In the midst of a lot of bad news for Trump from the (incomplete) Paul Manafort sentencing to the selfies with the rub-and-tug former spa owner, there’s always other news.
Ed Kilgore/New York magazine:
Democrats Aren’t Cultural ‘Extremists’, They’ve Moved With the Country
I sympathize with Douthat’s plight. For years, he advocated for the Republican Party to identify with the economic and cultural outlook and interests of the white working-class voters who were rapidly becoming the GOP’s electoral base. Then Trump came along like a nightmare version of Douthat’s vision, offering the white working-class not bigger child tax credits or health care reform, but raw racist appeals, virulent xenophobia, and empty anti-Washington (“Drain the Swamp”) demagoguery. No wonder Douthat is furious with Democrats for failing to sponsor some sort of “cultural centrism;” his own party and its visigothic leader have raised culture war to the raison d’etre of politics.
Any residual doubt about the position of the two parties on cultural change has largely been resolved by demographics. The Democratic Party is ever-increasingly diverse in race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and every other dimension that threatens cultural (and for that matter, economic) privilege, while the Republican Party is ever-increasingly monochromatic, placing nearly all its bets on resistance to change. Over time, to quote Sam Cooke, a “change is gonna come,” and it makes no sense for traditionalists like Douthat to expect the political agent of that change to hold back the tide for his benefit.
WaPo:
Manafort’s ‘mind-boggling’ 47-month sentence prompts debate over judicial system’s ‘blatant inequities
Yet, as a federal judge handed down his sentence in jam-packed Alexandria, Va., courtroom Thursday, and observers digested the judge’s decision — 47 months — Manafort’s case was immediately perceived as a high-profile instance of the justice system working one way for a wealthy, well-connected man, while working in another, harsher, way for indigent defendants facing lesser crimes.
“Paul Manafort’s lenient 4-year sentence — far below the recommended 20 years despite extensive felonies and post-conviction obstruction — is a reminder of the blatant inequities in our justice system that we all know about, because they reoccur every week in courts across America,” said Ari Melber, a legal analyst for NBC News, in a Thursday-night tweet.
Don’t forget Judge Jackson will add some years (maybe 10) to the sentence this week. Manafort isn’t done yet.
Sally Kohn/USA Today:
The right's revealing hypocrisy over Rep. Ilhan Omar's comments is painful to watch
Yes, some of Ilhan Omar’s statements evoked anti-Semitic tropes, but she apologized, explained herself and is learning. You’d think those on the right who routinely suggest the left is too quick shout about political correctness and read the worst intentions between the lines of every utterance would be the ones rushing to give Omar the benefit of the doubt. But the benefit of the doubt is, like everything else in the United States today, subject to partisanship. We only give the benefit of the doubt to our own side.
The fact is that all sides tend to silence legitimate criticism of their positions not by responding on substance to the critiques but rather smearing the character of those doing the criticizing. I’ll cop to this, for instance, in the case of marriage equality — accusing, for instance, people who didn’t want to bake cakes for gay weddings of being bigoted homophobes. Maybe some were, and maybe some weren’t — but pushing that blanket accusation to the fore served to shame the other side and silence debate, rather than encouraging it. Nuance is dying in America, and we’re all killing it. We now all prefer trolling to thoughtful debate.
Jason Sattler/USA Today:
Democrats have their 2020 rallying cry and it goes way beyond 'dump Trump'
The historic 'For The People Act' unites Democrats behind popular proposals to expand voting and improve democracy. The goal: Never another Trump.
Restricting the right to vote has been a pillar of those who have worked to keep America from becoming a more equal nation since our founding. As a result, America has one of the worst voter turnout rates in the rich world.
The bill aims to change that with popular electoral reforms like national early voting, making Election Day a holiday, independent redistricting commissions and automatic voter registration, which has already spread to 14 states and Washington, D.C. since it was first enacted in Oregon less than four years ago. In early results, Oregon’s efforts to register any voter who comes into contact with Oregon’s department of motor vehicles have both increased voter turnout and made the electorate “more representative of the state’s population.”
The "For The People Act" also takes aim special interest domination of our politics by adapting Rep. John Sarbanes’ revolutionary public finance proposal to empower small donors. The act would match their contributions 6-to-1 for candidates who participate in the system. This could help people like Katie Porter run for office, said Rep. Katie Porter. A single mom of three, Porter was one of the record 102 women elected to the House last fall.
EJ Dionne/WaPo:
How will we repair our democracy after Trump? H.R. 1 offers a clue.
As with any bill, the question needs to be asked: Is it addressing real, widely recognized problems, or is it more of a hobby horse reflecting concerns that may be valid but are hardly front-burner?
Fred Wertheimer, the veteran political activist who helped develop H.R. 1, offered as clear an answer as I have heard about the genuine urgency of fixing our democracy.
“We have a campaign finance system we haven’t seen since the Gilded Age,” he said. “We have efforts at voter suppression we haven’t seen since the days of segregation. We have gerrymandering at a level we have never seen before. And we have a president who raises financial abuse and corruption issues we haven’t seen in generations.”
Now, tell me again: Why should we ignore what the House is up to here and just go back to the latest incremental development in the Michael Cohen story?
Helen Branswell/STATNews:
The nightmarish tale of what happened to a child who wasn’t vaccinated
A 6-year-old boy from Oregon who had never received a single vaccine got a cut on his forehead while playing on his family’s farm in 2017. The wound was cleaned and sutured at home.
Six days later, doctors were treating the child for tetanus, an enormously painful, sometimes fatal infection that is caused by bacterial spores found in the soil and that is completely preventable with vaccine. It was the state’s first pediatric tetanus case in more than 30 years.
The boy did survive. But after a weeks-long, gut-wrenching medical marathon — which cost well over $800,000 — his parents refused to allow the hospital to give him a full course of vaccines to protect him against tetanus. Nor would they allow doctors to vaccinate their son against measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, polio, and a range of other diseases that are dangerous for and can be lethal to young children, despite the fact the team spent a great deal of time trying to persuade them of their benefits.
David Byler/WaPo:
Everyone is underestimating Trump. It could hurt Democrats and Republicans alike.
We live in an era of horribly misinformed political decision-making. In 2015, the Trump-skeptical Republican elite believed that Trump would naturally fade over the course of the primary, so they remained split between mostly implausible presidential candidates (looking at you, Jeb), and Trump won. That same year, major Democrats cleared the field for Hillary Clinton, who turned out to be the second most disliked presidential candidate ever and one of the few Democrats capable of losing an open race to Donald Trump. In Alabama’s special Senate election in 2017, Trump helped scandal-ridden Republican Sen. Luther Strange make it to a primary runoff with Republican Roy Moore, not realizing that Moore would win that runoff, subject America to a long race where the Republican was an (alleged) pedophile and ultimately lose the general.
Most of these mistakes were based on bad political calculations. People overestimated Clinton’s strength, the demographic resiliency of the Democratic coalition or Moore’s weakness, and their plans fell apart. And both Republicans and Democrats are in danger of making new mistakes by underestimating Trump’s strength in 2020.
The conventional wisdom on Trump’s reelection odds are much too bearish. Trump has a better chance of winning again than many pundits seem to think. And both Democrats and Republicans need to take Trump seriously and recalibrate their decision process or risk facing serious consequence
David and I agree, however, that Trump is not the favorite. I know he thinks that because I asked him.
And then: