Monthly Archives: August 2013

CRB: Arab winter

Featured image “When we heard Mohammed Morsi chanting ‘The sharia, then the sharia, and finally, the sharia,’ we should have been worried.” Hope springs eternal, but anyone familiar with the work of a couple of Andrews — C. McCarthy and G. Bostom — would surely know enough to temper youthful exuberance with some old-fashioned prudence when it came to the much ballyhooed Arab Spring. Or one could simply listen to the words »

Teasing racism out of Miley Cyrus’ tease

Featured image A professor called Pepper Schwartz, in a “special to CNN,” advises that “Miley Cyrus is sexual — get over it.” I have. It wasn’t difficult. I knew nothing about Miley Cyrus until her lewd performance caused a fuss. And I’ve know about our debauched culture for a long time. But not so fast, says this black feminist. It turns out that Cyrus’ performance was a racist “commodification of black female »

Russia Cracks Down on Satirical Art

Featured image Never accuse Russia’s leaders of having a sense of humor: St. Petersburg police have raided an art gallery and seized four paintings that ridicule Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders. The principal offender was this painting, which shows Putin in a negligee combing (or something) Dmitry Medvedev’s hair; click to enlarge: Apparently the St. Petersburg raid wasn’t a completely lawless act, like when an American policeman confiscates a citizen’s camera: »

Satellite Temperature Data Flat for Over 16 Years

Featured image Global warming hysteria is ramping up in anticipation of the UN releasing its latest work of fiction, AR5. So here is a simple antidote to the craziness: via Watts Up With That, the satellite data set RSS shows no warming over the last 16 years and 8 months, with a cooling trend currently in progress: The graphic above shows 3 lines. The long line shows that RSS has been flat »

Say what, Chuck?

Featured image Chuck Hagel said today that the United States doesn’t need permission from the United Nations or any other international body to strike Syria in response to its use of chemical weapons against civilians. I agree with Hagel, though I don’t quite follow his reasoning. Reportedly, Hagel explained: “No nation, no group of nations is bound by only one dimension of whether they’d make a decision to respond to any self-defense »

Is Obama Taking a Political Risk on Syria?

Featured image Today Glenn Reynolds wrote: Obama Seeks a “Coalition of the Willing” on Syria. Hmm. Seeking a coalition of the willing to take down an Arab Ba’athist dictator over WMDs. Where have I heard this before? Heh. We have seen President Obama continue and even amplify some of George W. Bush’s strategies in the war against Islamic terrorism. So, assuming that some sort of military action will be forthcoming in the »

Justice Ginsburg’s misinformed rant

Featured image Liberal hacks love to accuse conservative jurists of “judicial activism.” So we shouldn’t be surprised that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made that claim in an interview with the New York Times. “If it’s measured in terms of readiness to overturn legislation, this is one of the most activist courts in history,” Ginsburg declared. The extent to which a court overturns legislation and precedent is one way — but not the »

Best Video of the Day: Obamacare

Featured image Courtesy of the Crossroad GPS folks; about 1:30 long: It seems to me the style, and even the voice, is inspired by those terrific faux-ads from Veridian Dynamics in the late lamented TV show “Better Off Ted.”  Like this totally un-PC one (just 36 seconds long): We can use more of this kind of thing.  As H.L. Mencken once said, a horselaugh is worth 10,000 syllogisms. »

Spindle Time: Civil Rights Hypocrisy Edition

Featured image David Brooks takes a lot of heat from conservatives for trimming his sails at the New York Times, where, he’s remarked to me and others, being the identified “house conservative” is like being a rabbi in Mecca.  But even with his moderate disposition, his columns still rack up tons of hate mail and intemperate remarks from Times readers who simply can’t bear the presence of any columnist to the right »

A truly great phony

Featured image We’ve routinely documented Obama’s verbal and historical gaffes over the past five years. Of the historical gaffes, one of my favorites is Obama discoursing on Nuremberg during the 2008 campaign. I wrote about that one in the New York Post column “Anti-terror oops.” Another is Obama invoking Churchill’s opposition to “torture” in the course of his 100-day press conference in 2009. I wrote about that one in “Obama veers into »

CRB: The Great Emancipation

Featured image The new (Summer) issue of the Claremont Review of Books is hot off the press. The CRB is the flagship publication of the Claremont Institute and my favorite magazine. I want to persuade you to subscribe to it, which you can do here for the ridiculously low, heavily subsidized price of $19.95 a year and get immediate online access thrown in to boot. Our friends at the CRB have let »

The Best NSA Visual Yet

Featured image Hat tip to Jim Geraghty of National Review‘s “Morning Jolt” (and if you don’t subscribe–it’s free–you’re missing out) for pointing us to the best NSA put on yet: »

How should Obama respond to Assad’s chemical attack?

Featured image Secretary of State Kerry spoke publicly today about Syria’s use of chemical weapons. He said that the Assad regime’s use of such weapons is “undeniable,” and that “this international norm cannot be violated without consequences.” Kerry likes to talk about what’s moral and what isn’t, and he loves the sound of his own voice. Even so, it seems extremely unlikely that the Obama administration would let the Secretary of State »

Fight! Fight! A Knotty Problem Indeed

Featured image Our friend Stephen Knott of the Naval War College, featured here recently during his induction into the Power Line 100, is the subject of a spirited attack from a brand new website called NomocracyinPolitics.com.  The article is “Knott’s Folly” by Peter Haworth, the site’s editor-in-chief who is associated with something called the Ciceronian Society Foundation.  I’ve never heard of CSF, but anything modeled after Cicero can’t be all bad. Haworth’s »

Why not the worst?

Featured image In what is at least the column of the day, our friend Hugh Hewitt asks if Obama is the worst president ever. Hugh works the Obama-Carter comparison to render an affirmative judgment. Reading the column closely, I infer that Hugh might call it a tie on a per day basis. But Hugh is clearly right to recognize that Obama is “worsting” Carter, and not just because Obama will have two »

From dream to nightmare in 50 years

Featured image As we approach the 50th anniversary of the great civil rights march on Washington, some are reminding us that the rally — a march “for Jobs and Freedom” — wasn’t just about basic civil rights, but also about concrete economic demands. It’s a fair point. Historian William Jones notes that the demands of the march organizers included “federal jobs creation” and the raising of the minimum wage. Not that there »

Obama’s petty strategy

Featured image We are suddenly awash in interesting commentary on Obama’s foreign policy. John noted Julie Pace’s AP assessment yesterday. Michael Barone directs our attention to two more: Robert Kaplan’s “Obama’s ‘I’m not George W. Bush’ foreign policy” and Elliott Abrams’s “The citizen of the world presidency.” Abrams in particular really has Obama’s number. He writes that Obama has come to teach us: “The lesson Obama has learned, and wishes to teach »