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: Texas, Land of Wind and Lies

When post-truth politics meets energy policy.

Politicians are neither gods nor saints. Because they aren’t gods, they often make bad policy decisions. Because they aren’t saints, they often try to evade responsibility for their failures, asserting either that they did as well as anyone could have or that someone else deserves the blame.

For a while, then, the politics surrounding the power outages that have spread across Texas looked fairly normal. True, the state’s leaders pursued reckless policies that set the stage for catastrophe, then tried to evade responsibility. But while their behavior was reprehensible, it was reprehensible in ways we’ve seen many times over the years.

However, that changed around a day after the severity of the disaster became apparent. Republican politicians and right-wing media, not content with run-of-the-mill blame-shifting, have coalesced around a malicious falsehood instead — the claim that wind and solar power caused the collapse of the Texas power grid, and that radical environmentalists are somehow responsible for the fact that millions of people are freezing in the dark, even though conservative Republicans have run the state for a generation.

This isn’t normal political malfeasance. It’s the energy-policy equivalent of claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a false-flag Antifa operation — raw denial of reality, not just to escape accountability, but to demonize one’s opponents. And it’s another indicator of the moral and intellectual collapse of American conservatism.

Eugene Robinson: Biden’s immigration plan is ambitious. But a big problem demands a big plan.

The new president is avoiding negotiating against himself.

The Biden administration’s blueprint for immigration reform is already facing criticism as being far too ambitious to have a prayer of getting through Congress. But the bold plan has one big thing in its favor: It actually tries to deal with reality.

President Biden proposes a pathway to citizenship for all of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now in the country who follow the rules and stay out of trouble. Rather than nibble at the edges of the problem, Biden calls for a global solution — analogous to the sweeping amnesty President Ronald Reagan engineered in 1986. Whatever you think about the new president and his team, no one can accuse them of thinking small.

Republicans are going to ridicule the idea and will likely declare it dead on arrival. But they would subject a more modest proposal to the exact same treatment. Biden is right to start by demanding the reforms the country actually needs, rather than make some sort of tentative opening bid that leaves the situation of most resident noncitizens unaddressed.

The fact is that the undocumented are not going away. They are not going to “self-deport,” as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) famously suggested when he was running for president in 2012. They perform necessary jobs, they pay all kinds of taxes, they are at least as law-abiding as full-fledged citizens, and they are woven into the fabric of communities from coast to coast. In all but the formal sense, they are Americans. If they were all to somehow disappear tomorrow, the nation would suffer from their absence.

Catherine Rampell: Our students fell way behind this year. It’s time to start talking summer school.

To combat pandemic-driven learning losses, students across the United States need classes more than the usual vacation.

School’s in for summer. At least, it should be.

In an aside at his town hall on Tuesday, President Biden mentioned that school districts might consider staying open all summer. It’s a phenomenal idea. We should be moving mountains — and there will be a few — to make this happen for every child in the United States who has fallen behind this past year.

The pandemic has been disastrous for children (and their parents, and their teachers). Children are missing academic, social and developmental milestones because remote-learning programs are poor substitutes for in-person classes. School absences have doubled. Many low-income, rural and homeless kids without reliable Internet access have stopped attending classes; one report last fall estimated that 3 million children might have received no formal education, virtual or otherwise, since March.

But even if we vaccinated every teacher and made every other adaptation necessary to get schools reopened tomorrow (and recent developments unfortunately suggest that ain’t happening), kids have already fallen behind. Resuming regular classes alone won’t be sufficient to recover this lost ground.

Amanda Marcotte: Texas disaster exposes what happens when Republicans replace governance with trolling

Republicans have mastered the art of breaking government and telling voters it’s because government can’t work

By any reasonable standard, the disaster in Texas, as winter storms break the backbone of basic utility services and leave millions to suffer, should be the death knell for conservative ideology. It’s evidence of how wrong Republicans are on two of their most important beliefs: That climate change is a hoax best ignored and that government disinvestment and deregulation will magically lead to better services as the private sector fills in the gaps. And as many progressive analysts, energy experts, climate scientists, and Democratic politicians have been pointing out, the catastrophe in Texas proves that the U.S. government needs to move swiftly on two fronts that Republicans hate, climate change mitigation and public sector investment in infrastructure.

To add to the political humiliation of Republicans this week, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas made a spectacle of himself by abandoning his frozen state to fly to Cancun, Mexico for a vacation. Aided by Cruz’s own unique loathsomeness as a human being, the story spiraled as a crystalline illustration of Republican neglect and even malice towards the people they’re elected to represent. The gleeful dunking on Cruz got to the point where even the dog his family left behind, aptly named Snowflake, became a meme for balefully gazing out a window at a New York magazine photographer.

