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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The price we pay for not funding services [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-07
New York Times:
As Floods Hit, Key Roles Were Vacant at Weather Service Offices in Texas Some experts say staff shortages might have complicated forecasters’ ability to coordinate responses with local emergency management officials. In an interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending. “Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Mr. Kelly said. Asked if people might reconsider in light of the catastrophe, he said, “I don’t know.”
It’s a complicated sitch. People who won’t move camps away from flood prone areas, where flash floods have killed people before. Folks who won’t pay more taxes to get better public safety services. Cuts to the National Weather Service.
The end result is that people died and will continue to die. But what are the locals willing to do about it?
x It sure looks like it was Texas officials who failed to warn residents in a timely matter. KXAN-TV in Austin found a 4+ hour gap between the NWS flood warning & the first local govt warnings.
https://t.co/fnMRyKanSX https://t.co/h0zYgKVJ7O pic.twitter.com/DKqr5xh6lD — Jennifer Schulze (@NewsJennifer) July 5, 2025
Jeff Flake/New York Times:
In Today’s G.O.P., Voting Your Conscience Is Disqualifying Last weekend, Senator Thom Tillis announced that he would not seek re-election, and delivered a message that echoed my own. “It’s become increasingly evident,” he said, “that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.” His decision underscores what I feared in 2017: The fever still hasn’t broken. In today’s Republican Party, voting your conscience is essentially disqualifying.
x It really is an insult to the family's of those who died to try to silence an honest discussion about disaster response capacity with threats and verbal abuse against those who are raising it.
https://t.co/4DUI48Rshr — Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) July 6, 2025
Liam Kerr/Welcome Stack:
946: Why Elon Will Fail Politics is hard tbh The only time my writing made its way into an academic journal, it was to answer the question “Why will Elon Musk fail at creating a third political party?” Elon announced the new “America Party” yesterday, and the piece appeared way back in the Fall 2018 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. So, technically, it wasn’t about Elon specifically. But it was about the exact kind of misplaced confidence he’s now putting on full display. The question “How can philanthropists influence politics?” is important. The answer often lies in how different politics is from both business and traditional philanthropy. You won’t be surprised to learn that the best attitude for successful business people pivoting to politics is not “sounds easy”.
x *taps the sign*
30% of American jobs do not offer health benefits, and 49% of employed workers can't afford healthcare without going into debt.
Every American is a vulnerable American when healthcare is restricted, tied to employment, and for-profit.
https://t.co/QBRavpYfOD — Melanie D'Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) July 6, 2025
G Elliott Morris/Strength in Numbers:
Medicaid paperwork requirements don’t work Usually, I talk about political polls and election results in this newsletter. This week, I wanted to share a story on hard data about Medicaid, and the impact of additional document requirements. I saw the following chart in Paul Krugman’s Substack this week. I posted it on social media and it got a lot of attention — I think because most people do not realize how many children receive Medicaid: But the big point of the chart is not about the kids. It’s that the vast majority of Medicaid recipients are not non-working adults. According to the Census Bureau, only 3% of the dollars paid out by Medicaid in 2022 went to people who weren’t working long term. That is important because this is the group the Republicans say they are going after with their huge Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Yes, the tiny pink sliver at the bottom of the graph. But the policy change they are enacting will end up depriving a lot of people in the green bubbles of health care, too. The policy changes are detailed here, and include a lot of additional burdensome paperwork requirements both for people who are of working age, and for families. That means kids are likely going to lose health care, too…. Meanwhile, a new Kaiser Family Foundation report shows Medicaid has an 83% favorability rating.
x "A nation best prepares for a crisis not by ignoring it and hoping it never happens, but by anticipating it and planning for it."
On May 19, 2026, I wrote about the impact that cuts to weather forecasting would have on disaster response. @TheAtlantic
https://t.co/diONC2oJkz https://t.co/IFvUjfowkH — Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) July 6, 2025
Noah Smith/Noahpinion:
How to take our country back The America you grew up in is under attack from technologies that we ourselves invented. I remember a moment during the 2012 presidential campaign, when a woman sobbed on camera and cried “I want my America back!”. It bewildered me at the time; as far as I could tell, the America of 2012 was the same America I grew up in — unruly, anti-intellectual, independent to a fault, but kind to their neighbors, hard-working, fiercely protective of their freedoms, and generally accepting of those who were different. Like many others, I shrugged and concluded that the woman who was sobbing on camera was simply upset about the fact that the President was Black. Thirteen years later, I’m still not sure exactly what that woman was upset about. But I definitely feel that the shoe is on the other foot. Today I look out at my own country and I feel like an intense sense of loss and longing for something that may no longer exist. The shared values that I felt permeated and undergirded my culture haven’t vanished completely, but it feels like among a large segment of the populace, they’ve been replaced with politicized anger. There is data to support this feeling. Algan et al. (2025) use AI to analyze the sentiment of tweets — both a random sample of tweets, and the tweets of a few hundred of the most prominent political shouters in America (whom they label “partisan citizens”). They find that from around 2016-2019, Americans of both political stripes became much angrier online:
Errol Louis/New York:
How Zohran Mamdani Turned Youth and Inexperience Into Assets This was the David vs. Goliath election. A few hours before the polls closed Tuesday, Saman Waquad, president of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, mentioned to me in passing that Zohran Mamdani visited a head-spinning 135 mosques last week alone, marking the third time he had made the whirlwind tour through Islamic houses of worship. I thought immediately about the moment in a recent televised debate when I asked Cuomo why, during more than ten years as governor, he had never once made a public visit to a mosque. “I believe I have,” he answered, though he couldn’t remember where, when, or with whom. Writing off the city’s 750,000 Muslims, we now know, is not a politically wise thing to do. “The Democratic Party is having to learn the hard way that other groups’ interests need to be taken into consideration, if not prioritized,” Waquad told me. “Muslims are a huge voting block in New York City. And I think the Democratic Party is going to see that they need to pay a little bit more attention to that voting block.” An overlapping group of 450,000 South Asians, not all of whom are Muslim, also got special attention from Mamdani, who released ads in Urdu, Hindi, and Bangla to reach Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi voters.
x To avoid conflicts, I wouldn't even let Obama refinance his family home when I was his ethics czar
Now Trump is hoovering in hundreds of millions in violation of the law!
That's a threat to our national security as I discussed @MSNBC pic.twitter.com/XOOnyc4H2B — Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) July 6, 2025
David Shuster covers an Elizabeth Warren critique of Trump’s economic agenda:
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