May 21, 2022 — Scott Johnson
With perfect timing Christopher Caldwell reviews what we have learned about Watergate in the past 50 years. Caldwell’s First Things essay is titled “Regime change, American style.” The occasion of Caldwell’s essay is the publication of Garrett Graff’s Watergate: A New History. Caldwell’s essay usefully reminds us that, 50 years later, we still have no idea what the Watergate burglars were looking for. Whatever it was, however, they came away
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May 21, 2022 — Scott Johnson
When the Minnesota Department of Human Rights filed its 72-page charge of discrimination against the beleaguered and undermanned Minneapolis Police Department, I submitted a Data Practices Act request with the department for public inspection of the 480,000 pages of documents underlying the charge. I do not take the department’s charge at face value for reasons I suggested in “Who will speak for the MPD?” On May 10 I heard back
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May 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Bradley Foundation held its annual Bradley Prizes award ceremony this week in Washington on May 17. Moderated by the Wall Street Journal’s own former Bradley Prize-winning Kim Strassel, the event honored 2022 recipients Wilfred McClay, Glenn Loury, and Chen Guangcheng. Having been sent a link to view the ceremony via live stream, my wife and I watched at our kitchen table. When the great Bill McClay finished speaking, my
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May 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Glenn Reynolds’s New York Post column on the left’s hatred of Elon Musk has just rotated off our Picks. In case you missed it, I designate this paragraph the quote of the day: Musk is our greatest tycoon, and while NASA can’t seem to get a spaceship into orbit reliably, he’s been launching rockets and satellites and astronauts at a pace that no mere nation-state can achieve. And he’s doing
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May 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Senate Interior Committee held a hearing yesterday to examine the Biden administration’s fiscal year 2023 budget request for the Department of the Interior. The committee has posted video of the hearing here. The hearing presented an opportune moment for Interior Secretary Deborah Haaland to let her light shine and she did not disappoint. In the clip below Secretary Haaland avoids answering the question whether gas prices are too high.
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May 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I infer that Dr. Oz is going to emerge as the winner of the Pennsylvania when the initial tally is completed. With 99 percent of the votes counted as of Thursday evening, he led David McCormick by 1,100 votes or 0.1 percent. His lead has narrowed from about 2,600 votes or 0.2 percent as of late Tuesday evening. The final tally will land in automatic recount territory, but the recount
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May 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Steve and I have both weighed in on the six-month search for a bad spin on MAGA. Now it’s Ammo Grrrll’s turn to explore the PROCESS behind the marketing genius that produced Ultra MAGA. She has somehow obtained a transcript of the focus group assembled to do the work as she takes us deep inside the SIX MONTHS OF “RESEARCH” to BESMIRCH. She writes: A crack team of “researchers” assembled
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May 19, 2022 — Scott Johnson
President Biden has conducted an incredibly effective war on energy production in the United States. It is amazing what he has accomplished on this front in such a short span of time in office. We have seen his progress in the price we pay at the pump virtually every day since January 20, 2021. Steve Hayward maps out the path Biden has taken in the New York Post column “Biden’s
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May 19, 2022 — Scott Johnson
According to RealClearPolitics, 98 percent of the votes have now been counted on the Republican side of the primary election for Pennsylvania’s open senatorial seat. That’s up from 95 percent of the vote counted yesterday morning. Woo hoo! With the additional votes counted, David McCormick has cut Dr. Oz’s lead from over 2600 votes to 1241 votes — with well over a million votes having been cast. Oz’s lead computes
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May 18, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Adapting a famous translation of one of the Roman poet Martial’s epigrams, I disclose in lieu of reporting the outcome of the Pennsylvania primary election for the Republican senatorial nomination: I do not love thee, Dr. Oz. The reason why? Well, because… Reasons — plural. I draw straws. I do not love thee, Dr. Oz. With this qualification. I would “love” Dr. Oz in preference to Democrat John Fetterman, if
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May 18, 2022 — Scott Johnson
We have reached a grim milestone in grim milestones. A Google search on the term “grim milestone” now returns more than 6,000,000 results. It is a “grim milestone” in the unstoppable progress of a brain-killing media cliché. The “grim milestones” retailed by the media always seem to have a political twist and the political twist always seems to be detrimental to Republicans. If it can’t be given a twist detrimental
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May 17, 2022 — Scott Johnson
John Kass has posted a new podcast with the invaluable Heather Mac Donald on the war on cops, Chicago edition. “Everything the public thinks it knows about race and policing in this country, reverse it, and you’re likely to get the truth,” she said. Kass comments that Chicago Mayor Lori “lightweight” Lightfoot has turned over the downtown to the Black Lives Matters rioters. And now, with mobs cruising the Loop
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May 17, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Abbott has announced that it has agreed to to a consent decree under which it would be allowed to reopen its Michigan baby formula plant if all goes according to plan. Former FDA Associate Commissioner Peter Pitts supports the propriety of the FDA’s actions in the Abbott case. He sets forth his views in a New York Post column here. Mr. Pitts is the president of the Center for Medicine
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May 17, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The White House has posted the transcript of new press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s briefing yesterday. I posted a video clip of Peter Doocy’s “brain teaser” of a question along with the nonanswer Jean-Pierre read in the adjacent post before the transcript was available. The transcript lets us widen the focus to the entire exchange. The view afforded by the widened focus is even worse than the single exchange in the
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May 16, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Joe Biden has advocated raising corporate taxes to “bring down inflation.” Not some idiotic departmental secretary, but the superannuated dunce himself. Even Jeff Bezos isn’t buying that one. Indeed, as John noted, he’s hooting in derision. The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead. Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss.
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May 16, 2022 — Scott Johnson
We posted the video of Justice Thomas’s interview with John Yoo here in its entirety over the weekend. The interview was conducted Friday evening conference at a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution in Dallas. Now Townhall has clipped the video below from the interview. Justice Thomas’s concise comment on the performance of the press can stand alone as an eternal verity
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May 16, 2022 — Scott Johnson
We greatly enjoyed the news regarding the rollout of the new biography of (Don’t Forget to Call Her Doctor) Jill Biden’s biography by AP reporters Julie Pace and Darlene Superville. What was the news? The sales were dismal. We filed the news under “Signs and omens.” I feel obligated to update that post with Bloomberg’s report that Kamala Harris collected some $450,000 in book royalties during her first year in
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