June 2015

The crisis in Greece remains … a crisis.  After five years, during which time everyone who was paying attention said it was a crisis.  And, of course, the crisis went unresolved. The end game may come soon but, then, who knows?  But there seems to be a consensus of sorts building around the idea…

The FAA is announcing that Washington, D.C. will be a "no drone zone" on July 4.

A new poll from Suffolk University and USA Today finds the majority of Americans do not want to debate gun control in the 2016 presidential election. According to the poll of 1,000 adults, 52 percent say they would not like gun control to be a "significant subject" during the election, with 43…

Jon Bon Jovi is nobody’s idea of a conservative. Indeed, the hirsute rocker is a well-known Democrat. And yet, when Chris Christie announced his bid for the Republican nomination for president on Tuesday, and played a Bon Jovi tune in the process, the musician didn’t complain. Indeed, reports…

Donald Trump is finally running for president, and the polls tell us he’s no joke—contrary to what his GOP rivals would like to believe. Last week’s Suffolk University survey has him second in New Hampshire, trailing Jeb Bush 14 to 11 percent. It wasn’t a fluke, as a national Fox News poll taken…

On Tuesday, New Jersey governor Chris Christie became the fourteenth Republican to join the presidential race, promising in a rambling announcement in his hometown of Livingston that he would bring “strong leadership” to Washington. Christie also argued the country should not turn control over to…

On Wednesday, June 24, as reported by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), a foreign-funded news agency, the government of Kosovo sent police to raid the offices of five Iranian-controlled non-governmental organizations in the Balkan country.

Senator Tom Cotton, writing for the Washington Examiner:

The Emergency Committee for Israel has released an ad urging voters to hold Senator Chuck Schumer to his Iran deal red line:

To critics of the Obama administration's aggressive use of regulatory power, today's 5-4 high court ruling against the EPA in Michigan v. EPA might sound like a good thing. But the administrator of the EPA is sure she has the last laugh.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in King v. Burwell, most signs point toward Obamacare becoming the defining issue in the 2016 election.  That puts Republicans in an advantageous position, as it’s a lot easier to propose and defend an alternative to Obamacare than to defend Obamacare. …

Although President Obama has not yet fulfilled his promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the population there is gradually shrinking as detainees are repatriated or released into the custody of foreign governments. The Miami Herald noted recently that of 116 remaining…

First Lady Michelle Obama is thankful for her life. At the More magazine Impact Awards at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., the first lady credits her good life--and independence--to education.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with frequent contributor and legal scholar Adam J. White on the high court's three Monday rulings.

Vienna

Over at the blog Legal Insurrection, law professor William Jacobson reminds us of this answer Elena Kagan gave to Senator John Cornyn in her confirmation hearings to be Solicitor General in 2009:

The Hillary Clinton campaign is selling the "Chillary Clinton Koozie Pack" to help supporters gear up for the summer. Here's a screen grab from the merchandise section of Clinton's campaign website:

Here's a news bulletin from the Iran talks in Vienna:

Are airlines unfairly conniving to keep capacity low and thus drive up fares? According to Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, they are—and he's asked the Justice Department to investigate.

The The Republican National Committee is releasing a new video to argue that Democrat Hillary Clinton turn over the private email server she maintained while serving as secretary of state to an indpendent investigator. The web video showcases several reporters and members of the media excoriating…

AEI reports that Ben Wattenberg has died. I met him only once but had admired him for years, and it strikes me that he stands as a particularly important figure today. Not for his intellect, though it was keen; or for his energy, though it was abundant. No, what marked Wattenberg foremost was his…

South Korean President Park Geun-hye may have avoided walking into a potential minefield in postponing her recent Washington visit due to the MERS outbreak in her home country. Following the highly successful Washington visit of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, there is a growing sense of “Korea…

A veteran Obama Mideast adviser is claiming President Obama's position on a Palestinian state is no different from that of President George W. Bush--and he has effectively rewritten a key Bush letter on Israel in order to prove his point.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, while dictating one of the most sweeping social changes in history in his opinion in the Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized same-sex marriage across America, waxes magnanimous towards foes of the expansion of the millennia-old definition of marriage. He said those who…

If the world is looking for a go-to expert on links between Twitter and heart health, the University of Pennsylvania might just be the place. Earlier this year, The Telegraph reported on a study entitled "Psychological Language on Twitter Predicts County-Level Heart Disease Mortality" conducted at…

We are not allowed, needless to say, to disclose our top secret list ranking the GOP presidential candidates from top to bottom. It’s kept in encrypted form on a password-protected, self-destructing hard drive in a safe room at The Weekly Standard, accessible only to a trusted few who are cleared…

The Scrapbook confesses that its one big surprise, thus far, in the 2016 presidential campaign has been Donald Trump’s announcement of his candidacy. We are not surprised that he is running for the Republican nomination—although it can be difficult, at times, to tell which party would be most…

The Obama White House thinks that when it comes to the Iranian nuclear program, we ought to let bygones be bygones. What’s past is past, and now it’s time to focus on the future. Sure, the administration once thought it was a problem that the Iranians refused to disclose their past nuclear…

Walter Jones of North Carolina is among the House members that Republicans are most eager to defeat. But there’s a twist in his case. Jones is a Republican. His critics have their reasons—plenty of good ones, as it turns out. Jones, 72, was a strong backer of the Iraq war until he had a sudden…

These commencement remarks were delivered at the John Adams Academy, a charter high school in Roseville, California, on June 5. A graduation ceremony is a moment of pride in which we do honor to our graduates—and congratulations to you all—and to their parents and their teachers who were such a…

Before the advent of today’s advanced electronic gaming systems and cell phones with their apps, there were handheld games powered by AA or AAA batteries. 

The United States is slowly becoming pro-suicide. No, not all suicides. No one favors troubled teens or healthy adults killing themselves. But our society can no longer be described as unequivocally antisuicide.

"Oh, you Jews! Allah has permitted us to kill your brothers on French soil and here on the soil of the Islamic State.” So says the speaker in an Islamic State video released in March, which allegedly shows a Palestinian Mossad agent being shot dead by a child executioner. Standing next to the boy…

Africa’s black rhinos are on their last legs; there were seven subspecies, and three are already extinct. In the ’70s, there were only 65,000 black rhinos left. As Asian economies boomed, demand there for traditional, rhino-horn-based “medicine” paid for a corresponding boom in rhino poaching. Now…

America was going to have a national conversation about transgender issues, whether we wanted to or not. Our cultural betters decreed we would. The perfectly named Vanity Fair deployed its considerable resources to present the coming out of Caitlyn—née Bruce—Jenner in what it took to be the most…

The best moment in Jeb Bush’s announcement speech last week wasn’t choreographed. As he spoke, a group of protesters rose from their seats. They wore T-shirts with “Legal Status Is Not Enough” emblazoned across the front and succeeded in interrupting Bush. The crowd yelled at the protesters as they…

During 1849-50, the author and journalist Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) set about anatomizing the lives of the London poor in a series of 82 articles for the Morning Chronicle, which would eventually lay the groundwork for the greatest study of the English poor ever written, the four-volume London…

Jurassic World is a movie about itself. It tells a story about the difficulty of making special effects exciting when it seems like audiences have already seen it all. In the movie, the titular theme park has been built on the same island that hosted the old Jurassic Park back in the day when…

Congratulations to our friend, onetime colleague, and TWS contributing editor Mary Katharine Ham, who has just released End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun). It’s published by Crown Forum, it’s a bargain at…

Readers of a certain age will remember the critical surprise—a mingling of delight and disgust—when, in 1987, a pair of books on our country and our culture, written by obscure university professors, sold like Tom Clancy. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural…

World War I occupies virtually no acreage in the mental landscape of most Americans, even those who think themselves well educated and informed. And yet, as we honor the sacrifices of those Americans who were sent into battle on our behalf almost 100 years ago, how much do we really know about the…

It has never been easy to be a conservative in “polite” society, but these days it seems to be getting harder. We live in an age when opposition to liberalism is increasingly deemed illegitimate.

Not all Californians believe that drought is the greatest threat to their state’s future. Early this month, a bipartisan group of current and former local officials filed the “Voter Empowerment Act of 2016,” a statewide ballot measure aimed at reforming the politics of public pensions. Its passage…

"In the style of a lot of current shows, Deutschland 83 mixes real historical events into its made-up story. Ronald Reagan and other leaders of the period turn up in video clips spouting their Cold War bombast, verbiage that today feels both scary and ridiculously simplistic. The show has the feel…

It was after midnight when my dog, Woodrow, sounded the alarm. I knew right away that this was not the usual fox or raccoon or, mercifully, the occasional skunk that we’ve become accustomed to dealing with. Woodrow barks at them, too, but in a more gentlemanly way.

