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

Amanda Marcotte: Political reporters can’t handle the truth: Trump is never going to “pivot”

Smell the covfefe: Trump’s brief, sulky briefing was no momentous “shift” — he’ll be ranting on Twitter soon enough

First things first: Donald Trump is not going to “pivot.” Yes, on Tuesday he stood at a podium and, in stiff and sulky fashion, said words that, as written, were relatively serious and realistic. He admitted the coronavirus pandemic will “get worse before it gets better.” He also claimed that his administration is “developing a strategy” to combat the pandemic, after months of foisting it off on the states and then lambasting any state that tried to take serious measures, while rewarding governors who pushed to reopen businesses and damn the consequences. He said he’d wear a mask now, after months of implying that only soy-boys and wieners wear masks.

These are all words that Trump said. But they don’t mean anything. As Dan Rather sagely observed on Twitter, Trump “does not pivot” and whatever temporary behavior we see on display, he will always, always, always revert to being “who he is, and always has been,” which is to say a rancid monster with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Unfortunately, much of the media coverage gave an entirely different impression, presenting Trump’s performance at Tuesday’s press briefing as if it represented a real shift, and seeding the absolutely false hope that Trump might actually start doing something to fight the coronavirus, instead of acting like the coronavirus’s biggest champion. [..]

We’ve been down this road dozens of times before: Trump, facing bad press, sucks it up and, with the posture of a kid being dragged to the dentist, feigns being presidential for a few minutes. Then, with the predictability of a clock, he gets sick of all this “acting respectable” nonsense and goes right back to his preferred
mode: vitriol, incompetence and asserting that everything is “great” no matter how bad it gets.

Heather Digby Parton: Defund Homeland Security: Creating a massive federal police apparatus was always a mistake

We built and funded a federal secret-police agency, and now it’s being used against us. Why are we surprised?

It seems like only yesterday that Republicans were wringing their hands and rending their garments over federal officers attempting to arrest a large group of armed militia members who had taken over a federal building in Oregon and were refusing to leave. (The 2016 “Oregon standoff” is the subject of Anthony McCann’s fascinating book “Shadowlands.”) They were led by Ammon Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who triggered an earlier standoff with government forces in 2014, and they said they were planning to occupy the building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge “for years” as a protest against the conviction of two local ranchers who had been found guilty of arson for setting fire to government land. After six weeks of negotiating with federal authorities, the protesters were finally dispersed. Some did time but Ammon Bundy and a dozen others were tried and acquitted. [..]

I bring that story up now only because as we have watched the events unfold in Portland, Oregon, over the past few days — a few hours west of the Malheur refuge — with federal police in full military regalia attacking and kidnapping protesters, I’m struck by the deafening silence from all those erstwhile defenders of free speech and the right to protest. I guess in order for them to speak out, the protesters have to be carrying AR-15s.

Trump’s decision to send in DHS stormtroopers to Portland is anything but surprising. He’s been telegraphing his intention to do this since the George Floyd murder sparked protests in the beginning of June. And let’s be clear about the reasons. Trump doesn’t care about American cities or statues or “anarchy” or any of the rest of it. He cares about getting re-elected, and since he doesn’t know how to deal with the pandemic crisis, he figured he could use the Black Lives Matter protests to spark a white backlash that will carry him to victory.

Jennifer Senior: I Spoke With Anthony Fauci. He Says His Inbox Isn’t Pretty.

An interview with the man who has an important message for you, if he can get it out.

Americans may have lost faith in their most cherished institutions — the presidency, Congress, the media, perhaps even democracy itself — but 65 percent of them still believe in Dr. Anthony Fauci.

This, in spite of the fact that he’s practically disappeared from network and cable television while the pandemic has whipped through the country with alarming speed (his message of sober realism does not, one suspects, align well with the wishful thinking of his boss).

