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”.

Paul Krugman Block Those Metaphors

Like it or not – and I don’t – the Obama-McConnell tax-cut deal, with its mixture of very bad stuff and sort-of-kind-of good stuff, is likely to pass Congress. Then what?

The deal will, without question, give the economy a short-term boost. The prevailing view, as far as I can tell – and that includes within the Obama administration – is that this short-term boost is all we need. The deal, we’re told, will jump-start the economy; it will give a fragile recovery time to strengthen.

I say, block those metaphors. America’s economy isn’t a stalled car, nor is it an invalid who will soon return to health if he gets a bit more rest. Our problems are longer-term than either metaphor implies.

And bad metaphors make for bad policy. The idea that the economic engine is going to catch or the patient rise from his sickbed any day now encourages policy makers to settle for sloppy, short-term measures when the economy really needs well-designed, sustained support.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: The Specter Haunting Obama

American decline is the specter haunting our politics. This could be President Obama’s undoing – or it could provide him with the opportunity to revive his presidency.

Fear of decline is an old American story. Declinism ran rampant in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Stagflation, the Iranian hostage crisis, anxiety over Japan’s bid for economic dominance and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan all seemed to be symbols of a United States no longer in control of its destiny. . . . . .

For Obama, political renewal requires a bold and persistent campaign for national renewal. This would challenge his political opponents. But more important, it would challenge all of us.

Robert Kuttner: Social Security: The Coming Cave-in

If you think the Democratic base is mad at Obama now for making a craven deal with Republicans that continues tax breaks for the richest Americans and adds new ones for their heirs through a big cut in the estate tax, just wait a few weeks until Obama caves on Social Security.

How will this occur? The deficit commission appointed by the President has called for an increase in the retirement age, as well as other cuts in benefits over time. And the deal that Obama made with the Republicans just gave deficit hawks new ammunition by increasing the projected deficit by nearly $900 billion over a decade. Social Security will be in the cross-hairs.

The deficit commission has tried to camouflage these cuts by emphasizing that Social Security benefits for the very poor would not be reduced, and might even be increased. But in the commission’s proposal, the cuts would affect middle-class retirees. Larry Summers, who is stepping down as Obama’s economic chief, has refused to rule out cuts.

The likely winner, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. If this sounds implausible to you, then read this

President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have sunk to the lowest level of his presidency, so low that he’d lose the White House to Republican Mitt Romney if the election were held today, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

The biggest reason for Obama’s fall: a sharp drop in approval among Democrats and liberals, apparently unhappy with his moves toward the center since he led the party to landslide losses in November’s midterm elections. At the same time, he’s gained nothing among independents.

“He’s having the worst of both worlds right now,” said Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in New York, which conducted the national survey.

“As he moves to the center, he’s not picking up support among independents and he’s having some fall-off among his base. If his strategy is to gain independents and keep the Democrats in tow, it isn’t working so far.”

and look at this

Have things gotten better since late 2008, when Democrats took over? The answer is, not really. Unemployment went from about 8.5 percent when Obama took office, to 9.6 percent now. Millions of Americans’ mortgages are underwater. And despite wasting over a year on health care reform, almost no one has gotten new or better insurance as a result. In fact, the number of people with health insurance is even lower now than prior to passage of the Affordable Care Act.

The Republicans won back the House this past election not because they have a better idea or that Americans trust them, but to send a message to the President what he’s been doing hasn’t made it better. Raising taxes on on the poorest Americans and giving the top 2% free money that they won’t invest in jobs in this country, Obama will continue to alienate not just progressive, but independent voters and moderate Republicans. Obama can continue to turn his back on his supporters, break his campaign promises and negotiate with the “enemy” behind closed doors or he can move back to the left and start fighting for the people who put him in office. His choice. If he continues on the path he has now taken with this his tax cut bill, we will be watching President Mitt Romney take the oath of office January 20, 2012.

“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”.

This will be a full court press to get the Obama tax bill approved. Set your BS meters.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: David Axelrod will be front and center with Ms. Amanpour defending the Obama attack on 98% of America.

