Monthly Archives: May 2023
May 24, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Daily Beast’s Confider newsletter provides an interesting update on Fox News viewership in the wake of Tucker Carlson’s departure. I have no comments of my own other than that I thought readers might share my interest in the numbers. Confider first notes “the negative impact” of the Trump town hall on CNN’s ratings: “Last week, the cable news pioneer suffered its lowest-rated week since June 2015, averaging just 429,000
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May 24, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi writes from the perspective of the ever shrinking political left supportive of civil liberties and, well, the truth. I turned to him on a regular basis for his unerring commentary on the Russia hoax. More recently, he has been a key contributor to the Twitter Files. In his subscribers-only post “The McCarthy reboot” at his Racket News site, Taibbi reviewed the performance of the Democrats at the House
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May 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Two sets of current poll data are of interest. First, Americans hate the news media. Nothing new here, but if anything the feeling has intensified. Good. Rasmussen reports: The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 30% of Likely U.S. voters say they trust the political news they’re getting – down from 37% in July 2021 – while 52% say they don’t trust political news, and
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May 23, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
During a Monday meeting with House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY), the FBI refused once again to turn over an FD-1023 (a report from an informant) that allegedly details a bribery scheme between then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national. Comer issued a subpoena for this document three weeks ago. In a May 3 letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, Sen. Chuck Grassley
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May 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
I have no idea what Google thinks of you, but I know what it thinks of Power Line, and of me. Because I asked Google Bard, the company’s new artificial intelligence application. Google Bard is described by ZDNet here. I did this because a friend emailed me a disparaging description of Alpha News generated by Google Bard. So I asked, “Is Power Line a reliable news source?” This is the
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May 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
More from the latest Harvard-Harris Poll showing that Biden and the Democrats are on the wrong side of the public on leading issues, from cars, immigration, Biden’s race baiting, criminal justice, and affirmative action.
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May 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
At the G7 meeting in Japan, Joe Biden went on a riff that seems to be about our federal budget. See if you can figure out what he is trying to say: President Biden rambles unintelligibly for 40 seconds… pic.twitter.com/eaMZB0OQzo — The First (@TheFirstonTV) May 21, 2023 Can you imagine being one of the G7 translators and trying to turn this mush into something intelligible in a foreign language? More
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May 23, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I wrote to Peter Schweizer to ask him for his comment on the New York Times story by Adam Goldman that I discuss in the adjacent post. Peter points out “a couple of things”: 1. The FBI’s investigation of the Clintons was hamstrung by senior FBI leadership which limited their ability to investigation allegations that went far beyond just what was in my book. As the Wall Street Journal confirmed
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May 23, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Adam Goldman was part of a team of New York Times journalists that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for national reporting on the Russia hoax. Goldman and his Times colleagues promoted the hoax. They and their sources seemed not to notice that the Steele Dossier was a farce on its face and the FBI’s Russia collusion investigation something worse. The Times was itself a key player in the hoax.
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May 22, 2023 — Steven Hayward
It goes without saying that you could never screen Blazing Saddles on a college campus, because the woke could never pick up the satire on racism at its heart. In fact as Mel Brooks repeatedly says, he couldn’t make the movie today. The wokerati embedded in Hollywood would kill the project. Ditto for Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which is partly a satire of political extremism. (“What have the Romans
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May 22, 2023 — John Hinderaker
You can’t replace reliable energy (coal, nuclear, natural gas) with unreliable energy that most of the time produces nothing (wind and solar). If you do, the electric grid will fail and there will be blackouts. That is the situation we are in today. Isaac Orr writes: On Wednesday, May 17th, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) issued its 2023 Summer Reliability Assessment. Summarizing the report, Utility Dive noted that
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May 22, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The latest Harvard-Harris Poll is just out, and it has some very interesting findings. One that several people have noted is that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Ron DeSantis have the highest public favorability ratings among our leading political figures, and Biden’s unfavorable ratings are even higher than Trump’s. Moreover, the head-to-head matchup shows Trump continuing to strengthen, and showing that the ABC News/WaPo poll about 10 days ago showing
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May 22, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The NAACP has been a worthless organization for a long time, but its latest DNC-echoing attack on the State of Florida–it issued a “travel advisory”–may represent a new low: "Under the leadership of Governor Desantis, the state of Florida has become hostile to Black Americans and in direct conflict with the democratic ideals that our union was founded upon." — NAACP President and CEO @DerrickNAACP Take a stand with us.
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May 22, 2023 — Steven Hayward
From Angelo Codevilla’s posthumous book, America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams: The role of U.S. intelligence agencies is a prime example of how foreign policy has succumbed to the ways of the administrative state. Prior to World War II, American statesmen made decisions on the basis of their own understanding of foreign situations, augmented by reports from diplomats and from a press that
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May 22, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Today the Wall Street Journal editorial board makes a point that I also have made repeatedly on this site: there is zero chance of a default on sovereign debt arising out of the current budget impasse in Washington. The press hysteria, which we have seen before, arises out of a deliberate misuse of the word “default.” The editorial board writes: The debt talks are stalled and President Biden is again
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May 22, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I’m afraid I made a coding error that cut off the concluding points in this post — starting with “On the up side….” I am not sure what happened or if I fixed it, but I am taking the liberty of of reposting the whole thing as I intended it below * * * * * John and I are based in Minnesota and can’t help drawing on the politics
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May 22, 2023 — Scott Johnson
John and I are based in Minnesota and can’t help drawing on the politics of the local scene in our commentary. It is of interest in itself and of interest for illustrative purposes. Minnesota Democrats — the DFL — took control of the political branches following the elections this past November. Governor Walz was reelected by a wide margin over a weak Republican gubernatorial candidate. However, the margin of victory
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