“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”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
New York Times Editorial: Now, the Hard Part
President Obama and President Hassan Rouhani of Iran showed leadership this week in committing themselves to resolving the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. On Friday, they capped days of promising gestures with a phone call – the first direct contact between top American and Iranian leaders in more than three decades.
In a series of speeches, media interviews, private meetings and even a news conference, Mr. Rouhani, a moderate who took office in August, and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, laid the groundwork for mending ties with American policy makers, policy analysts and businesspeople. But the phone call was the most audacious sign of a new day, and Mr. Rouhani immediately told the world about it on Twitter.
Jason Stverak: A media law that stifles the press
There is a sad irony in the proposed media shield bill passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month.
Lawmakers introduced the bill after the federal government violated press freedom by probing the phone records of Associated Press reporters without permission last year. According to the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), the proposed law “ensures that the tough investigative journalism that holds government accountable will be able to thrive.”
Yet an amendment attached to the bill does the very thing the legislation purports to stop: Rather than providing a “shield” so that the government cannot force those who do journalism to reveal confidential sources, it determines who is and is not legally a journalist, offering protection only for those who fit a too-narrow definition of the term.
How many more rounds of this must America take? How many more times must the economic neck of the nation have a knife pressed against it by Republicans demanding a ransom?
It seems the answer is at least once more – or twice.
Washington is still wrangling over a way to avoid a government shutdown next week, while Republicans are already gearing up to refuse to raise the debt limit – something that no Congress under any other president has ever refused to do.
Ralph Nader: The UN Needs a Larger ‘War on Poverty’
The United Nations has recently been the source of much discussion and controversy. In a speech this week to the UN General Assembly, President Obama continued to make his case for a military strike against Syria. The president posed this question (which he could have asked himself) to the assemblage: “What is the role of force in resolving disputes that threaten the stability of the region and undermine all basic standards of civilized conduct?”
I’ll pose another question. What is the role of ending extreme poverty on a global scale that threatens the stability of millions of innocent human lives and undermine all basic standards of civilized conduct? What about access to food and water, education, and immunization to diseases?
Michelangelo Signorile: Why Barilla Pasta CEO Is So Clueless About Gays
A lot of people are scratching their heads, wondering how the CEO of Barilla Group could be so profoundly stupid as to slam gays by saying they should go eat someone else’s pasta. “For us, the ‘sacral family’ remains one of the company’s core values,” Guido Barilla, CEO of the Parma, Italy-based company, said in an interview. “Our family is a traditional family. If gays like our pasta and our advertisings, they will eat our pasta; if they don’t like that, they will eat someone else’s pasta.” Barilla also said that he wouldn’t depict a gay family in an ad, responding to a question about a female Italian politician’s criticisms of the stereotyping of women in ads in Italy, saying of his advertising, “the women are crucial in this.”
What many people don’t understand is that in Italy what Barilla said is, sadly, too often perfectly acceptable. He was speaking on an Italian radio program. He was likely oblivious to how it would play globally, and probably not very conscious of how the rights and conditions of LGBT people, and the role of women, have changed dramatically in the rest of the industrialized West. His pasta may be the No. 1 pasta in the world, but it appears he leads the insular life that many Italian straight men lead — yes, including educated, wealthy men — keeping women in their place and dismissing gays.
Les Leopold: Is the President Selling Out Higher Education to Wall Street?
The Obama Administration is transporting Wall Street logic into higher education by proposing to measure the value of a college by the earnings of its graduates. This conceptual coup may be the best news for Wall Street since the abolition of Glass-Steagall.
We need not repeat all that has been written about how this money-making metric misses the point of college — about how students should be studying to become good citizens and leaders, to find and know themselves, to discover which pursuits in life best suit them, to develop an inquiring mind and so on. But such musings, however admirable, miss the main point: Using future earnings as a measuring stick transforms the entire notion of higher education into yet another financial instrument. No doubt some Wall Street hustlers are already dreaming up how to create derivatives they can sell to insure students and their families against less than expected earning outcomes from the college investment. Wow, an entire new casino in the making, right up there with the ethanol market.
Recent Comments