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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Michelle Goldberg: Democrats Are Moving Left. Don’t Panic.
If you want to beat Trump, centrism is not the answer.
In November, several outright Nazis and white supremacists will appear on Republican ballot lines. Arthur Jones, a founder of a neo-Nazi group called the America First Committee, managed to become the Republican nominee for Congress in the heavily Democratic Third District in Illinois. The Republican candidate in California’s 11th District, John Fitzgerald, is running on a platform of Holocaust denial. Russell Walker, a Republican statehouse candidate in North Carolina, has said that Jews descend from Satan and that God is a “white supremacist.”
Corey Stewart, Virginia’s Republican Senate nominee, is a neo-Confederate who pals around with racists, including one of the organizers of the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last year. The longtime Iowa Republican representative Steve King has moved from standard-issue nativist crank to full-on white nationalist; he recently retweeted a neo-Nazi and then refused to delete the tweet, saying, “It’s the message, not the messenger.”
Clearly, the time has come for a serious national conversation. And so political insiders across the land are asking: Has the Democratic Party become too extreme? [..]
Democrats will not defeat Trump and his increasingly fanatical, revanchist party by promising the restoration of what came before him; the country is desperate for a vision of something better. Whether or not you share that vision, if you truly believe that Trump is a threat to democracy, you should welcome politics that inspire people to come to democracy’s rescue.
Jill Filipovic: Guess who wants to gut the Endangered Species Act
The Trump administration has set its crosshairs on new targets: Endangered species. [..]
Among our economic peers around the globe, even most social conservatives agree that climate change is real and we have to protect the environment for future generations. Not so in America, where half the country seems to operate under the delusion that we can do whatever we want to our land, our plants and our animals and it will magically have no ill effects on us, our children or our grandchildren.
The proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act fall in line with this anti-science sentiment: They drastically reduce the role scientists will have in identifying endangered and threatened species in the first place.
The changes would let the views of lawmakers take precedence over the in-depth research and on-the-ground observation of scientific experts. They would also let politicians weigh financial interests against whether plants and animals ought to be allowed to survive — and also against the rights of the rest of us to enjoy the many benefits of balanced and diverse ecosystems.
Rare plant species and gray wolves don’t have lobbyists; big oil does, and companies pay significant money to get politicians on their side so that they can plunder habitats to make more money. If it’s elected officials — whose coffers are filled by corporations — making decisions previously left to scientists and researchers, who do you think will benefit: animals and their environs, or the people holding out cash?
Max Boot: Without the Russians, Trump wouldn’t have won
President Trump is willing, under duress, to briefly and begrudgingly admit that Russian “meddling” took place in 2016 before reverting to calling it a “big hoax.” But he always maintains that the plot against America had no impact; he describes it as a “Democrat excuse for losing the ’16 Election.” Faithfully echoing the president, other Republicans, such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), say it’s “clear” that the Russian interference “didn’t have a material effect on our elections.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders even claims that the U.S. intelligence community reached that conclusion.
Not quite. Here is the intelligence community’s assessment, partially declassified in January 2017: “We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion.” When then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo claimed last fall that “the intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” his own agency rebuked him.
While the intelligence agencies are silent on the impact of Russia’s attack, outside experts who have examined the Kremlin campaign — which included stealing and sharing Democratic Party emails, spreading propaganda online and hacking state voter rolls — have concluded that it did affect an extremely close election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, writes in his recent book, “Messing with the Enemy,” that “Russia absolutely influenced the U.S. presidential election,” especially in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump’s winning margin was less than 1 percent in each state.
Martha Raddatz: I reported alongside soldiers in foxholes. The president can’t take that away.
Like so many of my colleagues, I have covered this nation’s wars for decades, working side by side with our soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen. I have shared foxholes and flight decks with these brave Americans, and I have felt our mutual respect for the responsibility that each of us holds in our chosen professions. It has been an honor covering them and the families who support them. I am proud that I can tell their stories.
It is the job of the press to rigorously cover the military and to ask hard questions. But I could never have told those stories if the military did not open its doors to me. [..]
I am proud to have gained the hard-won respect of so many of those I have met over the years. But as I listen to the vitriol aimed at the press by our president, I worry that those days of mutual respect will disappear for the next generation of reporters.
We in the press are all sadly getting used to listening to some Americans booing, threatening and belittling the media at the behest of President Trump. But Trump’s rally before hundreds of veterans at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Tuesday in Kansas City, Mo., was especially disturbing.
Jeffery Sachs: Trump is taking US down the path to tyranny
The United States was born in a revolt against the tyranny of King George III. The Constitution was designed to prevent tyranny through a system of checks and balances, but in President Trump’s America, those safeguards are failing.
Donald Trump holds the grandiose belief that only he should rule America. Unchecked by cowed or complicit Republicans in Congress, Trump invokes executive authority to alter policies and practices long established by law and treaty. [..]
The Nazi henchman Hermann Göring explained in Nuremberg prison how easy it is to mobilize the public to war: “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
Trump has started with a trade war, but we shouldn’t be surprised if the trade war morphs into a hot one. We are far down the path to tyranny.
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