March 2014

Military veterans give Obama bad grades.

In The Great Debate and elsewhere, Yuval Levin describes the fundamental difference between conservatives and progressives, rooted in the debates of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine:

Today is the last day of open enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges. Last week the administration had announced six million enrollments, with about five days left to go. If they enroll new people into the system at the same rate as they had the previous 10 days, that would put the final, nominal…

As Charles S. Clark of Government Executive  writes, three members of the House –  Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts and Gerry Connolly of Virginia – have requested, by letter, something called a Government Accountability Office study.  They are concerned that “The…

Three crusading filmmakers intent on doing stories that no one else will touch have moved on from a truth-telling documentary about natural-gas extraction to a planned TV movie about the man they’ve dubbed “America’s worst serial killer.” By the looks of it, plenty of people want the movie to be…

An Oklahoma reporter told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius how unpopular Obamacare is, rendering the cabinet secretary speechless:

The script is familiar. General Motors’ top executive heading down to Washington to be grilled by Congress. As Joseph B. White of Market Watch reports, fifty years after the Corvair controversy that made Ralph Nader a household name:

Salena Zito, writing about baseball, in honor of Opening Day:

Despite the Russian troops massing on the Ukainian border and Russia's "illegal and illegitimate" actions so far, Secretary of State John Kerry told the press in Paris last night after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov that, according to Lavrov, "Russia wants to support Ukraine in its…

The Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, is down and not allowing users (at least, this user) to create an account in order to register for health insurance through the federal exchange. Here's what the page looked like when I just tried to sign up: 

The boss, with Donna Brazile, Matthew Dowd, and David Plouffe, yesterday on ABC News:

In a time of widespread suffering and frequent despair, this little girl touched the hearts of millions of people in our own land and others. Shirley Temple was a cultural force to be reckoned with in the 1930s, and John F. Kasson shows how her films provided therapy as well as entertainment.

When Paul Lake published his controversial novel Cry Wolf: A Political Fable (2008), critics immediately recognized it as an adaptation of Animal Farm for the post-9/11 world. In Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell allegorically dissected the mendacity of Stalinism, which had hijacked a genuinely…

Many cheered last month when President Obama finally used his bully pulpit to talk about the problems facing young men of color. Of course, the president did not have much else to offer: Nearly all of the $200 million pledged for his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative is from private foundations, not…

Howard “Bo” Callaway, who in 1965 became the first Republican congressman from Georgia since Reconstruction, died last week at the age of 86. A West Point graduate and Korean War veteran, Callaway was the scion of a wealthy Georgia family—his parents were founders of the Callaway Gardens resort…

The failures of American will exposed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are numerous and mounting. Coming on top of the tepid response to China’s declaration of an air defense identification zone over Japanese waters and the withdrawals from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the “red line” in Syria, they have…

Last week the Israeli Air Force bombed Syrian military and security positions in retaliation for an operation on the Syrian-Israeli border in the Golan Heights. Four Israeli soldiers were wounded when Hezbollah attacked their Jeep. Hezbollah it seems was looking to kidnap them. This time they…

CVS, the nation’s second-largest pharmacy chain, recently decided to stop selling tobacco products. That was all well and good: There’s nothing objectionable about a corporation making the decision to stop selling a product that is well-known to be harmful. (Though we could have done without the…

The Commerce Department issued a low-key bureaucratic announcement on March 14: The government will not renew its contract with the Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN), under which ICANN has administered the Internet’s domain name system since the mid-1990s. U.S. government…

It's time for a reset for U.S. policy toward Russia. The original Obama reset has now run its course, and President Vladimir Putin has thoroughly dashed all hope of Russia emerging as a partner of the United States and a constructive contributor to a liberal international order. The armed takeover…

The Scrapbook continues to scratch its head over the barrels of ink spilled over the Chris Christie bridge scandal. It’s well worth reporting, but none of the Christie revelations to date justify the flood-the-zone coverage. So you’ll forgive us for suspecting that Christie’s political affiliation…

This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.

He arrived without ceremony. No pomp, no pageantry. It was as far in spirit from Caesar’s entry into Rome as it could possibly have been. He had come to Washington to be made only the third lieutenant general in the nation’s history (George Washington and Winfield Scott were the others) and to…

This is a somewhat eccentric book. It is written to oppose the display of the Ten Commandments in American public spaces, but it makes little reference to American law, precedent, principle, or polity. Rather, it is an erudite and interesting tour d’horizon of modern scholarship on the Ten…

When pundits talk about the Republican party’s troubles with the “nonwhite” vote, they usually mean the Latino vote. There are reasons for this. In 2004 George W. Bush won an estimated 44 percent of the Latino vote; in 2012 Mitt Romney won just 27 percent. What’s more, the Latino share of the…

The Grand Budapest Hotel, the latest offering from the writer and director Wes Anderson, is a laborious confection, rather like one of the Mitteleuropa cakes made by one of its characters. It is elaborate and beautiful. It is sweet. It is a work of true artistry. But it is also heavy, and slightly…

In Iowa’s crowded, six-way GOP Senate primary, Joni Ernst is trying to break out of the pack by running as the only candidate who is “a mother, a soldier, and a proven conservative.”

Did Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, help Osama bin Laden hide in the years before he was killed in Abbottabad in May 2011? According to an extraordinary piece of reporting in the New York Times Magazine, we finally know the answer: yes. 

In 2005, Thomas L. Friedman published a book that had far too much influence on how Americans think about world affairs. The World Is Flat was a paean to the wonders of economic interdependence and “globalization”—the belief that interdependence and cooperation had replaced competition in…

On February 22, popular protests led to the fall of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev. On February 27, in response to this setback, President Vladimir Putin sent forces into Crimea to seize it from Ukraine. On March 19, President Barack Obama delivered his response. He…

If you inhabit the Left Bank of Paris, you live left and vote right. The Left Bank is on the southern shore of the river Seine, and the heart of it is the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a small, dense country you can cross on foot in half an hour. Around here they vote right, though you…

Add LeBron James to the ranks of Obamacare pitchmen: The basketball star is featured in new ads urging his fans to sign up at HealthCare.gov. “You can go there to find an affordable health plan that’s part of the health care law.”

In our dining room, there was a small glass-top table that looked like an old-fashioned pushcart. On it my mother kept several small plants that made a mess of the glass top as they shed their leaves and, when watered, dripped soil from the holes at the bottom of their pots. To clean the table you…

Democrats are waiting. They’re waiting to see if Paul Broun is the Republican nominee for the Senate in Georgia. They’re waiting to see if challenger Matt Bevin and the Senate Conservatives Fund lacerate Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell sufficiently in Kentucky’s Republican primary to make…

James Whistler’s flamboyance assured his fame in decades when mass culture was setting new standards for recognition. He was a creature who relished the spotlight, and he became a star player in the increasingly public art scene that surged to the forefront in late-19th-century life. Whether…

His promising career in politics having come to an inglorious – and no doubt temporary – end, Anthony Weiner has turned to punditry.  In his first column for Business Insider, his subject is the controversy over the Tesla automobile and the campaign by its maker to sell directly to the consumer…

Senator Angus King, an independent senator from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, said this morning on Fox that "There's no such thing as Obamacare."

The state of Maryland has encountered many setbacks in its attempt to get a health care website up and running smoothly. (Sound familiar?) And now, it has run up the white flag.  As Mary Pat Flaherty and Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post report:

America is a fracking cornucopia of crude oil, independent of the rapacious OPEC cartel. And has an inexhaustible supply of natural gas, putting us in a position to become a major exporter able to use its gas reserves as a geopolitical weapon. Take that, King Abdullah and Vladimir Putin. Too good…

“Is your fortune teller licensed?”

In a surprising move, the influential Tea Party group FreedomWorks has withdrawn its endorsement of former Nebraska state treasurer Shane Osborn and is now endorsing former Bush administration official and Midland College president Ben Sasse in the GOP Senate primary. According to a statement from…

Ben Casselman at 538, on unemployment and underemployment, starting from this point.

Admiral Jeremiah Denton is dead at 89.  Americans of a certain age will remember him, if not by name, then as the returning Vietnam POW who stepped off the plane at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and concluded some remarks with the words, “God bless America.”

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol, live from the TWS Cruise. (Since this was recorded remotely from the ship, the sound quality at times is poor.)

Matthew Continetti, writing for the Washington Free Beacon:

In school, a child who gets a 67 percent will generally get a D.  But for Obamacare, 67 percent is apparently grounds for an A.  Talk about grading on a curve.

