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: Trump Is Killing the Economy Out of Spite

So what will he do if he loses the election?

Last year Donald Trump called Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person.” Actually, she isn’t — but he is.

Trump’s vindictiveness has become a major worry as the election approaches. He has already signaled that he won’t accept the result if he loses, which seems increasingly likely though not certain. Nobody knows what chaos, possibly including violence, he may unleash if the election doesn’t go his way.

Even aside from that concern, however, a defeated Trump would still be president for two and a half months. Would he spend that time acting destructively, in effect taking revenge on America for rejecting him?

Well, we got a preview of what a lame-duck Trump presidency might look like Tuesday. Trump hasn’t even lost yet, but he abruptly cut off talks on an economic relief package millions of Americans desperately need (although as of Thursday he seemed to be backtracking). And his motivation seems to have been sheer spite.

Eugene Robinson: Trump’s frantic desperation will only get worse

Another day, another flood of dangerous and offensive nonsense.

Predictions are risky these days, but I make this one confidently: President Trump’s frantic desperation at the prospect of losing the election will only get worse. Probably much worse.

I know that seems impossible, given the volume of vitriol now spewing hourly from the president. And I know it makes no political sense for Trump to continue to sound like a deranged end-of-days preacher yelling at random passersby. But nothing in Trump’s history suggests he will abandon his reelection “strategy” of unceasing bombast, transparent lies, manufactured grievance, unhinged conspiracy-mongering and an unforgivable attempt to disrupt the electoral process itself. [..]

The most important thing we can do is vote. Republicans can make it inconvenient for voters to cast their ballots, but they can’t make it impossible. Vote early by mail and track your ballot online. Vote early in person, wearing a mask and taking all precautions. Have a plan for Election Day, and follow through. Be patient, be determined, don’t give up.

And as for Trump, let him howl at the moon all he wants. He’s scared. And he has good reason to be.

Gretchen Whitmer: I will hold the president accountable for endangering and dividing America
Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, is governor of Michigan.

When I addressed the people of Michigan on Thursday to comment on the unprecedented terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges against 13 men, some of whom were preparing to kidnap and possibly kill me, I said, “Hatred, bigotry and violence have no place in the great state of Michigan.” I meant it. But just moments later, President Trump’s campaign adviser, Jason Miller, appeared on national television accusing me of fostering hatred.

I’m not going to waste my time arguing with the president. But I will always hold him accountable. Because when our leaders speak, their words carry weight.

When our leaders encourage domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit. And when a sitting president stands on a national stage refusing to condemn white supremacists and hate groups, as President Trump did when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during the first presidential debate, he is complicit. Hate groups heard the president’s words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry. As a call to action.

Jonathan Freedland: Covid-19 has unmasked the true nature of Donald Trump and Trumpism

The pandemic has exposed the hollowness of this presidency – and senior Republicans suspect their party could pay the price

Just in case you were about to feel an unfamiliar spasm of sympathy for Donald Trump following his contraction of coronavirus, this week has provided a helpful reminder not only of his morally repugnant character but also of the danger he poses to the United States and the wider world.

Firmly in the first category is his attempt to blame his infection on the grieving relatives of slain soldiers, citing Gold Star families’ tendency to “come within an inch of my face”. Speaking to Fox Business on Thursday, Trump said, “They want to hug me and they want to kiss me”, and so perhaps it was them who had made him sick. Clearly keen not to keep all that viral load to himself, Trump later told Fox News – in between coughing bouts – that he plans to host a rally in Florida on Saturday and another in Pennsylvania. He’ll doubtless repeat the gesture he premiered in his bargain-bin Mussolini performance on the White House balcony on Monday night, ripping off his mask with a flourish – as if to prove that nothing and nobody will stop him shrouding his devotees in a cloud of his contaminated breath.

Paul Waldman: The secret Republican health-care plan, revealed

How are they going to protect people with preexisting conditions while trying to destroy the law that does just that? You’ll never guess.

