1. Paul Krugman: Dreamers, Liars and Bad Economics

The truth is that letting the Dreamers work legally helps the U.S. economy; pushing them out or into the shadows is bad for everyone except racists.

To understand why, you need to realize that America, like other advanced economies, is facing a double-barreled demographic challenge thanks to declining fertility.

On one side, an aging population means fewer workers paying taxes to support Social Security and Medicare. Demography is the main reason long-run forecasts suggest problems for Social Security, and an important reason for concerns about Medicare. Driving out young workers who will pay into the system for many decades is a way to make these problems worse.

On the other side, declining growth in the working-age population reduces the returns to private investment, increasing the risk of prolonged slumps like the one that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

In short, letting Dreamers work is all economic upside for the rest of our nation, with no downside unless you have something against people with brown skin and Hispanic surnames. Which is, of course, what this is all really about. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/dreamers-liars-and-bad-economics.html

2. Robert Dallek: Judging the Trump presidency

Trump offers a master class in how not to be president. He has deepened skepticism about his suitability for the highest office by raging at opponents, decrying the media as enemies of the American people, dismissing as disloyal those who are in any way critical, and offering distorted versions of reality on virtually every subject, starting with the claim that the first 100 days of his administration were the most successful in history. His ignorant and offhand approach to foreign policy—first and foremost, his seemingly deliberate attempts to weaken and even threaten NATO—has dismayed America’s allies and emboldened its enemies. A special counsel has been appointed to investigate Russian interference in the election, reminding Americans of the process that drove Richard Nixon from office.

Trump would do well to study Roosevelt and, surely, Lincoln, along with other presidents, to grasp how they sought (or failed to seek) broad popular unity. It says something fundamental about the man that no one imagines he would actually do this. The problem is not just that it would take work. The larger problem is that he has no interest in the goal. September 6, 2017 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/historians-on-trump-presidency

3. John Cassidy: How Small Can Donald Trump Make the Presidency?

For some time now, it has been clear that Donald Trump is wading ever deeper into the cesspool. From his reaction to the white-supremacist-inspired violence in Charlottesville, to his attempt to bar transgender people from serving in the armed forces, to his pardon of Joe Arpaio, the controversial former Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff who rounded up and mistreated Latinos, Trump has recently been intent on pandering to his most embittered and prejudiced supporters.

From a cold political standpoint, these reprehensible acts may contain some logic. With his approval ratings in the mid-thirties, and with the Russia investigation seemingly closing in on him and his family, Trump’s survival depends on his ability to whip up his remaining supporters. Fear of incurring these supporters’ wrath (and a possible primary challenge) presumably prevents many congressional Republicans from breaking with the President.

Yet again, Trump has embraced a policy that targets the politically powerless, ignores the real challenges facing the country, further divides it, and tarnishes its international reputation. (“What a cruel, sour place is Trump’s America,” Helen O’Rahilly, an Irish television executive, wrote on Twitter.) A Presidency that has been shrinking before our eyes practically since its first day has been further diminished. Eventually, it may well shrink to nothing. But, between now and then, look for things to get even uglier.  https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/how-small-can-donald-trump-make-the-presidency

4. Charles M. Blow: Inner Racism Revealed

As Michelle Obama said: “Being president doesn’t change who you are. No, it reveals who you are.” That is what is happening with Donald Trump.

Trump has in the course of his life been on all sides of many issues, although he was always a liar, bully, misogynist, opportunist and economic isolationist. But his racial hostility and white supremacy seem to have blossomed with his entry into politics and his Russia-aided election. After spending a life catering to the appetites of the greedy and gauche, he realized that there was an exponentially larger market of white nationalists and neo-Nazis. To the aspirational he could be landlord, but to the racists he could be overlord.

Trump’s outrageous decision this week to end DACA, the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allowed many young people brought to this country as children to stay and work here, is just the latest expression of Trump’s growing intolerance and his growing adoption and internalizing of white nationalist ideology.

Not only did Trump wimp out and send the anti-immigration zealot Jeff Sessions out to make the announcement, he also made the sadistic and emotionally manipulative act of professing his “love” for the Dreamers last week, while moving to bring them pain this week.

Donald Trump continues to say in every way possible that power and privilege in America is primarily the provenance of people who are white, male, Christian and straight, and that all others should be targeted for denial, oppression or removal.

