Conservative: Ohio Squeaker’s Crucial Lessons for GOP Republican Troy Balderson’s apparent one-point win in Tuesday’s special congressional election in Ohio is “both good and…
Conservative: Ohio Squeaker’s Crucial Lessons for GOP
Republican Troy Balderson’s apparent one-point win in Tuesday’s special congressional election in Ohio is “both good and troubling news” for President Trump and his party, contends Henry Olsen at American Greatness. And the results should “serve as a wake-up call” to Republicans “to improve their focus on swing voters” before November. Voters who backed Mitt Romney in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 remain “dead set against President Trump and what they think he stands for, and they are voting for Democrats to send the party a message.” More troubling: Republicans are also showing weakness among those who voted for Barack Obama in ’12 and Trump in ’16. Candidates don’t need to endorse all of Trump’s tariffs, but “fighting for American jobs against unfair competition” is an issue Republicans should own.
Financial writer: A Revolution in Hospital Prices
Chalk up yet another major reform for the Trump administration. In fact, suggests John Steele Gordon at Commentary, “this is yuuge.” Effective Jan. 1, hospitals and outpatient clinics will be required to post their prices for surgeries and other procedures online. Says Gordon: “Once prices are known and can be compared, competition —capitalism’s secret weapon — will immediately begin to drive prices towards the low end, draining untold billions of dollars in excess charges out of the system.” Fact is, this kind of price transparency “has been almost wholly absent from American medicine since the coming of medical insurance in the 1930s.” Now patients “will be able to compare prices and bargain.” This will force hospitals “to become more efficient and more innovative to stay competitive at the lower price range.”
Media critic: About that Probe Into Joy Reid’s Hacker . .
It’s been three months since MSNBC host Joy Reid responded to old anti-gay posts on her blog by claiming she was the victim of a nefarious hacker, notes Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin. Her lawyer even insisted the FBI had been called in to investigate. But “if there ever was an FBI investigation, it has yet to conclude,” though surely “with the full force of one of America’s top law enforcement agencies on the case, Reid’s hacker would have been caught and brought to justice” by now. So what about NBC’s internal investigation? It doesn’t look like the network conducted one. Perhaps, suggests McLaughlin, “it’s because NBC knows that an investigation would find that, like Brian Williams before her, Reid lied.” But at least in Williams’ case, “there were repercussions.”
Policy wonk: Was Las Vegas Itself the Massacre Motive?
Ten months after Stephen Haddock killed 58 people when he sprayed bullets on an outdoor concert, Las Vegas police still have no clue as to why he did it. But City Journal’s Howard Husock wonders whether the city of Las Vegas itself — gambling, in other words — might be the real motive. After all, Paddock’s “high-stakes gambling habit had cost him some $1.5 million over the two years before his rampage.” And while we can’t expect police in such a gambling-centric city to “bite the hand that feeds it,” it’s “hard to avoid seeing it as at least an underlying cause.” Because as “now-ignored moralists once understood, even the few winners in this racket are losers — and the actual losers can remain addicted and become embittered.” So why, he asks, “do we remain so certain” that betting “is a harmless pastime?”
From the left: Don’t Punish Kavanaugh for Gov’t Service
There may be “sensible tactical reasons” for Democrats to demand “every last piece of paper” about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, concedes Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein. And those tactics revolve around the timetable for a confirmation vote, which they’re trying to push past the November midterms. But “their demands have gone too far.” Since the acrimonious defeat of Robert Bork in 1987, he notes, both parties have “overreacted by avoiding elevating anyone with any history of interesting writings,” depriving the court “of some presumably interesting thinkers” and those “with any record of public service.” That, he adds, is “making it harder and harder to appoint the kind of justices the Supreme Court needs now.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
