Tag: Open Thread

Apr 05 2015

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

“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:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on Sunday’s “This Week” are: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; California Gov. Jerry Brown; Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput; Major League Baseball commissioner emeritus Bud Selig and ESPN’s Keith Olbermann.

The roundtable guests are: Democratic strategist Donna Brazile; ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd; ABC News Chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl; and Associated Press Chief White House correspondent Julie Pace.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are: U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz;  Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC); former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA); and Sarah Warbelow, Legal Director for the Human Rights Campaign.

His panel guests are: David Sanger, The New York Times; David Ignatius, The Washington Post; CBS News State Department Correspondent Margaret Brennan; Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post; and Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic.

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: The guests on “MTP” this Sunday are: MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred; Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York; and Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA). The rest remains a mystery.

State of the Union: Jim Acosta will host this Sunday’s SOTU. His guests are Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).

Apr 04 2015

Health and Fitness News

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Gazette‘s 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

It’s Easy Being (Collard) Green

Collard Greens Tagine With Flageolets photo 01MARTHA-tmagArticle.jpg

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

While the brightest spring vegetables are not yet on offer, Martha notes that dark green collards, light green fennel, pale green dried flageolet beans and bright jalapeño are all available at the market. She offers a new collard greens stew, and we’ve dug up more of our favorite recipes for collard greens.

~ Tara Parker Pope ~

Collard Greens Tagine With Flageolets

Stuffed Collard Greens

Collard Greens With Farro

Farro with anything is comfort food, and the combination of farro and collard greens is particularly hearty and nutritious.

Breakfast Tacos With Eggs, Onions and Collard Greens

These comforting, easy tacos don’t have to be relegated to the breakfast table.

Apr 04 2015

Punting the Pundits

“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

Trevor Timm: Republicans have no interest in peace. The Iran talks proved that

A small part of the Middle East may soon be off limits to US bombing and killing, so naturally Republicans and their neocon allies are furious.

The tentative Iran deal announced on 3 April, in which Western leaders and the Islamic republic agreed on strict limits to Iran’s nuclear program, was hailed by many as a breakthrough, given that it could avert yet another US-led war in the Middle East. So almost immediately, it was denounced by key conservative members of Congress, neocons, and Republican presidential candidates, whose unquenched thirst for blood almost always outweighs their supposed commitment to peace. [..]

When neocons like Bolton come out of the woodwork to denounce the chance for peace with Iran, it’s always amusing to remember the people most responsible for helping the country to start its nuclear energy program: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They pushed President Ford to sign a deal to sell Iran nuclear material in 1976, but somehow that’s never brought up when Fox News is calling Iran “the devil”.

There’s still a long way to go this deal can become a signed pact, but given that the terms were better than expected, the Obama administration seems to have finally done something that could have lasting positive impact on the Middle East.

Joan Walsh: The right’s “cake” insanity: You won’t believe how it’s trying to deflect the Indiana backlash

“Cake is speech.”

That’s what Indiana Baptist pastor Tim Overton told NPR’s Steve Inskeep Thursday morning, defending his state’s controversial “religious freedom” law. I thought it was so funny, I immediately tweeted it.

But as the day went on, it became clear that Overton’s argument wasn’t some fringe theory: It’s shaping up as a core tenet of one “compromise” approach to religious freedom laws that’s under consideration, in the wake of the backlash to the Indiana law, which Overton fervently supported as written. It’s at the heart of the fix to the law Jeb Bush pushed Wednesday night with pro-gay rights Republican donors. [..]

For the far right, of course, even Indiana’s compromise is going too far. (Santorum is “disappointed” in his “dear friend” Mike Pence.) My friend Greg Sargent thinks it’s progress that some space has opened up within the GOP to at least debate these issues, and I guess that’s true. But the religious freedom argument should be simple: If your religion tells you it’s wrong to be gay, then don’t have gay sex, or get gay married. It’s amazing to watch Bush and others contort themselves to make floral arranging and cake baking a form of religious expression, to pander to the far right, though it’s not likely to work. This debate will get sillier before it’s settled.

Heather Digby Parton: Religious right’s next crusade: What they want to throw women in jail for now

It’s been heartening to see such a strong reaction to Indiana’s new law enabling bigotry against gay people over the past few days. A bright light is now shining on the cleverly framed “Religious liberty” movement and it’s going to be politically risky in the future for any officials to use the Supreme Court’s “Hobby Lobby” invitation to social conservatives to use a religious liberty doctrine to allow businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians. This is very good news. The Big Money Boyz decided that it was bad for business and the only people to whom conservative leaders listen more closely than the members of the religious right are the leaders of corporate America.

