From the right: How GOP Can Fix ObamaCare Now
Senate Republicans’ failure to pass even a “skinny repeal” of ObamaCare is “a serious disappointment,” say Lanhee Chen and Tevi Troy at The Washington Post. But even if they had, it “would have come nowhere close to solving the problems that plague our health-care system, especially rising costs and declining choices,” which are ‘exacerbated” under the existing law. But there are steps worth taking that can be attached to must-pass legislation, like medical liability reform and allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has the power to use “significant flexibility to shape the law” — he should “use that authority to promote choice in insurance marketplaces.” Because if Republicans “are unable to use the tools at their disposal, a government-run health-care system will move from being a liberal pipe dream to a realistic possibility.”
Conservative: What the Clintons Taught Trump
The New York Times notes that President Trump, facing the sort of “politically charged investigation” that dogged the Clintons, has adopted Bill and Hillary’s strategy against special prosecutor Kenneth Starr: Discredit the investigators before they hit their stride. But Terry Eastland at The Weekly Standard finds it “disconcerting that Trump aides have found the Clintons’ playbook and have studied it — and admire it.” Indeed, he doesn’t like the idea of teaching “their kind of politics.” Top Clinton aide Harold Ickes, he reminds us, told his attack team: “Everything is fair game. All guns up and loaded.” Says Eastland: “It’s not hard to imagine that kind of inspirational talk inside the Trump White House.”
Investigator: Vladimir Putin’s Real Motive
Last year’s election was marked “by three disclosure operations, all of which appear to have had a single author,” says Edward Jay Epstein at City Journal. Both sides, he notes, were offered dirt on their opponents “by a common source: Russian intelligence.” A third operation involved the stolen e-mails aimed at showing “the unfair treatment” by Democratic Party officials of Bernie Sanders. “Why would Russia so blatantly feed the slime to all sides in a campaign?” Look to Oliver Stone’s fawning interview with Vladimir Putin, who made clear “he views American hegemony, including America’s standing and respect in the international community, as a threat that Russia must counter.” It didn’t matter to Putin whether Clinton or Trump won: “His goal was to install doubt in the legitimacy of the process, regardless of how it turned out,” and “sow distrust in America’s reliability as a democracy.”
Policy wonk: Simple, Big Solutions for Penn Station Woes
The original Penn Station was “an architectural masterpiece,” notes Jim Venturi at Gotham Gazette, but as a transit facility had “serious flaws” which “are growing more obvious by the day.” The platforms and tracks, still in use, “haven’t been significantly altered in more than a century.” Amtrak’s Gateway Program calls for a new terminal station, Penn Station South, which would be “another inefficient terminal” that does “nothing to alleviate conditions in the existing station.” Better, says Venturi, to spend the $8 billion price-tag “on improving Penn and regional connectivity.” That includes operating Penn as a “through facility,” widening and lengthening the existing platform and building a major station in Sunnyside with access to all 26 commuter rail lines and seven different subway lines.
Literary critic: Remembering Sam Shepard’s Masterpiece
Playwright Sam Shepard’s death robs the American theater of “one of its last remaining giants,” says Graham Hillard at National Review. His 1980 masterpiece, “True West,” was “an exploration of identity, isolation and the deadening effects of the Hollywood machine,” part of Shepard’s “obsession” with “violent and unknowable men.” Now who will “seize his mantle?” Hillard says his “money would have been on David Mamet, an obvious genius and a dialogist of unparalleled skill.” Yet neither he nor writers like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tony Kushner “can claim Shepard’s fire.” Says Hillard: “The man had something. He gnawed that bone until it broke.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann