Tag: TMC Politics

Recently Naomi Klein, the author of the “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capital Management”, has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now discussing Anti-Union Bills and Disaster Capital Management American-Style:

   NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I just found out about this last night, and like I said, there’s so much going on that these extraordinary measures are just getting lost in the shuffle. But in Michigan, there is a bill that’s already passed the House. It’s on the verge of passing the Senate. And I’ll just read you some excerpts from it. It says that in the case of an economic crisis, that the governor has the authority to authorize the emergency manager-this is somebody who would be appointed-to reject, modify or terminate the terms of an existing contract or collective bargaining agreement, authorize the emergency manager for a municipal government-OK, so we’re not-we’re talking about towns, municipalities across the state-to disincorporate. So, an appointed official with the ability to dissolve an elected body, when they want to.

   AMY GOODMAN: A municipal government.

   NAOMI KLEIN: A municipal government. And it says specifically, “or dissolve the municipal government.” So we’ve seen this happening with school boards, saying, “OK, this is a failing school board. We’re taking over. We’re dissolving it. We’re canceling the contracts.” You know, what this reminds me of is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when the teachers were fired en masse and then it became a laboratory for charter schools. You know, people in New Orleans-and you know this, Amy-warned us. They said, “What’s happening to us is going to happen to you.” And I included in the book a quote saying, “Every city has their Lower Ninth Ward.” And what we’re seeing with the pretext of the flood is going to be used with the pretext of an economic crisis. And this is precisely what’s happening. So it starts with the school boards, and then it’s whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved because there’s an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining agreements. It also specifies that-this bill specifies that an emergency manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm. So, the person who would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality could actually be a corporation.

We are now seeing the push to fulfill this agenda to make “harsher American less democratic”.  Not  only are they stripping the rights of workers but the Republican corporate agenda is now going after the one remedy that Americans have to stop them, voting rights. Currently there are bills under consideration in 32 states to make it harder to vote in 2012, by forcing people to ID that the poor, minorities and students that they have difficulty obtaining, eliminating same day registration and restricting the voting rights of people who have served time in prison.

“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.: What Wisconsin Democrats can teach Washington Democrats

Consider the contrast between two groups of Democrats, in Wisconsin and in the nation’s capital.

Washington Democrats, including President Obama, have allowed conservative Republicans to dominate the budget debate so far. As long as the argument is over who will cut more from federal spending, conservatives win. Voters may think the GOP is going too far, but when it comes to dollar amounts, they know Republicans will always cut more.

In Wisconsin, by contrast, 14 Democrats in the state Senate defined the political argument on their own terms – and they are winning it.

By leaving Madison rather than providing a quorum to pass Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on collective bargaining for public employees, the Wisconsin 14 took a big risk. Yet to the surprise of establishment politicians, voters have sided with the itinerant senators and the unions against a Republican governor who has been successfully portrayed as an inflexible ideologue. And in using questionable tactics to force the antiunion provision through the Senate on Wednesday, Republicans may win a procedural round but lose further ground in public opinion.

Robert Reich: The Birth of the People’s Party

Look at the outrage in Madison, Wisconsin. Look at the crowds in DesMoines, Iowa. Look at the demonstrations in Indiana and Ohio and elswhere around America.

Hear what they’re saying: Stop attacking unions. Stop making scapegoats out of public employees. Stop protecting the super-rich from paying their fair share of the taxes needed to keep our schools running.

Stop gutting the working middle class.

Noam Chomsky: The Cairo-Madison Connection

On Feb. 20, Kamal Abbas, Egyptian union leader and prominent figure in the Jan. 25 movement, sent a message to the “workers of Wisconsin”: “We stand with you as you stood with us.”

Egyptian workers have long fought for fundamental rights denied by the U.S.-backed Hosni Mubarak regime. Kamal is right to invoke the solidarity that has long been the driving force of the labor movement worldwide, and to compare their struggles for labor rights and democracy.

The two are closely intertwined. Labor movements have been in the forefront of protecting democracy and human rights and expanding their domains, a primary reason why they are the bane of systems of power, both state and private.