This, in spite of the fact that the Trump White House waged a highly unusual campaign last week to undermine his credibility, with both named and unnamed administration officials dispatched to impale him like an hors d’oeuvre. Fauci has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, and he’s been the custodian of a jittery nation’s sanity since March 2020.

We had a chance to speak nine hours before the president’s first coronavirus news briefing since April. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Karen Tumulty: Four years ago, Trump said he alone could fix things. What isn’t worse now?

The sight of Donald Trump standing by himself behind the briefing room lectern, doing his best to sound presidential and in command of a crisis, was a reminder of a milestone to which no one at the White House cared to draw attention.

Tuesday — the day that Trump delivered his first coronavirus briefing in months — also marked the fourth anniversary of his acceptance of the 2016 Republican nomination at the GOP convention in Cleveland. It was there that he so memorably declared to thousands of cheering delegates and a national television audience: “I alone can fix it.”

Today, it is hard to find any measure by which the country is not feeling more insecure and worse off than it did when Trump was elected.

As the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus was rising toward 140,000, Trump said his administration is “in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful.” But he offered no clue of what that plan might be, or why he has yet to have any plan at all more than five months after covid-19 claimed its first victim in this country.

Though the president acknowledged that the pandemic is likely to “get worse before it gets better” — a more realistic assessment than his customary “light at the end of the tunnel” talk — Trump continued to congratulate himself for a job well done. [..]

What Trump needs to do now is prove that he is up to the job of calming the country and leading it through this dark time. But instead, he is reverting to the 2016 culture-warfare playbook, painting scary and baseless pictures of a dystopian future if Biden and the Democrats are put back in power.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Investment in child care can’t wait until there’s a coronavirus vaccine

Our economy cannot function without child care. That simple fact has been brought into stark relief by the recent pandemic, which has forced parents across the country to choose between supporting their family financially and caring for their children.

“In the Covid-19 economy, you can have a kid or a job,” wrote Deb Perelman in the New York Times, “But you can’t have both.” That’s hardly an exaggeration. With school districts contemplating virtual or partial reopenings in the fall, many of the nation’s 50 million working parents will have to fill gaps in child care. Already, 13 percent of American parents have had to either quit a job or cut back their working hours because of a lack of child care.

This crisis isn’t new. For years, working families have struggled with the rising cost of child care and the difficulty of finding licensed providers. [..]

Then there’s access. Before the pandemic, half the population lived in child-care deserts — “areas with little or no licensed child care capacity.” Now, these deserts have become complete wastelands. More than half of licensed child-care centers have closed as a result of the pandemic, many of them for good. CAP estimates that these closures could impact 4.5 million children, the majority of them from middle- and low-income families.

Our child-care system is on the brink of collapse, and working parents and our economy are at a breaking point. Something has to give.

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

Elizabeth Warren: To Fight the Pandemic, Here’s My Must-Do List

The Senate needs to act now. There is no time to waste.

Americans stayed at home and sacrificed for months to flatten the curve and prevent the spread of the coronavirus. That gave us time to take the steps needed to address the pandemic — but President Trump squandered it, refusing to issue national stay-at-home guidelines, failing to set up a national testing operation and fumbling production of personal protective equipment. Now, Congress must again act as this continues to spiral out of control.

Those who frame the debate as one of health versus economics are missing the point. It is not possible to fix the economy without first containing the virus. We need a bold, ambitious legislative response that does four things: brings the virus under control; gets our schools, child care centers, businesses, and state and local governments the resources they need; addresses the burdens on communities of color; and supports struggling families who don’t know when the next paycheck will come. [..]

Our constituents are counting on us to deliver the relief they desperately need. The House passed a relief bill over two months ago. Now the Senate must act to contain the virus and to provide the funding so that our economy, our schools and our families can begin to recover. This is about saving lives and livelihoods — and we don’t have time to waste.

Paul Krugman: What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Trump

“Slow the testing down,” he said, and it’s happening.

