“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”.
The Sunday Talking Heads:
This Week with Christiane Amanpour:I’ll make this brief. There’s an interview with the king of the Tea Party Republican’s Sen. Jim DeMint (SC) and Paul Krugman is a guest on the round table. You have a mute button until the round table segment. The rest is too maudlin for words.
Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Oy, Bachmann and Huntsman.
The Chris Matthews Show: It’s all about Perry. Seriously, what kind of a question is this:
In Bad Economic Times, Would Perry’s Far Right Rhetoric Get Overlooked?
What does that even mean?
Meet the Press with David Gregory: Don’t expect a rational discussion about jobs from this bunch: Tom Friedman (he’s got a new book); editorial page editor for the Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot; congresswoman from California, Maxine Waters (D); co-founder of No Labels, Mark McKinnon; and Presidential Historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin. Waters is the only realistic voice about jobs and Goodwin is out of her element.
State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Sen DeMint again. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Chair of the House “Intelligence” Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers babbling about Libya, Syria and 9/11. Time Magazine’s assistant managing editor Michael Duffy and New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker will talk about the president & the Republicans who wan to replace him
It’s the last weekend of Summer (damn). do you really want to spend it watching any pf this?
The August employment report, released on Friday, is bleak on all counts, but at least it leaves no doubt that the United States is in the grip of a severe and worsening jobs crisis. That should lend a sense of urgency to the speech on jobs that President Obama plans to deliver this week.
The August employment report, released on Friday, is bleak on all counts, but at least it leaves no doubt that the United States is in the grip of a severe and worsening jobs crisis. That should lend a sense of urgency to the speech on jobs that President Obama plans to deliver this week.
Michele Chen: Labor Day Showdown: Can Advocates Stop ‘NAFTA of the Pacific’?
This Labor Day, the Pacific Rim will wash into the Midwest’s flagship city, and activists will confront the tides of global commerce with a demand for global economic justice.
At trade talks in Chicago, the Obama administration will work with other officials to develop a trade agreement that will incorporate Vietnam, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Peru. Labor, environmental and human rights groups will gather in the city to warn that the structure, and guiding ideology, of the emerging trade deal could expand a model of free-marketeering that has displaced masses of workers across the globe and granted multinationals unprecedented powers to flout national and international laws.
Maureen Dowd: One and Done?
ONE day during the 2008 campaign, as Barack Obama read the foreboding news of the mounting economic and military catastrophes that W. was bequeathing his successor, he dryly remarked to aides: “Maybe I should throw the game.”
On the razor’s edge of another recession; blocked at every turn by Republicans determined to slice him up at any cost; starting an unexpectedly daunting re-election bid; and puzzling over how to make a prime-time speech about infrastructure and payroll taxes soar, maybe President Obama is wishing that he had thrown the game.
The leader who was once a luminescent, inspirational force is now just a guy in a really bad spot.
Mark Weisbot: Is This Minustah’s ‘Abu Ghraib Moment’ in Haiti?
Shock video of UN soldiers apparently raping a Haitian teenager raises questions about why these ‘peacekeepers’ are there at all
The video is profoundly disturbing. It shows four men, identified as Uruguayan troops from the UN mission in Haiti (Minustah), seemingly in the act of raping an 18-year-old Haitian youth. Two have the victim pinned down on a mattress, with his hands twisted high up his back so that he cannot move. Perhaps the most unnerving part of the video is the constant chorus of laughter from the alleged perpetrators; to them, apparently, it’s just a drunken party.
ABC News reports that a Uruguayan navy lieutenant, Nicolas Casariego, has confirmed the authenticity of the video. A medical certificate filed with the court in Port Salut, a southern coastal town where the incident took place, says that the victim was beaten and had injuries consistent with a sexual assault.
The incident is likely to pour more gasoline on the fire of resentment that Haitians have for the UN troops who have occupied their country for more than seven years. There has been a dire pattern of abuses: in December 2007, more than 100 UN soldiers from Sri Lanka were deported under charges of sexual abuse of under-age girls. In 2005, UN troops went on the rampage in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest areas in Port-au-Prince, killing as many as 23 people, including children, according to witnesses. After the raid, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders reported: “On that day, we treated 27 people for gunshot wounds. Of them, around 20 were women under the age of 18.”
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