Monthly Archives: August 2009

The right snuff

I haven’t watched the various ceremonies honoring Sen. Edward Kennedy, but I did read a nice tribute from his good friend, Sen. Orrin Hatch, which includes this anecdote: I recall a debate over increasing the minimum wage. Ted had launched into one of his patented histrionic speeches, the kind where he flailed his arms and got red in the face, spewing all sorts of red meat liberal rhetoric. When he »

Ted Kennedy’s Checkers speech

I was working as an intern in the office of then-Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale in the summer of 1969. Senator Kennedy’s office was down the hall and around the corner from Mondale’s on the fourth floor of the old Senate Office Building, if I remember correctly, but his cramped mail room was next door to Mondale’s office. The Chappaquiddick accident that took the life of Mary Jo Kopechne occurred that »

Barack Obama, decider-in-chief after all

There are at least three currents in this Washington Post story about the Obama administration’s decision to name a prosecutor to review whether CIA agents and contractors should be prosecuted for the way they interrogated terrorists. There’s the obligatory (for the Post) Obama worship; there’s the obligatory “who’s on top” in the bureaucracy angle; and, most importantly, there’s the matter of the extent of Obama’s personal involvement in the decision. »

Join Us at the Fair

The Minnesota State Fair is underway. Tomorrow the Northern Alliance will be broadcasting live from the Patriot’s booth from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. Brian Ward and I will be on, as usual, from 11 to 1. If you live in or near Minnesota and are planning to be at the Fair tomorrow, stop by and say Hi. I think this is either our fifth or sixth year of broadcasting »

Quote of the Day

From the Associated Press: But even Obama’s secretary of health and human services got into the act on Friday, telling seniors at a wellness center in a former theater named for Kennedy’s family that the driving question on health care should be: “What would Teddy do?” It’s an intriguing paragraph. Did Sebelius actually say “driving question,” or did some subversive at the Associated Press slip the phrase in as an »

More evidence of decline at Dartmouth

I majored in Philosophy at Dartmouth, as did John. So I’ve tried to pay attention to developments in that department over the years, especially since my daughter enrolled at the college, thereby putting me in a good position to talk to current students. The news isn’t good at all. A few years ago, well-regarded professors Julia Driver and Roy Sorensen left Hanover to teach at Washington University in St. Louis. »

Has the Holder Justice Department corrupted the procedure for investigating public corruption?

As Scott discusses below, the Holder Justice Department reportedly has decided to end its investigation of a pay-to-play regime in New Mexico involving one of Governor Bill Richardson’s largest political donors. It was this investigation that cost Richardson the Secretary of Commerce post. According to AP, the investigation “was killed in Washington” by top DOJ officials. Faithful readers know that I have no problem with top DOJ officials killing investigations »

Dore Gold: While America sleeps

Dore Gold served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1997 to1999. Dr. Gold’s new book — The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West — has just been published by Regnery. The book addresses one of the most critical issues confronting the civilized world at present. We accordingly invited Dr. Gold to write about the book for Power Line readers. He has graciously responded as follows: »

Investigate this

For the past year federal officials have investigated possible criminal charges against New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and other state officers. The investigation looked into the allegation that Richardson’s administration had steered a lucrative contract to a prominent political donor in a so-called “pay to play” scenario. The investigation has concluded without charges. Early Thursday the AP bluntly reported that the case was killed in Washington: The decision not to »

Sunshine patriots second-guess their betters who helped keep them safe

I hope all of you have read today’s Wall Street Journal editorial about the CIA Inspector General’s report on interrogations. The WSJ editors capture the essence of the report in the sub-title of their piece: “Interrogations were carefully limited, briefed on Capitol Hill, and yielded information that saved innocent lives.” John has already made the first point — that the CIA IG’s report shows “how humane our treatment of captured »

KennedyCare?

At an airport gate yesterday, I could hear CNN’s coverage of Ted Kennedy’s death–an event that looms much larger in the DC-media complex than it does anywhere else. Now the Democrats reportedly are readying to push their health care bill with a “win one for Teddy” theme. This strikes me as pretty dumb. Kennedy was never popular with the general public. He was an effective behind-the-scenes Senator, but it was »

Recalling Rathergate

Bernard Goldberg takes a look back at “Rathergate.” That’s the sorry episode in which CBS News claimed, based on fabricated documents, that George W. Bush shirked his duty to his country during the Vietnam war by maneuvering his way into the Texas National Guard, so as to avoid going to Vietnam. Scott and John were prominent among the bloggers who exploded CBS’s story, which was produced by Mary Mapes and »

Bad news for Blanche Lincoln; good news for Tom Cotton

A recent poll by the firm Public Policy Polling contains disheartening news for Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln and encouraging news for our friend Tom Cotton. According to the poll, whose margin of error is +/- 3.5 percent, Lincoln’s approval rate is down to 36 percent, with 44 percent disapproving. Earlier this year, more people approved of Lincoln (45 percent) than disapproved (40 percent). Obviously, Lincoln has been hurt by the »

A communist in the White House

Ronald Radosh explores the case of Van Jones. Jones is Obama’s green jobs “czar” (his formal title is Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality). As green jobs “czar,” Jones’s responsibility is to coordinate the stimulus spending to assure that a hefty portion of it goes to projects that promote green energy. In his relatively recent past Jones was a Marxist »

What made KSM talk?

As Tom Joscelyn notes, Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball says the Inspector General’s report and other recently-released documents pertaining to Bush-era interrogations of top al Qaeda operatives do not show that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) “actually worked.” Hosenball concedes that the detainees gave up a treasure trove of valuable intelligence, but the documents do not “convincingly demonstrate” that the EITs “produced this useful information.” Joscelyn fears that this is »

Union dues

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke regularly seeks to allay concerns about the possibly inflationary impact of the massive increase in the monetary base and related increase in the money supply that he has engineered. In a recent Wall Street Journal column, for example, he laid out the technical means by which the Federal Reserve would .what it has done. “At some point,” Bernanke explained, “as economic recovery takes hold, we »

Barack Obama, no decider-in-chief

Former Vice President Cheney has lashed out at the Obama administration over the decision to have a Justice Department prosecutor revisit the legality of the conduct of CIA interrogators of terrorists. Cheney said that “President Obama’s decision” serves as “a reminder, any were needed, of why Americans question the administration’s ability to protect the nation. The Obama team reacted not by defending the decision to investigate CIA interrogators, but rather »