Liberals
July 18, 2021 — John Hinderaker
One good thing about covid was that highway traffic was way down, so where I live we finally could get where we were going. With covid now more or less finished, traffic congestion has returned. But, as transportation expert Randal O’Toole explains, mass transit ridership remains depressed: Americans drove nearly 96 percent as many miles in May 2021 as in the same month in 2019, indicating a return to normalcy.
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July 16, 2021 — John Hinderaker
It is no surprise to any reader of this site that Wikipedia has been taken over by the Left, but it is perhaps notable that Wikipedia’s co-founder says the site has lost its way: Wikipedia has been taken over by left-leaning volunteers and only offers a one-sided version of information, according to the online encyclopedia’s co-founder. Larry Sanger, an American philosopher who co-founded the website in 2001, said the online
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July 15, 2021 — John Hinderaker
…is the love that American liberals have for Cuba’s Communist dictatorship. By any sane reckoning, Fidel Castro was an utter disgrace. And yet American liberals, as well as some Europeans, have never been able to let go. When asked in a press conference whether Cubans are protesting and trying to leave the island because they “don’t like Communism,” Jen Psaki could only dither: I think we’ve been pretty clear that
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July 6, 2021 — John Hinderaker
People are fleeing California in general, and San Francisco in particular, in droves. As to San Francisco, the fundamental problem is lawlessness. Which means not just violent crime, which the city has in abundance, but a breakdown in the fundamental norms of civilization that make urban living possible. The main problem is that San Francisco’s far-left city administration has decided not to prosecute theft. The result, naturally, is an epidemic
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June 30, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I know, this is a post we could do several times a day. But here are a couple of examples of the sheer insanity of today’s Left. First, in Ohio GOP representative Jena Powell introduced a bill to prohibit boys from competing in girls’ sports. Just a few years ago, this would have been noncontroversial, if anyone had even thought of such a thing. But today, the “trans” ideology has
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June 27, 2021 — John Hinderaker
We have written many times about the sad decline of the City of Minneapolis. Perhaps the number one villain of the story is City Council President Lisa Bender, who famously said on television that calling 911 when someone breaks into your house “comes from a place of privilege.” It is remarkable that such goofballs can be elected to public office. Minneapolis’s Uptown district has been devastated by riots and general
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June 9, 2021 — John Hinderaker
To say that Democrats have mixed feelings about the American flag is an understatement. The more moderate ones don’t actually burn the flag, but you can tell that they don’t much like it, either. That doesn’t prevent them, of course, from copious flag displays on ceremonial occasions, but I don’t think anyone believes their hearts are really in it. Occasionally the mask slips, as when far-left New York Times editorial
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June 2, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Thousands of emails to and from Dr. Anthony Fauci have become public through a FOIA request by the Washington Post. Reaction to the emails has generally been partisan: Democrats have hailed them as validating their view of Fauci as a secular saint, while conservatives have found confirmation of their suspicions of the life-long bureaucrat, who went to work for the NIH during the Nixon administration and has been rising through
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May 29, 2021 — John Hinderaker
The idea that the novel coronavirus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been around for a while. WIV is located within blocks of the market where the Chinese Communist Party says the bat-borne virus jumped to humans–a remarkable coincidence if there is no connection. Establishment scientists long denounced questions about the Wuhan lab, raised by Senator Tom Cotton and others, as a “conspiracy theory,” which increasingly
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May 29, 2021 — John Hinderaker
The Wall Street Journal notes that, as the coronavirus disappears in the rear-view mirror, two Americas are emerging: The unemployment rate in April nationwide was 6.1%, but this obscures giant variations in the states. With some exceptions, those run by Democrats such as California (8.3%) and New York (8.2%) continued to suffer significantly higher unemployment than those led by Republicans such as South Dakota (2.8%) and Montana (3.7%). It’s rare
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May 26, 2021 — Steven Hayward
You can find synoptic leftists who say that climate change requires solving every other social problem in human history, but there is in fact a lesson to be drawn between the explosion of homelessness over the last few years and the renewable energy mania proffered as a solution to climate change. Let’s start with this NPR (NPR!!) report on the $1 billion Los Angeles is spending on homelessness, with no
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May 24, 2021 — Steven Hayward
The current scene keeps bringing back to mind the old saying attributed (incorrectly) to Mark Twain: history doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes. Right now the country seems to be repeating the cycle of the 1960s, when liberals in power gave us reckless spending that stoked inflation, social engineering like “model cities” and busing, degraded law enforcement with soft-on-crime policies contributing to a massive crime wave, and race riots that elicited
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May 23, 2021 — John Hinderaker
My study of the data convinces me that mask mandates are utterly useless. The one thing in their favor is that, unlike shutdowns, they do not inflict vast human and economic damage. Rather, they are what many call a minor inconvenience, or what I think are mostly a symbol of submission to authority. In free states around the country, people have been going maskless for a while. But here in
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May 19, 2021 — John Hinderaker
When Americans think of failed cities, places like Portland, Seattle, Detroit and Baltimore come to mind. But Minneapolis is, at a minimum, flirting with a similar status. The problem is out-of-control crime. Last Saturday night, six people were shot in Minneapolis, including a nine-year-old girl. Alpha News has the straight story: A nine-year-old Minneapolis girl is in the hospital after she was struck by gunfire over the weekend, making her
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May 15, 2021 — John Hinderaker
As mask mandates fall around the country, liberals are being left disoriented. Now that the CDC says it is OK to forgo masks both inside and out, they desperately want to continue virtue signaling, but–on what basis can they claim masks as a virtue? It’s a puzzle! You may remember David Hogg. He was a teenager elevated into an anti-Second Amendment crusader by a cynical press, and more recently the
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May 10, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Daniel Pipes graduated from Harvard in 1971, the same year in which Paul and I graduated from Dartmouth. To Daniel’s misfortune, one of his college classmates was Chuck Schumer. Schumer, the next year, was one of my law school classmates. Happily, I have no recollection of ever having met him. Daniel writes: “The worst class ever”: that’s how Nathan Pusey, Harvard’s then-president, described my undergraduate cohort of 1971. What a
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May 10, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Buzzfeed has a story that is perhaps unintentionally revealing. Facebook documents leaked to that outlet indicate that Facebook is trying to assuage Starbucks’ ire at “hate speech” the company is encountering on the social media platform: Facebook is scrambling to prevent Starbucks from leaving its platform after the world’s largest coffee company said it was dismayed by hateful comments left on its posts about racial and social justice issues. In
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