Monthly Archives: February 2018

Parkland and the culture of leniency

Featured image Daniel Horowitz convincingly ties the Parkland shooting to the culture of leniency towards criminals, also known as the jailbreak agenda. He writes: The jailbreak agenda is definitely on display in the Broward County law enforcement agencies. It turns out that Broward County has been promoting a program, funded in part by the federal government, to incentivize local officials to do everything they can to keep juveniles out of jail. . »

“Jailed Instagram model wants to trade secrets for freedom”

Featured image For the Associated Press, any excuse to smear President Trump is a good one. Thus this story, which no doubt will appear in hundreds of newspapers tomorrow. I assume this “news” story wasn’t intended as a joke, but it definitely contains humorous elements: A Belarusian woman jailed in Thailand for offering sex lessons without a work permit… “Offering sex lessons without a work permit”? Several jokes come to mind, but »

Stand by your Awan, cont’d

Featured image It appears that the Daily Caller’s Luke Rosiak is the only reporter following the story of the Pakistani Awan family members who infiltrated the House Democrats’ IT staff working for Debbie Wasserman Schultz et al. When I say “following the story,” I mean reporting and breaking news in it, as Paul and I have noted many times on Power Line. In January Rosiak drew on the House Office of Inspector »

Once Again, the Democrats Are Losing On Guns

Featured image Perhaps the Democrats thought their Children’s Crusade would put them over the top this time, after repeatedly losing the battle over guns. But so far, it doesn’t look that way. Most people believe that stricter gun laws will either have no effect or lead to increased violent crime. And Rasmussen finds that 54% think massive government failures are mostly to blame for the Parkland, Florida shootings, while only 33% blame »

The Power Line Show, Ep. 59: Populism Sweeping Europe?

Featured image Steve Hayward catches up with Henry Olsen, who is over in London this week taking in the strange game that the Brits for some reason insist on calling “football,” just ahead of the upcoming general election in Italy where populist parties are expected to do well, and where German politics remain in disarray because of the populist eruption in their last general election. Meanwhile, Brexit continues to be a non-stop »

“Samantha Power lied to my face”

Featured image Samantha Power made a name for herself with a book proclaiming our obligation to stop genocide abroad. Once she took office in the Obama administration, she became an apologist for Obama’s detachment from the catastrophe in Syria and his deal with the genocidal maniacs in Iran, among other things. It’s almost enough to make one question her bona fides, or even to suspect she may be a complete fraud. Today »

CRB: How the ruling class rules

Featured image The new (Winter) issue of the Claremont Review of Books is published today. Thanks to our friends at the Claremont Institute, I have read the new issue in galley to select three days’ worth of pieces to be submitted for the consideration of Power Line readers. The new issue is full of great reviews and essays. As always, wanting to do right by the magazine and by our readers, I »

Xi Jinping’s promotion signals a cold war with China

Featured image Peter Beinart proclaims that “the Trump administration is preparing for a new Cold War.” Against whom? Against Russia and China. The left can’t seem to make up its mind. Is President Trump a tool of Putin or an anti-Russia cold warrior? I say he’s neither. Instead, I think Trump is slowly recognizing, as President Obama never seemed to, that Russia and China are waging a Cold War against us, and »

Neoliberal Madness

Featured image I thought it wasn’t possible to exaggerate the leftist derangement over “neoliberalism” that I mentioned yesterday in “The Perils of Neoliberalism.” Little did I know. This requires a brief preface. Of all the academic departments that are lost in the madness of ideological leftism, what you may not know is that one of the very worst of them is . . . geography. “Geography?? Isn’t that, like, the study of »

Trump 2020? Yes!

Featured image When the 2016 primary season started, there were 17 Republican candidates in the field. In my estimation, Donald Trump ranked somewhere between #15 and #17. (It was hard to take George Pataki, for example, seriously.) I was surprised when he emerged from the pack, and I worried about whether he was conservative enough to be the Republican nominee, but I was never a Never Trumper. And I was one of »

Free Speech? Liberals Say: You Can’t Even Buy It!

Featured image As you likely remember if you are a regular reader, I am now running a think tank/conservative activist organization, Center of the American Experiment. This year, we have enough room in our growing budget to promote our web site and do some institutional advertising. So if you live in Minnesota, you are likely to see an ad for our web site if you visit the Drudge Report, InstaPundit or Power »

Anthem protests fail to catch on [UPDATED]

Featured image The recently completed NFL season was marred, in the opinion of many, by players taking a knee during the National Anthem. To what extent has this gesture, or similar shows of protest, spilled over to other sporting events at which the Anthem is played? The answer, as far as I can tell, is that it hasn’t spilled over at all. The playing of the Anthem was observed immaculately at the »

Chai Feldblum’s EEOC

Featured image In December, the Senate was on the verge of confirming Chai Feldblum for another term as a commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Feldblum, a leading gay rights advocate, is the architect of the Obama administration’s aggressive LGBT policy. While strong conservative nominees, including ones for top positions at the Department of Justice, have been on hold for the better part of a year, Feldblum was all set to »

Collusion: Loose threads

Featured image I want to note a few columns that supplement previously assigned reading on the Schiff memo. Andrew McCarthy returns with one more thing — one more thing that is wrong with the Schiff memo — in the NR column “A Foreign Power’s Recruitment Effort Is Not a Basis for a FISA Court Warrant.” The shady Schiff and his Democratic colleagues would prefer that you not know that. They seek to »

Churchill in five minutes

Featured image PragerU enlisted the services of the prominent historian Andrew Roberts to give its short course on “Winston Churchill: The man who saved the free world” (video below). It’s a good title and Roberts knows what he is talking about. He is the author of The Storm of War: A New History of World War II and the forthcoming biography Churchill: Walking with Destiny (also a good title, drawn from the »

Democrats are surprised that more money in pay checks is popular

Featured image How out of touch is the Democratic Party? This out of touch: The Washington Post reports that Democrats expected the Trump tax cut to be unpopular and are surprised to find that voters like seeing more money in their pay checks. Post reporter Erica Warner writes: Democrats predicted a political backlash for ­Republicans in December when the GOP pushed through a deeply unpopular tax cut that added more than $1 »

The Perils of “Neoliberalism”

Featured image Hang around a campus long enough and you’ll soon get wind of the great bête noir of the left these days: “Neoliberalism.” When I first started hearing the term, I thought back to the early 1980s, when old line liberals like Charlie Peters of the Washington Monthly were trying to work out a “neoliberal manifesto” to go up against the highly successful neoconservatism. In fact Peters and Philip Keisling produced a »