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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May 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
There are three passings from the past week to note. The first is Alan Abelson, the long time “Up and Down Wall Street” columnist for Barron’s. I never met him, but, as with any favorite writer, you came to feel almost like you knew him every Saturday morning when Barron’s landed on the doorstep. He’s the reason I first started reading Barron’s more than 20 years ago. There was no
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May 12, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I dropped by my old haunts at AEI in Washington last week, and stuck my head in Norm Ornstein’s office with the intent of exchanging a few of our ritual jeers and heckles, but he was deep in phone conversation with his bookie or someone. Too bad, as he’s done it again with his National Journal article on “The Myth of Presidential Leadership.” Ornstein writes in a typically clever way
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May 10, 2013 — Steven Hayward
“People Died, Obama Lied.” ”That is the best summary of what has happened since September 11, 2012,” according to Breitbart.com. Yup, we definitely need this bumper sticker, ASAP. The only one I’ve seen so far reverses this order, to match the Bush meme better, but it will do for now. And do I even need to comment on the media’s performance on this story? I’ve never really understood all
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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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