Simon Maloy at The Week writes about North Korea:
President Trump, however, promised us this missile test was never going to happen. [...] What was put in place of "strategic patience?" Well, no one really seems to know, but it strongly resembles the same "strategic patience" policy the Trump administration insists has ended. The biggest discernible difference in the Trump North Korea strategy is that it seems to embrace incoherence and self-sabotage.
Bob Dreyfuss at Rolling Stone:
In the face of the intricately complex, three-dimensional chess problem that is North Korea's accelerating nuclear threat, since his January inauguration President Trump has unleashed a machine gun-like burst of 140-character responses that display an unhinged, mercurial state of mind. It's bad enough when one country is led by a leader who's often appeared to be on the edge of mental illness – earlier this year, Sen. John McCain called Kim Jong-un a "crazy fat kid," though Psychology Today deemed Kim "power-addled" but "rational." In the case of the U.S-North Korea standoff, not only North Korea but the United States too is led by a man who exhibits a "dangerous mental illness," according to a panel of psychiatrists at a Yale University conference, who called him "paranoid and delusional."
None of this inspires confidence in the outcome of the growing tension between the two nuclear-armed states. The crisis itself is real: faster than anyone, including intelligence experts, expected, North Korea has developed and fired off an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of more than 4,000 miles, making it capable of striking Alaska, and perhaps Hawaii. It has exploded nuclear weapons in tests five times, including twice in 2016, and its short- and medium-range missiles may already be capable of carrying atomic weapons to hit targets in South Korea and Japan, including American forces. It may have as many as 10 to 16 nuclear weapons already, according to the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. And, by all accounts, Kim Jong-un has no intention of giving any of it up.
Turning to health care, Jon Healey at The Los Angeles Times explains how awful the GOP position is right now:
Sen. Ted Cruz has a litmus test for his Republican Senate colleagues: Do they care more about cutting health insurance premiums than protecting people with preexisting conditions?
Granted, Cruz (R-Texas) wouldn’t put it that way. But the amendment he’s seeking to add to the Senate GOP’s bill to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act sets up a choice just that stark.
Mark Z. Barabak meanwhile writes about how inept the GOP is at health care policy:
Ever since the Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010, Republicans swore themselves to eradicating the legislation, a capstone of more than half a century of Democratic efforts. All they needed, they insisted, was the power to do so. [...]
How and when the legislative effort ends is anybody’s guess. But it certainly won’t get any easier from here.
The stakes are much higher now that GOP lawmakers are voting on legislation that could, with enough support, actually take effect. It’s an awful lot easier to attack and play to your political base when you have no worries about accountability, as Republicans did when they simply wished to score political points, than it is to constructively pass legislation having real-world consequences.
And on a final note, here’s Jonathan Chait’s take:
The most damaging development is a new statement by Mike Lee, one of the arch-conservative holdouts. Lee has been angling to make McConnell include provisions in the bill to weaken Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. Lee’s ideas are a complete nonstarter for many, perhaps most, members of the Republican Senate. Today his spokesman told Axios reporter Caitlin Owens, “The entire bill is unacceptable without the Consumer Freedom Option.” Lee’s position makes it almost impossible for McConnell to find his 50 votes. Blue-state senators Susan Collins and Dean Heller already appear irretrievably opposed to anything resembling McConnell’s plan. If Lee demands that the bill let insurers charge higher prices for coverage of treatments needed by sicker people, then he drives away at least one more vote on the party’s opposite wing: Lisa Murkowski or Shelley Moore Capito, among others, have expressed reservations about yanking coverage away from people who have obtained it through Obamacare.