“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: “This Week with Christiane Amanpour” goes to Jerusalem and New York for two big exclusive interviews. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton goes to Jerusalem for a second round of Mideast peace talks, she sits down with “This Week” anchor Christiane Amanpour for an exclusive interview. Can a breakthrough be achieved? Is a lasting peace within reach? And what can be done to keep Iran from destabilizing the region?

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes the world stage at the U.N. General Assembly in New York and he comes to “This Week” for a Sunday exclusive interview.

The Roundtable will include Delaware State Republican Chairman Tom Ross, George Will, David Sanger of the New York Times, and Peter Beinart of the Daily Beast to discuss what impact the Tea Party will have on the midterms.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. SChieffer’s guests will be Former President Bill Clinton and

Delaware Republican Senate Candidate Christine O’Donnell

The Chris Matthews Show: Mr. Matthews guests this Sunday are Gloria Borger, CNN

Senior Political Analyst, Chuck Todd, NBC News Chief White House Correspondent, Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune Columnist, and Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent.The questions under discussion are will Tea Partiers control the GOP and the 2012 Presidential Nomination? and could a Republican Congress repeal Health Care and stall the Government?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Joining Mr, Gregory this week will be former Pres. Bill Clinton and a live interview with Ret. Gen. Colin Powell

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Coming up on State of the Union… Is it “Tea” time in America?  The Tea Party claims another victory over “establishment Washington” with Christine O’Donnell’s primary win over favorite Rep. Mike Castle (R) in Delaware. Will the momentum carry over to the general election? What does it mean for Republican chances at a majority in Congress? And how will it shape the future of the party? We’ll sit down with a darling of the tea party movement, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC).

Then Democrats fight to regain their message. The President accuses Republicans of holding tax cuts hostage and sidesteps a Senate battle by appointing Elizabeth Warren; all that with Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine.

Finally, as the battle for Congress heats up our panel takes a closer look at the home stretch to Election Day with Fmr. Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) and Fmr. W.H. Communications Director Anita Dunn.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: Fareed looks at how the U.S. government’s bank bailout worked and managed to do something maybe even more incredible than save Wall St.: it got democrats and republicans in Washington to actually work together.

This week, an incredible GPS exclusive: we bring you face-to-face with one of Osama bin Laden’s comrade-in-arms — a man who says he said “No” to Bin Laden, not once but twice. He takes us inside the meeting in 2000 in Bin Laden’s hut in Kandahar when he told his host NOT to attack the U.S. And he tells us why just this week he wrote a letter to tell the Al Qaeda leader to lay down his arms once and for all.

Then, a look at all of the hot topics at home and abroad with an all-star panel featuring CNN’s newest prime time co-host, Kathleen Parker, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, Reuters’ Chrystia Freeland and Dan Senor of the Council on Foreign Relations. They tackle everything from the squeeze on the U.S. middle class to the potential of the Middle East peace talks.

Also, what in the world is going on in Cuba? Are we seeing the end of “la revolucion”? What one man has the power to change the Cuban economic system? It might not be who you think.

And finally, a last look at perhaps the most unlikely person to be tapped with fighting poverty. She’s taking it one step at a time.

Paul Rieckoff, an Iraq War veteran, Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), was a guest on The Rachel Maddow Show. He spoke with Ms. Maddow about the false message the White House is sending about the end of the combat mission in Iraq and the needs of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.  

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

September 18 is the 261st day of the year (262nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 104 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1793, George Washington lays the cornerstone to the United States Capitol building, the home of the legislative branch of American government. 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.

As a young nation, the United States had no permanent capital, and Congress met in eight different cities, including Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia, before 1791. In 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which gave President Washington the power to select a permanent home for the federal government. The following year, he chose what would become the District of Columbia from land provided by Maryland. Washington picked three commissioners to oversee the capital city’s development and they in turn chose French engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant to come up with the design. However, L’Enfant clashed with the commissioners and was fired in 1792. A design competition was then held, with a Scotsman named William Thornton submitting the winning entry for the Capitol building. In September 1793, Washington laid the Capitol’s cornerstone and the lengthy construction process, which would involve a line of project managers and architects, got under way.

“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.

