Monthly Archives: June 2008

All the News that Fits the Agenda

I don’t think we’ve written anything about the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. It isn’t really our beat. As Roger Simon points out, however, the press’s boycott of the story has become newsworthy in its own right, with the Los Angeles Times ordering its bloggers not to mention it. I also find it ironic (though hardly surprising) that the New York Times has yet to mention the Edwards/Hunter story. The contrast »

“Obama Clarifies Position…”

Is that becoming a familiar headline, or what? I hope someone is compiling them all. Today, it was the Supreme Court’s gun decision: “Obama clarifies position on D.C. gun ban”: Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama Thursday sought to clarify his position on a Supreme Court ruling striking down a Washington gun ban. *** When asked about his reaction, Obama disputed the one outlined earlier by his campaign, ABC News »

Dr. NObama

With energy shaping up as the number one issue in this year’s campaign, the RNC has launched a new site called Dr. NObama and released this internet ad to highlight Obama’s opposition to pretty much all forms of increased energy production: It’s not bad. What Obama really stands for is managed decline–a government-supervised lowering of Americans’ standards of living. (That would be your standard of living, of course, not his.) »

Our robed masters strike again

The Supreme Court’s death penalty decision yesterday constitutes a raw usurpation of authority from the people of Louisiana specifically and Americans generally. The Court’s outrageous decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana continues a tradition that goes back to the watershed case of Furman v. Georgia in 1972. The Kennedy case involves the extraordinarily cruel rape of an eight-year-old girl perpetrated by her stepfather. ‘‘In most cases justice is not better served »

Obama Gets One Right, For Now

The Supreme Court had a bad day today. Among other things, it ruled 5-4, in an opinion by Anthony Kennedy, that it is unconstitutional for a state to punish child rape by death. The Supreme Court’s death penalty jurisprudence is unprincipled. Capital punishment certainly was not considered “cruel and unusual” at the time the Constitution was adopted, or for nearly two centuries thereafter. So what the Court has done in »

Ideology-based hiring; ideology-based reporting

The ideology-based hiring that occurred at the Justice Department in 2006 and quite possibly in 2002 is a genuine scandal. Given the absence of any need to “work” the story in order to cast the Bush administration Justice Department in a bad light, one might have hoped for a spin-free rendition from the Washington Post. Carrie Johnson, though, fails to deliver. Life proceeds in chronological order, and the chronology of »

Don’t follow the bouncing poll

Two recent polls have Barack Obama leading John McCain by more than 10 percentage points. A Newsweek poll has the race at 51-36 and a Bloomberg/LA Times poll has it at 49-37. Thanks to these polls, the RCP average now tilts decisively towards Obama by a margin of 48.2 to 41.3. This would suggest that Obama has obtained a substantial “bounce” recently. But the polls I pay closest attention to »

Dems In Disarray

Yesterday, the Democrats’ House leadership announced with considerable fanfare that Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, James Clyburn, Rahm Emanuel and John Larson would hold a news conference at 11:30 this morning “to discuss the New Direction Congress’ efforts to lower gas prices.” Here is the press release; click to enlarge: This morning, the news conference was canceled. The Democrats don’t have an energy policy, and they can’t think of one. The »

Ania Egland answers MoveOn

You may have seen the latest ad from the far-left group MoveOn.org, which spent over $500,000 broadcasting it. The ad uses a young mother holding her infant son to launch a cretinous political attack on Senator McCain. You can watch MoveOn’s thirty-second ad here. The mother says: “Hi, John McCain; this is Alex. He’s my first. So far, his talents include trying any new food and chasing after our dog »

In hoc signo ridebis

Last night in “Fac me cocleario vomere!” I caught up with the news that Barack Obama has killed his very own presidential seal. Today Jim Geraghty devotes the NRO column “Mac vs. PC” to the seal. Geraghty speculates that “like Michael Dukakis riding in a tank or John Kerry declaring that he voted for war funding before he voted against it, we may have just witnessed one of those unexpected »

Vindicating Lincoln

This morning we conclude our preview of the Summer issue of the invaluable Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here). Hillsdale College Professor Thomas Krannawitter is in the process of establishing himself as one of the important Lincoln scholars of the younger generation. See, for example, his CRB reviews of books on Lincoln by the libertarian Thomas DiLorenzo and the liberal Mario Cuomo. Professor Krannawittter’s own Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Ideals »

Report finds politicized hiring at the Department of Justice in some years

The Justice Department has released a report by its Inspector General and its Office of Professional Responsibility on the question of whether the political or ideological affiliations of applicants were improperly considered in selections for the Department’s Honors Program and its Summer Law Intern Program. The years in question were 2002-2006. The reports finds no evidence of bias in 2003, 2004, and 2005. However, it finds statistical evidence of bias »

Demagoguery Unleashed, Ineptly

The Democrats, desperate to distract attention from the fact that they have no energy policy, have dredged up an old favorite–price gouging! Today they took out of mothballs the “Federal Price Gouging Prevention Act,” which died in the House last year. This gave them the opportunity to vote against something that sounds bad without actually doing any damage, since the proposal once again failed to get the 2/3 vote it »

Ride A Bus, Save A Porsche

One of the liberals’ favorite antidotes to high gas prices is public transportation. If we would only ride buses and subways, they say, we’d barely notice $4 a gallon prices. Besides, there is something about seeing people crammed together in equal discomfort on public transportation that liberals just like. It’s true, of course, that mass transit can reduce gas consumption. But today, House Republicans noted a startling statistic. The total »

Fac me cocleario vomere!

Just when my creative juices were beginning to work on the appropriate Latin mottos for Barack Obama’s very own presidential seal, the Obama campaign gave up the whole idea. I originally proposed “Obamanum Credimus” (“We believe in Obama”). Deliberating a bit more on the subject, I thought “In Obamano Speramus” (“In Obama we trust”) would also do nicely. Before the campaign settled on “Vero Possumus” (“Yes we can”) as the »

Smearland

Joe Klein asserts that “the fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives—people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary—plumped for [the Iraq] war. . .raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.” Although Klein uses the passive voice (the question was “raised”), the fact that he now raises it so starkly strongly suggests that he »

Mild Ridicule Is Better Than No Ridicule At All

Barack Obama was a figure of fun on last night’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart ridiculed–very mildly–Obama’s “Presidential” seal and his flip-flop on accepting public financing for his general election campaign. My favorite moment is when Steward assures his audience that it’s OK to laugh at Obama: Not the sort of full-throated ridicule we might wish, but a step in the right direction. To comment on this post go »