Monthly Archives: April 2015
April 29, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Forget the Electric Company’s Fargo North, Decoder. Attend to Michele Malkin, decoder. Michelle expertly decodes and debunks the “bilious babble” that President Obama has entered on the record to comment on the events of the past few days in Baltimore. Obama works a partisan vein as he continues to degrade public discourse on domestic matters with a racial angle (whole thing here). For those wishing to understand what we have
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April 28, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Fun time last night at the Institute for Governmental Studies at Berkeley, talking about whether Obama is “unleashed” or a “lame duck.” Fellow panelists were Tom Mann (insert melodrama boos and hisses here), Cathleen Decker of the Los Angeles Times, and Ann O’Leary, a senior adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign. O’Leary was very pleasant and engaging in the ordinary sense, but I noticed a rash on my right arm
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April 28, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
Today, as I mentioned here, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Obergefell v. Hodges in which the issue is whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to be deemed by the state “married” if that’s what they want. Lyle Denniston of Scotusblog filed this report on the argument. The Washington Post’s account is here. The argument confirmed the impression that the decision will be 5-4, with Justice Kennedy casting
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April 28, 2015 — John Hinderaker
On April 20, two gay men hosted a dinner for Ted Cruz in their Manhattan apartment. Presumably they are conservatives who favor sane fiscal policies, and so on. But when the New York Times reported that they had introduced some of their friends to Senator Cruz, the wrath of the gay thought police descended on them. The Times reports the sequel: Ian Reisner, one of the two gay hoteliers facing
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April 28, 2015 — John Hinderaker
The Baltimore Orioles’ games Monday night and tonight were canceled because of riots near Camden Yards. Now, in one of the strangest announcements ever, the Orioles and Major League Baseball say that tomorrow night’s game will be moved to the afternoon and “closed to the public.” The game will be played without spectators; will it be televised? I don’t know. But it is hard to imagine anything much stranger. Following
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April 28, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
As I begin typing this, the Supreme Court is in the middle of oral argument in Obergefell v. Hodges, the gay marriage case. You can follow the progress of the argument at Scotusblog. Personally, I am not opposed to changing the definition of marriage to encompass same-sex unions. I consider this a low-risk accommodation to the reasonable desires of a large segment of our fellow Americans. But a change of
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April 28, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Omri Ceren provides this email update on today’s developments in the Persian Gulf, reported in this brief Reuters story: It’s been a busy two hours, but some clarity is starting to emerge about the Iranian seizure of a cargo vessel in the Strait of Hormuz. The vessel is the M/V Maersk Tigris and sails under a Marshall Islands flag. It was intercepted by Iranian navy patrol crafts earlier today and
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April 28, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday’s Star Tribune featured Paul McEnroe’s page-one story “Minneapolis nonprofit tests program to pull teens from terror’s grasp.” Taking off on the arrest of the Minneapolis based Somali six who sought to depart these parts to join ISIS, the article focuses on an experimental program implemented under the auspices of Heartland Democracy to divert Somalis from such a path. Mary McKinley is the nonprofit’s executive director; Ahmed Amin is a
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April 28, 2015 — Scott Johnson
On Saturday night Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake explained her measured approach to the incipient destruction taking place on the streets of the city (video below). She “made it very clear that I work with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech.” “It’s a very delicate balancing act,” she continued. “Because while
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April 27, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
For months, I’ve heard rumors that Elizabeth Warren wants to take on Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. The rumors are plausible. Warren is 66 years old. It’s probably now or never, if she wants to become president. And why would we doubt that Warren wants to become president? On the other hand, running for president against the Clinton machine takes guts. What has Warren ever done that demonstrates
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April 27, 2015 — John Hinderaker
This article by Richard J. Petschauer at Watts Up With That? is an excellent short introduction to the views on climate that are held, generally, by those described as skeptics. (I prefer to call them climate realists.) You should read it all, but here are some excerpts: There are many areas where most skeptics and the “alarmists”, as they are called, agree. First is the idea of “climate sensitivity”, a
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April 27, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
In presenting the Justice Department’s negative findings about the Ferguson police department, Eric Holder characterized the violent and lawless response of Ferguson residents to the justified shooting of Michael Brown as an unsurprising reaction to the “highly toxic environment” created by the Ferguson police over the years. But in Baltimore — the un-Ferguson, where the mayor and police chief are Black, and Whites are a minority within the police department
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April 27, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
The Assad regime has suffered a series of setbacks in its fight against rebel forces to the point that its ability to retain power appears to be in jeopardy, the Washington Post reports. Walter Russell Mead concurs. Both the Post and Mead cite Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria. He says “we may be seeing signs of the beginning of the end.” The most important signs are on
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April 27, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Utopiastic liberal enclaves (usually college towns like Boulder, Berkeley, Cambridge, etc.) pride themselves on their enlightened caring and sharing mentality, their generosity toward the oppressed and underprivileged, etc. The residents are always happily smug about their moral superiority to the grasping, bourgeois middle classes of suburbia. But I couldn’t help notice during my year as an inmate at Boulder that everyone had a really beefy lock for their bicycles. Apparently
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April 27, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Michael Stokes Paulsen is the University Chair & Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas in the Twin Cities. Through his contributions to professional publications, he has emerged as one our foremost scholars of American constitutional law. As of May 5, Professor Paulsen is also the co-author, with his son, Luke Paulsen, of The Constitution: An Introduction. The book’s Web site is online here. United States Supreme Court
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April 26, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month, the New York Post reports. Charity Navigator, which rates nonprofits, refused to rate the Clinton Foundation because its “atypical business model . . . doesn’t meet our criteria.” Instead, it placed the Foundation on its “watch list,” which warns potential donors about investing in problematic charities. The
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April 26, 2015 — John Hinderaker
There has been quite a bit of news coverage of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Don’t ask me why. The annual lovefest between Democratic politicians and Democratic journalists hasn’t generated any actual news in a long time. But this year’s event was perhaps notable because it exposed our president’s bitterness, as he approaches the end of his term. Humor is often revealing. Obama began with a joke that would
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