Per the comments from last week, I’m continuing with the images from Compound Interest. Call it a victory for democracy in action.
The Washington Post doesn’t exactly see Mike Pence joining Trump’s ticket as a selfless move.
... it is likely that Mr. Trump chose Mr. Pence because the Hoosier is a more likeable version of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Mr. Trump’s vanquished adversary, whom Mr. Pence endorsed in the Indiana GOP primary. During his 12 years in Congress, Mr. Pence built up a reserve of credibility with movement conservatives and tea party types. He chaired the conservative Republican Study Committee and mounted one of the many right-wing campaigns to unseat Rep. John A. Boehner (Ohio) as the leader of House Republicans. Mr. Boehner later co-opted Mr. Pence by appointing him to the House leadership. Now Mr. Trump seems to be attempting a similar maneuver — neutralizing complaints from conservative true believers by bringing one of their own into the fold.
That Republican Study Committee would be one of many of the “think tanks” that act as political welfare on the right, propping up Republican politicians who failed in their last run for office and making sure they don’t have to sully their hands with an actual job.
Mr. Pence appears to be executing his biggest mistake, by far, right now. He has called himself “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.” … As he campaigns with Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence will have to add “hypocrite” to his list of labels.
Add? Pshaw. Anyone in Indiana could tell you Pence feels at home under that banner.
Soner Cagaptay is one of several people writing today on the idea that a coup attempt in Turkey was bad, but that a failed coup may turn out to be worse.
Though we do not yet know who was behind the Turkish coup plot to overthrow the Justice and Development (AK) Party government and the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one thing is for certain: after this attempt, Turkey will be less free and less democratic. If the military had won, then Turkey would have become an oppressive country run by generals. And if Erdogan wins, and this looks the likely outcome, Turkey will still become more oppressive.
Since coming to power in 2003, Erdogan has run the country with an increasingly authoritarian grip, cracking down on dissent as well as freedoms of expression, assembly, association and media. Initially a reformist seeking European Union accession, after winning electoral victories in 2007 and 2011 on a platform of economic good governance, Erdogan has turned conservative and authoritarian.
The failed coup will serve as both justification and incentive to tighten the screws.
Kathleen Parker on the Nice / Cleveland connection.
A friend calls predawn from Cleveland: “What are we going to do? No one’s coming,” she says.
Even before Nice, people were dropping out. Reservations for 700 rooms for volunteers who were to double up — 1,400 people — had to be canceled, she says. They’re not coming.
None of the party’s previous presidents is attending. Trey Gowdy (S.C.), one of the most respected members of the GOP House caucus, isn’t going. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), the highest-ranking Republican woman in the House, is skipping it.
Trey Gowdy is “one of the most respected members of the GOP House caucus?” I didn’t know things were that bad. A lot of this sounds a lot more like “I’m not coming, because I didn’t want to come, and, er, Nice! Yeah, Nice.” rather than people who are truly afraid to gather.
Leonard Pitts is talking about Pokémon Go. Which itself reflects what a plague this game has become.
Here’s something I never thought I’d have to say.
People should not play Pokémon at Auschwitz.
Nor at the Sept. 11 memorial in New York City, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, or Arlington National Cemetery. …
Apparently, we have reached a point in our devolution where people can’t figure such things out for themselves.
What strikes Pitts most forcefully is that the people spotted peering through their cell phones in search of imaginary monsters are often not nine-year-olds.
When a Washington Post reporter questioned the propriety of doing this at the Holocaust Museum, “Angie,” age 37, responded with the game’s catchphrase: “Gotta catch ’em all.”
To repeat: Angie, age 37, the Holocaust Museum . . . “Gotta catch ’em all.”
I’ve never been so ready to throttle someone I’ve never even met.
The point is that there’s a difference between staying young at heart—Pitts confesses to being a regular reader of Captain America—and acting like a child.
And, that when you lack the common sense and simple decency to put your toys aside and stand awed in a place sanctified by suffering and sacrifice, you have crossed fully from the one to the other. Nor are you just immature. You’re shallow and self-centered, too. And you have no apparent capacity for reverence and reflection.
Yeah, even when he’s writing about Pokémon, PItts make it worth reading the whole column.
The New York Times looks at President Obama and his own critique of Obamacare.
History will almost surely rank health care reform as one of President Obama’s greatest accomplishments. About 20 million Americans have insurance that might otherwise have been unaffordable, and the law has cost much less than anticipated. But one senior administration official thinks the Affordable Care Act has fallen short. His name: Barack Obama.
The Affordable Care Act hasn’t just cut the ranks of uninsured from over 16 million to 9 million, it has slowed rising health care costs, provided more preventative care, and started pushing ideas like paying more for drugs that are more effective, rather than just newer—an idea that terrifies Big Pharma.
