Tag: Politics

“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”.

Robert Kuttner: Zero Hour for Social Security

As I have previously warned–and I hope I’m wrong–President Obama seems on the verge of needlessly cutting America’s most valued social program and the one that best differentiates Republicans from Democrats. This is part of a vain effort to appease deficit hawks in his own party and on Wall Street, as well as Republicans who are utter hypocrites when it comes to deficits–increasing them as long as the purpose is tax cuts but then turning around and demanding program cuts in order to reduce the deficits they created.

All the choreography is in place for the president to embrace Social Security cuts in his upcoming State of the Union address.

Cutting Social Security is financially needless–the program is in sound shape for the next 27 years. It has nothing to do with the current deficit. It will be solvent indefinitely if we can get some wage growth going again. Failing that, we should raise the lid on income taxed, so that millionaires pay the same rate as regular people. For more detail, see ourfiscalsecurity.org.

Chris Hedges: Even Lost Wars Make Corporations Rich

Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice.

The moratorium on anti-war protests in 2004 was designed to help elect the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry. It was a foolish and humiliating concession. Kerry snapped to salute like a windup doll when he was nominated. He talked endlessly about victory in Iraq. He assured the country that he would not have withdrawn from Fallujah. And by the time George W. Bush was elected for another term the anti-war movement had lost its momentum. The effort to return Congress to Democratic control in 2006 and end the war in Iraq became another sad lesson in incredulity. The Democratic Party, once in the majority, funded and expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Barack Obama in 2008 proved to be yet another advertising gimmick for the corporate and military elite. All our efforts to work within the political process to stop these wars have been abject and miserable failures. And while we wasted our time, tens of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani civilians, as well as U.S. soldiers and Marines, were traumatized, maimed and killed.

Bob Herbert: A Flood Tide of Murder

By all means, condemn the hateful rhetoric that has poured so much poison into our political discourse. The crazies don’t kill in a vacuum, and the vilest of our political leaders and commentators deserve to be called to account for their demagoguery and the danger that comes with it. But that’s the easy part.

If we want to reverse the flood tide of killing in this country, we’ll have to do a hell of a lot more than bad-mouth a few sorry politicians and lame-brained talking heads. We need to face up to the fact that this is an insanely violent society. The vitriol that has become an integral part of our political rhetoric, most egregiously from the right, is just one of the myriad contributing factors in a society saturated in blood.

According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, more than a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were killed. That figure includes suicides and accidental deaths. But homicides, deliberate killings, are a perennial scourge, and not just with guns.

“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”.

New York Times Editorial: Can You Trust the Market?

The stock market was up in the first week of 2011 – following rallies in 2009 and 2010 – but many investors are still wary. According to the Investment Company Institute, a mutual funds trade group, 2010 was the fourth year in a row that individual investors withdrew more money than they added to funds that invest in American stocks. Some $80 billion was withdrawn in 2010, on top of nearly $240 billion in the three years before that.

Why the retreat? One explanation is reasonable doubt about the economy. Of late, profits, and related stock-market gains, have been fueled not by increased revenues but by layoffs and other cuts – an unsustainable pattern. Another explanation is a loss of faith in financial markets. The Dodd-Frank reform law could help restore that faith, but the new Republican majority in the House has vowed to try to block the law’s implementation, including regulations to make deal-making by banks more transparent. Some Democrats may join in.

Paul Krugman: Climate of Hate

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?  

Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 – an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report (pdf file) warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.

Conservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Turning the Tables on Health Care

Rule One of politics: When you have the advantage, don’t allow your opponents to turn the tables.

House Republicans violated this rule when they decided to make repeal of the health care law their first major act in the 112th Congress. The mistake will haunt them for years.

It was a surprising error from a leadership that showed shrewd judgment and exceptional discipline during President Barack Obama’s first two years. John Boehner is now speaker of the House because he and his party focused on demonizing everything Obama did and winning the public argument over both the health care plan and the stimulus. . . .