A top of advisor to President Barack Obama is in Los Angeles to try to get Obamacare written into scripts of TV shows and movies. Valerie Jarrett explained in an appearance on Top That! on PopSugar.com:

In the present crisis over Ukraine, the capabilities of the Russians are clear enough. As Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes of the Wall Street Journal report:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released details of the latest contract with Terremark Federal Group covering "open market items" required for the ongoing operation of Healthcare.gov. The documents include an itemized list of computing and network services, fees, licenses and…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on Obama's falling poll numbers.

Rep. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House intel committee, will not seek reelection. At the end of this term in Congress, he'll become a radio host. 

Schumer calls the Iran deal a mistake.

Aboard the Wind Surf, at port in Charlestown, Nevis

On Wednesday, the House Homeland Security Committee released a report summarizing its investigation into the April 15, 2013, terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon. Among the report’s key findings: Nearly one year after twin backpack bombs killed three people and wounded more than 260 others, U.S.…

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Barack Obama of dramatically weakening the United States' position in the world, drawing a straight line between Obama’s ever-yielding foreign policy and the increasing troubles around the world.

As Vladimir Putin reminds us that hard power, military power – not “soft” or “smart” power – is the ultima ratio in international affairs, who speaks for the Republican party?

Kuwait City

As Paul M. Barrett at Businessweek writes:

The AP is reporting:

A new report from the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee finds that "Economic Growth In 2013 Just Half Of What The President Said His Policies Would Deliver." Here's a chart, showing the committee's findings:

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has endorsed Karen Handel for U.S. Senate in Georgia. Palin made the announcement on her Facebook page, citing a quotation attributed to Margaret Thatcher: "If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman." Handel, the former…

Jennifer Jacobs of the Des Moines Register writes that:

President Obama has released a statement "on the Section 215 Bulk Metadata Program," saying that "Having carefully considered the available options, I have decided that the best path forward is that the government should not collect or hold this data in bulk." The statement is released by the White…

As Bloomberg is reporting:

President Obama has just concluded his meeting with the pope today in the Vatican. The White House sent details of the gift President Obama delivered to the pope.

Yesterday, President Obama explained that while “Russia’s actions are a problem,” it’s not really that big a concern. “They don’t pose the No. 1 national security threat to the United States,” said Obama. Russia, the president continued, is a “regional power that is threatening some of its…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with David Skinner reading his essay, "The Saint of the Family."

Late last month, the Spanish energy giant Repsol agreed to accept $5 billion worth of Argentine bonds as repayment for the government’s confiscation of YPF, Argentina’s largest oil company, which was formerly controlled by Repsol until its April 2012 seizure by President Cristina Kirchner. With the…

Oxon Hill, Md.

For the latest installment in the Department of Health and Human Services' Obamacare "My #GetCovered Story" series, HHS has borrowed a line from the traditional wedding vows: "In sickness and in health."  In a blog post of that title, a "theater artist" from Chicago tells the story of how her own…

The Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee has put together this chart showing that payments on the interest of federal debt will "dwarf virtually every federal expense" in 2024:

Nebraska Senate Candidate Shane Osborn is a former Navy Lieutenant Commander who was flying a reconnaissance mission in April of 2001 when the EP-3 aircraft he was flying was struck by a Chinese fighter plane. Osborn managed to land the plane safely, but in Chinese territory. This sparked the first…

That is how former secretary of defense, Robert Gates writing in the Wall Street Journal, describes what drives Vladimir Putin’s actions in the Ukraine, the Baltics, and any other region where he considers Russians interests and international reputation at stake. He is motivated by a massive…

Two hundred North Carolina teachers are getting their hours cut due to Obamacare, WITN reports:

Would President Obama prefer that you have health insurance of which he doesn’t approve, or no health insurance at all?  Well, based on the penalties in play under his signature legislation, it would appear that he prefers for you to have no insurance at all than to have the “wrong” insurance (as…

For sometime now, even figures that are politically sympathetic to Paul Krugman have been lamenting his abandonment of intellectual rigor and his seeming inability to debate in good faith. At times it seems the only real function Paul Krugman serves any more is, to borrow one of President Obama's…

Joni Ernst: "I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm. So when I get to Washington, I’ll know how to cut pork."

As Jennifer Jacobs of the Des Moines Register reports, candidate for the U.S. Senate from Iowa, Bruce Braley, recently made a gloves-off appeal to an audience:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with Mollie Hemingway, senior editor at thefederalist.com, on the Supreme Court oral arguments in Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius. a religious liberty challenge to the contraception mandate that's required by Obamacare. 

General Secretary Xi Jinping of China is in Lyon, France today, the second stop on a European swing, his first trip there since taking over the leadership of China’s Communist party.  He has already visited Amsterdam, where he met with President Obama. After France, including a visit to Paris, Mr.…

At Slate, Dave Weigel recently reported that the Democrats have been so successful at demonizing the Koch brothers that party fundraising emails mentioning the Kochs can raise three times as much as the emails that don't. However, attacking the Kochs may not be all that motivating to anyone outside…

Writing in the Washington Post  Strobe Talbott recalls a tense time during the days of the Kosovo crisis (and how many crises ago was that?) when he had a brief but telling encounter with Vladimir Putin, then a mere security chief but plainly a man on the make and someone to watch … carefully.  At…

Speaking at a brief news conference in the Hague, President Obama said he's more worried about a nuke being detonated in Manhattan than he is about Russia:

It’s being called the “GOP Lawmaker Principle.” Here’s how it works:

Vets for Freedom is launching a petition today titled, "Mr. President: Weakness is Dangerous."

When the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, one provision was a new 3.8 percent Net Investment Tax effective in 2013. Although the tax will generally hit high-end taxpayers (threshold is $250,000 for married and $200,000 for single), because of the way many parents choose to report their…

First Lady Michelle Obama talked about America as she visited a school today in China. She talked about the American dream:

Under sail aboard the Wind Surf, somewhere in the Caribbean

The G-7 will not be meeting in Sochi this summer, according to a statement just released by the seven-nation group. "This Group came together because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities.  Russia’s actions in recent weeks are not consistent with them.  Under these circumstances, we will…

With attention focused on the situation in Crimea and the Ukraine, Iran has been less in the news of late.  But it is still there, still dangerous. At the conclusion of a recent speech, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, former CENTCOM commander, was asked about Iran and current diplomatic efforts…

Big news: Up in New Jersey, Jeff Bell is running for the Senate.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Books & Arts Podcast with Philip Terzian, on the March 31 - April 7, 2014 edition of the Weekly Standard's Books and Arts section.

Kuwait City

Nate Silver, editor of 538, the online magazine of data based journalism, was once considered a bringer of empirical light and truth to a world that had, hitherto, struggled in intuitive darkness of expert opinion.  What Moneyball was to sports, his enterprise would be to politics.  But last…

President Obama is keeping up the rhetorical pressure on Russia. As Justin Sink of the Hill reports:

Jeffrey H. Anderson, writing for National Review Online:

The White House has been tight-lipped about the cost of First Lady Michelle Obama's trip to China, but based on the choice for lodging, it could be considerable. Mrs. Obama and her entourage, which numbers seventy according to the Washington Times (including her two daughters and her mother),…

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is mad as hell, and it’s not going to take it anymore. This is the third election cycle in a row where incumbent Republicans and the NRSC’s hand-picked candidates have faced stiff primary challenges funded by Tea Party groups. No less than Senate…

Ted Cruz is not in a fighting mood. The Texas senator is sitting in a booth at the Capital Grille, an upscale restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, about halfway between the Capitol, where Cruz works, and the White House, where many suspect he’d like to end up. His jacket is off, his light blue tie is…

In 1755, in the preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson declared that “the chief glory of every people arises from its authors.” Barely 160 years later, when England entered the First World War, the very notion of glory began to take a beating from which it has never…

At the beginning of this month, New York City Ballet principal dancer Janie Taylor, one of the most captivating dancers since George Balanchine died in 1983, took her final bow along with her husband, fellow principal Sébastian Marcovici. 

