August 2015

Cancun

One of the perks of covering the alcohol beat is the occasional complimentary sample that arrives by mail. It’s usually a medium-sized package containing, at most, a 750-ml. bottle. Often it’s smaller: A sample of the delicious Chopin wheat spirit Single was 375 ml. in size, Woody Creek vodka from…

Last Friday, I moderated a panel at Hudson Institute titled, “Why is Qassem Suleimani Smiling? The Iran Deal and Sanctions Relief for Terrorists.” (See video of the event here.) The panel’s focus was not speculative—for instance, how the regime might spend the signing bonus promised by the Joint…

Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon from Maryland, has had a good August in Iowa. In the last three polls of likely Republican caucusgoers, Carson has come in second to Donald Trump, with both candidates overtaking one-time leader Scott Walker. In the latest poll, Carson and Trump are actually…

Donald Trump has a new online video ad that hits Republican rival Jeb Bush for the former Florida governor's statement that immigrating illegally to the United States is an "act of love." The ad, available on Trump's Instagram feed, features audio and video of Bush speaking about the issue of…

Illinois will happily take your money and sell you a lottery ticket but, as the AP reports,

A new poll of likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa finds Donald Trump and Ben Carson tied for the lead at 23 percent support. The Monmouth University poll is the first since July to show Trump not in the sole lead position in Iowa.

I've suggested before that 2016 is beginning to look more and more like 1968. This is true in terms of the presidential contests—on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is Eugene McCarthy, Hillary Clinton is Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden will be Hubert Humphrey, and (the big question!) Elizabeth Warren…

Barack Obama is personally hurt when people call him an anti-Semite, the president said in an interview with the Jewish newspaper the Forward. Obama says "there not a smidgen of evidence for" the accusation.

A week ago, I suggested that—contrary to conventional wisdom and perhaps even to first-blush common sense—the GOP field might benefit from one or more new candidates. One of the well-qualified dark horses I mentioned was third-term Rep. Mike Pompeo from Wichita, Kansas.

StemExpress is the bio-medical company featured in a number of the undercover videos released by the Center for Medical Progress in connection with its Planned Parenthood exposé on fetal organ and tissue harvesting. StemExpress made several changes to its website last week, some cosmetic but others…

One of the perks of covering the alcohol beat is the occasional complimentary sample that arrives by mail. It’s usually a medium-sized package containing, at most, a 750-ml. bottle. Often it’s smaller: A sample of the delicious Chopin wheat spirit Single was 375 ml. in size, Woody Creek vodka from…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the August 24-31, 2015 double issue.

A new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll shows Bernie Sanders trailing Hillary Clinton by just 7 percentage points: 

A savvy friend who's held elective office emails:

Warren Buffett had it right, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” Peer through the fog of commentary on recent share price gyrations and you can see the unclothed figures of Chinese president Xi Jinping and his fellow managers of the Chinese economy, the very one…

Speaking to cadets at the Citadel today, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker criticized the "Obama-Clinton" foreign policy and called for deploying greater resources to defeat the Islamic State. 

New Jersey's kids, like all kids, are our future. And in many places, it takes a village to raise those children, complete with teachers' unions.

Let's check in with the big 2016 news from last week: Jim Gilmore? He gone. From the CNN debate, that is. I expect he'll be formally gone from the race soon and whoever manages to scoop up his support will be in the driver's seat to Cleveland.

Norfolk, Va.

Now that President Obama has returned from his two-week summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard—that is to say, now that life in political Washington is back to normal—we may put this annual media ritual in some perspective. Or put another way: If you're an admirer of Obama, you will regard this brief…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on Hillary's decline and The Donald's rise.

Ken Thomas and Lisa Lerer at the AP report that 

Cancun

In apparent retaliation for Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush's statements critical of Planned Parenthood, the Democratic party has launched an attack on crisis pregnancy centers. A blog post on Democrats.org said that crisis pregnancy centers "have zero understanding of what women’s…

At a rally in South Carolina Thursday, Donald Trump attacked Republicans for “copying” his phrase, "make America great again."  

