Gail Collins and Bret Stephens | Trump Missed the Part About No Do-Overs – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/opinion/trump-biden-columbus-jefferson.html

By Gail Collins and Bret Stephens

Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are Opinion columnists. They converse every week.

“Bret Stephens: Gail, I know we don’t typically talk about office politics, but sometimes it’s hard to avoid — as when our friend and colleague Nick Kristof leaves us to run for governor of his home state of Oregon. Our readers ought to know what an incredible guy he is behind the scenes.

Gail Collins: Bret, I am extremely proud to say that when I was the editor of this section, I lured Nick over from the news side to be a columnist.

One of his early projects was to write about the vile goings-on in a remote African country. I can’t remember all the details. But it involved a short plane ride that cost about $10,000 because he was barred from entry and had to be flown in by a brave pilot who claimed to be transporting a barrel of wheat.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT |NYT Comment:

Thank you Gail and Bret, for another good conversation.

I don’t know much about Jefferson yet, but as I read the gripping history, “Washington,” by Ron Chernow, I’m amazed at what a great man Washington was. I’m a historian of Vietnam and China, so the stories in “Washington” are mostly new to me. I knew about the miracle of escaping the British when they took NY City from the history “1776” by David McCullough, another magnificent read. I describe parts of the Battle of Yorktown, as the Battle of the Chesapeake, in my novel. Spoiler alert, we didn’t defeat the British at Yorktown, the French did.

This idea that all the founders of the 18th century have to pass the politically correct tests of the twenty first century is ridiculous.

Michelle Goldberg | Pramila Jayapal Won’t Let the Biden Presidency Fail – The New York Times

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

“IRECENTLY confided to Pramila Jayapal, the leader of the House Progressive Caucus, that I was literally losing sleep over the fate of the giant social spending bill she’s negotiating. It’s been impressive to see the left exert control over Congress, refusing to move on legislation cherished by moderates until there’s a deal on a bill containing progressive priorities. At the same time, it’s been terrifying to imagine what it will mean for the Biden presidency — and the future of the country — if an agreement isn’t reached soon.

Was she sure, I wanted to know, that progressive resolve wouldn’t blow up in all our faces?

She insisted she wasn’t worried. “We’re going to get both bills done,” she said.”

I think Pramila Jayapal and her caucus are endangering the Biden legacy, and that they are a threat to everything we need regarding the climate crisis.

Here is a comment, I completely second.

Scott Rose

ManhattanOct. 16

Against the threat of Trump and Trumpism, we need a greater sense of Realpolitik that Jayapal is capable of. The bi-partisan infrastructure bill should have been passed into law at the beginning of September. It would have fulfilled Biden’s promise of being able to accomplish things with Republicans in Congress. Biden won with the support of many lifelong Republicans but Jayapal kneecapped him there. Meanwhile, when is the last time Jayapal asked herself how she is going to help Democratic candidates for Senate from purple states win their midterm races? She doesn’t think in those terms. She only talks to people in her ultra-progressive bubble.

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Charles M. Blow | The Democrats Are in Danger of a Midterm Rout – The New York Times

By Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist

“The Democrats are staring down real danger.

They just aren’t getting enough done. They aren’t moving quickly enough on President Biden’s major campaign promises.

The warning signs are all around.

Democrats are still wrangling over their infrastructure and social spending bills. And the longer the fight drags on, the uglier it looks. Washington watchers are right — to a degree — to say that this is simply the way that large legislation is worked through. It’s a slog.

In the end, I believe that the Democrats will have no choice but to pass something, no matter the size, because the consequence of failure is suicide. Democrats must go into the midterms with something that they can call a win, with something that at least inches closer to the transformations Biden has promised.

But the budget isn’t the only issue.

There is still a crisis at the border.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT comment:

Hi Charles, you made some good points, but you basically lost me. I don’t think Manchin and Sinema are the biggest problem, even if they are too far right for me. I see the left wing of the party as the ones responsible for endangering Biden’s presidency and legacy. Are you in that group, who who wouldn’t let the the wonderful, bipartisan infrastructure bill sail through congress, after supported by both parties in the Senate. It isn’t enough to be right, you have to also have the votes in the right places.

