Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media 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

James E. Clyburn: Runoff elections should be a relic of the past

The recent results in Georgia demonstrate the continued effectiveness of the runoff requirement in keeping Black candidates from reaching elected office.

As a lifelong student and short-time teacher of history, I am often reminded that “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” I can think of no period in my lifetime that better reflects that truth than the past four years.

On Dec. 12, we marked the 150th anniversary of Joseph Rainey’s swearing-in as the first African American elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The once-enslaved South Carolinian was elected in 1870 during the roughly 12 years of Reconstruction. He served eight years before losing his seat when President Rutherford B. Hayes terminated federal oversight of the former slave states.

Southern states responded with all kinds of creative devices designed to disenfranchise Black voters, purge Black elected officials and relegate Black people to second-class citizenship. [..]

Some of the most pernicious devices, which included racialized campaigning, numbered posts, full-slate voting, and the “50 percent plus one” voting requirement, purposefully diluted Black votes and helped produce decades of white-only elected officials. This led my home state, which had eight Black members of Congress in the 19th century, to go 95 years — from 1897 to 1992 — without African American representation in Congress. Although the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed some of these devices, several remained, including the “50 percent plus one” requirement, known today as the “runoff” election.

Elizabeth Rosenthal: Some Said the Vaccine Rollout Would Be a ‘Nightmare.’ They Were Right.

There are already signs that distribution will be messy, confusing and chaotic.

Even before there was a vaccine, some seasoned doctors and public health experts warned, Cassandra-like, that its distribution would be “a logistical nightmare.”

After Week 1 of the rollout, “nightmare” sounds like an apt description.

Dozens of states say they didn’t receive nearly the number of promised doses. Pfizer says millions of doses sat in its store rooms, because no one from President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed told them where to ship them. A number of states have few sites that can handle the ultracold storage required for the Pfizer product, so, for example, front line workers in Georgia have had to travel 40 minutes to get a shot. At some hospitals, residents treating Covid patients protested that they had not received the vaccine while administrators did, even though they work from home and don’t treat patients.

The potential for more chaos is high. Dr. Vivek Murthy, named as the next surgeon general under President-elect Joe Biden, said this week that the Trump administration’s prediction — that the general population would get the vaccine in April — was realistic only if everything went smoothly. He instead predicted the summer or fall. [..]

So kudos and thanks to the science and the scientists who made the vaccine in record time. I’ll eagerly hold out my arm — so I can see the family and friends and colleagues I’ve missed all these months. If only I can figure out when I’m eligible, and where to go to get it.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s loss was radicalizing: His promise to “cheat” the system has further deluded his fans

Trump got elected by promising he knew how to cheat “the system”— now his voters can’t believe he’s failing

For years, many liberals have been confused by why so many Donald Trump voters seem unperturbed by all his criming and cheating. To understand Trump’s supporters, it’s important to understand that they don’t believe he’s a good person. On the contrary, the appeal of Trump from the beginning was a belief that he’s a liar, a cheat, and a crook — but one who would implement his evil-doing skills towards goals Republican voters support, with triggering the liberals and snagging all the government goodies for their tribe at the expense of other Americans at the top of the list.

This wasn’t exactly subtle. Trump repeatedly promised his supporters during the 2016 campaign that “Nobody knows the system better than I do.” He often bragged about his supposed skills at buying off and working politicians. [..]

The key is realizing that the typical Trump supporter, as I explained in the Standing Room Only newsletter, sees himself as in on the con. Indeed, the easiest way to hoodwink someone is to convince them that they’re part of the conspiracy, that they’re the ones getting one over on someone else. Trump’s story for his supporters was that all of politics is a rigged game, but this time he was rigging it for them.

All of which explains why Trump supporters, like their idol, are losing their minds right now. They elected a man who assured them he knew all the tricks and could get away with breaking any rule. But despite all his efforts at stealing the election from Joe Biden — and all the money he’s raised from them to do so — Trump is failing. Trump’s voters never believed he was an honest man, yet they got snookered by the biggest lie of all: that he had almost god-like powers to cheat the system.

Richard Wolfe:  The Trump White House has entered its final stage: complete meltdown

Trump has retreated to the proverbial bunker with an ‘elite strike force’ of wingnuts and lackeys. They’re all he’s got left

The last days of the Trump presidency increasingly resemble the fictional presidency in the movie Monsters vs Aliens.

