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: Why Can’t Trump’s America Be Like Italy?

On the coronavirus, the “sick man of Europe” puts us to shame.

A few days ago The Times published a long, damning article about how the Trump administration managed to fail so completely in responding to the coronavirus. Much of the content confirmed what anyone following the debacle suspected. One thing I didn’t see coming, however, was the apparently central role played by Italy’s experience.

Italy, you see, was the first Western nation to experience a major wave of infections. Hospitals were overwhelmed; partly as a result, the initial death toll was terrible. Yet cases peaked after a few weeks and began a steep decline. And White House officials were seemingly confident that America would follow a similar track.

We didn’t. U.S. cases plateaued for a couple of months, then began rising rapidly. Death rates followed with a lag. At this point we can only look longingly at Italy’s success in containing the coronavirus: Restaurants and cafes are open, albeit with restrictions, much of normal life has resumed, yet Italy’s current death rate is less than a 10th of America’s. On a typical recent day, more than 800 Americans but only around a dozen Italians died from Covid-19.

Although Donald Trump keeps boasting that we’ve had the best coronavirus response in the world, and some credulous supporters may actually believe him, my guess is that many people are aware that our handling of the virus has fallen tragically short compared with, say, that of Germany. It may not seem surprising, however, that German discipline and competence have paid off (although we used to think that we were better prepared than anyone else to deal with a pandemic). But how can America be doing so much worse than Italy?

Jamelle Bouie: There Is a ‘Great Silent Majority.’ But It Stands Against Trump.

And the minority he represents.

President Trump believes he represents the “silent majority” of the country against a dangerous, radical minority. He says as much on Twitter, frequently yelling “SILENT MAJORITY” at his followers. Accordingly, his campaign for re-election has tried to appeal to this “majority” with displays tailored to its perceived interests. [..]

Unfortunately for Trump, there’s quite a bit of distance between his perception and our reality. Most Americans support efforts to remove Confederate statues and monuments; most Americans welcome racial and ethnic diversity and few believe their communities should be less diverse; and most Americans are supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against police brutality — 67 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

There is a silent majority in this country, and it is arrayed against a radical, extremist minority. But it stands against Trump, not the other away around. He and his allies are and always have been in the minority, acting in ways that frighten and disturb the broad middle of the electorate. And as long as Trump cannot see this — as long as he holds to his belief in a secret, silent pro-Trump majority — he and his campaign will continue to act in ways that diminish his chance of any legitimate victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Michelle Cottle: The Battle for Joe Biden

He’s not listening to Twitter. So who does have the candidate’s ear?

For months, President Trump’s re-election team has been test-driving possible lines of attack against Joe Biden: He’s sleepy. He’s creepy. He’s corrupt. He’s soft on China. He’s soft in the head. So far, nothing has stuck. Which may explain why one theme Mr. Trump and his supporters have latched onto is that, whatever you think of Mr. Biden personally, he is “a helpless puppet of the radical left.”

To which the radical left would surely respond: If only!

As even Mr. Trump admits, the former vice president is no progressive revolutionary. The Democratic Party’s activist base, especially its younger members, harbors grave doubts about Mr. Biden and has vowed to keep the pressure on as he charts a path forward. One big, basic question on many people’s minds is, Just how far left will Joe go?

Looking to get a sense of how Mr. Biden’s governing vision is shaping up, I spent several weeks talking with his advisers, his allies, his critics and other party players. I wanted to know how the rolling crises have, for instance, impacted his search for the perfect running mate — the big reveal of which is expected any day now! — as well as how various policy proposals are being revised and expanded.

It was clear that, fundamentally, Joe is gonna be Joe. But he recognizes the need to respond to all the turbulence — and if there’s one thing Team Biden has a surfeit of, it’s people looking to influence how he does that.

Tim Wu: That Flour You Bought Could Be the Future of the U.S. Economy

Keep baking bread. Small grain companies may suggest a better path for American business.

