Sen. Mitch McConnell hopes to tweak the Senate health care bill so that he can submit it Friday to the Congressional Budget Office, the same Congressional Budget Office that torpedoed the bill in its current form when it announced that the bill would result in 22 million more people being uninsured by 2026.
That sent the Repubs into overdrive to get the bill revised in time for their Yankee Doodle break, because if anyone deserves a Fourth of July break, it’s hard-working Congress. ...
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Read MoreIn tennis, one way to serve an ace is to serve right down the middle. But what works in sports doesn’t always work in politics. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – how I love it when WaPo posters (that’s Washington Post posters to the uninitiated) call him “Kentucky Fried Voldemort” – tried to serve one right down the middle with the Senate’s health-care bill. But all he’s gotten so far for his troubles is a double fault as Conservatives, that world of No Theater, balk at “Obamacare Light” and liberals decry the bill’s meanness toward, well, everyone but rich people.
Will Mitchie prevail? As he serves for the match, he’ll need every Republican vote – and he’s no Federer. ...
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Read MoreSome years ago, I saw an exhibit at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass. in which a male artist included an image of the Y chromosome. It’s much smaller than the X chromosome. And it’s been shrinking.
I couldn’t help but think of this on the death of Otto Warmbier, the young American imprisoned and apparently tortured for allegedly taking a propaganda poster off the wall of a North Korean hotel. Returned to his homeland in a coma, he died six days later on June 19.
Lost, however, in the geopolitical story – the barbarism of North Korea, the failure of the Chinese to contain it and the challenge this poses for America – is both the larger and deeper cultural and psychological story. It is a narrative that says simply no one does stupid like a stupid man. ...
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Read MoreThe year 2017 is not quite half over but it’s already shaping up to be an annus horribilus, to borrow from Queen Elizabeth II. If the trend continues, we may look back on this past week as one of the most miserable of a miserable year.
The London fire, the Congressional shooting, the Michelle Carter case, the latest developments in Russiagate all point to a ruinous selfishness. ...
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Read MoreFor years, we have endured shooting after shooting in America. And Congress has done little to reform gun laws, caving to the National Rifle Association.
Today that indifference came full circle as an anti-Trump gunman opened fire on practice for a Congressional charity baseball game to be played tomorrow night, striking pro-gun Congressman Steve Scalise, the Majority Whip, and injuring three others as well. ...
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Read MoreYears ago, I had a boss who called me into his office one afternoon to “pick my brain.” As the big bosses in the company rarely acknowledged us bottom feeders, I was surprised and flattered. I shouldn’t have been.
Turns out “picking my brain” meant two hours of haranguing me over an incident involving my colleagues and our immediate superior in the hopes that I would knuckle under and take management’s side – which I didn’t. But the boss putting the squeeze on me left me shaken to my core.
I couldn’t help but think of this as former FBI Director James Comey riveted the nation with his testimony on his relationship with President Donald J. Trump, which was by turns folksy, candid, gutsy, self-deprecating and dramatic. I recognized a fellow traveler, someone caught between doing his job and serving the boss who threatened that job. ...
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Read More“These are the times that try men’s souls,” the great American patriot Thomas Paine wrote. We could use the strength of Paine and people like him at this moment.
Yesterday’s terrorist attack in London – which left seven dead and dozens wounded, including 21 critically – was not merely a momentary victory for the terrorists. It was a win for the strongmen of the world like President Donald J. Trump, whose response to them is more hatred and more irrational violence. Notice I wrote, “irrational violence.” ...
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