Sometimes you simply have to call a thing a thing, and the thing here is that Trump’s inner racist is being revealed, and America’s not-so-silent racists are rising in applause.  Sept 7, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/opinion/inner-racism-revealed.html

5. Joshua Green: Trump Again Highlights the GOP Divisions

The Republican bounty from Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential victory last November was the rare opportunity it afforded the GOP to enact an agenda without Democratic input. Because Republicans won control of the White House and both houses of Congress, nothing could inhibit them—in theory—from passing their preferred legislation. This happy scenario was the culmination of Republican fantasy: As the veteran conservative activist Grover Norquist once put it, Republicans needed only to elect a president ‘with enough working digits to handle a pen’ to sign those bills into law.

Under Trump, Norquist’s fantasy has given way to a sobering reality. Rather than sign off on a succession of Republican bills, President Trump has instead managed to exacerbate nearly every major division within the GOP, whether cultural or political. September 6, 2017 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-06/with-daca-decision-trump-again-highlights-gop-divisions

 

6. Anthony L. Fisher: Trump's DACA suspension proves his brand isn't winning — it's cruelty

The sudden and shocking moment in January when Trump suspended the U.S. refugee admissions program and halted visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries — including U.S. green card holders and people already on planes — was cruel, impractical, and sowed chaos. Though it interfered with businesses and educational institutions, it was a Trumpist's win, because the president demonstrated to his base that he's the type of guy who will wield the blunt force of presidential power without so much as thinking it through.

When Trump announced his ban on transgender troops in the military, and the removal of the approximately 1,000 already serving, the evangelicals who swallowed their sense of morality and voted for the philandering vulgarian with the penchant for sexual harassment were rewarded with a pointlessly cruel policy that the U.S. military neither asked for nor wanted. But still, winning.

Upon pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio — who abused his state-granted power to violate constitutional rights as a matter of policy — the president praised the disgraced sheriff's toughness. Though Arpaio's sadism included (but was not limited to) placing women and children in chain gangs, feeding detainees barely subsistence-level amounts of food, and housing them outdoors in what he called "concentration camps" under scorching Arizona heat (157 people would die while in custody on Arpaio's watch), Trump admires a man who knows how to punish people. As does Trump's base, and because it so outraged "the media" and "liberals," the presidential pardon of an unrepentant convicted criminal can be sold as more of that promised winning.

The deportation of the DREAMers — should it come to pass — would be a national stain on the honor of the United States for all time. Even Republican congressional leaders who opposed President Obama's creation of DACA recognize that simply repealing it is savagely inhumane, and while they can attempt to distance themselves from Trump's cruelty to their hearts' content, it won't matter to Team #MAGA. The more the president inflicts pain, the more they'll be convinced they are winning.  http://theweek.com/articles/722742/trumps-daca-suspension-proves-brand-isnt-winning--cruelty

7. Paul Krugman: The Paranoid Style In Conservative Politics

Lots of people are having fun with Rush Limbaugh’s insistence that warnings about Irma were a liberal plot, part of the great conspiracy to scare people about climate change — plus a sales gimmick for batteries and bottled water. (He evacuated his Palm Beach mansion soon afterwards.)

But you’re missing the point if you think this is about Rush Limbaugh. Crazy conspiracy theorizing about climate change isn’t an aberration on the right, it’s the norm. Almost every senior figure in energy and environmental policy within the Trump administration is a climate change denier, with most of them having expressed the view that the science is a hoax. And in this case Trump isn’t bypassing the GOP establishment: these people are the party’s establishment.

Rush Limbaugh makes a good punching bag, both because of his general grotesqueness, and because his personal flight from Florida provides a perfect punch line. But the paranoid style in policy debates is pretty much universal on the modern right.  9/09/17 https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/09/09/the-paranoid-style-in-conservative-politics

8. Joy-Ann Reid: What’s Going to Happen When the Trumpists Realize the America They Yearn for Is Gone?

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll—which shows a yawning cultural divide between Trump voters and Republicans on the one hand and everyone else on the other on everything from gay marriage to immigration—doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t know, but it does tell us something we should remember. The United States is not one country but two; and like many Western democracies, our two halves are cleaving apart.

The fault lines will be familiar to anyone who has observed Europe as its rural and urban populations speed to opposite societal poles, and as influxes of non-white immigrants and refugees, driven by war or increasingly by climate change, combine with globalization and a free-moving labor force to alter the social compact. In the recent French presidential election, the divide was described as between the “metropolitans”—the urban, modern France that favored Emmanuel Macron and the “peripherals”—the rural, aging France that clung to the far-right Marine Le Pen.

