Foreign desk: Win the Wars, Joe
Now that he’s not focused on winning re-election, President Biden should put all of his energy into “winning the global war” Russia “has unleashed against the West,” argue Mark Toth & Jonathan Sweet at The Hill. To “defend global democracy” Biden must confront the Ukraine and Israel wars. Ukraine’s surprise attack into Russia territory was a step in the right direction, and “Washington needs to surge even more offensive weapons capabilities and munitions to Ukraine and remove any remaining restrictions on their use.” And “in Israel, Biden must stop hedging by playing November politics.” “Hamas is the enemy” and its new leader, Yahya Sinwar, is no “partner for peace but a terrorist.” He should be in Washington’s “crosshairs.” By standing up to Russia and Iran’s proxies, Biden can send “a clear message to Chinese President Xi Jinping that democracies are still capable of winning wars.” If Biden fails, “World War III will find the US as well.”
From the right: Americans’ Debt Nightmare
“The untold story of how inflation affects America’s households” is “credit card debt,” warns the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito. “When hikes in basic food, clothing, energy, utility, and insurance costs started to hit families three years ago,” many began going into debt “to take care of their basic needs.” Recently, “the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said that U.S. residents as a whole owe $1.14 trillion on their credit cards,” and “delinquencies are up, too, jumping 7% in the second quarter.” “All this is happening while current absentee President Joe Biden is snoozing at the beach and Vice President Kamala Harris pretends she had no hand in supporting or promoting Bidenomics while the national press are unwilling to call Harris out on it.”
Health watch: Biden-Harris Hide Medicare Drug Costs
“In a move critics say is designed to shield the Biden-Harris administration from election fallout, the administration has leveraged taxpayer funds to mask upcoming increases in Medicare premiums,” reports Jamie Joseph at Fox News. The Inflation Reduction Act was “intended to cap out-of-pocket drug costs,” but it’ll let insurers “significantly hike monthly premiums, with average bids for Part D plans expected to triple by 2025.” To avoid “voter backlash,” the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services rolled out a three-year “demonstration project” to subsidize those premiums. Yet critics note that’ll simply shift the cost to taxpayers — up to $10 billion, one estimates. As a Paragon Health Institution analysis warns, CMS’s costly, “fake” voluntary “demonstration” is “neither a demonstration nor voluntary” — but rather a “massive subsidization scheme.”
Libertarian: EU Election Interference
In advance of Elon Musk’s conversation on X with Donald Trump on X, Thierry Breton, the European Union’s commissioner for internal market “warned Musk about creating a ‘risk of amplification of potentially harmful content,’” gripes Reason’s Robby Soave. “Breton’s threats are not idle” as “the European Commission is currently investigating X for allegedly violating Europe’s Digital Services Act” because “Breton does not approve of X’s new user-verification policy.” “Should unelected European bureaucrats meddle in political dialogue and work to prevent American presidential candidates from speaking their minds? The question answers itself.”
Campus beat: One Rule for Frats, Another for Hamas
The University of Maryland put all 37 of its fraternities and sororities on “social moratorium” over reports of hazing and other misdeeds that turned out to be fake, notes The Free Press’ Francesca Block — while at colleges around the nation, pro-Hamas “students who openly break the law” by “trespassing, breaking and entering, and harassing their fellow students” for being Jewish are “given a pass.” “All signs point toward another chaotic, and potentially violent, semester.” “One coalition at NYU has already said it’s ready to embrace ‘armed struggle’ in its fight for the pro-Palestinian cause. And it’s not clear whether or not colleges will stop them.” There are clearly “two very different sets of rules . . . depending on who you are affiliated with.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board