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: Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Debt

Why you should ignore the coming Republican deficit rants.

Amid all the wild swings in U.S. politics over the past decade, one thing has remained constant: the G.O.P. position on government debt. The party considers high levels of debt an existential threat — if a Democrat is sitting in the White House. If a Republican president presides over big deficits, well, as Donald Trump’s budget director reportedly told supporters last year, “nobody cares.”

So it’s a completely safe prediction that once Joe Biden is sworn in, we will once again hear lots of righteous Republican ranting about the evils of borrowing. What’s less clear is whether we’ll see a repeat of what happened during the Obama years, when many centrists — and much of the news media — both took obvious fiscal phonies

Let’s hope not. For the fact is that we’ve learned a lot about the economics of government debt over the past few years — enough so that Olivier Blanchard, the eminent former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is talking about a “shift in fiscal paradigm.” And the new paradigm suggests both that public debt isn’t a major problem and that government borrowing for the right purposes is actually the responsible thing to do. seriously and joined in the chorus of fearmongering.

Neal K. Katyal: I Wrote the Special Counsel Rules. Barr Has Abused Them.

There is no reason for the outgoing attorney general to appoint his preferred prosecutor for the continuing Trump-Russia inquiry.

Attorney General William Barr’s decision on Tuesday to name John Durham, the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut appointed by President Trump, as special counsel to investigate matters surrounding the 2016 election violates the rules for special counsels as well as fundamental democratic principles.

There may be reasons the inquiry by Mr. Durham — an investigation that began in 2019 into the Trump-Russia inquiry — should continue, but there is absolutely no reason to permit an outgoing attorney general to try to install his preferred personnel at the investigation’s helm in the new administration. And it is entirely appropriate for President-elect Joe Biden to appoint all the prosecutors in his new administration, just as his predecessors have done.

The special counsel regulations, which I drafted in 1999 as a Justice Department staff member, were designed with the idea that some investigations require a person from outside the department to assure the public of sufficient independence. We had in mind circumstances in which, for example, a president was alleged to have engaged in wrongdoing and having his attorney general conduct the investigation could cause a problem with impartiality. That is why they expressly require someone “outside the United States government” to serve as special counsel. Doing so helps reassure the public of an independent investigation.

Rebecca Solnit: Republicans are standing up to Trump. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late

Republicans like Gabriel Sterling – who are horrified by the torrent of death threats facing electoral workers – are voicing their outrage very late in the day

The first time I watched Georgia voting systems implementation manager Gabriel Sterling’s furious tirade about the threats against him and his coworkers, I was impressed. Here was a Republican, a self-described conservative, telling off the president and all the people making those threats. “Death threats. Physical threats. Intimidation. They have lost the moral high ground. I don’t have all the words for this because I am angry.” He was clearly furious. He talked about a young contract worker: “There’s a noose out there with his name on it. This kid just took a job and it’s just wrong. I just can’t begin to explain the level of anger I have right now … Mr President, it looks like you probably lost the state of Georgia. Stop inspiring people to commit acts of violence.”

It didn’t take long for me to sour on his indignation. They never had the moral high ground. The death threats and intimidation against him and his co-workers are wrong. However, they’re not the first people to get them but in some sense the last, and if you care about people the president has attacked verbally and urged violence against, you could have started caring during the 2016 campaign. Nothing suggests Mr Sterling did, since he belongs to a party that has supported Trump and, more broadly, campaigns of hate and discrimination for the last 40 years and more. In recent years, Trump has urged police to treat arrestees more roughly, audiences to harass and even rough up journalists and dissidents in his crowds, and is well-known for the 26 credible accounts of sexual abuse and violence with which women have charged him. He’s the guy who pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 2017 for his conviction for disobeying a judge’s order to stop racial profiling.

Amanda Marcotte: Dr. Fauci’s gamble pays off — white-knuckling his way through Trump set him up to steer Biden

For months, Fauci endured calls to resign in protest, but it’s good he didn’t — now he can shape vaccine policy

After a career of being largely unknown to the vast majority of Americans, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, has become a celebrity during the pandemic. With Donald Trump both unwilling to take a responsible leadership role and frankly incapable of it, Fauci filled in the void. Despite working full days directly on the pandemic, he also did countless TV interviews and appeared at multiple congressional hearings, all to educate the public about the coronavirus and encourage steps to limit its spread.

