“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”.
The Sunday Talking Heads:
This Week with Christiane Amanpour: Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., join Ms. Amanpour to debate the administration’s foreign policy, the role of the U.S. in the world, the formation of a new Iraqi coalition in Iraq, from which Graham has just returned from a congressional delegation visit, and the chances for a bipartisan foreign policy in the new Congress.
She also brings together top voices on the economy with two members of the deficit commission, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and chairman and CEO of Honeywell International, David Cote.
At the Round Table with George Will, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus and Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution the mixed messages from the White House on the Bush Tax cuts and President Bush’s new book, “Decision Points.”
Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Scheiffer will be joined this Sunday by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. and Sen.-elect Rand Paul, R-Ky.
The Chris Matthews Show: This Week’s Guests Gloria Borger, CNN Senior Political Analyst, Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post, Senior Political Editor, Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune Columnist and Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent will be Mr. Matthew’s guests to discuss these topics.
Which Republican Sees the Best Shot to Run as the Un-Obama in 2012?
The House Republican Plan for 280 Hearings in 2011 to Investigate the Obama Administration
Meet the Press with David Gregory: In his first television interview since Democrats suffered big losses in the midterm elections, Mr. Gregory will sit down with President Obama’s top advisor, David Axelrod and have an exclusive interview with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
Joining Mr. Gregory for a Round Table discussion of the Deficit Commission Chair Report and the Bush Tax Cuts will be former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-TN) and Co-Author of “All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis”, Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair.
As my good friend BillinPortland puts it:
On Meet the Press Sunday: Newt Gingrich, John McCain, Alan Greenspan and Harold Ford. A perfect 10 on the Wanker Scale!!!
State of the Union with Candy Crowley: This Sunday, the focus is on the president’s Asia trip, the Deficit Commission report and the agenda for the lame duck congress. Joining us, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX)and Senator Mark Warner (D-VA).
Then, after an historic election, the balance of power in the House tips to Republican control. What will it mean for the Democrats? We’ll talk to Congressmen James Clyburn of South Carolina and Heath Shuler of North Carolina.
And insight and analysis on the new balance of power with former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn and former Republican Congressman Tom Davis.
Fareed Zakaris: GPS: Mr. Zakaria will be on Hong Kong to talk about President Obama’s Asia trip and America’s diminished influence. He will have a one on one discussion with elder statesmen, George Shultz about the current state of the economy, his advice for fixing it, and his thoughts on world affairs.
Fareeed will then look at the inventions that are coming out of the tiny city-state of Singapore. Next up, what was accomplished on Obama’s trip overseas? GPS has gathered a panel of experts, one from each of the President’s four stops, to break down what Obama’s visit means for the future of U.S-Asian relations.
And finally, a last look at the President shouldn’t be sentimental about at least one aspect of his childhood home of Indonesia.
Frank Rich: Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?
(In) the aftermath of the Great Democratic Shellacking of 2010, one election night subplot quickly receded into the footnotes: the drubbing received by very wealthy Americans, most of them Republican, who tried to buy Senate seats and governor’s mansions. Americans don’t hate rich people. They admire and often idolize success. But Californians took a hearty dislike to Meg Whitman, who sacrificed $143 million of her eBay fortune – not to mention her undocumented former housekeeper – to a gubernatorial race she lost by double digits. Connecticut voters K.O.’d the World Wrestling groin-kicker, Linda McMahon, and West Virginians did likewise to the limestone-and-steel magnate John Raese, the senatorial hopeful who told an interviewer without apparent irony, “I made my money the old-fashioned way – I inherited it.”
To my mind, these losers deserve a salute nonetheless. They all had run businesses that actually created jobs (Raese included). They all wanted to enter public service to give back to the country that allowed them to prosper. And by losing so decisively, they gave us a ray of hope in dark times. Their defeats reminded us that despite much recent evidence to the contrary the inmates don’t always end up running the asylum of American politics.
The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election – those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.
Nicholas D. Kristof: Here’s a Woman Fighting Terrorism. With Microloans.
An old friend of mine here fights terrorists, but not the way you’re thinking. She could barely defeat a truculent child in hand-to-hand combat, and if she ever picked up an AK-47 – well, you’d pray it was unloaded.
Roshaneh Zafar is an American- educated banker who fights extremism with microfinance. She has dedicated her life to empowering some of Pakistan’s most impoverished women and giving them the tools to run businesses of their own. The United States should learn from warriors like her.
Bullets and drones may kill terrorists, but Roshaneh creates jobs and educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people – draining the swamps that breed terrorists.
“Charity is limited, but capitalism isn’t,” Roshaneh said. “If you want to change the world, you need market-based solutions.” That’s the point of microfinance – typically, lending very poor people small amounts of money so that they can buy a rickshaw or raw materials and start a tiny business.
Mark Engler: Tax Cuts and Trade: Is Obama Triangulating?
It was about this far into his first term-back in late 1994 and early 1995-when President Bill Clinton truly fell under the spell of malevolent strategist Dick Morris. Stung by the heavy losses brought on by the “Republican Revolution” in the 1994 midterms, Clinton began to believe that his only route to reelection was to tack to the right and steal some of the conservatives’ thunder on issues like welfare reform and federal deficits.
Morris, who was only forced out of the White House after a sex scandal and who has since exposed his true political stripes as a FoxNews commentator, thought triangulation both a brilliant political strategy and a generator of fine public policy. The remaining liberals in the Clinton administration disagreed. As the Economist notes, George Stephanopoulos incisively labeled it “a fancy word for betrayal.”
Not yet two weeks after the 2010 midterms, and just two years after Obama’s campaign of “hope” and “change,” there are troubling signs that the current president might be tempted to follow the same path as Clinton.
Steven Hill: Europe Ponders U.S. Elections Results
For several weeks before the recent U.S. election, there was much nervous speculation among Europeans as they watched the fluctuations of the poll numbers. Now that the results are in, Europeans are perplexed by this turn back toward the politics of the Bush-Cheney era.
Like the rest of the world, Europe cheered the election of Barack Obama as a change from the economic and foreign policy disasters of his predecessor. Yet just two years later the US government is returning to Bush-lite. How could this be, Europeans are wondering? The American electorate is looking like a coyote with its leg caught in a trap, chewing its own leg off to get out of the trap.
Europeans are puzzled by the success of the populist Tea Party movement, which seemingly wants to roll back the last two years and return to how things were at the end of the Bush-Cheney years. Even conservatives in Europe are scratching their heads over their transatlantic allies — “Americans don’t want health care??? How can these Tea Party people say ‘Get government out of my Medicare’ — don’t they know Medicare IS a government program???”
William Rivers Pitt: A Small Fraction of a Man
George W. Bush was all over my television this past week, all over the newspapers, and the feelings inspired by his sudden reappearance are almost beyond my capacity to describe. There was the story about his hearty approval of waterboarding. There was the story that had him contemplating dropping Dick Cheney from the administration. There was the story that had him describing himself as a “dissenter” on the Iraq invasion. He did interviews, and excerpts of his new book dribbled out, and it was all too much to endure.
This is the guy, I thought to myself when I saw his face or heard his voice. This is the guy.
This is the guy who took a massive Clinton administration budget surplus and gave it away to his friends at the top of the tax bracket, a move that laid the groundwork for our current economic calamity.
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