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A new report that has grabbed headlines on Fox News and other Murdoch-owned news outlets claims that regulations aimed at curtailing spread of the coronavirus through mandatory masking, lockdowns, and school closures in 2020 only reduced deaths from SARS-CoV-2 infections by 0.2 percent. The 62-page study, much-hailed by leading Republican politicians, has grabbed mainstream media headlines, as well. But closer scrutiny reveals that it is an example of motivated reasoning, indulging in scientific cherry-picking to prove a preferred thesis about public health.

Described as a Johns Hopkins study, the report was in reality published online by the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University, an academic enterprise tightly linked to the libertarian Cato Institute think tank. The institute is separate from the famed medical institution and school of public health affiliated with the university. It is co-directed by one of the authors of the new report, economist Steve Hanke, who also directs the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute.

The other two authors of the report are Scandinavian economists Jonas Herby and Lars Jonung. Herby advises the Center for Political Studies, in Copenhagen, a self-described independent, liberal, free-market think tank in Denmark that strongly opposes coronavirus lockdown policies across the Nordic region and is generally anti-regulation. He is also tied to the American Institute for Economic Research, where he has written in favor of the Swedish governments very loose pandemic policies in 2020 that resulted, by the end of the summer of that year, in death rates more than five times higher than in neighboring Denmark, over 9 times greater than in Finland, and more than 11 times worse than the toll in Norway. Herby wrote that Swedens huge mortality was due to a mild flu season in the country in 2019, which left too many dry tinder vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, who burned up with coronavirus infections.

A new report that has grabbed headlines on Fox News and other Murdoch-owned news outlets claims that regulations aimed at curtailing spread of the coronavirus through mandatory masking, lockdowns, and school closures in 2020 only reduced deaths from SARS-CoV-2 infections by 0.2 percent. The 62-page study, much-hailed by leading Republican politicians, has grabbed mainstream media headlines, as well. But closer scrutiny reveals that it is an example of motivated reasoning, indulging in scientific cherry-picking to prove a preferred thesis about public health.

Described as a Johns Hopkins study, the report was in reality published online by the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University, an academic enterprise tightly linked to the libertarian Cato Institute think tank. The institute is separate from the famed medical institution and school of public health affiliated with the university. It is co-directed by one of the authors of the new report, economist Steve Hanke, who also directs the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute.

The other two authors of the report are Scandinavian economists Jonas Herby and Lars Jonung. Herby advises the Center for Political Studies, in Copenhagen, a self-described independent, liberal, free-market think tank in Denmark that strongly opposes coronavirus lockdown policies across the Nordic region and is generally anti-regulation. He is also tied to the American Institute for Economic Research, where he has written in favor of the Swedish governments very loose pandemic policies in 2020 that resulted, by the end of the summer of that year, in death rates more than five times higher than in neighboring Denmark, over 9 times greater than in Finland, and more than 11 times worse than the toll in Norway. Herby wrote that Swedens huge mortality was due to a mild flu season in the country in 2019, which left too many dry tinder vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, who burned up with coronavirus infections.

Lars Jonung is retired from the Lund University Department of Economics in Sweden, where he for decades favored conservative financial policies. Since the pandemic emerged, Jonung has argued that the Swedish constitution renders such actions as mask mandates and business closures illegal.

Now the trio of economists claims, in a meta-analysis of allegedly thousands of coronavirus studies, to show that none of the nonpharmaceutical measures taken by governmentslike mask wearing, social distancing, bar closures, virtual school, and stay-at-home ordershave had any clear benefit in reducing the burden of death in the pandemic. Their lengthy literature review has not been peer-reviewed or submitted for review to a major journal.

The effect of border closures, school closures and limiting gatherings on COVID-19 mortality yields precision-weighted estimates of -0.1 percent, -4.4 percent, and 1.6 percent, respectively, they wrote. They added that lockdowns, compared to no lockdowns, also do not reduce COVID-19 mortality.

