December 2013

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with editor William Kristol with a look back at 2013 and how President Obama's liberalism fared this year.

A recent intelligence report on the future of Afghanistan, as outside support (from the U.S., largely and other NATA nations at the margins) is slowly withdrawn, is not encouraging.  As reported in a Washington Post article by Ernesto Londoño, Karen DeYoung and Greg Miller, the report:

The Kennedy Center Honors always present an odd spectacle. One of the hottest tickets in town, it brings D.C.'s elites together to sit in black tie and cheer for old rock stars (among others). It's hard to imagine FDR mumbling along to Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love," an arm slung around…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with Thomas Joscelyn from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, on his recent reporting about the whitewashing of Benghazi.

Blake Hounshell of Politico takes a look at the latest back and forth over Benghazi sparked by David Kirkpatrick’s 7,000-plus word piece for the New York Times.

And Dave Barry provides the valedictory in his usual fashion. For instance:

David Horowitz is a political thinker and cultural critic who enjoys challenging leftist shibboleths. His main contribution to contemporary political discourse is a passionate commitment to an outspoken, unabashed, myth-breaking version of conservatism. If communism was the triumph of…

Dr. Brian Lee is pastor of Christ Reformed Church, a small church in downtown Washington, D.C., which he founded six years ago. Lee knows something about a topic not ordinarily discussed at his church, that of “legislative prayer.” As we’ll see, he has his doubts about it.

As world powers debate what a comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran should look like, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to maintain that Israel is not bound by the interim agreement that the P5+1 and Iran struck in Geneva on November 24. Israel, says Netanyahu, “has the right and…

Members of the American Studies Association voted last week to boycott a country until it “ceases to violate human rights and international law.” Which nation could it be? New York University’s Scholars at Risk Network offers a number of options, citing 10 countries in which scholars are either…

If you have a taste for Schadenfreude (and who doesn’t, especially in this holiday season?), you’ll enjoy Anemona Hartocollis’s article in the New York Times of December 14. Here’s the opening paragraph:

One golden autumn morning 100 years ago, a few blocks from where I’m writing these words in northwest Washington, D.C., Ambrose Bierce said goodbye to his secretary, turned the key in the door to his apartment on Logan Circle, and went off to God knows where.

At least they have their health. When it comes to purchasing insurance through the Obamacare exchanges, young adults don’t have much else going for them.

Earlier this year, Cathleen Schine published a novel called Fin & Lady, a deliriously nostalgic look at an orphaned boy who comes to live with his wealthy sister in a half-renovated Greenwich Village townhouse. The time is the 1960s, and the whole cast of characters is present: the wise…

President Obama is more perceptive about the shortcomings of government than we thought. “We have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly,” he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Wow!

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) defined the genre of the American macabre, and his name has become synonymous with literary horror. He has had many imitators but few genuine literary successors—only Jorge Luis Borges and H. P. Lovecraft have come close. Cities across the Eastern seaboard, from Boston…

The trouble with Christmas is that it would consume the whole world if it could—or subsume, maybe, like an amoeba. Left to its own devices, Christmas would wrap itself around the universe and digest it whole.

The novelist Christopher Buckley says that The Baby Boom, the just-published memoir/history by P. J. O’Rourke, is O’Rourke’s best book. The Scrapbook is reluctant to disagree with any judgment from so authoritative a source. Plus, we’ve read The Baby Boom, and between chortles, snorts, guffaws, and…

Art Tatum had more outward flash, and Jelly Roll Morton certainly possessed more carny flair. But Earl Hines stood alone as the absolute champion of rhythm in jazz’s triumvirate of most important pianists. Never within the idiom has the instrument sounded quite as percussive as when Fatha was…

Kiev

We’re long past the point in contemporary America at which the concept of tolerance has any traction. Our cultural conversations have devolved into shouting matches with a cabal of white urban liberal enforcers insisting the rest of us be outraged by something no one was much concerned with five…

Truth to tell, The Scrapbook has gotten as good a laugh as anyone out of the saga of John C. Beale, the retired Environmental Protection Agency official—Princeton grad, onetime deputy assistant administrator in the Office of Air and Radiation, congressionally certified expert on global warming—who…

It's well over a year since the United Nations intellectual property agency got caught undermining the U.N.’s own sanctions—shipping U.S.-origin computers and related high-tech equipment to North Korea and Iran. In classic U.N. fashion, the World Intellectual Property Organization, known as WIPO,…

Oh, the writers! They came to Tangier in boatloads, getting—many of them—their first taste of Africa and Islam. Though over time, the great allure of Tangier for writers became other writers. 

Advocates of assisted suicide tell two—no, three—lies that act as the honey to help the hemlock go down. The first is that assisted suicide/euthanasia is a strictly medical act. Second, they falsely assure us that medicalized killing is only for the terminally ill. Finally, they promise that strict…

Apparently relations between the United States and Europe are actually maturing. How else to account for the singular absence of transatlantic crisis-mongering over the many, many ways in which the Obama administration has annoyed our allies in Europe?

Riga, Latvia

Let’s start by giving David Kirkpatrick credit. Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times and author of this weekend’s much-discussed piece on Benghazi, provides many new on-the-ground, minute-by-minute details of the attacks and the weeks and months leading up to them. Some of the…

David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times has published a lengthy account of the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. While much in Kirkpatrick’s report is not new, the piece is receiving a considerable amount of attention because of this sweeping conclusion: “Months of…

Most Americans are not exactly sanguine about the economy.  As CNN reports, according to its latest polling:

There is reason to look back on the year about to end with some satisfaction – not joy, but satisfaction. The until-now deeply troubled industrial sector last month topped its December 2007 pre-recession peak for the first time, and is over 20 percent above its June 2009 low. Autos led the way:…

AP: "Iran says it is developing new centrifuges."

Former congressman and want-to-be mayor of New York, Anthony Weiner, continues to apologize for … well, you know.  As Paige Lavender reports on the Huffington Post, Weiner posted his regrets on Facebook (of course he did) writing that

When interviewed by Lesley Stahl for 60 Minutes, national security advisor Susan Rice responded to one question with:

Once again, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is on the case.  Last week, his heart ached for fans of the Buffalo Bills who would not be able to watch their team’s game against the Miami Dolphins because the NFL & the FCC were blacking it out.  Retribution, it seems, for the fans’ failure…

Russia has become the world's leading practitioner of judo diplomacy. In its simplest terms, the discipline of judo teaches its adherents to use an opponent's movement to unbalance him and throw him to the ground. Unbalanced opponent. Takedown. Victory.

Seems that New York is about to be overtaken by Florida as the nation’s third most populous state. As Jesse McKinley of the New York Times reports, this is:

The year-end verdict on Congress is pretty stern according to CNN, which publishes a poll indicating:

The new WEEKLY STANDARD Books & Arts Podcast, with literary editor Philip Terzian and his guest, senior editor Andrew Ferguson. This week they discuss Ferguson's recent cover story on Ambrose Bierce. 

