“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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New York Times Editorial: Stop Saudi Arms Sales Until Carnage in Yemen Ends
A hospital associated with Doctors Without Borders. A school. A potato chip factory. Under international law, those facilities in Yemen are not legitimate military targets. Yet all were bombed in recent days by warplanes belonging to a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, killing more than 40 civilians.
The United States is complicit in this carnage. It has enabled the coalition in many ways, including selling arms to the Saudis to mollify them after the nuclear deal with Iran. Congress should put the arms sales on hold and President Obama should quietly inform Riyadh that the United States will withdraw crucial assistance if the Saudis do not stop targeting civilians and agree to negotiate peace.
The airstrikes are further evidence that the Saudis have escalated their bombing campaign against Houthi militias, which control the capital, Sana, since peace talks were suspended on Aug. 6, ending a cease-fire that was declared more than four months ago. They also suggest one of two unpleasant possibilities. One is that the Saudis and their coalition of mostly Sunni Arab partners have yet to learn how to identify permissible military targets. The other is that they simply do not care about killing innocent civilians. The bombing of the hospital, which alone killed 15 people, was the fourth attack on a facility supported by Doctors Without Borders in the past year even though all parties to the conflict were told exactly where the hospitals were located.
Michael Wahid Hanna and Daniel Benaim:: How Do Trump’s Conspiracy Theories Go Over in the Middle East? Dangerously.
In November 2015, a cartoon in Al-Ahram, an Egyptian state-owned newspaper, depicted an Islamic State ogre with “Made in America” emblazoned on his back. It wasn’t unusual. A look at Middle Eastern news media shows that this idea is startlingly common. Even prominent officials in the region, from Egypt’s former culture minister to a former deputy prime minister of Iraq, have publicly ventured conspiracy theories that Washington created the Islamic State.
Enter Donald J. Trump. Last week, Mr. Trump repeatedly claimed that President Obama is “the founder of ISIS.” Even when a sympathetic conservative radio host offered Mr. Trump a chance to backtrack from his ridiculous claim and instead blame the Obama administration’s policies for the Islamic State’s rise, the Republican candidate doubled down: “No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do.” (The next day, Mr. Trump belatedly took to Twitter to plead sarcasm.)
This will most likely fade from the news cycle as Mr. Trump moves on and the next controversy arises. But these misleading words will reverberate far beyond America’s shores for years to come, and there will be serious implications for American foreign policy.
Amanda Marcotte: Anti-choicers get even weirder: After losing in the Supreme Court, abortion foes turn to desperate distortion
The recent Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt, where the justices struck down a slew of Texas regulations severely limiting abortion access on the grounds that they were medically unnecessary, has been a devastating one for the anti-choice movement. Decades of trying to convince the public that an embryo the size of a walnut is the equivalent of an actual baby hadn’t moved the needle of public opinion on abortion. Now the notion that abortion needed to be regulated out of existence to protect “women’s health” — the anti-choice argument before the court — was shot down.
There are limits, in the United States, to how much lying you can get away with in your legislative maneuvering.
The anti-choice movement has been sent back to the drawing board. The two strategies abortion foes appear to have settled on are come up with are, first, trying to trick people into thinking embryos are babies and then trying to trick people into thinking abortion is too medically dangerous to be allowed.
They’re turning, in other words, to the very strategies that have failed them before. But the new spins anti-choicers put on these old ideas reek of desperation, though even their worst ideas can do some damage to abortion access in red states before they finally sputter out politically.
Lucia Graves: Yes, the media is weighted against Trump – because he mostly spouts lies
As Donald Trump’s poll numbers have dropped in recent weeks, bashing the “disgusting and corrupt” media has become the centerpiece of his campaign. “I’m not running against Crooked Hillary, I’m running against the crooked media,” he said at a rally in Fairfield, Connecticut, over the weekend.
His campaign is indeed a place where journalistic objectivity meets its limits, but it’s not because we’re deliberately gunning for him. There simply is no fairness in presenting both sides of a story when one side is consistently rubbish, to put it kindly, or a dumpster fire, in this cycle’s parlance. Trump changes his mind like it’s the weather and tells a lie every five minutes, going by Politico’s best count.
Different outlets have handled Trump’s unique challenge in different ways, but generally it means working harder. [..]
To have a low opinion of Trump’s suitability for higher office, to write critically about him regardless of how many journalistic outlets he blacklists in retaliation, is not a mark of bias – it’s a badge of honor. And journalists tellingly boast about it as such.
Haider Javed Warraich: Insurance companies want to weaken Obamacare. We can’t let them
Insurance companies keep pretending that participating in the Affordable Care Act exchanges is killing their business model. Aetna, one of the five largest insurance companies in the United States, announced on Tuesday that it was withdrawing from 70% of the Obamacare exchange markets it operates in by next year. And two other major insurers – UnitedHealthCare and Humana – also announced recently that they would be withdrawing their products from large portions of the exchanges where they’re available.
But this corporate hardship story couldn’t be further from the truth: Aetna’s overall profits surged last year, and its share prices have risen consistently since the ACA passed in 2010.
All the other major insurance companies have noted similar rises, even as the product that they offer has been deteriorating. Premiums have long outpaced wage increases and underinsurance is rife even among those with insurance.
So while staying wouldn’t have drastically endangered their bottom lines, the decision may, however, cause uninsured Americans looking for Affordable Care Act coverage have even fewer subpar options to pick from. One county in Arizona is slated to not have a single option available next year. These withdrawals could hurt Americans and the ACA in a way Republicans have only dreamed of.
If business is booming, why penalize Americans seeking healthcare? The picture becomes clearer when looking at the state of the health insurance industry at large. In short: politics.
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