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: Live from Egypt, Ms Amanpour’s guest will be the US Ambassador Sameh Shoukry to Egypt. She will host special round table discussing with journalists covering the demonstrations including veteran Egyptian journalists Lamia Radi and Nadia abou el-Magd, BBC’s John Simpson, Tony Shadid of the New York Times, and ABC’s David Muir.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer:Mr. Schieffer’s guests will include Martin Indyk, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, Thomas Pickering, Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Israel and Jordan, and Dr. Abderrahim Foukara, Al Jazeera, Washington and New York Bureau Chief

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s panel is Bob Woodward, The Washington Post Associate Editor, Katty Kay, BBC Washington  Correspondent, Joe Klein, TIME Columnist, and Anne Kornblut, The Washington Post, White House Correspondent.

The question are: Did the U.S. Miss Signs That Egypt Could Become a Hostile Islamic State?

Donald Rumsfeld’s Rewrite of the Iraq war

Fear the Muslims! Rummie would look good in orange.

Meet the Press with David Gregory:MTP is live from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library marking the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth. Mr. Gregory’s has interviews Mohamed ElBaradei and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The round table will be former Secretary of State and Reagan White House Chief of Staff, James Baker; former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan; former Speaker of the California State Assembly and Mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown; and W.H. Correspondent for NBC News during the Reagan administration, Andrea Mitchell.

Rah, rah, St. Ronnie who laid the foundation for the economic decline of the middle class.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: As the second week of protests comes to an end, we’ll discuss America’s standing in the Middle East and what’s next for Egypt and the region with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — exclusive, live and in-studio.

Then, former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Edward S. Walker, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte join us again to assess the ever-changing implications for the U.S.

Plus, live reports from CNN’s team of reporters on the ground.

And, we sat down with the co-chair of the White House Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Alan Simpson. The former senator from Wyoming outlined the commission’s plan for tackling the ever-growing national debt.

War criminals and “let ’em eat cake” misogynist

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: The latest on the turmoil in Egypt with live reports from our correspondents around the country and the region.

Egyptian opposition figure Mohammed ElBaradei speaks with Fareed on situation in Egypt and what might come next. Will Mubarak leave before September? Will ElBaradei run in the upcoming elections? Stay tuned to GPS to find out.

And, Fareed’s interview with British Prime Minister David Cameron. Will his austerity measures save England? Will Britain bail out its neighbors? And who will foot the bill for the royal wedding?

Jane White: Reagan’s True Legacy: Terminating the American Dream

As Ronald Reagan supporters celebrate his 100th birthday on Feb. 6, it’s astounding how not only the right wing has inflated and distorted his legacy, but most of the so-called liberal media as well.

The inconvenient truth about how Reagan won his first term had nothing to do with his superior game plan but the fact that you had to be crazy to re-elect Jimmy Carter. Carter’s reaction to the repressive Iranian regime that took Americans hostage for 444 days was simultaneously wimpy and self-righteous, implying that our gas-guzzling greed had led to the crisis along with finger-wagging us to turn down our thermostats and drive smaller cars.

On the other hand, while Reagan intolerance for repression apparently scared Iran’s leadership enough to release the hostages shortly after he was elected, his subsequent deregulatory legacy has left our country in economic ruin.

Richard Blumenthal: GOP Dials Back the Clock on Progress for Women

As families across Connecticut struggle to find work and make ends meet, it is both disappointing and alarming to see some lawmakers returning to the culture wars of the past and trying to restrict access to health care for women across this country.

The bills introduced by Representatives Mike Pence and Christopher Smith take an unprecedented step of blocking women’s access to the reproductive health care they need and have a right to — and I will strongly oppose them. These bills seek to overturn years of long-standing legal doctrine and, even worse, they endanger the health of women in this country by attempting to end insurance coverage — including private coverage — for all abortions. We cannot allow women’s health to be jeopardized by limiting the options that they and their doctors have when it comes to their reproductive health care.

Dana Milbank: A real dead-ender

Don Rumsfeld is a dead-ender.

Not in the meaning of the phrase as we understood it in 2003, back when he prematurely described the Iraqi insurgents as mere “pockets of dead-enders.”

No, Rumsfeld is a dead-ender under the revised definition, provided by the former defense secretary in his score-settling memoir. In this telling, being a dead-ender means you are tough and formidable.

Bob Herbert: Bewitched by the Numbers

The data zealots have utterly discombobulated themselves.

They were expecting something on the order of 150,000 new jobs to have been created in January. That would have been a lousy number, but they were fully prepared to spin it as being pretty good. They thought the official jobless rate might hop up a tick to 9.5 percent.

Instead, the economy created just 36,000 jobs in January, an absolutely dreadful number. But the unemployment rate fell like a stone from 9.4 percent to 9.0 percent.

The crunchers stared at the numbers in disbelief. They moved them this way and that. No matter how they arranged them, they made no sense. Nothing even close to enough jobs were being created to bring the unemployment rate down, but for two successive months it had dropped sharply. (It dived from 9.8 percent to 9.4 in December.)

David Sirota: With Democracy or Against It — There’s No In Between

In America, politicians are rarely compelled to turn rhetoric into action. Presidents make public commitments to support legislation while quietly instructing their congressional allies to kill the corresponding bills. Congresspeople then campaign on policy proposals only to make sure their respective presidents veto the initiatives.

We all know this game – we know its rigged rules ensure plausible deniability and prevent follow through. But as the Mideast showed this week, just because those are our rules doesn’t mean everyone plays by them.

Johann Hari:We All Helped Suppress the Egyptians. So How Do We Change?

The old slogan from the 1960s has come true: the revolution has been televised. The world is watching the Bastille fall on 24/7 rolling news. An elderly thug is trying to buy and beat and tear-gas himself enough time to smuggle his family’s estimated $25bn in loot out of the country, and to install a successor friendly to his interests. The Egyptian people – half of whom live on less than $2 a day – seem determined to prevent the pillage and not to wait until September to drive out a dictator dripping in blood and bad hair dye.

The great Czech dissident Vaclav Havel outlined the “as if” principle. He said people trapped under a dictatorship need to act “as if they are free”. They need to act as if the dictator has no power over them. The Egyptians are trying – and however many of them Mubarak murders on his way out the door, the direction in which fear flows has been successfully reversed. The tyrant has become terrified of “his” people.