Also impressive is what the law has not done. Republicans who derisively labeled the program Obamacare said it would cost jobs and wreck the federal budget. Yet the economy has added more than 14 million jobs since Mr. Obama signed the measure, and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the law has cost $157 billion, or one-quarter less than was forecast in 2010.
Which absolutely will not stop Republicans from continuing to act as if health care prices never rose a penny before the ACA, people have been torn away from there most favorite person in the world—their insurance agent, and those death panels are still lurking just out of sight, waiting for grandma.
Frank Bruni wrote a whole bit on the shifting color of Trump’s hair.
But less frequently observed is how much its hue changes, and I don’t mean from one year to another. I mean from one day to the next, in more incremental and mesmerizing ways, to a point where no two observers can agree on what to call it.
Yeah, okay. Nothing to write about this week, Frank?
Nicholas Kristof has a heartbreaking story of a young girl brutalized by drug gangs, and the US immigration policy that’s just as brutal.
Elena was 11 years old when a gang member in her home country, Honduras, told her to be his girlfriend.
“I had to say yes,” Elena, now 14, explained. “If I had said no, they would have killed my entire family.”
… her duties as a gang member’s girlfriend entailed working as a drug courier and a lookout, as well as intimacies that she didn’t want to discuss. At this point in our conversation, her mother and younger sister began crying.
After years of such brutality, Elena and her family finally fled this year when the gang threatened to kill them so as to seize their home
It’s an important story. Read it if your stomach is up to it on a Sunday morning.
Peter Wehner wonders if, post-Trump, the GOP can ever be the “party of Lincoln” again
For my entire adult life I have listened to the invective leveled against the Republican Party by liberals: It is a party sustained by racist appeals, composed of haters and conspiracy nuts, indifferent to the plight of the poor and the weak, anti-woman.
I have repeatedly denied those charges, publicly and forcefully. The broad indictment, the unfair generalizations, were caricature and calumny, the product of the fevered imagination of the left. Then along came Donald J. Trump, who seemed to embody every awful charge made against the Republican Party.
Wehner hasn’t just denied those accusations, he’s been in denial, because a lot of what Trump represents has been manifest in the party for decades in only slightly more subtle form.
For many on the left, explaining what happened is simple: The Republican Party has always been this way, and Mr. Trump is the logical and inevitable culmination of what the Republican Party has represented for decades. He is the ugly face of an ugly party.
Yup. And a heap of “mostly honorable individuals working to advance an agenda they believed was in the national interest” whitewashing doesn’t make it less true.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam teamed up for a message about the way to cure “Trumpism”
When Donald Trump accepts the Republican nomination on Thursday in Cleveland, it will represent a stunning moment in American politics — the triumph of a raw populism, embodied by a shameless demagogue, over both the official establishment and the official ideology of a major political party.
That’s not populism, and I wish Huey Long was here to talk to you about it. And anyway, a good chunk of this article has two problems: First, it’s loaded with Douthat and Salam doing exactly what Trump does so often—extolling their abilities to see the future, future, future…
We didn’t see Trump’s apotheosis coming. But in our 2008 book, “Grand New Party,” we pointed out that despite its “party of the rich” reputation, the Republican Party increasingly depended on mostly white working-class support, even as its policy agenda was increasingly unresponsive to working-class voters’ problems and concerns.
The second problem is that the NYT did something to the fancify formatting of this article that made it almost impossible to read using either of the browsers I employ. So … good luck if you try it, on several fronts.
Angelica Rogers has a piece that I’m not going to do much to abbreviate.
When I saw a photograph in my Twitter feed last Thursday of a protester holding a flag in Union Square, it was difficult to look away from the flag’s blocky, capitalized type. “A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday.” It shouted the words so matter-of-factly that I felt myself physically flinch.
I’m not going further because this piece is all visual. Go looking at the moving, disturbing, unflinching images.
Noah Feldman tries to instruct Newt Gingrich. Which … foolish mortal! Do you perceive that the Newtster knows all?
Fortunately, no one is going to follow Newt Gingrich’s unconstitutional and un-American plan for an inquisition to “test every person here who is of a Muslim background” and deport the ones who “believe in Shariah.”
You think so? I expect this to be part of Trump’s campaign rhetoric from here on out.
Put simply, for believing Muslims, Shariah is the ideal realization of divine justice — a higher law reflecting God’s will.
Muslims have a wide range of different beliefs about what Shariah requires in practice. And all agree that humans are imperfect interpreters of God’s will. But to ask a faithful Muslim if he or she “believes in” Shariah is essentially to ask if he or she accepts God’s word. In effect, Mr. Gingrich was proposing to deport all Muslims who consider themselves religious believers.
That outcome would be exactly the one Newt, Trump, and their followers are looking for. Hey, they might learn something from this article after all.