“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: Before the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, former President Bill Clinton discusses the global jobs crisis. Plus, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on the Middle East, and Google’s Eric Schmidt on jobs and innovation.
The roundtable with George Will, Cokie Roberts, ABC News senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl and presidential historian Michael Beschloss will discuss the recently released tapes of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: This Sunday’s Guests are former Vice President Dick Cheney and former President Bill Clinton.
The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent, Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent, Michael Duffy, TIME Magazine Assistant Managing Editor and Major Garrett, National Journal Congressional Correspondent, will discuss these questions:
Is Rick Perry Ronald Reagan? Is He The Underestimated Conservative Who Could Win?
The Jackie Kennedy Tapes — She Tells What JFK Could Not Tell
Meet the Press with David Gregory: Once again former President Bill Clinton discussing jobs and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, (R-KY, The Human Hybrid Turtle) discussing how not to create jobs.
Joining the roundtable, Former Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-MI), Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, Senior political analyst for TIME Magazine, Mark Halperin and NY Times White House Correspondent Helene Cooper will discuss jobs or not.
State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Plus, former Congressional Budget Office directors Alice Rivlin and Douglas Holtz-Eakin discuss the impact, or not, of President Obama’s jobs plan.
Fareed Zakaris: GPS: Pres. Obama’s jobs czar Jeff Immelt on getting US back to work & a panel on the Middle East.
New York Times Editorial:
Leadership Crisis
As the economy faces the risk of another recession, and the 2012 campaign looms, President Obama has been groping for a response to the biggest crisis of his career. All he has to do is listen to the voters.
The Times and CBS News released a new poll on Friday, and once again we were impressed that Americans are a lot smarter than Republican leaders think, more willing to sacrifice for the national good than Democratic leaders give them credit for, and more eager to see the president get tough than Mr. Obama and his conflict-averse team realize.
So long as the politicians keep reinforcing their misconceptions – and listening only to themselves – the country has little chance of getting what the voters want most: jobs and a growing economy.
Gail Collins: Rick Perry, Uber Texan
YOU think of Rick Perry, you think of Texas. And more Texas. Perry the cowboy coyote-killer, the lord of the Texas job-creation machine, the g-dropping glad-hander with a “howdy” for every stranger in the room. He barely exists in the national mind outside of the Texas connection.
A continuation of the TV series “Dallas” is due in 2012. How long will it take before we fixate on the fact that James Richard Perry is another J. R.?
Some of this is natural – the man is the governor, after all. But we didn’t obsess about the state this way when Governor Bush was the presidential candidate. (We obsessed about the Bushes.) We didn’t talk endlessly about Arkansas when we were evaluating Governor Clinton. (We obsessed about the Clintons.)
The difference is that Perry obsesses about Texas, too. On the campaign trail, he’s the ambassador from the Lone Star State, promoter of the Texas Miracle, filtering almost everything through a Texas prism. On his maiden voyage through the Iowa State Fair, some hecklers were giving him a hard time, the typical hazing for a new face on the national scene, and Perry’s response was instinctive.
Michelle Chen: [In Anti-Government Politics, “Time-Out” on Regulation versus Shortened Lives ]
Seizing upon a reliable “job creation” talking point, conservatives have stoked their war against “big government” by trying to freeze federal actions to protect the public.
The proposed “Regulatory Time-Out Act,” which would impose a one-year moratorium on “significant” new regulations, takes aim at regulations that keep industry from dumping poison in rivers or accidentally blowing up factory workers-in other words, policies that capitalists call “job killers.”
According to the champion of the bill, Sen. Susan Collins, “significant” rules are those “costing more than $100 million per year,” and those projected to “have an adverse impact on jobs, the economy, or our international competitiveness.” The guiding principle of this proposed regulatory kill-switch is a cold cost-benefit analysis that weighs profitability against people’s health and safety.
Jim Hightower: DuPont’s Herbicide Goes Rogue
The company’s landscaping weed-killer turned out to be a tree-killer.
In the corporate world’s tortured language, workers are no longer fired. They just experience an “employment adjustment.” But the most twisted euphemism I’ve heard in a long time comes from DuPont: “We are investigating the reports of these unfavorable tree symptoms,” the pesticide maker recently stated.
How unfavorable? Finito, flat-lined, the tree is dead. Not just one tree, but hundreds of thousands all across the country are suffering the final “symptom.”
The culprit turns out to be Imprelis, a DuPont weed-killer widely applied to lawns, golf courses, and – ironically – cemeteries.
Rather than just poisoning dandelions and other weeds, the herbicide also seems to be causing spruces, pines, willows, poplars, and other unintended victims to croak.
“It’s been devastating,” says a Michigan landscaper who applied Imprelis to about a thousand properties this spring and has already had more than a third of them suffer outbreaks of tree deaths. “It looks like someone took a flamethrower to them,” he says.
The building would take nearly a century to complete, as architects came and went, the British set fire to it and it was called into use during the Civil War. Today, the Capitol building, with its famous cast-iron dome and important collection of American art, is part of the Capitol Complex, which includes six Congressional office buildings and three Library of Congress buildings, all developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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