"Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look."

- President Ronald Reagan pic.twitter.com/LiBZ3LUq87

— The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) July 20, 2017

IF ONLY THERE WERE NO VOTERS...:

A revived bill that would dismantle large parts of Obamacare without an immediate replacement would leave 32 million more people uninsured and double premiums over a decade, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report Wednesday. [...]

The nonpartisan scorekeeper's report projects that 17 million people would lose insurance in the first year after a partial repeal that includes ending Obamacare's Medicaid expansion and repealing most of the taxes tied to the law. Premiums would jump 25 percent over that same period as insurers grapple with the effective elimination of Obamacare's requirement that everyone purchase coverage.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Clarence C. Little was a cultivated man. He was a Harvard graduate who served as president of the University of Maine and the University of Michigan. He was one of the nation's leading genetics researchers, with a particular interest in cancer. He was managing director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, later known (in the interest of verbal economy) as the American Cancer Society; the president of the American Eugenics Society, later known (in the interest of not talking about eugenics) as the Society for Biodemography and Social Biology; and a founding board member of the American Birth Control League, today known (in the interest of euphemism) as Planned Parenthood. His record as a scientist is not exactly unblemished -- he will long be remembered as the man who insisted that "there is no demonstrated causal relationship between smoking or [sic] any disease" -- but he was the very picture of the socially conscious man of science, without whom the National Cancer Institute, among other important bodies, probably would not exist.

He was a humane man with horrifying opinions.

Little is one of the early figures in Planned Parenthood whose public pronouncements, along with those of its charismatic foundress, Margaret Sanger, often are pointed to as evidence of the organization's racist origins. (Students at the University of Michigan are, at the time of this writing, petitioning to have his name stripped from a campus building.) Little believed that birth-control policy should be constructed in such a way as to protect "Yankee stock" -- referred to in Sanger's own work as "unmixed native white parentage," if Little's term is not clear enough -- from being overwhelmed by what was at the time perceived as the dysgenic fecundity of African Americans, Catholic immigrants, and other undesirables. ("The feebleminded are notoriously prolific in reproduction," Sanger reported in Woman and the New Race.) The question of racial differences was an obsession of Little's that went well beyond his interest in eugenics and followed him to the end of his life; one of his later scientific works was "The Possible Relation of Genetics to Differences in Negro-White Mortality Rates from Cancer," published in the 1960s.

The birth-control movement of the Progressive era is where crude racism met its genteel intellectual cousin: Birth Control Review, the in-house journal of Planned Parenthood's predecessor organization, published a review, by the socialist intellectual Havelock Ellis, of Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy. Ellis was an important figure in Sanger's intellectual development and wrote the introduction to her Woman and the New Race; Stoddard was a popular birth-control advocate whose intellectual contributions included lending to the Nazi racial theorists the term "untermensch" as well as developing a great deal of their theoretical framework: He fretted about "imperfectly Nordicized Alpines" and such. Like the other eugenics-minded progressives of his time, he saw birth control and immigration as inescapably linked issues.

"Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious," she says.

Reporter Emily Bazelon then asks Ginsburg a question about what she means and Ginsburg responds that the 1980 Harris v. McRae ruling upholding the Hyde amendment, which prohibits federal taxpayer funding of abortions, surprised her.

"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn't really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong," Ginsburg said.

WHAT VLAD BOUGHT:

Financial records filed last year in the secretive tax haven of Cyprus, where Paul J. Manafort kept bank accounts during his years working in Ukraine and investing with a Russian oligarch, indicate that he had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Donald J. Trump's presidential campaign in March 2016.

The money appears to have been owed by shell companies connected to Mr. Manafort's business activities in Ukraine when he worked as a consultant to the pro-Russia Party of Regions. The Cyprus documents obtained by The New York Times include audited financial statements for the companies, which were part of a complex web of more than a dozen entities that transferred millions of dollars among them in the form of loans, payments and fees.

CIRCLE THE FIRING SQUAD:

Mr. Trump said Mr. Mueller was running an office rife with conflicts of interest and warned investigators against delving into matters too far afield from Russia. Mr. Trump never said he would order the Justice Department to fire Mr. Mueller, nor would he outline circumstances under which he might do so. But he left open the possibility as he expressed deep grievance over an investigation that has taken a political toll in the six months since he took office.

Asked if Mr. Mueller's investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family's finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, "I would say yes." He would not say what he would do about it. "I think that's a violation. Look, this is about Russia."

