1. Eugene Robinson: Don’t let the absurd ploy to arm teachers distract you

The deliberately outrageous idea of arming classroom teachers is nothing more than a distraction, a ploy by the gun lobby to buy time for passions to cool.”

The National Rifle Association and its vassals in the Republican Party would like you to exhaust your outrage on a possibility that is, from the start, impossible. … ‘Up to States’ means abdicating the federal government’s responsibility and urging state legislatures to waste time and effort debating whether to mandate that instruments of death be introduced to classrooms.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-let-the-absurd-ploy-to-arm-teachers-distract-you/2018/02/26/4003d4fc-1b36-11e8-ae5a-16e60e4605f3_story.html

2. Paul Krugman: The Force of Decency Awakens

A funny thing is happening on the American scene: a powerful upwelling of decency. Suddenly, it seems as if the worst lack all conviction, while the best are filled with a passionate intensity. We don’t yet know whether this will translate into political change. But we may be in the midst of a transformative moment.

You can see the abrupt turn toward decency in the rise of the #MeToo movement; in a matter of months ground that had seemed immovable shifted, and powerful sexual predators started facing career-ending consequences.

You can see it in the reactions to the Parkland school massacre. For now, at least, the usual reaction to mass killings — a day or two of headlines, then a sort of collective shrug by the political class and a return to its normal obeisance to the gun lobby — isn’t playing out. Instead, the story is staying at the top of the news, and associating with the N.R.A. is starting to look like the political and business poison it should have been all along.

And I’d argue that you can see it at the ballot box, where hard-right politicians in usually reliable Republican districts keep being defeated thanks to surging activism by ordinary citizens.

This isn’t what anyone, certainly not the political commentariat, expected.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/opinion/the-force-of-decency-awakens.html

3. Michelle Goldberg: Either a Conspirator or a Sucker

Robert Mueller, the special counsel, first indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, the former chairman and deputy chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, last October on charges including money laundering and conspiracy against the United States. At the time, the White House and its apologists argued that these alleged crimes pre-dated the campaign, and were thus unrelated to any putative election-related conspiracies with Russia. Tweeted Trump, “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign.”

This wasn’t true then — multiple charges referred to crimes that were said to continue at least through 2016. But Mueller’s new indictments, released last week, render Trump’s defense even more ridiculous. They provide detailed evidence that Manafort and Gates’s alleged financial crimes continued while they were running Trump’s campaign. And despite the White House’s insistence otherwise, the felonies that Manafort is accused of, and the two that Gates pleaded guilty to on Friday, bear directly on the question of Russian collusion.

Perhaps Trump didn’t realize that his campaign was being run by alleged Russian money launderers, that at least two of his foreign policy advisers had entanglements with Russian intelligence, and that his campaign had a heads up about Russian plans to dump stolen Clinton emails online. None of last week’s new information proves that Trump is too disloyal to his own country to be president. But the only alternative is that he’s too clueless.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/opinion/trump-russia-election-conspiracy.html

4. Paul Waldman: The president's Trumpinator fantasy

Whenever there's a mass shooting, at least some supporters of gun rights can be counted on to say that we shouldn't be talking about guns, because the real problem is movies and video games (as though the United States is the only country in the world where violent movies and video games are available). But there actually is a way in which movies contribute to our violent culture and increase the death toll from guns. It's about the fantasies we — particularly men — construct about our own capabilities and potency.

Consider what President Trump said on Monday, talking — as he has a lot in the past few days — about the sheriff's deputy who, despite being armed, stood outside the high school in Parkland listening to the sound of students and teachers being shot. Calling it "frankly disgusting," Trump said, "You don't know until you test it, but I really believe I'd run in there even if I didn't have a weapon."

Yes, the 71-year-old obese man who avoided serving in Vietnam because of phantom bone spurs in his feet ("I had a doctor that gave me a letter — a very strong letter on the heels," he has said), would have gone all Trumpinator on the shooter. Right.  http://theweek.com/articles/757587/presidents-trumpinator-fantasy

5. Robert Kuttner: Robert Mueller Has Trump Cornered

Special counsel Robert Mueller is methodically, brilliantly filling in pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When complete, the puzzle will depict a president who is ripe ― overripe ― for impeachment.

