July 2015

ISIS strives to create a new Caliphate.  It is the fundamental reason for its existence.  But the vision does not stop there.  As USA Today reports:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the Republican Congress and why it's failing to get the Osama Bin Laden documents.

Bill Clinton is fighting to rid the world of AIDS. The former president, and husband to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, outlines his hard work in a blog post for Medium. 

Planned Parenthood emailed Hillary Clinton on her private email address. The revelation comes in the most recently released trove of Clinton's emails. 

Andrew Ferguson, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Human trafficking is a crime that not only breaks the law but basic human rights. The United States recently released its annual Trafficking in Persons report. Countries are ranked on a scale from Tier 1 to Tier 3. These rankings asses the country’s ability to 1) enact laws and practices that…

The Army and the Navy cannot do what they once could and might soon be required to do again.  They don’t have enough soldiers and enough ships.  Even reduced to the lowest force levels in years, the Army, as USA Today reports:

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, as well as Martin O'Malley and Ben Carson, will speak today at the National Urban League Conference in Florida. 

The Jeb Bush campaign announced today that the candidate's son, George P. Bush, will file his father's S.C. presidential paperwork.

A top Democratic believes President Obama may break the law to implement the Iran deal. The Democrat is Brad Sherman, a congressman from California, who made the comments after meeting with Obama personally about the Iran deal.

Over the decades, Donald Trump has been involved in a handful of businesses ventures -- some lucrative (game shows). Others, like steak sold at the Sharper Image, have been more of a flop.

The sun is a stubborn on-again-off-again partner in our solar energy relationship. With no way to store excess solar energy, solar homes are forced to return shamefacedly to the electrical grid each evening, not to mention in moments of cloud cover and/or rain.

As a Swede living in the U.S., one of the most common reactions when I tell people where I am from is the question of why I would ever leave Sweden in the first place.

Marcus Weisgerber at Defense One writes that:

Today! A chance to chat with President Obama about the Iran deal! Be there or be square! 

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published what would go on to be his most famous novel, It Can’t Happen Here. The novel describes the rise of Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a populist politician who resembling Louisiana’s Huey Long or, for modern readers, Caracas’ Hugo Chavez. He is described thusly:

Donald Trump, to borrow a phrase, is “dead to me.” Well, not exactly, but in a radio interview Wednesday with a San Francisco-based nutritionist, Trump did indulge in one of modern politicians’ most irritating habits: praising the airports in developing countries like China, and lamenting the…

Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal called sancruary cities "partners in crime" in an interview last night with Bill O'Reilly. Jindal said the city officials of these cities should be held "criminally liable."

A new national Quinnipiac University poll finds Donald Trump leading the crowded Republican presidential primary field with 20 percent support, even as 30 percent of registered Republican voters say there is "no way" they would support him for president. The New York reality TV star and real-estate…

Hillary Clinton's campaign is hiring from journalistic outfits. Julie Whitaker, a member of BuzzFeed's distributed content team, has been hired to run Clinton's social media accounts. 

Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood recently gained notoriety when the Center for Medical Progress released a video of people at the abortion clinic picking through a dish of aborted baby parts in order to sell them. Now the Planned Parenthood affiliate is facing accusations of serious wrongdoing:

Israeli media is reporting that an IAF strike on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights border killed several pro-Assad fighters today. One of them is believed to be Samir Kuntar. Many are hoping that it is.

At the end of an exchange between Sen. Tom Cotton and Gen. Martin Dempsey regarding the number of American servicemen killed by the Iranians, Cotton asks if Quds Force chief Qassem Suleimani was responsible for the explosively formed penetrators that took the lives of several hundred Americans.…

Rep. Grace Meng of New York has come out against the Iran nuclear deal. Meng's statement reads as follows:

Africa has been in focus with the death of a prized lion at the hands of an American hunter. The hunter is even being sought by Zimbabwean officials.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer John McCormack on Hillary Clinton and the growing Planned Parenthood scandal.

Secure America Now, a group opposed to President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, released a new poll this morning.

You didn't think that the Donald was going to pay a price for insulting John McCain, did you?

Secretary of State John Kerry testified on Capitol Hill today the U.S. government will not be revealing the contents of secret side deals with Iran to the American people. Senator Tom Cotton wanted to know why it can't be made public. 

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified on Capitol Hill today that it was his recommendation that the U.S. not lift its sanctions on conventional weapons and ballistic missiles that were part of the Iran deal.

It is clear that the final terms of the agreement between the U.S. and Iran fail to meet any of the goals publicly stated by the administration at the outset of the talks, even goals reiterated just a few months ago (e.g., “anytime, anywhere” inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites). There can only be…

The Factual Feminist exposes the fallacy at the heart of the claim that female athletes face a “grass ceiling.”

Defense Secretary Ash Carter admitted in testimony Capitol Hill this morning that Iran will not be changing its bad behavior as a result of the nuclear deal.

In a new interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader, Hillary Clinton calls videos about Planned Parenthood's involvement in the harvesting and selling of human organs "disturbing." Clinton doesn't say precisely what she finds disturbing about the videos, only that it "raises questions about the…

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying tells the story of Anse Bundren, an impoverished widower who carries his wife’s corpse across Mississippi to her desired burial ground.

A friend with political experience who's also a sports fan writes:

Senator Joni Ernst, a freshman Republican from Iowa, introduced a two-page bill Tuesday evening to defund Planned Parenthood without reducing federal funding for health care programs:

Planned Parenthood hired a Democratic polling firm to find out if taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood is still popular, and found out that 64 percent of voters still want federal funding for the organization. Here's the question that voters were asked: 

Despite little national coverage, scandals surrounding former NBA star and Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson have been intensifying over past few months. Monday's report at Deadspin is a good place to start -- things have gotten so bad that Johnson's allies are accusing a local paper that's done a lot…

A former ambassador in the Clinton administration, Marc Ginsberg, knocked Secretary of State John Kerry for sounding "like a used care salesman" earlier today on national television. Watch here:

Global Zero, a group dedicated to the total eliminiation of nuclear weapons worldwide, has a new video out in support of President Obama's Iran nuclear deal.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning, Representatives Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, call for the impeachment of IRS head Jim Koskinen. The congressmen accuse Koskinen of a host of serious transgressions including destruction of evidence, hiding the fact that evidence…

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Capitol Hill today that Iran "may" kill Americans or Israelis. Watch here:

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi was widely derided for saying Congress had to pass Obamacare "so that you can find out what is in it."

Hillary Clinton warned her audience at a townhall today in New Hampshire that she was about to spew a lot of hot air.

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:

Hillary Clinton was spotted getting on a private jet after she delivered her global warming speech yesterday in Iowa. Fox News played the video this morning:

This week, the Wall Street Journal wrote that in a report to Capitol Hill last week, the Obama administration said “it was unlikely Iran would admit to having pursued a covert nuclear weapons program, and that such an acknowledgment wasn’t critical to verifying Iranian commitments in the future.”

In Africa today, President Obama said that he think he's a "pretty good president." So good, indeed, that if he ran for a third term, he "could win." But he cannot, he acknowledged, because it's against the law.

The undercover investigation into Planned Parenthood's involvement in the trafficking of aborted baby organs has gained so much attention in the press that Planned Parenthood's president, Cecile Richards, felt compelled to appear on ABC's This Week on Sunday to address the scandal. 

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and a Republican candidate for president, will address the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, on Monday evening on her foreign policy outlook. In her speech, Fiorina will discuss how as president she would broker a "new deal" with…

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, sent out a fundraising email on Monday condemning congressional efforts to investigate Planned Parenthood's practice of harvesting and selling aborted baby organs to biotech companies.

Defenders of the nuclear deal with Iran are right to ask what the alternatives are to the offer that’s now on the table. What’s excessive is their confidence that the only alternative to this deal is war. In fact, the alternative is not hard to describe and is not terribly dramatic.

On Monday, President Obama arrived on a presidential visit to Ethiopia. The trip to the east African state raised eyebrows, even among President Obama’s allies on the American left.

Monica Lewinsky has weighed in on New York magazine's cover, featuring 35 women accusing Bill Cosby of sexual assault.

Asked directly by CNN's Wolf Blitzer whether she would vote to support President Obama's Iran deal, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz demurred, saying:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, her negative numbers, and the GOP's presidential and congressional confusion.

At a campaign event in Des Moines, Hillary dropped an awkward line -- similar to Mitt Romney's remark about the height of trees in Michigan -- to show how well she associates with voters. 

Hillary Clinton was asked about new poll numbers that show the American people don't trust her. "Well, I don't like to read that, it won't surprise you to hear me say it," Clinton said with a big grin on her face.

The following is an excerpt from a fact sheet prepared by Omri Ceren of the Israel Project that explains the significance of the Obama administration’s latest concession to Tehran—the reported collapse on the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program.

Religious conservatives are fighting back against allegations of homophobia.

A former Obama administration official says Hillary Clinton should release her private email server to the public.

On an official visit to Kenya over the weekend, President Obama labeled himself "the first Kenyan-American to be President of the United States."

The Associated Press captured footage of President Barack Obama dancing at a state dinner in his honor in Kenya:

Have you ever had two dinners in one night? I did, more than 20 years ago, in Budapest. My buddy Todd and I had gone backpacking through Europe, hitting 11 cities in 30 days. As students, we were careful not to overspend, staying at pensions and hostels and crashing at my former host family’s house…

It’s a pity that The Speechwriter will be judged, both for good and ill, in the light of the media sensation created six years ago by Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Famous for not hiking the Appalachian Trail, Sanford is Barton Swaim’s former employer and the principal character—under the…

President Obama’s deal with Iran is not even called an “agreement.” Technically, it’s a “joint comprehensive plan of action,” a mushy term adopted precisely to avoid the implication that it’s a formally binding agreement. In truth, it’s more like the sort of coordinated “plan of action” that…

Much of what we think we know about Sappho is apocryphal, conjecture, invented, or wrong, maybe even her name. (Sappho calls herself Psappho.) Yet somehow we feel we know her, that she is speaking directly to us across chasms of time, language, geography, and alphabets. And this is only from one,…

President Obama had a moment of impressive moral clarity at his Iran press conference Wednesday. It was when he was asked about Bill Cosby.

Every now and then, on Twitter or Facebook, I find myself referring to something I really enjoyed as “genius” or “a work of genius” or “pure genius.” Why do I do this? After all, I don’t actually think Richard Benjamin’s performance as an unhinged Jewish Van Helsing in the 1979 Dracula parody Love…

In the final days of World War II, Kurt Weill wrote a letter to his wife, Lotte Lenya, who was in New York, from the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. The couple had fled Germany after Hitler had taken power, and Weill was eager for the final collapse of the Third Reich. “This is what we’ve been…

One might think that after the last Iraq war Democrats would be wary of allowing intelligence to dictate policy. Yet that is effectively what Barack Obama has done with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed in Vienna on July 14. The agreement with Iran is strategically premised on the…

Of the making of books, there is no end. Thus spake the prophet, and he may have had books about the American Civil War in mind. They come too fast for the amateur to keep up, but one does try. So when I saw, a couple of months ago, that James McPherson was out with a new collection called The War…

It's not hard to figure out why the Obama administration is lashing out at critics of the deal it signed with Iran last week. The White House has been pretending it’s a nuclear deal but knows that it really isn’t. Everyone from the president to the secretary of state and his negotiating team is…

Where I now live, in Bloomington, Indiana, far from any ocean, my year is punctuated by the departure and return of the Canada geese. As the tasks invented by life in middle age accumulate, the rough cries of those geese in the spring and fall—their “ya-honk” of which Walt Whitman spoke—will have…

In his first Inaugural Address, President Obama offered an open hand to the Iranian regime. On July 14, announcing the nuclear deal that is the culmination of that overture, he shook a closed fist at the American people. The president came out swinging—not at the regime in Tehran but at his…

When Jenny McCarthy was fired from The View last year, The Scrapbook let out a sigh of relief. Her position on the ABC gabfest meant the former Playboy model could preach her antivaccination gospel to an audience of millions, five days a week. Now we fear deadly but preventable diseases like…

It may sound too ghoulish to be true, but it is. In a video released on July 14, a top official at Planned Parenthood was caught discussing how the billion-dollar nonprofit harvests and sells the organs of aborted babies to for-profit biotech companies.

Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) appeared before the world as a two-form, shape-shifting paradox. One is hard put to say if he was an American sculptor of Japanese extraction, or a Japanese sculptor who happened to spend most of his life in the United States. The short answer, according to Hayden…

The oil export ban made little sense when domestic production was low, and it is definitely not a good idea now that we’re awash in the stuff. Yet the antiquated rule still has plenty of defenders in Congress. Getting rid of the ban would benefit the economy, create jobs, and do nothing to raise…

Louisville

A happy sestercentennial (250th anniversary) to the publication by Sir William Blackstone of the first volume of his legal treatise, Commentaries on the Laws of England. He aimed to benefit his students most immediately, but his four-volume work would soon become the most influential legal treatise…

Two political entities are in a state of panic. One is the leadership of the Republican party, suffering a fright attack over the visibility of Donald Trump as a Republican presidential candidate. The other is Hillary Clinton, whose Democratic presidential campaign plunges as she tries to appease…

On July 16, we saw the definitive end to one of the greatest abuses of power in recent memory. After five years, the Wisconsin ­supreme court finally halted the Milwaukee district attorney’s notorious “John Doe” investigation that targeted Governor Scott Walker and political allies trying to reform…

The Scrapbook is delighted by the success of NASA’s New Horizons project to send a spacecraft all the way to the edge of the solar system—-indeed, just a few thousand miles from the surface of Pluto, which we now see with astonishing clarity. 

The huge rise in the incidence of gay men becoming fathers via surrogacy is largely seen as positive by those fighting inequality. Publications aimed at gays and lesbians advertise surrogacy services, and the annual Alternative Parenting Show in London attracts over 2,500 visitors. No wonder an…

‘Without this deal,” said President Obama on Tuesday, “there is no scenario where the world joins us in sanctioning Iran until it completely dismantles its nuclear program.” That was nothing new. Throughout the negotiations with Iran, “the world” has been one of the president’s favorite defenses…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Philip Terzian reading his casual essay "Marriage à la Modesto."

Secretary of State John Kerry's warning that Israel will be "blamed" if Congress opposes the Iran agreement conjures up troubling memories of other instances in which Israel or Jews were warned they might be blamed for international conflicts.

The president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, dismissed recent videos showing Planned Parenthood doctors preparing to harvest and sell parts of aborted babies. Richards claimed this morning in interview with George Stephanopoulos that the videos had been edited, and besides, she said, "the…

NBC's Chuck Todd reported this morning on a new poll showing that Hillary Clinton's "favorability numbers are dismal." In Iowa, 56% of all voters have an unfavorable view of Clinton, while only 37% have a favorable view of her. In New Hampshire, 57% view Clinton unfavorably, 37% favorably.

NBC's Kristen Welker reported that Hillary Clinton's email issue has eroded the trust of voters. And that it's "becoming a big political problem for Secretary Clinton. Everytime she wants to be talking about one of her policies, it's overshadowed by more questions about her use of a private email…

All bad things must come to end has been the hope of the banking industry for these past eight years. Now it seems that time has come. In the past week or so just about everything has been coming up roses for America’s banks. JPMorgan Chase delivered second quarter earnings that “beat the Street”,…

All bad things must come to end has been the hope of the banking industry for these past eight years. Now it seems that time has come. In the past week or so just about everything has been coming up roses for America’s banks. JPMorgan Chase delivered second quarter earnings that “beat the Street”,…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the July 20, 2015 issue.

