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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Washington Post Editorial Board: Donald Trump, scam artist

The Trump campaign believes this editorial is not journalism. It is “badgering.” That is how campaign manager Kellyanne Conway described on Tuesday some simple questions The Post and others have asked Mr. Trump and his circle over the past several months about his supposed philanthropic activities. If anyone has an authenticity problem, it is Mr. Trump. The facts on the table suggest he is not a great philanthropist — he is a scam artist.

Mr. Trump has cultivated the persona of a generous man, repeatedly claiming on television he would donate to charity “out of my wallet” and accepting honors from groups he appeared to support. In fact, an exhaustive investigation by Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold shows that Mr. Trump retooled his foundation about a decade ago to act as an intermediary for other people’s charitable giving, a racket from which Mr. Trump gained in reputation and from which he may even have occasionally profited. [..]

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) announced Tuesday that he is investigating the Trump Foundation. There is a movement to persuade the Justice Department to do so as well. Yet the potential violations of the law seem to be less significant than what Mr. Trump appears to have done legally: duped people into believing in another one of his self-aggrandizing shams.

Garrison Keillor: Hillary Clinton’s concrete shoes

I saw Hillary Clinton once working a rope line for more than an hour, a Secret Service man holding her firmly by the hips as she leaned over the rope and reached into the mass of arms and hands reaching out to her. She had learned the art of encountering the crowd and making it look personal. It was not glamorous work, more like picking fruit, and it took the sort of discipline your mother instills in you: Those people waited to see you, so by gosh you can treat them right.

So it’s no surprise she pushed herself to the point of collapse the other day. What’s odd is the perspective, expressed in several articles, that her determination to keep going reveals a “lack of transparency” — that she should have announced she had pneumonia and gone home and crawled into bed. [..]

Extremism has poked its head into the mainstream, aided by the Internet. Back in the day, you occasionally saw cranks on a street corner handing out mimeographed handbills arguing that FDR was responsible for Pearl Harbor, but you saw their bad haircuts, the bitterness in their eyes, and you turned away. Now they’re in your computer, whispering that the economy is on the verge of collapse and for a few bucks they’ll tell you how to protect your savings. But lacking clear evidence, we proceed forward. We don’t operate on the basis of lurid conjecture.

Someday, historians will get this right and look back at the steady pitter-pat of scandals that turned out to be nothing, nada, zero and ixnay and will conclude that, almost a century after women’s suffrage, almost 45 years after Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law, a woman was required to run for office wearing concrete shoes. Check back 45 years from now and if I’m wrong, go ahead and dance on my grave.

Carmen Martin: Trump’s childcare plan is good for the rich. But what about the rest of us?

After decades of dismissing issues impacting working families, Donald Trump is scrambling to win over women voters with a child care plan announced on Tuesday. While Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton released her child care proposal months ago, Trump has put a new coat of paint on the same tired policies that prioritize wealthy people like himself at the expense of working families.

Trump’s plan is mainly a tax deduction, which would allow parents to deduct the average price of child care from their taxes. Even with the other new bells and whistles included in Trump’s plan – such as income caps, rebates and savings accounts – Trump’s proposal will innately benefit the people who need the least help covering child care expenses, while lower income and middle class families are left behind. [..]

In stark contrast to Donald Trump’s childcare plan is that put forth by his opponent Hillary Clinton, which zeros in on the issue of affordability. Clinton’s plan aims to ease the financial strain of childcare for all families by capping costs at 10% of household income, while also increasing wages for childcare providers. Her plan – which has been publicly available for a year and was formally announced at a campaign event in May – prioritizes families that need the most help and would in fact make childcare more affordable. Clinton also prioritizes improving childcare quality with a plan to address chronically low wages and training for childcare providers.

E. J. Dionne: Obama asks the right question on Trump: ‘Huh?’

Even Donald Trump is capable of posing interesting questions, and he asked one of this election’s most important when he declared: “What the hell do you have to lose?”

He was specifically addressing his query to African Americans, but it’s something all Americans should think about. And the latest report on incomes released Tuesday by the Census Bureau suggests that the vast majority of Americans, including African Americans, have a great deal to lose if the progress the country has made since we began our recovery from the Great Recession is endangered by a candidate whose policies are, depending on the day, quite radical, entirely unpredictable or simply incoherent. [..]

This campaign has been one large collection of diversions and sweeping claims about the country, in Trump’s words, being “a hellhole, and we’re going down fast.”

Actually, we’re neither a “hellhole,” nor are we “going down fast.” On the contrary, the good statisticians of the Census Bureau have painted an accurate picture of a nation that is getting better but still has more work to do. Should blue-collar voters risk blowing the gains by taking a flyer on Trump? Obama had something useful to say about this on Tuesday: “He spent most of his life trying to stay as far away from working people as he could. And now this guy is going to be the champion of working people? Huh?”

That “Huh?” may be the most eloquent word spoken about Trump all year.

Heather Digby Parton: The general of gossip: Colin Powell’s leaked emails depict a juvenile busybody rather than an elder statesman

For instance, his old friends the Cheneys were probably upset to read what Colin really thinks about them:

“[The Cheneys] are idiots and spent force peddling a book that ain’t going nowhere.”

Meow. And this about Cheney, Rumsfeld and his old boss George H. W. Bush:

“One day when we both have had too many drinks we can discuss why [President George W. Bush] tolerated [Donald Rumsfeld] and why Dick [Cheney], a successful SecDef, was so committed to Don. I must say I gagged as [President George H.W. Bush] praised him as the ‘best’ at the statuary hall unveiling.”

Gag him with a spoon.

And that Hillary Clinton is such a total screw up: [..]

Unfortunately, last week members of congress released an email that was among those requested from the state department which showed that he did tell her  how he used personal email to circumvent the rules so they wouldn’t be subject to Freedom of Information requests. Ooopsie.

Colin Powell has a long history of being in the middle of scandals and wriggling out of any responsibility for them. From his involvement in the My Lai massacre, to Iran Contra, to personally blocking President Bill Clinton’s promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military, to his infamous testimony before the UN that led to the Iraq war, Powell’s fingerprints are on the wrong side of history and the truth time and again and he’s always got some excuse as to why it wasn’t his fault. Clinton should be overjoyed that this mean cheerleader isn’t rooting for her team.