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on Donald Trump's supporters and what he learned at a recent Frank Luntz focus group.

Many of my friends think Hiroshima was an unjustifiable atrocity. My usual course in atom-bomb disputes is to refer the belligerent to Donald Kagan’s brilliant 1995 piece in Commentary, “Why America Dropped the Bomb.” The reaction is consistent, and surprising: My friends do not challenge any of…

The Boston Red Sox are nearing the end of a woeful season, running last in their division, thirteen-and-a-half out of first, leaving the taste of wormwood and gall in the mouth of every member of Red Sox nation. 

President Obama spent two days in Ethiopia on his recent four-day trip to Africa. To house the president and his entourage during their stay, the government required four hotels costing over $1.3 million. 

The most frequent words that come to mind when Americans think about Hillary Clinton are "liar" and "dishonest." That's according to a new national poll from Quinnipiac that asked more than 1500 registered voters to say the "first word" that comes to mind when they hear the Democratic presidential…

If you want a good idea of how much water the media is willing to carry for Planned Parenthood, go ahead and check out this Politico story. It seems Planned Parenthood commissioned a "forensic report" to analyze the undercover videos that have got the organization in trouble for harvesting and…

Hillary Clinton compared Republican views on federal funding for abortion and elective contraception to the views of terrorists. Speaking in Cleveland Thursday, Clinton criticized Republicans who want to limit federal funding for abortions as wanting to deny "access to health care."

At the New York Times, Nick Kristof has written a column in favor gun control in the wake of Wednesday's terrible shooting of a local news personality and camera man near Roanoke, Virginia. It's a drearily predictable column in that it reiterates a number of pat talking points about gun control…

As New York suffers through yet another challenging era of ineffective political leadership, it is worthwhile to recall what one leader can accomplish under the most difficult circumstances. 

"One American citizen will effectively choose the next President of the United States" Chris Matthews opines for viewers in the movie Swing Vote. The little-seen movie, which comes with the tagline, "A nobody becomes the voice of everybody," is a story about Kevin Costner being able to decide the…

The latest salvo in a bizarre exchange of international sanctions has been fired. Russia has already taken its boycott of Western foodstuffs to theatrical extremes, bulldozing piles of cheese and destroying apples whose sole fault was their Polish origin. Now the government of Vladimir Putin seems…

Hillary Clinton, according to Bloomberg, 

Marina Koren at Government Executive writes that the Food & Drug Administration recently “sent a warning letter to the makers of Just Mayo, a vegan mayonnaise spread."

Nearly 200 retired generals and admirals have written a letter to Congress urging its members to reject the proposed nuclear deal with Iran. The retired military officials say the consequences of the deal will national security.

On August 18, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker became the first leading Republican presidential candidate to release a full-fledged Obamacare alternative. Walker’s alternative would fully repeal Obamacare and provide the sort of real reform for which Americans have long been waiting. But there has…

Advertisements in Japanese for handbags, backpacks, running shoes, and more began showing up on the website of the U.S. National Archives this week. Hackers managed to compromise a subdomain of the site, eisenhower.archives.gov. Below are screen captures of just two of the unauthorized pages:

The recent excitement about homes and businesses someday soon operating off the grid—courtesy of rapidly improving solar panels and the potential of Elon Musk’s batteries—isn’t exactly a new phenomenon: In the late 1970s and early ‘80s I attended a high school completely off the grid. It was…

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton offered her thoughts on Wednesday's fatal shooting of two TV news station employees in Virginia:

Last weekend’s Defending the American Dream Summit in Columbus played host to five presidential candidates: Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio. This part isn’t a surprise—the two-day event was organized by Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded political advocacy group…

Cancun

We can always count on the New York Times to remind us how complete has been conservatives’ loss in the culture wars. Elisabetta Povoledo reports from Venice that Mayor Luigi Brugnaro had to retreat from his proposed ban on books headed for the magical city’s preschool library about (1) a male dog…

For several years now, PolitiFact has been waging war on anyone who points out that America has the smallest Navy it's had in nearly a century. Mitt Romney pointed out this fact in a presidential debate in 2012 and PolitiFact rated his statement "pants on fire" even though the number of ships in…

Listening to 29 adults talk about Donald Trump for 2 ½ hours probably isn’t anyone’s idea of fun, especially when the talkers are Trump supporters to one degree or another. But it can be illuminating.

