Up first in today's Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is
The New York Times editorial board's take on President Barack Obama's proposed reform of America's domestic surveillance:
President Obama, who seems to think the American people simply need some reassurance that their privacy rights are intact, proposed a series of measures on Friday that only tinker around the edges of the nation’s abusive surveillance programs.
He said he wants “greater oversight, greater transparency, and constraints” on the mass collection of every American’s phone records by the National Security Agency. He didn’t specify what those constraints and oversight measures would be, only that he would work with Congress to develop them. But, in the meantime, the collection of records will continue as it has for years, gathering far more information than is necessary to fight terrorism. [...]
Fundamentally, Mr. Obama does not seem to understand that the nation needs to hear more than soothing words about the government’s spying enterprise. He suggested that if ordinary people trusted the government not to abuse their privacy, they wouldn’t mind the vast collection of phone and e-mail data.
Also generating buzz is this column by
Charles Blow in
The New York Times, in which he lashes out at America's empathy deficit:
In this America, people blame welfare for creating poverty rather than for mitigating the impact of it. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in June found that the No. 1 reason people gave for our continuing poverty crisis was: “Too much welfare that prevents initiative.” [...] How did we come to such a pass? Why aren’t more politicians — and people in general — expressing outrage and showing empathy?
Part of our current condition is obviously partisan. Republicans have become the party of “blame the victim.” Whatever your lesser lot in life, it’s completely within your means to correct, according to their logic. Poverty, hunger, homelessness and desperation aren’t violence to the spirit but motivation to the will. If you want more and you work harder, all your problems will disappear. Sink or swim. Pull yourself up. Get over it. Of course, that narrow conservative doctrine denies a broader reality: that there are working poor and chronically unemployed — people who do want and who do work and who do want to work, but who remain stuck on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.
In this regard, Republicans have all but abandoned the idea of compassionate conservatism and are diving headlong into callous conservatism. But another problem may be more broad-based: the way that many Americans look at the poor with disgust.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Speaking of the poor, over at The Los Angeles Times, Olga Khazan explains why we can't count on the test-tube burger to solve world hunger:
About 12.5 percent of the world's population is considered "hungry," but many development economists say we already grow enough food to feed them all.
It's true that as people get richer and populations continue to grow, more people will demand meat, and lab-grown meat could be one way to provide it to them without raising more cows. But most actual hunger that people experience, sustainability experts believe, is not because of a lack of food in the world -- lab-grown or otherwise -- but rather the result of a complicated mix of poverty, natural disasters, theft, or poor land use.
And while petri-dish burgers might help the situation by bringing attention to the "hunger" issue, they probably aren't going to solve it in the long run.
More fallout from Reince Priebus's threats to deprive CNN and MSNBC of GOP primary debate access from
Ron Klain writing at
The Washington Post. Klain has been a senior debate preparation advisor to presidential candidates and a professor at Georgetown:
There are many reasons the GOP primary debates need the networks a lot more than the other way around. [...] An all-Fox debate series in 2016 would be an unmistakable signal to the country that the Republican debates are an internal conversion only: made by Republicans, talking to Republicans, for the benefit of Republicans. At a time when Republicans desperately need to reach a broader audience, making the debates an intramural affair sends the wrong message.
Moreover, the GOP move would drastically curtail the size of the audience for its debates. While the Republican debates in 2012 set records for viewership for primary debates, those records were in the 6 million to 8 million viewer range — a trivial number compared with the 50 million to 80 million viewers who watch the fall general election debates. Cutting off CNN and NBC would be removing two platforms that provided about 60 percent of the debate viewership for Republican primary debates in 2012 — and in the case of NBC, the outlet that provided some of the largest individual debate audiences.
Benjamin Todd Jealous at
US News gives a critical eye to the "law of the Wild West" and stand your ground laws:
A recent Texas A&M University study took a look at crime in more than 20 states that passed some version of "stand your ground"-type laws from 2000 to 2010. Researchers found no decrease in crimes like robbery, burglary and aggravated assault, but they did find an 8 percent spike in reported murders and non-negligent manslaughter.
Yet while "stand your ground" statutes have allowed hundreds of admitted killers to walk free, the race of the victim plays a major factor in who is acquitted. Another study, published last year by the Urban Institute, found that when white shooters kill black victims, nearly 36 percent of the resulting homicides are deemed justifiable, yet when black shooters kill white victims, only 3 percent were ruled justifiable. An investigation by the Tampa Bay Times found that in Florida, defendants claiming "stand your ground" are far more successful if the victim is black. The paper found that 73 percent of those who killed a black person walked free, versus 59 percent of those who killed a white person.
Finally,
Gina Barreca has an interesting column in The Denver Post about "unlearning the life lessons I picked up in kindergarten" that merits debate and discussion:
In women's lives especially (and since I'm talking about the pre-K demographic I'll call us "girls" without fear of appearing patronizing), all sorts of lessons have encouraged us to sit politely and wait to be chosen. Remember the game "Duck, Duck, Goose," where you sat in a circle facing the center and waited to be recognized as the "goose," whereupon you were tapped and permitted to run around making choices yourself? [...] Men and women alike have to examine the lessons we teach — even for fun — and rewrite the rules of the games we play.
Nobody wants to go through life as the guy who slams into walls. And nobody wants to spend her life as a sitting duck.