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

Mark Joseph Stern: Trump Judge Neomi Rao’s Flynn Opinion Is Dangerous and Anti-Democratic

Donald Trump’s most brazenly partisan judicial appointee has come through for the president once again.

On Wednesday, in a 2–1 decision, Judge Neomi Rao forced a district court to dismiss the prosecution of Michael Flynn. Rao’s opinion is an exercise in outcome-driven sophistry that barely pretends to be a judicial opinion. While gutting a vital check of executive misconduct, Rao whitewashed the Justice Department’s flagrantly political decision to drop charges against Flynn—hours before the House Judiciary Committee heard whistleblowers testify about political interference at the DOJ, including in Flynn’s case. Rao accused the district court of “unprecedented intrusions on individual liberty” simply because it dared to “prob[e] the government’s motives” for meddling in the prosecution of the president’s ally.

Wednesday’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will almost certainly be appealed to the full court and possibly the Supreme Court after that. If upheld, Rao’s ruling will set a terrible legal precedent. But equally devastating are its broader, long-term implications for judicial independence.

Amanda Marcotte: Red-state reopening has been a disaster — and Republican hopes for a comeback are collapsing

Reopening stores and restaurants won’t save the economy with the caseload spiking, and even Republicans know it

Republicans believed the state of Texas would be the national model to prove Donald Trump and his supporters in right-wing media correct about the coronavirus. Trump and conservative pundits hav continued to champion conspiracy theories painting the virus as being deliberately exaggerated by Democrats in order to power down the economy and sink the president’s re-election chances. They’ve and that it’s fine to lift the pandemic restrictions, even in places that haven’t met  any of the criteria laid out by public health experts for safer economic reopening.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican who has remade himself in the Trumpist mold, made a big public noise about how his state’s reopening — in the face of all reasonable advice — would accomplish the twin goals of being safe and restarting the economy.

His administration’s focus “is keeping Texans safe while restoring their ability to get back to work, open their businesses, pay their bills, and put food on their tables,” Abbott claimed in May, when Texas went to “phase 2” of reopening, adding, “we are slowing the spread of COVID-19 and protecting our most vulnerable.”

In early June, when the state went to “phase 3,” Abbott kept up the clap-happy talk, saying, “The people of Texas continue to prove that we can safely and responsibly open our state for business while containing COVID-19 and keeping our state safe.” He promised that officials “will continue to mitigate the spread of this virus, protect public health, and get more Texans back to work and their daily activities.”

Twenty days later, Abbott was singing a much different tune, going on KBTX-TV and begging people to stay home.

Heather Digby Parton: Trump’s campaign of delusion hits the rocks — and Republican women are bailing out

A new Sun Belt spike in COVID-19 cases could be Trump’s Waterloo. Denying reality just isn’t working anymore

President Trump had his spirits lifted a little bit on Tuesday when he visited his beloved unfinished border wall and held an event in a megachurch filled with 3,000 cheering fans demonstrating their devotion in Phoenix, one of the most intense COVID-19 hotspots in the country. Virtually none of the crowd wore masks and they sat together, shoulder to shoulder, for hours, screaming and laughing, sharing their aerosols with abandon.

Trump was no doubt reassured by the spectacle. They love him so much they are ready to die for him.

He droned on for 70 minutes or so, hitting most of his greatest hits and complaining about mail-in voting, saying this election will be the most corrupt in history. But the main thrust of his message was that he had directed the best pandemic response of any leader in the world and that the U.S. is back, baby!

The “numbers” he was referring to there were economic statistics. But as you know, he’s been complaining about the COVID case numbers for months as well, even insisting earlier this week that if we didn’t do all this testing we wouldn’t have so many cases. He appears to have a mental block on this subject and is simply unable to comprehend that if we weren’t testing we would still have the cases. Apparently no one has asked him if he thinks fewer tests would result in fewer deaths, but it would certainly be interesting to know the answer.