By the established logic of the business world, Maine Grains, a small miller of flour in a rural part of the state, should not exist. With some 20 employees, it mills about 2,000 tons of flour a year in an industry where larger companies can mill more than 20,000 tons a day. Grain has long been a commodity business, and milling is driven by size and scale. Yet tiny mills like Maine Grains and small brands like King Arthur Baking Company and Bob’s Red Mill are thriving. They raise a bold question: Could flour, of all products, suggest a better path for more of the U.S. economy?

Milling flour, at the risk of stating the obvious, is not a new business. The basic technologies of milling were invented sometime in the third century B.C. For the early centuries of American history, local mills, powered by water, were economic anchors for small towns across the American colonies and, later, the nation. Their physical legacy is the hundreds of old stone gristmills scattered around the country, some converted to other uses, others quietly decaying. [..]

The flour industry might seem an unlikely arena for business innovation. There was once a time, in the 1990s and 2000s, when it was widely thought that Silicon Valley would show us the way to a better, fairer economy, creating entire ecosystems of companies with distinctive offerings. Yet that was before the emergence and eventual dominance of Amazon, Facebook and Google. Instead of high-tech, it is low-tech businesses like craft beer and community supported agriculture that seem to stand at the forefront of economic transformation.

If it can happen with flour, it can happen anywhere.

Amanda Marcotte: “Violent anarchists” are the new “migrant caravans” — and will flop just as badly

Trump already tried to distract voters from health care with racist paranoia — and that was before the pandemic

In 2018, Donald Trump’s very-stable-genius plan to win the midterm elections for Republicans was to hype the hell out of a so-called caravan of Central American refugees who were crossing Mexico in hopes of seeking asylum in the United States. About 7,000 people, mostly consisting of families with children, were indeed making the 2,500-mile trek to escape poverty and gang violence, but Trump and his Republican sycophants tried to convince American voters that they were coming to the U.S. to kill white people and burn down the suburbs. Through his preferred media of Twitter and Fox News, Trump endlessly hyped the “invasion” of these migrants, and suggesting they might be terrorists, and were coming to create gang warfare, not escape it.

The nonstop fear-mongering about the caravan did work its magic on the ever-gullible mainstream news media. A Media Matters study published two weeks before the election showed a precipitous rise in cable news coverage of what would have otherwise been a minor story, as similar caravans had been in previous years.

But if Trump and his minions succeeded in hijacking the news cycle with their racist hysterics, they failed in their goal of winning the 2018 midterm elections. While Republicans certainly leveraged their unfair electoral advantages to maintain a wildly disproportionate share of power, Democrats racked up historic wins, retaking the House of Representatives with a 40-seat pickup, as well as winning seven governorships and hundreds of state legislature seats. [..]

Now it’s time for another, even more important election and Trump, never one to believe that he was wrong just because he failed, is pulling out the same playbook. He’s replaced “caravan” with phrases like “professional anarchists, violent mobs or arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, antifa,” all terms he uses to describe the largely peaceful protesters who have been  demonstrating against police brutality and racism since May. [..]

Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 left many progressives wondering if he was some kind of political genius, even as he seems to think it’s a brag-worthy event to pass a cognitive test used to determine if someone has debilitating dementia. But that election was a fluke in many ways, a true black swan event. Thanks to his pathological narcissism, Trump cannot imagine what it would like to worry about losing health care access, and also can’t believe that other people might not be as racist as he is. So he’s running a campaign strategy, if you can even call it that, reflecting the “concerns” of a pampered racist poisoned by Fox News, instead of the things American voters are actually worried about. So long as Democrats stay out of the Trumpian media morass and continue to advertise their superior policies on real issues people, they have nothing to fear from Trump’s “anarchists and looters” strategy.

