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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: But it's about more than the guns pt. 2 [1]
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Date: 2023-05-09
Karen Attiah of The Washington Post writes about the sense of loss and “social deaths” of the survivors of the mass shooting at Allen Premium Outlets in Allen, Texas, this past Saturday that killed nine people (including the shooter).
For me, as a South Dallas kid, going to the outlet malls on the weekends with my parents and siblings was always a treat, and Allen Premium Outlets was one of our favorites. The mall has a mix of high- to medium-end stores, a testament to the growing economic power of the increasingly diverse populations in North Texas. Just weeks ago, I was at the outlets buying clothes for a trip. I had planned to go back to buy a pair of jeans. On Sunday, the same sidewalks I would have walked on were now stained with blood. Had I returned home earlier and gone straight to the mall that Saturday, the blood could have been mine. [...] I was witnessing in real time the variety of social deaths that don’t get captured in victim counts or statistics. How do you capture the social death of someone who will be forever traumatized by seeing children bleed out on a sidewalk? How do you capture the social injury to a child who is now too afraid to go to a mall to hang out with her friends? Or, if the Allen outlets close for good, the loss of a place for families to spend time together?
Heather Digby Parton of Salon writes about the dystopian American gun culture.
So we have three mass shooters in the course of a week who seem to be motivated to kill a large number of people for a variety of reasons. According to Republican politicians, the common thread is that mental illness is causing all of this bloodshed or it's an act of God and there's nothing we can do about it… [...] Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, is correct about the fact that Texas has a 73% higher gun death rate than California so Abbott is being disingenuous when he makes that claim. There is simply no doubt that states with looser gun laws have higher rates of gun violence. And the gun laws are getting looser by the day with both Texas and Florida recently just letting their gun-freak flags fly and allowing unlicensed carry pretty much everywhere. As it happens, Texas also has very high rates of mental illness and the lowest rate of access to mental health care in the country so he needs to stop cutting mental health services in the state if wants to have any credibility on that issue...It's obvious that mental illness is universal across all humanity. Yet we are the only country that has this problem with constant mass shootings. It is intensely frustrating to have to make this point over and over again but there's no choice. An average 6th grader can look at those facts and determine that while we all have mental illness in our societies the reason only America is awash is gun violence is because we are awash in guns. No other country is suicidal enough to allow this.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times points to the cowardice of some business organizations and think tanks in dealing with the debt limit and a possible default under Obama and now.
Few things about the looming crisis should come as a surprise. Anyone expecting a MAGAfied Republican Party, most of whose supporters don’t believe that Joe Biden was legitimately elected, not to weaponize the debt limit — a strange feature of U.S. budgeting that allows Congress to pass spending bills, then refuse to pay for them — was delusional. Nor am I surprised that the Biden administration hasn’t yet adopted any of the possible strategies through which the debt ceiling might be circumvented. Many of the economic objections to such strategies are just wrong. But there are legal and political risks to a debt end-run that could roil markets, and I understand the administration’s reluctance to show its hand until the last minute. One thing that has come as a surprise, however, is the cowardice of the self-appointed guardians of fiscal responsibility. I’m talking about the various groups — business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, supposedly nonpartisan think tanks like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — that played a very prominent role in the Obama years, successfully convincing much of the media and political establishment that debt, rather than a sluggish recovery, was the biggest economic issue facing America. The debt obsession, in turn, helped keep unemployment much higher for much longer than necessary, in effect costing America millions of jobs.
Laura Weiss and Paul M. Krawzak of Roll Call interview some current and former congressional aides that negotiated the 2011 raise in the debt ceiling.
Former aides noted the balancing act that McCarthy will have to pull off — and fast — to avert a debt limit crisis, given the House’s thin GOP majority and the number of hardline conservatives who would likely reject a negotiated agreement with more moderate deficit reduction measures. Brendan Buck, who was a spokesman for then-Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, in 2011, said that McCarthy will have to weigh a need to keep his conference read in on talks so they don’t feel surprised or betrayed in the end with a need to avoid undermining negotiations that are typically kept quiet. He said that McCarthy expended political capital uniting most of his conference behind the GOP debt limit bill and that it raised expectations among Republicans, even though any deal with Democrats will likely involve only modest deficit reduction. “There’s no question that he is going to face some level of blowback on the final deal,” said Buck, who also worked for Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis. “The question is how much can he cut that off ahead of time and make people feel like this is a win rather than a loss.”
Kyle Pope of Columbia Journalism Review says that political journalism remains stuck on the question of how much media time and space should be devoted to Number 45.
The question of how, or whether, to cover the candidacy of Donald J. Trump is among the most circular of our industry. It swings back and forth between those who say he’s newsworthy and warrants the scrutiny and those who say he shouldn’t be platformed, given his dangerous record of lies and incitement. What’s not said, at least not enough, is that Trump will be on CNN on Wednesday night because Trump and the national media—still, despite everything we have learned—are convinced they desperately need each other. Trump, clearly, relishes the attention and the legitimacy he’ll get from being treated as a serious candidate only weeks after he was arrested and indicted in a New York courtroom. He may even enjoy the irony of appearing on CNN, a network he has long derided and threatened and undercut, as payback to Fox News, which seems to have strayed from its usual obedience and is in the middle of a meltdown following the Dominion Voting Systems verdict. [...] All of this marks the intensification of a battle inside journalism about how to cover a candidate and a party that have threatened American democracy. Younger journalists don’t share the caution of their bosses, and are likely to rebel. But so far, the fight is an internal one. Ask a relative who lives outside the media bubble about “objectivity” and you’ll be met with a blank stare. We never come out looking great when we become the story. The debate can move forward only when we stop sniping at each other, and start thinking about how to connect with our audiences. What do they care about? How do we report stories that resonate with them? How can we convey the complexity and the nuance of the moment we’re in?