The January 31, 2014, Boston Globe front page included two life-and-death stories. One announced that the U.S. Department of Justice would seek the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is facing trial for the Boston Marathon bombing. Animated debate about the proper penalty for Tsarnaev…

Kiev

Paris

For decades, the notebooks of Gareth Jones (1905-35), a brilliant young Welshman murdered in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, were stashed away in his family’s house in South Wales, only to be retrieved by his niece, Siriol Colley, in the early 1990s. By that time, Jones, once a highly promising…

The carousel of failure at MSNBC has been spinning a little faster the last couple weeks. First Alec Baldwin blasted the network in New York magazine. And then the network’s latest savior, Ronan Farrow, experienced some .  .  . difficulties during the launch of his show, Ronan Farrow Daily.

President Obama likes to promote his domestic policy agenda by highlighting economic competition from China. In particular, he has repeatedly pointed to China’s massive infrastructure investments to tout his proposals for infrastructure spending in America.

"Ready for Hillary” is the rather ominous name given to the super-PAC working on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s putative presidential campaign. One group that appears to be ready for Hillary, according to the Hill, is the vast array of lobbyists known as K Street: 

Leslie H. Southwick of Jackson, Mississippi, is (or rather, was) “the nominee,” and here provides an account of his quest to become a judge on a particular federal court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which sits in New Orleans. President George W. Bush nominated him to that court…

Liberal media bias is such a fact of life The Scrapbook can’t get exercised about it every day. But there are two subjects in the news a lot in which the fourth estate’s inability to play fair is never less than appalling: Senator Ted Cruz and abortion. Last week, the Associated Press tried to…

President Obama is a gift to Republicans. His policies, his partisanship, his allegiance to liberal interest groups, his indecisiveness​—​they all have served Republicans well. Without Obama’s self-destructive presidency, Republicans would probably be somber today. Instead they are bursting with…

Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson was a congressman and then senator from Washington state from 1941 until his death in 1983. Jackson was a traditional Democrat: liberal on domestic policy, strongly tied to the labor movement, and a hawk on national security matters. He was very much in the tradition of…

In 1968, so the story goes, a 25-year-old aspiring journalist named Joe McGinnis overheard an advertising executive on a train report that his firm had acquired “the Humphrey account” for the forthcoming presidential election. “Until that moment,” wrote the Washington Post decades later, “Mr.…

My earliest memory of being spellbound by a piece of writing is of being read to as a small child from a book of Georgian (as in Caucasian) folk tales, the Yes and No Stories. For a time, I used to ask for “The Fox, the Bear and the Butter Jar” every night. 

Are Americans today war-weary? Sure. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been frustrating and tiring. Are Americans today unusually war-weary? No. They were wearier after the much larger and even more frustrating conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. And even though the two world wars of the last century…

It is almost unimaginable: five men past the age of 35 (one nearing 50), among the most successful and garlanded professionals in their field and at the height of their earning powers, leaving their jobs and their families to produce government propaganda. The experience was frustrating and often…

It's hard to find nice things to say about economists. Their detachment from the real world of human activity is matched only by their enormous influence over it, and by their unearned assumption that this arrangement is well deserved. That all changed last month, however. Now we can say something…

The Omaha World-Herald has two big stories up today that might impact the hotly contested Nebraska Republican Senate primary between former Bush administration official and Midland College president Ben Sasse and former state treasurer Shane Osborn. 

According to a pool reporter who was at the Great Wall of China for Michelle Obama's visit there today, "Chinese authorities made sure, for a day, that Mutianyu [a section of the Great Wall] was visibly free of Obama-Mao t-shirts." For $60, however, a merchant told the pool reporter that she'd sell…

In a question and answer session at Stanford Center at Peking University in Beijing, China, First Lady Michelle Obama said that sometimes one needs to do things she's uncomfortable with. She made the comments in response to a question about studying abroad.

Thursday, the Washington Post published a piece titled "The biggest lease holder in Canada’s oil sands isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers."

Josh Gelernter on how to sanction the Russians:

The government of Turkey has pulled the plug on Twitter and the White House is not happy.  As Mario Trujillo of the Hill reports:

We now know a lot more about the probable course of the economy than we did a few months ago, and are likely to learn even more in the next few weeks when the jobs report is released on April 4.

The nuclear ballroom.

An open letter from the Foreign Policy Initiative to President Obama:

The Food and Drug Administration is soliciting information and comment on brochure technology it's exploring as part of its mandate to implement the Tobacco Control Act, a law signed by President Obama during his first year in office.

Iran appears to be constructing a mock-up of the U.S.S. Nimtiz.  The ship is not operational.  Only 2/3s scale.  And not militarily capable of much of anything. 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on Paul Ryan and American Greatness.

Vice President Joe Biden has some problems speaking with a TelePrompter today at the National Association of Community Health Centers 2014 Policy and Issues Forum:

Long-term unemployment, in some cases, does not even show up in the jobless figures released monthly by the Labor Department and eagerly anticipated by the political spinners standing by to mold them into partisan shape. Many of those whose unemployment has been prolonged simply give up; something…

Matthew Continetti, writing for the Washington Free Beacon:

President Barack Obama warned yesterday at a private home in Miami that Democrats "get clobbered" in midterm elections.

Scott Pruitt vs. prairie chicken.

Congressman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) announced in a press release that he has been ranked the "most productive member of Congress" over the past ten years, noting that 31 of his 290 bills have been signed into law by either President Bush or President Obama.

The professional press corps has been frozen out of Michelle Obama's swing through China. But the White House has partnered with CNN to bring in amateurs. Katie Hawkins-Gaar, a CNN editor, coordinated the effort to solicit and accumulate submissions from "iReporters" interested in asking questions…

It would be ironic if Hillary Clinton had a second presidential campaign torpedoed because of another politician's foreign policy.

Feelings about the economy are not especially buoyant on this first day of spring.  First time claims held their own but, as Katherine Peralta of Bloomberg reports:

These days, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has time on its hands. So until we resume sending people out to explore the cosmic frontier, the bureaucracy is, as Alex Brown of the National Journal writes, keeping busy by funding and circulating studies into the:

A new poll of registered Georgia Republican primary voters shows businessman David Perdue leading his fellow GOP candidates for the U.S. Senate, with congressman Jack Kingston in second. Perdue gets 29 percent support, according to the Survey USA poll, while Kingston gets 19 percent. Three other…

A CBS reporter from Arizona reveals that President Obama's press secretary, Jay Carney, receives questions from the press in advance of his daily press briefing. In fact, she says, the reporters often receive the answers in advance of the briefing, too.

According to a local CBS Arizona affiliate, President Obama and his team have 3 tactics to make sure reporters stick to the 4 minutes the White House has allotted them to interview the leader of the world: a countdown clock, a looming aide, and they have to conduct the interview with the president…

The White House really doesn’t want to talk about FLOTUS’s China trip.

The BBC is reporting that:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the republicans' efforts to win big in 2014, and whether the Tea Party will play the role of spoiler as republicans hope to take back the Senate.

On the one-year anniversary of the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist convicted of murdering infants after they were born, the Senate's top Republican called for a vote on legislation prohibiting most abortions later than 20 weeks after conception, the point at which human beings…

In the weekend's Washington Post, Georgetown professor Angela Stent discussed the sudden demand for Russia experts—in particular those Sovietologists and Kremlinologists who in the 1990s had been consigned to the dustbin of history (or, if they had tenure, the dustbin of history departments). But…

In a statement released today, Senator Ted Cruz said a new government report detailing further delays and cost overruns for U.S. missile defense programs in Europe should serve as a "wake-up call that President Obama’s policies on both Russia and missile defense have collapsed and should be…

Well, that may depend upon how you define the word.  In the case of the Affordable Care Act, the definition will need to be rather expansive since, as Elise Viebeck of the Hill reports:

President Obama has made nuclear nonproliferation one of his highest priorities but, as the Wall Street Journal explains, the White House’s weak response on Ukraine is sending all the wrong messages.

Republican congressman Paul Broun, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, has paid part of his annual taxpayer-funded budget as a House member on a campaign consultant company.

First Lady Michelle Obama will be accompanied by her children and her mother on her trip to China, which begins today. But she won't be accompanied by the press. 

Appearing with the president of Latvia and Lithuania, Vice President Joe Biden warned Russia "that there is a price to pay for naked aggression."

Vladimir Putin has claimed Crimea. Obamacare premiums are about to skyrocket. And Barack Obama is filling out his NCAA "March Madness" basketball bracket. 

What can Obama’s resolve accomplish against Putin?

