Tag: Open Thread

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”.

Glenn Ford: Occupy All the Harlems, to Save Ourselves from the Dictatorship of Wall Street

Power to the people!

Say it like you mean it, because most of us have not been acting in the spirit of All Power to the People for a very long time.

For decades, we have been acting under the illusion that we could empower Black people by sending Black elected officials to the city council and the state legislature – and finally putting one in the White House – only to find that their philosophy of politics was: All Power To Those Who Already Have Power.

All Power to the Banks, to the Real Estate Developers; All Power to the Plutocrats, and to the Pentagon. That’s what has become of our Black Power, in the hands of our Black elected officials.

All Power to a President who uses his power to send $16 trillion dollars to Wall Street – and not just banks on Wall Street, but to banks in France, and Great Britain, and Belgium and Switzerland.

But not dime to bail out Harlem, and all the Harlems of this country.

There comes a time of awakening. We are now in that time – although some Black folks are not yet awake. Our job is to wake our people up, so that we don’t sleep through this moment.

New York Times Editorial: The Next Fight Over Jobs

Republicans will probably try to block an extension of expiring jobless benefits, which are the first line of defense against further weakening of the economy.

The way the job market is going, it will never be robust enough to bring down the unemployment rate, now at 9 percent, or 13.9 million people. Monthly job growth has slowed to an average of just 90,000 new jobs a month over the past six months, a pace at which growth in the working-age population will always exceed the number of new jobs being created.

High unemployment and low job growth, which have plagued the economy all through the current “recovery,” hurt both consumer spending and economic growth. But don’t count on government to do the obvious and urgent thing – intervene to create jobs.

Robert Kuttner: The Great Deflation

I never liked the term “The Great Recession,” because this is not an ordinary recession, not even a great one. It is a period of protracted deflation, where weak demand, declining incomes, and falling asset prices keep dragging the economy downward into a self-deepening sinkhole.

With the latest unemployment numbers, the evidence keeps accumulating that this will be a prolonged economic stagnation. The unemployment rate — stuck around 9 percent — is not as bad as that of the Great Depression, but in some respects the prognosis is equally grim.

Hadley Freeman: The Republican presidential candidates are farcically unelectable

Obama must have made a pact with the devil – how else to explain his good fortune?

When blues musician Robert Johnson famously if possibly not factually flogged his soul, he got in return superior guitar skills; when aged Joe Boyd did the same in the Faustian musical Damn Yankees, he was reborn as a dashing baseball player. As for Obama, just a few months ago he was being widely dismissed as a “one-term president”; now, while I can’t guarantee Obama will win the election next year (OK, I am partial to a Saturn-splattered turban, but my crystal ball recently cracked), I can say that his Republican rivals are fast becoming farcically unelectable. Some might argue that this is the inevitable result of a Republican party that has painted itself into a corner by focusing so much on social values and twisting its economic ones into such a knot that it claims to be a party for lower earners (it is, but only in the sense that it wants lower earners to pay high taxes so the rich don’t have to). But I say that only something truly satanic could conjure up what the GOP has vomited out this time round and, to prove it, I bring you the York Notes guide to the Republican candidates.

E. J. Dionne, Jr: The Politics of the Heavenly and Unheavenly

We have embarked on yet another presidential campaign in which religion will play an important role without any agreement over what the ground rules for that engagement should be.

If you think we’re talking past each other on jobs and budgets, consider the religious divide. One side says “separation of church and state” while the other speaks of “religion’s legitimate role in the public square.” Each camp then sees the question as closed and can get quite self-righteous in avoiding the other’s claims.

Anyone who enters this terrain should thus do so with fear and trembling. But a few things ought to be clear, and let’s start with this: The Mormon faith of Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman should not be an issue in this campaign. Period.

