A modest proposal on housing border-crossers and other commentary
Conservative: Where To House Border-Crossers
Reviewing the controversy over detention centers for illegal border-crosses, National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson proposes a tongue-in-cheek “solution” to housing people now stuck in what some Democrats call “concentration camps”: Since it’s summer, “America’s 4,000 colleges and universities have plenty of empty dorm space and underutilized facilities.” Places like Harvard and Yale could “volunteer to house and feed 1,000 detainees each,” with medical and law schools providing much-needed services. “Such first-hand association would ground urban progressives’ abstract advocacy in real-life caring.” In all, it’s “an ideal solution to those who are worried about the supposed callous treatment in overcrowded and underfunded federal immigration centers.”
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2020 watch: Tom Steyer’s Wasting His Money
Billionaire Tom Steyer has the “resources to tilt the balance of American political power,” but blowing his money “on a doomed presidential campaign” isn’t the way to do it, sighs The New Republic’s Matt Ford. Steyer “frames himself as a populist who would fight big corporations that have hijacked the nation’s political system,” but “it’s unclear whether a hedge-fund manager with no experience in elected office is the best evangelist of that message.” Rather than “spend lavishly on state legislative races” and judicial races, Steyer fell into the “singular obsession with the presidency” now characteristic of his party. This “vanity campaign” is proof that Steyer only cares about his “new political passion: himself.”
Libertarian: Fake News on #NotMyAriel
After Disney announced black actress and singer Halle Bailey as the new Ariel in the live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid,” #NotMyAriel began trending on Twitter — but not for the reason you think, warns Reason’s Robby Soave. It turns out the “overwhelming majority” of people using the hashtag “are doing so in support of Bailey and expressing outrage that anyone would be offended by a black Ariel.” A notorious early post (“Us white girls, who grew up with ‘The Little Mermaid’ deserved a true-to-color Ariel”) came from a fake troll account. The supposed “backlash” that a Washington Post column blamed on President Trump’s “white nostalgia” was really just “a handful of tweets” expressing dissatisfaction. “Mistakes like these,” Soave notes, “are the result of taking social media too seriously and too literally.”
From the left: Biden Is Still Dems’ Best Hope
For all the claims that Joe Biden would be “a general election train-wreck for the Democrats,” Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall points out that “basically every poll for months shows that he is significantly stronger than every other Democrat up against Trump.” A recent Washington Post-ABC Poll shows Biden “with a 10 point margin,” while every other candidate is nearly tied with Trump. Some dismiss Biden as “too old-fashioned” or “too out of touch with the causes and issues that animate a younger and more diverse generation of voters,” yet “primary polls are heavily driven by perceptions of electability,” and the “pattern” of his popularity is “universal.” In short, “wishful thinking won’t change the fact that the evidence we have to date shows Biden, whatever his faults, is the strongest challenger.”
Defense beat: Why the Pentagon Loves Israeli Tech
“Since the 1980s Jerusalem has become a key supplier of advanced military technology to Washington,” Seth Frantzman reports at Tablet, from add-on vehicle armor that’s saved countless US lives in Iraq and Afghanistan to Iran Dome anti-missile systems. Israel “has excelled in supplying the U.S. in areas where Washington requires a technology quickly.” And this tech is “battle-tested and operational” — a sharp contrast to dubious US systems like “the F-35 aircraft, the white whale of American defense technology, that has been in development for decades and is expected to cost more than a trillion dollars by the time it’s completed.” Indeed, “the American-Israeli military relationship . . . based on the similar demands born of common threats and shared experiences . . . shows every sign of continuing to grow stronger.”
— Compiled by Mark Cunningham & Ashley Allen
