“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: The Success of the Voter Fraud Myth
How does a lie come to be widely taken as the truth?
The answer is disturbingly simple: Repeat it over and over again. When faced with facts that contradict the lie, repeat it louder.
This, in a nutshell, is the story of claims of voting fraud in America — and particularly of voter impersonation fraud, the only kind that voter ID laws can possibly prevent.
As study after study has shown, there is virtually no voter fraud anywhere in the country. The most comprehensive investigation to date found that out of one billion votes cast in all American elections between 2000 and 2014, there were 31 possible cases of impersonation fraud. Other violations — like absentee ballot fraud, multiple voting and registration fraud — are also exceedingly rare. So why do so many people continue to believe this falsehood?
Credit for this mass deception goes to Republican lawmakers, who have for years pushed a fake story about voter fraud, and thus the necessity of voter ID laws, in an effort to reduce voting among specific groups of Democratic-leaning voters. Those groups — mainly minorities, the poor and students — are less likely to have the required forms of identification.
Trevor Timm: The Washington Post is wrong: Edward Snowden should be pardoned
With the launch of Oliver Stone’s Snowden film this past weekend came a renewed push for a pardon for Edward Snowden from the world’s leading human rights organizations.
But predictably, not everyone agreed that he should be pardoned. On Saturday, the Washington Post editorial board deplorably editorialized against it despite its own paper winning the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on his leaked documents.
They joined many of his other detractors in making old and factually incorrect arguments about what Snowden actually did. As the movement demanding his exoneration grows nonetheless, here are five common misconceptions about the whistleblower – and why they are wrong.
Kate Aronof: Clinton hasn’t won over millennials. And no, sexism isn’t to blame \
Hillary Clinton is having a harder time beating Donald Trump than she bargained for. According to a recent poll, a staggering 44% of millennials say they’ll be voting for either Green party candidate Jill Stein or Libertarian Gary Johnson. The chief reason for Clinton’s dip in these polls is not – as Barack Obama claimed on Sunday – that she’s a woman (though sexism does have a lot to answer for). It’s because Clinton has assumed a third of the electorate – millennials – would vote for her out of fear of her opponent.
Simply put, we want more.
Millennials are the generation that has occupied Wall Street, shut down bridges for black lives and chained ourselves to the White House fence to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. Disillusioned by Obama’s embrace of war and austerity alike – especially after knocking on doors to get him elected – we know better than to put blind faith in any candidate for the Oval Office.
Richard Wolffe: On terrorism, cooler heads have better policy. But do they win more votes?
An explosion on the streets of Manhattan, pipe bombs in New Jersey, and a shootout with a terrorist suspect: a jittery election, filled with hyperbole, just grew more breathless.
Of course most of that hype has emerged from the mouth of Donald Trump, and he embraced the emergence of a new terror campaign well before officials confirmed Saturday’s explosion as a bomb.
Whether this helps or hurts Trump’s candidacy depends a lot on whether you are already primed for the politics of fear. If Trump and Clinton sound like they’re talking to two different audiences, that’s because the polls suggest they really are.
The United States is deeply divided not just about how to respond to terrorism, but about how serious the terrorist threat is.
Recent surveys have underscored the wide gap in perceptions between Republicans on one side, and Democrats and independents on the o
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: There’s No Debate
Let’s call the whole thing off.
Not the election, although if we only had a magic reset button we could pretend this sorry spectacle never happened and start all over.
No, we mean the presidential debates — which, if the present format and moderators remain as they are, threaten an effect on democracy more like Leopold and Loeb than Lincoln and Douglas.
We had a humiliating sneak preview Sept. 7, when NBC’s celebrity interviewer Matt Lauer hosted a one-hour “Commander-in-Chief Forum” in which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump spoke with Lauer from the same stage but in separate interviews. The event was supposed to be about defense and veterans issues, yet to everyone’s bewilderment (except the Trump camp, which must have been cheering out of camera range that Lauer was playing their song), Lauer seemed to think Clinton’s emails were worthy of more questions than, say, nuclear war, global warming or the fate of Syrian refugees.
Of course, that wasn’t a debate per se but neither are the sideshows that we call the official debates, even though the rules put in place by the nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates are meant to insure a certain amount of fairness and decorum — unlike the trainwreck of “debates” during the primary season, which were run solely by the parties and media sponsors with no adult supervision.
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