Chuck Rosenberg: Bolton’s book suggests Trump corruption runs deep. Worse? Republicans don’t care.

The failure of House Democrats to examine this additional corruption, Bolton wrote, and their sole focus on Ukraine were “impeachment malpractice.” But would it have made a difference?

President Donald Trump was impeached in the House of Representatives because he linked the provision of security aid to an embattled ally, Ukraine, with a request that its president announce a bogus investigation of Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden. The evidence of Trump’s malfeasance was compelling, and the president’s conduct — putting political self before the interests of the nation — was egregious. But it did not seem, in the end, to matter to his supporters in Congress. In early February, along a predominantly party-line vote, the Senate acquitted Trump.

According to Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton in his new book, “The Room Where It Happened,” Bolton knew of Trump’s similar corrupt behavior beyond Ukraine. (The Trump administration sought to block distribution of the book, but a federal judge recently declined.) As The New York Times reported, Bolton knew that “Mr. Trump was willing to intervene in [Justice Department] investigations into companies like Turkey’s Halkbank to curry favor with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey or China’s ZTE to favor” Chinese President Xi Jinping. [..]

Bolton’s revelations, assuming they are true, suggest that Trump spends his time in office offering crooked backroom deals to foreign leaders. This is depressing. But perhaps more depressing is the reality that had the House investigated these additional allegations, the outcome of the impeachment trial likely would have been the same — an acquittal.

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: A Plague of Willful Ignorance

Trump has empowered America’s anti-rational streak.

In the early 20th century the American South was ravaged by pellagra, a nasty disease that produced the “four Ds” — dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and death. At first, pellagra’s nature was uncertain, but by 1915 Dr. Joseph Goldberger, a Hungarian immigrant employed by the federal government, had conclusively shown that it was caused by nutritional deficiencies associated with poverty, and especially with a corn-based diet.

However, for decades many Southern citizens and politicians refused to accept this diagnosis, declaring either that the epidemic was a fiction created by Northerners to insult the South or that the nutritional theory was an attack on Southern culture. And deaths from pellagra continued to climb.

Sound familiar?

We’ve known for months what it takes to bring Covid-19 under control. You need a period of severe lockdown to reduce the disease’s prevalence. Only then can you reopen the economy — while maintaining social distancing as needed — and even then you need a regime of widespread testing, tracing and isolation of potentially infected individuals to keep the virus suppressed.

Eugene Robinson: There is no earthly reason this nation should be defiled by Confederate statues

Solving the problem is easy: Tear them all down.

The solution to the problem of Confederate memorials is simple: Tear them down, all of them. If a few must be left standing for practical reasons — the gigantic carvings on Stone Mountain outside Atlanta come to mind — authorities should allow them to be appropriately defaced, like the graffiti-scrawled remnants of the Berlin Wall.

The question of monuments to other white supremacists is more complicated, but it’s still not rocket science. As a society, we’re perfectly capable of deciding together which must go and which can stay. This supposed “slippery slope” isn’t really slippery at all.

There is no earthly reason any of this nation’s public spaces should be defiled by statuary honoring generals, soldiers and politicians who were traitors, who took up arms against their country, who did so to perpetuate slavery, and who — this is an important point — were losers. [..]

We put statues in places of honor to depict our heroes and our values. Overt racism is not an idea we honor — not in relationships and not in bronze and marble. Not anymore.

Jamelle Bouie: The Boy Who Cried Fake News

From inside the MAGA gates, Trump can’t see how the world has changed.

If there’s anything we’ve learned in the five years since Donald Trump came down that escalator, it’s that he cannot thrive without a constant stream of attention, adulation and affirmation. It’s why he’s obsessed with cable news and Fox in particular; why his cabinet meetings begin with almost worshipful praise from each of his appointees; and why he’s constantly touting his sky-high support from other Republicans.

