Pondering the Pundits

“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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New York Times EDitorial Board: Donald Trump’s Alt-Right Brain

Donald Trump has devoted most of the past two weeks to discussing immigration, even though only 8 percent of Americans rank it as “the most important problem facing this country today,” according to a recent Gallup poll.

But within that thin slice of the electorate reside Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters, the “alternative right,” or alt-right. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the alt-right “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.” Most Americans hadn’t heard about the alt-right until this election, and some not until last month, when Hillary Clinton gave a speech in Reno, Nev., linking Donald Trump to it. [..]

There aren’t enough of these people to put Mr. Trump in the White House. But his candidacy has granted them the legitimacy they have craved for years. For the first time, a candidate is using a major-party megaphone to shout the ideas they once could only mutter among themselves in the shadowy fringes of national debate.

Heather Digby Parton: Press, lies and Hillary’s campaign: Years of smears have created a fictional version of Clinton. They’re also a disservice to voters.

Chris Cillizza ✔ @TheFix

This election is about voters choosing the least worst candidate. That’s where we are in our politics.

11:43 AM – 4 Sep 2016

That tweet from Chris Cilizza of The Washington Post’s The Fix blog is cleverly framed to be about the voters’ view of this campaign. Both candidates do have high unfavorable ratings among the public (as does the congress and pretty much every other institution, including the press.) However, that jaded comment by a member of the media illustrates something  important. Some members of the press are not just commenting on a reality, they are pushing the theme of two equally unpalatable candidates and it just isn’t true.

The main problem for Clinton is that people think she is a congenital liar. When asked what it is she lied about most people can’t point to anything specific they just know she’s  dishonest and corrupt. The fact that she’s been dogged by political enemies and investigated by special prosecutors, the media and the congress with unlimited budgets and every possible means of getting to the truth and has been exonerated doesn’t seem to register. Indeed, the fact-checkers all find her to be more honest than virtually anyone in politics while Donald Trump, by contrast, lies more than he tells the truth.

Robert Reich: The reality of free trade deals — they don’t benefit all

Free trade is figuring prominently in the upcoming presidential election. Donald Trump is against it. Hillary Clinton has expressed qualms.

Economists still think free trade benefits most Americans, but according to polls, only 35 percent of voters agree.

Why this discrepancy?

Because economists support any policy that improves efficiency and they typically define a policy as efficient if the people who benefit from it could compensate those who lose from it and still come out ahead.

But this way of looking at things leaves out three big realities.

Ben Railton: Standing Rock And The Forgotten History Of Native American Activism

For the last few months, members of North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux tribe and allies from numerous other Native American tribes have protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a multi-billion dollar oil pipeline that would span four Western states and affect native communities and land in many ways. The community of protesters represents the largest gathering of Native Americans in more than a century, yet it has been largely ignored by the mainstream American media. (The protest’s significant social media presence might make it seem to some of us as if it’s receiving such attention, but outside of that bubble of insiders there has been shockingly little national coverage.)

The absence of Standing Rock from our collective conversations is troubling on its own terms, as this is a huge and compelling American story. It’s also a story that links to many other significant issues: from debates over energy policy to the movement against police brutality, the history of Native American sovereignty and land rights to 21st century social media and hashtag activism.

Richard North Patterson: Trump 3.0: Pivoting In Quicksand

As most Americans enjoyed Labor Day, Donald Trump found himself staring into the political abyss.

Imagine his surprise and disappointment. The new Donald was pivoting! He had a message — Hillary Clinton is bad. His new campaign manager gave him new words to read from a Teleprompter. He was the candidate of change — any change. He was reaching out to black people to impress white people. He might even allow a few undocumented immigrants to linger — though maybe not. And after 14 months of lying, some polls even said that he was still more “trusted”than Clinton — though not so much.

Why am I still behind, Trump must wonder, when those emails are sticking to Hillary’s shoes like chewing gum. Sometimes she even stepped in it herself. What did she think Colin Powell was going to say — that he begged her to use a private server? And so what if none of the emails actually show political corruption? Millions of Americans believed him when he called the Clinton Foundation “the most corrupt enterprise in political history” — especially the ones who have never heard of Richard Nixon. And who the hell cares about Caligula — whoever he was.