Already, that impending vote had forced the GOP to fudge its pledge to respect the minority’s rights, since the leadership ruled out any amendments to its bill. The inconsistency led Boehner to produce one of the lamest sound bites of his career. “Well, listen, I promised a more open process,” he said. “I didn’t promise that every single bill was going to be an open bill.”

In other words, he was for an open process before he was against it, and it depends on what the meaning of the word open is. Not a good start.

“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!

“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”.

Dylan Ratigan: Free Market Fraud

At first glance, the December jobs report seems to be a step in the right direction. An unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, the lowest level in 19 months. And a president, happy to boast about another 103,000 jobs being created last month.

However, renowned economist Peter Morici points out two important caveats. For one, 260,000 Americans simply dropped out of the labor force in December. They are out of work, yet no longer counted as unemployed by the government. And secondly, 103,000 jobs is nowhere near the number of jobs we need to be adding each month. To bring unemployment down to 6 percent by 2013, businesses need to hire an average of 350,000 new workers each month.

Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who continues to defend his Quantitative Easing (aka money-printing) program, couldn’t ignore the writing on the wall during a Senate hearing Friday morning. “If we continue at this pace”, said Bernanke, “we are not going to see sustained declines to the unemployment rate.”

Daphne Eviatar: Is Proxy Detention the Obama Administration’s Extraordinary Rendition-Lite?

Shortly after taking office, President Obama announced he’d close CIA prisons and end abusive interrogations of terrorism suspects by U.S. officials. But the Obama administration has notably preserved the right to continue “renditions” — the abduction and transfer of suspects to U.S. allies in its “war on terror,” including allies notorious for the use of torture.

Although the Obama administration in 2009 promised to monitor more closely the treatment of suspects it turned over to foreign prisons, the disturbing case of Gulet Mohamed, an American teenager interrogated under torture in Kuwait, casts doubt on the effectiveness of those so-called “diplomatic assurances.” It’s also raised questions about whether the “extraordinary rendition” program conducted by the Bush administration has now been transformed into an equally abusive proxy detention program run by its successor.

Glenn Greenwald: Daley is a reflection, not a cause

Few things interest me less at this point than royal court personnel changes.  I actually agree with the pro-Obama/Democratic-Party-loyal commentators who insist it doesn’t much matter who becomes White House Chief of Staff because it’s Obama who drives administration policy.  Obama didn’t do what he did in the first two years because Rahm Emanuel was his Chief of Staff.  That view has the causation reversed:  he chose Emanuel for that position because that’s who Obama is.  Similarly, installing JP Morgan’s Midwest Chairman, a Boeing director, and a long-time corporatist — Bill Daley — as a powerful underling replacing Emanuel isn’t going to substantively change anything Obama does.  It’s just another reflection of the Obama presidency, its priorities and concerns, and its overarching allegiances.  

There’s a section of my forthcoming book about the rule of law which examines the direct causal line between the vast number of Wall Street officials in key administration positions and the full-scale exemption from accountability which financial elites enjoy even for the most egregious lawbreaking.  When you compile all of those appointments in one place, the absolute stranglehold large-scale corporate interests exert over virtually all realms of government policy is quite striking.  But it’s nothing more than what the economist Nouriel Roubini meant when he told the makers of the 2010 documentary “Inside Job” that Wall Street has “captured the political system” on “the Democratic and the Republican side” alike, or what Simon Johnson describes as “The Quiet Coup”:  “The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against” elite business interests.

“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”.

Paul Krugman: The Texas Omen

These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.

Wait – Texas? Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that “we have billions in surplus”? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.

And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting – the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending – has been implemented most completely. If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere.

Eugene Robinson: In Dallas, defusing a sociological bomb: Wrongful convictions

Race still matters in America, and justice is not completely blind. Anyone who believes otherwise should examine the case of Cornelius Dupree Jr., who was ruled innocent Tuesday after spending 30 years in prison – almost his entire adult life – for a brutal carjacking and rape that he did not commit.

