September 14, 2012 – 4:08 pm
This is just terrific. Obama in 2007: “I truly believe that the day I’m inaugurated, not only does the country look at itself differently, but the world looks at America differently. If I’m reaching out to the Muslim world, uh, they understand that I’ve lived in a Muslim country — and I may be a […]
September 10, 2012 – 10:31 am
Over at VFR, commenter “Buck” has presented an amusing little doggerel dating back to 1949: DEMOCRATIC DIALOG Father, must I go to work? No, no, my lucky son. We’re living now on Easy Street On dough from Washington. We’ve left it up to Uncle Sam, So don’t get exercised. Nobody has to give a damn”” […]
September 7, 2012 – 12:41 pm
With yet another hat-tip to VFR, here’s an interesting little item on Mitt Romney’s despisÁ¨d Bain Capital.
September 6, 2012 – 10:53 pm
Well! There you have it. I have to say: the more political conventions I see, the more I miss H. L. Mencken. “There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging. It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard […]
September 5, 2012 – 3:19 pm
I live in New York’s 11th Congressional District, and so my proxy in the House of Representatives, the champion responsible for advancing my interests in the august councils of this great Republic, is a woman by the name of Yvette Clarke. Ms. Clarke recently appeared on The Colbert Report. During her brief interview, she was […]
September 4, 2012 – 7:12 pm
In this election year’s frenzy of so-called “fact-checking”, we’ve been hearing a lot about the Obama administration’s recent maneuver regarding the 1996 welfare-reform law known as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, part of the Social Security Act). In case you missed it, back in July, HHS secretary Sibelius issued a fiat declaring that the […]
August 28, 2012 – 6:40 pm
In this endless, eye-gouging, brass-knuckled, dung-flecked presidential campaign, we’ve been hearing an awful lot of noise from the Obama machine about an imaginary conservative “war on women”. (It’s calumnious rubbish, of course.) On the the other hand, there is indeed one resolutely committed ideological faction in this world that really is waging a relentless war […]
August 22, 2012 – 2:49 pm
Here’s a delightfully un-PC item about Mitt Romney, by NRO’s Kevin D. Williamson, that’s sure to push all the right buttons. (As I write, it’s already clear from a quick survey of Twitter that those buttons have been pushed en masse.) It begins: What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select […]
August 19, 2012 – 1:02 pm
Remember Mike Dukakis in that tank?
August 16, 2012 – 11:51 am
Closed-door meetings between Obama, Biden, and Hillary Clinton today… I find it hard to believe that Ms. Clinton would accept Mr. Biden’s place on the ticket, but we’ll just have to see. Of course, they might just be talking about, oh, foreign policy, or something, I guess. [snicker]
August 15, 2012 – 9:45 am
What do you think, folks — will Joe Biden, who just seems to get battier and battier, be on the ticket in November?
August 11, 2012 – 11:11 am
So! Paul Ryan it is. Good choice, I think. It tilts the centrist Romney’s ticket toward fiscal conservatism, and makes the choice in November crystal-clear. Also: can’t wait for the Ryan – Biden debates! Last night on Twitter, just after the choice was “leaked”, Jonah Goldberg tweeted: “Joe Biden just soiled himself.” Will Antonin tweeted […]
August 10, 2012 – 8:29 pm
Following on our earlier item about unintended consequences, here’s another. They’re everywhere, it seems. Who knew?
NRO posted a good piece by Yuval Levin today, on competing views of the mediating layer that stands between the individual and the State. Here.
Patrick Buchanan explains, clearly and sharply, why the GOP will die, a witless suicide. Here.
There’s been quite a ruction over Mr. Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark. Are you one of the legions of his supporters who insist that his words were twisted out of context? Fine, then. Here’s Jim Geraghty responding, point, by point, to the rest of that horrifying, deeply revealing speech.
John Stossel gives President Obama’s ACA victory speech a brisk fisking, here.
