“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.
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William Kennedy Smith and Jean Kennedy Smith: Political violence is no joke
On April 4, 1968, the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, Robert Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency in Indianapolis. Bobby conveyed the news of King’s death to a shattered, mostly black audience. He took pains to remind those whose first instinct may have been toward violence that President John F. Kennedy had also been shot and killed. Bobby went on, “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”
That speech has crystallized into the single most enduring portrait of Bobby’s candidacy. Because it was extemporaneous, it conveyed directly, and with raw emotion, his own vulnerability, his aspirations for his country and a deep compassion for the suffering of others. Bobby concluded his remarks that night by urging those listening to return home and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Those words mattered. While there were riots in cities across the nation that night, Indianapolis did not burn.
Today, almost 50 years later, words still matter. They shape who we are as a people and who we wish to be as a nation. In the white-hot cauldron of a presidential campaign, it is still the words delivered extemporaneously, off the cuff, in the raw pressure of the moment that matter most. They say most directly what is in a candidate’s heart. So it was with a real sense of sadness and revulsion that we listened to Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, as he referred to the options available to “Second Amendment people,” a remark widely, and we believe correctly, interpreted as a thinly veiled reference or “joke” about the possibility of political assassination.
Trevor Timm: People who film police violence are citizen journalists. We stand with them
As the filming of police killing unarmed African Americans has led to a wave of protests and calls for reform across the US, one aspect of the controversy has received little attention: the after-the-fact targeting, harassment, and arrest of many of those who recorded and publicized the killings in the first place.
Today, dozens of Oscar-winning and nominated documentary film-makers – including Laura Poitras, Alex Gibney and many others – published an open letter calling on their fellow film-makers to defend these brave citizen journalists and activists who are now seemingly targets of the police themselves. They are also demanding the justice department investigate the disturbing pattern of police abuse.
With little media attention, many of the people who filmed the most notorious police killings in the last two years have subsequently been stalked and arrested by the very police departments that they filmed. The two most recent killings that made headlines around the country – the death of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota – are only the latest examples. Taken together, the pattern is startling, and for the first time, the letter’s organizer, director David Felix Sutcliffe, has catalogued many of these incidents in one place.
Shaun J. VanDiver: Donald Trump doesn’t speak for us ‘second amendment people’
I’m a gun owner and Donald Trump doesn’t speak for me – or any of the gun owners I know. His suggestion on Tuesday that we “second amendment people” could take matters into our own hands if Hillary Clinton makes undesirable supreme court justice selections makes all gun owners look unhinged. But he doesn’t speak for us. He speaks only for himself.
In his controversial comments, he warned: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks.” He then added: “Although the second amendment people – maybe there is, I don’t know.” Any reasonable person can tell what he’s hinting at there. It’s assassination.
We have a long history in our nation of a peaceful transfer of power. These days, it seems like some self-proclaimed “patriots” are getting further from that fundamental value of our society.
Scott Ritter: Much Ado About… Everything
Iran has been in the headlines lately, and not in a way that is complementary to the administration of President Obama or either of the major candidates seeking to replace him in office. First there was the report about a $400 million payment to Iran — in cash — in order to secure the release of Americans held prisoner in Tehran. Next there was a leaked document detailing the precise limitations placed on Iran’s centrifuge operations as part of the nuclear agreement — not nearly as restrictive, it turns out, as had been depicted by the Obama administration. And finally the tragic news out of Iran that Shahram Amiri, the Iranian nuclear physicist who had defected to the United States under mysterious circumstances in 2009, only to return under equally mysterious circumstances in 2010, had been executed.
Iran bashers in the U.S. media immediately went on the attack, calling the $400 million payment a “ransom,” denouncing the nuclear agreement as a little more than a “secret side deal” between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency that accelerates rather than retards Iran’s pathway to a nuclear bomb, and linking Amiri’s death to the decidedly unsecure e-mails sent on Hillary Clinton’s private server. But fact is always more compelling than fiction, and the truth of these matters, upon closer scrutiny, shows that the events sold by the Iran bashers as clear-cut examples of misconstrued policy (“America doesn’t engage in paying ransom for hostages”), Iranian duplicity (“the secret agreement will lead to instability and war”) and further proof that Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted with national security secrets (“Clinton e-mail led to execution in Iran”) were, in actuality, little more than tempests in a tea pot.
Dave Johnson Trump Trade Position Is Opposite Of What People Think It Is
One of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s stronger economic appeals to working-class voters is his position on trade. Trump understands that people are upset that “trade” deals have moved so many jobs out of the country and he offers solutions that sound like he is saying he will bring the jobs back so wages can start going up again.
But a deeper look at what he is really saying might not be so appealing to voters.
Trump says the U.S. is not “competitive” with other countries. He has said repeatedly we need to lower American wages, taxes and regulations to the point where we can be “competitive” with Mexico and China. In other words, he is saying that business won’t send jobs out of the country if we can make wages low enough here.
Trump even has a plan to accomplish this. He has said the way to make U.S. wages “competitive” is to pit states against each other instead of using China and Mexico to do that. He has said, for example, that auto companies should close factories in Michigan and move the jobs to low-wage, anti-union states. After enough people are laid off in one state, he has said, “those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less.” Then companies will be able to “make good deals” to cut wages. He says that companies should continue this in a “rotation” of wage cuts, state to state, until you go “full-circle,” getting wages low enough across the entire country. Then the U.S. will be “competitive” with China and Mexico.
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