USA Today reports that in much of the country consumers don't even have the option of purchasing an affordable "bronze plan" -- the cheapest tier of insurance available on the federal exchange:

Americans for Prosperity has two new ads targeting House Democrats in swing districts, both of which make the case that Obamacare "doesn't work" and should be repealed. The first ad, running in New Hampshire, tells Democratic congresswoman Annie Kuster to "stop thinking about politics and start…

The Russian people were polled, recently, on the question of which of their political figures is most popular. An alien notion in Russian politics, perhaps, but just the same, the question was asked and the people, knowing what is good for them, answered. In a surprise result:

After a month of trying, I still can't complete an application to join the D.C. Health Exchange. For a week, the Obamacare marketplace asked me to prove my citizenship, my daughter's existence, and my fixed address in the District of Columbia, but it would not allow me to submit the requested…

As the full breadth of the Healthcare.gov debacle became apparent, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) turned to the architect of the Federal Data Hub to lead the team of contractors to fix the woefully inadequate website that had disastrously launched just weeks before.…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on Christmas, Obamacare, and the gift that keeps on giving.

The daughter of incoming New York City mayor Bill de Blasio opens up in a YouTube video about her drug use, alcoholism, and depression:

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with James Capretta from the Ethics and Public Policy Center on all the last minute changes to Obamacare and what that spells for the law's future.

President Obama did not use Healthcare.gov to sign up for Obamacare. Instead, he sent his people to sign him up for the D.C. health care exchange in person.

Since it has become plain that “If you like your doctor …” and “Reduce the average family’s premium by $2,500 …” were never serious prospects and that the people making the promises didn’t believe them, the defenders of Obamacare have taken a new line of attack that goes something like, Quit your…

April Ryan, the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks, reports that President Obama has signed up for Obamacare. He's selected a "Bronze plan."

“Have we indeed sinned more than any other nation?”

The man responsible for the AK-47, the brutally simple weapon favored by terrorists and jihadist around the globe – as well as the armies of the most of important nations hostile to the U.S. – is dead at 94.  He was predeceased by the Soviet empire that employed him and for which he designed the…

Drudge is headlining a report from Fox News foreseeing the demise of Las Vegas and Atlantic City.  In other words, the end of civilization as we know it.

In a rare moment of candor, the Obama administration has acknowledged that the so-called Affordable Care Act is making insurance less affordable for millions of Americans.

You’ve got a problem.  Seems Oregon’s health care exchange is, on the eve of Christmas, throwing up its hands and saying to those applying for (mandatory) coverage, “Hey, don’t look at us.  You’re on your own.”

The Scrapbook is delighted to commend to readers a new ebook from our contributing editor Joseph Bottum. Nativity: A Christmas Tale “re-imagines Melchior, the Wise Man who brought gold, as a wealthy cancer patient adrift in the American Midwest, picking up a menagerie of strays as he fights his way…

The Nobel Prize in Medicine has already been given for this year, but I should like to get a jump on next year’s prize by describing and naming a mental condition from which untold millions suffer. The condition is not anything so devastating as dementia. Most people who have it manage to work…

College football wasn’t always like this. The eyes of the nation weren’t always riveted on a massive stadium in a tiny town in southeastern Alabama, wondering whether the two-time defending national champion Crimson Tide could really​—​against all probability—be knocked off by archrival Auburn.…

What may be the greatest painting in our hemisphere is on temporary loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Girl with a Pearl Earring (ca. 1665) hasn’t been in the United States since 1996 and is unlikely ever to be here again. We owe this traveling show of Dutch masterpieces, centering on Johannes…

One thing that Napoleon— who didn’t believe in God, ideologies, or progress—did believe in was his own destiny. The spectacular victories of his Italian campaign in 1796 made the 27-year-old general famous in France and throughout Europe, and, at that moment, he later said, “I no longer regarded…

There’s a breathtaking and deeply frustrating Italian film called The Great Beauty I have to tell you about, because it’s really something to see even though it will probably drive you a little crazy.

Neson Mandela, a man of some considerable personal dignity, might have been distressed by the series of mishaps at his public memorial service: the disorganization which left thousands unable to get to the event, rendering the stadium half-empty; the embarrassing “selfie” taken by Barack Obama…

Two public opinion polls released last week show that the American public is skeptical of the Obama administration’s interim agreement with Iran concerning the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons program. Further, the surveys show that Americans by a large majority mistrust the mullahs and, as much…

Rosemary Clooney was brought back to popular consciousness a half-dozen years ago in an episode from the first season of Mad Men. Viewers were treated to a rendition of “Botch-a-Me,” one of her conspicuous successes of the 1950s, a time when she recorded many hit records (the biggest being “Come…

Brian Schweitzer sounds content with being a “former” pol. As we chat on the phone, he is looking out the window of his home on Georgetown Lake in western Montana. By mid-November, the lake is frozen, and the Pintler Mountains to the south are covered with snow. Schweitzer’s home sits at the end of…

Last month, the Oxford English Dictionary named “selfie” the word of the year. If you are blissfully unaware, a “selfie” is a photo taken of yourself by yourself, holding a smartphone at arm’s length pointed towards your face. It is then typically shared on a social media site such as Facebook,…

Everybody has an opinion about the pope these days and, what’s worse, feels compelled to express it. Rush Limbaugh has an opinion about the pope. He says he finds the pope “upsetting.” And he’s not even Catholic!

There is a vintage Corvette parked on the street nearby, a 1977 canary yellow model in perfect condition. The NADA Blue Book says it’s worth around $15,000.

"Tables turn on the Michigan tea party”; “Business to tea party: Get out of our way”; “Donors Plot Against GOP Rebel”: Judging by the headlines, next year’s Republican primary in Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District is shaping up as a referendum on the conservative incumbent’s dogged adherence to…

The spectacle of North Korea’s former number two, Jang Song-thaek, being stripped of all his titles at a December 8 party meeting in Pyongyang and then arrested by uniformed guards left no doubt about his fall from grace. Jang’s former protégé, Premier Pak Pong-ju, was in tears as he denounced his…

Obamacare may or may not survive its inauspicious beginnings. It has become dangerously unpopular and accident-prone and faces a minefield of difficulties. Still, the Obama administration has a plausible strategy: to titrate the program’s numerous taxes, subsidies, mandates, and restrictions so as…

In Washington, folks are celebrating a new bipartisan budget deal that saves us from another full round of reductions in federal spending mandated by the “sequester.” Far fewer are lamenting the dwindling of the sequester itself. As usual, Washington has things upside down.

The early British and American reviews of this book are hilarious—hilarious, that is, in the sense of proving two of Melissa Mohr’s minor theses. In her account, the sex-based swear words so reviled by the Victorians have become almost commonplace: No real stigma attaches to their use these days,…

The biggest political story in our domestic politics since 2009 has been, as it will be for the foreseeable future, health care. One part of this story is ripe for telling now: the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—also known as Obamacare. That effort, you’ll recall, came in…

Robert Gibbs, President Obama's former press secretary, declared 2013 the worst year (so far!) of the Obama presidency:

Temperatures in the high 40s, with some rain.  That’s the forecast for Buffalo on Sunday when the Bills and the Dolphins kick it off.  Balmy, then.  So much so that the team from Miami can’t, should they lose, use the weather for an alibi.  Likewise, the fans who choose not to pay sit in the…

When the “President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology” issued its report (Liberty and Security in a Changing World) this past week, an honest and objective newspaper headline the next day would have read: “Rogue Panel Reports on Non-Rogue NSA Program.”

Years ago, when Americans began visiting Europe in significant numbers, they invariably returned with trophies ranging from cashmere sweaters (Britain), silk scarves (France), several inches on their waistlines (Italy), and assorted knick knacks. And with stories of the sullen London shop staffs…

The wrecking ball swung again toward the crumbling Obamacare edifice yesterday. Ironically, it continues to be the Obama administration that is operating the heavy machinery.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Jeffrey Anderson on how to escape Obamacare.

President Obama, speaking at his final press conference of the year, said he met with his Obamacare implementation team every two or three weeks ahead of the law's implementation.

Headline of the hour:

The Washington Examiner reports:

The White House will not say whether anyone will have to pay the Obamacare penalty in 2014:

NBC's Kasie Hunt reports on Twitter that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid "has been hospitalized."

Now that the hoopla has begun to die down over Kim Jong-un’s execution of his uncle—reportedly Mafia-style with machine guns—the Young General is anticipating his athletes shooting a few hoops under the expert tutoring of Dennis Rodman. Kim Jong-un’s best American buddy has just arrived back in…

Blogger Ezra Klein calls the sudden Obamacare rule change "the first crack in the individual mandate."

10K Iowans in health insurance limbo?

Teachers unions in nineteen different Wisconsin school districts failed to achieve recertification during annual elections that ended Thursday, according to the MacIver Institute.

The Emergency Committee for Israel released this statement following the White House's threat to veto a bi-partisan Iran sanctions bill, which was introduced today in the Senate:

The White House and congressional Democrats say Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare will take away the benefits Americans are experiencing because of the health care law. In a conference call with reporters Thursday afternoon, White House advisor David Simas praised Obamacare's provisions…

A recent AP/GfK poll shows that a majority of Americans, 55 percent, disapprove of how Barack Obama is handling the Iran issue. There’s good reason for skepticism about Iranian intentions—after all, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif threatens that if the interim deal agreed to on November 24 in…

Ruth Wisse, writing for Mosaic:

Brian Schweitzer, the former Democratic governor of Montana who may run for president in 2016, spoke Wednesday night to Progress Iowa, a liberal grassroots organization, in Altoona, Iowa. In his speech, Schweitzer criticized Democrats who voted for the Iraq war, a group that includes a potential…

Republican state senator Dick Black of Virginia is considering running for the House seat currently represented by retiring Republican Frank Wolf. Black announced on Facebook he was forming an exploratory committee.

As Alex Roarty  of National Journal reports:

First time claims came in higher than expected. Which is very nearly a sure thing. Not that the number of claims will increase. Or decrease. Just that whatever they do, it will be “unexpected."

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal criticized the suspension of Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson by network A&E.

Russia strongman Vladimir Putin had some kind words for NSA leaker Edward Snowden. "[H]e's noble," Putin said at a press conference in Moscow today. Snowden has been given temporary asylum in Russia and is on the run from the U.S. government.

State Department contract awards were posted this week for "Transportation services in support of Mandela Funeral" and "Accommodation in support of the Nelson Mandela funeral in South Africa."  The accompanying Justification and Approval documents estimated the cost of transportation at a maximum…

John Bolton: Nero in the White House.

Elie Wiesel's full-page ad on Iran in today's New York Times:

You would think the dearth of legislation coming off Capitol Hill might be a problem for K Street.  But that would be outside-the-beltway thinking.  There are other ways to skin a cat … or a taxpayer.  And the lobbyists have found one.  As Megan R. Wilson at The Hill writes, they are happily:

Adam Kredo reports:

The Twitter account of Barack Obama published an image Tuesday night that seems designed to encourage young Americans to "talk about getting health insurance" and Obamacare during the holiday season. The image featured a photograph of a young man wearing what appear to be full-length pajamas and…

Barack and Michelle Obama will gather in the White House later this afternoon with a group of moms. Their mission? To push Obamacare.

Walter Shapiro, writing in the The American Prospect, makes the case for second term agenda of jobs and economic growth. Not exactly original but, certainly, passionately argued.  

Appearing with Piers Morgan on CNN, Barbara Walters summed up The Grand Disillusionment this way

A provision in the Ryan-Murray budget to reduce cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for working-age military retirees is the reason a number of Republican senators are voting against the deal. “I’m for pension benefit reform but what they’re doing here is just unacceptable,” Senator Lindsey Graham…

Life is good in Washington, D.C., even as the lobbyists pout about how there hasn’t been enough action on Capitol Hill to keep those big retainers rolling in. As Michael Neibauer of Washington Business Journal reports:

The Healthcare.gov website has been plagued with problems since the October 1 launch.  As web programmers often do, the designers of the federal government's flagship health care website have a test version of the site, spa.healthcare.gov, to help work out the kinks before implementation on the…

The chief executive officer for Minnesota's Obamacare exchange resigned Tuesday after reports surfaced she had taken a tropical vacation in November, right when the state's health insurance exchange website was experiencing problems. ABC affiliate KSTP has the story:

The ad every Democrat up in 2014 should fear.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will be skipping the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. So will Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill Biden. 

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the president's plunging poll numbers.

Jim Matheson, the lone Democratic congressman from Utah, will not run for reelection in 2014. Matheson announced the decision on his Facebook page:

Congressman Frank Wolf announced today that he'll retire and not seek reelection in 2014:

Is to stiff the taxpayers. Not to mention the bondholders. As Todd Spangler of the Detroit Free Press reports:

Sixty-seven senators--all 55 Democrats and 12 Republicans--voted to cut off debate this morning on the two-year budget deal crafted by Republican congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Democratic senator Patty Murray of Washington. The bill now heads to a vote on final passage.

One could be forgiven for feeling qualms about the age of the Affordable Care Act, the dawning of which is now upon us. It would be difficult to be unaware of the troubles surrounding the new order in health care, some of which John Merline of IBD details in a piece that includes this:

On a recent trip to Miami, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted that, yes, some people will be paying more for health insurance under Obamacare:

Woody Allen once famously said "90 percent of life is just showing up." In the Kim family's North Korea showing up—or suddenly not—can be a true matter of life or death.

Can Obama bounce back from a terrible year?

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on his recent piece Schweitzer Takes Aim, and how the populist former Democratic governor of Montana might challenge Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The headline on this Bloomberg piece catches a certain, robust and current, strain of thought in Washington.

Occupy Wall Street was full of proto-revolutionary fervor at its founding, with a mission statement that opened:

According to the University of Maryland student newspaper The Diamondback, the university’s student health insurance plan is considering requiring coverage of sex change operations.

Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid Secretary of State John Kerry a backhanded compliment in a recent speech to the Union for Reform Judaism.

The Des Moines Register reports:

Two days before Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius announced on December 11 that she was ordering a comprehensive investigation into the reasons behind the Obamacare launch debacle, HHS announced an upcoming Contracting with CMS Conference with topics such as "The Good,…

A Request For Information by the defense department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in July 2011 culminated this month in contract awards to seven different companies worth up to $4 billion over the next ten years.  The contract awards, posted in a notice entitled Combating Weapons of Mass…

The Scrapbook has always observed that while Newton’s Third Law of Motion—“to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction”—is true of the physical world, it does not always apply to the political universe.

Last week, a headline in the Harvard Crimson confirmed that Harvard is continuing its depressing slide from an elite educational institution to a really expensive way to boost the self-esteem of America’s overachieving youth: “Substantiating Fears of Grade Inflation, Dean Says Median Grade at…

England produced some superb letter-writers in the 19th century: Lord Byron, Emily Eden, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, and Sydney Smith gave an altogether new charm and expressiveness to the epistolary art. Smith’s letter to his young friend Miss Lucie Austin in 1835 is a good example:

Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee wrote a letter on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to Rep. Dave Camp, Michigan Republican and Ways and Means chairman, urging him to devote some committee time to extending federal unemployment benefits. At issue is the Emergency Unemployment…

Seduced and then disappointed by a hipster who turned out just to be another solipsistic boomer, now chastened yet still hopeful for change (if no longer swept away by the promise of Hope and Change), young Americans are ready to ditch Barack Obama. Things had been getting rocky for a while, but…

After a decade-long run of bad weather that included Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Ike, and a host of other river valley and storm-surge floods, the 45-year-old National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) owes taxpayers about $25 billion that no analyst believes it will ever pay back. Meanwhile, by…

A question: Are Texas and all its agencies and local governments breaking the law? The answer is that they probably are, according to the Obama administration and its Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But the Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, isn’t waiting for the EEOC to investigate and…

"Tommy” and other chimpanzees are the subjects of several lawsuits in New York seeking writs of habeas corpus and “immediate release from illegal detention.” These lawsuits, the doing of the Nonhuman Rights Project, are not a surprise. As already noted in these pages (“Animal Desires,” April 9,…

Two hundred and forty years ago this month, a gang of Bostonians dressed as Indians boarded the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver and dumped 90,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor. That fateful action on December 16, 1773, and Parliament’s inflammatory response—closing the Port of Boston,…

I'm sitting at my desk, looking at a photograph of a gangrenous foot. It is a bloated thing in hues of phlegmatic gray rot, sanguine inflammation, melancholic black bile, and choleric open sores​—​exhibiting all the humors of a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Above the…

I was on the sidelines at my daughter’s 11-and-under travel soccer game. It had been a successful season, but today they were being outmuscled by a very physical team from Warrenton. With a strong wind blowing against them and only one substitute on the bench, the Alexandria Heat were on the wrong…

With all due respect to General David Petraeus, the most influential strategist of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may turn out to be Erik Prince. The fact that Prince has had a huge impact on how the U.S. military operates isn’t necessarily a compliment. The former Navy SEAL is the founder of…

The problem with 12 Years a Slave is that it is very, very good—and because it is very, very good, it is extraordinarily difficult to watch. So much so, in fact, that I assumed the movie was a more graphic version of the 1853 memoir of the same name by Solomon Northup, a free black man who, in…

"The first second of 1913. A gunshot rings out through the dark night. There’s a brief click, fingers tense on the trigger, then comes a second, dull report. The alarm is raised, the police dash to the scene and arrest the gunman straight away. His name is Louis Armstrong.” Armstrong is 12 years…

President Obama is 5-for-5, but not in the way he’d prefer. In baseball, 5-for-5 signifies perfection. In Obama’s case, it means the opposite. On the five most important polling questions that measure a president’s success, he’s not only dropped significantly, but he’s now regarded negatively…

In its breathless December 1 exegesis of the White House’s response to the Obamacare website crisis, the insiders who dared speak to the New York Times told the paper how angry the president was that he was deceived about the status of the website and how great he was at responding to the crisis.

Hollywood’s hostility to conservatives is so unrelenting that at times it reaches comic levels. In the recent remake of The Three Stooges, the film’s producers tried to communicate the depth of scurrility of Sofía Vergara’s villainess by showing her reading this estimable magazine in bed.  

Regularly scheduled elections are a hallmark of the American political system. In 18th-century Britain, the monarch could call new elections on a whim, and our Founders saw in that arrangement a seed of tyranny. The Constitution they designed requires elections for Congress every two years, and the…

Michio Kaku is a sort of pop physicist who makes a specialty of glibly forecasting future technology. He had a piece in the New York Times recently making 10 “predictions for the future,” and they’re about as facile as one would expect from a stalwart of the TED Talk circuit. Take just two…

Every Christmas season a new load of books about the Beatles appears, capitalizing on a baby-boom market that has yet to flicker out and the enduring love many middle-aged people feel for the Liverpudlians’ joyous noise from the 1960s. But the fanatics among us have been waiting with mounting…

Secretary of State John Kerry told ABC News in an interview that North Korea "potentially" having a nuclear weapon would be "even more unacceptable." North Korea first tested its nuclear weapons capabilities in 2006 and had a more successful test in 2009. The country's most recent nuclear test was…

NBC's long-running sketch show Saturday Night Live put the "series of unfortunate events" at last week's memorial service for former South African president Nelson Mandela in their comedic crosshairs. Cast member Jay Pharoah, portraying American president Barack Obama, lampooned the cell-phone…

The two-year budget deal crafted by Republican congressman Paul Ryan and Democratic senator Patty Murray sailed through the House of Representatives on a 332-94 vote last Thursday, just two days after it was introduced.

Free traders are ecstatic. Negotiators at the 9th World Trade Organization ministerial conference in Bali cheered, hugged, and wept at what they see as the successful culmination of their recent round of talks. “A giant step for businesses large and small,” enthused the CEO of UPS. The…

Michael Barone: Obamacare hurts Dems, helps GOP in 2014.

