Monthly Archives: December 2019
December 29, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Our final episode of 2019 brings together the entire Power Line gang—John, Paul, Scott, and me, along with “Ammo Grrll” Susan Vass—for a look at the current scene and a look ahead to next year. Consisting of excerpts from a recent Power Line VIP member live video chat, John hosts as we review the farce of impeachment, the state of the Democratic nomination contest (including how big a buffoon Joe
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December 29, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
George Will argues that “nothing more momentous happened in 2019 than Hong Kong’s heroic insurrection.” I would amend this comment to say “potentially momentous.” We can’t say with confidence what bearing the events in Hong Kong will have on the future. Events on the periphery of a great power can portend what that power will one day experience. This was true of the Soviet Union. However, it was decades from
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December 29, 2019 — Steven Hayward
On Friday the Wall Street Journal ran an extra-long and remarkable editorial about the agenda of Elizabeth Warren (“Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan, Oh My“), which is so far beyond extravagant that “socialism” seems an inadequate adjective. She makes Bernie Sanders look cautious by comparison. As the Journal put it in the lede: “[A]s we discovered after a tour of her 60-some policy papers, Ms. Warren is proposing a transformation
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December 29, 2019 — Steven Hayward
For several years now the climatistas have liked to point out that the Pentagon—the military industrial complex!—is down with climate alarmism, issuing a series of reports saying that climate change might be a serious security risk in the future. I always enjoy this celebration, because it is the first time I can remember that the left has embraced with complete credulity something coming out of the Pentagon, which they otherwise
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December 29, 2019 — Scott Johnson
I have written about all but three of the books I read this year on Power Line. Here they are with the briefest of notes on each. Andrew McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. McCarthy brings his professional background and experience to bear on the biggest scandal in American political history. Only he could have written the book, and he provides just
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December 29, 2019 — John Hinderaker
On October 7, the New York Times published an article about a 2016 Trump voter who changed his mind and now intends to vote Democrat: Mark Graham, a real estate appraiser in this faded manufacturing hub [Erie, Pennsylvania], sat with friends at a gym named FitnessU on the morning after the Democratic debate in mid-September. He had voted for Barack Obama, but in 2016 he took a gamble on Donald
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December 29, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Tucker Carlson recently found himself quoting the lyrics from Don McLean’s smash hit “American Pie” without quite knowing what they meant. Being an inquisitive fellow, Tucker thought to go to the man himself to ask (video below). I am a long-time fan of Don McLean and could not have been more delighted to see him. He is now 74 years old. Having watched Mike Douglas interview him on Douglas’s daily
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December 28, 2019 — John Hinderaker
In today’s London Times is a column by Rod Liddle that, I suspect, no American newspaper would print: “Rod Liddle’s politically incorrect Quiz of the Decade.” OK, boomers — wassup? I’ll tell you wassup. This was the decade you got left behind. *** [C]is is short for cisgender and refers to someone whose current gender is the same as the one they were “assigned” at birth. Yes, I know —
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December 28, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Kevin Drum is a left-of-center writer who is worth reading at Mother Jones. He often departs from liberal orthodoxy, as we’ve noted here in the past. To end this year, Drum offers “A Few Things Liberals Believe That They Shouldn’t.” Six, to be precise. They are: Head Start (and similar pre-K programs) raise student achievement. American health care is expensive because of private insurance. We have a retirement crisis. The
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December 28, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple has undertaken a retrospective series on “the media’s mishandling of the Steele dossier” in light of the recent Department of Justice Inspector General report on the FBI’s FISA-related misconduct investigating the Trump campaign and presidency. Today his series has reached six parts with no end in sight. Yesterday in part 5 Wemple put MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow under the microscope. Maddow not only touted the
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December 28, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In her weekly Wall Street Journal Potomac Watch column yesterday, Kim Strassel holds out the possibility that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has no intention of transmitting the articles of impeachment to the Senate “as long as Democrats can get away with it.” She calls the scenario she sketches “Pelosi’s rolling impeachment.” She asserts that “it’s not hard to imagine Mrs. Pelosi sitting on her impeachment articles through next fall’s election
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December 28, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Let us, in the spirit of the long holiday season, celebrate the gifts that keep on giving. (And GIFing, perhaps, too.) Like Saint Greta of Thunberg, who is surely good copy for a few more months until CNN discovers the next Michael Avenatti (though note in the headline section below the related stories of CNN ratings and the closing of the pretentious, precious Newseum). And Nancy Pelosi’s Hole in the
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December 27, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Did you know that Donald Trump had a cameo role in the movie “Home Alone Two?” I didn’t. This fact would be nothing more than a bit of trivia and a source of pride for the president except that when the Canadian television company CBC aired the movie this week, the Trump cameo did not appear. Ironically, the president had just discussed his role in the movie with overseas U.S.
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December 27, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
For my money, the coolest football nickname ever belongs to one-time Buffalo Bills wide receiver Elbert Dubenion. He was called “Golden Wheels.” Come to think of it, his real name has to be one of the coolest ever, too. Dubenion died yesterday at age 86. His death occurred on the 55th anniversary of the Bills’ victory over the San Diego Chargers in the AFL title game of 1964. Jack Kemp
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December 27, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Our friend Kathy Kersten attended a performance of “A Christmas Carol” at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis last night. She was astonished to find that the theater’s program included a lengthy “land acknowledgement” of the sort that is being promoted by a handful of Native American activists in Minnesota. Click to enlarge: This is the Native American version of the 1619 Project–a perverted retelling of American history in which everything
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December 27, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Roger Ailes might have gotten a kick out of this report from the Washington Post. Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly are locked in a proxy war over, in effect, which of the two women merits top billing in “Bombshell,” the movie about Ailes’s downfall at Fox News. (I say “proxy war” because the battle is being waged by their friends). The Post’s Paul Fahri reports: There’s an argument brewing over
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December 27, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Charles Lipson’s excellent December 17 RealClearPolitics column “The blues at St. James Comey’s infirmary” deserves special attention. From it one can infer the campaign of lies that former FBI Director James Comey has waged in public over the past three years. Of all the lies, I am most struck by the assurances Comey gave Trump as president-elect and president that Trump was not under investigation. We now know that Comey
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