Monthly Archives: August 2017

John Bolton on how to exit the Iranian nuclear deal

Featured image John Bolton says that in late July, Steve Bannon asked him to draw up a plan to exit the Iran nuclear deal. Although candidate Trump had repeatedly complained about the deal, President Trump, through two certifications to Congress, had twice declined to pull out of it. Moreover, according to Bolton, no option to remaining in the deal had been presented to Trump. Today, Bolton published his plan on NRO. The »

A note on Maxine Waters

Featured image Earlier today, I wrote a post about Maxine Waters being charged with violations by the House ethics committee. The post was accurate, but badly out of date. The charges were leveled years ago. The post did not deserve to be on Power Line, so I took it down as soon as I saw that a reader had informed us of the problem. I regret the error which was inexcusable. »

The war on standards — shoot the messenger edition

Featured image We have written about the war on standards. Most of the time, this war takes the form of attempts to bulldoze standards of conduct and achievement that stand in the way of equal distribution of society’s benefits and prizes to Blacks. Usually the standards are specific, as are the potential consequences of falling short. A certain test score must be attained to qualify for a job. A criminal law, if »

Democrats’ Russia Story Hits Another Dead End

Featured image The New York Times headlines: “Felix Sater, Trump Associate, Boasted That Moscow Business Deal ‘Will Get Donald Elected.’” Sounds exciting, right? But the story fizzles rapidly. Felix Sater was a real estate broker who didn’t work for the Trump organization. (Hence the weaselly “Trump associate” headline.) He has, to say the least, a colorful history. But what is the story? Sater sent a couple of emails to Michael Cohen, who »

The Alt-Right vs. the Ctrl-Left

Featured image A couple weeks back, before the events in Charlottesville blew up the world and gave a stimulus-style boost to the statue-removal industry (public infrastructure in reverse?), I asked on Twitter for definitions of the “alt-right,” and baited liberal readers to explain how or whether they distinguished between the “alt-right” and the generic “right” that liberals also seem to hate just as much. One reason for doing this is that for »

Michael Cromartie, RIP

Featured image Very sad news today of the passing of Michael Cromartie, after a long battle with cancer. I’ve known Mike for 30 years, and he was always my favorite person to encounter on the street or anywhere else in Washington. No one had a more infectious sense of joy and delight, which was the obvious product of his deep Christian faith, which he nevertheless applied with flinty realism in our always »

The Texas Storm and Climate Change

Featured image I’m sure if only President Trump had kept America in the Paris Climate Accord Hurricane Harvey would have blown back out to sea or not been as severe. That’s just about how the climatistas are predictably reacting to the flooding and devastation in Houston. Once again we have Roy Spencer on the case. While the media is rushing to make “unpredecented” the most overused word in their vocabulary, Prof. Roy »

Terry McAuliffe changes his tune on statues

Featured image Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe is a slippery customer. In 2015, McAuliffe favored keeping Virginia’s monuments to Confederate leaders, arguing that “these are part of our heritage.” “Leave the statues and those things alone,” he told MSNBC. But just two years later, McAuliffe supports local governments that want to take statues of Robert E. Lee and others down. How does he explain this shift? He did so yesterday by telling Jake »

Is America a Seething Hotbed of Racism and Bigotry?

Featured image The premise of diversity training at places like Google (and the various identity politics departments in universities that churn out endless theories of racism, sexism, etc. that back it up) is that implicit racism, sexism and all-around bigotry is pervasive in American society. Maybe DNC members like Bull Connor no longer turn firehoses on blacks in the South, and maybe Democratic jurists like Roger Taney no longer openly proclaim white »

Prayers for Texas

Featured image In Texas we confront a catastrophe of something like biblical proportions thanks to Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey. The New York Times opens its story on the storm (posted last night): “What felt like an apocalyptic onslaught of pounding rains and rapidly rising floodwaters brought the nation’s fourth-largest city to its knees on Sunday, as highways and residential streets turned to rivers, waist-high waters choked off access to homes and hospitals, and »

Tea for the Tillerson

Featured image Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace yesterday. Video of the entire 13-minute interview is embedded below. Tillerson made news in one respect that belies his standing in the Trump administration. Asked about President Trump’s response to the “racial protests in Charlottesville” (at 11:25) and a UN committee statement condemning the response, Tillerson responded in part: “I don’t believe anyone doubts the American people’s »

Developing, but not in the Star Tribune

Featured image As I wrote last week, Minnesota Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken are blocking the Senate from taking up President Trump’s nomination of David Stras to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Stras is a justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court; he is widely respected. His nomination is opposed by approximately no one, not even by Klobuchar or Franken. Yet they have withheld their blue slips »

All dreamy about the dream team

Featured image The Daily Beast serves up this puff piece about Robert Mueller’s “dream team.” It’s under the byline of Betsy Woodruff, but is so gushing it might as well have been written by the dream team itself. What I found most notable about Woodruff’s piece is the disconnect between her profile of the individual dream team members and her conclusion. Nearly every team member is, according to the article, either a »

Neo-Nazis and Communists: What’s the Difference?

Featured image Neo-Nazis have been around for a long time. I remember learning as a teenager that there was an American Nazi party led by George Lincoln Rockwell. It seemed odd, but no one paid much attention. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists–the terms seem to be used interchangeably these days–have been with us for decades, regarded as irrelevant fringe groups consisting of nuts and watchful FBI agents. Suddenly, though, that has changed. Neo-Nazi/white »

Labour demotes MP over true but politically incorrect statements about rape

Featured image We have written about the rape crisis in Rotherham, England. There, over a period of years, more than 1,400 girls, many of them pre-teens, were raped and trafficked by a loose consortium of men. The men were all Muslim immigrants or sons of immigrants, mainly from Pakistan. The girls were all, or nearly all, white. When the scandal finally came to light in 2014, city officials said that they had »

Frack This

Featured image I do hope that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo runs for president in 2020, and further that he is the Democratic nominee. He appears determined to make upstate New York into  the East Germany of America by his intransigent refusal to allow fracking to produce natural gas, thus keeping shale gas-rich upstate New York from enjoying the same kind of prosperity as western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Cuomo’s anti-gas bias extends »

Christian Group Sues SPLC and Amazon

Featured image Coral Ridge Ministries Media, Inc., which does business as D. James Kennedy Ministries, has sued the Southern Poverty Law Center, Amazon and Guidestar in federal court in Alabama. The complaint is here. The case arises out of SPLC’s designation of the Kennedy Ministries as a “hate group” because, consistent with Christian doctrine, it opposes gay marriage. Because of that designation, Amazon has barred Kennedy Ministries from its Amazon Smile program »