On Thursday afternoon, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius made a number of unusual requests to insurers selling health plans on the Obamacare exchanges. 

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the Ryan-Murray Budget deal, Obamacare Delays, and Obama's Nelson Mandela speech.

Vice President Joe Biden joked about becoming a "co-president" with Barack Obama.

The State Department is warning Americans not to travel to Libya. The stated reason: "extremist groups in Libya made specific threats against U.S. government officials and U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Libya."

It is taken as a given that the Obama administration has lost interest in Afghanistan and cannot get out of that country soon enough. And that the Karzai regime is doing its part by dragging its feet on a status-of-forces agreement. But to have things come to this:

Even after 65 years of hideous barbarity, the murderousness of the Kim regime still holds the capacity to shock. Korea-watchers are baffled at the news that Kim Jong-un had his uncle and former mentor, Jang Song-thaek, summarily executed for “treason” this week. (For analysis of the events leading…

Back in 2006, during a particularly low point in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group issued a report in which the central contentious proposition was that “all key issues in the region are inextricably linked.” Accordingly, to stem the deterioration in Iraq…

On November 26, the Financial Times published an extravagant encomium to Lady Catherine Ashton by its Brussels bureau chief Peter Spiegel, under the headline “EU foreign policy chief Lady Ashton comes of age in Iran talks.” Spiegel reported, “her team returned from negotiations in Geneva to a…

On Thursday evening, House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the budget deal crafted by Republican congressman Paul Ryan and Democratic senator Patty Murray, chairs of their respective budget committees.

Howie Carr on the Obama selfie.

On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services released a set of "additional steps" designed to "help" Americans get health insurance before the start of the new year. Philip Klein discusses those guidelines over at the Washington Examiner, reporting that HHS is "encouraging" health…

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the recent budget fight  and how dragging out the debate about the Ryan-Murray budget deal hampers the ability of conservatives to press forward on the failures of Obamacare.

The Iranians are saying the nuclear deal means the beginning of the end of sanctions. At least that's what a foreign ministry spokeswoman told the Iranian press.

Congressman Tom Rice of South Carolina, a Republican, is sponsoring a resolution in the House of Representatives that would, if adopted, direct the legislative body "to bring a civil action for declaratory or injunctive relief to challenge certain policies and actions taken by the executive…

Senate Democrats have taken advantage of the nuclear option to confirm one of President Obama's most extreme judicial nominees.

Sometimes a handshake is more than just a handshake. When President Obama warmly embraced the late Hugo Chávez at the 2009 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, he lent respectability to a brutal autocrat who had crippled Venezuelan democracy, terrorized his political opponents, and…

Certain employees of the government are being told not to trust their employer. As Jonathan Easley reports for the Hill:

Let me add a word to my comments from Tuesday night supporting the budget deal.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's agency announced grants of $58 million to 1,157 community health centers to allow them to "expand their enrollment assistance efforts as more Americans enroll in affordable health insurance coverage." These grants come on top of $150…

Initial jobless claims rose 68,000 to 368,000 as per this morning’s figures. This:

Last night, this 30-second advertisement ran to encourage folks to sign up in the "Health Insurance Marketplace," otherwise known as Obamacare:

David Hawkings, at Roll Call, writes almost wistfully of what might have been if Tom Daschle, President Obama’s first choice to be secretary of Health and Human Services, had been confirmed by the Senate where he had been majority leader before his constituents in South Dakota voted him out of…

In an impressive display of chutzpah, the Tampa Bay Times' fact-checking organization PolitiFact has designated President Obama's promise that "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it" as their "Lie of the Year" for 2013 while simultaneously distancing itself from its own years-long…

The Obama administration is bringing in the "Sexiest Man Alive" to help "boost" Obamacare enrollment numbers.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the Ryan-Murray budget deal and "selfies" as a sign of perception over reality.

The Foreign Policy Initiative has released this statement from its board of directors in support of the Paul Ryan-Patty Murray budget deal:

Tough times in the lobbying industry and the news is sure to be greeted with an outpouring of sympathy from across the land.  As Kevin Bogardus and Megan R. Wilson of the Hill report:

The Tower.org reports:

Over the weekend, Seymour Hersh published an article in the London Review of Books claiming that the Obama administration got it wrong regarding the August 21 chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. It wasn’t Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s forces that launched the attack.…

A future historian would describe the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) as having a profound effect on the United States. The BCA, he would write, was a critical step toward making America into a social democracy while ensuring its decline as a global military power. He would conclude that the law…

The team plays badly.  The coach coaches badly.  The owner owners badly.  The fight song is revolting and the name is an offense against the laws of political correctness.  But other than that …

At a Capitol Hill hearing, Kathleen Sebelius admitted today that the Obama administration is 3 million short of its Obamacare goal:

A Missouri school district faces a $150,000 bill for Obamacare, according to a report on KMIZ-MO:

The latest national opinion poll show Barack Obama continuing to receive low marks from the American people, just over a year after his reelection. The poll, commissioned by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, found that 54 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Obama is doing as president, a…

The Obama administration began emphasizing the option of applying for insurance through the Obamacare Marketplace with a paper application ever since it became apparent that the online process at Healthcare.gov was riddled with problems.  More recently, however, the administration began to shift…

Oregon, once touted as a model for President Obama's health care law, signed up just 44 people for insurance through November, despite spending more than $300 million on its state-based exchange.

The budget deal announced today is a good deal for conservatives and Republicans.

Voters aren't happy with President Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran, according to a new Quinnipiac poll:

Today is a snow day in Washington so even less will get done than on a day when the sun shines.  And this year has been particularly unproductive, as Laura Litvan at Bloomberg writes:

With the president on his way back from South Africa, it was left to Vice President Joe Biden to announce the administration's $100 million increase for "access to mental health services:"

Arnold Steinberg writes:

Weary of wading through the big muddy of Obamacare, the president has decided that it is time to change the subject. (They call that a “pivot,” in Washington, these days.) And as Amie Parnes at the Hill reports:

Dan Rather is still at it.  The story that brought him down was true, he claims, unlike the one that is the cause of Lara Logan’s difficulties.  On CNN, Rather said:

The White House has not even officially introduced the 2013 White House Holiday Card yet  and already Monday night copies were listed for sale on eBay for as much as $200.  The card is quite elaborate based on the standards of previous years.

President Obama's speech at the Nelson Mandela memorial today in South Africa:

At Nelson Mandela's memorial service today in Johannesburg, South Africa, President Obama shook hands with Raúl Castro:

Obama, inequality, and the great MacGuffin.

President Obama, who is aboard Air Force One on his way to a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in South Africa, will sign a plastic gun ban "via autopen," an aide tells the Huffington Post. 