I agree with Bret Stephens, who wrote today: “More to the point, I’m a fan of anything that gives Biden a bipartisan legislative win that will be popular with middle-of-the-road voters and arrest the decline in his poll numbers. On that front, I was struck by a fascinating column by our colleague Ezra Klein, based on his interviews with the superstar data analyst David Shor. The long-and-short of it, as Ezra paraphrases Shor, is that “Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe.” Shor thinks the Senate will soon slip out of Democratic hands, largely because the party has lost touch with both its white and nonwhite working-class voters. Many Democratic strategists think the way to shore up the Democratic majority is by offering statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., but I think that would just further alienate the very voters Dems need to win back.”

Climate change is an existential threat. We can’t afford to blow our leadership in congress.

David blogs at InconvenientNews.net

Opinion | ‘I Fear That We Are Witnessing the End of American Democracy’ – by Thomas Edsall – The New York Times

I would love to be more relevant. I found this piece by Tom Edsall so edifying, that I thought about posting it, and calling my blog, “Please, make me smarter!” This is the first clear explanation I’ve read for the extraordinary loyalty of most Trump supporters.

“. . .  According to Joshua Greene, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them,” Trump is expert at sending “signals that are music to the ears of his base,” signals that ineradicably affirm his membership in the populist right wing of the Republican Party.

Greene argued in an email that when

Trump says that a judge of Mexican ancestry can’t do his job, or attacks women for their physical appearance, or makes fun of a disabled reporter, or says that there are good people on both sides of a violent neo-Nazi rally, or that Haiti is a “shithole.” or that the “Second Amendment People” can maybe do something about Hillary Clinton, Trump is very deliberately and publicly excommunicating himself from the company of liberals, even moderate ones.

In Greene’s view, Trump offers a case study in the deployment of “costly signals.”

How does it work? Greene writes:

Making oneself irredeemably unacceptable to the other tribe is equivalent to permanently binding oneself to one’s own. These comments are like gang tattoos. And in Trump’s case, it’s tattoos all over his neck and face.

At the same time, Trump’s “costly signals” make his reliability as a protector of white privilege clear.

John Tooby, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Santa Barbara, described the signaling phenomenon in a 2017 Edge talk as an outgrowth of what he calls a “coalitional instinct.”

“To earn membership in a group,” Tooby says, “you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups.”

This, Tooby notes, encourages extremism: “Practical and functional truths are generally useless as differential signals, because any honest person might say them regardless of coalitional loyalty.” Far more effective are “unusual, exaggerated beliefs,” including “alarmism, conspiracies or hyperbolic comparisons.”

The success of Trump’s strategy will have long term consequences for the Republican Party, in Greene’s view:

Trump won over the base by publicly sacrificing his broader respectability. Back in 2016, the other Republican primary candidates looked ahead at the general election and thought this was a losing strategy. But Trump pulled it off, perhaps because he didn’t really care about winning. But now he owns the party. No Republican can get elected without the Republican base, and the Republican base trusts Trump and only Trump, thanks to his costly signals.”

Opinion | Elizabeth Warren: What Congress Must Do About Coronavirus – The New York Times

By Elizabeth Warren

Ms. Warren is a Democratic senator from Massachusetts and a former presidential candidate.

• April 8, 2020
• • 1135

Senator Elizabeth Warren.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York Times

Listen to This Opinion Essay

Audio Recording by Audm,  To hear more audio stories from publishers, like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

“Congress has passed three coronavirus packages aimed at providing immediate relief to families, workers, hospitals and small businesses, but with more than 12,000 dead and 10 million out of work, the scale of this tragedy demands we do much more — much faster.

Communities across the country are entering a critical stage. Illnesses are mounting and our health system is stretched to the brink. Early data shows people of color are infected and dying at disproportionately high rates. Unemployment is approaching Depression-era levels. No clear end is in sight for social distancing. The next round of policymaking must squarely address these hard realities — not with a few new nibbles, but with the kind of broad, direct action needed to save lives and save our economy.

Containing the health crisis must be our first priority. I have outlined immediate steps to accomplish a federal surge in testing capacity. In addition to using the powers under the recently invoked Defense Production Act, we must act now to have the government manufacture or contract for the manufacture of critical supplies when markets fail to do so — to produce tests, personal protective equipment, drugs in shortage and any future vaccines and treatments that our scientists develop — not in the thousands, but in the tens of millions. This will ensure swift production and build a stopgap against shortfalls moving forward. We must also use public programs to provide health care free for all who don’t otherwise have it.

