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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Eugene Robinson: Bringing peace to the Mideast is Kushner’s second-toughest job

Jared Kushner is emerging as the smoothest, slickest operator in the Court of King Donald. He is also, by far, the busiest — and the hardest to fire.

President Trump is apparently convinced that his son-in-law, who serves officially as a senior adviser, can fix anything. Make that everything : In less than three months, Trump has given Kushner, 36, the following assignments:

● Reinvent the federal government, one of the biggest and most complex organizations in the world. As head of the “White House Office of American Innovation,” Kushner is supposed to bring the mind-set and practices of the business world to the public sector. Given that his father went to jail for crimes including tax evasion, and that his boss declared four business bankruptcies, we can only hope Kushner looks far afield for role models. [..]

Access to the president equals power, and none of Kushner’s rivals can compete on that score. He is a callow young man who cannot possibly accomplish all that is being asked of him. But think what being Trump’s son-in-law must be like. Maybe peace in the Middle East doesn’t look so hard.

David J. Garrow: When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam

Fifty years ago today — and one year to the day before his assassination — the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the most politically charged speech of his life at Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan. It was a blistering attack on the government’s conduct of the Vietnam War that, among other things, compared American tactics to those of the Nazis during World War II.

The speech drew widespread condemnation from across the political spectrum, including from this newspaper. Other civil rights leaders, who supported the war and sought to retain President Lyndon B. Johnson as a political ally, distanced themselves from Dr. King.

Dr. King’s Riverside Church address exemplified how, throughout his final 18 months of life, he repeatedly rejected the sunny optimism of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and instead mourned how that dream had “turned into a nightmare.” But the speech also highlighted how for Dr. King, civil rights was never a discrete problem in American society, and that racism went hand in hand with the fellow evils of poverty and militarism that kept the country from living up to its ideals. Beyond signaling his growing radicalism, the Riverside speech reflected Dr. King’s increasing political courage — and shows why, half a century later, he remains a pivotal figure in American history.

David Leonhardt: How to End the Politicization of the Courts

Mainstream news coverage has a hard time making subtle distinctions between the behavior of the two political parties. When Democratic and Republican tactics are blatantly different — on voter suppression, for instance — journalists are often comfortable saying so. And when the parties act similarly — both soliciting large donors, say — journalists are good at producing “both sides do it” stories.

But when reality falls somewhere in between, the media often fails to get the story right. Journalists know how to do 50-50 stories and all-or-nothing stories. More nuanced situations create problems.

The 2016 campaign was a classic example. Hillary Clinton deserved scrutiny for her buckraking speeches and inappropriate email use. Yet her sins paled compared with Donald Trump’s lies, secrecy, bigotry, conflicts of interest, Russian ties and sexual molestation. The collective media coverage failed to make this distinction and created a false impression.

Now the pattern is repeating itself, in the battle over the federal courts.

Democrats are on the verge of filibustering Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination. If they do, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, has signaled that he will change the rules and bypass the filibuster. The move may change the nominating process for years to come.

Dean Baker: Filling In The Magic Asterisk: The Republican Reform Proposal

For years Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan wowed the Washington pundit class by pushing his balanced budget proposals. Not only did he outline a plan for taxes and spending that balanced the budget and paid down the debt, he actually got the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to score the proposal, verifying his claims.

As a practical matter, there was considerably less in these proposals than claimed. On the spending side, Ryan told CBO to assume a spending path for the domestically discretionary side of the budget that essentially eliminated the federal government by 2050.

While his plans still would have enough money for the defense department, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in the Ryan budget everything else was effectively zeroed out. He puts the Justice Department, State Department, Education Department and all other departments and agencies of the federal government out of business. That is one way to balance the budget.

If Ryan had a specific, albeit extreme, plan on the spending side of the budget, he was much less specific on the tax side. He told CBO that there would be large cuts in income tax rates. These reductions in tax rates primarily benefit the wealthy, since they would get the vast majority of savings.

To keep the plan revenue neutral, Ryan told CBO to assume that he would eliminate enough tax deductions to offset the reduction in interest rates. But Ryan never indicated which tax deductions he wanted to eliminate.

Bernard Weisberger: Resurrecting another big lie: The myth of Social Security as “Ponzi scheme”

In these pestilent, perilous times, when the very idea of distinction between truth and falsehood is under siege, it’s more critical than ever to keep a sharp lookout for destructive false analogies. Without an anchor in provable fact it’s dangerously easy to get taken in by them. So I am particularly exasperated by a sample dished up by scaremongers, namely that the Social Security program, our rock of security and stability for an aging population for the last 80 years, is a Ponzi scheme — a swindle designed to cheat Americans out of their money with false promises.

This especially ugly lie resurfaces periodically like the Loch Ness Monster and the Abominable Snowman and is just as devoid of proof, but at least those fakes are harmless. The same can’t be said of the presumed equality between Ponzi’s scam and Social Security, which was aired during last fall’s campaign by such eminent would-be Republican candidates as Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul in the gang scrimmages that passed for debates. In condensed form, here’s why.