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Jay Cost on his recent cover story, The Battle of 2014 on the political landscape for the 2014 elections.

A new Pew Poll released today shows the American public does not support the White House’s interim deal over the Iranian nuclear program. Conducted by the Pew Research Center and USA TODAY two weeks after the November 24 agreement struck at Geneva between the P5+1 powers and Iran, the national…

In the East Room of the White House Sunday night, President Obama hosted the Kennedy Center Honors Reception to recognize five American artists: Martina Arroyo, Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, Shirley MacLaine,  and Billy Joel.  The president gave a brief synopsis of each artist's career, including…

Anniversaries come thick and fast. But 500-year marks are still rare, reminders of a simpler time, a different world.  We look back to Columbus and forward to the Reformation without understanding the epochal revolution in between that made our time, our world.

The military option against the Iranian nuclear weapons program is still on the table: That’s the message President Obama wanted to leave listeners with Saturday at the annual Saban Forum, hosted by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Sure, Obama explained in his live…

The program for the Nelson Mandela has been released by the South African government, and President Obama is scheduled to speak:

Welcome, Washington, to the real world.

These days, the only thing in Washington performing less ably and delivering more disappointment than Obamacare would be the Washington Re****ns, a facsimile of a football team that is long on controversy, short on competence, and overflowing in controversy.  The Re****ns hosted the Kansas…

Concerns have increased over the security of personal information collected by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the volume of personal data has multiplied dramatically with the implementation of Obamacare. Security experts have testified before Congress about flaws they have…

The Financial Times reports:

I am no Miniver Cheevy, pining for days gone by. Not usually. But having just signed piles of paper before a gaggle of lawyers to get a relatively simple transaction done, I am thinking of Wally, if that was his real name. 

World War II posed no moral or existential problems for Albert Camus. As it began, he was 26 years old and had already made his mark as a crusading journalist; within a couple of years he would be famous for a shocking novel, The Stranger. With his family and his wife’s family in relative security…

While Washington and the world have been focused on the nuclear agreement reached with Iran last week in Geneva, on the other side of the globe, one of the parties to that deal, China, was at the very same time making the peaceful resolution of its dispute with Japan over a group of small islands…

O believers, when you encounter the unbelievers marching to battle, turn not your backs to them. Whoso turns his back that day to them, unless withdrawing to fight again or removing to join another host, he is laden with the burden of God’s anger, and his refuge is Hell—an evil homecoming! —Koran,…

The interim agreement that the United States and its partners cut with Iran last week stands as a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. The Obama administration has walked away from a core objective of U.S. policy for two decades—preventing a nuclear Iran—thereby threatening…

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) did not tolerate lateness, as Mick Jagger’s onetime wife Jerry Hall found out the hard way back in 1997. For four months, she had been sitting for her portrait, in which she was breast-feeding her and Jagger’s son. But being punctual was not among Ms. Hall’s virtues, and…

Hollywood, Fla.

It was brave to embark on this book: so vast is the literature on the period and familiar its highlights. But Peter Ackroyd is energetic and gifted enough to have mastered his sources and produced a sparklingly fresh account of Tudor England. No doubt, the professionals will find plenty to complain…

What would Miss Manners say about Russian president Vladimir Putin? No, not about his habit of going shirtless in public. It seems that Putin has developed the habit of showing up late for important meetings, and keeping foreign dignitaries waiting. On a recent visit to South Korea, where proper…

"There are some things I really believe in,” President Obama said last week. He was putting it mildly. Actually there are some things he really, really, really believes in—whether they work or not. Either way, he’s sticking with them. And Obama is one stubborn dude.

How do you make a movie about depressing people that is not, in itself, depressing? That is the challenge that writer-director Alexander Payne sets for himself: He is the Houdini of depression, shackling himself in a narrative straitjacket of hopeless despair and then somehow magically getting…

"If today’s extremist rhetoric sounds familiar, that’s because it is eerily, poignantly similar to the vitriol aimed squarely at John F. Kennedy during his presidency. And just like today, Texans were leading what some of them saw as a moral crusade. To find the very roots of the paranoid right of…

Americans have a few national quirks, the patriotic Scrapbook is willing to concede, and one of them is the assumption that people who have made great piles of money in life—Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, H. Ross Perot, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett—have something worthwhile to say on other subjects.…

It’s difficult to think of a company doing anything as gee-whiz neat as 23andMe. The Mountain View, Calif., firm, which opened its doors to the public in 2007, provides comprehensive genetic tests to anybody with $99 to spend. Customers send in a saliva sample and about six weeks later get access…

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law. So, too, extreme situations make bad policy and worse philosophy. The French Revolution was just such a situation; compared with the French, the English and American revolutions are almost unworthy of the title of revolution. No one took the measure of the…

Over the spring and summer of 2013, perhaps still sunning in his November 2012 victory and ideologically extrapolating from this win, President Obama attempted to press the case that skeptics about federal power were outré paranoiacs. At the Ohio State University commencement in May, the president…

Usually one disregards the puffs on dust jackets written by the author’s friends, who have often neglected to read the book in question. In the case of Like Dreamers, however, one of the blurb writers, former Israeli ambassador (and very fine historian) Michael Oren, has it right: “Yossi Klein…

A federal court in Louisiana will decide in the next few months how much oil company BP must pay in Clean Water Act penalties as a result of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The fine could total as much as $18 billion and, whatever the court determines, will rank among the largest in American…

Last week’s interim agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran over its nuclear weapons program offers the regime sanctions relief even as U.S. lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, are demanding more and stricter sanctions. The White House counters that more sanctions will only narrow diplomatic…

A new study from the Cato Institute asks the question many travelers have pondered after a pat-down gone awry: Can’t we replace the TSA? The agency’s embarrassing record of waste and mismanagement makes a compelling case.

Former president Bill Clinton said recently that Obamacare “only works .  .  . if young people show up.” But it won’t work—because young people won’t show up. Obamacare gives them too many reasons not to do so.

If you want to keep your doctor, you might have to pay more for it, Obamacare architect Zeke Emanuel said today on Fox News Sunday:

David Horovitz considers what Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu might say today at the Saban Forum:

My father emailed out this vignette about Pearl Harbor. After 72-years, the event remains something of an abstraction, but I mark the occasion a bit more solemnly than most. Had a plane landed a few dozen feet more to the left, I might not exist:

It was only 10:30 a.m., and already, we were too cold to move, let alone get out of our SUV to tailgate. We’d been parked outside Notre Dame’s football stadium in South Bend, Indiana, in the alumni lot for more than two and half hours, ahead of the university’s last home game of the year against…

It has been 72 years and veterans of the attack are in their 90s, some of them taking tourists out to the memorial built over the sunken battleship Arizona, which is still leaking oil.  Almost 1,200 men were killed and went down with that ship when a bomb found its magazine and blew it up.  Total…

“Everything’s coming up roses,” a mother reassures her daughter in Gypsy, the 1959 musical chronicling the rise of burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee. Were lyricist Stephen Sondheim surveying the American economy, he might want to extend the reassurance to the rest of us. For it does seem as if, at…

Max Boot on Nelson Mandela's character.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid tells the Reno Gazette Journal that the Affordable Care Act has made his health insurance a lot les affordable: 

The studying of Obamacare continues, seemingly without end, and under one scenario, the program may actually accomplish the obverse of its core aim.  As David Nather writes at Politico:

The post mortems on the launch of Obamacare continue and there are calls for heads – perhaps a lot of them – to roll.  The president’s management style has been questioned.  Why didn’t he know, and when didn’t he know it?  That sort of thing.  