Americans feel—with a good deal of justification—that the political establishment has been serving them poorly for roughly the last quarter-century. Policy has generally been driven by a need to give instant gratification to the 24-hour news cycle at the expense of solving long-term problems. We’ve…

President Obama recently referred to the wealthy as “society’s lottery winners.” This clever little locution contains a world of radical implications, none of them good.

The art song for voice and piano—Lied, mélodie, canzone—is the poor relation of opera and oratorio, at least as far as popularity is concerned. There are legions of classical music fans who can hum every bar of La Traviata from overture to last gasp and who make attendance at Messiah sing-along…

When news broke this spring about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s appetite for other people’s money and their indifference to other people’s rules, I was rereading my way through a shelf of old Hillary biographies. My memory thus was doubly stimulated. In the fresh revelations, as in the books, the…

Earlier this month, the G7 met in Bavaria; its seven members are the major European and North American economies, plus Japan. The G7 is the successor to the G8—Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been suspended, having invaded and annexed parts of Ukraine, and now actively making mischief on NATO’s Baltic…

Roosevelt Island, N.Y.

Chris Christie will officially announce he's running for president on Tuesday, but the New Jersey governor has released a video suggesting he's certain to make the bid. Watch the 2-minute spot titled, "Telling It Like It Is," here:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the June 29th issue.

Vienna

Kyle Balluck of The Hill reports: 

There has been a whole lot of yelling lately about the flag that is flown so proudly in the South even after all these years. I confess that as a Kentucky boy born and raised, to this day I have a love and affection for that flag.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the Obergefell v. Hodges decision rendered by the Supreme Court.

So we once again have a functioning senate, no longer a prisoner of Harry Reid’s theory of government – if you do not like a bit of legislation, you can keep it – keep it from the floor, keep it from debate, keep it from a vote. That proved to be a ticket to the minority, as disgusted voters…

Longtime Clinton associate Terry McAuliffe used the mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina to make the case for Hillary Clinton be the next president of the United States:

A congressman's son is part of a black market at school to sell junk food, the child's mother revealed on Fox News. The revelation came from child's mother, Rachel Campos-Duffy, who is married to Rep. Sean Duffy, an accomplice in the black market sales of junk food.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Terry Eastland on the Obergefell v. Hodges decision rendered by the Supreme Court today.

As a senator from New York, Hillary Clinton was staunchly opposed to recognizing same-sex marriage. She expressed that sentiment clearly in this 2002 interview with TV host Chris Matthews (starting at 2:05 mark):

A top commander in southwest Asia reminded U.S military personnel stationed in Muslim countries in the Middle East of the restrictions placed on them during Ramadan. According to a report by the U.S. Air Forces Central Command Public Affairs, Brig. Gen. John Quintas, 380th Air Expeditionary Wing…

The State Department's practice of downplaying Palestinian incitement has reached a new low, with its latest report whitewashing not only the Palestinians' behavior but also Secretary of State John Kerry's own words on the subject.

Back in the heady days when the Western world was still enthralled by what was then known as the Arab Spring, the 2012 Egyptian presidential elections represented a watershed – if albeit a mixed one, given the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi. The coming-to-power of Morsi…

By a 5 to 4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled today that the United States constitution requires states to recognize marriages between couples of the same sex. Justice Kennedy, joined by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Ginsburg, wrote for the majority. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia,…

Here's the text of the Supreme Court's decision recognizing a right to same-sex marriage:

Our friends at the Hertog Foundation are seeking applications for their well-regarded Fall 2015 Advanced Institutes. This round, Hertog is offering three seminars for professionals in Washington, DC with some extraordinary faculty that includes many Standard contributors.

Republican Jim Jordan went on Fox News this morning to discuss the fact that Republicans in the House of Representatives are considering impeaching the head of the IRS, John Koskinen:

Bernie Sanders isn't Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare. He probably doesn't even crack the top five on Hillary's watch list. (I'm pretty sure it's Elizabeth Warren who keeps people awake at night Clintonland. Though, just for kicks, imagine what would happen if Michelle Obama decided to run. Do you…

Bernie Sanders is within single digits of Hillary Clinton in a new poll of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters. The survey from CNN and WMUR finds Clinton's support among Granite State Democrats at 43 percent, while Sanders, a Vermont senator, registers 35 percent support. That's the best…

George Orwell was born on this date 112 years ago.  He remains the invaluable writer on matters of a phenomenon that resembles censorship but somehow goes beyond.  Censorship, after all, simply suppresses.  This other thing goes further, altering the DNA of facts and making untruths into truths.…

Bobby Jindal's chief strategist, Curt Anderson, describes the Republican presidential candidate's announcement video as "very different." Anderson says, it's "not just another melodramatic saga of mush like most of them are."

Washington Post reporter Nick Anderson’s response to our June 16 critique of his (and three of his colleagues’) very long front-page articles on June 12 as misleading readers about campus sexual assault is revealing, both for what it says and for what it does not.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is being attacked in a new ad for not being liberal enough on guns. 

Last week’s horrific events in Charleston demonstrate, unfortunately, that there are violent homegrown extremists in this country. The extent to which they present a danger to the citizens of the United States is a serious issue worth considering.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with frequent contributer Adam J. White on the high court's 6-3 ruling in King v. Burwell and why it is even worse than you could imagine.

Walter Jones of North Carolina is among the House members that Republicans are most eager to defeat. But there’s a twist in his case. Jones is a Republican. His critics have their reasons—plenty of good ones, as it turns out. Jones, 72, was a strong backer of the Iraq war until he had a sudden…

The Supreme Court’s ruling in King v. Burwell is disappointing. But it also provides a welcome moment of clarity: We can finally dispense with the false belief that the Supreme Court will save us from Obamacare. It is perhaps a blessing for the cause of repeal that all eyes will now turn to the…

The band Well Strung has released a music video called "Chelsea's Mom," in support of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign:

A bipartisan group convened under the auspices of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a “Public Statement on U.S. Policy Toward the Iran Nuclear Negotiations.” The group—comprising former Obama administration officials like David Petraeus, Robert Einhorn, Dennis Ross, Gary…

The Millennial Task Force, a group convened by the House Republican Policy Committee, held its first hearing this week to discuss one of the biggest challenges for the Republican party in the 2016 election: securing the millennial vote.

By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court upheld the government's decision to provide Obamacare subsidies to people in 37 states where Obamacare exchanges were established by the federal government even though the law only authorizes such subsidies for people enrolled in an "Exchange established by the…

As David E. Sanger of the New York Times reports, the warning to the president comes from:

Hillary Clinton is scheduled to speak at the Virginia Democratic party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on Friday in northern Virgnia. The event is from 2-6 p.m. in Fairfax. 

In anticipation of the Supreme Court's forthcoming ruling on the Obamacare case, the Republican National Committee is going on the offensive. In a new 66-second web video, which is set to be released later today, Republicans are blaiming the law on Democrats who "pushed through Obamacare." Not a…

Speaking at an LGBT event tonight at the White House, President Obama took credit for liberal LGBT progress since he took office six-and-a-half years ago. 

President Obama met with China’s Special Representatives to the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue and Consultation on People-to-People Exchange earlier today, according to the White House. A topic of discussion? America's cyber concerns.

Fox News and SiriusXM announced today the launch of a new news channel.

The top Republican in the Senate is applauding President Obama after the passage of the trade bill.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the digital war on the United States and why we're not doing enough to stop it and fight back.

“There’s not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal,” goes the story in the Washington Post, casting the worst of all possible lights on the steps that the two-term governor of Louisiana and current candidate for president has taken away from his immigrant past.

Jim Webb, the former Virginia senator who may run for the Democratic nomination for president, released a statement on Facebook regarding the Confederate battle flag and the debate over its continued use in state-funded memorials. Here's the message:

President Obama called French president Francois Hollande to tell him he's not listening to his calls.

With Washington quibbling over the finer points of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), many commentators are arguing that lessons of past trade deals, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), are useful augers for what to…

Julian Hattem at The Hill reports that:

This, as Lisa Rein of the Washington Post writes, is how Senator Charles Grassley describes the VA.  Which, as Emily Wax-Thibodeaux – also of the Washington Post – reports, is performing no better now than it was a year ago with:

Bobby Jindal is getting ready to announce that he's running for president of the United States. He appeared this morning on Fox News:

The New York Times is out with a warning: "Homegrown Radicals More Deadly Than Jihadis in U.S.," the headline reads.

It’s been said that the terminally ill can hear music just before slipping away. I’ve always imagined these souls listening to angels strumming their harps. I never thought it might be “Hey Jealousy” by the Gin Blossoms. But that’s what I heard as I lay in my hospital bed last month while battling…

Campbell Brown has launched the http://www.the74million.org, a new online outlet dedicated to covering education. 

