Monthly Archives: April 2017
April 28, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
That’s the title of this article by Amy Davidson of the New Yorker. It would be difficult to deny that such an effort is underway, as Davidson shows. The effort makes great sense. From all that appears, Ivanka Trump has influence with her father. Along with her husband, who apparently has become very influential, she is viewed as a force for moderation in the White House. Naturally, then, international elites
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April 28, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Well, to be fair, almost anyone is more trusted than the national political media. Morning Consult reports on a poll of more than 2,000 Americans: Thirty-seven percent of Americans said they trusted Trump’s White House to tell the truth, while 29 percent opted for the media. Responses to this question are of course highly partisan, but independents, like Republicans, trust the Trump administration more than the political media: But the
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April 28, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
With its recent round of layoffs, ESPN has largely ceased serious coverage of hockey. Apparently it regards covering the fourth most popular sport in the U.S. as a frill. But in ESPN’s eyes, not all frills are created equal. Hence, its new site for woman ESPNW, recently ran a feature called ““Five Poets on the New Feminism.” The “world wide leader in sports” doesn’t have much time for ice hockey
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April 28, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Pretty much all conservatives have been frustrated by the House’s inability to pass Obamacare repeal and replacement. Something that seemed simple on the campaign trail has turned out not to be simple in practice. House Republicans now have produced a second version of the bill, which has been improved so as to draw support from the Freedom Caucus. But what exactly is going on? What would the new House bill
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April 28, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Harvey Mansfield likes to say that the job of modern conservatism is to save liberalism from liberals. The educational corollary is that conservatives are the only people who can save the liberal arts from liberalism, which has done its best to ruin them. The post-modern left now dominates the traditional liberal arts disciplines, and wonders why fewer and fewer students want to major in any of those fields any more.
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April 28, 2017 — Scott Johnson
My friend Charles Kesler is a learned and a witty man. He is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and presides over the Claremont Review of Books as its editor. He puts his his historical knowledge to use in postulating a theory of Trump for readers of the New York Times in — hold on to your hat! — “Donald Trump is a real Republican, and
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April 28, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll invites us to PICTURE THIS. She writes: Hollywood and The Internet love lists and competitions. Every year People magazine crowns some man as “The Most Handsome Man in the World” and puts his picture on the cover. Sometimes I find the man reasonably attractive – though rarely armed and usually not manly or old enough for my taste – and sometimes I say out loud right there in
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April 27, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
From a conservative perspective, I think it’s clear that the new House Obamacare legislation — the MacArthur Amendment — is an improvement over the original bill concocted by Speaker Ryan. But how much of one? Yuval Levin makes the case that the core concept of the new legislation — state waivers from Obamacare insurance regulations — represents a significant improvement, in terms of both substance and political pragmatism. He writes:
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April 27, 2017 — Steven Hayward
A “normal” day at Berkeley (you really can’t ever use the word “normal” about Berkeley in the normal way), except for the hundreds of police officers present at Sproul Plaza, which included a large contingent of California Highway Patrol officers with riot gear and plastic handcuffs handy. The heavy CHP presence was the first sign that this time the city and University weren’t going to let things get out of
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April 27, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The Hill’s Jonathan Easley contacted me earlier today via Twitter to complain that I had erred in my post asserting his failure to identify any happy campers among the invited guests at the White House reception for conservative media this past Monday afternoon. He pointed to a quote from John Fredericks praising the event in the first of his two Hill stories airing the guests’ complaints. Easley therefore stated that
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April 27, 2017 — John Hinderaker
Steve writes below that “Portlandia” is the city of the petty, bankrupt, vindictive left. That’s true. It is also stupid. This report comes from the gonzo-left TruthOut: “Under Activist Pressure, Portland Agrees to End All Corporate Investments.” In a sweeping move that follows a wave of divestment activism in Portland, Oregon, and across the country, the Portland City Council voted last week to pull all of the city’s investments in
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April 27, 2017 — John Hinderaker
The Bank of America’s survey of 1,300 small business owners finds a dramatic increase in optimism resulting from the election of President Trump and the Republican Congress: Small business owners’ optimism about the economy has turned around dramatically since before the election, according to a survey released by Bank of America. The number of owners expecting the national economy to improve over the next 12 months jumped to 51 percent
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April 27, 2017 — John Hinderaker
ESPN is mostly losing money because people are turning away from cable television and the company paid far too much for the rights to various sports. But it hasn’t helped that ESPN has become a constant source of left-wing commentary. I don’t know what it is about sportswriters, but when they allow their politics to show, they are nearly always left-wing. It’s an odd phenomenon. Certainly you can’t say the
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April 27, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The Hill’s Jonathan Easley gets a second story out of the complaints of guests of the president at the White House reception for conservative media this past Monday afternoon. Yesterday I took a look at Easley’s first story on the event in “Not at the White House with Trump.” We still see the event through a gauzy filter. I posted my own first-hand account of the event early Tuesday morning
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April 26, 2017 — Steven Hayward
One of the staples of Portland, Oregon —”Portlandia” to TV viewers— is the annual Rose Festival and it has for several years now featured a kickoff parade akin to the Rose Parade in Pasadena on January 1 every year. But this year’s parade, scheduled for this weekend, has been canceled. The reason: It was going to include—gasp—Republicans! And this is too much for the hardened left, which threatens to shutdown the
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April 26, 2017 — John Hinderaker
For good political news, you can’t do better than South Dakota, my home state. The Democrats haven’t yet ceased to exist, but they are on a death watch. The events of this week are classic. The Democrats are holding their big annual event, the McGovern Day dinner, next weekend at the Ramkota in Sioux Falls. They invited Minnesota’s Keith Ellison to be their featured speaker. But then they got cold
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April 26, 2017 — John Hinderaker
The Democrats are spending millions on all of the special elections that are being held to fill seats vacated by House members who have been appointed to positions in the Trump administration. They see these elections as a way to symbolically repudiate Donald Trump, and they think that by deploying their vast financial resources, they can steal a seat or two that they wouldn’t normally win. Such a race is
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