“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

The Sunday Talking Heads:

Up with Steve Kornacki:Joining Steve will be: Jordan Fabian, Political editor at Fusion; Lorella Praeli, a director of advocacy and policy for United We Dream; Ryan Enos, a political scientist and assistant professor of government at Harvard University; Judy Pino, communications director for the conservative Hispanic group the LIBRE Initiative; Rev. William Barber, president, North Carolina NAACP; Gerrick Brenner, executive director of Progress North Carolina; Penda Hair, co-director at the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization; North Carolina State Senator Linda Garrou (D); Rashad Robinson, executive director at Color of Change; Josh Barro, columnist for Bloomberg View; Alexis Goldstein, former vice president at Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank; Liz Kennedy, counsel at Demos; and Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter covering Wall Street and finance for ProPublica and columnist, The New York Times.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Guests on “This Week” are House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) and committee member Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), join Atlantic national correspondent and Bloomberg View columnist Jeffrey Goldberg to debate the latest news from Boston and Syria.

The  powerhouse roundtable tackles all the week’s politics with ABC News’ George Will, ABC News contributor and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, ABC News political analyst and special correspondent Matthew Dowd, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Senators Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Clare McCaskill (D-MO), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC); The Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan, Harvard University’s David Gergen, plus CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, John Dickerson and Clarissa Ward.

The Chris Matthews Show: This Sunday’s guests are Bob Woodward, The Washington Post Associate Editor; Gloria Borger, CNN Senior Political Analyst; Michael Duffy, TIME Magazine Assistant Managing Editor; and Lesley Stahl, CBS News 60 Minutes Correspondent.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: MTP guests are Sen. John McCain (R-AZ); former British Prime Minister Tony Blair;  Rep. Peter King (R-NY); Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MI).

Joining the roundtable the guests are  Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), GOP strategist Mike Murphy, NBC’s Chuck Todd, and former counselor to the president, Karen Hughes.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are  Sen. Dan Coats (R-Intel Cmte) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Intel Cmte); former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns.

The political panel with Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

In this week’s segment of “What We Know Now,” Up’s new host Steve Kornacki the human element in how our clothes are made and the collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh that killed 340 people. His guest Starlee Kine, contributor to “This American Life;” Ed Cox, chairman of the NY Republican State Comittee; former Rep. Nan Hayworth, (R-NY); and Timothy Naftali, former Director of the Nixon Presidential Library discuss what they have learned this week

Bangladesh factory collapse: police detain owners, as death toll exceeds 350

by Syed Zain Al-Mahmood in Dhaka for The Guardian

Reports of workers being ordered to Rana Plaza building on day before collapse despite cracks appearing and jolts being felt

Police in Bangladesh have detained two factory owners for criminal negligence over the deaths of at least 352 workers at an eight-storey building that collapsed on Wednesday – a day after warnings had been given that it was unsafe.

Two engineers who had been involved in issuing building permits for the Rana Plaza complex in Savar, just north of Dhaka, were also being held. The owner of the building was being sought by police, who have put border authorities on alert and arrested his wife in an attempt to bring him out of hiding.

On Saturday around 30 survivors were found and police say that as many as 900 people remain missing, trapped dead and alive under the twisted steel and concrete, through which rescue teams were still searching last night using electric drills, shovels, crowbars and their bare hands. Anger at the collapse has sparked days of protests and clashes, with police on Saturday using teargas, water cannon and rubber bullets on demonstrators who burned cars.

French Gay Marriage Bill Approved By France’s Parliament

from Huffington Post

Gay marriage has been legalised by the French parliament on Tuesday after weeks of divisive national debate on the issue.

The Socialist-majority assembly passed the measure by a large margin of 331-225.

Despite large and vocal public protests against same-sex marriage, polls suggest 55-60% of the public are in favour, reports the BBC.

And Then There Were Ten

by Dorothy J. Samuels, The New York Times

Rhode Island’s Senate – including all five Republican members – voted 26-12 on Wednesday in favor of legislation to allow same-sex couples to marry. Once Gov. Lincoln Chafee signs the bill, which is expected to happen next week, marriage equality will be the law in every New England state (Rhode Island plus Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) – a meaningful victory for civil rights and a proud distinction for the region.

