June 16, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Power Line’s sports desk (Paul) is covering the Euro 2020 soccer tournament, but at the risk of annoying him with my soccer denialism, I want to bring to readers’ attention some real excitement yesterday in Munich, when a Greenpeace stuntman seriously injured two spectators, and ripped up the overhead “spidercam,” with a parachute jump into the stadium ostensibly intended as some kind of incoherent climate protest. The Daily Mail has a
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June 15, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Like Joe Biden, I didn’t pay attention to the G-7 meeting. (Heh.) Who needed to follow it when you knew that its chief product would be the brave declaration that we’ll all be “carbon-neutral” by 2050. The only thing missing was one of these clowns holding up the piece of paper saying, “I give you [climate] peace in our time.” Let’s check in on some actual energy news: • G7 Nations
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June 15, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Let’s stipulate right off the top that Stephen Colbert is the very worst of the late night TV talk show hosts. Supposedly he’s a “comedian,” but Trump broke him, too, and for the last several years he’s given the retired Garrison Keillor a run for his money for the title of “angry [partisan] humorist.” He’s been so unfunny as to be unwatchable even in small doses. And let us stipulate
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June 13, 2021 — Steven Hayward
J.P. Sears strikes again, this time explaining, as only he can do, the recent evolution of “wokeness,” from “the pre-paleowokalithic era,” and before the social justice warriors learned “how to make weapons out of keyboards.” And I note that for the second week in a row, Bill Maher took after his fellow progressives for their “progressophobia” (fear of progress), but I’ll skip over posting the video here, partly because it
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June 12, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Pour a double for this weeks 3WHH, as Lucretia and Steve host Michael Anton to talk about his extraordinary new article, “The Art of Spiritual War, Or, How to (Posthumously) Conquer the World from Your Desk.” The author of the famous (or infamous) “Flight 93 Election” article in 2016 covers an amazing amount of ground in a short space, which includes rehabilitating Machiavelli in a certain way, and then asking
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June 12, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It was a tough call deciding on the lead theme for the week, given how Jeffrey Toobin’s reinstatement at CNN summons fond memories of the eternal return of Anthony Weiner. It just shows that the Toobin Missile Crisis wasn’t armageddon for his media career. But Kamala Harris distributing faceless cookies of herself has to be perfectly fitting for her faceless, clueless vice presidency. Headlines of the week: And finally.
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June 11, 2021 — Steven Hayward
By now it is clear that Kamala Harris has had the worst week for a Vice President since Dan Quayle misspelled “potato” and attacked Murphy Brown almost 30 years ago. There are news reports, no doubt aided and abetted by some cagey White House staff, that the White House is “troubled” or even “dismayed” by her poor performance. I’m guessing a lot of Biden’s long-time loyal staff have discovered the
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June 10, 2021 — Steven Hayward
As regular listeners know, we never tire of beating up on Progressivism—both the old kind and today’s high-octane version—and we especially like to beat up on Woodrow Wilson. Most of what we know about Wilson’s perfidy comes from the ur-text of Wilson criticism, Ronald J. Pestritto’s Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism from 2005. R.J. (as he is known to his friends), is out this week with a
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June 10, 2021 — Steven Hayward
• With today’s bad inflation number, here’s what the trend looks like—but not to worry, I’m sure it’s nothing, and I’m sure the Biden Administration and the Fed are on it: • According to Gallup’s latest polling, a majority of Americans now prefer returning to normal life as soon as possible, and getting outside. There’s a catch, though. There’s a sharp partisan divide. Democrats—the “party of science,” remember—prefer to keep
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June 9, 2021 — Steven Hayward
In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen what a complete shambles the mainstream media have become. First up, someone at the New York Times was formatting a fake story about watermelons on Mars—perhaps this was a training exercise for a new employee?—but somehow managed to press the “publish” button, and this appeared on the Times website: Now, I could go a long time on the idea of “fruit aliens.” Wouldn’t
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June 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
One of the many things the Biden Administration wants to do is increase the enforcement budget of the IRS, so it can hound tens or hundreds of thousands more taxpayers every year in their rapacious desire to punish the prosperous. (Remember: According to the new liberal dogma of “Modern Monetary Theory,” we can borrow and spend all we want without consequence, so there is no reason to raise any tax
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June 7, 2021 — Steven Hayward
No sooner do I select the most funnest Tweet of the day than Cher steps up with this howler: She’s so indignant that she can’t even bother to identify the correct Kirsten, because I guess all blonde Kirstens look alike to her. Gives me an excuse to tell a celebrity story, from almost 30 years ago. For some reason I can’t now recall, I got to have a one-on-one lunch
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June 7, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I had no idea this was a thing, and if it wasn’t happening I’d have had to make it up: You really owe it to yourself to click through to the NewYorkerUnion home page, and take in the photos and statements of the “oppressed” class of New Yorker employees who are demanding justice! I have a hard time seeing any of them walking a picket line in Manhattan on a
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June 7, 2021 — Steven Hayward
First up, Washington and Lee University in Virginia has decided, after a long and stupid debate, not to change its name because, you know, Robert E. Lee, who as president of Washington College after the Civil War, rescued the institution from bankruptcy, whereupon the faculty had moved to have his name added to the institution. That was then, and this is now, to naturally the imperatives of the wokerati had
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June 6, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The New York Times reports today on an unintentionally hilarious and revealing internal study a consortium of Democrat-aligned consulting groups have produced concerning the fact that aside from Joe Biden, Democrats performed very poorly in the last election. There is special worry over the “overperformance” of Trump and Republicans with hispanics and blacks, which isn’t supposed to happen according to Democratic “emerging demographic majority” dogma that says if “we label
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June 6, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Once again Bill Maher went off the liberal script and attacked universities in his closing monologue in his latest Friday night HBO show, and if you look past his gratuitous insults of Florida, Republicans, etc., it is striking how much he sounds like someone who reads City Journal. I do notice that audience reaction to this one is noticeably more tepid than some of his other recent attacks on the
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June 5, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The modern conservative movement born in the 1950s had two main objects: It was anti-Communist, and anti-New Deal. Lately, however, some conservatives have warmed up to both FDR and the New Deal, which has to have Robert Taft rolling over in his grave—and maybe William F. Buckley, Jr. too. Conrad Black, an esteemed man of the right, has long championed FDR as a “champion of freedom” (the subtitle of his
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