As workers lose their jobs, small businesses close and household incomes plummet, we must extend economic relief beyond cash payments to families and individuals. This includes suspending consumer debt collection, enacting a universal national moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, stopping water and utility shut-offs, providing as much broad student loan debt cancellation as possible and finding money to keep child care providers afloat. With older Americans and those with underlying health conditions among the most vulnerable, we must also increase monthly Social Security and disability benefits.”

Editorial | Charity Won’t Solve Student Debt – The New York Times

“Around the turn of the last century, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie paid to build 1,689 libraries across the United States. Many are still in use, celebrated as monumental works of philanthropy.

They should be seen as monuments to the failure of public policy. The United States could have built a lot more libraries by taxing the incomes of Carnegie and his fellow Gilded Age plutocrats, but, at the turn of the last century, there was no federal income tax.

Now history is repeating itself. A new generation of plutocrats has amassed great fortunes, in part because the federal government has minimized the burden of taxation. Americans once again are reduced to applauding acts of philanthropy necessitated by failures of policy.

Robert Smith, a wealthy financier, announced on Sunday during graduation ceremonies at Morehouse College that he would repay the student loans taken by the 396 men in this year’s graduating class. The promise, which may cost Mr. Smith up to $40 million, was an act of generosity gratefully received by the new graduates of the historically black, all-male Atlanta college.”

Opinion | A Dummy’s Guide to Democratic Policy Proposals – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist

March 27, 2019, 290
Cory Booker’s proposal to reduce wealth gaps is one of many ideas being put forward by Democrats.
Credit
John Locher/Associated Press

“We in the news media often whack politicians for not being serious about policy. And then we ignore their policy proposals.

So here, in the spirit of orgiastic wonkishness, is my Dummy’s Guide to Democratic Policy Proposals. I write it because something fascinating is underway: After decades of incrementalism, Democrats are now proposing a litany of exciting big ideas.

Here’s my take:

Child allowances are among the best ideas to boost America’s future. They are used very successfully abroad to reduce child poverty. One proposal would give families with children $250 to $300 per month, in the form of a refundable tax credit. Luke Shaefer of the University of Michigan estimates that this would reduce the number of children living in poverty by more than one-third.

This version is called the American Family Act, sponsored by Michael Bennet and Sherrod Brown in the Senate and Rosa DeLauro and Susan DelBene in the House. It is broadly backed by Democrats in the House and the Senate.”

Opinion | Time for Republicans to Grow a Spine – The New York Times

“Let’s start easy, with a handful of “Non-Lickspittle” moves, some of which have already been called for by Senate Democrats:

1. Fully implement the broad Russia sanctions bill passed last year, with a special focus on Mr. Putin and the oligarchs in his inner circle. Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee put some fresh ones on the table months ago. Now seems like a good time to revisit.

2. Hold hearings and compel testimony from the national security team that accompanied Mr. Trump to Helsinki, Finland. Demand details of any pledges made in the Trump-Putin private session.

3. Stop parroting the president’s line that the federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies are politically motivated, inept and generally corrupt. At the very least, House Speaker Paul Ryan should publicly call out his rowdier troops for pushing to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

4. Call on Mr. Trump to demand the extradition of the Russians whom the Justice Department gained indictments for last week.

5. Take additional steps to protect the integrity of the coming elections from further Russian meddling. Significantly more money is needed, along with incentives for state and local election agencies to identify weak spots, erect firewalls and pursue other precautions. From what we already know about Russia’s invading voter databases, it is eager to make mischief.”

Opinion | We Are All Supreme Court Skeptics Now – by Ross Douthat – NYT

“Democracy is in peril. The majority no longer rules; a determined minority has the whip hand. The least accountable branch of government, the Supreme Court, has fallen into the hands of an aggressively counter-majoritarian faction, which intends to traduce self-government for ideological ends. The time has come to consider drastic countermeasures against our robed masters and their nascent tyranny.

These arguments are on the lips of many liberals lately. With the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, general Trump-era anxieties have found a focal point in the fear of right-wing judicial activism, of a high court that pushes policy rightward and allows Republicans to lock in anti-democratic advantages.

But any liberal with an ounce of self-awareness should recognize the resemblance between their sudden fear of juristocracy and the longstanding conservative critique of exactly the same thing. Indeed it’s quite striking, and ironically amusing, to have Trump-era liberals striking the same anti-Supreme Court notes as the talk-show populists and religious-conservative intellectuals of my own not-so-distant youth.