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

    The beautiful, sweet vegetables of spring ― artichokes and peas, favas and tender young asparagus, spring garlic and sweet spring onions ― come and go so quickly that I find myself impulse buying at the market and using them up in the simplest of dishes. They beg nothing more than pasta, and that’s a good thing because many of these vegetables are labor-intensive. It’s worth the time it takes to shell the peas, to free the heart of the artichoke from its leaves, to shell and skin favas. Then little more is required than a quick sauté or simmer with aromatics. You can always embellish, though, as I am doing this week with some recipes, with a pesto or, in the case of a baked orzo pastitsio with artichokes and peas, a béchamel.

~Martha Rose Shulman~

“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 Tork Times Editorial Board: Congress Rushes to Aid the Powerful

Congress can’t pass a budget or control guns or confirm judges on time, but this week members of both parties found something they could agree on, and in a big hurry: avoiding blame for inconveniencing air travelers. The Senate and House rushed through a bill that would avert furloughs to air traffic controllers, which were mandated by Congress’s own sequester but proved embarrassing when flights began to back up around the country.

Then lawmakers scurried out of town, taking a week’s vacation while ignoring the low-income victims of the mandatory budget cuts, who have few representatives in Washington to protest their lost aid for housing, nutrition and education. Though they are suffering actual pain, not just inconvenience, no one rushed to give them a break from the sequester, and it is clear that no one will.

Charles M. Blow: The Morose Middle Class

The Middle Class is in a funk, its view of the future growing dim as fear rolls in like a storm.

An Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll released Thursday found that while most Americans (56 percent) hold out hope that they’ll be in a higher class at some point, even more Americans (59 percent) are worried about falling out of their current class over the next few years. In fact, more than eight in 10 Americans believe that more people have fallen out of the middle class than moved into it in the past few years.

The poll paints a picture of a group that is scared to death about its station in life.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

April 27 is the 117th day of the year (118th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 248 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1805, Naval Agent to the Barbary States, William Eaton, the former consul to Tunis, led an small expeditionary force of Marines, commanded by First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, and Berber mercenaries from Alexandria, across 500 miles to the port of Derna in Tripoli. Supported by US Naval gunfire, the port was captured by the end of the day, overthrowing Yusuf Karamanli, the ruling pasha of Tripoli, who had seized power from his brother, Hamet Karamanli, a pasha who was sympathetic to the United States.

Lt. O’Bannon raised the US flag over the port, the first time the US flag had flown over a foreign battlefield. He had performed so valiantly that newly restored Pasha Hamet Karamanli presented him with an elaborately designed sword that now serves as the pattern for the swords carried by Marine officers. The words “To the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Corps official song commemorate the battle.

Sources:

Wikipedia

About.com

The Senate will not vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, CISPA, that was passed by the House last week.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.), who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, “believes that information sharing is a key component of cybersecurity legislation, but the Senate will not take up CISPA,” a committee staffer told HuffPost.

A staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee said the committee also is working on an information-sharing bill and will not take up CISPA.

“We are currently drafting a bipartisan information sharing bill and will proceed as soon as we come to an agreement,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement Thursday.

CISPA Is ‘Dead for Now,’ Thanks to a Left-Right Coalition for Online Privacy

by John Nichols, The Nation

What brings the most seriously libertarian Republican in the US House, Michigan’s Justin Amash, together with Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota?

What unites long-time Ronald Reagan aide Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, with liberal firebrand Alan Grayson, D-Florida?

What gets steadily conservative former House Judiciary Committee chair James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, together with progressive former House Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers Jr., D-Michigan?

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which has for 222 years promised that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

That’s an old commitment that members of Congress swear an oath to uphold. [..]

CISPA actually won 288 “yes” votes in the House, but the 127 “no” votes-coming from principled members on both sides of the aisle-sent a strong message to the more deliberative Senate. In combination with a grassroots campaign spearheaded by tech-savvy privacy activists and a threatened veto by President Obama, the bipartisan House opposition appears to have convinced Senate leaders have signaled that they plan to put the legislation on hold. The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday suggestion that CISPA looks to be “dead for now.”

ACLU: CISPA Is Dead (For Now)

By Jason Koebler, US News

The Senate will not take up the controversial cybersecurity bill, is drafting separate legislation

“I think it’s dead for now,” says Michelle Richardson, legislative council with the ACLU. “CISPA is too controversial, it’s too expansive, it’s just not the same sort of program contemplated by the Senate last year. We’re pleased to hear the Senate will probably pick up where it left off last year.”

