“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.
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New York Times Editorial Board: The President’s Weak Privacy Proposal
President Obama has said that the country needs a strong privacy law so consumers can protect personal information from advertisers, Internet firms, employers and other businesses. But the country is not going to get it from Mr. Obama. The bill his administration recently offered will do little to help individuals while giving companies great leeway in determining how they collect, use and share personal data.
Americans are increasingly worried about their privacy. About 91 percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center last year said they felt people had lost control of how personal information is collected and used by companies. Mr. Obama has been aware of those concerns for some time. In 2012, he called for a privacy bill of rights that included lots of admirable ideas. He said individuals should have the right to “reasonable limits” on the collection of personal data by businesses, and that people should be able to see and correct information that companies have collected about them.
The draft bill (pdf) released by the White House on Friday only vaguely reflects those ideas and is riddled with loopholes. It seems tailored to benefit Internet firms like Google and Facebook and little-known data brokers like Acxiom that have amassed detailed profiles of individuals. For good reason, many privacy groups and some Democratic lawmakers have criticized the draft.
Paul Krugman: Pepperoni Turns Partisan
If you want to know what a political party really stands for, follow the money. Pundits and the public are often deceived; remember when George W. Bush was a moderate, and Chris Christie a reasonable guy who could reach out to Democrats? Major donors, however, generally have a very good idea of what they are buying, so tracking their spending tells you a lot.
So what do contributions in the last election cycle say? The Democrats are, not too surprisingly, the party of Big Labor (or what’s left of it) and Big Law: unions and lawyers are the most pro-Democratic major interest groups. Republicans are the party of Big Energy and Big Food: they dominate contributions from extractive industries and agribusiness. And they are, in particular, the party of Big Pizza.
No, really. A recent Bloomberg report noted that major pizza companies have become intensely, aggressively partisan. Pizza Hut gives a remarkable 99 percent of its money to Republicans. Other industry players serve Democrats a somewhat larger slice of the pie (sorry, couldn’t help myself), but, over all, the politics of pizza these days resemble those of, say, coal or tobacco. And pizza partisanship tells you a lot about what is happening to American politics as a whole.
It’s seed time for the 2016 presidential elections, when candidates try to figure out what they stand for and will run on.
One thing seems reasonably clear. The Democratic nominee for President, whoever she may be, will campaign on reviving the American middle class. [..]
The Democratic nominee will just as surely call for easing the burdens on working parents through paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave, childcare, elder-care, a higher minimum wage, and perhaps also tax incentives for companies that share some of their profits with their employees.
All this is fine, but it won’t accomplish what’s really needed.
The big unknown is whether the Democratic nominee will also take on the moneyed interests — the large Wall Street banks, big corporations, and richest Americans — which have been responsible for the largest upward redistribution of income and wealth in modern American history.
Eric T. Schneiderman: 50 Years After Selma, The Fight for Voting Rights Continues
On March 7, 1965, more than 600 civil rights demonstrators attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. It was the first day of a planned 54-mile march to the state capitol in Montgomery to protest discriminatory voting restrictions against African Americans. [..]
Fifty years later, leaders from across the country are returning to Selma to mark one of the major milestones in our nation’s civil rights movement. Yet the sad reality is that — despite the considerable progress made in the last five decades — we are still fighting to ensure voting rights for every American.
According to the Brennan Center, 22 states have enacted some form of voter restriction since 2011. Around the country, states are enacting burdensome voter identification laws that disproportionately impact minority, elderly and student voters and scaling back early voting opportunities.
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Netanyahu Speaks, Money Talks
Everything you need to know about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress Tuesday was the presence in the visitor’s gallery of one man — Sheldon Adelson.
The gambling tycoon is the Godfather of the Republican Right. The party’s presidential hopefuls line up to kiss his assets, scraping and bowing for his blessing, which when granted is bestowed with his signed checks. Data from both the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity show that in the 2012 election cycle, Adelson and his wife Miriam (whose purse achieved metaphoric glory Tuesday when it fell from the gallery and hit a Democratic congressman) contributed $150 million to the GOP and its friends, including $93 million to such plutocracy-friendly super PACs as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund, Winning Our Future (the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC) and Restore Our Future (the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC). [..]
But Sheldon Adelson was not only sitting in the House gallery on Tuesday because of the strings he pulls here in the United States. He is also the Daddy Warbucks of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu is yet another of his beneficiaries — not to mention an ideological soulmate. Although campaign finance reform laws are much more strict in Israel than here in the United States, Adelson’s wealth has bought him what the historian and journalist Gershom Gorenberg calls “uniquely pernicious” influence.
Jared Bernstein: February Jobs Report: First Impressions
In yet another installment of the solid jobs reports we seen in recent months, February’s payrolls were up by 295,000 and the unemployment rate ticked from 5.7% to 5.5%, the lowest it has been since mid-2008, according to this morning’s job market update from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Still, while there’s no doubt the labor market is improving, and doing so at a faster clip than in recent years, there are still missing ingredients suggesting that the US job market is not as close to full employment — a truly tight matchup between jobs and job-seekers — as the low jobless rate suggests.
The good news is clearly the pace at which employers are adding jobs on net. Because the monthly data jump about a bit, what you want to do is smooth out some of the monthly bips and bops by averaging payroll gains over the short, medium, and longer term, as I do in the monthly jobs day smoother, shown below.
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