“Pondering 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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Jessica Valenti: It’s finally official: limiting abortion in the guise of helping women is a sham
In a major victory for American women, the US supreme court sent a powerful message on Monday in its Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt decision: that laws purporting to protect women’s health while limiting access to abortion are an unconstitutional sham.
In a 5-3 decision, the court struck down a Texas law, called House Bill 2, responsible for shuttering more than half of the state’s clinics. The restrictions mandated that clinics become ambulatory surgical centers, adhering to wholly unnecessary hospital-like standards, and that doctors have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital even though hospitalization is almost never necessary after ending a pregnancy. The goal wasn’t to make abortion safer, of course, just impossible to obtain.
The court’s decision made clear the justices were not fooled, noting in the majority decision that “when directly asked at oral argument whether Texas knew of a single instance in which the new requirement would have helped even one woman obtain better treatment, Texas admitted that there was no evidence in the record of such a case.”
And in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s concurring opinion, she wrote it was “beyond rational belief that HB 2 could genuinely protect the health of women, and certain that the law ‘would simply make it more difficult for them to obtain abortions.’”
New York Times Editorial Board: Good News From Diablo Canyon
Few nuclear power plants have been as contentious as Diablo Canyon. The plant, which went online in 1985 after years of ferocious opposition, sits on a gorgeous stretch of California coastline, surrounded by several earthquake faults and reliably producing enormous quantities of power — almost a tenth of California’s in-state generation. It also reliably kills enormous quantities of marine life with a cooling system that depends on huge intakes and discharges of seawater. David Brower, the executive director of the Sierra Club, got so angry with the organization when it refused to oppose the plant that he left to establish Friends of the Earth.
Mr. Brower, who died in 2000, would have been pleased with last week’s news. After long negotiations that involved, among others, Friends of the Earth and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the plant’s owner, Pacific Gas and Electric, announced that it would shut down Diablo Canyon when licenses for its two reactors expire in 2024 and 2025 and that it would replace the power with lower-cost, zero-carbon energy sources.
Robert Kuttner: Brexit: Why Most Commentaries Miss The Point
Policies of deregulation ended in the financial collapse of 2008. The austerity cure, enforced the gnomes of Brussels and Frankfurt and Berlin, is in many ways worse than the disease.
Rising mass discontent has failed to dethrone the elites responsible for these policies, but it has resulted in loss of faith in institutions. The one percent won the policies but lost the people.
So, yes, the Brits who voted for Brexit got a lot of facts and details wrong. And Britain will probably be worse off as a result. But they did grasp that the larger economic system is serving elites and is not serving them.
The tragedy is that we are further away from a reformed EU than ever. A progressive EU, more in the spirit of 1944, is not on the menu. The exit of Britain will give even more power to Angela Merkel’s Germany, architect and enforcer of austerity.
Rebecca Solnit: Our gun debate is topsy-turvy. Like quitting donuts to stop lung cancer
Imagine a chainsmoker comes in to see you who has lung cancer. You tell him to stop smoking, and he starts bargaining. He’s willing to give up donuts. You say donuts don’t cause lung cancer, so he offers to stop watching Game of Thrones. What’s clear is that he doesn’t intend to stop smoking, and he doesn’t want to hear about any correlation to lung cancer. That’s about where this country is on gun violence.
It’s weird that the civil-rights gesture of a sit-in is now being used to support gun action that apparently includes the no-fly list. The list, as a brown friend pointed out to me, is a list of mostly brown people, who got on for various reasons, some of them dubious at best, or wildly unfair and have no path to clearing their name and getting off. [..]
What we see over and over is that this society would like to imagine our epidemic of violence is by “them” – some kind of marginal category: terrorist, mentally ill, nonwhite. But when it comes to mass killings, mostly it’s an epidemic of “us” –mainstream men, mostly white, often young, usually miserable.
Matt Laslo: Brexit stands as a warning to American conservatives
Donald Trump’s elated that the British people have put xenophobia and fear over their own economic self-interest.
He views the nation’s exit from the EU (that’s the European Union, for those googling it today) as an affirmation of his own hate-fueled immigration proposals from one of America’s closest and oldest allies.
Many of our British brothers and sisters also viewed the vote as a way to close their borders. Even as global markets and the pound sank to depressing lows, Trump embraced the rushed Brexit. [..]
While Trump has been successful in employing similar fear-based arguments on immigration throughout the Republican party primary, he’s now in the big leagues and has to convince independent voters that his closed-door policies against Mexicans and Muslims are right for what was formerly the most open nation in the world.
The argument is simple, even simplistic: they don’t look, talk or pray like me, and my wallet’s feeling light, so it must be their fault.
Scapegoating comes with promises of gaudy Trump-like Monopoly money. But American voters would be wise to question the gold spray paint covering the package Trump’s selling.
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