The Taliban is conducting an offensive in Afghanistan that included the recent attack on the country's

Senator Jeff Sessions will release this statement in response to Senate's vote to advance the fast-track trade bill:

Bill and Hillary Clinton vacationed in the Dominican Republic around New Years, visiting at least two exclusive resorts, Punta Cana and the Casa de Campo. The once-and-possibly-future first couple spent the week, of course, under the watchful eye of the U.S. Secret Service, but the security…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on Donald Trump's candidacy, and the debate over the confederate flag.

On Monday, the Pentagon announced that Ali Ani al Harzi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Mosul, Iraq. For those who have followed the public reporting on the September 11, 2012, Benghazi attack  closely, al Harzi’s name will ring a bell. He was one of the first suspects to be publicly identified…

In response to yesterday’s Bloomberg View report that Iran’s forces and the United States share bases in Iraq, Senator Tom Cotton has issued a strong statement against the administration’s partnership with the Islamic Republic.

Former Clinton advisor Paul Begala told CNN's Chris Cuomo Tuesday morning that Hillary Clinton "absolutely" has to answer for standing by her husband when he served as governor of Arkansas and defended that state's flag's relationship to the Confederate battle flag.

According to National Security Council (NSC) chief of staff Suzy George, the NSC is "downsizing," but not "for its own sake." George calls it "right-sizing," a way for the White House to "align our staffing with our strategic priorities." 

Hillary Clinton is offering a chance for one lucky person and a guest to join her for dinner. The campaign is inviting supporters to "chip in" to be automatically entered in the contest, although no contribution is required:

The White House will host a "Summit on Climate Change and Health" tomorrow, according to a press release. The event is supposed to "stimulate a national dialogue on climate change and public health," the White House says.

Josh Rogin & Eli Lake report in Bloomberg that:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Jay Cost on his piece "Fighting for the Black Vote" and the recent debate about the confederate flag.

In today's newsletter, I segued from Alexander Hamilton and the ten dollar bill to a fine performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro at Wolf Trap last week (don't ask about the relationship, you had to be there--and in fact you can be there if you sign up here) but I then continued:

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Juliàn Castro defended his department’s new "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing" program on Capitol Hill last week. Designed to integrate low-income families into higher-income neighborhoods, the proposed rules would funnel federal grant money to…

Over the past few months, the boss has conducted an unscientific straw poll to ask newsletter subscribers (subscribe for free!) and TWS blog readers their top three choices for the 2016 GOP nominee. This morning, he sent out the results, and Scott Walker has maintained his lead.

The Select Committee on Benghazi is accusing Hillary Clinton of not turning over all her work-related emails. The committee says it will release the proof later today. 

The latest episode of Conversations With Bill Kristol, featuring Donald Kagan:

Fortunately for us, the middle-aged journalists-cum-anthropologists at the Washington Post are here to explain the psychological intricacies of those Americans who are roughly between the ages of 18 and 34. Indeed, it seems that just about every day, the Post publishes a new piece “explaining”…

Shortly after it was revealed that Jonathan Gruber was going around telling people that the Affordable Care Act had to be packaged and sold with the stupidity of the American voter in mind, the president referred to him as "some adviser who never worked on our staff.” 

Summer means it's wedding season, and in Washington that means plenty of potential for conflicts of interest. Consider the wedding of one Hillary Clinton aide, attended by several members of the national political press covering Clinton and her rivals for the White House.

A largely unnoticed story about Carly Fiorina is that she is the daughter of a man who was one of the finest lawyers of his generation. His influence on her, she says, is “huge.” Asked in an interview whether he would be surprised by her bid for the Oval Office, Fiorina said he “probably would be,”…

‘I envy the mind hiding in her words,” Mary McCarthy opined of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), a poet admired for her air of secrecy during the heyday of confessionalism, when poets regularly hauled their Freudian couches into the amphitheater. Bishop’s poems, in contrast, invoke textured scenes and…

Off hours, The Scrapbook has been dealing, like many everyday Americans, with the sort of problem that admits of no governmental solution: namely, a leaky basement. But just because government has nothing to offer by way of solutions (at least not yet!) doesn’t mean that it’s ignoring what we’re up…

As a comic actress, Melissa McCarthy resembles a first-rate baseball pitcher—because, unlike many of her brethren, who have a singular shtick and stick with it, she has both a curve and a fastball. 

The Third Reich has surely been the subject of more books and articles than any other topic in European history. Although it is certainly possible to imagine new discoveries of relatively minor features of Nazism or of the Nazi period, it is difficult to imagine someone uncovering facts about…

Speaking at the historically black Texas Southern University earlier this month, Hillary Clinton gave a fiery speech on voting rights. She accused Republicans of spearheading “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our…

Among the entries in a 1999 anthology called The Best American Sports Writing of the Century is a profile of Ty Cobb (1886-1961). It was originally published in True magazine the year of Cobb’s death. The writer, Al Stump, recalls the last, bleak days of the great ballplayer’s life and makes him…

Los Angeles

In last week’s blur of news, as we forced ourselves to pay attention to the candidacies of the second Clinton and the third Bush, as we reacted to the vagaries of the Supreme Court at home and the brutalities of ISIS abroad, as we pondered the implications both of the Iranian nuclear program and…

I’ve long held a fascination with what I term death works—bursts of art born of some thanatos-based concern, be it an artist fronted with his own mortality or, in the case of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, the demise of a friend. 

Birds of prey are mysterious. Most of us glimpse them at close quarters only occasionally. We hear the “peow-peow” of a hunting buzzard overhead and sight a pale, feathered under-carriage gliding on unseen thermals. Or the disquiet of other, smaller birds alerts us to an aerial dogfight: crows…

From 1911 through 1967, the old U.S. Post Office offered savings accounts. The enterprise started because private banks seldom insured deposits. The establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933 removed the raison d’être for postal banking. By the time Congress ended it,…

Atlantic City 

"I think about how decades ago, across America, white men sat in their white-men rooms deciding what kind of country they wanted to live in. They put blacks under a kind of dome and .  .  . ” (Lonnae O’Neal, Washington Post, June 8).

It’s far too early to pick a front-runner for the Republican nomination, but we already have a pretty good idea which candidate is doing the best job of scaring both the media and the Democratic establishment (but we repeat ourselves).

Roughly four years ago I reported on the acquisition of a calico kitten named Hermione. I began by writing that she was asleep in my inbox. Now four years later, too large for my inbox, she sleeps in the chair next to mine in the room in our apartment I call my office. I ended my earlier scribble…

A year ago the Islamic State first made headlines around the world by storming Mosul and conquering Iraq’s second-largest city. President Obama pledged to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the organization. Here we are a year later, and with ISIS now holding more territory—including other Iraqi…

Our attention was drawn last week to the presidential campaign of Lindsey Graham. The Scrapbook likes and admires Graham, the veteran Republican senator from South Carolina, but concedes that he is probably not the likely nominee. Graham’s specialty is foreign relations, which never plays a…

June, for conservatives, has been of late the “cruelest month” at the Supreme Court, as the decisions finally roll forth. Many expect—with a combination of apprehension and resignation—that in the critical case of Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy will furnish the fifth vote for…

Istanbul

You may recall Brendan Eich. The cofounder and CEO of Mozilla was dismissed from his company in 2014 when it was discovered that, six years earlier, he had donated $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8 campaign. That ballot initiative, limiting marriage to one man and one woman, passed with a larger…

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, promises that "the American people are going to see a very different candidate" this time around. He made the promise this morning on Fox News Sunday: 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Erin Mundahl reading her casual essay "A Room of One's Own."

Former Hillary Clinton aide Maria Cardona said she wouldn't be surprised if socialist Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton in Iowa or New Hampshire:

As this father’s day coincides with the summer solstice, it is an appropriate time to recall the astonishingly accurate calculation of the circumference of the Earth that was made on this same day more than 22 centuries ago by one of the founding fathers of mathematics and scientific measurement.

President Obama's week ahead includes an Iftar dinner and an LGBT reception. Via the White House schedule:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the June 22nd issue.

After the Democrats passed Obamacare without a single Republican vote, Republicans generally (and wisely) united around the notion that they shouldn’t pursue partial repeal or “fixes” to Obamacare.  Rather than willingly giving Obamacare a newly bipartisan sheen, they publicly committed to…

Alexander Hamilton can’t get no respect. First, he gets born with at least four strikes against him---in the British West Indies, not exactly the hub of the universe; poor, illegitimate, dead-beat dad, and mother dead when he was eleven; then he blunders into the first great sex scandal of the…

First Lady Michelle Obama hosted a surprise baby shower for expecting mothers at the U.S. Army Garrison in Vicenza, Italy. She brought along the "glam squad" from New York to join the festivities.

Democratic presidential candidate responds to the Charleston shooting with an email saying, "I'm pissed."

In his run for the GOP nomination in 2000, George W. Bush successfully united establishment Republicans and social conservatives. As a Chamber-friendly evangelical who could speak honestly about how Jesus Christ “changed my heart,” Bush created an unbeatable coalition that energized the socially…

Or perhaps it should be “Spare change for Sanders.”  Either way, it appears that the Senator from Vermont is raising the money he needs – a pittance, at $40 million, by Hillary Clinton’s standards.

Hillary Clinton kept calling Nevada reporter Jon Ralston "Joe" in a recent interview:

President Obama touted his legacy in a fundraising swing last night in California. No one could argue, Obama maintained, that he has "not made significant progress" over the course of his presidency.

NBC newsreader Brian Williams sounded a bit like John Kerry this morning when he insisted he told the story of his time in Iraq correctly before telling it "incorrectly."

Well, Tiger Woods answered yesterday’s question – can he find the magic again? – and did so emphatically.  In a field of 156 golfers, one of them 15 years old, only two finished behind Tiger who shot an 80. There was no one thing wrong with his game.  It was a total wreck and it left the…

The U.S. Forest Service has posted a request for public comment in the federal register on a proposed new regulation that would create a “National Saw Program.”

We have been hearing, for so long now, that the end is nigh in the crisis of the Greek economy that it is hard to take another such warning seriously.  The problem of Greece, like so many others, seems to have no end, no resolution and, even, no point. Unless, that is, you are a citizen of Greece.…

It’s no accident that Texas senator Ted Cruz sounds like a minister on the stump. His father, Rafael, is an evangelical pastor, after all. And as the Republican presidential candidate displayed before the faith-focused crowd at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in…

On Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced that after 2020, the image of Alexander Hamilton will share a place on the $10 bill with a to-be-determined woman. It has yet to be decided if Hamilton will share each bill with the yet-unnamed woman, or if there will be multiple series of $10 bills…

In remarks regarding the South Carolina shooting, President Obama talked up gun control and said that he recognizes "the politics in this town" may not allow "something" to get done. Watch here:

Kentucky senator Rand Paul has introduced a tax reform proposal that promises to "blow up the tax code" and replace it with a flat tax on individual and business income. Here's Paul introducing his proposal in the Wall Street Journal:

Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that the Justice Department has opened a hate crime investigation to look into the shooting last night at a South Carolina church:

President Obama will give remarks on the shooting in South Carolina. Via the White House:

In the words of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Nicolas Maduro's government is increasingly a “dictatorship whose economic policies and generalized corruption have terribly impoverished” Venezuela. A founding member of OPEC with extensive petroleum reserves, the once prosperous nation is plagued…

When he steps onto the first tee today, Tiger Woods will be coming off some of the worst rounds of his career and a last place finish in a tournament that he was accustomed to winning. In golf, as in all sport, anyone can have a bad day. But for Tiger Woods, this was something different. You wonder…

Both Florida Republicans running for president are tied for first among registered voters in their party, according to a new poll of the Sunshine State from Quinnipiac.

Michelle Obama pledges not to slow down, despite the fact her second and final term as first lady is winding down. She made the comments in an interview with an Italian publication touting her Let's Move health initiative.

At this evening's congressional picnic at the White House, President Obama had a warning: "I want to warn in advance, I can’t do a selfie with everybody."

Senator Jeff Sessions is worried that the adoption of the Trans-Pacific Partnership would lead to an "historic international regulatory Commission" that would eoncmpass 90 percent of the world's GDP. He's concerned that it would "[create] a self-governing and self-perpetuating Commission with…

President Barack Obama met with Senate and House Democrats to push trade, the White House announced this evening.

Donald Trump puts his chances at becoming the next president of the United States at "10-20 percent." He made the comments in an interview with Bloomberg News:

The subject of debt – how much and how tolerable – slipped into the shadows for a time. But yesterday, it reappeared. As Rebecca Shabad of the Hill reports:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Victorino Matus on the curious case of Rachel Dolezal.

Immediately after the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship Tuesday night with a 105-97 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers, one of the commentators asked Golden State coach Steve Kerr who he was thinking about. “Lute Olson,” said Kerr, referring to the legendary University of Arizona…

Female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) exists in the Islamic Republic of Iran even while the redoubt of clerical dictatorship is absent from a recent survey of FGM in 29 countries, published by UNICEF. The UN agency examined states in Africa and the Middle East. The UNICEF document did not…

Thanks to Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan, salad may soon be added to the list of government-enshrined responsibilities.  

The New York Times has an alarming article today about the movement to push sex change operations at earlier and earlier ages. It contains this detail:

Let's stipulate to a few things concerning the Republican 2016 field:

On Fox News's Special Report this week, Steve Hayes suggested Hillary Clinton is vulnerable in her march to the Democratic nomination for president and that Vermont senator Bernie Sanders could be the one to cut into her support.

Fox will be using a drone and other high-tech means to cover the U.S. Open golf tournament. The Fox News Channel reports:

President Obama's former top political adviser David Axelrod revealed this morning that he did not know about Hillary Clinton's private email server:

Neil S. Rodgers, a former D.C. government official, was sentenced Tuesday for his role in the misappropriation of $110,000 earmarked for D.C.'s Children at Risk and Drug Prevention Fund to cover a deficit for the 51st State Inaugural Ball for President Obama's inauguration in 2009. Rodgers, found…

On Tuesday, a big announcement was made by a publicity-seeking has-been with bad hair. Oh, and Donald Trump also declared that he was running for president.

People not from Cleveland often ask us natives during the rare instances when one of our sports teams is in a championship, “are you nervous?”

On Monday I detailed how the Washington Post's survey claiming that one in five women have been sexually assaulted in college is deeply flawed. But there was an aspect of the survey I didn't get to, one that does not bode well for the future of relationships among students.

France needs Greece more than Greece needs France. So long as the Greeks grab the headlines with their defense of their unreformed economy, no one seems to notice that France is in violation of EU rules on the size of the allowed deficit, has such sustained high-level unemployment that its young…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on Donald Trump's entry into the crowded GOP field of 2016 hopefuls.

In this week's edition of the boss's email newsletter -- Kristol Clear -- readers are asked to rank their top three picks for the GOP's 2016 presidential nominee. The boss writes:

Since 2012, the New York Times has led the way in systematically biased coverage of on-campus sexual assault allegations and how colleges are responding. The paper has relentlessly hyped the issue, has smeared quite possibly innocent students while omitting evidence that they were innocent, and has…

In a June 12 column, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank botches a key fact about federal legislation that would ban abortion during the final four months of pregnancy, when infants can feel pain and survive long-term if they're born prematurely: 

The only female Democratic candidate for president may have a problem with male voters in that party, judging by a new Suffolk University poll of the New Hampshire primary. The poll, which shows former secretary of state Hillary Clinton below 50 percent support and just 10 points ahead of senator…

A review of $2.8 billion in subsidies paid to health insurers on behalf of Obamacare enrollees during the early days of the program could not verify the accuracy of those payments. The Office of the Inspector General found that during January through April 2014, the Centers for Medicare and…

Donald Trump officially declared his candidacy for the presidency in a speech Tuesday. "I'm really rich," Trump said. "And by the way, I'm not even saying that in a braggadocious--that's the kind of thinking you need for this country." Trump promised that he would make America rich, too.

On the Today show, former Spokane NAACP head Rachel Dolezal explained how despite having two white parents, she identifies herself as an African American. She also mentioned her child's observation: "Mom, racially you’re human. Culturally, you’re black.” And according to her colleagues and fellow…

A second poll of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters shows Vermont senator Bernie Sanders closing the gap with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. According to a new Suffolk University poll, 41 percent of likely primary voters in the Granite State support Clinton, while 31 percent…

The government doesn’t seem to have many good days, these days.  If it isn’t a vast hacking of its employees’ personal information by, presumably, the Chinese, then it is the revelation that the people who are supposed to keep air travel safe, the crack agents of the TSA, missed some 95 percent of…

All the Democratic presidential candidates are "excellent," according to the president of the United States. Barack Obama made the comments this morning in a fundraising push targeting Democratic supporters. 

Hillary Clinton has taken a very nuanced position on the trade debate. But none would call it outright support of the president.  Which, even if you don’t understand exactly where she is today, is not where she was in the recent past.  Forty-five times.

When it comes to beer, the craft connoisseurs say Americans just don’t get it. Right-thinking drinkers all know that bitter is better. But despite the explosion in the market for craft beers, which are often high-alcohol, hoppy ales, Americans still like their Bud Light. According to the Washington…

On June 15, 1215, a band of frustrated and rebellious nobles forced King John to sign a “Great Charter” at Runnymede, a swampy field twenty miles west of London. At the time, few would have suspected the importance of the document, which was annulled by the Pope a mere nine days later.

Jeb Bush looked relieved to say it. “I’ve decided I’m a candidate for president of the United States of America,” said the former Florida governor Monday afternoon. Standing on a stage at Miami Dade College, Bush let out an audible sigh immediately after the announcement as the crowd around him…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on Jeb!'s 2016 efforts so far, and what he can do to improve.

