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

Kamala D. Harris: Voting is the best way to honor generations of women who paved the way for me

After the 19th Amendment, women of color fought voter suppression. Now, we all need to.

One hundred years ago, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was formally adopted. Courageous American women had been organizing and protesting for seven decades to be treated as equal participants in our democracy, and their hard work finally paid off. After ratification votes from 36 states, it was official: Our Constitution would forevermore enshrine the right to vote for American women.

That is, unless you were Black. Or Latina. Or Asian. Or Indigenous.

We cannot mark this day, now known as Women’s Equality Day, without remembering all the American women who were not included in that voting rights victory a century ago. Black activists such as Ida B. Wells had dealt with discrimination and rejection from White suffragists in their work to secure the vote. And when the 19th Amendment was ratified at last, Black women were again left behind: Poll taxes, literacy tests and other Jim Crow voter suppression tactics effectively prohibited most people of color from voting.

In fact, if I had been alive in 1920, I might not have been allowed to cast a ballot alongside White women. Neither would my mother, an immigrant from India, who first taught me how sacred our vote is. It would be another 45 years until the Voting Rights Act protected the voting rights of millions more voters of color — and an additional 10 years until Latinas and Indigenous women were no longer subject to literacy tests.

So although the centennial of the 19th Amendment offers a reminder that extraordinary progress is possible, it is also a reminder that there has never truly been universal suffrage in America.

Thomas B. Edsall: ‘I Fear That We Are Witnessing the End of American Democracy’

The frank racism of the contemporary Republican agenda is on display at the R.N.C.

The center-right political coalition in America — the Republican Party as it stands today — can be described as holding two overarching goals: First, deregulation and reductions in corporate and other tax liabilities — each clearly stated on the White House website — and second, but packing a bigger punch, the preservation of the status quo by stemming the erosion of the privileged status of white Christian America. [..]

The most important issue driving Trump’s ascendance, however, has not been the economy but race. [..]

The emergence of a right-populist, authoritarian-inclined Republican Party coincides with the advent of a bifurcated Democratic Party led, in large part, by a well-educated, urban, globally engaged multicultural elite allied with a growing minority electorate.

Structurally, the Democratic Party has become the ideal adversary for a Republican Party attempting to define political competition as a contest between “us the people” against “them, the others” — the enemy. The short- and medium-term prognosis for productive political competition is not good.

Joshua Greene, the Harvard psychologist, closed his email with an addendum: “P.S. I think that Biden will probably win and will probably be the next president. But the fact that I can’t say more than ‘probably’ is terrifying to me. I fear that we are witnessing the end of American democracy.”

Jamelle Bouie: Grievances on Parade

The Republican Party may not have a platform, but it has a plan.

Republicans chose not to produce a platform for their convention, no statement of values or declaration of principle. Instead, the party has approved a resolution to “enthusiastically support” President Trump’s “America-first agenda,” whatever that may be. And while the White House has produced a bullet-point outline of its second-term agenda, this week’s convention itself has little content planned other than cultural grievance and worshipful praise for the president. As one veteran congressional aide told Politico, the only thing Republicans believe now is “Owning the libs and pissing off the media.”

It’s easy, observing all of this, to say that the Republican Party has fallen fully into a cult of personality around Trump and his family, a shocking number of whom have featured speaking roles at the convention. It’s also easy to say the party has no ideas or plans for the future. But that would be a mistake. For the Republican Party, the situation now isn’t too different from what it was in 2016. Trump lacked a serious agenda then just as he lacks one now. Rather than bring a new program to bear on the party, he has made the equivalent of a trade: total support for his personal and political concerns in exchange for almost total pursuit of conservative ideological interests.

Robert Reich: Amid fire and pestilence, floods and storms, the personal is political: Trump must go

Americans face existential challenges. The president has done nothing to help and much to make things worse

My wife and I have been warned we may need to evacuate our cabin in the hills north of San Francisco, because of fires ravaging the Bay Area.

Climate change is largely to blame for these fires, which are growing in number and intensity every year. It’s also to blame for the increasing number and virulence of hurricanes hitting the Gulf and south-east, flash floods along the eastern seaboard, and fierce winds across middle America.

Two tropical storms are developing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf has never before had two hurricanes at the same time. Both are moving toward Louisiana.

In early August, Illinois and Iowa were hit with winds of up to 110mph. Homes were leveled. At least 10 million acres of crops were destroyed. Many are still without power.

Trump isn’t singularly responsible for climate change, of course. But he’s done nothing to stop it. In fact, he’s done everything he can to accelerate it.

This coming week, he’ll be nominated for a second term. I doubt he or anyone else at the Republican convention will mention his abandonment of the Paris agreement, his rollback of environmental regulations or his boundless generosity to the fossil fuel industry.

Yet I’ll be thinking about all this, and in a newly personal way. So will many others, including, I suspect, some who voted for Trump last time, who reside in the Gulf states, the eastern seaboard and the Midwest.

It’s one thing to understand climate change in the abstract. It’s another to live inside it.

Amanda Marcotte: Were Don Jr. and Kimberly “coked up”? Maybe not, but it’s all part of the fascist tradition

Hyperactive, aggressive rhetoric — with a stimulant-style flair — is meant to overwhelm the audience emotionally

During the first night of the Republican National Convention, the word “cocaine” started to trend on Twitter, and not because there was any breaking news about the infamous party drug. No, it’s because many of the speakers at the convention brought a hyperactive bombast to the proceedings that was highly reminiscent of the effects of cocaine and other illegal stimulants. Watching some of the speeches, in fact, felt quite a bit like sitting through that scene in “Boogie Nights” where a menacing half-naked cocaine dealer brandishes a gun while pacing and ranting to 1980s hits like “Sister Christian” and “Jessie’s Girl.” The only thing missing was a dude in the corner setting off fireworks randomly to keep people even more on edge.

