“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: This week a special rountable discussion about the Constitution with George Will, Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University, Jill Lepore, a professor of history at Harvard University and Time magazine editor-in-chief Richard Stengel.
Immigration will be the topic of the second rountable with former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, a first-generation American, former Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., who immigrated from Cuba as a boy, and Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for the Washington Post.
Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: This week’s guests are Governor Deval Patrick (D-MA), Governor John Kasich (R-OH), Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who will disuss their views of what’s wrong with Washington.
The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Dan Rather HDNet Global Correspondent, Katy Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent, Gloria Borger, CNN Senior Political Analyst and John Harris, Politico Editor-in-Chief who will discuss: How new media have affected modern politics and new media’s upsides
Meet the Press with David Gregory: We are spared Mr. Gregory this week. Instead you can watch the Men’s Final at Wimbledon
State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Guests Steve Case, AOL co-founder and Chair of the White House Startup America Partnership, Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Harlem Children’s Zone CEO Geoffrey Canada, personal finance expert Suze Orman and entrepreneur Russell Simmons to discuss making it in America.
Fareed Zakaris: GPS: Fareed will have an exclusive interview with National Security Advisor, Tom Donilon.
Last month, with almost no fanfare, the federal government did a very decent thing: It canceled the deportation of a Venezuelan man after he married an American man in Connecticut and claimed legal residency as a spouse. But the government did not say that it was formally recognizing their marriage, because it cannot. The Defense of Marriage Act, which ranks with the most overtly discriminatory laws in the nation’s history, remains on the books, prohibiting federal recognition of legal same-sex marriages.
The deportation dismissal was an isolated act of kindness by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. It is heavily outweighed by the continuing inequality imposed on thousands of same-sex couples who have been legally married in the five states – plus the District of Columbia – where it is already allowed. Likewise, the many couples who will take advantage of New York’s new marriage equality law will not be married in the eyes of Washington.
Maureen Dowd: When a Predator Collides With a Fabricator
SO what’s the moral of this Manhattan immorality tale?
That the French are always right, even when their hauteur is irritating?
They were right about Iraq and America’s rush to war. And they may be right about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and America’s rush to judgment.
In both cases, French credibility was undermined, so we resisted seeing things from their point of view.
John Nichols: What Michele Bachmann and Her Teapot ‘Patriots’ Do Not Know About America
The unsettling thing about Michele Bachmann’s failed discussion of the founders and slavery is not that the Tea Party “Patriot” knew so little about the birth of the American experiment that she made John Quincy Adams-the son of a somewhat disappointing founder (John) and the cousin of one of the true revolutionaries (Sam)-into something he was not.
Bachmann has for some time peddled the notion that the nation’s founding fathers worked “tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” She is simply wrong about this. The last of the revolutionaries generally recognized by historians as the founders-signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and their chief political and military comrades-passed in 1836, with the death of James Madison. That was twenty-seven years before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and twenty-nine years before the finish of the Civil War.
But Bachmann has never bothered by the facts. Until now.
Robert Parry: Neocons Want War and More War
The neoconservatives remain powerful in Washington in large part because of their continued influence inside leading opinion-setting journals like the New York Times and the Washington Post, two prestige newspapers that have pressed ahead with the neocon agenda despite serious blows to their credibility in recent years
Sometimes the New York Times and the Washington Post behave like two vintage ocean-liners competing to see which will edge out the other in a competition to become the flagship for American neoconservatism. Think of a cross-Atlantic race between the Titanic and the Lusitania.
The Times was pouring on the coal in Friday’s editions, pushing the Obama administration and NATO to finish off the war in Libya. The Times editors seemed most concerned at the prospect of negotiations to resolve the conflict without a clear-cut military victory over Col. Muammar Gaddafi.
Mike Lux: Back to Where We Started
Two hundred thirty-five years ago, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted to declare independence from Britain. From our very earliest days, this country has been involved in a heated debate about our collective soul, a foundational debate about what we stand for and what kind of people we want to be. Our founding fathers had a dream, but there were people who were afraid to change and wanted to rely on the traditions and rulers that were in place. Then as now, the debate raged over equality and democracy and the nature of tyranny, over whether we were indeed one people with equal opportunities and rights or whether the elites should be able to do whatever they want.
From those terribly risky early days, when the odds were so steeped against us winning the revolution and then forming a new kind of democratic government that would last, we have had a hell of a run. We’ve survived and prospered as a country through some very shaky early days, through a horrendous civil war just barely won, through a Great Depression, through the terrible threat of Hitler and Japan in WWII, to become the most wealthy and powerful country in the world over the last seven decades. But we have come to a juncture serious enough to raise those old foundational questions again.
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