"With Mike Lee and Jerry Moran declaring their opposition, the latest Senate health-care bill is dead. McConnell now wants to revert to what was his original idea of repeal-only. The problem is that the CBO score will be much worse -- a projected 32 million fewer with insurance rather than 22 million -- and even repeal-only isn't true repeal (the repeal-only bill in 2015 left the Obamacare regulations untouched). If Republicans can't pass what is, in relative terms, a generous version of a repeal bill, it's hard to see how they are going to get a more stringent version over the hump -- they may get Mike Lee and Rand Paul on board, but they will presumably lose from the left of the caucus. McCain is already out with a statement calling for a bi-partisan bill. If the current fight isn't completely over, it's certainly closer to the end of the end than the end of the beginning. We may well be witnessing one of the greatest political whiffs of our time."

"The Cruz amendment -- which has been inserted into the GOP Senate health plan -- is smart, because it doesn't take anything away from anyone. If you want Obamacare -- you can have it. You can have the coverage for the 10 'essential benefits,' you can have the subsidies and the exchanges that were supposed to save $2,500 per family. It's still there for you.

"The Cruz amendment creates what is called a 'Consumer Freedom Option.' This essentially allows an 'off-ramp' from Obamacare for the tens of millions of Americans who don't want it. The 'Consumer Freedom Option' allows insurers who offer Obamacare-compliant plans to offer a range of much less costly plans. In other words, it empowers people and families to pick and choose what they want in their own insurance package. Some families want and can afford blanket coverage that insures them for everything from cancer to contraceptives to drug addiction to dental care to the sniffles. If you want to pay for that coverage, go for it.

"What about families or individuals with lower incomes or healthy life styles that want the other extreme? They want slimmed-down coverage that protects them from major medical expenses -- a bad injury like breaking a leg, or a serious disease with costly ongoing treatments. These families may voluntarily choose to pay for more routine medical expenses, like a checkup or a visit to the dentist's office, out of pocket. One benefit is that since more people will pay directly for medical services, they are likely to shop around for the best price, and this competition will lower prices for everyone."

"Per the Iran Nuclear Review Act of 2015, the Trump administration is required to certify to Congress every 90 days that Iran is in compliance with the July 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) and that this agreement is in the national-security interests of the United States. The next certification is due on July 17, 2017.

"It is crucial that the Trump administration, in the next JCPOA certification statement, correct the gross error it made in April, when it certified that Iran was complying with this agreement and that the JCPOA is in the national-security interests of our country. Unfortunately, the administration reportedly might make this same mistake again.

"The April certification went against Mr. Trump's accurate statements during the presidential campaign that the JCPOA was one of the worst agreements ever negotiated and that there was clear evidence of Iran's failing to meet its obligations under the agreement as well as cheating. Although many Trump officials opposed the April certification -- and this decision to certify appeared to irritate President Trump -- State Department careerists succeeded in convincing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to agree to certify anyway. Press reports yesterday indicated that President Trump will grudgingly agree to certify Iranian compliance again but could change his mind.

"Senators Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), Ted Cruz (R., Texas), David Perdue (R., Ga.), and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) made it clear in a July 11 letter to Secretary Tillerson that they do not want this to happen again and cited four ways Iran is not complying with the nuclear agreement ..."

Read entire article here.

"The vast sums states are forced to throw into pension systems erode their ability to provide good public education, safe streets and livable communities -- all goals deeply cherished by progressives.

"Roughly a quarter of the entire Illinois budget in recent years has gone to funding pensions. And yet, all this money has done is slow the rate of decline of its financial outlook.

"It is time for Americans to recognize the troubling fiscal plight in many states. Perhaps when Illinois or other states like it finally hit a fiscal wall, voters will wake up to the calamity that awaits them."

"The problem with the Democratic Party can be summed up in the strange odyssey of Bernie Sanders. Formerly a weird, hard-Left socialist outlier, Sanders became iconic of the new party by his assault on inequality and his calls for massive government intervention to share the wealth.

"But if a self-acclaimed socialist can earn a $1 million a year while on the government payroll, own three tony homes, and have his wife under FBI investigation for mismanaging and bankrupting a college and leaving with a lucrative golden parachute (and perhaps on the way out, evicting the disabled from her college's new digs), then no progressive is immune from the new Democratic stereotype of talking socialist while living hyper-capitalist.

"Figures like Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, and other Silicon Valley and Wall Street grandees are not the Democratic pathway to rebuilding the blue wall. So far Trump has so positioned himself that most attacks on his agenda reflect the parochial concerns of privileged progressives rather than those of hoi polloi. Every time a MSNBC talking head, a NeverTrump New York pundit, an identity politics functionary, a Hollywood celebrity, a campus Pajama Boy, a Silicon Valley master of the universe, or a Democrat functionary attacks Trump, he ends up sounding either snobbish, hypocritical, or parochial -- and thereby energizes the Trump populist message."