They reached this conclusion by culling though Google Scholar anda coronavirus economic research website affiliated with the University of Cambridge for papers about the spring 2020 lockdowns in Europe and North America. They said they found 18,590 relevant papers. The first 13 pages of their study explains how and why they decided that only 34 of those 18,590 papers merited inclusion in their analysis. They tossed out studies that fail to provide what they deem as high quality and long-term evidence of association between specific anti-COVID nonpharmaceutical policies and deaths. Though few public health interventions can typically be credited with averting specific deaths, that is what they are demanding.

By this measure, studies that show, for example, that measles vaccination in Africa decreased child death rates during famines would be tossed out for lack of a clear cause-and-effect relationship between the vaccine and a subsequent comparative resilience of a child against starvation. In the case of COVID, the authors reject studies that point to declines in deaths due directly to diabetes or suicide, though it is clear that lowering the pandemic burden on urgent care facilities allows health care providers time and resources to address other medical issues.

Most of the selected 34 papers were written by economists, rather than public health experts, and only 22 of them have been peer-reviewed. After all of this cherry-picking, the trio further discounts contrary findings by declaring that the methodology of some of these 34 papers are of low quality, according to their vague standards, or cannot be reconciled with higher forms of analysis. This conveniently leaves only a handful of solid papers from which they draw the conclusion favored by right-wing and libertarian politicians: Public health restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus are a sham.

There are many reasons, both methodological and analytical, why the new report is wrong, which have been noted elsewhere. But the most obvious evidence that lockdownshowever authoritarian or heinous they may bestop the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and prevent associated mortality is China. Though the pandemic started in Wuhan in late 2019 and the coronavirus spread widely across the nation of 1.4 billion people, the zero COVID policy pushed by President Xi Jinping, which entails the worlds most aggressive lockdowns whenever and wherever a handful of cases are found, leaves it with one of the lowest death rates on earth.

The United States, by contrast, imposed among the longest periods of school closures of any country in part to make up for its failure to stringently enforce other public health interventions. The difference in results is stark. The United States has suffered around 2,690 deaths per million people. The rate in China has been around 3 deaths per million. (Among OECD nations, the United States has the highest death rate, by far.)

Chinas policies have, of course, been brutal, shutting entire cities of 14 million or more people off from the rest of the nation when fewer than a dozen suspected cases have been identified, and placing hundreds of thousands of households under quarantines so strict that families faced starvation as they were prohibited from shopping.

But less despotic lockdowns surely help explain why New Zealand has had only 11 deaths per million people, South Korea at 132, and Japan at 150. (The authors also dont acknowledge that strict border closures imposed by countries like New Zealand, Australia, and China may have played a role in limiting the spread of the coronavirus.) By excluding all Asian nations from their analysis, the trio ends up comparing measures in the dismally-mortality-stricken United States and the similarly hard-hit European Union, which has 2,150 deaths per million.

In the United States, multiple studies show markedly higher mortality rates in counties that voted Republican in the 2020 presidential election, where regulatory actions to address the pandemic are less likely to be in place, compared to counties that voted Democrat. Similarly, getting vaccinated, wearing masks, and taking the debunked ivermectin treatment for COVID all follow partisan lines in the United States.

A new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and California health authorities found that people in that state who wore any type of masks when among others in indoor settings reduced their odds of infection by 56 percent. If they wore N95 or K95 masks their risk dropped by a whopping 83 percent. Imposing mask-wearing guidelines in this pandemic appears to spare millions of infections and related deaths.

The appalling pseudo-science produced by Herby, Jonung and Hanke can be easily dismissed by public health advocates and scientists. But that will not be the end of it. The enemies of public health measures in the West are already using the study to fuel their ire. From Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to Alex Jones and Senator Rand Paul the message is loud and clear: All community precautions aimed at stemming the spread of SARS-CoV-2 are violations of our libertiesand do not work to boot.

For months, Republican leaders have attacked all forms of public health mandates across the United States, both nonpharmaceutical and vaccine-based. Republican governors led the charge against Biden administration efforts to impose vaccine mandates on large employers, an effort overturned by the Supreme Court in a partisan vote. In December, one faction of the Republican Party threatened to shut down the federal government to block mandates. They were eventually overruled by Senator Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders.

