Monthly Archives: December 2014
December 27, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Peggy Noonan joined the crowd that turned on George W. Bush in what I thought was (in Noonan’s case) a grossly unfair manner in 2008. I wrote critically about one of Noonan’s weekly Wall Street Journal columns in which she identified with the public disapproval of Bush that April in “Season of the witch.” Having turned on George W. Bush, Noonan moved on to support the election of Barack Obama
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December 27, 2014 — Scott Johnson
We went to see the film Unbroken on Christmas day at a suburban St. Paul multiplex. We arrived punctually for the first afternoon showing only to find that it had long since sold out, as had each subsequent showing until 10:30 p.m. They had a few tickets left for that one, but we bought two tickets for a mid-afternoon showing yesterday. It also sold out. Indeed, although we arrived 40
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December 27, 2014 — Steven Hayward
Well, since a duly shamed Sony decided to release ‘The Interview” after all, we might as well do an encore beat down on North Korea, Obama (well okay, so every week is an encore of that), Al Sharpton, the mess in Washington, etc. I’m still wondering if Seth Rogen and James Flacco Franco were the real hackers, and this was just a publicity stunt to rescue what looked to be
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December 26, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
A motorist has run over a memorial erected to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The memorial consisted of odds-and-ends placed in the middle of the street. Brown’s supporters have reassembled it. His supporters claim that the motorist ran over the memorial intentionally. How they know the driver’s intentions is unclear. In any event, it was probably inevitable that items situated in the middle of a street would eventually be run
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December 26, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
I’ve been dismissive of Jim Webb’s prospects for winning the Democratic presidential nomination. But Jacob Heilbrunn’s column on Webb, and Steve’s commentary on that column, made me take another look. On second look, I still don’t see Webb getting very far. Will female Democrats favor Webb — currently in his third marriage and the author of what some might consider a sexist novel — over Hillary Clinton? Not likely. Will
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December 26, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Veronique de Rugy has performed a real service by compiling the data shown in the chart below, in a manner that I haven’t seen it before. The chart depicts per capita federal spending from 1962 to the present, broken down into three categories: discretionary, mandatory and net interest, and stated in constant 2014 dollars. First the chart, then some comments about it. Click to enlarge: Shown on a per capita
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December 26, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Just before Christmas, the Commerce Department announced that third quarter GDP growth came in at an upwardly-revised 5% annual rate. Nearly everyone hailed this as wonderful economic news. The New York Times celebrated the apparent return to rapid growth: [H]ere, for the holidays, is the festive news: The economy roared ahead at a 5 percent annual growth rate in the July through September quarter, the fastest quarterly growth since 2003.
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December 26, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Reading Steve Hayward’s post on David Brooks and his mistreatment by Jay Michaelson in the Daily Beast set me off. In his magnanimous style, Steve calls for attention to Brooks’s religious reflections by all fair-minded readers. Steve urges us not to write Brooks off simply because his political judgment has gone haywire. As Steve suggested, I have listened to Brooks’s speech on Christianity in the public square. It’s an interesting
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December 26, 2014 — Steven Hayward
Way back in January I wrote over at Forbes about how the Democrats have become the party of the rich: If you brought back either of the Roosevelts—Teddy or Franklin—from the grave, the most astonishing thing they would find is that the “malefactors of great wealth” have become the benefactors of today’s liberalism, and Democrats have become the party of the rich. In the economic crisis of the 1930s, the
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December 26, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Mary Mapes is the award-winning CBS News producer responsible for the 60 Minutes story subsumed under the rubric of Rathergate. The story disgraced CBS in the 2004 presidential campaign and CBS commissioned an investigation to determine what had happened. The investigation was undertaken by former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and former AP president/ceo Louis Boccardi together with a team working under their direction. When they released their report the following
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December 26, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll returns returns in an autobiographical mode with A LIFE FULL OF MICROAGGRESSIONS. This seems to be part 1 of 2; you don’t want to miss this one. She writes: Sometimes I think my life’s story could be called “A Life Full of Microaggressions.” What with “The Audacity of Hope” already taken and all. And it would be the same for every hapless human. I will mention a very
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December 26, 2014 — Steven Hayward
By far the most remarkable article of the week was Richard Haass in the Wall Street Journal on Christmas eve, saying it is time for American foreign policy to seek . . . regime change in North Korea! They don’t make ‘em much more Capital-E “Establishment” than Haass, who is president of the uber-establishment Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR is hardly a nest of adventurous Bushoisie neocons. Still, Haass
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December 25, 2014 — Steven Hayward
David Brooks comes in for a lot of heavy weather from conservatives for supposedly going native at the New York Times, and especially his early fondness for Obama, but let’s not go too far overboard here: he just said he liked the crease in Obama’s pants, and didn’t go all leg-tingly like Chris Matthews. And if you follow him closely, you’ll have noted that he stopped saying much about Obama
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December 25, 2014 — Scott Johnson
In his regular Wednesday email to subscribers (you can subscribe at no cost here), the Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Last draws attention to Allahpundit’s December 18 Hot Air post “White House aides: Obama feels liberated and ready to be the president he always wanted to be.” Allahpunit takes up the implications of the Obama administration’s thawing of relations with Cuba in the context of the administration’s ongoing negotiations with Iran. Submitted
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December 25, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, I mentioned that Thomas Friedman is taunting Vladimir Putin for being exposed by the drop in oil prices as a “delusional thug” who, with oil tide receding, is now “swimming naked.” Friedman is also taunting conservatives for having been impressed by Putin’s successes, which is rich coming from a columnist who has long been in the tank for Communist China’s one-party rule. Not surprisingly, Friedman misses the point of
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December 25, 2014 — John Hinderaker
This is very cool, from (I think) a German grocery store chain: This is a short video of a dog wearing a Santa had and riding around on a Roomba, which evidently is a simple robot vacuum cleaner: The dog is having a more active Christmas Day than I am. This one isn’t actually a Christmas video at all. It features a brief encounter between a kangaroo and a drone,
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December 25, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Paul wrote yesterday that among the world’s clear winners in 2014 were ISIS, Bashar al-Assad and Iran. To that list we can add the Castro brothers, who may have been rescued from the trash heap by President Obama’s gratuitous aid. Michael Ramirez depicts President Obama as Santa, only he’s gotten his naughty and nice lists confused. Click to enlarge:
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