Unfortunately, as you will undoubtedly recall, the Hobby Lobby decision, which for the first time granted religious status to a corporation, wasn’t actually about gay rights. It was about denying female employees health insurance coverage for contraception due to the employers religious objection. (The employee’s beliefs were not deemed to be relevant.) So far, there hasn’t been much outcry against that in Indiana or elsewhere. Indeed, in Indiana the clock has been turned so far back on women’s rights that they are now imprisoning women for having abortions. Yes, you read that right.

David Sirota: Wall Street Democrats are on notice: Andrew Cuomo, Rahm Emanuel and the party’s new civil war

For those pining for a Democratic Party that tries to represent more than the whims of the rich and powerful, these are, to say the least, confusing times. [..]

It would be easy to conclude that the status quo is winning Democratic politics – but a series of high-profile elections shows the trends are markedly different outside the national political arena.

Two years ago, the era of billionaire Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Wall Street-worshiping city politics ended when populist Democrat Bill de Blasio and a slate of progressive city councilors backed by New York’s Working Families Party were swept into office promising to increase taxes on millionaires and fund universal pre-kindergarten. A year later, New York’s conservative Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his $40 million campaign war chest couldn’t muster two-thirds of the Democratic primary vote against an unknown progressive opponent named Zephyr Teachout. Though Cuomo was ultimately reelected, he was humiliated, and his future prospects have been significantly diminished.

Now comes Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel has shuttered schools, handed out big corporate subsidies, blocked a financial transaction tax and pushed for cuts to city workers’ retirement benefits. He made the old corporate Democratic assumption, betting that he could easily win reelection by simply spending opponents into the ground.

Lambasted as “Mayor 1 Percent,” Emanuel has been forced to champion more progressive policies to try to appease the Democratic base – he suddenly backed a $13 minimum wage and signed an ordinance compelling developers to pony up more cash for affordable housing. His underfinanced opponent Garcia still may lose the April 7th election, but in a city that has for decades been under the thumb of corporate Democrats’ political machine, a deeper victory for progressives has already happened.

Maarcy Wheeler: FBI’s brazen terrorism lie: What the Boston Marathon bombing trial reveals about America’s deluded terror narrative

Close to the end of the March 25 testimony in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial for his role in the April 25, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the government submitted a series of exhibits with chats from the defendant. One described (pdf) wanting President Obama to win the Presidential election as the “lesser of two evils” but asserting “killing Muslims is the only promise Obama or Mitt Romney] will fulfill.” One [joked (pdf) about sex even while discussing studying the Quran. Another described transferring from UMass Dartmouth (in reality, Dzhokhar was already failing out), joking about transferring to an Ivy League school, but ending by saying “I wanna bring justice for my people.” These were chats with no context, simply read by an FBI agent, without even any guidance about with whom Dzhokhar was chatting.

About the only one that made sense was one from December 25, 2012 that read “Doing something with Tamerlan,” Dzhokhar’s older brother who would go on to be killed in a police shoot out after the attack. “I’ll hit you up in a bit bro.”

But when the defense tried to introduce related chats, noting how religious Tamerlan had become and explaining that the older brother had influenced Dzhokhar so much he had been sober for a month, the witness said he wasn’t sure it was about Dzhokhar’s older brother.

It was just an example of the degree to which the prosecution in the marathon trial are cherry picking narrowly from the complex cultural world of Dzhokhar, a Chechen immigrant who grew up steeped in American culture in Cambridge, MA.

Sen. Bernie Sanders: The Political Revolution We Desperately Need

The good news is that the economy today is much better than it was six years ago when George W. Bush left office. The bad news is that, despite these improvements, the 40-year decline of the American middle class continues. Real unemployment is much too high, 35 million Americans continue to have no health insurance and more of our friends and neighbors are living in poverty than at almost any time in the modern history of our country.

Meanwhile, as the rich become much richer, the level of income and wealth inequality has reached obscene and unimaginable levels. In the United States, we have the most unequal level of wealth and income distribution of any major country on earth, and worse now then at any other time since the 1920s. Today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent of our nation owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and one family owns more wealth than the bottom 42 percent. In terms of income, 99 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent. [..]

Clearly, the struggle to create a nation and world of economic and social justice and environmental sanity is not an easy one. But this I know: despair is not an option if we care about our kids and grandchildren. Giving up is not an option if we want to prevent irreparable harm to our planet.