Heather Digby Parton: Will Joe Biden repeat Obama’s mistakes? Because repairing our damaged democracy is critical

Joe Biden sees himself as a healer — as a campaign strategy, it’s working. Governing is quite a different matter

I don’t know how many people have been watching Joe Biden’s speeches or reading about his policy rollouts, but they’ve really been quite good. This week’s socially-distanced conversation between Biden and Barack Obama was well done. These events may be under the radar but if the polls are any gauge whatever Biden is doing, or not doing, is working. [..]

If Biden wins the election and we get through the transition without a constitutional crisis and civil unrest (and both are very possible) his administration will immediately have to deal with the economic fallout resulting from Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. It’s highly likely that the health crisis will still be acute as well. On top of that, there will be an immediate need to deal with foreign policy and national security issues, as well as a full appraisal of the destruction wreaked on the administrative state, particularly with respect to environmental and financial regulation. It’s a lot.

But as much as I think that Biden’s campaign of unity and healing has been effective, I’m terrified that spirit will carry over too far into actual governance, to the extent that the assault on democracy we’ve seen under the Trump administration is swept under the rug — much as the electoral hardball and abuses of power during the Bush administration were ignored when Obama took office. He too ran as a “uniter” and was forced to face a major crisis from the moment he took office. Obama and his closest advisers decided they would not “look in the rearview mirror” because the new president was convinced he could deal with the Republicans in good faith. He set out his disastrous proposal for a Grand Bargain, including major budget cuts, even before he was inaugurated.

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

Amanda Marcotte: Political reporters can’t handle the truth: Trump is never going to “pivot”

Smell the covfefe: Trump’s brief, sulky briefing was no momentous “shift” — he’ll be ranting on Twitter soon enough

First things first: Donald Trump is not going to “pivot.” Yes, on Tuesday he stood at a podium and, in stiff and sulky fashion, said words that, as written, were relatively serious and realistic. He admitted the coronavirus pandemic will “get worse before it gets better.” He also claimed that his administration is “developing a strategy” to combat the pandemic, after months of foisting it off on the states and then lambasting any state that tried to take serious measures, while rewarding governors who pushed to reopen businesses and damn the consequences. He said he’d wear a mask now, after months of implying that only soy-boys and wieners wear masks.

These are all words that Trump said. But they don’t mean anything. As Dan Rather sagely observed on Twitter, Trump “does not pivot” and whatever temporary behavior we see on display, he will always, always, always revert to being “who he is, and always has been,” which is to say a rancid monster with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Unfortunately, much of the media coverage gave an entirely different impression, presenting Trump’s performance at Tuesday’s press briefing as if it represented a real shift, and seeding the absolutely false hope that Trump might actually start doing something to fight the coronavirus, instead of acting like the coronavirus’s biggest champion. [..]

We’ve been down this road dozens of times before: Trump, facing bad press, sucks it up and, with the posture of a kid being dragged to the dentist, feigns being presidential for a few minutes. Then, with the predictability of a clock, he gets sick of all this “acting respectable” nonsense and goes right back to his preferred
mode: vitriol, incompetence and asserting that everything is “great” no matter how bad it gets.

Heather Digby Parton: Defund Homeland Security: Creating a massive federal police apparatus was always a mistake

We built and funded a federal secret-police agency, and now it’s being used against us. Why are we surprised?

It seems like only yesterday that Republicans were wringing their hands and rending their garments over federal officers attempting to arrest a large group of armed militia members who had taken over a federal building in Oregon and were refusing to leave. (The 2016 “Oregon standoff” is the subject of Anthony McCann’s fascinating book “Shadowlands.”) They were led by Ammon Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who triggered an earlier standoff with government forces in 2014, and they said they were planning to occupy the building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge “for years” as a protest against the conviction of two local ranchers who had been found guilty of arson for setting fire to government land. After six weeks of negotiating with federal authorities, the protesters were finally dispersed. Some did time but Ammon Bundy and a dozen others were tried and acquitted. [..]

