Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium 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: Armpits, White Ghettos and Contempt

Who really despises the American heartland?

“If you live in the Midwest, where else do you want to live besides Chicago? You don’t want to live in Cincinnati or Cleveland or, you know, these armpits of America.” So declared Stephen Moore, the man Donald Trump wants to install on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, during a 2014 event held at a think tank called, yes, the Heartland Institute.

The crowd laughed.

Moore is an indefensible choice on many grounds. Even if he hadn’t shown himself to be extraordinarily misogynistic and have an ugly personal history, his track record on economics — always wrong, never admitting error or learning from it — is utterly disqualifying.

His remarks about the Midwest, however, highlight more than his unsuitability for the Fed. They also provide an illustration of something I’ve been noticing for a while: The thinly veiled contempt conservative elites feel for the middle-American voters they depend on.

Elizabeth Drew: The Danger in Not Impeaching Trump

It may be risky politically, but Congress has a responsibility to act.

The decision facing the House Democrats over whether to proceed with an impeachment of President Trump is both more difficult and more consequential than the discussion of it suggests. The arguments offered by House leaders, in particular Speaker Nancy Pelosi, against it are understandable, including that impeachment could invite a wrenching partisan fight; render the party vulnerable to the charge that it’s obsessed with scoring points against Mr. Trump; and distract Democrats from focusing on legislation of more interest to voters.

But the Democrats would also run enormous risks if they didn’t hold to account a president who has clearly abused power and the Constitution, who has not honored the oath of office and who has had a wave of campaign and White House aides plead guilty to or be convicted of crimes.

The argument that the Democratic House wouldn’t be able to focus on substantive legislation is the flimsiest rationale. It did so in 1974 while the House Judiciary Committee was considering the impeachment of Richard Nixon. It seems clear that what the Democratic leaders are actually worried about is public relations. The press no doubt would focus on that sexier subject. [..]

The Democrats may succeed in avoiding a tumultuous, divisive fight over impeachment now. But if they choose to ignore clear abuses of the Constitution, they’ll also turn a blind eye to the precedent they’re setting and how feckless they’ll look in history.

Jed Handelsman Shugerman: The Trump Campaign Conspired With the Russians. Mueller Proved It.

By the standards of a potential impeachment inquiry, the evidence is clear.

n his first letter after receiving the Mueller report, Attorney General William Barr accurately quoted it as saying that “the investigation did not establish” that the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

But the opposite is also true: The Mueller report does establish that, in fact, members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

How is this possible? It’s the difference between the report’s criminal prosecution standard of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” and a lower standard — the preponderance standard of “more likely than not” — relevant for counterintelligence and general parlance about facts, and closer to the proper standard for impeachment.

There is confusion about the Mueller report’s fact-finding because he used the wrong coordination standard, obstruction probably obscured the evidence of crimes, and the summary was unclear about evidentiary standards. The report’s very high standard for legal conclusions for criminal charges was explicitly proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” So the report did not establish crimes beyond a reasonable doubt. But it did show a preponderance of conspiracy and coordination.

Eugene Robinson: Biden may or may not win the nomination. But he knows the stakes.

Joe Biden begins his presidential campaign with a lead over the crowded Democratic field and a simple message the nation can immediately grasp: I can stop the madness. I can beat President Trump. [..]

Conventional wisdom holds that the Democratic candidates can’t just be anti-Trump — that they must talk primarily about bread-and-butter issues such as health care, the opioid crisis and the hollowing out of the working class. Indeed, Democrats do have to offer solutions. But to be silent about Trump is to tiptoe around the elephant in the parlor. The single biggest issue, for the health and prosperity of the nation, is getting him out of office.

We will hear much in the coming months about which candidates appeal to which components of the electorate. Biden potentially could do very well with two widely disparate groups in particular — the white working-class voters in the Rust Belt who gave Trump his 2016 victory; and the African Americans without whose support no one can win the Democratic presidential nomination.

But is Biden too moderate for a party that has moved leftward in recent years? I think he should invite a group of the fiery first-term Democratic women in the House to lunch. Instead of trying to hug them, he should listen to what they have to say. If he fails to make a real effort to understand how the party has changed, his first day on the campaign trail may turn out to have been his best day.

Abdul El-Sayed: The Green New Deal doesn’t just help climate. It’s also a public health new deal

I used to be a reluctant environmentalist. Of course, as a scientist, I’ve always believed in the science of climate change – even a casual examination of the evidence shows that humans burning fossil fuels into the Earth’s atmosphere is causing it. But my reluctance wasn’t about science, it’s just that the images of melting glaciers and dying polar bears – while compelling for many people – just didn’t move me. I’m not an outdoorsman. Besides, polar bears, however cute and cuddly they may seem, eat their own young.

As a doctor, I care about people. And the consequences of climate change felt so remote from the daily struggle. Babies are dying, so why should I be worried about faraway glaciers and cannibalistic bears? But after being appointed health director of the City of Detroit, I realized that the forces that cause climate change are the same forces that poisoned the lungs of babies in my city. Today, I’m standing up for the Green New Deal because it’s also a Public Health New Deal.

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

Hillary Clinton: Mueller documented a serious crime against all Americans. Here’s how to respond.

Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. It documents a serious crime against the American people.

The debate about how to respond to Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” attack — and how to hold President Trump accountable for obstructing the investigation and possibly breaking the law — has been reduced to a false choice: immediate impeachment or nothing. History suggests there’s a better way to think about the choices ahead.

