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If there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that in a few months, you'll be overwhelmed by news stories with headlines like these:

"She's a liberal Democrat -- maybe a commie! -- can I bring her home to meet my parents?"

"I just married a conservative, and my friends dropped me."

"I just married a liberal -- her friends let me pick up the check, but they still hate me."

"I'm libertarian, so will I ever find someone?'

Whatever would we do without those stories on political biology in Sunday lifestyle sections?

How can we live without advice columns calming the turgid panic surrounding the American political mating rituals?

You've seen them. They're all about hand-wringing over dangerous liaisons between men and women who find themselves ideologically opposed.

Often, they involve guilt, a liberal woman dating a paleo conservative and not knowing how to tell her friends the terrible news. They'll drop me from the book club!

And sometimes, they're not tales of forbidden political love, but obnoxious humble brags about how she married a conservative out of pity and was surprised to find that he treated her with respect and knew how to use a knife and fork.

Don't worry, she'll dump him and run off with a Bernie Bro before 2020.

Whether you like it or not, in coming months such themes will be pushed on you, relentlessly -- the way stories about bitcoins and Esperanto were pushed on you -- despite your loudest inner screams.

Your eyes will skim some. Talk show hosts will use them as program fodder. Can you date a Republican? Can you marry a Democrat without a prenup?

Soon we'll understand that our species is not long for this earth. Because what's natural is natural. And letting politics divert you from staring into her eyes and holding her hand is unnatural.

But politics doesn't care about what comes naturally. Politics has a mission.

Politicos may fight about tax cuts or Russian spies in our closets, but with the midterm elections coming in 2018, the sociopolitical herding will be on the increase. And shame is the goad of ruthless political herdsmen.

So there will be more studies and stories and polls asking, "Can I date a Republican and not get a disease?" or explaining, "How to hide your Democratic lover from your family," and so on.

And because the media leans left -- don't even try to argue otherwise, that's like being a wild-eyed science denier -- most political mating stories will reflect a certain antipathy toward "those people," meaning Republicans.

So gather around, let me put on my favorite cardigan, fill my pipe and pour myself a mug of mulled wine, and I'll tell you of ye olden days.

Back then, "mixed marriage" had nothing to do with politics. It meant Episcopalians dating Methodists.

And later, "mixed marriage" involved Italians marrying Irish, Greeks marrying Jews, blacks marrying whites, and the most difficult mixed marriage of all, Sox fans marrying Cubs fans.

Now the divide is politics, because politics is our new secular American church. There's much evidence of this already. Read or listen to the hysteria in the media. It has the ring of a crusade.

Each sect or denomination has its own particular catechism, dogma, priests (politicians) and stern bishops (pundits) who shepherd the faithful away from the temptations of those odd libertarians.

Over on the NPR news site -- yeah, I visit to find out what liberals are really thinking -- I found a story about political dating sites, one for Republicans, another for liberal Democrats.

"There's more activity now than ever," said the liberal dating site boss. "I knew liberals would only find comfort in each other's arms." The conservative dating site guy sounded the same.

Don't ask me for statistics. The internet is full of surveys. Some say that almost half of America wouldn't date someone with opposing political views. Others say that young Democrats don't want young Republicans in the same college dorm. Or at least I heard that on a talk show, so it must be kind of true.

If these surveys are in fact true -- and right now I don't care if they are -- anyone who lets politics interfere with romance is probably too idiotic to raise children and should probably be chemically altered for the greater good.

Some of the more ridiculous dating advice I've seen includes talking about your politics on your second or third date, "to get it out of the way."

You're going to talk tax policy on a date? Loser.

Happily, not everyone feels this way. Right now I bet there's some generic young Republican college student reading The Nation, just so he gets the buzzwords right so he might date that girl in Madison with the big brown eyes.

And there must be a liberal young woman going back to school in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the fall, thinking about gender studies, yes, but also about that boy who shocked her with his National Review.

Politics is so small compared to love, but you wouldn't know it sometimes with all the stridency aimed at guilting people apart.

