◼ Struggling to find a winning message against President Trump, Democrats seem to have settled on starting a government shutdown over expanding Obamacare. The national health care law, you may recall, issued a raft of regulations that spiked the cost of insurance. When Democrats gained power in 2021, rather than confront the underlying cause of higher premiums, they used the Covid emergency to make taxpayers pick up the tab by offering more generous subsidies. What was supposed to be a temporary measure during the pandemic was extended again in 2022 through this year. Now Democrats are using the threat of a shutdown as a way to twist Republicans into extending them further. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters that “Republicans have to come to meet with us in a true bipartisan negotiation.” A true bipartisan negotiation, however, would involve Democrats’ actually opening themselves up to deregulation and free market reforms, something that they have consistently opposed in lockstep. Instead of caving in, Republicans should call Schumer’s bluff. If he is willing to shut the government down to funnel tens of billions more dollars each year to insurance companies, that’s a fight worth having.

◼ On Wednesday, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely following blowback from his comments suggesting that the accused shooter of Charlie Kirk was actually “MAGA” rather than a left-winger. He should have gone on air the next night to apologize for getting it wrong, and to correct the record. Instead, Kimmel planned to argue on air that his comments were taken out of context, and was not planning to apologize. Two major ABC affiliates announced that they would stop carrying the show for an unspecified period of time. This forced the hand of Disney/ABC. If Kimmel were given the option of doing the honorable thing and apologizing and issuing a correction, and he refused, there is no reason the network should continue to produce his failing show. But there is more to the story. The move came amid threats from Trump and Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the latter of whom attacked the Kimmel segment and said “there are avenues here” for his agency. ABC and its affiliates may have pulled the trigger, but they did so with FCC guns pointed at their own heads if they did not. This action is a victory for those on the right who have been at war in recent years against limited-government impulses. They argue that the left’s use of such power is inevitable, regardless of what the right does, such as when Democrats leaned on Big Tech companies to stifle conservative speech in the name of fighting “misinformation.” But the underlying argument against government power is undimmed by Democratic abuses of it. Instead of reinvigorating the FCC, conservatives should be looking to abolish it. In a free society, people should not feel that their ability to comment on issues of the day will vary based on which party is in power.

◼ The Federal Reserve cut interest rates, even though inflation remains above target and, in recent months, has risen. Its stated rationale is twofold. The rise in inflation is supposedly transitory—where have we heard that before? And the labor market is showing signs of weakness. Some weakness: The unemployment rate is low by the standards of recent decades, at 4.3 percent. Several Fed governors want further cuts by the end of the year. Stephen Miran, whom Republican senators are allowing to fill a temporary spot while on leave from the White House, is especially dovish. The Fed, and the rest of us, may luck out. But it is raising the risk that inflation will run still higher and that it will be left having to boost rates to recession-inducing levels to get it under control.

◼ As the Fed began its September meeting, Trump was still trying to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook. A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit had blocked his attempt. Based on digging by Bill Pulte, the loyalist Trump installed at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the president claims that Cook committed bank fraud in connection with private mortgages she obtained in 2021, two years before Joe Biden named her to the Fed. Cook disputes the claim but has had no forum in which to make a defense. The legal issues have gotten tangled, but it bears repeating that Trump’s goal here is a dubious one: a more inflationary Fed policy.

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◼ In a discussion of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska’s murder in Charlotte, N.C., by a demented criminal, the hosts of Fox & Friends wondered what could be done with crazed vagrants who refused help. Lawrence Jones suggested jail. Brian Kilmeade offered “involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill ’em”—words that stood out even in a week marked by celebrations of assassination. Kilmeade, returning to earth or chastened by higher-ups, recanted. “I apologize for that extremely callous remark. I am obviously aware that not all mentally ill, homeless people act as the perpetrator did in North Carolina and that so many homeless people deserve our empathy and compassion.” Yes, but it’s not so obvious when you state the exact opposite. A sabbatical might help Mr. Kilmeade clear his thoughts.

◼ “Future generations will consider us monsters” for refusing to cast aside “the so-called sanctity of life” in favor of legalized assisted suicide, Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts insisted to his fellow members of the House of Lords. Others, more wisely, warned of the dangers to the weak and vulnerable of a Commons-passed bill. “Private, for-profit providers can become involved in ending an individual’s life, on the inherently unreliable medical prognosis that they have six months or less left to live,” the Times of London pointed out in an editorial that called the bill “sloppily designed and blundering” and “irredeemable.” Critics also pointed out that learning disabilities could become a justification for physician-assisted death. The Lords’ day of debate fell during World Suicide Awareness Week, a fact that former Prime Minister Theresa May mentioned in her speech opposing the bill. One can be merciful and provide comfort to the suffering without declaring them better off dead.

◼ The United States Postal Service rolled out a stamp honoring our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., in the year of his centennial. A single image cannot convey his wit and warmth. But the one chosen, based on a photo, aptly depicts him with his eyes set to the horizon. A stamp is not only a worthy honor, given his manifold contributions to American public life, but a fitting one: WFB was an indefatigable correspondent. In addition to nonfiction books, novels, magazine editorials, and columns, WFB wrote thousands of letters and postcards to friends, to subscribers, to donors, to activists, to the powerful, and to the humble and anonymous. Lawrence Perelman’s book American Impresario, for example, describes how Perelman’s life was changed by writing to WFB as an 18-year-old and receiving a letter in return. A man of letters indeed. P.S., we still think the Postal Service should be privatized.

◼ Robert Redford’s impressive career in acting and directing ran, in its heyday, for nearly three decades. It spanned the divides between Old Hollywood, New Hollywood, and modern Hollywood. Redford spent his early career in the Sixties playing blandly handsome supporting characters, as befitted the film industry’s reaction to his prepossessing good looks. Terrified of being typecast as little better than a “male bimbo,” Redford found his niche in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, playing alongside Paul Newman (a slightly older and similarly handsome actor who had fought his own earlier war against typecasting) in a buddy comedy that immediately launched Redford to stardom by featuring his sardonic wit and not just his looks. This launched a career that carried on through several  memorable roles in the Seventies—The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, and especially his reunion with Newman in The Sting. In the Eighties, he starred in such roles as Roy Hobbs in The Natural, and had a superb turn behind the camera with 1980’s Ordinary People. In 1992, he would achieve both simultaneously with A River Runs Through It, a film that brought the young Brad Pitt to national fame. But Redford’s truly standout role perhaps remains his turn as the namesake of 1972’s Jeremiah Johnson, which has barely any dialogue whatsoever. No more proof is needed to explain why Redford was one of the greatest film stars of our era than to watch him dominate the screen—in near-silence. Dead at 89. R.I.P.