Obama is not Hitler but Bush is a war criminal, Jon.

“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.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: The Tea Party favorite and newly-elected Republican Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul sits down with Ms. Amanpour for an exclusive interview. House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence and Former Reagan budget director David Stockman debate extending the Bush tax cuts.

Outgoing Democratic Senator Evan Bayh joins the Roundtable discussion with George Will, former Bush political strategist Matthew Dowd, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress and ABC News Political Director Amy Walter.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-SC) join Mr. Schieffer.

The Chris Matthews Show: Mr. Matthew’s guests will be Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Bob Woodward, The Washington Post Associate Editor, Joe Klein, TIME Columnist and Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent to dscuss these topics:  Will President Obama Change?

and George W. Bush’s New Memoir.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Mr. Gregory will speak exclusively with the Tea Party’s most vocal backer in the Senate, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and then New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

His guests for the Round Table discussion will be Former Obama White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, Former Adviser to Pres. George W. Bush Karen Hughes, President of the National Urban League, Marc Morial and Republican Strategist Mike Murphy.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley will be joined by re-elected Gov. Tim Pawlenty (MI) and Gov. Rick Perry (TX) to discuss what  Tuesday’s midterm elections say about the last two years in politics and  what they mean for the next two.

Then, after suffering a historic defeat in the House of Representatives, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the congressman responsible for electing Democrats to the House, will join us. What’s the way forward for Democrats in Congress after the election?

And Pennsylvania Sen.-elect Pat Toomey (R) joins us to explain how he defeated his Democratic opponent in a state with more than one million more registered Democrats than Republicans. What will he achieve in Washington?

Finally, we’ll be joined by Michael Duffy of Time magazine, and Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post to break down a midterm election with wide-ranging implications.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS. See why Fareed says that if this “Republican Revolution” doesn’t manage to cut the deficit, the American people will be saying “Fool me three times, shame on me”.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman thinks the outlook for the next two years — with a power split in Washington — is “terrible”. In an exclusive interview, Krugman goes head-to-head with the former chief economist of the IMF, the right-leaning Raghuram Rajan on what can be done to fix the U.S. economy…and whether it will ever GET done given the likely of gridlock in the nation’s capital.

Remember when we told you it’s only been a few weeks since the end of WWI? Well, it looks like we might have to wait a little bit longer for WWII to end. Japan never signed a peace treaty with the Soviets or Russia. And President Medvedev’s four-hour tour of an obscure island this week has heated up the cold war between the two nations. What in the world?

After that, we answer the question that has been asked over and over since last week’s thwarted cargo bombings: Is Yemen the next Afghanistan? Fareed speaks with the New York Times’ man in Yemen, Robert Worth.

Then, a look at a moderate Muslim country that’s fighting and winning their war on terror and extremism. An interview with the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak.

And finally, how one country could really put the “savings” in “daylight savings”.

It will be Republicans all the time now

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

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“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.

David Sirota: From Uprising to Hostile Takeover … and Back Again

Death Panels. Witchcraft. Birthers. Islamophobes. Tea partiers. Obama text messages. Palin robo-calls. TV commercial after TV commercial after TV commercial. And now, at the end of this $4 billion We-Didn’t-Start-the-Fire-worthy vaudeville known as the 2010 election, what do we have to show for it? That’s right, a new House speaker with the politics of Newt Gingrich and the skin complexion of a Syracuse mascot.

If after this soul-crushing extravaganza you find yourself shell-shocked, that’s understandable. If you are confused, that’s understandable, too, considering the contradictions.

A president who helped corporate interests gut the very proposals he was elected on-health care reform, Wall Street regulation and economic stimulus-was suddenly berated for being anti-business and for overreaching. An anti-Establishment/anti-corporate/anti-NAFTA/anti-government tea party ended up electing to the Senate a congressman’s son (Rand Paul), a pharmaceutical lobbyist (Dan Coats), a Bush trade representative (Rob Portman) and a corporate chieftain whose business was propped up by government grants (Ron Johnson). Meanwhile, a country that twice rejected Bush Republicans in favor of Democrats suddenly returned those same Republicans to power

Sen, Bernie Sanders: MSNBC’s Disgrace

It is outrageous that General Electric/MSNBC would suspend Keith Olbermann for exercising his constitutional rights to contribute to a candidate of his choice. This is a real threat to political discourse in America and will have a chilling impact on every commentator for MSNBC.

We live in a time when 90 percent of talk radio is dominated by right-wing extremists, when the Republican Party has its own cable network (Fox) and when progressive voices are few and far between.

At a time when the ownership of Fox news contributed millions of dollars to the Republican Party, when a number of Fox commentators are using the network as a launching pad for their presidential campaigns and are raising money right off the air, it is absolutely unacceptable that MSNBC suspended one of the most popular progressive commentators in the country.