Betty and I have been married for more than 30 years. She was a modern dancer marching in no-nuke parades. I admired Ronald Reagan. We're still together. We still hold hands.

It's a good thing there was no social media then. She might have been shamed out of our second date.

John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. His Twitter handle is @john_kass.

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Can you date a Democrat without shame or bring home a Republican without fear? - Quad City Times

In announcing his opposition to the bill, Mr. Moran said it fails to repeal the Affordable Care Act or address health cares rising costs.

Vice President Mike Pence, Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, discuss the next steps.

There are serious problems with Obamacare, and my goal remains what it has been for a long time: to repeal and replace it, he said in a statement.

In his own statement, Mr. Lee said of the bill, In addition to not repealing all of the Obamacare taxes, it doesnt go far enough in lowering premiums for middle-class families; nor does it create enough free space from the most costly Obamacare regulations.

By defecting together, Mr. Moran and Mr. Lee ensured that no one senator would be the definitive no vote.

House Republicans, after their own fits and starts, passed a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act in May, a difficult vote that was supposed to set the stage for Senate action. But with conservative and moderate Republicans so far apart in the Senate, the gulf proved impossible to bridge. Conservatives wanted the Affordable Care Act eradicated, but moderates worried intensely about the effects that would have on their most vulnerable citizens.

The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, responded to the announcement on Monday by urging his Republican colleagues to begin anew and, this time, undertake a bipartisan effort.

This second failure of Trumpcare is proof positive that the core of this bill is unworkable, Mr. Schumer said. Rather than repeating the same failed, partisan process yet again, Republicans should start from scratch and work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our health care system.

A comparison of public meetings on Obamacare and the Republican bills to repeal it.

Roughly 20 million people have gained coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Repealing the law was a top priority for Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress, who say it has driven up premiums and forced consumers to buy insurance they do not want and cannot afford.

The opposition from Mr. Paul and Ms. Collins to the latest version of the Senate bill was expected, so Mr. McConnell had no margin for error as he unveiled it. But he managed to survive through the weekend and until Monday night without losing another of his members though some expressed misgivings or, at the very least, uncertainty.

Mr. McConnell had wanted to hold a vote this week, but he was forced to abandon that plan after Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, had surgery last week to remove a blood clot from above his left eye. That unexpected setback gave the forces that opposed the bill more time to pressure undecided senators.

Already, Mr. McConnell was trying to sell legislation that was being assailed from many directions. On Friday, the health insurance lobby, which had been largely silent during the fight, came off the sidelines to blast as unworkable a key provision allowing the sale of low-cost, stripped-down health plans, saying it would increase premiums and undermine protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Mr. McConnell has now failed twice in recent weeks to roll out a repeal bill and keep his conference together for it. He first wanted to hold a vote in late June, only to reverse course after running into opposition.

House Republicans in competitive districts who supported their version of the bill will now have to explain themselves and Democrats are eager to pounce.

Make no mistake, Paul Ryan cant turn back time and undo the damaging vote he imposed on his conference, said Meredith Kelly, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. House Republicans all own a bill that would strip health care from 23 million Americans and raise costs for millions more, and it will haunt them in 2018.

Mr. Lee, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, was part of a group of four conservative senators who came out against the initial version of Mr. McConnells bill after it was unveiled last month. He then championed the proposal to allow insurers to offer cheap, bare-bones plans, which was pushed by another of those opponents, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. But the language ultimately added was not quite what Mr. Lee had been advocating, a spokesman said last week.

Mr. Moran, a reliable Republican vote and a past chairman of the Senate Republicans campaign arm, had announced his opposition to the bill as drafted after Mr. McConnell scrapped plans to hold a vote in late June. He expressed concerns about how it would affect Kansas, including whether it would limit access to health care in rural communities and effectively penalize states, like his, that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

The pressure on Mr. Moran at home showed no sign of relenting. The Kansas Hospital Association said last week that the revised Senate bill comes up short, particularly for our most vulnerable patients.

Robert Pear contributed reporting.

Get politics and Washington news updates via Facebook, Twitter and in the Morning Briefing newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 2 More Defections Lead To Collapse of Health Effort.

Read more here:
Health Care Overhaul Collapses as Two Republican Senators Defect - New York Times

Ad will collapse in seconds CLOSE / the national interest July 18, 2017 07/18/2017 10:11 am By Jonathan Chait Share Republicans celebrating the House health-care vote in May. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In 2009, David Frum, the former Bush administration speechwriter whose ideological apostasy was in its formative stages, met with conservative intellectuals to discuss the policy response to the great recession. Faced with evidence that only massive government action a financial rescue coupled with fiscal stimulus could have prevented a complete economic meltdown, one conservative made a startling confession: Maybe it was a good thing we werent in power then because our principles dont allow us to respond to a crisis like this.

The financial crisis is hardly the only issue for which conservative principles turn out to be incompatible with the practical demands of governance. (Climate change leaps to mind.) The collapse of the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare is an especially vivid demonstration of the broader problem. The cohesion Republicans possessed in opposition disintegrated once they had power, because their ideology left them unable to pass legislation that was not cruel, horrific, and repugnant to their own constituents.

Donald Trump promised during the campaign that he would quickly and easily replace Obamacare with an alternative everybody would love. Youre going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost, he said. Its going to be so easy.

One might dismiss this kind of rhetoric as a typical Trumpian boast. But the candidate was merely translating into the vernacular the somewhat more carefully hedged promises his party had made for years into terms in which they were meant to be understood. Paul Ryans A Better Way road map offered what it called a step-by-step plan to give every American access to quality, affordable health care. more choices and lower costs. And why wouldnt Republicans believe this? After all, Obamacare was, supposedly, a train wreck, a complete failure of design. It therefore followed that they could easily replace it without significant harm to anybody.

In truth, it was never possible to reconcile public standards for a humane health-care system with conservative ideology. In a pure market system, access to medical care will be unaffordable for a huge share of the public. Giving them access to quality care means mobilizing government power to redistribute resources, either through direct tax and transfers or through regulations that raise costs for the healthy and lower them for the sick. Obamacare uses both methods, and both are utterly repugnant and unacceptable to movement conservatives. That commitment to abstract anti-government dogma, without any concern for the practical impact, is the quality that makes the Republican Party unlike right-of-center governing parties in any other democracy. In no other country would a conservative party develop a plan for health care that every major industry stakeholder calls completely unworkable.

Every attempt to resolve the contradiction between public demands and conservative ideology has led the party to finesse it instead. That is why Republicans spent years promising their own health-care plan would come out very soon. It is why their first and best option was repeal and delay. And it is why they are returning to that option now.

The Trump administration might lash out at Obamacare by continuing to sabotage its functioning markets. They will find, however, that sabotaging the insurance exchanges will create millions of victims right away, as opposed to the luxury of delaying the pain until after the elections. The power to destroy remains within the Republican Partys capacity. The power to translate its ideological principles into practical government is utterly beyond its reach.

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Ike Kaveladze is an American businessman who represents the Russian real-estate development company associated with the Agalarov family.

Its been quite a ride, hasnt it?

He makes deals. Thats what he does.

If there really is nothing to the Russia collusion allegations, the editorial posits, transparency will prove it. But, uh, what if not?

If you tell students over and over and over again that certain types of speech are harming them, dont be surprised when they feel harmed.

Now that Trumpcare is all but dead, McConnell will give conservatives their straight repeal vote, and then move on to tax and budget legislation.

Were not laughing, youre laughing.

The House GOP wants the president to break his promise not to cut Medicare, for the sake of funding regressive tax cuts.

Thats 13 years to get a little less than 250,000 women on the ballot.

It was never possible to reconcile public standards for a humane health-care system with conservative ideology.

Sometimes government is complicated because life is complicated, and sometimes compromise requires policies that just arent so simple.

A new book claims Trump didnt want to use the governors phone for his congratulatory call from Obama.

He had to be talked into it, and warned them that he wont keep the deal indefinitely.

