From the Left: GOP Health Bill Deserved to Fail
The failure of the GOP's health-care bill is not as complicated as it might seem from all the “insider” accounts, writes Harold Pollack at Politico: “This would be a failure of policy and legislative strategy . . . not of tactics.” House Speaker Paul Ryan, Pollack says, had the chance to craft a bill consistent with the populism that put Mr . trump within the White House. This type of bill “might have proposed more sensible cuts on the most needy, smaller tax breaks for that wealthiest Americans, and tried harder to support the requirements of Republican governors, interest groups and citizens who rely on the Affordable Care Act in their daily lives.” Instead, he came up with a “radical bill” hated by think tanks left and right, the AARP and industry groups. It was dead on arrival.
Columnist's Modest Proposal: Split up Liberal Cities
Liberals love to feature the wondrous nature of their educated, diverse big cities. So perhaps you're ready to spread the wealth, suggests Ross Douthat at The New York Times: “We should treat liberal cities the way liberals treat corporate monopolies – not as growth-enhancing assets, but as trusts that concentrate wealth and power and conspire from the public good.” First, go ahead and take federal government's offices and disperse them among poorer locales. Then, heavily tax the endowments of major universities, “but offer exemptions for schools that expand their student bodies with satellite campuses in areas with well-below-the-median average incomes.” And provide new tax incentives for businesses to improve geographic diversity, “while their state and local tax break would be capped, which makes it more expensive for that upper class to live in and around high-cost, high-tax urban centers.”
Sleep Expert: The down-side of Solitary Slumber
Our current “system of sleeping – adults in one room, each child walled off in another” is a historical anomaly, explains Benjamin Reiss within the La Times. So why do we all do it? “It's more practical for adults to pursue nighttime leisure within an area where children aren't sleeping; it's easier to set everyone on a proper schedule for work and college whenever they can all retire to different spaces at different times; and parental intimacy may increase without children around.” Yet it also might breed “spousal tension” and “intergenerational conflict.” Notes Reiss: “If we raised our kids to share space with one another and their parents during the night, they may grow up to fight a bit less, share a bit more, and care for others around they are concerned on their own.”
From the best: AP Style Guide vs. the English Language
The Associated Press has joined the social justice warriors in erasing the fundamental concept of words for its popular style guide, reports Jazz Shaw at Heat. Gender, the AP now directs, merely “refers to some person's social identity.” Plus, the AP is allowing using plural pronouns to consult an individual, to prevent gender confusion. Says Shaw: “Words have power and it's a power which becomes magnified if this begins turning up in widely read and trusted sources . . . The Associated Press is flatly, boldly and incorrectly proclaiming that 'the term gender isn't synonymous with sex.' This is demonstrably false.” Plus they know it. But “the cohort which so frequently claims to function as the defenders of science . . . doesn't have curiosity about science when it comes to this question.”
Conservative Take: The Corporate Threat to Free Speech
“Fear of crackdown on free speech is a bipartisan thing nowadays,” writes Ben Domenech at The Federalist. However the real threat to speech comes less from government than from the corporate world. He points to a recent story about companies shunning advertising on the internet over complaints Google isn't doing enough to crack recorded on “hate” speech. Domenech sees how it'll play out: “First Google is going to be instructed to hire individuals to do a better job of policing its sites, tasked with removing 'extremist' content – its keep will be definitional drifts in how such content is considered extreme.” Ultimately, “the ability to make use of the platforms which have come to dominate the space is decided by the priorities of the corporations involved.”