Dupree is just the latest of 21 inmates from the Dallas area, almost all of them black, who have been exonerated since a 2001 Texas law permitted DNA testing of the evidence against them. At least another 20 convicts from other parts of the state have similarly been cleared of their crimes. Imagine the wrongs that could be righted if every state had a law like the one in Texas – and if every jurisdiction saved years-old evidence the way Dallas does.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Three Little Words: How Bill Daley Can Be Your Next Hero

Here’s a suggestion for Bill Daley, three simple words that could turn everything around for the President and his party: Be Joe Kennedy.

Progressives were appalled when FDR appointed that noted stock market manipulator Joe Kennedy to be the first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Kennedy had a reputation as a ruthless and unscrupulous master of insider trading. He was a master of the reckless and speculative financial instruments of his day, the early 20th Century equivalents of CDOs and mortage-backed securities. But Kennedy took his job seriously, went after the sharks ferociously, and help stabilize the capitalist system so effectively that it remained sound for another seven decades.

“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”.

Robert Reich The Shameful Attack on Public Employees

In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they’ve earned.

But now the right is going after public employees.

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work — sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees — to call them “faceless bureaucrats” and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican’s Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that’s too big.

Glenn Greenwald: Why Government Censorship of US Media is Unnecessary

In this week’s New Yorker, Peter Maass — who was in Iraq covering the war at the time — examines the iconic, manufactured toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, an event the American media relentlessly exploited in April, 2003, to propagandize citizens into believing that Iraqis were gleeful over the U.S. invasion and that the war was a smashing success.  Acknowledging that the episode demonstrated that American troops had taken over the center of Baghdad, Maas nonetheless explains that “everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television — victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq — was a disservice to the truth.”

Working jointly with ProPublica on this investigation, Maass describes the hidden, indispensable role the U.S. military played in that event — which has long been known — though he convincingly argues that the primary culprit in this propaganda effort was the Americans media.  That is who did more than anyone to wildly distort this event.  As usual, the Watchdog Press not only happily ingests and trumpets pro-government propaganda, but does so even more enthusiastically and uncritically than government spokespeople themselves.

The reason there’s so little government censorship of the press in America is because it’s totally unnecessary; why would the government even want to censor a media this compliant and subservient?  Recall the derision heaped upon the media even by Bush’s own former Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, for being “too deferential” to administration propaganda.  As soon as an entity emerges that provides genuinely adversarial coverage of the U.S. Government — such as WikiLeaks, whistleblowers, or isolated articles exposing its malfeasance — the repressive measures come fast and furious.  But in general, it’s no more necessary for the U.S. Government to censor the American media than it would be for Barack Obama to try to silence Robert Gibbs.

Laura Flanders: Constitutional Lessons For the New Congress

Republican lawmakers who read the Constitution out loud as their very first act in the new Congress better bask in their Tea Party glow because they’re certainly not going to be feeling the love from Constitutional scholars.

It’s true, this nation’s founders were like most of those Congresspeople — mostly propertied, white and male; but their vision of government couldn’t be more different.

As scholar Lew Daly points out in Dissent, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams weren’t Hooverites. To the contrary, they pushed the idea that property and power should be widely distributed — even redistributed. In their day, “starve the beast” meant starve the elites, those monarchs and mega money men who’d concentrate power and undermine democracy.

“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”.

Bob Herbert: Get Ready for a G.O.P. Rerun

You just can’t close the door on this crowd. The party that brought us the worst economy since the Great Depression, that led us into Iraq and the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, that would like to take a hammer to Social Security and a chisel to Medicare, is back in control of the House of Representatives with the expressed mission of undermining all things Obama.

Once we had Dick Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and belligerently asserting that deficits don’t matter. We had Phil Gramm, Enron’s favorite senator and John McCain’s economic guru, blithely assuring us in 2008 that we were suffering from a “mental recession.”

