Monthly Archives: June 2013
June 23, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Dr. John Christy participated in a conference on global warming last month, and presented some power points that make several points with respect to the ongoing climate debate. All of these observations will be familiar to Power Line readers, but Dr. Christy’s visuals are effective. You can view the power point slides here, and the accompanying text here. The following are some of Christy’s slides. Tornadoes are not becoming more
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June 23, 2013 — Scott Johnson
In tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal column “The IRS’s best friend in Congress,” my daughter Eliana cites chapter and verse to refute the party line toed by House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings as he seeks to obstruct the committee’s investigation into the IRS scandal. This column advances our understanding of the disgraceful game that is afoot. The events underlying the IRS scandal may have been orchestrated by the White
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June 23, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Tomorrow, Harry Reid will call for cloture on the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill as amended by Corker-Hoeven, a 1,200-page bill that no one–literally no one, given the fact that it was drafted by committee–has read. It is a remarkable moment in American history. This morning Jeff Sessions, who has been a one-man voice of sanity on the immigration issue, appeared on Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer. Schieffer went
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June 23, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote here about an incident that occurred when Secretary of Defense Hagel spoke at the University of Nebraska. After his prepared remarks, when calling on a questioner, Hagel said, “you’re not a member of the Taliban, are you?” Robin Gandhi, an assistant professor who is of Indian national origin, then asked a question. Hagel’s camp claims, however, that Prof. Gandhi was not the target of the Secretary’s Taliban joke.
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June 23, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’m pretty sure it was my first Washington mentor, the great M. Stanton Evans, who told me—and perhaps originated—the famous story of a senior Senate aide explaining American democracy to a Russian visitor shortly after the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991. The story is probably apocryphal, but like Xenophon’s re-telling of Cyrus the Great, or Machiavelli’s subtle mis-tellings of so many stories, it contains the “effectual truth” of the
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June 23, 2013 — Steven Hayward
In getting ready to review Pascal Bruckner’s terrific new beatdown on environmentalism, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse, I was pondering his discussion about, of all things, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and my favorite camp-classic, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and I got to wondering—why don’t we have some remakes of classic films within the horizons of today’s environmental correctness? How would Psycho’s famous shower scene go with a low-flow shower-head? Probably
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June 23, 2013 — Scott Johnson
60 Minutes performed a classic hit job on Israel in a 14-minute segment on April 22, 2012. Titled “Christians of the Holy Land,” video of the segment is here; transcript is here. Bob Simon “reported” the story. I wrote about the segment in a series of posts titled “Who ya gonna call?” (and in a few others as well) for reasons that will become apparent below. The gist of the
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June 23, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The role of prominent GOP senators in promoting the immigration fiasco is mystifying. It requires a cynicism beyond my poor powers of imagination to understand it. Equally mystifying to me is the misdirection so many have fallen for regarding the issue of border security. Border security recedes permanently into the distance while amnesty stays in the foreground, but look at the other hand! The news is in the new levels
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June 22, 2013 — John Hinderaker
National Geographic magazine has published thousands of the world’s most striking photographs over the years, but if you think about it, the ones they published are only the tip of the iceberg. The magazine’s archives contained many thousands of photos that had never seen the light of day. So they decided to make some of them available online. It is a remarkable collection. The oldest date to the late nineteenth
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June 22, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, Harry Reid told the Senate that Ted Kennedy is going “to smile at all of us” next Friday when the Senate passes amnesty legislation. Kennedy will, indeed, smile, just as he must have done when Obamacare passed. Kennedy will be particularly gratified by the impact of chain immigration, which he championed almost 50 years ago. This phenomenon will ensure that the Schumer-Rubio amnesty legislation has a huge multiplier effect,
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June 22, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that “waves of Egyptians” are pouring into Syria to join the fight against the Assad regime and its allies, Hezbollah and Iran. The Egyptians in question are “fired by the virulently sectarian rhetoric of Sunni preachers” who are “call[ing] for jihad.” In other words, the Egyptians pouring into Syria are Islamic jihadists. Under Hosni Mubarak, the government did all it could to prevent such jihadists from
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June 22, 2013 — Steven Hayward
As preface to the second half of our conversation with Gabriel Schoenfeld about his e-book A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign, here’s one passage of the concluding chapter about how the GOP establishment is reflecting on the aftermath of Romney’s loss that is worth taking on board: The RNC’s quest for better data so that it can have better “messaging” is not a mechanism for leadership. It is a
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June 22, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Where is Jeff MacNelly when you really need him? MacNelly, old timers may remember, was the brilliant editorial cartoonist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch back in the 1970s and early 1980s who took it to Jimmy Carter like nobody. MacNelly sadly died of cancer in his 40s, depriving us of his talents for their use on Bill Clinton and Obama. Because we could use a reprise of MacNelly’s “Official White House
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June 22, 2013 — John Hinderaker
It was another exciting night of boxing at the Minneapolis Convention Center last night. ESPN was in town, and broadcast some of the bouts for its Friday Night Fights program. For us, the highlight was local middleweight Caleb Truax’s fight against Don “Da Bomb” George. We wrote about Caleb most recently here, after he won a thrilling but decisive decision over Matt Vanda, another Minnesotan. Truax was a heavy underdog
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June 22, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Predictions of Washington insiders were fulfilled yesterday when Harry Reid introduced a substitute amendment that includes the Corker-Hoeven amendment and the rest of the Gang of Eight’s bill, refused to allow any other amendments, and announced that the Senate will move straight to final passage of the bill, with debate cut off on Monday and final passage probably on Wednesday or Thursday. The actual text of the Corker-Hoeven Amendment wasn’t
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June 21, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Now it’s The New Republic’s turn to spin and weave about the decade and a half pause in global warming, and they’re having a very hard time doing it. Nate Cohn writes in TNR: Even as scientists asserted an incontrovertible consensus on climate change, a funny thing has happened over the last 15 years: Global warming has slowed down. Since 1998, the warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures have not
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June 21, 2013 — Steven Hayward
We ran a short excerpt here a couple of weeks ago from Gabriel Schoenfeld about his new ebook, A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign: An Insider’s Account, which you can get on Kindle for just $2.99, but we thought it worth following up with Power Line’s first ever video chat. (More of these to come as we get better at it.) Gabe’s book is wonderfully compact; you can read
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