Jonathan Easley of The Hill reports that

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on Hillary Clinton's 2016 chances, the bad Iran nuclear deal, and how Donald Trump and the rest of the 2016 field are faring.

Bernie Becker of The Hill reports that:

Speaker of the House John Boehner is calling on Hillary Clinton to turn over her private email server "immediately."

This morning on America's Newsroom with Bill Hemmer on FOX News Channel, California Republican congressman Darrell Issa alleged that the IRS hasn't changed its procedures and is still targeting conservative groups.

President Obama has promoted the recently agreed Iran deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as “a comprehensive, long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” There are many fallacies and ambiguities in this statement.

The president, as Jordan Fabian of The Hill reports, said yesterday that:

Senator Elizabeth Warren praised two Democratic presidential candidates - Sen. Bernie Sanders and Gov. Martin O'Malley - for their stances on Wall Street. "I'm pleased that Sen @BernieSanders and Gov @MartinOMalley are supporting @TammyBaldwin's bill to slow down the Wall Street revolving door,"…

Donald Trump suggested that illegal immigrants with "merit" should be offered some sort of deal. "I'm a believer in the merit system," Trump said on a phone call this morning with MSNBC. "If somebody's been outstanding, we try and work something out."

The New York Times reports: 

The Donald Trump has announced the formation of "Veterans for Trump" in New Hampshire.

Hillary Clinton talked about race today and said white people fear black men in hoodies:

At a campaign event today at the U.S.-Mexico border, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump left the door open to amnesty. He did so at a press conference on the border:

President Obama did a rare thing today at the White House: he admitted to a shortcoming. 

The latest New York Times bestseller list has Ted Cruz's A Time for Truth at number 8. Just above him is former President Jimmy Carter's A Full Life, coming in at 7. 

New York assemblyman, Dov Hikind, a Democrat, was arrested outside Senator Chuck Schumer's office while protesting the Iran nuclear deal. The Israeli news outlet Arutz Sheva has video:

Donald Trump has arrived. Earlier this hour, Trump deplaned on the U.S.-Mexico border to see first hand what's going on there. His arrival was carried on cable television, including CNN:

Hillary Clinton failed to rebuke a questioner at an event today who criticized Israel. "[M]y third question is about Israel, we spend too much money, $6 billion dollars to Israel funding apartheid!" said the questioner. "There is not the shared values that we are supposed to share with Israel!"

President Clinton's former labor secretary, Robert Reich, has some good things to say about Republican presidential candidate John Kasich. Some good things, but not many.

Conservatives of America, unite. You have nothing to lose but regulations and subsidies. Hark. Listen up. Pay attention. And if there is any other cliché that might get your attention, pencil it in.

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio again refused to endorse his former boss, Hillary Clinton. He made the comments this morning on CBS:

Have you ever wondered what would happen if the conservative fantasy of taking over the culture came to pass? What if one major movie studio, and a few popular actors, comedians, writers, directors were conservative?

An Obamacare contractor has been found to be running a "fight club" in a New Zealand prison. The contractor is Serco and the scandal in New Zealand appears to be rapidly unfolding. 

Representative Diane Black, a Republican from Tennessee, has introduced a bill to deny all federal funding to Planned Parenthood, an organization that performs hundreds of thousands of abortions each year. An undercover investigation by the Center for Medical Progress has revealed that some Planned…

A new report by the American Action Forum, a center-right policy institute, details adverse economic consequences of the Keystone XL pipeline's delay. The report highlights billions of dollars in untapped economic activity, and the over $1 trillion the U.S. has paid other countries for oil. It also…

On Tuesday, the Washington Post's Greg Sargent penned a piece headlined, "What the GOP presidential candidates could say about the Iran deal, but won’t." While there's perhaps some food for thought in the column, this paragraph stopped me cold:

At an event in Washington, D.C., Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is attacking one of his opponents, Donald Trump.

The Pentagon is illustrating Defense Secretary Ash Carter's trip to Israel with a picture of any angry-looking Benjamin Netanyahu. The picture is available on the Defense Department's website:

In the summer of 1994 the Clinton administration faced the gravest crisis on the Korean peninsula since the signing of the armistice agreement in 1953. The genesis of the crisis had come in 1992 when Pyongyang concluded an agreement accepting the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear…

This week, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker signed a law protecting the lives of infants after the fifth month of pregnancy (or 20 weeks after conception), a point in human development when babies can feel pain and survive long-term if born prematurely.

The lone bright spot last week was the release of Ryan Anderson's much-anticipated (by me, at least) book on Obergefell and the future of marriage. It's called Truth Overruled: The future of marriage and religious freedom and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Last month the general synod of the United Church of Christ approved a resolution calling on its members and local churches to boycott products made in the West Bank. The resolution also called on the denomination's local churches and the organizations that manage UCC-related investments to divest…

The Republican National Committee has come out against the Iran nuclear deal, which it labels as part of the "Clinton-Obama foreign policy." The RNC makes their case in a 33-second web video which will be released later today:

Democrat Hillary Clinton is trailing some potential Republican opponents in three key swing states, according to a new poll from Quinnipiac, and doing about as well against the GOP as one of her rivals for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders.

Vice President Joe Biden posed for a picture with a man wearing a marijuana themed t-shirt on a recent visit to Colorado. The t-shirt, from High Times, reportedly says, "I got high in Colorado."

That Donald Trump was supported by 24 percent of Republican voters in the Washington Post/ABC News poll on presidential candidates isn’t the most worrisome number for the GOP.  Even scarier is the devastating role that Trump would play as an independent or third party candidate.

General Ray Odierno, the outgoing chief of staff of the Army, blamed President Obama's disengagement from Iraq for the country falling apart. He made the comments in an interview tonight on Fox News:

Fred Barnes, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney criticized President Barack Obama for the Iranian nuclear deal. We're not "credible anymore," Cheney said, saying that our allies around the world no longer trust us. 

President Obama in a taped appearance with the Daily's Shows Jon Stewart Tuesday denied that IRS targeted conservatives, an assertion that Stewart then appeared to ridicule him for making.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Lee Smith on the Iran deal, and why we can't trust the White House to be honest about it.

A recently released Pew poll finds that only 38% approve President Obama's deal with Iran. A plurality disapproves of the deal.

A fact sheet that Omri Ceren at the Israel Project prepared details why the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’s inspection and verification regime is unlikely to stop Iran from a nuclear breakout.

What will Iran do with the big “signing bonus” – perhaps as much as $150 billion – coming its way thanks to the nuclear pact negotiated by the Obama administration?

President Obama is finally ordering the American flag to be flown at half staff after the Chattanooga terror attack last week. Four Marines and one Sailor were murdered in that attack. 

As Reuters reports:

A second video from the Center for Medical Progress's undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood's practice of trafficking aborted baby organs was released Tuesday morning.

The Islamic State is teaching boys, some as young as 8 years old, how to behead "infidels." The Associated Press has a video report on the matter:

One of the new talking points for defenders of the Obama White House’s Iran deal is that lifting sanctions will hurt the regime’s hardliners, in particular the Revolutionary Guard. It may be true, the argument goes, that some of the $150 billion “signing bonus” in immediate sanctions relief will…

Rick Santorum is keeping expectations low for his second presidential campaign. Asked if he would need to win the Iowa caucuses to stay in the race, the former senator said it “depends.”

Martin O'Malley said the rise of the terrorist organization ISIS in the Middle East can be traced to climate change. In a Friday interview on Bloomberg aired Monday, the Democratic presidential candidate and former Maryland governor said a drought in Syria helped create the conditions for ISIS's…

On Monday Hillary Clinton posted a picture on her Facebook Page alongside a caption, "Hillary’s hosting her first Facebook Q&A of the campaign this afternoon. She'll be chatting live about her vision for a better economy—add your question below, and the post will be updated when she’s ready to…

When Hillary Clinton first launched her campaign in April, THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported that her website was asking for donations up to $2,700 on the English version of the site, but only up to $250 on the Spanish language version. Within hours after the story was published, the…

A new poll of likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa finds Scott Walker with a broad base of support just a week after the Wisconsin governor officially entered the presidential race. The new survey from Monmouth University finds Walker with 22 percent support, leading his closest competitor, Donald…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the Donald's campaign strategy as his candidacy falters.

