February 22, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Three years ago I sat down with Fred Siegel with my video camera and conducted a long interview with him about nearly everything, which I then edited down to five short installments on Power Line (you can take in the first episode again here and find the rest in our search window if you prefer vide0), but I realized that our complete conversation would make a great podcast. The result
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February 22, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I’m not much of an NBA fan (I prefer college hoops) but I did always enjoy watching Charles Barkley—”the round mound of rebound.” At only six-foot-six, Barkley always played like he was 6’10” around the rim. I even more enjoy listening to him talk. I remember when he was on the US Olympic “Dream Team” in the early 1990s, and a TV reporter asking him about their first round opponent,
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February 21, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The left would have you believe that America is a sea of hate from deplorable Trump voters, and on campus especially we hear endlessly that dissent from the party line is “literal” violence to vulnerable peoples. Strangely, actual violence on campuses (and elsewhere) seems to be the monopoly of the left. Such as this incident at Berkeley today, where a student with a table on Sproul Plaza promoting Turning Point
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February 21, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Well now this is curious, and an inconvenient fact for the “abolish billionaires” movement that thrives currently in the Democratic Party. (Keep in mind that besides Robert Reich saying all billionaires cheated, AOC’s chief of staff Tweets under the handle “Every billionaire is a policy failure.”) It turns out that of the top 20 nations on the UN’s Human Development Index, nine have more billionaires per capita than the United
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February 20, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Lots of news to catch up with and comment on today. • An RBG sighting! After weeks of being out of public view and prompting a ton of rumors, Justice Ruth Buzzie Ginsburg appeared—in person—at the Supreme Court yesterday, just in time to hand down today’s unanimous ruling that the 8th Amendments’s “excessive fines” clause applies to the states through “incorporation” of the due process clause. This ruling will greatly
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February 19, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I am so looking forward to the Democrats’ 2020 demolition derby at the four-way intersectionality of Identity Politics Boulevard and Oppression Road. Even more so now that Bernie Sanders is in. No surprise there. What is amusing is that Bernie looks to be running as a straight white male. Get a load of this exchange: When asked by VPR’s Bob Kinzel about concerns that he no longer best represents “the
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February 17, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Bruno Ganz, the talented Swiss actor who portrayed Hitler in “Downfall” and countless video parodies, has died at the age of 77. I had retired from doing “Hitler Learns About. . .” parodies, but by popular demand, here’s one final one from Power Line Productions—the parody to end them all I hope:
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February 16, 2019 — Steven Hayward
The fascination with every twitch and Tweet from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—”the moral equivalent of Gore,” as our friend Richard Samuelson calls her—is one of the compelling mysteries of our time, along with the absence of the Cambridge Comma. If there’s an Oxford Comma, why isn’t there also a Cambridge Comma? Or maybe it has merely been overtaken by what I call the “Shatner-Walken Comma,” which runs something like: “What, do you
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February 15, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Just in time for the long holiday weekend, an early edition of the Power Line Show, with special guest Justin Buckley Dyer of the University of Missouri. Prof. Dyer is the co-author (with Micah Watson) of a terrific book on C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law. Though Lewis was known as a literary critic and Christian apologist, a lot of his work bears on the deepest political and
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February 14, 2019 — Steven Hayward
A couple days ago in my post on “The Laffer Curve of the Left,” I predicted: MMT is getting some backup from mainstream economists. The incoming president of the American Economics Association, Olivier Blanchard, argued in his presidential address that the costs of public debt might have lower welfare costs than previously thought, which you can bet will be cited by the Krugmanites of the world on behalf of a
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February 14, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I like to say that half of the problems with the world today are linguistic, specifically, softheaded thinking follows soft language. Back when we referred to “the jungle,” it was something we wanted to cut down, but now it is the rain forest, and we can’t touch it. No one much cared about trash when we took it to “the dump,” but now it is called the landfill, so we have
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February 14, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Readers may have followed the ruckus that Tucker Carlson ignited on Fox News with his January 3rd monologue that many read as an abandonment of free market principles and an embrace of unguided populism, or at the very least, an implicit endorsement of protectionism on behalf of manufacturing and skilled labor jobs in the heartland. Now, I can pick a lot of nits with a number of particulars that Tucker
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February 13, 2019 — Steven Hayward
• So this is interesting news: Snow falls in Hawaii a few times a year in winter on the state’s highest peak, Mauna Kea rising 13,803 elevation in feet, but the white stuff is rarely seen at elevations below 9,000 feet to 10,000 feet. On Sunday, Maui’s 10,ooo-foot Haleakala received a thick dusting and snow also accumulated at 6,200 feet in Polipoli State Recreation Area. Officials at the Department of Land and
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February 13, 2019 — Steven Hayward
You just knew that a full-scale Maoist ideology struggle session would break out amongst college administrators in the aftermath of Governor Moonwalk’s yearbook fiasco. And behold American University: To: American University Community From: Daniel Myers, Provost, Fanta Aw, Vice President of Campus Life Re: Yearbook Review Dear American University Family, When the issue of yearbooks and past student conduct emerged in the national conversation last week, AU
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February 12, 2019 — Steven Hayward
One of my favorite Lincoln speeches is one that tends to be overlooked—his eulogy to Henry Clay in the Illinois State Legislature in 1852. This provides the best evidence that had Clay lived another decade, Lincoln would likely have supported him to be president in 1856 or 1860. In any case, Lincoln calls Clay his “beau ideal of a statesman,” and gives a compact teaching about the essence of statesmanship:
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February 12, 2019 — Steven Hayward
One of the genius effects of Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s was that he turned Democrats into deficit hawks, which was an unfamiliar place for the Keynes-drunk party that exists to spend more. It was an existential crisis for Democrats. Reagan’s tax cuts and unprecedented (at that time) budget deficits not only forced Democrats into becoming tax increase advocates, but put the brakes on any extravagant new spending programs.
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February 10, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Just in time for your Monday morning commute, we offer a show looking back on Michael Anton’s controversial 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election” which was compared to Tom Paine’s Common Sense as a tract that grabbed the public imagination. Michael is back now with a new book, After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote That Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose. I caught up with Michael Sunday
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