We’re now at the stage of the Covid-19 pandemic where Donald Trump and his allies are trying to suppress information about the coronavirus’s spread — because, of course, they are. True to form, however, they’re far behind the curve. From a political point of view (which is all they care about), their disinformation efforts are too little, too late.

Where we are: In just a few days millions of Americans are going to see a drastic fall in their incomes, as enhanced unemployment benefits expire. This calls for urgent action; but avoiding economic calamity was always going to be hard, because Republicans in general have balked at providing the aid workers idled by the pandemic need.

But now it turns out that there’s another obstacle to action: An intra-G.O.P. dispute over funding for testing and tracing of infected individuals. Even Senate Republicans support increased testing, which is desperately needed given our current situation: Surging cases have created a testing backlog, and test results are taking so long to come back that they’re effectively useless.

But Trump officials are opposed to any new money for testing. They’re barely even trying to offer excuses for their opposition, since Trump himself explained the strategy a month ago at his Tulsa rally: When you expand testing, he declared, “you’re going to find more cases, so I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”

In other words, what you don’t know can’t hurt Trump.

Jamelle Bouie: The Border War in Portland

 

How can this be a job for Homeland Security?

 

omething dangerous is taking shape within the Department of Homeland Security.

We got our first glimpse of it last week in Oregon, when unidentified federal agents clad in camouflage and tactical gear descended on Portland, beat and tear-gassed protesters and pulled others into unmarked vehicles for arrest and questioning. [..]

A secretive, nationwide police force — created without congressional input or authorization, formed from highly politicized agencies, tasked with rooting out vague threats and answerable only to the president — is a nightmare out of the fever dreams of the founding generation, federalists and antifederalists alike. It’s something Americans continue to fear and for good reason. It is a power that cannot and should not exist in a democracy, lest it undermine and destroy the entire project.

Democrats, thankfully, seem to recognize this. “We live in a democracy, not a banana republic. We will not tolerate the use of Oregonians, Washingtonians — or any other Americans — as props in President Trump’s political games,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Saturday, in a joint statement with Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. “The House is committed to moving swiftly to curb these egregious abuses of power immediately.”

But rhetoric isn’t enough. The House must act and act now. In addition to holding hearings and investigations — including eliciting testimony from Wolf and other officials — Democrats should condition final passage of its Homeland Security appropriations bill on a complete halt to operations in Portland and other cities and the dissolution of the response force. Should Democrats find themselves in control of both legislative branches and the White House next year, they should also use the opportunity to amend the relatively obscure Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which Trump has used to install loyalists in high-level positions without Senate confirmation.

Amanda Marcotte: Desperate to hide the numbers, Trump declares all-out war on testing

Trump has long believed he can make the pandemic go away by rigging the numbers — now he’s trying to end testing

In her tell-all book about being Donald Trump’s niece, “Too Much and Never Enough“, psychologist Mary Trump tells a story of how her grandfather and the president’s father, Fred Trump, would handle it when his tenants wanted the basic landlord services they were entitled to.

When one tenant repeatedly called the office to report a lack of heat, Fred paid him a visit. After knocking on the door, he removed his suit jacket, something he usually did only right before getting into bed. Once inside the apartment, which was indeed cold, he rolled up his shirtsleeves (again, something he rarely did) and told his tenant that he didn’t know what they were complaining about. “It’s like the tropics in here,” he told them.

Donald Trump clearly learned the art of gaslighting from his dear ol’ dad, a man so mean-spirited and racist that Woody Guthrie wrote a diss track about him. This belief, that any inconvenient or unflattering fact should be dealt with by pretending it doesn’t exist, is the closest thing Trump has to a guiding philosophy. So it’s no surprise that as coronavirus cases are rising around the country, due primarily to Trump’s own incompetence and malice, his strategy is to simply deny that the virus is a serious threat and do whatever he can to hide the evidence contradicting his lies.

his weekend, what was long suspected became undeniable: Trump believes he can make this coronavirus problem go away by hiding the evidence.