Over the weekend, thousands of Lebanese took to the streets to protest against their country’s corrupt political culture. The immediate cause of their concern, and anger, is that the country’s garbage has not been collected for a month and has come to pose, as Lebanon’s health minister warned, a…

President Obama once made promises about changing the “tone” in Washington. But when the spirit moves him, he can get down with the condescending name-calling, though he can’t compete with Trump in that league. (But who could?) 

The Washington Times reports:

PolitiFact, which has really been outdoing itself with its coverage of the Planned Parenthood scandal, has come up with another doozy. Here is the statement PolitiFact chose to evaluate:

The latest undercover Planned Parenthood video is an interview with Cate Dyer, CEO of an organization called StemExpress that buys aborted baby body parts from Planned Parenthood and sells them to researchers. 

Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada said Monday he is working toward filibustering a disapproval vote on President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, Politico reports. Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, a Republican who has been a vocal critic of the deal, released a statement blasting the Nevada…

A half dozen residential buildings have been put up in my Washington, D.C. neighborhood in the last five years, and the one thing they all have in common is that they are shorter than their surrounding buildings—markedly so. Two recently completed developments are a full two stories shorter than…

Over at Slate, there's an article headlined "Washington Man Wearing Anti-Government T-Shirt Thanks Firefighters for Saving His Home." The article is based on a news photo of a man in Washington state who's wearing a T-shirt from the conservative grassroots group FreedomWorks that says "Lower Taxes…

A new poll of "usual" Republican primary voters in New Hampshire gives Donald Trump his biggest lead yet in the Granite State. The Public Policy Polling survey found Trump with 35 percent support, a good 26-point advantage over the next closest GOP candidate, Ohio governor John Kasich at 11…

Bernie Sanders leads Hillary Clinton in a new poll of "usual" New Hampshire Democratic primary voters. According to Public Policy polling, a Democratic firm, Sanders has 42 percent support to Clinton's 35 percent support.

Americans have debated whether the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) gives inspectors sufficient visibility into suspected, undisclosed Iranian activities, and whether, in the event of Iranian breach, sanctions will snapback.  But there’s a bigger problem: the Joint Plan grants Iran and…

Rob Portman of Ohio may have one of the toughest Senate reelection campaigns in the country next year, and the Republican isn't wasting time hitting his likely Democratic opponent, former governor Ted Strickland. The Portman campaign has launched a new set of online ads targeting Strickland's…

The American Action Forum (AAF) is out with a new report about the Obama administration's unsuccessful efforts to reduce regulations. The findings are jaw-dropping.

Donald Trump's presence in the Republican primary for president has not significantly damaged the other GOP presidential candidates with respect to Hispanic Americans. That's according to a new poll from Gallup that finds the New York businessman with a highly negative net favorability among…

What’s the matter with Jeb Bush? The establishment favorite and frontrunner in the fundraising primary can’t seem to catch a break. Bush’s performance in the August 6 debate in Cleveland was judged as mediocre at best. He’s dropped to number two in New Hampshire and is tied for sixth place in Iowa.…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the 2016 race, the TWS cruise straw poll, and whether a positive message from Republicans can defeat Donald's dour outlook.

The plunge in U.S. stock markets, along with various bourses around the world, is a result of fears that whatever is happening in China is a portent of worse things to come, and that what happens in China is contagious. Whether that is true is difficult to discern, however: We don’t have any…

The White House said today that President Obama's best decision was picking Joe Biden to be his vice president. It was not, the White House confirmed, picking Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state.