No good deed goes unpunished, and Dr. Fauci has learned this lesson more than anyone. For his efforts, he has spent months being terrorized by Trump, who is childishly jealous of the positive attention Fauci gets, and is incapable of understanding why people might like the kindly old medical expert more than they like the raving sociopath in the Oval Office. [..]

But Fauci’s strategy of hanging in and meeting Trump’s vitriol with bland responses, while it may not have been dramatically satisfying, turned out to be successful: Not only is President-elect Joe Biden planning to keep Fauci on in his current role, the incoming president is also designating the famous disease expert as his chief medical adviser.

This isn’t just good news for Dr. Fauci — arguably, it’s not even good news for him personally, since his life is about to get much harder — but it’s good news for the nation.

Heather Digby Parton: What hath the Republicans wrought: Will Trump’s insanity finally rip the party apart?

Whatever happens in Georgia, Trump’s conspiracy theories have created a deranged third force the GOP can’t control

Over the past few years both the media and Democratic officials have often reported that certain Republicans say on background or in private that they really can’t stand Donald Trump. Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein even named some names a few days ago. Some people in the media and political classes would apparently prefer that the public see the Republican establishment as terrified of Donald Trump’s base rather as than the cynics they are, eagerly taking advantage of Trump’s chaos to advance their agenda.

Trump’s post-election flights of lunacy provide an excellent case in point. While “mainstream” Republicans covertly whisper in Joe Biden’s ear that they know he won the election, and assure him that they find Trump’s twaddle about “rigged” votes and what have you terribly uncouth, they remain quiet in public, ostensibly because they want to let Trump have his tantrum and run out the clock, at which point we will pretend that all this unpleasantness never happened. This is, of course, nuts. President-elect Biden and every other Democrat who goes before the cameras to reassure Americans that the Republicans understand that Trump is off his rocker and that as soon as he’s gone we’ll all get back to normal are enabling them to continue the sabotage of our democracy. Democrats have no obligation to cover for Trump’s accomplices and they need to stop doing it.

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

Bryce Covert: Biden Should Go Big, and Then Brag About It

Voters in both red and blue states have revealed what they want from government.

Florida once again offered an electoral conundrum this year. Even as the state’s voters filled in the bubble for Donald Trump, they did the same for one of the policies that his opponent, Joe Biden, consistently championed on the campaign trail. They voted by more than 20 percentage points to add an amendment to the Florida Constitution raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

A higher wage, in other words, actually got more votes than either presidential candidate.

If you only listened to Republicans or cable news it would seem impossible, but it’s true: Americans, including many conservatives, agree on a number of fundamental progressive economic policies, even if they vehemently disagree on which party should carry them out. This isn’t just obvious in the polling; when these policies are put to voters directly, as many were on Election Day, voters consistently approve them.

Charles M. Blow: Obama’s Curious Cautiousness

He is a great politician, but he is not an activist.

Barack Obama continues his rather strange mission to confront and correct young liberal activists. It is an odd post-presidential note: A man who is beloved and admired on the left is using his cultural currency as a corrective against those who are on a quest for change.

Wednesday morning on Peter Hamby’s Snapchat show, “Good Luck America,” Obama said this:

“If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘Defund the police,’ but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.” [..]

These chastisements by Obama delineate the difference between the politician and the activist.

The politician may be popular, but the activist will rarely be. The politician can unify, but the activist often divides. The politician seeks to unify people around a set of beliefs. The activist seeks to right a wrong that has been held up by a set of beliefs. In short, the politician navigates the system, while the activist defies it.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s outrageous lies used to be terrifying — now they’re just pathetic

Trump is the same BS artist as always, but with no power to enforce his lies, he’s becoming a shabby punchline

Donald Trump was at it again Wednesday, releasing a 46-minute video full of ridiculous lies, claiming that his loss to Joe Biden in November’s presidential election was due to “corrupt forces” operating “on a scale never seen before.” He called on the Supreme Court to throw out enough votes so that “I very easily win in all states.”