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior editor Lee Smith on the crisis in Ukraine and how President Obama's foreign policy crisis started in Syria.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Books & Arts Podcast with Philip Terzian, on the March 24, 2014 issue of the magazine's B&A section. Joining him is executive editor Terry Eastland, to discuss his recent review, Ordeal by Congress, which was a memoir by Judge Leslie Southwick on his road to confirmation to the…

Bloomberg reports:

Top Senate Banking Committee members released plans this week to wind down mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and replace them with a complicated apparatus disturbingly similar to Obamacare.

As William Maclean of Reuters reports, Iran has not let deals and agreements get in the way of its effort to build a bomb. He interviewed:

Scott Wilson of the Washington Post reports that Vice President Biden arrived in Warsaw:

A new poll from a Democratic firm finds Colorado senator Mark Udall in a close race with the leading Republican challenger, House member Cory Gardner. PPP polls discovered in its poll of registered voters that 42 percent support Udall, the Democrat, while 40 percent would vote for Gardner. Another…

Anne Barnard of the New York Times writes that:

A pastor recently diagnosed with cancer, and who is covered under Obamacare, tells a local Iowa reporter that there's "no compassion in the Affordable Care Act."

In recent weeks, all eyes have been on a revisionist regime dissatisfied with the post-Cold War status quo, convinced of the geopolitical necessity of and historical right to a hegemonic self-centric regional order, dedicated to the long-term job security of its political leaders, and driven by…

Healthcare.gov has eliminated the web chat customer service option. Sometime around the beginning of March, the online chat feature that has been present since Healthcare.gov was launched disappeared.  Although previous posts on the Healthcare.gov blog still refer to the "live chat" feature, the…

Average premiums are up 39-56 percent under Obamacare.

Jackson Diehl, writing in the Washington Post:

Earlier in March, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus revised how to count the size of the U.S.’s battle force inventory. The battle force inventory is important because it measures the size of the U.S. combat fleet. The new definition will make the U.S. combat fleet look larger than it really is. …

It may come as a surprise to the architects of our “Smart Power” foreign policy, but the world is not entirely rational.  Vladimir Putin defies the West, which threatens sanctions – but nothing personal – and he is not deterred, even at the risk of recession.  Like a lot of strongmen, Putin knows…

It comes as no big surprise that K Street has no plans to impose sanctions on Russia … or itself.

David Axelrod, the former top political adviser to President Barack Obama, talks Russia on Twitter. "Crimea and Punishment. Putin riding high at home now, but hard to see how his county benefits in the long run if ruble is in rubble," writes Axelrod.

Garry Kasparov, writing for Politico magazine:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with managing editor Claudia Anderson, reading her recent casual essay, "The Tale and the Teller."

Americans for Prosperity has two new ads running in Colorado and Louisiana knocking those state's Democratic senators, Mark Udall and Mary Landrieu, respectively, for their support for Obamacare. The ads, which are a version of earlier AFP ads targeting Democratic House members, feature a woman…

The boss, with Matthew Dowd, Michael Eric Dyson, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and Greta Van Susteren, yesterday on ABC:

As the war in Afghanistan winds down, commanders face the question of what to do with all that equipment.  It costs too much to bring it home where it is not needed so, as Richard Sisk at DoD Buzz reports:

When Michelle Obama celebrated the fourth anniversary of "Let's Move," her White House initiative on fitness and healthy eating, she cited a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) showing a remarkable 43 percent drop in obesity rates among children ages 2-5.  Mrs. Obama brought…

To be outrageously iconoclastic among the Washington foreign-policy crowd is easy: Just suggest that the Israeli-Arab peace process is not merely pointless but actually damaging to America’s position in the Middle East and bad for both Israelis and Palestinians. Such a view is anathema not only to…

Ernest Hemingway drank far more than most people, and probably more than was good for him. He loved liquor so much that when he was in his late 50s, and a diabetic, his doctors tried to ration his alcohol consumption—to a liter of wine a day.

For the better part of a week I lugged The Birds of America around with me as I went to campus. Colleagues, students, and strangers looked at me with a mixture of interest and concern as I waddled past them. In the Lilly Library at Indiana University, where I do most of my work, I propped up the…

Questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays has long been the domain of amateurs, and Delia Bacon was one of the first. An American schoolteacher, and mostly frustrated writer, she argued in her Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857) that the middle-class and…

Partly because I’m a guy, partly because my professor insisted on holding our Feminism and Culture class at 8 a.m., making it impossible for me to attend, I find myself now, decades later, far behind the curve of gender empowerment. The curve is shifting heavily to the distaff side. Can I still say…

Beginning in 1990, the Manhattan Institute’s estimable quarterly City Journal helped restore safety and order to Dinkins-era New York. Many had given up on the Big Apple—recall its hopeless depiction in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)—but under editor Myron Magnet, CJ doggedly…

Last week, a federal judge ruled that a $9.5 billion judgment for environmental damage in Ecuador could not be enforced against Chevron. American environmental lawyers had brought suit against Chevron for polluting the Amazon basin in Ecuadorean courts, which in turn handed down the astronomical…

On the last day of February and first day of March, Russia’s mendacious foreign and defense ministers told their credulous U.S. counterparts that Russia had every intention of respecting Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity. Of course, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is virtually the…

Another week, another Obamacare delay, improvised by the administration. The latest is particularly laughable. It seems the administration miscalculated when it first decided to delay Obamacare’s mandated minimum coverage requirements for health insurance. According to the Hill: “A one-year…

Back in the nineties, the notion of an online magazine was new and exciting. Salon was one of the first big web publishing endeavors, and for a number of years, the site attracted respectable literary and political contributors. It always had a liberal bent, but it was a serious publication. Over…

When House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican, introduced a major tax reform proposal at the end of February, the entire tax policy world in Washington was set into motion. I have friends who lobby on tax issues who claim they did not sleep the two days after the…

What does a poor or lower-middle-class white person, especially one from the South or Southwest, have to do to get a break from fancy high-end TV producers? It is a remarkable fact about this new Golden Age of television, which began with The Sopranos in 1999, that its primary focus of attention is…

Terry Eastland noted three weeks ago in these pages (“After the Filibuster,” February 24) that “President Obama and Senate Democrats have gone to great lengths to secure the appointment of executive-branch officers and judges and thus help advance his policies and programs.” A key move was Senate…

In a speech the other day to state attorneys general, the U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, offered an ideal job description for himself and his state counterparts: “not merely to use our legal system to settle disputes and punish those who have done wrong, but to answer the kinds of fundamental…

President Obama talks, talks, talks about jobs. The first 20 minutes of his State of the Union address in January was all about jobs. Immigration reform would “create jobs for everybody,” he said. His energy policy “is creating jobs.” Obama said he’s assigned Vice President Biden to make sure…

So Comcast’s chairman and CEO Brian Roberts is counting on his political clout with the Obama administration and a few inconsequential divestments to win regulatory approval for Comcast’s $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. And antitrust experts such as myself will be crunching numbers to…

Now that “software is eating the world,” in the words of Marc Andreessen, every once in awhile, we dinosaur types like to try our luck in the land of Web 2.0, 3.0, or Whatever.0 we’re on at the moment. To that end, I recently applied to become a driver at Lyft, the “ride-sharing” service where…

On February 23, five days before Russia invaded Ukraine, National Security Adviser Susan Rice appeared on Meet the Press and shrugged off suggestions that Russia was preparing any kind of military intervention: “It’s in nobody’s interest to see violence returned and the situation escalate.” A…

From his place on the podium at AIPAC’s annual policy conference last week, Benjamin Netanyahu surveyed the Middle East. “On the one side stands Israel, animated by the values we cherish,” said the Israeli prime minister. And on the other side are Iran, Bashar al-Assad, and Hezbollah—“the forces of…

It’s not often that The Scrapbook finds common cause with Vincent Gray, the mayor of Washington, D.C. But occasionally, worlds do collide. And in this instance, we are in full agreement with the mayor about a familiar topic for readers of this page: the United States Secret Service.