It is with great pleasure that we invite you to the Convocation heralding the opening of the American Museum of Tort Law on Saturday, September 26, 2015, in Winsted, Connecticut. It will be held at the nearby auditorium of The Gilbert School, 200 Williams Avenue, Winsted, Connecticut, from 1:30 to…

The first Conference of States Parties (CSP) to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) opens today in Cancun. Evidently, treaty signatories believe a seaside resort is a suitable location to discuss the international arms trade. Perhaps they’re right. This treaty is so ridiculous, so silly—in a word, so…

The new documentary Best of Enemies commits a mortal sin fatal to the integrity of its interesting subject matter: It treats William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal as intellectual equals, and therewith perfect synecdoches of conservatism and liberalism. But at the cost of too high a compliment to…

New Jersey governor Chris Christie says America needs a "strong law enforcer as president" in a new 30-second TV ad. In the spot, Christie, a Republican, lists off examples of "lawlessness in America and around the world under Barack Obama," including the terror of ISIS, sanctuary cities for…

Since news broke of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, Mrs. Clinton and her campaign have sought to downplay the significance of using non-government equipment to conduct electronic correspondence as the nation's top diplomat. During her first press…

In 1967, Milan Kundera was the most famous writer in Czechoslovakia. His novel The Joke, probably his best, had run through a printing of 150,000 copies—in a nation of 15 million. Among the century’s masterworks, The Joke exposed the incessant absurdity and routine vindictiveness inherent in a…

All writers begin as readers, and the majority, the ones worth reading, continue life as more prolific readers than writers—especially, it seems, as they age. “In my seventh decade I feel a new haste,” Larry McMurtry wrote in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (1999), “not to write, but to read.”…

Right now, in New York, the big news is the Broadway opening of a musical biography of Alexander Hamilton told in hip-hop. Such a deliberately anachronistic retelling of American history is automatic grounds for deep skepticism. And yet the chorus of raves for Hamilton—which extend from Barack…

A little over 30 years ago, three generations of the McMartin family, who had run a nursery school in Los Angeles for decades, were arrested, jailed, and put on trial, charged with hundreds of sensational counts of child sexual abuse. Six years later, when no convictions had been obtained, all…

It’s a rare constitutional law case that has something for everyone to loathe. But 10 years ago, the Supreme Court sparked a singular moment of bipartisanship when it held, in Kelo v. City of New London, that states can take property from one owner and give it to another to re-develop for a higher,…

Wikipedia defines “startup accelerators” as “fixed-term, cohort-based programs that include mentorship and educational components and culminate” in a “demo day” on which hopeful entrepreneurs make pitches to prospective funders. On August 4, President Obama hosted his own demo day, recasting it to…

“Because this is such a strong deal, every nation in the world that has commented publicly, with the exception of the Israeli government, has expressed support. The United Nations Security Council has unanimously supported it. The majority of arms control and nonproliferation experts support it.…

The opening Republican presidential debate was a spirited affair, but missing was any serious discussion of Obamacare, the domestic centerpiece of Barack Obama’s presidency. The moderators asked only two Obamacare-related questions. One elicited Donald Trump’s assertion that a government monopoly…

Ask which domesticated animal is most like humans, and the answer comes quickly: “Dogs!” Like us, dogs live in hierarchical packs, thrive on affection, and are smarter than the average cow, sheep, or goat. Yet all this is also true of the pig. 

Nearly everyone recognizes that student debt has risen to a level that will be difficult to sustain, given the nation’s slow-growing economy and the sagging incomes of too many college-­educated Americans. Nearly 40 million Americans carry some form of student debt; more than 7 million are in…

The late great comedian Milton Berle, when introduced to an enthusiastically applauding audience, would hold up his left hand in a modest gesture as if to say thank you but that’s enough, and with his right hand held at waist level encouraged the audience to even wilder applause. President Obama…

Charlottesville, Va.

A recent headline in the New York Times announced: “Metropolitan Opera Says Its ‘Otello’ Tenor Will Not Wear Blackface.” Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, made clear that the decision not to use any dark makeup on its white tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko in the Met’s new production of Verdi’s…

On the first page of this enjoyable double biography, Daisy Hay quotes the Mister-half of her titular couple as having said, “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” 

Among classic American murder cases, the 1922 shooting death of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor is one of the most intriguing. Although Lizzie Borden’s axe murders, the assassinations of Kennedy and Lincoln, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the O. J. Simpson trial continue to inspire…

The psychic wore a long, red skirt. It swirled when she walked, as if mystically stirred. She plopped down across the table from me, checked her iPhone, and lit a cigarette. After a long drag, she coughed. “I’m Jessica,” she said, pronouncing the name in a thick New Jersey husk. 

If this was meant to be entertainment, all 10 Flying Wallendas refused to walk the high wire, none of the clowns got out of the tiny car, and the elephants just stood around relieving themselves.

Hillary Clinton is a scandalous candidate for president of the United States. Most people acknowledge this, at least judging by her plummeting poll numbers. A raft of stories gives the distinct impression that she and her husband have been running an elaborate pay-to-play operation. Donations to…

The idea of writing a book about a presidential campaign that never happened had not occurred to Don Cogman. He had spent two years trying to get Mitch Daniels, then governor of Indiana, to run for president in 2012. His effort—and it was no small effort—had failed. Daniels had moved on, right out…

The Scrapbook can’t pretend to have had a misspent youth. But we did occasionally wallow in the spectacle of pro wrestling. And it’s pretty obviously the case, as a handful of astute observers have pointed out, that Donald Trump is a close student of, and has been deeply influenced by, the dramatic…

The latest star of the online “Conversations with Bill Kristol” (a growing series of over 30 talks, at conversationswithbillkristol.org) is Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute already famous for her Factual Feminist videos. Almost overnight, her interview became a…

Needless to say, The Scrapbook is strictly neutral on the results of last week’s Republican presidential debate on Fox News. So neutral, in fact, that we won’t even mention any of the highlights—or lowlights, if you prefer—and certainly won’t weigh in on who swept the floor with whom, who…

Bakari Sellers, a former member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and a key supporter in that early state, scolded Hillary Clinton for her comments about her email server. 

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley wants his party to lean forward. In an interview this morning with ABC News, O'Malley said that Democrats "have to look to the future." And he wants his party to have more debates.

In an interview this morning with CNN, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson indicated that he might be open to being Donald Trump's vice presidential pick. 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the August 17, 2015 issue.

Next year will be the most consequential presidential election in two generations. Given how difficult it is to hold the White House for three straight terms, and given President Obama's shaky approval numbers, Republicans will have a good chance to win. On the other hand, Democrats had a good…

There are times when excessive attention to monthly data reporting what’s up, what’s down, can be allowed to obscure underlying structural changes in an economy. With the game of what-will-Yellen-do-next in full flow, this is one of those times. No, the proverbial tectonic plates are not shifting,…

ABC News reports that the United States suspended and then resumed joint military exercises with South Korea this week after North Korea fired artillery shells across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Assistant Secretary of Defense David Shear gave reporters the news Friday, August 21, at a Pentagon…

A growing majority of Americans say Congress should reject the nuclear deal with Iran brokered by the Obama administration, according to a new CNN poll. Here's more from CNN:

The Yankees’s C.C. Sabathia is not having a stellar season.  With a 4-9 record and a 5.24 ERA he could be forgiven for feeling a sense of frustration. Even one serious enough to get him into a near brawl with fans in, of all places, Toronto. 

MSNBC reports that a "federal judge is calling Hillary Clinton's use of a private server a 'violation of government guidelines.'"

The website for What So Proudly We Hail has compiled several tributes to Amy Kass, who died Wednesday. Joining those from Bill Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb are thoughts from Robert P. George and William Schambra.

The 1998 best selling book, The 48 Laws of Power, is a Machiavellian Bible of sorts. Donald Trump, author of his own many books telling people how he thinks they can get ahead, is also a student of Machiavelli. 

