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: America Fails the Marshmallow Test

We lack the will to beat Covid-19.

The marshmallow test is a famous psychological experiment that tests children’s willingness to delay gratification. Children are offered a marshmallow, but told that they can have a second marshmallow if they’re willing to wait 15 minutes before eating the first one. Claims that children with the willpower to hold out do much better in life haven’t held up well, but the experiment is still a useful metaphor for many choices in life, both by individuals and by larger groups.

One way to think about the Covid-19 pandemic is that it poses a kind of marshmallow test for society.

At this point, there have been enough international success stories in dealing with the coronavirus to leave us with a clear sense of what beating the pandemic takes. First, you have to impose strict social distancing long enough to reduce the number of infected people to a small fraction of the population. Then you have to implement a regime of testing, tracing and isolating: quickly identifying any new outbreak, finding everyone exposed and quarantining them until the danger is past.

This strategy is workable. South Korea has done it. New Zealand has done it.

But you have to be strict and you have to be patient, staying the course until the pandemic is over, not giving in to the temptation to return to normal life while the virus is still widespread. So it is, as I said, a kind of marshmallow test.

And America is failing that test.

Mara Gay: Good Riddance to One of America’s Strongest Police Secrecy Laws

In New York and elsewhere, street demonstrations are leading to police reform.

Protest works.

The large street demonstrations in scores of cities and towns across the country are bringing sudden and sweeping changes to police practices and accountability.

Minneapolis is preparing to disband and rebuild its police department.

California is poised to ban the use of police chokeholds.

Dozens of cities are considering redirecting millions in taxpayer funds from America’s heavily militarized police departments to education, health care, housing and other needs of black and Hispanic neighborhoods that have been underinvested in for generations.

New York took a step toward reform with the repeal Tuesday evening of a state law known as 50-a, a decades-old measure that has allowed the police to keep the disciplinary and personnel records of officers secret. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is expected to sign the bill.

Susan E. Rice: Washington, D.C., Deserves Statehood

Trump transformed my hometown into a war zone, underscoring the imperative that the capital should be the 51st state.

For one long week, Mr. Trump transformed my hometown into a war zone to burnish his “law and order” credentials. Without statehood, Washington was virtually powerless to prevent Mr. Trump from using the capital as a petri dish to intimidate protesters, divide Americans and goad activists into ugly street battles to galvanize elements of his base.

America, beware. Washington was the testing ground, but Mr. Trump could yet find a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and send active-duty U.S. military forces into any state over the objections of its governor. He reportedly came close, only to be deterred by Pentagon officials.

Fortunately, when taunted by Mr. Trump’s abuse of power, the people of Washington refused to take the bait. The protests proceeded mostly peacefully, following some early, condemnable looting. Facing down federal forces, my hometown refused to give Mr. Trump any racially charged urban war scenes. So he gave up and ordered troops home.

But not before his actions underscored the imperative that Washington must finally attain statehood.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s peddling of a conspiracy theory about Antifa and protesters is part of a right wing trend

Baseless theories are being spread to derail the conversation about racism and police. Here’s how to push back

While some horrible tweets from Donald Trump are surely the result of impulsive decisions made during the president’s extensive “executive time” (read: sitting on the toilet, watching Fox News), there’s sadly good reason to believe that actual deliberation went into Tuesday’s tweet in which Trump smeared Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old peace activist who received a horrible head injury as a result of being pushed by police during a protest in Buffalo, New York.

The tweet, which accuses Gugino of being “an ANTIFA provocateur” trying to “black out” police equipment and who “fell harder than was pushed,” has one of the main hallmarks of being written by someone other than Trump, such as a White House staffer: It uses, and even correctly spells, a $5 word — “provocateur” — that is outside of Trump’s extremely limited vocabulary. So while the tweet masquerades as a Trumpian outburst, allowing Republican politicians and some media figures to pretend it’s not important, odds are this was not impulsive at all, but a calculated effort to float a conspiracy theory meant to discredit not just Gugino, but the larger protest movement against police brutality and racism that’s sweeping the nation. [..]

These conspiracy theories allow conservatives to downplay the legitimate concerns and organizing prowess of Black Lives Matter, a grassroots movement without centralized leadership. As the pressure mounts, expect to see more and more of these conspiracy theories proliferate through both right wing media and on social media platforms. It seems some conservatives would rather spend time on these conspiracy theories than talk about the larger problems being highlighted by the protests.

If you find yourself engaging with people who are citing conspiracy theories, avoid getting in a line-by-line argument with people over a narrative’s plausibility. Even getting into a fight over whether Floyd’s murder was “staged” is giving in to the desire to distract from the real issues.

Instead, the better approach is to go meta. Treat it as self-evident that the conspiracy theories are false (as they often are), and instead focus on calling out conspiracy theorists for repeating baseless claims in the service of a racist agenda.

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

Michelle Alexander: America, This Is Your Chance

We must get it right this time, or risk losing our democracy forever

Our democracy hangs in the balance. This is not an overstatement.

