“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
Heidi Moore: The Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger is not a marriage made to last
Two troubled giants, loathed by the public and facing plummeting profits, are heralding a brighter future. Don’t believe the hype
In mergers, as in marriage, the couple may be running toward each other – or away from something else.
The latest escapees from reality: widely loathed US cable providers Comcast and Time Warner Cable and their proposed $52bn merger. It would be the third-largest media merger of all time, and in its size and scope it sounds like a decisive and confident move between two powerful companies looking to grow even larger.
Don’t be fooled. The deal is a desperation move: a combination of Time Warner Cable’s eagerness to escape an ugly takeover offer from rival Charter Communications; a classic double-crossing manoeuvre by an acquisitive Comcast; and the nation’s two largest cable companies looking to preserve profits after spending years squandering every competitive advantage given to them.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: 10 Reasons to Call for More Than $10.10 as a Minimum Wage
Yesterday President Obama signed an executive order raising the minimum wage for some federally contracted workers to $10.10. This move illustrates the fact that we need a higher minimum wage for all workers. It also promotes the bill by Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. George Miller which would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 by 2015.
Make no mistake: The president’s gesture was a good one, and the Harkin/Miller bill is very important. But, as is so often the case nowadays, strategists on the left run the risk of prematurely accepting preconceptions about what is “politically possible.” If economic debate becomes strictly a defensive game on the left, the “Overton window” of acceptable debate will keep shifting toward the right.
The minimum wage is an excellent case in point. There are strong arguments for raising it even more — perhaps considerably more — than is currently being discussed, and the independent left should be making them.
Daniel Denvir:
Governors won’t save the Republican Party
Last year the Republican National Committee conducted an official autopsy after the defeat of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. It came to the somewhat comfortable conclusion that the party’s biggest problem was its image. “Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes,” it wrote, while “many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” The solution touted by the RNC? Practical Republican governors – “America’s reformers in chief” – who would save a party dominated by right-wing crazies in Washington.
According to the RNC, such Republican governors are successful because they “deliver on conservative promises of reducing the size of government while making people’s lives better.” But this lesson – that business-minded conservatives can overcome the ideological divide – is not quite reflected in reality. In Democratic-leaning but Republican-governed states, government got smaller, and some people’s lives got appreciably worse: Slashed education budgets prompted a widespread outcry in Pennsylvania, and anti-union laws polarized voters in Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. Indeed, the purple-state governors elected during the 2010 tea party surge – Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Ohio’s John Kasich, Florida’s Rick Scott, Maine’s Paul LePage, Michigan’s Rick Snyder and Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett – are among those most likely to face defeat in 2014.
This indicates that the Republican Party’s problems run deeper than Sen. Ted Cruz’s filibuster or Rep. Michele Bachmann’s contention that “The Lion King” might be gay-rights propaganda. People subjected to the small-government austerity at the heart of the contemporary conservative consensus sometimes simply do not like it.
Dave Johnson: No Fast Track to TPP: Fix NAFTA First
The big corporations and the Obama administration are trying to push through a giant new trade treaty that gives corporations even more power, and which will send even more jobs, factories, industries and money out of the country. This is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and they are pushing something called “fast track” in Congress to help push it through.
We have to stop this, and we should take the momentum we have generated in our push-back on this to demand Congress and President Obama instead fix NAFTA first. Then fix all of our trade relationships to help working people on all sides of our borders.
David Sirota: PBS Becoming the Plutocrats Broadcasting Service
In a world of screaming cable television hosts and partisan media outlets, PBS is supposed to be the last refuge for honest news. This is ostensibly why taxpayers still contribute money to the public broadcasting system. That money is appropriated to try to guarantee that there remains at least one forum for unvarnished facts, even if such facts offend those with money and power.
The problem, though, is that because our government spends so little on public media as compared to many other industrialized countries, our most prominent public media outlets are becoming instruments for special interests to launder their ideological agenda through a seemingly objective brand. Starved for public resources, these outlets are increasingly trying to get their programming funded with money from corporations and wealthy political activists-and that kind of cash comes with ideological expectations.
Joe Conason: : The Imminent Return of the ‘Clinton Scandals’
Hillary Clinton may well run for president in 2016. Or she may not. But while the nation awaits her decision, both jittery Republican politicians and titillated political journalists-often in concert-will seize upon any excuse to recycle those old “Clinton scandals.”
The latest trip around this endless loop began when Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican of extremist pedigree and nebulous appeal, deflected a question about his party’s “war on women” by yapping about Monica Lewinsky, the former “inappropriate” playmate of Bill Clinton. Then the Free Beacon, a right-wing Washington tabloid, published some old papers about the “ruthless” Hillary and the “loony toon Monica” from the archives of the late Diane Blair, a longtime and intimate Arkansas friend of the Clintons.
Suddenly, the media frenzy of the ’90s resumed, as if there had never even been a pause.
<?div>
Welcome to the 
Recent Comments