“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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David Dayen: A crisis we can solve: Denying health care to undocumented immigrants is immoral, unjust and un-American
Two Latino men are stricken with similar gunshot wounds by the shooter at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Both are rushed to local emergency rooms and treated for their injuries. Both require additional physical therapy, rehabilitation, mental counseling, and perhaps additional surgeries to be restored to full health.
Both make the same amount of money, but only one can afford the additional mcedical bills after the tragedy. That’s because one of the Latino men had health insurance coverage, and one doesn’t. The man with coverage is considered a U.S. citizen, and the man who doesn’t is an undocumented immigrant. And that fact sets them on two different courses as a result of Omar Mateen’s hail of bullets.
This is the current law of the land in 49 states. Undocumented immigrants cannot access health insurance coverage on the Obamacare exchanges, even if they can pay for it entirely with their own money. They can purchase directly through an insurance carrier, but with the advent of Obamacare those options have dried up and become more expensive. There aren’t many forms of discrimination left against particular classes of people for purchasing goods and services. You can’t stop someone from eating at a lunch counter or drinking from a water fountain. But you can stop someone from buying health insurance coverage to afford medical care, simply because of where they were born.
Trevor Timm: If Omar Mateen were white, we’d have a different Orlando shooting narrative
In the wake of the deplorable mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub on Saturday – and the deranged shooter’s tenuous connection to Isis – “national security” is about to take on a renewed focus in the presidential race. But the existential threat to Americans is not some fanatical and nihilistic death cult halfway around the world: it’s the fact that unstable individuals of all stripes continue to have easy access to assault weapons right here in the US.[..]
When the killer in these types of mass shootings is white, as the vast majority of them are, Republicans are happy to discount their extreme conservative political views as the ravings of a madman. Yet when a probably unstable American shouts “Isis”, that discussion halts and it’s immediately considered an act of war.
Really, mass shootings have always been a form of “terrorism”, we just don’t call it that because the perpetrators do not usually have a Muslim-sounding name. No matter the particularly hateful motive – whether its purported support for a terrorist organization, hatred of gay people, racism or a fanatical hostility towards abortion rights – there’s one thread that connects many of these shootings: easy access to guns that facilitate killing lots of people at once.
Chelsea E. Manning: We must not let the Orlando nightclub terror further strangle our civil liberties
This morning, I woke up in my cell to an even more shattered and fractured world. We are lost. We are devastated. We are bewildered. We are hurt. And we are angry. I haven’t been this angry since losing a soldier in my unit to an RPG attack in southeastern Baghdad during my deployment in Iraq in 2010.
As a young queer kid growing up, I explored my identity through the Chicago and Washington DC club scene. As many have said, the club is our sanctuary – a place where we find ourselves, love ourselves and find community. I can totally relate to the trauma that has afflicted our community in the wake of the shooting in Orlando.
We must grieve and mourn and support each other, but in our grief and outrage we must resist any temptations to let this attack – or any attack – trigger anti-Muslim foreign policy, attacks on our civil liberties or as an excuse to descend into xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Lucia Graves: The election isn’t just a vote. America’s very soul is in the balance
Barack Obama didn’t need to give a speech on the Orlando shooting Tuesday, having already addressed it in solemn voice the day before. But following a meeting with his national security team on the state of our country’s fight against Islamic State, he found he had something important to say.
He was haunted by an ugliness – not overseas, but right here in America – that’s beginning to rear its head once again. It’s a darkness embodied not just in the horrific attack in Orlando on Sunday, which left 50 dead and 53 wounded, but more by how we as a society respond, and even who we become in its aftermath. [..]
We are at a crossroads in this election, and the choices before us have perhaps never been more stark than they are today. Obama is right to be worried: it’s not just our safety that’s in question, but our country’s heart and soul.
After all, we’ve seen this before from America. We saw it in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when Muslims around the country were unfairly victimized and scapegoated for years. And we remembered it when authors like Alia Malek chronicled the stories of how Arab Americans were wronged. She did it so we would remember what not to do, and who not to be, and what doesn’t help us as a nation recovering from loss.
But we are seeing it all over again anyway.
Dana Milbank: The right response to Donald Trump? A media blackout.
Donald Trump’s ban of Post journalists has left other news outlets with a stark choice: your ratings or your responsibility as journalists in a free society?
Trump’s announcement that he is barring Post journalists from his events follows similar bans he put on reporters from Politico, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Gawker, Foreign Policy, Fusion, Univision, Mother Jones, the New Hampshire Union Leader, the Des Moines Register and the Daily Beast. Trump goons have been known to kick out undesirable reporters at Trump events. [..]
This goes beyond even Nixonian hostility. Before Trump events, all journalists — blacklisted or not — must apply for permission to attend. They are then notified if their applications have been approved.
But there is, happily, a just and appropriate response to Trump’s blacklist: a Trump blackout.
I don’t mean an outright ban of Trump coverage. That would be shirking our civic responsibility. But I suggest an end to the uncritical, free publicity that propelled him to the GOP nomination in the first place:
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