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 speak to some of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords‘ friends and colleagues including Rep. Chris Van Hollen, Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, and the chair or the New Democratic Coalition Rep. Jeff Crowley. Plus, up-to-the-minute reports from ABC News’ team of correspondents from Tucson, Arizona to Washington, DC. Also, a roundtable discussion with George Will, Donna Brazile and Freedom Works Chairman Dick Armey.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer will also discuss the latest on the Tucson shootings with his guests Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). Also reporting will be CBS News’ Nancy Cordes, Jan Crawford and Bob Orr

The Chris Matthews Show: This weeks panel will be Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent, John Heilemann, New York Magazine National Political Correspondent, Chuck Todd, NBC News Chief White House Correspondent and Alex Wagner, Politics Daily White House Correspondent

Meet the Press with David Gregory: There will be more on the latest on the Arizona shootings, plus an exclusive interview with Sen. Harry Reid

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: The brazen shooting of a U.S. congresswoman. A nine-year-old girl and a federal judge are among the six dead. One dozen more are wounded. A suspect is in custody as a country searches for answers.

We’ll bring you the very latest from Tucson, Arizona from CNN’s full spate of resources.

We’ll also discuss the still developing story with our previously booked guests: Sens. Lamar Alexander, Dick Durbin and Mike Lee; and two former White House counselors, Ed Gillespie and John Podesta.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: George Clooney talks to Fareed from South Sudan. Residents there will vote — starting on Sunday — on whether to become an independent nation. Clooney and activist John Prendergast are worried the referendum could bring war back to this nation where war never seems to end. Their novel solution to avoid war and mass murder involves satellite surveillance. Tune in and hear them explain how they hope to become the “anti-genocide paparazzi”.

Also, what does 2011 hold? Will it be better than 2010? Fareed gives you his “take” on the New Year.

Then, an all-star GPS panel featuring CNN host Eliot Spitzer, David Remnick of the New Yorker, Wall Street Journalist columnist Bret Stephens, and Chrystia Freeland of Reuters, offer their own “takes” on 2011 — from DC politics to world politics, from dollars and cents to war and peace.

Next up, what in the world? A new kind of cold front is emerging…in Baghdad.

Then, peril in Pakistan. A progressive politician killed in cold blood. What effect will the assassination have on the future of not only that country, but American efforts in the region? Fareed speaks to one of Pakistan’s leading journalists, who was also a key associate of the slain governor.

And finally a last look at how much it might cost to buy a big white house in Washington D.C. Prices are dropping!

Marty Kaplan: The “Lock and Load” Rhetoric of American Politics Isn’t Just a Metaphor

I’m not saying that putting a bullseye on Arizona Democrat Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ congressional race – as Sarah Palin did – was an explicit or intentional invitation to violence. Nor am I saying that the “Get on Target for Victory” events held by the guy Giffords beat – “Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly” – was the reason her assassin went after her. This tragedy is still unfolding, and the questions of motive and incitement will be argued about for a long time to come.

But I am saying that the “lock and load”/”take up your arms” rhetoric of American politics isn’t just an overheated metaphor. For years, the language of sports has dominated political journalism, and discourse about hardball and the horserace and the rest of the macho athletic lexicon has been a factor in the trivialization of our public sphere. This has helped dumb down democracy, making a serious national discussion about anything important too wonky for words.

The “second amendment solution,” though, does something worse than make politics a branch of entertainment. It makes it a blood sport. I know politics ain’t beanbag. But words have consequences, rhetoric shapes reality, and much as we like to believe that we are creatures of reason, there is something about our species’ limbic system and lizard brainstems that makes us susceptible to irrational fantasies.

Frank Rich: Let Obama’s Reagan Revolution Begin

Barack Obama’s Christmas resurrection was so miraculous that even a birther or two may start believing the guy is a Christian.  

Nothing captured the president’s sudden reversal of fortune more vividly than the Linda Blair-like head spin of the conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer, who pronounced the Obama agenda “dead” on Fox News on Nov. 3 only to lead the bipartisan media hordes anointing him “the new comeback kid” six weeks later. Last week Obama’s Gallup job approval rating fleetingly hit 50 percent for the first time in eight months. Even in post-shellacking mid-December, polls found that Americans still trusted him more than Washington’s Republican leaders to fix the nation’s ills – health care included, according to the ABC News-Washington Post survey on that question.

As the do-something lame-duck Congress’s triumphs were toted up, the White House pointedly floated the news that the president was meeting with Reagan administration veterans (David Gergen, Ken Duberstein) and taking Lou Cannon’s authoritative biography “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime” on vacation. Reagan, of course, was also pummeled (though a bit less so) in his maiden midterms of 1982, then carried 49 states in his 1984 re-election landslide. In January 1983, Reagan’s approval rating was much worse than Obama’s – 35 percent. So was the unemployment rate (10.4 percent vs. our current 9.4 percent) as Americans struggled to recover from what was then the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

John Nichols: You Say Sarah Palin’s Just Not Extreme Enough? How About Michele Bachmann for President?

It is no secret that the most enthusiastic encouragement of a presidential bid by Sarah Palin comes from the Obama White House. No Republican with her level of name recognition polls worse than Palin in a head-to-head race with the Democratic president. Indeed, fresh surveys by Public Policy Polling suggest that in much of the country Palin “would would lose by the biggest margin of any Republican Presidential nominee since Barry Goldwater.”

This, of course, only makes Palin more appealing to the true believers on the Republican right.

But what if the former governor of Alaska decides she would rather peddle ghostwritten books and plot a career as the Arctic Oprah?

Where could conservative crackpots turn? Would the whacked-out right be left without a presidential prospect of its own?

Not necessarily.

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, the wild-eyed Minnesotan who is so extreme that members of the House Republican Caucus rejected her for a leadership position in the new Congress, makes the GOP’s 2008 vice presidential nominee look like a mainstream moderate. And Bachmann is dramatically more ambitious than the Grizzly Grandma.