“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: Obama’s War on Inequality
There were two big economic policy stories this week that you may have missed if you were distracted by Trumpian bombast and the yelling of the Sanders dead-enders. Each tells you a lot about both what President Obama has accomplished and the stakes in this year’s election.
One of those stories, I’m sorry to say, did involve Donald Trump: The presumptive Republican nominee — who has already declared that he will, in fact, slash taxes on the rich, whatever he may have said in the recent past — once again declared his intention to do away with Dodd-Frank, the financial reform passed during Democrats’ brief window of congressional control. Just for the record, while Mr. Trump is sometimes described as a “populist,” almost every substantive policy he has announced would make the rich richer at workers’ expense.
The other story was about a policy change achieved through executive action: The Obama administration issued new guidelines on overtime pay, which will benefit an estimated 12.5 million workers.
What both stories tell us is that the Obama administration has done much more than most people realize to fight extreme economic inequality. That fight will continue if Hillary Clinton wins the election; it will go into sharp reverse if Mr. Trump wins.
Eugene Robinson: Sanders’s scorched-earth campaign is a gift to Trump
Bernie Sanders is playing a dangerous game. If he and his campaign continue their scorched-earth attacks against the Democratic Party, they will succeed in only one thing: electing Donald Trump as president.
I say this as someone who shares much of Sanders’s political philosophy; I, too, for example, see health care as a basic right. He has run a remarkable and historically significant campaign, pulling the party to the left and pumping it full of new progressive vigor. His crowds are almost as big as Trump’s and perhaps even more enthusiastic. Most important, he has brought legions of young people into the political process.
But he hasn’t won the nomination.
Hillary Clinton has an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates, earned by her performance in primaries and caucuses. In the aggregate, she leads Sanders by about 3 million votes. The will of the party is clear: More Democrats prefer Clinton over Sanders as their nominee.
Jessica Valenti: Donald Trump has a bad history with women. Will voters care?
In the strange tale of Donald Trump’s rise to power, it makes sense that women’s votes are thought to be what will stop him from winning the White House. It would be poetic justice: the candidate who speaks about women as objects and animals – the man known for “personally evaluating” pageant contestants and commenting on female employees’ weight – losing with the largest gender gap in voting history.
It’s a nice story, one I quite like. But this hopeful happy ending isn’t a given – and if the general election becomes a referendum on how tolerable Americans find sexism, we may find that the answer doesn’t match the optimistic stories we tell ourselves.
While feminism is wielding more cultural power than it has in decades, women’s gains in the US have historically been followed by periods of backlash. Some voters will see Trump’s comments about women not as mistreatment, but as a refreshing counter to “PC culture” run amok.
Bobby Scott: America’s schools are still segregated by race and class. That has to end
This week marks the 62nd anniversary of the landmark supreme court ruling in Brown v Board of Education, which concluded that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”, and compelled states to provide for educational opportunity that is “available to all on equal terms”.
Thanks in large part to federal intervention in the decades following Brown, students experienced indisputable academic and social benefits inherent to racially and socioeconomically diverse learning environments. A recent report by the Century Foundation affirms that learning in diverse environments improves critical thinking and problem solving. But as time marched on, deliberate government action and meaningful federal oversight fell by the wayside in many communities.
Amanda Marcotte: Disgrace in Oklahoma: Senseless abortion ban is now a poison pill for Gov. Mary Fallin
Thursday, the Oklahoma state senate, without any debate, passed a bill banning abortion outright, by making it a felony and stripping the license of any doctor that performs one. The state house had passed the same bill.
Now it goes to Gov. Mary Fallin’s desk to be signed, putting the governor in an untenable situation of having to either sign a bill that the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional over 40 years ago or offending the hardcore religious right of her state, which refuses to accept secular government. Signing the bill to placate the Bible-thumpers and letting the courts deal with it is not a good option for Fallin, either, as Oklahoma is in budget crisis and doesn’t have the funds to defend a law they know has no chance of being upheld.
The move is a surprising one, not just because it’s such a political poison pill for the Republican governor, putting her in a no-win situation that you’d think her Republican colleagues that dominate the state legislature wouldn’t want to put her in.
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