Joe Conason: Bloomberg vs. Occupy Wall Street

Americans listen when Michael Bloomberg speaks, not only because he is the mayor of New York City, but because he is a self-made billionaire and a smart guy. People think Bloomberg knows a lot about business and investment, which he surely does. But he nevertheless sounds terribly misinformed sometimes, as he did the other day-when he complained that Occupy Wall Street is unfairly blaming the nation’s big bankers for the crash and recession, when the real culprits are Congress and the government-sponsored housing lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” said the mayor. “It was, plain and simple, Congress, who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. … But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody.”

On this Day In History November 7

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.

November 7 is the 311th day of the year (312th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 54 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this dayin 1940, Only four months after its completion, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State suffers a spectacular collapse.

When it opened in 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was the third-longest suspension bridge in the world. Built to replace the ferry system that took commuters from Tacoma across the Tacoma Narrows to the Gig Harbor Peninsula, the bridge spanned 2,800 feet and took three years to build. To save cost, the principle engineer, Leon Moisseiff, designed the bridge with an unusually slender frame that measured 39 feet and accommodated just two vehicular lanes.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened with great fanfare on July 1, 1940. Human traffic across the waters of the Tacoma Narrows increased dramatically, but many drivers were drawn to the toll bridge not by convenience but by an unusual characteristic of the structure. When moderate to high winds blew, as they invariably do in the Tacoma Narrows, the bridge roadway would sway from side to side and sometimes suffer excessive vertical undulations. Some drivers reported that vehicles ahead of them would disappear and reappear several times as they crossed the bridge. On a windy day, tourists treated the bridge toll as the fee paid to ride a roller-coaster ride, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge earned the nickname “Galloping Gertie.

Rant of the Week: Stephen Colbert

Muffingate

The Department of Justice releases a full-color, 151-page cost report proving no government money was wasted on muffins.

On this Day In History November 6

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.

November 6 is the 310th day of the year (311th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 55 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1860, Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th President of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois.

Lincoln received 1,866,452 votes, Douglas 1,376,957 votes, Breckinridge 849,781 votes, and Bell 588,789 votes. The electoral vote was decisive: Lincoln had 180 and his opponents added together had only 123. Turnout was 82.2%, with Lincoln winning the free Northern states. Douglas won Missouri, and split New Jersey with Lincoln. Bell won Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and Breckinridge won the rest of the South. There were fusion tickets in which all of Lincoln’s opponents combined to form one ticket in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, but even if the anti-Lincoln vote had been combined in every state, Lincoln still would have won a majority in the electoral college.

As Lincoln’s election became evident, secessionists made clear their intent to leave the Union. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina took the lead; by February 1, 1861, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed. The seven states soon declared themselves to be a sovereign nation, the Confederate States of America. The upper South (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas) listened to, but initially rejected, the secessionist appeal. President Buchanan and President-elect Lincoln refused to recognize the Confederacy. There were attempts at compromise, such as the Crittenden Compromise, which would have extended the Missouri Compromise line of 1820, and which some Republicans even supported. Lincoln rejected the idea, saying, “I will suffer death before I consent…to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege to take possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right.”

Lincoln, however, did support the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which had passed in Congress and protected slavery in those states where it already existed. A few weeks before the war, he went so far as to pen a letter to every governor asking for their support in ratifying the Corwin Amendment as a means to avoid secession.

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

Punting the Punditsis 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:

Up with Chris Hayes: If you are an earlier riser on weekends or, like me, up all night working, I’ve heard that Hayes is a good watch and has had some very interesting guests and discussions. Guests are not announced adding to the spontaneity of the format.

“Up w/ Chris Hayes” focuses on politics including the day’s top headlines, newsmaker interviews, and panels of pundits, politicos and voices from outside the mainstream. It is live on Saturdays from 7:00 – 9:00 a.m. ET and Sundays from 8:00 – 10:00 a.m. ET.

