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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Trevor Timm: The Republican party is not dead. Far from it

Reports of the Republican party’s death at the hands of Donald Trump have been greatly exaggerated. The party is just going to concede the presidential election because their voters nominated an unhinged reality television star. Anyone who thinks that clearly hasn’t been paying attention to how the party works.

When Trump effectively clinched the nomination, many commentators gleefully wrote fake obituaries for the Republican party, as if one nomination was going to destroy a political party that has been nominating awful people or decades. To be fair, one of the very few redeeming qualities of Trump’s romp through the party this spring was the complete freakout of the Republican establishment. They were rendered completely helpless as Trump tore down their Chosen Ones one after another. But to claim that the party’s members were just going to spontaneously disintegrate after it was over was naive.

Let’s put aside for a second how shortsighted it is to declare a party “dead” that currently controls the House, the Senate and the vast majority of statehouses around the country. All you have to do is look at what has happened since Trump clinched the nomination: a string of polls now show him within striking distance of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. All those Republican establishment figures who acted offended by Trump a few weeks ago are now inching towards him one by one.

 

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Debbie has to go, now, before it’s too late: The Democratic Party can’t unite with her in office

To paraphrase the words of that Scottish master Robert Burns, the best laid plans of mice, men — and women — go often astray, or “gang aft agley,” as they say in the Highlands. No one knows this better than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Twice now, the flight of her presidential aspirations has been forced to circle the airport as other contenders put up an unexpected fight: In 2008, Barack Obama emerged to grab the Democratic nomination away and this year, although all signs point to her finally grabbing the brass ring, unexpected and powerful progressive resistance came from the mighty wind of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Certainly, Hillary Clinton is angered by all of this, but the one seemingly more aggrieved — if public comments and private actions are any indication — is Democratic National Committee chair and Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Hillary surrogate who takes umbrage like ordinary folks pop their vitamins in the morning.

Robert Greenwald: NRA Convention: Dwindling Membership, Desperate Rhetoric

Convention: Dwindling Membership, Desperate Rhetoric
Any doubts about whether the NRA is feeling the pressure of an increasingly powerful gun violence prevention movement can be quelled by reading Wayne LaPierre’s latest keynote rant. While never the most coherent thinker, this year’s stream-of-warped-consciousness epic hate poem, showed LaPierre giving up all pretense and appealing directly to his audience’s worst fears, deepest prejudices and festering anger. Here’s why:

For years the National Rifle Association has maintained its stranglehold on national politics by convincing politicians that it is politically invincible. But now there is fresh evidence — actual numbers — that show the NRA is increasingly feeling the heat of Americans’ shifting attitudes about gun violence prevention. This is a big deal.

The numbers appear in a tax form known as a 990, which charitable organizations must file every year to let the Internal Revenue Service know what they are up to. The NRA’s 990 for the year 2014 just appeared online at Guidestar, where all such filings are made public.

The invincibility myth has always been just that — a myth — the apocryphal story of a massive army of passionate gun lovers who will exact revenge on any who dare to cross them. The truth is far more complicated. As we show in our latest film, Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA, the NRA’s resources come largely from the gun industry and the organization’s actual membership does not actually agree with all their stances.

Dean Baker: Getting High On Interest Rates: What’s New at the Fed

The minutes from the most recent Federal Reserve Board Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting indicate that many of its members are anxious to move forward with more interest rate hikes. The next hit could come as soon as June. This should have the country very worried.

Just for some basic orientation, the point of raising interest rates is to slow the economy and keep it from creating too many jobs. The members of the FOMC are worried that the labor market is becoming too tight, with the unemployment rate falling too low. This would give workers more bargaining power, allowing them to get larger wage gains, which could be passed on in higher prices, kicking off an inflationary spiral. If that doesn’t sound like the economy you see, then it’s probably because you have a better idea of the data than the folks at the FOMC.

Starting at the basics, by many measures the labor market is still far from recovering to its pre-recession level, in spite of a recovery that will soon be entering its 8th year. Most notably the employment to population ratio (EPOP), which is the percentage of adults with jobs, is still more than 3.0 percentage points below its pre-recession level.

Robert North Patterson: Clinton Versus Trump: Predicting The Electoral College

President Donald J. Trump?

In this feverish year, the most recent symptom of distemper is media blather that — based on polling nearly 6 months out — America is on the cusp of electing Donald Trump. Before this conjures the megalomaniacal horror of Trump’s inaugural address, let me offer a consoling reality — that political fun house mirror known as the Electoral College.

We may not love it but, like shingles and pneumonia, this particular college will forever be with us. And so, a spoiler alert. At the end of this piece, I’m revealing who won the presidency in November, right down to the last electoral vote. Faced with a national nervous collapse, it seems unkind to wait.

I’m not alone in trying to be helpful. One day after the Indiana primary, the New York Times predicted the electoral vote count for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. A day earlier, I went through a similar exercise, and got an identical count.

Dana Milbank: Donald Trump, the welfare king

A generation after Ronald Reagan denounced the “welfare queen,” the Grand Old Party is evidently on the verge of nominating its first welfare king.

Four years ago last week, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, famously wrote off the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes. Romney, secretly recorded at a fundraiser, said the 47 percent “who are dependent upon government” won’t vote for him because “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Now, just one presidential cycle later, Republicans have settled on a presumptive nominee who is himself among the 47 percent of non-taxpayers. Trump has been refusing to release his tax returns, and now we have a pretty good idea why: He has been feeding at the public trough.