Monthly Archives: December 2023
December 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
So people sensibly ask: how can you possibly stay in Krazifornia? Certainly we are governed by worse than the usual malevolent morons, but California’s natural assets allow for our moron overlords to exact a high cover charge to live here. As I often ask audiences, how many people would live in Arkansas if they had California’s level of taxation and regulation? Economists call California’s attractions “exploitable asymmetries,” though when I
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December 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Donald Trump has made news by saying, in these Truth posts, that Joe Biden’s illegal open border policy is intended to generate fraudulent votes in the 2024 election: Those posts are classic Trump. Who else in our political history–at least since the first half of the 19th century–has talked that way? No one. But what about Trump’s specific claim that Biden has allowed millions of illegal aliens into the country
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December 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The Christmas/New Year season is one of heightened terrorism alert in Europe. Today, German authorities announced that they had stopped an intended Islamic attack on Cologne’s (Koln’s) historic cathedral: German police have arrested three people suspected of planning a New Year’s Eve terrorist attack on Cologne Cathedral, which was reportedly to be carried out in a car loaded with explosives. Officers had first been informed of an attack planned for
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December 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The Washington Free Beacon has been tracking Joe Biden’s senior moments all year. They put together this “best of” compilation; it could have been a lot longer: The frightening thing is that Biden may very well be president (or alleged president) for another four years beginning in January 2025.
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December 31, 2023 — Lloyd Billingsley
Back on July 23, the Obamas’ personal chef Tafari Campbell “disappeared while paddleboarding in the waters of Edgartown Great Pond on Martha’s Vineyard.” The death of the 45-year-old was “ruled an accident,” but troubling questions failed to float away. Campbell had posted videos of himself swimming laps, so it was strange that an able swimmer perished in eight feet of water, in a pond for the most part half that
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December 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I have adapted the heading of this post from the great Thomas Sowell’s occasional columns expressing “random thoughts on the passing scene.” It is unbelievable how many apothegms he formulated and shibboleths he pierced in those occasional columns. In no way can I rise to Sowell’s standards. I only claim to have a few random thoughts. Random I can do. Sowell compiled numerous random thoughts from his columns in Part
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December 30, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Glenn Reynolds quotes some of the same accounts of rape and sexual mutilation of Israeli girls and women by Gazans that I wrote about here. What the Arab Muslims did on October 7 isn’t just unspeakable, it is almost unimaginable. Glenn comments: It’s as if these people are a bunch of degenerate animals, which is because that’s what they are. Hamas and the — majority — of Palestinians who support
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December 30, 2023 — John Hinderaker
From the DHS comes confirmation that the Biden administration will issue ID cards to illegal immigrants: [The Office of Immigration Program Evaluation] is leading the ICE Secure Docket Card (SDC) project, which offers a uniform, durable card provided to noncitizens upon release, and facilitates reliable access to commonly lost or damaged immigration-related paperwork. The SDC will be integrated with the Unified Immigration Portal that ICE and [Customs and Border Protection]
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December 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Who needs a rockin new year’s party when you have the Three Whisky Happy Hour in peak form, dishing out on the top stories of 2023, and, in the spirit of the late financial analyst Byron Wein, offering a range of potential low-probability surprises (rather than firm predictions) for 2024. What’s the difference between a prediction and a surprise? Well think about it this way: who would have predicted, at
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December 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I read a lot of columns and columnists to populate the Picks that rotate through the top of our home page. I thought I might take a look back over some of my favorites of the past year. Having thought about it over the past few days, I am afraid the list necessarily reflects a recency bias. Please take these Picks as representative of the columnists’ work and conservative publications
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December 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Another year, another set of ignored new year’s resolutions. But we’re ready to ring in the new year with expectations for more of the last year—Biden bumbling, Kamala cackling, Hunter huffing, Trump trumping, Ukraine underperforming, the media mediating, etc. We resume with Colorado’s threat to democracy, which spread to the mean streets of Maine this week. Happy new year everybody! Headlines of the week: And finally. . .
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December 29, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Nikki Haley made one of the few real blunders of the GOP primary season when she was asked at a New Hampshire town hall, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” For a Republican, this shouldn’t be a tough question. The Republican Party was founded mostly to oppose slavery. But Haley equivocated, in rather weird fashion: The cause of the deadliest conflict in American history, she said,
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December 29, 2023 — John Hinderaker
These days, pretty much any inconvenient phenomenon is chalked up to “climate change.” What is climate change? Basically, anything you don’t like. So bad things being “caused” by “climate change” is more or less a tautology. Not long ago, when there was a spike in U.S. wildfires caused mostly, I believe, by lousy forest management practices imposed by California environmentalists, the world was said to be on fire–unprecedented wildfires caused
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December 29, 2023 — Scott Johnson
John Mearsheimer is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He fancies himself an international relations scholar who belongs to the realist school of thought. With Harvard’s Stephen Walt, he is the author of The Israel-Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book to which I devoted a lot of attention on Power Line when it was published in 2007. Mearsheimer has regained a
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December 29, 2023 — Scott Johnson
In his post on Bill Barr, Lloyd Billingsley draws on One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General to mount a critique of Barr’s service as AG in two administrations, the second time at the behest of President Trump. Along with former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, I thought Barr was one of Trump’s most impressive appointees. If Trump were to be reelected in 2024,
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December 29, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll looks back to count A FEW THINGS I HAVE LEARNED THIS YEAR and throws in some good advice to boot. We look back with gratitude for her weekly contributions over the past 10 years. The grrrll thinks funny. She writes: In past years that have drawn to a close, I have felt compelled to offer a few New Year’s Resolutions. I will forego that this year for a
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December 28, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Maine became the second state to bar President Trump from running for the presidency when, earlier today, its Secretary of State, a left-wing activist, declared that Trump was an “insurrectionist” under the 14th Amendment. On the merits, this is an absurd claim. What happened on January 6 was a protest that got out of hand. The principal violence, and the only fatality, was inflicted by a capitol police officer. Not
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