Eugene Robinson: Note to Democrats: Tea Party’s not over till it’s over

Not to spoil the fun, but Democrats shouldn’t take the Republican Party’s bitter internal warfare — and the inexperienced, flaky candidates who’ve emerged from the fray — as any kind of reassurance about November. Try as it might, the GOP probably can’t defeat itself. Not this year, anyway.

I don’t mean that the battle between the Republican establishment and the take-no-prisoners Tea Party insurgency is inconsequential. When Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party favorite, won the Senate primary in Delaware on Tuesday, my first reaction was that this one result almost guarantees that the Democratic Party’s majority in the Senate is safe.

On reflection, I think “almost guarantees” should be downgraded to something like “makes it likely.” And in moments of existential despair, I fear that she might actually win.

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

September is the 260th day of the year (261st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 105 days remaining until the end of the year.

On September 17, 1787, the Constitution was signed. As dictated by Article VII, the document would not become binding until it was ratified by nine of the 13 states. Beginning on December 7, five states–Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut–ratified it in quick succession. However, other states, especially Massachusetts, opposed the document, as it failed to reserve undelegated powers to the states and lacked constitutional protection of basic political rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press. In February 1788, a compromise was reached under which Massachusetts and other states would agree to ratify the document with the assurance that amendments would be immediately proposed. The Constitution was thus narrowly ratified in Massachusetts, followed by Maryland and South Carolina. On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document, and it was subsequently agreed that government under the U.S. Constitution would begin on March 4, 1789. In June, Virginia ratified the Constitution, followed by New York in July.

On September 25, 1789, the first Congress of the United States adopted 12 amendments to the U.S. Constitution–the Bill of Rights–and sent them to the states for ratification. Ten of these amendments were ratified in 1791. In November 1789, North Carolina became the 12th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Rhode Island, which opposed federal control of currency and was critical of compromise on the issue of slavery, resisted ratifying the Constitution until the U.S. government threatened to sever commercial relations with the state. On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island voted by two votes to ratify the document, and the last of the original 13 colonies joined the United States. Today, the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in operation in the world.

Leave it to Jon and company to point out how the Democrats can “F” up a sure thing. Given the fact that O’Donnell has a 16% chance of winning, that is still 16 percentage points too many. Good luck to Democrat Chris Coons.  

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the t 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.

Joseph E. Stiglitz: Fixing America’s Broken Housing Market

NEW YORK – A sure sign of a dysfunctional market economy is the persistence of unemployment. In the United States today, one out of six workers who would like a full-time job can’t find one. It is an economy with huge unmet needs and yet vast idle resources.

The housing market is another U.S. anomaly: there are hundreds of thousands of homeless people (more than 1.5 million Americans spent at least one night in a shelter in 2009), while hundreds of thousands of houses sit vacant.

Indeed, the foreclosure rate is increasing. Two million Americans lost their homes in 2008, and 2.8 million more in 2009, but the numbers are expected to be even higher in 2010. Our financial markets performed dismally — well-performing, “rational” markets do not lend to people who cannot or will not repay — and yet those running these markets were rewarded as if they were financial geniuses.

None of this is news. What is news is the Obama administration’s reluctant and belated recognition that its efforts to get the housing and mortgage markets working again have largely failed. Curiously, there is a growing consensus on both the left and the right that the government will have to continue propping up the housing market for the foreseeable future. This stance is perplexing and possibly dangerous.

Robert Scheer: After Summers Comes the Fall

When will the president give Lawrence Summers his pink slip? He can thank him for his years of service and use the excuse that his top economic adviser wants to spend more time with his family. I don’t care how he sugarcoats it. But Summers deserves the same fate as the millions of workers laid off because of the banking debacle he helped cause, the dire consequences of which he has done precious little to mitigate.

It was Summers who, as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which opened the floodgates to the toxic mortgage-backed derivatives that still haunt the economy. The Federal Reserve now holds $2 trillion in junk securities it took off the books of banks. But the financiers who packed those devilish derivatives still hold a huge amount, and the houses they unload every time the housing market shows faint signs of stabilizing keep the economy in the doldrums.

Jon Aravosis @ AMERICAblog Gay points out that the DNC web site on its “Civil Rights” page,  no longer mentions the repeal of DOMA which was one of the top three promises made to the GLBT community by Candidate Obama.