In his speech formally launching his presidential campaign today, Jeb Bush will defend religious liberty. According to an excerpt obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the former Florida governor will aim at Obamacare for trampling on the conscience rights of the Little Sisters of the Poor and also will…

Hillary Clinton finally made herself available this afternoon for her first press conference of the 2016 presidential campaign, and the crowd cheered. The cheers came after Clinton wrapped up her quick press conference.

There's a new poll of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters. It shows Bernie Sanders with 32 percent of the vote, closing in on Hillary Clinton with 44 percent. This survey was released yesterday afternoon, shortly, as it happened, after I'd suggested on This Week that Hillary might not be so…

The American firm with the iconic name of Colt has declared bankruptcy.  As Tiffany Kary of Bloomberg reports:

Jeb Bush has released the following excerpts of his campaign announcement expected later this afternoon:

I'm not sure what the great political philosopher Leo Strauss would have thought of the Internet (he was a skeptic about progress, but also a skeptic about reaction). I personally think he would have appreciated aspects of it. Perhaps he would have even written an essay on "Persecution and the Art…

Despite its boasting a much ballyhooed Pyongyang bureau, the Associated Press filed its report on the supposed fire at the iconic Koryo Hotel in the North Korean capital last week from its. . .Tokyo bureau. It appears that no AP reporters in North Korea have contributed reporting on the fire – this…

Lincoln Chafee, former governor and senator from Rhode Island, has crossed the aisle from the Republican to the Democratic side. He recently announced he will run for his new party’s presidential nomination. A key plank in his platform is to convert America to the metric system. No amount of…

Another Sunday, another New York Times magazine, this one featuring a cover story about “Scott Walker and the dismantling of American unions.” Readers of the Old Grey Lady, a newspaper not without its virtues, are undoubtedly aware of its sympathy for down-trodden workers, especially if they belong…

Mitt Romney ripped Hillary Clinton this morning for seeming untrustworthy in her weekend campaign event:

Jeb Bush readies to announce his presidential run:

Move for a job, they said. It’s the only way to advance your career, they said. Move out of your childhood bedroom, they said.

Kirya Military Base, Israel

The Washington Post has never paid much attention to nearby Baltimore. Which is no great shock, of course: Downtown Baltimore is 40 miles from the Post newsroom, which tends to ignore the immediate Virginia and Maryland suburbs of Washington as well. The Scrapbook has always found this regrettable,…

William Butler Yeats might have described an old person as a “paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick,” but then Yeats didn’t live to see the 72-year-old actress Blythe Danner bloom like a bird of paradise in the first starring role she’s had on screen in her 43-year career. I’ll See You in My…

A character in Elmore Leonard’s 1976 novel Swag devises and swears by “ten rules for success and happiness.” He carries them on his person, scrawled “in blue ink on ten different cocktail napkins from the Club Bouzouki, the Lafayette Bar, Edjo’s, and a place called The Lindell AC.” This budding…

Back in February, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., wrote menacing letters to various universities, wanting all sorts of details about the funding received by professors who are allegedly out of step with the prevailing opinions on climate change, as well as demanding copies of official communications…

Writing recently in the Daily Beast, John Pudner of Take Back Our Republic, a conservative reform group, offered an interesting proposal for improving our campaign finance system. He suggested that each political donor receive a tax credit worth up to $200:

William Butler Yeats sure had the Age of Obama right:

Maybe American higher education was never all that serious about, you know, the education portion of its name. After more than a decade of teaching in the Ivy League, the philosopher George Santayana dubbed Harvard and Yale the nation’s toy Athens and toy Sparta. He actually meant it as a…

It’s a heady moment for gay Americans. With victory after victory at the state level, public opinion on homosexuality having rapidly progressed from suspicion to grudging acceptance to celebration, and the Supreme Court seemingly on the verge of discovering a constitutional mandate that every state…

Skopje

Later this summer the Supreme Court will decide whether the Constitution requires that every state recognize same-sex marriages. Thus, in a ritual that would seem bizarre if it had not become so ordinary, nine lawyers will issue a decision authoritatively resolving subtle and far-reaching issues…

In his new book on the Constitution, Senator Mike Lee, the first-term Utah Republican, recalls his decision to run for the upper chamber in 2010. “It bothered me that even in the Republican Party, far too many elected officials have been reluctant to engage the public in a meaningful constitutional…

The media have no problem concocting scandals almost out of thin air when it comes to GOP candidates, so The Scrapbook continues to be agape at the journalistic treatment of this season’s Democratic field. When the media aren’t ignoring questions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s billion-dollar slush…

What if the economy goes off a cliff and the government does nothing to stop it? That’s the question James Grant considers in the aftermath of the underwhelming stimulus era. And it’s no hypothetical: In 1921, the American economy was in free-fall; every important sector from automobiles to…

When a CNN poll last week showed Hillary Clinton leading Rand Paul by a single percentage point (48-47) and only three points ahead of Marco Rubio (49-46) and Scott Walker (49-46), it was mildly shocking. In April, her lead over the three Republican presidential candidates had been in double…

Philosophers, held Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990), are of two kinds: didactic and contemplative. The former tend to have minds that gravitate to the formation of bold and graspable ideas, the latter to thoughts less readily summarized. Aristotle’s golden mean, Descartes’s cogito, Kant’s categorical…

Now that the Senate has approved legislation that would give President Barack Obama authority to complete a trade partnership agreement with Japan and 10 other Pacific nations later this year, the bill moves to the House for further debate. Its ultimate fate is in question, however—not only because…

According to a report released in April by the American Association of University Professors, the gap between the salaries of faculty at private and public universities is widening. The AAUP’s “Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession” stated that at public institutions full…

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been ignoring Bruce Jenner. As a child of the ’70s, I ignored him in the cereal aisle, where his Olympic-champion mug couldn’t entice me to pick his terminally bland Wheaties over more healthful Sugar Smacks. I ignored him in the ’80s, during his star-turn in…

Bernie Sanders, the independent Democratic senator from Vermont, is within striking distance of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in a new poll of likely New Hampshire presidential primary voters. A new survey from the Morning Consult finds 44 percent of New Hampshire voters who say they…

Bob Woodward had some advice for his fellow reporters this morning on CNN: investigate Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.

The Bush campaign is introducing Jeb to the country with this video ahead of tomorrow's announcement in Florida:

Hillary Clinton's supporters have had a notoriously difficult time identifying a single significant achievement during her tenure as secretary of state, but during her 45-minute speech on Saturday, Clinton tried to name a few. "I’ve stood up to adversaries like Putin and reinforced allies like…

The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley is whacking Hillary Clinton today for not taking a firm stand on critical issues in her speech today in New York City. 

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is making the case against Hillary Clinton.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the June 8th issue.

New York

Animal spirits rampant on a field of cheap money. For some analysts, that describes the red-hot deal-making that is going on here. According to Dealogic, the 4,373 deals consummated so far this year have a total value of $821 billion, a 20-year high. So it’s good news: newly confident CEOs, backed…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the House Democrats' rebuke of President Obama's trade deal, Hillary's island announcement, and how Hillary's candidacy hurts Jeb Bush's chances.

Earlier today, the Hillary Clinton campaign sent out a list of talking points for friends and allies to familiarize themselves with before tomorrow's campaign relaunch. 

The Obama administration is funding a provision of the Affordable Care Act unconstitutionally and against the decision of Congress, a Republican House member says. Peter Roskam of Illinois joined Fox News's Greta van Susteren Thursday to talk about the details of his findings in an oversight…

Speaker of the House John Boehner took the floor to make the case that Congress should pass Trade Promotion Authority:

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley is rallying the opposition against President Obama's proposed "fast track" trade law. O'Malley, unlike his rival Hillary Clinton, has voiced strong opposition to the plan.

The new novel Les Événements (The Events), by the French author Jean Rolin, tells the tale of a France that has descended into a chaotic and multifaceted civil war involving jihadist, nationalist and Marxist militias, in various and fluctuating combinations, as well as remnants of the regular army.…

On Thursday, reason.com published a genuinely outrageous report about two parents who had been arrested, strip-searched, jailed overnight, and charged with felony child neglect simply because their 11-year-old son had been left alone to play basketball for 90 minutes in his own backyard.

America Rising has a compiled a video of New York City residents complaining about Hillary Clinton's campaign reset set for tomorrow at Roosevelt Island:

Hillary Clinton aide Karen Finney was on CNN this morning talking about her boss, who she called "one of the most unknown well-known people." Finney said this weekend's campaign relaunch would be about letting people know Clinton:

While Hillary Clinton will re-launch her campaign this weekend in New York City, Martin O'Malley is headed to New Hampshire.

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz told radio host Hugh Hewitt that he supports fast tracking trade, but isn't sure about how he'll vote on the current bill in Congress. Listen here:

A State Department official at the center of the Benghazi controversy may also have called off a controversial inspector general probe.