Rand Paul, whose father, Ron, led the Libertarian Party and named his son after libertarian icon Ayn Rand, has for two years led Republican opposition to wearing masks, outdoor dining orders, and social distancing measures, and insists that millions of Americans are, like himself, naturally immune after having COVID. He also supported the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocates allowing SARS-CoV-2 to spread freely and spawn herd immunity that would allegedly lead to disappearance of the coronavirus. As with this new report, the herd immunity claims drew accolades from right-wing media, and led President Donald Trump to bring advocate Scott Atlas into his White House pandemic response team.

With more than 900,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States, the most in any nation, and the pandemic nearing its third year, Americans are understandably fed up and vulnerable to messages that direct their rage while providing justification for abandoning disease control measures. This Johns Hopkins report is easily cast aside as bogus science, but it will nevertheless live on, exacerbating partisan divides and casting doubt on the Biden administrations COVID response. It should not. It is mere disinformation.

Link:
Economists Are Fueling the War Against Public Health - Foreign Policy

Im not a sports fanIm bored by games in general, including that wordy color-blindness test or whatever it is that everyone online seems to be playing latelybut Im already rooting for the defeat of the newly rechristened Washington Commanders. The name is a clumsy reminder that Washington, DC issues orders and the rest of us are expected to obey. Its as obnoxious in its way as the propagandistic, authoritarian tone of the Olympics opening ceremony.

But sports isnt the real enemy here. For all the brutality, primitivism, sadism, tribalism, and zero-sum win/lose thinking of sportsmade worse by nationalism in the case of the pompous Olympicspolitics is worse. Politics is also involuntary, so long as governments (or other, more anarchic threats of violence) exist. Involuntary, by definition, isnt fun.

Thats why so many political figures devote their time to the pretense of being just like you, as if theres no need to fear their preferences would ever diverge from yours. No divergence, no need to wonder where theyre taking you or what they plan to do to you when you get there. Theyre all competing to see who can get you to a centrally planned economy fastest.

Take the Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, with his oscillations between sounding like the populist whos coming to save you from the depredations of capitalism and sounding like the party stalwart wholl save Republicans from further embarrassment by Trump. Its a safe bet that as the primary approaches in May, Carpet-Bagger Vance will sound like he has whatever principles are polling well, likely determined by that months stock market fluctuations but explained via homespun tales about his working-class upbringing.

One of the most positive spins on Vances oscillations was a Simon van Zuylen-Wood piece arguing that Vance is taking care not to let his anti-woke thinking devolve into classical liberalism and is striving to combine Trumpism with the milder reformicon (ostensibly-reformist conservative) tendencies of Ross Douthat circa 2010.

In short, if you squint, you can see Vance working to avoid libertarianism (that is, 19-century-style, small-government, classical liberalism) while also grinding a cultural axe, bashing global trade, and praising the most expensive parts of the welfare statesuch as Social Security and Medicare, the debt-swelling, huge-ticket items that purported reformers such as Douthat are keen to leave intact, since a citizen is afraid to discuss tampering with them.

Whatever that makes the Vance agenda, its not really capitalism. Far from being a fresh set of ideas, its basically a watered-down version of the anti-economic, pro-big-government thinking celebrated in those Chinese ceremonies I mentioned earlier. If conservatives are just milder commies now, dont expect me to get worked up making distinctions between the two philosophies or voting for either.

Vance is far from alone on the right in his bland attack on the market and private property. Floridas Gov. Ron DeSantis, inordinately beloved by some pseudo-libertarians whose anti-regulatory thinking goes little farther than their dislike of anti-Covid rules, crowed on Twitter last Thursday about urging his state legislature to throw another $100 million of taxpayers money at fighting cancer. So much for the heirs to Trumps populist mantle looking to dispel the illusion that government is generous and lifesaving. Unless they explicitly argue for the non-violation of property rights and the drastic and immediate shrinking of government, populist politicians will obviously deliver politics as usual with a few novel freebies tossed in.

