May 9, 2013 — Steven Hayward
When I wrote my much-misunderstood and mischaracterized feature on “Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?” in the Washington Post four years ago (wow–can it really be four years already?), no passage caused a more mixed reaction than my mixed judgment on Glenn Beck: The case of Glenn Beck, Time magazine’s “Mad Man,” is more interesting. His on-air weepiness is unmanly, his flirtation with conspiracy theories a debilitating dead-end, and his judgments sometimes loopy
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May 9, 2013 — Steven Hayward
You may recall that back in the late 1980s, lots of certified smart people like James Fallows and Clyde Prestowitz were telling us that Japan was eating our lunch in terms of economic policy, because they had embraced the kind of government-led industrial policy that used to put a spring in Walter Mondale’s step. It was confidently predicted that at the present rate, Japan might well overtake the United States
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May 8, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Back in the 1980s, when The New Republic described Jesse Jackson as “the great ambulance chaser of American politics,” it was Jackson who would insert himself in every foreign crisis he could. He sprung a downed airman from Syrian captivity in 1984, and then got on the phone with various Lebanese terrorists trying to mediate the 1985 TWA flight 847 hijacking and hostage crisis. (He was unsuccessful that time.) At
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May 8, 2013 — Steven Hayward
David Tucker, my sometimes colleague out at the Ashbrook Center, is one of America’s underrated writers and thinkers, chiefly because he toils away most of the time out of view on the arcana of counter-terrorism and intelligence work at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, such as can be seen in his book Illuminating the Dark Arts of War: Terrorism, Sabotage, and Subversion in Homeland Security and the New
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May 8, 2013 — Steven Hayward
If you want to understand how the United States is suddenly eating everyone’s lunch when it comes to energy, see the chart below, from the Financial Times. No wonder Europe is getting off its duff and trying to move forward with plans to expand its own shale natural gas potential. Not coincidentally, cheap natural gas is starting to prompt several states to back off of their renewable portfolio standards that
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May 8, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It is not necessary to be a Trekkie (but really, why wouldn’t you be?) to appreciate the intergenerational rivalry of this Audi ad featuring the original Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) versus the “rebooted” younger Spock, Zachary Quinto. And kudos to Nimoy, for being game to spoof the most embarrassing moment of his entire career; and no, I don’t mean that Trek episode where he got the seven-year Vulcan itch. Rather,
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May 6, 2013 — Steven Hayward
In what constitutes sort of a reverse-Green Weenie Award, we need to give credit to the New York Times when they get something right. And they get something really right today with a feature and video that revisits the infamous Mobro Garbage Barge episode from the late 1980s: that was when TV news viewers were treated to nightly images of the garbage barge trawling up and down the Atlantic seaboard looking
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May 6, 2013 — Steven Hayward
“Dictatorships and Double Standards” is of course the title of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous Commentary article about how “human rights” liberals of the time were hard on our allies who had less than stellar human rights records, but supine in the face of totalitarians like the Soviet Union and its allies such as Cuba. (Because, as we all know, Cuba’s literacy and universal health care are more important than bourgeois rights
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May 5, 2013 — Steven Hayward
One of our regrets here on the Power Line 100 selection committee is that we didn’t get Yale’s Donald Kagan into our sequence soon enough to feature him before his recent retirement, which Scott noted here the other day. So we don’t want to slip up by letting the same thing occur with Pamela K. Jensen, professor of political science at Kenyon College, who has retired as a full-time instructor
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May 5, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Either Hinderaker is too busy right now, or we’re in that in-between period like we suffer after the Super Bowl and before baseball opening day when we only have the NBA to tide us through for sports, but there’s clearly a dearth of coverage of beauty pageants on Power Line right now. Thank goodness for the NRA, which has been holding its convention this weekend. And thank goodness for Robert
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May 4, 2013 — Steven Hayward
So what should be our theme of the week? Maybe how the White House is still passing Benghazi all the time? Or how the media is still (fill in the blank)? Or perhaps the story about the heroism of apparently the first-ever person to come out publicly as gay? Why don’t we start with the unintentionally revealing photo that the Wall Street Journal ran yesterday about the annual shareholder meeting
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May 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
One of my favorite scenes from Dirty Harry (the first film to “talk back to liberalism,” as the late, great Richard Grenier put it) is when Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Callahan meets his new and unwanted partner, Chico Gonzales: Callahan: “You from around here?” Gonzales: “Yeah, but I went to school at San Jose State.” Callahan: “Just what I need, a college boy. . . Get your degree?” Gonzales: “Sociology.” Callahan:
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May 2, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Ben Boychuk of City Journal California (and the fine InfiniteMonkeys blog) has been after me for a while to write for its pages now that I’ve been foolish enough to move back to the less-than-golden state, but I’ve been too busy to oblige. But when he pointed me to the latest nonsense from the climate capos about how California’s wine industry was imperiled, I had to swing into action. The result
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May 2, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I spent last evening at a splendid dinner of the Friends of Ronald Reagan at the California Club in downtown Los Angeles, where our special guest was Senator John Thune. It was off the record, so no, I won’t tell you what he said, except that when I mentioned I was from Power Line, he recalled running into Scott at the airport recently and was wondering if we were starting
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May 1, 2013 — Steven Hayward
That’s the headline of an interesting graphic The Economist has posted up (hat tip: Jim Geraghty, NRO), concerning a Pew survey of attitudes toward Sharia law and religious liberty in Islamic countries. You’ll notice two things from the charts below: first, a severe case of cognitive dissonance, where large majorities say they support Sharia law, but also say they support religious freedom. The case gets more troubling in the second
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May 1, 2013 — Steven Hayward
So the Washington Redskins are under pressure to change their name. The only surprise here is that it took so long. After all, the Washington Bullets of the NBA changed their name some years ago from this violence-ridden image to the chief nominative of the Ku Klux Klan (nice going, NBA name committee). At least the Redskins don’t have the politically correct “tomahawk chop” like the Atlanta (kind and gentle)
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April 30, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It’s not enough that Washington Republicans seem bent on signing onto any immigration deal that supposedly helps them with their “image” problem, but why do so many of them want to bash one of Obama’s better ideas in his budget: privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)? Let’s see: Barry Goldwater was for this before it was cool, and Ronald Reagan broached the idea in 1981, and was beaten back. Now
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