“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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Glen Greenwald: On whistleblowers and government threats of investigation
No healthy democracy can endure when the most consequential acts of those in power remain secret and unaccountable
The times in American history when political power was constrained was when they went too far and the system backlashed and imposed limits. That’s what happened in the mid-1970s when the excesses of J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon became so extreme that the legitimacy of the political system depended upon it imposing restraints on itself. And that’s what is happening now as the government continues on its orgies of whistleblower prosecutions, trying to criminalize journalism, and building a massive surveillance apparatus that destroys privacy, all in the dark. The more they overreact to measures of accountability and transparency – the more they so flagrantly abuse their power of secrecy and investigations and prosecutions – the more quickly that backlash will arrive.
I’m going to go ahead and take the Constitution at its word that we’re guaranteed the right of a free press. So, obviously, are other people doing so. And that means that it isn’t the people who are being threatened who deserve and will get the investigations, but those issuing the threats who will get that. That’s why there’s a free press. That’s what adversarial journalism means.
Paul Krugman: The Big Shrug
I’ve been in this economics business for a while. In fact, I’ve been in it so long I still remember what people considered normal in those long-ago days before the financial crisis. Normal, back then, meant an economy adding a million or more jobs each year, enough to keep up with the growth in the working-age population. Normal meant an unemployment rate not much above 5 percent, except for brief recessions. And while there was always some unemployment, normal meant very few people out of work for extended periods.
So how, in those long-ago days, would we have reacted to Friday’s news that the number of Americans with jobs is still down two million from six years ago, that 7.6 percent of the work force is unemployed (with many more underemployed or forced to take low-paying jobs), and that more than four million of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months? Well, we know how most political insiders reacted: they called it a pretty good jobs report. In fact, some are even celebrating the report as “proof” that the budget sequester isn’t doing any harm.
In other words, our policy discourse is still a long way from where it ought to be.
The US has shown itself so paranoid in the face of possible ‘al-Qaida-linked terror’ that it has played right into jihadist hands
Washington has handed Osama bin Laden his last and greatest triumph. The Prism files revealed in the Guardian indicate how far his bid to undermine western values has succeeded in the 12 years since 9/11. He has achieved state intrusion into the private lives and communications of every American citizen. He has shown the self-proclaimed home of individual freedom as so paranoid in the face of his “terror” as to infiltrate the entire internet, sucking up mobile phone calls, emails, texts and, we may assume, GPS movements.
The vast databases of Microsoft, Google, YouTube and Facebook are open to government. They may cry “your privacy is our priority”, but they lie. Obedience to regulatory authority is their priority. And what does authority say? It says what authority always says: “We collect significant information on bad guys, but only bad guys.” As police states have said down the ages, the innocent have nothing to fear. For innocent, eventually read obedient.
Robert Kuttner: Sweet and Sour Pork
President Obama’s personal summit with China’s new president, Xi Jinping, at the well-named venue of Rancho Mirage, Calif., covered a wide range of issues, from North Korea to cyber-spying to territorial disputes with Japan and Taiwan, to global climate change. What the meetings did not engage is the fact that China’s entire economic system violates the naïve American premise that free markets produce efficient and balanced outcomes.
As China has demonstrated for more than a generation, “free trade” is a useful American fantasy, and state-led capitalism is not a contradiction in terms. It is a recipe for hollowing out the U.S. economy in favor of Chinese economic primacy. Nor does capitalism, Chinese-style, logically lead to increased democracy and human rights.
Robert Reich: The Quiet Closing of Washington
Conservative Republicans in our nation’s capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They’ve basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration reform.
It’s as if an entire branch of the federal government — the branch that’s supposed to deal directly with the nation’s problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law — has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called “sequester” that’s cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation’s poor, and national defense.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Trash Talking Economists
Thomas Carlyle called economics “the dismal science.” Journalist A. J. Liebling called boxing “the sweet science.” To read the Internet lately, you’d think they got the two professions mixed up.
Economics is becoming a battle royale, a free-for-all. It’s a melee where everybody with a fist, glove or folding chair can jump out of the audience and into the ring. It doesn’t matter how much ref blows his whistle. There will be blood. If economists had entourages, bullets would be flying.
The brawl du jour is over the Affordable Care Act, but it’s also an argument over the tone of policy disputes, a burning “meta” question in that paradoxical world where conservative economists believe every human being on Earth is an economic actor … except other economists.
Economists are talking trash about each other. And, as crazy as it sounds, it actually matters.
Welcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes. 
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