July 13, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Poland’s incumbent president, Andrzej Duda, has been elected for another five-year term. He narrowly defeated Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw and friend of the EU. With nearly all votes counted, the split was 51.2 to 48.8. Duda is an ally of President Trump. Duda visited Trump at the White House shortly before the first round of presidential voting, in which he also came out on top. Duda is a
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July 13, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The number of daily reported cases of the Wuhan coronavirus in the U.S. increased by three fold in the past month. As we approached mid-June, around 20,000 new cases per day were being reported. Now, the daily number is averaging around 60,000. (All numbers cited in this post are from Worldometer.) Some of the increase is due to more testing. But last week, testing reportedly plateaued. Yet the number of
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July 13, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Adrian Wojnarowski reports on basketball for ESPN. He became a media star by breaking big stories (as NBA news goes), the way Adam Schefter does with the NFL but probably more so. His tweets of major NBA news are called “Woj bombs.” To drop these bombs, Wojnarowski relies on league sources, including players and team executives. His sources could give the information to any of a number of reporters, but
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July 12, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Kimberly Gardner is the St. Louis prosecutor who caused a warrant to be served on the McCloskeys, the couple that brandished, but did not fire, guns when a mob broke into their property and threatened them. Gardner has threatened to prosecute the McCloskeys for violent assault. Gardner’s record as St. Louis Circuit Attorney is abysmal. I’m told that her conviction rate is only around 20 percent in cases tried to
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July 11, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
This week, demonstrators took to the streets of Anacostia, an area in Southeast Washington, D.C. where I was born, to protest the taking of black lives. But they weren’t protesting police misconduct. They were protesting the killing by gang members of an eleven year old boy and the lax policing of their neighborhood. The boy, Davon McNeal a budding football star, was gunned down as he was leaving a Fourth
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July 11, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
According to this report, law enforcement officials in St. Louis served a warrant on Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple that brandished guns when an angry mob trespassed on their property and allegedly threatened them with violence. St. Louis police officers reportedly executed a search warrant and seized the rifle Mark McCloskey held during his confrontation with the mob. Attorney Harmeet Dhillon had this to say about the
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July 10, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
President Trump has commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, who was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency.” But the congressional investigation of Russian interference in the
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July 10, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
In this post from last month, I tried to explain why Republican presidents have far less success nominating reliably conservative Supreme Court Justices than their Democratic counterparts have in nominating liberal ones. The main reason, I said, is that the conservative legal movement in America has multiple strands, not all of which point adherents to a result that can be called, or agreed upon as, conservative. For example, if one
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July 10, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
In an interview broadcast last night on Sean Hannity’s program, President Trump said he was about to send in forces to take back the area in Seattle known as CHOP. Hannity asked: I had a source that told me, I was not able to confirm it, that one of the reasons that the Seattle mayor finally acted is that they were given notice that if they didn’t act that you
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July 9, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Today, the Supreme Court navigated its way through disputes about the disclosure of President Trump’s financial records without doing much harm (in my view, at least). However, the Court issued a real stinker in a case that was under my radar — McGirt v. Oklahoma. By a 5-4 vote, the Court decided that much of Oklahoma is “Indian country” for the purpose of prosecuting crimes committed by Indians. Justice Gorsuch
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July 9, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
I’ll say this for Judge Emmet Sullivan, he’s a persistent old cuss. Sullivan is so determined to sentence Michael Flynn that, rather than giving up after an appeals court ordered him to grant the government’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case, he has petitioned the full appeals court for en banc review. His lengthy brief can be found here. I can understand why Sullivan fights on. First, the appeals court’s
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July 9, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Departing from the practice (universal, I think) of modern presidential candidates, Donald Trump refused to make public his tax records. Not good. Trump’s political enemies contrived to use congressional and prosecutorial authority to force the disclosure of Trump’s financial records. Not good. Both sets of enemies went to town. They subpoenaed not just President Trump’s records but also those of Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump. Not good.
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July 8, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
As I discussed here, the NBA will allow its players to replace the names on the back of their jerseys with political messages. I guess it’s a good thing DeSean Jackson plays in the NFL, rather than the NBA. Recently, this luminary issued an anti-Semitic statement on Instagram, based on a Hitler quote (apparently fake). Jackson soon issued a less than fully satisfactory apology. However, as Ed Morrissey points out,
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July 8, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
On July 4, a group of more than 400 Princeton faculty members and (from the look of it) hangers-on sent a letter to the university’s president and other leaders on the subject of “anti-black racism.” After a few perfunctory and unsupported allegations about this phenomenon, the authors proceed to the business at hand. They present several dozen “demands.” Each demand seems more outlandish than the last until, finally, we get
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July 8, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Supreme Court today handed down decisions in two important cases involving religious freedom. Considerations of religious freedom prevailed in both. In Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrisey-Berru, the issue was whether the First Amendment’s religion clauses prevent civil courts from adjudicating employment discrimination claims brought by an employee against her religious employer, when the employee carried out important religious functions. The Court ruled that the First Amendment does
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July 7, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Israel has done extraordinarily well in preventing the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. It reports only 37 deaths per one million people (342 deaths in total). By way of comparison, the U.S. reports 405 deaths per million. Only Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, and Hawaii report fewer deaths per million than Israel. Israel’s success is probably due to the stringent measures it took early on to keep the virus from spreading. They
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July 7, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington, D.C. area has a large number of black immigrants from Africa. My impression (and it’s only an impression) is that these immigrants make up a considerable percentage of people who care for the elderly in this area, and are well represented among local taxi drivers. I gather they are well represented in certain other job categories too, but it is in these capacities that I encounter them. Do
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