A new memorial for National Mall; Betsy DeVos costs taxpayers as she fails to protect students
Good morning. On behalf of The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board, welcome to The Take, your opinion-politics newsletter. Please sign up for it here.
Jack Ohman discovers the latest pre-existing condition under Medicaid. Experience the symptoms here.
Our take
Editorial
Betsy DeVos fails to protect students against for-profit colleges. It will cost you: If Education Secretary Betsy DeVos believes the Obama administration’s rules restricting for-profit colleges are muddled, she should come up with her own. But she won’t.
Columns
Foon Rhee: Fewer than 1 percent of Americans have served in the military since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. A proposed memorial on the National Mall is an important symbol for them – and a big test for the rest of us of how much we value their service.
Karin Klein: Many of us don’t want a drawn-out, painful decline in nursing homes, or extreme measures to keep us barely alive. No last-ditch killer chemo that would have no realistic chance of restoring us to meaningful life.
Andres Oppenheimer, Miami Herald: In a move that has drawn fire from some of the best-known U.S. technology innovators, the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security announced July 10 that it will postpone until March 14, 2018 – and “may ultimately eliminate” – the so-called U.S. startup visa program.
Op-Eds
Jon Leibowitz: Despite its name, the California Broadband Internet Privacy Act, awaiting votes in the state Senate, won’t do anything meaningful to protect consumer privacy online.
Roger S. Peterson: Democrats really stink at marketing. And unless they figure it out, they’re going to have a hard time winning elections.
Take a number: 1
Sen. Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres, no doubt welcomes Modesto’s Sen. Tom Berryhill to the Republican doghouse. Cannella was the lone Republican to vote for the gas tax increase in April, and Berryhill was the lone Senate Republican to vote for the cap-and-trade legislation, though as it happens, his vote wasn’t needed. All 27 Democrats voted for it, the two-thirds majority needed. Former Secretary of State George Shultz and former Gov. Pete Wilson chimed in, supporting the measure. “I am very pleased to have given farmers, small-business owners and rural Californians a voice in the negotiation of a measure that would have been passed one way or another," Berryhill said in a statement. The bill says farm equipment would qualify for the sales exemptions, and that farmers would get a share of cap-and-trade revenue to offset the cost of installing equipment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We’re guessing there’s more. Cannella, after all, got a promised train depot in Ceres.
Their take
East Bay Times: Eleven seconds was the estimated difference between a recent near-miss at San Francisco International Airport and the possible deaths of hundreds of passengers in what could have been one of the worst aviation disasters ever. How could this happen? There must be answers. There must be accountability. There must be changes. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating. But so far, we're getting more information from the Canadian government than our own.
Los Angeles Times: Assemblyman Travis Allen has hitched his political star to the campaign to repeal the “gas tax” – a package of vehicle fees and fuel taxes that the Legislature passed earlier this year to raise $52 billion over 10 years for transportation projects. Other Republican politicians also have jumped on the bandwagon. But don’t be fooled.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: When it comes to providing homeless services, compassion does not mean adherence to the status quo. The kindest thing to do often can be the hardest especially when it involves relocating individuals who have found a home off the grid and are reluctant to move.
Biloxi Sun Herald: Mississippi is running out of time. It must find out why millennials are leaving the state at the highest rate in the United States. And it must find out quickly.
David French, National Review: Last week, while the most in the media fixed their eyes on Donald Trump Jr., far-left activists geared up for a different kind of assault on the Trump administration: a full-court press to maintain a series of unlawful Obama-era policies that have stripped young men of their constitutional rights, ruined lives, and fostered politically correct (but factually challenged) hysteria on campuses from coast to coast.
Syndicates’ take
Michael Gerson: More than 3 million Somalis – about one-fourth of the population – are in critical need of help. Poverty and despair do not cause terrorism, but they can contribute to the failure of states, which provides the chaos in which terrorism thrives.
Eugene Robinson: We have a president – commander in chief of the armed forces, ostensibly the leader of the free world – whose every word is suspect. We have a president whose North Star is naked self-interest, not the good of the country.
Charles M. Blow: President Donald Trump’s abuse of language isn’t simply a thing to blithely mock. It is something with which we must all take great umbrage, because it has the power to degrade truth itself.
Paul Krugman: Predicting the effects of destroying the ACA is much easier than predicting the consequences when it was enacted, because what the Senate bill would do, pretty much, is return us to the bad old days.
Mailbag
“Make America great again? We're the laughing stock of the world. When were we not great?” – Todd Mead, Chico
Tweet of the day, actually July 14
“Thank you @RepDavidValadao for sending this excellent gift: smelt-themed cupcakes.” – Rep. Devin Nunes, @DevinNunes, tweeting a photo of cupcakes topped with gummy fish, as House Republicans passed HR 23, a bill that would allow Nunes donor-farmers to draw more Delta water. So helpful to the California water debate.
This story was originally published July 18, 2017 at 5:31 AM with the headline "A new memorial for National Mall; Betsy DeVos costs taxpayers as she fails to protect students."