As protests, riots, and police violence roiled the nation last week, the president vowed to send the military to quell persistent rebellions and looting, whether governors wanted a military occupation or not. John Allen, a retired four-star Marine general, wrote that we may be witnessing the “beginning of the end of the American experiment” because of President Trump’s catastrophic failures.

Trump’s leadership has been disastrous. But it would be a mistake to place the blame on him alone. In part, we find ourselves here for the same reasons a civil war tore our nation apart more than 100 years ago: Too many citizens prefer to cling to brutal and unjust systems than to give up political power, the perceived benefits of white supremacy and an exploitative economic system. If we do not learn the lessons of history and choose a radically different path forward, we may lose our last chance at creating a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously said that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Today, the same can be said of our criminal injustice system, which is a mirror reflecting back to us who we really are, as opposed to what we tell ourselves.

Jamelle Bouie: The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It.

It is an attack on civil society and democratic accountability.

If we’re going to speak of rioting protesters, then we need to speak of rioting police as well. No, they aren’t destroying property. But it is clear from news coverage, as well as countless videos taken by protesters and bystanders, that many officers are using often indiscriminate violence against people — against anyone, including the peaceful majority of demonstrators, who happens to be in the streets. [..]

None of this quells disorder. Everything from the militaristic posture to the attacks themselves does more to inflame and agitate protesters than it does to calm the situation and bring order to the streets. In effect, rioting police have done as much to stoke unrest and destabilize the situation as those responsible for damaged buildings and burning cars. But where rioting protesters can be held to account for destruction and violence, rioting police have the imprimatur of the state.

What we’ve seen from rioting police, in other words, is an assertion of power and impunity. In the face of mass anger over police brutality, they’ve effectively said So what? In the face of demands for change and reform — in short, in the face of accountability to the public they’re supposed to serve — they’ve bucked their more conciliatory colleagues with a firm No. In which case, if we want to understand the behavior of the past two weeks, we can’t just treat it as an explosion of wanton violence; we have to treat it as an attack on civil society and democratic accountability, one rooted in a dispute over who has the right to hold the police to account.

Jennifer Senior: Is This the Trump Tipping Point?

I know. We’ve said we’ve been here a thousand times before. This time feels different.

You never want to say that you’ve reached a tipping point with this administration. Donald J. Trump has proved to be the Nosferatu of American politics: heartless, partial to Slavs, beneath grace and thus far impervious to destruction.

Even when I read my colleague Jonathan Martin’s fine piece on Saturday, about how some high-profile Republicans refuse to vote for Trump or are struggling with publicly lending him their support, I thought: yes, but. They’re just a handful. They’re the usual suspects. Too few of them have coattails.

Yet something right now really is different. I think.

Before diving into the more entrancing developments, I’ll start with the obvious: Trump’s old tactics, once so reliable, are starting to fail him, utterly.

Jennifer Rubin: The politics of racial resentment come back to haunt the GOP

The NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday revealed the depth of President Trump’s electoral problems. Former vice president Joe Biden’s lead held steady at 7 points (as compared with Hillary Clinton’s two-point lead at this point in the 2016 campaign). Moreover, “this week’s poll finds [Trump] leading among those without a degree by only about 3 points [as compared with 8 points in 2016], while he is losing voters with a degree by 24 points [in comparison with 9 points in 2016],” says NBC’s Dante Chinni.

Other polls confirm Trump’s crashing support. The latest CNN poll shows Biden up by 14 points with Trump’s approval sinking to 38 percent. Only 31 percent approve of his handling of race relations; 63 percent do not. Two-thirds of those polled say the criminal-justice system treats blacks worse than whites, and a stunning 84 percent find the peaceful protests justified. By a 60 to 36 percent margin Americans oppose use of the military to subdue protests. Trump leads among men by a scant 2 points and trails among women by 27 points. Biden leads by 3 points among non-college graduates and by 28 points among white college graduates.

If there is one critical factor in the demise of the Trump GOP, it would be the overwhelming loss of people with a college degree, a group that Republicans used to win or at least come close to winning.

Robert Reich: Trump’s use of the military backfired – but will it back him if he refuses to go?

Faced with the George Floyd protests, the president wants to be seen as a strongman. What happens if he loses at the polls?

History teaches that mass protests against oppression can lead either to liberation or brutal repression.

This past week, Donald Trump bet his political future on repression. Much of the rest of America, on the other hand, wants to liberate black people from police brutality and centuries of systemic racism. As of this writing, it looks like Trump is losing and America winning, but the contest is hardly over.

Trump knows he can’t be re-elected on his disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic or on what’s likely to be a tepid economic recovery. But he must believe a racist campaign could work. After all, stoking racism got him into the White House in the first place. [..]

But although Trump’s response to the protests seems to have backfired, it also raises a troubling question. If Trump loses and refuses to give up the presidency, will the military support him?