We must stand up and fight back. We must launch a political revolution which engages millions of Americans from all walks of life in the struggle for real change. This country belongs to all of us, not just the billionaire class.

Please join the grass-roots revolution that we desperately need.

Apr 04 2015

On This Day In History April 4

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 4 is the 94th day of the year (95th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 271 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1949,the NATO pact signed

The United States and 11 other nations establish the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact aimed at containing possible Soviet aggression against Western Europe. NATO stood as the main U.S.-led military alliance against the Soviet Union throughout the duration of the Cold War.

Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union began to deteriorate rapidly in 1948. There were heated disagreements over the postwar status of Germany, with the Americans insisting on German recovery and eventual rearmament and the Soviets steadfastly opposing such actions. In June 1948, the Soviets blocked all ground travel to the American occupation zone in West Berlin, and only a massive U.S. airlift of food and other necessities sustained the population of the zone until the Soviets relented and lifted the blockade in May 1949. In January 1949, President Harry S. Truman warned in his State of the Union Address that the forces of democracy and communism were locked in a dangerous struggle, and he called for a defensive alliance of nations in the North Atlantic-U.S military in Korea.NATO was the result. In April 1949, representatives from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal joined the United States in signing the NATO agreement. The signatories agreed, “An armed attack against one or more of them… shall be considered an attack against them all.” President Truman welcomed the organization as “a shield against aggression.”

Apr 03 2015

Punting the Pundits

“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 York Times Editorial Board: A Promising Nuclear Deal With Iran

The preliminary agreement between Iran and the major powers is a significant achievement that makes it more likely Iran will never be a nuclear threat. President Obama said it would “cut off every pathway that Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon.” [..]

By opening a dialogue between Iran and America, the negotiations have begun to ease more than 30 years of enmity. Over the long run, an agreement could make the Middle East safer and offer a path for Iran, the leading Shiite country, to rejoin the international community.

The deal, if signed and carried out, would vindicate the political risks taken by President Hassan Rouhani of Iran and President Obama to engage after decades of estrangement starting from the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Paul Krugman: Power and Paychecks

On Wednesday, McDonald’s – which has been facing demonstrations denouncing its low wages – announced that it would give workers a raise. The pay increase won’t, in itself, be a very big deal: the new wage floor is just $1 above the local minimum wage, and even that policy only applies to outlets McDonald’s owns directly, not the many outlets owned by people who bought franchises. But it’s at least possible that this latest announcement, like Walmart’s much bigger pay-raise announcement a couple of months ago, is a harbinger of an important change in U.S. labor relations.

Maybe it’s not that hard to give American workers a raise, after all.

Most people would surely agree that stagnant wages, and more broadly the shrinking number of jobs that can support middle-class status, are big problems for this country. But the general attitude to the decline in good jobs is fatalistic. Isn’t it just supply and demand? Haven’t labor-saving technology and global competition made it impossible to pay decent wages to workers unless they have a lot of education?

Richard (RJ) Eskow: What Everyone Should Know About the Student Debt Crisis (in 4 Charts)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Elijah Cummings, who co-chair an initiative called the Middle Class Prosperity Project, are holding a forum this afternoon (Thursday, April 2) at the University of Massachusetts in Boston on “Tackling the Student Debt Crisis” (more info here).

If the word “crisis” seems dramatic to you, you haven’t been paying attention. The Federal Reserve recently released new data on student debt, and it shows that the situation is even worse than many people realized. There’s a lot of new information available, but here are four things every American needs to know:

1. Student debt is soaring in this country.

2. The debt burden is disproportionately falling on younger Americans.

3. An alarming number of student loans are delinquent.

4. Student debt is ruining credit scores — and keeping young people out of the consumer economy.

Excessive consumer debt is another economic problem, of course. But these figures are an indication that student debt is keeping young Americans from forming households and purchasing homes, from buying cars, and presumably from other types of purchases as well.

If large numbers of young people are prevented from fully participating in the consumer economy — if they’re not able to buy things — that doesn’t just harm them personally. It hurts the entire economy — which means it affects almost everyone.

Robert Reich: The Rise of the Working Poor and the Non-Working Rich

Many believe that poor people deserve to be poor because they’re lazy. As Speaker John Boehner has said, the poor have a notion that “I really don’t have to work. I don’t really want to do this. I think I’d rather just sit around.”

