“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Trevor Ti,,: The NSA can’t surveil Americans’ every phone call – at least for now
Today is a landmark day for Americans’ privacy: you can finally make a telephone call in the United States without the NSA automatically keeping a record of who you called, when, and for how long. It’s been more than a decade since that was the case. Now the only question is: will it last?
After the Senate voted down an extension of the Section 215 of the Patriot Act in a rare Sunday evening session, the dreaded law authorizing the mass surveillance of Americans expired at the first stroke of midnight and, with that stroke, one of the NSA’s most controversial and invasive surveillance program exposed by Edward Snowden was reportedly shut down. But what powers the NSA will have by the end of the week – the details of which is still up in the air and changing by the hour – is anyone’s guess. [..]
The rhetoric about the NSA in the last week from surveillance state supporters has been so dishonest, it’s bordered on farcical, so there’s not much hope that its defenders won’t simply plant an 11th-hour knife in the back of NSA reformers despite their apparently new-found willingness to pass the USA Freedom Act.
Paul Krugman: That 1914 Feeling
U.S. officials are generally cautious about intervening in European policy debates. The European Union is, after all, an economic superpower in its own right – far too big and rich for America to have much direct influence – led by sophisticated people who should be able to manage their own affairs. So it’s startling to learn that Jacob Lew, the Treasury secretary, recently warned Europeans that they had better settle the Greek situation soon, lest there be a destructive “accident.”
But I understand why Mr. Lew said what he did. A forced Greek exit from the euro would create huge economic and political risks, yet Europe seems to be sleepwalking toward that outcome. So Mr. Lew was doing his best to deliver a wake-up call. [..]
The thing is, it’s pretty clear what the substance of a deal between Greece and its creditors would involve. Greece simply isn’t going to get a net inflow of money.
New York Times Editorial Board:
Who’s Willing to Fight for Iraq?
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s recent assessment of Iraqi security forces was impolitic and true, and rarely voiced by senior officials. After the devastating loss of the Iraqi city of Ramadi to the Islamic State in May, he told CNN that while Iraqi troops vastly outnumbered the brutal extremists, they “just showed no will to fight.” [..]
After the Ramadi debacle exposed more weaknesses in the regular Iraqi security forces, American officials say they will have to rely more heavily on a combination of elite Iraqi units, Kurdish forces, the Sunni tribes and some Shiite militias to fight ISIS.
The Iraqi state has been fragile since the Americans overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003, in part because the Shiites have excluded Sunnis from a fair share of the country’s political and economic power and fostered grievances that extremists exploit. Now, under the new threat of ISIS, the politically dysfunctional state is under more strain, and may be in greater danger than ever of splitting apart into Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni sectors. That would make defeating Islamic State forces even harder.
Robert Reich: State of Disaster
As extreme weather marked by tornadoes and flooding continues to sweep across Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has requested — and President Obama has granted — federal help.
I don’t begrudge Texas billions of dollars in disaster relief. After all, we’re all part of America. When some of us are in need, we all have a duty to respond.
But the flow of federal money poses a bit of awkwardness for the Lone Star State.
After all, just over a month ago hundreds of Texans decided that a pending Navy Seal/Green Beret joint training exercise was really an excuse to take over the state and impose martial law. And they claimed the Federal Emergency Management Agency was erecting prison camps, readying Walmart stores as processing centers for political prisoners.
There are nut cases everywhere, but Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott added to that particular outpouring of paranoia by ordering the Texas State Guard to monitor the military exercise. “It is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed upon,” he said. In other words, he’d protect Texans from this federal plot.
Rep. Sandy Levin: Is TPP the Most Progressive Trade Agreement in History? Not If You Need Access to Affordable Medicines
In 2007, House Democrats insisted on changes to four pending trade agreements with Peru, Panama, Colombia and South Korea. Those changes, among other things, created the most progressive medicines provisions in U.S. trade agreements. Unfortunately, TPP is currently failing to live up to that standard.
Millions of people in developing countries currently lack access to life-saving medicines. According to an expert commissioned by the United Nations, improving access to existing medicines could save 10 million lives each year.
Generic medicines can improve access by dramatically lowering costs. For example, a decade ago, a year of antiretroviral treatment for HIV infections cost approximately $10,000 — roughly two or three times the per capita income in Peru. Once generic alternatives became available, the average cost of treatment dropped dramatically. Today, the cost can be as low as $200 per patient in developing nations with access to these low-cost generic drugs.
Gary Younge: The US can’t keep track of how many people its police kill. We’re counting because lives matter
The question of who counts and whom is counted is not simply a matter of numbers. It’s also about power; the less of it you have the less say you have in what makes it to the ledger and what form it takes when it gets there. Collecting information, particularly about people, demands both the authority to gather data and the capacity to keep and transmit it. Those who have both the authority and the capacity need to feel that the people on whom they are keeping tabs on matter.
The Guardian has, through its new investigative project The Counted, developed the capacity to count the number of people killed by the police. We think it matters; the debate that has ensued on the issue of police killings and has been forced on to the national agenda through popular protest will be better informed for having easily accessible data.
We think those who have been killed matter; a handful of these deaths make national headlines while the rest barely make a ripple beyond their own families and communities. The data is important. But they are not statistics; they are people. To record their deaths, particularly when the circumstances of those deaths are in dispute, marks a small but important step in the attempt to restore their humanity – albeit posthumously.
Ray Charles Robinson (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004), known by his shortened stage name Ray Charles, was an American musician. He was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records. He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums. While with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company. Frank Sinatra called Charles “the only true genius in show business.”
On this day in 1980, 
The Cable News Network was launched at 5:00 p.m. EST on Sunday June 1, 1980. After an introduction by Ted Turner, the husband and wife team of David Walker and Lois Hart anchored the first newscast. Burt Reinhardt, the then executive vice president of CNN, hired most of CNN’s first 200 employees, including the network’s first news anchor, Bernard Shaw.
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