“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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Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Clinton needs to call for these two top Democrats to resign — for her campaign’s sake
There are two Democrats whose resignation from office right now would do their party and country a service.
Their disappearance might also help Hillary Clinton convince skeptical Democrats that her nomination, if it happens, is about the future, and not about resurrecting and ratifying the worst aspects of the first Clinton reign when she and her husband rarely met a donor to whom they wouldn’t try to auction a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom.
In fact, while we’re at it, and if Secretary Clinton really wants us to believe she’s no creature of the corporate and Wall Street money machine — despite more than $44 million in contributions from the financial industry since 2000 and her $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, not to mention several million more paid by other business interests for an hour or two of her time — she should pick up the gauntlet herself and publicly call for the departure of these two, although they are among her nearest and dearest. And we don’t mean Bill and Chelsea.
No, she should come right out and ask for the resignations of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee Chair — and Florida congresswoman — Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In one masterstroke, she could separate herself from two of the most prominent of all corporate Democratic elitists.
Robert Reich: GOP Tax Plans Would Be the Largest Redistributions to the Rich in American History
The tax cuts for the rich proposed by the two leading Republican candidates for the presidency — Donald Trump and Ted Cruz — are larger, as a proportion of the government budget and the total economy, than any tax cuts ever before proposed in history.
Trump and Cruz pretend to be opposed to the Republican establishment, but when it comes to taxes they’re seeking exactly what that Republican establishment wants.
Here are 5 things you need to know about their tax plans: [..]
Bottom line: If either of these men is elected president, we could see the largest redistribution in American history from the poor and middle-class of America to the rich. This is class warfare with a vengeance.
Juan Cole: How Not to Talk About Muslims After a Terrorist Attack
1. Stop calling Daesh “the Islamic State.” They are manipulating you. They aren’t a state and they aren’t Islamic. If some fringe cult took over some villages in Mexico and called itself “The Vatican,” then committed terrorism, would journalists blithely say on air “Today, the Vatican killed 39 and injured 200 with a bomb belt”? People in the Middle East hate this small desert fringe, and they term it “Daesh,” not “Islamic.” They should know.
2. Call the terrorists “Muslim” if you have to characterize them, not “Islamic” or even worse, “Islamics.” There is no such thing as “Islamic” terrorism. The word “Islamic” has to do with the ideals and verities of the religion of Islam, and is analogous to “Judaic.” There are Muslim criminals and Muslim terrorists, just as there are Jewish criminals and Jewish terrorists. But there are no Judaic terrorists, and there aren’t any Islamic ones either. But it is all right just to call them terrorists or cultists.
Howard Fineman:
“Split screen” coverage can vividly illuminate the real story in politics.
On Monday, it highlighted the essential foreign policy conflict between President Barack Obama and his would-be successors. The contrast became even sharper on Tuesday, with the terrorist attacks in Brussels.
From Havana, President Barack Obama has doggedly pursued the idea that helped get him elected: that the best way to assure peace and prosperity is to reach out to one’s “enemies” — in this case, Cuba — and express a willingness to understand them and seek deals on common ground.
The U.S. presidential candidates went in the opposite direction at a gathering Monday before Israel supporters in Washington. They competed to make the toughest “get tough” speech about Iran while assuring supporters of Israel that America would never even consider seeing the world as Arabs and Iranians do.
Willaim J. Astore: A Force Unto Itself
In the decades since the draft ended in 1973, a strange new military has emerged in the United States. Think of it, if you will, as a post-democratic force that prides itself on its warrior ethos rather than the old-fashioned citizen-soldier ideal. As such, it’s a military increasingly divorced from the people, with a way of life ever more foreign to most Americans (adulatory as they may feel toward its troops). Abroad, it’s now regularly put to purposes foreign to any traditional idea of national defense. In Washington, it has become a force unto itself, following its own priorities, pursuing its own agendas, increasingly unaccountable to either the president or Congress.
Three areas highlight the post-democratic transformation of this military with striking clarity: the blending of military professionals with privatized mercenaries in prosecuting unending “limited” wars; the way senior military commanders are cashing in on retirement; and finally the emergence of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as a quasi-missionary imperial force with a presence in at least 135 countries a year (and counting).
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