Monthly Archives: September 2024
September 30, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
“Terry Teachout published more pieces in Commentary than any other writer in the magazine’s 76-year history,” wrote John Podhoretz in January of 2022 after Teachout passed away at 65. “The loss to his loved ones, the loss to the American theatre he both championed as a critic and mastered as a playwright, and the loss to the broader American culture he knew more fully than anyone else in our time
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September 30, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
In March of 2021, Joe Biden appointed Kamala Harris to take charge of the border. Since then, the Biden-Harris administration ushered in some 10 million illegals, with no criminal background checks. With crime by these illegals a raging issue with voters, Harris made a rather odd choice to introduce her at an event in Douglas, Arizona, last Friday. Doing the honors was Tori Verber Salazar, former district attorney of California’s
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September 30, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Hurricane Helene has devasted a wide swath of the Southeast, especially portions of North Carolina. Of course this has nothing to do with the government. A hurricane is what used to be known, quaintly, as an act of God. But some of us remember with bitterness how the Democratic Party press blamed President Bush for Hurricane Katrina, and used that absurd narrative to destroy Bush’s second term. The idea of
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September 30, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Israel’s stunning success in taking out the entire leadership of Hezbollah has laid the foundation for a ground incursion that will eliminate the terrorists’ ability to threaten northern Israel, where somewhere around 100,000 people have had to flee their homes to avoid Hezbollah rockets. The Wall Street Journal reports: Israeli special forces have been carrying out small, targeted raids into southern Lebanon, gathering intelligence and probing ahead of an expected
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September 30, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Gallup is one of the country’s oldest and, as far as I can tell, least partisan polling companies. It is valuable in part because it has asked the same questions over a considerable period of time, and therefore can document trends. One question Gallup has been asking for many years is party identification: do you consider yourself a Republican, lean Republican, a Democrat, or lean Democrat? Here are the results
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September 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Animal rights have been around for quite a while now, but I have spotted the next big thing for the misanthropic left: plant rights. I’m not making this up. The New York Review of Books has a book review by and follow-up interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, who up to this point has distinguished herself as one of the leading climate change hysterics. Her newest obsession might be called “the secret
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September 30, 2024 — Scott Johnson
In my head I can hear some keffiyeh-clad folk singer warbling an adaptation of the folk song about union activist Joe Hill: “I dreamed I saw Fateh Sherif last night, alive as you and me…” That would be after the IDF blasted him in an airstrike in one of those eternal refugee camps in Tyre, Lebanon. Sherif was head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Lebanon with a second gig
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September 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
We noted here about 10 days ago that several elite universities are boasting about achieving their “diversity” (meaning racial) goals for admissions of this year’s incoming class—the first since the Harvard decision outlawed using race as an admissions factor—and concluding that these universities either lied to the Supreme Court that racial preferences are essential, or are cheating by disguising their continued but now unlawful practice of using racial preferences. One
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September 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I’ve added a new term to Power Line’s Lexicon of Contemporary Political Terms: Consensus: When everyone agrees with the agenda of the left. Take in John Kerry talking about the need to reach “consensus,” which obviously means agreeing to obey him—but be sure to watch to the very end, when he lets the mask slip about what leftists really think of freedom and our Constitution (just 2 min long): Note
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September 30, 2024 — Scott Johnson
This past Friday Kamala Harris made a rare appearance at the border wall near Tucson. Harris proposed fake restrictions that would have no effect on the invasion of illegal aliens that she invited, facilitated, and then lied about during her years in office as vice president in the incumbent administration. The video below compiled by the Daily Caller includes clips from Harris’s Meet the Press interview in September 2022 (transcript
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September 30, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The Sunday morning gabfests are generally a waste of time, but Senator Tom Cotton’s appearances are not to be missed. He was the lead guest on Face the Nation yesterday. I have posted the video at the bottom. CBS has posted the transcript here. Robert Costa filled in for regular host Margaret Brennan. Costa asked Senator Cotton about Israel’s potential expansion of the war between Israel and Iran. This is
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September 30, 2024 — Scott Johnson
David Samuels takes up the case of Tucker Carlson in his overlong Tablet essay “Op nation.” Circling around the subject of conspiracy theories, Samuels makes some arguable and some compelling points. When he comes to Tucker Carlson, he is over the target: If you truly believed that America’s fate was about to be decided by the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the holographic representative of the Democratic Party
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September 29, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Israel’s precision attacks on Hezbollah have brought warfare to a new level of sophistication. This New York Post story mostly summarizes reporting by others, but it is a good compendium: Former Israeli intelligence officials and Lebanese politicians told the FT that the battle in Syria unearthed a trove of information from the otherwise secretive terror group, with Hezbollah constantly publishing information on its slain fighters that revealed their personal information.
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September 29, 2024 — John Hinderaker
A society can reach a point where it is literally too stupid to survive. Are we getting close to that fatal juncture? Here is one of many thousands of data points: a judge in Indiana has ordered that state to pay for sex-change surgery on a convicted murderer. Not just any murderer, but Jonathan Richardson, who is serving a 55-year sentence for strangling his own stepdaughter. He now goes by
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September 29, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Some years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates was the hottest thing on the Left, viewed as an intellectual of world-historical importance. Scott performed the excruciating task of reading Coates’s Between the World and Me. It won the National Book Award for nonfiction, but Scott called it the worst book he had ever read. Coates made a lot of money from his racist grifting, and then disappeared from sight. He hasn’t been heard
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September 29, 2024 — Scott Johnson
You may have heard that the Secret Service was dispatched to guard the president of Iran — one Masoud Pezeshkian — during his visit to the United Nations in New York last week. For some reason, the Secret Service has done a better with the President Pezeshkian than with President Trump. AEI’s Danielle Pletka attended a closed session with Pezeshkian for press types. Pletka sizes Pezeshkian up and discreetly (per
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September 29, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Albert O hosts the weekly Saturday morning show Highway 61 Revisited on WUMB. The station seeks to promote various genres of folk music. The music of Bob Dylan and the ’60s/’70s are the inspiration of Highway 61 Revisited. Yesterday’s show was the first of two dedicated to recordings released in 1976. Why feature the music of 1976? The only reason I can think of is the bicentennial of the United
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