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: Ms. Amanpour will be live from Cairo, Egypt. Her guest s will include, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Egyptian Ambassador to the U.S. Sameh Shoukry, and National Security Adviser to former President Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Al Jazeera Washington Bureau Chief Abderrahim Foukara, ABC News’ George Will, ABC News Senior Foreign Correspondent Martha Raddatz, and ABC News contributor Sam Donaldson join ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper for the roundtable discussion.

I think we can all guess the topic.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr Schieffer will have an exclusive interview with New White House Chief of Staff William Daley in his first television interview since joining the administration.

Plus the latest on the crisis in Egypt, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Rick Stengel, TIME Managing Editor, John Harris, Politico Editor-in-Chief and Helene Cooper, The New York Times White House Correspondent.

This weeks questions are:

In his quest for the center, is Barack Obama watching Ronald Reagan?

The politics of an Obama gun control Push

I bet those topics have changed

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be Mr. Gregory’s guest to discuss the protests in Egypt. Also joining him for insights and an analysis are former Mideast negotiator and Ambassador to Israel for President Clinton, Martin Indyk, and New York Times Columnist, Tom Friedman.

Also an exclusive guest: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). (heh, the Human Hybrid Turtle)

The roundtable: Longtime Republican strategist, Mike Murphy, former Tennessee congressman and Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, Harold Ford, NBC’s Chief White House Correspondent and Political Director, Chuck Todd and Washington Correspondent for the BBC, Katty Kay.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: As unrest in Egypt builds: Will anything besides President Mubarak’s resignation assuage the protesters? Is this a tipping point for unrest throughout the Middle East? And what’s the next move for the Obama Administration?

We’ll begin with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (Hillary is going to need a throat lozenge or two)

Then, joining us with their insights will be the former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Edward S. Walker and former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte. (more war criminals)

And Arizona Sen. John McCain, who believes the protests are “a wake-up call” for the Mubarak-led government. (the real question: Will John be awake?)

On the domestic front, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will argue that the GOP is playing a high stakes game of chicken over government spending. Who will blink first?

(I think we have the answer to that)

And finally a conversation with Alan Simpson, the Co-chair of the W.H. Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. His report laid out a path to fiscal discipline, but no one seems ready to follow it.

(Let’s hope they don’t change their minds)

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: Site not up dated at the time of our publishing but I fairly certain the Middle East will be a big topic for discussion.

Frank Rich: The Tea Party Wags the Dog

ANY lingering doubts about Barack Obama’s determination to appropriate Ronald Reagan’s political spirit evaporated just before the State of the Union. No American brand is more associated with Reagan than General Electric, and it was that corporation’s chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, who popped up as the president’s new wingman when the White House rolled out its latest jobs initiative on Jan. 21. Obama’s speech on Tuesday, with its celebration of the nation’s can-do capitalist ingenuity, moved him still closer to Reagan’s sweet spot as a national cheerleader. The president even offered a remix of the old Reagan-era G.E. jingle “We bring good things to life” – now traded up to the grander “We do big things.”

Obama’s rhetorical Morning in America is exquisitely timed to coincide with the Gipper’s centennial – and, of course, the unacknowledged start of his own 2012 re-election campaign. It’s remarkable how completely the G.O.P. has ceded the optimism of its patron saint to the president just as the country prepares for a deluge of Reaganiana. Obama’s post-New Year’s surge past a 50 percent approval rating – well ahead of both Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s comeback trajectories after their respective midterm shellackings – may have only just begun.

David Bromwich: Obama, Incorporated

Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address was an organized sprawl of good intentions-a mostly fact-free summons to a new era of striving and achievement, and a solemn cheer to raise our spirits as we try to get there. And it did not fail to celebrate the American Dream.

In short, it resembled most State of the Union addresses since Ronald Reagan’s first in 1982. Perhaps its most notable feature was an omission. With applause lines given to shunning the very idea of government spending, and a gratuitous promise to extend a freeze on domestic spending from three years to five, there was only the briefest mention of the American war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The situation in each country was summarized and dismissed in three sentences, and the sentences took misleading care to name only enemies with familiar names: the Taliban, al-Qaeda. But these wars, too, cost money, and as surely as the lost jobs in de-industrialized cities they carry a cost in human suffering.

David Swanson: The imperial war presidency

Remember Obama ran as an Iraq war opponent? As president, he has ruinously escalated foreign military commitments

“So tonight, I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years.” Thus spoke President Barack Obama in his state of the union speech on Tuesday. “Domestic” spending means non-war and non-military spending. Over half of our public spending in the United States goes to wars and the military. Even the president’s own deficit commission recommended cutting $100bn from military spending.

Why leave it out of the freeze? This may be why:

   “And we’ve sent a message … to all parts of the globe: we will not relent, we will not waver, and we will defeat you.”

That’s going to be expensive, and President Obama promised lower taxes on corporations in the same speech. He’s already signed off on tax cuts for billionaires, even while promising for the second year in a row to oppose them. Spending cuts will have to come somewhere else.

   “Already, we’ve frozen the salaries of hardworking federal employees for the next two years. I’ve proposed cuts to things I care deeply about, like community action programmes. The secretary of defence has also agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending that he and his generals believe our military can do without.”

But those little cuts out of the $1tn we spend on the military each year are planned for future years, not this one. The president is expected to propose a larger military budget for the third year in a row next month. And he has thus far consistently used off-the-books supplemental bills to add more funding to his wars.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous: Live From the Egyptian Revolution

CAIRO, Egypt — I grew up in Egypt. I spent half my life here. But Saturday, when my plane from JFK airport touched down in Cairo, I arrived in a different country than the one I had known all my life. This is not Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt anymore and, regardless of what happens, it will never be again.

In Tahrir Square, thousands of Egyptians-men and women, young and old, rich and poor-gathered today to celebrate their victory over the regime’s hated police and state security forces and to call on Mubarak to step down and leave once and for all. They talked about the massive protest on Friday, the culmination of three days of demonstrations that began on January 25th to mark National Police Day. It was an act of popular revolt the likes of which many Egyptians never thought they would see during Mubarak’s reign. “The regime has been convincing us very well that we cannot do it, but Tunisians gave us an idea and it took us only three days and we did it,” said Ahmad El Esseily, a 35 year-old author and TV/radio talk show host who took park in the demonstrations. “We are a lot of people and we are strong.”