There has been a good deal of talk lately about how Republicans want to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, which would revoke the protection for those with preexisting conditions that ACA created for the first time in U.S. history. Spurred to action by the moral urgency of terrifying poll numbers, Republicans have responded “Nuh-uh” and insisted that they have a plan to protect the thing that is already protected by law, and that is threatened only by Republicans themselves.

Democrats counter that this “plan” is a phantom, a fantasy, something President Trump and other Republicans keep promising but never deliver. It’s as though the GOP says, “We have a plan to make car theft illegal!” while its members go around smashing people’s car windows.

On a purely factual basis, the Democrats are absolutely correct. But it’s also the case that Republicans do have a plan of a sort, to be explained below.

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

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern: This Supreme Court Term Will End With Either Catastrophe or 13 Justices

If Amy Coney Barrett is seated before the election, Democrats will need to act quickly.

When Republicans gathered at the White House on Sept. 26 to celebrate the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, they placed themselves at the epicenter of a likely superspreader event. Several senators in attendance—in addition to the president, the first lady, Chris Christie, and multiple GOP operatives—reported COVID-19 infections in the following days. Trump remains hospitalized while key Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are in quarantine. Yet on Friday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisted that he will move “full steam ahead” with confirmation hearings to install Barrett on the Supreme Court, even if that means endangering themselves and Senate staff. McConnell understands they’ll have to act fast to make it happen.

Democrats, meanwhile, have been slow to catch up. At the first debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Biden refused to say whether he’d expand the Supreme Court if Republicans confirm Barrett, insisting that the issue is a “distraction.” He’s wrong. Broaching the conversation about systemic reform after the election will be too late. And the coming Supreme Court term, which begins Monday, reflects just some of what’s at stake, this week, this month, and in the months ahead. The debate about structural changes to the court can’t wait until a hypothetical future in which everything has settled down. That future has already vanished.

Margaret Sullivan: No more presidential debates this year? Not a problem. We’ve seen enough.

At their best, debates serve an essential purpose. But not the way they’ve been going this cycle.

The first presidential debate — just over a week ago, if calculated in ordinary time — was a nightmare.

Moderator Chris Wallace failed to keep President Trump under control, and the dominant memory is of three White men in their 70s shouting over one another’s voices.

The one and only vice-presidential debate Wednesday night was a different kind of mess, but no more useful to the voting public. USA Today’s Susan Page asked some excellent questions, but the candidates dodged them, giving mini-speeches about the subjects of their choice instead.

Page failed to effectively follow up by demanding germane answers; nor did she successfully enforce time limits — meaning that the dominant memory of that night is of a fly lingering on Mike Pence’s white hair or Kamala Harris’s pained smiling (following the ironclad women’s rule for expressing disagreement) as she repeated the phrase, “I’m speaking.” [..]

It’s, well, debatable if next week’s planned event will come off.

But if it doesn’t, that’s perfectly fine. We’ve seen enough.

Paul Waldman: Why Trump’s demand for nondisclosure agreements at Walter Reed is so alarming

He’s so desperate to keep the state of his health a secret that he’s forcing doctors to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Donald Trump is already the oldest person to become president in American history; should he win reelection, he will be 78 at the end of his second term. He has now contracted covid-19, a disease that can produce effects that linger for months and potentially years.

Yet despite the fact that his health status is of intense concern to the country, he and his administration are not only not being forthcoming with details about his condition; they are doing everything they can to cloak them in mystery.

And according to a surprising new NBC News report concerning a strange visit he made to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last year, Trump was so worried that personnel there might reveal information about his health that he even insisted on nondisclosure agreements: [..]

The use of NDAs is nothing new for Trump. He lives in constant fear that people who work for him might reveal the things they saw while in his employ; given how many former aides and associates have written books and articles explaining how appalled and disgusted they were at his behavior, that fear is not unwarranted. [..]