In case you missed this 2009 animated masterpiece, President Hathaway (voiced by Stephen Colbert) responds to an alien invasion with a team of unlikely heroes, among them a giant-sized TV reporter from Modesto, a cockroach-turned-mad-scientist, and an enormous blob of Jell-O.

One of the running gags is that the president has installed two red buttons in his situation room. One is to make his morning latte, the other to launch all his nuclear weapons. He can never remember which is which.

In the final month of Donald Trump’s time in the Oval Office, he has at last assembled his own team of outsized odds and ends, self-aggrandizing wingnuts, and brainless lumps of gelatin. You can decide for yourself if this latest incarnation of his “elite strike force” of advisers is more likely to launch all the nuclear weapons or make a fresh cup of coffee.

At the center of the team to save Planet Trump are the unhinged characters of Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, who reportedly met with the soon-to-be-ex-president in the White House over several hours on Friday.

Greg Sargeant: The Biden team does not seem spooked by the ghost of Stephen Miller

A glimpse into Biden’s plans on immigration hints at a clean break with Trumpism.

When it came to asylum seekers and refugees, President Trump’s agenda, crafted by adviser Stephen Miller, was largely animated by a few core principles.

Among them: Migrants are primarily a threat, and should above all be feared. They’re largely driven by nefarious motives, looking to scam their way into the United States and get over on us, rather than being driven by larger forces that rendered their decisions to migrate understandable, earning them just treatment.

And because of those, their efforts to migrate must above all be crushed through the deterrence of maximal cruelty and hardship, and migration flows must be mercilessly reduced to the lowest levels possible.

President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team is sending early signs that the break with this worldview will be comprehensive, substituting an entirely new vision. And the rough outlines of this vision are heartening, though details will matter greatly. [..]

Again, the details will matter, and unwinding Trump’s horrors will be extremely hard. Politics could also intervene. Another crush at the border and the Biden administration might fear liberalizing too quickly. They may be reluctant to quickly lift Trump’s coronavirus-inspired limits on legal immigration.

But the early returns suggest solid, reality-based, humane principles are outweighing political concerns.

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media 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

Paul Krugman: The Ghost of Sabotage Future

This winter’s economy won’t be as grim as feared, but what about after?

The not-a-stimulus deal Congress reached over the weekend — seriously, this is about disaster relief, not boosting the economy — didn’t come a moment too soon. Actually, it came much too late: Crucial aid to many unemployed Americans and businesses expired months ago. But now some of that aid is back, for a while.

True, the aid will be less generous than it was in the spring and summer: $300 a week in enhanced unemployment benefits, rather than $600. But because the workers still out of a job as a result of the pandemic tended to have low earnings even before the coronavirus struck, they will, on average, be receiving something like 85 percent of their pre-Covid-19 income.

By the way, although the one-time $600 checks to a much wider group of Americans are getting much of the media coverage, they account for only a small percentage of the overall expense and are far less crucial than the unemployment benefits to keeping families afloat.

So what’s not to like about this relief package? There’s some dumb stuff, like a tax break for corporate meal expenses — fighting a deadly pandemic with three-martini lunches. But the serious problem with this deal is that economic aid will end far too soon: Enhanced unemployment benefits will last just 11 weeks. And the process by which the deal was reached has ominous implications for the future.

Eugene Robinson: So long, 2020. We won’t miss you.

We are still cataloging, much less healing from, this terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year.

There’s panic in Europe that’s fast spreading over an apparently super-contagious strain of the coronavirus in Britain. The outgoing president of the United States reportedly spent hours last week entertaining deranged, seditious ideas about clinging to power through the imposition of martial law. And, as a grace note, the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii began erupting Sunday night.

Because, of course, 2020.

I believe I speak for humankind, with few exceptions, when I say we will all be overjoyed to see the back of this awful year.

It’s not as if no good things at all happened in 2020. Joe Biden was elected president, stamping a Jan. 20, 2021, expiration date on Donald Trump’s putrid presidency. Scientists developed vaccines against covid-19 in record time, marking the beginning of the end of this deadly, devastating, soul-crushing pandemic. Also, um, let me think — oh yes, there was no extinction-level asteroid strike, which is definitely a plus.

