Punting the Pundits

“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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”

Robert Reich: Governor Walker’s Coup D’Etat

Governor Scott Walker and his Wisconsin senate Republicans have laid bare the motives for their coup d’etat. By severing the financial part of the bill (which couldn’t be passed without absent Democrats) from the part eliminating the collective bargaining rights of public employees (which could be), and then doing the latter, Wisconsin Republicans have made it crystal clear that their goal has had nothing whatever to do with the state budget. It’s been to bust the unions.

That’s no surprise to most people who have watched this conflict from the start, but like any coup its ultimate outcome will depend on the public. If most citizens of Wisconsin are now convinced that Walker and his cohorts are extremists willing to go to any lengths for their big-business patrons (including the billionaire Koch brothers), those citizens will recall enough Republican senators to right this wrong.

Eugene Robinson: Peter King’s Modern-Day Witch Hunt

“There is nothing radical or un-American in holding these hearings,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) claimed Thursday as he launched his McCarthyite probe of American Muslims. He could not have been more wrong. If King is looking for threats to our freedoms and values, a mirror would be the place to start.

Here’s why. Imagine a young man, a Muslim, who changes in troubling ways. His two best friends become concerned, then alarmed, as the young man abandons Western dress, displays a newfound religiosity and begins to echo jihadist rhetoric about the decadence of American society. Both friends suspect that the young man has become radicalized and might even attempt some kind of terrorist attack.

One friend is Muslim, the other Christian. Does the Muslim friend have a greater responsibility than the Christian to contact the authorities? By the logic of King’s witch hunt, he does.

Glenn Greenwald: The “Bush-Tortured” Excuse for Indefinite Detention

Earlier this week, I wrote about the fictitious excuse being offered to justify why Obama is continuing the indefinite detentions and military commissions which defined the Bush/Cheney Guantanamo detention scheme:  it’s Congress’ fault.  Today we have a new excuse:  it’s Bush’s fault.  Because Bush tortured some of the detainees, this reasoning goes, Obama is incapable of prosecuting them, yet because many of those detainees are Terrorists and/or Too Dangerous to Release (even though they can’t be convicted of anything), he has no real choice but to keep imprisoning them without charges.  Here are the NYT Editors — even as they criticize Obama’s indefinite detention policy — making this case, one frequently heard from Obama supporters offering excuses for his policy of indefinite detention:

   [T]he Obama administration has still chosen to accept the concept of indefinite detention without trial, which represents a stain on American justice. The president made that acceptance clear in a speech in May 2009. To some degree, he was forced into it by the Bush administration’s legacy of torture and abuse, which made some important cases impossible to prosecute.

snip

There’s a serious moral flaw in the NYT‘s reasoning, and two even worse empirical flaws with this excuse-making for indefinite detention.   There are several compelling reasons why the use of torture-obtained evidence is barred by every civilized country for use in prosecution, and has been barred for decades if not centuries.  A primary reason is because the most basic norms of Western morality demand that torture not be rewarded, which is what happens when the fruits of it are admissible in court to prosecute people.  Those who say that Obama is justified in imprisoning people without charges because the evidence against them was obtained via torture and is thus unusable in court are repudiating this long-standing Western moral principle by justifying imprisonment based on evidence obtained by coercion (we know they’re guilty because of the evidence we got from torture, so we have to detain them).

Jeremy Scahill A Real Sharia Law Promoter for Peter King to Investigate

As Representative Peter King begins his hunt for Islamic radicals in our midst, including infiltrators of the US government and military, I hope that part of his inquiry focuses on those who really advocate Sharia law in the United States. I have a suggestion for a witness for that panel: Joseph Schmitz, the former inspector general of the Department of Defense. Schmitz was among a group of conservative activists and former senior CIA and military officials, led by Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin and Lt. Gen. Edward Soyster, who last September issued a report: “Shariah: The Threat to America.”

In the report, the authors argued, “Today, the United States faces what is, if anything, an even more insidious ideological threat: the totalitarian socio-political doctrine that Islam calls shariah.” They concluded, “proponents of an expansionist shariah present a serious threat to the United States.”

So, why should Schmitz be called to testify on this? Because Schmitz himself has advocated for the United States to recognize Sharia law. After he left the DoD in late 2005, Schmitz went straight to employment with Blackwater, serving as the General Counsel for its parent company, The Prince Group. He coordinated Blackwater’s legal defense stemming from a series of lawsuits filed by Iraqi civilians, former employees and families of Blackwater employees killed in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of these lawsuits was brought in 2005 by the widows of US servicemen killed in November 2004 in Afghanistan in the crash of Blackwater Flight 61. . . . .

In 2008, in attempting to have the case thrown out of federal court in Florida, Schmitz argued that because the crash occurred in Afghanistan, Sharia law should be applied.

John Nichols: ‘Shame!’ Legislators Approve Wisconsin Governor’s Anti-Worker Agenda

Wisconsin State Representative Mark Pocan, the former co-chair of the legislature’s powerful Joint Finance Committee, says he is starting to feel as if he lives in a “third world junta.”

Wisconsin State Senator Bob Jauch, a senior Democrat, says that what he is witnessing feels like “a coup.”

Marty Beil, the head of the AFSCME Council 24, the state’s largest public employee union, said Wisconsin had been turned into “a banana republic.”

And thousands of Wisconsinites, men and women, adults and their children, public employees and private-sector workers, have poured into the state Capitol in Madison, shouting: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Laura Flanders: New Wave of Protests Fighting Banksters

It was tax day in 2009 that saw the first Tea Party protests, and the FOX-led media firestorm that’s followed has made it seem as though the Tea Party’s the only game in town if you want to complain about bailouts.

This year, though, as tax day approaches, a new wave of protest is sweeping the country.  On February 26th, inspired by the UK, US Uncut actions took place at Bank of America branches around the country-and all 50 states held solidarity rallies to support Wisconsin’s protesters.

Taxpayers connected with National People’s Action and other community-based groups occupied a Bank of America, protested the Attorneys General and the Republican congressional leaders this week. and as James Mumm of National People’s Action noted on GRITtv yesterday, this one actually represents the majority.  And diversity.

Compare the coverage with what followed every Tea Party outburst and you’d weep.

Mark Weisbot Wisconsin Continues Right-Wing Structural Reforms That Have Decimated the United States

The real story of Wisconsin is the Republican right’s long war to refashion American society without unions

With the latest turn of events in Wisconsin, Republican state senators have circumvented the need for a quorum vote on Scott Walker’s budget bill by leaving out the fiscal clauses and passing the new laws curbing collective bargaining rights for state and public employees. This dubious tactical manoeuvre strips away the pretence that Walker and his GOP allies have hitherto maintained that the legislative package was necessary to close the state’s budget deficit: Walker’s objective is, as protesters in Madison have argued all along, to break the last vestige of organised labour strength in the US – the power of public sector workers to organise and negotiate collectively. Stated or not, Walker’s ambition is to complete what Ronald Reagan began 30 years ago.

But the legislative chicanery in Madison’s Capitol smacks of desperation. It may yet prove that the right in the US has overreached in its attack on public sector unions, provoking the left/liberal base of the Democratic party, a popular uprising in Wisconsin and elsewhere, and a backlash among the public. The latest Rasmussen poll shows Wisconsin voters disapproving of Governor Scott Walker by a margin of 57% to 43%, with 48% saying they “strongly disapprove”. But there are also some positive lessons that American progressives and liberals could learn from the right’s political strategy.