The trajectories of labor struggles in Egypt in the U.S. are heading in opposite directions: toward gaining rights in Egypt, and defending rights under harsh attack in the U.S.

Michael Moore appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show commenting on the aftermath of the stealth, and quite possibly illegal, vote by the Republicans in the Wisconsin Senate to remove the right of collective bargaining from state workers. He was so furious that his voice actually broke with the emotion of the moment. Every working person in this country needs to walk out on Friday at 2 PM in your respective time zones and join the people of Wisconsin to take back our country for the people.

“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 Democrats Should Never Have Started Paying Ransom to Avoid a Shutdown

It’s called ransom. That’s what Republicans are demanding from the White House and congressional Democrats for not pulling the plug on the government.

Problem is, when you pay ransom once, you’re almost begging to pay it again. And that’s exactly the pickle the Obama administration is finding itself in.

In order to avoid a shutdown last week and buy time until March 18, the White House agreed to more spending cuts for the remainder of this fiscal year than it originally put on the table. Now, in order to get past March 18, Republicans want even more. Democrats have offered to cut an additional $10.5 billion but Republicans want $61 billion. The White House is hinting it’s ready to compromise further.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: When Murdoch wins, citizens lose

We tend to measure the influence of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in terms of the reach of Fox News or the circulation of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. But it is actually local television stations on which Murdoch has built his empire and increased his stranglehold on access to information.

He has done so, in large part, by taking advantage of a 1999 change in FCC rules that allowed a single company to own more than one television station in the same market. That arrangement, known as a duopoly, lets big conglomerates such as News Corp. buy up stations, reduce their staffs and consolidate newsrooms. Murdoch now has nine duopolies. According to Santa Clara University’s Allen Hammond, a staggering 109 duopolies were created between 2000 and 2006.

The problem isn’t just that control over the airwaves becomes concentrated; it’s that such consolidation often results in the gutting of local news coverage. Duopoly owners tend to duplicate their local coverage and reduce the amount of airtime dedicated to community news. The subsequent lack of coverage gives local governments a free pass to operate without any real media scrutiny.

Bob Herbert: Flailing After Muslims

It has often been the case in America that specific religions, races and ethnic groups have been singled out for discrimination, demonization, incarceration and worse. But there have always been people willing to stand up boldly and courageously against such injustice. Their efforts are needed again now.

Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island, appears to harbor a fierce unhappiness with the Muslim community in the United States. As the chairman of the powerful Homeland Security Committee, Congressman King has all the clout he needs to act on his displeasure. On Thursday, he plans to open the first of a series of committee hearings into the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the bogus allegation that American Muslims have failed to cooperate with law enforcement efforts to foil terrorist plots.

Some of this is just really depressing. Where is this country headed?

• From Michael Moore: The Forbes 400 vs. Everybody Else
  

  According to the most recent information, the Forbes 400 now have a greater net worth than the bottom 50% of U.S. households combined.

  In 2009, the total net worth of the Forbes 400 was $1.27 trillion.

  The best information now available shows that in 2009 the bottom 60% (yes, now it’s 60%, not 50%) of U.S. households owned only 2.3% of total U.S. wealth.

  Total U.S. household net worth — rich, middle class and poor combined — at the time the Forbes list came out was $53.15 trillion. So the bottom 60% of households possessed just $1.22 trillion of that $53.15 trillion, less than the Forbes 400.

  Thus the Forbes 400 unquestionably have more wealth than the bottom 50%.

  By contrast, in 2007 the bottom 50% of U.S. households owned slightly more wealth than the Forbes 400; the economic meltdown has hurt the bottom more than the top. (And in fact, in 2010 the net worth of the Forbes 400 jumped to $1.37 trillion.)

• From TPM: Republicans Move To Strip Detainee Authority From Holder And Future Attorneys General
  

  Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are teaming up with Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee to write legislation that would take decisions about trying detainees out of the attorney general’s hands and hand that power to the secretary of defense.

  In the wake of the White House’s new executive order allowing Guantanamo detainees to be held indefinitely, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) unveiled legislation that would, among other things, affirm the military’s right to detain, hold and interrogate detainees at its discretion without Department of Justice or Attorney General Eric Holder involvement.

