“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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Paul Krugman: No, Donald Trump, America Isn’t a Hellhole
Donald Trump has taken a strange turn lately. O.K., he has taken a lot of strange turns — that’s what happens when you nominate a short-attention-span candidate who knows nothing about policy and refuses to sit still for more than three minutes. But never mind what passes for Trumpian policy ideas. What’s odd is the shift in what the problem is supposed to be.
When the Trump campaign started, it was, at least nominally, about economics. Foreigners are stealing your jobs, the candidate declared, both through unfair trade and by coming here as immigrants. And he would make America great again with punitive tariffs and mass deportations.
But the story changed at the Republican convention. There was remarkably little economic discussion on display; there wasn’t even much economic demagogy. Instead, the focus was all on law and order, on saving the nation from what the candidate described as a terrifying crime wave.
That theme has continued in recent weeks, with Mr. Trump’s “outreach” to minority voters. His notion of a pitch to these voters is to tell them how horrible their lives are, that they are facing “crime at levels that nobody has seen.” Even “war zones,” he says, are “safer than living in some of our inner cities.”
All of this is really strange — because nothing like this is actually happening.
Eugene Robinson: Donald Trump is a flake and a fraud
Donald Trump’s supporters can pretend otherwise, but deep down they must know the truth: Trump has been playing them for fools all along.
All that bluster about creating a “deportation force” to round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and kick them out of the country? Forget about it. Trump is now “softening” that ridiculous pledge, which he could never have carried out, into a new policy in which “we work with them.”
Hmmm. Work with them how? [..]
Trump talked about how such families will “pay back-taxes, they have to pay taxes,” and claimed that “there’s no amnesty, as such.” If this is indeed Trump’s revised policy, he now advocates the same basic approach as the one laid out in the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” reform bill passed three years ago by the Senate — which immigration hard-liners derided as amnesty.
Attempts by allies to explain the complete reversal have been comic. My favorite came from Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, who said this on CNN: “He hasn’t changed his position on immigration, he’s changed the words that he is saying.”
That absurdist formulation sounds like something from the experimental writings of author Gertrude Stein — who, come to think of it, gave us the perfect blanket description of the entire Trump campaign: “There is no there there.”
Cindy Cohn: Word Games: What the NSA Means by “Targeted” Surveillance Under Section 702
We all know that the NSA uses word games to hide and downplay its activities. Words like “collect,” “conversations,” “communications,” and even “surveillance” have suffered tortured definitions that create confusion rather than clarity.
There’s another one to watch: “targeted” v. “mass” surveillance.
Since 2008, the NSA has seized tens of billions of Internet communications. It uses the Upstream and PRISM programs—which the government claims are authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act—to collect hundreds of millions of those communications each year. The scope is breathtaking, including the ongoing seizure and searching of communications flowing through key Internet backbone junctures,[1]the searching of communications held by service providers like Google and Facebook, and, according to the government’s own investigators, the retention of significantly more than 250 million Internet communications per year.[2]
Yet somehow, the NSA and its defenders still try to pass 702 surveillance off as “targeted surveillance,” asserting that it is incorrect when EFF and many others call it “mass surveillance.”
Harry Boyte: Trumpism’s ugly side effect: How consumer culture is killing citizenship
Donald Trump’s candidacy gives rise to many descriptors — authoritarian, bigoted, divisive. It is also the culmination of long-developing dysfunctions of a culture where market values have spread beyond appropriate limits and radically eroded citizenship.
Though many feel hopeless about changing this culture, resources are appearing for revitalizing citizenship and for building a movement for a deeper democracy, across party lines, after this sour and dispiriting election.
Susan Faludi describes the consumer culture well in her 1999 book, “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man.” Drawing on interviews with groups of men from African-American shipyard workers to veterans to evangelical Christians, she shows how ideals of loyalty, team play and the mastery of a vocation were replaced by “a competitive individualism… robbed of craft or utility and ruled by commercial values that revolve around who has the most, the best, the biggest, the fastest.” Masculinity became something “to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources, to be displayed not demonstrated.”Trump’s public persona, winner-in-chief, is a poster child for Faludi’s male. He surrounds himself with gold-plated trinkets. He seeks to brand everything he touches. He is also a snake oil salesman, a figure familiar from American history.
All these traits might be called Trumpism, not simply Trump. Trumpism represents a model of public life which replaces citizens as makers of democratic society with a transactional politics that asks only “what’s in it for me?” It is the mark of a society where market values spread without limit, in which we are branding and selling ourselves along with everything else.
Harry Edwards: A Letter To The University Of Texas About Campus Concealed Carry
One of the enduring consequences of living in extraordinary times is that so often we are compelled to a consideration of evident and emerging challenges within the context of our professed principles and values. Today we live in extraordinary times.
A core principle of higher education in a free society is the belief, expectation, and insistence that education will take place in an environment that is conducive to the open discussion and debate of competing, even controversial ideas and perspectives. Impediments to the establishment of such an environment threatens the very authenticity, integrity, and legitimacy of the educational process itself.
Today, incidents of mass murder in a variety of settings ― including educational institutions ― by both common criminals and others claiming affiliation with terrorist organizations have provoked some eight state legislatures to pass and implement what are termed “campus concealed carry laws.” These laws for the most part permit students, faculty, staff, and in some cases even campus visitors to carry concealed fire arms into classrooms, locker rooms and other athletic facilities, and institutional offices (with some exceptions). Among the colleges and universities now subject to “campus concealed carry laws” is the University of Texas at Austin. Thousands at the university – administrators, faculty, staff, and students – neither wanted nor have welcomed this concealed carry gun law, and many among them have undertaken various efforts and actions in protest of its implementation within the U of Texas campus community. I support and stand with those waging these protests.
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