But I would not be writing the eulogies for Cruz’s political career just yet.

Greg Sargent: Republicans think they’ve found Biden’s big weakness. But there’s a problem.

Have Republicans thought about what happens if Democrats succeed on covid-19?

In recent days, Republicans have tried to project confidence that they’ve found a killer attack line on President Biden: They can use the increasing anger of parents over the failure of schools to reopen to win back the suburban voters they’ve lost.

As Republicans describe this, it’s a twofer: They can channel the genuine hardships this has imposed on countless Americans to their advantage while also tarring Democrats as in the pocket of teachers unions, casting them as tools of their special interests.

But both Democrats and Republicans (ones who are less beholden to the party, anyway) alike have spied a problem with this line of attack: Its shelf life might not last all that long.

Even more to the point, if and when its shelf life ends — when covid-19 is tamed sufficiently, and when normal life resumes, including kids returning to school — it will be in no small part because of solutions implemented on Democrats’ watch, which Republicans are already resisting.

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

Dan Froomkin: Lame Limbaugh obits: Mainstream media fawns over a toxic bigot who poisoned our politics

Major media finally turned against Trump — but keeps on normalizing the culture of hatred that made him possible

Leaders of our elite newsrooms had a full year to figure out how they were going to frame Rush Limbaugh’s life.

He announced he was dying of lung cancer last February, right before Donald Trump gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. It was a striking moment, symbolic of how thoroughly Limbaugh’s moral rot had infected the body politic, all the way to the presidency and its most hallowed traditions.

In the ensuing months, even the most stubbornly aloof mainstream news organizations began to publicly acknowledge Trump as a liar, a failure, a loser and an inciter of division and violence.

But calling out the hatred and bigotry that Trump established as the central tenets of the modern Republican Party remains a step too far. Our newsroom leaders still cannot bring themselves to declare that the hysteria and conspiracy theories that once only inhabited the lunatic fringes of our political discourse — until Rush Limbaugh, and then Donald Trump, came along — don’t merit respect, but should be banished, rejected and denied.

And that is why, even with a year to pre-write and edit them, major media outlets on Wednesday published obituaries celebrating Limbaugh’s extraordinary success as a “conservative provocateur.” They whitewashed his once-unimaginably vile and divisive demagoguery as “comic bombast.” They hailed him as “the voice of American conservatism,” when what really matters about Rush Limbaugh is that he spread hatred more effectively and lucratively than any American before him. He didn’t hide his bigotry and, eventually, neither did the Republican Party.

Amanda Marcotte: Rush Limbaugh captivated dads like mine and created America’s modern fascist aesthetic

Limbaugh co-opted rock-and-roll to sell authoritarianism

To explain the rise of Rush Limbaugh, who died on Wednesday at age 70, in the early 90s, it helps to understand that, in large parts of America at least, he read as a not your grandfather’s buttoned-up Republicanism. He wasn’t cool, exactly, but he appealed to middle-aged Boomers who were still coasting on their image as the generation of Woodstock and “Animal House.” His bumper music was a song by the Pretenders, a bona fide punk band. He often did comedy skits and spoke in the mellifluous tones of an FM radio DJ. He used rock music and humor to package vicious racism, homophobia and misogyny as a rollicking good time.

It was total bullshit, but it was effective bullshit. [..]

This habit of authoritarians to appropriate music from people they hate was a regular source of interest for journalists covering Trump rallies, which regularly featured rock and disco blasted at decibels more appropriate for a rock concert than a political event. Many of the songs regularly played at Trump rallies were either explicitly opposed to everything he stands for or were made by the kind of people he and his administration were eager to oppress. His crowds would swoon to music by gay icon Elton John. Trump himself would dance in an idiotic way to “Macho Man” and “YMCA,” classic disco tracks about gay life in the 70s by the Village People. He played “Fortunate Son,” a Creedence Clearwater Revival song that literally mocks men like Trump, who used family money and connections to avoid the draft in Vietnam. The list of musicians who publicly demanded that Trump stop playing their music was long, and included progressive-minded artists like Neil Young, REM, Adele, Queen, and Rihanna.

It was common for both journalists and liberal commentators to wonder out loud if Trump and his campaign were just too dumb to understand that the music he chose cut against his authoritarian message. And while I’m not one to overlook the “he’s just dumb” explanation for Trump’s behavior, the relentless drumbeat of cease-and-desist letters make it impossible to imagine he was unaware, any more than Limbaugh was unaware his bumper music was written by a woman he’d probably write off as a “feminazi.”

Gail Collins: Trump’s Dreaded Nickname

Watching the Senate is better than watching reruns.

I’ve got to say I loved it when Joe Biden described Donald Trump as “the former guy.”

