January 11, 2025 — Steven Hayward
The first picture here, which has appeared widely in the media in LA, shows the likely first outbreak of the Eaton Canyon fire, which is now thought to have been sparked by an electrical line owned by one of our corporate socialist “public” utilities. The relevant thing for Powerline readers to know is that the house in the foreground is owned by one of my best friends (who by the
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January 11, 2025 — Steven Hayward
It’s been a three-fer podcast week for me, with the resumption of both the Ricochet podcast on Friday, a guest turn on Dany Pletka and Marc Thiessen’s “What the Hell is Going?” podcast, and then today with the all-new format 3WHH, which is moving to its own wholly independent identity at Ricochet and on my “Political Questions” Substack. We have an all-new logo for the 3WHH, as you can see
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January 11, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Trump clearly isn’t satisfied with just making America great again: he wants to make the entire western hemisphere great again! And who says Reaganism is over and fine with, now that we’re on course to reconquer the Panama Canal. Here’s an idea: build a long water pipeline from the Gulf of America directly to fire hydrants in California. (And maybe sneak some oil and natural gas in it when Newsom
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January 10, 2025 — Steven Hayward
A lot of my libertarian friends, especially at the currently drifting but once-great Cato Institute, like to defend their clueless open-borders disposition by pointing to statistics that purport to demonstrate that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. Even if you assume the crime statistics are complete and accurate these days (and usually it is libertarians who express doubt that our law enforcement bureaucracy reports accurately), it
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January 9, 2025 — Steven Hayward
I’ve been expecting the climatistas to rush to the barricades to declare that climate change is the key factor in the LA fires, and I have not been disappointed: Yet California just had two years in a row of double normal rainfall, but of course as John (and others) have pointed out, we let nearly all of it just run back out into the ocean: Meanwhile, fire prevention clearing, especially
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January 9, 2025 — Steven Hayward
• Having grown up in the LA area, I’ve seen a lot of big fires (sometimes up fairly close) along with our legendary earthquakes, but nothing like this. Although I live 200 miles north these days, many of the places seen on TV are very familiar to me. I used to run every weekend in Eaton Canyon and up the Mount Wilson fire road, and I can recall seeing the
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January 8, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Here’s a headline many people have perhaps expected: ‘The View’ Announces Major Shakeup to the Long-Running Weekday Talk Show So, is that egregiously awful show going to add some actual balance to its panel, ditch Sunny Hostin, who gives ABC’s legal department fresh headaches every day, or add some producers who insist Whoopi and Joy (who inspire neither thing, let alone any brightness from Sunny) include some actual facts in
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January 8, 2025 — Steven Hayward
It’s amazing what one shocking election will do. DEI is dying fast—even at McDonald’s! (Which never needed it in the first place, but never mind.) And then someone woke up (irony alert!) and noticed that Trump carried 65% of the votes of Native Americans, who I am sure Trump will refer to as Indians, to the delight of a majority of native Americans who wanted to keep “Redskins” as the
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January 8, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Kudos to the Wall Street Journal today for calling out the appalling hypocrisy of Democrats on “election denial,” most especially House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries had this to say in the House early in the week: There are no election deniers on our side of the aisle. You see, one should love America. One should love America when you win and when you lose. That’s the patriotic thing to
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January 7, 2025 — Steven Hayward
I don’t have a clear sense of who is winning the Russo-Ukraine War. Perhaps “neither” is the right answer, as appalling losses suggest the exhaustion of both sides but no sign that either will retreat, similar to World War I. There are lots of reasons to estimate that Russia has the upper hand in the long run, though Ukraine can hold off Russia for a long time as long as
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January 6, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Last week Victor Davis Hanson noted that Germany’s current de-industrialization, born of its fanatical “Net-Zero” climate mania that has resulted in ruinously high energy prices, resembles a self-imposed “Morgenthau Plan” from World War II. For readers not up on their World War II history, the “Morgenthau Plan” was a proposal hatched by the staff of, and endorsed by, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and presented to FDR at the Quebec summit
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January 6, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has resigned. I guess that groveling visit to Mar a Lago a few weeks ago wasn’t enough to save him. Amazing how many foreign leaders have been brought down a peg or four by Trump’s win. Anyway, if you wonder why Trudeau had to go before he got pushed by his own party, this chart explains it, even though it is a little hard to
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January 4, 2025 — Steven Hayward
For those of you with access to Newsmax TV, I’m scheduled to appear for a short segment about Jimmy Carter less than an hour from now, at 1:50 pm eastern time, with host Rob Astorino and Mark Halperin. Should be fun! And with a little more lead time for this second announcement, for readers in the Philadelphia area, I’ll be headlining a daylong conference at the Charles Widger School of
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January 4, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Only seventeen more days to go. But even a senile president can do a lot of damage in 17 days when he is a malevolent narcissist. Makes you long for the good old days when the worst thing an outgoing Democrat did was steal the White House china and furniture and rip out all the ‘W” keys from the computers. Headlines of the week: And finally. . . a throwback:
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January 3, 2025 — Steven Hayward
One of my low-probability but plausible surprise predictions for 2025 was that there will be a political crisis in Chicago, and perhaps the whole state of Illinois, on account of the radically deteriorating condition of the city under its radical mayor Brandon Johnson, whose public approval rating is somewhere down in the low teens. Our friends at the Illinois Policy Institute show one of the greatest sources of fiscal ruin
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January 2, 2025 — Steven Hayward
Elon Musk has raised eyebrows to DefCon1 with his recent endorsement of the insurgent AfD (“Alternative for Germany”) Party in Germany’s snap election next month, in the pages of DieWelt, one of Germany’s leading newspapers. AfD has a checkered character, to put it mildly, but like Marine le Pen in France, it seems the unified front of the established political parties against considering AfD as part of any governing coalition
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January 2, 2025 — Steven Hayward
San Francisco has a new mayor taking office shortly: Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, and described as a “moderate Democrat”—a term that, if not an oxymoron, is a museum piece these days. And on the relative scale of things, what does a “moderate” Democrat look like in San Francisco? Maybe someone who doesn’t want to make drag queen story hours mandatory in pre-school? In any case,
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