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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Paul Krugman: The Frauding of America’s Farmers
Trump’s biggest supporters are his biggest victims.
Donald Trump is unpopular, but he retains the loyalty of some important groups. Among the most loyal are America’s farmers, who are a tiny minority of the population but exert disproportionate political influence because of our electoral system, which gives 3.2 million Iowans as many senators as almost 40 million Californians. According to one recent poll, 71 percent of farmers approve of Trump’s performance — which is down somewhat from previous polling, but remains far above the national average.
Yet farmers are hurting financially. Investors are worried about a possible recession for the economy as a whole, but the farm recession is already here, with falling incomes, rising delinquency rates and surging bankruptcies. And the farm economy’s troubles stem directly from Trump’s policies. [..]
The questions, looking forward, are whether farmers understood what they were getting themselves into, whether they understand even now that their distress isn’t likely to end anytime soon, and whether economic pain will shake their support for the man who’s causing it.
Quinta Jurecic: The Comey Circus Rolls On
The true moment of reckoning is always just around the corner.
The Justice Department’s internal investigator has concluded their widely anticipated report into the former F.B.I. director James Comey’s handling of his memos documenting his interactions with President Trump — and the document is far from a page-turner. In fact, it’s outright boring. [..]
It turns out that, according to the inspector general, investigators “found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the memos to members of the media.” And, contrary to some speculation in right-wing media, the document includes no finding that Mr. Comey was untruthful or incomplete in his answers to investigators. But Inspector General Michael Horowitz is still not happy with Mr. Comey’s conduct: the former director “violated F.B.I. policy and the requirements of his F.B.I. employment agreement” when he provided information contained in one memo to The New York Times through an intermediary. Mr. Comey did the same, the inspector general argues, when he retained copies of the memos without authorization to do so after leaving the bureau and did not notify the bureau after learning that one memo contained “six words” that the F.B.I. later deemed to be classified.
It’s a bit hard to take these concerns seriously in light of the events that moved Mr. Comey to disclose the information to The Times in the first place: The president of the United States threatened to disclose possibly nonexistent “tapes” of his conversations with Mr. Comey, the substance of which involved the president’s effort to quash an F.B.I. investigation into a former close adviser. As the former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller put it, the report “basically faulted Comey for speeding on his way to tell the village that a fire was coming.” Mr. Horowitz knocks Mr. Comey for setting “a dangerous example” for F.B.I. employees who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps — but if other F.B.I. employees are routinely facing crises comparable to what Mr. Comey dealt with, the country is in dire shape.
Eugene Robinson: Trump’s trade war could get him kicked out of office
President Trump is conducting his trade war with China as though it were a zero-sum game, but it’s not. It’s a negative-sum game. Both sides lose.
Sad! And self-defeating.
It’s clear at this point that Trump’s ill-advised gambit of tariffs and bombast is hurting both economies. The question is who can more stoically withstand the pain — an autocrat with a mandate to rule indefinitely over a tightly controlled one-party state, or a democratically elected president with dismal approval numbers who must face voters in 14 months.
I think I know the answer. I think most people do, except Trump. The president seems to have drunk his own Kool-Aid about being some sort of genius dealmaker. Asked Monday about his erratic and disruptive method, if you can call it that, Trump told reporters with a shrug, “Sorry, it’s the way I negotiate.” I’m sorry, too. The whole world should be.
Revised figures released Thursday show that the economy grew by 2 percent in the second quarter of this year — not bad, but sharply down from the 3.1 percent growth we saw in the first quarter. Trump claims on Twitter and at his rallies that the economy is not slowing. His own administration’s statistics prove that’s not true.
Dahlia Lithwick: Let’s Compare Donald Trump’s Week to the Impeachment Articles Brought Against Nixon, Clinton, and Johnson
Forget what you think “high crimes and misdemeanors” means and consider what we’ve impeached presidents for in the past.
Every single day, Donald Trump offers up a fragrant, colorful, teeming bouquet of reasons to believe he is unfit to hold the office of president. And every single day, the nation shrugs and waits for something to be done about it. (Really, congressional Democrats take a long summer break and largely shrug, and hope that the election will take care of this specific problem for them.)
But it’s still worth cataloging the specific things Trump is doing that, in another time or place or plane of being, could be deemed as demanding an immediate and focused impeachment inquiry, as Jennifer Rubin also points out in the Washington Post. Because this week alone, the president has asked government workers to break the law to fulfill his requests, and noted that he will pardon them if they get in trouble; suggested hosting the next G-7 summit at his property (so that he can profit); and diverted funds from FEMA relief to his border fever dream. He’s also denying lifesaving medical care to immigrant children he will deport and changing citizenship rules for the children of military families born abroad. On the 25th Amendment front (meaning the “is he mentally unfit for office” front), the president has lied about his wife’s relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, garbled an answer about climate change in ways that would terrify anyone in search of a topic sentence, attacked Fox News for disloyalty, blamed Puerto Rico in advance of a hurricane for being in the path of a hurricane, and generally conducted himself in ways that bespeak grievously low functioning. This all comes on the heels of a week in which he approvingly quoted someone describing him as the second coming (a performance that would have sent most of us to the nearest psych ward), called his own economic adviser the enemy of the state, “ordered” American companies to stop investing in China, and got in a fight with Denmark over a real estate deal gone south in Greenland.
The responses to the increased chaos are to be predicted. Jim Mattis went to work on his brand, gravely stating that he tried to protect us as long as he could, but things are officially out of hand and stay tuned for future acts of bravery™ (or as Scott Pilutik drolly interprets Mattis, “At some indeterminate point in the future, when the political risk has thankfully passed (if it indeed does), I will roar with the courage of a lion at a series of book signings”). Stephanie Grisham explained that he’s just kidding. Senate Republicans are hiding or quitting. And congressional Democrats are still just waiting for a sign that things have gotten Really Bad.
Here’s a sign that things are Really Bad. If one were to consider, again, the articles of impeachment against the three sitting presidents who have historically faced impeachment proceedings, not only has Trump clearly achieved all of them—he actually now achieves most of them in under a week. Every week. As Frank Bowman has argued in his new book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, because Americans have no contemporary understanding of the grounds for impeachment, they fail to comprehend that we go there, and back, on stilts virtually every day. So, let’s refresh our memories. What did previous presidents do that warranted congressional action?
William Rivers Pitt: There’s Poison in the Tap Water. The Government Must Act.
esidents of Worden and Ballantine, Montana — two tiny towns northeast of Billings — were recently informed they may be unable to use tap water for a year or more. Tests began detecting pollutants in the water back in May, but officials have been unable to pinpoint exactly where or how the groundwater supply is being contaminated. The people have been told to use bottled water only for the foreseeable future, a future of indeterminate length.
The residents of Flint, Michigan, can relate. So can residents of Newark, New Jersey, and East Chicago, Indiana, along with thousands of other communities of color that are being poisoned by the water in their homes, schools, parks and businesses. Unlike Worden and Ballantine, whose water supply was likely contaminated by nitrates used in farming, Flint and the other municipalities have been dealing with the dangers of lead. [..]
There are few things in life more frightening and bewildering than when that which you never think twice about suddenly goes sideways and does you harm. When something as prosaic as tap water becomes a menace, everything is suspect. When that menace is caused by greed and institutional racism, it speaks to the rot at the core of the country itself.
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