That’s not to say Congress won’t pass any cybersecurity legislation this year. Both Rockefeller and President Obama want to give American companies additional tools to fight back against cyberattacks from domestic and foreign hackers.

But cybersecurity legislation in the Senate, such as the Cybersecurity and American Cyber Competitiveness Act of 2013, has greater privacy protections than CISPA does. Richardson says that bill makes it clear that companies would have to “pull out sensitive data [about citizens]” before companies send it to the government and also puts the program under “unequivocal civilian control,” something CISPA author Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., was unwilling to do.

Even if the Senate gets something done, Rogers and other CISPA supporters will likely have to compromise more than they’ve been willing to over the past year as Obama has made it clear he will veto legislation that doesn’t have more privacy protections.

CISPA Is Dead. Now Let’s Do a Cybersecurity Bill Right

by Julian Sanchez, Wired

Americans have grown so accustomed to hearing about the problem of “balancing privacy and security” that it sometimes feels as though the two are always and forever in conflict – that an initiative to improve security can’t possibly be very effective unless it’s invading privacy. Yet the conflict is often illusory: A cybersecurity law could easily be drafted that would accomplish all the goals of both tech companies and privacy groups without raising any serious civil liberties problems.

Few object to what technology companies and the government say they want to do in practice: pool data about the activity patterns of hacker-controlled “botnets,” or the digital signatures of new viruses and other malware. This information poses few risks to the privacy of ordinary users. Yet CISPA didn’t authorize only this kind of narrowly limited information sharing. Instead, it gave companies blanket immunity for feeding the government vaguely-defined “threat indicators” – anything from users’ online habits to the contents of private e-mails – creating a broad loophole in all federal and state privacy laws and even in private contracts and user agreements.

Given that recent experience has shown companies shielded by secrecy often err on the side of oversharing with the government, that loophole was a key concern. So why the gap between what the law permits and its supporters’ aims?

It’s a principle wonks call tech neutrality. Nobody wants to write a bill that refers too specifically to the information needed to protect current networks (like “Internet Protocol addresses” or “Netflow logs”) since technological evolution would render such language obsolete over time.

The original mission of the Central Intelligence Agency was to provide national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers. The National Security Act of 1947 established the CIA, affording it “no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad“.

The primary function of the CIA is to collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and to advise public policymakers, but it does conduct emergency tactical operations and carries out covert operations, and exerts foreign political influence through its tactical divisions, such as the Special Activities Division.

There has been considerable criticism of the CIA relating to: security and counterintelligence failures, failures in intelligence analysis, human rights concerns, external investigations and document releases, influencing public opinion and law enforcement, drug trafficking, and lying to Congress.

In his new book, “The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti tracks the transformation of the CIA and U.S. special operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines in the world’s dark spaces: the new American way of war. The book’s revelations include disclosing that the Pakistani government agreed to allow the drone attacks in return for the CIA’s assassination of Pakistani militant Nek Muhammad, who was not even a target of the United States. Mazzetti’s reporting on the violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan – and Washington’s response – won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. The year before, he was a Pulitzer finalist for his reporting on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. [includes rush transcript]

“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

Paul Krugman: The 1 Percent’s Solution

Economic debates rarely end with a T.K.O. But the great policy debate of recent years between Keynesians, who advocate sustaining and, indeed, increasing government spending in a depression, and austerians, who demand immediate spending cuts, comes close – at least in the world of ideas. At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics.

Yet two big questions remain. First, how did austerity doctrine become so influential in the first place? Second, will policy change at all now that crucial austerian claims have become fodder for late-night comics?

Ralph Nader: Boston, Texas and Corporate Criminal Justice

The Boston Marathon bombings killed three and injured more than 180. The West, Texas industrial explosion killed at least 14 and injured more than 180. Guess which one drew the greater media and law enforcement response?

If it turns out that the West, Texas explosion is the result of a “terrorist act,” expect federal law enforcement officials and the mass media to fly to Texas from Boston. But until then, don’t expect much.

One reason — our two tier criminal justice system. One tier for individuals. Another for corporations.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

April 26 is the 116th day of the year (117th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 249 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident occurs at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Thirty-two people died and dozens more suffered radiation burns in the opening days of the crisis, but only after Swedish authorities reported the fallout did Soviet authorities reluctantly admit that an accident had occurred.

