Monthly Archives: March 2018
March 29, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Been a while since we checked in with the world of energy. So how’s that whole energiewende (“energy revolution”) going over in Deutschland? Yup—it’s still phony. From Politico: Germany’s green energy shift is more fizzle than sizzle By Kalina Oroschakoff Germany’s enormously expensive Energiewende green energy transformation is sputtering. The numbers tell the story. Despite spending about €150 billion and years of political effort to scrap nuclear and fossil fuels and switch to
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March 29, 2018 — John Hinderaker
The Inspector General of the Department of Justice announced yesterday that he will investigate potential abuse of the FISA process by the FBI in connection with its surveillance of Carter Page, and perhaps more broadly of the Trump presidential campaign: Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz announced today that, in response to requests from the Attorney General and Members of Congress, the Office of the Inspector General
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March 29, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The appointment of John Bolton as President Trump’s National Security Advisor has induced another round of hysteria among the Democrats and their media adjunct. He is the man, if there is one, who can help the president achieve his objectives with North Korea, Iran, and elsewhere around the world. See, for example, my daughter Eliana’s Politico piece on Bolton’s bureaucratic skills. Bolton is a man of the Churchillian persuasion. For
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March 29, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Will Rogers liked to joke that it was no trouble to be a humorist when you have the whole government working for you, and I’ve long thought that this should be amended to say that leftists are now working full time for our amusement. I had heard that Sean Penn had written a novel, but intended to spend zero time looking into it, because life is too short. (Besides, I’ve
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March 28, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The omnibus bill Congress passed and President Trump signed last week is a disaster. However, one positive thing to come out of it, in addition of course to the increase in military spending, was the defunding of President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation (AFFH). This is a move we’ve been advocating for some time. Finally, the Republican Congress pulled the trigger. AFFH enables the Department of Housing and Urban
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March 28, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, writing about the Commerce Department’s decision to ask about people’s citizenship in the 2020 census, I wrote: “Any country, especially one in which immigration is hotly debated, ought to have a good idea of how many citizens and how many non-citizens make up its population.” But do other countries ask about citizenship when they take a census? The answer, apparently, is: yes. Hans von Spakovsky writes: [E]ven the United
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March 28, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
A reader and friend informs me of an omission from my list of all-time great University of Michigan basketball players. The omitted Wolverine is Bennie Oosterbaan. I don’t know whether Oosterbaan rates among Michigan’s twenty best basketball players, but he’s arguably the school’s best athlete ever. Oosterbaan earned All-American recognition five times; twice in basketball (1927 and 1928) and three times in football (1925, 1926, and 1927). He earned nine
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March 28, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I had thought that the New York Review of Books took the prize for the most gobsmacking correction for this item related to its recent hit piece on Jordan Peterson: Of course, this mistake is understandable at the NYRB, as they always hoped that Solzhenitsyn’s revelations about the character of the Soviet Union were fiction. But then there’s this from the Wall Street Journal today: With all of the talk
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March 28, 2018 — John Hinderaker
You can measure any two things. In all probability, they will be different. If you have an agenda, you can call that difference a “disparity” or a “gap.” Thus, the difference between average white incomes and average black incomes is a “disparity,” but the difference between white incomes and Asian-American incomes, which on average are considerably higher, is not a “gap” that calls out for a remedy. This is the
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March 28, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The media have manifested remarkably little curiosity about the producers of the so-called March For Our Lives of this past weekend. They have treated it as something like a force of nature. Not so Horowitz Freedom Center Shillman Journalism Fellow Daniel Greenfield of the Sultan Knish site. Knish hits me in the kishkes with his post “Who runs March For Our Lives?” (also published on Frontpage as “Who’s really behind
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March 28, 2018 — Scott Johnson
In the memoir Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO on the Feds’ Hit List (written with Stephen Saltarelli), Howard Root tells the story of his experience as chief executive officer of Vascular Solutions caught in the crosshairs of the federal government when prosecutors sought to put his company out of business and to send him to the big house. Howard touched on one aspect of his story in
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March 28, 2018 — Scott Johnson
In 1747 Samuel Johnson announced the plan to write what became his Dictionary of the English Language. Johnson had hoped to get the job done in three years. His friend Richard Adams questioned his ability to complete such a massive undertaking in such a short time. It had taken the 40 members of the French Academy 40 years to compile their Dictionary, Adams reminded him. Boswell reported Johnson’s famous response:
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March 27, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The University of Michigan has made it to the Final Four eight times. It has made it there in five of the last six decades, missing out only in the first decade of this century. Michigan captured the NCAA championship in 1989 under Steve Fisher, winning an overtime thriller against Seton Hall, 80-79. This year is its second Final Four appearance under John Beilein. He’s the program’s winningest head coach.
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March 27, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote this morning about the Department of Commerce’s decision to ask about people’s citizenship when it takes the 2020 census. One of the main arguments against doing so is the claim that it will cause non-citizens not to participate in the census. In my view, even if this is true, it’s an insufficient reason to abstain from finding out how many citizens live in the U.S. But will asking
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March 27, 2018 — John Hinderaker
The Left has enlisted Big Tech to help suppress conservative activism and conservative ideas. We are seeing this on a number of fronts, one of the more recent (March 1) being Microsoft. Microsoft announced a new Service Agreement effective May 1 that applies to the company’s “consumer products, websites, and services.” Those include the Office suite, Xbox and Skype, among others. The new Service Agreement includes a Code of Conduct:
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March 27, 2018 — Steven Hayward
I can’t recall whether we’re supposed to think that popular culture is a leading or lagging indicator of things, but it seems Hollywood anticipated the recent children’s crusade for banning guns—and lowering the voting age to 16—exactly 50 years ago, in a film that I never heard of (“Wild in the Streets”), but which a sharp-eyed Power Line reader pointed out to me. See if this doesn’t capture a fair
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March 27, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Commerce Department has announced that the 2020 census will ask about people’s citizenship status. The Justice Department had requested the reinstatement of this question. The question obviously should be asked. Any country, especially one in which immigration is hotly debated, ought to have a good idea of how many citizens and how many non-citizens make up its population. The census should be used to get at this question. It’s
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