I bring that story up now only because as we have watched the events unfold in Portland, Oregon, over the past few days — a few hours west of the Malheur refuge — with federal police in full military regalia attacking and kidnapping protesters, I’m struck by the deafening silence from all those erstwhile defenders of free speech and the right to protest. I guess in order for them to speak out, the protesters have to be carrying AR-15s.

Trump’s decision to send in DHS stormtroopers to Portland is anything but surprising. He’s been telegraphing his intention to do this since the George Floyd murder sparked protests in the beginning of June. And let’s be clear about the reasons. Trump doesn’t care about American cities or statues or “anarchy” or any of the rest of it. He cares about getting re-elected, and since he doesn’t know how to deal with the pandemic crisis, he figured he could use the Black Lives Matter protests to spark a white backlash that will carry him to victory.

Jennifer Senior: I Spoke With Anthony Fauci. He Says His Inbox Isn’t Pretty.

An interview with the man who has an important message for you, if he can get it out.

Americans may have lost faith in their most cherished institutions — the presidency, Congress, the media, perhaps even democracy itself — but 65 percent of them still believe in Dr. Anthony Fauci.

This, in spite of the fact that he’s practically disappeared from network and cable television while the pandemic has whipped through the country with alarming speed (his message of sober realism does not, one suspects, align well with the wishful thinking of his boss).

This, in spite of the fact that the Trump White House waged a highly unusual campaign last week to undermine his credibility, with both named and unnamed administration officials dispatched to impale him like an hors d’oeuvre. Fauci has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, and he’s been the custodian of a jittery nation’s sanity since March 2020.

We had a chance to speak nine hours before the president’s first coronavirus news briefing since April. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Karen Tumulty: Four years ago, Trump said he alone could fix things. What isn’t worse now?

The sight of Donald Trump standing by himself behind the briefing room lectern, doing his best to sound presidential and in command of a crisis, was a reminder of a milestone to which no one at the White House cared to draw attention.

Tuesday — the day that Trump delivered his first coronavirus briefing in months — also marked the fourth anniversary of his acceptance of the 2016 Republican nomination at the GOP convention in Cleveland. It was there that he so memorably declared to thousands of cheering delegates and a national television audience: “I alone can fix it.”

Today, it is hard to find any measure by which the country is not feeling more insecure and worse off than it did when Trump was elected.

As the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus was rising toward 140,000, Trump said his administration is “in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful.” But he offered no clue of what that plan might be, or why he has yet to have any plan at all more than five months after covid-19 claimed its first victim in this country.

Though the president acknowledged that the pandemic is likely to “get worse before it gets better” — a more realistic assessment than his customary “light at the end of the tunnel” talk — Trump continued to congratulate himself for a job well done. [..]

What Trump needs to do now is prove that he is up to the job of calming the country and leading it through this dark time. But instead, he is reverting to the 2016 culture-warfare playbook, painting scary and baseless pictures of a dystopian future if Biden and the Democrats are put back in power.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Investment in child care can’t wait until there’s a coronavirus vaccine

Our economy cannot function without child care. That simple fact has been brought into stark relief by the recent pandemic, which has forced parents across the country to choose between supporting their family financially and caring for their children.

“In the Covid-19 economy, you can have a kid or a job,” wrote Deb Perelman in the New York Times, “But you can’t have both.” That’s hardly an exaggeration. With school districts contemplating virtual or partial reopenings in the fall, many of the nation’s 50 million working parents will have to fill gaps in child care. Already, 13 percent of American parents have had to either quit a job or cut back their working hours because of a lack of child care.

This crisis isn’t new. For years, working families have struggled with the rising cost of child care and the difficulty of finding licensed providers. [..]

Then there’s access. Before the pandemic, half the population lived in child-care deserts — “areas with little or no licensed child care capacity.” Now, these deserts have become complete wastelands. More than half of licensed child-care centers have closed as a result of the pandemic, many of them for good. CAP estimates that these closures could impact 4.5 million children, the majority of them from middle- and low-income families.

Our child-care system is on the brink of collapse, and working parents and our economy are at a breaking point. Something has to give.