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After the Texas mall massacre, I witnessed a different sort of death
After the Texas mall massacre, I witnessed a different sort of death, Karen Attiah, The Washington Post
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?
The Cowardice of the Deficit Scolds
The Cowardice of the Deficit Scolds, Paul Krugman, The New York Times
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.
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Trump and the TV time machine
Trump and the TV time machine, Kyle Pope, Columbia Journalism Review
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?
Jordan Neely, Tucker Carlson, and ‘rooting for the mob’ as America unravels
Jordan Neely, Tucker Carlson, and ‘rooting for the mob’ as America unravels, Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer,
But here’s what’s even scarier about the death of Jordan Neely: the rapid downward spiral of how Americans are judging and treating the people we don’t know, or the ones we pretend to know. A civil society truly depends on the kindness of strangers, and as our pandemic-fueled isolation rots into dangerous paranoia, with our politics at an 1861 level of distrust, we see the people around us not as neighbors but as targets for our rage. At the doorbell. In the parking lot. At the property line. And now in the underground melting pot of New York City.

[...]

We can’t bring Jordan Neely back, but we don’t have to live like this. The delayed justice of treating a homicide as a crime when the victim was a Black, homeless man would be a start. But we can also start taking seriously the handful of candidates — in elections as early as this month— who believe a mental health crisis in our cities means spending money on skilled responders and not more overtime for armed and poorly trained cops.

America’s newsrooms can also start asking themselves whether it’s the pursuit of clicks or just laziness that leads to printing stereotypes and police lies about homelessness or crime, rather than investigating the truth. And maybe it would help if all of us took a second to ask ourselves what we would have done on that F train on Monday. Even Tucker Carlson knew rooting for the mob “isn’t good for me.” But what it’s doing to America is much, much worse.
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Independents back abortion rights. They’re less sure Democrats do.
Independents back abortion rights. They’re less sure Democrats do., Rachel M. Cohen, Vox
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.
For the love of guns
For the love of guns, Heather Digby Parton, Salon
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.

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