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on Nelson Mandela, young voters, and more.

Rep. Matt Cartwright, a member of President Obama's Obamacare "strike team," says it's a "good thing" that people are losing their old health care plans:

Vice President Joe Biden's $585,000 hotel bill for a Paris visit early in 2013 focused a lot of attention on the issue of the high cost of VIP travel.  Even as Biden is currently on a swing through the Far East, the State Department has posted a $583,000 contract with the Shangri-la Hotel in…

Eric Cohen, executive director of the Tikvah Fund, interviews Michael Doran, a Brookings Institution senior fellow. They discuss the U.S., the Middle East, and President Obama.

With more than two months into its implementation, most Americans want to see the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, repealed or scaled back, according to a new poll from Gallup. In a survey conducted earlier this week, 20 percent of adults said they want to scale back the health care…

The press covering Joe Biden's trip Asia caught an unusually frank comment from the vice president. Biden, speaking about himself, reportedly said that his "profound insights on policy are vastly exaggerated, but we do have profound respect for the people of South Korea."

The latest employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Matthew Continetti, writing in the Washington Free Beacon:

Obamacare causing "chaos" for doctors.

President Barack Obama, on the passing of Nelson Mandela:

CNN reports:

If you were about to press the trigger on the weapon that would destroy the world (or come close, anyway) then wouldn’t you want to do it with a touch of style?  Some elegance, wit, or mordancy?

Hundreds of congregations across the country have left the Episcopal Church (TEC) over the past decade, moved to act over the church’s evolving doctrine on sexuality. The tipping point for many was after the church ordained Gene Robinson, its first openly gay bishop, in 2003. One of those…

The island of Guam has a real problem with snakes.  Brown tree snakes to be precise, which probably came in via uninspected air cargo. Having no natural predators on Guam, they quickly multiple, until, according to this report:

With all the other problems experienced by consumers at Healthcare.gov, actually making payments for plans selected has gotten relatively little attention until recently.  As the end of the year draws closer, however, the importance of making a payment to secure coverage by January 1 has increased.…

The New York Post reports that incoming New York City mayor Bill de Blasio will name Bill Bratton as the next NYPD commissioner.

Pessimists who believe that once a large piece of governmental malpractice is in place, it is there forever and immoveable, should to pay attention to this day and, perhaps, celebrate with a cocktail.

Vice President Joe Biden talked up the pool reporter covering him in China today to the vice president of China. According to the pool report, Biden told the Chinese VP that "he is a very important man. Seriously he is important." 

Can your health insurer auto-enroll you in Obamacare?  The Daily Caller reports that, at least in some cases, the answer is yes:

Peggy Noonan on low-information leadership.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on Obamacare and why more speeches by the president will not save it.

House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon doesn’t look like an insurgent.  The quintessential Californian – a man of Reaganesque optimism whose congressional district now includes the Gipper’s presidential library – McKeon has been a steadfast supporter of House speaker John…

The Obama administration’s appeasement of Iran over its nuclear weapons program is intertwined with its appeasement of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. For Obama, the red line in Syria was the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, not his murdering, at this stage, upwards of 120,000 people.…

Conor Ryan of the American Action Forum finds that, in Obamacare, "Young Adult Exchange Enrollees Disproportionately Low."

At the corner of First and H Streets in Northwest Washington, the balloons were all set, hanging stories high in the cold morning air. The inflatable Pepsi and Mountain Dew bottles were twisting in the breeze, and a mini-hoop game was set up. There was even a marching band and Chester the Cheetos…

The headline over a Brian Resnick item at National Journal reads:

A new poll from Harvard University's Institute of Politics shows young people increasingly cooling to President Obama and his signature domestic achivement, Obamacare. Fifty-four percent of young people (ages 18 to 29) disapprove of the job Obama is doing. A total of 47 percent of young people,…

Chris Frates at CNN reports:

The boss, joined by former Democratic senator Blanche Lincoln and USA Today's Susan Page, discussed Obamacare and efforts by the Obama administration to "rebrand" the law with CNN's Jake Tapper on Tuesday. Watch the video below:

Mark Pryor, the incumbent Democratic senator from Arkansas up for reelection next year, is releasing a new TV ad Wednesday in which he invokes his belief in God. The ad first aired on the news broadcast on ABC affiliate KATV in Little Rock Tuesday evening.

At an event today in China, Vice President Joe Biden encouraged youth to challenge authority. The event took place at the U.S. consulate. 

To avoid Obamacare fraud, the IRS needs changing.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on President Obama's speech to the press today on the problems plaguing Healthcare.gov and Obamacare.

Chuck Schumer will introduce legislation to make it illegal to make guns with 3-D printers, according to the Huffington Post. He's expected to introduce the bill in the Senate next week.

President Obama sent a memorandum to Secretary of State John Kerry to direct him not to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to the capital city Jerusalem. Despite U.S. law, the embassy is currently in Tel Aviv, though there's an American consulate in Jerusalem.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two challenges to the constitutionality of the HHS mandate that employer-provided health insurance cover certain reproductive services free of charge even over the employer’s religious objections. Of the many who will be closely watching the high court’s…

In Politico, Trudy Lieberman delivers a careful, detailed analysis of how the media failed to see the approaching Obamacare storm:

The bankruptcy of Detroit, which has been a widely appreciated fact for some time now, has now become sanctioned by law.  As Reuters reports:

Absolute coherence when it comes foreign policy is a rare thing.  International relations will forever be a mix of principles, interests, circumstances, and necessities.  But recognition of that fact doesn’t mean one has to jump to the opposite conclusion that foreign policy is simply a grab bag of…

At the end of September, the federal government's fiscal year was drawing to a close, the threat of a shut down was increasing, and the State Department was shopping for art.  Four contracts were awarded in the last two weeks of September, including $1,000,000 for a granite sculpture by Irish-born…

We’re going to hear a lot in the coming days about how the “Chinese” education system is superior to America’s.  That’s because the results of an international exam were released today, and American students fared predictably poorly. And it was “Asian nations [who] dominated the test,” reports the…

Vice President Joe Biden asked a group of women in Japan whether their husbands like them working full-time. "Do your husbands like you working fulltime?" Biden asked, according to the pool report.

