Monthly Archives: April 2019
April 29, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Those of us who lived through the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court came to the conclusion that Anita Hill was lying with our eyes wide open. We observed the inconsistencies between her conduct and her testimony. The more we learned about what had gone on behind the scenes to knock off Thomas with the instrumentality of Hill, the more we understood that Hill was a willing instrument
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April 28, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
This year, the Democratic National Committee decided that presidential candidates can qualify for the first two debates by earning at least 1 percent of the vote in three national or early-primary-state polls conducted by qualifying pollsters or by receiving donations from at least 65,000 unique donors, including at least 200 individual donors in at least 20 states. I assume that this liberal approach was a reaction to charges that the
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April 28, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
The answer is no. Joe Biden may be too old to be an effective president. He’s certainly too much of a hack to be one. But he’s not too kind for the office. The suggestion to the contrary comes from Kathleen Parker, a columnist for the Washington Post (the question forms the title of her column in the paper edition). Parker cites Biden’s courteous behavior towards Sarah Palin in the
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April 28, 2019 — Steven Hayward
As Scott noted this morning, David Burge (better known perhaps as “Iowahawk”) has introduced a competing award to Power Line’s coveted Green Weenie. His is the Grand Carbonator Award, but just as the Oscars have the People’s Choice Awards and other competitors, and the Nobel Prize has to compete with the MacArthur “Dunce” Awards*, there is plenty of room for other awards in this domain. We haven’t given out as
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April 28, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Britain has a fracking industry–or could have one, anyway, if it weren’t for the Greens’ political clout. It finally became too much for Natascha Engel, Britain’s “fracking czar,” who quit with a blistering letter of resignation: Natascha Engel’s decision to walk away from such a high-profile role is driven, she says, by her dismay that Ministers are jeopardising Britain’s energy security because they would rather appease noisy green campaigners than
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April 28, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Having gone to the trouble of selecting a Grand Champion Carbonator of 2019 for his Earth Week Challenge, Iowahawk deserves all the attention he can get for the work performed. It can’t have been easy to have found such a deserving winner among all the contenders. Hats off to the British actress Emma Thompson. Dame Emma Thompson, for her 5,400 mile private jet joyride to London to join the Extinction
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April 28, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Dominic Green’s biting column on the anti-Semitic cartoon that the Times ran in its international edition this past Thursday was posted yesterday at 1:57 p.m. (is that Eastern time?). He must have written it well before the Poway synagogue shooting interrupted the synagogue’s 2:00 p.m. (Eastern) service yesterday. Green found the Times’s statement retracting the cartoon a “morally enfeebled non-apology that the Times’s New York office emitted after all the
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April 28, 2019 — Scott Johnson
According to Yeats, the intellect of man is forced to choose between perfection of the life or of the work. Does anyone choose perfection of the life? It doesn’t seem like a realistic alternative. Perfection of the work, however, is a different story. Driving home one day from court last week, I listened to Ann Hampton Callaway spin the songs on SiriusXM’s Siriusly Sinatra channel. Playing Favorites is the name
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April 27, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
I wrote here about how the federal government is probing the Montgomery County School system to determine whether it is discriminating against Asian-American students by limiting their admission into two highly sought-after magnet school programs. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of Asian-American students admitted into the two programs dropped by 23 percent. The next year, it dropped again, this time by 20 percent. One reason for the sharp decline
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April 27, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Michael Connelly’s books featuring Los Angeles Detective Harry Bosch are among the world’s most popular police procedurals. Connelly published the first Bosch book in 1992, and there have been 22 altogether. The Bosch series has spun off two other characters, Mickey Haller (the Lincoln Lawyer) and Renee Ballard, a young detective who has been featured in two books so far, which I like a lot. One of my sisters-in-law turned
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April 27, 2019 — John Hinderaker
The Democratic Party, following in the steps of Britain’s Labour Party, is sinking ever deeper into anti-Semitism. Now it’s the Democrats’ house organ, the New York Times. On April 25, the international edition of the Times published this blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon attacking Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump: The weirdest aspect of the cartoon (although not the most offensive) is the depiction of Trump as a Jew. Wasn’t he was supposed
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April 27, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I’ll bet you didn’t know you need a federal disaster management plan for your pet rabbit if you use your pet rabbit as part of a magic act for birthday parties. Well, you did, until the U.S. Department of Agriculture got embarrassed by the adverse publicity for this abject stupidity, but it is of a piece with the proposed European Union regulation on the proper length and curvature of bananas
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April 27, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The prosecution concluded its cross-examination of Mohamed Noor. The defense called its expert witness on police practices, Emanuel Kapelsohn and called two fact witnesses — neighbors of Justine — to testify to the noise they heard in the alley (formerly a “slap,” now characterized as a “loud bang”) preceding the shot in the alley behind their houses on the evening of July 15, 2017. The defense rested its case with
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April 27, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Somewhere I am sure there’s a medieval German dictionary with the archaic term Bidenfreude, which means “taking delight in the spectacle of drooling old guys with hair plugs pretending to be ‘woke.'” But what the heck, if the Strolling Bones can still strut on stage in their late 70s, why not the Groovin Groper? In 1992 someone asked Bill Clinton whether he wore boxers or briefs. I want someone to
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April 26, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
The Trump administration has proposed a new hiring rule under which federal job applicants would have to disclose whether they went through a criminal diversion program. Currently, applicants are asked about criminal convictions and periods of incarceration, but some criminals avoid prison and a criminal record through pretrial “diversion.” Under the proposed new rule, they would be asked about this. The proposed rule is sensible. The federal government ought to
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April 26, 2019 — John Hinderaker
In the U.S., coverage of the Islamic terrorist bombings of churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday has been sparse and generally uninformative. It tells you something when Britain’s Sun, which has mostly abandoned the news in favor of soccer and celebrities in bikinis, is a better source than the New York Times or the Washington Post. That is certainly the case with regard to the Sri Lanka
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April 26, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Back when I was writing a book with Joel Schwartz on conventional air pollution around 2005, we were struck how the media everywhere covered the issue with a reverse Lake Woebegone effect: our local area has “some of the worst” air pollution in the whole country! Of course, even without looking at the actual data, this is obviously nonsense—if everywhere has “some of the worst” air pollution, then nowhere is
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