In reality, a large and growing share of the nation’s poor work full time — sometimes sixty or more hours a week — yet still don’t earn enough to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

It’s also commonly believed, especially among Republicans, that the rich deserve their wealth because they work harder than others.

In reality, a large and growing portion of the super-rich have never broken a sweat. Their wealth has been handed to them.

The rise of these two groups — the working poor and non-working rich — is relatively new. Both are challenging the core American assumptions that people are paid what they’re worth, and work is justly rewarded.

Why are these two groups growing?

Jared Bernstein: March Jobs Report: First Impressions

Payrolls rose only 126,000 last month in a surprisingly downbeat reading on the state of the labor market. Unemployment remained unchanged at 5.5%, but the closely watched labor force rate fell a tenth in another sign of weakness.

Contributing to the disappointing report, job gains for the prior two months were marked down by a total of 69,000. Thus, the average monthly gain over the first quarter of the year fell slightly below 200,000, as shown below.

Average weekly hours ticked down slighty as well in March, the first such decline in over a year. [..]

Has the job market really downshifted, or is this month a temporary blip? While there’s evidence for both sides of that argument, I’d give more weight to the 260K bars in the above figure than the lower first bar. The underlying trend, both for overall GDP growth and for job gains has been steady and moderate, productivity certainly hasn’t accelerated (which would suggest employers could meet demands with fewer workers), and the unemployment rate has generally fallen for good reasons — more jobseekers finding work — than for bad ones — more jobseekers giving up the search and leaving the labor market.

Jason W. Murphy: Big oil is pressuring scientists not to link fracking to earthquakes in Oklahoma

For some time now, scientists have wondered whether fracking-related activities, such as wastewater injection, might be the source of increased seismic activity in Oklahoma. In May of last year, the Oklahoma Geological Survey, an affiliate entity of the University of Oklahoma, released a statement in conjunction with the United States Geological Survey, saying that wastewater injection was a “likely contributing factor the increase in earthquakes”.

Not long after this statement, David Boren, president of the university, summoned the Oklahoma Geological Survey’s lead seismologist Austin Holland, who was also one of the authors of the statement, to a meeting with Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, one of Oklahoma’s largest oil and gas exploration and production companies. Boren facilitated the meeting despite the fact that he also serves as a member of the Continental Resources board of directors.

In July 2014, Continental Resources released a presentation

positing an alternative theory for the seismic swarms and downplaying the influence of induced seismicity. One can only imagine the pressure this meeting must have brought upon Holland and his team of scientists.

That’s why state policy makers like myself are concerned that industry pressure conveyed through the highest levels of academia could compromise the deliberative and fact-based response by which state officials are attempting to put an end to the seismic swarms.

Apr 03 2015

The Breakfast Club (The Times They Are Changin)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Martin Luther King Jr. gives speech before assasination; Bruno Richard Hauptmann electrocuted for kidnap and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s son; President Harry Truman signs Marshall plan; Jesse James shot to death; Pony Express begins service; Marlon Brando is born.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Bob Dylan

Apr 03 2015

On This Day In History April 3

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 3 is the 93rd day of the year (94th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 272 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1948, President Harry S.Truman signs Foreign Assistance Act.

President Harry S. Truman signs off on legislation establishing the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, more popularly known as the Marshall Plan. The act eventually provided over $12 billion of assistance to aid in the economic recovery of Western Europe.

In the first years following the end of World War II, the economies of the various nations of Western Europe limped along. Unemployment was high, money was scarce, and homelessness and starvation were not unknown in the war-ravaged countries. U.S. policymakers considered the situation fraught with danger. In the developing Cold War era, some felt that economic privation in Western Europe made for a fertile breeding ground for communist propaganda.

The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was the large-scale economic program, 1947-1951, of the United States for rebuilding and creating a stronger economic foundation for the countries of Europe. The initiative was named after Secretary of State George Marshall and was largely the creation of State Department officials, especially William L. Clayton and George F. Kennan. Marshall spoke of urgent need to help the European recovery in his address at Harvard University in June 1947.

The reconstruction plan, developed at a meeting of the participating European states, was established on June 5, 1947. It offered the same aid to the Soviet Union and its allies, but they did not accept it. The plan was in operation for four years beginning in April 1948. During that period some US $13 billion in economic and technical assistance were given to help the recovery of the European countries that had joined in the Organization for European Economic Co-operation. This $13 billion was in the context of a U.S. GDP of $258 billion in 1948, and was on top of $12 billion in American aid to Europe between the end of the war and the start of the Plan that is counted separately from the Marshall Plan.

