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 Waldman: The nation’s governors are succeeding where Trump fails

Right now the country faces a public health crisis, which is producing an economic crisis. While in Washington they’re concentrating mostly on the latter, which they have the power to address with the enormous tools at their disposal (like throwing a trillion or two dollars at the coming recession), it’s at the state level where many of the most critical decisions about public health are being made.

Which has brought new attention to the nation’s governors, particularly those who seem to be rising to the occasion and offering the kind of leadership that isn’t coming from the White House.

You could see it in a spat that erupted when President Trump went after Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. She said something critical of the president’s response to the coronavirus, leading him (of course) to insult her as a “failed” governor. She responded by listing some of the many actions she has taken to address the crisis. [..]

So while Trump’s response to the crisis has been somewhere between incompetent and catastrophic, governors have for the most part been acting aggressively and winning praise for it. That’s an important political point: While for Trump every appalling press conference, idiotic statement, or self-congratulatory interview produces a flood of criticism from congressional Democrats and commentators like yours truly, at the state level there has been a good degree of bipartisan cooperation and comity.

Michelle Cottle: Well Played, Bernie Sanders

But for the sake of the Democratic Party and the nation, it’s time to step aside and join forces with Joe Biden.

It is time to bid a gentle and grateful farewell to Bernie Sanders’s quest for the presidency.

On Tuesday, even as the coronavirus pandemic roiled the primaries and kept some voters away from the polls, Joe Biden swept to victory in three states — Illinois, Arizona and Florida. The results were not close. In Florida, with 219 delegates on the line, Mr. Biden bested Mr. Sanders by some 40 points, winning every county in the state. In Illinois, with its 155 delegates, his margin of victory topped 20 points.

The harder you look at the math and at the voting coalition that Mr. Biden has put together, the harder it is to see a way for Mr. Sanders to make a comeback. [..]

America is in crisis, with little sense of where this pandemic is headed. Mr. Sanders has an opportunity to show leadership by acknowledging his grim electoral position, putting aside his presidential ambitions and working to help heal the rifts in the Democratic Party.

Mr. Biden, in turn, has a responsibility to respect the power of Mr. Sanders’s movement — its ideas, its energy, its people. Progressives, especially younger voters, have grave doubts about whether Mr. Biden understands, much less can be trusted to address, their concerns and everyday struggles. He must work overtime to win their confidence.

Michael Tomasky: Sanders Is Betting It All on New York. Big Mistake.

Despite its liberal reputation, the state is where insurgent candidacies have come to die.

After a second consecutive week of convincing defeats, Bernie Sanders is facing intense pressure to drop out of the Democratic presidential race. At noon Wednesday, his campaign suspended its Facebook advertising.

The candidate has made no announcement yet, but according to a Politico article Tuesday, his aides were girding for the campaign to continue at least through April 28 — the so-called Acela Primary, featuring multiple Eastern Seaboard states, most notably New York and its 274 delegates. “Sanders’ aides have long thought that he would have a good shot in the Empire State,” read one sentence in particular that caught my eye.

The idea that New York might back Mr. Sanders sounds plausible on its face. New York has a reputation for being liberal, even ultraliberal; Williamsburg and Bushwick, and the young left-leaning voters therein, get a lot more media attention than Utica and Jamestown.

Alas, history does not support the contention. In fact, history smothers it. I know. I covered it.

Adam Gafney: Trump sees the coronavirus as a threat to his self-interest – not to people

Trump has made it clear he sees this pandemic chiefly as a threat to the market and wealthy people’s interests (and relatedly, his political future)

A fictional film about a US president mismanaging the response to a dangerous pandemic would never depict its lead character anywhere near as selfish and bumbling as Donald Trump in the age of Covid-19. He’d be too cartoonish and inept to be believable.

And yet, here we are. At a press conference on Sunday – the same day that state governors declared closures of bars and restaurants and when the Covid-19 death count shot up in Italy – the American president spent more time gushing over the Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut, heaping praise on big corporate retailers for keeping Americans well-supplied, and praising Friday’s rise in the stock market (“almost 2,000 points!”) than, say, addressing the health concerns of the public.

Trump’s response goes beyond incompetence – it’s a political abomination. However uncoordinated his administration’s moves have been, Trump has made it clear he sees this pandemic chiefly as a threat to the market and wealthy people’s personal interests (and relatedly, his own political future) – not to the people whose lives it will threaten or claim.

Amanda Marcotte: Bernie needs to step back and let other progressive leaders flourish — especially women

Sanders loses again, but a victory for pro-choice progressive Marie Newman in Illinois shows the path forward

Tuesday night was another round of major losses in the Democratic presidential primary for Sen. Bernie Sanders. Ohio may have delayed its primary, but in the states that still had voting — Florida, Illinois and Arizona — Sanders fell 8-12 percentage points below what he got in the 2016 primary race, despite having four years steadily building his national presence. Former Vice President Joe Biden is now so far ahead in the delegate count so far that for all intents and purposes, it’s impossible for Sanders to catch up.

The Sanders ceiling is real. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for the progressive movement going forward. On the contrary, on the same Tuesday night that likely ended the 2020 Sanders campaign there was a major progressive victory in the Chicago suburbs, as Marie Newman finally ousted Rep. Dan Lipinski, a conservative Democrat who inherited the seat from his father, Bill Lipinski, and has been in the family since 1982. [..]

In the face of his evident primary defeat, therefore, the best thing Sanders can do to prove that this is about “us” and not “me” is to step back as the leader and let others come forward, younger figures who may be better positioned than Sanders to expand the progressive base past that ceiling Sanders keeps hitting. Bernie can do one last, big thing for the progressive movement to which he’s dedicated his life in politics: Let others take over, especially younger women, as we move into the third decade of the 21st century.

