Brian Beutler/Crooked Media:
The contrast between Benghazi and Niger as political events parallels the contrast between how the American political system processed revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct and how we processed similar revelations about the male leaders of Fox News—and even the Republican president of the United States.
In each case the institutions of the right responded to key developments instrumentally, revealing through the shifting scenes and casts of characters that their animating concerns weren’t protecting Americans serving in dangerous parts of the world, or protecting women in the workforce from powerful, abusive men, but making partisan brickbats of those incidents when possible, to advance unrelated goals.
The institutions of the left, by contrast, addressed each event in close to neutral fashion, guided primarily by their commitments to competent governing, and the physical well-being of fellow citizens.
This illustrates a fundamental characterological difference between the American left and the American right. And, if we aspire to root our political culture in reason, empiricism, and good faith, it should inform how we sort political controversies—what we do and don’t lend credence and emphasis to—as we debate policies and select political leaders.
WaPo:
GOP senators’ struggle: Speak out against Trump, or achieve something for their silence
NY Times:
Another Republican Call to Arms, but Who Will Answer?
Pro tip: if you want more to speak out, don’t immediately dump on them for their previous sin of being conservative Republicans. Yeah, i know all about their voting record. I know who they are. I’m not asking you to be them. But do you want to be right, or do you want them to speak out?
OTOH, the silent ones hoping for advancement and achievement? We have a term for the silent Germans during the Nazi era. They’re called Nazis.
WaPo:
In an unannounced Senate floor speech Tuesday announcing his retirement, Flake excoriated Trump without using his name.
“We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that is just the way things are now. If we simply become used to this condition . . . then heaven help us,” Flake said, his voice shaking. “Without fear of the consequences and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe, we must stop pretending that the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused as telling it like it is when it is actually reckless, outrageous and undignified.”
David A. Graham/Atlantic:
Flake’s Senate floor speech, which he delivered in a nervous but deeply felt manner, came not long after he announced his retirement to the Arizona Republic. The address was a stinging critique of Trump, impeaching him for divisiveness, moral bankruptcy, and lack of leadership on the national and international stages. He also adopted the language of the self-described “Resistance” to Trump, warning against allowing Trump to be “normalized,” though he at no time used the president’s name.
“We must never regard as ‘normal’ the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals,” he said. “We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country—the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve. … They are not normal.”
Michael Gerson/WaPo:
A common defense of President Trump points to the positive things he has done from a Republican perspective — his appointment of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and other conservative judges, his pursuit of the Islamic State, his honoring of institutional religious freedom. This argument is not frivolous. What frustrates is the steadfast refusal among most Republicans and conservatives to recognize the costs on the other side of the scale.
Chief among them is Trump’s assault on truth, which takes a now-familiar form. First, assert and maintain a favorable lie. Second, attack and discredit sources of opposition. Third, declare victory based on power or applause. So, Trump claimed that Florida Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson’s account of his conversation with a Gold Star widow was “totally fabricated.” (Not true.) Wilson, after all, is “wacky.” (Not relevant.) And Trump won the interchange because Wilson is “killing the Democrat Party.” (We’ll see.)
The pattern is invariable. President Barack Obama is a Kenyan; the Mexican government deliberately dumpscriminals across the border; “thousands and thousands” of people in New Jersey celebrated the 9/11 attacks ; Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s father consorted with Lee Harvey Oswald; vaccination schedules can be tied to autism; Obama was “wiretapping” Trump Tower during the presidential campaign; Obama asked British intelligence to spy on Trump; at least 3 million immigrants voted illegally in the 2016 election. Any source that disputes Trump is personally defamed or dismissed as “fake news.” And how is truth ultimately adjudicated? “The country believes me,” Trump said earlier this year. “Hey, I went to Kentucky two nights ago. We had 25,000 people.” Confronted by a reporter about his routine deceptions, Trump answered, “I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president and you’re not.”
“I won, so FU” is a Republican governing principle. But hey, it might get worse. Politico on Thom Tillis:
North Carolina’s Thom Tillis is tired of his fellow Republicans complaining about the way the Senate is run. As for Democrats, they lost—too bad for them.
And most of all, the former speaker of the statehouse in Raleigh says, it’s time for Republicans to stop paying attention to process complaints about hearings and regular order and reconciliation and the way it gets played in the political press—voters don’t care about that, he says—and focus on getting bills through that become laws.
“When people are fundamentally opposed to the policy, they start screaming process,” Tillis told me, in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “It’s hard to debate the result. They may not like the process, but if they don’t like the process, change the rules. Otherwise, you should use whatever rules are available to produce the outcome.”
