December 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward

Will Democrats Rediscover the Constitution?

Featured image You have to hand it to Donald Trump’s limitless political genius. Beyond his obvious capacity to drive the media and the left (but I repeat. . .) out of their minds, some of his singular achievements have gone unremarked. Consider, for instance, that Trump has figured out how to make Democrats actually hate a Kennedy. Republicans have ben trying without success to do this for 60 years. It looks like »
December 6, 2024 — Scott Johnson

DeButts of the joke

Featured imageYou may know Hunter deButts as the former Princeton lacrosse midfielder. This Hunter deButts actually exists and has done nothing to require a presidential pardon. He is not to be confused with the fictitious Hunter deButts whom The View’s Ana Navarro cited as Woodrow Wilson’s brother-in-law — the one whom Wilson pardoned for his crimes. Searching for precedents that would support President Biden’s pardon of his partner in the corrupt »
December 6, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley

Tennessee Trans Tales

Featured imageIn U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Biden-Harris administration seeks to strike down Tennessee’s law restricting “transgender” procedures for minors. As Steve noted the case has revealed that the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), has taken direction from Admiral Rachel Levine, Biden’s Assistant Secretary For Health. The admiral is on record that cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, are gender reassignment surgeries are “medically necessary, safe, and effective for trans and non-binary youth.” »
December 6, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Thoughts from the ammo line

Featured imageAmmo Grrrll running to keep up with GALLOPING GRATITUDE. She writes: I know what you’re thinking: Ammo, LAST week was Thanksgiving. NOW you choose to talk about “Gratitude”? Did you not get your homework in on time? Ah, but I can explain. My dearest Orthodox Jewish mentors and friends do not celebrate either Father’s or Mother’s Day as any kind of special day because they believe it sends the wrong »
December 5, 2024 — John Hinderaker

More Pardons to Come?

Featured imageThis morning I was on Chicago drive time radio with Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson. This is my segment: It was an interesting conversation as always, but Dan asked me about something I hadn’t thought much about: will Joe Biden follow up on his pardon of Hunter by pardoning people like Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, and Liz Cheney? Politico says that such pardons may be in the works: President Joe »
December 5, 2024 — Steven Hayward

The Daily Chart: Another Look at the Red Shift

Featured imageAs we have covered here in several different ways, the Trump victory is impressive in its uni-directionality. It turns out that Harris is the first presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover in 1932  who didn’t shift a single county in the country in her party’s direction from the previous election. A unidirectional loss like that may not be a statistical landslide, but as argued previously here, it is at least an »
December 5, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Mr. D’Souza regrets

Featured imageI recently came to the defense of former Attorney General Bill Barr in “They comfort me.” My post specifically addressed comments made by Lloyd Billingsley in “Thy Rod and thy staff” and pointed out Lloyd’s misleading quotation from Barr’s excellent memoir. A reader who shall go unnamed wrote me an email in response to my defense of Barr: “When you try to discredit Trump about the integrity of the 2020 »
December 4, 2024 — John Hinderaker

Hegseth Nomination In Trouble?

Featured imageThe Hill reported, an hour or two ago, that Pete Hegseth’s nomination as Secretary of Defense is “sinking fast in the Senate.” Senate Republicans say Pete Hegseth, President-elect Trump’s choice to head the Defense Department, faces a very tough path to confirmation in the Senate and his bleak prospects have been communicated directly to the Trump transition team, which is now mulling other options. Senate sources say there is a »
December 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward

The Daily Chart: The Case for Chainsaws

Featured imageEveryone knows that Argentina’s president Javier Milei likes to brandish a chain saw as a symbol of his zeal to cut government, and so far he has been good to his word, cutting spending such that Argentina is running a surplus for the first time in decades, and cutting monthly inflation from around 25% to about 2.% percent. »
December 4, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Judge Scarsi to Joe Biden

Featured imageIt is unusual for judges to respond to political attacks or to correct the public record in controversial cases. Judge Mark Scarsi has now done so with a blistering response to the big lies of President Biden in the statement that preceded Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden. The White House has posted the text of the statement and pardon online. Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to the charges against him in »
December 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward

WPATH and Sociopaths

Featured imageOral argument is underway at this hour at the Supreme Court in the case of U.S. v. Skrmetti, in which the Biden Administration is seeking strike down a Tennessee law restricting transgender treatment of minors. The case will be argued along the traditional lines of whether minors suffering from “gender dysphoria” constitute a “protected class” under civil rights law, and related questions of whether “strict scrutiny” review applies, etc. I’ll »
December 5, 2024 — Steven Hayward

Today in the College Collapse

Featured imageThe Chronicle of Higher Education seems to have decided to go into competition with the Babylon Bee with this feature: Affluent White Students Are Skipping College, and No One Is Sure Why White students are falling out of higher education more quickly than any other racial group, and recent data suggests that middle- and upper-income white students are skipping college at a higher rate than their lower-income peers. That flies »
December 5, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Skrmetti and beyond

Featured imageThe Supreme Court hearing in United States v. Skrmetti featured several highlights. As framed by the Biden administration, the case raised the question: Whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1 (SB1), which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity,” »
December 4, 2024 — John Hinderaker

Trump, the President-In-Fact?

Featured imageIt is extraordinary how impactful Donald Trump’s election has been. Without yet taking office, he is already bestriding the world stage. Thus, no sooner had Trump won the election than Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine may be willing to cede some territory to bring its war with Russia to an end, after all. Simply by winning the election, Trump might bring the Russia-Ukraine war to a halt. Next, Trump threatened »
December 4, 2024 — Steven Hayward

Stanford in the Hot Seat

Featured imageThe Stanford Review, the conservative student newspaper that Peter Thiel and others founded back in the 1980s, managed to persuade Stanford’s new president, economist Jonathan Levin, to sit down for an interview. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but in short the Stanford Review did a great job of putting Levin on the hot seat. Some excerpts, starting with the one that is getting the most attention on social media »
December 4, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Brendan Carr on NewsGuard

Featured imageThis past month FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr took up the work of NewsGuard in a letter to the chief executive officers of Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), and Apple. I learned of the existence of the letter in Carr’s NewsNation interview with Chris Cuomo posted here by RCP. Carr is President Trump’s pick to chair the FCC. In the interview with Cuomo he states that he will seek to “smash »
December 4, 2024 — Scott Johnson

A lift too far: In the MN Supreme Court

Featured imageOn the local front I have sought to draw attention to the case of JaycCee Cooper v. USA Powerlifting in several posts accessible here. Filed in Ramsey County District Court and assigned to Judge Patrick Diamond, the case raises the question whether USAPL’s separation of men from women in USAPL’s Minnesota competitions must yield to Cooper’s self-identification as a woman. Although a biological male, Cooper seeks to compete with the »