I hope paleolibertarian-ish ex-punk Sam Goldman is right to argue the fumbling of the Republicans populist team post-Trump might yet yield a return of the delayed libertarian moment in American politics. If there are any signs of hope in that regard, though, I dont think they take the form of any politicians but rather private-sector phenomena like that shining Castello Cube made of $11.7 million worth of gold that appeared in Central Park last week (likely inspired by the 1990s sci-fi novel Cryptonomicon) heralding the launch of yet another cryptocurrency.

Im not saying this is the coin that will end humanitys reliance on governments arbitrarily-inflated fiat currencies, but governments tyrannical hold over humanity is more likely to be ended by some exogenous phenomenon like that than by any internal reforms government itself endorses or generates. Lately, all the worlds political teamsleftists, liberals, conservatives, moderates, most anarchists, even some libertariansbadmouth or at least rhetorically shy away from unregulated, laissez-faire markets.

In the 20th century, they might all at least have agreed that the USSR was terrible and promised not to replicate its errors. With European Communism gone and Chinese Communism seemingly a taboo topic among obedient Westerners, our political players are free lazily to forget what a society without market mechanisms looks like. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is free to denounce capitalism as irredeemable, as the economically ineducable and inflammatory New York politician said a few days ago on a trip to Austin, TXthe sort of liberal town where she probably hears as many youthful cheers for her extremism as she does back home in New York City, though both places owe their freedom and prosperity to markets.

But its not just quirky post-libertarian right-wingers and left-wing backbenchers who are out to destroy capitalism. Boring old President Biden and his ostensibly centrist pals can do that just fine all by themselves. Among other things, Biden plans to triple the amount of protected (that is, government-controlled and largely unused) land in the U.S. and wants half again as much federal spending as when he took office, though his agenda is notoriously sputtering. And the White House still finds time to tell Spotify it needs to go farther in silencing easygoing non-partisan conversationalist Joe Rogan (Jon Stewart, by contrast, urges people to let Rogan speak).

Make enough mediocre leaps forward like Bidens and it wont much matter if you keep claiming not to be a full-blown socialist. America will be socialist nonetheless. It wont matter one bit that libertarians and conservatives used to complain more explicitly about that threat back in the 1980s, when their principles were clearer and more consistent, back when they didnt always shift around in an embarrassed fashion looking for something else to talk about, like pot, immigration, or sex. Now, every political team of any appreciable size is either silent on econ or battling for the collectivist gold.

Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on Twitter at @ToddSeavey

Originally posted here:
The World Is Always Playing Commie Olympics - Splice Today

Editor:

Its tempting to think of the people of the Bible as idiots; after all, they didnt have modern conveniences like cars, smartphones or deed-restricted housing.

But what they did have was an acute understanding of how to maintain peace in small communities, as that was their core lived experience. Respect must be paid to concepts like Jubilee, because those concepts (such as not coveting your neighbors donkey) helped maintain social order in small communities for centuries. To apply modern labels like libertarian to those concepts is ignorant.

Ive proposed a secular Jubilee, to be implemented by releasing the deed restrictions on housing units owned by private citizens. This would give economic freedom to locals who have served our community for decades (make no mistake: this is payment for services rendered, not some random windfall, and has been earned many times over). And releasing the deed restrictions would immediately bring housing to market, whereas deed-restricted units rarely trade.

But Jubilee is not just about freeing the real estate market. Releasing the deed restrictions would create a new political environment and would free our towns political process from being dominated by the housing issue.

We now have politicians who rule because they control the employee-housing voting bloc, deed restrictions that run with the land forever, class war and government that is literally stuck in traffic because it is captive to the housing issue. Maybe we are the idiots.

Millard Zimet

Aspen

Continued here:
Are we the idiots? | Opinion | aspendailynews.com - Aspen Daily News

Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi speaks during a ceremony to mark the 43rd anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran, Iran February 10, 2022. Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

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Feb 11 (Reuters) - Hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said on Friday Tehran never pins hope on ongoing talks in Vienna aimed at reviving the country's 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers.

Iran and the United States resumed indirect talks in the Austrian capital on Tuesday after a 10-day break, but envoys gave little away as to whether they were closer to resolving various thorny issues.