Mueller’s indictment on Friday of Russia’s cyberwarfare against the 2016 election was a tactical and investigative masterstroke. President Donald Trump is now cornered. Mueller’s report makes a total liar out of Trump for his repeated claims that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when Putin says Russia had nothing to do with it, that the hacking could have been “some guy in New Jersey.”

The indictments do not quite connect the Russian operation to Putin personally, but that’s beside the point. No serious person believes that an operation as sensitive as deliberate disruption of the U.S. election could go forward without Putin’s full knowledge and support in a state as authoritarian as his.

Trump, having repeatedly denied Russian involvement, has now shifted gears and is insisting that the proper test of wrongdoing is “collusion.” But this is a straw man.

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly and publicly urged the Russians to come forward with dirt on Hillary Clinton. His top advisers met with Russian operatives to see what they had. That part of Mueller’s investigation is still open.

What we already know is plenty damning. A conspiracy of interest does not have to include an explicit tit-for-tat deal. It can be based on signaling.  https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-kuttner-mueller-russia_us_5a8a3dfde4b004fc31939016

6. Opinion: The Flimsy Excuses That Congressional Republicans Whisper to Themselves

It is easy to conjure up the excuses that congressional Republicans murmur to themselves as they stay silent in the face of Trump’s outrages.

“I am in Congress — and not working in the White House. I’m not responsible for everything that Trump says.”

“Trump’s just bored and blowing off steam. The best thing to do is to ignore it.”

“With the Democrats piling on, I’m not going to criticize a Republican president.”

“What’s the upside to getting involved for me?”

“I’m in a tough re-election fight. The last thing I need is to split the GOP base.”

“What if Trump starts attacking me on Twitter?”

“Now just isn’t the time. I’ll save my ammunition for later.”

This collective timidity has contributed to a presidency that refuses to take any steps to protect the sanctity of American elections in 2018 and beyond.

When the histories of these dismal Trump years are written, congressional Republicans will be called upon to justify their conduct. Somehow their inevitable line, “It was easier to go along,” will not rank up their with Ronald Reagan’s invocation of “a shining city on a hill.”  http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/congressional-republicans-excuses-trump

7. Jeva Lange: America's incredible teenagers

A week after Parkland, the world seemed ready to settle back into that familiar wait for the next one.

Everyone, that is, except America's incredible teenagers.

With the grace and composition and fury of people many times their 15 or 16 or 17 years of age, the survivors of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are no longer willing to simply wait for the next mass shooting. Conscious of the limits of their personal power — many have months or years to go before reaching voting age — they are using their voices to shake the nation out of its post-shooting stupor. A sharp student journalist, 17-year-old David Hogg, stared down a CNN camera and begged, "Please … we are children. You guys are the adults." Speaking at the Florida Capitol on Wednesday, 16-year-old Alfonso Calderon became emotional as he told the crowd of protesters: "Although we are just kids, we understand. … I don't think we should ever be silenced because we are just children."

Their anger is frightening in its magnitude and unfamiliarity. While the children who survived Newtown were too young to put into words their experiences, with Parkland the country is suddenly confronted by the livid demands of teenagers who were recently in real danger of losing their lives. It is very hard to argue with them.  http://theweek.com/articles/756702/americas-incredible-teenagers

8. Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump Is the Most Pure Conservative President Ever

Trump’s racism, paranoia, and authoritarianism are all deeply rooted in the American conservative tradition. William F. Buckley supported segregation and white supremacy, and after his shouts of “Stop!” failed to halt the civil-rights train, he again supported white supremacy and segregation in South Africa until that, too, was a lost cause. Buckley had fulsome praise for right-wing dictators like Francisco Franco. These beliefs may not have defined the entirety of his worldview, but they formed an important foundation for it.

Trump habitually repeats theories he sees in conservative media. Donald Trump had a firmer grip on reality as a younger man who primarily followed the mainstream news, before the invention of Fox News. His descent into paranoia is linked with his growing absorption into the right-wing media echo chamber. Trump has not infected conservatism. Conservatism has infected Trump.