President Obama assumes Congress will get in line and follow the United Nations's approval of the Iranian nuclear deal.

Terry Eastland reviews Barton Swaim's The Speechwriter for the Wall Street Journal:

In the wake of the Iran deal, a letter to President Obama congratulating him appeared online. It was issued by something called The Iran Project, the stated purpose of which is to improve "the Relationship Between the U.S. and Iranian Governments" and was purportedly signed by more than 100 former…

Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz, writing for Foreign Policy:

Ames, Iowa

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made news recently, when she said—bragged, it seemed—that she and her fellow liberals on the Court were going out of their way to stifle their individual voices in high-profile cases. When the liberals find themselves on the losing side of a case, she explained, they…

From Brussels to Chicago to the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in White Oak, Maryland, public health officials, antismoking crusaders, and mayors are waging a battle against flavorings for both tobacco cigarettes and newer e-cigarettes. 

With all the grave issues confronting the nation in these dangerous times, it may seem frivolous to worry overmuch about whose picture appears on the $10 bill. But public symbols matter. They are one of the ways we tell each other, and the world, what we honor as Americans. Treasury secretary Jack…

The new Pixar film about an 11-year-old girl’s moment of crisis and change is called Inside Out, and it’s a perfect title—maybe too perfect for its own good. Everything the movie shows going on inside Riley’s head is glorious. And that’s most of what we see, so Inside Out deserves to be called the…

Someone joked this past week that for the first time in 2,500 years, Persia and Greece are dominating world news. But now, as then, the questions raised by Persia and Greece go beyond Persia and Greece.

"They have good days and bad days, but I will tell you they are resolute,” attorney Herb Grey says of his clients, Aaron and Melissa Klein, two bakers from Portland who are facing a $135,000 fine from the state of Oregon for refusing to bake a cake for a lesbian commitment ceremony in January 2013.…

For political observers, the story of the Supreme Court’s recently concluded term was the clash of two great colliding forces. On one side stood the Court’s always-unified liberal bloc, fortified by the apostasies of Republican-appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy and sometimes Chief Justice John…

A mass outbreak of syphilis, the radical economist and member of parliament Costas Lapavitsas told an interviewer, is about the only thing the European political establishment did not threaten Greece’s voters with before the country’s early-July referendum. 

One hundred years ago this spring, rowdy automobile caravans from all over the South and Midwest rolled into Chattanooga for the inaugural meeting of the Dixie Highway Association (DHA). It would have been no Sunday drive, according to Tammy Ingram: American roads at the time comprised a…

Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, is surging in the polls against Hillary Clinton. A Quinnipiac University survey has him within 20 points in Iowa, while three of the last four polls have found him within 15 points in New Hampshire. Judging by state polls alone, Sanders is in…

In all the hubbub around the Supreme Court’s big end-of-session rulings on same-sex marriage and Obamacare, some high-level banana-republicanism was overlooked. The FDA has given American food manufacturers three years to get the “trans fat” out of their food. Trans fat, as you may know, is a type…

The Caitlyn (née Bruce) Jenner case has engendered if not a new subject at least a newly publicized and sensationalized one. For an old-timer like myself, transgenderism is reminiscent of the postmodernism that swept the universities several decades ago. Indeed, transgenderism now looks like a more…

One of the benefits of living in a monarchy is that whenever an Englishman feels miserable he can always point to some hapless royal whose lot is worse. As the British aristocrat Richard Grenville-Temple noted back in the days of George III: 

All fiction, it’s been said, boils down to two plots: Either a stranger comes to town or someone goes on a trip. Gatsby lands on Long Island, drawn like a luna moth to Daisy’s green light. Huck and Jim raft away in an idyll of racial amity that today seems, in a term dear to Mark Twain, a…

It took the Bolsheviks a good while, but they eventually learned something that may still be eluding their North Korean counterparts. By as early as the 1930s, Stalin and his accomplices seem to have come to terms with two fairly basic facts of life: The family is a real institution, and there is…

As a lifelong student of the manners and habitat of the American upper-middle, and upper, classes, I am of course a weekly reader of the Vows (weddings) pages in the Sunday New York Times. The tone of these notices has evolved with the years—the weekly essays on one featured couple tend to…

We turn now to the suburbs of Philadelphia. Waldron Mercy Academy is a private school in Merion Station which takes children all the way from daycare at three months through eighth grade. It is not cheap—tuition for grades one through eight is $13,250 per year. Its campus sits nestled around an old…

Senate candidates aren’t as important as they used to be. Republican and Democratic presidential nominees have intruded. The outcome of Senate races in 2016 will be heavily affected, if not determined, by which party’s presidential candidate wins a state. This is especially true in tossup states.

James Salter died last month at age 90. His death took place in a gymnasium not far from his home in Sag Harbor, New York. There was something fitting about this. As a West Point graduate, he was always very physically fit. The obituaries were fulsome. He was spoken of as a “writers’ writer.” This…

Thomas Oden is a Methodist, ecumenist, evangelical, and patristics scholar who was dissuaded from liberal modernism by a Jewish conservative, becoming himself a theological paleo-orthodox and devoting the last half of his life to the reaffirmation of Christian orthodoxy rooted in the early church…

If you were on social media last week, you no doubt heard about the new contract being promoted to college students by the activists at the Affirmative Consent Project in their effort to beat back the supposed “rape culture” on U.S. campuses. The group suggested that amorous couples, after signing…

Whenever the annual Clinton Global Initiative convenes, as it did in Denver last month, and I watch the billionaires and their hired policy experts rearing up to compliment one another for their plans to bring our troubled species ever closer to perfection, my mind detaches itself from the windy…

Vienna

The old New Yorker used to have a contributor named “Mr. Arbuthnot the Cliché Expert”—actually writer Frank Sullivan (1892-1976)—who, between 1935 and 1952, specialized in identifying and analyzing the puerile thoughts and hackneyed phrases of American politics and journalism. The Scrapbook has…

Bill Kristol appeared on ABC's This Week Sunday and said he is "finished" with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. At a political event in Iowa over the weekend, the New York businessman had criticized senator John McCain's record on veterans' issues and dismissed the Arizona…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the July 20, 2015 issue.

Secretary of State John Kerry told NBC's Chuck Todd that "the arms and the missiles" were "thrown in as an add-on to this nuclear agreement."

Secretary of State John Kerry defended the Obama administration's decision to take the Iran deal to the United Nations before the U.S. Congress votes on it. Kerry made the remarks in an interview this morning on ABC News:

Ames, Iowa

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Victorino Matus reading his casual essay "A Fistful of Forints."

At a campaign event on Saturday, Donald Trump mocked John McCain's war heroism:

Speaking today in Iowa, Donald Trump attacked John McCain for being a former prisoner of war. Watch here:

The Hillary Clinton campaign forbid young supporters from talking to the press at an event last night in Iowa: 

Two big deals were signed this week, with one thing in common – can-kicking. The Eurozone countries, more precisely Germany, kicked the Greek debt can down the road for three years by lending the already over-indebted country another €86bn. And the P5+1, the permanent members of the UN Security…

"Without a deal, the international sanctions regime will unravel with little ability to reimpose them."

Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama, details a pattern of terrorism committed by immigrants. These "events," he writes in a statement, "do not occur in isolation, but are often part of broader networks, groups, and pockets of radicalization made possible by unwise immigration policy."

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the President's UN ploy regarding the Iran deal, the Chattanooga shootings, and Donald Trump.

