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: Donald Trump is bored: He wants to move on from this pandemic — just as it hits swing states

There’s no grand political strategy here — Trump’s tired of this virus and wants to get back to trolling his foes

In March, after months of ignoring the looming threat of the novel coronavirus, Donald Trump decided to recast himself in a new role, declaring he was now a “wartime president,” clearly imagining himself in the mold of FDR or, more likely, as Bill Pullman’s presidential character in the 1996 film “Independence Day.”

This was a total joke from the beginning, as Trump’s behavior wasn’t hard to predict. As a sociopath and narcissist, Trump would enjoy a stint play-acting as president while doing nothing. But when it began to dawn on him that waging war is like, hard work, he would just drift away, letting the “war” effort fail.

Unsurprisingly, that is what exactly happened. As Heather Digby Parton explains in her Wednesday column for Salon, what has “become clear in the last few days is that the Trump administration has made a decision” to give up any semblance of trying to flatten the curve, stop the spread or do anything meaningful to defeat the coronavirus.

Instead, Parton writes, Trump and his advisers “have apparently decided to let the virus ‘wash over the country’ as Trump wanted to do from the beginning.” [..]

Trump made that clear in his press conference Tuesday, telling reporters, “We can’t keep our country closed for the next five years” (which exactly no one was proposing).

When asked about all the people who will die as part of this “reopening,” Trump implied that Americans will be happy to die for his cause, because they’re “warriors.”

Trump has clearly talked himself into the belief that the economy will come roaring back to life as soon as lockdown restrictions are lifted, which is utterly ludicrous. Between the certain further spread of the virus itself and the existing damage to the economy, things aren’t getting better anytime soon.

Bryce Covert: It’s OK to Not Be a Perfect Quarantine Employee

We’re all rightfully cutting ourselves some slack on the parenting front. So why aren’t we and our employers doing the same when it comes to work?

With schools and day care programs closed, working parents are starting to crack. In an attempt to ease that pressure, there have been a number of essays telling parents to go easy on themselves. “Now Is the Perfect Time to Lower the Parenting Bar,” Kimberly Harrington wrote at The Cut. “Quarantine Parenting Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect,” the New York Times writer Elizabeth Bruenig reassured her fellow parents.

You’re doing the best you can, these essays tell us — our children will come out healthy and whole on the other end of this, whenever that will be.

It’s true. Our children will survive without a well-orchestrated activity for every spare moment, or with a couple of extra hours of screen time each week (or, let’s face it, a couple of extra hours a day). But amid all the articles reminding us that we don’t have to be perfect parents during lockdown, where are the essays letting us know that we don’t have to be perfect employees? Why are so many of us still maintaining the fiction that we are all as competent at our jobs as we were before the virus hit our shores?

It’s extremely telling where we’ve decided it’s OK to cut ourselves some slack, and where we seem to be continuing as if there weren’t a global crisis of historic proportions.

Family and personal life always takes second place to work in this country. It’s untenable most of the time, but it’s absolutely unreasonable right now. We are still somehow expected to get the same amount of work done as when we spent eight or more hours in an office without homebound children and a pandemic to distract us.

This is lunacy. Keeping output steady while maintaining our physical and mental health just cannot be done. We have to work less, and employers have to get on board.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: The pandemic has made the Poor People’s Campaign virtual — and vital

“May we who are merely inconvenienced remember those whose lives are at stake. May we who have no risk factors remember those most vulnerable. May we have the necessary righteous indignation in this moment to fight for transformation.” Those words were part of a prayer that the Rev. William J. Barber II offered last week to a virtual meeting for readers of the Nation magazine (where I am publisher and editorial director). With his deep baritone, Barber’s moral clarity cut through the distance of the Internet. As the human toll reaped by the pandemic and the deepening economic depression grows, the call for fundamental change — for a new New Deal — gets louder. Whether we can summon up the vision and the leadership for that remains uncertain. What is clear is that Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign that he and his colleagues have been mobilizing over the past two years will galvanize a movement.

