“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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Gail Collins: Republicans See How Long They Can Hold Their Breath
Maybe we’d better refrain from having any new opinions until after the election.
Follow the leader. Mitch McConnell says the Senate shouldn’t do anything about the Supreme Court’s vacancy as long as Barack Obama is president. Not even go through the motions of pretending to think about it. We’ve hit a whole new level in the politics of obstruction.
Why stop there? For the next 11 months it’s probably better if we let everything go except for the purchase of food staples.
Don’t even bother to fake it. Virtually every Republican with a job more elevated than zoning commissioner thinks the best thing to do with any Supreme Court nomination is to act as if it isn’t there, like a wad of gum on the sidewalk.
Susan McGregor: Apple isn’t protecting a shooter’s iPhone data – they’re defending digital privacy
Both the motion Tuesday ordering Apple to help the FBI access the contents of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s encrypted iPhone – and Apple CEO Tim Cook’s public letter refusing to do so – appear to be the latest volley in a dispute over encryption that has been going on between law enforcement and Silicon Valley, off and on, for over 20 years.
Though the FBI’s request studiously avoids asking Apple to directly decrypt Farook’s data or hand over his key, the debate is the same: can law enforcement compel tech companies to provide the means to access consumers’ data?
Apple’s switch to default encryption on iPhones has been a subject of complaint from law enforcement since its introduction in 2014, but the FBI’s current request seems to intentionally side-step the encryption question, instead requesting Apple’s assistance to bypass non-encryption features of the iPhone in order to get at its currently encrypted contents.
While the particular model of iPhone in question here means that it may be technically feasible for Apple to comply with the FBI’s request, this is not the true heart of the issue. As Cook’s open letter to customers stating that Apple would oppose the order points out, the request “has implications far beyond the legal case at hand”.
Dean Baker: Renewed deficit hysteria based on flimsy CBO projection
It is often said that in Washington, no bad idea stays dead for long. This is certainly true for the crazy paranoia we see around the budget deficit and idea that it is going to bankrupt the country and leave our children impoverished. The moral of this story is usually that we need to cut and/or privatize Social Security and Medicare.
The deficit hawks had been relatively quiet the last few years. They had a big victory with the 2011 budget deal between President Barack Obama and House Republicans. This led to substantial reductions in spending for 2012 and subsequent years. These cuts slowed the economy and kept millions of people from getting jobs, but the small positive from the deal was that it temporarily silenced the deficit hawks. After all, with the deficit falling rapidly and the debt-to-GDP ratio going down, what did they have to complain about?
But the new budget projections released last month by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) resurrected their complaints from the dead. The projections show deficits rising as a share of GDP with the debt-to-GDP also rising.
Bill McKibbne: Exxon’s Never-Ending Big Dig
Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now — entirely legally — is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story.
Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: we could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter century of pointless climate debate.
Jonathan Jones: Jeb Bush’s gun tweet is a portrait of the American nightmare
When a man hoping to be president of the United States can sum up his own country with a photograph of a monogrammed gun and the single-word caption “America”, it may be time for the rest of the world to worry.
Instead they are laughing. Since the Republican nomination hopeful (although not very hopeful) Jeb Bush tweeted a picture of his handgun he has been mocked around the world with images that comically replace that violent symbol with the gentler images that sum up less trigger-happy places – a cup of tea for the UK, a bike for the Netherlands, a curry for Bradford.
The joke’s a bit thin, because what is currently happening in US politics is only funny if you are an alien watching from a spaceship and the fate of the entire planet is just one big laugh to you. For what is Bush trying to achieve with this picture? He’s trying to appeal to the rage and irrationality that have made Donald Trump’s bombastical assault on the White House look increasingly plausible while Bush languishes, a conventional politician swamped by unconventional times.
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