Wednesday morning roundup

I tend to agree with this NRO editorial that Rand Paul ought to come around on the Graham-Cassidy bill. I might not have taken this position at any number of points earlier this year, but Congress is clearly exhausted by the successive efforts to actually repeal the "A"CA, and this legislation does, to employ a hackneyed phrase, move the needle, albeit not by a whole lot.

A true replacement of Obamacare would be better than Graham-Cassidy, but Graham-Cassidy is still much better than Obamacare. It abolishes the individual and employer mandates, caps per capita spending on Medicaid, blocks federal funds from going to insurance plans that cover abortion, and lets interested states attain freedom from some of Obamacare’s regulations. Some of those states could use that freedom to create markets in which people outside of Medicare, Medicaid, and employer-based coverage would finally be enabled to buy cheap, renewable catastrophic-insurance policies.

The senator’s objections to the bill amount to a case for improving it, perhaps in a conference committee after it passes the Senate. They do not amount to a case for voting it down. The bill goes farther in the right direction than the “skinny repeal” bill for which Paul voted earlier this summer. That bill abolished only the individual and employer mandates.

Jason Riley at the WSJ does a great job of taking down race polemicist Ta-Nehisi Coates. Would excerpt some of it, but apparently my reading of it a while ago was my one free article before the paywall kicked in. If you aren't a subscriber, you'll do well to make this your free article as well.

Prayers for Puerto Rico. Maria is one mean bitch.

Modern post-American adolescents aren't getting it on or imbibing the juice or weed at the rate of even their recent forebears, but they aren't getting jobs or driver's licenses at the same rate, either.

A new study shows that computer models are a worthless way to draw conclusions about the global climate.