News addiction? Nothing new. “You cannot imagine to what a disease the itch of news is grown,” wrote an Englishman named John Cooper in 1667. At that time, newspapers had been in existence for just over 60 years. The first appeared in Strasbourg, in German, in 1605: the Strasbourg Relation, a…

This weekend’s hymn appears to be “Democrats in Trouble.” Follow along with Jonathan Martin and Ashley Parker of the New York Times:

Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Dan Pfeiffer, an advisor to President Obama, wasn't telling the truth:

The administration continues to jury rig the Affordable Care Act, which it sometimes calls “the law of the land.” The most recent fix is a 279 pager, released on Friday afternoon when the administration no doubt hoped most people would have better things to worry about. The 279 pages detailed…

Today marks the third anniversary of the beginning of the Syrian rebellion, a popular uprising that started as a protest movement and degenerated into a civil war that has already claimed more than 146,000 lives. As the White House has come to enumerate the various reasons why it has balked at…

President Obama might have been economical with the truth when he promised Americans they could keep their doctors when Obamacare takes effect, but he is proving a man of his word when it comes to the exercise of presidential power as he defines it. “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” he told…

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts who defeated Republican Scott Brown in 2012, has sent out a fundraising email to encourage supporters to donate to New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. Brown announced Friday he is forming an exploratory committee to run against Shaheen…

Beyond the spin, the numbers are stacked against Obama. 

Scott Brown is officially exploring a run for U.S. Senate from the state of New Hampshire, he announced today. "I’m going to stop complaining and get involved again.  So I am announcing that I have formed an exploratory committee to prepare a campaign for the U.S. Senate," Brown will say at a New…

Elliott Abrams writes:

Expectations unexpectedly fell with is something many have come to expect … if you know what we mean.

Politicians out of power like to promise the moon and the stars to voters. They make contracts and pledges to America. Some vow to make the oceans recede and usher in a new era of hope and change. Others merely claim they have the power to make D.C. listen. But you don’t hear any grand promises…

Not exactly a victory lap when, as the AP reports, the president says:

Fifty-two people in Wisconsin were un-enrolled in Obamacare due to a glitch. They all must now re-enroll in order to be covered by Obamacare. WKOW in Madison reports:

In the latest issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, which went online early this morning, I have an article about the Nebraska Senate race. In a nutshell, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is trying to give a boost to one of the candidates due to some disagreements with outside conservative…

White House spin doctors and a sea of lawyers have somehow managed to schedule a presidential appearance:

Daniel Gade lost his right leg in Iraq. But Gade, an assistant professor of political science at the U.S. Military Academy, does not consider himself disabled. Instead, he uses himself as an example of how the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs often inaccurately assesses disability.

President Obama is warning Americans that they might have to change doctors because of Obamacare:

The mothers of celebrities Jonah Hill, Adam Levine, Jennifer Lopez, and Alicia Keys star in a new web ad to promote Obamacare:

The Obama administration has been under heavy criticism from foes and even some friends for selective enforcement of laws.  Executive orders and executive actions have contradicted, delayed, or otherwise modified laws regarding same-sex marriage, immigration, and, most controversial in the last…

Jeff Sessions’s plan for the GOP. 

CNN reports:

Steven Lee Myers and Alison Smale of the New York Times are reporting:

HHS is trying to jump start Obamacare signups among the young with an image that is supposed to be the universal disapproving mother scowling at her spawn while saying, “Don’t worry about me, I’ll just wait here until you #GetCovered. – Mom.”

House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan has come under fire from Democrats over comments he made Wednesday while discussing the problems of fatherlessness, poverty, and unemployment in America's inner cities. During an appearance on Bill Bennett's radio program, Ryan said that the government had…

Testifying Wednesday before the House Ways and Means hearing on the Health and Human Services (HHS) budget, Kathleen Sebelius was bombarded with questions about implementation of the Affordable Care Act. She was asked to provide details on the administration's claims about current enrollment…

In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry made the point that his department is not just concerned with foreign affairs.  The State Department tweeted the following comments of the secretary at the hearing:

Pollsters call it the “rally effect.”  In a crisis, people tend instinctively, if abstractly, to support their leaders.  The signature example being that, when the Bay of Pigs invasion ended in failure, John F. Kennedy’s poll numbers went up.

With Obamacare, it seems like every day brings with it a new interpretation, ruling, finding, exemption, or what-have-you. This thing is more slippery than a basket of greased eels.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Books & Arts Podcast with Philip Terzian, on the March 17, 2014 issue of the magazine's B&A section.

The A-10 has been designated for retirement in the Pentagon’s quest to downsize. (Not for the first time, either.) According to the plans under review, those few hundred copies still in service will be decommissioned and, presumably, shipped of to some boneyard. Or, perhaps, cut up for scrap.…

As sequestration bore down in February 2013, the threat of furloughs for thousands of government workers was a common refrain from those warning of the dire effects of the across the board budget cuts. Janet Napolitano, then-head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), told Rep. Bennie…

HHS quietly suspends the individual mandate. 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the GOP win in the special election in Florida, and what it means for 2014.

Two car companies – Toyota and GM – some of whose vehicles are having engineering problems serious enough to be a safety risk and require massive recalls.  One is investigated by Congress and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration while the other is not … until very recently, that is.…

White House spokesman Jay Carney plugged his wife's book today at the White House press briefing: 

Republican David Jolly won Tuesday's special election for an open House seat in Florida over Democrat Alex Sink, a former chief financial officer for the state and a 2010 candidate for governor. Jolly, a lobbyist and one-time congressional staffer, is succeeding his former boss, the late Bill…

The big news in the Wall Street Journal poll as reported by Partrick O'Connor is that the president’s approval ratings are low.  Lower, in fact, than they have ever been.

On Saturday, March 8, members of the Gonabadi-Nimatullahi Sufi order, the most powerful Muslim contemplative body in Iran, assembled with supporters of other political prisoners in Tehran, for a peaceful protest against repression by the country’s clerical regime. Participants in the demonstration,…

Senator John McCain was one of many prominent Republicans who urged Governor Jan Brewer to veto an amendment to Arizona's existing religious freedom law two weeks ago. Following an intense backlash from activists and pundits who who said the bill was "anti-gay," Brewer followed McCain's advice and…

A new Gallup poll shows the American people say climate change is one of the problems they worry about the least.

Texas governor Rick Perry told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel that "America is a great place for second chances" when asked about running for president in 2016. Perry, appearing on Kimmel's show Tuesday night while on location in Austin, teased the idea of running again after his failed 2012 bid.

The G-7 leaders are coming together to say that they "would not recognize the outcome" of a vote "to change the status of Crimea contrary to Ukrainian law and in violation of international law."

Colorado senator Mark Udall, a Democrat first elected in 2008, is in a statistical tie with Republican challenger Cory Gardner, according to a new poll from Rasmussen Reports.

President Obama knows that his time is almost up. It's a point he's making to liberal Democratic donors to get them to donate generously in this year's mid-term election.

Jolly wins in Florida.

Arkansas's Democratic senator Mark Pryor won't say why he believes Tom Cotton, the Republican congressman who is challenging him this year, "gives off" a "sense of entitlement" to the Senate seat because of Cotton's military service. In a recent interview with NBC News, Pryor said, "I think that's…

On a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services insisted that March 31 is the firm deadline to sign up for Obamacare. "We have no plans to extend the open enrollment period," HHS official Julie Bataille said. "In fact, we don't…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with staff writer Jay Cost on how the GOP can be competitive in deep-blue regions like New England.

The White House pool reporter says that President Obama has gone shopping at Gap in New York City:

Harry Reid claims that recent bad weather is more evidence climate change exists and needs a response from the federal government. Reid's comments today come just after the Senate's all-night "talkathon," during which several Democratic senators spoke back-to-back about climate change.

NBC reporter Chuck Todd shouted a question to President Obama about whether he still has confidence in the CIA director. The president refused to answer the question.

If Israel believed that exposing an Iranian arms transfer to terrorists in Gaza was a public relations coup that might make the White House think twice about making a deal with the regime in Tehran over its nuclear weapons program, then Jerusalem has fundamentally misread the Obama administration.…

On May 18, Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, will be Barnard College's commencement speaker and will receive the Barnard medal of distinction, the college’s highest honor.

The top referrer to Healthcare.gov right now is the website Funny or Die. That's according to White House senior communications advisor Tara McGuinness.

In Wisconsin, as Jason Stein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

The Senate remained in session through Monday night and into this morning. The yield of this all-nighter was … nothing. Which was predictable. There never was any legislative point to the exercise.  It was for show.  The kindest possible description would be that the senators wanted to raise…

For now, the "one-stop shopping" experience at Healthcare.gov repeatedly promised by President Obama is still at least one stop short of the goal.  In early January, news reports revealed a glaring shortcoming at Healthcare.gov: no function existed to report "life events," such as the birth of a…

President Obama joined Zach Galifianakis's “Between Two Ferns”:

How not to help the uninsured.

