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

Bill McKibben: New York State Sends a Blunt Message to Big Oil

The comptroller’s threat to pull billions from fossil fuel investments is a big victory for climate activists.

New York State’s comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, announced on Wednesday that the state would begin divesting its $226 billion employee pension fund from gas and oil companies if they can’t come up with a legitimate business plan within four years that is aligned with the goals of the Paris climate accord. Those investments have historically added up to roughly $12 billion.

The entire portfolio will be decarbonized over the next two decades. “Achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 will put the fund in a strong position for the future mapped out in the Paris Agreement,” he said in a statement.

It’s a huge win, obviously, for the activists who have fought for eight years to get Albany to divest from fossil fuel companies and for the global divestment campaign. Endowments and portfolios worth more than than $14 trillion have joined the fight. This new move is the largest by a pension fund in the United States, edging the New York City pension funds under Comptroller Scott Stringer, who announced in 2018 that the fund would seek to divest $5 billion in fossil fuel investments from its nearly $200 billion pension fund over five years.

But it also represents something else: capitulations that taken together suggest that the once-dominant fossil fuel industry has reached a low in financial and political power.

Robert Reich: To reverse inequality, we need to expose the myth of the ‘free market’

We need an informed public that sees through the poisonous myth billionaires want us to believe: that income is a measure of your market worth

How have a relative handful of billionaires – whose vast fortunes have soared even during the pandemic – convinced the vast majority of the public that their wealth shouldn’t be taxed in order to support the common good?

They have employed one of the oldest methods used by the wealthy to maintain wealth and power – a belief system that portrays wealth and power in the hands of a few as natural and inevitable.

Centuries ago it was the so-called “divine right of kings”. King James I of England and France’s Louis XIV, among other monarchs, asserted that kings received their authority from God and were therefore not accountable to their earthly subjects. The doctrine ended with England’s Glorious Revolution of the 17th century and the American and French revolutions of the 18th.

Its modern equivalent might be termed “market fundamentalism”, a creed that has been promoted by today’s super rich with no less zeal than the old aristocracy advanced divine right. It holds that what you’re paid is simply a measure of what you’re worth in the market.

Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo: Billionaires made $1tn since Covid-19. They can afford to protect their workers

In a holiday shopping season with rampant rates of Covid-19 infection, we must protect frontline workers before it’s too late

There are few scenes more sordid than the surging wealth gains of the world’s billionaire class during an unprecedented pandemic when millions have lost their lives, health, and livelihoods.

As the US heads into another wave of Covid-19 infections, the wealth of 650 American billionaires has increased by over $1tn since mid-March, the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns.

Who’s generating all this wealth? In many cases, it’s frontline retail, healthcare, and food workers who are underpaid and under-protected from the virus.

These workers risk their lives every day to do the work that increases already obscene corporate wealth. And going into a holiday shopping season with cases exploding, the risk is only increasing.

Who are the prime offenders?

Amanda Marcotte: Trump voters don’t really believe Biden stole the election — but they do want a coup

Conservatives aren’t entirely delusional — they’re trolls arguing in bad faith to delegitimize Democratic voters

Do Republican voters really believe that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump? Do they sincerely see Trump’s efforts to overturn the election as the legitimate actions of a wronged man trying to defend democracy? When they declare “stop the steal,” are they truly unaware that they are the ones trying to steal this election from the rightful winners?

Or are millions of Americans arguing in bad faith, merely claiming to believe Trump is the true winner? Is this all just a disingenuous song-and-dance, meant to put a morally justifiable gloss on what is actually widespread support among Trump voters for a coup? The answer to this question of “delusion or bad faith?” matters quite a bit, as Trump continues to prosecute his futile campaign to steal the 2020 election.

Polls show that a hefty majority of Republican voters — 68%, according to Reuters/Ipsos — say they believe the 2020 election was “rigged” in Biden’s favor. Since the election, more than $200 million has flowed into Trump’s coffers from Republican donors responding to emails promising to “stop the steal.” Are these donors innocent lambs who sincerely believe that Trump is a good man done wrong? Or are they people who are actively seeking to finance a coup, employing the flimsiest of excuses?

Well, as the author of a book called “Troll Nation,” it’s clear where I stand: By and large, Republican voters who claim that Biden stole the election are arguing from bad faith, not delusion.

Richard Wolff: Only in Trump’s Operation Warped Reality is his vaccine leadership a success

The president’s ‘vaccine summit’ was notable for its absentees amid revelations that he had spent $14bn on insufficient doses

Donald Trump leaves office exactly how he entered it: catastrophically clueless about how his own government and country works.

You might think that after grappling with a historic pandemic for most of his final year in office, the hapless and hopeless occupant of the Oval Office would have picked up a little experience.

But no. Here we are, on the verge of rolling out a new vaccine, and the soon-to-be-ex-president can’t get his head around the job.

It’s almost as if this extraordinary triumph of global science has overwhelmed not just the novel coronavirus but a lifetime of play-acting by a small-time property developer with a big mouth.

Trump ran for office in the role of the successful businessman he played on The Apprentice. He ran for re-election in the role of the successful steward of the economy. Until now, the people playing political pundits on TV claimed that Trump had some magical powers of stagecraft that kept the crowds enthralled.

