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.
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Robert Reich: Coronavirus exposes the height of corporate welfare
Here’s the bottom line: no mega-corporation deserves a cent of bailout money
With the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc on the global economy, here’s how massive corporations are shafting the rest of us in order to secure billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded bailouts.
Charles M. Blow: Covid-19, Confusion and Uncertainty
It will be a difficult road back to any kind of normal living.
Do you feel lost and anxious about the coronavirus crisis and the murky future that rises in its wake? You are not alone.
At the moment, the most urgent and important thing you can do is stay home (if you have the privilege to do so), wash your hands, become teachers for your children and wait it out.
But there is a reckoning coming. We can all feel it.
The number of dead and infected in this country rises every day. A staggering 46,000-plus people have already died, in about two months no less. We have not even tackled the first wave of this virus and we are already being warned that the second wave could be even worse.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, told The Washington Post this week, “There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.”
That would mean a second, worse wave would overlap the election. How do we conduct a legitimate election or a reliable census in the middle of a pandemic?
So far, there is no approved medical treatment for the virus and no vaccine. Social distancing is the only tool we have, and yet we know that we can’t maintain it indefinitely.
Jennifer Senior: If We’re Giving Trump a Show, We Should Give Biden One, Too
The president is hitting the virtual campaign trail every night.
Let’s drop all pretenses, shall we? The president has decided he’s had enough of running the country and is running full time for re-election instead.
One could argue that this has been Donald J. Trump’s approach from the start — the last three years of shriek-tweeting, Fox-bingeing, and stadium rallies have had little to do with governance — but it’s much more obvious now that we’re in the midst of a global emergency. The moment Trump declared that it was up to the states to decide when to reopen — and to scale up their own coronavirus testing, and to scale up their antibody testing, and to get their own personal protective equipment — he was implicitly saying, I’m out.
It’s important to make this distinction. Trump’s nightly news conferences, propaganda from the very beginning, are now aimed almost entirely at his base. They are campaign events. And if they are campaign events, the cable news outlets, which still carry the bulk of them live, ought to balance their programming. They ought to check in with the Joe Biden camp before, during and after each one.
Amanda Marcotte: At first, Tucker Carlson took the coronavirus seriously — but now he’s gone total bats**t
Ignoring the whole of human history, Carlson calls pandemic quarantines an “experiment” that’s “never been done”
During the months when Donald Trump thought he could somehow defeat the novel coronavirus by lying, minimizing it and calling concerns about the coming pandemic a “hoax,” most Fox News hosts were right there with him. The one major exception, however, was popular prime time host Tucker Carlson. While Sean Hannity kept calling the coronavirus crisis a “hoax” and Laura Ingraham described people concerned about it as “panic pushers,” Carlson actually criticized Trump and his Fox colleagues for “minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” arguing that the virus was “a major event” that “will affect your life.” The fact Trump made a reluctant pivot and began to admit that the coronavirus was a real threat — even though he’s still trying to cover up the spread of the disease — is likely due to Carlson’s pressure.
In fact, the difference between Carlson’s approach and that of his fellow Fox News hosts, especially Hannity, was so pronounced that it likely altered the course of the disease. A new study shows that communities that favored Hannity’s show over Carlson’s show had more cases of COVID-19 and more deaths. The reason is simple: Because Hannity downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus, his viewers were less likely to follow stay-at-home recommendations and therefore more likely spread the disease. [..]
But now even Carlson’s racism-inflected willingness to take the coronavirus seriously has abruptly ended. Starting at the beginning of April, even after his Fox News colleagues had begun to take the virus more seriously, Carlson switched gears and moved toward a denialist viewpoint. He started attacking public health officials for the stay-at-home orders and saying the economic results of the lockdown were worse than the disease.
Linda Greenhouse: A Precedent Overturned Reveals a Supreme Court in Crisis
Separate opinions in a case show nine justices pursuing agendas far removed from the dispute at hand.
The country wasn’t exactly holding its breath for the Supreme Court’s decision this week that the Constitution requires juror unanimity for a felony conviction in state court. The case promised little change. Unanimity has long been understood as constitutionally required in federal court as a matter of the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury.
The only outlier among the states was Oregon. Louisiana, where the case originated in an appeal brought by a man convicted of murder in 2016 by a 10-to-2 vote, changed its rule two years later to require unanimity going forward. Six Supreme Court justices agreed this week that contrary to the outcome of a 1972 case, there is not one rule for the federal courts and another for the states: Conviction only by a unanimous jury verdict is now the rule for both.
That sounds almost too straightforward to be very interesting. Even people with more than a passing interest in the Supreme Court may well have thought, “Well, then that’s that,” before moving on to other cases, other concerns.
That would have been a mistake. This decision, Ramos v. Louisiana, is in fact one of the most fascinating Supreme Court products I’ve seen in a long time, and one of the most revealing. Below the surface of its 6-to-3 outcome lies a maelstrom of clashing agendas having little to do with the question ostensibly at hand and a great deal to do with the court’s future. Peek under the hood and see a Supreme Court in crisis.