Culture
October 25, 2012 — John Hinderaker
The Center of the American Experiment hosted its annual Fall Briefing tonight, with Bill Bennett as the featured speaker. My wife and I bought a row, as we always do, and because we had a few vacancies at the last minute, I offered three seats to Power Line readers last night. The Fall Briefing is usually at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, which is being renovated at the moment. So this
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October 12, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Just what the world needs for a Friday afternoon. Worst. Tattoos. Ever.
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October 3, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The “B-Hed” feature article in today’s Wall Street Journal is “Proposed Ban on Public Nudity Offends Some in San Francisco.” But Power Line reported this story way back in April! Nevertheless, the Journal story today helps highlight some aspects of contemporary liberalism, especially how liberalism is all about “lifestyle”and “personal autonomy” for everything except commerce. Liberals are all for freedom for acts between consenting adults–except commercial transactions. Or as Irving
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September 13, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Reporters tell us that the anti-American riots that have broken out across the Middle East are a spontaneous outpouring of rage prompted by the presence on YouTube of a trailer for a movie called “Innocence of Muslims.” The fact that the riots began on September 11 apparently was coincidence, and in that region RPGs and mortars are evidently the tools of spontaneity. But, notwithstanding the silliness of the claim that
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September 7, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Now that both conventions are over, the new NFL season is starting, and the fall wine grape harvest and crush approaches, I’m going to take a very brief interlude to catch up on a few odds and ends, and unleash my inner Andy Rooney. Like what’s up with this confusing signage in the toilet of my airplane today? So can we smoke or not? (For that matter, why do planes
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September 6, 2012 — John Hinderaker
The Democrats’ serial bungling of the “God” and “Jerusalem” issues is being universally derided as an unforced error. And, of course it was. But it was not an error that occurred in a vacuum. On the contrary, these events–dropping any reference to God from the party’s platform, and refusing, in effect, to identify Jerusalem with Judeo-Christian history, followed by the spectacle of a majority of delegates voting against reinstating God
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September 2, 2012 — John Hinderaker
The Minnesota State Fair is one of the world’s grand spectacles. It goes on for 12 days at the end of the summer, concluding on Labor Day. One year my wife and youngest daughter went ten times. My own appetite for the fair is more modest, but today the three of us attended. It was a gorgeous end of summer day, and the crowd was huge. Food and drink are
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August 27, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Now he’s done it. It wasn’t enough for Francis Fukuyama to declare (rather prematurely) the “end of history”; now he’s gone and declaimed about The Wire, the greatest television show ever done (except for Firefly, but that’s a rant for another day). Actually, it’s quite a good piece. Fukuyama notes that the series creator, David Simon, is a lefty who thought he was making a proto-Marxist critique of American society:
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August 26, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, John reviewed “2016,” the new movie in which Dinesh D’Souza argues that Barack Obama has assumed the anti-colonialist, anti-Western, anti-American, anti-free enterprise perspective of his left-wing, African father. Joe Malchow supplemented John’s post and noted that the film is doing well at the box office this weekend. Joe is correct. According to this report, “2016: Obama’s America,” having expanded from limited to nationwide release this weekend, took in $6.2
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August 15, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
I mostly concur with John’s thoughts about today’s shooting at the Family Research Council. However, I find more merit than John does in criticism of the MSM’s reticence about the incident. It is instructive, I believe, to compare that reticence regarding this patently partisan political shooting in the offices of a conservative organization to the noisy, reckless, anti-conservative approach the MSM has taken in instances where there was no sound
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August 15, 2012 — John Hinderaker
One of the most troubling aspects of contemporary public life is the frequency with which violent episodes take on a political coloration. We have, actually, very little political violence in this country–almost none. But we have a lot of people who try to make political hay out of violence. A wrong turn was taken in the Jared Loughner case. Loughner was a lunatic, so deranged that it remained doubtful for
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August 12, 2012 — John Hinderaker
I’ve been offline most of the weekend because I was in my home town, Watertown, South Dakota, for a unique event: an all-class reunion of the Watertown High School debate team. I am not sure there is another high school in the country that could hold an event like this. Around 200 people attended on Friday or Saturday night, or both. Attendees ranged from graduates of the 1940s and 1950s
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August 10, 2012 — Steven Hayward
A couple years back I got briefly up close and personal with then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at an event at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and in framing a question about what he might do after leaving office, told him the story of Gov. Ronald Reagan’s appearance on the Tonight Show in 1973. Carson asked Reagan if he might return to Hollywood to make movies after leaving the governorship. Reagan displayed
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August 9, 2012 — Steven Hayward
A long-time Power Line reader and old drinking buddy of mine from my mis-spent youth of the Reagan years writes in with the following observations: The whole Chick-fil-a thing got me curious about the companies that have been targeted for boycotts etc. by the Left in recent years. The results are interesting. Wal-Mart has been targeted by the left for at least 20 years. Here’s their stock chart since Jan.
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August 7, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Let me slip in behind Paul’s series on culture to add a couple of thoughts, starting with noting that WaPo columnist Richard Cohen has slipped off the liberal reservation again. First, he does a blog post deploring Harry Reid’s “gutter politics,” even as most of the pro-Obama media remain resolutely silent about Reid’s gutter politics: In “The Godfather Part II,” a senator from Nevada is portrayed as corrupt. His name
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August 2, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Bill Clinton agrees that culture is an important factor in the economic problems experienced by the West Bank. Seth Mandel at Commentary recalls that Clinton took this very view in a speech to the American Jewish World Service in 2007: Clinton expressed his frustration that the Palestinians in Gaza possess some of the most beautiful beaches he’s ever seen, beaches that could be tourism cash cows, if only they could
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August 1, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Whatever one believes about Israel and the Palestinians, the general proposition that culture strongly influences economic performance should not be controversial. Romney likes to cite The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by former Harvard professor David Landes, which makes that case. The work of economist Mancur Olson also supports Romney’s view. Reaching further back, Romney could have cited Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and R.
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