#  Enacting the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which includes measures prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity;

# Ensuring full civil unions and federal rights for LGBT couples;

# Repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in a sensible way that strengthens our armed forces and our national security;

It the DNC now calls for “civil unions”. How about marriage guys?

And WTF does this mean?

Repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in a sensible way that strengthens our armed forces and our national security

Meanwhile, Sen. Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have written Attorney General Eric Holder to not appeal Judge Virginia Phillips’ ruling that DADT violates the 1st Amendment.

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

September 16 is the 259th day of the year (260th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 106 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1932, in his cell at Yerovda Jail near Bombay, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi begins a hunger strike in protest of the British government’s decision to separate India’s electoral system by caste.A leader in the Indian campaign for home rule, Gandhi worked all his life to spread his own brand of passive resistance across India and the world. By 1920, his concept of Satyagraha (or “insistence upon truth”) had made Gandhi an enormously influential figure for millions of followers. Jailed by the British government from 1922-24, he withdrew from political action for a time during the 1920s but in 1930 returned with a new civil disobedience campaign. This landed Gandhi in prison again, but only briefly, as the British made concessions to his demands and invited him to represent the Indian National Congress Party at a round-table conference in London.

In 1932, through the campaigning of the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar, the government granted untouchables separate electorates under the new constitution. In protest, Gandhi embarked on a six-day fast in September 1932. The resulting public outcry successfully forced the government to adopt a more equitable arrangement via negotiations mediated by the Dalit cricketer turned political leader Palwankar Baloo. This was the start of a new campaign by Gandhi to improve the lives of the untouchables, whom he named Harijans, the children of God.

Did the Tea Party just throw the Democrats a bone that will allow them to hold on to their majority in the Senate and narrow their losses in the House?

The victory last night of Tea Party candidate, Christine O’Donnell to challenge Democrat Chis Coons for the last 4 years of Vice President Joe Biden’s Senate seat along with some far right candidates for the House that even  devoted Republicans are reluctant to vote for just may have saved the Democrats from demise.

The big news last night was O’Donnell’s win over Republican Party stalwart, Mike Castle who has never known defeat. It has left Republican voters disgusted and shifted the odds of Coons winning which will help maintain the status quo. With Castle’s silence on supporting O’Donnell and the The NRSC, the Republican campaign arm in the Senate, not about to toss her any campaign money, the Coons chances rose. According to Public Polling Policy Poll, Castle primary voters support Coons over O’Donnell 44-28 in general election. Ouch!

The Alaskan and New Hampshire Senate seats will most likely stay on the Republican side of the isle. Even though in NH the Democratic candidate, Rep. Paul Hodes, is very popular, it is still an up hill battle. Democrats may be able to hold onto the Florida, Nevada and California seats. Forget Arkansas, the President and his crew screwed that pooch backing the un-reelectable Blanche Lincoln in her primary against progressive, popular, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. If the Democrats can take control of the message that “It’s the Economy, Stupid” and it was Republican policies that put it in the toilet just as it did under Reaganomics, they just might be able to cut their losses and hold the Senate.

h/t to David Dayen @ FDL, Nate Silver @ NYT and Chris Cillizza @ The Washington Post.

Up Date: From Jake Tapper at ABC News:

Speaking more broadly about yesterday’s primary results, including O’Donnell’s victory, (WH Press Secretary, Robert) Gibbs said the “practical implications” of “intra-party Republican anger has changed the complexion of a number of races at a state and a district level.  And that has real-world practical implications for the outcome of what happens in November. Again, last night, I think — I think is a pretty good example, both in a congressional race and in a Senate race in Delaware, that makes winning those races for the Republicans a fundamentally harder task.”

Asked if the conservative voter anger would now turn against establishment Democrats, Gibbs said he remains “confident.. that on election night we’ll retain control of both the House and the Senate.”

Up Date #2: This isn’t good:

New Reuters/Ipsos FL poll: Rubio 40, Crist 26, Meek 21

From the Political Wire:

When voters were asked their choice between Rubio and Crist if Meek was not in the race, the contest is essentially tied — Rubio 46% and Crist 45%.

I stand corrected. FL will most likely go to the Republicans.