This is not an abstract question or a debater’s point. The insistence by conservative dissidents on treating Trump as an alien disease upon their movement prevents them from diagnosing, and therefore treating, the source of the infection. To restore the Republican Party to health, defined as being committed to some baseline relationship with reality and a commitment to democratic governing norms, requires freeing it from conservatism’s grip. It requires a break from decades of American right-wing tradition. And if that sounds like a deeper schism than anti-Trump conservatives are willing to contemplate at the moment, they need to come to grips with the reality that before their party gets better, it is going to get much worse.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/donald-trump-is-the-most-pure-conservative-president-ever.html

9. William Falk: Sacrificed for the right of revolution

A civilian knockoff of a weapon designed for battlefields, AR-15–style rifles are the perfect tools for mass killings — easy even for a novice Rambo to fire accurately, with little recoil, and customizable with handgrips, sights, and magazines of 30 to 100 rounds. For 10 years, the federal government banned assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines, but that law expired in 2004. Now the NRA and its allies fiercely oppose any renewal of the ban. Why?

You'll hear various disingenuous arguments, but in The Federalist  this week, John Davidson provides the answer that is the bedrock of all gun-control opposition. The Second Amendment, Davidson says, was not meant to merely protect hunting and self-defense. No: "The right to bear arms stems from the right of revolution." Weapons designed for war must remain legal, Davidson says, so that Americans can "overthrow their government if it becomes tyrannical." It's a terrible shame, he concedes, that AR-15s have been used to shoot up schools, concerts, workplaces, and churches — but the Second Amendment "is worth dying for." Seen from this perspective, the bullet-riddled dead of Parkland, Newtown, Las Vegas, et al. are necessary sacrifices; their slaughter enables liberty-loving Americans to maintain the option of armed rebellion. This core belief, which drives the intractable opposition to any form of gun control, is not often publicly discussed; until it's addressed and confronted, the carnage will continue.  http://theweek.com/articles/756968/sacrificed-right-revolution

10. Damon Linker: The Parkland shooting may just ruin the GOP

There were already plenty of signs of a rising Democratic wave before the Parkland massacre. But now? After all the deaths, and the endlessly repeated perfunctory expressions of impotence on the part of our politicians, and the risible suggestion of our credulous commander in chief that the answer to deadly weaponry in our schools is even more deadly weaponry in our schools — after all of that, will the wave not rise higher? Will Democrats and left-leaning independents, and maybe even some Republican parents, not show up at the polls in November to register their disgust at the refusal of our elected officials to do anything at all in response to the carnage piling up all around us?

I could be wrong. But this time feels different. This time Republicans better watch out. A majoritarian storm is brewing, it's moving their way, and there could be little left standing by the time the outraged winds stop blowing.  http://theweek.com/articles/756973/parkland-shooting-may-just-ruin-gop

11. Maureen Dowd: This Snake Can’t Shed His Skin

On her way to work one morning, down the path along the lake, a tenderhearted woman saw a rich, coldhearted, frozen snake.

His tangerine skin was all caked with makeup and his bald spot was frosted with the dew.

“Poor thing,” she cried, “I’ll take you in, and I’ll take care of you.”

“Take me in, oh tender woman. Take me in, for Heaven’s sake. Take me in, oh tender woman,” sighed the vicious snake.

She wrapped him up all cozy, tucking in his absurdly long tie of silk, and laid him by her fireside with two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate shake of milk.

She hurried home that night from holding up a torch on Liberty Island, and soon as she arrived, she found that the freaky snake, transfixed by his own image on TV, had been revived.

“Take me in, oh tender woman. Take me in, for Heaven’s sake. Take me in, oh tender woman,” pleaded the cunning snake.

She clutched him to her bosom, which he really seemed to like. “You think you’re pretty,” she cried. “But if I hadn’t brought you in, by now surely you would have died.”

She stroked his puffy Velveeta scales again, and kissed and held him tight. But instead of saying thank you, that grabby snake wrapped around her you-know-what and gave her a vicious bite.

“Take me in, oh tender woman. Take me in for Heaven’s sake. Take me in, oh tender woman,” sighed the sneaky snake as he changed to “Fox & Friends” for news that was fake.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/opinion/sunday/donald-trump-snake-dowd.html

12. LA Times Editorial: Well-Heeled Investors Reap the Republican Tax Cut Bonanza

After President Trump signed the Republican tax cut into law, companies put out cheery announcements that they were giving workers bonuses because of their expected windfalls from the tax reductions. The president and Republican lawmakers quickly held up these news releases as vindication for their argument that cutting the top federal corporate tax rate to 21 percent, from 35 percent, would boost workers’ incomes even as it added $1.5 trillion to the debt that future generations would have to pay off.

Now corporate announcements and analyst reports confirm what honest observers always said — this claim is pure fantasy. As executives tell investors what they intend to do with their tax savings and their spending plans are tabulated into neat charts and graphs, the reports jibe with what most experts said would happen: Companies are rewarding their stockholders.

Businesses are buying back shares, which creates demand for the stocks, boosts share prices and benefits investors. Some of the cash is going to increase dividends. And a chunk will go to acquiring other businesses, creating larger corporations that face less competition.

In addition to benefiting investors, these maneuvers will end up boosting the pay of top executives because their compensation packages are often tied to the price of their companies’ stock. Finally, a small sliver of the money will find its way into paychecks of rank-and-file employees, but it won’t be a big boost and will probably come in the form of a temporary bonus, rather than a lasting raise.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/opinion/investors-republican-tax-cut.html

13. Matt Latimer: Trump Is Winning. Are you sick and tired of it yet?

Despite Russiagate, despite shitholegate and despite whatever gate he blunders through next. Despite approval ratings that would make Nixon weep. Despite his mind-numbing political misjudgments—defending accused pedophiles, for example—and the endless, unnecessary daily drama. Trump is winning. It is actually happening, people. And if there are those who want to stop it—and there are, of course, millions—they need to know what they are up against. It’s a lot more than they overconfidently think.

The other day his personal lawyer made the preposterous claim that he personally paid $130,000 to an ex-porn star threatening to expose her relationship with Trump—with money from his own pocket—apparently just because Trump is a notoriously swell guy. How many lawyers do you know who’d so generously shell out over one hundred grand for a friend simply out of the goodness of their heart?

Did anyone believe that ridiculous story? Who knows—because it’s off the front pages and we moved on to yet another shocking scandal like last weekend’s tweetstorm, when the president of the United States seemed to blame the Russia investigation for the death of schoolchildren in Florida.Remember the pardon of the controversial Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a birther who was accused of using his office to target political opponents and conduct racial profiling and was found guilty of a felony for disobeying a court order? Remember the phone call with the war widow when Trump seemed to forget the dead soldier’s name? Nobody does. We are too exhausted. We don’t have time.  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/25/trump-reelection-2020-approval-ratings-217037

14. Charles Homans: Do Trump’s ‘Approval’ Numbers Tell Us About Him, or About Us?

‘Partisanship has always factored heavily into presidential approval, but in recent decades it has come to eclipse all other variables in Gallup’s data. The last president to hold more than 40 percent approval from opposition-party voters in the early days of his presidency was George H.W. Bush. In his first three months in office, Trump received the lowest-ever approval rating among opposition-party voters (9 percent) and the third-highest-ever among his own partisans (87 percent). In a Huffington Post poll in April, 40 percent of respondents — 63 percent of those who disapproved of Trump and 24 percent of those who approved of him — said there was almost nothing Trump could do to change their minds about him.

This question becomes less and less hypothetical every time Trump barrels through another taboo that previously bound the modern American presidency: firing an F.B.I. director who was investigating him, hesitating to censure white supremacists, casually accusing his critics of treason. Trump sees an approval rating maddeningly stuck around 40 percent, while most of the country — 57 percent of it, if you credit Gallup — wonders: Really, still 40 percent? These numbers used to seem to say something, however vague, about a presidency and where it was headed. Now they tell us something about us, and it is maybe more than we would like to know.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/do-trumps-approval-numbers-tell-us-about-him-or-about-us.html