Partisanship being what it is, I don’t really expect either side to learn anything from these echoes and convergences. But for liberals newly awakened to the dangers of judicial power, let me offer two suggestions for thinking seriously about democratic accountability in Congress and the courts.

First, it would be wise for liberals to recognize that neither a judiciary out of step with democratic majorities nor an electoral advantage for one political apparatus are new things in American history — because when the Democratic Party dominated American politics both were important aspects of liberalism’s rule.

The politics of the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s would have still been generally liberal without judicial activism; Democrats would have still held congressional majorities, mostly, without the baked-in advantages that gave them more House seats than their share of the popular vote.

But the countermajoritarian sweep of liberal jurisprudence in that era was still dramatic, extending beyond race and segregation to encompass the entirety of the culture war, where majorities were consistently overriden, legislative debates consistently short-circuited, and longstanding features of American life — ecumenical school prayer, Christian-influenced morals legislation — overruled or uprooted by fiat.”

David Lindsay:  Well done Ross Douthat, for awhile you had me confused. This is an attractive set of arguments. Here are the two top comments, which I endorsed, which help put the analysis above into some perspective.

Martin

New YorkJuly 14

May I mention, as an example, that Roe v Wade, the decision most often cited by Republicans as demonstrating judicial liberal overreach, was a decision in which 5 Republican judges joined 2 Democrats in the majority, with the 2 dissenters came 1 from each party? It seemed to many of us that the positions of the post war era that we now call “liberal” became dominant not by gerrymandering, voter suppression & partisan propaganda, but by reasoned argument. And it has always struck me that the “conservative” reaction against those positions over the last 40 years has used identity politics, partisan media, and political power not to engage a debate on the issues, but to obtain a pre-determined result by exercising economic & political power.

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Barking Doggerel commented July 14

Barking Doggerel

AmericaJuly 14

Although not alone in doing so, Douthat takes false equivalence to historic highs.

Equating the surges of liberalism and conservatism over time is either cluelessness or disingenuousness on steroids.

Liberals actual press to advance the values and promises of democracy.

Equality under the law for women, people of color and LGBTQ citizens is not “activism.” it is justice – albeit delayed and incomplete.

Fighting for voting rights is not a partisan game. It is fighting for the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Attempting to protect the rights to reproductive health autonomy against an onslaught of religious objections is not a “liberal” position. It is an effort to honor the founding of our pluralistic republic by keeping the hands of theology off the bodies of women.

It is dangerous to see this nomination or the broader issues as just equally valid points of view.

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From Hollywood to Public Office: Cynthia Nixon Tests a Role Played by Men – The New York Times

By Shane Goldmacher June 19, 2018

“Arnold Schwarzenegger. Al Franken. Ronald Reagan. Sonny Bono. Fred Thompson. Jesse Ventura. Donald J. Trump.All were celebrities of a sort. All won high office. All were men.As Cynthia Nixon, the actress made famous from her turn on “Sex and the City,” runs for governor of New York, she is not just bidding to become the first woman and first openly gay governor in the state’s history. She would be one of the first female celebrities elected to a prominent political office anywhere in the United States.Every celebrity seeking office, especially those with show-business backgrounds, has confronted the question of qualifications.

But will a famous woman be treated differently from all the famous men who have come before her?The crosscurrents of Ms. Nixon’s challenge to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — celebrity and dynasty (Mr. Cuomo’s father also served as governor); incumbency and insurgency; gender and ideology — have made their Democratic primary among the most closely watched in the nation.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | Pending Approval

Part Two. There is useful information at cynthiafornewyork.com. “New York has become the single most unequal state in the country. The top 1 percent of New Yorkers earn 45 times more than the bottom 99 percent. Black and Latino families in New York still earn much less than white families. Women still earn much less than men. It was a choice to slash taxes for the super-rich and impose austerity on everybody else. It was a choice to allow the schools attended by children of color to be underfunded and over-policed. It was a choice to sell our government off to corporate interests and wealthy donors, while the rest of us suffer. These are choices usually made by Republicans. But for the past eight years, they’re all choices that have been made by our governor, Andrew Cuomo. . . . New York’s eight years under the Cuomo administration have been an exercise in living with disappointment, dysfunction, and dishonesty. Our state could be a place where every single New Yorker has what we need to thrive, if only we could stop our governor from selling New York off to the highest bidder.” Nixon has been actively fighting for better public school, improving the NYC subway, and defending the rights of minorities and groups that suffer discrimination. She wants cleaner, more responsive government, and supports fighting climate change.