(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Day 2 of the Munich Security Conference [1] ['Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags', 'Showtags Popular_Tags'] Date: 2023-02-19 Shamil Shams of Deutsche Welle reports on the talks that Munich Security Conference participants had about Afghanistan. "Right now, we are looking at the humanitarian assistance," Michael McCaul, chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, said during Saturday's Munich Security Council panel. "Half of Afghanistan's population is starving. We have these nongovernmental organizations on the ground, and the US is providing assistance to them." [...] Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari told the panel that Afghanistan would need support as a state. "We all want to see women receiving education in Afghanistan," Bhutto-Zardari said. "We all want to see a more inclusive government in Afghanistan. The terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan is worrisome." The Taliban government must be willing to deal with these issues, he added. "If the interim government in Afghanistan demonstrates the will to do that, we will have to find a way to build its capacity so that it can do so," Bhutto-Zardari said. "They don't have a standing army, they don't have a counterterrorism force, they don't even have a proper border security." The comments by Bhutto-Zardari and McCaul illustrate the conflicting and contradictory approaches regarding Afghanistan and the Taliban. Though Pakistan's foreign minister wants the world to engage more with the Taliban, leaders from outside of the region are keeping a diplomatic distance from the group. The former host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources”, Brian Stelter, writes for The Atlantic that he finally has Fox News all figured out. On November 7, Fox had fallen in line with the other major networks and called the election for Biden. There were spontaneous celebrations in major cities and long faces across Fox’s airwaves. The consensus view both inside and outside the network was that Fox’s acknowledgment of reality—and specifically its early projection that Biden had won Arizona—had turned the audience against the network. I was working at CNN at the time, so I studied the ratings spreadsheets that arrived in the late afternoon. Newsmax, a tiny Fox wannabe, was suddenly surging by catering to MAGA viewers and refusing to call Biden the president-elect. On November 8, I interviewed Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy and aired clips of election deniers speaking on his network. “Your commentators are promoting bogus voter-fraud lies,” I said. He tried to turn the interview into a sales pitch. “Don’t believe you, don’t believe me, just watch Newsmax,” he said, “and make your own judgment about how fair we are.” Ruddy, in other words, was capitalizing on the business opportunity before him. He was welcoming viewers to Newsmax with a pledge to tell them what they wanted to hear. Fox’s top talent knew it—and freaked out. According to the Dominion filing, Carlson texted his producer that weekend and said, “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We're playing with fire, for real....an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.” Really? He’s just figur... ..you know what, never mind, let’s move on... Jason Garcia looks at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his “weaponizing” of conservative media and his weakening of independent media for NiemanLab. Separate records show, for instance, that the DeSantis administration was directly involved in recent legislation that allowed cities, counties, and towns to stop publishing legal notices in local newspapers. Attorneys for the governor are arguing in courts that DeSantis does not always need to comply with Florida’s public-records laws. And DeSantis hinted last week that he wants to make it easier to sue news organizations for libel and defamation — an idea the governor has been quietly working on for at least a year. The governor’s efforts to prop up supplicant sources of news — while trying to destabilize and delegitimize independent ones — make for a dangerous combination, said Michael Barfield, the director of public access at the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a watchdog group that supports transparent government and investigative journalism. “This is what state-run media looks like,” Barfield said. “Russia, China, and Venezuela use it as a tool to control the message. The strategy has far-reaching and negative implications for freedom of the press and democracy. History is full of painful lessons when the government interferes with and manipulates a free and independent press.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes for The New York Times about Ron DeSantis, the Lost Cause, and the complexity of Black studies. Heated debates within the Black community, beginning as early as the first decades of the 19th century, have ranged from what names “the race” should publicly call itself (William Whipper vs. James McCune Smith) and whether or not enslaved men and women should rise in arms against their masters (Henry Highland Garnet vs. Frederick Douglass). Economic development vs. political rights? (Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. Du Bois). Should Black people return to Africa? (Marcus Garvey vs. W.E.B. Du Bois). Should we admit publicly the pivotal role of African elites in enslaving our ancestors? (Ali Mazrui vs. Wole Soyinka). Add to these repeated arguments over sexism, socialism and capitalism, reparations, antisemitism and homophobia. It is often surprising to students to learn that there has never been one way to “be Black” among Black Americans, nor have Black politicians, activists and scholars ever spoken with one voice or embraced one ideological or theoretical framework. Black America, that “nation in a nation,” as the Black abolitionist Martin R. Delany put it, has always been as varied and diverse as the complexions of the people who have identified, or been identified, as its members. [...] Why shouldn’t students be introduced to these debates? Any good class in Black studies seeks to explore the widest range of thought voiced by Black and white thinkers on race and racism over the long course of our ancestors’ fight for their rights in this country. In fact, in my experience, teaching our field through these debates is a rich and nuanced pedagogical strategy, affording our students ways to create empathy across differences of opinion, to understand “diversity within difference,” and to reflect on complex topics from more than one angle. It forces them to critique stereotypes and canards about who “we are” as a people and what it means to be “authentically Black.” I am not sure which of these ideas has landed one of my own essays on the list of pieces the state of Florida found objectionable, but there it is. Paul Krugman of The New York Times discusses the relationship between protecting the environment and economic growth. As you may know (although a surprising number of people don’t), the Biden administration has taken a huge step forward in the fight against climate change. The strategically misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act is mainly a climate bill, using subsidies and tax credits to promote green energy. Environmental experts I follow believe that it’s a very big deal, which, if