The saving grace for this hour will be Paul Krugman at the Round Table with George Will, Cokie Roberts and Matthew Dowd.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr Schieffer’s guests David Axelrod, Senior White House Adviser (This guy is really making the rounds), Howard Dean, former Democratic National Committee Chair and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.

This could be interesting.

The Chris Matthews Show: Tweetie’s guest this week are pretty much the usual suspects: Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Michael Duffy, TIME Magazine Assistant Managing Editor, Helene Cooper, The New York Times White House Correspondent and Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic Senior Editor.

They will discuss these topics:

Did Barack Obama Get Back on the Right Track This Week?

Top Ten Political Gaffes of the Year

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Joining “Lurch” will be the “other Glen Beck with a white board”, Austin Goolsbee, trying to defend Obama’s latest cave exploration. Also, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another politician that hasn’t seen a regressive tax he didn’t like, giving his corporatist opinion about Beltway gridlock. (I-195 has always sucked at rush hour).

The Round table should be a lively affair that actually might get me to watch. NY Rep. Anthony Weiner, who strongly opposes the Obama tax cuts, sits down with Fmr. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-TN), Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot, and NBC News White House Correspondent Savannah Guthrie.

Axelrod gets a break

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Oh Noes! Here he is again! David Axelrod discussing guess what.

At least Candy has some balance with guests Reps. Elijah Cummings and Jim McDermott, two Democrats who are speaking out against the president’s compromise and telling the White House to stand up to the Republican Party and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who is one of a number of Democrats who have expressed their disappointment with Obama’s deal, but he’ll vote for it anyway.

The last guest will be Dennis Blair, the former director of national intelligence, who will babble about the tensions with North Korea and justification for staying in Afghanistan and, finally, call for Julian Assange’s hanging.

Gotta get that Wilileaks shot in there

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: It seems Mr. Axelrod missed Fareed’s show. Eh, too “international”

The President cut a deal with the GOP to continue the Bush tax cuts while extending unemployment benefits. Fareed’s take on the issue? It’s a missed opportunity to invest in America’s long term growth. And he’ll tell you about a country that seems to be setting itself up for the future, while the U.S. is putting more on the credit card.

Next up, he’s the most decorated soldier in Israel, a former Prime Minister, and that nation’s current Minister of Defense. Ehud Barak sits down with Fareed to talk about what we all know — thanks to Wikileaks – his country and a few of its Arab neighbors might have in common: the fear of a nuclear Iran. Barak also talks about how to move the peace process forward.

Then, one of the Republican party’s top women on why the GOP has the wrong attitude after its electoral victory. Former member of President George W. Bush’s cabinet and former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman on fixing that attitude problem…and on Sarah Palin’s chances for 2012. And what in the world: Glenn Beck says 10% of the world’s Muslims are terrorists. Could that be true?

After that, a GPS panel on how China handled the Nobel Peace Prize controversy and what’s behind that nation’s aggressive foreign policy moves?

And finally a look at the Star of David, in the last place on earth you might expect to find it.

“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”.

Bruce Fein: Slouching Towards Tyranny

The state of civil liberties and national security in the United States is alarming. . . . . .

The United States was founded on the idea that the individual was the center of the nation’s universe; and, that freedom was the rule and government restraints grudging exceptions. The right to be left alone was cherished above all others. The national purpose was not to build an Empire by projecting military force throughout the planet, but to revere due process and the blessings of liberty at home.

These ennobling ideas have been abandoned for the juvenile thrill of domination for the sake of domination and a quest for absolute safety that elevates vassalage to the summum bonum.

Where are the leaders to awaken America to its philosophical peril? Who has the courage to preach, “Better free than safe,” “As we would not be tyrannized, so we shall not be tyrants,” and, “due process is a higher life form than vigilante justice?”

If not us, who? If not now, when?

New York Times Editorial:  Civil Rights in California

However the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rules in California’s pivotal same-sex marriage battle – and it should uphold the civil rights of Americans – the court has already set one standard that the Supreme Court should follow.

