Pondering the Pundits

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.

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Charles M. Blow: Is Trump a Rapist?

America needs to give these women, and the accusations they’ve brought forth, the full attention they deserve.

I am simply disgusted by what’s happening in America.

My political differences with this president and his accomplices in Congress — and now on the Supreme Court — are only part of the reason. Indeed, those differences may not be the lesser reason, and that, for me, says a lot.

For me, the reason is that the country, or large segments of it, seems to be acquiescing to a particular form of evil, one that is pernicious and even playful, one in which the means of chipping away at our values and morals grow even stronger, graduating from tack hammer to standard hammer to sledgehammer.

America, it seems to me, is drifting toward catastrophe. Donald Trump is leading us there. And all the while, our politicians plot about political outcomes and leverage. Republican politicians are afraid to upset him; Democratic politicians are afraid to impeach him.

One thing that should never be underestimated is a politician’s clawing instinct toward self-preservation. These disciples of flexibility have learned well that the trees that remain standing are those that bend best in the storm.

Trump is to them a storm. But, to many of us, he is desolation, or the possibility thereof.

But, because nothing changes, because he is never truly held accountable, too many Americans are settling into a functional numbness, a just-let-me-survive-it form of sedation. But, that is where the edge of death is marked. That is where the rot begins. That is where a society loses itself.

Mara Gay: Tiffany Cabán and the New Democrats

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory was no fluke.

It was election night at La Boom, a Queens nightclub, and Tiffany Cabán’s supporters had something to say.

“Black Lives Matter!” they shouted, an extraordinary cry at the victory party for a district attorney candidate. “Black Lives Matter!”

Such was the scene as the night’s tally ended with Ms. Cabán 1,090 votes ahead of Borough President Melinda Katz in the Democratic primary. The final toll won’t be known until at least next week, when absentee and other paper ballots are counted.

If Ms. Cabán’s lead holds, New York is likely to be added to the list of cities that have elected district attorneys who want to remake the criminal justice system to undo two decades of policies that led to the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of black and Latino Americans, too often for minor crimes and drug-related offenses.

The election also affirms the growing power of a fairly new force in New York politics: a millennial-based coalition pulling the Democratic Party to the left, and challenging its leadership machine.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joseph Crowley, the Queens Democratic chairman and fourth-ranking House member, last June, she gained star power more akin to Beyoncé’s than that of a freshman member of Congress. The city’s political establishment thought it was a fluke.

Victories by reform Democrats in the New York State Senate primary elections in September threw shade on those doubts. This election should put to rest the idea that the coalition isn’t a sustainable force.

Richard Wolffe: ‘What’s been missing is courage’: Elizabeth Warren throws down the gauntlet

Warren towered over the first Democratic debate and its biggest questions on the economy and healthcare

There was one dominant figure on the very crowded stage in Miami at the first TV debate of the 2020 presidential election.

She happened to be the smallest and oldest figure in the middle of the pack, but it made no difference. Elizabeth Warren towered over the opening sequence of the first Democratic debate and its biggest questions on the economy and healthcare.

There’s a reason why Warren has risen steadily in the early polls to the point where she is threatening the previously safe space occupied by Bernie Sanders as the insurgent challenger to the establishment frontrunner.

Yes, she has a plan for everything. But more than policy proposals, she has the rare ability – especially for a senator – to talk about the big complex stuff in simple and direct ways. [..]

But it was Amy Klobuchar’s experience that carried the biggest warnings for Joe Biden – and anyone else in the centrist bloc of the Democratic party.

Her pitch of Midwestern reasonableness and purple state compromise was ripped as a complacent and compliant acceptance of the status quo. Her promise that she could beat Trump by reaching his voters seemed premature. Her citing of Obama’s compromises sounded like reaching back to a long-lost time when Democrats still believed there was someone reasonable on the other side of the aisle.

Those days are gone, after two and a half years of Donald Trump and the Republican party he has reshaped with lies, delusions and plain old derangement.

Whether Biden understands that reality – as Warren clearly does – may be the biggest question of this first phase of a very long primary season.

Leah Litman and Seth Davis: A momentous change may be upon the Supreme Court

Wednesday, the progressive justices managed to stop the Supreme Court from overruling yet another one of the court’s prior decisions. In Kisor v. Wilkie, a bare majority of the court composed of the progressives together with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. opted not to overturn a 75-year-old line of precedents directing courts to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of their own regulations. But the doctrine of stare decisis — which requires courts to adhere to precedents and supports not only the administrative state but also Roe v. Wade and a host of important constitutional decisions — remains under attack.

The decision in Kisor precipitated a separate writing by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett M. Kavanaugh (in part), in which they announced that they do not feel bound by stare decisis principles in an important subset of cases. The progressive justices have gone out of their way to warn us that the conservative court is clearing the path to a radical reshaping of U.S. law.

The doctrine of stare decisis ensures stability in the law, protects private parties who rely on the law and helps preserve the court’s reputation as a nonpartisan — or at least not entirely partisan — institution. It does so by binding progressive justices to conservative rulings and conservative justices to progressive rulings. Departing from stare decisis, Roberts wrote just last year, “is an exceptional action demanding special justification.”

Dana Milbank: Trump demands subservience and gets incompetence

His ‘actings’ are causing babies to go hungry, and they may soon bumble us into war with Iran.

Can’t anybody here play this game?

The Trump administration, if you haven’t noticed, is undergoing one of its frequent paroxysms of incompetence.

On the border, the administration holds hundreds of migrant children in deplorable conditions: filthy, frightened and hungry. The president ordered and then called off a massive immigration raid, and, in the middle of the chaos, the administration’s top border security official resigned Tuesday.

Overseas, the administration is stumbling toward war with Iran, ordering and then canceling an attack. Iran on Tuesday said the White House is “afflicted by mental retardation,” and Trump responded by threatening Iran with “obliteration.”

Here in Washington, Trump just appointed a new press secretary for the third time and a White House communications director for the seventh time. He refuses to say whether he has confidence in his FBI director, his third, and he’s publicly feuding with the Federal Reserve chairman he appointed over whether Trump can fire him. Meantime, Trump is defying a Trump-appointed watchdog who called for the firing of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway for illegal political activities, and he’s brushing off the latest credible accusation of sexual misconduct by saying the accuser is “not my type.” And Trump’s protocol chief is quitting on the eve of the Group of 20 summit, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, amid allegations that he carried a whip in the office.

The chaos takes on many forms, but most of it stems from a single cause: Trump’s determination to run the country like “The Apprentice.”