The Washington Nationals’s winning streak ended Thursday night in Colorado. After two games. But when recent performance includes a six game losing streak that helped the team fall from first place, by 4 and a half games in their division, to trailing the Mets by four, then you take what you can…

Concerns over immigration from our neighbors to the south have loomed large this primary season, with the GOP candidates in agreement regarding the dangerous exports of one country in particular: Mexico. However, before we erect more walls between us and our third largest trading partner, it…

The Obama administration spent the last two years telling lawmakers and reporters that any deal with Iran would require the Iranians to provide International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors robust access to the Parchin military base, where the Iranians conducted hydrodynamic experiments relevant to…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol, live from the TWS Alaska Cruise on the 2016 race, Hillary's fall, and Donald Trump's chances.

As Mario Trujillo at The Hill writes,

Amy Kass’s family and friends, students and colleagues, will testify to her many virtues—her love and devotion to husband, children, and grandchildren (so amply reciprocated by them in these last painful months), her keen intellect and sensibility, her faith in Judaism as a heritage and ethic, her…

We are very sorry to have to inform our readers of the death last night of our friend, our teacher (in class and out), and above all a woman whom we thoroughly and unreservedly admired, Amy Kass. Amy's character and her work will be the subject of many well-deserved tributes in the days and weeks…

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich told a voter in New Hampshire Wednesday that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in the United States is the "law of the land."

Even if they disagree with his politics, Jeremy Corbyn’s parliamentary colleagues, such as Douglas Carswell from the UK Independence Party (UKIP), acknowledge that he is a nice, down-to-earth fellow; certainly not one of his party’s grandees. Unpretentious, rarely seen wearing a suit and a tie,…

Most church groups and prominent religious voices speaking to the Iran nuclear deal are supportive. Most notable among them is the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. 

As Megan R. Wilson of The Hill writes

The good news is that Australia is close to acknowledging the obvious: Digital currency should be treated as currency. The bad news is that this same thing hasn’t happened in the United States. Bitcoins can now be used to buy almost anything from coffee to surgery, but the government still doesn’t…

Liberals and progressives go to great lengths to keep church and state separate. Just try to have religious schools share in a voucher or other government program that provides relief to students trapped by the teachers’ unions into failing schools. No can do. It violates the separation of church…

Kaveh Waddell of National Journal reports that 

A former Goldman Sachs executive just got named to an important job in the Federal Reserve system and if you think that’s a problem then you just may be an anti-Semite. Or maybe it’s that you don’t appreciate diversity.

The Republican National Committee is selling a special, "Hillary-Clinton"-branded wipe cloth.

Former Obama hand Dan Pfeiffer does some player evaluations on the political scene and comes up with this regarding Hillary Clinton:

The Associated Press reports that under the provisions of the deal, the Iranian government will be allowed to use its own inspectors on one site thought to have been used to develop nuclear weapons. Here's more from the AP:

Sherlock Holmes is one of the few literary inventions still captivating audiences well after its creator settled into dust. Growing apace with the tastes of his audience—seamlessly transitioning from print, to stage, to screen—Holmes has, as Zach Dundas, Executive Editor at Portland Monthly, so…

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is nothing if not a campaign veteran. He’s run and won three statewide races since 2010, including the highly contentious recall election in 2012. In fact, since an unsuccessful bid for the state assembly in 1990 when he was just 22, Walker hasn’t lost an election.…

Proof positive that it’s the latter half of August—when just about everyone is on vacation, or ought to be—arrived this week with the news that the latest social media sensation in Great Britain is a clandestine video of Prime Minister David Cameron.

The blogger Angry Staff Officer writes at taskandpurpose.com that

How might the United States end up in a boots-on-the-ground shooting war with Iran? 

Hillary Clinton may be looking to tweak her opposition, or perhaps just to turn the page on her infamous 1992 campaign comment, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas" with the latest item for sale in her campaign store. A cookie cutter in the shape of Mrs. Clinton's…

Hillary Clinton refused to tell the press whether she wiped her private email server. Instead, Clinton played dumb and asked whether the reporter was wondering whether she wiped her server "with a cloth."

Jeffrey Anderson, writing at the Federalist, calls Scott Walker's Obamacare replacement proposal a "winning conservative alternative." Here an excerpt:

Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey and one of the leading voices for tougher sanctions on the Iranian regime, delivered an address Tuesday at Seton Hall University in which he declared he would oppose the nuclear deal with Iran.

