From the right: Liz Warren Is the Progressive Trump

Just as the 2016 election was a choice between “two symbols of heedless ambition,” Noah Rothman at NBC News suggests 2020 may shape up as a battle between “two slightly distinctive flavors of populism” — especially if the Democrats nominate Sen. Liz Warren, whose “brand of politics is just Trumpism with a bleeding heart.” No one, he notes, “can be an effective populist without identifying and attacking the enemies of their people.” Warren, for one, is a market skeptic — but so is Trump, whose criticisms of major corporations align with the views of populist Democrats. Like Warren, Trump is no deficit hawk. Fact is, “both progressive and nationalist brands of populism often share more similarities than distinctions.” So 2020 could shape up as a choice “between radically different styles, not visions.”

Conservative: ‘Medicare for All’ a $32T Boondoggle

Advocates of the “Medicare for All” single-payer health-care system, like Bernie Sanders and a growing number of more mainstream Democrats, don’t like to talk about its price tag. So George Mason University’s Mercatus Center has done it for them. As National Review’s Jack Crowe reports, the libertarian-leaning policy center calculates it would cost the federal government $32.6 trillion over the next decade and require a massive tax hike. This aligns precisely with a 2016 Urban Institute study. While it would “reduce prescription and administration costs by streamlining operations,” Crowe notes, those savings “would be far outpaced by the cost of covering some 30 million uninsured Americans and eliminating copays and deductibles for all consumers.” Fact is, even doubling all personal and corporate income-tax collections wouldn’t provide enough revenue.

PC watch: Sarah Silverman Turns on PC Crowd

Standup stalwart Sarah Silverman was “all for PC comedy restrictions before she was against them,” says Christian Toto at PJ Media. Until just recently, he notes, Silverman seemed comfortable with “the creeping terror that is PC groupthink.” She even apologized for a years-old bit on her Comedy Central show. But now that she’s seeing fellow lefties like James Gunn lose gigs thanks to PC-unfriendly jokes, “she’s apparently scared.” So she’s begun criticizing the critics for attacking some of her own jokes “from a time not long ago when hard absurd jokes by comedians were recognized for that they were — jokes.” It’s gratifying that she’s “finally realizing the error of her ways,” says Toto, “even if it came from a self-defensive posture.”

Foreign desk: Israel’s Gay-Big Tech Alliance

Last week, 100,000 Israelis staged one of the largest political demonstrations in the country’s history in what Zev Chafets at Bloomberg calls “an unsuspected display of power” by the gay community. At issue was a new law that bars gay male couples — unlike straight couples and single women — from receiving public financing for parental surrogacy. The rally was successful in large part thanks to support from “virtually the entire Israeli high-tech sector.” Companies like Apple and IBM gave their employees a paid day off to attend and closed their stores in a show of solidarity. This, notes Chafets, is an issue “that challenges the entire theocratic web of special rights enjoyed by the Orthodox minority.” And, he adds, it “could decide elections.”

Culture critic: The GOP’s Abortion Conundrum

These are “bittersweet times” for pro-lifers, suggests Shikha Dalmia at The Week. One the one hand, they’re poised to have enough strength on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. But their gains over the past decade “in turning public opinion against abortion have evaporated into thin air.” Fact is, recent polls show 64 percent opposed to overturning Roe, though most Americans aren’t “breezily cool with abortion.” Indeed, more believe it is morally wrong than morally acceptable. Which means pro-lifers “need to take the full complexity of this issue into account if they want to truly convince a majority of Americans of their cause’s righteousness.” Her suggestion: “Change the cultural incentives of women, not try to demonize them by shoehorning the issue into a simplistic and inapposite ‘abortion is murder’ framework.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann