“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: Black Lead Matters
Donald Trump is still claiming that “inner-city crime is reaching record levels,” promising to save African-Americans from the “slaughter.” In fact, this urban apocalypse is a figment of his imagination; urban crime is actually at historically low levels. But he’s not the kind of guy to care about another “Pants on Fire” verdict from PolitiFact.
Yet some things are, of course, far from fine in our cities, and there is a lot we should be doing to help black communities. We could, for example, stop pumping lead into their children’s blood.
You may think that I’m talking about the water crisis in Flint, Mich., which justifiably caused national outrage early this year, only to fade from the headlines. But Flint was just an extreme example of a much bigger problem. And it’s a problem that should be part of our political debate: Like it or not, poisoning kids is a partisan issue.
Amanda MarcotteLaws that hurt women: Dangerous anti-choice policies in Texas and Ohio may have damaged women’s health
For more than a decade, opponents of reproductive rights have cited a need to protect women’s health to justify their attacks on abortion clinics and reproductive health centers like Planned Parenthood. For years, anti-choicers have been passing medically unnecessary legislative restrictions on abortion clinics and attacking funding for Planned Parenthood, and claiming to do so to protect women from abortion, despite the fact that abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth
This summer the Supreme Court rejected this argument, overturning a series of abortion restrictions in Texas on the grounds that the state had done nothing to show that these regulations improved the quality of women’s health care. But now research in two states — Texas and Ohio — has gone a step further, showing that anti-choice regulations have caused substantial harm to women’s health care, raising the rates of complications. These stricter rules may even be related to a surge in maternal mortality.
Lucia Graves: Trump’s immigration code-switching wasn’t skillful – it was disingenuous
Tony Schwartz, author of Donald Trump’s myth-making book, The Art of the Deal, recently told the New Yorker that it took him a while to settle on the right euphemism for Trump’s willingness to ignore truth.
“I play to people’s fantasies,” wrote Schwartz in his channeling of Trump. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and it’s a very effective form of promotion.” [..]
Speaking on NBC’s Today show on Thursday morning, Hillary Clinton’s veep pick Tim Kaine knocked Trump’s performance as “amateur”, saying: “You can’t say different things to different audiences.” It’s an interesting knock coming from Kaine, who’s known for speaking differently to different audiences, sometimes speaking in English, other times in his dad-like Spanish.
A fundamental difference: Kaine changes how he talks but not the substance of what he promises.
Tweaking how you talk depending on the audience – code switching – is actually the sign of a good listener, an empathetic human being and, very often, a skilled politician. But it can be difficult for politicians to walk the line between authenticity and connecting with different populations.
Mark Bittman: G.M.O. Labeling Law Could Stir a Revolution
Big food and its allies spent roughly $100 million to counter the movement to force the labeling of foods produced with genetically modified organisms. And one could argue that they were successful: President Obama recently signed the weakest labeling law imaginable, and to most of the food movement, this felt like a loss.
But to be optimistic, perhaps rashly so, to me the law looks like a victory wrapped inside a defeat.
The new law mandates that the Department of Agriculture define what constitutes a genetically modified food ingredient and then requires food manufacturers to label products that contain them. Disappointment among labeling proponents stems from the latitude the law gives food companies in how this labeling is done. [..]
At first glance, it seems like another tacit agreement between government and industry to rob consumers of our right to know what’s in our food.
But what if this backfires? What if the food industry has inadvertently opened the door to a transparency revolution? Could the acknowledgment implicit in the new law, that we should know what goes into making our food, be the thin end of the wedge? Has the argument that food production processes are as important as ingredients begun to make sense to policy makers?
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