Lawyers on both sides of the struggle sparred over questions of legal procedure and civil rights for two intense hours on Monday – and the whole country had a chance to watch, thanks to the court’s decision to allow C-Span to televise the argument. The dignified proceeding only increased our regret over the moment that was lost in January when the Supreme Court abruptly intervened to block the planned broadcasting of the trial that led to the appeal. The court has persisted far too long in its refusal to allow unobtrusive camera coverage of its own oral arguments.

The central issue before the appellate court was whether Proposition 8, California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, violates the United States Constitution. In August, in Federal District Court, Judge Vaughn Walker held that it did. After a nearly three-week trial, Judge Walker found no rational basis for the proposition’s inherent discrimination, which he said violated rights to equal protection and due process of law.

Gail Collins: My Favorite War

Well, here’s some good news for a change. The Holiday Parade of Lights in Tulsa, Okla., has been saved!

know you’ve been worried.

The Tulsa City Council has voted to allow the parade to go forward Saturday night, despite protests against the disappearance of the word “Christmas” from its name.

It’s not entirely clear that the council actually could have stopped it, or even whether the parade ever officially had Christmas in its name. But Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma is outraged.

Inhofe was away from home last December, stuck in Washington trying to kill off health care reform. Now he’s back, and he’s noted a dwindling in the parade’s religious angle. “I just don’t like what’s going on in America today, all over the country, with the aversion some people seem to have toward Christ,” he said in one of his many interviews explaining that he will no longer ride his horse in any holiday event that isn’t named for Christmas.

Go to it, Senator Inhofe! I love this controversy, and only in part because it diverts Oklahoma’s senior senator from his normal day job of trying to convince the world that global warming doesn’t exist.

“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: Who Is Sanctimonious?

Washington – What does President Obama think of those who fought and bled to pass his bills in Congress (in some cases losing in this year’s election for their pains) while also defending him against wild charges from the right wing? Are they among the liberals he described as “sanctimonious” who long for the “satisfaction of having a purist position and no victories for the American people”?

Obama’s comments make you wonder: Who does he think he can count on when conservatives try to repeal the health care law, force cuts in programs he supports, investigate his administration down to the last pencil, and continue to denounce him as an un-American socialist?

A senior Obama lieutenant insisted that the president wasn’t attacking liberals. He was responding only to those condemning him as a “sellout” for a tax deal that achieves many progressive goals, at the cost of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and egregiously conceding billions to very rich people who inherit large estates.

Yet simultaneously, the White House was also sending out signals that it was consciously casting the president as a centrist problem-solver in a new iteration of Bill Clinton’s old “triangulation” strategy.

John Nichols: It’s the Estate Tax Exemption, Stupid

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been given a charge from the chamber’s Democratic caucus to negotiate a better tax deal than President Obama got from Senate Republicans.

And Pelosi says she will do just that.

But what’s her “ask”? What’s her credible — and doable — demand?

Pelosi should pull no punches. But, If we assume she cannot get the Republicans or Obama to abandon the absurdly uneven trade-off that defines the deal — a two-year extension of tax cuts for billionaires in return for a one-year extension of basic benefits for the unemployed — then she has to look elsewhere.

For plenty of practical and political reasons, Pelosi can and should start the pushback by focusing on the side deal to renew the estate tax with broad exemptions for millionaires — up to $5 milion for individuals, up to $10 million for couples — and a top rate of 35 percent for the coming two years.

Pelosi has already pointed to the estate-tax agreement as a bone of contention for House Democrats.

“We believe the estate tax in the bill is a bridge too far,” the Speaker has said.

Beverly Bell and Tory Field: “Miami Rice”: The Business of Disaster in Haiti

“We were already in a black misery after the earthquake of January 12. But the rice they’re dumping on us, it’s competing with ours and soon we’re going to fall in a deep hole,” said Jonas Deronzil, who has farmed rice and corn in Haiti’s fertile Artibonite Valley since 1974. “When they don’t give it to us anymore, are we all going to die?”

