"The AHCA is far from perfect, but would be a substantial improvement over the Obamacare mess. Obamacare stifled choices and drove up prices.

"As the Senate reshapes the health care reform law, it should emphasize giving customers and states greater flexibility. Any bill should allow people to keep their current insurance. And it should focus on bringing down premiums, particularly for the young, healthy people opting out of the health insurance market because it is too expensive."

"A top Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee says she has yet to see evidence of collusion between Donald Trump advisers and the Russian government.

"'Do you have evidence that there was in fact collusion between Trump associates and Russia during the campaign?' CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked California Sen. Dianne Feinstein during an interview on Wednesday.

"'Not at this time,' she responded.

"'Well, that's a pretty precise answer,' Blitzer said."

"College campuses still appear superficially to be quiet, well-landscaped refuges from the bustle of real life.

"But increasingly, their spires, quads, and ivy-covered walls are facades. They are now no more about free inquiry and unfettered learning than were the proverbial Potemkin fake buildings put up to convince the traveling Russian czarina Catherine II that her impoverished provinces were prosperous.

"The university faces crises almost everywhere of student debt, university finances, free expression, and the very quality and value of a university education."

"Because President Trump is a man in a hurry, here's how he can save time today when he welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the White House.

"After the briefest of pleasantries, Trump can say, 'Mr. Abbas, your people should be preparing to celebrate the 17th anniversary of the creation of their own state. But Yasser Arafat foolishly refused to recognize Israel's right to exist at Camp David in 2000, so there was no deal, and history marched on without a Palestinian state.

"'That was a mistake you can rectify right here, right now,' Trump continues. 'I ask you, President Abbas, are you ready to recognize Israel as the Jewish homeland, renounce violence against it and negotiate peaceful, secure borders for two states?'

"It is a yes-or-no question. If Abbas won't say yes, the answer is no -- and there is nothing more to discuss. Trump can spend his windfall of free time on issues more likely to bring results."

"House Republican leaders and White House officials are increasingly confident about passing their long-stalled Obamacare replacement bill: More lawmakers than ever are committed to voting 'yes,' they say, and GOP insiders insist they're within striking distance of a majority.

"But the window of opportunity for Speaker Paul Ryan and his leadership team is closing fast. The House is scheduled to leave town for a one-week recess on Thursday, and some senior Republicans worry that failing to get it done by then would fritter away critical momentum. Skittish Republicans would return home to face a barrage of pressure from Democrats and progressive outside groups.

"Some senior Republicans and White House officials are advising Ryan (R-Wis.) and his top lieutenants to cancel the recess if needed, and to keep the House in session until they have the votes."

"What is the Democratic agenda? What does the party have to offer besides disunity, obstruction, incoherence, obsession, and obliviousness? They haven't rallied behind a plan to fix Obamacare or an alternative to the president's tax proposal. They seem dead set against enforcement of immigration laws, they seem opposed to any restrictions on abortion, they seem as eager as ever to regulate firearms and carbon dioxide. It's hard to detect a consensus beyond that. Banks, trade, health care, taxes, free speech, foreign intervention -- these issues are undecided, up for grabs.

"For eight years President Obama supplied the Democratic message, provided the Democrats answers to public questions. Now Obama himself is under fire for agreeing to deliver a $400,000 speech to Cantor Fitzgerald. He is already a figure of the past: His hair gray, his legacy under siege, his time spent lounging on Richard Branson's yacht or listening desultorily to Chicago undergrads. The energy is with Bernie, with the identity-politics movements, with the paramilitary 'antifa' bands, and each one of these overlapping sects are outside the party establishment Obama represents.

"That establishment is just as befuddled as its Republican counterpart at the current political scene. 'I don't know what's happening in the country,' Hillary Clinton is said to have told a friend at some point during the recent campaign. This apprehension of distance between herself and the everyday lives of her co-nationals is one of the most perceptive observations Clinton has ever made. Her problem was she never figured out the answer, never came to realize that the various guesses she and Obama and other professional Democrats have wagered about 'what's happening in the country' -- racism, sexism, nativism, gerrymandering, Citizens United, Fox News Channel and talk radio, Russia -- are insufficient. What the Democratic party has yet to understand is that its social and cultural agenda is irrelevant or inimical to the material and spiritual well being of their former constituents. And until the Democrats recognize this fact, their next 100 days will be no better than their first."