For many across the country and the world there were, of course, personal milestones and triumphs. Several of my good friends were blessed with the birth of a first grandchild. To see the joy in their faces, even via Zoom, warmed my heart.

Overall, though, we have been through a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad 12 months. It will take some time just to catalogue all the damage 2020 has done, much less begin to heal from it. As a general rule, I’ve always thought the end of the calendar year was an arbitrary and irrational date for marking some sort of generalized turning of the page. This year, however, I’m desperately hoping it proves to be just that: a bright line between what has been and what will be.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s coup goes beyond a grift: The president is desperately seeking any path to stay in power

New reporting shows that Trump really still thinks he can steal this election

For weeks now, Donald Trump’s hopes of stealing the 2020 presidential election from the winner, Joe Biden, have been fading. Nonetheless, the dumbest and worst president in American history continued sending out fundraising appeals to his endlessly gullible supporters, giving birth to the theory — to which I, personally, subscribed — that Trump’s coup is little more than another one of his many schemes to defraud people. After all, the Trump campaign spent very little on the actual legal efforts to challenge the election and redirected most of the cash into what is likely going to be used as a slush fund for Trump and his family.

And yet, as Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported in the New York Times on Saturday, Trump is deep in talks with an increasingly unhinged cast of characters, all of whom believe there must be a way to steal the election even though the Electoral College made Biden’s win official last week. The president invited conspiracy theorists like his former lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security advisor Gen. Michael Flynn to the White House on Friday to discuss a potential declaration of martial law as a last-ditch effort to force a second vote in some swing states. That suggestion came from the disgraced Flynn, who has been involved in violently oppressive work on behalf of Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan  [..]

The story isn’t just alarming because Trump is flirting with violence, either. It’s alarming because it’s proof that Trump is continuing to push these idiotic conspiracy theories because he really, truly does think there’s still a way for him to steal this election.

Paul Waldman: Why Republicans demanded that tax break for business lunches

They know that even when they’re comically villainous, Democrats are too disorganized to make them pay a price.

As negotiations over the pandemic relief bill reached their end, Republicans had a demand from which they would not move. No matter what else the package contained, the White House and its Senate allies insisted that it must provide help for one particular struggling and oppressed group: business people who want to write off the entire cost of their meals.

Over 2,000 Americans a day are dying from covid-19, 20 million are out of work, lines at food banks stretch for miles, millions are in danger of losing their homes, and Republicans are worried about whether some Wall Street banker can deduct the entire cost of his three-martini lunch, rather than only 50 percent as current law allows.

According to The Post’s reporting, “Democratic leaders agreed to the provision in exchange for Republicans agreeing to expand tax credits for low income families and the working poor in the final package.”

It’s common for voters to think that politicians do whatever is popular, pandering shamelessly to the whims of the masses. But this is one area where Republicans appear to have an extraordinary commitment to their ideals, even in the face of political risk. Yet the truth is that they are able to work so assiduously to advance the welfare of corporations and the wealthy because they’ve figured out that the risks of doing such unpopular things are far lower than they might be.

Why? It’s a combination of the public’s ignorance and inattentiveness on the one hand, and Democratic fecklessness on the other.

Greg Sargent: Don’t let Mitch McConnell get away with his vile rewriting of history

The story of how we got a deal suggests McConnell will sabotage the recovery next year.

As Congress passed a new $900 billion economic rescue package on Monday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) offered a choice bit of spin on how we got to this moment:

“A few days ago, with a new president-elect of their own party, everything changed,” Mr. McConnell said on Monday. “Democrats suddenly came around to our position that we should find consensus, make law where we agree, and get urgent help out the door.”

Getting the story right here is highly consequential. It will shape the arguments that determine the outcome of the Georgia runoffs — and control of the Senate — and should leave little doubt that continued GOP control means McConnell will strive to sabotage the recovery to cripple Joe Biden’s presidency.

This is what McConnell wants to obscure. Because as he has privately admitted, the failure of Congress to deliver a robust aid package to people is putting his Georgia senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue at risk.

So McConnell wants voters — especially those in Georgia — to believe Republicans supported generous aid all along, particularly the stimulus checks in the new deal, and that Democrats refused to act, to harm President Trump’s reelection campaign.

But the reality is that Democrats were the ones pushing for stimulus checks and robust aid all along, even though it would have helped Trump’s reelection, and McConnell and Republicans were the main obstacle.