Vox Sentences: IMF decides Greece is getting too boring, concocts scheme to make it interesting

Shorter IMF: "Wild card!"

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and IMF managing director Christine Lagarde look befuddled at each other. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

• In a turn that basically nobody expected, the International Monetary Fund, one of Greece's main lenders, is demanding that any new bailout package include debt forgiveness for Greece.

  [NYT / Suzanne Daley and James Kanter]

• Before that happened, Greece had more or less capitulated to demands from its other lenders and agreed to extensive austerity and economic reforms in exchange for bailout money.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• It was a bizarre development, coming just days after Greek voters rejected a very similar bailout deal in a referendum.

  [Time / Simon Shuster]

• Unsurprisingly, the rank-and-file of Greece's ruling far-left Syriza party are in open revolt over the deal.

  [FT / Christian Oliver, Henry Foy, and Peter Spiegel]

• Enter the IMF, which insisted on reducing Greece's overall debt load, by just forgiving some debt or by not requiring payments until 2053 (!) or by making other governments pay for Greece's budget. Put another way: It wants the EU to become a fiscal union like the US, where members pay each other's bills.

  [NYT / Josh Barro]

• Matt O'Brien: "The IMF doesn't want to reduce Greece's debt because it feels bad for Greece. It wants to reduce Greece's debt because it wants to be repaid by Greece."

  [Washington Post / Matt O'Brien]

• To unpack that a bit more: There's no way Greece can pay back the IMF unless its debts are reasonable. So the IMF wants to make them reasonable.

• For more background, see "9 questions about the Greek crisis you were too embarrassed to ask."

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• Or "11 things about the Greek crisis you need to know."

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

Selling the Iran deal

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Obama's biggest Democratic foe on Iran. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

• Now that it has a final nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration is pivoting to lobbying Congress to not scuttle it.

  [NYT / Michael Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis]

• Joe Biden took to the Hill to try to convince House Democrats, many of whom are still unsure of where they stand and many of whom are very skeptical.

  [Politico / Lauren French and Burgess Everett]

• The Washington Post's whip count suggests that 58 senators, including Democrats like Ron Wyden and Bob Menendez, are leaning against; Republicans would need 67 to sink it.

  [Washington Post / Abby Phillip]

• Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) was probably the most critical, calling the deal "the greatest appeasement since Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler" and claiming Obama wants to "get nukes to Iran."

  [BuzzFeed / Andrew Kacynski]

• The only sensible thing to do upon hearing inane Munich allusions is to read Nick Baumann's classic defense of Chamberlain, arguing he actually got a pretty good deal from Hitler.

  [Slate / Nick Baumann]

• Amanda Taub: All this talk of "appeasement" indicates that it's not Obama who's afraid of Iran; it's the hawks who are terrified.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

• Matt Yglesias: Hawks "don't actually have any arguments about what Obama has done wrong … What they have instead are a lot of talking points, MacGuffins, red herrings, and distractions that aim to divert attention from the core issue — hawks' desire to avoid diplomacy and have a war."

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Not totally up on what's in the Iran deal? This 3-minute video covers the basics.

  [Vox / Johnny Harris and Max Fisher]

Throwing medals away

George W. Bush presents Bill Cosby with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

• President Obama has weighed in on the sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby, saying "If you give a woman, or a man, for that matter, a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent ... that's rape, and this country, any civilized country, should have no tolerance for rape."

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

• But he also said he couldn't revoke Cosby's Presidential Medal of Freedom: "There's no precedent … we don't have that policy."

• Cosby admitted in 2005 to obtaining Quaaludes so that he could use them to sedate and rape women.

  [AP / Maryclaire Dale]

• Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill and Kirsten Gillibrand have called on Cosby to return the medal.

  [Politico / Darren Samuelsohn]

• It's not even clear how revoking the medal would work, as it's never been done before.

  [Washington Post / Hunter Schwarz]

• Cosby originally got the medal from President Bush in 2002, who praised him for "appeal[ing] to the common humanity of his audience, rather than the differences that might divide it."

  [White House]

• You can watch Cosby get the medal here. It's pretty cringeworthy.

  [YouTube]

• For more, see our full Cosby explainer here.

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

Misc.

• A small fries at Burger King has nearly twice as much fries as a small fries at McDonald's.

  [Eater / Khushbu Shah]

• I spent a lot of time as a kid playing Tekken and Pac-Man and the like at a now-defunct arcade called More Fun, so I really hope this argument that virtual reality games will resurrect the arcade business is right.

  [Medium / Josh Taylor]

• Heroic University of Maryland professor Dylan Selterman put his social psychology students through a real-life "tragedy of the commons." They failed.

  [Baltimore Sun / Quinn Kelley]

• You've heard the story of Healthcare.gov's screwed-up, failure-ridden rollout. This is the story of the developers who made the site finally work.

  [The Atlantic / Robinson Meyer]

• Charities' desire to supervise their beneficiaries in developing countries makes programs more expensive — and it's not clear it does any good.

  [Washington Post / Chris Blattman]

Verbatim

• "From their first meeting, it was clear [Energy Secretary Ernest] Moniz and [Iranian atomic weapons chief Ali] Salehi would get along. 'If they were on an online dating site, they probably would have been matched together,' said one aide."

  [Boston Globe / Matt Viser]

• "At any given place and time, some things are considered urgent and others aren't. In the contemporary USA 'what does Bibi Netanyahu think?' is always urgent and 'are infants' brains being poisoned by decades-old lead deposits' is never urgent."

  [Matt Yglesias]

• "Why can't we learn to stop worrying and love the air conditioner?"

  [Slate / Daniel Engber]

• "In effect, every person on that floor is a cell in a spreadsheet. The floor is a worksheet and the building is an Excel file, with thousands of cells each containing a single person."

  [Benedict Evans]

• "One area of autism research that hasn’t been fully explored, it’s safe to say, is whether the condition might be cured by an autistic child’s mother making a series of rumbling noises at her child, and how this ties into the idea of creating a mythological elephant who teaches humanity how to be more human."

  [NY Mag / Jesse Singal]

Video of the day

• How the Iran nuclear deal works, explained in 3 minutes

  [YouTube]

Correction: A previous version of this post said that the IMF proposed not requiring debt payments from Greece until 2059. The real year is 2053.

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