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: This Earth Day, we must stop the fossil fuel money pipeline

Taking down the fossil fuel industry requires taking on the institutions that finance it. Even during a pandemic, this movement is gaining steam

1970 was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.)

Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was nothing subtle about it. In New York City, the environmental lawyer Albert Butzel described a permanently yellow horizon: “I not only saw the pollution, I wiped it off my windowsills.” Or consider the testimony of a city medical examiner: “The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink lungs. The city dweller’s are black as coal.” You’ve probably heard of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, but here’s how the former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller described the Hudson south of Albany: “One great septic tank that has been rendered nearly useless for water supply, for swimming, or to support the rich fish life that once abounded there.” Everything that people say about the air and water in China and India right now was said of America’s cities then.

It’s no wonder that people mobilized: 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day in 1970 – 10% of America’s population at the time, perhaps the single greatest day of political protest in the country’s history. And it worked. Worked politically because Congress quickly passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and scientifically because those laws had the desired effect. In essence, they stuck enough filters on smokestacks, car exhausts and factory effluent pipes that, before long, the air and water were unmistakably cleaner. The nascent Environmental Protection Agency commissioned a series of photos that showed just how filthy things were. Even for those of us who were alive then, it’s hard to imagine that we tolerated this.

But we should believe it, because now we face even greater challenges that we’re doing next to nothing about. And one reason is you can’t see them.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump doesn’t want coronavirus testing: His instinct is always to hide the truth

His whole life, Trump has lied about the numbers: From the beginning, he’s tried to deflate the coronavirus count

In recent days, Donald Trump’s go-to excuse for why the federal government hasn’t done more to ramp up efforts to test Americans for the novel coronavirus — even though such tests are necessary for the economy to successfully reopen — is that this should be the responsibility of state governments. [..]

When governors complain that they can’t ramp up coronavirus testing, because there’s nowhere near enough capacity, Trump denies it, claiming that governors “don’t want to use all of the capacity that we’ve created.” When asked why testing rates have stayed mostly flat for the past month, Trump of course turns it around and pins blame on the governors, falsely claiming they haven’t asked for help.

It should be obvious what’s going on: The Trump administration is doing everything possible to hamstring states’ capacity to perform the large-scale testing that would be needed to end the lockdowns safely and reopen the economy. When Trump is called out for this, he lies about it. He literally doesn’t want more testing. But why? [..]

Because Trump isn’t capable of seeing widespread testing — and more accurate information about the spread of the virus — as being in his self-interest. He sees it this way: The more tests that are done, the more confirmed cases are counted, and his impulse is to conceal that larger number if he possibly can. So he’s trying to keep the official case count as low as possible through the only method he understands: Lying and cheating. In this case, by preventing testing such that no accurate count is possible.

Dahlia Lithwick: America’s Heroism Trap

Yes, we are grateful for every person working on every front line. But the language of martyrdom distracts from what we could do about it all.

Doctors and nurses and orderlies, truck drivers and grocery workers and transportation workers, nursing home aides and sanitation workers and EMTs—they are all, along with so many others, heroes. Stipulated. There is no amount of honking, singing, or clapping that can adequately express our gratitude for these people, across so many professions, who suit up every day, imperiling their own lives and the lives and health of their loved ones, to make sure that the needs of the rest of us can be met. That’s why it feels good to honor and celebrate and fete and lionize these extraordinary people, who are answering the call of honor and duty every single day as we attempt to flatten the curve. [..]

We keep struggling with the language of privilege and good fortune. When asked how we are, we intone solemnly that we are lucky not to have to risk our lives in this crisis. Maybe instead of thanking and revering and worshipping our first responders we could instead simply ask them what they need and then find a way to give it to them. Even heroes need armor and a spear. Yes, these essential first responders are our heroes. But if the price of their heroism is silencing, retribution, death threats, and delegitimization, we should perhaps find another name for them. Might I suggest that we start by remembering they are humans, too?

 
Dana Milbank: Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination

Whether you’re going to heaven or hell, the old joke goes, you’ll have to change planes in Atlanta.

But Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is proposing to offer a new nonstop service to the Great Beyond: He has a bold plan to turn his state into the place to die.

Kemp, a Republican and an ally of President Trump, just called for the reopening within days of his state’s gyms, fitness centers, bowling alleys, body-art studios, barbers, nail salons, cosmetologists, aestheticians, beauty schools, massage therapists, theaters, private social clubs and dine-in restaurants.

He’s doing this even though the state ranks near last in testing, even though it’s not clear that covid-19 cases are declining there, and even knowing “we’re probably going to have to see our cases continue to go up,” as Kemp himself said.

Public health experts fear coronavirus will burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman. But Kemp is making a big gamble that his constituents wouldn’t want to swab places with anyone, and that tourists will be dying to get to Georgia in any class of travel — economy, economy plus or intensive care — as the Peachtree State remakes itself as the Petri State.

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: The Right Sends In the Quacks

Covid-19 highlights the conservative reliance on fake experts.

Over the past few days there have been noisy, threatening demonstrations at various statehouses demanding an end to Covid-19 lockdowns.

The demonstrations haven’t been very big, with at most a few thousand people, and involve a strong element of astroturfing — that is, while they supposedly represent a surge of grass-roots anger, some of them have been organized by institutions with links to Republican politicians, including the family of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education.

And polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans — including half of Republicans — are more worried that restrictions will be lifted too soon than that they will be kept in place too long.

But the demonstrators have received huge favorable coverage from right-wing media; Donald Trump called them “very responsible people”; and they were praised by White House economic adviser Stephen Moore, who compared them to Rosa Parks.

That last bit caught my eye, and not just because some of the demonstrators were waving Confederate flags. The grotesqueness of the comparison aside, why are we still hearing from Stephen Moore?

Catherine Rampell: Trump has almost nothing to lose. That’s why he wants to reopen the economy.

Public health experts worry that “reopening” the country too soon will be bad for public health. Economists worry it will be bad for the economy. The general public worries it will bad for, well, everyone.

So why is President Trump agitating to do so anyway, even encouraging insurrection against his own administration’s stay-at-home guidance?

Because it’s the only Hail Mary chance he has at reelection. And, sure, it probably won’t pay off. But just as he’s done his entire life, Trump has no problem gambling with other people’s money and well-being — even if the stakes could be fatal.

Pre-pandemic, Trump’s case for reelection could be summed up as: “But the economy.” Ignore the racism, misogyny, abuses of power, environmental destruction, kids in cages, the siphoning of taxpayer funds into Trump-owned golf cart rentals. The economy has been good! And, rightly or wrongly, voters credit him. So long as stocks are high and unemployment is low, Americans might be willing keep him in charge.

Now, of course, that political strategy has collapsed.

Michelle Goldberg: A Biden Presidency Could Be Better Than Progressives Think

Campaign promises matter, and his platform shows a distinct leftward drift.

Lawrence Mishel, a well-known labor economist, has been a critic of centrist Democrats for decades. “My adult lifetime has covered the Carter, Clinton and Obama years, and labor policy has never been a priority,” Mishel, the former president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, told me. In the 2016 primary, he voted for Bernie Sanders. This year he supported Elizabeth Warren. (So did I.)

But when Mishel saw Joe Biden’s labor policy, he was thrilled. “I think that if you had asked me in 2016 whether we would ever see an agenda like this, this is beyond my hopes,” he said.

Biden’s proposals go far beyond his call for a $15 federal minimum wage — a demand some saw as radical when Sanders pushed it four years ago. While it’s illegal for companies to fire employees for trying to organize a union, the penalties are toothless. Biden proposes to make those penalties bite and to hold executives personally liable. He would follow California in cracking down on companies like Uber that misclassify full-time workers as independent contractors who aren’t entitled to benefits. He’d extend federal labor protections to farmworkers and domestic workers.

Mishel said that no Democratic nominee in his lifetime has presented “as robust and fleshed out a policy suite on labor standards and unions.”

The anticlimactic end of the Democratic primary has left many progressives depressed, if not despairing. Instead of a fresh face or a revolutionary, the party has chosen a man who seems to embody the status quo, at least as it existed before Donald Trump. Yet should Biden become president, progressives have the opportunity to make generational gains.

Eugene Robinson: Reporters shouldn’t play Trump’s self-serving game

In theory, regular updates from the commander in chief at a time of grave crisis could help forge national unity and resolve. In practice, Donald Trump is president.

Trump’s daily “briefings” on the covid-19 pandemic offer an unprecedented challenge to both the media and the general public. If journalists take seriously our responsibility to report truth rather than falsehoods, we need to devise some sort of filter — a mental analog to the face masks that so many Americans now wear to keep from contaminating others. [..]

Broadcast media should consider either taping the briefings and airing only newsworthy excerpts, or providing some means of fact-checking Trump’s statements in real time. Split the screen, if necessary. Cut away altogether when things go completely off the rails.

Should the White House correspondents walk out en masse? No, because covering the president is their job. Making a pact to follow up on questions Trump refuses to answer truthfully won’t work: Trump can back up a lie with another lie, or just walk away.

But the correspondents do have another option: When Trump finishes a fact-free opening harangue, they should direct their questions to Fauci and the other experts — not to the president. Reporters are there to seek reliable information on behalf of the public, not to play Trump’s self-serving game.

Karen Tumulty: The tea party is back — and endangering lives

The tea party is back. I was wondering where they had gone.

You remember them, right? When Barack Obama was in office, these self-styled defenders of limited government and individual liberty took to the streets to protest federal debt, corporate bailouts, government-sponsored health care and a president who they said governed like the king our forefathers rebelled against.

We haven’t heard from them much in the past 3½ years. Not that they shouldn’t have found plenty of fodder for outrage: record deficits and debt; an autocrat in the White House who regularly claims extra-constitutional authority; economic policies that tilt heavily in favor of the wealthy and big business.

Tea party activists have looked the other way on all of these things throughout the presidency of Donald Trump. But now they are appearing again in state capitals across the country, screaming and waving their “Don’t Tread on Me” banners to vent at the lifesaving measures that governors have taken in the face of an epidemic that has already caused upward of 40,000 deaths in the United States.

There is a legitimate — and reasonable — debate to be had about how much economic pain the country should be willing to bear to bring the epidemic under control.

But that is not what we are hearing in their nihilistic fury. Some of them carry Confederate flags and assault weapons as they protest. Theirs is a doctrine fueled not by high-minded principles, but by conspiracy theories and populist resentment.