This Week with Christiane Amanpour:House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for a one-on-one and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has a book. The round table guests are the usual suspects: George Will, political strategist Matthew Dowd, Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post and Niall Ferguson, author of “Civilization,” debates the fallout for the Cain campaign and the rest of the Republican field and then take on the Greek economic crisis.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer:Guests, GOP consultants Liz Cheney, Ed Gillespie and Ed Rollins, CBS News Political Analyst John Dickerson, and Rick Perry supporter Ken Blackwell, will babble about the Republican clown parade and Jon Huntsman’s daughters, @jon2012girls whose video spoof went viral.

The Chris Matthews Show: More babble about Republicans candidates and who can defeat Obama by this week’s guests Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post Columnist, Jim Cramer, CNBC Host, Mad Money, Gloria Borger, CNN Senior Political Analyst and Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post Senior Political Editor.

Meet the Press with David Gregory:Former U.S. Ambassador to China and struggling Republican candidate for the presidential nomination, Jon Huntsman in an exclusive interview and the Fmr. Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM), and former RNC Chairman, Governor Haley Barbour (R-MS) will talk about the other Republican choices. The roundtable guests are Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Kim Strassel, Senior Political Reporter for Politico, Maggie Haberman and author of the new book “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,” and host of MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews (who will compare everyone to JFK).

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Maryland Governor and Democratic Governors Association Chair Martin O’Malley on state election strategy for Obama; Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) on the Cain/Perry controversy and the Super Committee; veteran political panelists Tom Davis and Anita Dunn on politics of the week; and  American Values President Gary Bauer and Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine discussing how religion will affect both the primary and the 2012 general election.

Go back to bed or watch the NYC Marathon, football later. There are also leaves to be raked. You have an extra hour today.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Vetoing Democracy: In Athens or Washington, Elites Still Call the Shots

This week was a sharp reminder that the ancient ideal of democracy is just as threatened — and to some, just as threatening — as it’s ever been. In government offices in Athens, G20 meeting rooms in Cannes, and “Super Committee” chambers in Washington, we learned that there are still places where the will of the people can be overruled by the whims of the powerful.

From the Parthenon to the Potomac, it was the same story: Elites still hold veto power over the democratic process, and they’re not afraid to use it.

Fred Wison: The XL Pipeline Is a Dog That Can’t Hunt

As thousands get ready for a big last push on President Obama against the XL Pipeline in Washington DC this weekend, decision makers should remember Elvis Presley’s sage advice: “When things go wrong, don’t go with them.” If, or when, XL goes down, how many politicians, businessmen and labour leaders will get pulled under with it?

By any measure, TransCanada Pipeline’s Keystone XL project has gone horribly wrong. This $7 Billion project was supposed to have been under construction seven months ago. It has yet to receive critical US state approvals, and the once expected pro-forma approval from the White House is now very much in question.

Paul Krugman: A Brave New World Wide Web of Economics

Ryan Avent, the economics writer at The Economist, and I have been corresponding about the role of the economics blogosphere, for the Christmas issue of the magazine.

I don’t know what parts of our conversation will actually show up there, but having assembled my thoughts I might as well put some of them here.

The concern, or maybe just issue, is whether the rise of econoblogs is undermining the gatekeepers – whether any old Joe can now weigh in on economic debate, whereas in the good old days you had to publish in the journals, which meant getting through the refereeing process.

My take is that the system never worked like that – or at least not in my professional lifetime. And when you consider how economic discussion actually used to work, you see the blogs in a different and more favorable light.

Alejandro Reuss: The 99%, the 1%, and Class Struggle

Between 1979 and 2007, the income share of the top 1% of U.S. households (by income rank) more than doubled, to over 17% of total U.S. income. Meanwhile, the income share of the bottom 80% dropped from 57% to 48% of total income. “We are the 99%,” the rallying cry of the #OccupyWallStreet movement, does a good job at calling attention to the dramatic increase of incomes for those at the very top-and the stagnation of incomes for the majority.