In particular, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, along with his girlfriend, former Fox News host and current Trump campaign factotum Kimberly Guilfoyle, delivered speeches that caused widespread speculation on social media about the use of chemical assistance.

This entire display left progressives, mainstream journalists and anyone who isn’t already in the Trump tribe befuddled. It was grotesque and overwhelming, and only served to unnerve viewers. Even the presence of speakers who took a more measured tone, like former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, didn’t help matters. If anything, the rapid and dramatic tonal shifts only served to discombobulate viewers more. It was an emotional roller coaster that was, yes, reminiscent of the wild mood swings of someone who’s cranked up on hardcore stimulants.

As gross as it all was, it would be a mistake to assume that Republicans don’t know what they’re doing. On the contrary, this coked-up aesthetic has a long and unsavory history in the annals of fascism, authoritarianism and other forms of personality cult.

Hitting audiences with a firehose of emotions is about deliberately unmooring them, spinning them so hard emotionally that they can’t tell up from down. It’s about breaking down people’s sense of self and their grip on reality, so they turn into putty at the hands of the authoritarian leader, to be rebuilt in the form that he prefers.

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: QAnon Is Trump’s Last, Best Chance

The only thing he can hope for is fear itself.

Last week’s Democratic National Convention was mainly about decency — about portraying Joe Biden and his party as good people who will do their best to heal a nation afflicted by a pandemic and a depression. There were plenty of dire warnings about the threat of Trumpism; there was frank acknowledgment of the toll taken by disease and unemployment; but on the whole the message was surprisingly upbeat.

This week’s Republican National Convention, by contrast, however positive its official theme, is going to be QAnon all the way.

I don’t mean that there will be featured speeches claiming that Donald Trump is protecting us from an imaginary cabal of liberal pedophiles, although anything is possible. But it’s safe to predict that the next few days will be filled with QAnon-type warnings about terrible events that aren’t actually happening and evil conspiracies that don’t actually exist.

That has, after all, been Trump’s style since the very first day of his presidency.

Brian Stetler: Trump’s Favorite Four-Letter Word

The president didn’t always love the word, “hoax.” Now it serves him, but not the public, well.

The Trump era is the hoax era. But not in the way he or his cheerleaders claim.

Donald Trump has shouted “hoax” hundreds of times, about everything from climate change to Supreme Court rulings to impeachment. At this point, his copious claims about hoaxes add up to a hoax. And through the history of his use of this single word, we can see how he has fooled his biggest fans but failed to persuade almost everyone else. [..]

We will never know how many people fell for the “hoax” rhetoric. But we do know this: When you’re told every day not to peer outside your own bunker, when you’re told that evil forces are trying to make you the victim of a “hoax,” your world begins to shrink.

You don’t know whom to trust or what to believe. In San Antonio last month, the chief medical officer of Methodist Hospital, Dr. Jane Appleby, told the story of a 30-year-old patient, dying of Covid-19, who looked at his nurse and said: “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.”

Charles M. Blow: Trump’s Campaign of Chaos

The president’s behavior is that of a desperate man.

I smell the stench of panic on Donald Trump.

Every week that passes with him trailing in the polls — and with the very real possibility of defeat lurking — his Twitter tirades and public utterances seem to grow more erratic.

He is leaning into a campaign of chaos. He has undertaken an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting, trying to force voters to choose between protecting their health and exercising their right to vote.

This is an attempt at voter suppression on a massive scale. It is out in the open, designed to reduce the number of ballots cast (to give him a better chance of winning), and to create a pretext for contesting and delegitimizing the result should he lose.

This is the behavior of a desperate man, but it’s also a repeat of 2016, when Trump, then behind in the polls as he is now, signaled that he might not accept the election results.

Robert Reich: Profiteering off the Pandemic

Since the start of the pandemic, American billionaires have been cleaning up. As more than 50 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance, billionaires became $637 billion richer. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth has ballooned 59 percent. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’s, 39 percent. Walmart’s Walton family has added $25 billion.

Big drug company CEOs and their major investors are doing nicely, too. Since the start of the pandemic, Big Pharma has raised prices on over 250 prescription drugs, 61 of which are being used to treat Covid-19.

Apologists say this is the “free market” responding to supply and demand – the barons of Big Tech, online retailing, and Big Pharma merely providing what consumers desperately need during the pandemic.

But the market also operates under laws that ban profiteering, price gouging, and monopolizing, and that tax excess profits in wartime. Where did they go?

The Trump administration hasn’t enforced them.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump mega-donor Louis DeJoy’s testimony makes clear: He can’t be trusted with the post office

Republicans try to blame pre-election mail slowdowns on anyone else, but the buck stops with this Trump toady

During Monday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on the dramatic slowdowns of the U.S. Postal Service under the leadership of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major donor to Donald Trump who continues to have tight relationships to the Trump campaign, Republicans worked two contradictory claims.

The first claim is that DeJoy is a major expert in logistics and that’s why he was appointed as postmaster general — not because he was useful to the Trump campaign’s efforts to sabotage mail-in voting.

The second claim is that Democrats are being unreasonable in expecting that DeJoy, this supposed expert on the mechanics of delivering stuff, should make sure the mail arrives on time, as it generally did before he was hired. […]

Democrats, who run the Oversight Committee thanks to their overall House majority, had quite a simple and compelling story about what’s going on at the post office: It was working fine until DeJoy took over. Now it’s falling apart, either because of DeJoy’s incompetence, or — as many Democrats on the committee suggested — because DeJoy is deliberately slowing down the mail in order to help Trump subvert an election in which most Americans are likely to vote by mail.