THE BIG ENCHILADA:

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would not have appointed Jeff Sessions as attorney general if he had known Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia investigation, according to a New York Times interview.

JOIN THE CLUB:

Legal experts tell PEOPLE that campaign finance laws prohibit the acceptance of anything of value from a foreign government or a foreign individual, or coordinating to work with a foreign government.

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, considers the actions "treason." "It is betraying your own country in the hands of a foreign adversary," Painter tells PEOPLE. He notes that under the Bush administration, Don Jr. would have been in custody and brought in for questioning. "I think there are grounds here on campaign finance violations alone that it is illegal," he says.

Whatever his personal and legal predicament, Don Jr. will remain loyal to his father, say his friends.

"The loyalty within this family is insane," says a family friend especially close to Don Jr. and Eric. "They would never speak against their dad."

Adds the source in the brothers' circle, "You can't bite the hand that feeds you, but he [Don Jr.] can't wait for these four years to be over."

DONALD WHO?:

Democrats, clearly delighted with the turn of events, have welcomed the Republicans' failure to replace Obamacare as an opportunity to work together. Republicans conceded their other options may be exhausted.

The No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn, told reporters it was "unfortunate" that he expected bipartisan talks to begin.

"Democrats are strongly committed to Obamacare and are unwilling to admit structural problems, which create the problems we are having in the individual market today," Cornyn said. "But we'll do the best we can with the hand we've been dealt."

If senators try to shore up Obamacare, an initial hurdle in coming weeks will be boosting faltering state insurance markets by ensuring that insurers keep receiving subsidies that help lower the cost of insurance for low-income individuals.

The Trump administration will continue making the subsidy payments through August while a related Republican lawsuit is pending. The uncertainty beyond that has rattled insurers.

Republican senators have acknowledged the need to address the unstable markets but resisted Democratic calls to fund the subsidies without accompanying reforms, calling it a "bailout" for insurance companies.

Funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program, a part of the Medicaid government health insurance program for the poor and disabled, known as CHIP, expires on Sept. 30 and will require reauthorization.

Bills to address the subsidy payments and CHIP would likely require 60 votes for passage, acting as a barometer of how inclined Republicans and Democrats are to work together, industry lobbyists and experts said.

Trump suggested on Tuesday that Republicans should allow the insurance markets to fail before working with Democrats. But Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, the head of the Senate Committee on Health, Labor and Pensions, said he would begin holding hearings on the issue in the next few weeks.

THERE IS NO POLITICAL PRICE TO KILLING TRUMPCARE:

Currently, 60% say the federal government is responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans, while 39% say this is not the government's responsibility. These views are unchanged from January, but the share saying health coverage is a government responsibility remains at its highest level in nearly a decade.

Among those who see a government responsibility to provide health coverage for all, more now say it should be provided through a single health insurance system run by the government, rather than through a mix of private companies and government programs. Overall, 33% of the public now favors such a "single payer" approach to health insurance, up 5 percentage points since January and 12 points since 2014. [...]

Even among those who say the federal government is not responsible for ensuring Americans have health care coverage, there is little public appetite for government withdrawing entirely from involvement in health care coverage. Among the public, 33% say that health care coverage is not the government's responsibility, but that programs like Medicare and Medicaid should be continued; just 5% of Americans say the government should not be involved at all in providing health insurance.

WHAT VLAD WAS BUYING:

In an interview with Current Time America, Browder, who was Magnitsky's client, said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is determined to see the Magnitsky Act repealed, as is Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 election campaign.

VIETNAMIZATION THIS TIME (profanity alert):

The battle of Mosul began officially on Oct. 17, 2016. Sonically, it didn't come into its own until some weeks later. In the opening skirmishes, as Iraqi troops encountered Islamic State fighters on farmland and in villages outside the city, rounds whistled unobstructed through the air and thudded in the sod, a vague overture. When the troops breached the easternmost districts of the city proper -- in early November -- then you could begin to really listen to the conflict.