After two more GOP defections, McConnell said his bill will not be successful but Obamacare is still in danger.

Obamacare repeal is in big, big trouble.

This is why he wanted a really fast vote.

Watch out Jeb!

Riiiight.

Someone broke into Dean Hellers Las Vegas office and left the threatening message.

The press secretary took the presidents picture in a big-boy fire truck.

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Trumpcare Collapsed Because Republicans Cannot Govern - NYMag - New York Magazine

The donations were a kind of unintentional gift to the de Blasio campaign: It has made tying Ms. Malliotakis, who represents parts of Staten Island and Brooklyn in the Assembly, to the national Republican Party and specifically to Mr. Trump a centerpiece of its strategy since she became the Republican front-runner last month.

Their pockets have no bottoms, Mr. de Blasios campaign said of the Mercers in an email sent to supporters on Monday. The email linked the Mercers to Mr. Trumps chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and the right-wing website Breitbart News. The email also referred to Ms. Malliotakis as a Trump acolyte.

Ms. Malliotakis, speaking at a news conference in Queens to attack the mayors handling of crime and police issues, dismissed concerns about the donations as irrelevant and said she believed the mayor had also accepted money from people whom he does not see eye-to-eye with all the time. She added, It has nothing to do with Trump.

Sal Albanese, a lawyer and former city councilman who is the most prominent Democratic challenger to Mr. de Blasio, brought in more money than in previous two-month periods, with $41,000 this time around, but he spent it just as fast. He remains far from his goal of qualifying for the citys matching program; a candidate for mayor must raise $250,000 to receive matching funds.

Mr. Albanese could still qualify for the Democratic primary debate with Mr. de Blasio next month. With his current contributions, he would have to collect roughly another $50,000 by Aug. 11 to meet the threshold for the debate.

Bo Dietl, who is running for mayor as an independent, raised $245,266 during the two-month reporting period. Notably, he raised only $38,020 after Mr. Massey dropped out a development that might have been seen as a boost to his bid as well. Mr. Dietl spent more than he raised over the last two months, including more than $150,000 on television advertising.

Mr. Dietl, a former police detective who runs a private investigation company, had hoped to challenge the mayor in a Democratic primary but made a mistake filling out his voter registration form and wound up without a party affiliation. He then lost a court case in which he sought to run as a Republican. (Filings show he paid $10,000 to a lawyer, Martin Connor, who assisted in that effort.)

Another independent candidate, Roque De La Fuente, a millionaire real estate developer and California transplant, continued to put his own money into a campaign that has raised little from outside donors. Mr. De La Fuente lent his campaign $350,000 and raised a little over $8,400 in contributions.

One of the City Council candidates who raised the most money over the two-month reporting period was Mark Gjonaj, a Democratic assemblyman who is running for a seat in the Bronx. He raised $180,040 during the period, the majority of it from outside New York City. Mr. Gjonaj, one of several state lawmakers who are running for the City Council a job that would result in a considerable increase in pay is seeking a seat in a district in which no incumbent is running because of term limits.

A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2017, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: De Blasio Keeps His Fund-Raising Lead, but a Republican Makes Some Gains.

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De Blasio Keeps Fund-Raising Lead, but a Republican Makes Some Gains - New York Times

citizens or even law-abiding citizens. Photograph: Shelby Lum / Times-Dispatch/AP

In the middle of the hot summer, citizens will gather this week in Florida to champion a ballot initiative to end the states permanent felony disenfranchisement.

As we face the daily jaw-dropping revelations about the Trump campaign and administrations actions, keeping our focus on restoring legitimacy to our elections and our democracy has never been more important, and ending the historic wrong of felony disenfranchisement absolutely must be part of our agenda.

It seems unlikely that the Trump-Pence electoral integrity commission will touch this important issue, and any commission that ignores it isnt serious about the legitimacy of our elections.

The right to vote is the most fundamental right of any democracy, granting it legitimacy as a means of government by instilling power in the people and not in politicians. It ensures consent of the governed and holds government accountable to the people: not law-abiding people, or moral people, or any other qualifier, but the people.