"We put our hopes on the east, west, north, south of our country and never have any hope in Vienna and New York, Raisi said in a televised speech commemorating the 43rd anniversary of Iran's Islamic Revolution.

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Raisi, whose election last June led to a five-month hiatus in the talks, said Iran would rely on its domestic economic potential rather than expect support from overseas and from the nuclear talks with world powers.

U.S. President Joe Biden's administration publicly pressured Iran on Wednesday to revive the agreement quickly, saying that it will be impossible to return to the accord if a deal is not struck within weeks. read more

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday there was still a long way to go before the deal could be revived.

Raisi said: "Our foreign policy is balanced. Looking toward the West has made the country's relations unbalanced, we need to look at all countries and capacities in the world, especially our neighbours.

His speech was frequently interrupted by chants of Death to America - a trademark slogan of the revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed shah in 1979. The audience also chanted Death to England and Death to Israel.

For the second year in a row, Iranians marked the revolutions anniversary by parading vehicles in the streets rather than marching on foot in line with regulations aimed at limiting COVID-19 contagion.

State television aired live footage of cars and motorcycles moving through the streets of dozens of cities and towns where, before the pandemic, tens of thousands of people would march for the annual event.

In 2018, then-U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal - designed to stop Iran developing a nuclear weapon - and reimposed sanctions in a bid to force Tehran into talks on a broader agreement that would have also addressed its ballistic missile programme and support for proxies in the Middle East.

Iran responded by breaching many of the deal's restrictions and pushing well beyond them, enriching uranium to close to nuclear bomb-grade and using advanced centrifuges to do it, which has helped it hone its skills in operating those machines.

Iran's foreign ministry said on Monday the United States had to make a "political decision" regarding lifting sanctions as Tehran's demand for their full removal to revive the 2015 deal was non-negotiable. read more

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Editing by Mark Heinrich

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Link:
Iranian president says Tehran 'never has hope' in Vienna nuclear talks - Reuters

Washington, DC United States Senator Bob Menendez started an hour-long presentation on the Senate floor last week with a poster featuring a green, white and red bomb the colours of the Iranian flag.

Over the next 60 minutes, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee argued tirelessly against reviving the Iran nuclear deal, warning that the curbs the pact would impose on what he called Tehrans dangerously and rapidly escalating nuclear programme are not enough.

At this point, we seriously have to ask: What exactly are we trying to salvage? Menendez, a key Democrat, said on February 1.

As Iran nuclear deal negotiations enter the final stretch, Menendez is not alone in voicing opposition to reviving the landmark agreement, with Republicans and hawkish Democrats in Washington, DC warning President Joe Biden against restoring the pact.

That more vocal US rebuke of the agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is a sign that a deal is imminent, analysts say and that Biden is pushing ahead to secure it despite potential political costs.

This is a clear signal, as we also know from other reporting, that a deal is in sight. The negotiators are close to the end goal, said Negar Mortazavi, an Iranian-American journalist and analyst. And thats why the opposition is growing louder because they see it as something imminent and want to stop it, as they tried to do in 2015.

The eighth round of indirect US-Iranian talks resumed in Vienna this week after a hiatus that saw diplomats return to their respective capitals for consultations.

The 2015 multilateral agreement saw Iran scale back its nuclear programme in exchange for a lifting of international sanctions against its economy. Former US President Donald Trump nixed the deal in 2018 and started reimposing sanctions on Iran as part of a maximum pressure campaign. In response, Iran has escalated its nuclear programme well beyond the limits set by the JCPOA.

Biden vowed to restore the agreement negotiated by the administration of former President Barack Obama, in which Biden served as vice president but multiple rounds of talks in the Austrian capital have yet to forge a path back into the deal.

This time, however, the negotiations have resumed amid some positive signs.

Last week, the US restored sanction waivers that would allow other countries to assist Iran with its civilian nuclear programme, a step Washington said is necessary for restoring the agreement and bringing Tehran back into compliance with the deal. A US official also said last month that negotiations are entering the final stretch.

Biden administration officials, branding Trumps maximum pressure policy a failure, have argued that the deal is crucial to containing Irans nuclear programme and ensuring through diplomacy that Tehran never develops a nuclear weapon.