Is Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz next? Is this simply a ‘personality conflict’ within MSNBC or is one of America’s major corporations cracking down on a viewpoint they may not like? Whatever the answer may be, Keith Olbermann should be reinstated immediately and allowed to present his point of view.

Johann Hari: America is now officially for sale

It’s the Tea Party spirit distilled: pose as the champion of Joe America, while actually ripping him off

The laws and policies of the legislature of the United States of America are now effectively on e-Bay, for sale to the highest bidder. Are you a Wall Street boss who wants to party like it’s 2007? Are you a Big Coal baron who wants to burn, baby, burn? Are you an insurance company that wants to be able to kick sick people off your rolls? Meet John Boehner, the most powerful Republican and soon-to-be Speaker of the House. But – of course! – you already have.

Here’s an example of how you have worked together. In 1995, the House was going to finally repeal subsidies for growing tobacco, because an addictive cancer-causing drug didn’t seem like the most deserving recipient of tax-payers’ cash – until Boehner walked the floor of the House handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to his fellow elected representatives. They changed their minds. The subsidy stayed. Explaining his check-dispensing, Boehner says: “It’s gone on here for a long time.” So get your bids in: the House is open for business.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

November 6 is the 310th day of the year (311th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 55 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1860, Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th President of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois.

Lincoln received 1,866,452 votes, Douglas 1,376,957 votes, Breckinridge 849,781 votes, and Bell 588,789 votes. The electoral vote was decisive: Lincoln had 180 and his opponents added together had only 123. Turnout was 82.2%, with Lincoln winning the free Northern states. Douglas won Missouri, and split New Jersey with Lincoln. Bell won Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and Breckinridge won the rest of the South. There were fusion tickets in which all of Lincoln’s opponents combined to form one ticket in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, but even if the anti-Lincoln vote had been combined in every state, Lincoln still would have won a majority in the electoral college.

As Lincoln’s election became evident, secessionists made clear their intent to leave the Union. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina took the lead; by February 1, 1861, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed. The seven states soon declared themselves to be a sovereign nation, the Confederate States of America. The upper South (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas) listened to, but initially rejected, the secessionist appeal. President Buchanan and President-elect Lincoln refused to recognize the Confederacy. There were attempts at compromise, such as the Crittenden Compromise, which would have extended the Missouri Compromise line of 1820, and which some Republicans even supported. Lincoln rejected the idea, saying, “I will suffer death before I consent…to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege to take possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right.”

Lincoln, however, did support the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which had passed in Congress and protected slavery in those states where it already existed. A few weeks before the war, he went so far as to pen a letter to every governor asking for their support in ratifying the Corwin Amendment as a means to avoid secession.

In case you missed this

“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.

David Sirota: Thank You, Dick Cheney, For Giving Me the Proper Words

The facts are painfully apparent. Though hundreds — if not thousands — of people in D.C. are professionally paid to pretend these facts require debate and analysis and parsing and speculation and press releases and pithy Tweets and Sunday Show roundtables and C-SPAN symposia and to-camera cable-TV rants and lengthy thousand-page books, they don’t require any of that. The facts are simple. The facts are obvious. The facts are undeniable to anyone not paid fistfulls of sweaty money  to lie or sensationalize:

1. The Democratic Party shit on its base with its policies, as noted above.

2. This demoralized the Democratic base, which responded by not turning out to vote. As CBS News notes, “Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections (but) turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels.”

3. In cause-and-effect style, the result of all this was, as the Washington Post reports, a freshman congressional class that is primarily made up of angry, white, lunatic-conservative assholes.

So yes, all of you who are wasting all of our time pretending this isn’t the basic point-A-to-point-B story of the election — and there are a lot of you out there — please, if not for me, then for everyone else: Go fuck yourself.

Paul Krugman: The Focus Hocus-Pocus

Democrats, declared Evan Bayh in an Op-Ed article on Wednesday in The Times, “overreached by focusing on health care rather than job creation during a severe recession.” Many others have been saying the same thing: the notion that the Obama administration erred by not focusing on the economy is hardening into conventional wisdom. . . . .

Of course, there’s a subtext to the whole line that health reform was a mistake: namely, that Democrats should stop acting like Democrats and go back to being Republicans-lite. Parse what people like Mr. Bayh are saying, and it amounts to demanding that Mr. Obama spend the next two years cringing and admitting that conservatives were right.

There is an alternative: Mr. Obama can take a stand.

For one thing, he still has the ability to engineer significant relief to homeowners, one area where his administration completely dropped the ball during its first two years. Beyond that, Plan B is still available. He can propose real measures to create jobs and aid the unemployed and put Republicans on the spot for standing in the way of the help Americans need.

Would taking such a stand be politically risky? Yes, of course. But Mr. Obama’s economic policy ended up being a political disaster precisely because he tried to play it safe. It’s time for him to try something different.

