Tag: Open Thread

“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”.

Today’s “pundits is going a left turn from the “norm” and give thanks and high praise to Alex Pareene chief “warrior” of the War Room at Salon for his compilation of the 30 worst Pundits of the MSM.  I don’t necessarily agree with the order of his picks but I do like his selections giving true meaning to “punting”

Your regular “Pundits” will return tomorrow.

I give you the Top Ten of the Hack Thirty with links to the rest of the worst.

No. 1: Richard Cohen

The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen has been a columnist since 1976. He’s good friends with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. He works one day a week. At a certain point, in that exceptionally privileged and cushy position, his brain disintegrated. He’s not so much an old liberal who grew conservative as he is a simplistic old hack who believes his common prejudices to be politically incorrect truths and his Beltway conventional wisdom to be bracing political insight.

No. 2: Mark Halperin

I thought we were all done talking about former Bob Dole speechwriter former ABC News political director Mark Halperin, whose star had seemed to stop rising toward the end of the Bush years — but then he attached himself, leechlike, to reporter John Heilemann, to co-write “Game Change,” a lengthy catalog of the 2008 presidential campaign’s moments of least import.

Halperin used to write this thing called the Note, which was an e-mail newsletter that various Washingtonians whom Halperin referred to as “The Gang of 500” used to read to find out what they themselves thought about the news of the day. It was written as privileged wisdom from Beltway insiders — cryptic references, obscure jokes, endless name-dropping, constant inexplicable plugs for the Palm restaurant — when it was in fact just “whatever a professional political operative recently told Mark Halperin, along with links to political stories in the major papers.”

No. 3: Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around the world on the literally unlimited expense account his money-bleeding newspaper provides him with pondering KFC billboards he spots outside the windows of gleaming office towers in Delhi — or when he’s not lounging beside the pool at his absurd home — the [second-most-influential business thinker in the country] is worrying about carbon emissions. Which is, I freely admit, a nice change of pace from back when he was telling the world that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would lead to a glorious new dawn of freedom/democracy/whiskey/iPods/Old Navy in the Middle East as a whole.

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

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

November 25 is the 329th day of the year (330th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 36 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1999, The United Nations General Assembly passes a resolution designating November 25 the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The resolution, which was introduced by the Dominican Republic, marked the anniversary of the death of three sisters, Maria, Teresa, and Minerva Mirabel, who were brutally murdered there in 1960. While women in Latin America and the Caribbean had honored the day since 1981, all UN countries did not formally recognize it until 1999.

Many organizations, including the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), had been pushing for international recognition of the date for some time.

The Mirabal sisters were four Dominican political dissidents who opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Three of the sisters were assassinated by persons unknown.

Patria Mercedes Mirabal (February 27, 1924 – November 25, 1960), Belgica Adela “Dede” Mirabal-Reyes (March 1, 1925 – present), Maria Argentina Minerva Mirabal (March 12, 1926 – November 25, 1960) and Antonia Maria Teresa Mirabal (October 15, 1935 – November 25, 1960) were citizens of the Dominican Republic who fervently opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Dede Mirabal was not assassinated and has lived to tell the stories of the death of her sisters. Presently, she lives in Salcedo, Dominican Republic in the house where the sisters were born. She works to preserve her sisters’ memory through the Museo Hermanas Mirabal which is also located in Salcedo and was home to the women for the final ten months of their lives. She published a book Vivas en El Jardin, released on August 25, 2009.

The Mirabal women grew up in an upper class, well-cultured environment. Their father was a successful businessman. All became married family women. When Trujillo came to power, their family lost almost all its fortune. They believed that Trujillo would send their country into economic chaos. Minerva became particularly passionate about ending the dictatorship of Trujillo after talking extensively with an uncle of hers. Influenced by her uncle, Minerva became more involved in the anti-Trujillo movement. She studied law and became a lawyer, but because she declined Trujillo’s romantic advances, he ordered that while she would be issued a degree she was not to receive her practitioner’s license. Her sisters followed suit, and they eventually formed a group of opponents to the Trujillo regime, known as the Movement of the Fourteenth of June. Within that group, they were known as “The Butterflies” (Las Mariposas in Spanish) because that was the underground name that Minerva was given. Two of the sisters, Maria Argentina Minerva Mirabal and Antonia Maria Teresa Mirabal, were incarcerated and tortured on several occasions. While in prison they were repeatedly raped. Three of the sisters’ husbands were incarcerated at La Victoria Penitentiary in Santo Domingo.

