Monthly Archives: May 2021
May 31, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The argument by some conservatives that eschewing lockdowns would have yielded enormous economic benefits without any appreciable increase in covid deaths – i.e., that there were no tradeoffs here – is the kind of argument liberals often make. Normally, it’s liberals who say the policies they favor will yield only benefits. Normally, it’s liberals who deny there are tradeoffs. Whether it’s liberals or conservatives who make these claims, I’m always
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May 31, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Democrats and the mainstream media have a lot of explaining to do when it comes to their dismissal as a “conspiracy theory” of questions as to whether the Wuhan coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab. It was clear all along that the questions were legitimate, and now, finally, the media and the Dems are asking them too. In doing so, they recognize the need to explain their earlier dismissal
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May 31, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Last week Tablet published Professor Patrick Henry’s remembrance of Roddie Edmonds, the former Army master sergeant who saved the Jews in his ranks from plans the Nazis had in store for them as prisoners of war. Professor Henry takes the title of his column from Edmonds’s memorable assertion to the unhappy Nazi commandant of the prison camp: “We are all Jews here.” It is a moving and inspirational story. In
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May 31, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In observance of Memorial Day 2007 the Wall Street Journal published a brilliant column by the late Peter Collier to mark the occasion. The column remains timely and is accessible online here. I don’t think we’ll read or hear anything more thoughtful or appropriate to the occasion today. With the kind permission of Peter himself, here it is: Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those
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May 30, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Marty Walsh is Joe Biden’s Secretary of Labor. Alex Acosta was Donald Trump’s for a few years. Acosta lost his job after reports showed that he gave a sweetheart deal to Jeffrey Epstein, a pedophile. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal suggests that Walsh might have a somewhat similar problem. The alleged pedophile in question is the former chief of the Boston police union, Patrick Rose. He was
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May 30, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Using race-based preferences to admit students with qualifications vastly inferior to those admitted without the need for such preferences creates all sorts of problems and dislocations. One of them is the erosion of standards within various departments, especially ones that teach hard stuff. I wrote about one example — eliminating econometrics as a required course for graduating from a major school of public policy — here. Now comes word, via
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May 30, 2021 — John Hinderaker
President George H. W. Bush nominated Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in July 1991. It turned out to be one of the most consequential things Bush did during his four years in office. To the Democrats, Thomas, a black conservative, was anathema, and they did everything they could to defeat his nomination. They trotted out Anita Hill, a former protege of Thomas, to give false testimony against him.
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May 30, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I have never seen a movie in which Johnny Depp appeared, and I know that he was once married to Amber Heard, an actress otherwise unknown to me, only because of my ceaseless scanning of internet headlines. But it turns out that there is an interesting story behind the Depp-Heard divorce drama–a story that may illustrate widespread corruption among big-buck nonprofits. The Daily Mail reports: A bitter defamation lawsuit is
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May 30, 2021 — John Hinderaker
…to defend our military against critical race theory and related leftist dogmas that are being propagated by the Biden administration. Tom Cotton and Dan Crenshaw are doing exactly that: On Saturday, Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton and Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, both military veterans, teamed up to release a whistleblower form for military members to fill out if they spot any “woke” training efforts. Enough is enough. We won’t
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May 30, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Last week we had the “Shootout from George Floyd Square” broadcast live from Minneapolis. The video looks like a scene from a dark comedy. I think of it as the shootout at the not OK corral. It was in any event the perfect way to commemorate the anarchy and lawlessness Minneapolis has experienced in the year since George Floyd’s death. Patrick Coolican was a reporter who wrote (with Stephen Montemayor)
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May 30, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Jason Riley has just published Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell. Riley is senior fellow of both the Manhattan Institute and the Hoover Institution as well as a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday the Journal ran an excerpt of the biography under the headline “The soul of black conservatism.” Hoover’s recent profile of Sowell provides a handy overview of his life and work. It also reminds me
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May 30, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I think I accumulated my first 10 thoughts for our tenth anniversary online. I hope I’ll have one big one or 20 new ones in honor of our twentieth anniversary next year, but in the meantime I’m going to borrow from previous editions to note the occasion today. It was 19 years ago this weekend — 19 years ago today, I think, but maybe tomorrow — that John Hinderaker went
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May 29, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
I want to give Christian Adams Power Line’s last word on Kristen Clarke’s fitness to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Christian, after all, has had the misfortune of dealing with Clarke (I have not). And Christian’s assessment of Clarke encompasses the issue of voting — something I did not discuss in my many posts about her. Here is some of what Christian has to say about Clarke: Clarke
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May 29, 2021 — John Hinderaker
The idea that the novel coronavirus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been around for a while. WIV is located within blocks of the market where the Chinese Communist Party says the bat-borne virus jumped to humans–a remarkable coincidence if there is no connection. Establishment scientists long denounced questions about the Wuhan lab, raised by Senator Tom Cotton and others, as a “conspiracy theory,” which increasingly
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May 29, 2021 — John Hinderaker
The Wall Street Journal notes that, as the coronavirus disappears in the rear-view mirror, two Americas are emerging: The unemployment rate in April nationwide was 6.1%, but this obscures giant variations in the states. With some exceptions, those run by Democrats such as California (8.3%) and New York (8.2%) continued to suffer significantly higher unemployment than those led by Republicans such as South Dakota (2.8%) and Montana (3.7%). It’s rare
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May 29, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Over the last 18 hours or so, this video has been widely shared. If you haven’t already seen it, it opens another window onto Joe Biden’s mental state: Many have seen this as another instance of Biden’s weird obsession with little girls. Yes, but I think the truth is worse than that. Biden’s handlers have undoubtedly warned him many times not to act inappropriately toward little girls, but when he
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May 29, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Kamala Harris delivered the commencement address yesterday at the U.S. Naval Academy. In an attempt at woke humor, Harris inserted feminism into her homage to green energy. She said: Just ask any Marine today, would she rather carry 20 pounds of batteries or a rolled up solar panel, and I am positive she will tell you a solar panel. And so would he. At least Harris limited herself to two
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