Monthly Archives: October 2017
October 30, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Politico Magazine placed Tim Alberta’s long retrospective account of John Boehner’s career online last night under the heading “John Boehner unchained.” It is an extremely long article, but it is well written. It is funny. It is insightful. It looks back at where we have been and helps us understand where we are. I think it is well worth the time it takes to read it. Politico’s Playbook provides Tim’s
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October 30, 2017 — Scott Johnson
‘Round about the moment I came to the conclusion it was time to call the whole thing off, CNN reported that Robert Mueller’s team of 16 or 17 all-star prosecutors has secured an indictment of someone for something from the Washington grand jury. The indictment, however, is sealed. Whoever leaked news of the indictment to CNN is guilty of serious wrongdoing. That’s a big story too, but CNN isn’t going
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October 29, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
If this year’s Virginia governor’s race between Republican Ed Gillespie and Democrat Ralph Northam is a dress rehearsal for 2018, then next year’s congressional races should present quite a spectacle. If you don’t think so, check out this story in the Washington Post called “Bikers for Trump rallies for Gillespie — without Gillespie.” Gillespie narrowly defeated Corey Stewart in the Republican primary. Stewart managed Trump’s campaign in Virginia for a
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October 29, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
I respect Bill Kristol, Sen. Jeff Flake, and every other conservative who takes a principled anti-Trump stand. I don’t much respect Sen. Bob Corker who supported candidate Trump and reportedly wanted to be his Secretary of State, only later to “discover” what most of us knew all along– Donald Trump is a bad guy. I don’t disagree with many of the criticisms leveled at President Trump by Kristol, Flake, and
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October 29, 2017 — Steven Hayward
I missed this story several days ago about General Electric’s former CEO Jeff Immelt, who always spouted the party line about climate change and the “renewable energy” racket: For much of Jeff Immelt’s 16-year run atop one of the world’s largest conglomerates, an empty business jet followed his GE-owned plane on some trips to destinations around the world, according to people familiar with the matter. The two jets sometimes parked
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October 29, 2017 — Steven Hayward
There’s a saying attributed variously to Robert Conquest or John O’Sullivan that “any institution that is not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing over time.” A good case in point is the Episcopal Church, which was once known as “the Republican Party at prayer,” but which has for the last several decades fallen in line behind every politically correct enthusiasm of the left. We imagine the conversation in the Episcopal clergy
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October 29, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Doing the work that the mainstream media won’t do, the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross has compiled a useful timeline bearing on what I have been calling the Trump Dossier. Our friendly former FBI Special Agent with two decades of experience in counterintelligence provides related background on the Attorney General Guidelines for National Security Investigations and Foreign Intelligence Collection. “Without an understanding of them,” he says, “it is impossible to understand
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October 29, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez is not only a lawyer, he served as Secretary of Labor under President Obama and as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Holder Justice Department. It therefore makes a certain kind of sense that he was invited to give the sixth annual Birch Bayh Lecture at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law. In his lecture Perez spoke on the subject
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October 29, 2017 — Scott Johnson
With the coming of Halloween on Tuesday, it may be an opportune moment for a diversion. If you listen to the right radio stations at this time of the year, you will hear a few songs associated with the holiday. Probably foremost among them is “I Put a Spell on You” by the artist known as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. I’d like to take the liberty of revisiting the song this
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October 28, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
It is now undisputed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC paid for the infamous Trump dossier (though as Andy McCarthy notes, the media is characterizing the transaction as paying “for the research that led to the dossier”). What is the response of Democrats and their media friends to this upsetting news? The main response I’ve heard is that it doesn’t matter who paid for the dossier. What matters is
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October 28, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Now we know that the Trump Dossier was not just a product funded by Democrats, but was commissioned by the general counsel of the Clinton presidential campaign. After the Trump campaign collusion hysteria fomented by Democrats and their media friends roughly since the election, we learn that Russian disinformation (as it seems to me) disseminated by the friends of Vladimir Putin (i.e., the Russian officials identified by alphabetic descriptors in
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October 28, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Has there ever been a “scandal” that has backfired as bad as Trump Russiagate? Suddenly I think the Trumpsters who think he should fire special counsel Mueller probably now want him to stay on the job until Hillary dons some pumpkin-colored apparel. Trump must be having a great weekend. Speaking of costumes, since I’m speaking next Tuesday night at Bowdoin College, I was planning to dress up as the most
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October 27, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Student anxiety and hostility at public high schools have worsened since Donald Trump became president, according to a study. More than half of the 1,535 teachers who responded to a survey claimed to see more students than ever with “high levels of stress and anxiety” between January and May of this year. The study was conducted by UCLA’s director of the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. The title of
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October 27, 2017 — Steven Hayward
So you know how environmentalists like to tell us endlessly to “reduce our carbon footprint” and such? And how you’ve long suspected that you don’t even have to be a Hollywood star (like Leo di Caprio) to be a hypocrite about it? Now we have science to prove the matter. Biological Conservation has an article just out that reports the results of a survey of consumption patterns of conservationists, economists,
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October 27, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Jennifer Kerns calls for an investigation into the placement of the Trump Dossier into the hands of the Obama administration — the hands of John Brennan in particular. Kerns doesn’t quote the Gershwin brothers song, but she’s got the refrain. Let’s call the whole thing off: As for the Russian collusion probe against Trump, it’s highly unlikely that Mueller will disband the probe on his own. After all, Mueller now
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October 27, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Big things are afoot in the world of federal regulation. While the media and liberals (but I repeat. . .) obsess over Trump’s tweets and other unconventional speech acts, the Trump Administration is quietly but determinately going about the task of, in Steve Bannon’s words from February, “deconstructing the Administrative State.” Certainly they are rolling back old regulations and stopping new ones at a rate not seen since the best
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October 27, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Scott has linked to an article by Paul Sperry in the New York Post called “How Team Hillary played the press for fools on Russia.” Sperry’s article is also one of our “Power Line picks.” Many of our readers will come across Sperry’s article, either via Power Line or in some other way. However, I think portions of it are worth quoting here, just in case. Sperry writes: Hillary Clinton’s
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