Alicia Wanless for Lawfare writes an interesting—and lengthy— article on the need to find alternatives to simply fighting back against disinformation … and a English king named Charles.
Democracies around the world are backsliding into authoritarianism. And the problem of degrading the information environment is central to the slippage. Lies and influence operations are part of the authoritarian playbook. The trouble is that control of the information space in the name of controlling disinformation is also part of the authoritarian playbook. So the shift toward authoritarianism manifests itself not only with the government propagating its own lies but also with governments exerting increased control over their corner of the information environment at the same time as trust in public institutions is degraded by information pollution. This trend is happening in India, Hungary, and Ghana, once a bastion of democracy in Africa. Even well-established democracies such as the United States are slipping into decline in attempting to address problems like disinformation and foreign interference. Many of the desired interventions, such as banning bad actors and disinformation from social media platforms, resemble authoritarian approaches—albeit all done in private spaces where the First Amendment does not apply. It’s an easy slope to slip down, in any number of different directions. Yet it isn’t the only option. Finding an alternative approach requires looking at the problem differently. Current understanding of the information environment is hyperfocused on specific threats, such as disinformation undermining U.S. election processes and officials or threat actors like Russia. This focus, in turn, emphasizes responses that aim to counter threats, with little understanding or consideration of the impact those interventions have on the broader information environment. These responses include measures like banning the use of deceptive media and “deepfakes” in advance of an election or prohibiting election officials from spreading disinformation. Often these measures are limited to foreign actors as if their activities in the information environment can easily be isolated from those of other domestic entities. In this problem-focused approach, an attempt to address issues present in the wider system—the space where people and machines process information to make sense of the world—goes missing.
Rachel M. Cohen of Vox points to polling that independent voters in three possible presidential battlegrounds are confused about the Democrats’ position on abortion rights.
Polls conducted over the last few months indicate that abortion remains top of mind for voters, who seem to have grown even more supportive of abortion rights than they were before the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturned the constitutional right to an abortion last June. “I don’t think Democrats have fully processed that this country is now 10 to 15 percent more pro-choice than it was before Dobbs in state after state and national data,” pollster Celinda Lake said recently. But there is one worrying sign for Democrats in the polling data. Over the past two weeks, for example, two new national polls and data from three focus groups conducted in swing states (Ohio, North Carolina, and Michigan) indicated that significant numbers of independent voters remain confused and skeptical about where Republicans and Democrats stand on protecting abortion rights. The upside for Democrats is they may have substantial room to grow with these voters.
Levent Gültekin writes for the Turkish online media site Diken (translated by the French site World Crunch) about the whispers that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may go the way of Number 45 and Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro and challenge the results of Turkey’s presidential election this coming Sunday.
There’s a Turkish saying about how the words and sentences about a certain topic are worse than the topic itself. In other words, talking about something may be worse than it actually happening. The topic that I’m going to write about now is a little like that. And yet, the problem doesn't go away by not talking or writing about it. Süleyman Soylu, Turkey’s Interior Minister, recently compared the upcoming May 14 elections to the coup attempt of June 15, 2016. Can you comprehend this? The man who will be in charge of the security of the ballots is presenting the elections as a coup attempt before anyone has gone to vote. [...] Let me stop beating around the bush and say what I really want to say. I have talked to many people in recent days including retired politicians and bureaucrats. All of them are worried about civil conflict on election night. They are worried by the whispers from behind the scenes regarding some unlawful steps the government may take on election night.
Finally today, Ruth Michaelson and Deniz Barış Narlı of the Guardian talk with Turkish opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu ahead of the Turkish elections this coming Sunday.
“I live like you, I have a humble life like yours,” Kılıçdaroğlu told a field packed with people waving Turkish flags and others bearing the image of the founder of modern Turkey and the CHP, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Kılıçdaroğlu, who presents himself to voters as Erdoğan’s arch-opposite, held up his hands in a heart shape, his signature gesture. He prides himself on running a campaign that avoids the kind of barbs Erdoğan has become notorious for, claiming he would decline to live in the presidential palace and would move into a more modest premises that belonged to Atatürk if he wins. A member of Turkey’s Alevi religious minority, Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy is considered boundary-breaking. His ascent to presidential candidate has taken decades, galvanised through a 280-mile (450km) march from Ankara to Istanbul in 2017 to protest against arrests following a 2016 coup attempt. Now heading a six-party opposition coalition, he has also worked to garner support from Turkey’s marginalised Kurdish community, which resulted in him being given a hero’s welcome in Kurdish-majority towns. The opposition leader holds a narrow lead in the polls, which suggest the vote may advance to a second round later in the month. Despite having lost several elections as leader of the CHP, he has become the face of the opposition’s strongest chance to unseat Erdoğan in a generation, whose popularity has dipped amid rampant inflation and a deepening cost of living crisis.
Try to have the best possible day, everyone!
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