On MSNBC today, Washington Post reporter Janell Ross hinted that Jeb Bush was covering up a major family scandal -- but she offered no proof or explanation for her comments. Even the MSNBC host made an effort to distance herself and her network from the Post reporter's comments.

Security will be tight at Hillary Clinton's re-launch in New York City. It will mimic "airport style security," according to an email from the campaign to people who have registered for the event.

Carly Fiorina has a message for Democrats who oppose a ban on late-term abortions: You don't represent most women. The Republican presidential candidate and former Hewlett-Packard CEO said she backs a bill, passed by the House of Representatives and just introduced in the Senate, that limits…

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has released an attack ad aimed at Hillary Clinton:

In May 2015, I visited the Indian city of Lucknow, the most important Shiite center in India. The visit was exceptional in its composition—an Israeli delegation from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, headed by Dr. Dore Gold, and a Saudi delegation from the Middle East Center for Strategic…

A Kiev-based Ukrainian friend, after meeting a delegation of young Russians, emails me:  "totally terrible, young Russian diplomats. Manipulation, propaganda, gloating over victory in Eastern Ukraine, this new generation even worse than before. We will have big trouble with Russia for a very long…

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders suggested Thursday morning that groups have paid Bill and Hillary Clinton exorbitant speaking fees in order to buy influence. 

Harvey Mansfield, writing for City Journal: 

The Koryo Hotel is probably the most famous hotel in Pyongyang. (Granted, that’s a small pool.) It’s the usual spot where tourists stay on their unethical, ill-advised junkets to the country. And it’s apparently on fire.

Hillary Clinton will certainly have supporters at Sunday's rally in Des Moines at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, but could face some stiff competition from another event: the final day of a three-day gun show. The show is one of six being held during 2015 at the fairgrounds, and one of more than a…

House majority leader Kevin McCarthy laid out the Republicans' game plan for trade votes this week. In short, the memo sent out late last night details the rule votes will be held today, Thursday, and final vote is slated for Friday.

Johnny Isakson, the two-term senator from Georgia, has been talking for nearly a year about running for reelection, and he officially announced his intention to run just days after last November’s midterm election. And when the 70-year-old Republican announced on Wednesday that he has Parkinson’s…

 Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post reports:

On Wednesday, Democrat Hillary Clinton posted her first photo to Instagram, the photo-based social network, with a joke referencing her memoir Hard Choices. Here's the photo, which shows several red, white, and blue pantsuits hanging on a rack:

Two months after Hillary Clinton entered the race to be the next president of the United States, she will be hosting a launch party in Iowa.

A $100,000 donation given to a New York Times charity campaign in 2008 by Bill and Hillary Clinton's family foundation is not included in a Times list of large gifts from various other foundations, such as George Soros's charitable foundation.

A new poll of Florida Republican primary voters finds a tightening race between the Sunshine State's two favorite sons in the 2016 GOP presidential primary. According to St. Leo University's Polling Institute, former governor Jeb Bush has 30 percent support among likely Republican primary voters in…

Sarah Ferris of The Hill writes:

Watching the NBA playoffs one cannot but be upset at the rampant inequality that the league tolerates.  LeBron James constitutes less than 10 percent of the number of players on the Cleveland Cavaliers, but scores about 40 percent of the team’s points. Think what this does to the self-esteem of the…

More than 50 Republican activists and officeholders in New Hampshire have signed an open letter to the heads of Fox News and the Republican National Committee to "urge" those leaders to "reconsider the criteria and to design a debate that will allow voters to hear from a more diverse and inclusive…

Michael R. Gordon at the New York Times writes:

Nearly a month after making a significant error in a story on legislation banning late-term abortion, the New York Times has finally issued a correction.

First Lady Michelle Obama had some strong words for the graduating class of Martin Luther King Jr. Preparatory High School in Chicago, Illinois. She advised the class on how to get past "struggles."

A UN panel says that the White House and other Western governments have neglected to report Iranian violations of the sanctions regime.

Joe Biden will be returning to work tomorrow. It'll be his first day back at his job since the passing of his son, Beau Biden, on May 30. Biden has spent most of that time at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he'll be returning after work tomorrow.

Hillary Clinton is asking supporters to chip in a buck. In an email this afternoon, Clinton writes, "I’m asking you to step up today, give just $1, and become a Launch Donor -- one of the tough, essential supporters who stood with me from the very beginning."

Nearly a month after making a significant error in a story on legislation banning late-term abortion, the New York Times has finally issued a correction.

Nearly a month after making a significant error in a story on legislation banning late-term abortion, the New York Times has finally issued a correction.

Nearly a month after making a significant error in a story on legislation banning late-term abortion, the New York Times has finally issued a correction.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on the New York Times and the failed hit on Marco Rubio's fishing boat.

Nearly a month after making a significant error in a story on late-term abortion, the New York Times has finally issued a correction.

Carly Fiorina discusses her latest book, Rising to the Challenge, with Fred Barnes at the recent WEEKLY STANDARD Summit at the Broadmoor:

The Centers for Disease Control recently announced the availability of $76 million in grants for the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance (NHBS) program. This program is designed to "monitor the HIV epidemic" and detect changes in HIV-risk behaviors among high-risk population groups with an eye…

Hear the Factual Feminist at her most eloquent, calling on Western women to demonstrate solidarity with women around the world who are struggling for basic rights we take for granted.

Last week, there was yet another news frenzy over something that happened on social media. A Muslim Northwestern University chaplain, Tahera Ahmad, wrote on her Facebook page that she was in "tears of humiliation from discrimination" because a flight attendant refused to give her an unopened can of…

First, Imagination Playground fell victim to Hillary Clinton's re-announcement of her presidential campaign on Roosevelt Island in New York City this Saturday. Now, comes a second casualty: yoga. Four Freedoms Park has posted notices on its website that the Kids & Family Yoga class scheduled…

In today's New York Times hit of Marco Rubio, there is this quotation from Harold Evensky:

Hillary Clinton will be fundraising later this month with Dorothea and Jon Bon Jovi, according to an announcement on the candidate's website. The event will be held in New Jersey.

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska has a stark warning: TSA is not doing its job. He talked about some of the problems on Fox News:

On a day when the president declares that the United States does not yet have a complete strategy for defeating ISIS, it compounds the discouragement to learn that, as Barry Posen writes at DefenseOne:

Hillary Clinton is coming to Washington, D.C. for an LGBT fundraiser tonight. "Clinton will be in Washington, D.C., on Monday night for a fundraiser hosted by and attended by predominantly lesbian supporters," reports the Huffington Post.

Xiaoping Ren means well. The doctor from Harbin Medical University in China has extensive experience in the realms of hand and face transplants. And he hopes his current research will lead to transplants that, according to the Wall Street Journal, "might one day be able to help human patients who…

President Obama is "frustrated" with the court's ruling on his executive amnesty. He expressed his frustration in comments at a press conference in Germany.

A review conducted by the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security found that two and a half years after a scathing report on the state of intra-agency communications in the event of an emergency, "DHS components’ inability to communicate with each other persists."…

Fresh off its widely-mocked exclusive on the traffic citations given Marco and Jeannette Rubio – fewer than one per year, combined – the New York Times has an in-depth look at Scott Walker and the wealthy conservatives who backed him throughout his rise to national prominence. It’s a classic of the…

Congressman Mark Pocan attacked the Republican field at the Wisconsin Democratic state party convention over the weekend:

At a press conference in Germany, President Obama admitted that he does not have a "complete strategy" to defeat ISIS:

The latest Conversations With Bill Kristol featuring Peter Berkowitz:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has a warning for his main rival, Hillary Clinton. “Let me tell you a secret: we’re going to win New Hampshire,” Sanders reportedly told supporters, according to the Keene Sentinel. 

