Monthly Archives: August 2009

August 19, 2009 — John Hinderaker

Science vs. Hysteria

Tonight I had the great privilege of meeting Dr. Fred Singer. Dr. Singer was in town, along with several other climate experts, for a program on climate realism sponsored by the Minnesota Free Market Institute. The event, which had an excellent turnout, was followed by a small dinner. For many years, Dr. Singer has been a strong and often lonely voice, defending the integrity of science against politicization and alarmism. »
August 19, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

An immodest proposal

My posts about baseball the way it used to be, including my nostalgia for pennant races, have prompted my conservative cousin from New York to offer what he “modestly consider[s] the best baseball reform since The Agreement of 1903 which recognized the American League’s equality with the Nationals and established the World Series.” Here’s how it would work: Merge the National and American league. Create four geographic-based divisions. Think of »
August 19, 2009 — John Hinderaker

Dem Disarray

It’s hard to say where the Democrats are on the “public option” at the moment. Over the weekend, the Obama administration signaled that it was open to dropping that piece of the health care “reform” plan. The result was substantial push-back from the party’s left wing, with some Congressmen saying that 100 liberal Democrats in the House will refuse to support the bill if the public option is removed. Whether »
August 19, 2009 — John Hinderaker

Republican Tide Rising

Republicans have pulled out to a five-point lead on the generic Congressional lead, matching their best performance of the past several years. In closely related news, Democrats say they will push ahead with their plan for government takeover of health care even though it has zero GOP support. »
August 19, 2009 — Scott Johnson

A health care sidebar

Quoting Ken Vogel’s Politico story, Glenn Reynolds describes it as logrolling in our time: Two firms that received $343.3 million to handle advertising for Barack Obama’s White House run last year have profited from his top priority as president by taking on his push for health-care overhaul. One is AKPD Message and Media, the Chicago-based firm headed by David Axelrod until he left last Dec. 31 to serve as a »
August 19, 2009 — Scott Johnson

Against the virtual life

In the new Summer issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here), the master essayist Joseph Epstein reviews Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto. “Ostensibly a book about copyright,” Epstein writes, the work is in fact “a diatribe, harangue, lecture, attack, onslaught, denunciation, polemic, broadside, fulmination, condemnation, no-holds barred, kick-butt censure of the current, let us call it the digital, age.” Helprin is wary of the impact of »
August 18, 2009 — John Hinderaker

What Happened to the Antiwar Movement? The Sequel

This morning I linked to Byron York’s column on the demise of the antiwar movement, now that George Bush is no longer President. This really is a phenomenon that deserves more attention. It is widely believed that Republicans were defeated in 2008 because George Bush was unpopular, and that Bush was unpopular because of the Iraq war. So how does it happen that Barack Obama continues our involvement in Iraq »
August 18, 2009 — John Hinderaker

The Good Old Days

From the New York Times’s obituary of Robert Novak, recalling his role in the 1972 Presidential election: In April 1972, Mr. Evans and Mr. Novak reported that Senator George S. McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate, favored abortion rights, legalization of marijuana and amnesty for draft dodgers — positions that crippled his standing with most conservative voters. 1972–how long ago it seems! The Times reporters may not have been around then, »
August 18, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

With puff-pieces like this, who needs to be attacked?

The Washington Post sends what it must consider a Valentine to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: She talked chickens with female farmers in Kenya. She listened to the excruciating stories of rape victims in war-torn eastern Congo. And in South Africa, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited a housing project built by poor women, where she danced with a choir singing “Heel-a-ree! Heel-a-ree!” Clinton’s just-concluded 11-day trip to Africa »
August 18, 2009 — Scott Johnson

Brennan’s bromides

Earlier this month Obama administration assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John O. Brennan gave a speech outlining the administration’s deep thoughts on combating terrorism. The speech — “A New Approach for Safeguarding Americans” — “conveniently outlined the administration’s present and future policy mistakes,” in the words of Daniel Pipes. If you seek a handy compilation of the shibboleths that now guide our approach to the phenomenon formerly known as »
August 18, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

The mask, such as it was, is dropped

Ed Whelan reports [note: Wendy Long, actually] that Sonia Sotomayor’s first vote as a Supreme Court Justice was to stay the execution of an unquestionably guilty hitman. According to Ed, even Ohio’s liberal Democratic governor wanted the execution to go forward, and it did. Is this the “tough-on-crime” former prosecutor we kept reading about during the confirmation process? Ed also reports that New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. was among »
August 18, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

Robert Novak, RIP

Robert Novak, the prominent Washington journalist, has died. As a teen-ager, I was a huge fan of the Evans and Novak columns which, nestled in between the ponderous writing (as it appeared to me at the time) of Joseph Alsop and Walter Lippmann, seemed so fresh, full of life and, well, political. What politically keen teen-ager would rather have read about the Sino-Soviet split than about a rift between a »
August 18, 2009 — John Hinderaker

Bringing Guns to Political Events?

This strikes me as very dumb. Leave your guns at home! »
August 18, 2009 — John Hinderaker

What Happened to the Antiwar Movement?

Byron York goes looking for it, without success. Now that George Bush is no longer President, opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has dropped to dead last on the priorities of American leftists, like those who gathered for “netroots nation” last week. It is telling that only a few cranks, like Cindy Sheehan, haven’t gotten the message that, now that Barack Obama is President, war is OK. We can »
August 18, 2009 — Scott Johnson

The conservative challenge

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it,” Abraham Lincoln counseled in his great 1858 House Divided speech. In Lincoln’s spirit, Professor Charles Kesler situates the dire position of the conservative movement confronting Barack Obama. “In President Barack Obama, conservatives face the most formidable liberal politician in a generation, perhaps since John »
August 17, 2009 — Scott Johnson

Did Krupskaya cave?

We have closely followed the story of Obama administration flack Linda Douglass — a cross between Nurse Ratched and Mrs. Lenin — and her invitation to report fishy comments on Obamacare to the [email protected] official email address. I thought the project was, as the liberals say nowadays, un-American, and rather obviously so. How fitting of the Obama administration to hark back to the ethos of Big Brother while promoting socialized »
August 17, 2009 — Paul Mirengoff

A promise Obama knows he won’t keep

President Obama has repeatedly asserted that if the health care reform he supports is enacted, everyone will be able to keep their current coverage. For example, on Saturday, in Grand Junction, Colorado, he declared: I keep on saying this but somehow folks aren’t listening. If you like your health-care plan, you keep your health-care plan. Nobody is going to force you to leave your health-care plan. Similarly, in Portsmouth, New »