It’s also why, on Saturday, he held an indoor rally in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic. “I guarantee you after Saturday, if everything goes well, he’s going to be in a much better mood,” an unnamed Trump political adviser told CNN the day before the event. “He believes that he needs to be out there fighting and he feeds off the energy of the crowds.”

The president is plainly unable to handle bad news, or even the idea that he isn’t popular or well-liked. Someone who rejects the idea of being rejected may, for example, believe that voter fraud is the only threat to his re-election. And he’s constructed a bubble, let’s call it a safe space, in which he’s insulated from bad news, negative feedback and pretty much any kind of criticism. The result is that he’s unable to respond to a changing national mood, unable to adjust to a public that wants more leadership than spectacle.

Michelle Goldberg: America Is Too Broken to Fight the Coronavirus

No other developed country is doing so badly.

Graphs of the coronavirus curves in Britain, Canada, Germany and Italy look like mountains, with steep climbs up and then back down. The one for America shows a fast climb up to a plateau. For a while, the number of new cases in the U.S. was at least slowly declining. Now, according to The Times, it’s up a terrifying 22 percent over the last 14 days.

As Politico reported on Monday, Italy’s coronavirus catastrophe once looked to Americans like a worst-case scenario. Today, it said, “America’s new per capita cases remain on par with Italy’s worst day — and show signs of rising further.”

This is what American exceptionalism looks like under Donald Trump. It’s not just that the United States has the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths of any country in the world. Republican political dysfunction has made a coherent campaign to fight the pandemic impossible.

Amanda Marotte: Donald Trump thinks coronavirus testing is a plot to destroy him — and no, he’s not kidding

Lifelong con man has convinced himself he can make voters un-see the pandemic if he just keeps lying about it

At his Tulsa rally on Saturday, Donald Trump may have failed to draw the big crowd or the violent protests he desired, but he did enter a new phase in his efforts to make the coronavirus pandemic disappear through the magical power of lying about it.

During Trump’s disjointed speech, he mentioned that the “bad part” about testing people for the virus lies in the fact that “you’re going to find more cases.”

“So I said to my people, slow the testing down please,” he added, protesting that they “test and they test” and suggesting that cases that might otherwise be written off as “the sniffles” then get classified as COVID-19.

This is far from the first time that Trump has publicly speculated about concealing the extent of the pandemic by clamping down on testing. Indeed, there’s every reason to believe that the glacial pace of testing in the U.S. is a direct reflection of the president’s wishes.

As Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, observed the last time Trump whined about testing, “The lack of tests isn’t accidental. It’s by design.”

Despite this history, the White House made a show of playing Trump’s comment as a joke, with one administration official telling CNN that Trump was “obviously kidding” and another saying it was “tongue in cheek.”

But Trump doesn’t like it when his own people undermine his heartfelt desire to make the coronavirus go away through pure denialism, and so on Tuesday morning he laid down the law on Twitter: No, he’s not kidding, and he really does think he can disappear the virus by making sure people can’t get tested for it.

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

Preet Bharara: The Wrong Justice Department Official Lost His Job This Weekend

The attorney general, Bill Barr, undermined the rule of law by forcing out Geoffrey Berman, the United States attorney in Manhattan.

President Trump has long made clear that, for him, “rule of law” is a limited-utility slogan. By word and deed, he has demonstrated his belief that the law and its instrumentalities exist to serve him, personally and politically.

He has pressured individuals and institutions to pervert their usual independent government missions to comply with a mandate of pure self-interest to protect the president’s friends and pursue the president’s adversaries. This explains Mr. Trump’s ire at his former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from the Russia investigation; recusal made the protection part of the mandate harder to accomplish. [..]

Mr. Trump’s latest domestic political errand involves the office I led for almost eight years — the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, commonly known as S.D.N.Y., a place where politics is supposed to be off limits. The United States Attorney Geoffrey Berman was fired on Saturday in a manner and under circumstances that warrant criticism and scrutiny.

Jennifer Senior: America’s Wannabe Autocrat Is in the Home Stretch. How Worried Should We Be?