Vice President Joe Biden says that women are not "kinder and gentler" in the work place than men. 

The D.C. Council began the year by trying to pass a minimum wage hike intended to bring to Walmart to heel. It is ending the year by pushing a minimum wage increase that would likely benefit Walmart. Such are the tangled politics and economics of the minimum wage issue.

CNN host wondered out loud on his show this evening whether the physically unfit Chris Christie could follow the "perfect physical specimen" Barack Obama into the White House:

Capretta: Obamacare will narrow doctor networks, too.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on Iran, its nuclear program,  reports the President might visit there, and how the GOP can reach younger voters regarding the Obamacare debacle.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Back when he had not been in the White House very long, President Obama called the fight in Afghanistan as “a war of necessity.”  That, to distinguish it from his predecessor’s “war of choice,” in Iraq and to justify the decisions he would make and the actions he would take to make sure that the…

In recent years, as its regime has been increasingly hemmed in by sanctions, North Korea has encouraged foreign tourists to visit the country. Unfortunately, it’s been working—nearly 10,000 Westerners now travel to the North Korea each year. One of them, 85-year-old Merrill Newman of Palo Alto,…

In a routine, short-run economic downturn, people tend to adopt more healthy behaviors.  You quit smoking and cut back on the drinking because … well, maybe to save money and maybe because you tend to focus more on the essentials and live less indulgently.  But our current long, lingering economic…

We’ve grown accustomed to waiting for news on the economy that would signal a return to movement and growth.  And, mostly, there is a forlorn quality to the waiting with most of the news indicating a continuing stalemate.  Latest reports from the retail front are not reassuring.  As Matt Townsend…

The Kuwaiti news outlet Al-Jarida reports that President Obama is seeking to arrange a trip to Tehran, Iran next year.

The educrats have decided that if students are to be taught about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, then it might be best to leave out any mention of that … well, that war that was being fought at around that same time.

Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called on the Obama administration to be more forthcoming about Obamacare:

The boss with Bill Daley, former White House chief of staff to President Obama, yesterday on CBS's Face the Nation:

On November 5, Republican Rob Astorino was reelected executive of upscale Westchester County, which lies directly north of New York City, between the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. Back from a week of postelection beachifying in Puerto Rico, Astorino is already thinking about running for…

In order to possess literary merit, poetry must do at least one of three things adequately: condense emotion, embody truths about the human condition, or enrapture readers with the poet’s ability to put words together in a beautiful way. Great poems can do all of these things. Adequate poetry…

The Washington Post, like many publications, has been observing the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in considerable detail. No, make that lurid detail. No day has gone by in recent weeks without extended lists, recycled photographs, old reminiscences, new theories, and the sort…

My mother, who admired Linus Pauling, kept three rows of bottles filled with vitamins and herbs in her kitchen, as well as stacks of newsletters with advice about “natural” remedies. She maintained an admirable figure on a low-fat, low-meat diet and enjoyed a full, happy life. So when she died of a…

The Scrapbook will readily confess to avoiding toll roads when possible. Sure, they are usually convenient, faster than other routes, and less crowded, but paying for the privilege makes the “open road” seem, well, less open. But when we have to, we grudgingly reach in our change tray like everyone…

Setting aside the flaming dirigible that is Obamacare, the big news out of Washington heading into the Thanksgiving holiday is that Democrats have finally made good on their threat to eliminate the filibuster for judicial and executive branch appointments. For the last few years, Senate majority…

Along with President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is yet another arrow in the quiver of the Islamic Republic’s charm offensive. The chief negotiator at Geneva over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Zarif was schooled in the United States, is fluent in English, and…

The investigator is chasing a suspect, who has just disappeared through a secret trapdoor. Breathlessly, the private dick follows the masked figure down a ladder into a dark passageway: It turns out to lead from the Belgravia mansion into the vault of a nearby bank. Our hero can see the thief in…

As we go to press, the Obama administration seems to be hurtling towards a bad deal with Iran. The administration will claim the agreement freezes and indeed sets back the Iranian nuclear program. But even the New York Times acknowledges that “only some elements are frozen, and rollbacks in the…

Everyone of a certain age, it is said, remembers the moment when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot. Yet even though I was 13 years old at the time, and recall quite a lot from 1963, I do not remember this, though for a technical reason.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman and chair of the Democratic National Committee, is nothing if not dedicated to the cause. “You’re darn right our candidates are going to run on the advantage that Obamacare will be going into the 2014 election,” she recently told CNN.

Like the music of Virgil Thomson and the dances of George Balanchine, the paintings of Norman Rockwell are enlivened by a conspicuously transparent species of Americana. They also had the good fortune to make their debuts before irony was turned loose on the land. There was no mocking impulse…

Atherton, Calif. 

There is only one person on screen. We hear him in a brief voiceover at the beginning of the movie, after which he speaks a total of 40 words during the 106-minute running time. What we do is watch this man as he copes with a disaster at sea. The movie is called All Is Lost, and it’s nothing short…

In early 1997, Dertu was a barely mapped speck on the parched landscape of the Somali nomads of Kenya’s North Eastern Province. The place’s misfortune was to possess just enough groundwater to attract a UNICEF borehole. By late 2009, Dertu was a picture-perfect dystopia of 5,000 souls. Its…

The legacy of President John F. Kennedy is a wondrous thing. Any president compared with Kennedy comes up short, even if his actual accomplishments were greater than JFK’s. Presidents in the modern era can never measure up to JFK in the public’s mind, period. Today, 50 years after JFK’s death, it’s…

As Americans pause to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, they should not overlook the other fateful assassination that took place that same month. On November 2, 1963, South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem was murdered in Saigon in a coup carried out by a…

China’s Communist party leadership concluded an important agenda-setting meeting in Beijing on November 12. At this point much remains unclear about the decisions made at the Third Plenum of the 18th Communist Party Central Committee conclave, including changes to the One China policy, market…

In The Price of Politics, journalist Bob Woodward describes the toll that politics took on the presidency and public image of Barack Obama during the budget battle of 2011. Elected as an outsider with little experience in governing and none in executive leadership, Woodward’s Obama is ill-equipped…

Last week one of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s major shareholders proposed dismantling the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and replacing them with two new private-sector entities that would offer the same services, namely buying and guaranteeing home mortgages. Perhaps more interesting than…

For just a moment, let’s pretend the GOP really were waging a “war on women.” Where would you go to find less inequality and chauvinism? According to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, three of the best options for women seeking greater equality are Cuba, Nicaragua, and Burundi.

Peter Doocy of Fox News reports that Healthcare.gov has not been working properly today:

Lifesitenews.com reports: