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
John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment
Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.
That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.
Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.
Paul Krugman: Putting the Ex-Con in Conservatism
In 2010 an explosion at a coal mine operated by Massey Energy killed 29 men. In 2015 Don Blankenship, the company’s former C.E.O., was sent to prison for conspiring to violate mine safety standards. In 2018, Blankenship appears to have a real chance at becoming the Republican candidate for senator from West Virginia.
Blankenship is one of four Republicans with criminal convictions running for office this year, several of whom may well win their party’s nominations. And there is a much broader list of Republican politicians facing credible accusations of huge ethical lapses who nonetheless emerged victorious in G.O.P. primaries, ranging from Roy Moore to, well, Donald Trump. [..]
And Trump, although unprecedentedly unpopular for a president at this stage of his term, continues to receive overwhelming support from the G.O.P. base. Some Republican politicians have openly admitted that this makes the party’s congressional wing unwilling to hold Trump accountable for even the most spectacular malfeasance, up to and including possible collusion with a hostile foreign power.
Jessica Valenti: The guns debate is a culture war. And young people will win it:
Young activists raised on social media and memes were bound to come up with the best protest signs. At the March for Our Lives, and the national school walkout earlier this month, teenagers held posters blasting politicians and declaring, “I should be writing my college essay, not my will.” Some were hilarious, many were sad, and all were designed to go viral.
The one that I can’t get out of my mind, though, was held by a teenage Pakistani immigrant in New York’s Union Square: “Girls’ clothing in school is more regulated than guns in America.”
The 18-year-old high school senior who carried the poster, Sana Haider, tells me she wanted to find “the perfect sign that stood out” and one that reflected her feminist values. She just went to her first protest, the Women’s March, last year.
We know that the gun debate is a culture war. But Haider and her sign reminded me that it’s more than an abstract debate over ideology or constitutional principles. It’s a fight between a young, diverse, feminist generation representing an emerging majority and an old, white, male minority desperate to hang on to power. And guns are their security blanket of choice.
Eugene Robinson: Trump has played his supporters for suckers
President Trump’s most urgent political problem doesn’t involve Robert S. Mueller III, Stormy Daniels, Vladimir Putin or the hundreds of thousands of voters who marched for gun control. Rather, it’s that his die-hard supporters might be starting to realize how thoroughly he has played them for suckers.
On immigration, the issue that most viscerally connects the president with his thus-far-loyal base, Trump got basically nothing in the $1.3 trillion spending bill he signed Friday.
The vaunted “big, beautiful wall” he pledges to build along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico? Trump got 25 miles’ worth of new wall, along with eight miles of new fencing. And the bill specifies that none of this tiny increment can be built using any of the prototype designs Trump so ostentatiously showed off. [..]
There’s something Trump is as eager to hide as any entanglements with Russians and porn stars: The man who gave us “The Art of the Deal” couldn’t get Congress to approve a resolution supporting Mother’s Day. Even if he brought flowers.
Catherine Rampell: Trump’s economic team needs to grow up — fast
Last week, for the 10-year anniversary of the Bear Stearns failure, Marketplace released an hour-long interview with the key economic policymakers involved: former Federal Reserve chair Ben S. Bernanke, George W. Bush administration treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and former New York Federal Reserve presidentTimothy F. Geithner, who would later become President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary.
Listening to their recounting of the start of the financial crisis, I found myself unexpectedly . . . wistful.
Not for the ensuing panic, or market crashes, or foreclosures, bankruptcies and layoffs that would lay ruin to millions of innocent bystanders. That was all unequivocally awful. The resulting scars, both economic and political, still have not fully healed.
What I missed was the sense that grown-ups, even if imperfect ones, had once been in charge.
Recent Comments