Republican congressman Paul Broun is leading a field of five Senate candidates in Georgia, a new poll has found. Broun has 27 percent of the GOP primary vote, according to a poll commissioned by liberal group Better Georgia. Broun's competitors came in relatively far behind, with fellow congressman…

In a statement to THE WEEKLY STANDARD Monday, Democratic U.S. senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia said he's "supportive of the the principles" in the late-term abortion ban that passed his state's legislature by an overwhelming margin this weekend. Manchin did not say if he will vote for a similar…

Who’s surprised that the Obama administration, evolved, urbane and forward-looking, is having a hard time dealing with Vladimir Putin’s unreconstructed Cold War mentality in Ukraine? “We’re hoping that Russia will not see this as sort of a continuation of the Cold War," John Kerry said last week. …

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with senior writer Matt Labash, reading his recent casual, "My App-Lyfting Story."

White House counselor John Podesta has joined Twitter. Podesta, the former head of the Center for American Progress, wants his Twitter followers to "Stay tuned for all things climate, #post2015, big data & more."

“I think that cutting the defense budget in significant ways right now is a serious mistake. When we’ve cut the budget before at the end of the Cold War, at the end of Vietnam and other times, it’s been because we thought the world was going to be safer place. No one can make that case right now."…

Over the weekend, the West Virginia legislature became the first state legislature controlled by Democrats to pass a bill that would prohibit most abortions during the final four months of pregnancy. The Senate voted 29-5 in favor of the measure, and the House of Delegates voted 85-15 to approve…

The boss has a new weekly newsletter launching next week—but we're giving you a sneak preview today. Sign up now by clicking here to make sure you never miss out.

My wife woke up Saturday with a badly swollen knee. We had no idea what could have caused it—her hot yoga class puts her in poses that put stress on the knee but she didn't remember the knee hurting during her last session.

A group of Democratic senators, as Niels Lesniewski of Roll Call reports, are planning to keep the Senate in session all night tonight.  This, in order:

The federally subsidized railroad service Amtrak is offering up to 24 writers the chance to take a 2-5 day trip aboard a train for free. It's all part what is being called the "#AmtrakResidency program." 

Less than a month after the exposure of a widespread vulnerability on government "open data" websites, another perhaps even more insidious opening for abuse of government websites has come to light. The problem is known as an "unvalidated redirect," and has been found on the websites of the…

The conventional wisdom in Tinseltown is that the biggest Oscar snub of the year went to Robert Redford, who failed to get a Best Actor nod. The Hollywood legend delivered a highly praised and mostly wordless performance of a man fighting for his life on a sinking boat in All Is Lost. But much…

Representative Kerry Bentivolio once said, “I have a problem figuring out which one I really am, Santa Claus or Kerry Bentivolio. All my life I have been told I’m Kerry Bentivolio, and now I am a Santa Claus, so now I prefer to be Santa Claus.” Bentivolio, a 62-year-old freshman Republican from…

The Scrapbook confesses to a soft spot for the preservation of historic architecture. We understand, of course, that cities are dynamic, not static, and that sometimes progress demands sacrifice. But we also understand that the march of “progress” sometimes points us upside-down—has New York ever…

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. When the suits at CNN were searching around for a successor to crotchety, unfocused old Larry King—“There’s a lot of good restaurants in Philadelphia. .  .  . What do you make of Dancing with the Stars?”—they settled on 45-year-old Piers Morgan, a…

Jacksonville, Fla.

America’s chattering classes seem at last to have awoken to the fact that the U.S. military ain’t what it used to be. Even the New York Times allows that “the Pentagon’s proposals to reduce the Army to pre-World War II levels” could “seem unsettling to a nation that prides itself on having the…

In Washington, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose—it’s how long you play the game. Witness the reaction last week to the announcement that Michigan congressman John Dingell would make this, his 29th term in the House of Representatives, his last. The 87-year-old Detroit-area Democrat has been a…

In his State of the Union speech in January, President Obama said he was planning a new initiative to help “more young men of color facing tough odds to stay on track and reach their full potential.” Last week, Obama launched “My Brother’s Keeper.” In essence, the president will use the power of…

“No one can or should sit on the sidelines.” —Hillary Clinton, at the University of Miami, February 26, 2014 Hillary Clinton is right. Well, partly right. Her characteristic disregard for personal freedom and her instinctive love of the nanny state lead her to say that no one can sit on the…

February was a bad month for Vladimir Putin. Despite Russia’s impressive Olympic victories, the Sochi Games turned out to be a $51 billion showcase of graft and corruption that even the Kremlin’s deftest apologists could not explain away without sounding embarrassingly Soviet. Then, as the…

Last June, scientists at the Astrolabe Institute in Houston made an electrifying discovery. While listening in on sounds emanating from deep space, they heard what seemed to be a conversation between two sentient creatures located on Nardalus X-50, a small, recently discovered planet. 

Though raised Catholic, I was educated by Quakers, and from an early age I took my politics from the Society of Friends. They were for the United Nations and against pollution and—this being the late 1970s—terribly concerned about the bomb. We heard a lot about nuclear war at school. Our little…

In that classic movie on wartime leadership Twelve O’Clock High (1949), Brigadier General Frank Savage (Gregory Peck) reluctantly recommends the relief of his good friend, Colonel Keith Davenport, who commands the stricken 918th Bomb Group flying out of England in 1942. Savage’s diagnosis of the…

The Monuments Men is a profoundly well-intentioned movie that seeks to pay deserved tribute to a subject both moving and dramatic: the effort by the Allies to protect the cultural patrimony of the West during World War II. But just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so, too, it…

One of President Obama’s greatest political challenges has been hiding the fact that Obamacare is largely financed by siphoning huge sums of money out of Medicare. In particular, Obamacare cuts—or guts—Medicare Advantage, the popular program that allows seniors to get their Medicare benefits…

Last week, things reached a fever pitch in Arizona as legislators tried to clarify existing religious liberty protections in state law in light of incidents, in which Christian business owners have been sanctioned for refusing to participate in gay weddings. The bill in question was immediately…

Most conservatives, and even some liberals of the dwindling “New Democrat” variety, put near-religious faith in the maxim that greater consumer choice would improve nearly every heavily regulated service. They’re usually right. But examining a case where the benefits of consumer choice haven’t…

Historically, potent third parties or outside political movements have had one of two origins. On the one hand, they were driven by powerful personalities who did not fit cleanly within either of the major parties: Theodore Roosevelt (1912), George Wallace (1968), and H. Ross Perot (1992, 1996) are…

It is occasionally noted that Florida has replaced California as the legitimate home of the nation’s nuts, but what is left unmentioned is that Floridians, unlike Californians, embrace the title—sort of the way England cherishes its eccentrics, though they are generally a more lovable group. 

It was a year or two before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. I was sitting in the kitchen of a small, second-floor apartment in the Thuringian town of Ilmenau, when my friend’s mother turned pensive and pointed out the window to a hill nearby. In 1945, Frau Loebner explained, American soldiers arrived…

There’s long been a certain romance associated with train travel. Think of the trains of the 1920s, replete with well-appointed compartments and dining cars featuring white tablecloths and five-star cuisine. And one need not necessarily go back in time to find examples of impressive trains: Even in…

First question asked, supposedly, in situation rooms when there is … well, a situation: Where are the carriers?

Sarah Palin, inspired by Ted Cruz's reading of Green Eggs and Ham during his filibuster last year, re-wrote the Dr. Seuss classic to whack Uncle Sam at CPAC today:

Rand Paul is the winner of the CPAC straw poll. As Stephen Dinan and Seth McLaughlin report:

Ralph Nader is exasperated.  Not an unusual condition for him.  But the cause of his frustration, this time, is not GM (the company he helped destroy) or Al Gore (the presidential candidate he helped defeat) or any of the usual suspects.  In this case, Citizen Nader is peeved at fellow progressive,…

Close on the heels of an Obamacare-related "off the record" conference call hosted by Vice President Biden, President Obama will host one of this own on Monday, March 10 with "faith leaders."  According to the announcement, the president "wants to thank all of the faith and community leaders across…

Five years ago this Sunday share prices hit a 13-year low: the S&P index of 500 shares fell to 676.53. Today it stands at 1,878.04, an increase of about 170 percent. Five years ago Sunday the unemployment rate stood at 8.7 percent, and was to reach 10 percent in a few months. Today, the…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with editor Bill Kristol on the Democrats' no good, very bad week:

Even as the situation in Ukraine has some talking about the possibility of a new cold war with Russia, Secretary of State John Kerry issued his first Policy Guidance since assuming his position a little over a year ago. The subject: Climate change.  In a blog post entitled "We Need To Elevate the…

The Tax Policy Center, a project of the liberal-leaning Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, released a new analysis this week of Senator Mike Lee's family-friendly tax reform plan. According to TPC, the Utah Republican's plan would reduce federal revenues by $2.4 trillion over 10 years, a…

The Washington Post's report on two surveys suggesting that Obamacare's heavily taxpayer-subsidized exchanges "appear to be making little headway in signing up Americans who lack insurance," contains this additional nugget about the Obama administration's level of foresight and competence:

Late last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Hewlett-Packard was replacing Verizon's Terremark subsidiary as the host of the federal government's Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, when Terremark's contract expired in March 2014.  However, the Department of Health and Human…

Non-farm payrolls surprised to the upside in February with 175,000 jobs added.  The number was “unexpectedly” high with forecasts running in the 150,000 range and some going much lower.  

