“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”.
New York Times Editorial Board: Rudy Giuliani’s Racial Myths
For a nation heartsick over the killings of black men by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the ambush murders of officers by a gunman in Dallas, here comes Rudolph Giuliani, bringing his trademark brew of poisonous disinformation to the discussion.
In his view, the problem is black gangs, murderous black children, the refusal of black protesters to look in the mirror at their “racist” selves, and black parents’ failure to teach their children to respect the police. [..]
Mr. Giuliani’s garbled, fictional statistic echoes a common right-wing talking point about the prevalence of “black on black” violence in America. Homicide data do show that black victims are most often killed by black assailants. (They also reveal that whites tend to be killed by whites.) This observation does not speak to the matter of racist policing and police brutality. Killings of the police have, mercifully, been on the decline during the Obama presidency. But unwarranted shootings by police officers remain a persistent problem, ignored for generations, exploding only now into the wider public consciousness because of bystander videos that reveal the blood-red truth.
I have been to the place of Bernie Sanders’ utopian dreams. I have seen social democracy in action. I just completed a vacation in Sweden and Denmark, two countries that achieved an unusual prominence in Democratic primary debates this year.
Obviously you can only learn so much about a country while on vacation, in between sightseeing and binge-eating herring. I spent most of my time in the biggest cities, which don’t necessarily correspond to the typical Nordic experience. But what I took away from brief glimpses of everyday life in Scandinavia is that they exhibit a culture of respect for the dignity of work, which completely drives the policies that facilitate it.
Americans, if they think about Scandinavia at all, tend to focus on the high-tax, high-service social welfare model. And when you’re spending $30 on a shish kebab and rice in central Copenhagen because of the value-added taxes, you can think that way, and naturally conclude that such a setup could never work here, because of the stronger foothold of anti-tax forces.
Amanda Marcotte: War on federal parks: Radicalized Republicans try prevent turning Bears Ears in Utah into a national monument
Most Republican politicians kept their distance when a group of armed militants, under the leadership of the infamous Bundy family, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon earlier this year. But while they didn’t love the optics of the Oregon takeover, it appears that some Republicans do embrace radical opposition to the federal government’s power to protect land from corporate exploitation.
The latest battle over public lands pits Republican congressmen against a coalition of Native American tribes over the status of Bears Ears, an area of southern Utah that encompasses 1.9 million acres of mountainous land that features thousands of sites of archeological interest. {..]
If Obama, using the authority of Teddy Roosevelt’s Antiquities Act of 1906, were to designate the area as a national monument, these lands would be preserved for the use not just of the tribes, but of any Americans who would like to bask in the beauty or explore the archeological wonders of the area.
It seems like a straightforward proposal, but the tribes are running up against a newly radicalized Republican party that, under pressure from groups like American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Americans for Prosperity (AFP), has decided to start quietly dismantling the system of federal land protections, with an eye towards turning America The Beautiful into America The Strip-Mined.
Richard North Paterson: The GOP Reaps The Whirlwind: Racism, Nativism, Xenophobia — And Donald Trump
The warning comes from the Hebrew book of Hosea: “Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.”
So it is with the Republican Party and Donald Trump.
True, Trump personifies a fear and hatred of “the other” embodied by some of our history’s more frightening and despicable figures: Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace. This has led to some of our most shameful chapters — lynchings, anti-immigrant violence, the internment of Japanese-Americans. Because such tragedies are so searing, we view them as unique.
But they do not arise from nowhere. Nor did Donald Trump. Those who are shocked by his success have given scant notice to the darker forces which stain our society and roil our politics. Or, more likely, they pretended not to notice.
Most deplorably, the Republican Party.
The terrible tragedies of last week have muted, for all too brief a moment, the racial politics which suffuse the Trump campaign. But they are there, and will persist. So there will never be a better time than now to examine how the Trump became the Republican nominee.
Richard Eskow: Don’t Stop the Revolution: The Sanders Movement After Orlando
Bernie Sanders’ “political revolution” scored some impressive wins this weekend at the Democratic Party Platform Committee meeting in Orlando, adding to its victories last month in St. Louis. ABC News called the resulting document “exceptionally progressive.”
Apparently Sanders had more leverage after the California primary than his critics were willing to admit.
To be sure, there were also some losses – most notably on getting the party on record opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. But this new movement has already had a major impact on American politics. It’s likely to have even more in the months and years to come.
Paul Buccheit: How the Super-Rich Will Destroy Themselves
Perhaps they believe that their underground survival bunkers with bullet-resistant doors and geothermal power and anti-chemical air filters and infrared surveillance devices and pepper spray detonators will sustain them for two or three generations.
Perhaps they feel immune from the killings in the streets, for they rarely venture into the streets anymore. They don’t care about the great masses of ordinary people, nor do they think they need us.
Or do they? There are a number of ways that the super-rich, because of their greed and lack of empathy for others, may be hastening their own demise, while taking the rest of us with them.
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