It’s the sort of thing that used to be both riveting and terrifying. Indeed, two days after the election, Trump went on national television to give a similar, if blessedly shorter, speech making essentially the same claims: That he’s the victim of a widespread conspiracy, that he’s the real winner, that votes from certain cities — strangely enough, cities with large Black populations — are inherently suspect and illegitimate.

At the time, most experts felt confident that Trump’s coup attempt would fail. Still, watching the president of the United States blatantly attempt to steal an election by telling vicious and racist lies was chilling. For weeks, there was an undercurrent of panic that he might somehow pull it off, as he has managed, in the past, to pull off all manner of illegal and unethical acts without facing consequences.

Even Stephen Colbert was rattled. And Stephen Colbert never gets rattled.

But as often happens with sequels, Trump’s latest conspiracy theory tirade was bigger and bolder, yet somehow much less impressive. Trump’s self-pitying rant registered as pitiful instead of frightening. The speech barely touched the top headlines at most major news sites. It was driven down in coverage not just by the rapidly worsening COVID-19 pandemic, but also by other political stories, such as the U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia and even other Trump-related stories, like the fate of Attorney General Bill Barr or the impact of Michael Flynn’s pardon. The tone of most media coverage was more condescending than fearful. Outrage is quickly being eclipsed by annoyance at Trump for being a pest who doesn’t know when to pack it up and go home.

Jill Filipovic: Donald Trump believes in clemency and mercy. But only for his friends and family

Many expect the president will issue a flurry of pardons in the coming weeks, even as he lets others be executed

Given that Donald Trump treats the office of the presidency like a personal branding tool, and deals with adversity like a two-bit mafioso, this moment was perhaps predictable: the president is reportedly considering pre-emptively pardoning three of his children, his son-in-law, and associates including Rudy Giuliani. He has already pardoned or commuted the sentences of several of his friends and associates, which should raise some eyebrows – why do so many people who surround this president wind up charged with a crime, in jail, or bracing themselves for criminal charges? And why is the supposedly law-and-order “pro-life” Republican party shrugging as this president excuses the criminality of his kin and his cronies while he refuses to intervene to save anyone from execution – and in fact, is using what little time he has left in office to reinstate barbaric practices like death by firing squad?

We all know Trump didn’t drain the swamp. But in his last two months in office, he is sending a clear message about who and what he and his party value. It’s not Christian mercy, or hard-nosed law and order, or even the sanctity of life. It’s power, dominance and a thick line between two Americas: one connected, white, power-hungry and lawless, and the other at its mercy.

Pal Waldman: What’s the future of the GOP? You’re looking at it — and it’s bonkers.

If you thought things would calm down after Trump lost, I have some bad news.

While President-elect Joe Biden is working on his transition to the presidency, the Republican Party is in its own transition. Soon it will be out of power, perhaps retaining control of the Senate but still being the secondary player in Washington. So how is its transition going?

It’s madness. [..]

From the beginning, the tea party was unruly and potentially threatening to Republican officeholders, since it produced primary challenges from the right that ousted some established members of Congress. The reaction of just about every Republican was to try to ride the tea party tiger without getting eaten. It sometimes forced them into politically problematic places — like the government shutdown of 2013 — but it also kept the base’s energy high and helped them win the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.

How will that process play out this time? Every force on the right will push it in the direction of being crazier.

As extreme as the tea party was, it was nothing compared to the QAnon-inflected hysteria that now grips the GOP. Tea partyers believed that Obama was born in Kenya; significant parts of today’s Republican Party believe that Obama and other Democrats are Satan-worshiping, child-sex-trafficking pedophile cannibals.

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

Heather igby Parton: Suddenly Republicans want norms, ethics and “civility”: Are they actually psychopaths?