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: Step Aside for Powell and Pelosi

Republicans, it turns out, can’t do economic policy.

America’s catastrophically inadequate response to the coronavirus can be attributed largely to bad short-term decisions by one man. And I do mean short-term: At every stage, Donald Trump minimized the threat and blocked helpful action because he wanted to look good for the next news cycle or two, ignoring and intimidating anyone who tried to give him good advice.

But here’s the thing: Even if he weren’t so irresponsibly self-centered, he has denuded the government of people who could be giving good advice in the first place. [..]

What’s now becoming clear is that when it comes to dealing with the economic fallout from Covid-19, the situation may be even worse. There are still some competent professionals holding senior positions at federal health agencies, who could give Trump good advice if he were willing to listen. But serious economic thinking has effectively been banned from this administration, if not the whole Republican Party. As far as I can tell, the Trump team is utterly incapable of formulating a coherent response to the gathering economic crisis.

Dana Milbank: Trump’s late conversion to reality leaves out his supporters

Behold, the perils of the Pinocchio presidency.

For three years, President Trump told his supporters that the federal government perpetrates hoaxes and frauds, that the media produces fake news and that nothing is on the level except for his tweets. He did the same with the novel coronavirus, portraying it as an ordinary flu that would “disappear” and accusing Democrats of a hoax and the media of exaggerating.

Belatedly, Trump has begun to speak the truth about the virus, which by some estimates could kill more than 2 million Americans without attempts to control it. After an abrupt change of tone Monday afternoon, Trump continued to say the right things, using the same word on Tuesday that former vice president Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron have used: war. [..]

But Trump’s late conversion to reality has left behind one group of Americans that will be difficult to convince: his own supporters. Their alternative-facts diet has left them intolerant of anything the government and the media feed them.

An alarming new poll from NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist shows that the number of Republicans who believe the virus is a real threat has actually fallen over the past month, from 72 percent in February to just 40 percent now. A majority of Republicans now say the threat has been blown out of proportion — more than double the 23 percent who said so last month.

Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden: Here’s how to guarantee coronavirus won’t disrupt our elections

The coronavirus has brought unprecedented disruptions to the daily lives of Americans. Something as commonplace as walking into the grocery store is a troubling reminder that the world is facing a challenge that most of us have never seen before.

Our top priority right now is to make sure that people are safe in the face of this global pandemic. Federal, state and local health-care providers and first responders are working overtime to protect people, and we must give them the resources they need to do their jobs. The federal government must also fund testing, vaccine development and economic assistance for those whose lives have been turned upside down.

In the midst of this crisis, we must also remember to protect the foundation of our democracy by ensuring that every eligible American can safely cast a ballot in the upcoming elections. The coronavirus should not stop our citizens from casting their ballots. [..]

Without federal action, Americans might have to choose between casting a ballot and protecting their health. That’s wrong, and we must take swift action to address the problem.

The best way to ensure that this virus doesn’t keep people from the ballot box is to bring the ballot box to them. We must allow every American the ability to vote by mail. And we must expand early voting so that voters who are not able to vote by mail are not exposed to the elevated infection risks of long lines and crowded polling locations.

Michelle Goldberg: Grieving for My Sick City

For those who revel in urban life, it’s hard to believe it can just stop.

There is a lot to mourn right now. Many thousands of people all over the world are mourning dead loved ones. People are mourning lost jobs, lost savings, lost security. Senior citizens in locked-down nursing homes are mourning the loss of visitors. I’m lucky; I’m just mourning the city.

To live in a city like New York, where I’ve spent most of my adult life, is to trade private space for public space. It’s to depend on interdependence. I don’t have a dining room, but I’ve been able to eat in thousands of restaurants. I have no storage space, but everything I needed was at the bodega. I don’t have a home office, but I could work at coffee shops.

Now those supports are gone. The coronavirus disaster is going to devastate communities all over the country, even if many in red America don’t realize it yet. But it poses particular challenges for urbanites, and not just because the disease spreads more easily where people are packed close together.

Amanda Marcotte: Right-wing pundits’ shameless pivot: It was a “hoax,” but now it’s an “emergency”

After weeks of minimizing coronavirus, now conservatives are trying to blame Democrats for the pandemic

For weeks, Donald Trump clearly believed he could lie the coronavirus away. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times carefully chronicled, starting on Jan. 22, Trump began a campaign of falsehoods geared towards tricking Americans — and especially the stock market — into thinking everything was going to be fine, this epidemic was “very well under control,” that “like a miracle” the virus “will disappear” and that anyone who suggested otherwise was participating in a “hoax.” Fox News and other right-wing media, in the endless infinity symbol of conservative lies, both led and followed Trump on this, blanketing red-state America with a steady drumbeat of assertions that the “liberal media” was exaggerating the crisis to hurt Trump.

Furthermore, all this happened in the face of substantial evidence that Republican voters and Fox News viewers, who tend to be older and live in rural areas with poorer access to medical care, are more likely to die from coronavirus.

Life, as the Twitter dorks say, comes at you fast. Coronavirus has been reported in 49 states now, and cities are going on lockdown to prevent the spread. After multiple failed stunts geared toward trying to trick investors, Trump finally held a serious press conference on the crisis Monday. All those right-wing pundits on Fox News and talk radio, being utterly shameless, have switched seamlessly from denying that we have a coronavirus problem to claiming that Trump has been showing mighty leadership — and oh yeah, trying to blame Democrats for the problem.