More than two years ago, Barber took on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s 1968 call for a “revolution of values” in America and revived King’s effort to build a poor people’s campaign across lines of race, religion and region. Long before the current catastrophe, the Poor People’s Campaign was challenging the “interlocking evils” of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and “the distorted moral narrative” of religious nationalism.

Mobilizing around a call for moral revival, the Poor People’s Campaign has built more than 40 state committees, bringing together poor and low-income people — many now called “essential” workers, faith leaders and citizens of conscience. In state capitals across the country, they spurred the most expansive wave of nonviolent citizen disobedience since the civil rights movement, protesting the skewed priorities of state budgets, the racializing of voter suppression and the cruelty of our immigration system. The group put forth a Poor People’s Moral Budget laying out sensible priorities at the national level. The campaign’s original plan for this year was to bring millions to Washington on June 20 to empower the 140 million people living in poverty in America and lift up their voices. Now, the pandemic has turned that demonstration virtual — but made it even more vital.

Karen Tumulty: Save us all from Jared Kushner

Whenever a member of the Trump family gets involved with a project, it is always smart to keep an eye out for the grift.

We might have hoped that a pandemic that has already cost more than 70,000 Americans their lives would be an exception to this rule. But no. President Trump’s decision to again put his unqualified son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of a team charged with a vital national security interest — this time, procuring crucial supplies and protective equipment for hospitals and others on the front lines of fighting the coronavirus — is producing the usual results: incompetence and cronyism.

Both The Post and the New York Times report that Kushner and a small team of inexperienced volunteers from the private sector have overridden career officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and are making a deadly crisis even deadlier with their amateur-hour bungling. The two newspapers — which no doubt will be denounced by the White House as “fake news” — based their accounts on a whistleblower memo written by one of the volunteers and interviews with government sources familiar with the effort. [..]

We are seeing now why government cannot, and should not, be run like a family business. In normal times, nepotism is merely corrupt. But at a moment such as the nightmare that we are all living through, it can be fatal.

Jennifer Rubin: Reopening the economy won’t avert a serious recession

President Trump and his band of obedient, red-state governors are determined to restart the economy despite the climbing death toll (more than 71,000). They imagine that if they open the doors of barbershops and movie theaters, the worst of the economic collapse might be averted. This is irrational for two key reasons.

First, the economy is sinking into a deep, structural recession that is unlikely to recede quickly. The Post reports: “U.S. companies shed 20.2 million jobs from their payrolls in April as the coronavirus pandemic brought the economy to a standstill and shuttered many of the country’s businesses. … April’s staggering number is the worst in the report’s history, which began in 2002, and is double the last record set in February 2009, during the Great Recession.” And that figure covers less than half of the month. [..]

In short, there is no evidence that major employers have bought into the hype that the economy will be back in high gear in a month or so. If reopening was supposed to generate a sense of normalcy and induce employers to bring back their employees, it is not working.

The second reason — the duration of the pandemic — is an even bigger barrier to Trump’s economic revival. The Associated Press reports: “New confirmed infections per day in the U.S. exceed 20,000, and deaths per day are well over 1,000, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University. And public health officials warn that the failure to flatten the curve and drive down the infection rate in places could lead to many more deaths — perhaps tens of thousands — as people are allowed to venture out and businesses reopen.” While extreme social-distancing measures have bent the curve in New York, the rest of the country has been going in the opposite direction: Take New York out of the equation and “the rate of new cases in the U.S. increased . . . from 6.2 per 100,000 people to 7.5.” [..]

In sum, the recession is well underway, and the pandemic shows no sign of abatement. The likely result of premature openings without a robust system for testing, tracking and isolating cases is more deaths — and further economic pain.