On an evening later that month, I was embedded with a company of Iraqi Special Operations Forces in a neighborhood near Mosul's eastern edge from which they had expelled the jihadists. The troops had set up a temporary command post and barracks in a group of commandeered homes surrounding a plaza that included a mosque and a park, or what had been a park -- now it was a mud patch where Humvees, armored bulldozers and a fuel tanker were parked. Most of the modest rowhouses in this neighborhood -- Zahra, a middle-­class enclave of shopkeepers and pharmacists and taxi drivers -- had made it out of the fighting intact; others were crumpled but salvageable; others were mere rubble. The sunset was threaded through with black smoke from the car fires ISIS had lit to try to obscure its positions from aerial surveillance. The futility of this tactic could be heard and felt every few minutes, as a jet dove in to drop a bomb, or a heavy artillery shell found its target, with an atmosphere-­consuming shriek and a thunderous, belly-­seizing impact. And yet ISIS set the cars ablaze every day.

After dark, a polyphony of firefights broke out around our position. The reliable chatter of rifles, the more insistent clangor of machine guns, the congested peals of rocket-­propelled grenades went back and forth. The airstrikes and artillery continued. At midnight, I climbed to a roof, ducked below the parapet -- ISIS snipers had night-­vision equipment, it was believed, though they were good enough not to need it -- and peered over. Mosul is situated in a riverine basin, so that a high enough spot can give you a view over the city's ancient marble walls, the domes and minarets of its medieval mosques, the balconies of its cinder block apartment houses. The car fires had created around the city a necklace of Boschian throbbing orange-­red.

A sinister chorale crept into the gunfire -- ISIS fighters baying from mosque loudspeakers. "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" Others shouted the phrase in the streets. From more loudspeakers came an ISIS anthem. I asked a soldier how the same song could come from different places in unison. He pulled from his fatigues a pocket radio and tuned it to 92.5 FM.

"ISIS's radio station," he said.

At the time, Zahra and a few areas around it represented a minute but expanding peninsula of military occupation jutting into the city, whose 251 neighborhoods were otherwise entirely controlled by ISIS. The plan was to push the jihadists west toward the Tigris River, which bisects Mosul, then encircle them on the west side. No one knew how many fighters were waiting. Some soldiers estimated a thousand, some five times that. Some believed that the battle would take two months, others a year. However many fighters there were, ISIS knew they were not enough to face off in the streets with the Iraqi forces pouring into Mosul: roughly 10,000 troops, with an additional 90,000 militiamen, police officers and Kurdish soldiers massed on the city's perimeter. Flying above Mosul were the jets, bombers, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles of an American-­led international coalition, and around it was a constellation of heavy artillery firebases.

So ISIS, in its efforts to hold Mosul -- or, really, to kill as many people and destroy as much of the city as it could while losing it, as the jihadists knew they inevitably must -- relied on tactics known in Western military parlance as "harassing fire." It was a phrase that amused Iraqi soldiers whose English was sufficient to understand its insufficiency and who had to actually endure this harassment. ISIS's harassers included world-class snipers, crack mortar teams, the suicidal drivers of vehicle-­borne improvised explosive devices, or V.B.I.E.D.s -- mobile car bombs -- and, to direct these efforts, something new to warfare, a fleet of commercial-­market drones. ISIS managed to smuggle untold numbers of the small, cheap machines, the kind of thing you can buy on Amazon, into Mosul.

On his phone, a sergeant major showed me a video taken by one of the enemy drones, which the jihadists used to target strikes as well as record them. When a strike was successful, they would quickly edit the video and put it online, part of the steady diet of near-real-time footage that each side supplied the internet. The troops watched ISIS's videos as avidly as everyone else -- another of this battle's weird techno-­wrinkles. This particular clip, uploaded a few days earlier, showed a car bomber speeding up a street not far from where we were now, toward a group of parked Humvees. "Those are ours," said the sergeant major, Karim. The car bomber slammed into a Humvee. A ghostly gray expanded in the middle of the screen. "I was injured," Karim said, lifting up his shirt to reveal a scar. "No, wait. This is from something else."

It was hard to keep track. The Iraqi special forces had been fighting ISIS for more than two years. They had fought them near Baghdad, in Ramadi, then Falluja, Tikrit and Baiji, pushing the jihadists north nearly 250 miles to Mosul, the caliphate's greatest urban stronghold. Many of Karim's comrades had fought Al Qaeda and ISIS's other precursors before that. The tip of the spear into Mosul, the special forces had been going without a break for weeks now, taking heavy casualties. Karim had been wounded five times since Ramadi. In Falluja, a rocket skivered a Humvee in which he was the gunner. It was the scar from that attack that he wanted to show me, a discolored sunken patch below his rib cage. Looking down at it, he said, "It was a big hole before."

