Monthly Archives: January 2019
January 31, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Heather Mac Donald has warned that identity politics, having engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses, is now taking over the hard sciences. Here is an example: A friend sent me this application form for the Graduate Data Science Summer Program at the National Institutes of Health. Those accepted to the summer program “will spend the summer at the NIH learning how to use their computational skills to
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January 31, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Here in Minnesota, we are enduring a brutal stretch of weather. The temperature hasn’t gotten above zero in the last three days, with lows approaching -30. And that is in the Twin Cities, in the southern part of the state. Yesterday central Minnesota experienced a natural gas “brownout,” as Xcel Energy advised customers to turn thermostats down to 60 degrees and avoid using hot water. Xcel put up some customers
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January 31, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Max Boot, writing in the Washington Post, decries President Trump’s decision to remove U.S. forces from Syria and the likely decision to leave Afghanistan once a deal with the Taliban is finalized. I strongly agree with Boot that we shouldn’t leave Syria and tend to agree with him about Afghanistan, as well. What’s striking about Boot’s column, though, is its superficiality. Boot lumps Syria and Afghanistan together, choosing to ignore
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January 31, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Scott wrote this morning about the collective freakout on the Left about Howard Schultz’s independent candidacy for president, because his vote-splitting potential might assure Trump’s re-election. The logic of this is obvious enough, but I am not so sure Schultz isn’t doing Democrats a big favor, and that it could work out very differently. Stranger things have happened. It’s not like we’ve never seen a billionaire who had never held
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January 31, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
When he was a U.S. Attorney in South Florida, Alex Acosta, now President Trump’s Secretary of Labor, gave pedophile Jeffrey Epstein the deal of a lifetime. According to the Miami Herald, a federal investigation revealed 36 underage victims of Epstein (the Herald apparently found dozens of additional ones). Yet, through a plea agreement with then-U.S. Attorney Acosta, Epstein managed to plead to only two state prostitution charges. Epstein served just
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January 31, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The panic of 2019 is the Democrat/media chorus breaking down over Howard Schultz’s potential independent candidacy for president in the 2020 election. The Washington Free Beacon’s David Rutz has compiled one of his supercuts videos (below) depicting the panic this time. Rutz’s account of the panic is posted here. The talking heads are like little children working each other up into a hysterical lather over a bogeyman. We may as
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January 31, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar is a supporter of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) Movement and an opponent of the state of Israel. She likens Israel to South Africa, calling it an “apartheid regime.” See, for example, the speech she gave on the floor of the Minnesota legislature in support of the BDS Movement that I transcribed in “Ilhan Omar: Why I hate Israel.” Omar’s opposition to the contrary
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January 31, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Like Tucker Carlson, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham is unclear why the FBI sent a heavily armed battalion to arrest Roger Stone at his home in Fort Lauderdale. The AP reports that Senator Graham “wants a briefing from the FBI on the tactics it used last week” when it took Stone into custody. Senator Graham asked for the briefing in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray (copy below
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January 30, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Howard Schultz’s independent run for president, if it occurs, will be based on his view that there is a vast amount of space between the two political parties and that voters will flock to a candidate who fills that space. The first proposition is certainly true. The second remains to be tested. Yesterday, Schultz stepped into the space between the parties on health care. He denounced Sen. Kamala Harris’ call
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January 30, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, I wrote about the three conservatives President Trump nominated for the Ninth Circuit last year, but did not renominate this year. The unwillingness to renominate the three came about after a request by California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris. They asked that the White House “work with us to reach an agreement on a consensus package” of appeals court nominees from California. The package they desired would have
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January 30, 2019 — John Hinderaker
I never did notice the extremely-partial government “shutdown,” but some people thought it was a big deal. Not private employers, apparently: Private payrolls grew in January at a much faster pace than expected as the labor market shrugged off the longest U.S. government shutdown in history, according to data released Wednesday by ADP and Moody’s Analytics. “Shrugged off”? I don’t know, maybe they welcomed it. Companies added 213,000 jobs this
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January 30, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Ilhan Omar is in the news again. Yesterday, in an interview with Zainab Salbi of Yahoo News, Omar said that she “almost chuckles” at the idea that Israel is a democracy. Instead, she equates Israel to Iran. Israel is a Jewish state, Iran is an Islamic state, what’s the difference? For what it is worth, I think Omar may actually be that stupid. Here is the relevant portion of the
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January 30, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan (among other hot spots, has published an op-ed in the Washington Post. In the paper edition, his op-ed is called “The U.S. is surrendering to the Taliban.” It looks that way. The U.S. is negotiating with the Taliban. The Afghan government has been cut out of the negotiations at the Taliban’s insistence. The two parties — the U.S. and the Taliban —
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January 30, 2019 — Steven Hayward
It appears that the ultimate “Bernie Bro” (whatever exactly that is supposed to be) is . . . Bernie Sanders himself. A short grainy video has emerged in the last couple days, apparently put out by the Beto O’Rourke camp, that shows a shirtless Bernie (insert shudder here) in Moscow on his honeymoon in 1988, singing “This Land Is Your Land” with a bunch of Soviets who appear (for that
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January 30, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In his January 28 monologue on the arrest of Roger Stone at his home in Fort Lauderdale by a heavily armed battalion of the FBI, Tucker Carlson queried why the FBI did what it did (video below). FOX News has posted the text of the monologue under the heading “Roger Stone raid shows that CNN is no longer covering Robert Mueller. They’re working with him.” It’s a good question. A
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January 30, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Like former Obama administration CIA Director John Brennan, former Obama administration Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied notoriously to Congress, yet he remains at large. He is not under indictment. The FBI has not sent a heavily armed battalion to raid his home and take him into custody in front of his friends at CNN. Clapper could certainly have been included in Rep. Devin Nunes’s list of those who
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January 30, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Certain impenetrable mysteries envelop the Mueller probe, including its charter. The media’s lack of curiosity about these mysteries is unsurprising, but it is inexcusably stupid. Andrew McCarthy’s Hill column on the indictment of Roger Stone last week takes up the mysteries of FISA warrant: In all four of the warrants the Justice Department and FBI sought to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, the purportedly “verified” applications outlined Russia’s hacking
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