  What digby said about the above:

  Are these guys under the misapprehension that the Secretary of Defense doesn’t serve at the pleasure of the president, exactly as the Attorney General does? What’s the point of this?

• From the New York Times: AARP Sues U.S. Over Effects of Reverse Mortgages
  

  Reverse mortgages, which pay older homeowners a regular sum against the equity in their house, are supposed to shield borrowers from economic upheaval. But the popular loans have become tangled up in the real estate collapse.

  AARP, the seniors’ organization, filed suit Tuesday against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which regulates reverse mortgages. The suit asserts that policy changes by HUD are pushing older homeowners into foreclosure.

  The case was filed in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia by the AARP Foundation, the organization’s charitable arm, and the law firm of Mehri & Skalet on behalf of the surviving spouses of three homeowners who had bought reverse mortgages. All three are facing eviction, the suit says.

  “HUD has illegally and without notice changed the rules in the middle of the game at the expense of vulnerable older people,” said Jean Constantine-Davis, a senior lawyer at the AARP Foundation.

  This is happening with a Democrat in the White House?

“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”

Lucinda Marshall: The Imperative Of Women’s Human Rights

Reflections On The 100th Anniversary Of International Women’s Day

This year marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.  It is a time to celebrate the lives of women and to renew our commitment to women’s human rights throughout the world.

That it is even necessary to have such a day should give us pause.  There is not, after all, an International Men’s Day.  But the truth is that while women may be half of the world’s population, they most assuredly are not equal stakeholders when it comes to human rights and empowerment.

Here in the U.S., women’s reproductive health rights are under sustained siege as never before.  In the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Sudan women are raped with impunity.  In Mexico and Guatemala, thousands of women have gone missing and been brutally murdered and the perpetrators roam freely.  Honor killings continue to be a huge problem in the Middle East and female genital mutilation is still a common practice in many parts of Africa.  In southeast Asia and eastern Europe, women are trafficked into sexual slavery.  In India there are dowry murders.

Widney Brown: Sidelining Egyptian Women after the Uprising

All the members of the committee writing Egypt’s new constitution are men.

A century ago, more than a million people marched in streets across Europe on the first International Women’s Day. They called for an end to discrimination and for women to have the same rights as men to work, vote, and shape their countries’ futures.

A hundred years later, women across the globe are still much more likely than men to be poor and illiterate. We earn only one-tenth of the world’s income for doing two-thirds of the work. Women produce up to 80 percent of the food in developing countries, but own only 1 percent of the land in those nations.

In many countries, we’re still told what we can do and even what we can wear. Women in Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, and Iran face harassment if they don’t observe conservative religious dress codes. Muslim women in France and some parts of Spain now break the law there if they don traditional attire.

Women campaigning for their liberation are often met with derision, abuse, or worse. In Russia, the Philippines, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, and Nepal, leading activists have recently been murdered for speaking out. In China, Bangladesh, India, Zimbabwe, and many other countries, they are routinely detained and tortured.

Tragically, the international community largely ignores these facts. Women’s inequality is treated as a regrettable but inevitable reality.

Michelle Chen: The Republican Attack on Women’s Health Goes Global

What does a congressperson from Ohio have in common with a 16 year-old sex worker in Cambodia? They’re both symbols of the perverse political stalemate in Washington, D.C., that threatens to set back the struggle for women’s equality around the world.

The year that girl was born, a conference of world leaders vowed to eliminate many of the worst forms of gender oppression. Last week, officials and civil society groups convened again at the United Nations to take stock of all the ways the international community has fallen short of its promises on women’s health, education and political and economic empowerment. And on Capitol Hill, the GOP is pushing budget cuts that would make sure the promise remains broken.

It’s not a coincidence that conservatives in Congress are fighting a two front war on women: attacking women’s rights across the Global South and killing Roe v. Wade at home. Conservatives are exploiting the budget process to defund Title X, the primary federal funding vehicle for family planning reproductive health services for women. Cutting these funds would leave many poor women with no local clinic or social service agency to get the guidance they need to make informed choices about sex and pregnancy.