The ERP addressed each of the obstacles to postwar recovery. The plan looked to the future, and did not focus on the destruction caused by the war. Much more important were efforts to modernize European industrial and business practices using high-efficiency American models, reduce artificial trade barriers, and instill a sense of hope and self-reliance.

By 1952 as the funding ended, the economy of every participant state had surpassed pre-war levels; for all Marshall Plan recipients, output in 1951 was 35% higher than in 1938.[8] Over the next two decades, Western Europe enjoyed unprecedented growth and prosperity, but economists are not sure what proportion was due directly to the ERP, what proportion indirectly, and how much would have happened without it. The Marshall Plan was one of the first elements of European integration, as it erased trade barriers and set up institutions to coordinate the economy on a continental level-that is, it stimulated the total political reconstruction of western Europe.

Belgian economic historian Herman Van der Wee concludes the Marshall Plan was a “great success”:

   “It gave a new impetus to reconstruction in Western Europe and made a decisive contribution to the renewal of the transport system, the modernization of industrial and agricultural equipment, the resumption of normal production, the raising of productivity, and the facilitating of intra-European trade.”

George Catlett Marshall (December 31, 1880 – October 16, 1959) was an American military leader, Chief of Staff of the Army, Secretary of State, and the third Secretary of Defense. Once noted as the “organizer of victory” by Winston Churchill for his leadership of the Allied victory in World War II, Marshall served as the United States Army Chief of Staff during the war and as the chief military adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As Secretary of State, his name was given to the Marshall Plan, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

Apr 02 2015

Punting the Pundits

“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 York Times Editorial Board: The Scrambled States of Immigration

A country that has abandoned all efforts at creating a saner immigration policy has gotten the result it deserves: not one policy but lots of little ones, acting at cross purposes and nullifying one another. Not unity but cacophony, a national incoherence – one well illustrated in a recent report in The Times on the various ways the states, forsaken by Congress, are adjusting to the millions of unauthorized immigrants living outside the law. [..]

Depending on how the Fifth Circuit rules on the lawsuit challenging Mr. Obama’s executive actions, his valiant effort to repair some of the damage to the immigration system could well be undone, and everybody, families and felons, may get put back in the shadowy line of potential deportees. Meanwhile, the Army is expanding and fast-tracking a program to give citizenship to unauthorized immigrants with special language or medical skills.

Who is on the right side of this argument – the Army, Mr. Obama, Gov. Jerry Brown of California, Mr. de Blasio? Or Texas, Alabama, Arizona and the Republicans whose resistance to reform has left the nation in this mess? Those die-hard opponents fail to remember that laws and policies that deny rights and promote exclusion have been the source of shame and regret throughout American history. Integration and assimilation are the core values of a country that is in danger of forgetting itself.

Will Rogers: Our Land, Up for Grabs

A BATTLE is looming over America’s public lands.

It’s difficult to understand why, given decades of consistent, strong support from voters of both parties for protecting land, water and the thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic benefits these resources make possible.

Last week, the United States Senate voted 51 to 49 to support an amendment to a nonbinding budget resolution to sell or give away all federal lands other than the national parks and monuments.

If the measure is ever implemented, hundreds of millions of acres of national forests, rangelands, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas and historic sites will revert to the states or local governments or be auctioned off. These lands constitute much of what’s left of the nation’s natural and historical heritage. [..]

Rather than selling off the lands we all own, or looking for other uses for the money approved at the ballot box for conservation, our leaders should listen to voters and find ways to protect more of the places that make America special.

David Cay Johnston: Phantom income helps poor children

Reform the earned income tax credit but not at the expense of struggling families

The number of informal businesses in the United States is growing robustly, but the average size of these enterprises is shrinking fast, my analysis of official government data from 1988 to 2012 shows.

Given the millions of people who have lost a job, cannot find work or kept working but at reduced pay, it’s not surprising that many of them are starting small businesses to make ends meet. If you cannot get a job, make one for yourself – sell homemade goods, wash windows, edit articles.

The trends in what government calls sole proprietorships – any unincorporated business that files a Schedule C with the owner’s personal tax return – open a window on how Americans are adapting to an economy that for decades has been glorious for those at the top but hard on the vast majority.

This is a story not of prosperous entrepreneurship but of desperate struggles to swim against powerful economic currents. A much darker story lies hidden in the official numbers, a story of crushing poverty alleviated by a strange amalgam of thieving tax preparers, ignorant parents and Congress’ failure to focus on making government policies work as intended.

