May 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson

“Break the Wheel,” or something, part 2

Featured image 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: »
May 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Thinking about Bobby

Featured imageJames Freeman’s Best of the Web column yesterday asserts that “Biden has a Kennedy problem.” He takes a look at a new Echelon Institute poll “find[ing] that likely voters have a remarkably positive view of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the kooky environmental lawyer who is challenging Mr. Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. In fact the Echelon survey suggests that Mr. Kennedy may have the best nationwide favorability rating of »
May 30, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Flattening the Curve Was a Lie

Featured imageRemember when government officials told us that we needed just a brief shutdown of economic and social activity to “flatten the curve” of covid transmission? The theory, although few seem to remember it, was that the same number of people would eventually catch covid, we just wouldn’t catch it all at once and thus we wouldn’t overload the hospital system. In fact, two weeks of curve-flattening turned into a year »
May 30, 2023 — John Hinderaker

What Is a Lawyer Good For?

Featured imageThe City University of New York has a law school that apparently is very far left. At this year’s commencement ceremony, a graduating law student who was elected by her classmates as their representative delivered a far-left screed: A graduate speaking at the City University of New York’s law school commencement called for a “revolution” to challenge oppressive institutions in the US — name-checking the “fascist” NYPD, military, Immigration and »
May 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward

The Beach Boys Do Renewable Energy

Featured imageJon Reisman, Professor of Economics & Public Policy Emeritus at the University of Maine, devoted Power Line reader, and self-described “Statler and Waldorf Intern,” passes along this update of the Beach Boys classic tune everyone will recognize from the opening line: California’s Grid With apologies to Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Greta Thunberg Well, East Coast grids are hip I really dig wind mills they wear And the Southern grid, »
May 30, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer

‘My name is Nick. I’m one of the fairy godmother’s apprentices’

Featured imageSome readers may already be familiar with the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique at Magic Kingdom Park, the place “where fairy tales come true.” Parents can watch as their children are “royally transformed” into elegant princesses and shining knights – “right before [their] eyes.” Your child will be welcomed into the boutique by one of the shop’s “fairy godmother’s apprentices.” Over the weekend, one little girl was lucky enough to be received »
May 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward

Loose Ends (226)

Featured image• File this away for an update, though I suspect we won’t get an update if the story turns out as I expect: University of California President’s Berkeley Home Vandalized A hate crime investigation is underway after University of California officials say vandals painted racial slurs on the home of the UC president. The hate-filled graffiti has left a Berkeley neighborhood outraged and on edge. Bruce O’Neill showed NBC Bay »
May 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson

“Break the Wheel,” or something

Featured imageI’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. »
May 29, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Turning America Into a Third-World Country

Featured imageThe mark of a developed country is reliable, affordable energy. Despite this undeniable fact, the Biden administration and what Robert Bryce calls the anti-industry industry are rushing pell-mell to destabilize our electric grid, while charging Americans more and more for less and less electricity. This impoverishment of ordinary Americans is not an unfortunate by-product of liberal energy policies. Rather, it is the central goal of those policies. Bryce writes at »
May 29, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Remembering Leo Thorsness

Featured imagePower Line observes its twenty-first anniversary this Memorial Day weekend. I am taking the liberty of looking back by pulling out three of my favorite posts of the past twenty-one years. This is the third. Stephen Spender wrote in his most famous poem: “I think continually of those who were truly great.” Today I am thinking of Leo Thorsness. He was truly great. When Leo died on May 3, 2017, »
May 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward

Biden’s Free Fall Continues

Featured imageIt was possible to dismiss the ABC News/Washington Post poll a couple weeks back that had dismal numbers for Joe Biden as an outlier, but then the Harvard/Harris poll reported similar dismal results for Biden. And now CNN joins the pile on, with a poll showing Biden’s approval rating continuing to slump all the way down to 35 percent. President Joe Biden’s bid for a second term begins with a »
May 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward

The Daily Chart: When and Who

Featured imageMany readers really don’t like the debt ceiling deal, but the irony is that relatively speaking divided government delivers better results than when Republicans have had unified control of the executive and legislative branches in recent decades, as a careful look at this data series will suggest: Meanwhile, here’s how Steve Moore, an ultra spending hawk, sizes up the deal: Hats off to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Eight weeks ago »
May 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Message to Hunter

Featured imageThe New York Post publishes Jonathan Turley’s column on newly uncovered messages deriving from the panic induced by the New York Times coverage of the Biden family business in December 2018. Turley’s Post column is headlined “Bidens offer ‘safe harbor’ to Hunter as he flails over scandalous reports, new messages show.” In his long column, Professor Turley writes: “Joe Biden repeatedly claimed as a presidential candidate and as president that »
May 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward

About the Debt Ceiling Deal

Featured imageWe don’t have many of the fine details of the debt ceiling deal Kevin McCarthy has struck with (P)resident Joe Biden yet, but my first proposition is that the exact details don’t matter, and my conclusion is that the outcome is a modest but potentially significant win for Republicans. I think McCarthy played a weak hand—the political equivalent of a pair of deuces—extremely well. The political outcome of this deal »
May 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward

The Daily Chart: $99 Trillion in Climate Reparations?

Featured imageYou didn’t actually think the leftist drive for “reparations” would end only with blacks did you? “Reparations” is merely the latest slogan for the perennial leftist dream of wholesale wealth confiscation and redistribution, and whatever tool comes to hand will be used. So of course there is a mounting call for “climate reparations,” ostensibly paid by fossil fuel companies, but of course that means in practice you and me and »
May 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward

What’s Wrong with American Foreign Policy in One Embassy

Featured imageSometime in the middle of our unfolding Iraq agony beginning 20 years ago, the State Department decided it needed to build a new embassy compound in Baghdad at a total cost approaching $1 billion. No one seemed to ask why our mission in Iraq, which we assumed wouldn’t last forever, needed what looked like an outpost for a permanent colonial empire rather than a mere security necessity. What security necessity—both »
May 28, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Senior moment with a local twist

Featured imageMinnesota Fourth District Rep. Betty McCollum is a malicious nobody and pre-Squad Israel hater. She has stayed around long enough to become the ranking Democratic member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. As such, she attended President Biden’s announcement this past Thursday of his intent to nominate General Charles Q. Brown, the Air Force chief of staff, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The »