Lisa Murkowki is a Republican Senator from Alaska who voted against even opening debate on repeal and replace of Obamacare.
Murkowski has betrayed her constituents. She betrayed them this week by trying to block debate on repeal and replace. Or, she betrayed her constituents when she lied to them in 2015 with her vote in favor of repeal in the full knowledge that her vote didn’t matter because then-President Barack Obama (D) would veto the matter.
In a Wall Street Journal editorial about Republican Senators’ timorous attitude toward actual repeal and replace of Obamacare now that what they do matters, the editors had this remark toward the end of their piece:
One vote to watch would repeal ObamaCare with a two-year window to replace it, which is similar to a bill that 51 Senate Republicans voted for in 2015. We’ll see how many have changed their minds.
We’ll see how many have changed their minds. The rest of that sentence is this: …now that their vote has actual consequences, and they can’t hide behind their virtue signaling.
Little covered in the NLMSM is a growing dispute among Bhutan, the People’s Republic of China, and India over a region of Bhutan called Doklam. Bhutan is a landlocked, high altitude nation in the eastern Himalayas. Who cares? Bhutan and India do. And the US should.
Doklam is a region of Bhutan that abuts PRC-occupied Tibet, and by seizing Doklam the PRC would be able to further isolate TIbet, the better to deal with its impertinence. Doklam also sits along a narrow stretch of India that lies among Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh; occupying of Doklam would position the PRC to choke off a large region of India that lies beyond it: six states, three of which border on India’s Arunachal Pradesh—a state that the PRC claims for itself under the fiction that it’s a part of its occupied Tibet.
The proximate problem is a PRC effort to build a road into and through Doklam, the better (say most observers) to allow the PLA to enter and spread out into the region, sealing its occupation. Naturally, Bhutan demurred from this, and it asked for Indian assistance in stopping the PRC. India answered, sent troops into the region, and forced a halt to the construction. The PRC is objecting to this “interference.”
Now the PRC, through its press organ in the region, the South China Morning Post, is insisting that the situation is none of India’s business, and India should butt out—leaving the behemoth to partition the tiny.
The PRC, through this organ, even is making the cynical claim that Bhutan can’t possibly be sovereign over a “patch of territory which [it] does not effectively control.” Never mind that the reason Bhutan doesn’t control this patch of its territory is because the PRC is occupying it, and Bhutan alone is too small to dislodge it. Here is the extent of the cynicism:
New Delhi must push Thimpu [the Bhutan capital] to take the lead in engaging Beijing and devise a mutually acceptable boundary protocol that acknowledges China’s effective jurisdiction of the area….
Bhutan, and India along with it, must abjectly surrender.
We should become active in supporting India and Bhutan against this further example of PRC aggression, especially as it threatens not just Bhutan, but India as well—a potentially powerful ally in southern Asia.
This also would have implications for us far beyond aiding a little guy and a potential ally. Coming in bluntly on the side of India and Bhutan and opposing PRC aggression in southern Asia would be a clear signal (certainly, concrete action would need to follow) to other Asian nations—rimming the East and South China Seas, for instance—that pivot or no, we are moving to protect our and our friends’ and allies’ interests throughout Asia and the seas adjoining it.
This set of graphs, via Mark Perry at AEIdeas, tells the tale. The full article is Max Roser‘s at Our World in Data.
The graphs are easier to read in Roser’s article. Following are Perry’s “captions” for each of the graphs.
Free market capitalism did that.
That’s what one of the signs held by a protestor says in the lead image of the Wall Street Journal piece on the soon-to-be-fatal plight of baby Charlie Gard. The baby suffers from a rare mitochondrial disorder that usually is fatal. The baby’s doctors insisted this case can only be fatal, and a British court (and a European Union court! Is there any stronger argument for the Brits taking themselves out of the EU?)—because in Great Britain Government gets the final word on babies, not parents—agreed and agreed with the doctors’ further demand that baby Charlie be taken off life support to die.
But.
An American doctor has treated babies with this mitochondrial disease, and he has had some success with his treatment. He indicated he had a 10% chance of helping Charlie.
However.
Charlie Gard’s parents’ legal fight to keep him on a ventilator and take him abroad for experimental therapy, against the opinion of his doctors, ended Monday when they dropped the case, saying his muscular damage was worse than feared and the treatment wouldn’t help.
Charlie’s parents struggled for months (months!) to get their baby out of gaol so they could take him somewhere to get treatment, however long-shot. Now the doctors claiming to treat him and the court that said “No further effort to treat is allowed” must explain the impact those months of interference and delay had on baby Charlie’s chances.
This is what Brits can look forward to, now that their government and its death panels have asserted their absolute control over the fate of British children. The sign isn’t far wrong.