Heath care point-counterpoint
Alexander C. Hart/USA Today:
Democrats should adopt a simplicity agenda, from health care to retirement
The Republican vision focuses on deregulation, leaving Americans on their own against massive insurance companies. GOP proposals have hidden this approach within a Trojan horse of federalism: If enacted, states would be allowed to eliminate many of the basic standards of coverage the Affordable Care Act created.
Republicans say this approach will let each American pick the plan that best meets his or her needs. But in reality, the main outcome will be more work and worry for consumers. Denied a core set of guaranteed, essential benefits, consumers will have to evaluate potentially dozens of plans for coverage of maladies and treatments both common and rare. It’s a massive workload for little benefit, even ignoring how these changes would hurt the sickest and poorest Americans.
Against that backdrop, Democrats would be wise to run harder in the opposite direction, laying out a vision for a world that is not just morally superior, but also simpler and less stressful. Medicare for All would dramatically reduce the complexity by creating an easy-to-use health insurance plan that all Americans can trust to cover the care they need
Steven Rattner/NY Times:
Amid the many complications of Medicare for All, the question of what would happen to the 157 million Americans who get their insurance from their employers and the 19 million who are enrolled in Medicare Advantage loom large.
To be sure, some Democratic senators seem to be supporting Medicare for All as a lever to achieve more modest goals, like a public option within the existing health care exchanges.
For example, Al Franken of Minnesota called the Sanders proposal “aspirational” and “a starting point for where we need to go as a country.”
More like the starting point of a political nightmare for Democrats. For one thing, Mr. Sanders has been unabashed in his attacks on “the establishment wing of the Democratic Party” and has intimated that primary challenges may be in the offing.
For another, when the Republicans unleash their inevitable blitzkrieg, I doubt voters will recognize the subtleties in positions like Mr. Franken’s.
Ed Yong/The Atlantic:
The Deadly Panic-Neglect Cycle in Pandemic Funding
A nonprofit is calling for the U.S. to redouble its commitment to helping developing countries prepare for new infectious diseases
America has a long and bipartisan history of supporting global health. In 2003, George W. Bush created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has since used over $72 billion in funding to distribute antiretroviral drugs to almost 11.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2014, Barack Obama deployed thousands of troops and health workers to fight Ebola in West Africa, and secured an emergency budget of $5.4 billion to deal with the epidemic.
The Trump administration’s attitudes toward global health have been harder to gauge. The president’s penchant for isolationism, from his America First rhetoricto his thrice-attempted travel ban to his NATO skepticism, sit uneasily with an ethic of international cooperation, and the administration’s proposed budget threatened to slash $2.2 billion from global health programs. But recent signs from administration officials have been more reassuring.
NEJM:
Firearm-Related Injury and Death — A U.S. Health Care Crisis in Need of Health Care Professionals
Educate yourself about gun safety. Ask your patients if there are guns at home. How are they stored? Are there children or others at risk for harming themselves or others? Direct them to resources to decrease the risk for firearm injury, just as you already do for other health risks. Ask if your patients believe having guns at home makes them safer, despite evidence that they increase the risk for homicide, suicide, and accidents.
Don’t be silent. We don’t need more moments of silence to honor the memory of those who have been killed. We need to honor their memory by preventing a need for such moments. As health care professionals, we don’t throw up our hands in defeat because a disease seems to be incurable. We work to incrementally and continuously reduce its burden. That’s our job.
Will yet another commentary about the ravages of firearm-related harm change anything? Probably not — our journals have published far too many following prior firearm-enabled catastrophes. The only thing that will change the world for the better is a group of people who believe that they can change the world. With regard to firearm-related injury and death, let’s each be part of that group.
Matt O’Brien/WaPo:
President Trump's shortlist for the next Federal Reserve chair includes the most qualified person for the job who's been on the right side of every economic argument the last 10 years, and also Kevin Warsh.
The first one, of course, is current Fed Chair Janet L. Yellen. Now, the case for Yellen is as straightforward as it gets. She has the best résumé for the job, and has done about the best job she could at it the last four years. Indeed, she has a PhD in economics from Yale, she's been a Fed governor, a regional Fed president, the Fed vice chair, and now the Fed chair itself at a time when unemployment is at a 16-year low and inflation is below their 2 percent target. The only possible quibble is that inflation actually might be a little too low right now. In any case, though, it's impossible to invent a better C.V. for a central banker.
But as easy as it is to tell a story about why Yellen should be Fed Chair, it's hard to tell one about Warsh. The Harvard Law-trained Warsh, whose father-in-law is a major Republican donor and the heir to the Estée Lauder fortune, got his start on Wall Street before taking a job in the Bush White House. From there, he was nominated to be a Fed governor despite lacking the kind of high-level academic or financial credentials that others have had. “Kevin Warsh is a bad idea,” former Fed vice chair and Reagan appointee Preston Martin said at the time, and “if I were on the Senate Banking Committee, I would vote against him.”