Despite these setbacks, they persisted in fighting to end Trujillo’s leadership. After the sisters’ numerous imprisonments, Trujillo was blamed for their murders, but this is now being questioned. During an interview after Trujillo’s assasination, General Pupo Roman claimed to have personal knowledge that they were killed by Luis Amiama Tio, perhaps to create a rise in anti-Trujillo sentiment. On November 25, 1960, he sent men to intercept the three women after they visited their husbands in prison. The unarmed sisters were led into a sugar cane field and executed, they didn’t even have the luxury of being shot, instead they were beaten to death, along with their driver, Rufino de la Cruz. Their car was later thrown off of a mountain known as La Cumbre, between the cities of Santiago and Puerto Plata, in order to make their deaths look like an accident.

This day also marks the beginning of the 16 days of Activism against Gender Violence. The end of the 16 Days is December 10, International Human Rights Day.

“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”.

Mike Lux: The Heart of Darkness

Democrats are still reeling from our political losses, and the DC political class is still obsessed with the re-positioning dance, but at the heart of everything else, at the center of everything that matters, are these bleak economic facts driving our politics. The sooner Democrats stop worrying about being center or left, and start focusing on how to get the middle class out of its economic black hole, the sooner our politics start getting fixed. Period. End of story. The heart of our political darkness is the heart of the middle class’ economic darkness.

Valerie Plame Wilson: START Treaty Must Not Be Derailed

For me, the most bittersweet moment watching the new movie Fair Game comes when it shows my clandestine CIA work involving nuclear counterproliferation. I remain passionate about the issue of preventing rogue states and terrorist organizations from ever procuring a nuclear weapon. Since resigning from the agency however, I realize that much of what I had been doing may only have served to delay the inevitable. My thinking on proliferation has therefore evolved considerably, and I now believe that the best way to ensure our national security for the long term is to move to achieve the goal of total, global elimination of nuclear weapons.

Laura Flanders: Solving the Irish Crisis

The financial crisis in Ireland is leading to a political crisis on the heels of a bailout and more “austerity measures.” The coalition that currently rules is falling apart, the Green Party detaching from the prime minister’s Fianna Fail party, and elections loom.

But just as in colonial days, the “Irish problem” is really a problem from outside. Ireland wouldn’t need “help” if it hadn’t been robbed by multinationals.

To be fair, its own government turned over its pockets to be picked. Ireland’s corporate tax rates are some of the lowest in the EU and its loopholes allow foreign companies to use Ireland’s well-educated and health-insured workforce, while giving the least possible back. Americans are linked to the problem — every time we GOOGLE we’re using a company that’s avoiding taxes at home in the United States and in other, higher-rate European countries by setting up in Ireland, and shuttling profits in and almost tax-free out.

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

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

November 24 is the 328th day of the year (329th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 37 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1859, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a groundbreaking scientific work by British naturalist Charles Darwin, is published in England. Darwin’s theory argued that organisms gradually evolve through a process he called “natural selection.” In natural selection, organisms with genetic variations that suit their environment tend to propagate more descendants than organisms of the same species that lack the variation, thus influencing the overall genetic makeup of the species.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. For the sixth edition of 1872, the short title was changed to The Origin of Species. Darwin’s book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. It presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent[ through a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(science) branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation.

Various evolutionary ideas had already been proposed to explain new findings in biology. There was growing support for such ideas among dissident anatomists and the general public, but during the first half of the 19th century the English scientific establishment was closely tied to the Church of England, while science was part of natural theology. Ideas about the transmutation of species were controversial as they conflicted with the beliefs that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy and that humans were unique, unrelated to animals. The political and theological implications were intensely debated, but transmutation was not accepted by the scientific mainstream.

The book was written for non-specialist readers and attracted widespread interest upon its publication. As Darwin was an eminent scientist, his findings were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion. The debate over the book contributed to the campaign by T.H. Huxley and his fellow members of the X Club to secularise science by promoting scientific naturalism. Within two decades there was widespread scientific agreement that evolution, with a branching pattern of common descent, had occurred, but scientists were slow to give natural selection the significance that Darwin thought appropriate. During the “eclipse of Darwinism” from the 1880s to the 1930s, various other mechanisms of evolution were given more credit. With the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, Darwin’s concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection became central to  modern evolutionary theory, now the unifying concept of the life sciences.

“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”.

Jim White: Douthat Stumbles Upon, Discards Truth to Promote Conservative Myth on Irish Economic Woes

Poor little Ross Douthat, this analysis gig of his is so hard, especially while the fantasy world of conservatism continues crashing all around him when his primary job is to keep that fantasy alive, at great cost to the real world. Today we find little Ross taking on the crash of the Irish economy. In flailing about for an explanation of what has happened to this former poster-child of Chicago economics run wild, Douthat briefly flirts with an accurate explanation of what went wrong, but then pays proper homage to his overlords by discarding the painfully obvious truth in favor of yet another conservative talking point that is easily demonstrated to be false.