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley is still trying to expand the shrunken Democratic debate schedule. Today his campaign is collecting debate questions to be asked of all candidates.

Hillary Clinton said the lack of medical insurance coverage for gender-reassignment surgery is an issue that's "going to have to be dealt with." At a townhall campaign event in Nevada Tuesday, a woman who said she was the mother of a transgendered person asked the Democratic candidate about…

As Jeffrey Anderson noted in this week's issue of the magazine, the issue of Obamacare featured less conspicuously that one might have expected in the first Republican presidential debate. More broadly, the issue has been less central to the GOP primary campaign than one might have anticipated,…

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell addressed the topic of higher education at a Shelby County Chamber of Commerce membership luncheon. Joe Arnold, political editor for WHAS-TV, tweeted some quotes from McConnell during the event. 

Chuck Grassley, the dean of the Iowa congressional delegation, recently sent out a fundraising letter/poll to Iowa voters. (He's running for his seventh six-year term in the Senate in 2016.)

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on the 2016 race and why the front-runners are fading.

Peter Sullivan of The Hill reports that

Hillary Clinton, who is routinely criticized for her lack of public availability, granted a private meeting on August 11 to activists from the group #BlackLivesMatter -- a movement across the country well-known for its controversial methods of generating publicity.

Unlike Scandinavia, where the police procedural form has been wedded to socio-political activism and pessimism since at least the 1960s, and unlike the United States, where different variations of the native hardboiled school continues to sell, the traditional mystery story is still alive and well…

Predicting the collapse of North Korea is a bit like predicting the collapse of Donald Trump’s lead in the polls: it never seems to happen. Yet, on several occasions in recent days, South Korean president Park Geun-hye has intimated that North Korea’s horrific regime may be more unstable than we…

Last week, THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported on a $412,000 contract for 1,280 sleeping room nights at the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. However, at least two other hotels were booked for the visit, and a fourth hotel was also used, although no contract has yet been posted. The new…

Former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels was on Conversations With Bill Kristol recently, and the clips aired this weekend.

Donald Trump’s campaign web page is telling. There is a biography of the candidate, an extensive news page where his clippings are available, a store where one can buy plenty of Trump-branded merchandise, and only one issue brief, on immigration. If this is not the best illustration of his…

Mark Hensch of The Hill writes that

The statement of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the 70th anniversary of the conclusion of the Second World War was the focus of profound anticipation throughout Asia. The prime minister was in an extremely delicate position, seeking to balance the need to express contrition to Imperial…

Hillary and Bill Clinton were recently vacationing at Martha's Vineyard, the tony island getaway off the coast of Massachusetts. The former first couple attended a birthday party for former aide Vernon Jordan, and a member of the band playing at the party shot video of the Clintons dancing. Watch…

If he were a race horse, then up-to-now the smart play would have been to bet him to show. On six occasions, Jason Day had finished among the top five in the big golf tournaments known as the "majors." But never first. He seemed to lack that urge to run out ahead of the pack, where the view is…

The websites of several federal government agencies, including the National Weather Service (NWS), are unprotected from scammers looking to exploit a security weakness to fool potential victims. The sites in question allow what are known as "unvalidated redirects." An unvalidated redirect is a link…

Proponents of the Iran nuclear agreement say assisting Iran out of its economic isolation could help prop up more moderate elements within the Islamic Republic. By any standard, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC, fails the moderation test: it is Tehran’s ideological vanguard,…

It had been a long time since I’d been to a big league ballgame and I was looking forward to this one. My brother had bought the tickets, and going by the stadium schematic, it looked like we had good seats. Grandstand on the third base line, not too far up. We had lucked out on the schedule, too.…

Perhaps no other Jane Austen novel lends itself so well to modern interpretation as Emma. Considered by many to be Austen’s magnum opus, Emma features a heroine who, though “handsome, clever, and rich,” is judgmental, arrogant, presumptuous, and, at times, callous. She is deeply flawed, and her…