This was at a CNN town hall, and Biden was pursuing his goal of changing the subject from … his predecessor. Part of the strategy seems to be avoiding his actual name.

Excellent agenda. Sitting in disgraced, double-impeached political purgatory, Trump has been trying to retrain the world to refer to him as “the 45th president” during his unwelcome retirement. (If you are lucky enough to get a mass email from him, the return address will be “45 office.”) How cool would it be if he had to sit in front of the TV listening to people talk about “the former guy?”

D.J.T. = T.F.G.

Biden’s current mission is to make the world focus on his $1.9 trillion plan for a coronavirus comeback. It’s currently in the House, where the Democratic majority is expected to pass it readily, once the poor bill makes its way through all the subcommittee chairs who want a little poke at it. But sometime in March it’ll be in the hands of Senator Chuck Schumer, whose majority consists entirely of Kamala Harris breaking tie votes. [..]

The bottom line here, people, is that Biden’s plan to attach a $15 minimum wage to the coronavirus bill is probably doomed. (Spiked by the senator from West Virginia!) And then most of the package will pass, probably before we get halfway down the vaccine line. Movie’s over.

But we’ve still got Trump, desperate for our attention. The Former Guy says he’s going to devote himself to permanently remaking the Republican Party in his own image. Unless, of course, he gets hauled off to debtors’ prison first.

Jennifer Rubin: The party that does not give a darn

Recklessness and indifference have become standard.

We are on the verge of seeing half a million Americans die from covid-19 thanks to the horrendous mismanagement of the former president. About half a million Texans are still without power due to their state’s failure to weatherize and protect its electric grid. Meanwhile, Texas’s junior Republican senator, Ted Cruz, jets off to Cancun, Mexico. Yes, that’s the same Ted Cruz who helped incite the Jan. 6 riot with his baseless challenges to the electoral vote count.

Speaking of which, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) declared that the assault on the Capitol — which left five dead, injured scores of others and included placement of explosive devices — “didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me.” (This would be the same Ron Johnson who fanned Russian propaganda during the Ukraine scandal.) [..]

And all that brings me to ask: How in the world do Republicans get elected? It is a serious question. Cruz, Johnson and a host of other Republicans clearly see their posts as platforms for right-wing political theater. If they were not in office, they would never get the right-wing media hits or the large social media followings. They would not be greeted as rock stars at CPAC and other right-wing gatherings.

Greg Sargent: The latest GOP nonsense on Texas shows us the future Republicans want

Faced with a massive public problem, Republicans retreat into their alternate information universe.

Texas is showing us the future Republicans want.

This isn’t intended to mean that Republicans want a future beset by the sort of power shortages that have crippled Texas, which have left millions without power in frigid temperatures and are being exacerbated by other dire conditions, such as water shortages.

No doubt many Republicans expressing outrage at the failures producing this disaster — and calling for accountability and reform — are sincere in their intentions, though we’ll see how long those demands persist.

But it’s painfully obvious that in an important larger sense, many aspects of their reaction to the Texas calamity do indeed demonstrate the future they want.

It’s a future in which the default response to large public problems will be to increasingly retreat from real policy debates into an alternate information universe, while doubling down on scorched-earth distraction politics and counter-majoritarian tactics to insulate themselves from accountability.

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

Robert Reich: No compromising with the GOP cult

There is no longer a “center” in American politics

I keep hearing that Joe Biden has to govern from the “center.” He has no choice, they say, because he has razor-thin majorities in Congress and the Republican Party has moved to the right.

Rubbish. First, there is no “center” between the reality-based world and the conspiracy-fueled, hate-filled world of today’s Republican Party. Second, the problems the country is facing cannot be solved with milquetoast, centrist solutions — they demand immediate, bold action.

I’ve been in or around politics for 50 years. I’ve served several Democratic presidents who have needed Republican votes. But the Republicans now in Congress are nothing like those I’ve dealt with.

Today’s Republican Party is a cult.

93 percent of House Republicans voted against impeaching Trump for inciting an insurrection, and Senate Republicans refuse to convict him. This is after Trump’s insurrection threatened even their own lives.

The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are facing backlash from their colleagues, with some even calling to remove Liz Cheney from her leadership position.

But hardly any have condemned the vile conspiracy theories spouted by Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has claimed that the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings were “false flags” and that the deadly California wildfires were sparked by a Jewish space laser, among other wild lies.

All of this marks the culmination of the GOP’s growing lunacy over the last four years. With Trump at its head, the Republican Party has embraced blatant white supremacy, and now inhabits a counterfactual wonderland of lies and conspiracies.