Two years and two months ago the American people hailed a new President and an end to our national nightmare of the Bush reign of eight years of trampling the Constitution, the laws that govern  and the economy. Since then the reality that nothing has changed comes down with crashing reality. This President, Barack Hussein Obama, is as complicit as the last President in the war on the US Constitution, International laws and treaties and human rights. Today it became evidently clear that Obama is not Bush, he’s Cheney.

Today Obama issued an Executive Order (pdf) that not only will restart the Military Commissions at Guantanamo but also orders indefinite detention for forty seven detainees without any of them ever being charged with a crime. Why? Because Obama is covering up the war crimes of the previous administration which, according to the Nuremberg Principles, is a war crime. Claims that the evidence against these men would harm national security just rings hollow.

Marcy Wheeler at FDL explains that “the new and improved Military Detention Regime has two parts”. The first part relates to the indefinite detention polices without anything other than a claim of “because I say it’s justified”:

“Continued law of war detention is warranted for a detainee subject to the periodic review in section 3 of this order if it is necessary to protect against a significant threat to the security of the United States.“

. . . .this doesn’t appear to tie to any wrong-doing on the detainee’s part. “It” here appears to refer to “continued law of war detention,” suggesting that “it” may be necessary regardless of any threat posed by the detainee himself.

Also note that the standard “significant threat to the security of the United States” doesn’t invoke the war (ostensibly, the war against Afghanistan) itself. This seems very very wrong. It also seems designed to authorized the continued detention of the Yemeni detainees who we admit aren’t themselves a threat, but must be detained, our government says, because they come from a dangerous country.

(all emphasis mine)

The EO also restarts the Military Commissions where evidence that has been attained through torture is admissible.

Dana Milbank, in his Op-Ed, remarked that the conference call with reporters and “some top-notch lawyers from across the executive branch” with “ground rules required that the officials not be identified”, sounded very much like what the Bush lawyers used to say:

It was another important moment in the education of Barack Obama.

He began his presidency with a pledge to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year. Within months, he realized that was impossible. And now he has essentially formalized George W. Bush’s detention policy.

Even the Tea Baggers, like newly minted Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee(R-UT), are saying indefinite detention is wrong and calling for trials in civilian courts:

Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano, subbing for Glenn Beck on his television show, hosted Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT) to talk about a variety of issues. At one point, Napolitano mentioned Obama’s announcement and queried the two senators about their positions on indefinite detention. Lee and Paul both broke with the standard positions of their party, slamming the policy and endorsing trials for terrorism suspects instead. Paul said that he had met with a mother of a 9/11 victim who said that what she really wanted to see was justice, and that the best way to do that was to “have trials.” Lee said that detaining someone who “has been tried and found not guilty” is “particularly problematic”

Human Rights Watch points out that 47 of these men will never be tried. Those detainees will be able to “submit documentary evidence every six months, but will only go before the full panel once every three years”. However, as the press release states, “the use by the US of indefinite detention without trial still fails to meet the most basic elements of due process under international law”.

While Obama’s EO confirms the administration’s commitment to prosecuting  some cases in civilian courts

“Is added review an improvement? Yes. Does it make US detention policies lawful? No,”

said Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch. “Signing an executive order does not suddenly make it legal to lock people up and hold them forever without proving they have committed a crime.”

HRW further notes:

. . .compared to federal courts, military commissions have moved very slowly. During the nine years since the military commissions were first announced, military prosecutors have brought only six cases to completion, four of them by plea bargain. Federal courts, in contrast, have prosecuted hundreds of terrorism-related offenses during the same period, convicting, among others, 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and “shoe bomber” Richard Reid.

“Any trial in the military commission system carries the stigma of Guantanamo and will be tainted by a lack of due process,” Prasow said. “A verdict in the federal court system, in contrast, would be recognized internationally as legitimate.”

As I read through the executive order and news articles, all that I could think of was that surely, Dick Cheney will approve.

