Dear Jolters,
June ends with a bang. But to your ears, it should end with the smooth sounds of Charlie Cooke and Kevin Williamson — now up on NRO (and iTunes et al.) is the latest episode of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, in which the Bearded Ones talk minimum-wage madness and much more.
You know, the vacationing Jim Geraghty has his own daily podcast, the long-running Three Martini Lunch, which you need to catch. Jim's days of catching rays will be coming to an end — he's back in the saddle here on Monday. Jim is a tolerant man, allowing me to muck around in his domain while he gets toasted on Southern beaches. Grazia.
Okay, let me send you off to the weekend with a few NRO reading suggestions:
Cruz Care. The Texas senator looms larger in the health-care debate. Tiana Lowe has the very interesting story. Here is a part:
Critics speculated that Cruz was merely bluffing when he publicly came out against the initial version of the BCRA along with Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Ron Johnson — but then Cruz began passing out memos entitled "Path to 'Yes,'" which detailed the four concessions required from Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to earn Cruz's vote. The most significant of those points, a consumer-freedom option allowing insurance companies to sell non-Obamacare-compliant plans so long as they sell at least one Obamacare-compliant plan as well, may actually be coming to fruition.
Attention NYC Haters. Kyle Smith give Mayor Bill de Blasio a kick in the big apples, and saves one for Governor Andrew Cuomo too.
Twump. Both Michael Brendan Dougherty and David French weigh in on the president's attack tweets against MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski.
Planned Parenthoodwink. Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins are hell-bent on making sure that your tax dollars bankroll Planned Parenthood and seek to strip a ban from the Senate health-care bill. Alexandra DeSanctis has the story. And here's some of it:
The vast majority of the group's services are related to reproductive issues, not general health. Of the 9.5 million services Planned Parenthood self-reported for the 2015–16 fiscal year, not even 40,000 were family-practice services. In fact, the group treats significantly more urinary-tract infections in a year than it provides general health-care services.
Planned Parenthood provides less than 1 percent of the nation's Pap tests and less than 2 percent of its breast exams and cancer screenings. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, not a single Planned Parenthood clinic has a mammogram machine. And even the reproduction-related services on offer are rather limited: Earlier this year, Live Action team members called 97 Planned Parenthood facilities and found only five that provided prenatal care; the majority of the others repeatedly insisted that the organization doesn't provide prenatal care at all, because it specializes in abortion.
Over at McClatchy newspapers D.C. bureau, Lesley Clark reports that House pro-lifers will not allow Murkowski-Collins to prevail. From her report:
"We've warned the Senate that there's nothing they could do that would blow the health care bill to Mars more than taking the pro-life components out of it," said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., who signed a Republican Study Committee letter to McConnell outlining the group's concerns. "I think they know if they do, they might as well not vote. It would blow it to smithereens over here."
Twitter Gag. Alexandra also reports that Twitter has blocked the pro-life group Live Action from advertising until it deletes tweets that the company finds "offensive."
The Mighty Have Fallen. This should not surprise you, but Professor Samuel J. Abrams has an interesting piece on just how poorly the "elite" colleges of New England, from Harvard and Yale to Tufts and Amherst, rank when it comes to the amount of "viewpoint diversity one can expect to find on a particular campus."
Programming Notes. Please subscribe to NR magazine, in the print or digital versions#...#lots of people are still giving to the Spring Webathon (God bless you!) and you can send a few bucks NR's way here#...#I am going to cry if you don't buy a copy of Al Felzenberg's magnificent new biography, A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.#...#There is a Queen Mary 2 cabin waiting for your reservation on the National Review 2017 Trans-Atlantic Crossing.
I yearn for a simpler time. Back in the day when I was the delivery boy on Tony Spagnuola's fruit-and-vegetable truck (serving the little old ladies of Yonkers and Woodlawn in The Bronx, making sure they had their weekly fill of plums and potatoes), the radio was set to WOR-AM, and Bob and Ray were on in the late afternoons, and every Friday they would play the silly old tune, "Run Rabbit Run." Well, it was said to be Churchill's favorite, so if it was good enough for Winston, it's good enough for us this last day of June. Listen to it here.
We'll meet again. I don't know where and I don't know when, but I am sure we are going to meet again, probably on some sunny day.
God bless,
Jack Fowler
P.S.: No P.S. today!
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