The NAACP chapter in Atlanta, Georgia, has demanded the destruction of a famous, engraved Confederate depiction near their city. The largest bas-relief in the world, sculpted on the north face of Stone Mountain, just a 30-minute drive east of Atlanta, the relief consists of Confederate leaders…

The State Department will hang the Cuban flag in the lobby of the State Department building on Monday in recognition of the imminent reopening of the communist nation's embassy in Washington. The AP's Matt Lee reports:

After the removal of Ronald Rogers, the long-serving Pardon Attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice who failed to please President Obama over issues of clemency, his replacement, Deborah Leff, has begun to operate the new ‘Clemency Project 2014.’ It is an effort to turn felons back on the…

President Obama will appear on the Daily Show With Jon Stewart. The appearance will be next week in New York City. Stewart's last scheduled show is August 6.

Even in the context of China’s steadily deteriorating human rights situation, the developments of the last few weeks have been remarkable. 

In this week’s newsletter, I talked about Donald Trump’s electoral prospects in the context to two other reasonably successful, non-traditional candidates: Jesse Ventura and Ross Perot. My basic point is that voters are more likely to support fringe candidates than the establishment often assumes.…

Technically, we are told, it is simply “the Open.”  Or, perhaps, “The Open.”  Maybe even “The Open.”

The top paid employee on Hillary Clinton's campaign is Huma Abedin. According to Federal Election Commission disclosures released this week, Abedin was paid $69,263.09 in the first quarter of the campaign. 

President Obama marked Ramadan with a statement last night which was released by the White House.

Hillary Clinton made a statement today on the terror attack in Tennessee, which reportedly claimed the lives of four Marines. The Democratic presidential candidate compared today's attack to the racially-motivated murder of 9 Americans in a Charleston church last month:

Susan Rice, President Obama's national security advisor, said on CNN that at least some money that Iran will receive from the nuclear deal will be used by the regime to support terrorism. 

Hillary Clinton has unveiled a "profit sharing" tax plan. The details of the plan have been published on her website.

As part of their attempt to sell the Iran deal as something other than a catastrophe for American and international peace and security, President Obama and John Kerry are now invoking the United Nations. The Obama administration raced straight from Vienna to the Security Council, awaiting nothing…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on Hillary's 2016 campaign and her new winning strategy.

Hillary Clinton was heckled today at a town hall in New Hampshire.

Samsung C&T and New York investor Paul Singer have been engaged in a heated battle over the future of the telecommunications company. 

The first Republican presidential debate isn't until next month, but former Texas governor Rick Perry is already hitting back at fellow GOP contender Donald Trump. In a statement, Perry knocked Trump's criticism of the governor's 14-year tenure in Austin, saying the New York businessman has a…

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters Thursday that the release of four Americans being held in Iran should not be part of a deal with the Islamic Republic. 

A new TV ad argues the Obama administration's nuclear deal with Iran is repeating history, drawing parallels with the 1994 nuclear deal President Bill Clinton brokered with North Korea. The ad, produced by the Foundation for American Security and Freedom, interchanges lines from both president's…

Greece ill-temperedly rattles a tin cup, desperate for another handout from the European Union but feeling far more anger than gratitude toward its would-be benefactors.

How should Republicans in Congress approach the process of repealing Obamacare? Jeffrey Anderson suggests a careful use of Senate reconciliation rules. Here's Anderson:

Would George W. Bush have negotiated and signed the JCPOA with Iran?  Even for those who (like me) worked in the Bush White House, that seems like a silly question. After all, who cares? Bush has been out of office for more than six years, and refrains from commenting on foreign affairs or from…

Before we begin discussion of Donald Trump, we must start with Kevin Williamson's epic burn from a few weeks ago, because it's the truest thing you've ever read:

Elliott Abrams, writing for National Review Online:

Aaron David Miller, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Just one day after the Iran deal was announced, the State Department tweeted a video in which Under Secretary Wendy Sherman, a lead U.S. negotiator, recounts something Secretary of State John Kerry said at the close of the Iran negotiations. 

Hillary Clinton has already spent nearly one million dollars on polling. According to the Democratic presidential candidate's first Federal Election Commission disclosure report, the campaign has already spent $904,915.00 on polling.

If you were to ask a group of grade schoolers their opinions on grown-ups, what would they say? In our age of participation awards and "good job," would the descriptives be more positive than negative? In a 1931 issue of Harper's Magazine, a schoolteacher asked her students, ages 7 to 11, that very…

To cut through the rhetoric surrounding the Iran deal, and to better understand what the two sides conceded and gained, I’ve compiled a balance sheet on the Iran deal. It’s simple and non-technical; a basic list comparing what the U.S. gets versus what Iran gets. The reader is free to make up his…

Barack Obama scolded a reporter at his Wednesday briefing after getting a critical question about the nuclear deal with Iran. CBS News's Major Garrett pressed the president on the imprisonment of Americans in Iran.

Arnold Steinberg, a polling expert, offers a good reason to think the latest poll showing Donald Trump leading the Republican presidential field is problematic. Here's an excerpt:

Planned Parenthood’s response to the infamous video revealing its senior director for medical services Deborah Nucatola discussing the sale of fetal organs with undercover reporters demonstrates, once again, the logical fallacies upon which the nation’s largest abortion provider is based.

Years ago, a left-leaning reporter for a mainstream newspaper grossly exaggerated the crowd at one of her favorite protest rallies. When I pointed out the much lower crowd estimates by police and other sources, she responded with, “facts are the enemy of truth,” words from the mouth of Cervantes’…

In the midst of revelations about a massive data breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the agency awarded a $4.3 million two-month contract extension to Northrop Grumman for the OPM's Data Warehouse Program (DWP). According to the award documents, the follow-on contract includes…

Another poll of likely Democratic presidential primary voters shows Vermont senator Bernie Sanders closing a considerable gap with Hillary Clinton, while Vice President Joe Biden looks like he could be a spoiler if he decides to run for the nomination. The latest Monmouth University poll finds…

President Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, has been using doublespeak to sell the nuclear deal to the American people. In April of this year, Rhodes claimed that the nuclear deal would include "anywhere, anytime" access to Iranian nuclear sites. Last night, the top Obama…

Planned Parenthood’s response to Tuesday’s video revealing their senior director for medical services Deborah Nucatola frankly discussing the sale of fetal organs with undercover reporters demonstrates, once again, the logical fallacies upon which the nation’s largest abortion provider is based.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney blasted the Iran deal in remarks last night to Sean Hannity:

In background documents sent to reporters on Tuesday, Planned Parenthood's public relations firm calls the organization's harvesting of human organs a "humanitarian undertaking." 

The latest Suffolk University/USA Today poll is likely spooking Republicans in Washington and eliciting cheers from Hillary Clinton headquarters. The poll finds Donald Trump leading the pack of GOP White House hopefuls with 17 percent support, with all the remaining candidates but Jeb Bush…

The Washington Post appears to be struggling a bit to cover today's blockbuster story about the undercover video of Planned Parenthood harvesting and selling organs from aborted fetuses. First, they changed the headline to something that's far more friendly to Planned Parenthood without noting the…

Hillary Clinton supports the Iran nuclear deal. The Democratic presidential candidate expressed her support for the deal in an email to reporters.

According to the terms of the Iran deal announced in Vienna on Tuesday, U.N. Security Council sanctions regarding nuclear-related issues will be lifted on a number of entities and individuals—from Iranian banks to Lebanese assassins, like Anis Nacacche. The name that most sticks out is IRGC-Quds…

Businessman and TV personality Donald Trump tops the latest Suffolk University/USA Today poll of the Republican presidential primary. Trump has 17 percent support among likely GOP primary voters nationwide, edging out former Florida governor Jeb Bush with 14 percent. The remaining candidates earn…

As the news of the nuclear deal reached between the United States, its Western allies, and the Islamic Republican of Iran broke Tuesday morning, Republican presidential candidates were nearly unanimous in condemning the agreement.

