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.

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: Christiane Amanpour asks Sens. Joe Lieberman, Kent Conrad and Kay Bailey Hutchison what the President needs to achieve in his speech next week. Will the health care law survive Republican efforts to repeal it? What can the President and the Congress do about jobs? With a call for a new tone in Washington in the wake of the Tucson shooting, does bipartisanship have a chance? And why have these three Senators decided to retire?

Christiane talks with three new Republican members of Congress, Rep. Chris Gibson (R-N.Y.), Rep. Bobby Schilling (R-Ill.) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) share their views on how they hope to change Washington, whether they can keep their campaign promises and their thoughts about the Tea Party movement.

The roundtable with George Will, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman, former Bush political strategist Matthew Dowd, and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile will take a hard look at the tough compromises that both the White House and newly emboldened Republicans on Capitol Hill will have to make if Washington is to avoid gridlock.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Scheiffer will have exclusive interviews with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. (at left)

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post Senior Political Editor, Norah O’Donnell, MSNBC

Chief Washington Correspondent, Katty Kay, BBC

Washington Correspondent and Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Columnist who will discuss these questions:

Will President Obama’s State of the Union offer Republicans a deal they cannot refuse?

Riding the tiger: are Chinese mothers really superior to western mothers?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Gregory has an exclusive interview with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA).

This Sunday’s roundtable guests are the Assistant Democratic Leader in the House, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), former advisor to President George W. Bush, Ambassador Karen Hughes, Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta now with the Center for American Progress, the Political Director for Atlantic Media, Ron Brownstein and CNBC’s Erin Burnett.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley will have and exclusive live, in studio interview with former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

And are we at a political pivot point for the Obama administration? We’ll break down presidential politics and the Republican agenda with Democratic strategist Paul Begala and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson.

Fifty years after President Dwight Eisenhower‘s farewell speech and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, we’ll sit down with author and presidential historian, Richard Norton Smith.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: The big story of the week was Chinese President Hu Jintao’s State Visit to Washington. It’s visit that would not have been possible without the past efforts of two men: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Both men paved the way for U.S./China relations. And both of these diplomatic giants sit down in exclusive one-on-one interviews with Fareed to assess the trip, the current state of affairs, and the future of relations between the two nations. Are things as tense as they seem? Can the world’s two economic superpowers find common ground and work together?

Next week, President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address. What does he need to say? Fareed offers his take.

And later in the show a GPS panel of experts, including two former Presidential speechwriters share their thoughts on why the speech is so critical and what should (and shouldn’t) be in it.

Then, what in the world is going on in the Arab world? Is George W. Bush’s vision of democracy across the Middle East and North Africa coming true?

And finally a last look at what happens when a village meets 49,200 lbs. of explosives.

Robert Reich: American Competitiveness, and the President’s New Relationship with American Business

Whenever you hear a business executive or politician use the term “American competitiveness,” watch your wallet. Few terms in public discourse have gone so directly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence.

President Obama just appointed Jeffry Immelt, GE’s CEO, to head his outside panel of economic advisors, replacing Paul Volcker. According to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, Immelt has “agreed to work through what makes our country more competitive.”

In an opinion piece for the Washington Post announcing his acceptance, Immelt wrote “there is nothing inevitable about America’s declining manufacturing competitiveness if we work together to reverse it.”

But what’s American “competitiveness” and how do you measure it?

William Rivers Pitt: Just The Same Old Dumb

I endured a moment of deep crisis on Thursday, upon realizing that there might actually be more Pure Dumb in the world than I was aware of.

Now, understand that I have been a Chronicler of Dumb for a very long time now. I am a Student of Dumb, and a well-worn one at that. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in the Study of Dumb during the Clinton impeachment. I got my Masters in the aftermath of the 2000 (s)election. It took a grueling eight years, but I got my first Ph.D in Dumb Studies during the George W. Bush administration. After that, earning my second Dumb Studies Ph.D came a lot easier over the last two years of observing and reporting on the demented frenzy of Dumb that has been emanating from a broad swath of the Republican Party since the election of a president who is a Democrat and also not White.

William John Cox: An American Suicide Terrorist

The shooter of Congresswoman Giffords acted as a domestic suicide terrorist on the political “battleground” of American politics. His YouTube postings and “goodbye” phone messages are ominously reminiscent of the traditional farewell videos of Islamist martyrs.

The deadly combination of suicide terrorists’ mental instability, their political and religious indoctrination and readily available bomb materials and firearms explode in violence almost every day somewhere in the Middle East.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that Jared Loughner, a young, schizophrenic American, whose untreated illness is exacerbated by inflamed political rhetoric, easily buys a legally concealed combat handgun and shoots the “target” of the political “speech” under conditions where there is no escape.