Here’s more on the ACA ruling, from Daniel Foster at NRO. From Kennedy’s dissent, joined by Scalia, Alito, and Thomas (but not Roberts!): “In our view, the entire Act before us is invalid in its entirety.’
The blogger Poor Richard makes an interesting point about the Obamacare ruling, here.
Well, SCOTUS made its big ruling today, and the key point of contention — the individual mandate — was upheld. I haven’t read the opinions yet, but it seems the IM was ruled not to be permissible under the Commerce Clause, which was what pretty much everyone thought the decision would hinge on, but was […]
Scientist James Lovelock, best known for his development (with Lynn Margulis) of the “Gaia hypothesis” and for his ardent advocacy of radical measures to prevent global warming, surprised us all a little while back when he told MSNBC that in retrospect he thought he had been too “alarmist” about climate change. (It is no small […]
OK, last item about Wisconsin: for those of you who hadn’t followed the recall campaign, here’s a video clip that should help to explain what happened there yesterday. The Dow shot up 286 points today.
Sorry to harp on politics, but the Walker victory in Wisconsin yesterday was an important inflection point, and this recent piece by economist Walter Williams underscores its significance so clearly and straightforwardly that I’m going to reproduce it here in full. Why was Wisconsin so important? Because the tragedy-of-the-commons effect described here by Williams is […]
James Lileks weighs in, so to speak, on the soda-ban ruction.
Warning: you won’t be able to unsee this.
A few months ago one of our readers reader kindly sent me a copy of The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. I finally got around to reading it, and recommend it to you all. Here’s the publisher’s summary over at Amazon: For […]
The big news of the day is that President Obama, after years of reticence on the topic, has just announced that he supports same-sex marriage. I don’t suppose this will have much effect on the vote. It’s hard to imagine that his coming out in favor of SSM will snatch any supporters away from Mitt […]
East Germany, before and after.
As depressing as presidential campaigns are, they can be entertaining, too, as long as you enjoy forms of entertainment that don’t cheer you up. President Obama just gave us a good example with his latest promotional offering, The Life of Julia, which chronicles a faceless, solitary woman’s journey “forward” from cradle to grave, apparently without […]
We note with some surprise the Obama campaign’s adoption of the word Forward as its new slogan. The word has, of course, been a rallying cry of socialists and Marxists for a very long time — so much so that Wikipedia even has an entry about it. Perhaps this indicates a refreshing frankness on the […]
In case you’ve been shackled to a drainpipe for the past couple of weeks, there’s been an escalating tension in the air over the fate of Obamacare, now that the Supreme Court has heard the case. President Obama, warning the other day that he would view a negative ruling by the Court as “judicial activism”, […]
In the comment-thread of a recent post, I’ve been arguing with our resident gadfly The One Eyed Man about the Constitutional legitimacy of Obamacare’s individual mandate — part of a broader disagreement about the proper scope of Federal power. After much back-and-forth I wrote: Bottom line: Constitutional law is a fascinating study, combining history, literature, […]
March 28, 2012 – 12:09 pm
The New York Times opines today about yesterday’s Obamacare arguments in the Supreme Court. Predictably, the editors seem to believe that the effects of the Affordable Care Act are of sufficient national importance to trump its Constitutional audacity, and so they are willing to brush aside yesterday’s sharp questioning by conservative Justices as mere tendentiousness: […]
March 27, 2012 – 11:51 pm
It was a big day at SCOTUS, and long awaited: the Justices heard oral arguments about the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate, and the buzz seems to be that it was rough sailing for the Solicitor General. Transcript here. Decide for yourself. Tomorrow: severability. If the mandate falls, does it take down the whole rotten […]
March 26, 2012 – 12:46 pm
The story making the rounds today concerns Barack Obama’s remarks to Vladimir Putin’s proxy Dmitri Medvedev, as detected by some open mics: President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space. President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message […]
Here, courtesy of VFR, is another illustrative account of the myriad blessings that the cult of Diversity showers upon us all. As anyone with a realistic understanding of history and human nature knows, high diversity erodes social trust and cohesion, and this story has it all: ethnic conflict, identity politics, race-hustling lawyers enriching themselves by […]
March 14, 2012 – 10:13 am
Oh, no, this is awful. It looks as if Obamacare is going to end up costing more than the Democrats told us it was going to! Who could ever have imagined that they would deceive us like this? I feel so… used.
