http://twitter.com/WesleyLowery/status/623641272411099136
The Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian was arrested one year ago on Wednesday. “His incarceration is the longest, by far, for a Western journalist in Iran since the 1979 revolution that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power,” the Post’s Joby Warrick writes.
http://twitter.com/AnupKaphle/status/623647804154617857
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As Secretary of State John Kerry prepares to attempt to sell the Iran nuclear deal to Congress this week, the anti-deal lobby is kicking into high gear. The Boston Globe reports that The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is supporting a group called Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran that is planning to run up to $40 million worth of TV ads against the deal.
http://twitter.com/leshemle/status/623407810307493889
The Republican Jewish Coalition, an advocacy group opposing the deal, is co-sponsoring a rally in New York’s Times Square on Wednesday evening.
President Obama, meanwhile, took his case for the deal to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention in Pittsburgh and equated the opponents of the current deal with those who had pressed for military action against Iraq.
(White House – Speech begins at 46:00 mark)
http://twitter.com/latimesworld/status/623548100242583552
The CBS affiliate in Pittsburgh reports that
While the reception was generally warm to the commander-in-chief, a VFW member from South Dakota tried to unfurl a sign that read “the emperor of Benghazi has no clothes.” When his sign was taken, he stood in protest until he shouted during the president’s speech, which led to his being escorted from the ballroom.
Meanwhile, the White House took the fight to social media.
As Israel’s opposition ramps up, The Guardian reports on how satire almost imitates life.
On a more serious note, Shibley Telhami writes at Reuters on how “Netanyahu steered the US towards war with Iran – the result is a deal he hates.”
How would war have been good for Israel? The Jewish state would have been, for the first time, at war with a Persian civilization (since all Iranians would likely have unified against the enemy) that would inevitably develop nuclear weapons anyway. It would have seemed that the United States was deliberately dragged into war on behalf of Israel — undermining the Israeli-U.S. relationship. How in the world is that good for Israel?
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* WORLD * The Greek parliament will vote on Wednesday on a second round of domestic reforms necessary to facilitate the bailout talks.
At a gathering in The Vatican, Pope Francis met with mayors of more than 60 cities worldwide to discuss his encyclical on climate change and urge action in advance of the UN Paris summit in December.
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* BUSINESS * Maybe the story of the day is by Andy Greenberg at Wired
“When I saw we could do it anywhere, over the Internet, I freaked out,” Valasek says. “I was frightened. It was like, holy fuck, that’s a vehicle on a highway in the middle of the country. Car hacking got real, right then.”
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* POLITICS * The Republican Presidential field grew to 16 on Tuesday, when Ohio Gov John Kasich declared his candidacy at a press conference at the Ohio State University in Columbus.
Yet Donald Trump continues to suck the oxygen out of the GOP primary contest. Hadas Gold writes at Politico:
Just 35 days since the brash real-estate mogul launched his presidential campaign with all the subtlety of a rhinoceros, Republican candidates have been gasping for air, choked off from media access and desperate to break out beyond an egomaniacal celebrity who is polling better than most of the field. The early jostling has a special urgency this year: The first GOP debate on Aug. 6 is just two weeks away, and only 10 candidates will make the cut.
Even Rand Paul’s (remember him?) stunt with a chainsaw and a copy of the tax code went largely unnoticed.
Trump trolled South Carolina Sen Lindsey Graham in his own early-primary backyard, by giving out his cellphone number, after Graham had called Trump a “jackass.”
Graham later tweeted:
On the subject of that first debate, by the way, Fox is apparently set to change the format – not of the main event, but the “kids table” forum set to take place earlier in the day. Dylan Byers writes at Politico that
If the debate were held tomorrow, such criteria would likely see Rick Santorum, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham and George Pataki relegated to the 5 p.m. forum.
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* CULTURE * President Obama also addressed the Iran deal – teasing Dick Cheney – during his seventh and final appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart’s final show will be on August 6th, although the President joked about “signing an executive order” preventing Stewart from leaving.
Writer E.L. Doctorow died in New York City aged 84. Bruce Weber writes in the New York Times:
Subtly subversive in his fiction — less so in his left-wing political writing — he consistently upended expectations with a cocktail of fiction and fact, remixed in book after book; with clever and substantive manipulations of popular genres like the Western and the detective story; and with his myriad storytelling strategies. Deploying, in different books, the unreliable narrator, the stream-of-consciousness narrator, the omniscient narrator and multiple narrators, Mr. Doctorow was one of contemporary fiction’s most restless experimenters.
Finally, although most likely not the end of the franchise, Sharknado 3 hits the Syfy Channel on Wednesday night.
Of course it does.
The Overnight Note 