January 23, 2020 — Steven Hayward
[Note: This lengthy post is mainly intended for our academic readers and connoisseurs of conservative intellectual history, and if this is not your cup of tea—like Paul’s soccer posts—you’ll want to move on right away to another item and spare us your TL;DR complaints. . .] I had a notion that when I said in my observance of the passing of Sir Roger Scruton that he was “the greatest conservative
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January 22, 2020 — Steven Hayward
This special edition of the Power Line Show offers a panel discussion on impeachment that I hosted and moderated yesterday before a packed house at Berkeley Law School. Its purpose was not to rehash or thrash out the specific issues of the Trump impeachment as much as to illuminate what the founders had in mind when they wrote impeachment into the Constitution, and what we have learned from the two
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January 22, 2020 — Steven Hayward
A predictable dustup over sexism has arisen in Australia over a KFC ad that has caused KFC to apologize and pull the ad. This has had the predictable effect—millions more people around the world have seen this ad (funny that the oh-so-woke Guardian would embed the ad—I’m sure it was just an oversight by a junior editor), which we are proud to share with Power Line readers—only 15 seconds long:
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January 21, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Last week I mentioned the possibility that Michael Bloomberg is setting himself up to run as an independent in the fall. Today we should entertain the possibility that Hillary is itching to run again, and hoping to be “on call” in case of a deadlocked convention. Why not? She’s tanned, rested, and ready! Did you hear there is a documentary hagiographic film about Hillary coming out soon on Hulu? (Of course, it
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January 20, 2020 — Steven Hayward
This special edition of the Power Line Show uses the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as the occasion to ponder his legacy in light of the lengthening of history and the dramatic changes in the poisonous racial politics of our moment. And who better to comment than “Lucretia,” Power Line’s international woman of mystery, along with special guest Peter C. Myers, who is professor of political science at the University
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January 20, 2020 — Steven Hayward
One of the many odd things about the New York Times‘s “1619 Project” on slavery is that Martin Luther King Jr is barely mentioned (ditto Frederick Douglass). This omission may not be accidental, since both Douglass and King found sources for the remedy of slavery inside the American founding that today’s left wishes to repudiate completely. It will be a curious thing to see whether and how the 1619 Project
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January 19, 2020 — Steven Hayward
There’s a joke from way back in the 1980s about how the major media would report the announcement that the world is going to end tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal’s headline would say, “World Ending Tomorrow; Markets to Close Early.” USA Today’s headline would say, “World Ending Tomorrow, but We’ll Grin and Bear It.” And the New York Times headline would say: “World Ending Tomorrow: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.” Lo and
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January 19, 2020 — Steven Hayward
While we await the start of today’s conference championship games, I came across a story from a few months back that just makes you want to stand up and salute our armed forces even more than usual: US troops drink Iceland capital’s entire beer supply in one weekend More than 6,000 soldiers were in Reykjavik for four days participating in the Trident Juncture 18 – a NATO-led military exercise. After their drills, the
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January 18, 2020 — Steven Hayward
If you think it is impossible to sink lower than CNN, well have a look at a piece up over at NBC News by Noah Berlatsky: Trump Voters Motivated by Racism May Be Violating the Constitution: Can They Be Stopped? The article goes on to report on the “reasoning” of Terry Smith, a visiting professor of law at the University of Baltimore Law School (I never heard of him either), which
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January 18, 2020 — Steven Hayward
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally got the chicken entrails that she needed to see, and has transmitted the yellowing and brittle articles of impeachment to the Senate, following which the stock market soared even higher, proving yet again that gridlock is the next best thing to constitutional government. Good times! Meanwhile, the Democrats hosted the world’s most boring presidential debate ever. See, this is what happens when you toss out
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January 17, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Everyone is scandalized that Arizona Senator Martha McSally called a CNN reporter a “liberal hack” and refused to speak with him, but I think this falls into the category of a Michael Kinsley gaffe, that is, when someone tells the truth they’re not supposed to tell in Washington. As Paul noted yesterday, CNN completely disgraced itself in the Democratic debate Tuesday with its handling of the Warren-Sanders “he said—she said”
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January 17, 2020 — Steven Hayward
What if Michael Bloomberg isn’t really running for the Democratic nomination at all? It is well known that Bloomberg looked closely at running for president as an independent in one or two previous election cycles, partly because he knew his chances of winning the Democratic nomination were very remote. He decided against it in 2016 because he was certain it would hand the election to Trump. Bloomberg’s chances of winning
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January 16, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Today’s email brings this hysterical warning from the good folks at The Nation: Trump’s attacks on public radio are sickening. Trump’s new budget will literally END funding for Public Radio! Public Radio is SO important for millions of Americans. It provides accurate journalism and high-quality educational programming. Trump knows these cuts mean less educational programming for rural Americans, but he doesn’t care. Could there be anything more cheering and cockle-warming than hearing that the Federal government
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January 15, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I try to keep up with some social science, partly for the amusement value, and partly because social science is sometimes useful for proving the obvious (which is also amusing). But I’ve been falling behind in posting highlights, so it is time to catch up. First up, do you think it is really necessary to prove that good looking people enjoy a lot of advantages in life? Apparently this proposition
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January 14, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I thought this headline represented a nadir for the Washington Post in the last week, though it can be excused at least for being reporting about the collective madness of the Democratic Party: But the Post has yet greater reserves. Did you know that Star Wars is — wait for it — racist? Of course it is: And it’s not just the characters, but the music itself! [I]f we take a moment
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January 13, 2020 — Steven Hayward
The good folks at ReasonTV put together this 15-minute highlight reel of Bernie Sanders’s greatest socialist hits, and I expect we’ll see parts of this rolled out by other campaigns—especially Bloomberg but ultimately Trump’s campaign—if Bernie does well in the early primaries. Worth it alone for the quote at the very beginning on the virtue of food lines in socialist countries. That one quote alone ought to kill Bernie’s campaign
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January 13, 2020 — Steven Hayward
This week’s guest is Stephen F. Knott of the Naval War College, discussing his terrific new book, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency: The Decline into Demagoguery and the Prospects for Renewal, just out from University Press of Kansas. Knott, one of the nation’s pre-eminent scholars of Alexander Hamilton, thinks the American presidency has slipped from the modest republican design of the Founders almost from the very beginning, starting with
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