When examining Ireland’s rapid economic growth just prior to the collapse, Douthat of course rushes immediately to tout conservatives’ wet dreams about growth. . .

Yup, it’s that nasty move toward “one world government” represented by the EU that is really to blame for Ireland’s woes. Poor little Ross can’t trouble himself with considering that if this explanation were true, all of the EU would be suffering just as badly as Ireland. So where are the staggering government debts in those EU countries that didn’t slash their taxes? Where are the failing banks in the EU countries that maintained more regulation? Maybe Ross can get back to us on those points.

Joe Conason: On Earmarks

It isn’t the earmarks, stupid.

Bullying Republican Senate leaders into a “voluntary” ban on earmarks may represent a political triumph for the tea party movement, but as a measure to reduce the federal deficit it is a meaningless substitute for real action. The facts about earmarks — and the deficit, for that matter — are so simple that even the dumbest birther should be able to understand.

Funds directed to specific projects by legislators — which is what earmarks are — account for around 1 percent of any annual budget, so they represent far too little money to substantially reduce the budget. Besides, banning earmarks won’t reduce the budget (or the deficit) anyway, because they are drawn from funds that have already been appropriated. . . .

It isn’t the stimulus, stupid. And it isn’t the bailouts, either. . . .

Proposals to reduce the deficit by impoverishing seniors, punishing middle-class families, and neglecting infrastructure and education will do more harm than good. The deepest problem in the U.S. economy is the gross tilt of income and wealth toward the very top and the distortion of policy to favor financial manipulation rather than real growth.

Perhaps it is time to listen again to the only president in recent memory who balanced four budgets and left a surplus for the Republicans to squander. He achieved those goals not by cutting spending, shutting down the government or ending welfare, but raising taxes on the wealthy in his first budget. There will be no progress toward fiscal balance and economic sanity until we acknowledge those facts — and stop listening to stupid.

Thom Hartmann: Michael Chertoff, Bend Over, Please…

During the time you’re reading these words, somewhere in the world somebody is getting onto or off an airplane with a few ounces of cocaine, heroin, or diamonds packed into a condom and stuffed up their rear.

The cocaine, heroin, or diamonds could just as easily be enough C4 plastic explosive to blow out the side of a plane, easily molded to fit into a condom.

Easily removed in an airplane lavatory and detonated. . . .

As Benjamin Franklin famously wrote on February 17, 1775 in his notes to the Pennsylvania Assembly, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

If we are serious about stopping Middle Eastern zealots from attacking us, instead of blowing up our own Fourth Amendment right to be secure in our persons, let’s stop blowing up Middle Eastern countries.

When the Obama administration pulls our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and works hard to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, then I’ll believe our government really cares about our safety.

Until then, it’s just theatre – with a few millions in profit for Chertoff and his friends.

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

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

November 23 is the 327th day of the year (328th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 38 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1936, the first issue of the pictorial magazine Life is published.

Life actually had its start earlier in the 20th century as a different kind of magazine: a weekly humor publication, not unlike today’s The New Yorker in its use of tart cartoons, humorous pieces and cultural reporting. When the original Life folded during the Great Depression, the influential American publisher Henry Luce bought the name and re-launched the magazine as a picture-based periodical on this day in 1936. By this time, Luce had already enjoyed great success as the publisher of Time, a weekly news magazine.

In 1936 publisher Henry Luceaid $92,000 to the owners of Life magazine because he sought the name for Time Inc. Wanting only the old Life’s name in the sale, Time Inc. sold Life’s subscription list, features, and goodwill to Judge. Convinced that pictures could tell a story instead of just illustrating text, Luce launched Life on November 23, 1936. The third magazine published by Luce, after Time in 1923 and Fortune in 1930, Life gave birth to the photo magazine in the U.S., giving as much space and importance to pictures as to words. The first issue of Life, which sold for ten cents (approximately USD $1.48 in 2007, see Cost of Living Calculator) featured five pages of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s pictures.

When the first issue of Life magazine appeared on the newsstands, the U.S. was in the midst of the Great Depression and the world was headed toward war. Adolf Hitler was firmly in power in Germany. In Spain, General Francisco Franco’s rebel army was at the gates of Madrid; German Luftwaffe pilots and bomber crews, calling themselves the Condor Legion, were honing their skills as Franco’s air arm. Italy under Benito Mussolini annexed Ethiopia. Luce ignored tense world affairs when the new Life was unveiled: the first issue depicted the Fort Peck Dam in Montana photographed by Margaret Bourke-White.

