Policy wonk: Left Needs To Find Better Martyrs
Immigration activist Ravi Ragbir and his supporters shouldn’t have been surprised when he was ordered detained, says City Journal’s Seth Barron. After all, Ragbir spent time in prison for wire fraud in connection with a subprime mortgage scam after immigrating here and ordered deported after his release. But Manhattan Federal Court Judge Katherine Forrest ordered him released in an opinion one law professor characterizes as “long on rhetoric and short on careful legal analysis.” Her “perverse logic” is that since the government “didn’t deport Ragbir immediately,” it “can never deport him.” But the Left should think twice before “committing itself so fiercely to the plight of people like Ragbir, a confessed fraudster and thief.”
Conservative: Trump Should Tout His Record on Russia
If President Trump really is dedicated to “selling out American sovereignty to Russia,” as his critics suggest, he’s going about it “in an extremely confused fashion,” suggests Commentary’s Noah Rothman. Unfortunately, he’s “allowed [his] opponents to shape public perceptions” of what actually is a “laudably hawkish record” on Russia. Problem is, the president “still clearly clings to his fantasy of a thaw” with Moscow and “continues to talk about that prospect as if it was realistic.” Yet he’s also “boxed in Putin’s Russia” — for example, selling Patriot missiles to Poland and offensive weapons to Ukraine — and “vastly improved on the last administration’s permissive record.” Fact is, “the Trump administration has a good case to make, but they’re not making it.”
Pigskin watch: Pray the Super Bowl Doesn’t Go Into OT
The Weekly Standard’s Gregg Easterbrook is not looking forward to the possibility of Sunday’s Super Bowl game being decided in overtime. That’s because the NFL’s rules for extra quarters “are too fouled up.” Better, he says, “to let a coin flip determine” the winner if the score is tied after regulation. “After all, that’s what the NFL did last year,” when the New England Patriots won (in the first-ever Super Bowl to go to OT) without the Atlanta Falcons ever touching the ball. “For all the crazed events during that contest,” he notes, “in the end the most significant was that New England won the overtime coin toss.” Overtime “should guarantee at least one possession to each team. Deciding the Super Bowl winner based on a coin toss isn’t right.”
From the right: Schumer Torpedoing Infrastructure Plan
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer penned an op-ed in The Washington Post saying he’s prepared to work with President Trump on infrastructure. But as Jazz Shaw notes at Hot Air, that promise comes with a big if: Trump must propose “a real, direct, federal investment in infrastructure.” In other words, says Shaw, a plan in which “pretty much all the funding would come from the federal purse and be poured down rabbit holes in the individual states, who would feel zero accountability for how wisely it was spent.” Pretty much like the Obama stimulus, which was “by and large a failure.” By doing “precisely the sort of thing Schumer is arguing against” — allowing states to partner with private interests — “the government might actually achieve something useful and merit praise from the entire country.”
Culture critic: Can Amazon Transform Health Care?
People want to do something about soaring health-care costs, but no one ever does it, laments Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle. Now Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase are teaming up to offer an independent health-care company “free from profit-making incentives and constraints” for their employees. If they can remake the market and “dam up the river of money that flows into the health-care system every year,” she says, “more power to them.” Moreover, “it’s not entirely crazy to think that they might.” A major reason why: Amazon knows technology, and current health-care IT is “a hot mess.” Still, “there are also plenty of reasons to think that it will fail.” One caveat: If they succeed, that “success may help usher in an era of even tighter employer control over employees’ lives.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann