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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Robert Reich: Trump doesn’t need business advice — he needs advice about how to lead a democracy

The White House has announced that President Donald Trump will name his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to run a new Office of American Innovation — described as a SWAT team of strategic consultants staffed by former business executives, designed to infuse fresh thinking into Washington and help make government work more like a business.

It’s good to have fresh thinking about how government might function more efficiently. But it’s important to remember that government is not a business. The purpose of government is not to show a profit. It is to achieve the common good.

Precisely because there are many different views about the common good, government leaders must be capable of listening and responding to many different opinions and perspectives.

They must also be public educators — telling the public the truth, explaining the consequences of different options and conducting public deliberation about what is best for society.

Above all, presidents should enrich and strengthen democracy — building trust in democratic institutions, avoiding conflicts of interests, and promoting tolerance and social cohesion.

So far, Donald Trump has done the opposite. He doesn’t need more business advice. He needs more advice about how to lead a democracy.

Heather Digby Parton: Donald Trump’s grotesque new “grand bargain”: Did he learn nothing from the Obama years?

I have written many times that Barack Obama’s most serious misjudgment was when he came into office and declared that he would bring people together and strike a “grand bargain” with all the warring political constituencies. It failed in grand fashion and the fact is that members of both parties were relieved. The idea of trying to do a huge bipartisan agreement in this era of sharp polarization was a major misreading of the political Zeitgeist. So naturally Donald Trump thinks it’s a good idea to try a grand bargain of his own. On Monday Axios reported that the Trump administration plans to negotiate tax reform and infrastructure concurrently. [..]

Obama could claim a mandate when he came into office and proposed his grand bargain. Trump, on the other hand, won the election only through a fluke of the Electoral College’s functioning, is mired in a major scandal and is presiding over a congressional majority run by a bumbling leadership that is being held hostage by a gang of fanatics. Trump has already proved that his vaunted negotiating skills are better suited for licensing deals concerning ugly ties and cheap perfume than for running the most powerful nation on Earth. The likelihood that he can enact a grand bargain is roughly the same as the chance he can stop lying. That would be zero.

Frank Bruni: Devin Nunes Is Dangerous

Representative Devin Nunes obviously fancies himself Jason Bourne. To sneak onto the White House grounds for that rendezvous with an unnamed source last week, he switched cars and ditched aides, vanishing into the night.

But Senator Lindsey Graham looks at him and sees a different character. Graham said on the “Today” show on Tuesday that Nunes was bumbling his way though something of an “Inspector Clouseau investigation,” a reference to the fantastically inept protagonist of the “Pink Panther” comedies.

I salute Graham’s movie vocabulary. I quibble with his metaphor. While Clouseau was a benign fool, there’s nothing benign about Nunes’s foolishness.

As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes, a California Republican, is a principal sleuth in the paramount inquiry into whether members of the Trump campaign were in cahoots with Russia, and from all appearances, he either doesn’t want to know the answer or has determined it already — in President Trump’s favor.

Bil McKibben: America’s deportation squads want to expel our neighbours. We are saying no

Vermont, where I live, has the second-smallest population of any state. It’s also among the most rural parts of America, and taken together those two facts produce an iron law: if you see someone with their car stuck in a snowbank, you don’t drive by. You stop and help push. Because if you don’t, nobody else may come by for an hour.

Which is why, I think, many of us have spent part of the past couple weeks trying to win the freedom of three of our neighbors – Kike Balcazar, Zully Palacios and Alex Carrillo. They are undocumented immigrants, who came here to work on our farms, and were detained by the (aptly named) Ice, or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, in New Hampshire, awaiting deportation.

Even as the great healthcare debate came and went, even as the Keystone pipeline won approval – even as enormous affairs of great and lasting import captivated the nation – this particular small-town tragedy united a great many Vermonters.

Kate Aronoff: Don’t just defend Obama’s legacy against Trump: fight for radical climate action

The fossil fuel industry is rejoicing. Donald Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that would tear up many of the so-called burdensome climate protections – those regulating things like power plant emissions and leasing to coal companies – put in place by the Obama administration. Horrified by this move, many have vowed to jump to their defense.

That’s not enough.

The clean power plan, perhaps the biggest target of today’s executive order, is far from perfect. It’s a parallel of sorts to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare. Both policies – however flawed – address deeply pressing crises that will kill millions if left unaddressed. Each are far preferable to nothing, of course. But they were each crafted to appease Republicans, many of whom are funded by the industries (insurance and fossil fuels, namely) that the measures set out to curtail.

So while the clean power plan was not a result of the kind of legislative sausage-making that birthed Obamacare, it still bears the trademark of the Democratic establishment’s politics of compromise. That’s why we must do more than simply defending existing policies: now is the moment to fight for something better.