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

Brice Covert: The Debate Over What ‘Infrastructure’ Is Is Ridiculous

Both snarled traffic and a morning without a home health aide can make you late for work.

Ask any of the parents who have spent the last year at home with their children, while trying to participate in Zoom meetings, whether child care enables them to show up to work and perform at their best. The direct conflict between children’s need to be cared for during the day and working parents’ need to devote their attention to their jobs exploded into full view during the pandemic, not just for families but for their employers and co-workers. Suddenly it was everyone’s problem. [..]

We’re in the middle of a loud debate over what, exactly, counts as “infrastructure.” The word has come to be associated with the country’s physical assets: our national highway system, the pipes that bring us water and the cables that bring us electricity, the tarmac in our airports and the tracks on our train routes. These things are infrastructure because they are underlying systems that facilitate other critical functions — moving people and goods, connecting communities, delivering necessities. They are important for what they make possible.

But they are not the only systems that undergird critical needs. President Biden’s next legislative priority is fixing the country’s decrepit infrastructure as a way to help the economy rebound from the pandemic, and he’s taking a more expansive view of what falls into that category. The first half of his package expands home- and community-based care for seniors and the disabled, and he has promised to include more so-called soft infrastructure in his follow-up American Family Plan, including investments in child care and paid leave.

Jennifer Rubin: Yes, it’s possible the GOP is worse post-Trump

Republicans repeatedly show they stand outside decent society.

The Republican Party seems to be getting worse. In some cases, it has exceeded the level of dishonesty, bigotry and anti-democratic fervor that it displayed when its MAGA cult leader was in office.

Last week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) had the gall to question the effort to vaccinate people despite their hesitancy. As he told a conservative radio host: “If you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?” This he said a time when combating vaccine aversion is most difficult among recalcitrant Republicans. Even the former president wants people to get vaccinated.

Elected Republicans are certainly more disconnected from reality than they were in that fleeting moment after the Jan. 6 attack when they took exception to the disgraced former president’s role in fueling the insurrection. Now, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is flat-out lying about the former president’s responsibility for inciting violence, arguing that Donald Trump was unaware of events at the Capitol during a phone conversation that day and acted promptly to diffuse it. This is contrary to McCarthy’s own previous account of the phone call, as well as accounts from others, making his latest spasm of political opportunism at the expense of democracy, truth and decency all the worse.

Joseph E. Stiglitz and Lori Wallach: Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish

Joseph E. Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences, teaches at Columbia University. Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

New covid-19 variants are spreading quickly. An outbreak anywhere could lead to a more deadly or infectious strain hopping around the globe.

So why, after three months of making great progress on domestic vaccination, has President Biden not ended a self-defeating policy from the Trump administration that hinders a global initiative to increase access to covid-19 vaccines and treatments? More than 100 countries support a temporary waiver of some World Trade Organization rules that guarantee pharmaceutical firms monopoly control over how much medicine is produced, yet the United States remains opposed.

Had WTO members agreed to waive aspects of its agreement on trade-related intellectual property for covid-related medicines when some countries proposed it last October, poor nations might not wait until 2024 for vaccines, as projected.

Waiving intellectual property rights so developing countries could produce more vaccines would make a big difference in reaching global herd immunity. Otherwise, the pandemic will rage largely unmitigated among a significant share of the world’s population, resulting in increased deaths and a greater risk that a vaccine-resistant variant puts the world back on lockdown.

Amanda Marcotte: The Charlottesville model: Trump’s “fine people” praise of white nationalists is now GOP mainstream

Racist voting laws, love for killer cops, and encouraging violence against protesters: This is the post-Trump GOP

Former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean had some choice words for the modern Republican Party during a recent interview with Molly Jong-Fast of The Daily Beast. He called the GOP “racist” and “neo-fascist” and, hilariously, compared the Republican congressional caucus specifically to a “sentient YouTube comment section.” I expected there to be some outrage, but so far not so much. Apparently, even Republicans are running out of energy to deny what is obviously true about their party. Donald Trump’s only been out of office for a little over three months and his once-shocking levels of racism have now become just normal Republican politics.

In August 2017, Trump incited one of the larger of his nearly infinite controversies by insisting that a crowd of neo-Nazis and other white nationalists who gathered for a race riot in Charlottesville contained “very fine people” in it. Over the next few days, Trump did his usual thing of backing off the racist comments and then backing off the back-off. Ultimately, everyone walked away with the same general understanding: Trump’s heart was with the white nationalists and any half-hearted gestures otherwise were political theater no one actually took seriously. Efforts by conservative pundits to clean up Trump’s comments over the next few years were merely meant to get liberals to stop bugging them about it, not a genuine sign of confusion over where he stood on the matter.

Trump was constantly in the news for saying racist things, but this one stuck out because that crowd of “very fine people” that Trump had so much love for produced a murderer that day. James Fields Jr. rammed his car into a crowd of anti-racists that were counter-protesting, killing a woman named Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others, five critically. Fields went to prison for the attack, but Republican politicians, following Trump’s “very fine people” lead, have since moved to legalize what Fields did that day.

Paul Waldman: Republicans decide that for them to win, everything has to be a crisis

President Biden says we can solve our problems. Republicans say we’re spiraling toward chaos and collapse.

As President Biden reaches his 100th day in the White House, this is the shape of American political conflict: He wants to reassure the country that everything is under control, our problems are significant but solvable and things are getting better. The Republican Party, on the other hand, wants the country to believe that we are in a spiraling crisis, a nightmare of chaos and oppression that threatens to drag us to hell — if we aren’t already there.

There are hamburgers involved (seriously), but for his part, the president has so far implemented a strategy that seems almost designed to stay out of the news. Biden isn’t just refusing to be drawn into silly media controversies; he’s almost acting as though the national conversation is of minimal concern to him.

The contrast with the Donald Trump years couldn’t be stronger. Trump believed not only that he had to monopolize our attention for every waking moment, but also that conflict that had him at its center was inevitably good for him. Where Biden tries to tamp down disagreement and create the perception of stability — even if it means you can go for days without thinking about him — Trump wanted chaos, believing that he could ride it to success.

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: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/opinion/coal-mine-workers-climate.html

A document from the United Mine Workers offers reason to hope.

“Change is coming, whether we seek it or not.” So declares a remarkable document titled “Preserving Coal Country,” released Monday by the United Mine Workers of America, in which the union — which at its peak represented half a million workers — accepts the reality that coal isn’t coming back. Instead, it argues, the goal should be “a true energy transition that will enhance opportunities for miners, their families and their communities.”

It’s good to see this kind of realism. Remember, back in 2016 Donald Trump promised that he would restore coal to its former greatness, reopening shuttered mines — and voters in coal country believed him. Many of them probably still imagine that something like that is possible.

The union, however, understands that it isn’t. What killed the mines wasn’t a “war on coal”; it was technological progress, first in the extraction of natural gas, then in solar and wind power. Generating electricity from coal would be economically unviable even if we didn’t have to worry about climate change.

Of course, we do need to worry about climate change, which is an existential threat to civilization. The question is how to address this threat.

Michelle Goldberg: Biden, the World Needs Your Help to End the Pandemic

The president should keep his promise on vaccine patents.

Last July, during the presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised the universal health care advocate Ady Barkan that he wouldn’t let intellectual property laws stand in the way of worldwide access to coronavirus vaccines.

“The World Health Organization is leading an unprecedented global effort to promote international cooperation in the search for Covid-19 treatments and vaccines,” said Barkan. “But Donald Trump has refused to join that effort, cutting America off from the rest of the world. If the U.S. discovers a vaccine first, will you commit to sharing that technology with other countries, and will you ensure there are no patents to stand in the way of other countries and companies mass-producing those lifesaving vaccines?”

Biden was unequivocal. “It lacks any human dignity, what we’re doing,” he said of Trump’s vaccine isolationism. “So the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it’s not only a good thing to do, it’s overwhelmingly in our interest to do.”

Yet now that Biden is in power, his perception of our interest doesn’t seem quite so clear. Last year, India and South Africa requested a waiver from World Trade Organization rules governing intellectual property for technology dealing with the pandemic. Dozens of mostly developing countries have since joined them. A handful of rich nations, including the United States, oppose the waiver, but there’s a widespread belief that if America changes its position, other countries will follow. Much of the world is waiting to see what Biden does.

