Media outlets around the country Wednesday weighed in on issues from President Donald Trump’s leadership on the Senate health care vote to whether Callista Gingrich, wife of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, is the right person to be the ambassador to the Vatican.
Here's a look at some of those opinions from the Right and from the Left.
Opinions From the Left
Callista Gingrich’s nomination to the Vatican stinks to high heaven
"Let us consider the qualifications of President Trump's nominee to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Holy See: one Callista Gingrich of Virginia. She is a former clerk on the House Agriculture Committee. She is the author of children's books about an elephant named Ellis. She sings in the choir at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. She plays French horn in City of Fairfax Band.
And, she testified Tuesday, she has “looked at some of” Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change.
But really, Gingrich was receiving a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because of one qualification: She is married to Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a major backer of President Trump.”
The Trump Standard
“What did Trump say when confronted with proof that his son jumped at the prospect of meeting with a “Russian government attorney” offering to dish dirt on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support” for his candidacy?
Trump said: “many people would have held that meeting.”
The next day, Trump revised “many” to “most,” saying: “I think from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting. . . . Politics isn’t the nicest business in the world, but it’s very standard.”
It’s true that politics isn’t the nicest business in the world. I’ve been there. Real estate development isn’t the nicest business in the world either, for all I know. But breaking the law and flirting with treason isn’t standard practice in either realm.”
A terminal tug of war
“An attentive world is watching, aghast, at the troubling tug-of-war over a terminally ill baby boy in a London hospital. On one side are the distraught and devoted parents who want to shoulder the cost of a treatment that reportedly has little chance of success. On the other side is a medical and state bureaucracy that is insisting, instead, on turning off the baby's ventilator and allowing him to die.
The case of Charlie Gard is creating anxiety for spectators everywhere as they observe the locus of control over difficult end-of-life decisions pass from the intimate family and doctor unit to an impersonal and distant state.
In watching Charlie's case we learn that with government-run or socialized medicine, not only can the state refuse to provide life-extending care, it can deny us the freedom to pay for it ourselves, to leave the country seeking an alternative treatment and even to go home to die.”
Why Colin Kaepernick is still looking for a job
“Why can't Colin Kaepernick find a job? At a time when NFL teams are scrambling for good backup quarterbacks prior to training camps, the former San Francisco 49er, who took a knee during the singing of the national anthem last year to protest police shootings of unarmed black men, can't get a tryout. Kaepernick, 29, is better than most backups and several starters, with stats to prove it. Last year he threw for 16 touchdowns, four interceptions, and had an overall rating of 90.7 — on a terrible team. When we contrast that with 38-year-old Josh McCown, the New York Jets' projected starter, who had six touchdowns, six interceptions, and a rating of 72.3, it sure looks suspicious.
Here's a slightly harder question: How come NFL teams will employ players who've been arrested for domestic violence, including five who were newly drafted in 2017, but will not employ Kaepernick? In other words, what's worse in the eyes of the NFL — players beating women or kneeling for the national anthem? Answer: kneeling, and it's not even close.”
Opinions From the Right
Yes, Politics Is Dirty. No, It Isn't As Dirty As You Think It Is
“Expectations define behavior.
The success of a marriage nearly always depends on the expectations of the parties going in. If you believe marriage is going to be a rose garden of happy trips to the beach interspersed with moonlight dinners and foot massages, you're more likely to end up cheating on your spouse when that doesn't materialize. If you believe marriage is a mechanism for changing your potential spouse, you're likely to end up estranged. If you believe that marriage is about a lifelong union devoted to self-improvement and the creation and rearing of children, you're likely to make decisions that lead to that outcome.
The same is true in politics.”
It's time for Senate GOP to ditch Mitch McConnell so that Trump's agenda can succeed
“Mitch McConnell, in public, says he wants to pass a health care reform plan that repeals ObamaCare. Remember, McConnell says he wants to scrap ObamaCare “root and branch.”
But behind the scenes, McConnell has been working over liberal senators to assure them his plan will not actually scrap the Medicaid expansion and that he will undermine Senator Ted Cruz’s amendment to provide individual freedom in health care choices.
McConnell, again and again, stacks the deck against conservatives, setting them up to be the fall guy for his own failures.”
Trump Jr. and the whiff of treason: Morally, he's in deep.
"This is moving into perjury, false statements and even into potentially treason," Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., says of Donald Trump Jr.'s adventures among the Russians. "We understand why some are raising issues of treason," ethics lawyers Norman Eisen and Richard Painter write in The New York Times.
A whiff of treason is in the air. But perhaps in their zeal to discredit Donald Trump, the Democrats and the liberal media are grotesquely overplaying their hand. That is what we're being told by a variety of Trump defenders and even some Trump critics. Such talk, complains attorney Alan Dershowitz, is "overwrought."
A message made for Trump Country, lost in the stampede
“Last week the Trump administration did something right. You may very well have missed this.
In a press conference Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price announced that the government has charged 415 defendants, including 115 medical professionals, for about $1.3 billion in false billings to government healthcare programs. More than 120 of the defendants were charged with prescribing and distributing opioids and other narcotics.
“In some cases, we had addicts packed into standing-room-only waiting rooms, waiting for those prescriptions… Some doctors wrote out more prescriptions for controlled substances in one month than entire hospitals were writing,” acting FBI director Andrew McCabe said of the cases investigated in the crackdown.
Sessions promised there would be more prosecutions in the fight against opioid abuse, and called for an overall reduction in the prescription of opioids by doctors.”
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