“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”.
The Sunday Talking Heads:
This Week with Christiane Amanpour: This should be an interesting Economics forum with Sen. Richard “no” Shelby (R-AL), Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Chairman/CEO of MF Global Inc. Jon Corzine, who is also the former Democratic governor of New Jersey and former Chairman/CEO of Goldman Sachs and ABC News senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal, ABC News senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper and ABC News’ George Will discuss Gingrich’s “rats” jumping ship.
This should be a “winner” panel to discuss Weiner’s political suicide by Twitter:
ABC News’ Claire Shipman, co-author of “Womenomics,” former Assistant Pentagon Press Secretary Torie Clarke, and Cecilia Attias, former wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
I just might watch to hear what Cecilia has to say.
Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guest are House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD), House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, David Ignatius, The Washington Post Columnist, Rana Foroohar, TIME Magazine Assistant Managing Editor and John Heilemann, New York Magazine National Political Correspondent. They will discuss:
Tough new signs America won’t recover soon: can President Obama still win?
Is talking to the Taliban the way out of Afghanistan?
Meet the Press with David Gregory: The first debate between the new DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and RNC Chair Reince Priebus.
GOP presidential hopeful former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) is interviewed. Don’t expect Gregory to be “harsh”.
The roundtable guests Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed (D), GOP strategist Mike Murphy, MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe, and the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel will discuss Obama, the economy, the budget and the GOP presidential field.
State of the Union with Candy Crowley: New Hampshire politics on the national stage, Candy talks to Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Rep. Charlie Bass.
Then, Candy sits down with two men who share a name well-known in the realm of New Hampshire politics. New Hampshire’s father and son pair, Fmr. Governor John Sununu and Fmr. Senator John Sununu, to give us their take on the GOP field shaping up for 2012.
Finally insights on Monday’s debate from Philip Rucker of The Washington Post and the Neil King of the Wall Street Journal.
Check out our Live Blog of the Le Mans finish and the Canadian Gran Prix.
Fareed Zakaris: GPS: Rountable guests are CNN’s “In the Arena”, Eliot Spitzer, conservative commentator Ann Coulter, Reuters Global Editor-at-Large Chrystia Freeland, and the British historian Andrew Roberts.
Coulter??? Really, Fareed, that is scraping bottom.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the author of a new book On China discusses will discuss what, his war crimes?
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius will discuss spying and spies and his new novel Bloodmoney.
Robert Reich:
The Stalled Recovery, Smoke and Mirrors, and the Carnage on the Street
The Dow ended the week below 12,000 for the first time since March. This is the sixth straight week of downs for the Dow. It’s almost as bad over at the Nasdaq. All the gains racked up in 2011 have now been erased.
What’s going on?
The real economy is catching up with the financial economy, as it always does eventually. Wall Street is built on smoke and mirrors, while the real economy is based on jobs and wages. Smoke and mirrors can only take you so far – as we learned so painfully three years ago.
Jobs and wages stink, if you haven’t noticed. They’ve been bad for months, even before this week’s data made it fairly clear the recovery has stalled.
Eileen Appelbaum: No Tax Holiday for Multinational Corporations
If you think that “double Irish” and “Dutch sandwich” are schoolyard jump rope games girls play, think again. These are the nefarious, but legal, games that hundreds of multinationals play to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. According to a report by Bloomberg, Google used these techniques to cut its tax rate to 2.4 percent and its taxes by $3.1 billion over the three years from 2007 through 2009. The company’s top two markets by revenue are the US, with a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, and the UK, with a 28 percent rate, yet Google – using practices widely employed by global companies – dramatically reduced its tax rate.
At the heart of this strategy is the transfer of rights to intellectual property developed in the US – often, as in Google’s case, with early research funded by US taxpayers through the National Science Foundation – to a subsidiary in a low-tax country. Foreign earnings based on the technology are then attributed to the subsidiary. Google transferred its search and advertising technology for much of the world to its Irish subsidiary at a price sanctioned in 2006 by the IRS. But even the much-vaunted low Irish taxes were not low enough for Google. That’s where the “double Irish” and the “Dutch sandwich” come in.
Michelle Alexander: Think Outside the Bars: Real Justice Means Fewer Prisons
A white woman with gray hair pulled neatly into a bun raises her hand. She keeps it up, unwavering and rigid, as she waits patiently for her turn to speak. Finally, the microphone is passed to the back of the room, and she leaps to her feet. With an air of desperation she blurts out, “You know white people suffer in this system, too, don’t you? It’s not just black and brown people destroyed by this drug war. My son, he’s been in the system. He’s an addict. He needs help. He needs treatment, but we don’t have money. He needs his family. But they keep givin’ him prison time. White people are hurting, too.” She is trembling and sits down.
There is an uncomfortable silence in the room, but I am in no hurry to respond. I let her question hang in the air. I want people to feel this discomfort, the tension created by her suffering. The audience is overwhelmingly African American, and a few of them are visibly agitated or annoyed by her question. I’ve spent the last forty minutes discussing my book, The New Jim Crow. The book argues that today, in the so-called era of colorblindness, and, yes-even in the age of Obama-racial caste is alive and well in America. The mass incarceration of poor people of color through a racially biased drug war has birthed a new caste system. It is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow.
Michael Winship: The Perils of Ignoring Science
A local NPR reporter was talking with Joseph Nicholson, CEO of Red Jacket Orchards in Geneva, New York, up in the neck of the upstate woods where I was born and raised. There’s been a lot more rain than usual, he said. Produce hasn’t been exposed to sufficient “heat units” — in other words, the sun.
“We’re going to be at least two weeks behind in harvest or ripening,” he said, and if the skies don’t brighten up soon, yields could be down 30 to 35 percent. That’s a lot of lost apples — and cherries, peaches and plums (although the rhubarb is doing just fine, thanks for asking).
As upstate kids we were told — apocryphally — that the only part of the world more overcast than us was Poland, so the idea that all these years later it’s cloudier than ever is startling. Is this part of manmade climate change?
Nicholas D. Kristof: When Food Kills
The deaths of 31 people in Europe from a little-known strain of E. coli have raised alarms worldwide, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Our food often betrays us.
Just a few days ago, a 2-year-old girl in Dryden, Va., died in a hospital after suffering bloody diarrhea linked to another strain of E. coli. Her brother was also hospitalized but survived.
Every year in the United States, 325,000 people are hospitalized because of food-borne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s right: food kills one person every two hours.
Yet while the terrorist attacks of 2001 led us to transform the way we approach national security, the deaths of almost twice as many people annually have still not generated basic food-safety initiatives. We have an industrial farming system that is a marvel for producing cheap food, but its lobbyists block initiatives to make food safer.
Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.
Saturday April 9, 2011
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