“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 fault in our starry-eyed ‘recovery’: 2014 looks like we’re going bust again
Wall Street and Washington hype is just that. Anyone who’s really been paying attention knows the truth about the economy
Forget the cheerleading from the White House. Nevermind the latest job numbers. Look at your wallets. Despite the persistent happy talk about a recovery, and the hundreds of charts that come along with it, the US economy is not getting better – it may actually be getting worse.
There are millions of Americans who hoped 2014 would be the year their financial lives would improve. After the struggle of a stagnant country since 2009, economic forecasts predicted that a real recovery was coming – that this this would be the year for a well-paying new job, a house, the year those Americans would pay off student loans or reduce their credit-card debt.
But nothing can really improve for us individually until everything improves for all of us economically. And, increasingly, that utopia looks distant. According to the numbers – and to an increasingly frustrated group of experts – the first few months of 2014 are turning out to be a bust, and there’s no reason to believe the rest of the year will be any better, for the haves or the have-nots.
Duncan Black: Guns aren’t meant to be fun
Open carry shouldn’t become a way for people to show off while risking deadly accidents.
It’s rare that I agree with National Rifle Association officials about anything. Recently, though, they rightly sent a message to gun owners in legal open-carry areas, suggesting that what is (and, in their view, should be) legal is not always appropriate. In particular, groups of people “toting a variety of tactical long guns” to fast-food restaurants and similar establishments might be, at best, demonstrating poor manners.
It’s difficult to know when something is really a trend, or whether in the age of the Internet social media just puts the spotlight on things that aren’t actually any more common than they are normally, but let me remind people that guns are scary. They’re scary because they’re capable of killing people, and because it’s not unreasonable, in certain contexts, to think that a person with a gun might be planning to use it. Why else would you have it with you? People are going to suspect you’re a bad guy with a gun.
MOST people associate FIFA, the organization that oversees international soccer, with the quadrennial joy of the World Cup. But as the 2014 tournament begins next week in Brazil, FIFA is plagued by levels of corruption, graft and excess that would shame Silvio Berlusconi. [..]
Under the iron-fisted leadership of Sepp Blatter, FIFA has been steeped in rotating scandals for so long, it’s difficult even to imagine its not being immersed in one public relations crisis or another. Mr. Blatter succeeded his mentor, the similarly scandal-plagued João Havelange in 1998. Under his stewardship, FIFA officials have been accused of financial mismanagement, taking bribes and projecting a level of sexism and homophobia that seems to come from another century.
FIFA’s corruption has been such an open secret for so many years that when new reports emerge, they tend to provoke more eye-rolls than outrage.
George Zorrnick: Will the EPA’s Climate Plan Lead to a Counterproductive Fracking Boom?
There’s little doubt the Obama administration’s big push to cut carbon pollution, announced this week, will lead to much less coal-fired power in the United States. That’s a good thing.
But what if states instead turn to natural gas-powered electricity instead? That’s certainly what the administration would like them to do-it’s explicitly laid out as an alternative in the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule, and Obama echoed that suggestion when he spoke on a conference call the day the rule was unveiled. For years, his administration has pushed natural gas as a fundamental part of America’s long-term energy strategy.
If that happens, it could be a disaster for the environment, according to some leading climate experts. Federal regulations on the extraction and transport of natural gas range from insufficient to nonexistent, and the resultant methane emissions from a bigger natural gas boom could neutralize the gains made by the EPA’s rule, and possibly even accelerate climate change in the short-term.
Richard Reeves: Welcome Home, Sergeant
If today’s Republican Party had been around during the Civil War, it would have tried to stop its own president, a fellow named Lincoln, from appointing Gen. Ulysses S. Grant commander of the Union Army because he drank on duty-quite a lot, apparently. And if the president was a Democrat, say Thomas Jefferson, the Republicans would be calling for hearings to find out the “real” reason he was sending Lewis and Clark into the wilderness to learn what was out there between the Mississippi and the Pacific.
So now it is President Obama and Sgt. Bergdahl. It could be Obama and anyone or anything. In fact, the Republicans and other conservatives have been bad-mouthing the president for years for not doing enough to get the wandering sergeant back from the Taliban.
Davis Sirota: Private Equity Is Becoming a Public Problem
A few weeks ago, a top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission reported on what he called a “remarkable” amount of potentially illegal behavior in the private equity industry-aka the industry that buys up, changes and sells off smaller companies.
In its evaluation of private equity firms, the SEC official declared that half of all the reviews discovered “violations of law or material weaknesses in controls.” The announcement followed an earlier Bloomberg News report on how the agency now believes “a majority of private equity firms inflate fees and expenses charged to companies in which they hold stakes.”
At first glance, many probably dismiss this news as just an example of plutocrats bilking plutocrats. But that interpretation ignores how such malfeasance affects the wider economy.
Recent Comments