Monthly Archives: March 2014
March 31, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
A new report by the Senate Intelligence Committee accuses the CIA of all manner of misconduct during the perilous post-9/11 period in which that Agency helped America combat al Qaeda and prevent additional deadly attacks. The Committee’s core conclusion, according to the Washington Post, is that “the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years.” Specifically, the CIA is said to have
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March 31, 2014 — Steven Hayward
As previously mentioned, the IPCC released it’s “impacts” report today, and the media did their duty by collectively wetting their pants. You think I jest? Check out—if you can stand it—NBC’s Brian Williams saying that “We’ve never been warned like this before” about climate change. Really? What 30 Rock has he been living under? (Next he’ll tell us that nobody has ever warned us before about the dangers of cigarette
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March 31, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
In 2012, the French narrowly elected Socialist Party candidate Francoise Hollande to be their president. Polls showed that even as they did so, voters had little confidence in Hollande’s ability to deal with the economy. His victory seemed to stem in part from the electorate’s dislike, on a personal level, of Nicolas Sarkozy. Hmm. No confidence in the leftist, but ill-will towards the center-right candidate? Sounds like President Obama’s reelection
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March 31, 2014 — John Hinderaker
If you read pretty much any climate alarmist literature, you will see the claim that the Earth’s warming over the last 100 years is due overwhelmingly to the burning of fossil fuels. But this is disingenuous: even under the defective models on which the alarmists rely, it cannot be claimed that prior to 1950, human contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere could have had any significant effect. So why do
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March 31, 2014 — John Hinderaker
So far, I have heard nothing in response to my email to Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson about their possible coordination with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Congressman Henry Waxman or other Democrats in writing the article about the Keystone pipeline that I critiqued here and here. I will follow up with them in due course. In the meantime, I have written the following letter to Whitehouse and Waxman:
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March 31, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Maine Senator Angus King declared that Obamacare does not exist. That health insurance policy that you lost courtesy of Obamacare? Take two aspirin and call King in the morning. As we take a walk down memory lane, comparing our present ills with those of the Carter era, perhaps it’s time to recall the creativity of Carter administration deregulation guru and inflation czar Alfred Kahn. While
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March 31, 2014 — Scott Johnson
As badly as Barack Obama wants to sell us out to the mullahs, they have a way of reminding us just how they feel about us. Say what you will about him, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never much sought to camouflage his feelings about the United States, though he never confessed to his role in tormenting the American hostages during their 444 cays of captivity (reported by Mark Bowden in his book
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March 31, 2014 — Steven Hayward
We were told a few days ago that we were going to be able to resolve the Ukrainian crisis through diplomacy, because John Kerry is on the job. From the Wall Street Journal this morning: Kerry’s Talks With Russia’s Lavrov Fail to Ease Ukraine Crisis You were surprised at this news? Forget the text of the story (well okay, just this: “Mr. Kerry, in remarks after the negotiations, said he
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March 31, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Steve is, I believe, cloistered as he plows through the IPCC’s latest report on the baleful consequences of “climate change.” Meanwhile, alarmist headlines are everywhere. But more sophisticated observers are asking, global warming? What global warming? At Watts Up With That, Christopher Moncton adds the just-reported HadCRUT4 numbers to the dataset of datasets, which shows zero warming this millennium: We are, of course, living in a relatively cool era. Global
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March 31, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
This year’s NCAA basketball tournament has provided far more than its share of exciting games. And now it has produced a Final Four: Florida, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and Kentucky. As tends to happen when there are so many thrills and spills, this Final Four is problematic for those of us who want to see the championship go to the best college team, not the hottest. Connecticut finished third in its recently
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March 31, 2014 — Steven Hayward
The “impacts” report of the IPCC is out today, and we’ll try to get through some of the highlights of the thousand-page plus report. (Always reminds me of Churchill’s note about an overlong memo: “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.” We’ll take the risk.) Turns out that an acquaintance of mine helped write the FAQ portion of the report. But we don’t
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March 31, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Doing the job the mainstream media have declined to do — declined since a 2003 Los Angeles Times investigation, anyway — Matt Continetti takes a look at Dirty Harry Reid’s financial shenanigans. Alluding to Mario Puzo, and playing on the exposure of Reid’s latest shenanigans, Continetti titles his column “The grandfather.” We get the corruption. What about Reid’s easily refuted denial of accusing opponents of Obamacare retailing “lies” about the
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March 31, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Abraham Lincoln’s argument with Stephen Douglas came down to a disagreement over the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln articulated this disagreement with special gusto in his critique of Douglas on July 10, 1858. According to Douglas, the teaching of the Declaration had no general applicability beyond the immediate situation that confronted the Founding Fathers. Restating and paraphrasing Douglas’s argument, Lincoln asked “in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in,
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March 30, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
I share Steve’s skepticism about the wisdom of nominating Jeb Bush for president, an idea being pushed by the “GOP elite” according to the Washington Post. Indeed, I think that nominating Bush would be bad idea. I agree with Steve that Bush is an able leader. Indeed, Bush was held in sufficient regard by GOP leaders that if he had won his race for Florida governor in 1994, instead of
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March 30, 2014 — John Hinderaker
When the subject is immigration: how to get more of it, especially unskilled Mexicans; how to legalize those who are already here; and above all, why the Republican Party is in deep trouble if it doesn’t go along with the Times’ open borders ideology. Hence this story in yesterday’s Times: “California Farmers Short of Labor, and Patience.” The theme of the article is that California farmers need to import more
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March 30, 2014 — Steven Hayward
A little over a year ago I mentioned here taking in a Jeb Bush speech at the Reagan Library that sounded like the speech of someone at the early stages of a presidential campaign, albeit one that appeared to want to run as . . . Jon Huntsman. Ugh. This, from today’s Washington Post: Influential Republicans working to draft Jeb Bush into 2016 presidential race LAS VEGAS — Many of
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March 30, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
A regional director of the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that scholarship football players at Northwestern University are “employees” and therefore should be allowed to organize a union. The United Steelworkers Union is backing the unionization effort at Northwestern. The ruling is the latest example of law’s imperial intrusion (this time by a bureaucrat, rather than a judge) into aspects of American life where it does not belong. College
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