But aside from his incessant tweeting, there was no theatrical or business genius at work. Trump always relied on his TV producers – Mark Burnett for NBC or Roger Ailes for Fox News – to make his performance semi-coherent.

In his final days in the White House, the Trumpian trope of the business executive running a business-like White House has withered away. Just like all those election lawsuits filed by his elite strike force of part-time lawyers and full-time grifters.

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: Republicans Can’t Handle the Truth

You shouldn’t be surprised that they’re still backing Trump.

President Trump’s continuing attempts to overturn an election he lost decisively more than a month ago is, like so much of what he’s done in office, shocking but not surprising. Who imagined that he would go quietly?

What some people may not have been fully prepared for is the way Trump’s party as a whole has backed his dangerous delusions. According to a survey by The Washington Post, only 27 Republican members of Congress are willing to say that Joe Biden won. Despite the complete lack of evidence of significant fraud, two-thirds of self-identified Republicans said in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that the election was rigged.

But you really shouldn’t be surprised by this willingness to indulge malicious, democracy-endangering lies. After all, when was the last time Republicans accepted a politically inconvenient fact? It has been clear for years that the modern G.O.P. is a party that can’t handle the truth.

Charles M. Blow: How Black People Learned Not to Trust

Concerns about vaccination are unfortunate, but they have historical roots.

It would appear that the people in American hit hardest by Covid-19 — Black people — are also the group most leery about the prospects of a vaccine.

As a Pew Research report published last week pointed out: “Black Americans are especially likely to say they know someone who has been hospitalized or died as a result of having the coronavirus: 71 percent say this, compared with smaller shares of Hispanic (61 percent), White (49 percent) and Asian-American (48 percent) adults.”

But that same report contained the following: “Black Americans continue to stand out as less inclined to get vaccinated than other racial and ethnic groups: 42 percent would do so, compared with 63 percent of Hispanic and 61 percent of white adults.”

The unfortunate American fact is that Black people in this country have been well-trained, over centuries, to distrust both the government and the medical establishment on the issue of health care.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump lost the election — but his legacy of coronavirus denialism is here to stay

Refusing to wear masks or maintain social distance is part of a larger right-wing assault on the common good

Donald Trump encouraged coronavirus denialism for months for one simple reason: He thought it would help him win re-election. Ever the believer that appearances matter more than reality, Trump felt that as long as people acted like there was no pandemic — by refusing wearing masks and continuing to crowd into public places, especially his rallies — that was as good as there being no pandemic. The mounting death toll and hurricane-like effects on our health care system didn’t matter to him, as long as he could pretend everything was doing well and take credit for it.

That was why I held out hope, in the days after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election, that Republicans would finally drop the act and start taking the pandemic seriously. After all, as Heather Digby Parton argued Monday morning at Salon, conservatives have a remarkable ability to discard their current enthusiasms the second they lose political value, and pretend that particular lunacy never happened. (You’d never know from its current behavior how gung-ho the American right was for the Iraq war 15 years ago.) It seemed entirely possible that in the face of rising case counts and Trump’s defeat, the right would suddenly embrace public health measures and begin casually acting as if coronavirus denialism was never really a thing.

Unfortunately for the health of the nation, the opposite has happened. If anything, coronavirus denialism is as powerful a force as it was a month ago, when the media finally called the election for Biden.

Michelle Goldberg: No One Expects Civility From Republicans

What’s worse: making Sarah Sanders leave a restaurant, or terrorizing election officials?

Perhaps you remember the terrible ordeal suffered by the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen in 2018. She was awaiting her entree at the Virginia farm-to-table restaurant when the co-owner, appalled by Sanders’s defense of Donald Trump’s administration, asked her to leave. This happened three days after the homeland security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen, was yelled at for the administration’s family separation policy as she tried to dine at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.

These two insults launched a thousand thumb-suckers about civility. More than one conservative writer warned liberals that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s re-election. “The political question of the moment,” opined Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, is this: ‘Can the Democratic Party control its left?’”

Somehow, though, few are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about voter fraud. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.”

David Sirota and Julia Rock: Tucked into the Covid-19 stimulus package? Protection for corporations

The proposed legislation would shield corporations from liability if their workers die from Covid-19 in unsafe workplaces

In early October, Harvard researchers sounded an alarm: they released a report showing a pattern of coronavirus deaths surging soon after workers filed requests for workplace safety assistance from the US labor department. The takeaway was clear: workers are desperately begging the government to help protect them from a deadly pandemic, the government has been unresponsive, and lots of workers have subsequently died preventable deaths.

Today, a little more than a month after the study came out, the federal government is finally responding: a bipartisan group of Senate and House lawmakers have announced legislation to shield corporations from lawsuits when their lax safety standards kill more workers.

In practice, the legislation, which is being tucked into a larger Covid relief package, is a holiday-season gift for corporate donors: it would strip frontline workers of their last remaining legal tool to protect themselves in the workplace – at the same time the unemployment system is designed to financially punish those workers if they refuse to return to unsafe workplaces during the pandemic.