Catherine Rampell: Don’t pull the plug on pandemic unemployment aid

A federal program providing financial aid to 30 million jobless Americans is set to expire this week. The money has helped struggling families pay their bills and put food on the table — and kept many retailers and landlords afloat.

Unless Congress acts fast, America’s fragile economic recovery is poised to nosedive off a cliff.

Traditional state unemployment insurance benefits replace, on average, only about 40 percent of a worker’s lost wages. As concerns about the pandemic’s impact grew in March, Congress created a federal “top-up” payment to supplement state-level unemployment benefits. Congress wanted to give workers enough money to replace 100 percent of their lost wages, but embarrassingly ancient government IT systems made it virtually impossible to link benefits to a specific share of workers’ lost pay. Lawmakers instead settled on a flat $600 extra per week, for every worker, an amount chosen because it was roughly enough to make the average jobless worker whole.

Inevitably, some idled workers have been receiving more in unemployment benefits than they did in their pre-pandemic paychecks. Now, economic advisers to President Trump argue that these benefits are too generous — and are the real reason unemployment remains so high: Workers are allegedly being treated to a collective, government-sponsored vacation and refuse to return to their jobs.

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 Keep Flunking Microbe Economics

Getting other people sick isn’t an “individual choice.”

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida said something remarkably stupid the other day. I know, I know: it’s probably harder to find a day on which DeSantis didn’t say something stupid than a day on which he did. But this particular piece of thickheadedness, I’d argue, helps us understand why America’s response to the coronavirus has been so disastrous compared with other wealthy nations.

Florida has, of course, become a Covid-19 epicenter, with soaring case totals and a daily death toll now consistently exceeding that of the whole European Union, which has 20 times its population. But DeSantis won’t contemplate any rollback of the state’s obviously premature reopening; he even refuses to close venues that are perfect coronavirus incubators. [..]

But all this is beside the point. The reason we need to close gyms isn’t to protect the people working out, it’s to protect the other people they might infect. Even gym rats have families, friends, and co-workers; the guy lifting weights might be OK, but the senior citizens who get sick because he spent time hanging out in a petri dish might well die.

This should be obvious. Yet five months and almost 140,000 deaths into this pandemic, many Republicans still can’t or won’t grasp the point that choices have consequences beyond those to the individual who makes them.

Charles M. Blow: Where Is the Outrage?

Americans are getting sick and dying while Trump plays a political game.

It never ceases to amaze me how more people aren’t outraged, shocked and disgusted by Donald Trump’s cruelty and malfeasance.

Nearly 140,000 Americans are now dead because of the Covid-19 pandemic and more than 3,000,000 have contracted the disease. Furthermore, our outlook in this country is dire: Cases are surging and the number of dead continues to climb.

This is still the first wave; a second wave could simply pile on and be catastrophic.

And yet, Trump’s cronies are attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, demanding that all schools reopen in the fall even as the virus rages, and continuing to tell the lie that the reason we have more cases is because we have more tests.

Trump has so completely politicized the pandemic that people now routinely refuse to wear masks in public places, insisting that being compelled to wear them is an infringement on their rights.

Republican lawmakers for their part offer only the mildest contradictions to Trump’s deadly leadership, if they offer any at all.

Michelle Goldberg: In Some Countries, Normal Life Is Back. Not Here.

Trump’s incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign?

If you’re lucky enough to live in New Zealand, the coronavirus nightmare has been mostly over since June. After more than two weeks with no new cases, the government lifted almost all restrictions that month. The borders are still shut, but inside the country, normal life returned.

It’s coming back elsewhere too. Taiwan, where most days this month no new cases have been reported, just held the Taipei Film Festival, and a recent baseball game drew 10,000 spectators. Italy was once the epicenter of Europe’s outbreak and remains in a state of emergency, but with just a few hundred new cases a day in the whole country, bars are open and tourists have started returning, though of course Americans remain banned. According to The New York Times’s figures, there were 321 new cases in all of Canada last Friday.

