Democrats
March 18, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The New York Times and other newspapers have devoted a large number of column inches to the Senate investigation of the multibillion dollar losses incurred by JPMorgan Chase in its so-called London Whale trades. See, for example, Jessica Silver-Greenberg’s Saturday Business article and Gretchen Morgenson’s Sunday business column. Why should we care about the bank’s trading losses? Morgenson gets around to the question at the end of her column, but
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March 5, 2013 — John Hinderaker
At The Hill, John Feehery makes a provocative claim: John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are eating Barack Obama’s lunch: Don’t tell the Tea Party, but the tag team of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are currently mopping the floor with Barack Obama. The president convincingly won a second term in November, but since that time, the congressional Republican leadership has outfoxed, outmaneuvered and plain out-strategized him on just about every
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March 1, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Newt Gingrich met yesterday with some Republican Congressional staffers and gave them the memo below, which I obtained from a Congressional aide. It lays out Newt’s assessment of where the Democratic and Republican parties stand today. Much of it will seem familiar to readers of this site, but Newt sets forth the facts–many of them grim–with his customary panache. This is obviously a big topic, and I have just a
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February 26, 2013 — Scott Johnson
President Obama’s transparent mendacity about his responsibility for the sequester is revealing. The obtuse Chuck Todd doesn’t think it’s a story; he characterizes it as a traditionally sterile argument about who is to blame for the unpleasantness (which is the way the New York Times treats the issue it when it deigns to touch it). Todd can’t be that stupid, can he? True, it would be nice to know how
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February 25, 2013 — John Hinderaker
As we have noted repeatedly, the Democrats never stopped campaigning after the last election. They know they can’t move the country significantly to the left as long as Republicans control the House, so everything they are now doing is intended to fire up their party’s base so that they will have the kind of enthusiasm in 2014 that conservatives had in 2010. Can it work? Given what happened in November,
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February 6, 2013 — Steven Hayward
There’s been a lot of chatter about whether Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell might be vulnerable to a challenge in next year’s election, especially if he was challenged by the telegenic Ashley Judd. But I’m guessing Judd might think twice about the idea when she takes on board this prototype ad from American Crossroads:
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February 5, 2013 — Scott Johnson
I’ve known David Horowitz for more than 20 years, from the time he came through town with Peter Collier talking about their invaluable book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties. As Jay Nordlinger has written, David was a leader of the New Left who became a leader of the fighting Reaganite Right: “He is a thinker and a doer, an intellectual and an activist. His mind ranges widely, and
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January 20, 2013 — Scott Johnson
In May 2010 we posted a report on (Democratic) Michigan Supreme Court Justice Diane Hathaway under the heading “Tall tale for a short sale.” With the assistance of reader and Philadelphia attorney Martin Karo, who provided an account better than any to be found in the press either now or then, we noted that Hathaway had “screwed her bank and the taxpayers who bailed it out.” We quoted Steve Fishman,
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January 13, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The 2012 elections placed Minnesota in the hands of a Democratic governor in conjunction with a Democratic legislature for the first time in a generation. Republican governors and legislators have prevented a lot of damage to the state that would otherwise have taken place. The state’s Democrats now mean to satisfy the pent-up demand to give it to us good and hard. They have big plans for us. In her
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January 12, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday four Democratic senators–Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Patty Murray and Chuck Schumer–wrote a letter to President Obama urging him to take all “lawful steps” to increase the debt limit, with or without the Republicans. Byron York points out that all four of these Democrats voted against increasing the debt limit in 2006. At that time, the Democrats pretended to be outraged by the deficits of the Bush administration, which were
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December 20, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Anyone who has observed the hateful rhetoric that Democratic politicians and media figures have directed at Republicans over the last few years must have wondered whether Democrats’ over-the-top hate speech would lead to violence. So far, mercifully, it hasn’t; not lethal violence, anyway. But a pro-gay marriage activist named Ronnie McMillian, from Hawthorne, New Jersey, shows how liberal loyalists can be whipped into a homicidal frenzy by liberal hate speech.
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December 8, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I’ve been meaning to bring up the following New York Times graphic since it was published last month, as it shows that Republicans are at their highest level of control of state governments in 60 years. Not bad for a party supposedly in deep trouble and on death’s door. (Notice, by the way, that Republicans controlled exactly zero states after the 1976 election.) So while all eyes are on Washington
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December 7, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Over at NRO, Stanley Kurtz deduces the emerging Democratic agenda from a New York Times op-ed column by Kenneth Baer and Jeffrey Liebman. Kurtz summarizes the column and comments on it: With Obama safely re-elected…we’re now beginning to hear the Democratic take on the coming demographic challenge. Today’s Baer-Liebman Op-Ed highlights the “baby boom bump,” but takes the polar opposite of a conservative approach to it. For Baer and Liebman,
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December 6, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Yuval Levin explains why compromising over how to deal with the nation’s fiscal crisis is so difficult: The Democrats want to raise revenue and the Republicans want to reform entitlements. Those goals would seem to be easily reconciled — just do some of each, or even lots of each. But it only seems that way because we don’t often think about why the parties want these things. Simply (and surely
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December 5, 2012 — John Hinderaker
It’s the holiday season, so when I get an email titled “The Perfect Gift,” I pay attention. Except this email came from the Democratic Party: This is stunning to me. Can you imagine the Republican Party telling its supporters that partisan merchandise is the “the perfect gift” for the holidays? I can’t. Most Republicans actually believe in the holidays, which makes our concept of the ideal gift a little different.
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December 3, 2012 — Scott Johnson
The Summer issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here) published Jonah Goldberg’s terrific review of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books, edited by Charles Kesler and John Kienker. Jonah closes his review with these comments: The Claremont Review of Books came on the scene far too late, but also just in time. Its influence on the conservative movement has
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December 2, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Harvey Manssfield is the great teacher of government and long-time member of the Harvard faculty. Among his books are Manliness and an indispensable edition of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The Wall Street Journal Weekend interview profiles Professor Mansfield. At age 80, he can look back on an incredibly distinguished career, but he’s still going strong. The quotable Professor Mansfield offers this: “We have now an American political party and a
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