March 5, 2018 — Steven Hayward

California’s Suicide Attempt, Part 3: The Wages of Gentry Liberalism

Featured image The great thing about being a liberal is that it is an endlessly adaptable creed. Back in the 1960s and 1970s when white people moved to the suburbs and urban cores deterioration, it was called “white flight,” and the left decried it as racist, etc. But now that affluent whites have moved back into the urban cores, it is called “gentrification,” and it is terrible because it ruins old neighborhoods »
March 5, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff

How Trump is enforcing immigration law

Featured imageToday was supposed to be the day that President Obama’s illegal DACA order expired. However, a lawless leftist judge contrived to find that President Trump’s revocation of Obama’s illegal order somehow was, itself, illegal. Thus, DACA remains in effect for now, protecting more than 600,000 illegal immigrants from deportation. A much larger group, the so-called Dreamers who differ from the DACA population because they didn’t came forward pursuant to the »
March 5, 2018 — John Hinderaker

The World’s Energy Superpower: Us

Featured imageThis Wall Street Journal article is heartwarming: The U.S. will overtake Russia to become the world’s largest oil producer by 2023, accounting for most of the global growth in petroleum supplies, a top industry monitor said Monday. U.S. crude production is expected to reach a record of 12.1 million barrels a day in 2023, up about 2 million barrels a day from this year, said the International Energy Agency, which »
March 5, 2018 — Steven Hayward

The Power Line Show, Ep. 60: Free Speech on Campus

Featured imageReaders ask me from time to time whether any of my classes or lectures are ever taped or live streamed or otherwise available online, and generally they aren’t for a very simple, but perhaps strange-sounding, reason. My classes are either seminars, with lots of wide-ranging discussion that wouldn’t make for good viewing or listening, or lectures, but even my lectures have a conversational, often stream-of-consciousness quality to them that also »
March 5, 2018 — Steven Hayward

Hollyweird [Updated]

Featured imageLast night marked the 35th consecutive year of my Not Watching the Academy Awards, and from early news reports it appears that 20 percent of last year’s audience are following my example. Ratings are at their all-time lowest ever. Host Jimmy Kimmel apparently made a lot of jokes about Trump, conservatives, the NRA, and in support of the #MeToo movement, which is pretty cheeky for someone who hosted The Man »
March 5, 2018 — Scott Johnson

Sam Nunberg goes full Bartleby

Featured imageRobert Mueller is leaving no pebble unturned in his search for Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. He is only leaving Democratic boulders unturned. The Democratic boulders are different — they’re the real thing, not a political fabrication. The latest pebble to be touched by Mueller is one Sam Nunberg. He was briefly an adviser to the Trump campaign until he was terminated in August 2015 following a Business Insider »
March 5, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff

Italian voters send an unmistakable message

Featured image“Italians registered their dismay with the European political establishment on Sunday, handing a majority of votes in a national election to hard-right and populist forces that ran a campaign fueled by anti-immigrant anger. The election. . .was widely seen as a bellwether of the strength of populists on the continent and how far they might advance into the mainstream. The answer was far, very far.” So reports the New York »
March 5, 2018 — Steven Hayward

For Democrats, Deja Vu All Over Again

Featured imageSen. Orrin Hatch got into a heap of trouble a few days ago when he called the supporters of Obamacare “the stupidest, dumbass people I’ve ever met.” He has apologized, though a new poll suggests that a lot of Democrats actually agree with him. At least that’s the takeaway from a new poll, out today from Civis Analytics, a new opinion survey firm started by some 2012 Obama campaign veterans. The »
March 4, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff

Washington Post joins smear campaign against Bill Otis

Featured imageOn Thursday, President Trump nominated Bill Otis to serve on the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Immediately, the left, marching in lock-step as usual, launched an attack on Bill. I addressed one of the salvos, NPR’s, here. For years, Bill has written for “Crime and Consequences,” an influential blog in the field of criminal law. Thus, those opposing his nomination had the opportunity to sift through Bill’s archive looking for objectionable material »
March 4, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff

Trump needs to control his staff

Featured imageAccording to the Washington Post: Trump is now a president in transition, at times angry and increasingly isolated. He fumes in private that just about every time he looks up at a television screen, the cable news headlines are trumpeting yet another scandal. He voices frustration that son-in-law Jared Kushner has few on-air defenders. He revives old grudges. And he confides to friends that he is uncertain about whom to »
March 4, 2018 — Steven Hayward

California Suicide Watch, Part 3: Bring Back the Lunacy Commission?

Featured imageWith even the Los Angeles Times asking in an editorial, “How Can a Place with 58,000 Homeless People Continue to Function?“, perhaps it is worth looking back a hundred years or so to this section of California’s 1916 state budget, which proposed establishing a “Lunacy Commission” and a “Deportation Bureau” to send “insane” people back to their home states. The first line of the second paragraph below, in case you »
March 5, 2018 — Steven Hayward

The Closed-Mindedness of Lightweight Liberals

Featured imageToday’s comic relief comes to us courtesy of Washingtonian magazine, which has posted a feature on how hard it is for conservatives to date in DC these days, and despite the best efforts to be evenhanded, it is clear that the problem is liberals are so insecure or intolerant that they just can’t date a conservative. Someone spotted this delicious paragraph: First of all, Thomas Locke? Oh-kaaay. And second of »
March 5, 2018 — Scott Johnson

The case against Comey

Featured imageThe current issue of Imprimis gives us Joseph diGenova’s “The politicization of the FBI.” Adapted from a speech diGenova gave at Hillsdale College in late January, a far better title would be “The case against James Comey,” for that is what it is. It lays out the case against Comey’s handling of the fake Hillary Clinton email investigation and Comey’s handling of the counterintelligence investigation of alleged Trump-Russia collusion. Comey »
March 5, 2018 — Scott Johnson

Night thoughts with Nunes

Featured imageHouse Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appeared for the full hour on the second installment of Mark Levin’s new FOX News show last night (video below). It is thanks to Rep. Nunes in particular and his Republican colleagues in general that we know as much as we do about the Obama administration’s efforts to undermine the Trump campaign during the election and the incoming Trump administration afterwards. The saga continues. »
March 4, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff

NYT reports Sweden crime problem it criticized Trump for discussing

Featured imageIn February of last year, at CPAC, President Trump linked mass Muslim immigration to an increase in crime in Sweden. The New York Times, in an article called “From an Anchor’s Lips to Trump’s Ears to Sweden’s Disbelief,” ridiculed Trump for getting his information from television (a report on Tucker Carlson’s program) and suggested that Trump was misinformed. It also criticized Trump for “start[ing] a dispute with a longtime American »
March 4, 2018 — John Hinderaker

Whose Fantasy of the Past?

Featured imageJoy Reid, a leftist writing at the Daily Beast, has a column titled “The Right Can’t Fight the Future.” It is an odd mingling of triumphalism and paranoia, a combination we see often on the left. It is the sort of thing we have seen a thousand times–the inevitable victory of leftism, never mind the USSR, East Germany, North Korea, Venezuela, and so on. But some found Reid’s column impressive, »
March 4, 2018 — John Hinderaker

Et Tu, Country Music?

Featured imageIf there is any place in America where one might have expected a conservative to feel at home, it would be country music. Or would have been, anyway, until the Country Music Association chased Mike Huckabee off the board of its charitable foundation: On Wednesday, the Country Music Association announced the newest members of the board of its charitable foundation: singer Chris Young and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R). »