Pondering the Pundits

“Pondering 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.

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Mohamad Bazzi: The ’28 pages’: Americans deserve to know if Saudis financed terror

For years, Saudi Arabia’s leaders have argued that the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks were Saudis is irrelevant. They insist there is no evidence Saudi officials or institutions provided a support network for al-Qaida and its hijackers. For a long time, Americans largely accepted that explanation.

But in recent months, the façade of Saudi Arabia as America’s most important ally in the Arab world and a force for stability in the Middle East has begun to crack. US public anger against Saudi Arabia is rising – over its war in Yemen, its treatment of women and dissidents and the use of its oil wealth to export extremist ideology by building mosques and dispatching preachers throughout the Muslim world. Prodded by some relatives of the 9/11 victims, Americans want a reexamination of whether any Saudi officials played a role in the attacks.

Paul Krugman: Trump and Taxes

This seems to be the week for Trump tax mysteries. One mystery is why Donald Trump, unlike every other major party nominee in modern times, is refusing to release his tax returns. The other is why, having decided that he needs experts to clean up his ludicrous tax-cut proposals, he chose to call on the services of the gang that couldn’t think straight.

On the first mystery: Mr. Trump’s excuse, that he can’t release his returns while they’re being audited, is an obvious lie. On the contrary, the fact that he’s being audited (or at least that he says he’s being audited) should make it easier for him to go public — after all, he needn’t fear triggering an audit! Clearly, he must be hiding something. What? [..]

Meanwhile, however, we can look at the candidate’s policy proposals. And what has been going on there is just as revealing, in its own way, as his attempt to dodge scrutiny of his personal finances.

The story so far: Last fall Mr. Trump suggested that he would break with Republican orthodoxy by raising taxes on the wealthy. But then he unveiled a tax plan that would, in fact, lavish huge tax cuts on the rich. And it would also, according to nonpartisan analyses, cause deficits to explode, adding around $10 trillion to the national debt over a decade.

Eugene Robinson: Ryan and Trump’s painful sham

Save us all the faux drama. We already know how this star-crossed courtship is going to end: House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) will decide that Donald Trump isn’t such an ogre after all, and they’ll live unhappily ever after.

Ryan will be unhappy, at least. Trump has stolen his party, and there’s nothing Ryan can do in the short term to get it back.

“I heard a lot of good things from our presumptive nominee,” Ryan told reporters after his much-ballyhooed Thursday meeting with Trump. “I do believe we are now planting the seeds to get ourselves unified to bridge the gaps and differences.”

Translation: Ryan may still not be “there yet,” in terms of a formal endorsement, but we should have no doubt about where he’s headed.

Amanda Marcotte: Obama bucks anti-trans bullies: Shunning backlash fears, the president is bravely and aggressively defending trans rights

The White House stepped into battle over trans rights this week, announcing plans to send out a letter on Friday to schools across the country that instructs them, to put it in plain terms, to leave transgender students alone.

The letter reminds schools that federal anti-discrimination laws require “schools to provide transgender students equal access to educational programs and activities even in circumstances in which other students, parents, or community members raise objections or concerns.” [..]

It is worth taking a moment to remember that hysteria over trans people in the bathrooms was not a thing less than a year ago, and this entire thing is being driven by a conservative movement that, having lost the battle over same-sex marriage, is casting around for some other way to keep their rigid notion of gender essentialism in the headlines.

Perhaps this one reason that the Obama administration has shown no hesitation or reluctance to go all-out in their defense of trans rights, as evidenced both by this letter and by the DOJ’s lawsuit against North Carolina’s anti-trans law. The timing of this makes the bad faith even more transparent than usual, creating a real opportunity for liberals to strike early and hard, to gain control of the narrative.

Heather Digby Parton: The GOP’s terrifying Trump ignorance: They think they can control him, but that just isn’t going to happen

Everyone knows Donald Trump is obsessed with polls. It is his favorite topic on the stump and he recites them as if they’re political poetry. But media reports suggest on Thursday that he only looks at his own poll numbers or he would have known that he was backtracking on his most popular proposal when he said that his much ballyhooed ban on Muslims was “just a suggestion.” The scuttlebutt is that he heard from some of his new best friends on Capitol Hill that the ban was a bad, bad thing and he immediately reconsidered once these much smarter people enlightened him. This was just part of a day-long campaign to show that Trump has now become a fine upstanding mainstream politician Republicans everywhere can support with pride.

Paul Ryan characterized their highly anticipated meeting as being a “very positive step toward unification” and left it at that. But Luke Russert on MSNBC reported that the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senate Committee endorsed Trump with enthusiasm.  He also reported that many Republican leaders believe the whole ugly “Mexicans are rapists” and “Muslim ban” stuff was in the past, but they do wonder if he might say something untoward going forward.

To that I say: Of course he will. How do we know this? Well, we can look at everything he’s said for the past six months, but let’s take a look at this alleged “backtrack on the Muslim ban” as an example. Recall that his very first ad was this one: