“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”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Kieth Olberman; The Electoral College has Affirmed Donald Trump What Now – The Resistance
By overwhelming majorities, Americans would prefer to elect the president by direct popular vote, not filtered through the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College. They understand, on a gut level, the basic fairness of awarding the nation’s highest office on the same basis as every other elected office — to the person who gets the most votes.
But for now, the presidency is still decided by 538 electors. And on Monday, despite much talk in recent weeks about urging those electors to block Donald Trump from the White House, a majority did as expected and cast their ballots for him — a result Congress will ratify next month.
And so for the second time in 16 years, the candidate who lost the popular vote has won the presidency. Unlike 2000, it wasn’t even close. Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump by more than 2.8 million votes, or 2.1 percent of the electorate. That’s a wider margin than 10 winning candidates enjoyed and the biggest deficit for an incoming president since the 19th century.
Yes, Mr. Trump won under the rules, but the rules should change so that a presidential election reflects the will of Americans and promotes a more participatory democracy.
Francine Prose: Truth is evaporating before our eyes
Given how little content the 2016 presidential debates contained, how rarely specific policies or programs were outlined or even mentioned, it often seemed that the only thing left for journalists – and ordinary citizens – to do was tally the number of lies each candidate told.
By some counts, Donald Trump told a lie every few minutes; Hillary Clinton’s distortions appear to have been fewer and less blatant. And when the bigger liar won the election, one conclusion to be drawn was that, for millions of Americans, honesty was not nearly so important as we might have wished or assumed. If we factor in the popular assumption that all politicians lie, perhaps all that mattered was what they lied about.
Who cared if Trump denied sexually harassing women when he was so boldly telling the truth about the fear, rage, racism, xenophobia and misogyny that many of his supporters felt but had hesitated to voice?
Richard Wolffw: American democracy is being derailed. Can faith be restored?
Now that the electoral college has formally selected the next president of the United States, it’s worth taking a deep breath and asking: what kind of democracy do we live in?
The will of the people ought to be clear after an election. But as 2016 draws to a close, there are deeply troubling signs that American democracy – after 227 years of seeking a more perfect union – has left the rails.
It turns out it’s possible to win the governorship in North Carolina but find the job is stripped of power before you’re sworn into office.
And across the nation, we abide by the archaic rules of an electoral college that has all but renounced its first responsibility: to elect someone fit to be president.
The Founders may have wanted to prevent demagogues from taking power, but party hacks ignored all that original intent. It makes you wonder why the candidates and voters abide by the rules of a game that nobody is interested in playing.
Heather Digby Parton: Donald Trump’s goon squad: As president, Trump will maintain private security force to crack down on protest
On Monday, Politico reported the startling fact that in addition to his Secret Service protection, Donald Trump employs his own private security and intelligence service and plans to continue to do so as president. This is unprecedented. Presidents already have the most sophisticated protective shield of any human on earth and none has ever employed his own before. If the Politico article is correct, Trump’s private security has not been trained for this kind of work, and may actually make Trump less safe than if they were not there at all. All this raises the question of why he insists on having them around. [..]
As Robert Reich observed in Newsweek, this is one of the ways Trump disseminates propaganda (such as insisting that he won in a landslide). One can easily imagine him telling his crowds that the CIA is plotting against him or that authoritarian policies are necessary to fight whatever enemies he decides are keeping America from being great again.
Trump is only appearing before friendly crowds, many of whom have been to Trump rallies before and consider themselves part of his “movement.” Rather than using the opportunity to wind down the hostilities as one might expect a new president with a very shaky mandate to do, he’s winding them up.
This is where his private security force comes in. Their specialty seems to be bringing the hammer down on dissent. Where the Secret Service concentrates on keeping the president safe, these “special bodyguards” concentrate on protesters.
Recent Comments