A Utah man signed himself and his adult children up for a dental plan through Obamacare, but was unknowingly enrolled in a worthless child's plan:

The White House announced that Vice President Joe Biden would spend the weekend vacationing in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It's his second vacation there in three months.

New surveys: Obamacare signs up few uninsured.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has had a fraught relationship with the conservative movement, sought to win back friends on the right Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In a 15-minute speech, Christie recounted his battle with public sector unions, defended the Koch…

Marco Rubio made the case for American power around the world in a speech today at CPAC: 

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with executive editor Fred Barnes on President Obama's Ukraine statement and why it's his job to stop Vladimir Putin.

Gimme Shelter, the movie starring Vanessa Hudgens, Rosario Dawson, Brendan Fraser, and Anne Dowd, is a straightforward and unpretentious film about an unmarried pregnant teenage girl who chooses to have her baby rather than an abortion. Written and directed by Ronald Krauss, the film is both…

The Mobile World Congress (MWC to the cognoscenti) took place in Barcelona during the last week of February.  It was a four-day exhibition of the digital world’s latest and coolest.  Phones, tablets, “wearables.”  All of it very cutting edge.  One of the big winners was the Yota, a dual-screen…

This afternoon, the Senate will vote on an amendment offered by Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York that would take the prosecution of certain serious crimes in the military, including sexual assault, outside the chain of command. Although all-star Republican senators Ted Cruz of…

In Vermont, where he has been running for something for as long as anyone can remember, the senator is known, simply, as “Bernie.”  His national profile is not quite so well established but there are people who have floated the possibility that he might run for president representing the left flank…

In a joint town hall with Telemundo and Univision, President Obama made a pledge that his administration will not use Obamacare sign up data to deport illegal aliens:

At the Conservative Political Action Conference today, House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan dismissed reports of a GOP "civil war" and heaped praise on both Tea Party and establishment members of Congress.

The Dalai Lama opened today's Senate session with a prayer:

The House of Representatives passed legislation Wednesday afternoon to make the fine/“tax” for violating Obamacare’s individual mandate $0 for this year, and it did so by the wide margin of 90 votes (250 to 160).  That’s 83 more than the 7-vote margin (219 to 212) by which Obamacare passed the…

The Labor Department report on first time unemployment claims came in slightly below expectations:  323,000 against an expected 336,000 and the best figure in three months.

Here's the executive order President Obama signed today on Ukraine: 

President Obama "has signed an Executive Order that authorizes sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for activities undermining democratic processes or institutions in Ukraine," according to the White House. 

The semi-annual report on "Re-engagement of Detainees Formerly Held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" was released on Wednesday by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Out of a total of 614 former prisoners (up from 603 six months ago), intelligence has confirmed that 104 (up from 100) have…

Report: Obama “sabotaged” Kerry’s peace efforts in Israel. 

A French-built warship is on its way to Russia where it will undergo sea trials before joining the Russian fleet and, who knows, perhaps see service in the Black Sea.  As the AP reports:

The Department of Health and Human Services announced this afternoon that health insurance plans that are supposed to be canceled by Obamacare may be sold through October of 2017 in states that approve of the extension. CNBC reports:

In a surprising move, the Democratic-controlled Senate rejected President Obama's nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division on a 52-47 vote today.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the IRS Scandal, Lois Lerner, and why the press won't get serious about it.

Yet another damning revelation about the Clintons: Daughter Chelsea preferred imitation maple syrup over the real thing. In Dining at the White House, former presidential chef John Moeller recalls his urging another cook to give the first daughter what she wants, even if it seems just plain wrong.

Earlier this morning Israeli commandos boarded an Iranian vessel in the Red Sea carrying an arms shipment destined for Gaza and the Sinai. According to Reuters, the Panamanian-flagged cargo vessel Klos C was boarded in international waters without resistance from its 17-strong crew, who may have…

When you spend in the trillions and run deficits in the (many) billions, then you look for the millions where you can find them.  

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell opposes the nomination of Debo Adegbile as assistant attorney general.

"Bitcoin" is the most widespread, cryptographically-secure Internet currency. It was created in 2009 by someone (or someones) who referred to themselves as "Satoshi Nakamoto." Once it was released into the wild, the bitcoin currency ecosystem operated on a public, inalterable schedule. We know…

In an interview with NBC News, Democratic senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas accuses his Republican opponent, 36-year-old congressman Tom Cotton, of feeling entitled to a seat in the Senate because he served two tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan: 

Darrell Issa asked Lois Lerner a serier of devastating questions about her involvment in the IRS's targeting of conservatives. 

Mike Lee, perhaps the United States Senate’s leading voice for a conservative reform agenda, has now endorsed Ben Sasse in Nebraska’s Senate race.  Lee declared, “Nebraskans need Ben Sasse to represent their values, reformers in the Senate need his conservative vote, our country needs his voice.” …

Private sector employment Increased by 139,000 jobs in February as reported by ADP (Automatic Data Processing, Inc.). This early, closely watched number comes in below:

The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on Wednesday to reduce the fine/“tax” for violating Obamacare’s individual mandate this year to $0.  It will be interesting to see how Democrats in both the House and Senate react.  President Obama has plainly violated the law—and the constitutional…

Austin

Poll: one in three Americans believe they've been harmed by Obamacare.

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section of our March 10, 2014 issue.

Many Republican donors, consultants, and politicians believe that passing "comprehensive immigration reform" is absolutely necessary for the GOP to be a politically viable party. And most polls seem to show that American voters support a "path to citizenship" for illegal immigrants. But a new poll…

Richard V. Reeves has written in The Atlantic a confident and illuminating account of the state of marriage in America today.  College-educated American men and women “are reinventing marriage as a child-rearing machine for a post-feminist society and a knowledge economy.”  On this front, the…

New analysis by the Senate Budget Committee Republican staff finds that, under President Obama's proposed budget, interest payments on debt will exceed the defense budget in just 5 years.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rep. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, both Republicans, have a new op-ed at CNN calling on the United States to punish Russia economically and to aid Ukraine militarily if Russia does not back down:  

The administration has produced a budget that includes various predictions not least of which concerns GDP growth. The White House, as Jeffry Bartash of Marketwatch reports, is looking for sunny days ahead and:

Vladimir Putin is aggressive, increasingly armed, and dangerous. Besides his recent attack against Ukraine, he invaded Georgia in 2008 and has been rearming since well before then.  Like his Communist and czarist predecessors, Putin seeks to expand Moscow’s control.  Russian military spending—for…

Jeff Sessions, the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, says that President Obama's budget includes a $1.76 trillion tax hike. 

Here's a rather harsh assessment of the last four years under the Obama administration's economic policies:

Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, slams President Obama's budget in a statement released by his office.

President Obama unveils his budget today. And the numbers aren't likely to satisfy fiscal conservatives and budget hawks, who might have been hoping for a budget that decreases spending and lowers the debt. 

In a radio interview Monday, House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is another result of President Obama's weakness on defense and foreign policy. "I think it’s one more chapter in what happens when you project weakness abroad through your foreign policy,…

In a statement released this morning, House Speaker John Boehner pledged "to impose consequences on Russia for its hostile act" against Ukraine.

We are all familiar with the concept of gunboat diplomacy. But Harley diplomacy, as practiced by Vladimir Putin in the present crisis, is something new. As reported by Terry Golway at Reuters:

New Hampshire senator Kelly Ayotte called for reseting the "reset" policy with Russia.

