“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”.
David Sirota: Promoting Militarism While Hiding Bloodshed
In a breathless story somehow presented as a groundbreaking revelation, The New York Times recently reported that the Pentagon is-shocker!-using all sorts of media channels to market itself to the nation’s children. Though the Times presents this as a brand-new development, it is nothing of the sort. The armed forces have spent the last three decades carefully constructing a child-focused Military-Entertainment Complex, which has long had the Pentagon subsidizing everything from video games to movies-most of which glorify militarism to kids.
That said, the Times piece did include one important (if buried) piece of genuine news. It concerns a subtle-yet-insidious shift in martial propaganda-one that opens the military up to charges of rank hypocrisy.
Ari Melber: Liberal Bloggers: Are Democrats Pro-Labor?
Liberal activists rallied in Minneapolis on Thursday for Netroots Nation, a blogger conference that is now one of the largest gatherings in progressive politics. A whopping 2,400 people are here this year, the highest turnout in the conference’s six-year history. The draw is simple: a string of speeches, panels and parties with new political stars, from hometown Senator Al Franken to Paul Ryan’s would-be nemesis Rob Zerbin, along with progressive classics like Van Jones, Howard Dean and Russ Feingold-liberals who have been more vanquished than rewarded for their prescience.
In the first timeslot on Thursday morning, organizers from MoveOn, DFA, PCCC and AFT outlined lessons from the Wisconsin labor protests. About half of the standing-room crowd was from Wisconsin, according to a show of hands, and they were interested in how to tap the backlash to change the dynamics beyond Wisconsin.
Tomorrow’s 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s declaration of the War on Drugs comes amid growing recognition that the policy, and all that it wrought, is a complete disaster.
Shifting priorities toward a more sensible approach that offers treatment rather than punishment for addicts may seem like a daunting task but public opinion is increasingly opposed to the war on drugs, and many states facing tight budgets are de-emphasizing expensive criminalization in favor of strategies that decrease the penal population.
As Sasha Abramsky explained in an extensively reported and still-timely 2009 piece, “out of economic necessity and because of shifting mores, the country will likely get more selective, and smarter, about how it uses incarceration and whom it targets for long spells behind bars.”
Johann Hari: Cheap Meat, MRSA and Deadly Greed
If they aren’t stopped soon, the WHO warns we are facing a ‘doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics’
Here is a news story that could determine whether you live or die. Many of the world’s scientists are warning that one of the mightiest weapons doctors have against sickness is being rendered useless – so a few people can get richer, for a while. If they aren’t stopped soon, the World Health Organization warns we are facing “a doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics”. It will be a world where transplant surgery is impossible. It will be a world where a simple appendix operation will be as routinely lethal as it was in 1927, before the discovery of penicillin. It will be a world where pneumonia and TB and gonorrhea are far harder to deal with, and claim many more of us. But it’s a world that you and I don’t have to see – if we act on this warning now.
As the scientists I’ve interviewed explain it, antibiotics do something simple. They kill, slow down or stall the growth of bacteria. They were one of the great advances of the 20th century, and they have saved millions of us. But they inherently contain a problem – one that was known about from very early on. They start an arms race. Use an antibiotic against bacteria, and it kills most of it – but it can also prompt the bacteria to evolve a tougher, stronger, meaner strain that can fight back. The bacteria is constantly mutating and dividing. The stronger the antibiotic, the stronger some bacteria will become to survive. It’s Darwin dancing at super-speed.
Joe Conason: Washington’s Deeper Immorality Washington’s Deeper Immorality
While the well-deserved departure of Anthony Weiner draws rapt attention in our tabloid nation, the depredations of less colorful but more powerful politicians go unnoticed, so long as no genitalia are involved.
At the moment, for instance, Republican leaders in the House and the Senate are mounting yet another series of assaults on some of the most vulnerable Americans-the poor single mothers who cannot feed their children, and the long-term unemployed who still have no prospect of work nearly two years after the recession supposedly ended.
Hardly anyone other than a lobbyist would normally pay much attention to the machinations of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, but that is where truly indecent behavior is running rampant these days. Members of that subcommittee, who oversee the Women, Infants and Children (or WIC) federal nutrition support program for the poor, recently decreed reductions in its annual funding, just as food prices are rising more rapidly than in many years.
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