Monthly Archives: April 2005

April 28, 2005 — John Hinderaker

Out of the Closet

Roger Simon spills the beans, I guess. What does it all mean? Beats us. We’ll keep you advised as events occur. Basically, we’re looking at a banding together of the blogosphere to try to inject some economic benefit into the enterprise for everyone. If you’re a blogger, check with Roger to sign up. »
April 28, 2005 — John Hinderaker

A Great Job…

…by President Bush tonight. President Bush can be his own best spokesman. For whatever reasons, he doesn’t like doing press conferences. But if I were advising him, I would tell him to do a press conference every thirty days. He stands head and shoulders above his Democratic rivals, intellectually, politically, and morally. What I don’t know is, was anyone watching? Some will be upset about his suggestion that Social Security »
April 28, 2005 — John Hinderaker

A Compromise of Genius?

Senator Bill Frist has just delivered a speech on the Senate floor, proposing a compromise to end the threat of judicial filibusters. His proposal, in a nutshell, is that the parties agree that 1) no Supreme Court or Court of Appeals nominees will be filibustered by the minority, and 2) no such nominees will be blocked in the Judiciary Committee, presumably by the majority. The effect of the agreement would »
April 28, 2005 — Scott Johnson

Unsustainable?

Last night we noted that Dartmouth College has hired its first “sustainability director,” Jim Merkel. The Dartmouth Daily story on Merkel’s hiring reported that Merkel — “who is currently bicycing through Spain to promote his book ‘Radical Simplicity'” — has lived “on only $5,000 a year — close to the global average income — for the past 14 years.” The article also notes the students instrumental in Merkel’s hiring, including »
April 28, 2005 — Scott Johnson

That was then, this is now (2)

In opposing the filibuster in 1993 and 1994, the Minneapolis Star Tribune apparently led the way for its betters among the mainstream media. Free Republic has posted the text of the still-timely January 1, 1995 New York Times editorial: “Time to retire the filibuster.” Here is the Times’s 1995 teaching: The U.S. Senate likes to call itself the world’s greatest deliberative body. The greatest obstructive body is more like it. »
April 27, 2005 — Paul Mirengoff

Pryor restraint

Paul Greenberg in the Washington Times identifies the latest Democratic Senator to attack the rights of Christian fundamentalists. It’s Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, who finds it inappropriate for Christians (or at least a certain type of Christian) to invoke religion in support of a certain kind of political position (conservative). He fears that doing so could “make the followers of Jesus Christ just another kind of special interest group.” The »
April 27, 2005 — Paul Mirengoff

The truth is Senator Biden’s latest victim

It isn’t just the Minneapolis Star Tribune that’s suffering from memory loss when it comes to past positions about filibustering judicial nominees (see John’s post below). Senator Joe Biden has the same affliction, and even less of an excuse since he’s an individual, not an institution (an individual with a history of problems regarding what he did and did not say or write). The Washington Times notes that, in an »
April 27, 2005 — Scott Johnson

My favorite Democrat, part 17

I’ve been a fan of former Georgia Senator Zell Miller since early 2003, when I posted my first in this long running series of notes and explanations for my assessment of him. This is the seventeenth in a series that began in March of that year. I wrote then that the list of acceptable Democrats was admittedly a short one, but I provided a list of reasons why Miller rated »
April 27, 2005 — John Hinderaker

That Was Then, This Is Now

On Monday, we did this post about the fact that the Minneapolis Star Tribune was fervently anti-filibuster during the Clinton administration (“the putrid flood of verbiage known as a filibuster”), but has changed its tune now that the Democrats are using the filibuster to block President Bush and the Senate’s Republicans. Our post drew an outraged respose from the Strib’s Deputy Editor, Jim Boyd, who claimed that the paper had »
April 27, 2005 — Scott Johnson

Free the Burger King 10

Catching up with the dead tree version of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, I found one of the best interviews I’ve read in the Journal in quite a while. Journal staff reporter Steven Gray interviewed Burger King chief executive officer and turnaround artist Greg Brenneman regarding the progress he has made in improving the company’s performance over the past year. Brenneman is a 43-year-old Harvard MBA with an already impressive track »
April 27, 2005 — Scott Johnson

Cheating Green dreams

We have closely followed events involving the pending election of two trustees to the Dartmouth College board. Today National Review Online catches up with the story in a big way, with Alston Ramsay’s detailed report on the Dartmouth administration’s flagrant violation of the applicable rules: “Getting hell from Hanover.” Given mysterious foul-ups in the delivery of ballots by mail, the deadline for voting has been extended from April 22 to »
April 27, 2005 — John Hinderaker

A Scoop

I’m home again after subbing for Hugh Hewitt, along with Mitch Berg and Captain Ed Morrissey. It was a fun show, and one of the highlights was an interview with Senator Norm Coleman. He had a very clear message: President Bush’s judicial nominees are going to get an up or down vote. All of them. I asked Senator Coleman point-blank whether he was telling our listeners that the Republicans have »
April 27, 2005 — Scott Johnson

Tony Snow back on the case

We’re all big fans of Tony Snow here at Power Line, and that goes twice over for our wives. So the good news of the month is that Tony has returned to work at Fox News Radio with his nationally syndicated talk show. And the good news is supplemented by the udpates posted on his Tony Snow site. Today Tony is pressing the important story of the independent counsel report »
April 27, 2005 — Paul Mirengoff

Believing the worst about America regardless of the evidence

The editors of the Wall Street Journal explain that, given the outcome of the various trials and investigations of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, one of two things is true. Either the story was over-hyped last year or our government — the Bush administration, the U.S. military, and independent investigators such as former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger — has perpetrated a massive cover-up. The Journal thinks it’s a case »
April 27, 2005 — John Hinderaker

Speaking of Hate Speech…

The Trunk noted earlier today that the President of St. Thomas University, where Ann Coulter gave a speech last week, issued a statement denouncing her talk, and branding it as “hate speech.” (This was without the benefit of having heard the speech, of course.) A local newspaper columnist wrote, I believe, two columns making the same charge. Meanwhile, some actual hate speech has occurred on Air America, where–not for the »
April 27, 2005 — John Hinderaker

Zarqawi’s Laptop

The New York Post reported this morning on the capture of Zarqawi’s laptop in a special forces ambush that almost netted the terrorist himself. Supposedly, the laptop is a treasure trove of information about Zarqawi’s international terror network. The story that has appeared about the ambush is that Zarqawi was riding in a vehicle with one of his top aides. They apparently got wind of the ambush and turned around; »
April 27, 2005 — John Hinderaker

Media Alerts

Fox News picked up on our post about the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s shifting attitude toward filibusters, depending on who is doing the filibustering. Brit Hume talked about it on his Special Report show last night, and it’s on Hume’s Political Grapevine on Fox’s site as well. Brit also covers the attack on John Bolton by Frederick Vreeland, which we wrote about here and here, and the bogus Washington Post/ABC News »