Leana S. Wen: As states reopen, here’s how you protect yourself from the coming surge

Leana S. Wen is an emergency physician and visiting professor at George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. Previously, she served as Baltimore’s health commissioner.

The federal government’s social distancing guidelines ended last week. As states lift their shelter-in-place orders and reopen parts of their economies, I am deeply worried that the next phase of the coronavirus pandemic will bring much more suffering and many more preventable deaths. What should concerned policymakers and residents do? Two things:

First, prepare for a massive surge.

More than 40 states have announced plans to lift restrictions, even though only a handful have met the minimum criteria for reopening as outlined by the White House coronavirus task force. The consequences of this are all too predictable, because the science around covid-19 has not changed: Without a vaccine or cure, the only thing keeping the disease in check has been keeping people separated from one another. Once social distancing is relaxed, covid-19 will again spread with explosive speed. [..]

Now is also the time to fully implement pandemic response plans to shore up health-care capacity across the country. In addition, no state has yet set up the testing, contact tracing and quarantining needed to contain the virus. State and local officials should do their best to ramp up these public health capabilities as they call upon the federal government to put forth the national coordinated effort to secure needed supplies and staff.

Second, stay safe for yourself and for those around you.

Just because you now can go out in public doesn’t mean you should. This is not the time to plan family gatherings, dinner parties and play dates. Restaurants, retail shops and salons might be open, but is going worth the risk? [..]

It will be tempting to see reopening as a return to our way of life before the coronavirus, but it will be anything but. As a society, we have made the decision to reopen before the science says we are ready. We are knowingly going back to where we were in mid-March, before the first exponential surge in infections and deaths. That surge will come again, but this time no one can say they didn’t see it coming.

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: Trump and His Infallible Advisers

Beware men who never admit having been wrong.

“You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.”

We have contained this, and the economy is “holding up nicely.”

It’s not nearly as serious as the common flu.

We’re going to have 50,000 or 60,000 deaths, and that’s great.

OK, we may have more than 100,000 deaths, but we’re doing a great job and should reopen the economy.

You sometimes hear people say that Donald Trump and his minions minimized the dangers of Covid-19, and that this misjudgment helps explain why their policy response has been so disastrously inadequate. But this statement, while true, misses crucial aspects of what’s going on.

For Trump and company didn’t make a one-time mistake. They grossly minimized the pandemic and its dangers every step of the way, week after week over a period of months. And they’re still doing it.  [..]

The moral of this story, I’d argue, is that observers trying to understand America’s lethally bad response to the coronavirus focus too much on Trump’s personal flaws, and not enough on the character of the party he leads.

Yes, Trump’s insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to people who tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge error. But disdain for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists and failure to learn from experience are standard operating procedure for the whole modern G.O.P.

Amanda Marcotte: Anti-lockdown “movement”: Powered by racism

These protests aren’t really about public health policy or the virus — they’re a display of white identity politics

On Sunday, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, appeared on CNN and declared that the protests against stay-at-home orders that plagued her state capital, as well as numerous others, “depicted some of the worst racism and awful parts of our history in this country,” pointing to the regular appearance of swastikas, nooses, Nazi slogans and the American swastika, also known as the Confederate battle flag. (We can safely assume that the usual excuse of “Southern pride” used to defend the Rebel flag doesn’t apply in Michigan or Ohio or Illinois, states where thousands of young men fought and died for the Union.)

Conservatives cried foul at Whitmer’s words, of course, but there’s little point in denying it. We all have eyes and ears, and no one is mistaking the protesters for people who would flinch if they heard a friend casually use the n-word in conversation.

The question isn’t whether white identity politics and racism are fueling the protests. The real question is why. Racism isn’t some kind of magical force that shields your body from the coronavirus. Even Donald “Inject Bleach” Trump hasn’t been fool enough to suggest you can defeat the virus by wrapping yourself in the Confederate flag. Yet there’s no denying that there’s a direct correlation between racist attitudes and the belief that the coronavirus is an overblown hoax and the lockdowns are the result of a widespread leftist conspiracy.

That isn’t just true of the protesters, either. The most prominent voices in media and politics who are egging them on and denouncing stay-at-home orders also happen to be the people who are doing their utmost to mainstream white nationalist ideology.

Michelle Goldberg: Democrats, Tara Reade and the #MeToo Trap

Don’t compare the case against Joe Biden to the one against Brett Kavanaugh.

Here is one thing that Christine Blasey Ford and Tara Reade have in common: The Intercept reporter Ryan Grim was pivotal in publicizing their stories. Before anyone had heard of Blasey, Grim reported that Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, had a letter from a constituent represented by a lawyer specializing in sexual harassment and assault cases. It was about the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

And it was Grim who helped put Reade, the former Senate aide who has accused Joe Biden of sexual assault and harassment, on the public radar. In March, Grim raised questions about why a legal fund devoted to helping #MeToo victims declined to take her case. He later broke the news that a woman Reade identified as her mother called into “Larry King Live” in 1993 to ask for advice for her daughter, who worked for a “prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all.”

Try to imagine what would have happened if, a few weeks before Grim reported on Blasey, she had tweeted at him, apropos of Kavanagh’s fortunes, “Yup. Timing … wait for it … tick tock.” My guess: She never would have been asked to testify publicly. Democrats would not have dared to champion such politically tainted allegations.

Of course, Blasey didn’t tweet that. Reade did, after Grim tweeted that Biden would fare poorly in a two-person race against Bernie Sanders. A few weeks later, a political bomb went off. [..]

I suspect that whatever happens in this campaign, the credibility of the movement will suffer. The original #MeToo stories were carefully and meticulously documented. Now it threatens to become a way to handicap one political faction in the middle of a partisan free-for-all. In a season full of appalling and sickening losses, this is just the latest one.

Eugene Robinson: We keep waiting for the ‘new normal.’ It might already be here.

We keep waiting to see what the “new normal” will be like. But I have the sinking feeling that it’s already here.

Social distancing has managed to keep the novel coronavirus pandemic from overwhelming the entire nation’s health-care system the way it did for a time in New York City. But the steep rise in covid-19 cases and deaths is not being followed by an equally steep decline. Rather, we seem to have reached some kind of plateau.

New York is clearly past its peak: New cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all gradually going down. But those tragic numbers are still rising in much of the rest of the country. Covid-19 has become one of the leading causes of death in the nation. The New York Times reported that an internal Trump administration estimate predicts daily covid-19 deaths nationwide could rise to 3,000 by the beginning of June, roughly twice the daily toll right now.

et, as New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) noted Monday, draconian stay-at-home restrictions are “not a sustainable situation.” People will have to be let out of their homes. Children need to be educated. The economy will have to be gently roused from its induced coma.

Covid-19 can — and, I believe, someday will — be defeated by a safe and effective vaccine. But the fastest-ever vaccine development to date (for mumps) took four years. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said Sunday that it may be possible to have a covid-19 vaccine by the end of the year “on paper.” But written formulae, however brilliant, cannot be injected into veins.

So, for now, we’re going to have to find a way to coexist with this pathogen.

Catherine Rampell: If they’re heroes, pay and protect them like heroes

If they’re heroes, pay them like heroes — and protect them like the precious resources they are.

Americans nationwide have lavished praise upon “essential workers.” We cheer the front-liners tending to the sick, stocking groceries, delivering supplies, cleaning hospitals, processing meat and driving buses. So, too, does the president.

“Through it all, we have seen the heroism of our doctors and nurses like never before. These are our warriors. The bravery of our truck drivers, such bravery, and food suppliers,” President Trump said at a news conference last month. “Such incredible bravery.”

Such plaudits, though presumably welcome, haven’t shielded these pandemic “warriors” from growing ill and dying in staggering numbers.

The United States owes these workers more.