(emphasis mine)

Joe Conason: Obama should push back — like Bill Clinton

It’s true that Clinton compromised after 1994 — but first he fought the Gingrich GOP to a standstill

Long before the dismal results of Tuesday’s election were complete, one especially dog-eared bit of guidance for President Obama was getting wide circulation in the mainstream: He must now emulate Bill Clinton, who “shifted to the center” after the electoral debacle of November 1994, “triangulated” his way to compromise with the Republicans, and won a second term.

Among the reasons why such advice is outdated and useless, the most obvious may be that Obama’s position today is stronger than Clinton’s after 1994. Today, unlike then, the Democrats can look forward to retaining control of the Senate. But there are two other overriding reasons why Obama shouldn’t seek to imitate Clinton by immediately seeking compromises with the Republicans.

The first is that he has tried vainly from the beginning of his presidency to engage the Republicans in negotiation over vital reforms, only to learn again and again that they aren’t really interested in anything but sabotage. The second is that compromising with the Republicans isn’t exactly what Clinton did — or not at first, anyway. Before he could do anything else, he had to push back.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

November 5 is the 309th day of the year (310th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 56 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1938, Samuel Barber’s Adagio For Strings receives its world premiere on NBC radio

Adagio for Strings is a work for string orchestra, arranged by the American composer Samuel Barber from the second movement of his String Quartet. Barber finished the piece in 1936, and in 1938, it was conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini’s conducting was recorded at 8H Studio for radio broadcasting. Toscanini took the piece on tour to Europe and South America. It is disputed whether the first performance of Adagio in Europe was conducted by Toscanini or Henry J. Wood. Barber has rejected many arrangements published by G. Schirmer, such as the organ arrangement by William Strictland.

The piece begins with a B flat played by the violins. Lower strings enter two beats after the violins. At practical tempo, the piece length is about eight minutes. The piece’s reception was generally positive, with Alexander J. Morin writing that Adagio for Strings contains “full of pathos and cathartic passion, rarely leaves a dry eye.” The piece can be heard in many TV shows and movies.

The recording of the 1938 world premiere, with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra, was selected in 2005 for permanent preservation in the National Recording Registry at the United States Library of Congress.[18] Since the 1938 recording, it has frequently been heard throughout the world, and was one of the only American pieces to be played in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The Adagio was broadcast over the radio at the announcement of Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s death. It was also played at the funeral of Albert Einstein and at the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco. It was performed in 2001 at Last Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall to commemorate the victims of the September 11 attacks, replacing the traditional upbeat patriotic songs. It was also played during the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. In 2004, listeners of the BBC’s Today program voted Adagio for Strings the “saddest classical” work ever, ahead of “Dido’s Lament” from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, the “Adagietto” from Gustav Mahler’s 5th symphony, Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss and Gloomy Sunday as sung by Billie Holiday.

Adagio for Strings can be heard on many film, TV, and video game soundtracks, including Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film Platoon, David Lynch’s 1980 Oscar-nominated film The Elephant Man, Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko, Lorenzo’s Oil, A Very Natural Thing, Reconstruction, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Oscar-nominated 2001 film Amélie. It has been heard in episodes of The Simpsons, Big Brother 2010 (UK), That Mitchell and Webb Look, The Boondocks, South Park, Seinfeld, ER (TV series), Big Love. A recorded performance by the London Symphony Orchestra was, for a time, the highest selling classical piece on iTunes. The work is extremely popular in the electronic dance music genre, notably in trance. Artists who have covered it include Armin van Buuren, William Orbit, Ferry Corsten, and Tiesto. eRa included this song in their new album Classics.

Is it time to primary Obama?

Nov. 2: The Death Knell of Corporate Liberalism

Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive

(But) Obama didn’t help himself by trying to placate the Republicans and by muddling his messaging.

He didn’t help himself by lowballing the stimulus and by rejecting a moratorium on foreclosures.

He didn’t help himself by playing a Washington insider game, by trying to buy off a couple of Republicans in Congress and by playing footie with huge industries, like the banks and the pharmaceutical companies. . .

He didn’t call people to march on Washington for universal health care, or at least Medicare for all who want it.

You can’t tell an unemployed person that you’d have been twice as unemployed without my help. You need to give that person a job now.

You can’t tell an elderly person you’re closing the donut hole on prescription drugs-by the year 2020. You need to close it now.

You can’t tell an adult with a pre-existing condition that you’ll force insurance companies to cover you-by the year 2014, when you may be dead. You need to cover people now.

You can’t tell families being foreclosed upon that you’re trying hard to keep them in their homes. You need to keep them in their homes now.

h/t lambert @ Corrente

How’d That Bipartisanship Thing Work Out For You?

Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks

I’d like to ask all of the people who thought trying to reach out to Republicans in a bipartisan manner would be a good idea — Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama in particular — how’d that work out for you?

h/t Hecate