successfully implemented, will greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not quite as aggressive as the climate plans in Biden’s original Build Back Better legislation, but modelers estimate that it will accomplish about 80 percent of what B.B.B. was trying to do. The biggest factor making this kind of climate initiative possible, after so many years of inaction, is the spectacular technological progress in renewable energy that has taken place since 2009 or so. This means that we can greatly reduce emissions using carrots instead of sticks: giving people incentives to use low-emission technologies rather than trying to regulate or tax them into giving up high-emission activities. And the politics of carrots are obviously a lot easier than the politics of sticks. Strange to say, however, at this precise moment — the most hopeful moment for the environment, as far as I can tell, in decades — my inbox has been filling up with woeful claims that environmental protection is incompatible with economic growth. These claims are oddly bipartisan. Some of them come from people on the left who insist that the planet can’t be saved unless we give up on the notion of perpetual economic growth. Others come from people on the right who insist that we must give up on all this environmentalism if we want to preserve prosperity. Wolfgang Münchau writes for The New Statesman about the conditions that would probably have to be met in order for Britain to rejoin the European Union. I’m hearing the first rumblings of a pro-EU campaign. My advice to Team EU – those in the UK who want Britain to one day rejoin the EU – would be this: use this time wisely. Do not pick up where you left off in 2019. In particular, do not think about the deal you can get, or even frame it in terms of a transactional relationship. Instead, think about what you want the EU to do, and how you want the UK to contribute. That didn’t happen last time, during the referendum campaign in 2016. Even if the UK were to reapply, in, say ten years, the EU would surely not offer it the same deal it had when it left. The UK had an opt-out from the euro and the Schengen passport-free travel zone. It also had opt-outs of sorts from the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the entire area of internal security and justice. The UK was not really a full member in the last 20 years of its membership. By the time the UK reapplied, the EU would have moved on in several policy areas. London would be unlikely to regain its status as the eurozone’s financial centre. Frankfurt and Paris have taken some of London’s business. Milan is coming up fast. I recall well that Mario Draghi, in his role as president of the European Central Bank (ECB), was focused on challenging London’s position as the eurozone’s financial centre. The ECB thought it was bizarre that the world’s second-largest currency zone was reliant on a financial centre outside its territory. The ECB can be relied upon to insist that the UK should join the euro if it were to rejoin the EU. Has Team EU even thought about that? France will almost certainly insist that the UK conforms to the EU’s policies on immigration and home affairs. Why would France want to accept an external EU border on its northern shores when it can outsource that problem to the UK? Per the request of a few commenters in Thursday’s APR, here’s Israeli law professors Amachai Cohen and Yuval Shany with a three-part series on the proposed changes in the way the Israel Supreme Court can review legislation for Lawfare. This excerpt is from the second installment. In January, two draft bills proposing drastic reforms in judicial review over Knesset legislation were made public. Unlike previous bills, the two bills appear to enjoy the support of the governing coalition and have real chances of passage. The first draft bill was published on Jan. 11 by Minister of Justice Yariv Levin. When it became clear that Levin’s proposal could not be fast-tracked in the Knesset, the chair of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, Simcha Rothman, published on Jan. 18 another proposal for debate in his committee. The proposals are similar but not identical. Since both of them will be considered by the Knesset, we will discuss them together and highlight the relevant differences. Generally, the two proposals seek to significantly weaken the authority of the Supreme Court to review the compatibility of new legislation with the basic laws. This weakening is to be achieved by introducing severe limitations on the Court’s authority. First, the proposals seek to limit the Court’s authority to strike down legislation to those cases that substantively contradict an explicit provision of the basic law (this is Levin’s proposal) or “clearly contradict[] an enshrined provision” (translated from Rothman’s proposal: “ סותר בבירור הוראה ששוריינה בחוק-יסוד”). Both proposals seem to aim at limiting the Court’s ability to interpret provisions of basic laws expansively and to protect unenumerated human rights. This might result, specifically, in denying the Court the power to invalidate laws that infringe on the right to equality—a right not mentioned in basic laws but considered until now by the Court as implicit in the constitutional right to human dignity, Part One is here. Part Three is here. Bethan McKernan and Quique Kierszenbaum of the Guardian note that though the protests against changes in Israel’s Supreme Court have been massive, Israel’s Palestinian citizens have, by and large, been absent from them. The “Israeli spring”, as commentators are starting to call it, is a rare show of unity in what is normally a deeply polarised society. Afraid that the proposals curbing the power of the supreme court will start Israel down an authoritarian path similar to that of Turkey and Hungary in recent years, upwards of 100,000 people have taken to the streets every Saturday night in cities across the country to voice their opposition. As of last week, protests are taking place outside Israel’s parliament too, and several industries have held strikes. In particular, the high-profile presence of sectors that would normally never get publicly involved in politics – hi-tech executives, bankers, and establishment figures such as former army and intelligence officials – are forcing the government to listen. Some votes were postponed for a week as a result of the public pressure, and Israeli media reported on Friday that Netanyahu’s office has begun quiet talks exploring compromises. But this centre-left rebellion against what is seen as a coup by far-right extremists has a demographic fault line: Palestinian-Israelis, who make up one-fifth of the population, have been conspicuously absent from the protests to date, even though the new government is fervently anti-Arab and the community is likely to be hit hardest by the judicial reforms. The West Bank is already roiling after a year of increasing violence. Finally today x I saw both of my grandparents yesterday. They are at peace and—as always—their home is full of love. Thank you all for your kind words https://t.co/9rhG61sZEV — Jason Carter (@SenatorCarter) February 18, 2023 Godspeed, Mr. President. Have the best possible day, everyone! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/19/2153655/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Day-2-of-the-Munich-Security-Conference Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/