Read entire article here

"The president's tax proposal -- a big, swashbuckling vision for enacting pro-growth principles -- offends many on the left by its very nature. Within a few minutes of its release, liberal economists, politicians and pundits were ripping it as a payoff to the wealthy, a deficit buster, regressive, unrealistic. That alone is proof Mr. Trump is getting the policy right.

"Yet what Mr. Trump may be doing best is the politics of tax reform. The president's proposal marks not only a triumph of ideas, but a savvy acknowledgment of the Washington landscape. After a rocky first few months, Mr. Trump is playing to win.

"Start with the fact that this proposal is substantive. It didn't have to be. In the wake of the health-care meltdown, Republicans on Capitol Hill began debating whether they ought to throw out messy, complicated tax 'reform' in favor of easy, straightforward tax 'cuts.' That wasn't what they campaigned on; they had promised to slay the tax-code beast. Moreover, targeted rate cuts wouldn't deliver for the economy. But this crew argued to the White House that a slimmed-down approach would at least deliver a quick, symbolic legislative victory.

"Mr. Trump's plan rejects that retreat. Instead of going weaker, it goes stronger, compiling into one document all the tax-reform ideas that most inspire conservative movers and shakers. Simplify the brackets? Check. Lower rates? Check. Harmonize rates between corporations and small businesses? Check. Move to a territorial corporate-tax system? Check. Kill off the estate tax, the alternative minimum tax, itemized deductions, and corporate loopholes? Check. This is the sort of stuff that think tanks, congressional reformers and business groups have been salivating over for years."

"President Trump moved Wednesday to fulfill one of his key campaign promises, outlining a dramatic plan to slash taxes for nearly all individuals and businesses and give the tax code its biggest overhaul in three decades. ...

Predictably, Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer instantly dismissed the proposal with their usual mantra of 'a tax giveaway to the very, very wealthy.'

Well, let them propose an alternative that genuinely boosts economic growth and cuts taxes for a broad swath of Americans.

Plenty of political horse-trading is ahead; the final product may look very different. But Trump was elected on a promise to jump-start the economy and produce 'jobs, jobs, jobs' -- and his opening move puts that goal at the heart of the tax-reform fight."

"A full decade after voting to construct a secure barrier along the U.S. border with Mexico, Congress continues to refuse to lay out the money required to build the damned wall.

"This, even after the stunning upset in last year's elections by the juggernaut presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, who won the presidency on a clarion vow to voters that he would once and for all build a wall along the border. Mr. Trump's historic upset came after years and years of both Democrat and Republican politicians talking tough about illegal immigration and promising to crack down on the porous border, yet refusing to actually fix the problem.

"Because they are politicians. If you fix the problem, then you can no longer campaign on the problem."

"What if Donald Trump had unilaterally shut down every investigation into Russian espionage, released over 20 suspected Russian spies, struck a deal to get rid of sanctions against Russia -- in return for honoring deals that had been signed years before -- and then lied to the American people about the entire episode?

"That's the Obama Administration's Iran deal. It might have been the first time the United States has offered extensive concessions to a nation that has continued to destabilize its interests, for nothing in return. But Barack Obama didn't just support Iran's position over our allies like Israel (no surprise there, considering his antagonism) or Sunni nations -- he supported it ahead of his own Justice Department's 30-year counterproliferation efforts.

"According to an over 8,000-word investigation by Politico, Obama's efforts to placate Iran includes releasing genuine spies (not the type we see behind every bowl of borscht these days) to a terror-supporting theocracy that has American blood on its hands and threatens the stability of the entire Middle East. Obama released Iranians who were allegedly part of an 'illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made microelectronics' that would help create surface-to-air and cruise missiles. Information that will come in handy. In seven years, 'all the sanctions, even arms embargoes and missile-related sanctions would all be lifted,' Hassan Rouhani correctly noted during the post-deal Iranian celebration. ...

"It seems increasingly plausible that Obama was hamstrung to act in Syria by the overriding need to avoid upsetting the Iranians (and Russians). That alone should be enough to count the Iran deal as a massive disaster. Yet, considering how little we know about what was in the deal, who knows what ugly things we'll find out in the coming years."