This way of looking at income distribution, however, does not explicitly focus on the different sources of people’s incomes. Most people get nearly all of their incomes-wages and salaries, as well as employment benefits-by working for someone else. A few people, on the other hand, get much of their income not from work but from ownership of property-profits from a business, dividends from stock, interest income from bonds, rents on land or structures, and so on. People with large property incomes may also draw large salaries or bonuses, especially from managerial jobs. Executive pay, though treated in official government statistics as labor income, derives from control over business firms and really should be counted as property income.

Health and Fitness News

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness 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.

Thanksgiving Side Dishes, Part 1: Winter Squash

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Many families fall into one of two camps when it comes to Thanksgiving menus. There are those who never veer from their annual menu; recipes are pulled out once a year, then put away until the next. Then there are those who like to try new recipes. [..]

Winter squash offers a big nutritional bang at a small caloric price – lots of vitamin A in the form of beta carotene, vitamin C, potassium, dietary fiber and manganese, folate, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B1, copper, vitamin B6, niacin and pantothenic acid.

Puréed Roasted Squash and Yams With Citrus

This aromatic dish is inspired by a recipe in Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s wonderful book “The Splendid Table.” The dish was traditional at Yom Kippur among the Italian Jews of Emilia-Romagna.

Fried Winter Squash With Mint

If you make it for Thanksgiving and don’t want to be in the kitchen frying squash at the last minute, opt for the room-temperature version. Or fry the squash ahead of time and warm in a low oven. The recipe works equally well with butternut and starchier squash like kabocha.

Simple Provençal Winter Squash Gratin

There’s little more than squash here, seasoned with lots of garlic and fresh herbs. Dicing all the squash takes time, but then the work is just about done.

Winter Squash With Anchovies, Capers, Olives and Ricotta Salata

The seasoning is provided by the anchovies, capers and cheese, a salty contrast to the sweet squash (the recipe is not for you if you cannot eat salt).

Winter Squash and Sage Blini

Pancakes are a great vehicle for many vegetables. These are simple buttermilk/buckwheat blini with puréed butternut squash and sage whisked into the batter.

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”.

Bill Moyers: How Wall Street Occupied America

During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”

She should see us now. John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it. Barack Obama criticizes bankers as “fat cats,” then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.

That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. The president has raised more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and private equity managers than any Republican candidate, including Mitt Romney. Inch by inch he has conceded ground to them while espousing populist rhetoric that his very actions betray.

Let’s name this for what it is: hypocrisy made worse, the further perversion of democracy. Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy-fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and tactics of Tony Soprano.

Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is filled with people is no mystery. Reporters keep scratching their heads and asking, “Why are you here?” But it’s clear they are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country. And that’s why in public places across the nation workaday Americans are standing up in solidarity. Did you see the sign a woman was carrying at a fraternal march in Iowa the other day? It read, “I Can’t Afford to Buy a Politician So I Bought This Sign”. Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want.

Paul Krugman: Protest Changes Austerity Debate

I visited Zuccotti Park on Oct. 20. Michael Moore gave a short speech, transmitted by the human microphone. (I gather that right-wingers are claiming that Occupy Wall Street is anti-Semitic; someone forgot to tell the excellent Klezmer band.) Overall, what struck me was how nonthreatening the thing is: a modest-sized, good-natured crowd, mostly young (it was a cold and windy evening) but with plenty of middle-aged people there, not all that scruffy.

Hardly the sort of thing that one would expect to shake up the whole national debate.

Yet it has – which can only mean one thing: The emperor was naked, and all it took was one honest voice to point it out.

Robert Reich: Washington Pre-Occupied

The biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy.

The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent.

The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.

Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.

John Nichols: Occupy the Ballot: Colorado Voters Reject Corporate Power

Citizen anger with corporate control of our politics isn’t playing out only at Occupy Wall Street rallies. In Colorado, voters occupied their polling places and urged Congress to clarify that constitutional rights belong to people, not corporations.

They also voted to fire their private power company and set up a municipal utility-as sixteen communities across the country have over the past decade.