Trump is still trying to steal the election — but Republicans are acting as if they never enabled this criminal

Throughout this post-election period, the reaction from congressional Republicans has been entirely predictable. Mostly they’ve remained mum about the demented behavior of their president during the last month as he has continued his precipitous dive into a rabbit hole filled with conspiracy theories so delusional that it calls for medical intervention. A few have stepped up to say publicly that Trump has a “right” to pursue legal remedies in court, while privately assuring reporters that the president just needs to act out a little bit before he finally can emotionally accept what’s happened to him. [..]

This isn’t the first time a demagogue and conspiracy-monger has captured the Republican Party. CNN’s Ron Brownstein has pointed out the unpleasant parallels between the way the GOP establishment kowtowed to Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the ’40s and ’50s and their servile acquiescence to Trump’s malignant narcissism. In fact, this seems to be a permanent strain in American conservatism

Amanda Marcotte: Mitch McConnell’s dark pivot: Wreck the economy — and sabotage Biden’s presidency

Trump is still pretending he’ll be president next year, but McConnell has moved on to his plot to ruin Biden

Donald Trump is still pretending he’ll be able to successfully steal himself a second term as president, probably because it’s such a lucrative lie. Mitch McConnell, however, appears to be moving on to his next mission: kneecapping Joe Biden.

The Senate majority leader is doing what everyone who actually learns from history predicted he would, and deliberately sabotaging the American economy, in a belief that voters will blame the incoming Democratic president for the disaster and not the Republican senators who are actually responsible.

On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of congressional leaders proposed a compromise coronavirus relief bill, worth about $900 billion. The bill is meant to rescue the economy from what is likely to be a disastrous winter, as lockdowns tighten and people stay home in the face of rising cases of COVID-19. It falls far short of the $3 trillion relief package that the Democratic-controlled House passed in May — a bill that was ignored by the Senate — but is substantially better than anything McConnell has proposed. It’s also better than nothing, which is what McConnell’s actions so far have amounted to.

Unsurprisingly, however, McConnell’s reaction to this carefully drafted and dramatically announced bill was to blow a big, fat raspberry, refusing to even look at it. [..]

McConnell is as shameless a liar as Trump, even if he’s less theatrical about it. He is clearly in no hurry to pass a stimulus bill and, frankly, is behaving like a man who hopes no bill gets passed at all. That’s because McConnell does not care one whit about how many people die, lose their jobs, lose their homes or otherwise fall into ruin. All he cares about is power — and he likely believes, with good reason, that tanking the economy is the best bet for getting more power.

Richard Wolffe: Trump’s legacy is the plague of extreme lies. Truth-based media is the vaccine

The toxic politics of conspiracies and lies did not start four years ago and will live on beyond Trump. But we can protect ourselves and reward the truth

Normal presidents start to think about their legacy long before the final weeks of their time inside the West Wing. But if there’s anything we have learned from the lab rat experiment of the last four years, it’s that Donald Trump is entirely abnormal.

Whether he knows it or not – and all the evidence suggests he knows nothing worth knowing – Trump’s legacy is the toxic politics of lies: a permanent campaign of fabrications and falsehoods. [..]

The good news is that we already have a vaccine. It’s the best way to protect yourself from demagogues, deception and delusions. It separates fact from fiction. It recalls recent history to place the present in some kind of meaningful context.

It’s called the news media, and you can help. You can be an informed citizen by reading established news media first, not your social feed or email. You can share stories from the truth-tellers who have no problem calling out the liars.

Tom Udall and Charles Grassley: End the Taxpayer Giveaway to Big Oil and Gas

Congress should raise the royalty rates on federal lands.

One hundred years ago, Congress passed the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, setting up a system in which companies lease public lands to wrest valuable oil and gas from the ground. In the century since, the royalties and rent that those corporations pay to the American people for access have remained essentially unchanged even as the scale of development and profits has grown hugely.

As senators from different parties, we have our share of policy differences. But we both believe in sticking up for the public interest and the taxpayer. In this case, we agree that oil and gas companies should pay fair market value for the public resources they extract and sell. They aren’t doing that now — not even close — and the American public is the big loser.

That’s why we introduced the Fair Returns for Public Lands Act this year to reform the antiquated law that governs royalties and the leasing of public land.