Monthly Archives: April 2015
April 30, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Are any of you other geeks out there looking forward to the new Star Wars films as much as I am? I regard it as a good sign that J.J. Abrams took on the franchise, despite having gotten hopelessly lost with Lost. His reboot of Star Trek turned out rather well I thought (please spare me any more Jean Luc Piccard and his UN General Assembly sensibilities). Besides, George Lucas
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April 30, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
The latest potentially damning “Clinton cash” allegation involves a 2008 nuclear agreement between India and the United States. According to Politico, Peter Schweizer says that Hillary Clinton changed her position on the agreement after Indian business and government interests flooded various Clinton enterprises with cash. The newly obtained chapter, titled “Indian Nukes: How to Win a Medal by Changing Hillary’s Mind,” details a series of donations and overtures from Indians
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April 30, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Here are three photos of good old-fashioned Stalinist architecture, but only two of them are from former Communist countries. See if you can spot the one from here at home, and guess where. (Answer key below.)
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April 30, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
Tito Fuentes played second-base for the San Francisco Giants during the 1960s and early 1970s. Once, after being hit in the head by a pitch, Fuentes reportedly said: “They shouldn’t throw at me. I’m the father of five or six kids.” I thought of Tito when I heard President Obama and others theorize that the criminal justice system — long prison sentences and/or “over-criminalization” — is partially to blame for
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April 30, 2015 — Steven Hayward
There are surprisingly few recollections under way today of the final ignominious chapter of our Vietnam agony, when the U.S. was chased out of Saigon. I wonder if there isn’t a larger subtext here. We not only seem to be re-running the 1960s at home right now (Ferguson, Baltimore, etc), but we seem to be trying to re-run 1970s foreign policy too, with American retreat leading to chaos, instability, and
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April 30, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif speaks on behalf of a regime that is an avowed enemy of the United States, one whose Supreme Leader regularly chants “Death to the United States.” It is a regime with the blood of many Americans on its hands. Yet here he is on stage at New York University, in conversation with the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, and speaking with great confidence that he has
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April 30, 2015 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal‘s “Notable and Quotable” feature offers today a reminder not only of the climate “consensus” of the 1970s, but also the familiar language about the signs and wonders and the certainty of scientists about how global cooling was upon us. From Time magazine, June 24, 1974, just because: As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists
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April 29, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote here about Pacific Rubiales, an oil company founded by Bill Clinton’s pal Frank Giustra. During Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, Pacific Rubiales was the subject of substantial charges of violations of the rights of its workers. It was alleged, for example, that when workers at Pacific Rubiales staged a strike in 2011, the Colombian military rounded them up at gunpoint and threatened them with violence if
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April 29, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that a prisoner who was in the police van with Freddie Gray says he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.” According to the Post, the prisoner’s statement is contained in an affidavit that’s part of an application by the police for search warrant seeking the seizure of the uniform worn by one of
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April 29, 2015 — John Hinderaker
With regard to the Baltimore riots, Hillary Clinton followed her usual pattern, staying safely out of sight while calculating her political advantage, and then weighing in. She wrote a little-noted article for the Brennan Center on Monday, which consisted mostly of the platitudes for which she gets paid something like $5,000 a minute (“What would Robert Kennedy think if he could see us today?”). But a few additional observations are
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April 29, 2015 — John Hinderaker
Scott wrote earlier today about Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif’s insulting speech at New York University. While generally expressing contempt for the United States, Zarif dismissed Congress’s role in any agreement the Obama administration might forge with Iran: Zarif also took several shots at the U.S. Senate, just as it debated amendments to a bill designed to slow the lifting of sanctions against Iran and give Congress an oversight role
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April 29, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Omri Ceren writes with an update on Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif’s appearance at NYU today with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. In his remarks Zarif took an early victory lap with respect to achievement of Iran’s goals in the arrangement in process with the Obama administration. Josh Rogin reports on Zarif’s remarks for Bloomberg here. To borrow from Mark Twain, we might say that Zarif speaks with the confidence of
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April 29, 2015 — Steven Hayward
For the latest example of climate change fanaticism, look no further than Newsweek yesterday (how is Newsweek still a thing at all?), where we are solemnly told that . . . wait for it now . . . climate change caused the Nepal earthquake: “This effect could certainly have made the Nepal earthquake come sooner,” says Professor Roland Burgmann, of the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University
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April 29, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
President Obama called on Americans “to do some soul searching” in the aftermath of the rioting that occurred in Baltimore on Monday. Obama offered a perfunctory condemnation of the rioters, but then, as the Washington Post reports, criticized “Americans, including the news media and some politicians, for failing to address the chronic problems of men, women and children who live in poverty and find their opportunities limited because of poor
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April 29, 2015 — Steven Hayward
I’ve had occasion before to mention the maxim of my late teacher of international affairs, Harold Rood, that “nothing happens for no good reason.” (By the way, there’s a brand new book out about Rood’s idiosyncratic method of understanding international affairs: You Run the Show or the Show Runs You: Capturing Harold W. Rood’s Strategic Thought for a New Generation, by J.D. Crouch II and Patrick J. Garrity. More about
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April 29, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Does it seem like we’re re-running the 1960s, with rolling riots and liberals talking about “root causes” again? Bill DeBlasio is playing the John Lindsay role in New York quite ably, and Baltimore mayor Rawlings-Blake offered a decent reprise of Hubert Humphrey’s infamous remark that if he’d been born in a ghetto, he might start a riot too. How long until the New York Review of Books runs a diagram
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April 29, 2015 — Scott Johnson
I have found Iranian reports concerning the (current) so-called Joint Plan of Action with Iran as well as the arrangement in process to be more reliable than those deriving from official sources in the Obama administration. This, however, is where I draw the line: Secretary of State John Kerry told his Iranian counterpart that he wished the United States had a leader more like Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, according to
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