THE SHI'A AND THE ISLAMISTS ARE OUR ALLIES:

While the recent victory in Mosul has been hailed as a crucial milestone in the fight against ISIS, AEI Research Fellow and al Qaeda expert Katherine Zimmerman explains in a new report how US policymakers are pursuing the wrong strategy by focusing on military victories against specific groups such as ISIS and al Qaeda.

Among her key points:

1.The United States is losing the war on terror because it has misdefined the enemy. The Trump administration is continuing and accelerating the flawed strategy of the Obama administration, which defined the enemy too narrowly. An effective strategy should not focus on retaking Mosul and Raqqa and killing ISIS and al Qaeda leaders plotting attacks against the United States.

2.The Salafi-jihadi movement is the real enemy of the United States. While this movement is inherently global and includes both ISIS and al Qaeda, it does not encompass all Muslims or Islam. Its goal is to destroy current Muslim societies as they are today and replace them with an Islamic caliphate through force. It also aims to attack and either subjugate or destroy the US and the West.

ROLLING ID:

Few props have been more indispensable to Donald Trump's presidency than the golf cart. He drives them on his frequent weekend trips to the links (invariably at Trump-owned clubs, where he rolls onto the greens, too--normally a no-no). During his visit to Saudi Arabia in May, rather than walk, the president hopped a ride in a cart as he toured the National Museum in Riyadh. And a few days later, while six other world leaders at a G-7 summit in Sicily walked 700 yards up a slight hill to a photo-op, Trump followed behind for at least part of the way in, yes, another golf cart.

The images of Trump in his carts--at the wheel, wearing a "MAGA" hat on the golf course, or suited and solemn in Saudi Arabia--resonate strongly with Jack O'Donnell, an executive who worked for Trump in Atlantic City. It was 28 years ago--right after a helicopter crash killed three of Trump's executives--that Trump told O'Donnell, who often trained for triathlons, that exercise was going to ruin his body. "He told me you've got to stop that," O'Donnell told me. "He really believed we only have so much energy, that it was important not to waste it."

When O'Donnell, who in 1991 published a tell-all book about working with Trump, watches Trump putter along in his vehicle of choice, he doesn't see a man conserving energy but a man who is unfit for office. As in, literally, physically unfit. "It says to me that he is in horrible shape and he knows it," O'Donnell said. "He'd walk if he could, but he knows he can't keep up with the group, so he rides the cart instead." [...]

By any measure, America's president is overweight, and medical experts say it could be affecting his health and his job. In Saudi Arabia, after Trump deviated from the prepared text of a speech, an aide explained that the president was "exhausted." 

THE PRICE WOULD HAVE BEEN FOR REPEALING IT:

[H]ealth care was not the top concern for Trump voters and Republican voters in the 2016 presidential election. It ranked far behind their general concerns about the direction the country is headed in, jobs and the economy, and their feelings about Hillary Clinton. Just 7% of Trump voters and a paltry 5% of Republican voters picked health care as the biggest factor in their vote.

Focus groups with Trump voters reinforce this picture; they are focused much more on making ends meet and, when health comes up, getting help with paying their premiums and deductibles. They hoped candidate Trump would find a way to help them pay their health care bills. Just like Democratic voters, and all voters, they care more about their health care costs than the partisan Washington debate about the ACA.

Republicans also don't show high levels of intensity on the issue. For example, in July, just 25% of Republicans said they had a "very favorable" view of the Republican ACA replacement plans, while 52% of Democrats said that about the ACA.

About half (52%) of Republicans have supported the idea of repealing the ACA now and replacing it later, but that is hardly an overwhelming mandate. (Just 26% of the public overall supported the idea.) Still, most Republicans do want to keep trying. In July, 80% said they don't want to give up on efforts to repeal and replace the ACA.

The most conservative Republicans who advocate repeal come from safe districts. They have little to worry about, whether the ACA is repealed or not.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

International trade experts, including NYU Law professor Robert Howse, told Axios that Trump made a big mistake by identifying "dumping" as his basis for imposing retaliatory tariffs on national security grounds. There are already laws on the books to remedy dumping, and if Trump invokes the national security provision to impose new tariffs, other nations will immediately challenge him because they're operating under a World Trade Organization agreement that has no national security exceptions.

If this self-sabotaging scenario sounds familiar that's because lawyers fighting Trump's travel ban used his bombastic tweets and public statements as evidence he was motivated by a desire to ban Muslims from America rather than his stated mission of keeping out terrorists.