Monthly Archives: April 2014

Raise the minimum wage, line Donald Sterling’s pockets

Featured image Reihan Salaam ties together the topics of Donald Sterling, land-use regulation, and the minimum wage. He argues that Sterling, a notorious slum lord, “has profited enormously from the tendency of liberal cities in California to limit housing permits.” Why? Because “these limits help constrain the supply of low-rent housing, which in turn forces low-income renters to spend a high (and rising) proportion of their incomes on rent.” Why then do »

Who was that cranky old man and why did he ice Kevin Durant?

Featured image With 27 seconds left in the crucial Game Five of an incredibly hard-fought NBA playoff series, the score was Memphis 100, Oklahoma City 99. OKC’s Kevin Durant, who shoots 87 percent from the foul line, had just hit his first free throw. The ball had been returned to Durant for his second, potentially game-tying shot and he was beginning his foul shooting ritual. Suddenly, an old, bald, loud-mouth guy rushed »

In Ukraine, Is the Obama Administration Failing On Purpose?

Featured image Eastern Ukraine is sliding toward chaos, and the Obama administration’s response to Russian aggression has been limited to sanctions imposed on a handful of individuals associated with the Putin regime. It is hard to see how such measures could deter Putin, and, as George Friedman of Stratfor explains, they won’t: “The U.S. Opts for Ineffective Sanctions on Russia.” Friedman’s analysis is, I think, intensely interesting: Placing effective sanctions on a »

If Young People Don’t Like Government, Why Do They Keep Voting For More Of It?

Featured image Harvard’s Institute of Politics released a poll yesterday that showed millennials’ trust in government at a historic low. This chart shows how many respondents said that they trust the entity in question to do the right thing either all of the time or most of the time. Notably, 20% of millennials said they trust the federal government to do the right thing; 32% said they trust the president; and 14% »

Jay Carney Lies About the Benghazi Email

Featured image Yesterday I wrote about the most significant email that the Obama administration produced in response to a FOIA request by Judicial Watch. It was sent by White House political operative Ben Rhodes to a variety of administration officials whose duties related to PR, not policy. Among the recipients were David Plouffe, Dan Pfeiffer, Dag Vega and Jay Carney. Sent on the Friday before Susan Rice made her infamous tour of »

Criminalizing Speech in the UK?

Featured image In my post over the weekend about the arrest of Paul Weston over in the UK for reading Churchill’s infamous passage about Islam from The River War, I wondered whether Weston might have been arrested for violating some kind of hateful “hate speech” law or perhaps on the narrower charge of violating the UK equivalent of a “time, place, and manner” restriction.  It ominously appears it was the former, as »

A salute to Terry Teachout

Featured image The folks who administer the Bradley Prizes have announced this year’s first winner: the great Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal (drama critic), Commentary (critic-at-large) and his own site, About Last Night. Terry doesn’t just criticize; he is also the author of biographies, libretti and the play Satchmo at the Waldorf (which I saw in New York with my family earlier this month and raved about in “A tour »

Obama gets Egypt backwards

Featured image I was elated when the Egyptian military overthrew the elected government of Muslim Brotherhood man Mohamed Morsi. Under Morsi, Egypt seemed on the road to becoming an Islamist state. The overthrow looked like the lesser of two evils. It still does, but the lesser evil is gaining ground. Earlier this week, for example, an Egyptian court sentenced 683 people to death after a brief mass trial. The most serious charge »

All roads lead to…

Featured image At long last we have the email of assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for strategic communications (hack/flack) Ben Rhodes on the urgent need to disseminate the (patently false) message that the video got Ambassador Stevens et al. killed in the 9/11 Benghazi attack. Catherine Herridge observes: Newly released emails on the Benghazi terror attack suggest a senior White House aide played a central role in preparing »

Kristol connects

Featured image Bill Kristol spoke to an overflow crowd of our small local chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Minneapolis on Monday night. Under the leadership of chapter president Mark Miller, our chapter has grown from the 38 members at the time of our first event (former Senator Rudy Boschwitz was the speaker) to some 700 today. I would like to think that the growth of the chapter is a straw »

The Benghazi Scandal In One Email

Featured image One aspect of the scandal, anyway. The administration has released a series of emails in response to FOIA requests by Judicial Watch. You can read them here. This one, by Benjamin Rhodes, a White House political operative, shows the administration’s priorities on the Friday before Susan Rice’s infamous tour of the Sunday talk shows. Click to enlarge: From the earliest hours after the attack, this is how the Obama administration »

Democrats perfect the science of converting cash into congressional seats

Featured image The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently sent out the following email under the subject heading “DOOMED”: We’ll get straight to the point: We’re officially being outspent 2-1 by Boehner’s allies. If we can’t close this fundraising gap now, our chances of winning a Democratic House are doomed from the start. We can’t just sit on our hands here. With 48 hours until the deadline, we still need 22,701 more donations »

NBA grandstands; Sterling is punished

Featured image Adam Silver, the new commissioner of the NBA, has banned Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling from the league for life and fined him $2.5 million. Under the ban, Sterling will not be allowed to attend games or practices or make decisions about the team he owns. It is not yet clear whether the NBA will force him to sell the Clippers. I find myself agreeing with Bill Maher, who »

Senate polling roundup

Featured image Magellan Strategies, which provides analysis for Republicans and conservative groups, has released poll results for seven important Senate races: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, and North Carolina. In most cases, the candidates are running neck-and-neck according to Magellan, which surveyed 600 to 900 voters in each state. Let’s start with Arkansas. According to Magellan, our friend Rep. Tom Cotton leads Sen. Mark Pryor by three points, 46-43. Two recent »

The Daily Show in German?

Featured image Apparently there is a German version of The Daily Show.  And in this six-minute clip (with subtitles), they beat down on Germany’s green energy madness: Over at Breitbart.com, James Delingpole offers more background: What I like about it – apart from its sweary joke about kilowatts – is its palpable and honest outrage about Germany’s disastrous state-enforced transition to renewable energy, the so-called Energiewende. Hitherto one’s instinct towards Germany’s post-Fukushima »

Civil War on the Left, Part 5

Featured image Well, well, what do we have here?  The Nation magazine anguishing over “The Unbearable Whiteness of the American Left.”  Memo to lefties everywhere: when you make everything a matter of race, don’t be surprised when it comes back on you like a boomerang (oh, wait–can’t use the boomerang simile: that’s racist).  Some samples: In the United States, campaigns for social justice are always “a racial thing.” That doesn’t mean they »

Is the EPA Merging with the IRS?

Featured image With increasing signs that the EPA is having trouble coming up with a regulations designed to kill coal-fired power plants that will survive legal challenge, there is fresh news that the EPA is, on its own authority, considering allowing states to impose a carbon tax.  From Adele Morris of the Brookings Institution: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is developing a proposed rule due out in June that could allow »