Monthly Archives: September 2011

Hitler Learns that AttackWatch.com Is a Joke

Featured image This video has been around for a while, but I just ran across it this morning. It is part of the very funny Hitler series of which we have posted one or two in the past. In this one, Hitler gets the bad news that that the administration’s AttackWatch.com site has become a standing joke on the internet: »

Springtime for Abbas

Featured image Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas turned up last week at the United Nations. He was there to petition for statehood on behalf of the PA or the PLO. There’s something almost funny about Abbas’s gambit. Fred Siegel reminds us that Abbas is currently in the 81st month of his 48-month term and that he is the leader of the West Bank component of the Palestinian Authority, supposedly including the Gaza »

Wherefore heartless?

Featured image A long-time reader writes about Rick Perry’s position on college tuition for illegal immigrants and his claim that those who disagree with him are heartless: Rick Perry took some serious hits in Thursday’s presidential debate for his defense of the view that children brought to Texas illegally by their parents should receive the same discount on their college tuition at Texas’ public universities as children who reside in Texas legally. »

Another Brain Freeze at the Times

Featured image [Damn.  John beat me to this story.  As soon as I banged out a draft and went to post I saw that John had already worked it over.  Another failure of editorial coordination here at Power Line.  Should I pile on?  Yeah, why not.  There’s one little item in this story I can add to.] Are New York Times editorial writers complete innumerate nincompoops?  Okay, silly question.  The answer is »

Is Solyndra A Fluke?

Featured image That’s what the New York Times editorial board thinks. In an editorial yesterday, the paper denounced what it called a “panic” over the collapse of Solyndra. In the view of the Times, all is really well on the “green energy” front: Solyndra made a bad bet, investing heavily in a new type of solar array just as the price of silicon, the main ingredient in competitors’ solar cells, was dropping. »

More Distraction From the Left

Featured image If the 2012 election is run on the issues, the GOP will win in a landslide. The Left’s strategy for avoiding this outcome is to create as many distractions as possible. We saw it first with the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party poses a serious threat to liberalism. It is the most authentic grass-roots political movement of the last half-century, and its emphasis on limited government, fiscal responsibility and »

Why We’re Reading Hayek Again

Featured image Matt Ridley, author of a splendid book, The Rational Optimist, that has won the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize this year has a terrific article in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend (“From Phoenecia to Hayek to the ‘Cloud’”) that mentions the very passage from Hayek that I’ve mentioned several times here on Power Line.  Ridley reiterates the central Hayekian idea that I’ve been pounding into the heads of my »

Green Fascism at Work

Featured image Sometimes I like to point out that even if catastrophic global warming could be conclusively proven, it would not change one crucial political fact: Al Gore and the environmental left are the last people you would trust to solve the problem.  This is a variation of my axiom that the environment is much too important to be left to environmentalists—they’ll just screw it up further and crush our liberties. Case »

Fact Checking the “Fact Checker,” Part 3

Featured image On Tuesday, I wrote a post called Who Checks the Fact-Checkers? In that post I criticized an article by Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, who writes a regular feature called The Fact Checker. In The Fact Checker, Kessler purports to evaluate the truth or falsity of politicians’ statements. In the article I criticized, which ran on Monday, Kessler accused Rick Perry of a “newbie mistake” in Perry’s answer to »

A Palestinian State? Why Not?

Featured image This pretty well sums it up: »

Mrs. Warren’s profession, cont’d

Featured image Given that citizens of lesser means always outnumber the rich, the classic political philosophers held that government based on majority rule was untenable. They were of the view that it would lead to organized theft from the wealthy by the democratic masses. Thus Aristotle observed in The Politics, for example: “If the majority distributes among itself the things of a minority, it is evident that it will destroy the city.” »

President Solyndra

Featured image My cover story in the Weekly Standard is out this morning: “President Solyndra and His Mean Green Wealth-Wasting Machine.”  Here’s the “nut graf,” as they say in the feature magazine trade: Even if the administration eventually escapes any finding of legal wrongdoing, Solyndra threatens to haunt the green energy campaign in much the same way that the collapse of Lincoln Savings became the emblem of the savings and loan industry’s »

The Empty Promise of Green Jobs

Featured image That is the title of this superb piece by the House Budget Committee. In a relatively short space and in clear prose, “The Empty Promise of Green Jobs” recounts the sorry history of the Obama administration’s “green jobs” initiatives; reviews the history of failure that such efforts have universally encountered both in the U.S. and abroad; explains the reasons why government “investment” in political favored industries is a bad idea; »

Mr. Netanyahu goes to New York

Featured image I write to draw attention to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations today. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan demonstrated once upon a time, there is something especially thrilling about the truth being told in this particular forum (a “theater of the absurd,” in Netanyahu’s reckoning). It happens rarely, but it happened today. Attention should be paid: Ladies and gentlemen, in Israel our hope for peace never wanes. »

Another Smoldering Stogie of Misinformation from the Lung Association

Featured image If you watch Fox News—and really, who doesn’t watch Fox News?—you’ve probably seen the ads the American Lung Association is running displaying a red baby carriage with a coughing infant making its way to the U.S. capitol, urging us to urge Congress not to “weaken” the Clean Air Act.  “More air pollution means more childhood asthma,” the narrator says. (There isn’t a direct link to the ad, but you can »

Solyndra Pleads the Fifth

Featured image This morning, two top executives of Solyndra, CEO Brian Harrison and CFO W.G. Stover, appeared before a House Energy and Commerce Committee investigative panel. They didn’t testify, however. They declined to answer every question put to them on the ground that the answers might tend to incriminate them. The Fifth Amendment, which protects witnesses against self-incrimination, is pretty much an all-or-nothing thing. The witness can identify himself and perhaps answer »

A bridge too far

Featured image President Obama made an appearance yesterday at the Brent Spence Bridge in Cincinnati to promote his “jobs” (i.e., tax) bill. The bridge was intended to symbolize Republican opposition to Obama’s bill, though the bill hasn’t proved to be a big hit with Democrats in the Senate either. The bridge spans the Ohio River separating Ohio, home of House Speaker John Boehner, from Kentucky, home of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. »