The U.S. version pits what Stephen Miller and the Bannonites derisively call the “cosmopolitan elites”—but which actually includes both white urbanites and majorities of every non-white and non-Christian ethnic group at all socioeconomic levels—versus the nearly all-white-Christian Trump coterie—rural, suburban and exurban. It’s “high output” America—the fewer than 500 counties Hillary Clinton carried, which account for 64 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product—versus “low output America”—the more than 2,600 Trump counties, which nonetheless contribute just a third of nation’s economic output. And as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out in his blunt and brilliant new essay, it’s a fault line Trump and the Bannonites have also openly cleaved around white identity politics.  http://www.thedailybeast.com/whats-going-to-happen-when-the-trumpists-realize-the-america-they-yearn-for-is-gone

9. Jonathan Chait: The Only Problem in American Politics Is the Republican Party

Political scientist Lee Drutman argues in a Vox essay that American politics is descending into what he calls “doom-loop partisanship.” Drutman notes that Americans have been “retreating into our separate tribal epistemologies, each with their own increasingly incompatible set of facts and first premises,” each heavily racialized, in which “[t]here’s no possibility for rational debate or middle-ground compromise. Just two sorted teams, with no overlap, no cross-cutting identities, and with everyone’s personal sense of status constantly on the line.”

Drutman attributes this to winner-take-all elections, the expanding power of the presidency, and the growing influence of money in politics. I think, despite all the very real design flaws in American politics, the problems he describe stem mainly from the pathologies of the Republican Party.

The doom loop Drutman describes is, in reality, both sides responding to the phenomenon of Republican extremism. Republicans are sealed off in a bubble of paranoia and rage, and Democrats are sealed off from that bubble. Democrats fear Republican government because it is dangerous and extreme. Republicans fear Democratic government because they are dangerous and extreme.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/the-only-problem-in-american-politics-is-the-republicans.html

10. Greg Sargent: Hillary Clinton’s new book blasts Republicans and Russia. She’s 100 percent right.

Today Hillary Clinton’s new book about the 2016 campaign is getting released. This means a lot of very smart people will suddenly decide that they can’t keep these two ideas in their heads at the same time:

Hillary Clinton, her weaknesses as a candidate, and the mistakes she made were partly to blame for her loss.

There are other reasons she lost, and it is not only appropriate for her — and us — to discuss them; it’s desirable, because they have major implications for the future of our democracy.

Clinton’s book, by most accounts, tries to balance those two basic claims. I have not read it, so I can’t say whether it balances them fairly, or whether she feints toward blaming her own failings while dodging accountability for herself via an overemphasis on other causes. But a lot of Twitter traffic today suggests an unwillingness to allow space for the notion that both those claims can even be reconciled or discussed simultaneously at all. That’s absurd, and it could have terrible consequences.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/09/12/hillary-clintons-new-book-blasts-republicans-and-russia-shes-100-percent-right/

11. Michelle Ruiz: No, Hillary Clinton, the First Woman to Win a Major-Party Presidential Nomination, Does Not Need to Shut Up About It

The history of sexist animosity against Clinton makes it hard to see the dismissal of her book as anything but more of the same. Though she’s a convenient and familiar scapegoat, Clinton isn’t hurting the Democratic party by sharing her account of history—it happened, after all—nor is she a roadblock to its moving forward. Must she enter the witness protection program or move to the Italian countryside and pull an Under the Tuscan Sun for Dems to be able to craft a compelling message for 2018 and 2020? (For one, they can’t blame her for that corny “Better Deal” slogan.) Instead of willing her away, her party should probably read What Happened and try to learn from her mistakes. As for the cries that Clinton is “cashing in,” please refer to the Amazon listings for books penned by Obama, McCain, Biden, Gore, and Romney. If Clinton is cashing in, she’s in good company.

But most hollow of all may be the argument that Clinton isn’t doing the women and girls she appealed to in her concession speech any favors by speaking out. “Clinton’s behavior doesn’t help would-be glass ceiling-crackers,” the Washington Post wrote. “Publicly calling out misogyny is probably not the best strategy for combating it, or for encouraging other women to run for office.” On the contrary, condemning misogyny whenever and wherever you see it, in a forum as public as possible, is the precise way to fight it. Hence why, after Clinton’s loss, a record 16,000 women have reached out to Emily’s List in 2017 about running for office. Clinton doesn’t have to keep quiet—and neither do they. https://www.vogue.com/article/hillary-clinton-what-happened-doesnt-have-to-shut-up/amp

12. Jeffrey Toobin: Trump’s Cynical Voter-Fraud Commission 

It is difficult to imagine a more cynical enterprise than the Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity, which Trump appointed after he claimed (falsely) that the casting of illegal votes last November accounted for his loss of the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won by a margin of nearly three million. Trump named Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who has been the nation’s leading advocate for restrictions on voting rights, as the vice-chair of the commission. 

