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”.

This will be a full court press to get the Obama tax bill approved. Set your BS meters.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: David Axelrod will be front and center with Ms. Amanpour defending the Obama attack on 98% of America.

The saving grace for this hour will be Paul Krugman at the Round Table with George Will, Cokie Roberts and Matthew Dowd.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr Schieffer’s guests David Axelrod, Senior White House Adviser (This guy is really making the rounds), Howard Dean, former Democratic National Committee Chair and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.

This could be interesting.

The Chris Matthews Show: Tweetie’s guest this week are pretty much the usual suspects: Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Michael Duffy, TIME Magazine Assistant Managing Editor, Helene Cooper, The New York Times White House Correspondent and Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic Senior Editor.

They will discuss these topics:

Did Barack Obama Get Back on the Right Track This Week?

Top Ten Political Gaffes of the Year

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Joining “Lurch” will be the “other Glen Beck with a white board”, Austin Goolsbee, trying to defend Obama’s latest cave exploration. Also, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another politician that hasn’t seen a regressive tax he didn’t like, giving his corporatist opinion about Beltway gridlock. (I-195 has always sucked at rush hour).

The Round table should be a lively affair that actually might get me to watch. NY Rep. Anthony Weiner, who strongly opposes the Obama tax cuts, sits down with Fmr. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-TN), Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot, and NBC News White House Correspondent Savannah Guthrie.

Axelrod gets a break

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Oh Noes! Here he is again! David Axelrod discussing guess what.

At least Candy has some balance with guests Reps. Elijah Cummings and Jim McDermott, two Democrats who are speaking out against the president’s compromise and telling the White House to stand up to the Republican Party and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who is one of a number of Democrats who have expressed their disappointment with Obama’s deal, but he’ll vote for it anyway.

The last guest will be Dennis Blair, the former director of national intelligence, who will babble about the tensions with North Korea and justification for staying in Afghanistan and, finally, call for Julian Assange’s hanging.

Gotta get that Wilileaks shot in there

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: It seems Mr. Axelrod missed Fareed’s show. Eh, too “international”

The President cut a deal with the GOP to continue the Bush tax cuts while extending unemployment benefits. Fareed’s take on the issue? It’s a missed opportunity to invest in America’s long term growth. And he’ll tell you about a country that seems to be setting itself up for the future, while the U.S. is putting more on the credit card.

Next up, he’s the most decorated soldier in Israel, a former Prime Minister, and that nation’s current Minister of Defense. Ehud Barak sits down with Fareed to talk about what we all know — thanks to Wikileaks – his country and a few of its Arab neighbors might have in common: the fear of a nuclear Iran. Barak also talks about how to move the peace process forward.

Then, one of the Republican party’s top women on why the GOP has the wrong attitude after its electoral victory. Former member of President George W. Bush’s cabinet and former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman on fixing that attitude problem…and on Sarah Palin’s chances for 2012. And what in the world: Glenn Beck says 10% of the world’s Muslims are terrorists. Could that be true?

After that, a GPS panel on how China handled the Nobel Peace Prize controversy and what’s behind that nation’s aggressive foreign policy moves?

And finally a look at the Star of David, in the last place on earth you might expect to find it.

Now for the other Sunday pundits:

Robert Reich: Why Bill Clinton’s Favorable View of Obama’s Tax Deal Should Be Disregarded

Bill Clinton seems the perfect validator for Barack Obama — which is why the president is utilizing the former president for selling his tax deal. After all, the economy boomed when Clinton was president and 22 million net new jobs were created. From a more narrow political perspective — and this is important to Democrats in Washington — Bill Clinton was reelected, even though he lost both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterms.

But the analogy falls apart as soon as you realize Clinton’s economy was vastly different from Obama’s. The recession Clinton inherited was relatively small, and caused by the Fed raising interest rates too high to ward off inflation. So it could be reversed by the Fed lowering interest rates — as the Fed did in 1994. By 1995, the so-called “jobless recovery” had morphed into a full-blown jobs recovery. By 1996, at pollster Dick Morris’s urging, Clinton could proclaim to the American people “you’ve never had it so good, and you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Johann Hari: The Banks Have Not Been Reregulated by Our Corrupt Politicians. So Get Ready for the Next Crash

Two years ago, you were mugged. So was I. So was everybody we know. You remember that night. The mugger wore a pin-striped suit from Saville Row, and when he cornered you at the cash machine, he said if you didn’t hand over $1 trillion in cash guarantees now now now, he’d knife the global economy in the heart. Oh, he was polite enough: he called the mugging a “bank bailout,” and promised that, sure, tomorrow he’d change my ways, so this will never happen again, guv’nor. But since then he has been laughing in your face — and preparing for an even bigger mugging next time.

There was a time when we left the question of banking to nerds, wonks, and lobbyists. You can leave this question to them again, if you want — but the price could be your job and your home.

To understand the renewed disaster that is waiting for us, you need to recap the story of how the bankers crashed the global economy. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, everybody realized the banks had behaved in a reckless and risky way with the people’s money, and they resolved to never let it happen again. President Franklin Roosevelt called them “malefactors of great wealth”, and said “I welcome their hatred.” In response to public pressure, he introduced strict regulations. Banks had to behave conservatively. They couldn’t take the deposits of ordinary people and gamble with them on Wall Street. They had to hold substantial capital reserves. They were locked in a golden cage, and similar rules spread across the world. For sixty years, it worked well. . . . .

It is all going to happen again, unless there is hefty public anger and pressure to bring back the banking regulations that worked so well between the 1930s and the 1990s. We need to take our government back from the corrupt clutches of the City. If we go back to sleep, we will be mugged again, and next time it will be with a bigger knife and deeper stab wounds. You can, at least, bank on that.

Dean Baker: The Obama Tax Deal: Giving the Hostage Takers More Hostages

As readers of this blog know, I was originally willing to support the package that President Obama negotiated with the Republicans. While I am not happy about giving tax breaks to rich people, President Obama extracted more concessions from the Republicans than I had expected in the form of extending unemployment insurance benefits, an expanded earned income tax credit, and most importantly a substantial reduction in the payroll tax.

However, after further thought and conversations with people around Washington (first and foremost, Nancy Altman, the co-director of Social Security Works), I have become convinced that this deal would be a disaster. Paul Krugman does a nice job laying out the limited benefits of the stimulus, but my greater concern is what happens to Social Security in this story. Effectively, this deal would give us a permanent two-percentage point reduction in the payroll tax in a Washington climate very hostile to Social Security.

The logic is that the tax cut is scheduled to expire in December of next year. While it would require new legislation to extend the cuts, the Republicans will describe the failure to extend the cuts as a tax increase on middle class workers. (Several Republicans have already told reporters that this would be their view.)

Jon Walker: In Tax Deal with GOP, Obama Didn’t Win as Many Concessions as Advertised

President Obama seems remarkably proud of himself for the many “concessions” he won from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as part of their deal to extend all the Bush tax cuts for two years. The administration has really tried to spin the “success” of this deal by claiming Obama got $238 billion in spending while the Republicans got only $114 billion of spending on what they want. Yet, it seems almost all of the “concessions” Obama claims to have won were ideas actually promoted by Republicans. The amount of money allocated for things Obama wanted that didn’t have bipartisan support is much smaller.

Overall, a very Republican Package

Looking at the entire package, it is a very pro-Republican proposal. Many of the items in the package that Obama and other Democrats have bragged about winning already had Republican support or were originally Republican ideas. Republicans have long pushed for a payroll tax cut, expanding the child tax credit, and special tax treatment for business investment. Congress probably could have passed all of these even without Obama giving in on the estate tax, so you can’t really count them as real concessions. Even the extension of unemployment benefits, which is a win for Obama, is only a partial cocession, given that the White House would have been able to get a shorter extension, separate from this deal.

The portion of the tax cut deal actually being spent on items that were not supported by Republicans and conservatives-like the college tuition tax credit-is relatively small. By my count, Obama really “got” a little over $80 billion in actual concessions from the Republicans-much less than the $114 billion in giveaways to the position Obama said he opposed.

It is hard to look at the totality of this package with its mostly Republican ideas and think Obama actually got a good deal-that is unless you accept the fact that he really didn’t want to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy right now, so he wasn’t actually giving up that much himself.

5 comments

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    • on 12/12/2010 at 16:35

    Van Hollen made a little news, and Justice Stephen Breyer was just about as wonderful as it gets.

    • on 12/12/2010 at 18:14
      Author

    spew his bold faced lies and whining about Obama and this heinous tax bill. Mute saved my TV.

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