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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Dean Baker: Fixing Facebook and Defending Democracy

Facebook recently acknowledged it received more than $100,000 from Russian sources to purchase ads intended to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. While the actual amount spent on such ads may have been considerably higher, this is the amount the company itself acknowledges. [..]

In the fallout from this disclosure, Facebook is doing the usual corporate Keystone cops routine, saying that they had no idea and couldn’t possibly police against this sort of misuse of their system. The Democrats, who get plenty of campaign contributions from the Facebook crew, immediately moved to demand ineffectual steps from Federal Election Commission (FEC), the most ineffectual federal agency ever created.

In the months ahead we can expect much troubled handwringing from pundits telling us how hard it is to police against this sort of abuse with a social network like Facebook. We will be told that this is just one of those inevitable problems of living with the Internet.

While the politicians in Washington may not want to find a solution that could be expensive for their Silicon Valley friends, it actually is not hard to devise a mechanism that would get Facebook to effectively police their system. We know this because they already do it to enforce copyrights. We just have to give Facebook the right incentives.

Charles M. Blow: ‘The Flag Is Drenched With Our Blood’

Yes, Donald Trump has once again used racial hostility to rouse his base and is reveling in the achievement.

According to The New York Times, when Trump’s advisers appeared lukewarm about the uproar he created by chastising, in the coarsest of terms, N.F.L. players who chose to quietly kneel to protest racial inequality and police violence, “Mr. Trump responded by telling people that it was a huge hit with his base, making it clear that he did not mind alienating his critics if it meant solidifying his core support.”

Every way he is manipulating his majority-white base to oppose a majority-black group of private citizens is disgusting. Trump is disgusting.

But I am also infuriated by his framing: that this has nothing to do with race (whenever you hear that, know that the subject at hand must have everything to do with race) and that this is just about patriotism, honoring national ritual, celebrating soldiers, particularly the fallen, and venerating “our flag.”

What this misses is that patriotism is particularly fraught for black people in this country because the history of the country’s treatment of them is fraught. It’s not that black people aren’t patriotic; it’s just that patriotism can be a paradox.

E. J. Dionne: How Steve Bannon just defeated Trump

In Alabama’s Republican Senate primary on

Tuesday, Steve Bannon defeated Donald Trump. The state’s GOP voters showed how sharply divided their party is. And right-wing insurgents were given a license to challenge Republican incumbents all over the country in 2018.

Former judge Roy Moore’s victory over Sen. Luther Strange was a sign of just how extreme Republican rank-and-filers have become. Moore, who believes biblical law should override the Constitution, beat Strange 55 percent to 45 percent. Contrast that with the 2006 gubernatorial primary in which then-Gov. Bob Riley trounced Moore by a margin of 2-to-1.

Moore is now 70 years old and was twice suspended as the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to obey laws he saw as at odds with his religious beliefs. Normally all this would be career-ending. But that was before the Age of Trump. “What Donald Trump has done,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, “is embolden the Roy Moores of the world.”

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: The Brutal Reality: Kap Is Still Unemployed!

The first and harshest of all is that the man who ignited the firestorm of hand wringing, soul searching and recriminations within and without the NFL is still unemployed. The 32 NFL owners have made it clear, some publicly, and some simply by their inaction and silence, that Colin Kaepernick is still very much persona non-grata in their league. The special emphasis is on “still” because despite the mass indignation at Trump, Kap is still unemployed. And there has been absolutely no hint, sign or indication from any of the protesting owners that they, or any of the other owners, are any more willing the Tuesday after the last of the weekend games ended than the day before they began to give him another shot in the league.

The second brutal reality is that the reason that Kap took his fateful knee in the first place was nowhere to be seen or heard in any of the sea of verbiage and commentary from mainstream media football commentators. Kap made it clear. He was not kneeling in protest against the national anthem. He was certainly not kneeling in protest against the meat on the hoof gross exploitation of the players in the NFL. He knelt to protest police violence and racial injustice in society. The owners weren’t kneeling for that. It’s doubtful that many of the players knelt, sat or linked arms in protest against that. It was simply to the owners there way of thumbing their nose at a guy who had the temerity to bad mouth their league and in effect challenge their awesome, near dictatorial power. As for the players, it was a reaction to the vulgarity of one man and his disdain for them. But the police killing of Blacks? That’s a whole different matter.

David Leonhardt: Tax, Lies and Videotape

The standard by which the Trump tax plan should be judged is the standard that the Trump administration itself has set.

“There will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said shortly after the election. “My plan is for the working people,” President Trump said yesterday. “I don’t benefit.”

None of that is true. It’s the latest disturbing example of politicians telling falsehoods about a proposed policy. Trump has done so repeatedly, and now members of Congress are doing it more often, too. These aren’t mere exaggerations or truth shadings; they are often just lies.

“Trump’s tax plan: prioritize cuts for the rich, say he isn’t,” as New York Magazine succinctly puts it. [..]

And the tax cuts for the affluent are so large — trillions of dollars over the coming decade, says Lily Batchelder of N.Y.U. — that they would cause the deficit to soar.