March 13, 2012 – 11:02 pm
This in my inbox just now, from info@barackobama.com: Friend — If the general election were held today, President Obama would lose to Mitt Romney — according to the latest poll from Washington Post-ABC News. And then there’s this, from today’s Times: Obama’s Rating Falls as Poll Reflects Volatility Despite improving job growth and an extended […]
We’ve been hearing ad nauseam about what a cad Rush Limbaugh was to call Sandra Fluke a “slut”. (I certainly agree that he would have been far wiser not to, for assorted good reasons, not least of which being that it was ungentlemanly.) President Obama was shocked — shocked! — to hear such language, and […]
My goodness: it looks like the long Congressional career of Dennis Kucinich might be coming to an end as a result of tonight’s primary in Ohio.
February 28, 2012 – 4:17 pm
Here’s a rotten piece of legislation: the Virginia Senate has passed a bill requiring women to undergo an ultrasound examination prior to an abortion. The bill includes language saying that the procedure is to “to determine gestation age”, but that is surely a red herring; obviously the measure is an attempt to confront women with […]
February 24, 2012 – 6:52 pm
Remember all those sanctimonious calls from the Left for “civility” in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting? New York Times columnist and race-warrior Charles Blow appears not to have got the memo. Come to think of it, it looks like Slate’s Alex Pareene didn’t either.
February 15, 2012 – 5:32 pm
Ever since the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” began its ontogeny in whatever sunless Congressional womb such hell-spawn are gestated, conservatives have howled that it reposes too much power in the Federal government (to be specific, in the capricious Executive Branch) — and so presents a grave threat to cherished liberties. “Suck it up, […]
February 13, 2012 – 11:12 pm
In a recent comment-thread I cited William Voegeli’s opinion that liberalism admits of “no limiting principle’ regarding what government can and should do. Indeed, one of our own more liberal commenters assured us not long ago that the bulging Constitutional aneurysm commonly known as the Commerce Clause is, in his opinion, “infinitely elastic”. We will […]
February 13, 2012 – 12:12 am
Nicholas Kristof weighed in today on the Catholic-contraception kerfuffle, in a Times op-ed piece. Even Mr. Kristof acknowledges that this issue is hardly cut-and-dried. He writes: Look, there’s a genuine conflict here. Many religious believers were sincerely offended that Catholic institutions would have to provide coverage for health interventions that the church hierarchy opposed. That […]
February 12, 2012 – 1:57 pm
Having just had yet another another arid and pointless dust-up about the Constitution, it seems apt to link to this interesting little art project, which comes to us courtesy of David Duff.
February 11, 2012 – 2:11 pm
The Obama administration made an embarrassing political blunder recently when it mandated, with swaggering disregard of First Amendment niceties and pugnacious indifference to the moral teachings of the Roman Church, that Catholic organizations would be required to provide contraceptives to their employees. When Catholic institutions objected, they were told they had a year to get […]
February 3, 2012 – 11:18 pm
There was a positive jobs report today, and the markets, starved for encouragement, rallied. Obviously any upbeat economic news is to be welcomed, but it’s election season too, and so for the loyal opposition these little silver linings come complete with little clouds. (Those who found the Bush years unbearable often found themselves rooting for […]
February 2, 2012 – 4:03 pm
Just saw this, from our “uniter”-in-chief: Today, we’re announcing the 2012 launch of African Americans for Obama. There’s no better time than African American History Month to consider the tremendous progress we’ve made through the sacrifice of so many””or a better time to commit to meeting the very real challenges we face right now. Visit […]