A Round Up: Catching Up on the Morning's Columns

Mara Gay Aug 21, 2009
THE POLITICS OF HEALTH CARE REFORM
  • Heather Richardson Higgins, The Wall Street Journal: GOP should resist compromise at all costs. "Once the left's health-care vision is in place, it will be almost impossible to undo. If this takeover isn't worth resisting, what is?"
  • Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal: To save his presidency, Obama should pull the plug on ObamaCare. "It shouldn't become a wallow, but there's nothing wrong with self-reflection and trying to learn from everything we did that was wrong, and right. It wouldn't be so bad to see a president echo this."
  • Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post: How about a little passion from the left, please. "The Pew survey suggests, basically, that Republicans are more passionate about the health-care issue than Democrats."
  • Paul Krugman, The New York Times: Obama has lost the trust of progressives. "On the issue of health care itself, the inspiring figure progressives thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat who talks of 'bending the curve' but has only recently begun to make the moral case for reform."
AFGHANISTAN
  • Editorial, The New York Times: Better governance is the best cure for the Taliban. "Afghan misgovernment is the Taliban's most important ally and most effective recruiting agent."
  • Richard Haas, The New York Times: Afghanistan is a war of choice. "There are alternatives to current American policy. One would reduce our troops' ground-combat operations and emphasize drone attacks on terrorists, the training of Afghan police officers and soldiers, development aid and diplomacy to fracture the Taliban."
REPLACING TED KENNEDY
  • Scott Lehigh, The Boston Globe: How to replace Kennedy. "Ted Kennedy is right: Massachusetts needs two voices and two votes in the US Senate."
  • Editorial, The Wall Street Journal: Kennedy is trying to change the rules. Again. "Beacon Hill has long sported heavy Democratic majorities, so the state legislature has the votes to grant Mr. Kennedy's wish. But does it have the chutzpah?"
THE END OF SWISS BANKING?
  • Editorial, The Washington Post: "The agreement promises to secure the Internal Revenue Service much of the information it legitimately seeks, including about 4,450 names of the worst violators -- while poking a potentially durable hole in the shroud that has traditionally enveloped Swiss banking."

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