Robert Muggah: The world’s broken promises to Haiti

A year on from the earthquake, more than a million are still living in tents and less than a tenth of aid cash has been delivered

Despite breathless promises to “build back better”, the international community has made only incremental progress in Haiti over the past 12 months. Our failures are especially stark when measured against the genuine displays of global solidarity with Haiti in the wake of the the January earthquake and financial pledges to reconstruction three months later, in March.

Even if some allowance is made for the extraordinary devastation wrought by the disasters, few disagree that the Haitian government’s handling of the situation has been spectacularly poor. Likewise, with few exceptions, the international aid sector’s record has been dismal. Notwithstanding efforts to signal political commitment to supporting Haiti’s transition – including UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon’s appointment of Bill Clinton as special envoy – few tangible outcomes have yet to be materialise. Haitians themselves are growing disillusioned and impatient, and signs of violence are apparent in the streets of wrecked Port-au-Prince.

And while 2010 was grim, there are few guarantees that 2011 will be any better.

Eugene Robinson: Health Care Melodrama

If the incoming Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is serious about trying to repeal health care reform, there’s only one appropriate Democratic response: “Make my day.”

Just to be clear, there’s no earthly chance that a bill repealing the landmark health care overhaul could actually make it through Congress and be signed into law. Even if Republicans managed to hold together their new majority in the House, they would face the inconvenient fact that Democrats still control the Senate. And even if a repeal measure somehow sneaked through the Senate, President Obama would veto the thing faster than you can say “pre-existing conditions.”

So this exercise in tilting at windmills can’t even be described as quixotic, since that would imply some expectation of success, however delusional. The whole thing is purely theatrical-and woefully ill-advised.

“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”.

Robert Reich: The Big Lie

Republicans are telling Americans a big lie, and Obama and the Democrats are letting them. The Big Lie is that our economic problems are due to a government that’s too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.

The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928, combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us. The result: Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full capacity. Since the debt bubble burst, most Americans have had to reduce their spending; they need to repay their debts, can’t borrow as before, and must save for retirement.

Joseph E. Stiglitz: Common Sense, Not Austerity, in 2011

New Year’s Hope against Hope

The time has come for New Year’s resolutions, a moment of reflection. When the last year hasn’t gone so well, it is a time for hope that the next year will be better.

For Europe and the United States, 2010 was a year of disappointment. It’s been three years since the bubble broke, and more than two since Lehman Brothers’ collapse. In 2009, we were pulled back from the brink of depression, and 2010 was supposed to be the year of transition: as the economy got back on its feet, stimulus spending could smoothly be brought down.

Growth, it was thought, might slow slightly in 2011, but it would be a minor bump on the way to robust recovery. We could then look back at the Great Recession as a bad dream; the market economy – supported by prudent government action – would have shown its resilience.

In fact, 2010 was a nightmare. The crises in Ireland and Greece called into question the euro’s viability and raised the prospect of a debt default. On both sides of the Atlantic, unemployment remained stubbornly high, at around 10%. Even though 10% of US households with mortgages had already lost their homes, the pace of foreclosures appeared to be increasing – or would have, were not it not for legal snafus that raised doubts about America’s vaunted “rule of law.”

Paul Krugman: Deep Hole Economics

If there’s one piece of economic wisdom I hope people will grasp this year, it’s this: Even though we may finally have stopped digging, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole.  

Why do I need to point this out? Because I’ve noticed many people overreacting to recent good economic news. What particularly concerns me is the risk of self-denying optimism – that is, I worry that policy makers will look at a few favorable economic indicators, decide that they no longer need to promote recovery, and take steps that send us sliding right back to the bottom.

So, about that good news: various economic indicators, ranging from relatively good holiday sales to new claims for unemployment insurance (which have finally fallen below 400,000 a week), suggest that the great post-bubble retrenchment may finally be ending.

“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”.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Celebrating the New GOP Majority

Welcome to the Republicans who take over the House of Representatives this week. Since it is a new year, let us be optimistic about what this development means for our nation.

