Monthly Archives: December 2014
December 31, 2014 — John Hinderaker
HarperCollins has produced at atlas for use in English-speaking schools in the Middle East that features a conspicuous omission. There’s Gaza, and there’s the West Bank. Jordan and Lebanon are accounted for. But…where is Israel? I naively would have expected HarperCollins to say we weren’t looking hard enough, or attribute the omission to a lack of space. But no: Collins Bartholomew, the subsidiary of HarperCollins that specialises in maps, told
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December 31, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Why not end the year with a soccer post? This one will cover (1) the world player of the year award, (2) the EPL title race, and (3) Everton. 1. Three players are finalists for world player of the year, to be announced next month. The three are Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and Manuel Neuer. Ronaldo has been phenomenal this year for Real Madrid, but did not shine at the
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December 31, 2014 — John Hinderaker
President Obama says that race relations have improved on his watch, which seems obviously untrue. 2014 will go down in history as the year when there was a racist under every bed. Grabien has assembled these clips from the past year, in which 39 things are claimed to be racist. It would be funny if the Democrats’ stirring up of racial conflict were not having tragic consequences:
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December 31, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Like all presidents, and probably more than most, President Obama is concerned about his legacy. Obama devoutly hopes that the following sentence will not appear in history books: Although he was the first African-American elected president, race relations worsened during his time in office. It’s not that Obama hates the idea of race relations worsening during his time in office. The idea of “no justice, no peace” may well appeal
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December 31, 2014 — Steven Hayward
Since just about everybody else runs a collection of year-in-review pics, it seems to me that we might as well do a “best of” offering of our Week in Pictures roundups. Actually it’s hard to conjure up an objective criterion, so we just selected one image from each week of the past year, not quite at random. So here goes: Power Line’s jaundiced eye on 2014, in no particular order—happy
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December 31, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Jim Webb reportedly is fixing to run a fiery populist campaign for president. That campaign, if it materializes, will not be helped by the fact that he gave nearly $100,000 from his PAC, “Born Fighting,” to members of his family. “Born Fighting” supposedly is dedicated to backing “candidates and entities” who support economic fairness, “reorienting our national security posture,” and developing greater accountability in government. But Business Insider reports that,
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December 30, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Pope Francis has already caused consternation among knowledgeable Catholics with his criticisms of economic freedom. Some have tried to defend him or reinterpret his words, but it is hard to sugarcoat the fact that he is instinctively hostile to free enterprise. Perhaps this is because, as a native of Argentina, he has never seen free enterprise at work and doesn’t understand what it can do for the average citizen. Now
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December 30, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
We closed today’s Power Line show with a brief discussion of the outlook for Hillary Clinton in the coming year. I speculated, and Steve agreed, that Clinton likely will not be able to clear the field of rivals for the Democratic nomination. This time next year, she may very well still be the Democratic frontrunner, but probably will not have an unimpeded path to the nomination. This was about where
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December 30, 2014 — Joe Malchow
This afternoon Steve, Paul and I got together to bid farewell to 2014 and usher in the new year. We talked about some of the major news stories of the past twelve months, and made bold predictions for 2015 (in my case, the demise of Obamacare). I think you will find the show entertaining. You can play it right here: Or you can click here to download Episode 4 and
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December 30, 2014 — Scott Johnson
I was surprised, to put it mildly, to hear Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke disparaging Mayor de Blasio and President Obama and Obma pal Al Sharpton last week when I happened to catch Clarke’s post-Christmas appearance live on cable news. It’s not that Sheriff Clarke hasn’t distinguished himself as a voice of truth and reason on matters of race and law enforcement. It’s that he was saying these things on
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December 30, 2014 — Steven Hayward
If you want to see a good example of why more and more sensible women—especially in the “millennial” generation—no longer identify themselves as feminists, look no further than the website refinery29.com (that’s okay—I never heard of it either, but it’s a slick-looking women’s-oriented site that ironically, as we shall see, offers up many of the usual fashion and beauty tips—especially shoes). Today refinery29 offers up a bitter complaint that Caley
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December 30, 2014 — John Hinderaker
I will be guest hosting for Laura Ingraham one more time this holiday season, tomorrow from 9 to 12 a.m. Eastern, 8 to 11 Central. It should be a fun show, with Senator-elect Tom Cotton, Bill Kristol, Andrew McCarthy and Michelle Malkin slated to join me. Find Laura on your local radio dial and have your phone handy–the number to call is 855-405-2872. Also a New Year’s Eve noisemaker. If
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December 30, 2014 — John Hinderaker
In furtherance of a completely different point, Foreign Policy performed a simple experiment: it used the search engine on the State Department’s web site to determine how often State has described any nation’s conduct as “unacceptable” since the onset of the Obama administration. The results were interesting and, I suppose, sadly predictable: using the State Department search engine, the top 10 countries for whom “unacceptable” was most often used in
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December 30, 2014 — Scott Johnson
The Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza lack the requisites on which a decent state might be formed. Among other things, they lack the infrastructure of a civil society. What they do have in abundance is the infrastructure of terrorism. They also have the bloodlust on which to sustain it. To take just one recent example, the Jewish Press draws attention to the video below demonstrating the proper use
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December 30, 2014 — Scott Johnson
The wave of Central American illegals welcomed by the Obama administration this year is one of the major stories of 2014. Yet the media have mostly gone silent on it. The Obama administration’s preferred method of dealing with the illegals was release pending administrative hearings. How are the hearings going? At NRO, Mark Krikorian notes that the investigative unit at Houston’s KPRC decided to find out (video below). The Daily
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December 29, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Timothy Zoll, the spokesman for the Ferguson police department who characterized a makeshift memorial to Michael Brown as a “pile of trash in the middle of the street,” has been placed on unpaid leave. As I discussed here, when the Washington Post contacted Zoll after a motorist ran over the Brown “memorial,” Zoll responded (in part) by saying “a pile of trash in the middle of the street; the Washington
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December 29, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Or what they tweeted about, anyway. Twitter provides a fascinating, objective look at what people are discussing. Tracked over the course of the year, it tells us a little about the news, and quite a lot about us. People may claim to have lots of high-minded interests, but what are they actually talking about? Donald Sterling. Here it is: 2014, as documented on Twitter. Click to enlarge: The results are
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