At first glance, the two make an odd couple: Rep. Paul Ryan, the campaign-polished Wisconsin representative, and Deion Sanders, the two-time Super Bowl champion. But they aren’t here to talk politics. And, despite their very different backgrounds, they share the same goal: finding a more effective…

On Monday, President Obama announced the results of his war on unjust sentences and the incarceration of large numbers of low-level, non-violent drug offenders. Now in the seventh year of his presidency, he has added just 46 federal felons to the list of those whose sentences he has commuted.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Lee Smith on the Iran deal, and whether the country will achieve full nuclear breakout before the end of Obama's second term.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton on the "diplomatic waterloo" that is the Iran nuclear deal.

Sean Davis reports at The Federalist: 

Professor of history emeritus at Brown, National Humanities Medalist, and WEEKLY STANDARD contributor, Gordon S. Wood, here discusses his latest books, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate (Volume I, and II), both published by the Library of America.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the Iran nuclear deal and how it is worse than everybody expected it to be.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican senator from Arkansas, blasted the Iranian nuclear as a "terrible, dangerous mistake" this morning on MSNBC:

President Obama's Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, is warning all not to be "deceived by the propaganda of the warmongering Zionist regime." He made the statement on Twitter.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, released the following statement blasting the nuclear deal reached this morning with Iran:

We have a deal. It's a deal worse than even we imagined possible. It's a deal that gives the Iranian regime $140b in return for ... effectively nothing: no dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program, no anytime/anywhere inspections, no curbs on Iran's ballistic missile program, no maintenance of the…

Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is blasting the Iran nuclear deal. "I will refer later to the details of the agreement, but before that, I would like to say here and now – when you are willing to make an agreement at any cost, this is the result," Netanyahu said.

Carly Fiorina accused Hillary Clinton having "blood on her hands" for her handling of the Benghazi terror attack that killed four Americans:

Waukesha

Among the Affordable Care Act’s many features is a tax on high dollar health insurance coverage that is part of an individual’s employment compensation. The thinking is that someone who is self-employed or doesn’t have employer provided coverage pays for health insurance with after-tax dollars so…

Hillary Clinton outlined her economic agenda today at the New School in Manhattan, and attacked Uber. The ridesharing service did not reply to Clinton directly, but the company did post a story on its blog about how the service helps “senior mobility.” Clinton, a grandmother, is 67 years old.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the entrance of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker into the crowded 2016 GOP primary field.

Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on the economy earlier today in New York City. Here are the talking points the Clinton campaign sent along to friends and allies, hoping that they'll repeat these lines on cable news and in conversations:

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is announcing that he's running for president today. Because of Walker's anti-Union reputation, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka made sure to weigh in.

Today, in an economic speech at the New School in Manhattan, Hillary Clinton spoke out against short-term traders.

Hillary Clinton attacked a bank that paid her husband, Bill Clinton, and donated to her family foundation at a speech on the economy today in New York City. The bank Clinton called out was HSBC.

In his recent interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump sharply criticized the way the Obama administration has been negotiating the forthcoming nuclear deal with Iran.

As he has for much of his post-presidency, Bill Clinton was on the road again in June, traveling to Europe at the end of the month for various conferences and other public appearances. After a few days in London, the president popped over to Paris for a day or two to shop at Hermès, a well-known…

Milwaukee

Jeb Bush will no longer be talking about Donald Trump. Bush made the comments to Fox News' Bret Baier, in comments that aired today on Fox News Sunday:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the Summer Reading Issue.

Democratic senator Bob Menendez ripped the Iran deal in an interview this morning on ABC:

The Associated Press reports:

Anthony Weiner, the husband of Hillary Clinton's closest aide, Huma Abedin, is suggesting that Bernie Sanders run as an independent. Sanders, of course, is currently challenging Clinton for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential race.

Pope, President, Prices and Paris. That covers just about everything you need to know about the next step in the battle to prevent what has come to be called climate change, the title now preferred to “global warming” by those who worry that CO2 emissions are causing, er, global warming. The Pope…

Secretary of State John Kerry says "progress" has been made with the Iranians. And some things have been "resolved."

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the week that was in Washington and around the world.

Omar Sharif died Friday at the age of 83. He starred in a number of major films, like “Doctor Zhivago,” and was a fixture in Hollywood and what used to be the Hollywood of the Middle East, Cairo. It was in Egypt where Sharif, born Michel Shalhoub to a Lebanese Christian family, first made his…

The director of the Office of Personnel Management will resign her post as more details emerge of a massive hack that has compromised the personal information of million of Americans. The New York Times's Julie Davis reports:

The eyes of the nation tuned in to cable news this morning as South Carolina removed the Confederate Battle Flag from its Capitol grounds after 54 years. 

There’s been plenty of sound and fury over the Republican presidential primary debates. Who will make the 10-candidate cut? Who will get left out? Will Ohio’s governor John Kasich be shut out of the first debate, which is being held in his own state? What nutty thing(s) will Donald Trump say?

More than 20 million Americans had their privacy violated in the recent hack.  This according to a story in the New York Times, which reports that:

The question is not whether Iran can be trusted to uphold the nuclear deal now being negotiated in Vienna (it can’t), but whether the Obama administration and its P5+1 partners can be trusted to punish Iran when it violates the agreement? 

When Scott Walker formalizes his presidential run Monday with a long-anticipated announcement, he will have at his side a seasoned veteran of Republican politics and an architect of the modern conservative movement. THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that Walker is expected to name Michael Grebe as…

Ray Takeyh, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Twenty years have now passed since the brutal subjugation of the besieged town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, after which 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered by Serbs commanded by ex-Yugoslav army general Ratko Mladic. The terrible episode is itself worth commemorating,…

The Atlantic dubbed July 8, 2015 “the day the computers betrayed us” as systems supporting the NYSE, United Airlines, and the Wall Street Journal all suffered crashes. Those events served as a fitting backdrop to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson's remarks on cybersecurity at…

The Atlantic dubbed July 8, 2015 “the day the computers betrayed us” as systems supporting the NYSE, United Airlines, and the Wall Street Journal all suffered crashes. Those events served as a fitting backdrop to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson's remarks on cybersecurity at…

David Keyes, executive director of a group called "Advancing Human Rights" is at it again. This time in Vienna.

Earlier today, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing to consider whether President Obama's pick to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., should be advanced to the Senate for a confirmation vote.

In at last announcing in detail that it would reduce the size of its active-duty force, currently 490,000, by 40,000 soldiers over the next two years, the U.S. Army seems finally and for a day to have captured the attention of the political class.  In fact this is not news, but the long-anticipated…

First time claims for unemployment spiked last week.  As Bloomberg reports:

The mainstream press corps and (at least privately) many Republicans officeholders have adopted two seemingly irreconcilable positions.  They claim Obamacare is politically toxic for Democrats yet is somehow immune to repeal by Republicans (even after President Obama leaves office).  A recent piece…

Bill Kristol joined Anderson Cooper on CNN Wednesday night to discuss the newsman's interview with real-estate mogul and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The boss argued Trump is a force for good in the GOP presidential primary. Kristol debated Democratic operative and Hillary…

Will religious schools be punished by the government in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage? During oral arguments of the Supreme Court case, the Obama administration's top lawyer said that the charitable tax status of religious…

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas introduced a bill on Wednesday that would deny federal law enforcement aid to cities that don't comply with federal immigration laws. The problem of so-called "sanctuary cities" has been in the news following the murder of Kathryn Steinle, a young woman who was killed…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with online editor Daniel Halper on Hillary's first big interview.

Identity politics are truly the coin of the realm.

Hillary Clinton falsely claimed in an interview that she had not received a subpoena for her emails. But Trey Gowdy, the chair of the House Benghazi committee, released the subpoena he sent the former secretary of state after hearing Clinton not tell the truth:

The political action committee headed by Ohio governor John Kasich has a new advertisement as the Republican prepares to run for president. The 60-second ad features Kasich speaking directly to the camera about his experience both as governor and as a longtime member of the House of…

Fareed Zakaria, CNN’s foreign policy touchstone, has officially entered what is passing for the “culture wars” in American education with his new book, In Defense of a Liberal Education. Zakaria argues that the mode of education known as the liberal arts is in peril, and purports to offer a robust…

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tells NBC News that he will "win the Latino vote." Here's video:

As the negotiations over a nuclear deal with Iran drag on in Vienna, the Boston Globe's Matt Viser provides an inside look at how the United States delegation spends its time as the top diplomats confer. Among the details about snacks and American officials falling asleep is a nugget about the U.S.…

Bill Kristol appeared with Steve Malzberg on Newsmax TV Tuesday to discuss Donald Trump's influence on the Republican presidential field. The boss argued that despite Trump's inappropriate comments about illegal immigrants, Republicans should not be so quick to disregard the issues the real-estate…

Actor Tom Selleck has shirked California’s restrictions on water use in a pretty deplorable way. The Los Angeles Times reports,

After days of bad -- albeit free -- press over her campaign's controversial roping of journalists at a parade in New Hampshire, footage has been unearthed of the Bill Clinton campaign doing precisely the same thing to the press in 1992.

A Hillary Clinton staffer was caught on a hot mic saying "holy moly" after realizing how late Clinton was to her own event. Here's video:

Rebecca Shabad of The Hill reports:

At a total cost of more than a trillion dollars, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons program in history.  The U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — not to mention the air forces and navies of more than a dozen U.S. allies — are counting on the Lockheed Martin plane to…

If you’re searching for an explanation for Donald Trump’s relatively modest surge in the crowded Republican presidential field, look no further than this story from the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker:

For the first time since an American-led coalition toppled the Taliban in 2001, Afghan officials are engaged in formal talks with Taliban leadership. Afghan president Ashraf Ghani confirmed that members of the Afghan High Peace Council sat down for face-to-face negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan…

The Professional Golfers' Association of America will move its annual Grand Slam of Golf tournament from a Los Angeles-area golf course owned by New York businessman and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The tournament, which features the winners of the four major championships, was…

Flushed with the success of its five-year effort to restore prosperity to Greece, Brussels’ eurocrats have turned their attention to Italy, and ruled that the country’s famous buffalo mozzarella need not be made with fresh milk: powdered milk will do just fine. So Italy will have to repeal a 1974…

Longtime Clinton aide and defender Paul Begala called the roping off the press "horrible, horrible" this morning on CNN:

Americans are rightfully concerned about ISIS’s rampage across the Middle East. But one thing that even ISIS has not yet accomplished is what the president, the director of the FBI, and the director of the NSA all insist Kim Jong-un's hackers did last year -- suppress the release of a major motion…

Bernie Sanders had another huge political campaign rally last night. This one was in Portland, Maine, a city of just over 66,000 residents.

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush is weighing in on the debate whether the U.S. government should strike a deal with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The Chamber of Commerce has launched two new ads focusing on what are expected to be some of the closest Senate races of the 2016 cycle: the seats up in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the Hillary Clinton campaign's literal wrangling of reporters over the weekend.

The World Bank last week removed a chapter of its latest report on China, saying it had not been properly reviewed. It seems that the chapter, “Special Topic: Reform Priorities in China’s Financial Sector” called China’s financial sector wasteful, poor performing, overly indebted and weakly…

CNN's Brianna Keilar will be interviewing Hillary Clinton this week. It's Clinton's first big national interview since jumping in the presidential race.

Another big-headed candidate is running for president. And no, this one isn’t vying for the GOP nomination.  

The latest episode of Conversations With Bill Kristol, featuring David Gelernter:

Robert Pear of the New York Times reports that:

In the July 3, 2015  “Notable and Quotable” column, the Wall Street Journal honors the school reformer, Marva Collins, who died this week at age 78, by resurrecting a 1982 opinion piece about her authored by Paul Gigot. Collins was a fearless supporter of funded tuition vouchers, and herself a…

Oklahoma senator James Inhofe did the world no favors earlier this year when he brought a snowball onto the Senate floor in order to “disprove” global warming. For one, a blizzard hitting Washington, D.C. tells us absolutely nothing about whether man-made climate change is indeed occurring. His…

The top spokesman in the Hillary Clinton campaign says the press cannot get in the way of Clinton's ability to campaign. That's how Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director for Clinton's campaign, explained the press being roped off at a July 4 event for Clinton over the weekend.

The top spokesman in the Hillary Clinton campaign said that they are "worried about" Bernie Sanders, the 73-year-old socialist from Vermont:

It’s a Saturday afternoon in 1955, and I am sitting with my father in the Palace Theater in Lorain, Ohio. I am 7 years old, and we are waiting for the start of a war movie called To Hell and Back. It is, my dad tells me, a true story, and the hero is a real hero playing himself. His name, I learned…

Thirty-seven years later, it is difficult to describe the impact of Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case on the America of 1978. Weinstein died last week at the age of 77, but his most famous work has long since been enshrined in the historical canon. Here’s why.

The Valley is marketed as a police procedural set in a remote American military outpost in Afghanistan, and it is a page-turner, all 448 of them. It’s also so cunningly constructed that I had to read it twice to be sure I understood everything that was going on—and there are still a few loose ends.…

Is the world better off than it was eight years ago? 

Like humans and chimpanzees, Americans and Britons share 99 percent of linguistic and cultural DNA, but it’s the 1 percent difference that often seems to define us. Here, Erin Moore ably strives to explain how and why this is so.

China’s foreign aid programs are distinguished by size (much larger than those of other countries), breadth (encompassing 92 emerging-market countries in six geographic regions), and composition (focused on mining and exports of natural resources and supporting infrastructure). They are also unique…

Did the clock just strike 13, or are we now in the middle of some interminable national conversation about all the things we’d like to ban? It started with the Confederate flag, a controversial emblem to be sure. The Scrapbook is not opposed to removing the flag as an official state symbol. But…

How should Republicans court the conservative Christian vote in 2016? Among the presidential candidates, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz are offering competing models for maintaining and growing a critical part of the GOP’s coalition in the primaries and in the general election. Both strategies show promise…

Ever since the environmental movement began it has had a religious fervor: Like God, Earth is always capitalized, and there is an annual celebration, Earth Day, rather like holidays celebrated by other religions. Of course, the dogmas of green religionists have changed over time: Prophecies of a…

All royal families are alike; all are unhappy in their own way. Most of their unhappiness is as common as their subjects, but the best of it has the resonance and unworldliness of a fairy tale. Royalty, as the proverb says of the Jews, are like other people, only more so.

Needless to say, The Scrapbook was horrified last week to learn that Sean (Diddy) Combs had been arrested in Los Angeles and charged with assault with a deadly weapon, making terrorist threats, and battery. All of this took place on the UCLA campus, where Combs’s son Justin is a member of the…

With grievance and unspecific anger the major themes of so many contemporary memoirs, Unabrow is a literary breath of fresh air. The book consists of 20 comic essays chronicling Una LaMarche’s difficulty navigating womanhood while looking back at how her awkward formative years—as a single-browed…

Ye who are disappointed in the Supreme Court this term, take heart: Its plainly wrong decision in the housing case from Texas, handed down last week, was not as bad as it might have been.

