Monthly Archives: November 2016
November 21, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Democrats are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that they lost the presidential election. Now they are threatening to kill Republican electors unless they switch allegiance and vote for Hillary Clinton when the electoral college meets on December 19. The Detroit News reports: Trump’s opponents have deluged [Michael] Banerian and other GOP electors with pleas and nasty emails to reverse course and cast their ballots for
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November 21, 2016 — John Hinderaker
How could Donald Trump’s appointments get even better? He could recruit Tulsi Gabbard as a member of his administration. Gabbard, a Democratic Congresswoman from Hawaii, is an orthodox liberal on domestic policy. She can get away with that, coming from Hawaii. In fact, she supported Bernie Sanders, and nominated him at the Democratic Convention. But, unlike almost all of her fellow Democrats, Gabbard takes national security seriously. She is a
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November 21, 2016 — John Hinderaker
Donald Trump is on a roll. His appointments so far have been superb, and his rumored appointments–e.g. Rick Perry, who spent time with Trump today–also look excellent. Tonight Trump released a three-minute video in which he begins to outline plans for the early days of his administration. His list includes serving notice of intent to withdraw from the Trans Pacific Partnership; canceling restrictions on shale oil and clean coal production;
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November 21, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
This report comes to us via Rockslide. We cannot vouch for its accuracy: The flood of Trump-fearing American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week. The Republican presidential campaign is prompting an exodus among left-leaning Americans who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, pay taxes, and live according to the Constitution. Canadian border residents say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of
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November 21, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
For years, Republicans and conservatives have charged that President Obama has shielded embarrassing intelligence and other information regarding Iran in order to limit opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and Obama’s conciliatory approach to Tehran. The charge seems well-founded. After all, it took Sens. Tom Cotton and Rep. Mike Pompeo to discover secret side agreements attached to the nuclear deal. Eli Lake suggests that the Trump administration may well stop
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November 21, 2016 — Scott Johnson
It can’t be a good thing if Democrats elect Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison to lead the Democratic Party. It would be bad for the country. To borrow a term, Ellison is a bad hombre. When he was on the make in Minneapolis as a local leader and activist on behalf of the Nation of Islam, Ellison had the following to say about his main man (i.e., Louis Farrakhan)
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November 21, 2016 — Scott Johnson
The Fall 2016 issue of the Claremont Review of Books is in the mail and, thanks to our friends at the Claremont Institute, I have read it in galley to select three pieces to be submitted for the consideration of Power Line readers. As always, wanting to do right by the magazine and by our readers, I had a hard time choosing. You, however, can do your own choosing at
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November 20, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
John has written about what happened when Mike Pence attended the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton” yesterday. First, members of the audience booed Pence when he and his family took their seats. Then, when the performance was over and the Pences were exiting, a member of the cast read a harangue against Donald Trump, on behalf of the cast, that was addressed to the vice president-elect. In response, Trump went on
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November 20, 2016 — John Hinderaker
San Antonio police officer Benjamin Marconi was writing a traffic ticket outside police headquarters earlier today when a motorist pulled up behind him, got out of his car, approached Marconi and shot him twice in the head. The murderer got back into his car and drove away. The perpetrator has not yet been caught, so we don’t know whether he was inspired by the Black Lives Matter anti-police movement. What
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November 20, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Donald Trump cracked the Democrats’ “blue wall” by narrowly winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He accomplished this by attracting non-upscale white voters. He also took advantage, it seems, of lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton among black voters in cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Has Trump thereby transformed the electoral landscape? The answer probably depends on the extent to which his policies improve, or will be perceived as
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November 20, 2016 — John Hinderaker
The Democrats say that they will oppose confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, and will smear him with discredited race allegations from 30 years ago. This is rather pathetic: if they can’t come up with anything within the last 30 years, they don’t have much of a case, to say the least. So why are they hysterical about Sessions? Byron York supplies much of the answer: Sessions is
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November 20, 2016 — Steven Hayward
“Politics is downstream from culture,” Andrew Breitbart liked to argue, and given the near-monopoly of the left on America’s cultural scene (Hamilton hecklers anyone?), the ballot box is the only place where the American people get to fight back. So it is worth taking in instances when the cultural world seems to get it, like this sketch on Saturday Night Live last night about the liberal “bubble.” Just 2:20 long
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November 20, 2016 — Steven Hayward
Yes, I know, for liberals to have any second thoughts requires that they had some first thoughts. (Rim shot!) There are a few liberal thought leaders, like Mark Lilla and Damon Linker, who are honestly confronting the destructive dead-end of the identity politics that is now the core desideratum of the Democratic Party. But there is a déjà vu all over again quality to some of these ruminations. Take, for
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November 20, 2016 — Scott Johnson
The Democrats and their media adjunct played the race card over and over in the campaign that concluded with the election of Donald Trump on November 8. They aren’t about to give it a rest now. They have done a superb job of devaluing the charge. One might reasonably infer that the equal treatment of men without regard to race means nothing to them. Rather, they treat the issue of
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November 19, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Michael Rushford of the Crime and Consequences blog calls attention to a new study by John Lott, Jr. of the Crime Prevention Research Center and Carlisle Moody of the College of William and Mary. The two scholars developed a database for police shootings nationwide from 2013 through 2015. Their database is significantly larger and more detailed than the data available through the FBI. Lott and Carlisle found that white officers
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November 19, 2016 — John Hinderaker
At the end of 2008, I worried that the Obama administration would do great damage to America–correctly, as it turned out. But no one considered my misgivings to be newsworthy. The case is different with respect to the incipient Trump administration. Criticisms by his opponents–the ones who just lost the election–dominate the news. The Associated Press, once a respected news organization, headlines: “Trump’s staff picks alarm minorities: ‘Injustice to America.'”
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November 19, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Ten days after his victory, Donald Trump has already made several key personnel decisions. He filled three major staff positions and two extremely important posts that require Senate approval — Attorney General and CIA Director. However, his most important selection, Supreme Court Justice, may not come for a while. Unlike staff and Cabinet/sub-Cabinet jobs, Justices don’t have to prepare to administer a bureaucracy. Thus, the need for Trump to select
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