But using NDAs on government employees and medical personnel is very different. Bradley Moss, a prominent attorney specializing in federal employment and national security law, told me that NDAs forced on government workers — including those at Walter Reed — are unenforceable.

Frank Bruni: Mike Pence’s Debate Performance Bugged Me Out

He’s numb to pests large and small.

We need to talk about that fly.

It was a fly, wasn’t it? If not, it was a bug doing an ace interpretation of a fly, and about two-thirds of the way through the debate in Salt Lake City on Wednesday night, it took up residence in Vice President Mike Pence’s hair, a smudge of black against a shock of white, where it lingered for a few minutes before undoubtedly realizing that there was warmer, more demonstrably human real estate to be had.

Off it flew, and on Pence droned. He never exhibited any awareness — not the subtlest glance upward, not the slightest flinch or twitch — that his head had been colonized. I first found this strange and then realized it was everything. Pence’s years of obsequiousness to Donald Trump had beaten all sensitivity and capacity for revulsion out of him.

How could he be expected to register or exile an itty-bitty pest when he routinely puts up with a great big one? That fly was some crazy combo of metaphor, visitation and karmic joke.

Rebecca Solnit: Trump’s response to the pandemic has always been dishonest and cruel

The contemporary right has one central principle: rejecting any responsibility for others in the hollow name of freedom

“Everybody was told to wear a mask. Why did the first family and the chief of staff believe that the rules for everybody else didn’t apply to them?” debate host Chris Wallace said on Fox News Sunday, and the answer is obvious. Throughout the pandemic the Trump administration and right-wingers in the US and elsewhere have found that the laws of science are offensive to their sense of impunity and irresponsibility. Their attitude has been “this doesn’t affect me – and I don’t care how it affects you”.

The pandemic focused and intensified the need to recognize the interconnectedness of all things—in this case the way that viruses spread and the responsibility of those in power and each of us to do what we can to limit that spread, and to recognize the consequences that could break our educational system, our economy, and our daily lives and hopes and dreams if we did not take care, of ourselves, each other, and the whole. In other words that we are not separate from each other, and that inseparability is a basis for making decisions on behalf of the common good. But Republicans have long denied this reality.

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: Trump’s COVID: Empathy for the world’s least empathetic person?

“Can you imagine if Biden had contracted Covid rather than Trump? Trump would be all over him.”

For about a minute today I found myself feeling sorry for Donald Trump. The poor man is now “battling” Covid-19 (the pugilistic verb is showing up all over the news). He’s in the hospital. He’s out-of-shape. He’s 74-years old. His chief of staff calls his symptoms “very concerning.”

Joe Biden is praying for him. Kamala Harris sends him heartfelt wishes. President Obama reminds us we’re all in this together and we want to make sure everyone is healthy.

But hold on: Why should we feel empathy for one of the world’s least empathetic people?

Out of respect. He’s a human being. And he’s our president.

Yet there’s an asymmetry here. While the Biden campaign has taken down all negative television advertising, the Trump campaign’s negative ads continue non-stop.

And at almost the same time that Biden, Harris, and Obama offered prayers and consoling words, the Trump campaign blasted “Lyin’ Obama and Phony Kamala Harris” and charged that “Sleepy Joe isn’t fit to be YOUR President.”

Can you imagine if Biden had contracted Covid rather than Trump? Trump would be all over him. He’d attack Biden as weak, feeble, and old. He’d mock Biden’s mask-wearing – “See, masks don’t work!” – and lampoon his unwillingness to hold live rallies: “Guess he got Covid in his basement!”