Amanda Marcotte: GOP response to the Texas winter storms steals directly from Trump’s sadistic COVID-19 playbook

Texas Republicans try to troll their way through a disaster

Donald Trump may be gone, having left behind a pandemic that has killed nearly 500,000 Americans, due to his malicious incompetence. Still, his spirit of governing the people like you hate them and want them to die lives on in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus, Fox News. Just take a look at the GOP response to the crisis in Texas, which has been buried under blizzards so bad that “unseasonable” is a comical understatement. The ice and snow has caused the power grid in the state to collapse, leaving millions of Texans without power and heat in deadly conditions. Rather than deal with the problems with maturity and grace, however, Texas’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and his allies are taking a page directly from Trump’s coronavirus response playbook by abandoning people while exploiting the situation to push a far-right, authoritarian agenda that will only make the problems much worse.

Just as Trump’s response to the pandemic suggested he was rooting for the coronavirus, Abbott and company are using this natural disaster to fight for a future with more natural disasters.

“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott sneered on Fox News Tuesday night, blaming “[o]ur wind and our solar” and insisting that it “just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.” This is, of course, the opposite of true. [..]

Not only is Abbott’s trolling response to this crisis only going to make the problem worse, but it’s also flat-out lying.

As the Electric Reliability Council of Texas pointed out, frozen turbines were the smallest contributor to the Texas blackout problem. Instead, the problems are largely due to Republican governance and the conservative philosophy of letting government services rot instead of keeping them updated and working. Indeed, it’s the natural gas system — one of the fuels Abbott was hyping with his troll-the-liberals approach — that has been the primary source of the blackout problem in Texas.

Eugene Robinson: Let’s leave the 45th president behind and focus on what’s ahead

Don’t let a self-obsessed ex-president hold you captive.

The time has come to leave the sins and wickedness of the 45th president to the criminal justice system — and to turn attention and energy to the challenges and opportunities that face the 46th. Allowing ourselves to be held captive by the past four years serves no one except a certain self-obsessed ex-president. Better to spend that energy where it can make an actual difference.

Impeachment is history. House managers made a vivid, compelling case that the previous president incited an insurrection. Republican senators tried to use a technicality to weasel out of doing their duty. Afterward, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tried to have it both ways with some righteous-sounding but utterly meaningless words. Democrats were correct to pursue a second impeachment. If we don’t impeach a president for inciting a mob to storm the Capitol in an attempt to void an election and cling to power, then the impeachment clause of the Constitution has no meaning.

But nothing about this outcome is surprising, so why belabor it? [..]

Let’s give the Justice Department the responsibility to identify, and file charges against, those who planned and financed the Capitol insurrection. Let prosecutors in New York and Georgia continue the investigations into the former president’s actions and business dealings that they’ve already begun. Let civil lawsuits work their way through the various court systems.

Greg Sargent: As the GOP war over Trump gets worse, Democrats have a big opening

How Trumpism’s descent into madness provides an opportunity for Democrats to exploit.

The rage-addled statement that Donald Trump has fired at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell plunged the GOP into worsening infighting. But as Republicans reacted to the former president’s missive, it also revealed a glaring tension in the story they are telling about his legacy.

It’s a tension that Democrats can exploit to their advantage.

The tension is this: On one hand, Republicans widely acknowledge that Trump cost them the House, Senate and White House. On the other, they continue to hail the Trump presidency as a great triumph — not just on policy, but a political success as well. [..]

Samuel Hammond, a policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, points out that the promise of Trumpism, at least in its respectable version, was supposed to be partly that it offered “bold policies” to problems such as “the decline in working-class jobs.”

Instead, Hammond notes, Trumpism has devolved into “conspiracy theories all the way down and hatred of the leftist enemy.”

“What that means,” Hammond concluded, “is that Democrats have space to occupy that vacuum and in some ways be more authentically populist than Trump or Trumpism ever could be.”

Jennifer Rubin: Texas shows that when you cannot govern, you lie. A lot.

Republicans were not prepared for this disaster.

Incompetence is not the purview of one party. But when you view politics as theater and grievance-mongering, chances are you are going to shortchange governance. Elect a president with no public-sector experience, no interest in learning, no desire to hire competent people and no ability to accept responsibility, and you get something like the covid-19 debacle. Moreover, if your party is hostile to government and exercising regulatory power because it is beholden to a donor class and right-wing ideologues, you will not be prepared for disasters when they strike.

And that brings us to Texas. The Post reports, “As millions of people across Texas struggled to stay warm Tuesday amid massive cold-weather power outages, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) directed his ire at one particular failure in the state’s independent energy grid: frozen wind turbines.” There is one problem: That is not remotely true (as you might have guessed from a state with an enormous oil and gas sector). “The governor’s arguments were contradicted by his own energy department, which outlined how most of Texas’s energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines.”