“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”.

Frank Rich: Could She Reach the Top in 2012? You Betcha

“THE perception I had, anyway, was that we were on top of the world,” Sarah Palin said at the climax of last Sunday’s premiere of her new television series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” At that point our fearless heroine had just completed a perilous rock climb, and if she looked as if she’d just stepped out of a spa instead, don’t expect her fans to question the reality. For them, Palin’s perception is the only reality that counts.

Revealingly, Sarah Palin’s potential rivals for the 2012 nomination have not joined the party establishment in publicly criticizing her. They are afraid of crossing Palin and the 80 percent of the party that admires her. So how do they stop her? Not by feeding their contempt in blind quotes to the press – as a Romney aide did by telling Time’s Mark Halperin she isn’t “a serious human being.” Not by hoping against hope that Murdoch might turn off the media oxygen that feeds both Palin’s viability and News Corporation’s bottom line. Sooner or later Palin’s opponents will instead have to man up – as Palin might say – and actually summon the courage to take her on mano-a-maverick in broad daylight.

Short of that, there’s little reason to believe now that she cannot dance to the top of the Republican ticket when and if she wants to.

NIcholas D. Kristof: When Donations Go Astray

This holiday season, Americans will dig into their pockets for good causes. But these gifts will sometimes benefit charlatans or extremists, or simply be wasted.

Partly that’s because religious giving – and a good deal of casual secular giving – isn’t vetted as carefully as it should be. Researchers find that religious people on average donate more of their incomes than the nonreligious, and Christians, Jews and Muslims alike write checks to charities that they assume share their values. Dangerous assumption.

Some well-meaning Christians will support Feed the Children, a major Oklahoma-based Christian charity that describes its mission as providing food and medicine to needy children at home and abroad. By some accounts it is the seventh-largest charity in America.

But the American Institute of Philanthropy, a watchdog group that also runs Charitywatch.org, lists Feed the Children as “the most outrageous charity in America.” The institute says that Feed the Children spends just 21 percent of its cash budget on programs for the needy – but spends about $55 to raise each $100 in cash contributions.

Turkana: Do the Democrats remember why they are Democrats?

The Republican Bush administration inherited a budget surplus from the Democratic Clinton administration. The Bush administration destroyed the surplus and created the largest deficit in human history by cutting taxes, increasing corporate welfare, and launching a trillion dollars worth of wars. President Obama inherited one of the worst disasters inherited by any president. But he knew, going in, what he was getting. Or he should have.

The obvious answer should have included repealing and revoking as much of the Bush agenda as was possible. Let the tax cuts on the wealthiest expire. Cut corporate welfare. Draw down the two lost wars. Instead, one war was expanded and we now hear that the other may be allowed to continue. Corporate welfare to Wall Street increased. The tax cuts may be allowed to remain in place. And instead of helping the vast majority of the American people by upending the Bush agenda, we may actually see the burden fall even harder on the most vulnerable. Even Social Security is on the table.

Not even Bush tried to cut Social Security. Not when he had a Republican Congress and was soaring in the polls, and not in his second term, when he faced a Democratic Congress that wouldn’t have given such an idea a serious hearing. If President Obama follows the recommendations of the Catfood Commission, he will be going where not even Bush dared go. We will have a Democratic administration taking on the Third Rail of which Democrats, in particular, are supposed to be unwaveringly protective. We are told that the Catfood Commission is just advisory, and we shouldn’t fear the worst. We must hope that turns out to be true.

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

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

November 22 is the 326th day of the year (327th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 39 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1990, Margaret Thatcher, the first woman prime minister in British history, announces her resignation after 11 years in Britain’s top office.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS (born 13 October 1925) served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. Thatcher is the only woman to have held either post.

Born in Grantham in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom, Thatcher went to school at Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School in Grantham, where she was head girl in 1942-43. She read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford and later trained as a barrister. She won a seat in the 1959 general election, becoming the MP for Finchley as a Conservative. When Edward Heath formed a government in 1970, he appointed Thatcher Secretary of State for Education and Science. Four years later, she backed Keith Joseph in his bid to become Conservative Party leader but he was forced to drop out of the election. In 1975 Thatcher entered the contest herself and became leader of the Conservative Party. At the 1979 general election she became Britain’s first female Prime Minister.

