Monthly Archives: September 2024
September 26, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
Kamala Harris’ plan to visit the border has recalled her support for illegal alien Sergio Garcia to obtain a license to practice law, a move opposed by the Obama DOJ. Garcia is now the poster child for the policies Harris would apply as president. The media spin it as a feel-good story, but some facts need clarification. Garcia’s parents brought him to the United States as a toddler but when
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September 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
John noted yesterday that the commercial real estate market (especially downtown office buildings) is in considerable distress, and might well get much worse before it gets better. But there are other signs that all may not be well with our overall economy. The first clue is Democrats who tell us not to believe our lying eyes (and supermarket prices). But there is also data, especially about consumer confidence, which is
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September 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Next week will see the 60th anniversary of the inception of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, which became one of the milestones of the radical student movement of the 1960s. Berkeley is very proud of that legacy. Two weeks ago Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and former ACLU executive director Nadine Strossen appeared at a campus forum championing free speech and rejecting the “heckler’s veto” over unpopular views and
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September 26, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Kamala Harris’s flip-flops have surpassed John Kerry levels, reinforcing that she is in fact product of Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: “There’s no ‘there’ there.” She was going to end fracking—until she needed to win Pennsylvania. Now she is for ending the Senate filibuster so that a nationwide, unlimited abortion statute can be passed by a bare majority. But in another case of “being for it before I was against it,” in
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September 26, 2024 — Scott Johnson
In her Devine Online newsletter this morning, New York Post columnist Miranda Devine takes up President Biden’s appearance on The View yesterday. For those of us who missed it, Devine writes: Joe Biden is still president and, on Wednesday, when he appeared on ABC’s rancid talk show, “The View,” he showed himself, yet again, to be morally unfit for the job. Just ten days after the second assassination attempt against
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September 26, 2024 — Scott Johnson
In the adjacent post I serve up the 24-minute MSNBC video of Kamala Harris’s “interview” with Stephanie Ruhle yesterday. Here I want to offer bite-sized video clips via X for those who don’t have the taste for the whole thing. Speaking of bite-sized…here Harris reiterates her McDonald’s fakery. This is the least of it. It’s all fakery. Ruhle: "At any point in your life, have you served two all beef
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September 26, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Last week on Bill Maher’s HBO show Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC appeared with Bret Stephens of the New York Times. When Stephens had the temerity to suggest that Kamala Harris owed it to the American people to come out from beneath her rock and do a solo interview or two revealing her plans and schemes, Ruhle instructed Stephens that he was mistaken. We didn’t need to learn anything about Harris
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September 25, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Eric Adams, the Mayor of New York City, presides over an administration that has been disastrous in nearly every way. A federal corruption investigation has led to the indictment of a number of members of the Adams administration. Today, the (presumably) final shoe dropped: Adams himself has been indicted: Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted by a grand jury on charges connected to a federal probe that has shaken his
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September 25, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Democrats try to pass Tim Walz off as a small-town moderate, “America’s coach.” The reality is entirely different, as Minnesotans know: he is a hard-core left-winger. Walz is in the midst of a radical overhaul of K-12 education in Minnesota. The curriculum of every class in every grade in every school is now required to include instruction in “Ethnic Studies.” Voters might naively think that Ethnic Studies means learning that
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September 25, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
In his first speech at the United Nations, Argentine president Javier Milei said: Now, at some point, as is often the case with most bureaucratic structures that we men create, this organization stopped upholding the principles outlined in its founding declaration and began to mutate. An organization that had been essentially intended as a shield to protect the realm of men, was transformed into a multi-tentacled leviathan that purports to decide not only what
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September 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The progressive left, in another of its typical toddler temper-tantrums, wants to pack the Supreme Court, by means of getting rid of the Senate filibuster if necessary. (But never forget that Trump is the violater of “norms” and a “threat to democracy.”) Bruce Mehlman’s weekly “Age of Disruption” Substack points to some interesting graphics that can tell us a lot about judicial politics today. First, you can see from Gallup
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September 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
To no one’s astonishment, Penn has reprimanded Prof. Amy Wax for her crime of disagreeing with campus woke orthodoxy. Prof. Wax will be suspended for the next academic year, her salary cut in half, and stripped of her title as the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law. This outcome was foreordained from the beginning of the witch hunt several years ago, and it is a near certainty that Wax would have
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September 25, 2024 — Scott Johnson
President Biden gave a farewell address to the United Nations General Assembly. The White House has posted the 3,000-word transcript here. I have posted the NBC video at the bottom. Perhaps more than anything else, it gives us an occasion to recall the insight of former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Gates committed his judgment to book form in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War: “I think he has
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September 24, 2024 — John Hinderaker
The commercial real estate market is in the doldrums across much of the U.S., but it is especially bad in some places. Like Minneapolis. John Phelan relates the bad news: Last week, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reported: Two downtown Minneapolis office towers have sold in a deal representing one of the core’s steepest discounts in recent history. The 634,000-square-foot Forum buildings, previously known as International Centre and Oracle Centre,
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September 24, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Last week we noted that newsrooms skew more heavily Democratic than ever, and the AllSides report this was based on has additional ways of viewing the problem: If you think this heavy skew doesn’t affect news coverage, if only by selection bias, then I have Florida swampland and a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. A separate survey of elite opinion by our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity
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September 24, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Republicans held a narrow majority in the Minnesota state senate after the 2018 elections that produced Tim Walz as governor. The Republican majority was reduced to one vote after the 2020 elections. Paul Gazelka served as the senate majority leader for five years including the entirety of Walz’s first term. Mr. Gazelka did an excellent job holding his caucus together and keeping Walz in check — until Walz seized on
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September 24, 2024 — Scott Johnson
TCM is running a series based on the New Republic’s list of “The 100 most significant political films of all time.” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006) came in at number 19 on the New Republic list: “Set in the 1980s, this German drama tells the story of a morally conflicted Stasi agent spying on two East German residents, a playwright and an actress.” The film made
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