“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: ABC News White House News correspondent, Jake Tapper, will be hosting This Week. He will have an exclusive interview with the president’s top economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee and actor, humanitarian, George Clooney with a message for the government of Sudan: “The world is watching.”
The Round Table guests, George Will, Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile, ABC News Political Director Amy Walter and National Journal Congressional Correspondent Major Garret discuss the incoming Republican Congress and its investigative agenda.
Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: This Week on Face the Nation, Representatives Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), and Rep.-elect Mike Kelly (R-Penn.) discuss what’s ahead for the new Congress.
The Chris Matthews Show: The Chris Matthews Show: This Week’s Guests Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent, John Heilemann, New York Magazine National Political Correspondent, Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic Senior Editor and Gloria Borger, CNN Senior Political Analyst, will discuss:
What Must President Obama Do This Year to Get Competitive for 2012?
Year’s Resolutions for Palin and her GOP Rivals, for Hillary Clinton, and the Royals
Meet the Press with David Gregory: Oy. It’s all Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and how the Republicans will block everything and do nothing. I hope Obama has stopped taking this man at his word about cooperation.
At the Round Table, “Lurch” will be joined by The New York Times’ David Brooks, The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, Yale law professor and author Stephen Carter, and BBC World News America’s Washington Correspondent Katty Kay, and Senator-elect Pat Toomey (R-PA). They will discuss the politics of the new year, the economy, our two wars, and even the politics of snow fall.
State of the Union with Candy Crowley: A new year, a new Congress; we’re looking ahead to what’s in store. CNN Chief White House correspondent Ed Henry guest hosts.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine will join us exclusively to discuss President Obama’s next two years in office. Can he rise above a stronger Republican Party? Or will his spirit of compromise sink his hopes for re-election?
Then, the incoming chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, California Rep. Darrell Issa joins us. The last time a Democrat occupied the White House while a Republican chaired the committee, over 1,000 subpoenas were issued. Will Chairman Issa use his subpoena power to help enact the GOP agenda?
And finally, three distinct voices within the House Democratic caucus chart the course forward for a wounded party looking to regain some momentum in the new year. Reps. Jason Altmire, Elijah Cummings and Steve Israel will join us.
Fareed Zakaris: GPS: No information for this Sunday.
Nicholas D. Kristof: Equality, a True Soul Food
John Steinbeck observed that “a sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.” That insight, now confirmed by epidemiological studies, is worth bearing in mind at a time of such polarizing inequality that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans possess a greater collective net worth than the bottom 90 percent.
There’s growing evidence that the toll of our stunning inequality is not just economic but also is a melancholy of the soul. The upshot appears to be high rates of violent crime, high narcotics use, high teenage birthrates and even high rates of heart disease.
Jack Schafer: Floyd Abrams Whizzes on WikiLeaks
The First Amendment litigator disparages Julian Assange’s secret-busting enterprise.
Did an imposter steal Floyd Abrams’ identity and use it to sell an in today’s Wall Street Journal? That’s the only explanation I can come up with after reading the First Amendment litigator’s wacky battering of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange (“Why WikiLeaks Is Unlike the Pentagon Papers”).
Abrams, who represented the New York Times in both the Pentagon Papers and Judith Miller cases, applauds Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg because he withheld four volumes of papers-while releasing 43-because he “didn’t want to get in the way of the diplomacy.” That is, Ellsberg didn’t want to interfere with ongoing and confidential negotiations to end the war. Continuing his “Ellsberg good,” “Assange bad” formulation, Abrams asks, “Can anyone doubt that [Assange] would have made those four volumes [of the Pentagon Papers] public on WikiLeaks regardless of their sensitivity?”
William Rivers Pitt: Over, Done, Finished, Out
Be careful what you wish for, right?
In my last column, I made the following half-witted comments: “Give me winter. Give me cold wind and snowstorms, bare branches wrapped in white, pink noses and boots and big coats with lots of pockets…We will eat, we will drink, we will be merry, and if the weather guys have it right, we will do it all surrounded by the first White Christmas I have seen in many a year.”
Ah, well…yes. The weather guys were indeed right, and I wound up trapped in New Hampshire for an extra two days until that “White Christmas” was finished with us. My mother’s house got buried under nearly two feet, and my home city of Boston fared little better.
Ellen Goodman: No Time for “Tirement”
Boston – When I retired from my tenure as a columnist last year, my daughter relayed the news to my grandson, who promptly picked up the phone and, in his most serious 7-year-old voice, said: “Grandma, I hear you’re tired.”
Well, not exactly.
My daughter and I struggled to hide our amusement from a misunderstanding that was not entirely linguistic. After all, retirement was once a matter of ‘tirement. It was the formerly new idea that we didn’t have to work until we dropped in place.
But writing, after all, is not heavy lifting. I wasn’t leaving one career to swoon into the hammock. I was rather thinking about renewal — tweaking and trying new things with my mind and fingers.
Now my un-tirement seems to be something of a trend. I am part of the first huge generation to pass the demarcation line of senior citizenship with the statistical promise of good time ahead.
Recent Comments