Heather Digby Parton: Trump’s incoherent COVID bluster is destroying him — but America continues to suffer

Trump is back home and tweeting like a lunatic — maybe he’s fine! But this has been a massive political train wreck

President Trump spent Tuesday night tweeting madly for hours about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and various conspiracy theories about the 2016 election. Twitterati speculated that his experimental drug cocktail and steroid treatment for COVID-19 might be making him manic and grandiose. But how could you tell, really? This is pretty much his normal modus operandi. The only reason one might suspect that his drug treatment was contributing to the burst of energy and wild commentary is that he is a 74-year-old man with co-morbidities who has been seriously ill with a disease that has killed more than 210,000 Americans. Since he didn’t even make one of his “proof of life” videos on Tuesday, it’s possible someone else was tweeting for him. But in the end the best guess is that Trump was lying in bed with Fox News on as usual, scrolling through his Twitter feed and incoherently venting his spleen — just as he might do on any other Tuesday night.

Sick or high or just having a normal one, it is perfectly understandable that Trump would be melting down in spectacular fashion. His only concern for the last four years has been getting re-elected for four more years, and that’s not going well at all at the moment. This tumultuous last couple of weeks brought him only one piece of good news: the death of a beloved liberal icon, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The insensitive glee with which Trump and his GOP accomplices greeted that event, and their shameless hypocrisy in insisting on filling the seat just weeks before the election, was a true high point for the Republicans this year. I hope they enjoyed their moment, because everything that’s happened to them since then has amounted to an epic train wreck.

Margaret Sullivan: Trump doesn’t need Russian trolls to spread disinformation. The mainstream media does it for him.

This time, it only took the megaphone of the presidency — amplified by journalists trying to seem neutral — for Trump’s falsehoods to go viral, a Harvard study found.

Voting fraud, according to study after study, is rare. Mail-in ballots are, with a few exceptions, a safe way to vote.

But millions of Americans have come to believe something radically different: They think the Nov. 3 election could very well end up being stolen. That the outcome — especially if it relies on counting the votes that come in later than in a normal election year — might well be illegitimate.

Where would they get such an idea?

Conventional wisdom might say it comes from false stories and memes spread on social media, originating from foreign troublemakers trying to influence the election results — most likely in favor of President Trump, who is behind in public opinion polls and stands to benefit most from doubt sown about the reliability of mail-in ballots.

Not so, says a major new study: It’s the American mainstream press that’s doing most of the dirty work.

Jennifer Rubin: The Commission on Presidential Debates should be disbanded

The commission is acting recklessly.

The Commission on Presidential Debates allowed President Trump to debate last week without proof of testing negative for the coronavirus and without forcing Trump’s entourage at the event to abide by the commission’s rule on mask-wearing. Circumstantial evidence strongly suggests Trump’s Rose Garden ceremony for the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was a superspreader event, making it entirely possible that Trump was positive when he debated without a mask on Sept. 29. Given this, the commission’s insistence on in-person live debates has become a public health hazard.

On Wednesday night, the commission will allow Vice President Pence to appear at the vice-presidential debate, even though he, too, was at the Rose Garden event and sat immediately in front of at least one person who tested positive (Sen. Mike Lee of Utah). Pence will be separated from Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) by the skimpiest of plexiglass panels.

What is clear is that the commission is allowing the White House to call the shots. Commission co-chair Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. told the Los Angeles Times: “There will be a plexiglass divider between the two candidates and the candidates and the moderator. The Trump campaign agreed to that so long as we don’t surround Vice President Pence all the way around.” It should not be Pence’s call. The plexiglass is for others’ protection, not just his.

Jamelle Bouie: The Myth of Trump’s Political Genius, Exposed

His victory in 2016, the product of luck as much as skill, went to his head.

It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true: Donald Trump is bad at electoral politics.

Yes, he is the president, which by itself would suggest the opposite. But to look at his conduct during the coronavirus pandemic is to see someone who doesn’t understand his own political interests and won’t listen to anyone who does.

The past week has been instructive in this regard. Last Tuesday, he faced off against Joe Biden in the first presidential debate. Trump, who trailed Biden in national polls and in most swing states, had one job: to bring wavering voters back into the fold. With a sufficiently competent performance, Trump could stop the bleeding and maybe even mount a small comeback. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it should have been simple — a straightforward turn that any incumbent president ought to have been able to make.