“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.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter
New York Times Editorial Board; The Struggle to Vote in Kansas
The right to vote is turning into a tooth-and-claw saga in Kansas, thanks to right-wing ideologues’ determination to force new voters to produce a passport, a birth certificate or naturalization papers as proof of citizenship.
This is unheard-of in most of the nation, where aspiring voters are required only to swear to being citizens under penalty of prosecution for fraud. But in Kansas, the requirement that citizenship be documented has become a grave electoral impediment that is being challenged on two legal fronts. [..]
Use of the form for such a state purpose had been rejected by the Election Assistance Commission, a four-member panel created by Congress to make voting easier after the chaos of the 2000 election. But Brian Newby, a Kansas Republican and the commission’s newly appointed executive director, took it upon himself this year to authorize the use of the proof-of-citizenship hurdle for state elections in Kansas, Georgia and Alabama. Mr. Newby, a close ally of Mr. Kobach’s, did so without a vote by commission members or a public hearing.
Paul Krugman: Trump, Trade and Workers
Donald Trump gave a speech on economic policy last week. Just about every factual assertion he made was wrong, but I’m not going to do a line-by-line critique. What I want to do, instead, is talk about the general thrust: the candidate’s claim to be on the side of American workers.
Of course, that’s what they all say. But Trumponomics goes beyond the usual Republican assertions that cutting taxes on corporations and the rich, ending environmental regulation and so on will conjure up the magic of the marketplace and make everyone prosper. It also involves posing as a populist, claiming that getting tough on foreigners and ripping up our trade agreements will bring back the well-paying jobs America has lost.
That’s a departure, although not as much as you may think — people forget that Mitt Romney similarly threatened a trade war with China during the 2012 campaign. Still, it was interesting to see a Republican presidential candidate name-check not just Bernie Sanders but the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which has long been critical of globalization.
But the institute is having none of it: Lawrence Mishel, the think tank’s president, put out a derisive reply to what he called the “Trump trade scam.” His point was that even if you think, as he does, that trade agreements have hurt American workers, they’re only part of a much broader set of anti-labor policies. And on everything else, Donald Trump is very much on the wrong side of the issues.
Dean Baker: Bill Gates Could Fund Huge XPrize To End Austerity in Europe
Unfortunately that’s not true. After all, we don’t expect our multi-billionaire types to be that innovative. But if Gates really did want to help the world, it’s hard to envision a better use of $1 billion or so of his money than to post this sort of prize, especially at a time when needless austerity is threatening the survival of the European Union.
In case folks haven’t been following it, the basic story is that the insistence on balanced budgets or low deficits in Europe is costing the continent over $1 trillion a year in lost output (over $2,000 per person). Rather than spending money on improving infrastructure, education, health care, and expanding the use of clean energy, the euro zone countries have been cutting back spending with the idea of getting their budgets closer to balance and lowering their debt-to-GDP ratios. These policies have also prevented millions of people across the continent from getting jobs.
The pain being experienced by workers across Europe is undoubtedly a factor in their hostility to immigrants and their turn to right-wing populist politicians. Also the deterioration of public services, like national health care systems, due to needless budget cuts has played an important role in this backlash as well. It is easy for right-wing politicians to blame immigrants for the deterioration in these services even if the real problem is that their government has reduced spending levels. After all, none of the mainstream politicians are making this point.
Richard North Patterson: Kidnapped By A Narcissist: The GOP’s Stockholm Syndrome
It is two months since Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, promising us a “Trump” who would now be “presidential.”
So let’s take inventory of the improvements. [..]
Among GOP professionals, the light slowly dawned. The man who thrived in the hothouse of disinformation and resentment peculiar to Republican primaries was, ineluctably, a one — trick narcissist who has no second act.
Faced with their concerns, Trump told them to get over it. “Don’t talk,” he said of party leaders. “Please be quiet. [B]ecause they have to get tougher… they have to get smarter, and we have to have Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself.”
But left to his own devices, Trump has the self – destructive self – involvement common to malignant narcissists. He refuses to learn; or to bone up on policy; or to listen to advice; or, in general, to do anything which suggests a sense of obligation to his party — let alone the country.
Michael Winship: Republicans want a do-over: The GOP finds itself trapped in the date from hell
Republicans, we know what you’re going through.
Many of us have been in this kind of relationship before: You meet someone new and he or she seems different, exciting, rebellious, maybe even a little dangerous. You get involved. Your friends say, “What do you see in him/her?” And you reply, “Oh, you just don’t know him/her like I do.”
But as the weeks and months go by, you start to realize he/she isn’t just a little dangerous. He/she is a menace. Time to re-evaluate.[..]
As the great Charlie Pierce recently wrote at Esquire, “Our politics are not supposed to be vulnerable to this kind of abject farce.” But here you are, GOP, stuck in a dead-end relationship with someone who, when all is said and done, may prove to be the very thing that Trump himself so loves to call other people: a loser. You brought it upon yourself through decades of encouraging rage and ignorance, ignoring the realities of economic inequality and social injustice and creating a government and politics of dysfunctional inertia.
And you wonder why you can’t meet a decent guy for once.
Recent Comments