September 17, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
For years, I’ve argued that major league baseball desperately needs a pitch clock. Everyone seems to agree that baseball’s painfully slow pace of play is a huge problem. Yet, MLB hasn’t implemented the one measure that would speed play up — a limit on how long pitchers can hold the ball without putting it in play. Watching dozens of old games on MLB-TV during the pandemic, I noticed that pitchers
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September 17, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
My friend who notifies me of rare instances when the New York Times provides less than favorable coverage of the Biden administration writes: Today’s NYT has a front page article with a picture on the border surge. This is unusual. Fox talks about the open border all the time, but the mainstream press generally ignores the issue to the extent that it can. Not today. The article even quotes Republican
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September 15, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Scott has provided video of the exchanges between Sec. Antony Blinken and several Republican Senators yesterday during a hearing on the Afghanistan fiasco. He has done a great service to those of us unwilling to watch Blinken in full. All of the clips Scott presented are worth watching. In this post, I want to focus on Sen. Rob Portman’s comments (the video is below). Portman presented the best data made
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September 15, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
A headline in the Washington Times declares: “Biden has ‘great confidence’ in Gen. Milley despite the general’s anti-Trump maneuvers.” A more accurate headline would replace “despite” with “because of.” Other than Milley’s anti-Trump sentiments and maneuvers, it’s difficult to imagine a reason why Biden would have any confidence in the general. Oh, wait. I forgot about Milley’s determination to expose military members to the anti-American ravings of critical race theorists.
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September 15, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
As Scott discussed in a post this morning, Gov. Gavin Newsom not only avoided recall, he avoided it quite handily. It seems that nearly two-thirds of the Californians who voted in this election favored sticking with Newsom despite the obvious deterioration of the Golden State and its governor’s foibles. Kyle Smith explains Newsom’s easy victory with a question: “Compared to what?” Conservatives got high on our own supply out in
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September 14, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Dozens of protesters have carried through on their threat to demonstrate at the home of Justice Kavanaugh because of his vote in the case challenging Texas’ anti-abortion bill. Newsweek reports: Around 50 to 60 people gathered outside Kavanaugh’s home in Chevy Chase, holding placards demanding that he resign and protesting against the new restrictive abortion law. . . . The demonstration was largely peaceful and no arrests were made. .
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September 14, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced new rules governing the federal monitors who impose their leftist views of policing on police forces trying to cope with skyrocketing criminality. These monitors exercise the authority of the federal government through consent decrees imposed on localities. Under Donald Trump, the Justice Department wisely stopped pursuing consent decrees. However, the Biden DOJ, under the leadership of BLM-supporting Vanita Gupta and racist Kristen Clarke, is
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September 13, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Nikuyah Walker is the mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia. She was elected to the city council in 2017 on a BLM-style platform and was selected by the council to be mayor in 2018 and 2020. Charlottesville knew what it was getting in Walker, and that’s what it got. She insisted that the city was racist, going so far as to tweet out a graphic poem that compared the “beautiful-ugly” college town
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September 13, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Citing FBI statistics, Tevi Troy informs us that hate crimes in 2020 reached their highest level in 12 years. Of religion-based hate crimes, 57.5 percent of them were targeted at Jews, even though Jews make up only 2 percent of the U.S. population. That’s what I call disparate impact. Yet, nearly everything I read in the mainstream media about hate crimes focuses on other minority groups. Tevi writes: Though American
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September 13, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Mail-in voting is fraught with the danger of fraud. The obvious danger is that ineligible voters will cast ballots or have ballots cast in their name. But now comes word from California that eligible voters are in danger of not being able to vote in person on the pretext that they have already voted. And guess what. It appears, anecdotally, that the voters who showed up to vote in the
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September 12, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
David Von Drehle writes that most of the time the war on terror “has felt like war only to the few, the deployed: the special operators, the contractors, the diplomats, the spies, the data analysts. . .the drone pilots. “For the rest,” he complains, “it has felt like mom’s birthday, finals week, the playoffs, just another April.” But when the enemy’s short-term goal is to terrorize populations and its long-tern
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September 12, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
A reader responded to my post about the shunning of Joe Biden by family members of troops who died at Kabul airport with this trenchant message: The heartbreaking ritual at Dover AFB, too often repeated, is inherently theatrical. It fixes our national attention, ignites the glare of media coverage. Every word and gesture is pregnant with emotion and meaning. We know this very well. And our leaders know it, or
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September 11, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Based on what I’ve read and seen, the prevailing narrative on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is that the war on terror went pear-shaped. 9/11 presented a test, and we failed it. On September 12, 2001, America was unified as it hadn’t been for decades. Our allies were fully behind us. But we blew it, or rather the Bush administration did by plunging us into war in Iraq. So I
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September 10, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
When George Bush was president, parents of armed service members killed in Iraq received special attention from the media if they denounced the war and criticized Bush. Cindy Sheehan gained a huge profile for bitterly attacking Bush after her son was killed. Eventually, she became a fringe figure, to put it as politely as I can, but this was only after Barack Obama succeeded Bush. Before then, the mantra on
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September 10, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Biden/Garland Justice Department has sued the state of Texas over its new anti-abortion law. You can read the complaint here. Whatever one’s views of the Texas law, the DOJ’s suit is baseless. Its filing demonstrates that under Joe Biden and Merrick Garland, the DOJ has become a hyper-partisan, unprincipled, and lawless tool of the left. The Department of Justice lacks authority to file any lawsuit unless a statute grants
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September 9, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Joe Biden today announced sweeping new coronavirus vaccine mandates of the kind he and key administration officials have previously said they would not impose. Biden will require that all federal employees be vaccinated, with no option for those who prefer to be regularly tested instead. More audaciously, Biden will mandate all employers with more than 100 employees to require that their employees be vaccinated or, alternatively, that the employees take
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September 9, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
If Code Pink demonstrators start screaming during a congressional hearing, should they be charged with a felony and sentenced to 20 years in prison? They have not been, and as much as I dislike Code Pink, they should not be. Thirty days in the hole seems like a sufficient sentence. But the federal statute that criminalizes “obstructing an official proceeding” of Congress makes such obstruction a felony punishable by up
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