In analyzing the official data, I saw hints that many of these informal businesses either are bogus or inflate their profits. It may appear bizarre that anyone would tell the Internal Revenue Service that they made more money than they actually did. But doing so can be lucrative for unscrupulous tax preparers and their poorest clients.

Charles M. Blow: Religious Freedom vs. Individual Equality

Indiana’s governor is now vowing to “clarify” a religious freedom law he recently signed in that state, because of what he calls a “perception problem” about whether the legislation would allow open discrimination against people whose sexual identities defy the heteronormative construct.

In truth, there is no perception problem. There was a detection problem: People detected precisely what the bill was designed to do, and they objected. And, possibly more important than individuals’ objections, were the objections of big business like Apple and Angie’s List.

Rather than simply protecting the free exercise of religion, the bill provides the possibility that religion could be used as a basis of discrimination against some customers. [..]

Too many people in this country continue to have an unhealthy obsession with what other people do in their bedrooms rather than focusing on what they do – or don’t do – in their own.

Mind your own faith and your own business and allow other people to define their own relationships with a god, if he or she believes and chooses such a spiritual communion.

Michelangelo Signorile: A Spellbinding Week: What Are the Gains and Losses for LGBT Rights, and What Battles Lie Ahead?

It’s been an extraordinary week for LGBT people in America, as we saw a battle play out in the media that made all of us who support equality — lesbian, transgender, gay, bisexual, and straight — feel proud. Major celebrities, media personalities, prominent politicians, and huge corporations — even some on Fox News — were standing up against bigots and speaking out for equality. It was exciting, even dazzling. [..]

Yeah, we won a major media battle and got amazing support. We should thank people like lesbian longtime journalist Kerry Eleveld and others for lighting a firecracker under HRC with much-needed, intense criticism in recent weeks for its lack of a strategy. It was wonderful, too, to see allies support us, exciting to behold. And hopefully we learned a lot about holding our enemies’ — and gay groups’ — feet to the fire. But in larger frame, LGBT citizens lost protection from discrimination. So, yes, be proud of our work this week. But there’s so much more to do. Don’t think our opponents aren’t already regrouping and calibrating their next attack, moving on to other states. We cannot fool ourselves, dazzled by the events, into thinking that because we won a media battle, we have won the war.

Jessica Valenti: It isn’t justice for Purvi Patel to serve 20 years in prison for an abortion

Abortion is illegal in the United States. So is having a stillbirth – not officially, perhaps, but thanks to a case in Indiana, we’re halfway there. On Monday, Purvi Patel, a 33 year old woman who says that she had a miscarriage, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for neglect of a dependent and feticide. She is the first woman in the United States to ever be sentenced for such a crime. [..]

We may never know what really happened in Patel’s case. She has repeatedly said that she had a miscarriage which, if true, means that the state is sending a woman to jail for not having a healthy pregnancy outcome. But even if Patel did procure and take drugs to end her pregnancy, are we really prepared to send women to jail for decades if they have abortions? Even illegal ones?

When women are desperate to end their pregnancies, they will. The answer to this shouldn’t be punitive, but supportive: women need better access to education, affordable contraception and abortion without harassment or delay.

Patel’s case opens the door for any woman who expresses doubt about her pregnancy to be charged if she miscarries or has a stillbirth. It’s a terrifying thought, but one that is already impacting real women: the anti-choice movement is now sending women to jail for what happens during their pregnancies. So tell me again how abortion is totally legal. Or tell Purvi Patel.

Apr 02 2015

On This Day In History April 2

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 2 is the 92nd day of the year (93rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 273 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1513, Ponce de Leon discovers Florida. Near present-day St. Augustine, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon comes ashore on the Florida coast, and claims the territory for the Spanish crown.

Although other European navigators may have sighted the Florida peninsula before, Ponce de Leon is credited with the first recorded landing and the first detailed exploration of the Florida coast. The Spanish explorer was searching for the “Fountain of Youth,” a fabled water source that was said to bring eternal youth. Ponce de Leon named the peninsula he believed to be an island “La Florida” because his discovery came during the time of the Easter feast, or Pascua Florida.

First voyage to Florida

Ponce de Leon equipped three ships with at least 200 men at his own expense and set out from Puerto Rico on March 4, 1513. The only contemporary description known for this expedition comes from Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, a Spanish historian who apparently had access to the original ships’ logs or related secondary sources from which he created a summary of the voyage published in 1601. The brevity of the account and occasional gaps in the record have led historians to speculate and dispute many details of the voyage.

