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.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Progressives have a bold agenda. Biden should act on their priorities in his first 100 days.
This moment demands boldness.
With the electoral college confirming him as the next president, Joe Biden now faces his true test. Will he act swiftly and boldly to meet the calamitous crises he inherits? Or will his penchant for working across the aisle, combined with sobering down-ballot election results, lead him to fail what he describes as a “Roosevelt moment”?
Biden embraced a remarkably progressive agenda during the campaign, but many of his early appointments — lacking vision or new ideas — and his skittishness about his executive powers augur poorly. It will likely fall to progressive leaders and movements to force Biden to step up to that Roosevelt moment. Unlike the early days of the Obama administration, they are rising to the occasion.
Thanks to growing electoral strength and successful protests, progressives enter 2021 with a growing consensus around a bold reform agenda. And they are urging Biden not to wait for legislation — a tough prospect given a likely GOP-controlled Senate — but to act during his first days in office through executive orders and other similar actions.
Catherine Rampell: The GOP reckoning never came
Party leaders should have grappled long ago with losing control of a once-useful strain of paranoia.
Over the years, Republican politicians seemed many times to be on the cusp of a reckoning — a realization that a lunatic fringe had seized control of the party’s more pragmatic center and that conspiracy-theorizing, race-baiting, science-denigrating demagogues had transformed the GOP base into ungovernable paranoiacs. The situation seemed untenable; the fever had to break eventually.
Yet the party’s radicalization continued, and the reckoning never came. Today, U.S. democracy is paying the price as millions of Americans refuse to acknowledge the results of a legitimate election, and their leaders appear too cowardly or too powerless to disrupt the collective delusion.
Republican politicians have had ample motives to decide that enough was enough, that they had lost control of a once-useful strain of the paranoid style in American politics and that the golem must be decommissioned. Public association with tinfoil-hatters is usually bad PR, after all. Or, as William F. Buckley Jr. put it in his quest to purge the Birchers from conservatism 60 years ago, linkage with extremists might allow the media “to anathematize the entire American right wing.”
Amanda Marcotte: Bill Barr gets the Roy Cohn boot: Trump’s long history of disloyalty strikes again
Barr betrayed: Donald Trump has a long legacy of unceremoniously dumping the men who would move planets for him
Attorney General Bill Barr, after much hinting from the palace intrigue press, has finally gotten the boot, er, resigned, a mere 36 days before the will of the voters forced him out the door. The announcement, released on Donald Trump’s Twitter feed as usual, was a long time coming, as Trump has reportedly been furious at Barr for not doing more to falsify evidence of “voter fraud” that Trump can use to justify his ongoing and failing efforts to steal the election. Trump’s pressure campaign on Barr to break the law got so out of control recently that Barr reportedly had to ban a White House liason from visiting the Department of Justice (DOJ) offices. But while Barr no doubts his good reputation on Capitol Hill can be restored by parachuting out of the burning plane at the 11th hour, no one should mistake this ending as a redemption tale for Barr. [..]
So what happened? Why did Barr announce — after the election — that a DOJ investigation found no “fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election“?
Probably for the same reason the Supreme Court has delicately decided to blow off Trump’s demands that they steal this for him: It simply wasn’t close enough to steal. It seems that, unlike Trump, Barr has the sense to know when the heist simply can’t be pulled off. And so, while Barr crossed every ethical line and probably quite a few legal boundaries for Trump, in the end, it wasn’t enough. Trump’s belief that loyalty is a one-way street finally kicked in and now Barr is out the door.
Barr is just the latest of lawyers-cum-fixers for Trump that have met the same fate, dating all the way back to the 1980s, when Trump pulled the same move on the infamous Roy Cohn, the man who appears to have taught Trump everything he knows about being a real-life supervillain.
Jennifer Rubin: Senate Republicans finally capitulate
A disgraceful charade comes to an end.
A “mere” six weeks after Joe Biden’s decisive win in both the electoral college and the popular vote, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and a few other Republican holdouts finally recognized him as president-elect. Snarky commentators observed that McConnell recognized Biden’s win after Russian President Vladimir Putin did so publicly.
The delay was unconscionable. It was apparently not enough for the networks to call the race. Or for multiple recounts to confirm the results. Or for states to certify the results. Or for dozens of courts to throw out President Trump’s ludicrous claims. It took until the electors cast their ballots Monday for McConnell to finally decide it was time to capitulate to reality, to get off the Trump train wreck and to recognize nothing more was to be gained by supporting the increasingly deranged president.
It is not clear why McConnell finally took an off-ramp. Did the threats to the lives of state workers finally wear him down? Did big donors, including business interests, finally tell him to knock it off? We do not know, but we should not applaud a six-week delay that facilitated an entirely unprecedented attack on our democracy.
Jane Dudman: Female leaders make a real difference. Covid may be the proof
It may be no coincidence that countries with women at the helm have had fewer infections and deaths
What do Erna Solberg, Sanna Marin, Katrín Jakobsdóttir and Mette Frederiksen have in common apart from all four being female prime ministers (of Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark, respectively)? The answer is that their countries have much lower rates of Covid-19 infection than male-led neighbouring nations such as Ireland, Sweden and the UK.
Are those facts connected? There’s a growing body of evidence to suggest they may be.
Alongside an overview of gender parity in 100 countries by digital bank N26, it has also noted that Finland, with a population of 5.5 million, has had just over 370 deaths, a rate of around 60 deaths per million people. The UK death rate is more than 10 times that. Of course they are very different countries, but there have been similarly low Covid death rates in the other female-led northern European nations. Norway has seen 57 deaths per 1 million, Iceland 73 and Denmark 135 compared to 412 in Ireland, 626 in Sweden and 820 per 1 million in the UK.
Other countries with a female leader, notably Germany and New Zealand, have also kept Covid infections low.
Analysis earlier this year, published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the World Economic Forum, suggests the difference is real and may be explained by the “proactive and coordinated policy responses” adopted by female leaders.
My daughter is the bread baker but Sugarplum Bread is the one I enjoy making, too. This sweet bread studded with candied fruit is not as heavy as fruit cake. It is topped with a white icing glaze and decorated with red and green cherries to look like clusters of berries. It is a treat for breakfast or in the afternoon with tea. I make small ones baked in large muffin tins, decorated and wrapped in colored plastic wrap tied with ribbon as gifts for guests.