Voters in Boulder backed an anti-“corporate personhood” referendum by a 3-1 margin, putting the Colorado college town on record in favor of a constitutional amendment that declares that corporate campaign spending is not protected as a free-speech right.

Ari Berman: War Against Government Workers Is Prolonging the Recession

The US economy gained 104,000 private sector jobs last month, but lost 24,000 public sector jobs, resulting in a net total of 80,000 new jobs-fewer than expected and well below what the country needs to get out of the Great Recession.

This is by now a depressingly familiar story. In the past year, 1.6 million private sector jobs have been created. But since the recession began in December 2007, more than 500,000 public sector jobs have been lost. Half of those jobs have disappeared since January 2011, after Republicans (who ran on improving the economy in 2010) took control of the House of Representatives. States have cut 49,000 jobs and localities have cut 210,000 jobs since the beginning of the year. Contrary to what Republicans might tell you, these are “real” jobs lost by real people, who pay taxes, spend money, provide for their families and perform vital public services. When they suffer, the economy suffers too.

Mary Bottari: Robin Hood Tax Gains Ground at the G-20

The G-20 meeting in Cannes got underway this week. The sunny beach resort, playground to movie stars and media moguls was an odd choice for a somber G-20 meeting. As President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner touched down in Air Force One, the Greek government was on the verge of collapse, austerity was sweeping Europe and the future of the Eurozone in doubt.

But the first day of talks offered a ray of hope for the entire global economy. For the first time, the 20 most powerful countries in the world sat down to discuss taxing the financial service industry. And for the first time, the U.S. blinked.

President Sarkozy of France has long championed a small sales tax on the financial services industry. “At a time when states are making remarkable efforts to restore their public finances… how can the financial sector triumphantly continue to march, indifferent to the world around it, carelessly and without a care for the disorder it has more than its share in causing,” Sarkozy said. Angela Merkel of German agrees.

On this Day In History November 5

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.

November 5 is the 309th day of the year (310th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 56 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1938, Samuel Barber’s Adagio For Strings receives its world premiere on NBC radio

Adagio for Strings is a work for string orchestra, arranged by the American composer Samuel Barber from the second movement of his String Quartet. Barber finished the piece in 1936, and in 1938, it was conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini’s conducting was recorded at 8H Studio for radio broadcasting. Toscanini took the piece on tour to Europe and South America. It is disputed whether the first performance of Adagio in Europe was conducted by Toscanini or Henry J. Wood. Barber has rejected many arrangements published by G. Schirmer, such as the organ arrangement by William Strictland.

The piece begins with a B flat played by the violins. Lower strings enter two beats after the violins. At practical tempo, the piece length is about eight minutes. The piece’s reception was generally positive, with Alexander J. Morin writing that Adagio for Strings contains “full of pathos and cathartic passion, rarely leaves a dry eye.” The piece can be heard in many TV shows and movies.

The recording of the 1938 world premiere, with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra, was selected in 2005 for permanent preservation in the National Recording Registry at the United States Library of Congress.[18] Since the 1938 recording, it has frequently been heard throughout the world, and was one of the only American pieces to be played in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The Adagio was broadcast over the radio at the announcement of Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s death. It was also played at the funeral of Albert Einstein and at the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco. It was performed in 2001 at Last Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall to commemorate the victims of the September 11 attacks, replacing the traditional upbeat patriotic songs. It was also played during the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. In 2004, listeners of the BBC’s Today program voted Adagio for Strings the “saddest classical” work ever, ahead of “Dido’s Lament” from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, the “Adagietto” from Gustav Mahler’s 5th symphony, Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss and Gloomy Sunday as sung by Billie Holiday.

