“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”.
Paul Krugman: On Economic Arrogance
According to press reports, the Trump administration is basing its budget projections on the assumption that the U.S. economy will grow very rapidly over the next decade — in fact, almost twice as fast as independent institutions like the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve expect. There is, as far as we can tell, no serious analysis behind this optimism; instead, the number was plugged in to make the fiscal outlook appear better.
I guess this was only to be expected from a man who keeps insisting that crime, which is actually near record lows, is at a record high, that millions of illegal ballots were responsible for his popular vote loss, and so on: In Trumpworld, numbers are what you want them to be, and anything else is fake news. But the truth is that unwarranted arrogance about economics isn’t Trump-specific. On the contrary, it’s the modern Republican norm. And the question is why.
Before I get there, a word about why extreme growth optimism is unwarranted.
New York Times Editorial Board: Ryancare: You Can Pay More for Less!
President Trump promised to replace the Affordable Care Act with something that is better, is cheaper and covers more people. Scratch that. Republican leaders in the House and Mr. Trump’s secretary of health and human services released a plan last week that would provide insurance that is far inferior, shift more medical costs onto families and cover far fewer people. […]
The paper is Mr. Ryan’s blueprint for effectively repealing and replacing Obamacare. Unsurprisingly, he and his colleagues offered no estimates of how many people would lose coverage or how much premiums and deductibles would rise for middle-class and poor families. Yet those missing details did not stop the Trump administration’s top health official from embracing the proposal. Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services and a former Ryan lieutenant in the House, said the president “is all in on this.”
It was only a matter of time before Sweden – the politically-correct, socialist hellhole inhabited by 10 million unfortunate souls – came into Trump’s crosshairs. “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible”, Trump said in a speech over the weekend.
That something had happened “last night” in the small European country came as news to many in the crowd. He had mentioned Sweden right after citing Brussels, Nice and Paris – which had all been hit by terror attacks. Had there been an attack in the Nordic country? This baffled journalists. And, it puzzled the entire population of Sweden, who were surprised to hear that something terrible had happened in their country – and that it took Donald Trump to give them that information.
Austin Sarat: Freedom of the press isn’t guaranteed. Especially when it’s labeled the ‘enemy’
This weekend brought the latest salvo in President Trump’s campaign to discredit the news media. Friday afternoon the president tweeted “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
In an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Reince Priebus, the president’s chief of staff, tried to clarify the meaning of the tweet and reassure Americans that “The president believes in the First Amendment. He believes in a free press.” Nonetheless, commentators correctly noted that the phrase “enemy of the people” has notorious associations from the purges ordered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, which killed tens of millions of people.
Public officials also expressed alarm. “As an American diplomat,” Tom Malinowski, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor in the Obama Administration, said: “I stood up to petty tyrants who called journalists ‘enemies of the people.’ Guess that’s not our policy anymore.”
Robert Kuttner: The Impeachment Of Hillary Clinton
Satire.
February 20 – House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) announced today that the impeachment proceeding against President Hillary Clinton would proceed directly to a vote of the full House.
“We know everything we need to know,” said Goodlatte. “This woman belongs in prison, or worse, for the high crime of treason.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan added, “We knew Hillary Clinton was incompetent and we knew she was corrupt. But trading favors with Vladimir Putin to throw the election, and to enrich the Clinton business interests, is a new low, even for the Clintons.”
“I don’t want to pre-judge this, since the Senate still needs to vote to convict,” added Senate leader Mitch McConnell, “but her behavior makes Benedict Arnold look like a patriot.” [..]
Okay, the shoe is on the other foot. Most Republicans have reversed their longstanding view of the Russian threat rather than embarrass Donald Trump. It’s breathtaking. They’re okay with having Putin be the dominant world leader as long as Republicans get their tax cuts, deregulation, Supreme Court, and dismantling of government.
With a handful of exceptions, the Republicans already concluded that selling out America in exchange for partisan goals is an acceptable deal. Hypocrisy is rampant in politics, but this takes it to an unimagined extreme.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson: ‘Blacks For Trump 2020’ Is Trump’s Latest Con
They had the best, closest and most visible spot in the crowd behind Trump at his much-touted recent pep rally in Melbourne, Florida. “They” being the handful of blacks that enthusiastically waved the “Blacks for Trump” signs behind him. The black Trump boosters didn’t stop there. They promoted and ballyhooed their website, primping Trump’s presumed re-election campaign in 2020, complete with a re-election website, Gods2.com.
Now, in case one thinks this is a recent Trump stunt or stunt by some black odd balls to get their 15 minutes in the bask of Trump’s presidential glow, it’s a little more involved. This bunch popped up at a Trump rally in Florida back in October a couple of weeks before his win. Their very conspicuous appearance on the political scene has prompted more than a few conspiratorial musings about whether and how much they’re being paid by Trump operatives. What does Trump know about them? This is coupled with some murky, even unsavory, facts about the one, identifiable cheerleader of the Trump cause in the group, Michael the Black Man.
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