“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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Katrina vanden Heuvel: What we can learn from our ‘radical’ past
Author Gore Vidal liked to call this country “the United States of Amnesia.” Even more so than other places, our country has been formed not by what it chooses to remember of its own past, but by what it chooses to forget.
In such a country, simply to remember is itself a radical act. It is to refuse to submit to the blinders that the powers that be are always trying to slip onto the rest of us. It is to subvert, implicitly or otherwise, the tyranny of the present — to insist on expanding the realm of the possible.
If all of this is true, then historian Eric Foner is one of the most dangerous men in the United States. And in the Trump era of sham populism turned shameless plutocracy, he might be the clearest voice on what this moment means for our country and how progressives might move forward.
David Leonhardt: School Vouchers Aren’t Working, but Choice Is
Betsy DeVos’s favorite education policy keeps looking worse. Last week, the Education Department, which she runs, released a careful study of the District of Columbia’s use of school vouchers, which she supports. The results were not good.
Students using vouchers to attend a private school did worse on math and reading than similar students in public school, the study found. It comes after other studies, in Ohio and elsewhere, have also shown weak results for vouchers.
To channel President Trump: Who knew that education could be so complicated?
The question for DeVos is whether she’s an ideologue committed to prior beliefs regardless of facts or someone who has an open mind. But that question doesn’t apply only to DeVos. It also applies to all of us trying to think about education, including her critics. And the results from Washington are important partly because they defy easy ideological conclusions.
Catherine Rampell: Trump’s nifty plan to spend more and hurt poor people more — at the same time!
Who says President Trump isn’t a policy genius? He’s figured out a clever way to spend more government money just to stick it to poor people.
His innovation has to do with the intricate interplay of Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Obamacare has two major kinds of subsidies designed to make health care cheaper for low- and middle-income Americans buying insurance on the exchanges. The first is a tax credit that helps enrollees pay their premiums. The second, which is a bit less well-known, is called “cost-sharing reductions.” These subsidies shrink poor people’s out-of-pocket health spending — for example, the co-pays and deductibles that apply when they fill a prescription or see their doctor.
Here’s how that second subsidy works.
Douglas Williams: Trump’s civil war comments master the Republican art of downplaying slavery
Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. To columnists. To late-night comedians. And, most dangerous of all, to his base.
The latest red meat that he has thrown to the most reactionary elements of American society came in an interview with Salena Zito that was broadcast on satellite radio last weekend. In the interview, he engaged in some interesting commentary on the antebellum period of American history.
People don’t realize, you know, the civil war, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the civil war? Why could that one not have been worked out?
Many people are going to attack the logic of the statement itself, and there’s much to attack it on. Negotiations require, to some degree, an acceptance of the legitimacy of the viewpoints on the other side. Given that the civil war was fought to maintain chattel slavery as the dominant mode of economic production in the south, it is puzzling that Trump conceives of a negotiation that legitimizes the concept of owning other human beings.
Eugene Robinson: 100 days of Trump, two lonely accomplishments
President Trump’s first 100 days in office were mostly about empty noise. The next 100 likely will be the same.
There is no principle at the heart of Trump’s policies. In many cases, there are no policies at all, just improvised attempts to bridge the gap between Trump’s rhetoric and inconvenient reality. This is no way to run a corner bodega, let alone the greatest nation on Earth.
What kind of president calls North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a “pretty smart cookie,” as Trump did in an interview broadcast Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation”? Who uses words of grudging admiration for a brutal dictator who consolidated power by executing hundreds of people, including his uncle? Who gives props to the leader of a rogue regime that threatens U.S. allies with nuclear weapons and may soon have missiles that can target Seattle?
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