The three ships in this small fleet were the Santiago, the San Cristobal and the Santa Maria de la Consolacion. Anton de Alaminos was their chief pilot. He was already an experienced sailor and would become one of the most respected pilots in the region. After leaving Puerto Rico, they sailed northwest along the great chain of Bahama Islands, known then as the Lucayos. By March 27, Easter Sunday, they reached the northern end of the Bahamas sighting an unfamiliar island (probably Great Abaco).

For the next several days the fleet crossed open water until April 2, 1513, when they sighted land which Ponce de Leon believed was another island. He named it La Florida in recognition of the verdant landscape and because it was the Easter season, which the Spaniards called Pascua Florida (Festival of Flowers). The following day they came ashore to seek information and take possession of this new land. The precise location of their landing on the Florida coast has been disputed for many years. Some historians believe it occurred at St. Augustine; others prefer a more southern landing at a small harbor now called Ponce de Leon Inlet; and some argue that Ponce came ashore even further south near the present location of Melbourne Beach.

After remaining in the vicinity of their first landing for about five days, the ships turned south for further exploration of the coast. On April 8 they encountered a current so strong that it pushed them backwards and forced them to seek anchorage. The tiniest ship, the San Cristobal, was carried out of sight and lost for two days. This was the first encounter with the Gulf Stream where it reaches maximum force between the Florida coast and the Bahamas. Because of the powerful boost provided by the current, it would soon become the primary route for eastbound ships leaving the Spanish Indies bound for Europe.

Apr 01 2015

Punting the Pundits

“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

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty will help neither workers nor consumers

“China wants to write the rules for the world’s fastest-growing region … We should write those rules,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union address. To sell Congress on giving him authority to “fast track” consideration of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade and investment treaty with 12 nations that has been under negotiation for five years, the president argues it is vital that “we” write the rules. The real question, of course, is what does he mean by “we”? [..]

How do trade treaties that undermine workers, cost jobs and create a private, corporate global arbitration system get through Congress? The answer, of course, is the corporate lobby that writes the rules mobilizes big money and armies of lobbyists to drive them through. Most Democrats oppose the treaties, but the Wall Street wing of the party tends to support them. Conservatives would naturally oppose secretive global panels that can force taxpayers to pay damages to companies, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable round up votes to get the treaty passed.

So remember, when the president argues that it is vital that “we” write the rules, “we” means not the American people, but corporate and financial interests.

President Obama has dramatically called inequality the defining challenge of our time. But the reason the 1 percent capture virtually all of the income growth in this society, the reason working families are struggling simply to stay afloat, is that the rules are rigged by the powerful to favor themselves. Our trade policies are clear examples of that. America’s middle class will continue to sink until “we” means the American people, not Wall Street and the corporate lobby.

Jessica Valenti: Don’t stress out. Our kids are just fine when their mothers work late

Some welcome news for working moms: you can stay late at the office tonight and your kid will be just fine.

A new study published this April in the Journal of Marriage and Family (pdf) shows that the widely-held belief that young children do better when their mothers spend significant time with them is actually wrong: kids are okay no matter how many hours mom works.

In fact, the stress of trying to live up to unrealistic parenting standards is likely more detrimental to children than a lack of time spent together. The so-called Mommy Wars aren’t just hurting women – they’re hurting kids, as well.  [..]

But, despite the neverending guilt mothers are expected to feel for working outside the home, the results of the study showed that the amount of time parents – mothers, in particular – spend with young children doesn’t have a statistically significant impact on their development or well-being.

Jess Zimmerman: April Fools’ pranks reveal the unfunny future of consumerism

The tech industry, hovering constantly one buzzword away from self-parody, is a hostile environment for mockery. So why are tech companies such zealous April Fools participants, second only perhaps to my cousin, who once pranked my grandmother by snail mail because she’d been warned not to believe anything he said on the phone on 1 April?

This year’s tech industry April Fools’ pranks started sliding out a day in advance. Maybe companies couldn’t bear to keep their jokes under wraps, or maybe they thought they’d sucker more people with a 31 March-dated press release. How else do you explain that, one day before 1 April, we already had Google Panda (a huggable version of Siri), the Samsung Galaxy BLADE edge (which turns your phone into a cleaver), and PACMaps, which merges PacMan with Google Maps. As usual, tech companies are falling all over each other to roll out a gag product, though this is the first time I’ve noticed them being so eager that they bring them out a day early. As usual the offerings are mildly funny, mildly annoying and only barely distinguishable from actual real-life products offered for sale. [..]