Obviously, this is personal for me, and some may say I’m not the right messenger. But my perspective is not just that of a former candidate and target of the Russian plot. I am also a former senator and secretary of state who served during much of Vladi­mir Putin’s ascent, sat across the table from him and knows firsthand that he seeks to weaken our country.

I am also someone who, by a strange twist of fate, was a young staff attorney on the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate impeachment inquiry in 1974, as well as first lady during the impeachment process that began in 1998. And I was a senator for New York after 9/11, when Congress had to respond to an attack on our country. Each of these experiences offers important lessons for how we should proceed today.

Paul Krugman: Survival of the Wrongest

Evidence has a well-known liberal bias.

Evidence has a well-known liberal bias. And that, presumably, is why conservatives prefer “experts” who not only consistently get things wrong, but refuse to admit or learn from their mistakes.

There has been a lot of commentary about Stephen Moore, the man Donald Trump wants to put on the Fed’s Board of Governors. It turns out that he has a lot of personal baggage: He was held in contempt of court for failing to pay alimony and child support, and his past writings show an extraordinary degree of misogyny. He misstates facts so much that one newspaper editor vowed never to publish him again, and he has ben caught outright lying about his past support for a gold standard. Oh, and he has described the cities of the U.S. heartland as “armpits of America.”

But it’s also important to put Moore in context. Until he decided that the Fed should roll those printing presses to help Trump, he was part of a fairly broad group that advocated tight money in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. This group bitterly criticized both the Fed’s low interest rates and its efforts to boost the economy by buying bonds, so-called “quantitative easing.” Its members warned that these policies would lead to runaway inflation, and seized on a rise in commodity prices in 2011-12 as the harbinger of an inflationary surge.

Michelle Cottle: Meet the Press? Don’t Bother

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, nominally the White House press secretary, has abandoned the custom of briefing the news media.

Tuesday saw yet another record broken by the Trump White House: the longest run without an official news media briefing.

At 43 days and counting, this information drought supplants the previous record of 42 days without a briefing, set in March — which broke the 41-day record set in January.

At some point, one cannot help but wonder: What is the job of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who holds the title of White House press secretary?

Conducting daily briefings was once a core function of the press secretary. The White House put its spin on the news of the day; reporters pushed for more information or clarification. Somewhere in all the give-and-take, the public interest was served.

Under President Trump, such sessions have all but vanished. Since the first of the year, Ms. Sanders has held two formal briefings. She has also developed a frustrating reputation for not responding to media inquiries in general.

This presumably pleases her boss. Mr. Trump prefers to broadcast to the public from the safety of Twitter, where truth and accountability are not held at a premium. In January, he even directed Ms. Sanders (in a tweet) “not to bother” with briefings anymore. Is a White House press secretary unwilling to interact with the press earning her taxpayer-funded salary?

In Ms. Sanders’s case, the growing lack of access is arguably less troubling than the lack of credibility — a problem highlighted in last Thursday’s release of the Mueller report.

Thomas B. Edall: Bernie Sanders Scares a Lot of People, and Quite a Few of Them Are Democrats

What happens if he’s the nominee in 2020?

In 34 national surveys conducted from October 2018 to early April, Joe Biden, who is expected to announce his presidential bid on Thursday, led of all competitors.

Then, in an Emerson College poll conducted two weeks ago, Bernie Sanders, a candidate with substantial liabilities as well as marked strengths, pulled ahead of Biden for the first time, 29-24 percent.

Sanders is also doing well in Iowa and New Hampshire, sites of the first caucus and primary.

One consequence of these developments is summed up in the headline of my colleague Jonathan Martin’s April 15 story, “‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats Are Agonizing Over His Momentum.”

In this light, I asked a group of Democratic and liberal-leaning consultants, pollsters, economists and political scientists what the likelihood of a Sanders’ nomination was, what his prospects would be in the general election, and how Democratic House and Senate candidates might fare with Sanders at the top of the ticket. When necessary, I offered them the opportunity to speak on background — with no direct attribution — to encourage forthcoming responses.

The answers I got from Democrats who make their living in politics revealed considerable wariness toward Sanders — the response many Sanders supporters would expect. [..]

Democratic primaries, as I mentioned earlier, are hardly a proving ground for how well a democratic socialist — and a self-declared social and cultural outsider — will sell in November, something Trump and the Republican Party are already gearing up to turn into a major 2020 issue.

The question extends beyond Sanders. Democratic constituencies competing to pick a candidate to square off against Trump next year face a difficult-to-resolve problem. Will they find themselves flying blind, entangled in a cause more than a campaign as they leave too much of the middle-of-the-road electorate behind?

E. J. Dionne Jr.: Will Trump and the Supreme Court tear our democracy apart?

2020 Census and thus representation in Congress to benefit the party that placed them on the court.

Trump’s brazen attacks on U.S. institutions and the court’s partisanship are not separate stories. They are the product of a radicalization of American conservatism. Republicans and conservative ideologues — including the ones wearing the robes of justice — are destabilizing our institutions in pursuit of power.

The apparent willingness of the court’s five conservatives to go along with the Trump administration on the census is of a piece with earlier rulings gutting the Voting Rights Act and increasing the power of big money in politics. All tilt the workings of our democratic republic in favor of conservative candidates, conservative causes and the appointment of conservative judges just like them.