May 21, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The news broadcasts of the Oklahoma tornado disaster that I saw last night and this morning were thankfully free of speculation that this tornado is proof of—wait for it—global warming, and therefore one more reason to hand over control of our energy sector to environmentalists. I am certain this will come from the usual people starting today, but for now, note the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin discounting the thesis:
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May 20, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’ve expressed my puzzlement and disappointment here before about how Apple, like so much of Silicon Valley, is reflexively liberal in its politics. So it is with some curiosity that I note the story out last week about how Apple CEO Tim Cook was trying to “get out ahead” on the story of his appearance before a Senate committee tomorrow in Washington where he will essentially be called unpatriotic—by both
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May 20, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Cast your mind back about ten years or so to a series of speeches that got Bill Cosby in a lot of trouble, especially his 2004 speech to the NAACP Awards dinner. The Cos took aim at dysfunctions in the black community . . . and he was slammed for “blaming the victim” and taking focus away from white racism. Here’s an extended excerpt: Ladies and gentlemen, I really have to
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May 19, 2013 — Steven Hayward
CBS News reported yesterday that senior officials in the Treasury Department knew of the IRS targeting of conservative groups during the 2012 campaign. While this doesn’t yet place the matter inside the West Wing, it assures another leg to the scandal at least. To paraphrase an old Watergate-era slogan, “Follow the money-grubbers.” (CBS News) WASHINGTON – There were new questions Saturday night concerning if anyone in the White House was
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May 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
If the old weekly Life magazine had managed to hang on until the Internet arrived, it might have survived as an online summary, but fortunately they left the space open to Power Line. And things are happening so fast we almost need to go daily with this feature. I’m guessing that the fury of Marines on seeing Obama’s appalling breach of Marine protocol will be lost on the media, but
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May 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
It’s about time we start turning our attention to law professors who belong on the Power Line 100 list, and we’ve got a long list of them. As with the rest of the field of finalists, there is no particular order, so we’ll start with Jonathan Adler, the well-known interior designer whose baubles you can find at Bed, Bath & Beyond—no, wait, not that Jonathan Adler! We mean the Jonathan
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May 18, 2013 — Steven Hayward
How will we tell when Obama is slipping fully into Nixon territory? I predict it will be when The Daily Show juxtaposes the two images below (though as one commenter suggests, wouldn’t Walter Slobchak be screaming “over the line!”):
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May 17, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I had to doublecheck the calendar this morning to make sure I hadn’t woken up back on April 1, for a couple of the front section headines in today’s Wall Street Journal had me wondering. Such as: “As Hepatitis C Spreads, Scotland Steps In.” Scotland? Since when did it become the CDC? Or how about this: “Berlin Leftists’ New Target: Barbie Dreamhouse.” You can always count on the left for
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May 16, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I already thought National Review‘s Kevin Williamson, author of the fine new book The End Is Near And It’s Going to Be Awesome was a total stud, but after last night’s bravado performance in a New York theater, he’s a total heroic stud. If you haven’t heard the story yet, check out how he dealt with cell phone rudeness during a performance: The lady seated to my immediate right (very
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May 16, 2013 — Steven Hayward
We take this brief time out from our ongoing Obama scandal coverage for a detour in the intellectual fever swamps of the left, in particular a bizarre article out in the current issue of The Nation by Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Nothing subtle about that title. The Nation article, “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek” attempts to discredit Hayek’s free market
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May 15, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’ve been skeptical if not dismissive of all the loose talk that the multiple scandals piling up around Obama would be sufficient to bring about his impeachment–until this afternoon. Let’s remember that impeachment didn’t work out too well with Clinton, and the evidence of his bad behavior was a lot more direct than it is (so far) with Obama. In the case of Nixon, it will be recalled, it required
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May 15, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Hadley Arkes of Amherst College (since 1966!) would make the top of the Power Line 100 Best Professors list if we went either by alphabetical order or any kind of semi-objective scoring system. Hadley is the Edward Ney Professor of American Institutions at Amherst, and is also affiliated with our friends at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the Jurisprudence of the Natural Law, whose fine blog, right-reason.org, is worth bookmarking.
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May 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
As I mentioned here once before, the fad in California wines for more than a decade now has been the heavy emphasis on what I call MSG wines. No, that’s not a designation of something to order in your favorite Chinese restaurant; rather, it refers to Rhone-style blends featuring Mourvedre-Syrah-Grenache. Many of these blends are knockouts, and adjusting the blend allows winemakers to bob and weave depending on the weather
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May 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
And thank goodness it doesn’t. Time for our monthly installment from the Paso Wine Guy, this month extolling the virtue of Viognier. I heartily approve. Can’t get enough good Viognier. Just picked up the new 2012 Viognier from Denner Vineyards, but it needs a couple more months in the bottle before it’s ready to drink. So I’ll be thirsty for a couple of months I guess. Anyway, here it is,
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May 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
With the Obama Administration having moved fully into the “limited modified hangout” stage of its multiple scandals (Jay Carney: Ron Ziegler is on line two for you right now), some of the cartoons and memes are piling up too fast to wait for Power Line’s weekend photo wrap. So here we go. You know you’re in trouble when this headline appears in the Puffington Host, as it does right now:
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May 13, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I didn’t know Jason Richwine very well during his post-doc fellowship at AEI, but in my rare interactions I was favorably impressed. But as background to pondering his shameful dismissal from Heritage last week, I want to recall the time in the late 1980s when I first met James Q. Wilson, arguably America’s greatest social scientist at the time, shortly after he left Harvard for UCLA. In the course of
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May 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The revelations of the IRS investigations of conservative groups, and the incredible explanations of why this should be regarded as an “innocent” mistake, summons to mind Churchill’s campaign speech of June 1945, attacking the socialist platform of the Labour Party in that hard fought campaign (which Churchill’s Tory party lost in a landslide). Some of this description may not fit Obamaworld perfectly, but the third paragraph sounds like an accurate
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