Beware a despot when he’s cornered.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that perhaps, at long last, we had reached a tipping point in Trump’s popularity, and I stand by it. On Thursday, a poll conducted by Fox News (Fox!) showed him trailing Biden by 12 percentage points; the Tulsa arena hosting his comeback rally on Saturday was two-thirds empty. The man is ripe for the ultimate “Downfall” video. Especially given his recent sojourn in an actual bunker.

Yet it’s precisely because Trump feels overwhelmed and outmatched that I fear we’ve reached a far scarier juncture: he seems to be attempting, however clumsily, to transition from president to autocrat, using any means necessary to mow down those who threaten his re-election.

Whether he has the competence to pull this off is anyone’s guess. As we know, Trump is surpassingly incapable of governing. But he has also shown authoritarian tendencies from the very beginning. For over three years, he’s been dismembering the body politic, institution by institution, norm by norm. What has largely spared us from total evisceration were honorable civil servants and appointees.

Trump has torn through almost all of them and replaced them with loyalists. He now has a clear runway. What we have left is an army of pliant flunkies and toadies at the agencies, combined with the always-enabling Mitch McConnell and an increasingly emboldened attorney general, William Barr.

Charles M. Blow: ‘Law and Order’ for ‘Blacks and Hippies’

Trump’s tough talk doesn’t seek to address the rage that inequity has bred, but rather to contain it.

Last week, Donald Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden and announced an executive order on police reform — a list of minor, unfunded actions that incentivized some changes but mandated none.

This was his response to the anti-racism, anti-police brutality Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country. I don’t think it was an action he wanted to take, but one that he had to take at this moment when his poll numbers are dipping and people are demanding change.

Not once in his speech did he say the words “protests” or “protesters.”

Instead, it was a whiplash speech that swung from acknowledging the pain of families who’ve lost loved ones to police violence and promising “to fight for justice for all of our people,” to more law-and-order talk and condemnation of riots, looting and arson.

Those lawless acts occurred in some cities in the beginning, but the protests have moved well beyond that now.

Jennifer Rubin: Trump’s campaign has no clue how to solve this problem

President Trump’s disastrous rally in Tulsa is arguably more than a one-time embarrassment. Rather, it revealed a central problem for a campaign already taking on water: What is Trump going to do with his time for five months?

Remember, before the Tulsa debacle, he was frantic to return to rallies with his die-hard supporters. Without them, he was becoming extra grouchy, according to news reports. Tulsa was supposed to kick off a series of these showstoppers, but the show is now stopped indefinitely. [..]

Trump has painted himself into a corner of the electorate, namely the true believers in red states. His access to other voters is curtailed or ineffective. When he does reach a broader audience, disasters tend to ensue (e.g., saying during his Tulsa rally that he ordered testing be slowed down, the horrific optics at his West Point speech, his attack on peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square followed by a cheesy photo op with a Bible).

Someone versed in reality TV should have seen this coming. Trump has been overexposed for 3 ½ years and has nothing new to offer. His racist appeals, a mainstay of his message, are even less tolerable in the current political environment. His act has gotten old and tired. The way to solve this, Trump surely knows, is to fire the “host” and get someone new. It’s reality TV 101.

Robert Reich: What Defund the Police really means: replacing social control with investment

Protests over brutality and racism highlight how far the US has travelled from any sort of equality. Real change is needed

Some societies center on social control, others on social investment.

Social-control societies put substantial resources into police, prisons, surveillance, immigration enforcement and the military. Their purpose is to utilize fear, punishment and violence, to maintain what they consider order.

Social-investment societies put more resources into healthcare, education, affordable housing, jobless benefits and children. Their purpose is to free people from the risks and anxieties of daily life and give everyone a fair shot at making it.

Donald Trump epitomizes the former. He calls himself the “law and order” president. He even wants to sic the military on Americans protesting against police brutality.

Trump is really the culmination of 40 years of increasing social control in the US and decreasing social investment.