“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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Dean Baker: Can’t We Kill the Deficit Hawk Industry?
Yes, I know Peter Peterson is a major source of employment in Washington and that the Washington Post editors and many pundits would have to look for substantive issues to talk about if they couldn’t whine about the debt, but really it is time for these folks to grow up. The immediate provocation here is Steven Rattner’s NYT column giving “2016 in Charts.”
Most of the charts are actually quite interesting and useful, but then he ends the piece with a tirade about the prospects for the national debt under a Trump administration. Rattner warns:
“These huge tax giveaways — along with Mr. Trump’s promises to increase infrastructure spending and not touch Social Security and Medicare — would blow up the deficit and add $4 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years over and above current projections.”
Just to be clear, there is no reason to be giving more money to Donald Trump’s billionaire friends as he proposes, but the argument is not that it will “blow up” the deficit and add to the debt. The argument is that this money could be much better used educating our children, improving our infrastructure, and making health care affordable, among other things.
Jesse Jackson: Civil Rights at Risk Under Jeff Sessions
Confirmation hearings for Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, named by Donald Trump to be attorney general of the United States, will begin on Jan. 10, before Trump is even inaugurated. The rush and insistence on only two days of hearings reflect Republican efforts to cram the nomination through before Americans understand what is at stake.
Sessions will, no doubt, present himself as a humble, genial and reasonable public servant. In reality, Sessions is an outlier, an unimaginable nominee as attorney general, an implacable opponent of the very rights and liberties that the attorney general is supposed to defend. As more than 200 civil rights, human rights and women’s groups noted in a unified statement: “Sen. Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law and hostility to the protection of civil rights that makes him unfit to serve as the attorney general of the United States.”
Three decades ago, a Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee rejected Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Sessions to a federal judgeship. It deemed him unfit for the bench due to his repeated racially biased remarks, his intemperate dismissal of the ACLU and the NAACP as “un-American,” and his open opposition to the Voting Rights Act, which he scorned as “intrusive.” Republicans agreed that no person with such extreme views should adjudicate the laws that he clearly disdained. That was then. Now Donald Trump and Sen. Charles “Chuck” Grassley, R-Iowa, are intent on putting Sessions in charge of enforcing those very laws.
Charles M. Blow: The Anti-Inauguration
The inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States is just two weeks away, so now is the time to begin making plans to send him the strongest possible signal that your opposition to the presidency he has foreshadowed will not be pouting and passive, but active and animated.
Now is the time to begin making your plans for the anti-inauguration.
Exclaiming your resistance, while necessary, is insufficient. Resistance is a negative position. While negativity in the face of this menace is justified and admirable, negativity alone is a fractional response. As with most things in a fully articulated life, balance is required. You need to augment your outrage with actions that are affirming, behaviors that reinforce principles and values.
When politics seem out of your control, remember that community and culture are very much in your control. We help shape the world we inhabit every day. A life is a collection of thousands of decisions, large and small, made every day. Make those decisions with purpose and conviction, especially for Jan. 20.
Drew Altman: The Health Care Plan Trump Voters Really Want
This week Republicans in Congress began their effort to repeal and potentially replace the Affordable Care Act. But after listening to working-class supporters of Donald J. Trump — people who are enrolled in the very health care marketplaces created by the law — one comes away feeling that the Washington debate is sadly disconnected from the concerns of working people.
Those voters have been disappointed by Obamacare, but they could be even more disappointed by Republican alternatives to replace it. They have no strong ideological views about repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, or future directions for health policy. What they want are pragmatic solutions to their insurance problems. The very last thing they want is higher out-of-pocket costs.
Jessica Valenti: America: don’t be polite in the face of demagoguery
When my father was a young man in Queens, New York, he was friendly with an older man – a neighborhood fixture who sat in a chair in front of my family’s laundromat so he could chat with passersby. One day, this man’s adult children pressured him into putting his apartment under their names; they kicked him out soon after.
Although they in effect swindled their father out of his home, his children weren’t able to stay there long: people spat at them as they walked down the street, neighbors cursed them, local grocers refused to sell them food.
This public shaming didn’t undo the damage they wrought on their father, of course, but it did send a clear message about what the community found unacceptable.
As Americans continue to grapple with Donald Trump’s presidential win, it’s a lesson we need to remember more than ever: there’s nothing wrong with shaming people who have done shameful things. And there are few things more shameful than supporting a fascistic bigot.
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