Eugene Robinsosn: Derek Chauvin’s conviction shouldn’t feel like a victory. But it does.

That a jury saw George Floyd as fully human, and trusted their eyes and ears, is just a start.

It shouldn’t have been an open question whether a police officer could kneel on a man’s neck for more than nine minutes, snuffing out his life, with complete or even partial impunity. We shouldn’t have had to hold our collective breath from the moment it was announced there was a verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial to the moment that verdict was read. This shouldn’t feel so much like a victory.

But it does. The jurors in Chauvin’s trial trusted their eyes and ears. They saw the video of George Floyd pinned to the hard pavement, they heard him plead again and again that he couldn’t breathe, and they held Chauvin fully accountable.

They saw George Perry Floyd Jr. — fully — as a human being.

So many times, that simple acknowledgment of humanity has apparently been too much to ask. The police officers who killed Philando Castile, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and so many other Black men either were acquitted of wrongdoing or never even charged. Chauvin’s conviction is a tremendous relief — and, one hopes, a beginning. [..]

Right now, though, it is possible to feel both elation and relief. George Floyd won justice today. So did we all.

Richard L. Hasen: Republicans Aren’t Done Messing With Elections

Mr. Hasen is the author of several books about elections and democracy. Last year he proposed a 28th amendment to the Constitution to defend and expand voting rights.

Not content with limiting voting rights, they are threatening the integrity of vote counting itself.

A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.

We already know the contours of the battle over voter suppression. The public has been inundated with stories about Georgia’s new voting law, from Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta to criticism of new restrictions that prevent giving water to people waiting in long lines to vote. With lawsuits already filed against restrictive aspects of that law and with American companies and elite law firms lined up against Republican state efforts to make it harder to register and vote, there’s at least a fighting chance that the worst of these measures will be defeated or weakened.

The new threat of election subversion is even more concerning. These efforts target both personnel and policy; it is not clear if they are coordinated. They nonetheless represent a huge threat to American democracy itself.

Amanda Marcotte: Tucker Carlson’s immigration bait-and-switch betrays his desperation

No one denies that immigration brings change, Tucker — just that it’s racist to be angry about it

Fox News host Tucker Carlson is really determined to sell his audience on what is — and this cannot be stressed enough — a literal neo-Nazi conspiracy theory. Neo-Nazis and other white nationalist groups have long pushed the idea that a shadowy cabal of Jews is secretly conspiring to “remake” America and “steal” it from its rightful owners, white Christians. They are supposedly doing this by “importing” non-white people — who neo-Nazis believe to be mentally inferior and therefore easily controlled by the shadowy Jewish conspiracy — into the U.S.

Carlson’s only spin is replacing the word “Jews” with “Democrats,” but other than that, he’s lifting “replacement theory” wholesale from the neo-Nazi dregs of the internet and now is repackaging this ridiculous conspiracy theory as if it were an inarguable fact, much to the delight of white nationalists. And because Carlson’s main modus operandi is trolling, he’s relishing the negative attention he gets by hyping a racist conspiracy theory and he’s using his audience’s love of liberal-triggering to encourage them to mindlessly burrow deeper into the worldview of unapologetic fascists.

Carlson is a moral monster. It’s likely he has been this way since his high school “Dan White Society” days. Sadly, he is a monster that must be dealt with, despite the unfortunate risk of troll-feeding. It’s not just because Carlson has an audience that regularly tops 3 million viewers, though that alone is terrifying. It’s that he is a smart man whose strategy for selling this conspiracy theory is sinister and clever. To fight back, it’s crucial that progressives don’t fall into the trap he is setting.

Basically, Carlson is pulling off two bait-and-switch routines. First, he falsely conflates any cultural change with his ridiculous “replacement” conspiracy theory. Second, he tries to paint the debate as one over whether change is real — something that literally no one contests — so as to avoid talking about the real issue, which is how it’s nuclear-level racist to react to cultural change like it’s some kind of existential threat. In reality, it’s just what happens if you’re lucky to live long enough to experience it.