“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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Eugene Robinson: Jeb Bush’s Last Stand
The South Carolina Republican primary may well be Jeb Bush‘s last stand. He described the situation—polls show him trailing badly, following weak performances in Iowa and New Hampshire—in typical Bushian syntax:
“It’s all been decided, apparently,” he harrumphed this week in Summerville, a town near Charleston. “The pundits have made it all, we don’t have to go vote, I guess. I should stop campaigning maybe, huh?”
Maybe so, actually.
Several recent state polls agree on two things: Bush’s nemesis, Donald Trump, has a commanding lead in my native state; and no late-breaking surge for Bush has yet been discerned. South Carolina Republicans are capable of producing a surprise—in 2012, Newt Gingrich trounced Mitt Romney, who was the establishment favorite—but I see no good reason to wager that Bush is about to stun the political world.
Ralph Nader: The Conundrums of Justice Scalia
The passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia evoked widespread commentary about how outspoken he was both on the Court and at law schools and other forums where he often lectured and sometimes tangled with audiences. Knowing of Justice Scalia’s unusual expressiveness for a jurist, my colleague Robert Weissman and I wrote him a challenging letter in 2006, starting with these words:
We are writing to inquire as to how the application of the Bill of Rights and related constitutional protections to the artificial creations known as corporations can be squared with a constitutional interpretation theory of “originalism.”
We referred to the Supreme Court case which was falsely reported to have decided that a corporation is a person. This was the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. This case dealt with a taxation matter and the Court neither decided the personhood issue nor did it even address the issue. Instead, the court reporter (or scribe as he was called), a former railroad company president, simply wrote in the headnotes that “Corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States….”
Despite this fraudulent representation of the Court’s opinion, subsequent Supreme Court cases started extending Bill of Rights protections to corporations. Nowhere in the Constitution is there any mention of the words “corporation” or “company.” The word “person” meant to the Framers in those early days a human being; the Framers never said a company or corporation is a person. The Preamble of the Constitution, we should remember, starts with “We the People,” not “We the People and the Corporations.”
Joshua Kopstein: FBI fight with Apple is a big farce to get inside your phone
Earlier this week, the U.S. government dropped a bombshell in its ongoing crusade against strong encryption: A court order demanding that Apple help the Federal Bureau of Investigation bypass the security features of an iPhone recovered from Syed Rizwan Farook, who, along with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people last December during a mass-shooting in San Bernardino, California.
National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden called it the “the most important tech case in a decade,” and in many ways he’s absolutely right. Apple has been on the front lines of the tech privacy fight ever since it improved the security of its devices such that no one, not even the company itself, would be technically capable of accessing their stored data. Now, facing a standstill in Congress, the U.S. government has ordered the company to build a custom version of the iOS operating system that would disable the iPhone’s security features, allowing FBI investigators to crack the passcode protecting the device by trying every possible combination — a method known as “brute force.”
The order is unprecedented. At stake is whether the U.S. government can legally compel a company to create software that sabotages its own products in the name of fighting crime. In a scathing letter posted on Apple’s website, CEO Tim Cook announced the company’s intent to fight the order, saying it would set a “dangerous precedent” that would be ineffective against criminals and “would hurt only the well-meaning and law-abiding citizens who rely on companies like Apple to protect their data.”
What’s more, many details of the case cast doubt on the value or existence of data supposedly contained on the device. It suggests the government’s real goal is actually setting this dangerous precedent — not unlocking a dead criminal’s phone.
Michael Winship Maybe It IS a Single-Issue Election
Maybe it’s that 50,000-year-old, Neanderthal DNA scientists say a lot of us possess, but this feels like the most brutal, vicious and mendacious political year since the days when politicians traded jugs of corn whiskey for votes, fought duels, and flagellated opponents to near death with canes.
In last Saturday night’s Republican debate, the words “lie,” “lying” and “liar” were fired off by the candidates against each other like volleys in a paintball tournament. [..]
Have we so lost touch that the truth no longer sets us free but inspires braying derision? Have so-called “reality television,” and social media plagued with trolling and conspiracy theories so melted our brains that when facts get in the way of whatever nonsense we prefer to believe, we bellow like wounded beasts?
In comparison, two nights earlier, the Democratic debate co-sponsored by the PBS NewsHour was more Downton Abbey than Duck Dynasty. (Truth: While different members of the Duck Dynasty clan actually have endorsed Trump and Cruz, the aristocrats at Downton are still debating primogeniture and the three-field system.)
Adam Johnson: Billionaire-Owned Observer Whines About Democratization of Media in 2016’s Worst Op-ed
Second only to glib equivalencies between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, 2016’s most popular lazy media trope is the idea that rabid Sanders fans have unleashed dark populist forces that threaten our republic. Both are fairly common, and more or less write themselves if the author tosses coherence and intellectual honesty out the window. But it’s rare that both are on such stark display as with New York Observer‘s editor-at-large Ryan Holiday’s recent op-ed (2/17/16).
The diatribe, “The Cause of This Nightmare Election? Media Greed and Shameless Traffic Worship,” poses as media criticism but is little more than petulant establishment gatekeeping. Let’s begin with the thesis, or what passes for one, which is that the democratization of media has created a “sub-prime market” for the media. A superficially catchy hook but one that, upon further examination, make little sense: [..]
This is the rub: This article is not a serious piece of media criticism and the reason we know that is because it has no clearly defined target. First it’s the “bloggers,” then the cable news outlets, then any publication that reports on major candidates not preordained by Nate Silver, then any media outlet that wants ad revenue—including, by definition, his own. It’s not media criticism, it’s lazy centrist navel-gazing. It’s a way for Holiday to signal to other establishment media types that he’s above the fray like them, while lamenting their—and by extension his—increasing irrelevance.
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