There is already a standard line of advice to Speaker-to-be John Boehner and his colleagues that goes like this: Democrats overreached in the last Congress by doing too much and ignoring “the center.” Republicans should be careful not to make the same mistake, lest they lose their majority too.

This counsel is wrong, partly because the premise is faulty. Democrats did not overreach in the last Congress. On the contrary, they compromised regularly. Compromise made the health care bill far more complicated than it had to be and the original stimulus bill too small. Democrats would have been better off getting more done more quickly, and more coherently.

New York Times Editorial: Reform and the Filibuster

The new Senate will face one of its most momentous decisions in its opening hours on Wednesday: a vote on whether to change its rules to prohibit the widespread abuse of the filibuster. Americans are fed up with Washington gridlock. The Senate should seize the opportunity.

A filibuster – the catchall term for delaying or blocking a majority vote on a bill by lengthy debate or other procedures – remains a valuable tool for ensuring that a minority of senators cannot be steamrollered into silence. No one is talking about ending the practice.

Every returning Democratic senator, though, has signed a letter demanding an end to the almost automatic way the filibuster has been used in recent years. By simply raising an anonymous objection, senators can trigger a 60-vote supermajority for virtually every piece of legislation. The time has come to make senators work for their filibusters, and justify them to the public.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: How to Stay Friends With China

The visit by President Hu Jintao of China to Washington this month will be the most important top-level United States-Chinese encounter since Deng Xiaoping’s historic trip more than 30 years ago. It should therefore yield more than the usual boilerplate professions of mutual esteem. It should aim for a definition of the relationship between the two countries that does justice to the global promise of constructive cooperation between them.

I remember Deng’s visit well, as I was national security adviser at the time. It took place in an era of Soviet expansionism, and crystallized United States-Chinese efforts to oppose it. It also marked the beginning of China’s three-decades-long economic transformation – one facilitated by its new diplomatic ties to the United States.

“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: ABC News White House News correspondent, Jake Tapper, will be hosting This Week. He will have an exclusive interview with the president’s top economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee and actor, humanitarian, George Clooney with a message for the government of Sudan: “The world is watching.”

The Round Table guests, George Will, Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile, ABC News Political Director Amy Walter and National Journal Congressional Correspondent Major Garret discuss the incoming Republican Congress and its investigative agenda.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: This Week on Face the Nation, Representatives Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), and Rep.-elect Mike Kelly (R-Penn.) discuss what’s ahead for the new Congress.

The Chris Matthews Show: The Chris Matthews Show: This Week’s Guests Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent, John Heilemann, New York Magazine National Political Correspondent, Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic Senior Editor and Gloria Borger, CNN Senior Political Analyst, will discuss:

What Must President Obama Do This Year to Get Competitive for 2012?

Year’s Resolutions for Palin and her GOP Rivals, for Hillary Clinton, and the Royals

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Oy. It’s all Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and how the Republicans will block everything and do nothing. I hope Obama has stopped taking this man at his word about cooperation.

At the Round Table, “Lurch” will be joined by  The New York Times’ David Brooks, The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, Yale law professor and author Stephen Carter, and BBC World News America’s Washington Correspondent Katty Kay, and Senator-elect Pat Toomey (R-PA). They will discuss the politics of the new year, the economy, our two wars, and even the politics of snow fall.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: A new year, a new Congress; we’re looking ahead to what’s in store. CNN Chief White House correspondent Ed Henry guest hosts.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine will join us exclusively to discuss President Obama’s next two years in office. Can he rise above a stronger Republican Party? Or will his spirit of compromise sink his hopes for re-election?

Then, the incoming chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, California Rep. Darrell Issa joins us. The last time a Democrat occupied the White House while a Republican chaired the committee, over 1,000 subpoenas were issued. Will Chairman Issa use his subpoena power to help enact the GOP agenda?

And finally, three distinct voices within the House Democratic caucus chart the course forward for a wounded party looking to regain some momentum in the new year. Reps. Jason Altmire, Elijah Cummings and Steve Israel will join us.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: No information for this Sunday.