The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine). An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere, which spread over much of Western Russia and Europe. It is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and is one of only two classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the other being the Fukushima I nuclear incident, which is considered far less serious and has caused no direct deaths). The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles, crippling the Soviet economy.

The disaster began during a systems test on 26 April 1986 at reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, which is near the town of Pripyat. There was a sudden power output surge, and when an emergency shutdown was attempted, a more extreme spike in power output occurred, which led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of explosions. These events exposed the graphite moderator of the reactor to air, causing it to ignite. The resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive smoke fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area, including Pripyat. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. From 1986 to 2000, 350,400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. According to official post-Soviet data, about 60% of the fallout landed in Belarus.

The accident raised concerns about the safety of the Soviet nuclear power industry, as well as nuclear power in general, slowing its expansion for a number of years and forcing the Soviet government to become less secretive about its procedures.

(Click on image to enlarge) Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have been burdened with the continuing and substantial decontamination and health care costs of the Chernobyl accident. Thirty one deaths are directly attributed to the accident, all among the reactor staff and emergency workers. A UNSCEAR report places the total confirmed deaths from radiation at 64 as of 2008. Estimates of the number of deaths potentially resulting from the accident vary enormously: the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest it could reach 4,000; a Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more; a Russian publication, Chernobyl, concludes that 985,000 excess deaths occurred between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination.

Decommissioning

After the explosion at reactor four, the remaining three reactors at the power plant continued to operate. In 1991, reactor two suffered a major fire, and was subsequently decommissioned. In November 1996, reactor one was shut down, followed by reactor three on December 15, 2000, making good on a promise by Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma that the entire plant would be closed.

Even after the last reactor shutdown, people continue to work at the Chernobyl plant until reactor units 1, 2, and 3 are totally decommissioned, which is expected to take years. The first stage of decommissioning is the removal of the highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel, which is placed in deep water cooling ponds. However, storage facilities for this are not suitable for long term containment, and those on site do not have the capacity for all the spent fuel from units 1, 2 and 3. A second facility is planned for construction that will use dry storage technology suitable for long term storage and have the required capacity.

Removal of uncontaminated equipment has begun at unit 1 and this work could be complete by 2020-2022.

The remains of reactor unit 4 will remain radioactive for some time. The isotope responsible for the majority of the external gamma radiation dose at the site is Caesium-137 which has a half-life of about 30 years. It is likely that with no further decontamination work the gamma ray dosage at the site will return to background levels in about three hundred years. However, as most of the alpha emitters are longer lived, the soil and many surfaces in and around the plant are likely to be contaminated with transuranic metals such as plutonium and americium, which have much longer half-lives. It is planned that the reactor buildings will be disassembled as soon as it is radiologically safe to do so.

“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

Jared Bernstein: The Preferences of the Wealthy and Their Role in Our Politics

A critical concern of our time is not simply our high levels of income inequality and their negative impact on opportunity and mobility. It’s how inequality and immobility become entrenched in the system — how they replicate.

In a nation like ours, where the flow of money into politics keeps getting stronger, one way this occurs is through the political preferences of the wealthy. Of course, at any point in our history, the disproportionate policy influence of the wealthy has been a serious problem for our democracy. But in today’s America, two factors intensify this threat: the increased concentration of economic resources, and the increased access those resources have to the political system.

There’s yet another piece to this puzzle, however, kind of a riff off the old F. Scott Fitzgerald line about the rich being different from the rest of us (i.e., besides “they’ve got more money”). What are the political preferences of the wealth and how do they differ from those of the rest of us?

Robert Sheer: 277 Million Boston Bombings

The horror of Boston should be a reminder that the choice of weaponry can be in itself an act of evil. “Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim” is the way the New York Times defined the hideousness of the weapons used, and President Obama made clear that “any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror.” But are we as a society prepared to be judged by that standard?

The president’s deployment of drones that all too often treat innocent civilians as collateral damage comes quickly to mind. It should also be pointed out that the U.S. still maintains a nuclear arsenal and, as our killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese demonstrated, those weapons are inherently, by the president’s definition, weapons of terror. But it is America’s role in the deployment of antipersonnel land mines, and our country’s refusal to sign off on a ban on cluster munitions agreed to by most of the world’s nations, that offers the most glaring analogy with the carnage of Boston.