• Andrew Klavan, Wall Street Journal: What death panels might look like if they actually existed: "You have the luxury of thinking only of yourself, but we have to think about everyone," says the professor of ethics. He's a celebrity and waxes eloquent every Tuesday and Thursday on Bill Maher Tonight. "This isn't the free market, after all. We can't just leave fairness to chance. We have to use reason. Is it better for society as a whole that we allocate limited resources for your operation when we might use the same dollars to bring many more high quality years to someone, say, younger?"
• Bob Herbert, New York Times: This is reform? "It's never a contest when the interests of big business are pitted against the public interest."
• Eugene Robinson, Washington Post: Where's the reformer we voted for? "The fate of a government-run public health insurance option will be an early test of his ability to end the way Washington's big-money, special-interest politics suffocates true reform."
• William McGurn, Wall Street Journal: Democratic plans have no substance. "Right now the entire Beltway--including the West Wing--seems obsessed with finding out what went wrong with the administration's sales pitch. No one appears to think the problem might be substance."

• Wall Street Journal Editorial: "Whole Foods is a publicly traded company, so the effects of a real boycott would mainly damage the pocketbooks of those nice Whole Foods employees and its stockholders. They may have little to worry about. Summer is nearly over and when the weekend farmers markets close, a real protest would require the store's hyperprogressive customers to withdraw forever from the Whole Foods community to get their artisanal foods at the supermarket chain down the block."
  

• David Milliband, Daily Telegraph: A plan for Afghanistan from Britain's foreign minister. "The next Afghan government has a duty to show its determination to root out corruption, the dedication to build a state that properly protects its people and the vision to build an inclusive political settlement."
• Melik Kaylan, Forbes: Let's give imperialism another shot. "Fund warlords, arm sympathetic tribes, build modest waterworks and roadways and mosques even, use Predator drone strikes aplenty, but let the Afghans fight it out while keeping the scales tilted in our favor."
• Corey Levine, Globe and Mail: Fair and free elections in Afghanistan? Forget it. "Widespread impunity, corruption and an embedded patronage system have also contributed to an entrenched political cynicism."

• Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal: "We know better than to talk to al Qaeda. This is why we should know better than to talk to the Irans and North Koreas of the world."

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