The Scrapbook’s faith in the younger generation has just spiked upwards. A reader emails us an editorial from the Zephyr, student paper of the Brearley School, the very liberal prep school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. A tip of The Scrapbook’s homburg to author and editor in chief Claire Kozak…

In its heyday in the twenties, the Algonquin Round Table was a headline-grabbing “smart set” that came to fame in a decade when mass media took center stage in American culture. A showcase setting for journalists and theater people, the Round Table’s stars included Dorothy Parker, George S.…

The English writer and artist Max Beerbohm lived between 1872 and 1956, nearly 84 years in all. But early on, he cultivated his career like a man with little time to lose. Fresh from Oxford, he began contributing witty articles to the Yellow Book, a lively quarterly associated with Oscar Wilde and…

Morning comes like a great bird, sailing over the dark curve of the earth to illuminate the hills and trees. Dawn arrives like an angel’s burning sword, expelling night from the garden of this world. Sunrise melts to fresh dew the last wisps of frost across the lawn, a diamond sparkle in the golden…

It’s the summer of 2015, and the left is on the march. Or perhaps one should say—since the left presumably dislikes the militarist connotations of the term “march”—that the left is swarming. And in its mindless swarming and mob-like frenzy, nearly every hideous aspect of contemporary leftism is on…

"It was like an out-of-body experience,” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell says. He was talking about his congratulatory phone call from President Obama after Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) passed the Senate last week. “It was kind of fun.” McConnell enjoyed hearing the president castigate…

In 1969, a young Hillary Rodham was chosen to give a commencement address to the graduating class of Wellesley College, and she used the occasion to deliver some fairly radical remarks. She spoke of her generation feeling “that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including…

The term “illiberal left” is one of the useful contributions of this book. Liberals, as Kirsten Powers grew up believing, are committed to tolerance, pluralism, and reasoned debate. Freedom of speech is, to them, a cherished principle. By contrast, she insists, “authoritarian demands for…

Richard Schickel—the Time critic who has been writing about movies for a living since 1965—estimates in the opening chapter of Keepers that he has seen roughly “22,590 films, or about 294 of them a year. Which means that two out of every three days, for a long time now, I have been at the movies.”…

Halloween, it seems, never fails to arrive in “Witch City” without a spike in tourism. These tourists have conferred the nickname on Salem, Massachusetts. For the past several decades, the otherwise ordinary Essex County community of 41,000 has been the destination of people with a sometimes-lurid…

When it comes to first ladies, one size does not fit all. From Martha Washington to Michelle Obama, presidential spouses have ranged from the brilliant to the batty, the dutiful to the distraught. But then, so have their husbands, so it really isn’t all that surprising. Come the 2016 election, we…

One week before the June 30 deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a series of demands about the final terms. Among them: He called for an immediate end to all United Nations Security Council and U.S. economic sanctions on Iran; he said Iranian military…

The 378 men of the 2nd Light Battalion King’s German Infantry made up a tiny fraction of Wellington’s force of 68,000 at Waterloo, and they are often forgotten amid Napoleon’s massive frontal assaults against the allied line on the heights of Mont-Saint-Jean. Their fierce defense of a farmhouse…

That the president is an important media figure is an indisputable fact in the modern political landscape. In my own book on presidents and popular culture, I argued that the ways in which presidents interact with the content and various modes of popular culture can provide a valuable insight into…

The vote in Greece is running 60 percent “No” on the terms of its creditors.  The same experts who had been predicting a close vote will now explain why it was a runaway in favor of … well, who knows.  But count on the usual confident voices to sort it all out.  

Secretary of State John Kerry wants a "couple" more days to negotiate with the Iranians. And he wants privacy. 

Bill Kristol, with Rep. Joaquin Castro, Rep. Tom Cole, and Anne Gearan, earlier today on ABC's This Week:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Jim Swift reading his casual essay "Father Knows Best."

Bill Kristol, writing a few years ago in the New York Times:

One of the great July 4th speeches was delivered by a shy man who played baseball for a living. Lou Gehrig played every day, never took a game off, until he was told, at age 35, that he was dying.  More than 60,000 fans and former teammates came out to Yankee Stadium to honor him.  Between the two…

The press was roped down by aides today at Hillary Clinton event in New Hampshire. Photos of the press corps following Clinton at a July 4 parade were shared today on Twitter and Snapchat.

Parades, fireworks, patriotic songs, 150 million hot dogs consumed, 41 million car trips of more than 50 miles -- and heightened security in reaction to Islamist terrorist threats to disrupt our celebration with murder and mayhem as part of their celebration of their holy month of Ramadan. That’s…

Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif has released a YouTube message aimed apparently at his American negotiators. In the video, Zarif even suggests his nation and the United States are int he fight together against terrorism: "Our common threat today is the growing menace of violent extremism and…

One hundred and fifty two years ago, at 2:00 p.m., General Longstreet, who could not bring himself to speak the order, nodded to General Pickett that his division could begin the assault up Cemetery Ridge The South’s greatest – and most peculiarly southern – novelist wrote of how that moment lives.…

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will not find a home in France. The French government has announced today it will not grant asylum to the fugitive.

A Baltimore man has finally been charged with arson for setting ablaze a CVS pharmacy during the Baltimore riots in April. The criminal complaint was announced by the Department of Justice.

In April, an administrative judge with the Oregon Department of Labor ordered Aaron and Melissa Klein, the owners of the now shuttered bakery Sweet Cakes by Melissa, to pay a fine of $135,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a lesbian couple's wedding. While there's a case the couple violated the…

Hillary Clinton's communications director was spotted huddling with President Barack Obama. The meeting took place at the White House and was noticed by the pool reporter who was not able to identify the president's interlocutor.

That is the guidance from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in what will likely be his last message to the troops and commanders serving under him. 

Hillary Clinton will be speaking to La Raza in a couple weeks in Kansas City.

Vienna

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on the Bernie Sanders campaign and how it's impacting the frontrunner, Hillary Clinton.

The Bernie Sanders moment does not appear to be passing, at least not yet. The latest Quinnipiac poll of of likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa shows the Vermont senator trailing Hillary Clinton by 19 points—a gaping deficit, until you consider that just two months ago, Clinton led Sanders by 45…

Bloomberg reports that:

The former top political adviser to Barack Obama, David Axelrod, has likened the Bernie Sanders surge to Howard Dean's in the 2004 election. Axelrod made the comments on Twitter.

It makes no more sense to be certain that the globe is definitely not warming than to be certain that it definitely is. It makes no more sense to be certain that if the globe is warming it is not due to carbon emissions than to be certain that it definitely is. It makes no more sense to be certain…

 The Iran nuclear talks deadline was recently extended for a week until July 7 according to the Associated Press. This extension could conceivably raise the already enormous financial cost of the diplomatic home-stretch effort even higher. Even before the extension was granted, contracts for…

Thousands appeared in Madison, Wisconsin Wednesday night for a rally supporting Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont running for the Democratic nomination for president. CNN reporter Dan Merica tweeted a photo of the rally held at Veterans Memorial Coliseum, which seats 10,000…

Presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz blasted President Obama for making major concessions to the Cuban government by normalizing relations, and said the U.S. has all but caved to Cuba.

One reads of the crisis in Greece.   And the one much closer to home in Puerto Rico.  The crisis, that is, that inevitably comes after spending too much and taking on more debt than it is possible even to service, much less pay down. One thinks of how unfortunate it is for the people who will now…

Senator Chuck Grassley has written a series of letters to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew demanding answers about a shady uranium deal with a company tied to the Clintons.

Look, it's not the end of the world.  

The elite media types have been in bed with the elite national Democratic party types for so long that one hardly bothers to note it any longer. Still, it is a little jarring when the Hillary Clinton e-mails reveal this kind of panting sycophancy

Some Republican leaders are sharply criticizing the Obama administration for establishing official diplomatic ties with Cuba, the Caribbean island nation that has been under the control of Communist dictator Fidel Castro and his brother Raul since 1959. A number of GOP presidential candidates and…

A former solider who served most of 2003 in Iraq as a cavalry scout and is now suffering from PTSD was turned away from a VA facility in Georgia. When he went to another VA facility to make the same request, he made a record of the encounter on his smartphone.  As Patricia Kime of Military…

In a newly released email exchange between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, Hillary emails Podesta asking, "When can we talk?"

Hillary Clinton does not know how to operate a fax machine. That's one of the disclosures from the last email document dump from the State Department.

Michael Schmidt of the New York Times reported this morning that dozens of Hillary Clinton's emails are now be labeled classified. Clinton, of course, said that none of her emails were classified.