This most fundamental right is not and never has been about rewarding good citizens or even law-abiding citizens. It is not a luxury or a reward, handed out by the government as it sees fit. It is a right, and should not be conditioned on anything more than citizenship, and being of voting age.

And yet since the civil war, states have intentionally denied the right to vote to a certain category of citizens those with a felony conviction. Today, felony disenfranchisement bars roughly 6.1 million citizens from the ballot box one in 13 African Americans nationally.

This denial of a right so inherent to democracy and to citizenship is not based on respect for the law, but is rather a historic and deliberate effort to prevent black people from voting.

Proponents of felony disenfranchisement argue that as a felon or former felon, an individual has shown a disregard for the law, and therefore must demonstrate respect for the law before being able to vote on issues related to law. Yet felony disenfranchisement did not originate, nor is it being maintained, out of any high reverence for the law: quite the opposite.

It was invented after slavery, when white elites sought to diminish the power of newly freed slaves. White politicians tied disenfranchisement only to those crimes believed to be disproportionately committed by black people. The sole objective was to prevent black citizens from threatening the power of the white elite an act fundamentally at odds with the very purpose of voting rights.

The discriminatory intent and impact of felony disenfranchisement is alive and well today. Those affected by disenfranchisement are disproportionately minorities and low-income citizens, voting groups that trend Democratic.

Moreover, the discriminatory politics and impact of todays mass incarceration cannot be separated from those of felony disenfranchisement. By doubling down on mass incarceration under President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and perpetuating felony disenfranchisement, the Republican party effectively blocks a determinative number of voters from voting, including in key battleground states.

Take Florida, for instance, where felony disenfranchisement bars nearly one in four black Floridians from voting. In tight races, that disenfranchisement can make or break an election. In 2000, an estimated 600,000 ex-felons were prevented from voting President George W Bush won Florida by just 537 votes.

Disenfranchisement is fundamentally undemocratic. And yet only two states in the country fully protect the right to vote and enable people who are incarcerated to vote (Maine and Vermont).

The rest of the 48 states disenfranchise voters, with some states restoring voting rights at certain stages after completion of ones sentence, parole or probation. Disenfranchisement is most illegitimate in Florida, Iowa and Kentucky, where a felony conviction costs a citizen his or her right to vote for life.

The only way to regain the right to vote in Florida, for instance, is to seek clemency from a court or the governor. This process is incredibly time intensive and has a low rate of success. Moreover, in clemency hearings, applicants are granted mere minutes to plead their cases, and can be asked any array of questions unrelated to their original conviction, including about acts of good citizenship and any traffic violations.

Citizens seeking clemency have already served whatever sentence, probation, and parole has been deemed appropriate by a court of law, and are back in society trying to successfully reintegrate. And yet a mere speeding ticket can be used to justify the permanent denial of their right to vote, forever making them a second-class citizen. Imagine if the right to free speech or religion were so conditioned.

There are 23 states that have expanded voting rights for former felons, and ending felony disenfranchisement is actually a bipartisan issue. Just recently, Alabama dramatically reduced the number of felonies that result in disenfranchisement. Florida could be next.

The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition is rallying volunteers of all backgrounds at a gathering this week to build momentum toward next years state ballot initiative, which would automatically restore voting rights upon the completion of ones sentence, parole, and probation.

Supporters of felony disenfranchisement argue that the current system is about preserving respect for the law. But they know better. Felony disenfranchisement has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with politics. It is an excuse to deny voting rights, just like voter ID laws and the literacy tests and poll taxes of old.

When a person is incarcerated, they do not lose their citizenship. We do not disown them and cast them from our borders. As citizens, they have a right to vote, and that right must be protected.

The alternative is to weaken our foundation as a democracy, at the expense of all of us. As citizens, we should seize the momentum building across the country and reject the Trump-Pence voter suppression commission, and instead champion the restoration of voting rights and our democratic legitimacy.

Read more:
America steals votes from felons. Until it stops, our democracy will be weakened - The Guardian