We begin today’s roundup with Paul Krugman at The New York Times and his take on the “attack of the fanatical centrists,” people like Howard Schultz who claim to be for “centrist” policies but who really aren’t for any popular policy that would affect their bottom line:
Over the past few days we’ve been treated to the ludicrous yet potentially destructive spectacle of Howard Schultz, the Starbucks billionaire, insisting that he’s the president we need despite his demonstrable policy ignorance. Schultz obviously thinks he knows a lot of things that just aren’t so. Yet his delusions of knowledge aren’t that special. For the most part, they follow conventional centrist doctrine. [...] Schultz... still declares debt our biggest problem. Yet true to centrist form, his deficit concerns are oddly selective. Bowles and Simpson, charged with proposing a solution to deficits, listed as their first principle … reducing tax rates. Sure enough, Schultz is all into cutting Social Security, but opposes any tax hike on the wealthy.
Funny how that works.
In general, centrists are furiously opposed to any proposal that would ease the lives of ordinary Americans. Universal health coverage, says Schultz, would be “free health care for all, which the country cannot afford.”
Here’s Frank Rich’s take:
Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as “centrism” in our politics anymore beyond its use as a branding strategy for pundits and out-of-work politicians hustling to be hired as talking heads. As Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post wrote this week in response to CNN’s hiring of John Kasich and CBS’s of Jeff Flake, networks love the television-news equivalent of elevator music — “the smarmy centrism that often benefits nobody” but “won’t offend anyone.” Yet along comes Howard Schultz to prove that even in these polarized times, Americans from Donald Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can still rally in the center in support of a shared conviction: Schultz’s potential third-party presidential candidacy is a ludicrous exercise in plutocratic ego that is of benefit to no one except Trump.
At The Washington Post,
Eugene Robinson is growing more concerned about Donald Trump’s tweets:
[T]here are tinfoil-hatted lunatics yelling on street corners who make more sense than President Trump’s increasingly loopy
Twitter feed. Think about it: Most mornings, and some evenings as well, the most powerful man in the world rants and raves like someone you’d urgently tell the gate agent about if you were waiting to board the same airplane. This is not normal. This is alarming.
I know, there is a school of thought that says Trump’s tweets are nothing more than weapons of mass distraction and should be ignored. But if you want to know the administration’s policy on just about anything, what other reliable source is there? Surely not press secretary Sarah Sanders and the other White House mouthpieces, whose main job is to invent “evidence” to back up Trump’s misstatements, distortions and pants-on-fire lies.
Also at The Washington Post,
Eugene Scott makes an excellent point about Trump’s approach to law and order:
[I]t seems as though Trump has two different messages for law enforcement. When it comes to arresting people of color, police shouldn’t hold back. But those closest to him — even those suspected of being involved with something as serious as interfering with an election — deserve an entirely different, more humane kind of treatment.
Don’t miss John Cassidy’s deep dive into the history of the wealth tax:
In many policy circles, where taxing wealth is widely seen as an idea whose time has come, the debate is shifting to practicalities. Bill Gale, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who worked at the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George H. W. Bush, told me that taxing wealth more effectively can be justified on at least four different grounds: equity (in some cases, as Warren Buffett famously pointed out, the very richest American households pay a smaller share of their income in tax than middle-income households do); revenues (even though the unemployment rate is at a historic low, the budget deficit stands at more than 4.5 per cent of G.D.P.); “rent-seeking” (by manipulating compensation committees, many C.E.O.s effectively set their own compensation); and the desire to prevent the further emergence of a plutocracy. (By some estimates, the top 0.1 per cent now controls almost as much wealth as the bottom ninety per cent of households.) “I am sympathetic to the idea of a wealth tax,” Gale said. “It is certainly not a crazy notion, but I don’t know if it would work.”
On a final note, President of Common Cause Karen Hobert Flynn says Trump is making us less safe in a piece at USA Today:
Americans expect and deserve a president who puts the nation and its security before his personal interests and whims. President Donald Trump's approach to international affairs has been indifferent at best, and at worst, openly hostile to more than 70 years of bipartisan agreement on global alliances that have kept us safe. His fascination with dictators and so-called strong men is dangerous. The president's well-documented lies and exaggerations are disturbing and unprecedented, but when he openly ignores and ridicules the findings of the U.S. intelligence community, he puts American lives at risk, diminishes our role in the world, and makes us all less safe. [...] The intelligence community's work is vital to our national security and our international interests. Congress must be ready to step in to prevent further erosion of our global standing. No judicial confirmation or tax cut is worth jeopardizing the safety of our democracy. Every member of Congress must put country before party — Americans, our global allies and all freedom-loving people around the world are watching.