Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

post from Daily Kos on 03 July 2009 08:24:30 AM. © Daily Kos

Friday pundits are the best! Except, maybe for Wednesday. Or Tuesday. And there's always Saturday and Sunday.

NY Times editorial:

The jobs report for June should put a chill on hopes for an economic recovery anytime soon. And it makes a compelling case for more government stimulus, as unpopular as that idea may be in Washington. Americans all over the country are struggling.

Paul Krugman:

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Matt Taibbi: a Taibbi tour de force (not without controversy - Goldman Sachs is less than happy with it):

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

David Brooks:

The frictions are building and will lead to divorce, conflict and potential catastrophe. China, Ferguson argued, is now decoupling from the United States. Chinese business leaders assume that American consumers will never again go on a spending binge. The Chinese are developing an economy that relies more on internal consumption.

Chinese officials are also aware that the U.S. will never get its fiscal house in order. There may be theoretical plans to reduce the federal deficit and the national debt, but there is no politically practical way to get there. Depreciation is inevitable and the Chinese are working to end the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

WaPo:

A document filed in federal court this week by the Justice Department offers new evidence that former vice president Richard B. Cheney helped steer the Bush administration's public response to the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's employment by the CIA and that he was at the center of many related administration deliberations.

~~For a small fee, you can come over for dinner and we can discuss whether to post more stories like this.~~ Nota Bene: the dinner has been canceled because of an overzealous publicist.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:

Mountaintop removal coal mining is the worst environmental tragedy in American history. When will the Obama administration finally stop this Appalachian apocalypse?