Adagio for Strings can be heard on many film, TV, and video game soundtracks, including Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film Platoon, David Lynch’s 1980 Oscar-nominated film The Elephant Man, Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko, Lorenzo’s Oil, A Very Natural Thing, Reconstruction, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Oscar-nominated 2001 film Amélie. It has been heard in episodes of The Simpsons, Big Brother 2010 (UK), That Mitchell and Webb Look, The Boondocks, South Park, Seinfeld, ER (TV series), Big Love. A recorded performance by the London Symphony Orchestra was, for a time, the highest selling classical piece on iTunes. The work is extremely popular in the electronic dance music genre, notably in trance. Artists who have covered it include Armin van Buuren, William Orbit, Ferry Corsten, and Tiesto. eRa included this song in their new album Classics.

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”.

Paul Krugman: Oligarchy, American Style

Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

New York Times Editorial: Putting Millionaires Before Jobs

There’s nothing partisan about a road or a bridge or an airport; Democrats and Republicans have voted to spend billions on them for decades and long supported rebuilding plans in their own states. On Thursday, though, when President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion on infrastructure repairs came up for a vote in the Senate, not a single Republican agreed to break the party’s filibuster.

That’s because the bill would pay for itself with a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million. That would affect about 345,000 taxpayers, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, adding an average of $13,457 to their annual tax bills. Protecting that elite group – and hewing to their rigid antitax vows – was more important to Senate Republicans than the thousands of construction jobs the bill would have helped create, or the millions of people who would have used the rebuilt roads, bridges and airports.

Eugene Robinson: The Mitt Might Not Fit

The Republican Party’s inevitable decision to nominate Mitt Romney for president is starting to look evitable after all.

That’s certainly not a consensus view among the Washington cognoscenti, who tend to see the yet-to-come primaries and caucuses as mere formalities. Romney, they say, is the GOP’s obvious choice-a poised and experienced candidate with presidential bearing, world-class hair and the ability to speak in complete sentences, even about the economy. Sooner or later, the party will come to its senses and see that he has the best chance of beating President Obama.

The White House certainly seems to buy into this scenario. For months now, virtually every conversation I’ve had with one of those increasingly chatty “senior administration officials,” on any subject, has included at least a swipe or two at Romney. It’s clear that he’s the opponent the Obama machine is gearing up to face.

But I’m less and less convinced. It’s hard for me to see how any of the other candidates can win the nomination-but it’s hard for me to see how Romney wins it, either.

John Nichols: Union Pressure, OWS Protests Tear Down a Barrier to Taxing Speculators

Does protesting and pressuring powerful players in political and economic life matter?

Can the White House and Congress really be moved on questions so central as taxing financial speculation?

Yes.

And here’s the evidence of how of it works.

For months, the AFL-CIO has been been pressuring the Obama administration to ease off rigid opposition to international efforts to tax financial speculators. And that pressure has been highlighted on Capitol Hill and on the streets by an allied union, National Nurses United.

The White House stance has been one of the chief barriers to the efforts of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to reach an agreement within the Group of 20 economic superpowers to develop a small financial transactions tax (FTT) that would target speculators.

Patricia J. Williams: Culture of Death: Who Gets to Be a Person in Mississippi?

On November 8, Mississippi is set to vote on Measure 26, a ballot initiative that would redefine the state’s Bill of Rights to extend the protections of personhood to include “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” It is striking that the measure, which is largely motivated by religious concerns about the sanctity of human existence, crops up in a state that has one of the lowest indices for overall quality of life-whenever it might begin-in the entire country: the infant mortality rate over the last decade is about 10 per 1,000 live births, with black babies dying at twice the rate of white babies. Mississippi leads the country in obesity and ranks forty-sixth in the number of state residents who have health insurance. It suffers from high death rates from cancer and heart disease. Twenty-three percent of the population lives below the poverty level, giving Mississippi the unenviable distinction of ranking dead last in the nation.

With the odds of survival so relatively skewed, it is no wonder that there might be some anxiety over preserving the very idea of life. Then, too, the legal category of “personhood” seems particularly capacious since Citizens United; if such a label protects corporations, banks and homeowners’ associations-and don’t they seem to be thriving!-what blessings might it extend to a zygote, that abstracted conception of future stock, human capital, mortal enterprise?

William Greider: Smearing Social Security

The Washington Post published a sensational story last Sunday that claimed that Social Security is already broke. “Adding billions to US budget woes,” the headline read. Instead of piling up surpluses, as the Social Security trust fund has done for nearly thirty years, this year the system became “cash negative.” Social Security, the Post warned, “is sucking money out of the Treasury.”

This is alarming news, if true. Fortunately, it is not true. The Post committed what I call fact-filled mendacity-a pejorative mash of scary buzz words and opaque statistics that encourages readers to reach false conclusions. The newspaper’s obvious objective is goosing the so-called supercommittee whose Congressional members seem to be reluctant about whacking Social Security benefits. The formerly liberal Washington Post has long urged that as a solution to federal debt and deficits. Its ideological posture influences its reporting and also what “informed observers” think. Last night, I heard a TV anchor remark in passing, “We just read that Social Security is in the red.”

Baloney. The truth-if truth is still relevant to Washington politics-is that Social Security has never contributed a dime to the federal budget deficits. Therefore, cutting Social Security for the elderly will do nothing to relieve the deficit problem. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has made this point, so has President Obama. Not true, the Post story flatly declares.

George Zornick: America’s Top Corporations Pay Half of Taxes They Owe

Particularly in recent months, Republicans have gotten a lot of mileage out of the claim that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes. “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax,” Rick Perry said in his presidential announcement speech. “A majority of American households paid no income tax in 2009. Zero. Zip. Nada,” declared Senator John Cornyn of Texas this summer.

The truth behind the truth, of course, is that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes because they don’t earn enough money. For example, a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 isn’t required to pay any income taxes, because they are presumably stretched thin enough already. The elderly, poor and young receive various tax credits that exempt them from having to pay already meager incomes to the federal government.

If Republicans really wanted to go after tax freeloaders, they ought to start talking about big corporations. Today, Citizens for Tax Justice released a damning report detailing how many large corporations paid ridiculously low tax rates on billions in profit-and in some cases, actually got money from the government.

On this Day In History November 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.

November 4 is the 308th day of the year (309th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 57 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discover a step leading to the tomb of King Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.

The British Egyptologist Howard Carter (employed by Lord Carnarvon) discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb (since designated KV62) in the Valley of the Kings on November 4, 1922, near the entrance to the tomb of Ramesses VI, thereby setting off a renewed interest in all things Egyptian in the modern world. Carter contacted his patron, and on November 26 that year, both men became the first people to enter Tutankhamun’s tomb in over 3000 years. After many weeks of careful excavation, on February 16, 1923, Carter opened the inner chamber and first saw the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun. All of this was conveyed to the public by H. V. Morton, the only journalist allowed on the scene.

The first step to the stairs was found on November 4, 1922. The following day saw the exposure of a complete staircase. The end of November saw access to the Antechamber and the discovery of the Annex, and then the Burial Chamber and Treasury.

On November 29, the tomb was officially opened, and the first announcement and press conference followed the next day. The first item was removed from the tomb on December 27.

February 16, 1923 saw the official opening of the Burial Chamber, and April 5 saw the death of Lord Carnarvon.

On February 12, 1924, the granite lid of the sarcophagus was raised In April, Carter argued with the Antiquities Service, and left the excavation for the United States.

In January 1925, Carter resumed activities in the tomb, and on October 13, he removed the cover of the first sarcophagus; on October 23, he removed the cover of the second sarcophagus; on October 28, the team removed the cover of the final sarcophagus and exposed the mummy; and on November 11, the examination of the remains of Tutankhamun started.

Work started in the Treasury on October 24, 1926, and between October 30 and December 15, 1927, the Annex was emptied and examined.

On November 10, 1930, eight years after the discovery, the last objects were finally removed from the tomb of the long lost Pharaoh.

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