But several US lawmakers have been increasingly outspoken against reviving the deal.

Critics say the agreement fails to address major sticking points with Iran, including its ballistic missile programme and support for militias hostile to Washington and its allies across the Middle East. They also argue that Irans recent nuclear escalation proves that the JCPOA only limited without fundamentally disabling Irans nuclear programme.

We do know that even for the first couple of years of the JCPOA, Iranian leaders gave absolutely no indication that they were willing to look beyond the scope of these limited terms and fought vigorously to keep their highly advanced nuclear infrastructure in place, Menendez said last week.

On Tuesday, 33 Republican senators sent a letter to Biden calling on his administration to put a renewed JCPOA to a vote in the US Congress as a treaty. Formal treaties require a two-thirds majority in the Senate to be ratified. Currently, Democrats have the thinnest of majorities in an evenly divided chamber, where Vice President Kamala Harris casts the tie-breaking vote.

The Republican senators warned that any agreement not approved by Congress would likely be torn up in the early days of the next presidential administration.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell last week also cited Menendezs opposition to the JCPOA in urging more pressure on Iran, calling the country the biggest threat America and its partners face in the Middle East.

Yet as opposition mounts, proponents of diplomacy with Iran are rallying support for the JCPOA.

Senators Jeff Merkley and Ed Markey released a joint statement reaffirming support for the agreement on Wednesday.

A restoration of the Iran Nuclear Deal will verifiably close off Irans pathways to a nuclear bomb through the most intrusive monitoring and inspection regime ever negotiated in a nonproliferation agreement, the senators said.

On Wednesday, 20 advocacy groups in favour of US diplomacy with Iran including Americans for Peace Now, J Street, MoveOn, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and the Truman Center for National Policy urged the Biden administration to continue to push to revive the JCPOA.

Many of those who cheered as Trump sabotaged the JCPOA have already made clear that the maximum pressure road ends in a full-blown war between the US and Iran, they said in a letter addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

A turn away from diplomacy toward a war of choice with Iran would be incredibly detrimental to US national security.

Ryan Costello, policy director at NIAC, one of the groups that signed Wednesdays letter to the Biden administration, said the deal offers crucial, immediate non-proliferation benefits, while noting that regional security worsened after Trump left the agreement.

Costello told Al Jazeera that demands to dismantle Irans nuclear programme and change its geopolitical posture, which he said would amount to a surrender for Tehran, have never been in the cards.

The way you might get to a longer deal, or more-for-more deal that addresses issues beyond the nuclear file, is to first show that the US can comply with its sanctions-lifting commitments because thats our leverage over Iran right now, he said.

Early in his tenure, Biden and his top aides emphasised consultations with Congress and US allies in the Middle East. They succeeded in securing backing for the deal from the Gulf Cooperation Council, but Israel the USs top ally in the region and many in Congress remain adamant in rejecting the JCPOA.

Mortazavi, the journalist, said more than a year into the Biden administration, it has become clear that a US president who seeks to pursue diplomacy with Tehran will not satisfy hawkish officials in Washington. For that reason, she said she hopes the administration has given up on trying to appease them. It looks like they have because the opposition is becoming more and more vocal from the other side, she told Al Jazeera.

Mortazavi also stressed that it is fully within the presidents authority to revive the agreement, noting that JCPOA opponents do not have a two-thirds, veto-proof majority in Congress to thwart such a move. At the end of the day, I think there still will be a political cost for this; the critics will attack the president and his team when they make that decision [to return to the deal], she said.

Still, Imad Harb, director of research and analysis at the Arab Center Washington DC, said with Americans growing wary of interventions in the Middle East, the attacks on Biden if he restores the deal are unlikely to damage Democrats in Novembers congressional midterm elections.

He added that it will be difficult for Republicans to paint Biden as dangerous for Israel because he himself is more pro-Israel than they are, anyway.

I really dont think that this is going to be a political setback for him. I think hes going to gain from it, Harb told Al Jazeera.

See the article here:
As Iran nuclear talks enter final stretch, opposition grows in US - Al Jazeera English