6 of our top opinion pieces this week: ICYMI
In today's fast-paced news environment, it can be hard to keep up. For your weekend reading, we've started in-case-you-missed-it compilations of some of the week's top USA TODAY Opinion pieces. As always, thanks for reading, and for your feedback.
1. Trump raids military families, national security to pay for border wall: Vets in Congress
By Gil Cisneros and Anthony Brown
"The president’s decision to take money away from our military to pay for his border wall — a wall he promised repeatedly that Mexico would pay for — is an insult to our service members and their families who have for years been forced to do more with less. ... Rather than keeping us safe, his decision endangers our national security and the lives of our service members and their families."
2. Dear Taylor Swift, you are not a victim, so stop acting like one.
By Haley Victory Smith
"Taylor Swift’s gender has not been a hindrance to her — it has been an asset. Her incredibly successful brand is uniquely feminine. ... Why decide to craft a clearly feminine persona, make millions upon millions of dollars, and then decide to say your life would be so much easier if you weren’t a woman? She certainly hasn’t needed to be a man to become the highest-paid celebrity in the world."
3. Abortionist Ulrich Klopfer kept thousands of dead babies but inspires little curiosity
By David Mastio
"There’s something sick in America’s abortion industry. What else would account for a doctor who collected thousands of dead babies in some kind of twisted hobby that he hid from his allegedly unsuspecting wife? ... While this case is unique, it is not like there aren’t regular reports of shady doings at the nation’s abortion clinics. In the six years since (abortionist Kermit) Gosnell’s conviction, abortion clinics have been shut down and others have been cited for serious medical problems."
4. Trump wants you to think he's racist so you won't notice he's corrupt and killing jobs
By Jason Sattler
"If you start calling Trump a racist or a white nationalist, bad news: You’re now a volunteer in the Trump campaign. This is the fight he wants to have. ... Trump wants voters to go to the polls believing that America is locked in a cage fight between warring racial groups: “Who is the real racist, the person warning about illegal immigrants or the person saying that’s racist?” When that’s the debate, Trump wins."
5. Wyoming, Monaco, voting rights and taxes: All the reasons Washington, DC, should be a state
By Jill Lawrence
"D.C. residents have left no doubt about what they want. Nearly eight in 10 of us voted for statehood at the polls in 2016. I know the rest of the country has some reservations. ... Maybe they still think of us as Chocolate City ... or they don't want two more Democratic senators ... Maybe they think we don't pay taxes, or they know we do and they don’t care about taxation without representation."
6. 2020 Democrats should look to Andrew Yang. Nuclear power is the way to go.
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
"People are scared and invoke things like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, but when they do, they’re mostly thinking about the absurdly dramatized fictional versions of those incidents. ... (Andrew) Yang’s (climate change) plan specifically recognizes this, noting that nuclear power causes orders of magnitudes fewer deaths than fossil fuels. ... It’s time for our leaders to get their heads out of thriller movies and start supporting a massive shift to nuclear power."
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Taylor Swift's feminism, Trump raiding military families: Top columns
