Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Featured image I know, I am a day late. And frankly, St. Patrick’s Day is not something that I celebrate. Especially when it falls on a Sunday. Still, we are all familiar with the holiday, and if someone stands up in a crowd to talk about St. Patrick’s Day and Ireland, and speaks incoherently, slurring his words, it is normally safe to assume that he has celebrated too enthusiastically. Unless, of course, »

Clown Cars In Ohio

Featured imageThis year’s Senate race in Ohio could be pivotal to who controls that body in 2025. Incumbent Sherrod Brown, while not unpopular, should be beatable by a strong candidate in increasingly-red Ohio. But here, as so often happens, the question is whether the GOP can come up with a good nominee. The principal candidates in the Republican primary, which is tomorrow, are Trump-endorsed Bernie Moreno and state senator Matt Dolan. »

The Daily Chart: COVIDiocy Confirmed

Featured imageOne of my favorite exchanges from “Yes, Minister” between Jim Hacker and the subversive career bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Appleby is when Hacker, the junior minister for administrative affairs, asks Sir Humphrey about whether he (Sir Humphrey) believes government policy should be carried out “even if it is wrong.” Sir Humphrey responds “Well, almost all government policy is wrong. . . but frightfully well carried out!” This came back to mind »

A lift too far: The Court of Appeals decision [With Comment by John]

Featured imageOn the local front, I have sought to draw attention to the case of JaycCee Cooper v. USA Powerlifting in several posts accessible here. Filed in Ramsey County District Court and assigned to Judge Patrick Diamond, the case raises the question whether USAP’s separation of men from women in USAP’s Minnesota competitions must yield to Cooper’s self-identification as a woman. Although a biological male, Cooper seeks to compete with the »

A bloodbath in the Supreme Court

Featured imageThis morning the Supreme Court held oral argument in the case that is now styled Murthy v. Missouri. C-SPAN has posted audio of the oral argument here. The case arises from the government’s “encouragement” of censorship by the social media platforms, as documented in the Twitter Files. We have followed the case as it has wended its way through the district court to the Fifth Circuit and then to the »

Annals of Failed Intelligence

Featured imageThe Wall Street Journal has a feature news story in today’s edition detailing a fact long known about the success Cuban intelligence has enjoyed penetrating American government over the years, in particular their sophisticated and widespread recruitment efforts. “Cuba has ‘the best damn intelligence service in the world’ for cultivating agents, said Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst who led the agency’s Latin America division,” the story notes. There is »

Revenge of Poontronage

Featured imageThe Kamala conundrum comes down to this: She was picked because she was Black and female, a combo tantamount to job security. Now that she has become a burden to the Democratic ticket, Biden can’t fire her. He can’t risk alienating his base. Full stop. That was Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker, in a March 15 piece headlined “For the Country’s Sake, Vice President Harris Should Step Aside,” a move »

Terrorist Apprehended at Border?

Featured imageThis account in the New York Post is confused, not to say incoherent. It relates to the apprehension of a Lebanese man named Basel Bassel Ebbadi near the Mexican border: A Lebanese migrant who was caught sneaking over the border admitted he’s a member of Hezbollah, he hoped to make a bomb, and his destination was New York, The Post can reveal. Basel Bassel Ebbadi, 22, was caught by border »

Are Dems Heading for Extinction-Level Election?

Featured imageDonald Trump has held a narrow but consistent lead in just about every poll for several months now—having never led in the polls in either the 2016 and 2020 election cycles. More significant is where this lead has come from. Trump has not improved his share of white vote at all; his improved standing has come from huge gains in minority votes, as John pointed out recently in drawing our »

Understanding Israel’s war, cont’d

Featured imageRick Richman is the author of And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel (2023) and Racing Against History: The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler (2018), both published by Encounter Books. He forwards the video of Dave Rubin’s “utterly amazing interview” of former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. and now Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer below with the recommendation »

Fatal Bureau Inventory

Featured image“We are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border,” FBI boss Christopher Wray told Congress last week. “There is a particular network that has – some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have — ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about, and we’ve been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners investigating.” As Robert Spencer, author of The History of Jihad: »

Shady Grove, Act III

Featured imageThe Star Tribune represents the mainstream media at work in Minnesota. It is the dominant voice of conventional wisdom that relentlessly peddles the left-wing line on its news pages and in its editorial positions. It is, moreover, a profitable business owned by a billionaire. Glen Taylor bought it in 2014 for $100 million. He may have assumed some of the paper’s debt in the process. It reportedly makes a substantial »

Trump Is Funny? Who Knew?

Featured imageFor years, liberals have obtusely refused to acknowledge that part of Donald Trump’s appeal is his sense of humor. Often they have branded his comments as outrageous, when in truth they were intended as jokes, and understood as such by his audience. Now, for whatever reason, liberals are belatedly conceding the point. As in this Politico piece, which is, in its own unintentional way, funny. Politico acknowledges that Trump’s sense »

The Liberal Arts Are a Right-Wing Plot!

Featured imageIn its typically clueless way, The New Yorker is hot on the topic of whether the liberal arts—and especially classical education—have gone conservative. (The article is titled, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?”) Better break out the smelling salts. You’d think this is an easy question. The left have attacked or hollowed out the liberal arts on campus, and the only people who take the classics seriously, and on their »

Biden unplugged

Featured imageIn his weekly NRO column yesterday, Andrew McCarthy urges readers to review the transcript of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview of President Biden. Hur interviewed Biden in the course of his investigation last year on October 8 and October 9. The Department of Justice did not see fit to release the transcripts until the day of Hur’s congressional testimony last week. As McCarthy puts it, “the transcript is such a »

Sunday morning coming down

Featured imageJohn Sebastian celebrates his 80th birthday today. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008. I had a great time compiling a set of videos in his honor last year. I can’t let Sebastian’s big 8-0 pass without inviting readers to take another look back with this revised and expanded edition. Sebastian grew up in Greenwich Village in a musical family. He is saturated in American music »

Immigration and Affirmative Action

Featured imageThis is by David Leonhardt of the New York Times, in that paper’s daily email of yesterday. It is a good example of a liberal confronted by facts that refute his ideology, who can see truth off in the distance but can’t quite get there: Two economists — Ran Abramitzky of Stanford and Leah Boustan of Princeton — embarked on an ambitious project more than a decade ago. They wanted »