December 6, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll running to keep up with GALLOPING GRATITUDE. She writes: I know what you’re thinking: Ammo, LAST week was Thanksgiving. NOW you choose to talk about “Gratitude”? Did you not get your homework in on time? Ah, but I can explain. My dearest Orthodox Jewish mentors and friends do not celebrate either Father’s or Mother’s Day as any kind of special day because they believe it sends the wrong
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December 5, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I recently came to the defense of former Attorney General Bill Barr in “They comfort me.” My post specifically addressed comments made by Lloyd Billingsley in “Thy Rod and thy staff” and pointed out Lloyd’s misleading quotation from Barr’s excellent memoir. A reader who shall go unnamed wrote me an email in response to my defense of Barr: “When you try to discredit Trump about the integrity of the 2020
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December 5, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The Supreme Court hearing in United States v. Skrmetti featured several highlights. As framed by the Biden administration, the case raised the question: Whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1 (SB1), which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity,”
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December 4, 2024 — Scott Johnson
It is unusual for judges to respond to political attacks or to correct the public record in controversial cases. Judge Mark Scarsi has now done so with a blistering response to the big lies of President Biden in the statement that preceded Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden. The White House has posted the text of the statement and pardon online. Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to the charges against him in
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December 4, 2024 — Scott Johnson
This past month FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr took up the work of NewsGuard in a letter to the chief executive officers of Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), and Apple. I learned of the existence of the letter in Carr’s NewsNation interview with Chris Cuomo posted here by RCP. Carr is President Trump’s pick to chair the FCC. In the interview with Cuomo he states that he will seek to “smash
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December 4, 2024 — Scott Johnson
On the local front I have sought to draw attention to the case of JaycCee Cooper v. USA Powerlifting in several posts accessible here. Filed in Ramsey County District Court and assigned to Judge Patrick Diamond, the case raises the question whether USAPL’s separation of men from women in USAPL’s Minnesota competitions must yield to Cooper’s self-identification as a woman. Although a biological male, Cooper seeks to compete with the
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December 3, 2024 — Scott Johnson
President Biden’s comprehensive pardon of Hunter for crimes he may have committed since 2014 presents as a barking dog of a clue to the “work” of the Biden crime family. It also presents as a barking dog of a clue to the “work” of the flacks, hacks, and quacks who work us over every day. Somewhere along the way they lost their sense of shame. Shamelessness is a bona fide
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December 2, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Catching the early flight from Minneapolis to Washington, D.C. on Thanksgiving, we found a group of players from the Minnesota State–Mankato Mavericks women’s hockey team waiting for their teammates at the entrance to the G Concourse. We were sitting at the coffee shop off to the side. “There’s the Gophers women’s hockey team,” my wife said to me. Close, but not quite. The ladies looked happy hanging out together. They
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December 2, 2024 — Scott Johnson
If you think President Biden is the leader of a crime family and everything he says is a a lie, father pardoning son despite numerous vows he would never do so comes as something other than a surprise. When Joe pardoned Hunter yesterday, however, he prefaced it with a laughable statement. The White House has posted the text of the statement and the pardon here. Biden actually includes this proposition
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December 1, 2024 — Scott Johnson
President Trump has announced his appointment of Kash Patel as Director of the FBI. That means incumbent director Chris Wray will have to resign or be fired. Which will it be? We shall see. The important point is that the president has the unencumbered power to remove the director even though Wray is serving an unexpired ten-year term. See Robert Chesney, “Backgrounder: The Power to Appoint & Remove the FBI
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December 1, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Chris Hillman celebrates his 80th birthday next Wednesday. I can’t let it pass by without note. This morning I am taking the liberty of observing the occasion with this slightly revised tribute that I wrote in August 2020. Since I wrote it, Chris has published his memoir Time Between: My Life As a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond. It expands on just about everything I have to say below. I
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November 30, 2024 — Scott Johnson
In January 1933 the Oxford Union voted 275-153 to approve the motion: “That this House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country.” The proposition became known as the Oxford oath. Winston Churchill was not amused. While others counseled that it be dismissed as youthful folly, he declined to ignore the proceedings at Oxford. Rather, he declared it “a very disquieting and disgusting symptom” and proceeded to explain
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November 29, 2024 — Scott Johnson
You may have heard of the appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. In the Thanksgiving Day video below, Kamala Harris is filmed in the same location and attire that she appeared in earlier this week when some doubted her sobriety. It must have been filmed later the same day, by which time Kamala could walk a straight line. In the Thanksgiving video, however, Harris was joined by Doug Emhoff.
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November 29, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Jay Bhattacharya has been nominated by President Trump to head the National Institutes of Health. During the Covid regime, Dr. Bhattacharya was relegated to the “fringe” by the likes of former NIH head Francis Collins and his NIAID colleague Anthony “fallacious” Fauci. John Tierney observes at City Journal that Jay-B is the doctor who came in from the fringe: Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at
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November 29, 2024 — Scott Johnson
As she says, Ammo Grrrll’s topic today is ROOKIE MISTAKES. She writes: So enough already with post-election analysis. I want to turn utterly from politics, to a brief restoring respite from them. So our topic today is: Rookie Mistakes. It’s a fun topic that I hope to use as a recurring theme, so I will just cover a couple of categories today. A quip I saw decades ago in Reader’s
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November 28, 2024 — Scott Johnson
We arrived early at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport this morning to catch the first flight to Washington, D.C. When we stopped for coffee, my wife pointed out the Minnesota State–Mankato Mavericks women’s hockey team. They stood together smiling at the entry to the concourse where we were headed. They told me they were traveling to Dartmouth for games this Friday and Saturday. That took me by surprise. I told them
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November 28, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Paul A. Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship and is one of the country’s most distinguished scholars of history and politics. His personal site is here. In view of his study of Republics Ancient and Modern, Professor Rahe is the academy’s foremost authority on the history of republics. Although his subsequent work
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