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.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: The Tea Party favorite and newly-elected Republican Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul sits down with Ms. Amanpour for an exclusive interview. House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence and Former Reagan budget director David Stockman debate extending the Bush tax cuts.

Outgoing Democratic Senator Evan Bayh joins the Roundtable discussion with George Will, former Bush political strategist Matthew Dowd, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress and ABC News Political Director Amy Walter.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-SC) join Mr. Schieffer.

The Chris Matthews Show: Mr. Matthew’s guests will be Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Bob Woodward, The Washington Post Associate Editor, Joe Klein, TIME Columnist and Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent to dscuss these topics:  Will President Obama Change?

and George W. Bush’s New Memoir.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Mr. Gregory will speak exclusively with the Tea Party’s most vocal backer in the Senate, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and then New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

His guests for the Round Table discussion will be Former Obama White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, Former Adviser to Pres. George W. Bush Karen Hughes, President of the National Urban League, Marc Morial and Republican Strategist Mike Murphy.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley will be joined by re-elected Gov. Tim Pawlenty (MI) and Gov. Rick Perry (TX) to discuss what  Tuesday’s midterm elections say about the last two years in politics and  what they mean for the next two.

Then, after suffering a historic defeat in the House of Representatives, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the congressman responsible for electing Democrats to the House, will join us. What’s the way forward for Democrats in Congress after the election?

And Pennsylvania Sen.-elect Pat Toomey (R) joins us to explain how he defeated his Democratic opponent in a state with more than one million more registered Democrats than Republicans. What will he achieve in Washington?

Finally, we’ll be joined by Michael Duffy of Time magazine, and Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post to break down a midterm election with wide-ranging implications.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS. See why Fareed says that if this “Republican Revolution” doesn’t manage to cut the deficit, the American people will be saying “Fool me three times, shame on me”.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman thinks the outlook for the next two years — with a power split in Washington — is “terrible”. In an exclusive interview, Krugman goes head-to-head with the former chief economist of the IMF, the right-leaning Raghuram Rajan on what can be done to fix the U.S. economy…and whether it will ever GET done given the likely of gridlock in the nation’s capital.

Remember when we told you it’s only been a few weeks since the end of WWI? Well, it looks like we might have to wait a little bit longer for WWII to end. Japan never signed a peace treaty with the Soviets or Russia. And President Medvedev’s four-hour tour of an obscure island this week has heated up the cold war between the two nations. What in the world?

After that, we answer the question that has been asked over and over since last week’s thwarted cargo bombings: Is Yemen the next Afghanistan? Fareed speaks with the New York Times’ man in Yemen, Robert Worth.

Then, a look at a moderate Muslim country that’s fighting and winning their war on terror and extremism. An interview with the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak.

And finally, how one country could really put the “savings” in “daylight savings”.

It will be Republicans all the time now

Dana Milbank: Would we be better off under a President Hillary Clinton?

As I sat in the East Room last week watching a forlorn President Obama account for his shellacking, I listened with concern as he described the presidency as a “growth process” and suggested that the midterm setback was somehow inevitable. “You know, this is something that I think every president needs to go through,” he said.

It brought to mind Hillary Clinton’s 3 a.m. phone-call ad from the 2008 campaign, and her withering criticism of Obama: “When there is a crisis . . . there’s no time for speeches or on-the-job training.” I wondered whether Democrats would be in the fix they’re in if they had chosen a different standard-bearer. . . .

Back in April 2008, a Clinton ad delivered a populist blow to Obama: “When the housing crisis broke, Hillary Clinton called for action: a freeze on foreclosures. Barack Obama said ‘no.’ . . . People are hurting. It’s time for a president who’s ready to take action now.”

Obama survived the challenge then. But times changed, and the president, feeling “removed” from the people, asked in the East Room how he can give Americans “confidence that I’m listening to them?”

The answer is simple: Do what Hillary would have done.

There are places where heads will explode.

Frank Rich: Barack Obama, Phone Home

AFTER his “shellacking,” President Obama had to do something. But who had the bright idea of scheduling his visit to India for right after this election? The Democrats’ failure to create jobs was at the heart of the shellacking. Nothing says “outsourcing” to the American public more succinctly than India. But the White House didn’t figure this out until the eve of Obama’s Friday departure, when it hastily rebranded his trip as a jobs mission. Perhaps the president should visit one of the Indian call centers policing Americans’ credit-card debts to feel our pain.

Optics matter. If Washington is tumbling into a political crisis as the recovery continues to lag, maybe the president shouldn’t get out of Dodge. If the White House couldn’t fill a 13,000-seat arena in blue Cleveland the weekend before the midterms, maybe it shouldn’t have sent the president there. If an administration charged with confronting a Great Recession knew that its nominee for secretary of the Treasury serially cut corners on his taxes, maybe it should have considered other options. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Well, here we are.

True, the big things matter more than the optics. Unfortunately, they are a mess too.

Nicholas D. Kistof: Our Banana Republic

In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.

But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home – and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

Robert Reich: America’s Two Economies, and Why One Is Recovering and the Other Isn’t

Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the “American economy” is doing these days, watch your wallet.

There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.

The one that’s mending is America’s Big Money economy. It’s comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives. . . .

But there’s another American economy, and it’s not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy. . . . .

Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.

Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren’t so sure. The economy has been so bad they’re angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.

But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.

Ralph Nader: Democrats Squander the Swing Vote

The mid-term 2010 Congressional elections are over and the exaggerations are front and center. “A tidal wave,” “an earthquake,” “a tsunami,” cried the Republican victors and their media acolytes.

Wait a minute! No more than 7 percent of the actual voters switched sides to create a 14 point spread. This amounts to about 3 percent of all the eligible voters who produced this “tidal wave.” That is what happens in our winner-take-all system. So when it is said that “the people have spoken,” chalk it up to 7 percent or so switcheroos. The rest voted the way they did in the previous Presidential and Congressional election (and about 28 million voters stayed home.)

Such sweeping descriptions gave incoming House Speaker, John Boehner, even more leeway than usual to play with words when he declared, without further elaboration, that “the peoples priorities and agenda are our priorities.” Mr. Boehner is the consummate corporate logo-man masquerading as a Congressman. If someone drew the logos of all the big companies that have marinated his career and put them on his suit coat, they would run into each other.

How then did the Democrats lose against the most craven Republican party in modern history-a Party that opposes again and again the fair rights of workers, consumers, investors, savers and patients.

Elizabeth Wurtzel: America, Land of the Free to Be Stupid

What people are angry about, if they only knew it, is that social mobility in the US is over and their economic future screwed

There are some remarks that are so stupid that to be even vaguely aware of them is the intellectual equivalent of living next door to Chernobyl. This is what it’s been like to live in the United States for the last year or two: it’s the moronic influenza, as the irate among us find increasingly convoluted ways to say decreasingly less (as I just did).

Hard to say precisely what it is that people – “folks”, as President Obama likes to call them – are so darn exercised about, but they say things that show that their command of any words with more than two syllables is completely questionable, like: “The president is a socialist”, or “healthcare reform is unconstitutional”. Of course, what they want to say, and what they should say, is something to the effect that they hate this man that those people elected president and they want to kill him – but only people like me, elitists with Ivy League degrees – people who actually have read Das Kapital and who have studied constitutional law – talk trash like that.

If you don’t know better, apparently, you demand to see the president’s birth certificate – suddenly, every American is on border patrol – and you start claiming that there is nothing about separation of church and state in the first amendment, even though the supreme court has ruled on the point more than 25 times since 1878.