The Obama administration on June 2 convened the White House Forum on Antibiotic Stewardship, “to bring together key human and animal health constituencies involved in antibiotic stewardship.” The White House billed this meeting—to which more than 150 companies were invited—as furthering previous…

I've had a lot of dogs of many different physical types, but each has come loaded with the same daunting reminder: the countdown clock I can’t help but hear ticking away inside of them. I suppose I come with one of those, too, if I care to confront reality. Denial may be easier on the nerves, but…

At intervals in his abbreviated life, John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865) apparently pictured himself as a man of destiny—although when, on one occasion, he exclaimed, “I must have fame,” he was presumably thinking of the family craft (acting) and not murder. But like so many of the memories that crowd…

The Scrapbook is willing to wager that, until last week, the vast majority of Americans had never heard of FIFA, the governing body of association football (soccer), headquartered in Zurich. Among other things, FIFA runs the popular World Cup tournament every four years; perhaps more important,…

Alexis de Tocqueville, perhaps the greatest French export to the United States, took special notice, during his travels, of what he called the “philosophic method” of Americans: 

Oklahoma City

At the Japan Society, an exhibition of ukiyo-e has clawed its way into the spotlight. Ukiyo-e is a genre of woodblock prints, a familiar medium in Japanese art exhibitions. While these prints are always beautiful and historically intriguing, rarely do journalists pounce with such enthusiasm to laud…

A little more than three hours after the State Department released 848 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the Daily Beast had seen enough to render its judgment: “Sorry GOP. There’s No Smoking Gun In Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Emails.” The subhead: “Conspiracy-minded conservatives, be warned: The…

The Scrapbook is generally pleased that Bernie Sanders has decided to enter the presidential race. Where Democrats laughably insist that they are mere pragmatists free from ideological cant, the senator from Vermont is refreshingly honest about his desire to impose socialism on America. However,…

The Unraveling is a love story. Like many love stories, it starts with two seemingly irreconcilable personalities forming a bond they never anticipated. But, true to form, the ending is tragic. In this instance, the main character is author Emma Sky, the British, Oxford-educated, lefty…

When I sit down with old friends who, like me, are in their 70s, I sometimes ask: “If you could live your life again, would you do anything differently?” Most just scratch their heads and say, “I dunno.” Recently, I told three old friends that I would do one thing differently: I would get a middle…

Had Jeremiah Wright’s antics not forced Barack Obama to expound famously on race in 2008, the most significant speech of his short Senate tenure would have been his 2006 remarks on religion and democracy. Appearing before Call to Renewal’s conference on “Building a Covenant for a New America,”…

Even the Obama administration acknowledges that Iran is up to a lot of mischief in the Middle East. Tehran is engaged in a sectarian conflict from Lebanon to Syria and Iraq that has recently come to include Yemen as another active front. However, the White House continues to insist, against all…

On May 22, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage through popular referendum, with 62 percent of the electorate supporting the constitutional change. The reported reactions, as you might expect, were overwhelmingly positive. Prime Minister Enda Kenny proclaimed,…

"One of the Obama administration’s underrated virtues is its intellectual honesty. Yes, Republicans see deception and sinister ulterior motives everywhere, but they’re just projecting. The truth is that .  .  .” (Paul Krugman, New York Times, May 22, 2015).

The Democratic presidential candidates are a sad lot. Hillary Clinton is clumsily positioning herself inside the left wing of her party. She won’t take questions. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is 73, looks 10 years older, and says a 90 percent income-tax rate would be fine with him. Lincoln…

In his Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery, President Obama seems to have taken it upon himself to update the greatest achievement in the history of the English language—the King James Bible. He was reaching for John 15:13, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his…

We live in the world that the Middle Ages made. It is hard to think of any modern institution—bank, business corporation, university, the legal system, parliamentary government—that doesn’t have medieval roots. Even the typeface of this review had its origins in monks’ scriptoria not long after the…

Former Texas governor Rick Perry is gearing up for another presidential run and recently fired a shot across the bow of some of his competitors. In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Perry said that while he had “great respect” for senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul, they were not…

Buried deep in the House version of this year’s defense authorization is a brief provision that has great potential to improve and accelerate the way the armed services buy weapons​—​yes, an actual reform of Pentagon procurement. The irony is that this reform would mark a reversal of past “reforms”…

Many supporters of an Iranian nuclear agreement believe that a deal could help to moderate, even democratize, Iranian society. Barack Obama’s constant allusions to the transformative potential of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action for U.S.-Iranian relations suggest that he believes an…

From the beginning, patriots have understood the need, at times, to sound the alarm:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Matt Labash reading his casual essay "After Moses, Solomon."

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio said on CBS's Face the Nation that "we have a democracy problem in this country." The liberal mayor blamed Republicans for the problem:

Scott Walker does not think he's the front runner in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Instead, the Wisconsin governor believes that title goes to the former Florida governor, Jeb Bush.

The boss marks the D-Day anniversary with Ronald Reagan's words (and more!):

Bill Clinton attended the funeral of the son of Vice President Joe Biden earlier today in Wilmington, Delaware and then headed up north to see American Pharoah win the Triple Crown at the Belmont Stakes in New York.

Randy Richardson, a friend of my parents and a man I knew and admired, died on Memorial Day. Randy was an important if unheralded figure (unheralded because he preferred to shun the limelight) in the conservative intellectual movement for several decades. Here are excerpts from tributes by his…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the June 1st issue.

On Friday we learned that the U.S. economy surprised on the upside by adding 280,000 new jobs in May, and that 32,000 more jobs had been created in March and April than originally reported. The fact that economic growth is still sluggish, while more and more workers are finding jobs, suggests that…

Matthew Continetti, writing in the Washington Free Beacon: 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the week in review, Hillary Clinton's bad week, and why the New York Times is panicked about Marco Rubio

I took a 7:00 a.m. train this morning from Washington to New York and about an hour into my trip, I made my way to the café car for a cup of coffee. Standing at the little bar/work area was Martin O’Malley. He was just hanging out.

Even as diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Russia remain decidedly chilly over the Ukrainian conflict, the State Department is reaching out to "up-and-coming" Russian journalists. A recent $150,000 grant offering from the U.S. embassy in Moscow seeks to establish a program to give Russian…

The White House is celebrating the most recent jobs numbers. 

Presidential candidate and former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee has promised he will switch the United States to the metric system in the exceedingly unlikely event he ends up in the White House. While the idea may help him among the Europhile segments of the Democratic base, it’s a truly…

The latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the unemployment rate ticking up to 5.5 percent and that the economy added 280,000 jobs:

The door continues to revolve between the White House and MSNBC. Rachel Racusen, who worked at the White House before going to MSNBC, is coming back to work for the president again.

Hillary Clinton is making voter ID a major issue in her 2016 presidential election. And she's accusing America of falling "short" of her "ideal."

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, collapsed in Moscow on Tuesday. A friend of Boris Nemtsov, the Russian dissident murdered in February, the 33-year-old showed no previous signs of illness.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the Iran Deal, and how the Obama administration continually makes excuses for Iran's dealbreaking.

Former Virginia senator Jim Webb said American foreign policy over the last two decades has had a lack of clarity and purpose. But the potential Democratic candidate for president stopped short of directly criticizing former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

The Obama family, minus the president of the United States, will head to Europe later this month, according to the White House. They'll be visiting the United Kingdom and Italy.

The Hillary Clinton campaign is looking for some Everyday Americans willing to open up their homes to strangers. On a webpage entitled "Host a Hillary for America Volunteer," the campaign asks for name, email address, phone number and home address for those willing to host a fellow Clinton…

Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, announced Thursday afternoon he is running for president in 2016. Introduced by his wife Anita and flanked by retired U.S. Navy SEALs Marcus and Morgan Luttrell, Perry spoke about his upbringing in West Texas, touted his job-creation record during his 14 years…

Jon Stewart’s shrewdness as a crowd pleaser has never been more evident than in his treatment of Caitlyn Jenner. Earlier this week, when Bruce Jenner’s sexual transformation made the cover of Vanity Fair, Stewart strung together a series of television commentaries about Jenner’s appearance. Most,…

Matthew Continetti wrote a great column last week about Bernie Sanders' quixotic quest for the Democratic nomination:

Former Texas governor Rick Perry is running for president, releasing a video focusing on his record and background. The Republican will formally announce the campaign Thursday during an event outside of Dallas.

The Obama administration has not been shy about partnering with religious leaders on issues such as poverty, HIV/AIDS prevention, Obamacare, and even climate change. Now the White House is soliciting nominations for an upcoming Champions of Change ceremony to "honor faith leaders who are making a…

For the last several days, State Department spokesperson Marie Harf has been at pains to explain why Iran is not violating the interim nuclear agreement, or Joint Plan of Action. For the last few days, the Obama administration has been pushing back against a New York Times article published Monday…

Carly Fiorina has released by far the most detailed financial disclosure of any presidential candidate. The document details to a penny her net worth: $58,954,494.88.

Bloomberg reports that:

Weekly Standard contributor Adam White posed this question on Twitter yesterday, and maybe it seems a little out there at first blush, but it's worth pondering:

Renzo Piano is too good an architect for his new Whitney Museum, in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, to be a total failure. The interior is, in general, quite good and surely a vast improvement over Marcel Breuer’s nuclear bunker on Madison Avenue, which housed the museum for half-a-century. And…

Former president Bill Clinton will be the keynote speaker at a conference of health-insurance executives this week. America's Health Insurance Plans, the largest health-insurance provider trade group in the country, is holding its Institute 2015 conference in Nashville this week. Clinton, whose…

Too Islamist-friendly for NATO, too pro-European for Russia, too pro-Sunni for Iran, and too pro-democracy for Saudi Arabia, Turkey can’t seem to manage lasting alliances. It’s an issue that figures to play a role in the Turkish parliamentary elections on June 7.

“Is Finland crazy? I want somebody to comment on that.” 

