“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 Timm: Iran deal supporters have more cred. But opponents have the media-savvy
The true nature of the debate over the Iran nuclear deal announced last month is slowly coming into focus. Those who favor it are are backed by dozens of nuclear scientists and arms control experts, while opponents consist almost exclusively of bellwether politicians mugging for the camera and playing into the fears of the constituents they have whipped into a terrified frenzy.
That’s where the ever intensifying debate surrounding the nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran now sits, as a furious lobbying campaign – estimated to cost upwards of $40m – tries to buy enough votes in Congress to override the president and scuttle the historic deal. [..]
It’s entirely predictable, yet demoralizing, that actual experts are being largely ignored in the public debate over the opinions of politicians who are being fed talking points by lobbyists. Even Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of silencing Iranian experts in his own country’s intelligence agencies who are in favor of the deal.
Jill Richardson: Big Ag Spars with the First Amendment
The First Amendment may be inconvenient to some people at times, but it’s still the law of the land. Case in point: so-called “ag-gag laws.”
These are laws in Idaho, Montana, Utah, North Dakota, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa that prohibit people from taking photos or videos of farms without permission. They’re designed to prevent the exposure of cruelty to animals on factory farms.
According to the proponents of such regulations, mistreating animals is only a problem when people talk about it. Well, if the freedom of expression that the First Amendment protects is now optional, here’s what I’d like to get rid of: flimsy rhetoric intended to fool the public.
Efforts to hoodwink us all into tolerating animal abuse extends beyond abused livestock.
The CIA’s torture-era leadership won’t repent. Even after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report saying in no uncertain terms that the CIA had tortured its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that torture never elicited any actionable intelligence that saved American lives, Bush-era CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and several of their underlings announced plans to release a book justifying torture.
They intend to repeat a lie over and over again in this book: that torture worked. They hope that the American people are either so gullible or so stupid that they’ll believe it. It’s up to the rest of us to ensure that our government swears off committing this crime against humanity.
I know that these former intelligence leaders are lying because I worked with them at the CIA. When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.
Isaiah J. Poole: Those Republican Spending Caps Are Costing Us Jobs
The case for ending the federal budget spending caps known as the “sequester” has just gotten a whole lot stronger. It’s all about jobs.
At the request of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is currently running as a Democratic presidential candidate, the Congressional Budget Office this week released a letter that said that if these spending caps were eliminated, the economy would be able to add as many as 1.4 million additional jobs in 2016 and 2017. [..]
What would having up to 1.4 million additional jobs mean to the economy? Some insight into the answer came Wednesday from the Labor Department’s latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey – the “JOLTS” report in Washington-speak that many economic experts say Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen considers more valuable than the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report. That report said that in June there were 5.2 million job openings, while June’s unemployment report indicated there were 8.3 million people looking for work. That’s roughly two jobs for every three job seekers.
Robert Greenwald: Is Schumer Setting Us on Another Path to War?
The framework agreement that the U.S. and its international partners reached with Iran that blocks Tehran’s pathways to building a nuclear bomb is barely a week old, yet the usual suspects have already denounced it as a “bad deal.”
To the opposition of the Iran deal, President Obama recently stated, “Let’s not mince words: The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy and some form of war — maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon.” And now as the President is trying to broker the historic deal, Sen. Charles Schumer – who also voted for the Iraq war – is sabotaging the Iran deal, claiming the United States should call for a “better deal.”
Schumer was wrong about Iraq and is wrong about the Iran deal.
The reality is that those calling for “a better deal” have never offered a viable plan on how to get one. Opposing this deal and offering no alternative is putting us on the path to war, which we all know will come at a tremendous cost.
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