Barack Obama
April 30, 2026 — Scott Johnson
President Obama wasted no time condemning yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The Court held that congressional districts were not to be gerrymandered on the basis of race under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Equal treatment without regard to race — surely this cannot stand! Scott Jennings responded concisely. Must be exhausting to be for gerrymandering one week and against it the next. https://t.co/W5sAMbkj0n — Scott
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April 23, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Looking for something a little more concise than my usual favorites to highlight, I want to offer Ben Domenech’s comment on President Obama’s role in the passage of the Virginia redistricting referendum this past Tuesday. The referendum is the predicate for an allegedly temporary “restoration of fairness” in the form of ludicrously gerrymandered districts. My own comments yesterday highlighted Obama. Domenech steps back to take a look at the larger
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April 22, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Virginia voters bought the pitch to “restore fairness” by gerrymandering their purple state into mostly Democratic congressional districts. The redistricring referendum passed by three points — 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent. That narrow vote should result in a lopsided Democrat Virginia congressional delegation. That’s what it’s all about. UPDATE: Our friend Jeff Anderson sends along this image of the absurd referendum question. Jessica Schwalb covers yesterday’s vote for the Free
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March 25, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Fox News draws on Peter Baker’s New York Times story to focus on an illuminating moment in former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair’s meeting with then President Obama in the White House. Neither Blair (speaking here) nor Baker provides the date of the meeting, but I infer that it must have taken place in the first year of the Obama administration: Former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair once
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February 26, 2026 — Scott Johnson
Michael Lynton was the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment when it greenlit Seth Rogen’s film The Interview. You’ve most likely never seen it because it displeased the Supreme (Communist) Leader of North Korea and led to North Korea’s hack of the company’s emails, confidential scripts, and his family’s personal information. Sony limited distribution of the film in order to mitigate the damage. The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of
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October 29, 2025 — John Hinderaker
In June, Barack Obama appeared at the Connecticut Forum for an extended conversation with Heather Cox Richardson. I became aware of the event via this tweet: Barack Obama says the quiet part out loud — it’s time to “experiment” with “new forms of journalism” with “government regulatory constraints.” “Part of what we’re going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how we use
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October 24, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Preoccupied with other business this week, I have barely been able to keep up with the headlines. I thought I would post my recommendations in last year’s Claremont Review of Books annual Christmas roundup, which is full of contributions by eminent scholars such as Andrew Roberts, Heather Mac Donald, Dan Mahoney, Amy Wax, and Jean Yarbrough. Slightly supplemented, this is what I had to offer. Washington Post reporter and editor
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September 29, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Joanne Chesimard — a/k/a Assata Shakur — died in Cuba over the weekend. Among many other such stories, Bryan Burrough recalls Chesimard’s case in his 2015 book Days of Rage: American’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. It’s an outstanding book that seems to me more timely than ever and Chesimard’s story is one of the most sickening he tells in the book. At the
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September 6, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Lee Smith’s “The Choice: Trump or Obama” is the column of the week and this is the quote of the day: * * * * * Washington policymakers favor Israel because of its strategic value. Since the start of the U.S.-Israel alliance in the mid-’70s, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services have come to rely on Israeli intelligence, especially human intelligence, technology, and innovation, as well as Israel’s large and
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August 6, 2025 — Scott Johnson
It was 80 years ago today…that we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This is adapted from a post I wrote in 2016. Please forgive my anachronistic citation of Barrack Obama. He can stand in for proponents of the revisionism that threatens to obliterate historical reality. Richard Frank’s excellent column “The Atomic Bombing of Japan Was Justified” of this date is unfortunately behind NR’s paywall. In the words of the
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July 24, 2025 — John Hinderaker
One of the debates now raging over the Obama administration’s falsification of intelligence relates to Vladimir Putin’s motive in trying to impact our 2016 presidential election. Barack Obama and John Brennan pushed the idea that Putin wanted Donald Trump to win the election, while the intelligence professionals saw little or no evidence of that preference, and believed that Putin was just trying to sow discord. But my question is: since
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July 21, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Today the Senate Judiciary Committee released a tranche of documents relating to the FBI’s investigation of the Hillary Clinton bathroom-server scandal. Remember that? This is how the committee’s press release begins: Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today is bringing to light the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) findings that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) failed to fully investigate Hillary Clinton’s use of a
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June 24, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Israel’s current hostilities with Iran may not be entirely over yet, but the end is in sight. We can say with some confidence that the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons program has been set back substantially. I would add: Barack Obama hardest hit. With the JCPOA, Obama sought to facilitate it, legalize it, protect it, and fund it. He wanted Iran to have a nuclear weapons. He seems to have thought
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May 5, 2025 — Scott Johnson
In 2008 National Review ran Mark Steyn’s story on Michelle Obama with a classic cover and the headline “Mrs. Grievance.” In 2020 NR’s Kyle Smith followed up in “What Does Michelle Obama Have to Complain About?” In 2025 Mrs. Obama is still providing raw material: How do you raise kids in the White House? It’s dangerous. As the first black potential president, we knew there would be death threats. There
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February 8, 2025 — John Hinderaker
During the last months of Joe Biden’s presidency, he obviously was not fit to serve as president. So who ran the White House during that time? Lindy Li is a former Democratic National Committee insider who was heavily involved in Kamala Harris’s campaign. Li answers that question: According to Li, Joe Biden, already staggering from public scrutiny, effectively lost control of the White House after that fateful debate [with Donald
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December 7, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
On Thursday, former president Obama delivered a 4,756-word speech purporting to deal with “pluralism,” which “means that in a democracy, we all have to find a way to live alongside individuals and groups who are different than us.” On the other hand: What happens when the other side has repeatedly and abundantly made clear they’re not interested in playing by the rules? It’s a problem. And when that happens, we
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December 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Free Beacon reporter/humorist Andrew Stiles has suffered through two public appearances of Barack Obama this week so you don’t have to. In “Obama Takes Another Victory Lap” he catches Obama interviewing Angela Merkel at an event sponsored by Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. this past Monday evening. Tickets for the sold-out event — the marked price ranged from $75-$125 — included an unsigned copy of Merkel’s doorstop memoir Freedom
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