Monthly Archives: March 2014
March 28, 2014 — Scott Johnson
In Minnesota, Al Franken is up for reelection to the United States Senate. Minnesota’s Republican Party is a mess and the announced GOP candidates haven’t made much of an impression. Indeed, you have to be something of an obsessive to know that Franken will be on the ballot this November. I was reminded of Franken’s reelection campaign by an article last week in the Washington Post. According to the Post’s
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March 27, 2014 — Steven Hayward
The climate campaign is collapsing faster than one of my popover recipes made with old flour and not enough milk. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is set to release on Monday the report of Working Group II, on the projected impacts of climate change. (See my Weekly Standard review of Working Group I’s report on the latest science of climate change released last September, “Pay No Attention
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March 27, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
When Nate Silver found that the Republicans have a 60 percent chance of capturing the Senate in this year’s election, he rated the GOP’s chances of winning the Iowa race at 25 percent. But that was before the Democratic candidate, Rep. Bruce Braley, dismissed popular Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley as a “farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” Braley made that comment during a fund raising talk to
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March 27, 2014 — John Hinderaker
The Democrats’ candidate for the Iowa Senate seat being vacated by Tom Harkin is Bruce Braley. Until Tuesday, Braley was the favorite. But then this video surfaced: Braley raising money from a group of big-ticket plaintiffs’ lawyers in Texas. Apparently a Republican sneaked into the gathering with a camera. Two can play that game! Braley assures the Texas lawyers that he is one of them; he has been “fighting tort
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March 27, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Unemployment, low wages and lack of opportunity for income advancement dominate discussion of our economy these days. But an obvious ingredient is too often missing from the conversation: economic growth. Growth, the rising tide that lifts all boats, creates more jobs, more wealth, and more opportunities for advancement. The various ills that voters and politicians complain about are all largely the consequence of slow or non-existent growth. This is the
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March 27, 2014 — John Hinderaker
I will be on the Bill Bennett radio show tomorrow morning with guest host Mark Davis at 6:30 Central, 7:30 Eastern, talking about the Washington Post/Keystone scandal. If you don’t know where to find Bennett’s Morning In America show on your radio dial, you can listen online here. Also, Fox & Friends has bumped me from tomorrow to Saturday (same topic). So now I am scheduled to be on at
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March 27, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
A CBS News poll finds that only 36 percent of Americans approve of the job President Obama is doing on foreign policy. 49 percent disapprove. Obama actually polls better when it comes to his handling of the economy and of health care than he does on foreign policy. Robert Kagan points out, however, that Obama has been giving Americans the detached, non-interventionist foreign policy they want after the Bush years.
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March 27, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Minnesota is the beat of John and Scott, but I can’t resist noting this story by Andrew Johnson at NRO. It seems that Governor Mark Dayton has advised parents of children with disabilities to buy marijuana in the street, given that medical marijuana has not been legalized in Minnesota. Jessica Hauser, whose son suffers from a form of epilepsy, reports that Dayton gave her this advice during a private meeting.
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March 27, 2014 — Scott Johnson
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen made news yesterday when he told the House Oversight Committee that it might take years before congressional investigators can review all of the documents pertaining to the inappropriate targeting of Tea Party groups. “What they want is something that’s going to take years to produce,” Koskinen told Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in reference to Republican
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March 27, 2014 — John Hinderaker
UPDATE: Fox & Friends has bumped me from Friday to Saturday at the same time, 6:15 Eastern, 5:15 Central. This one is for early risers: I will be on Fox & Friends tomorrow morning at 6:50 6:15 a.m. Eastern, talking about the Washington Post/Keystone scandal. That’s assuming my alarm goes off. No response yet to my request for documents from the Post. When I have time in the next day
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March 27, 2014 — Scott Johnson
The hearing of the Hobby Lobby case by the Supreme Court this week inspired Kevin Williamson to meditate on the deeper currents running through it. Williamson’s NRO column is “The right not to be implicated” and I commend it to your attention. Williamson notes the dramatic revision of public orthodoxy that moves us “from forbidden to compulsory in record time, and vice versa.” He invites us to consider the case
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March 27, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Obama and the Democrats enacted Obamacare on a foundation of lies — you can keep your health insurance, you can keep your doctor, Obamacare will save the average family $2500, and all the rest. Now the lies just keep coming. This week brought us the extension of Obamacare open enrollment beyond the legal deadline of March 31 by administrative fiat, despite the recent denial by Queen Seeb and others (video
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March 26, 2014 — John Hinderaker
A major development occurred today in the scandal surrounding the Washington Post’s attempt to advance Democratic Party talking points by falsely linking Koch Industries to the Keystone Pipeline. In the unlikely event that you are not already familiar with the story, you should begin by reading this post and this one, as well as the one from last October where I dismantled the International Forum on Globalization report that was
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March 26, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
President Obama, fresh from dodging Jonathan Karl’s question about whether Mitt Romney was right in deeming Russia our number one geopolitical (Obama said “the number one national security threat to the United States” is a terrorist attack in this country, but that’s not a geopolitical threat), unloaded more fuzzy thinking on a group of students in Belgium. Obama declared: This is not another Cold War that we’re entering into. After
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March 26, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
When President Obama visited Russia in 2009, his hosts, as I reported at the time, found Obama laughably naive. Indeed, they were astonished to find an American president looking for things to give away to Russia in exchange for “good will.” The Russian leadership concluded, in the prophetic words of my source, that they could “steal Obama’s pants.” The Russians also had a good laugh at Obama’s imperial trappings. These
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March 26, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law — one Sulaiman Abu Ghaith — was found guilty today of conspiring to kill Americans and of providing material support to terrorists in federal district court in New York. According to the Wall Street Journal, the conviction “bolsters the arguments of those who contend that civilian courts, rather than military commission, are suitably equipped to handle terrorism prosecutions.” I’m not buying that for a minute. Indeed,
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March 26, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
We have written several times about Alex Mooney’s campaign for Congress. Alex, a friend and partner in the Dartmouth College battles, is running in West Virginia’s Second Congressional District for the seat being vacated by Shirley Moore Capito, who is likely to be elected Senator. As I explained here, Alex is easily the most conservative of the serious contenders in the Republican primary, and he appears to be electable in
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