The state agency in charge of Maryland's beleaguered Obamacare Marketplace, the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange (MHBE), is looking to establish a standing advisory committee to provide the board of the MHBE advice and input on a "broad range of policy issues."  The MHBE sent out a letter to…

A nightmare for an Alabama woman, who was trying to find help for her disability through Obamacare:

An event later today by at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.:

Where did Yanukovych’s money go?  

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with editor William Kristol on Ukraine, Israel, and the foreign policy crisis.

On Friday, President Obama noted that “any violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity would be deeply destabilizing, which is not in the interests of Ukraine, Russia, or Europe.” But it also matters deeply to the United States of America and the tools Obama hopes to use to resolve…

Good news for members of congress and their staffs. There is a benefit to them that is not, astonishingly, available to ordinary citizens. As Pete Kasperowicz at the Hill reports, unlike millions of Americans, they:

Last month the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the nomination of Debo Adegbile to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The vote broke along party lines, 10-to-8. Over the weekend Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania became the first Democrat to oppose Adegbile. “I will not vote to…

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine is not slowing down the president. Barack Obama will travel to Boston on Wednesday for Democratic National Committee events, the White House announced today. 

From CNN:

An amendment to Arizona's existing religious freedom law was demagogued to death last week by pundits and politicians who warned that it would usher in a new era of Jim Crow for gay people. "You can believe anything you want," said CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. "You can't turn away gay people…

On the eve of the Netanyahu visit to Washington, President Obama gave a lengthy interview to Jeffrey Goldberg that shows a chief executive who has learned next to nothing about the world in his five years in office.

In President Obama's blindside of an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, finely timed for Prime Minister Netanyahu's arrival in Washington and the opening of the AIPAC conference, Obama made the following, revealing remark, "I believe that President Abbas is sincere about his willingness to recognize…

Sarajevo

In an increasingly grim and dangerous world, we must give thanks to the Old Gray Lady for providing its readers with one howler after another. Some of the latest.

The March 31, 2014 deadline for Obamacare open enrollment has been widely publicized since Healthcare.gov launched in October 2013, but, until recently, information about purchasing coverage outside of the open enrollment period was ambiguous at best.  For most of February, a page on the federal…

A number of apologists for the Obama administration declare themselves vexed at the ongoing hostility to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (which isn’t affordable, and from which many people are seeking protection), regarding resistance to its charms as a perverse and irrational…

Millions of Americans, glutted with benefits that until now have seemed likely to be renewed and renewed again, have suddenly become devoid of ambition, shed the work ethic, and taken to the couch and the TV remote. Or found a back pain or emotional problem that entitles them to the even higher…

Facile cosa è farsi universale. (It is an easy thing to make oneself universal.) The statement in English has a blowhard’s windy obscurity. It sounds as though it came from the facile mouth of an exceedingly minor Transcendentalist. Some things are best said in Italian, and by men who can back up…

A couple of weeks ago, Ethan -Epstein wrote in these pages about President Obama’s “naked philistinism,” exemplified in the cheap shot the president took at the study of art history in a speech in Wisconsin (“Philistine in Chief,” Feb. 17). “A lot of young people no longer see the trades and…

In 1916 London faced a dilemma. The British were hoping to bring American reinforcements to assist them and their beleaguered French allies in the trenches of the First World War. Woodrow Wilson, however, seeking to become the first Democratic president to win reelection since before the Civil War,…

It was a day like any other. Oh, the weather was a little cool, I suppose. A thin band of clouds moved across the early sun, threatening an angry rain—but then again, maybe not. Light around the edges but dark in the center, like a calculating woman’s smile, those morning clouds are hard to read,…

It is unlikely that any debut in the field of military history will rival that of John Keegan’s masterpiece The Face of Battle (1976) nearly four decades ago. It was not his first book, or even his first good one. But it was, and remains, definitively brilliant and original. 

The Scrapbook has taken a shot or two (or three, or four) at the United Nations in the past, but the organization still does good work from time to time. Last week was one of those times. The U.N.’s Human Rights Council released a deeply disturbing and extraordinarily important 400-page report on…

Kiev is ablaze. Syria is a killing field. The Iranian mullahs aren’t giving up their nuclear weapons capability, and other regimes in the Middle East are preparing to acquire their own. Al Qaeda is making gains and is probably stronger than ever. China and Russia throw their weight around, while…

Readers may recall The Scrapbook taking note of a fawning, seven-page, profusely illustrated story in the Washington Post by Dan Zak (May 13, 2013) about three antiwar activists on trial in Tennessee for invading and vandalizing the nuclear weapons research facility at Oak Ridge. The heroes seemed…

Tallinn 

To hear the left tell it, the right is seething with hatred, ready to erupt into violence at any moment. Pro-lifers, gun owners, and Tea Partiers—a Venn diagram that encompasses more than half the country—are all sub rosa thugs. The media assist by reflexively blaming acts of political violence on…

Two leading Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence say that Michael Morell, then acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, gave an account of his role on Benghazi that was often misleading and sometimes deliberately false.

The economic news from Tehran is good—good, that is, if you are a state sponsor of terror moving toward a nuclear weapons program. If on the other hand you were hoping that sanctions might persuade the Iranians to cease and desist, the news is disastrous.

Every student of American religious history has heard of the event known as “the Great Disappointment.” In 1818 William Miller, a former naval captain turned lay Baptist preacher, developed a new method for calculating biblical chronology to arrive at the conclusion that the millennium would take…

Cortney Munna must be one of America’s most famous young debtors. A religious and women’s studies graduate of New York University, she was working as a photography assistant when the New York Times discovered her. Munna was 26 and still $97,000 in debt for her bachelor of arts degree. She became a…

Last fall, during an earnings conference call, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made an announcement that landed him on the front page of every newspaper business section: His company had surpassed HBO to become America’s biggest pay-TV service. Today, about 30 million Netflix accounts exist, serving…

Louisville

Texas attorney general Greg Abbott has a famous saying: “What I really do for fun is I go into the office [and] sue the Obama administration.” Abbott’s relentless struggle against an administration that routinely exceeds its authority and tramples on federalism made him the ringleader among the two…

Josephus Daniels was a North Carolina newspaper mogul, Democratic party kingmaker, Prohibitionist, progressive leader, ardent Methodist, equally ardent segregationist, friend to William Jennings Bryan, and counselor to Woodrow Wilson. He was an anti-imperialist who conquered and ruled parts of six…

Despite the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, the White House is focused on making the argument for raising the minimum wage. In just a few minutes, Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest will be joined on the phone with Governor Malloy of Connecticut, Governor Chafee of Rhode Island, and Governor Shumlin of…

Florida senator Marco Rubio spoke about Ukraine, Russia, and American foreign policy this morning on Meet the Press:

Lois Lerner, the official involved in the IRS's targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups, will testify before Congress on Wednesday, according to House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa. Lerner had previously invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions from members of…

President Obama spoke to the Democrat National Committee's winter meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday and addressed the minimum wage increase that he recently proposed, comparing it to the minimum wage in Ronald Reagan's time.  According to the White House transcript, and the C-Span video, the…

Marco Rubio, writing for Politico:

Foreign Policy Initiative Board Members Ambassador Eric S. Edelman, William Kristol, and Dan Senor issued today the following statement about Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine:   “Russian President Vladimir Putin has violated Ukrainian sovereignty, sending thousands of Russian troops into…

Saturday afternoon the White House press office released a "Readout of President Obama's Call with President Putin." Here it is, with interpretative commentary:

Elliott Abrams writes:

Jim DeMint, the former senator from South Carolina and head of the Heritage Foundation, blasted President Obama's "weak statements" on the ongoing situation in Ukraine.

A White House official emailed some reporters to say that President Obama's team met today to discuss the ongoing situation on Ukraine. It appears President Obama did not attend. 

The WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, with editor William Kristol on the situation in Ukraine.

Vice President Joe Biden tried to convince a young Canadian woman to sign up for Obamacare:

Judy Shelton, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has an interesting idea for saving Ukraine's currency from collapsing in panic:

The Wall Street Journal's "Saturday Interview" with former Georgia president Mikheil Saakashvili:

Here's President Obama on Friday: "The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine."Characteristically, Obama establishes a few degrees of separation between himself and actually acting. He doesn't say,…

The housing market and house prices are the economy’s gift to journalists. For one thing, almost everybody either owns a house, is looking to buy one, or to sell one – and all want to know whether prices are going up, down, or sideways, whether buyers are in the saddle and ride sellers, or vice…