Share the View: Judicial Elections

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THE LATEST OPINIONS FROM BLOOMBERG VIEW

JANUARY 22, 2015 bloombergview.com

LAW The Editors: "Unlike legislators and executives, who are elected to advocate for a cause or constituency, judges are supposed to answer only to the law. Judicial elections endanger the impartiality of the courts and undermine public confidence in the justice system." Read more... Noah Feldman: "Judicial elections are idiotic -- but 38 states have them in some form." The U.S. Supreme Court grappled Tuesday "with the contradiction inherent in using the electoral process to select public officials whose primary obligation is to be impartial." Read more... Feldman: The U.S. Supreme Court struck a blow for whistle-blowers yesterday -- "but it had to resort to extreme formalism to do it." Read more... Feldman: "American commentators were quick to dismiss Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo's threat to sue Fox News over its false and mistaken claims that certain areas of the city were 'no-go zones' for non-Muslims. ... But these objections are really beside the point of the threatened suit: How should the news media be policed to stop them from making stuff up?"Read more... U.S. ECONOMY Jim O'Neill: "At the start of 2015, two familiar features dominate the global economic outlook: continuing turbulence in financial markets and the relative strength of the U.S. recovery. One aspect of America's superior performance, though, has received surprisingly little attention, and that's the marked decline in the country's external deficit." Read more... WALL STREET Matt Levine: "Here's a story that the Securities and Exchange Commission tells about Standard & Poor's 2010 holiday party." Read more... TECH Katie Benner: Obama wants to prod corporations into addressing their cybersecurity weaknesses and he used his State of the Union speech "to do just that. Obama also placed responsibility for inaction and any damage from future attacks on the shoulders of a deeply divided, partisan Congress." Read more... POLITICS Albert R. Hunt: "Republican Senator Orrin Hatch is correct: Washington is engaged in class warfare and a battle over redistribution of income. The senator from Utah just has the details backwards." Read more... Margaret Carlson: In his State of the Union address, "one place the president didn't venture was into the darkness that has haunted the country for the last year: How to resolve the conflict between often largely white police forces and the urban population they sometimes fail to protect, with deadly consequences." Read more... James Gibney: Obama's omission of India in his State of the Union address "was a blunder, and not just because it might offend some of the more than 1 billion citizens of a country he's about to visit. He missed an opportunity to highlight for Americans, who might otherwise not pay much attention to his trip, why the emerging U.S. partnership with India is so important." Read more... Francis Barry: "After Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, Clinton used his State of the Union address to offer an olive branch to Republicans. ... On Tuesday night, President Obama took the opposite tack, giving an address that talked over the heads of Republicans, barely acknowledging their existence, no less their November victories, and defining 'middle class economics' as synonymous with his own policies of the past six years." Read more... Clive Crook: "Many of the tax proposals in the White House plan released this week make good sense -- and you don't need to be a liberal to think so."Read more... Stephen L. Carter: I didn't watch the State of the Union address. "The problem isn't the players but the game. It's politics that makes me tired. And I don't think I'm alone in this." Read more... SPORTS Kavitha A. Davidson: "Deflategate is real, and depending on your capacity for schadenfreude, it's spectacular. ... Pause the outrage machine for a moment and you might start to get some real answers." Read more... MEDIA Justin Fox: Remember how, back in 2011, Netflix was going to spin off its DVD-by-mail service and call it Qwikster? And how, in the face of furious customer opposition, Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings had to walk it back? ... Ah, those were the days." Read more...