The results of Trump’s voting commission are preordained. It will inevitably seek to impose measures that will have the effect of erecting barriers to voting for poor people, who generally vote Democratic. The commission will call for requiring more forms of identification to register, and the possession of photo identification to actually cast ballots. In addition, the commission will almost certainly pursue limitations on early voting and absentee balloting, all as part of a supposed effort to combat fraud. During the Obama Administration, the Justice Department, under Eric Holder and then Loretta Lynch, got courts to limit some of the worst voter-suppression efforts, especially those in Texas and North Carolina. But Attorney General Jeff Sessions has withdrawn from this undertaking, and, just as he did when he was a senator, he has embraced the vote-suppression agenda.

If the President had the slightest inclination toward bipartisanship, as some appear to think he displayed last week, he would disband the fraud commission. It exists solely to help the Republican Party, with no residual benefits for anyone else in the country. Trump, of course, will not disband it, and his failure to do so will be the clearest evidence (if any is needed) that there was no pivot last week, but at most a very slight detour on the road to an electoral future of Republican dominance. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-voter-fraud-commission-heads-to-new-hampshire

13.  Eugene Robinson: Climate-Change Denial Is a Cruel Insult to Storm Victims

When, if not now, is the time to talk about global warming and what to do about it? The answer from the Trump administration and the Republican Party, basically, is succinct in its willful ignorance: "How about never? Is never good for you?"

No rational U.S administration would look at the devastation from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and seek to deny climate change. At present, however, there is no rational U.S. administration.

We have instead a president and an Environmental Protection Agency chief who refuse to acknowledge the obvious. Thoughts and prayers are welcome at times like these, but they are insincere if not supplemented by analysis and action. Future megastorms will likely be worse, scientists say; the question for policymakers is to what degree.

When, if not now, is the time to talk about global warming and what to do about it? The answer from the Trump administration and the Republican Party, basically, is succinct in its willful ignorance: "How about never? Is never good for you?"

No rational U.S administration would look at the devastation from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and seek to deny climate change. At present, however, there is no rational U.S. administration.

We have instead a president and an Environmental Protection Agency chief who refuse to acknowledge the obvious. Thoughts and prayers are welcome at times like these, but they are insincere if not supplemented by analysis and action. Future megastorms will likely be worse, scientists say; the question for policymakers is to what degree.

And maybe Trump doesn't get the fact that the rest of the world recognizes both the environmental and the economic benefits of clean energy technologies. It is likely, I believe, that at some point there will be world-changing breakthroughs in solar power, battery capacity and nuclear fusion. I hope these advances are made in the United States; I fear they will be made in China, Japan or Germany.

The Trump administration should at least be insisting that coastal communities in Texas and Florida be rebuilt taking climate change into account. Sea level rise is an unquestioned fact; the cruelest insult to those now suffering would be to pretend it is not. September 12, 2017 https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/09/12/climate-change_denial_is_a_cruel_insult_to_storm_victims_134964.html

14. Jonathan Chait: Bernie Sanders’s Bill Gets America Zero Percent Closer to Single Payer

The sight of 15 Senate Democrats, including many of the party’s likely presidential contenders, co-sponsoring Bernie Sanders’s single-payer health-care bill may look like a momentous step. “What that means,” writes Jake Tapper, “is that with the notable exception of former Vice President Joe Biden, every top tier(ish) 2020 Democrat is now on board with a policy proposal that Clinton said less than two years ago would ‘never, ever come to pass.’”

But this image of progress only holds true if you imagine the process as a series of continuous steps. In reality, single payer has always been, and remains, a political dilemma that nobody has been able to resolve, and there is no evidence the resolution has grown any easier. What looks like a large step forward is actually a party edging closer to a cliff it has no intention of going over.

The barrier to single payer is that the American health-care system has been built, by accident, around employer-based insurance. The rhetoric of single payer concentrates its moral emphasis on people who lack insurance at all. (“Do we, as a nation, join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee comprehensive health care to every person as a human right?” writesSanders today.) But the barrier to single-payer health care is the people who already have coverage. Designing a single-payer system means not only covering the uninsured, but financing the cost of moving the 155 million Americans who have employer-based insurance onto Medicare.

Obama himself said many times that, if he were starting a health-care system from scratch, he would prefer a single-payer system. Sanders’s single-payer bill is vague enough that the Democrats co-sponsoring it are really doing nothing more than saying the same thing Obama did: A single-payer plan would be nice, in a world that looks nothing like the one we inhabit. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/sanderss-bill-gets-u-s-zero-percent-closer-to-single-payer.html