Round Up: Catching Up on the Morning's Columns

Mara Gay Aug 28, 2009
REMEMBERING TED KENNEDY
  • David Brooks, New York Times: Kennedy was a compromiser. "Those words have negative connotations. But they shouldn't. Kennedy never abandoned his ambitious ideals, but his ability to forge compromises and champion gradual, incremental change created the legacy everybody is celebrating today."
  • Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: Ted Kennedy kept hope alive. "We sorely miss Kennedy's moral clarity."
  • Harold Meyerson, Washington Post: The age of the Irish. Kennedy and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, "channeled the best of the Irish American heritage -- its passion for justice, its empathy for the excluded, its strong sense of class into their work."
  • Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal: The Reagans and the Kennedys.
HEALTH CARE WARS
  • Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic: What Obama should have said about health care. "Had he spent more time reminding voters that reform would provide them with the security they now lack--security from financial ruin and medical catastrophe, the type private insurance too rarely provides--he probably would have been better off."
  • Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post: ObamaCare: An exit strategy for Democrats. "The end result is the liberal dream of universal and guaranteed coverage -- but without overt nationalization. It is all done through private insurance companies."
  • Gary Locke, Secretary of Commerce, Wall Street Journal: Fixing health care is good for business. "The alternative is frightening."
CIRCUMCISION
  • Hanna Rosin, DoubleX: I've heard from men. What do women think about circumcision? 
  • Robert Stacy McCain, The Other McCain: "Being quite happily married for 20 years, after having previously spent more than a decade as an equally happy and reasonably popular bachelor, I protest any suggestion that I really give a damn about anyone else's penis but my own."
  • Rush Limbaugh: "It's President Obama who wants to mandate circumcision."
  • Gabriel Winant, Salon: "Now that we're talking about Limbaugh's penis, all of a sudden, we're in a world where the tiniest measure of government suggestion about sexual health equals a full onslaught against privacy."

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