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:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: Ms. Amanpour’s guest will be Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner discussing the debt ceiling. A gang of Tea Party Republicans, Reps. Joe Walsh (R-Ill), Steve Southerland (R-Fl), Renee Ellmers (R-NC) and Allen West (R-Fl), “debate” that and the looming debt crisis and Donald Trump.

The roundtable with George Will, economist Alice Rivlin of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, political strategist Matthew Dowd and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick debate the competing budget plans.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Scheiffer’s guests are Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) to  discuss the deficit and debt reduction

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Joe Klein, TIME Columnist, Norah O’Donnell, MSNBC Chief Washington Correspondent, Becky Quick, CNBC Co-Anchor, Squawk Box and Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast Editor, The Dish, who will discuss these questions:

Why is raising taxes on the rich so tough?

What if there Is no hell?

Meet the Press with David Gregory:Tim Geithner makes another appearance to discuss spending and the debt ceiling and Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA)joins David Gregory to discuss the candidacy of Mitt Romney.

At the round table, Fmr. chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan; Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Fmr. Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-MI); author Jon Meacham; and author of the new book “Fail Up,” PBS’s Tavis Smiley will add their opinions on Romney

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York will join Ms Crowley exclusively to debate the buget competing proposals.

Former CIA Director, Gen. Michael Hayden (Ret.) will discuss the Libya crisis. The former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister will try to explain rising gas prices when there is no shortage and another interview with Donald Trump

Now that you’ve read this, you can go back to bed or get out in the fresh air.

Glenn Greenwald: Mission Transformation in Libya

Barack Obama, March 28, 2011, explaining America’s involvement in the war in Libya:

   Of course, there is no question that Libya — and the world — would be better off with Qaddafi out of power. I, along with many other world leaders, have embraced that goal, and will actively pursue it through non-military means. But broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.

Barack Obama, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy, joint Op-Ed, yesterday:

   The bombing continues until Gaddafi goes

   Our duty and our mandate under UN Security Council Resolution 1973 is to protect civilians, and we are doing that. It is not to remove Gaddafi by force. . . . However, so long as Gaddafi is in power, Nato and its coalition partners must maintain their operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds. Then a genuine transition from dictatorship to an inclusive constitutional process can really begin, led by a new generation of leaders. For that transition to succeed, Colonel Gaddafi must go, and go for good.

Whatever one thinks about this war limited humanitarian intervention on the merits, this is not the mission that Obama cited when justifying America’s involvement. It’s the opposite:  “broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake” v. “so long as Gaddafi is in power, Nato and its coalition partners must maintain their operations.” To claim that “regime change” is subsumbed under the goal of “protecting civilians” is to define that objective so broadly as to render it meaningless and, independently, is to violate Obama’s explicit decree at the start that regime change would not be the military goal.  Finally, note the blithe dismissal of the very limited U.N. Resolution that initially justified all this: it does not provide for regime change in Libya by force, acknowledged the three leaders, but that, in essence, is what we’re going to do anyway (continue “operations” until he’s gone).

John Nichols: How Socialists Built America

This article is adapted from The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism, published in March by Verso.

If there’s one constant in the elite national discourse of the moment, it is the claim that America was founded as a capitalist country and that socialism is a dangerous foreign import that, despite our unwarranted faith in free trade, must be barred at the border. This most conventional “wisdom”-increasingly accepted at least until the recent grassroots mobilizations in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Maine-has held that everything public is inferior to everything private, that corporations are always good and unions always bad, that progressive taxation is inherently evil and that the best economic model is the one that allows the wealthy to gobble up as much of the Republic as they choose before anything trickles down to the great mass of Americans. Rush Limbaugh informs us regularly that proposals to tax people as rich as he is for the purpose of providing healthcare for kids and jobs for the unemployed are “antithetical” to the nation’s original intent and that Barack Obama’s reforms are “destroying this country as it was founded.”

MIchelle Chen: A Year On, BP Oil Still Mars Gulf Communities, Public Scrutiny Dries Up

The April 14 meeting proceeded efficiently, as scheduled, for BP shareholders. For the workers, environmentalists and community members rallying in protest, though, the day of reckoning had yet to arrive.

The government and media may be moving on from aftermath of the Deepwater disaster, but the scars left behind by the spill are still raw and festering.

First, Congress has passed no legislation to prevent the kind of disaster that touched off the explosion that killed 11 workers and poured masses of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Bill McKibben; What if Your President’s Just Not That Into You?

Tomorrow in Washington, at the sprawling and wonderful Power Shift, a few of us are on a panel titled “What If Your President’s Just Not That Into You?” Funny title, serious question.

The first thing: those of us in the environmental movement aren’t high school sophomores feeling jilted by their first crush. Most of us liked Obama a lot: I was among the first green leaders to join upon ‘Environmentalists for Obama,’ back when he seemed a longshot. It wasn’t because I thought he would solve every problem; it’s because I thought he’d make climate change one of the top two priorities of his presidency. And he thought so too: on the day in June of 2008 when he finally clinched the nomination he said that people would someday look back and say “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

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    • on 04/17/2011 at 16:12
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