Deronzil explained this in April inside a cinder-block warehouse, where small farmers’ entire spring rice harvest had sat in burlap sacks since March, unsold, because of USAID’s dumping of U.S. agribusiness-produced, taxpayer-subsidized rice. The U.S. government and agricultural corporations, which have been undermining Haitian peasant agriculture for three decades, today threaten higher levels of unemployment for farmers and an aggravated food crisis among the hemisphere’s hungriest population.

“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: Why the Obama Tax Deal Confirms the Republican Worldview

Apart from its extraordinary cost and regressive tilt, the tax deal negotiated between the president and the Republicans has another fatal flaw.

It confirms the Republican worldview.

Americans want to know what happened to the economy and how to fix it. At least Republicans have a story — the same one they’ve been flogging for thirty years. The bad economy is big government’s fault and the solution is to shrink government.

Here’s the real story. For three decades, an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth have gone to the top 1 percent. Thirty years ago, the top got 9 percent of total income. Now they take in almost a quarter. Meanwhile, the earnings of the typical worker have barely budged.

David Sirota: Watch the Outfielders In Baseball, Watch the Corporate Lobbyists On Taxes

When I went to Phillies games as a kid, my dad would always remind me that if you want to know what’s going on in the game, its more important to watch the fielders than to watch the ball after the ball is hit. Watching the fielders like Von Hayes and Lenny Dykstra and how they reacted told you if the ball hit by Tim Raines or Ron Gant was going to be a foul, an out, a base hit or a homer.

It’s sorta the same thing in politics – if you want to know what a bill really does, it’s more important to watch corporate lobbyists’ reaction than to listen to the politicians pushing the bill. That’s because whereas politicians have a vested interest in making themselves look good for purposes of reelection and party advancement, lobbyists jealously represent Big Money, without regard for partisanship or electoral maneuvering.

Michael Winship: The Heartbreak of Premature Capitulation

There’s this old joke about the French Revolution. A group of prisoners is lined up before the guillotine. One by one, their heads are lopped off. Then, the next man is put in place. The lever is pulled, but the blade stops just inches above his neck. This must be a sign of divine intervention, the judge in charge declares, and the man is freed.  

The same thing happens to the next prisoner, and the next and the next. Finally, as the very last man is prepared for execution, he looks up at the mechanism and exclaims, “Wait! I think I see your problem!”  

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you President Barack Obama, providing needless aid and comfort to those who would do him wrong, handing over his own head without a fight, afflicted with a curious syndrome we men of science have decided to call Premature Capitulation.

“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”.

Verlyn Klinkenborg: John Lennon

I don’t remember how I heard that John Lennon had been shot. Thirty years ago, on a warm December night in Manhattan, it was suddenly, in the air, on the street – with only a brief, grim gap between news of the shooting at the Dakota, on 72nd Street and news of his death at Roosevelt Hospital. I called my brother in California and then sat in the stairwell of a building at 27th and Third, numb and grieving, like everyone else.

*

*

*

We remember what we remember of Lennon, and of that night. When I was young, he was the only adult that mattered outside my family – the Beatle of Beatles. I loved his wit; his irony; his “Help!”; his urgent, reedy voice; his unceasing transformations. Like everyone else who loved him, I can’t help grieving, even now, for all the transformations we lost 30 years ago when John Lennon was only 40.

John Nichols: Organizing for America Sacrifices Credibility, Harms Obama, By Talking Up Misguided Assault on Public Employees

Organizing for America, the online community of campaigners for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run that evolved into a Democratic National Committee-aligned “activist” network is undermining its own credibility — and, ultimately, harming the president– by attempting to gin up support for Obama administration initiatives that Obama backers did not support in 2008 and do not support now.

While OFA, the succesor organization to the “Obama for America” campaign organization,  was a disappointing player during the health care and banking reform debates, it has now begun to inflict actual harm – not just to progressive ideals but to the long-term prospects of maintaining what remains of Obama’s political base.

OFA, so silent on the compromise the Obama administration is trying to gin up to extend tax breaks for the rich, has found something it is for: cutting the pay of federal workers.

Julian Assange: The truth will always win

In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”

His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.

