Books
July 1, 2023 — Scott Johnson
After posting my own brief comments on the Supreme Court’s historic decision in the affirmative action cases on Thursday, I wrote Professor Andrew Kull. Professor Kull is Distinguished Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and the author of The Color-Blind Constitution. I told him I had been drawing on CBC for something like 20 years to write about the “affirmative action” regime and that
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June 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
I’m pleased to announce a new short course for “Power Line University,” featuring my old writing partner Ken Green, with a webinar here this Wednesday at 4 pm Pacific time, focused on his brand new book, A Plague of Models: How Computer Modeling Corrupted Environmental, Health and Safety Regulations. The book has been banned by Amazon, so you know it must be hot! As everyone who followed the COVID story
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June 13, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Over the weekend I posted excerpts of Dr. David Shaywitz’s May 29 Wall Street Journal review of In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took On the US Army, by Charles Barber. As presented in the Shaywitz review, Dr. John Holcomb serves as a sort of foil for Frank Hursey and Bart Gullong, the heroes of Barber’s book. Dr. John Roback wrote to comment: Hi
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June 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Wall Street Journal published Dr. David Shaywitz’s May 29 review of Charles Barber’s In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took On the US Army. Offhand, I can’t imagine a less inviting or more boring headline than the one the Journal slapped on the review: “How to Improve a First-Aid Kit.” It took me a while to get around to it, but I couldn’t
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June 9, 2023 — Scott Johnson
City Journal has posted my essay/review of Keith Ellison’s Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence. I am grateful to managing editor Paul Beston for letting me have my say under the auspices of City Journal and for giving me permission to cross-post my review on Power Line today. Please see the review as published with links here at City Journal. Having covered Ellison’s career on Power Line
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June 7, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s new memoir– Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence — received glowing press in the days following its publication on May 23. The Star Tribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR all lent a hand in the public relations for the book. Asking around among publishing sources, I am advised that Ellison’s book sold 410 copies in the first week
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June 4, 2023 — Scott Johnson
This should be the last part of my series of notes on Keith Ellison’s memoir of the Chauvin prosecution for the death of George Floyd — Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence. The series has let me take my eye off the news while I read the book and wrote a review that may see light in some form some time in the next week or two.
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June 3, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Keith Ellison’s Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence posits the death of George Floyd in the custody of the Minneapolis police as representative of the murderous rampage of law enforcement authorities against black Americans. Yesterday I noted that Ellison fails to cite any statistical analysis or study of deadly force police encounters to support the premise that the “cycle of police violence” exists. He also fails to
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June 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s memoir of the Chauvin prosecution — Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence — was published last week. It’s good to be Keith Ellison. He’s got the Star Tribune doing public relations for him. He’s got the New York Times doing public relations for him. He’s got the Washington Post doing public relations for him. He’s got NPR doing public relations for him.
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June 1, 2023 — Scott Johnson
United States District Judge Patrick Schiltz supervised the Blue Grand Jury that indicted Derek Chauvin et al. on federal civil rights charges following Chauvin’s conviction in state court for the murder of George Floyd. The indictment was sealed, but someone leaked news of the sealed indictment to Star Tribune reporter Andy Mannix. Mannix’s story was dated April 29, 2021, a few days in advance of the unsealing of the federal
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May 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I’m still working my way through Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s just-published memoir Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence. I hope to write a formal book review that administers justice to the book. In the meantime, I want to post a series of notes on the book. This is Ellison’s second memoir and it shares certain traits in common with the first, My Country, Tis of Thee:
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May 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I’m slowly working my way through Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s just-published memoir Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence. I hope to write a formal book review. I’m taking my time reading the book, compiling notes on it, and doing research on related points. I want to post a series of brief comments on the book on Power Line while I am working my way through it.
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May 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Power Line observes its twenty-first anniversary this Memorial Day weekend. I want to take the liberty of looking back by pulling out three of my favorite posts of the past twenty-one years. This is from March 2009. * * * * * * Asked where they had their most memorable campus experiences, Dartmouth students polled back when I was an undergraduate most frequently identified the Hopkins Center for the Arts.
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May 23, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Adam Goldman was part of a team of New York Times journalists that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for national reporting on the Russia hoax. Goldman and his Times colleagues promoted the hoax. They and their sources seemed not to notice that the Steele Dossier was a farce on its face and the FBI’s Russia collusion investigation something worse. The Times was itself a key player in the hoax.
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April 25, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I greatly respect the biographer/historian David Garrow for the depth of his research and the honesty of his work. I wrote about his gargantuan biography of Barack Obama in “Obama’s airbrushed dreams” and quoted from his response to one of my queries about it. As the title
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April 24, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Glenn Beaton is the former columnist of the Aspen Times and current proprietor of The Aspen beat. Glenn’s new book — High Attitude: How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen — was published on April 18 by Bombardier Books, the conservative imprint at Post Hill Press. I took up Glenn’s invitation to read the book in galley this past January. This is what I had to say about it: Glenn Beaton tells
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April 18, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Since the cancel culture censors have come for Dr. Seuss, Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, and P.G. Woodhouse (among others), how come they’ve overlooked Evelyn Waugh, for passages like this one—my favorite—in Scoop: Various courageous Europeans in the seventies of the last century came to Ishmaelia, or near it, furnished with suitable equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, draft treaties and flags of the nations which they had been obliged
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