“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 reporting live from Japan.
Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Chairman, Homeland Security Committee and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Homeland Security Committee.
The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent, David Ignatius, The Washington Post
Columnist, David Brooks, The New York Times Columnist and Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent who will discuss these questions:Can Any GOP Candidate Beat President Obama At His Own Game of Hope?
Will Republicans Successfully Cut Off Funds For PBS and NPR?
Meet the Press with David Gregory: Mike Todd, NBC’s White House correspondent will be hosting for Mr. Gregory this week. The guests will be Japan’s Ambassador to the US, Ichiro Fujisaki to discuss the disaster in Japan, also, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniel and Sen Chuck Schumer, (D-NY).
At the roundtable the panel will be: Political reporter for The Washington Post, Dan Balz, and host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Michele Norris who will be joined by nuclear reactor expert, Michael Norris
State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) will discuss the break down a budget battle that seems no closer to resolution than it did at the last deadline two weeks ago with up dates on the Japan disaster.
Fareed Zakaris:GPS: According to Fareed’s Tweets, there will be discussion about the situation in Libya with experts on the region
Maureen Dowd: In Search of Monsters
Paul Wolfowitz has lost the right to be moral arbiter on matters of war. He just doesn’t know it. comment icon
The Iraq war hawks urging intervention in Libya are confident that there’s no way Libya could ever be another Iraq.
Of course, they never thought Iraq would be Iraq, either.
All President Obama needs to do, Paul Wolfowitz asserts, is man up, arm the Libyan rebels, support setting up a no-fly zone and wait for instant democracy.
It’s a cakewalk.
Pierre Tristam: Peter King’s Muslim McCarthyism
New York Congressman Peter King’s so-called homeland security hearing on Muslim radicalization should surprise no one. We’ve been at war with Islam abroad for 10 years. It’s amazing it’s taken this long for the xenophobia and hate-mongering to be elevated to heroic status on Capitol Hill, where even the fringe the notion of Barack Obama as a Muslim fifth columnist still has currency. It’s all part of a long American tradition, rich in blood and bile.
This is a country partly built on the genocidal eradication of the Indian, on the enslavement of blacks for 300 years and the terrorizing and demonizing of blacks for another hundred. At the turn of the last century it was the “Yellow Peril” that led Congress to ban Asian immigration. In the 1920s, at a time when Jews were openly barred from colleges, clubs, restaurants and neighborhoods, Henry Ford was devoting page after page of his Michigan newspaper to battling what he perceived as the threat of Jewish radicalization in America, and dreaming of the day when the country would be cleansed of them. That was just warm-up for the mass hysteria of the 1950s when it was feared that Soviet communists, who had trouble keeping a light bulb functioning properly in Russia, would overrun the United States thanks to a few well-placed “infiltrators.” The Soviet threat has become the Muslim threat.
Nicholas D. Kristof: Pay Teachers More
Remember when public schools paid almost as well as law firms?
From the debates in Wisconsin and elsewhere about public sector unions, you might get the impression that we’re going bust because teachers are overpaid.
That’s a pernicious fallacy. A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession.
Michelle Chen: Union Battleground Shifts From Wisconsin to Ohio-and Ballot Box
The movement has been set back for now, but the standoff in Madison captured labor’s political imagination. Although the Republicans have cynically used the “nuclear option” to ram through the anti-union bill, the battleground will now just shift to other states.
Ohio lawmakers are mulling a bill similar to Wisconsin’s, which would restrain the collective bargaining rights of some 360,000 state and local employees.
Ohio does not need as many votes for a quorum. This means Democrats cannot hold up the voting process by going AWOL, as they did in Wisconsin and are still doing in Indiana (where unions are fighting proposals to further erode union rights and public education). But in Ohio’s case, Madison-style people power could be deployed in a more concrete way, according to some lawmakers. House minority leader Armond Budish told Bloomberg News that even if the bill initially passes, he and other Democrats will mobilize citizens to thwart the legislation through other channels, through public pressure and perhaps ultimately, the ballot box.
David Sirota: From Charlie Sheen to Reagan nostalgia, the ’80s just won’t go away
Charlie Sheen is hogging the spotlight. “Tron” and “Wall Street” have just left theaters. Moammar Gaddafi is the planet’s top bad guy. Millionaires are enjoying budget-busting tax cuts. Conservatives are saber-rattling against Iran. Bon Jovi is on tour. And Ronald Reagan tributes are everywhere.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think we’d all just stepped out of a 1.21 gigawatt-powered DeLorean and right back into the 1980s.
And in some ways, we have. This collective deja vu moment is part coincidence, part commodified nostalgia and part impulse to rehash successful old political and entertainment brands. But the similarities between today and the 1980s also reflect a country now run by those who came of age in that decade – people whose worldviews were molded by an era that began with a Chrysler bailout and ended with foreign students protesting dictatorship in a distant square.
Recent Comments