Reagan.
Jeb Lund: The National Review’s coordinated attack on Donald Trump will backfire
National Review, a Thurston Howell impression on print and with staples in it, published a special edition yesterday titled Against Trump. Not Stop Trump, or Dump Trump or even Chump Trump. “Against Trump.” Toward a Normative Understanding of Trump Negation. Whatever.
I’m sure it will be very effective with all 5,000 subscribers who are not conservative thinktanks. There is definitely no way that the snob mouthpiece of the Republican party rolling out a coordinated attack on Donald Trump will backfire. And nobody will make fun of the cover, and the august list of contributors definitely does not read like a grocery list beginning with “Lunatic”, stopping off twice at “Nepotist” and hitting all the other lowlights of fraudsters and homophobes, etc.
What makes this especially fun is that everything that makes Donald Trump a runaway success is a creation of conservatism. He is their Be Careful What You Wish For candidate. (This guy put it about as succinctly and hilariously as anyone can.) National Review can stand athwart history and yell stop, but they’re standing in front of a snowball they’ve been pushing down a hill for the last half-century. Even the hand-wringing that Donald Trump is such an ugly and hateful candidate is hilarious from a rag that started out defending liberty and segregation.
Ralph Nader: The Devastating Cost of Monetized Elections
Corporatized and commercialized elections reach a point where they stand outside and erode our democracy. Every four years the presidential and Congressional elections become more of a marketplace where the wealthy paymasters turn a civic process into a spectacle of vacuous rhetorical contests, distraction and stupefaction.
The civic minds of the people are sidelined by the monetized minds of a corrupted commercial media, political consultants, pundits and the purveyors of an ever-more dictatorial corporate state.
The dominance of influence money by the plutocracy and now big business PACs, such as that of the super-rich Koch brothers is just the beginning. The monetized minds don’t just rely on their “quid pro quo” checkbooks. They foster gerrymandering electoral districts so that politicians indentured to them pick the voters instead of a legitimate congressional district’s voters picking a candidate. And the debates now are more ratings inventory for Big Media than a discussion of major issues which remain off the table.
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