I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.

These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.

“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: The Tax Cut Endgame

We suppose it could have been worse. The deal could help to stimulate the weak economy. And if the Republicans had blocked an extension of unemployment benefits, as they were threatening to, millions of Americans would have suffered greatly.

But the country can’t afford to continue tax cuts for the rich indefinitely. And by kicking the issue down the road to 2012 – a presidential election year – it all but guarantees more craven politicking then.

Speaking on Monday evening, the president said that the deal would extend for two years all of the tax cuts, both those from the Bush years and those for low-income workers from last year’s stimulus law. Recently expired benefits for the long-term unemployed would also be extended for another 13 months.

In addition, the agreement includes a one-year cut in payroll taxes that will put a relatively modest, but much needed, $120 billion in workers’ pockets, and a year of bolstered write-offs for business investments.

On a decidedly sour note, Mr. Obama also said he had agreed to cut estate taxes even more than in the last year of the Bush administration. That is not compromise. It is capitulation.

Joan Walsh: Party time for Bush and Cheney!

Obama extends tax cuts for the rich that the GOP passed with chicanery and Cheney’s vote. How did we get here?

I know they weren’t the best of friends when they left Washington, but I bet former President Bush and Dick Cheney at least had a phone call tonight congratulating one another on one of the great heists in history. In 2001, they knew they couldn’t make their budget-busting tax cuts for the rich permanent, so they agreed to phase them out in 2010, leaving the political consequences to another administration. Even with that chicanery, the Bush tax cuts were divisive enough that they required Cheney to cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. No problem. That’s how Republicans play: They reward their wealthy base.

Increasingly it seems, Democrats, too, reward the wealthy in their base, and ignore their much larger constituency of working and middle class voters, struggling in the economy destroyec by Bush and Cheney. President Obama’s compromise was a long time coming, telegraphed for months, but depressing nonetheless. The good news is that he got a little bit more for caving than some Democrats expected. It’s great that unemployment insurance may be extended 13 months; many Americans will appreciate a payroll tax cut, an extended Earned Income Tax Credit and the latest patch of the Alternative Minimum Tax.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Can Democrats “Up Their Game”?

Last week, I sat down with these Democrats who were defeated in November to get their sense of what the election means for the future and how the president should respond. Their observations were more revealing than the abstractions that conventional punditry typically invokes to explain what “the people” supposedly said.

They spoke just off the floor of the House shortly after it approved an extension of the Bush tax cuts only for families earning under $250,000 a year. This vote of principle was unfairly dismissed as “symbolic,” but Perriello said something that pointed to the opportunity Obama and the Democrats had kicked away.

“Why not up the game,” he asked, “instead of playing the same old game?” Perriello was in no mood to criticize his already beleaguered party. But his comment pointed to how it might have avoided a debilitating tax cut endgame.

“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: What Now for the Democrats?

Let’s imagine the political possibilities of the next two years and beyond. So far, President Obama’s response to the drubbing of the mid-term has confirmed the progressive community’s worst fears. Astonishingly, he still seems to believe the following:

The American people care more about bipartisan compromise and budget cuts than about ending the economic crisis.

If he just compromises a little more, the Republicans might still meet him halfway.

The recipe for economic recovery has something to do with reducing the short term federal deficit.

All three of these premises are disastrously wrong — as politics and as economics.

Dan Froomkin: On Jobs, Robert Rubin Points In The Wrong Direction Again

WASHINGTON — On a morning when dire unemployment numbers underscored the desperate and urgent need to jump-start the job market, shameless financial arsonist Robert Rubin was hosting a massive exercise in distraction.

The job market is suffering from a terrible cyclical shortfall in aggregate demand brought upon by the financial crisis and the Great Recession, but Rubin wanted to talk about long-term structural issues affecting employment — like the need to reduce the budget deficit, or change corporate tax rates. His is a Wall Street agenda, not a Main Street agenda.

The setting was a policy conference hosted by Rubin’s pet think tank, the Hamilton Project, and its strange bedfellow, the liberal Center for American Progress.

