Monthly Archives: November 2020
November 30, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, I wrote about three races in which the outcome may still be in doubt. Today, there is news about two of the races. In Iowa’s second district, we have a winner — Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks, at least for now. Today, the state canvass board certified her victory. The margin was six votes, reportedly the slimmest in any House race since 1984. However, Miller-Meeks’ opponent, Rita Hart, is likely to
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November 30, 2020 — Steven Hayward
As is well known, you aren’t allowed to criticize Black Lives Matter (still less say anything as offensive as “All Lives Matter”), Critical Race Theory, or any aspect of transgenderism. And it seems increasingly difficult to criticize the orthodoxy of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) in any way. Witness the case of Dorian Abbot, a professor of geology at the University of Chicago, who has criticized the DEI orthodoxy. He’s
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November 30, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Everyone with an ounce of common sense knows that remote learning is generally inferior to learning in school, and that it’s emotionally harmful to some children. Anyone who has studied the data is likely to conclude that keeping schools open doesn’t risk a harmful spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. Alexandria’s public schools are closed. But this doesn’t mean the system’s school superintendent, Gregory Hutchings, Jr, lacks common sense or is
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November 30, 2020 — John Hinderaker
David Horowitz writes that today’s Left is the same as yesterday’s Left: irredeemably destructive and dishonest. Hating America and working toward its demise is the Left’s pole star. This piece is special to Power Line. My first political demonstration was a May Day parade in 1948. I was nine years old. We chanted in support of President Truman’s “Fair Employment Practices Commission” and his successful effort to integrate the civil
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November 30, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Joe Biden, the devout Catholic who doesn’t know that the “P” in Psalms is silent, seems poised to carry on the left’s attack on religion. That’s a fair inference from the fact that his transition team includes Chai Feldblum — the prominent LGBT activist who believes that in almost all cases where the “sexual liberty” of gays conflicts with religious belief, “sexual liberty should win.” Feldblum is part of the
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November 30, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Robert Goldberg of The Goldberg Retort headlines: “Biden Takes Early Lead in Baseball Hall of Fame Balloting.” It’s pretty funny: President-elect Joe Biden has vaulted into a surprising early lead in voting for the 2021 candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. With about 10 percent of all the ballots in, Biden leads early favorites, including former Yankees Gary Sheffield, Nick Swisher, Roger Clemens, and Andy Pettitte as well as
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November 30, 2020 — Steven Hayward
There’s a refrain on the left that is now so familiar as to be unremarkable. The form runs, “Even Reagan wasn’t as bad as [insert current Republican president here].” It got a workout under George W. Bush, and it’s gotten heavy use under Trump. And already I’ve seen several articles in the New York Times and elsewhere saying, “Whatever the GOP offers us after Trump will be even worse.” To
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November 30, 2020 — Scott Johnson
I’ve been following the stories on the assassination of top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, but they are confusing and conflicting. On November 27, for example, the New York Post reported that Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in “an ambush.” The story added that Fakhrizadeh was “seriously wounded” during a battle between the gunmen and his bodyguards before being rushed to a nearby hospital. On November 29 the Post reported that the
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November 30, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Jon Tevlin worked as a Star Tribune reporter and columnist for 20 years, retiring in January 2018. He perfectly represents the low average and high self-regard of the reporters and editors at the paper. Like just about everyone at the Star Tribune, Tevlin conceives of himself as a high-minded man of the world, but he is a benighted twit. In his last column for the newspaper Tevlin unburdened himself: I
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November 30, 2020 — John Hinderaker
That is what my friend Roger Simon says: “Now Is the Time for All Good Men and Women to Get Off Twitter.” Whatever Jack Dorsey and his minions dislike, whatever threatens them, is automatically banned or, at best, temporarily tolerated with some supercilious notation about its supposed wrongheadedness. (And they claim they’re a public facility—like the phone company.) Almost never do they say with any specificity why they are censoring.
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November 29, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post says it is: Some children are doing fine with remote school; some even prefer it. But many others are. . .suffering emotionally, mentally and even physically from so many hours, often alone, in front of a computer screen. To gauge the struggle, The Washington Post asked parents nationwide to share stories and artwork produced by youths participating in the mandatory home-school experiment, garnering more than 60 responses
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November 29, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Paul notes below several razor-close House races, including especially Iowa 2, where the Republican candidate, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, is leading by six votes. Prediction: if Miller-Meeks is certified as the winner, House Democrats will refuse to seat her in January, so desperate are they to secure every possible House seat they can. Can they do this? Yes—because House Democrats have done this before. Back in 1984, in what became known as
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November 29, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
I want to update readers on three extremely close House races. In California’s 25th congressional district, Republican incumbent Mike Garcia leads Democrat Christy Smith by 405 votes out of approximately 340,000 cast. It appears from this account that, amazingly, there are still some votes that haven’t been counted. No one seems to know how many. The final canvass is supposed to be tomorrow (Monday). After that, I think the loser
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November 29, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Three professors, two from Dartmouth and one from Brown, have produced a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research titled, “Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” It focuses on the U.S. press, and its findings are disturbing: On February 18, the Oxford Mail published a story that Professor Sarah Gilbert and her colleagues at Oxford’s Jenner Institute were working on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus and that
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November 29, 2020 — Scott Johnson
My law school classmate Kevin Roche wrote the column DON’T BLAME MINNESOTANS FOR GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE for the opinion pages of the Star Tribune. For whatever reason, it wasn’t accepted for publication. The column makes important points of general applicability to the epidemic as it has manifested in current hotspots including the Upper Midwest. Kevin is the former general counsel of UnitedHealth Group and former chief executive officer of its Ingenix
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November 29, 2020 — Scott Johnson
I wrote yesterday about the state trial court injunction prohibiting the governor and secretary of state from taking any further steps to perfect certification of the election, including but not limited to appointment of electors and transmission of necessary paperwork to the Electoral College. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court promptly vacated the trial court order and dismissed the case with prejudice. Bill Jacobson comments: The question on everyone’s mind is whether
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November 29, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Spectator USA has posted Patrick Basham’s column “Reasons why the 2020 presidential election is deeply puzzling.” Subhead: “If only cranks find the tabulations strange, put me down as a crank.” I’ve asked our friends at Spectator USA to make the column accessible, but at the moment it is behind their (semipermeable) paywall. Basham is not a crank. He is founding director of the Democracy Institute and was an adjunct scholar
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