“Pondering 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.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
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New York Times Editorial: A Flawed Approach to Labeling Genetically Modified Food
The Senate is expected to vote as early as Thursday on a bill that would require businesses to label genetically modified foods. Unfortunately, it would allow companies to use confusing electronic codes for scanning instead of simple, clear labels.
This bill, a bipartisan compromise negotiated by Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, is being pushed through Congress because some lawmakers from farm states want to pre-empt a Vermont law that requires labeling for some genetically modified foods that went into effect on July 1 (Vermont is giving companies six months to comply) and to prevent other states from enacting similar laws. The Senate bill follows an failed effort in March to block state labeling laws. The House passed a bill last year that would pre-empt states from enforcing such laws. [..]
The biggest problem with the Senate bill is that — instead of requiring a simple label, as the Vermont law does — it would allow food companies to put the information in electronic codes that consumers would have to scan with smartphones or at scanners installed by grocery stores. The only reason to do this would be to make the information less accessible to the public.
Owen Jones: The war in Iraq was not a blunder or a mistake. It was a crime
Tony Blair is damned. We have seen establishment whitewashes in the past: from Bloody Sunday to Hillsborough, officialdom has repeatedly conspired to smother truth in the interests of the powerful. But not this time. The Chilcot inquiry was becoming a satirical byword for taking farcically long to execute a task; but Sir John will surely go down in history for delivering the most comprehensively devastating verdict on any modern prime minister.
Those of us who marched against the Iraq calamity can feel no vindication, only misery that we failed to prevent a disaster that robbed hundreds of thousands of lives – those of 179 British soldiers among them – and which injured, traumatised and displaced millions of people: a disaster that bred extremism on a catastrophic scale.
One legacy of Chilcot should be to encourage us to be bolder in challenging authority, in being sceptical of official claims, in standing firm against an aggressive agenda spun by the media. Lessons must be learned, the war’s supporters will now declare. Don’t let them get away with it. The lessons were obvious to many of us before the bombs started falling.
Jessica Valenti: Women hate Donald Trump, and he’s running out of time to fix it
There is no saving Donald Trump. Republicans will keep up their begrudging damage control campaign, of course, as their candidate continues to offend and alienate his way to November. But not even the most seasoned fixer will be able to mend the damage Trump has done to the group of voters he needs most of all: women. Especially when even the women in his own party are loathe to support him. [..]
Perhaps the biggest problem for Trump is his total unwillingness to repent for past sins. Everyone likes a redemption story, and conservative women have forgiven sexist behavior from men of the GOP before. But it’s hard to imagine Trump, who would rather lie and brag than reflect, showing the least bit of regret for his past treatment of and statements on women.
Without Republican women working en masse and with vigor to support him, it’s unlikely that Trump will close what’s expected to be the largest gender gap in voting history. Hiring a few experts won’t help, nor will a poised and affectionate daughter. Thank goodness.
Samuel Sinyangwe: Alton Sterling didn’t have to die. It’s time to address police violence
Another black man killed by police. On video. And at point blank range while he lay on the ground. By our count – I work with other activists to collect data on police violence – Alton Sterling was the 184th black person killed by police this year, a rate which has persisted at a near constant pace over the past several years. (According to the Guardian’s own count, Sterling is the 135th.) We know Alton should be alive, at home with his five children. And yet, here we are again.
Already, those with power and platform are working to justify his death, erase his humanity and exonerate his killers. Alton’s criminal history was reported just hours after his death, while the records of the two officers who killed him have yet to be released. And, due to Louisiana’s law enforcement officer’s bill of rights, the officers who killed Alton have up to 30 days to craft their version of events before being questioned in an administrative investigation – often the only path to holding officers accountable in a country where 99.9% of officers face no criminal punishment for killing civilians.
The system, in no uncertain terms, enables levels of police violence against our communities at rates unheard of in the developed world. Based on data reported by Mapping Police Violence, the rate of police homicides of black men in America last year – 15.7 per million population – surpasses the total homicide rates of England, France, Germany and even China.
Susan McGregor: Hillary Clinton’s private email use isn’t shocking – and that’s the problem
If there is any significant lesson to take away from the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email servers to conduct official – and sometimes classified – business, it is this: even if her actions were “extremely careless”, as director James Comey put it on Tuesday, they is also seem to be shockingly commonplace.
A May report from the Office of the Inspector General found that both Clinton and her predecessor as secretary of state, Colin Powell, made extensive use of non-governmental email systems during their tenures. And while the report blames “management weaknesses at the department” for poor information security and record keeping, it also tellingly affirms that such weaknesses to be “the case throughout the federal government”.
In other words, behaviors like Clinton’s questionable email handling seem to be the rule rather than the exception in a political and organizational culture that treats information security as an afterthought rather than a core competency. While it may be convenient to lambast Clinton for her potentially irresponsible use of private email, the reality is that her actions reflect a legislative environment that for decades has failed to act either thoughtfully or meaningfully on information security issues affecting everyone from the secretary of state to individual citizens.
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