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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April 30, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Liberals will never tire of calling conservatives racist, because it’s always a show-stopper, a way of cutting off further debate on any issue where a liberal is likely to lose. So don’t expect it to go away any time soon. (Though why Republicans aren’t better at “punching back twice as hard,” e.g., by pointing out the permanent racist legacy of the Democratic Party, noting the vote tally for the 1964
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April 29, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It’s an axiom of American cosmopolitanism that Europe is far advanced over the United States in terms of social democracy, tolerance, openness, and so forth, and at the pinnacle of European sophistication stands France. The French have it over us on everything from existential filmmaking, wine and cheese, anti-semitism, and embrace of gay . . . —wait, what’s this? A major populist uprising against gay marriage in France, with hundreds
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April 29, 2013 — Steven Hayward
How did I miss these two 30-second videos last week while compiling the Week in Pictures? The first is a recording, via YouTube, of NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston speculating that the Boston bombing was likely the result of right-wing extremists because Hitler’s birthday was about to be observed. Even though this video has only sound but no images, you have to hear it, not to believe it–much better than reading the
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April 28, 2013 — Steven Hayward
There’s likely an inverse relationship between the decline of the legacy media and the increasingly over-the-top desperation, self-congratulation and spectacle of the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, held last night. You would think the media would do themselves a favor and not televise the proceedings of their Otherness on C-SPAN, just as the Gridiron dinner is not open to cameras. Even Tom Brokaw has had enough; isn’t this almost a
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April 28, 2013 — Steven Hayward
As we noted here a few weeks ago, The Economist has gone off the reservation on climate change, and in the current issue it has done so again on the issue of affirmation action and race-conscious policy. The issue is featured on the cover, which means it is the subject of the first “leader” (house editorial), “Time to Scrap Affirmative Action,” as well as the focus of a long feature
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April 26, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Lot to get through this week; in fact it almost demands a video, but I haven’t got the time. In any case, we need to start with our friends at The Looking Spoon, who made up this poster to make vivid John’s post the other day on how liberals have trouble with this whole “problem of evil” thingie (beyond, that is, rich people, who are clearly evil if you’re a
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April 26, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Just in time for the Weekly Winston comes the fabulous news that the Bank of England has decided to put Churchill on the five-pound note. Now, can we please put Reagan on the twenty, or something? Speaking of Winnie, who according to legend (surely apocryphal) was the inspiration for A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, loyal Power Line reader RS sends along this adaptation of Milne to remind us of why
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April 25, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Modern liberalism is all about “rights”—rights to health care, right to a job, right to food, the right to more rights, and so forth. You know the drill. Of course, these kind of liberal “rights” aren’t rights at all properly understood; they are benefits that require the state to tax or expropriate someone’s property to provide the “right” to someone else. Right now the California state legislature is poised to
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