In her foreword to the 1979 Conservative manifesto, Thatcher wrote of “a feeling of helplessness, that a once great nation has somehow fallen behind.” She entered 10 Downing Street determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitate national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and the selling off and closing down of state owned companies and withdrawing subsidy to others. Amid a recession and high unemployment, Thatcher’s popularity declined, though economic recovery and the 1982 Falklands War brought a resurgence of support and she was re-elected in 1983. She took a hard line against trade unions, survived the Brighton hotel bombing assassination attempt and opposed the Soviet Union (her tough-talking rhetoric gained her the nickname the “Iron Lady”); she was re-elected for an unprecedented third term in 1987. The following years would prove difficult, as her Poll tax plan was largely unpopular, and her views regarding the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister in November 1990 after Michael Heseltine’s challenge to her leadership of the Conservative Party.

Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister was the longest since that of Lord Salisbury and the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century. She was the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom, and the first of only four women to hold any of the four great offices of state. She holds a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, which entitles her to sit in the House of Lords.

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

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

November 21 is the 325th day of the year (326th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 40 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1934, Ella Fitzgerald wins Amateur Night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. A young and gangly would-be dancer took to the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater to participate in a harrowing tradition known as Amateur Night. Finding herself onstage as a result of pure chance after her name was drawn out of a hat, the aspiring dancer spontaneously decided to turn singer instead-a change of heart that would prove momentous not only for herself personally, but also for the future course of American popular music. The performer in question was a teenaged Ella Fitzgerald, whose decision to sing rather than dance on this day in 1934 set her on a course toward becoming a musical legend. It also led her to victory at Amateur Night at the Apollo, a weekly event that was then just a little more than a year old but still thrives today

Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996), also known as the “First Lady of Song” and “Lady Ella,” was an American jazz and song vocalist. With a vocal range spanning three octaves (Db3 to Db6), she was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a “horn-like” improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.

She is considered to be a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Over a recording career that lasted 59 years, she was the winner of 14 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Art by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.

“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: Since the goal post for starting troop withdrawal has been moved to 2014, Ms. Amanpour’s interview with he Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen should be interesting.

The cholera outbreak kills hundreds in Haiti and puts thousands of people at risk. With 1.5 million Haitians still living in tents, “This Week” has a report from the cholera hot zone on the frantic medical effort to contain the outbreak.

The roundtable with George Will, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, Ed Luce of the Financial Times and former Labor Secretary and author of “Aftershock,” Robert Reich will discuss General Motors’ historic IPO returning billions of taxpayer dollars to the treasury.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Scheiffer’s guest will be Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), House Majority Leader and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

The Chris Matthews Show: Sitting in for Mr. Matthew’s, who is on vacation, will be Nora O’Donnell. This week’s guests Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent, Dan Rather, HDNet Global Correspondent, Rick Stengel, TIME Managing Editor and Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent who will discuss these questions:

Will Republicans Restrict Any Compromise with President Obama?

Americans on Marriage: Who Needs It?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Mr. Gregory will host Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and an exclusive interview with Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal.

The Roundtable will discuss the post election landscape with  Robert Draper, who takes us “Inside Sarah Palin’s Inner Circle” in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot, Tea Party-backed Rep.-elect Allen West (R-FL) and Richard Wolffe, author of the new book “Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House.”

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Moving forward in Afghanistan. How to wrap our heads around a 2014 security hand-off in 2010–the deadliest year for U.S. troops since the war began. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joins us to look ahead.

Then, Thanksgiving flyers might not be so thankful for their holiday pat-down from one of their local airport’s TSA agents. Are these new measures too invasive? Or are they a necessary new reality to flying in the 21st century? What’s the right balance between security and privacy?

John Pistole, the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, joins us to defend the system; and Florida Rep. John Mica, the ranking member on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, will join us to explain his plan to reform the agency.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: The deficit. Fareed says it’s the most important issue facing Americans today. But will American politicians listen to the recommendations of the U.S. Fiscal Reform Commission? Maybe. Fareed’s Take on how to fix the deficit.

Then, a fascinating and exclusive look at the inner workings of the Iranian Regime. Fareed sits down with a member of one of Iran’s most powerful political families — often referred to as the “Kennedys of Iran.” The Iranian government’s human rights commissioner, Mohammed Javad Larijani Discusses not only Iran’s human right’s record, but also his nation’s nuclear ambitions and whether Tehran is ready to sit down at the table and negotiate with the U.S.

And you might be asking “What in the World?” has the U.S. government done right lately? How about bringing the largest U.S. automaker back from the brink of death to the largest IPO in American history?

Next up, 2014 is the new date for combat troops to be out of Afghanistan. Is that possible? How DOES the coalition get out of Afghanistan? And what will Afghanistan look like after they leave? We’ve gathered a panel of experts from all sides of the debate.

And finally, a last look at a real clown elected to congress.