Foreign desk: How To Handle the Showdown With Iran

With US-Iran tensions rising, Michael Rubin at The National Interest offers three key observations: First, history has shown that “pressure can work on Iran” — if America shows enough unity that Tehran doesn’t think it can “further aggravate political crises in Washington.” Second, “personnel is policy”: Though the United States had “cordial and professional relations” with Iranian leaders in the past, their successors “have to prove their military mettle” and may try to “test long-established boundaries.” Finally, “we could be witnessing the death throes of the Islamic Republic”: With economic and social upheaval looming, the regime may be hoping to use a crisis to “rally” its “fiercely nationalistic” citizens. So the trick is to “maintain the pressure on Iran without playing into the hands of a regime that may want conflict.”

From the right: Dems Turn to Failed ’60s Programs

More than 50 years after the 1966 Freedom Budget and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Democrats are now praising “the sixties’ social-engineering experiments” and promising government money for every voting constituency, observe Gene Dattel and Fred Siegel at City Journal. Yet today’s goals no longer include stimulating self-sufficiency and individual responsibility, focusing instead on victimhood. Meanwhile, America’s inner cities still “stand in disrepair.” And “thorny questions about the tax revenues needed to fund” such social programs get “dismissed as partisan abstractions.” Though the programs are “cost-prohibitive,” the authors quip, “trillion-dollar campaign promises make great politics.”

From the left: The Dem Civil War Is Here

Two flaps between presidential candidates — Joe Biden vs. Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders v. Liz Warren — “reflect divides within the party” that could “make it easier for Trump to win a second term,” warns The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky. Booker slammed Biden for boasting about his past success in working with segregationist Democrats. It won’t doom Biden, but it “showed how out-of-date his idea of acceptable rhetoric is in today’s Democratic Party” — and will boost Booker. Sanders used kind words for Warren at a meeting of the centrist Third Way group as proof that “the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is publicly ‘anybody but Bernie,’ ” a fresh sign that “he has no loyalty to the Democratic Party” and might do anything if he loses the nomination. These are “fault lines — generational and ideological — on which the party’s divisions could badly damage its chances.”

Libertarian: Move More Agencies out of DC

Agriculture Department staff recently turned their backs on Secretary Sonny Perdue to protest the move of several hundred jobs from Washington to Kansas City, but Reason’s Alex Muresianu wants it to be a trend. DC real estate is expensive, and “many agencies are research organizations” with no need to be “near the seat of power.” Plus, “bringing thousands of government workers to the Midwest would bring hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer spending to” areas that have been losing population. And the shift of these 550 jobs will save taxpayers an estimated $20 million a year, so imagine the “savings from shifting hundreds of thousands of federal employees into lower-cost states.”

Urban beat: LA’s Drug Culture Fueled Homeless Crisis

California has “the fifth biggest economy in the world,” notes PJ Media’s Roger Simon, yet Los Angeles has 36,000 homeless people on the streets, “replete with human feces and syringes.” Why? Money can build homeless shelters, but it can’t force people to use them. And most of LA’s homeless are addicts who “prefer to live in tents where they can smoke what they want, shoot what they want, pop what they want.” The city’s drug problems started as countercultural recreation, but “all those joints and acid tablets have morphed into syringes for extremely depressed people.” The Baby Boomers have trouble accepting how their bad habits have spread and devolved, but even if they did “beat their chests with guilt and self-loathing,” Simon is not optimistic: “I’m not sure it would help now.”

— Compiled by Ashley Allen and Adam Brodsky