Monthly Archives: July 2013

Eliot Spitzer, “umpire of capitalism”

Featured image Charles Krauthammer and others have noted that, unlike Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer shrewdly chose to seek a lesser office for his comeback than the one he held pre-scandal. But Spitzer also selected his “lesser office” shrewdly. The Comptroller of the City of New York job is an excellent fit for the self-described “f—ing steamroller,” and he has big plans for this post. My conservative cousin from New York explains: The »

The Obama-Zinn connection

Featured image From time to time, we have noted President Obama’s lack of knowledge about American history. The most recent manifestation — his claim that Ho Chi Minh was inspired by America’s Founding Fathers — suggests that Obama’s ignorance is to some extent willful. It is, in any event, not accidental. From Stanley Kurtz, we learn that Obama is a fan of the leftist historian Howard Zinn. Stanley cites this passage from »

Dr. Dean says see, I told you Obamacare rate-setting won’t work

Featured image Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Howard Dean concludes that the Affordable Care Act’s Independent Advisory Board “will never control costs” and “will cause frustration to providers and patients alike.” A friend comments: Note what is going on here. The Affordable Care Act was a liberal dream-come-true that was going to create a utopian, leftist society that brought the “dream” of health insurance to all Americans through the guise of »

Media Notes: Climate Campaign in a Snit

Featured image The climate campaign has gone to DefCon1 over the tergiversations of Reuters, where alarmist news stories about climate change have fallen by nearly 50 percent following the hiring of an editor (Paul Ingrassia, formerly of the Wall Street Journal) who harbors some skeptical views.  Media Mutters is all over the case, producing the chart below showing the decline in climate change coverage pre- and post-Ingrassia: There’s a full-scale media outrage »

Oh Goody: Krugman Discovers Sprawl

Featured image It was bound to happen sooner or later: Paul Krugman has discovered suburban sprawl.  He’s against it.  Big surprise there.  After all, sprawl has been an all-purpose bogeyman for enlightened liberals for a long time (some liberals blamed the 1999 Columbine school shooting on sprawl, harshing Michael Moore’s anti-NRA narrative, but never mind).  One wonders what took Krugman so long to joint the bandwagon. Krugman comes close to suggesting that »

Green Weenie of the Week: Germany

Featured image Well why shouldn’t an entire nation be eligible for one of our coveted Green Weenie Awards?  After all the country actually has a Green Party that has been included in past cabinets, and is often held up as an example of how a nation should embrace green energy technologies. Except that the whole expensive scheme is falling apart.  Despites hundreds of billions of Euros in subsidies and direct investment, German »

Kerry’s middle east lark puts Israeli lives at risk

Featured image No good can come from John Kerry’s push for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. In all likelihood, the negotiations will produce no deal. In any event, they will produce no real peace. But Kerry’s lark has already produced harm. To keep Kerry’s peace fantasy alive, and thus curry his favor, Israel has agreed to release 104 Palestinian terrorists. According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, the release will be carried out »

The Weiner in Pictures: Special Bonus Pictorial

Featured image NO WAY.  I wouldn’t really do that.  We’re Power Line, not Gawker, or Mocker, or Schlocker, or whatever site would actually reproduce the tweets of Weiner’s weiner.  But there have been so many good cartoons coming our way since “The Week in Pictures” posted yesterday that it seemed to me a supplemental post was justified. And because Weiner may be feeling, um, lonely, right now. . . And finally, to »

An Old-Fashioned Weekend

Featured image The world is going to Hell in a hand basket, but it is high summer here in the Upper Midwest. It is hard to think about politics when you’re having so much fun. For us, it was a classic weekend that could have been enjoyed in the 1930s: boxing, guns and horse racing. Friday night it was boxing, a card at the Hyatt in downtown Minneapolis. Our friend Corey Rodriguez, »

The Sequester, “Austerity,” and Obama’s Attempt at a Comeback

Featured image On Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office wrote a letter to Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen, responding to Van Hollen’s questions about the effect of canceling the sequester of a modest amount of federal spending for the rest of 2013, and 2014. CBO director Douglas Elmendorf wrote, in part: In total, by CBO’s estimates, canceling the automatic spending reductions effective August 1 would increase outlays relative to those under current law »

Reporting from Amsterdam: Nazi chess

Featured image We flew overnight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam and arrived happily on time this morning. We hit the ground running, touring the Rijksmuseum this afternoon. The museum is of course the home of many magnificent works including, perhaps most famously, Rembrandt’s Night Watch. The museum just reopened this year after a 10-year reconstruction project. The reconstructed museum is magnificent. We are taking in what Amsterdam has to offer for a few »

Peter King’s overly broad denunciation

Featured image Rep. Peter King added his voice to Chris Christie’s in blasting Rand Paul on foreign policy and national security issues. King went beyond attacking Paul, though — he indicted Republican House members who voted to curtail NSA’s surveillance program. King told CNN’s Candy Crowley that he finds it “absolutely disgraceful” that so many House Republicans voted to defund the NSA’s surveillance program. He added, “this is an isolationist streak that’s »

The Developing States of America?

Featured image Telegraph columnist Nile Gardiner jumps all over President Obama today for his latest embarrassing gaffe, calling the United States and Europe “developing” countries: You can imagine the derision that would have flowed from the liberal “mainstream media” if George W. Bush had referred to the United States as well as its European allies as “developing countries.” This is exactly the term he used in an interview with The New York »

Who serves in the military?

Featured image Peter Robinson at Ricochet directs attention to a study by the Heritage Foundation of military enlistment to population ratios by region. It tells us that, generally speaking, folks from Red States are much more inclined to serve in the military than folks from Blue States. The most over-represented region consists of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The most under-represented region is the Northeast from Pennsylvania upwards. The Mountain West — »

George Boutwell and seven decades of American history

Featured image I wrote here about Lewis Cass, and how he influenced American history for seven decades — the 1800s through the 1860s. Now, I have found another seven-decade man, George Boutwell. Boutwell wasn’t as influential as Cass for as long a period of time, and he never ran for president. But like Cass, Boutwell served as governor, U.S. Senator, and key member of a presidential cabinet (Cass actually served in two »

The Democrats’ Hate Campaign Continues

Featured image Over the last year or two, I have published a number of emails that I have received from the Democratic Party. My purpose is to expose the hateful, purposely ignorant tone in which the Democratic Party communicates with its faithful. There is nothing like it on the Republican side: as it is sometimes expressed, we are playing golf, while they are playing football. Yesterday this email came in, another in »

Juror B29 and Zimmerman Revisionism [With comment by Paul]

Featured image One of the George Zimmerman jurors, identified as Juror B29, gave an interview to ABC News on Thursday that some news outlets treated as a blockbuster. The juror, whose first name is Maddy, was quoted as saying that Zimmerman “got away with murder.” (Some observers said that if you watch the unedited footage of the interview, which is available online, the suggestion that Zimmerman got away with murder was offered »