Traveling, so expect a light blogging day.
“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”.
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Jill Abramson: Hillary Clinton’s best riposte to Trump? Radical transparency
Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump has been going well. What isn’t going so well is her attempt to convince Americans that they have reasons to want her in the White House beyond Trump’s odiousness and unsuitability for office.
Her terrible ratings on trustworthiness have persisted. I have written before that she is fundamentally honest and does not deserve such high disapproval ratings. Every so-called scandal that has enveloped her has been wildly overblown. The recent FBI report on her emails ratified my original judgment. Still, it’s clear that most voters, including some loyal Democrats, don’t share my assessment. At a time when she should be pulling way ahead of Trump. [..]
The time has come to do something daring to try to restore trust. It goes against every fibre of her nature, but Clinton should now become radically transparent.
Jill Richardson: The Bacteria on Your Skin Are Safer Than These Two Chemicals the FDA Just Banned From Your Soap
Some people love to hate government regulations. Many believe they’re just bureaucratic barriers that waste our time. But the Food and Drug Administration just passed a new regulation that’ll actually protect us, and may save you a few bucks and an unnecessary purchase at the store.
If you’re one of the millions of Americans who buys antibacterial soaps, you’ve been, at a minimum, duped. But more importantly, you’ve been exposed to harmful chemicals.
Antibacterial soaps sound good. After all, no one wants to imagine their hands teeming with bacteria.
We are utterly covered in microorganisms. That idea grosses us out, and some of that bacteria can make us sick. Kill them all, we think.
But in reality, we couldn’t survive without beneficial bacteria, some of which help protect our immune system. And antibacterial soaps are no better at preventing disease than regular soap and water.
If you’ve ever purchased soap based on its deadliness to bacteria, you’re a victim of false advertising. But it’s not as benign as that.
Jim Hightower: Dear media elites, No, Trump is not a populist
Being a muckracking political writer often makes me feel like a custodian in a horse barn, constantly shoveling manure. It’s a messy, stinky job — but on the bright side, the stuff is plentiful, so the work is steady. Indeed, I’m now a certified equine excrement engineer, having developed a narrow but important professional specialty: cleaning off the horse stuff that careless politicos and sloppy media types keep dumping on the word “populist.”
As you might imagine, in this year of global turmoil, I’ve been especially busy. Populism — a luminous term denoting both an uplifting doctrine of egalitarianism and a political-economic-cultural movement with deep roots in America’s progressive history — has been routinely sullied throughout 2016 by elites misusing it as synonym for ignorance and bigotry:
When right-wing, anti-Muslim mobs in a few European nations literally went to their national borders to block desperate Syrian war refugees from getting safe passing into Europe, most mainline media labeled the boisterous reactionaries “populists.” [..]
When in the United States, the unreal reality show “The Donald” spooked representatives of the corporate and political establishment, which denied that Trump harnessed public fury toward them, smugly attributed his rise solely to “populist” bumpkins who embraced his demeaning attacks on women, Mexicans, Muslims, union members, immigrants, people with disabilities and veterans, among others. Indeed, the power elites sneeringly branded Trump himself a “populist.”
Excuse me, but if that bilious billionaire blowhard is a populist, then I’m a contender in his Miss Universe contest.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: This election’s faith-based candidate
This is the inversion election, a contest in which so many of our familiar mental categories have been turned upside down.
This year, it’s the Republican presidential candidate who says the United States isn’t great anymore and the Democrat who insists it is. The Republican says that the former KGB agent presiding over Russia is a better leader than the president of the United States. The Democrat condemns him for it.
But last week reminded us that there is another role reversal in this election. There is one candidate who is authentically religious, who has thought seriously about what the Scriptures teach, and whose own view of the world was changed radically by her engagement with faith. Her name is Hillary Clinton.
Yes, I flinched when I typed that word “authentically.” How can we know whose faith is authentic or truly understand someone else’s relationship to God? It’s hard enough for most of us to come to terms honestly with our own relationship to the Almighty.
Richard Wolffe: Hillary had a terrible weekend. The alternative is still far, far worse
This should not be news. But in today’s febrile world of Twitter-fed headlines, it bears repeating: there are two old people running for president.
One is a 68-year-old woman whose legs gave way in the late summer heat on Sunday. Hillary Clinton has also coughed a few times on camera. Both events have taken on cosmic significance in this otherwise sedate and stately presidential contest.
Four years ago, Clinton fainted and banged her head while sick with a stomach virus. Her doctor detailed last year the handful of pills she takes regularly: for her allergies, thyroid, and blood thinning. These facts have driven the conservative media into the kind of hysteria that requires its own medical attention.
If American voters (or journalists) still expect their candidates to be – in the words of a popular musical – young, scrappy and hungry, they have not been paying attention. The primaries have left us with two nominees who are rather geriatric, stiff and well-fed.
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