And America? We had 68,241. As of last week, the worst per capita outbreak on the planet was in Arizona, followed by Florida. The world is closed to us; American passports were once coveted, but now only a few dozen nations will let us in. Lawrence O. Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown, told me he doesn’t expect American life to feel truly normal before summer 2022. Two years of our lives, stolen by Donald Trump.

Andrew O’Hehir: Is this what democracy looks like? With federal goons in the streets, history hangs in the balance

Whether the Trump regime’s Portland gambit is purely political or an attempted coup, the danger is enormous

Let’s have the decency not to pretend we weren’t warned about this, shall we? Since virtually the day Donald Trump was elected, if not before that, people like journalist Masha Gessen and historian Timothy Snyder have told us that his presidency would be a sustained assault on democracy, and that America stood at a historical fork in the road, with at least one of the paths leading into darkness. We began to talk about “fascism” and “authoritarianism,” and maybe those terms seemed metaphorical or melodramatic, for a while. Do they seem that way now?

It didn’t feel like the end of democracy, did it? To use Gessen’s language, did it feel like the dangerous moment between the “autocratic attempt” and the “autocratic breakthrough”? Not the way that alarming news reports from Hungary and Russia and Turkey and the Philippines do. The problem is, as history informs us, that we’re not likely to notice such dangerous moments while they’re happening. So the insults and outrages piled up and the news cycle grew ever more discordant and surreal, but there was still takeout and Netflix and Amazon. Life was about the same, for most people most of the time. Maybe it was all an “aberrant moment in time,” in Joe Biden’s immortal phrase. There was no Reichstag fire. There were no troops in the street. Not until now.

Amanda Marcotte: Desperate, Trump and the Republicans will try to win by declaring war on the cities

Trump sends in the troops and Republicans encourage the spread of coronavirus — war on the cities is now for real

Donald Trump is convinced that the reason more American voters aren’t swooning for his racism is because he’s just being too subtle about it. Forget the polling evidence that shows Trump’s overt racism is turning voters off. He just knows, in his heart of hearts, that the fundamental dynamics of American politics haven’t changed since the Reagan administration and voters want him to draw a clear line in the sand on racial politics. So he turned up the dial on Thursday in a bizarre rant during a clearly illegal campaign event disguised as a “press conference” in the Rose Garden.

“The Democrats in D.C. have been and want to at a much higher level abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs,” Trump said, claiming that “your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise” if Democrats get their way.

Even Trump isn’t nutty enough — yet — to seriously suggest that the Democrats have some secret plan to bulldoze the suburbs. What Trump’s talking about, as Jonathan Allen at NBC News explained, is “an Obama-era rule designed to combat racial discrimination in housing.”

Which is to say that Trump’s campaign strategy is to tell white suburbanites that if they don’t vote for him, Black people might move into their neighborhood. What makes suburbs “beautiful,” apparently, is racial segregation.

“His message is clear: ‘Elect me and I’ll keep Black people out of your neighborhoods and out of your schools,'” Democratic strategist Michael Starr Hopkins told Allen.

Down in the polls and desperate, Trump and his fellow Republicans have decided to go all-out in trying to stoke a war between rural and suburban areas — imagined as primarily white, which in itself is outdated — and more racially diverse cities. Republicans have long tried to appeal to white voters by painting American cities as terrifying places, and under Trump all subtlety has been stripped away from that pitch, along with any plausible deniability that this is anything but racist fear-mongering.

Instead, with less than four months to go until the election, Trump and his fellow Republicans are declaring war on American cities, and hoping that rural and suburban white people still hate the cities — and the Americans who live in them — so much that they’re willing to ignore the spreading pandemic and the cratering economy to indulge their racist impulses one more time.