Five Best Thursday Columns

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Rick Perry in USA Today on border security. The Governor of Texas continues to push for more resources on the U.S.-Mexican border, one day after meeting with President Obama about the issue. "The fact is, this is a crisis created by failed federal policy, and a lack of will to dedicate the resources necessary to secure the border, once and for all." Perry calls for National Guard troops, drone flights, and more funds to tackle the security problem. "Everything else is only treating a symptom of a much larger problem. And as we know with treating symptoms, the problems will continue until the root cause is resolved."

Noam Scheiber at The New Republic on Hillary Clinton's insulting rhetoric. It's become a common refrain among politicians that it takes a united effort to solve the problem of inequality, because "we are in it together." Scheiber says that is not even close to being true. "When it comes to inequality, the numbers show a tiny group of ultra-rich amassing a shockingly large and rapidly accelerating share of income and wealth.... The good news is that this means the bottom 99 percent of us are in some sense very much 'in this together.' But, in economic terms, we are emphatically not in it with the richest .1 percent or .01 percent." He also says that Hillary Clinton's adoption of this "consensus" idea suggests she's spent too much time with that .1 percent, or simply isn't interested in solving the problem. "If Hillary Clinton wants to take a pass on the plutocracy question, that’s entirely her right. But she should have the courtesy to level with us rather than insult our intelligence."

Chloe Angyal at Reuters on the problem with Tinder's boy's club culture. Tinder's lone female co-founder has sued the company for sexual harassment, and revealed a disturbing problem found among Silicon Valley's young male entrepreneurs. "After reading Wolfe’s suit against her male co-founders, though, and after reading [Snapchat founder] Spiegel’s emails, it should be clear that these are not the men we want at the helm of our bold new digital dating enterprise. These are not the men — the very young men — we need in charge of determining how old prejudices and problems are translated into the digital, handheld age."

The Wall Street Journal on why impeachment talk is a delusion. Sarah Palin is pushing impeachment of the president, but WSJ's editors say staking the extreme position is a bad idea. "Impeachment is also inherently a political process that at the current moment would backfire on Republicans. Mr. Obama is unpopular, but that is due mainly to the failure of his policies. Focusing on impeachment lets Democrats off the hook on those progressive failures and plays into their claim that GOP opposition to Mr. Obama is personal. Then there is the answer to nobody's question—President Biden? Impeachment fails to address any of the problems that Republicans are upset about."

Christopher Flavelle at Bloomberg View on why Obamacare isn't helping black people enough. New Obamacare data shows a dramatic decrease in the number of uninsured people, but one group seems to be left out: African-Americans. "The drop in uninsurance rates held across almost every demographic group: young and old, male and female, married and unmarried, with children and without. The exception to that trend was blacks. [...] When the Commonwealth Fund conducted a survey from July to September last year, 21 percent of blacks reported being uninsured. This year, in a similar survey conducted from April to June, that level was effectively unchanged." One explanation is that the states that refused to expand Medicare have a disproportionate share of poorer black residents, but if more progress isn't made, "one of the law's major benefits — reducing racial inequality in U.S. health care .... will be left unfulfilled."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.