Pondering the Pundits

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium 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.
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Paul Krugman: Truth and Virtue in the Age of Trump

Remember when freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose? These days it’s just another word for giving lots of money to Donald Trump.

What with the midterm elections — and the baseless Republican cries of voting fraud — I don’t know how many people heard about Trump’s decision to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson, wife of casino owner and Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson. The medal is ormally an acknowledgment of extraordinary achievement or public service; on rare occasions this includes philanthropy. But does anyone think the Adelsons’ charitable activities were responsible for this honor?

Now, this may seem like a trivial story. But it’s a reminder that the Trumpian attitude toward truth — which is that it’s defined by what benefits Trump and his friends, not by verifiable facts — also applies to virtue. There is no heroism, there are no good works, except those that serve Trump.

About truth: Trump, of course, lies a lot — in the run-up to the midterms he was lying in public more than 100 times each week. But his assault on truth goes deeper than the frequency of his lies, because Trump and his allies don’t accept the very notion of objective facts. “Fake news” doesn’t mean actual false reporting; it means any report that hurts Trump, no matter how solidly verified. And conversely, any assertion that helps Trump, whether it’s about job creation or votes, is true precisely because it helps him.

Neal KatyaL: The rules are clear: Whitaker can’t supervise Mueller’s investigation

The installation of Matthew G. Whitaker as acting attorney general isn’t just unconstitutional — although it is unconstitutional. Even if Whitaker’s appointment ever survived a court challenge on constitutional grounds for most of his day-to-day duties at the Justice Department, the fact that he’ll now be performing the sensitive work of supervising Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation raises other deep problems. Putting Whitaker in charge of the inquiry is sharply at odds with the special counsel regulations governing Mueller’s work and with the Justice Department’s rules about who may oversee an investigation.

I had the privilege of drafting the special counsel rules 20 years ago, when I was at the Justice Department. Recall the setting: The independent counsel statute was expiring in June 1999, and there was a robust debate about what should take its place. After the multitude of investigations of the Clinton administration, many in Washington clamored for renewal of the supercharged independent prosecutor in the act. Others, seeing what they believed were abuses by then-independent counsel Ken Starr (and prior independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, who oversaw the earlier Iran-contra investigation of the Reagan administration more than a decade before Starr), believed that something more accountable and less independent had to be created instead.

Bryce Covert: Cities Should Stop Playing the Amazon HQ2 Bidding Game

It’s official: Amazon has anointed New York and Northern Virginia as locations for a major expansion, involving at least 25,000 employees and an investment of $5 billion.

The announcement is the culmination of an intense bidding war among 238 cities for Amazon’s promise of $50 billion in investment and 50,000 high-paying technology jobs. To land that deal, cities offered billions in tax breaks and incentives. According to the announcement, the company could score more than $2 billion in tax incentives from the two new sites.

In the end, only Amazon and other corporations won that war. By pitting cities against each other, Amazon created a frenzy of ever more lavish and outlandish offers. [..]

The problem is that once one city offers a company a lucrative deal, other employers want to get in on the bonanza. JP Morgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, said he would watch to see which city won the beauty contest and immediately call up those lawmakers and demand the same perks. Other companies are lining up to do the same.

 

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Progressives point the way to recapturing the rural vote

When student activist Chloe Maxmin graduated from Harvard University in 2015, many of her classmates went on to lucrative jobs in big coastal cities. But Maxmin, who devoted much of her time on campus to a fossil-fuel divestment campaign that she co-founded, chose a different path. The native of Nobleboro, Maine (population 1,643), returned to her home state to work as a grass-roots organizer.

This February, Maxmin, now 26, decided to run for a seat in Maine’s House of Representatives. In a district that had never elected a Democrat, she campaigned with a progressive message focused on improving education funding, health-care access and transportation options for seniors. She won endorsements from unions, social workers and even former president Barack Obama. Last Tuesday, she defeated her Republican opponent by five points.

Maxmin is one of many progressive candidates who prevailed in this month’s elections despite the long odds that Democrats traditionally face in their districts. Yet her victory stands out even more because of where she was able to win: in a district that contains the most rural county in America’s most rural state. And as Democrats reflect on the midterms and plan their next moves, it shows how the party can build on its momentum.