Monthly Archives: January 2012

The Mitt Fits

Featured image Mitt Romney is on his way to a sweeping victory in Florida, with close to 50% of the vote, compared with 32% or so for Newt Gingrich. It seems reasonable to conclude that South Carolina, and the early days of the Florida campaign, represented the high-water mark of the Gingrich campaign. As voters saw more of Newt, and especially as they witnessed his often over-the-top attacks on Romney, they became »

Obama’s Economy: Bad, But Is It Bad Enough?

Featured image Today the Congressional Budget Office released a report that contained bad news for President Obama. Guy Benson writes, “White House Panic: Gruesome 2012 Economic Forecast Could Doom Obama.” [T]oday’s dreadful report will cast a much darker and longer shadow over the 2012 presidential election landscape. Team Obama will likely put on a brave face and serve up rosier in-house economic figures in the media, but you’d better believe the CBO’s »

On Israel and a nuclear Iran

Featured image Finding the video of Douglas Murray at the Cambridge Union debating the question of a nuclear Iran, apparently last year, I looked around for some background on the debate. I haven’t found the background, but I have found a handy summary at Seraphic Secret: This is an incredibly powerful video of the brilliant and erudite British Conservative Douglas Murray speaking at Cambridge about a nuclear Iran. It’s eleven minutes long »

Mangling Abe

Featured image As usual I am slow to get around to all the weekend’s reading, but I note that Harold Holzer, in a Washington Post article on Newt’s idea of Lincoln-Douglas style debates, couldn’t resist this sideswipe of Lincoln: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he declared in Charleston, Ill., to robust »

The Church against Obamacare, cont’d

Featured image Michael Gerson considers the implications of the Obama administration’s betrayal of its Catholic allies in its adoption of Obamacare regulations requiring the provision of benefits including sterilization, contraception and abortifacients. He singles out three Obama supporters for consideration: Consider Catholicism’s most prominent academic leader, the Rev. John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame. Jenkins took a serious risk in sponsoring Obama’s 2009 honorary degree and commencement address — which promised a »

Do Wind and Solar Work?

Featured image Everyone knows that wind and solar energy are inefficient sources of energy compared to fossil fuels. But, as the Science and Environmental Policy Project points out in the current The Week That Was, the extent to which “green” energy actually works is surprisingly opaque: Someone experienced in analyzing potential investments in innovative industries may be surprised by the lack of hard data on the performance of solar and wind in »

Occupiers Assert Constitutional Right to Commit Crimes

Featured image The Occupy movement has generally faded away, succumbing in most cities to cold weather and public indifference. But Oakland is different. The Oakland Occupiers include criminals–not just those who commit sexual assault and defecate on police cars, but serious criminals. The criminal element has given the Oakland branch of the movement staying power. On Sunday, Oakland’s Occupiers, putting their underworld training to good use, broke into City Hall: Mayor Jean »

Are Government Employees Overpaid?

Featured image Today the Congressional Budget Office released a report comparing compensation of federal employees with comparable workers in the private sector. This chart sums up the results: »

Mr. and Mrs. Cranky Pants

Featured image Michelle Malkin’s entertaing column “Mr. and Mrs. Cranky Pants” takes off on Obama’s close encounter with Governor Brewer last week. In the column Michelle explores the pettiness of the president and Lady O. She writes that “Chief Touchy-Touchy seems to be personally consumed by our critiques. Yes, mine included.” Here is the personal note that adds a poignant touch to the column: You know those “petty grievances” of “Washington politics” »

The Church against Obamacare

Featured image We’ve noted many times that Obamacare amounts to an assault on limited constitutional government. One small prong of the assault: the Obama administration’s recent announcement that all employers (with few exceptions) are required under Obamacare to provide health insurance to their employees which includes subsidized contraception, sterilization and coverage for abortion-inducing drugs. At Business Insider, Michael Brendon Dougherty comments: “This mean[s] that religious institutions, like Catholic colleges and hospitals, or »

Another Blow for the Climateers

Featured image Hard on the story noted here the other day of new doubts about catastrophic global warming from the scientific mainstream comes the news from Britain’s MET office, which is one of the primary nodes of the global warming establishment, that global temperatures have now been essentially flat for the last 15 years.  The UK Daily Mail’s story notes: The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge »

Happy Anniversary to Grave Digger, and Me

Featured image Today marks the one year anniversary of my very first Power Line post, and as it happens I can mark this august occasion with the same subject as the first post: monster trucks.  Sure enough, while John was out shooting for relaxation this weekend, I was taking in the Advance Auto Parts Monster Jam at the Verizon Center, a sport which also requires you to wear ear plugs. This year’s »

James Q. To The Rescue

Featured image With his typically inimitable and lucid prose, James Q. Wilson appears in today’s Outlook section of the Washington Post today with a clear-eyed deconstruction of the whole inequality blather of the left: “Angry About Inequality?  Don’t Blame the Rich.”  Aw, what fun is that? There’s a lot packed into this relatively short article, so you should read the whole thing.  But I like the punch line to this paragraph: Income »

Thomas Friedman, you pitiful fool, cont’d

Featured image Mark Hemingway draws attention to Thomas Friedman’s latest candidate for inclusion in our “Thomas Friedman, you pitiful fool” series. Let me turn the floor over to Hemingway: Thomas Friedman, apparently trying to top his many previous attempts to convincingly demonstrate coherence is just beyond his grasp, opens his column today thusly[.] Hemingway quotes Friedman: The Associated Press reported last week that Fidel Castro, the former president of Cuba, wrote an »

Speaking of bankruptcy

Featured image Last weekend the New York Times published a page-one story on an academic study finding racial bias in an obscure corner of American life. Tara Siegel Bernard’s Times story is “Blacks face bias in bankruptcy, study says.” What is the bias? Bernard reports: Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to wind up in the more onerous and costly form of consumer bankruptcy as they try to dig out »

More #Greenfail

Featured image The green energy bubble continues to burst in about the same fashion as the housing bubble.  The other day we noted here the collapse of German solar power subsidies, and now Spain is following suit: Spain halted subsidies for renewable energy projects to help curb its budget deficit and rein in power-system borrowings backed by the state that reached 24 billion euros ($31 billion) at the end of 2011. “What »

When Newt went to Oxford

Featured image In his Washington Post column speculating what an Obama-Gingrich debate would look like, Claremont-McKenna Professor John Pitney recalls the February 1985 Oxford Union debate on American foreign policy in Central America. The AP account of the debate is still available online. Professor Pitney recalls the debate for purposes specific to his column, but (to say the least) it also adds interesting context to the discussion of Newt’s relation to Ronald »