Up Date: As expected, Glenn Greenwald weighed in:

None of this is the slightest bit unexpected. The new Executive Order has been previewed for months and merely codifies what has long been Obama’s policy: “long” in the sense of “since he’s inaugurated”  — not, of course, “when he was a Senator and presidential candidate.” I’m writing about this merely to address the excuse from the White House and its loyalists that the fault for this policy, this inability to “close Guantanamo,” lies with Congress, which forced the President to abandon his oft-stated campaign pledge. That excuse is pure fiction.

It is true that Congress — with the overwhelming support of both parties — has enacted several measures making it much more difficult, indeed impossible, to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the U.S. But long before that ever happened, Obama made clear that he wanted to continue the twin defining pillars of the Bush detention regime: namely, (1) indefinite, charge-free detention and (2) military commissions (for those lucky enough to be charged with something). Obama never had a plan for “closing Guantanamo” in any meaningful sense; the most he sought to do was to move it a few thousand miles north to Illinois, where its defining injustices would endure.

(emphasis mine)

He also sited an article by Daphne Linzer at ProPublica:

While the order is new, most of the ideas it contains are not. This is the third time such a board has been created for nearly the same purpose. Two similar processes to review detainee cases were in place during the Bush administration. Like its predecessors, the Obama administration’s review process will operate outside the courts and will be subject to no independent review.

While the idea is recycled, Obama now owns 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”

David Swanson: Manchurian Senators

People are doing journalism and the Washington Post is pissed. How to respond? Apparently the answer arrived at by Post editors is to just give up on any Americans who have been informing themselves and target those Americans who believe anything that super important people say. How else to explain an op-ed full of documented lies and published last Friday over the byline of two Democratic senators, Carl Levin and Jack Reed?

The headline was “The Surge Afghanistan Still Needs.” Surge is not code for food or peace or environmental restoration or a moment’s relief from the attentions of the world’s oil, gas, and power addicts. Surge, in ignorant-American-newspaper-readerspeak is a term denoting the comical pretense that a criminal and genocidal invasion and occupation can be redeemed by escalating it. The term was coined in reference to Iraq, that hell on earth where pro-democracy demonstrators are now being murdered by the government that 20 years of war and sanctions built, even as that government demands reparations payments for recent US destruction.

Laurence Lewis: Democrats Are Ceding the Entire Traditional Democratic Economic Ideology

On Thursday, we got this news:

   President Obama on Wednesday intervened in a partisan brawl that threatens to shut down the government, inviting congressional leaders of both parties to sit down with Vice President Biden and work out a compromise to fund federal programs through the end of the fiscal year.

The official statement called for a “bipartisan” approach. There seems to be a presumption that no one has been paying attention the past couple years, because the only people that still believe in bipartisanship are also likely the holdouts on Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. The way it actually works is that every time the word is mentioned, Democrats give ground on core principles while Republicans have to accept that they get only some, but not all, of what they want. The administration’s framing of its role also is interesting. Republican administrations tend to think of themselves as partisan, representing the core values of their party. This administration seems to think of itself as a mediator between partisans. Triangulation you can believe in.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: How Boehner is playing the Democrats

Richard Nixon espoused what he called “the madman theory.” It’s a negotiating approach that induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down to avoid the wreckage your rage might let loose.

House Republicans are pursuing their own madman theory in budget negotiations, with a clever twist: Speaker John Boehner is casting himself as the reasonable man fully prepared to reach a deal to avoid a government shutdown. But he also has to satisfy a band of “wild-eyed bomb-throwing freshmen,” as he characterized new House members in a Wall Street Journal interview last week by way of comparing them fondly to his younger self.

Thus are negotiators for President Obama and Senate Democrats forced to deal not only with Republican leaders in the room but also with a menacing specter outside its confines. As “responsible” public officials, Democrats are asked to make additional concessions just to keep the bomb-throwers at bay.

Even before the ink was dry on the continuing resolution that will keep the US government open until March 18, President Obama was already caving to Republican demands:

The White House has released what amounts to an opening bid in budget negotiations for Fiscal Year 2011 with Republicans. They have offered an additional $6.5 billion in cuts below the baseline of the 2010 budget. This goes on top of the $4 billion in cuts that have already been signed into law….this briefing took place before the first meeting between the White House and Congress even began. So the compromises preceded the negotiation. And there are no compromises happening on the other side.

