Новости за 03.08.2017

The headline at The Boston Globe on Wednesday was incredulous: “Could 3 people from Massachusetts really run for president?” Yet it was a question the hometown paper had to ask this week, with news that Barack Obama is urging former Governor Deval Patrick to consider a White House bid and that Representative Seth Moulton plans to attend an Iowa steak fry this September. If either Patrick or Moulton wants to take on President Donald Trump in 2020, they could be entering a Democratic primary field... Читать дальше...

So first, the good news: The notion that income inequality has caused harm in America has finally broken into the hubs of elite opinion. The sort of socio-political tastemaker who not so long ago denied the problem, has moved on to dissembling about it instead. That’s progress, of a sort.

In the heat of the 2016 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders released one of his signature proposals: Medicare-for-All. In response, economists, policy experts, and the liberal media all hammered the plan: Vox’s Ezra Klein called it “puppies-and-rainbows” and Paul Krugman wrote at The New York Times that “Sanders ended up delivering mostly smoke and mirrors.” The Urban Institute released an analysis that contended that Sanders’s proposal would have cost twice what the campaign had projected. Sanders’s plan was dragged for being vague... Читать дальше...

Conservative opposition to the Affordable Care Act degenerated into fantastically unprincipled nonsense almost as soon as it became a Republican organizing principle, but it worked in that capacity for so long because there was something real at the heart of it.

Admiral Paul Zukunft, the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, knows oil spills. As the lead coordinator for the government’s response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he directed tens of thousands of responders as they attempted a herculean task: recovering 200 million gallons of crude oil from the Gulf of Mexico. Today, Zukunft admits that task was impossible to complete, and that’s why he knows that drilling for oil in the freezing, unpredictable Arctic Ocean would be far more dangerous than drilling in the Gulf. Читать дальше...