April 9, 2024 — Scott Johnson

The word from Dearborn

Featured image We are given to understand that the Dearbornistan vote has something to do with the Biden administration’s turn toward Hamas. In the category of what’s wrong with this picture?, the invaluable MEMRI tuned in to the International Al Quds Day rally in front of Dearborn’s Henry Ford Centennial Library (perfect!) this past Friday (video below). Chants of “Death to America” were joined with chants of “Death to Israel” among the »
April 8, 2024 — John Hinderaker

Total Eclipse of the Sun

Featured imageThe eclipse was a bust here in Minnesota. We were supposed to get around a 70% eclipse, but it was cloudy and the Sun never came out, all day. So, a moot point. One of my daughters lives in Texas and reports that the eclipse turned out to be rather cool there. But what can you really say, on a politics-oriented web site, about a purely scientific phenomenon? You can »
April 8, 2024 — Steven Hayward

The Daily Chart: Full F5 Nonsense

Featured imageWelp, we had earthquakes on both coasts last week, and today a total eclipse in the heartland. Can boiling frogs and locusts be far behind? All caused, of course, by climate change. Because there’s nothing it can’t do. Including make liberal Democrats looks stupid: What about tornados! We know those are getting worse with climate change: Enjoy your eclipse everybody. Just remember to wear your fake-news filtering glasses. »
April 8, 2024 — John Hinderaker

Is the Earth Round?

Featured imageI thought that question was settled a long time ago. People have knows that the Earth is spherical (more or less) for millennia. The ancient Greeks not only knew it was round, they used triangulation to calculate its circumference to within a small margin of error. So, are there really still people who think the Earth is flat? Allegedly so. This video got a lot of circulation on social media. »
April 8, 2024 — Scott Johnson

A politician for our time, cont’d

Featured imageThe site formerly known as Twitter covers a lot of news that you won’t easily find anywhere else, if at all. When it comes to the Hamas-Israel conflict, most of it is of the heartbreaking or infuriating variety. The tweet below, for example, falls into both categories — “Hamas Negotiators have reportedly told International Meditators in Cairo that it has No Ability to Release the 40 Hostages in the Humanitarian »
April 8, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Proofread this

Featured imageI’m not a fan of the Star Tribune, yet keeping up with it is an occupational necessity for me. The Star Tribune dominates the local news in roughly the same fashion that the New York times dominates the national news. It sets the agenda for other outlets that chase its tail. Over at Alpha News, we seek to fill the void created by the Star Tribune and its uncompetitive competitors. »
April 8, 2024 — Steven Hayward

Thought for the Day: Bill Clinton on Hamas

Featured imageYou know things are bad when Bill Clinton is the voice of moral clarity in the Democratic Party. Here’s what he said in 2016: “I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state. I had a deal they turned down that would have given them all of Gaza… between 96%-97% of the West Bank, compensating land in Israel, you name it.” “Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket »
April 8, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley

Olbermann Stalks Sage Steele

Featured imageOf COURSE it was scripted. If it hadn’t have been @sagesteele – the dumbest person I’ve ever worked with in sports or news – couldn’t have gotten through it. I mean Jesus, if this happened to you, you’d just assume it WASN’T being done to protect the network from you humiliating it – and yourself? That was Keith Olbermann, after Sage Steele revealed that her 2021 interview with Joe Biden »
April 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward

Thought for the Day, From Richard Weaver

Featured imageRichard Weaver (author of the canonical 1949 text, Ideas Have Consequences) writing about social science in 1956: Those Congressmen who are reported to have confused social science with socialism may not have been so dumb after all. They had the right intuitive perception, even if they got the academic distinctions a little confused. A thing is defined partly by its tendency, and the tendency of scientistic social science, from Comte »
April 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward

Has Hamas (and Biden) Checkmated Israel?

Featured imageVery discouraging news out of Israel today that the IDF is pulling its forces out of southern Gaza, supposedly to “rest, regroup, and re-supply” after four months of hard fighting. Let us hope this is true, but one can’t help but suspect that this move may be in response to demands from the Biden Administration that will inevitably lead to a permanent cease-fire which will amount to a Hamas victory, »
April 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Sunday morning coming down

Featured imageMerle Haggard died eight years ago yesterday at the age of 79 — to be exact, on his seventy-ninth birthday. Haggard is finally the subject of a full-scale biography — The Hag: The Life, Times, and Music of Merle Haggard (2022), by Marc Eliot. Mark Pulliam reviewed it at Law and Liberty in the excellent column “Our redneck poet.” He “expand[s] upon Eliot’s respectful (but not hagiographic) treatment of the »
April 8, 2024 — Steven Hayward

The Declaration of Independence, Updated

Featured imageThe ideologically indescribable historian John Patrick Diggins once offered this version of the Declaration of Independence if it had been written by contemporary intellectuals: We hold these truths to be historically conditioned: that all men are created equal and mutually dependent; that from that equal creation they derive rights that are alienable and transferable depending on the larger question of needs, among which are the preservation of life, liberty, and »
April 8, 2024 — Scott Johnson

To the Supreme Court

Featured imageI found the oral argument of the case now styled Murthy v. Missouri last month to be utterly demoralizing. As soon as the oral argument concluded I rashly hazarded my assessment that it portends a victory for the massive censorship-industrial complex represented by the Biden administration, probably on procedural grounds (i.e., standing). My assessment was a hot take based on the tenor of the argument. The argument seemed to me »
April 7, 2024 — John Hinderaker

Truth and Consequences

Featured imageThis is from Britain’s Telegraph, but I think we would see similar numbers in other countries, and worse in some: Only one in four British Muslims believe that Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on Oct 7, a major report has found. The numbers are even worse for “educated” Muslims: Younger and well-educated Muslims were the most likely to think Hamas did not commit atrocities on Oct 7, with »
April 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward

Why Biden Is Losing Young Voters, in One Chart

Featured imageAs I have written several times, with low unemployment, a (somehow) still-growing economy, and an unpopular rival candidate, Joe Biden ought to be breezing to a relatively easy re-election. But he continues to trail Trump. (Leave aside for separate treatment why the top line economic numbers are misleading. . .) Check out this chart from Bloomberg: Bloomberg translates what this means in terms of votes as follows: Trump is currently »
April 7, 2024 — John Hinderaker

The Coming Disinformation War

Featured imageIn the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins reviews the dishonorable role that the intelligence community played in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and predicts more of the same. In 2016: A Democratic presidential campaign, representing the incumbent party, fabricated evidence that its Republican opponent and the eventual president-elect was a Russian agent, and the in-power party’s FBI legitimated the evidence in the eyes of the media so it would be »
April 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Their story

Featured imagePresident Biden used the IDF’s accidental killing of the seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza to demand that Israel capitulate to Hamas. That’s my translation of the White House readout of Biden’s April 4 phone call with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I posted the crucial excerpt here last week. I also noted that Secretary of State Blinken added a twist in his April 4 press conference. He declared that »