That was Friday. Then on Saturday in his weekly address to the country via You Tube, he not only confirmed this but stated he was willing to go further.

How much further is he willing to sell out the middle class, the poor and future generations? Well this weekend he sent our one of his “canaries” to test the “air”, Austin Goolsbee, who in appearance on Lawrence O’Donnell’s “Last Word” couldn’t answer a straight question about Social Security.

From Gaius Publius at AMERICAblog points out the worst of Goolsbee’s administration apologia:

The Goolsbee interview starts at 3:20; the Social Security discussion starts at 7:15. At 8:80, weasel words begin leaving Goolsbee’s mouth – and they just don’t stop

Kudos to O’Donnell (who’s a benefit hawk himself) for pressing this hard. Question: Are you open to small changes to Social Security benefits, changes that would not be called “slashing”?

Goolsbee: “We don’t have a specific plan” … we want an “open discussion” … the president won’t weaken Social Security “including especially ideas about privatization” … but he “will look at” things that “insure the solvency” of the program. Weasel. They still want at it.

And by “they” I mean Obama. The Bush tax cuts blow a hole, and Social Security benefits are the fix. Dems, Reps, doesn’t seem to matter.

Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D-NV), to his credit, very clearly and concisely stated on Meat the Press in January that Social Security did not contribute to the deficit or the current budget problems:

DAVID GREGORY: Social Security– how does it have to change? (an assumption by Gregory, TMC) What they put on the agenda is raising the retirement age, maybe means testing benefits. Is it time for Social Security to fundamentally change if you’re gonna deal with the debt problem?

HARRY REID: One of the things that always troubles me is when we start talking about the debt, the first thing people do is run to Social Security. Social Security is a program that works. And it’s going to be– it’s fully funded for the next forty years. Stop picking on Social Security. There’re a lotta places–

DAVID GREGORY: Senator are you really saying —

HARRY REID: –where you can go to save money.

DAVID GREGORY:– the arithmetic on Social Security works?

HARRY REID: I’m saying the arithmetic in Social Security works. I have no doubt it does.

DAVID GREGORY: It’s not in crisis?

HARRY REID: The ne– no, it’s not in crisis. This is– this is– this is something that’s perpetuated by people who don’t like government. Social Security is fine. Are there things we can do to improve Social Security? Of course.

Why is Obama even bothering to say he’s willing to “negotiate” when we all know the real word is “cave”?  

“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 have an exclusive interview with Sen. John McCain about the revolt in Libya and why he thinks a “no-fly” zone should be enforced. Also a discussion withe guests Daily Beast and Newsweek Editor in Chief Tina Brown, Egyptian writer and activist Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, Zainab Salbi of Women to Women International and Sussan Tahmadebi of the International Civil Society Action Network for Women’s Rights, Peace and Security who will discuss how women are changing the Muslim world.

ABC News anchors Diane Sawyer, David Muir and Sharyn Alfonsi will discuss jobs and manufacturing in the US. The publisher and real-estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, Chrystia Freeland of Reuters and United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard will discuss how America can generate more jobs in a competitive global economy.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer:Mr, Schieffer’s guests are Sen. Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader (R-KY), Sen. John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (D-MA) and Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist.

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent, Rick Stengel, TIME Managing Editor, Howard Fineman, The Huffington Post Senior Political Editor and Norah O’Donnell, MSNBC Chief Washington Correspondent who will discuss these questions:

Is America Still Number One?

Will Establishment Republican Hopefuls For 2012 Pander To The Far Right?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Mr. Gregory has two exclusive interviews with White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). The round table guests will be Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson and New York Times columnist and author of the new book “The Social Animal,” David Brooks.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Sunday’s guests will include Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. National Security Adviser, and Dr. Ali Errishi, the former Libyan Immigration Minister to discuss Libya. Also, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) looking at potential 2012 contenders for the White House. Finally, Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has planned hearings on the radicalization of Muslims in America. He’ll join us to explain what he’s hoping to learn. Also joining us will be Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: The schedule for this Sunday was not available at the time this diary was published.

The other Pundits are below the fold