Behind the light-heartedness of today’s jokes is a tiny blip of menace: today’s satire is often tomorrow’s reality. On April Fools’ Day we look disconcertingly into our secret cravings and into the future of consumerism, and what we see isn’t all that implausible. No wonder nobody laughs all that hard.

Michelle Goldberg: Indiana Just Sentenced a Woman Convicted of Feticide to Twenty Years in Prison

Indiana’s law allowing discrimination against gay people is not the only reason that the state deserves our opprobrium. It’s also about to become the first state to imprison a woman for what it says is the death of a baby born after an attempted abortion.

On Monday, 33-year-old Purvi Patel, an unmarried woman from a conservative Hindu family who bought abortion drugs online, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the crimes of feticide and neglect of a dependent. It was not the first time that feticide laws, passed under the guise of protecting pregnant women from attack, have been turned against pregnant women themselves. Indiana, after all, was also the state that jailed Bei Bei Shuai, an immigrant who tried to commit suicide by poisoning herself while pregnant, and whose baby later died. But the Patel case is still a disturbing landmark. “Yes, the feticide laws in other states have been used to arrest and sometimes punish the pregnant women herself,” says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which advised Patel’s defense. “This is the first time it’s being used to punish what they say is an attempted self-abortion.” [..]

Indiana strengthened its feticide law in 2009, after a pregnant woman who was shot during a bank robbery lost the twins she was carrying. Under the statute, feticide applies in cases where a “person…knowingly or intentionally terminates a human pregnancy with an intention other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus.” There is an exemption for legal abortion, but no explicit one for self-abortion. Reproductive rights activists like Paltrow have long contended that such laws, championed by conservatives, are a sneaky way of eroding abortion rights, and the Patel case shows that they are right. We’ve reached a point where desperate women who end their pregnancies before viability are going to prison.

Linda Greenhouse: The Supreme Court’s Death Trap

You wouldn’t know it from the death penalty proceeding about to take place in the Boston Marathon case, or from Utah’s reauthorization of the firing squad, or the spate of botched lethal injections, but capital punishment in the United States is becoming vestigial.

The number of death sentences imposed last year, 72, was the lowest in 40 years. The number of executions, 35, was the lowest since 1994, less than half the modern peak of 98, reached in 1999. Seven states, the fewest in 25 years, carried out executions.

California has the country’s biggest death row, with more than 700 inmates. Many more of them die of natural causes – two since mid-March – than by execution. Last July, a federal district judge, Cormac J. Carney, concluding that California’s death penalty had become “dysfunctional,” “random” and devoid of “penological purpose,” declared it unconstitutional (pdf); the state is appealing.

In 2008, two years before he retired, Justice John Paul Stevens renounced the death penalty. His nuanced opinion (pdf) in Baze v. Rees (pdf) rewards rereading. No current justice has taken up the call. I’m not so naïve as to predict that a majority of the Supreme Court will declare the death penalty unconstitutional anytime soon. But the voice of even one member of the court could set a clarifying marker to which others would have to respond. And it just might over time point the way to freeing the court – and the rest of us – from the machinery of death.

Elise Czajkowski: Can Trevor Noah fill Jon Stewart’s big shoes for ‘Indecision 2016’?

This morning, Comedy Central officially announced 31-year-old South African comedian Trevor Noah as the third host of its flagship late-night show, The Daily Show. Noah has been slowly working his way up the ladder of US comedy over the last few years, with his own Showtime special and appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Late Show with David Letterman. When he joined The Daily Show back in December as an international correspondent, it seemed like a forward-thinking move on the part of the network. But it’s a big jump to take over from Jon Stewart, whose wry voice has become a pillar of American satire. [..]

Noah’s presence should an international flavour to the show, hopefully breaking it out of its obsession with the 24-hour news channels and petty Washington bickering. It was Stewart who swung the show sharply towards politics when he took over in 1999; there’s no reason that Noah couldn’t change the direction once again.

Stewart hasn’t officially announced his leaving date, confirming that it will be sometime in 2015. Noah’s tour schedule has him booked at shows in the UK as late as 22 October, which means he’s probably not to take over the chair until late in the year. Between then and now, he’s got a lot of studying to do.

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