As Clinton administration Treasury Secretary, Rubin presided over the nearly-fatal deregulation of the financial industry, then went on to make $126 million nearly driving Citigroup into bankruptcy, making him arguably one of the men most responsible for causing the financial crisis. But it was so lucrative for him that he can underwrite events like this one.

Thom Hartmann: Tax Cut Lies: The Day The News Died

The New York Times today jumped on board with a classic Frank Luntz “Big Lie.”

Democrats in the House and Senate put forth a bill that would reduce taxes on the first quarter-million, and then, when that failed, the first million dollars of income for every single American. . . .

   WASHINGTON – The Senate on Saturday rejected President Obama’s proposal to end the Bush-era tax breaks on income above $250,000 for couples and $200,000 for individuals, a triumph for Republicans who have long called for continuing the income tax cuts for everyone.

What? “Republicans who have long called for continuing the income tax cuts for everyone”??

EVERYONE would have gotten a tax cut under the Democrats’ proposal. Every single taxpayer in America, from the street-sweeper to Bill Gates. Everyone!

“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 discuss the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell debate with Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark, Lt. Col. (ret.) Bob Maginnis, Senior Fellow of the Family Research Council, R. Clarke Cooper, Executive Director of the Log Cabin Republicans, Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness and Tammy Schultz, Director of National Security and Joint Warfare at the Marine Corps War College.

Can we win in Afghanistan? will be the question for former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, former ambassador to the United Nations and Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, Sakena Yacoobi of the Afghan institute of Learning and George Will

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr Schieffer’s guest will Sen. Richard Durbin, Democratic Whip, (D-Ill), Sen. Jon Kyl, Republican Whip, (R-Ariz), Nancy Cordes, CBS News Congressional Correspondent and Jim VandeHei, Executive Editor, Politico

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, John Heilemann, New York Magazine National Political Correspondent, Susan Davis, National Journal Congressional Correspondent and Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic

Senior Editor. They will discuss these questions:

Will Obama Grab the Deficit Cause and Drive a National Movement for Shared Sacrifice?

Why are Combat Commanders and Troops Worried about Open Service by Gays?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: The Republican Leader of the Senate Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Democratic Senator John Kerry (D-MA) will talk about the “battle grounds” in the Senate.

MTP’s Round Table panel New York Times columnists David Brooks and Tom Friedman, BBC World News America’s Washington Correspondent Katty Kay and Republican Strategist Mike Murphy will continue the discussion of the Senate, as well as, Wikileaks, START, DADT and tax cuts.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Taking center stage this Sunday: the lame duck Congress tackles some hot button issues: compromise over tax cuts, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, unemployment benefits, and the deficit. What will they achieve before the new Congress and is there room for compromise? The president makes a surprise trip to Afghanistan. And the leak felt around the world as Wikileaks releases confidential State Department documents.

Up first the view from both sides of the aisle with Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch.

Plus, an exclusive: New York Rep. Charlie Rangel in his first television interview since being censured by the House of Representatives.

Then the unlikely Republican maverick in an era of increasing partisanship, we’re joined by the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: This week on GPS: Just what have the 250,000 diplomatic cable from the latest WikiLeaks document dump proven? Nefarious backroom dealings? The secretive inner workings of the State Department? Or do these documents show that American diplomats might actually be good at their jobs? Fareed offers his take.

And to help make sense of WikiLeaks, the financial crisis in Europe and its effect on America, we’ve assembled an all-star GPS panel. Niall Ferguson of Harvard, Richard Haass of the Council On Foreign Relations and Gillian Tett of the Financial Times.

Then, 2010 was a catastrophic year. Devastating earthquakes led the list, but the year also brought an uptick in climate-related deaths — from floods and droughts, heat and cold, . What’s it all about?

Next up, someone Fareed calls “one of the sharpest observers of American politics and life-in-general out there.” Bill Maher, the host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” and one of this county’s most prominent stand-up comedians has had Fareed on his show before. Now see what happens when the tables are turned.

And finally, a last look at when nationalism, is perhaps, out of fashion.