Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

While mishima is on hiatus, I will be cross posting some of our daily and weekly features from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Punting the Punditsis 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: This Week has exclusive interviews with White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley and IMF Managing Director and Chair Christine Lagarde.

The roundtable guests, George Will, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, Bloomberg’s Al Hunt, and ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Jonathan Karl will discuss the “debt ceiling divide”.

Another roundtable with Vanity Fair columnist and ADWEEK editorial director Michael Wolff, NPR’s Nina Totenberg and CourtTV founder Steve Brill, will debate “the state of the media in this tabloid culture.”

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr, Schieffer’s guests are Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL).

The Chris Matthews Show: This Week’s guests, Bob Woodward The Washington Post Associate Editor, Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Jamie Tarabay, National Journal Managing Editor and Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune Columnist, will discuss:

Is the Tea Party’s flirtation with default a big favor to Barack Obama?

Is Michele Bachmann too far right even for the GOP?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is making the rounds. Republican presidential contender, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty has his turn with Gregory.

The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson and NBC’S Chief White House Correspondent and Political Director Chuck Todd join in a discussion of the debt ceiling fight and its impact on Obama’s 2012 reelection.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen will have a stand off about the debt ceiling and its impact.

GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum will exam his chances of getting the GOP nod.

Ans finally. a look at the future of space exploration for the United States.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: Fareed Zakaria asks Peter Godwin, author of “The Fear”, about whether the birth of South Sudan will be marred by war.

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof talks about whether Sudan will allow South Sudan to flourish.

This could change the conversation on these shows: John Boehner Rejects Obama’s Grand Bargain On Debt Ceiling

New York Times Editorial: The Worst Time to Slow the Economy

It was not surprising to hear the Republican presidential candidates repeat their tiresome claim that excessive government spending and borrowing were behind Friday’s terrible unemployment report. It was depressing to hear President Obama sound as if he agreed with them.

The Labor Department report showed virtually no job growth in June, with the unemployment level edging up to 9.2 percent from 9.1 percent the month before. It seemed to confirm last month’s indication that the economy had stalled. After the report came out, the president went to the Rose Garden and said he hoped that a conclusion to the current debt-ceiling talks would give businesses “certainty” that the government had its debt and deficit under control, allowing them to start hiring again.

Certainty? That sounds like Mitt Romney, or any of the other Republicans who have concocted a phony connection between hiring and government borrowing.

Jane Hamsher: Breaking Point: Obama and the Death of the Democratic Party

According to both the Washington Post and the New York Times, Obama is proposing cuts to Social Security in exchange for GOP support for tax hikes.

Nobody ever says they want to “cut” Social Security or Medicare. They want to “save” it.  Just ask Pete Peterson, he wants to “save” it. Likewise AARP.  They don’t want reduced benefits for senior citizens, they want to “preserve” it for future generations.  If they have an enormous customer base they can market private “add-on” accounts and other retirement products to when Social Security goes bye-bye, I guess that’s just a happy coincidence.

Now if you think that this is something the President is doing because it’s the only way to get Republican cooperation you can stop reading here, because we’re going to disagree.  From the moment he took the White House, the President has wanted to cut Social Security benefits.  David Brooks reported that three administration officials called him to say Obama “is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending” in March of 2009.  You can only live in denial for so long and still lay claim to being tethered to reality.

Amy Goodman: WikiLeaks, Wimbledon and War

Last Saturday was sunny in London, and the crowds were flocking to Wimbledon and to the annual Henley Regatta. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower website Wikileaks.org, was making his way by train from house arrest in Norfolk, three hours away, to join me and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek for a public conversation about WikiLeaks, the power of information and the importance of transparency in democracies. The event was hosted by the Frontline Club, an organization started by war correspondents in part to memorialize their many colleagues killed covering war. Frontline Club co-founder Vaughan Smith looked at the rare sunny sky fretfully, saying, “Londoners never come out to an indoor event on a day like this.” Despite years of accurate reporting from Afghanistan to Kosovo, Smith was, in this case, completely wrong.

Close to 1,800 people showed up, evidence of the profound impact WikiLeaks has had, from exposing torture and corruption to toppling governments.

Assange is in England awaiting a July 12 extradition hearing, as he is wanted for questioning in Sweden related to allegations of sexual misconduct. He has not been charged. He has been under house arrest for more than six months, wears an electronic ankle bracelet and is required to check in daily at the Norfolk police station.

Johann Hari: Would You Trust a Management Consultant with the World’s Rainforests?

Our protests stopped David Cameron handing UK forests over to corporations. Now the rainforests are being handed to management consultants

The two most dreaded words in any office are the same – management consultants. Their arrival rumbles through a workplace like the approaching thwump-thwump of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, rattling our desks and making us all fear we will be picked up and gored at random. We’re right to be afraid – and scornful. According to “Rip Off”, a report on management consultants by David Craig, 170 organizations who used management consultants were studied in the 1990s by the Cranfield School of Management, and only 36 per cent of clients thought they had brought any value. We all know now that management consultants were threaded through the banksters and hedge funders who just crashed the global economy.

But now management consultancy has been taken to a whole new level, according to a startling new report by Greenpeace entitled: “Bad Influence: How McKinsey-inspired plans lead to rainforest destruction.” Management consultants have, in effect, been tasked with setting the future of the world’s rainforests – and facing accusations that they are using our money to draw up plans that will result in their more rapid destruction. Instead of stopping the loggers and miners, the report suggests they are aiding them.