While campaigning against the Patriot Act in South Carolina last weekend, Rand Paul—a committed and supposedly knowledgeable civil libertarian—made a rather surprising claim. The Kentucky senator said that American law enforcement officials had "probable cause" to obtain a warrant for the arrest…

Many Americans have a friend or family member who has served in the military. Now, American Corporate Partners (ACP), a non-profit that helps returning veterans transition into new post-service careers, is promoting a unique way to honor them. It’s called #GiveThem20. Give them 20 push-ups or…

In at least one respect, visiting China is a little bit like traveling back in time to America in, say, 1957. (Or so I gather.) That is, people routinely smoke cigarettes in shopping malls, elevators, lines, apartment building hallways, schools, and yes, even hospitals. (Oh, and of course bars and…

President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry both spent two days in April at the Summit of the Americas in Panama, but hotels and transportation for the entire delegation for the conference topped $1.4 million. An estimated total of 3,889 room nights were split between two hotels:…

Tom Cotton is headed to Iowa. This weekend the freshman Republican senator from Arkansas will be a featured speaker at a Republican presidential candidate gathering in Boone, Iowa. 

Jeb Bush, a probable Republican presidential candidate, got feisty in an interview with Fox News's Neil Cavuto earlier today in Florida:

An FPI bulletin from Tzvi Kahn:

The home of Congressman Elijah Cummings of Baltimore caught fire this morning. Cummings was in Washington at the time of the fire.

The home of Congressman Elijah Cummings of Baltimore caught fire this morning. Cummings was in Washington at the time of the fire.

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley is deeply unliked on Wall Street, reports Charles Gasparino of Fox Business.

“The quality of mercy is not straine’d,” implored Shakespeare’s Portia, meaning it should not be difficult or forced. But President Obama’s Clemency Project, an effort to free “a whole bunch of good citizens who committed one little mistake” and ended up with more than 10 years in prison, is…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the latest polls and how Hillary is faring.

Writing in the Washington Post, Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, offered a curious suggestion for dealing with global warming skeptics:

Everyone is talking about the New York Times piece exposing how utterly wrong, willfully blind, and insanely dangerous Paul Ehrlich is, and has been, for the last forty-seven years. There’s video, too.

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told Bloomberg that the Russian reset was an "invention of Hillary Clinton" and the Obama administration.

That negative 1st quarter GDP has been widely passed off as the effect of a particularly severe winter.  Things, we were assured, were not that bad and would be getting better as the weather warmed.  Well, not so fast.  The Commerce Department came out this morning with a report on factory orders…

President Obama has used memos to change immigration law. But now he's using his presidential pen for a different reason -- to express a preference for antibiotic free meat and poultry.

CNN's Jeff Zeleny reports that a new poll finds that Hillary Clinton's "shine has tarnished":

First Lady Michelle Obama has been trying to promote healthy living. But now she's aiming at something different -- promoting "pollinator health."

Republican House majority leader Kevin McCarthy is dubbing the third week of June “health care week.” It is then the House of Representatives will bring up a series of health care-related bills as the Supreme Court prepares to issue its ruling on a major provision of the Affordable Care Act at the…

Bill Clinton, no stranger to controversy, raised eyebrows again with a Clinton Global Initiative gathering last month, as ABC News put it, "at a five-star luxury hotel in Morocco [hosted] by one of the world's most controversial mining companies, criticized for 'serious human rights violations' by…

Charles Gasparino of the Fox Business Network reported today that Martin O'Malley is the "last person" Wall Street CEOs want is Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley:

A Saudi fair was being held at the Gaylord National Resort outside Washington, D.C. so David Keyes, the executive director of Advancing Human Rights, tried to throw "an awesome gay party at the exact same time." Keyes uploaded video of the event:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer John McCormack on the expiration of provisions of the PATRIOT Act, the role of the NSA in Rand Paul's campaign, and the fate of the USA Freedom Act.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is running for president of the United States. The New York Times reports:

Hillary Clinton told a New Hampshire supporter looking for an autograph to "go to the end of the line."

Over the weekend, Lally Weymouth, a senior associate editor at The Washington Post, interviewed Naftali Bennett, Israel's new education minister and a notable tech entrepreneur. Bennett wants to annex the part if the West Bank known as Area C and, in the words of the Post, "offer full Israeli…

The latest episode of Conversations With Bill Kristol, featuring Fred Barnes:

On Sunday night, the Senate voted 77-17 to advance the USA Freedom Act. The bill, which already passed the House 338-88, amends the Patriot Act by ending the NSA's practice of storing U.S. phone records (the date, time, duration and numbers dialed--but not the content or identity of the caller--of…

Jonathan V. Last and Tucker Carlson discussed The Dadly Virtues: Adventures from the Worst Job You'll Ever Love on Fox News over the weekend:

In his first two days as a presidential candidate, Democrat Martin O'Malley took "over 70 uncensored questions" from the press and general public, according to deputy campaign manager Lis Smith.

The very old ones—los viejos—still tell the tale of the Cubs and the Fed. 

I used to watch sports on television in the same episodic and grudging manner I would tune in to C-SPAN. The proceedings mattered little, but I picked up useful information. It made me better at water cooler conversation—I got passing references to Monday night’s game. 

When a new study came out late last year proving​—​scientifically!​—​how easy it is to turn opponents of gay marriage into supporters, the political scientist Andrew Gelman managed to summarize his reaction in a single unscientific word: “Wow!”

Between the early 1950s and mid-1990s, crime rates rose steadily across the United States. Crime destroyed neighborhoods, ruined lives, and topped public opinion polls of the issues Americans cared about most.

Lately, there’s a lot of talk among feminists about the need to keep women safe. The rape culture is allegedly inescapable, and trigger warnings are appended to college syllabi to protect sensitive souls from reminders of any past cause of pain, from “neuro-atypical shaming” to mention of “how much…

The latest craze in the presidential campaign is to ask the contenders (on the Republican side) whether they would have invaded Iraq if you knew what you know now. The answer is supposed to be obvious. Jeb Bush got himself into some trouble by answering the more important question, which is where…

Peter Gay, who died May 12 at the age of 91, had a long and estimable academic career, writing “groundbreaking books on the Enlightenment, the Victorian middle classes, Sigmund Freud, Weimar culture and the cultural situation of Jews in Germany,” according to the New York Times. Unfortunately, his…

On May 14, I joined a tiny, highly exclusive group of Republicans, namely those who have decided not to seek our party’s presidential nomination. By contrast, the coach section of the party contains perhaps two dozen people who have announced (or soon will) their availability. Good luck to them all…

In The Semisovereign People, political scientist E. E. Schatt-schneider argues that “political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of…

In the release last week of a few more documents from the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, the director of national intelligence included a list of the English-language books that were found in bin Laden’s possession. Among them, The Scrapbook was pleased to see, was one by our…

Burlington, Vt. -- The senator was returning to the place where it had all begun for him. Almost 40 years ago, to the surprise of practically everyone, perhaps including himself, he had been elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city and the only one with any real claim to the title. Back…

Warning against the threat from China has been a staple of national security literature since at least the late 1990s. This genre typically begins by compiling a list of the most alarming statistics related to China’s economic potential, military advancements, and global misdeeds—environmental…

Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, seems to be a victim of the law of unintended consequences. His book lays out, in lurid detail, what it claims in its subtitle: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. And it must be said,…

Pity the poor Neanderthals, our prehistoric cousins. The first Neanderthal fossils were discovered in a place of that name in Germany in 1856. Archaeologists have since turned up fossils ranging from Protoneanderthals and Transition Neanderthals to Classic Neanderthals at about 75 sites from…

They’re outraged, the students at Columbia University—outraged that their professors would dare to put Ovid on mandatory reading lists, outraged that the ancient Roman author doesn’t share their sensitivities, outraged that a modern education would include something so .  .  . so .  .  . so…

After four years of fierce internecine battles and inexplicable delays, the intelligence community last week started the process of releasing more documents captured in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) posted on its website…

"Alexandra Svokos was six years old, growing up in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, when she became a Hillary Clinton fan” (“Not What You’d Expect: What Young Feminists Think of Hillary Clinton,” National Journal, May 16, 2015).

Last week, Fox News announced its guidelines for the first debate among presidential contenders endorsed by the Republican National Committee (RNC). The network plans to invite the top 10 candidates, with the ranking determined by an average of the five most recent national opinion polls before the…

Last week, Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin convened a focus group of Iowa Democrats to discuss Hillary Rodham Clinton. They were Ready for Hillary. Indeed, they were enthusiastic about the prospect. But when Halperin asked them to name an accomplishment of Hillary as secretary of state, they couldn’t…

New York

After ensuring that key sections of the Patriot Act will expire at midnight Sunday, Kentucky senator Rand Paul said that some of his critics "secretly want" a terrorist attack in the United States while those anti-terror surveillance programs are shut down. "People here in town think I'm making a…