"Members of Congress returned from the Fourth of July recess this week facing a series of challenging fiscal issues with looming deadlines and no agreed-upon plan to avoid potentially disastrous outcomes.

"While the focus over the holiday and into this week has been whether Senate Republicans can pass their Obamacare repeal legislation, lawmakers have an increasingly tight timeline to speed through a consolidated budget and appropriations process and raise the debt ceiling. So far, there is no clear strategy to avoid the brinksmanship that has come to define Washington, D.C., in general, and Capitol Hill, in particular.

"Neither the House nor the Senate has passed a budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2018 despite the deadline to do so passing months ago. Neither chamber has yet considered a single appropriations bill, leaving them far behind schedule. Republican members have yet to coalesce around a strategy for raising the debt ceiling -- or even determine when they plan to lift it."

"When President Trump declared in his speech that 'we must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the south or the east, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are,' he was only stating a truth demonstrated throughout history: Societies that don't want to survive won't. And that would be a particular calamity in Europe and the Anglosphere, because it is there that the conditions of ordered liberty have been most spectacularly achieved, and that achievement is fragile. Securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity did not happen naturally or spontaneously, and it is not guaranteed, except by an unflagging commitment to maintaining them -- if necessary, by force of arms.

"This is not about race. It is one of the obvious achievements of Western civilization that its values and norms aren't limited to its core countries, but have spread throughout the world, and wherever they have taken hold have contributed to the advance of human liberty and welfare.

"All of this is apparently forgotten, though, when Donald Trump is involved. That the president's critics would jettison altogether the foundations of their own liberty for dislike of him would seem to make the speech's central question -- namely, 'whether the West has the will to survive' -- all the more important."

"President Trump delivered one of the most important speeches of his young presidency on Thursday. Billed as 'Remarks to the people of Poland,' the address was as clear a statement we've heard of Trump's nation-state populism. This philosophy, which differs in emphasis and approach from that of other post-Cold War Republican presidents, is both enduring and undefined. ...

"The most important concept in nation-state populism is the people. These are citizens of the folk community, membership in which crosses ethnic, racial, and sectarian lines. Note, for example, Trump's reference to the Nazis' systematic murder of 'millions of Poland's Jewish citizens, along with countless others, during that brutal occupation.' Or as Trump put it, in a different context, in his Inaugural Address: 'Whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American flag.'

"Together, the people constitute the nation. Borders define the nation's physical extent, but not its nature. Indeed, the nation may exist independent of statehood or political sovereignty. 'While Poland could be invaded and occupied,' Trump said, 'and its borders even erased from the map, it could never be erased from history or from your hearts. In those dark days, you had lost your land but you never lost your pride.' Nor is the nation always represented in the corridors of power. 'Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another,' Trump said at the inaugural, 'or from one party to another -- but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C, and giving it back to you, the American people.' ...

"These are more than remarks to the Poles. They describe a world of sovereign nation-states, governed by peoples proud of their histories and confident in their futures, united in common cause against the enemies of civilization, of freedom and human dignity. And Trump presents a challenge in the form of a question: Are we still made of that stuff that populated a continent, became an industrial powerhouse, went to the moon, and defeated the Kaiser and the Fuhrer and the Emperor and the Politburo? I hope the answer is yes."

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"Americans may be more supportive of the president's new, post-Supreme Court order travel ban policy than many observers might have expected.

"A new Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday found 60 percent of respondents supported the ban, either strongly or 'somewhat' when given this explanation of it ...

"A full 37 percent of respondents said they 'strongly' supported the ban, with an additional 23 percent supporting it 'somewhat.' Only 14 percent strongly opposed the ban. Interestingly, the poll's crosstabs show even 39 percent of respondents who reported voting for Hillary Clinton last November expressed support. Forty-four percent of 2012 Obama voters were supportive as well. Among voters who listed their top issue as security, 81 percent supported the policy."

"President Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are not going to replace the American healthcare system with a free market. There are just too many obstacles, political, moral and economic.

"But the Republican Party does have a chance to create small experiments in market-based healthcare amidst the tangle of safety net programs, and outside the reach of Byzantine insurance regulations. If they write a bill that allows these experiments by either states, individuals, or organizations, they might transform the industry in the long run and perhaps beat back the Left's hitherto relentless march toward socialized healthcare.

"Creating room for such market forces would make a Republican bill worth supporting. ...

"The virtue of markets is not that they allow businesses to profit, although they do that, but that through robust competition, risk-taking and experimentation, they provide innovation and value at the lowest price. Market microcosms around the country, structured differently in different states according to local taste, and utilizing various models of coverage, could discover products that work far better than anything available before or after Obamacare."