The New York Times may still be known as the “paper of ­record,” but the paper’s unresponsiveness in correcting the record is not something that is going to burnish its reputation. On July 20, the Times published a story about the first of a ­recent spate of undercover videos showing ­affiliates of…

Maybe “Culture Belongs to Everyone,” as they say at New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park shows, but the works of Atlantic essayist and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates appear to exist in another realm altogether. In the weeks since the publication of Between the World and Me, Coates’s letter to his…

One can’t do justice in a short space to the late Robert ­Conquest’s gifts as a poet. But The Scrapbook can offer Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz’s assessment, which was no exaggeration: 

From my living-room windows, I can see two of the three coffee shops within a block of our apartment. Within less than a mile, there are five other coffee shops. In America the coffee shop has for the most part replaced the neighborhood bar, the country club, it used to be said, of the working man.…

Seoul

Like Lazarus, or maybe Frankenstein’s monster, the appalling plan for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., appears to be sputtering to life once more. Only two months ago it seemed safely kaput. 

Sendhil Mullainathan is a brave economist. I say that because the Harvard professor and recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant admitted in a recent New York Times piece that until recently he had no recollection how he had invested his retirement funds, and that when he finally got around to…

The dynasty project is not faring well. Two relatives of three of our most recent presidents have faced early woes in their succession plans, despite layers of aides, networks of backers going back generations, and extravagant levels of cash. On June 11, a front-page story in the Washington Post…

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has long lived as a literary recluse, famously dodging publicity associated with her classic work. After Mockingbird’s publication, she never wrote another novel. The author’s decades of silence (she famously turned her back if anyone mentioned her work…

War, President Obama says, is the only alternative to his deal with Iran. But if the president’s overriding goal is to avoid bloody conflict, why is he arming the Middle East for a shootout that may lead to Armageddon?

"Russia is a friendly, European country,” said President Vladimir Putin in a 2001 address to the Bundestag in Berlin. Putin told German lawmakers he applauded European integration, believed in the unity of European culture, and was convinced that no one had benefited from Europe’s divisions in the…

Manchester, N.H.

It’s more than a quarter-century since the Berlin Wall came down. We now take it for granted that it happened, assume it was inevitable that it would happen, and forget that some people helped bring about victory in the Cold War while others sought to impede their efforts.

Mission: Impossible–Rogue Nation makes no sense. Even more striking, this fifth installment in the Tom Cruise movie series based on the 1960s television show doesn’t even try to make sense. 

One of the more puzzling manifestations of the conflict ­between radical Islam and the West is the presence of Islamist communities in places like Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France: They are unwelcome in their Muslim homelands—indeed, they are in exile from them​—​and yet they harbor an…

Those who venture upon the heights of Mount Proust are well aware that his fame in the English-speaking world owes much to a Scots translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Proust’s masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, certainly among the half-dozen literary classics of the 20th century, with its…

The beautiful planes that flew over the National Mall on the seventieth anniversary of V-E Day are rare not because few survived the war but because few survived the war’s aftermath. 

"As the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act’s signing approaches Thursday, Marione Ingram says we’re backtracking as a country. ‘They’re disenfranchising the poor, the elderly, blacks, Latinos, students,’ she says of voter identification laws and the Supreme Court’s continued refusal to hear…

Over the years, “agency capture” has been a staple of the economic analysis of regulation—the phenomenon whereby regulatory agencies would come to be largely controlled by the industries they purported to regulate, or at the very least would protect those industries as a cartel in a tradeoff for…

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Beijing in May 2012 for a top-level conference with Chinese officials on strategic and economic issues, she got much more than she bargained for. A handicapped Chinese human rights activist, Chen Guangcheng, had managed to obtain provisional asylum…

Many years ago, I struck up a conversation with a Dutch businessman in a hotel in China. In the course of our discussion, I learned that he had been born in Asia, in the Dutch East Indies, today known as Indonesia. I quickly calculated that he was old enough to have been alive during World War II,…

Robert Conquest could easily have missed being . . . well, Robert Conquest, the most morally significant historian of the second half of the twentieth century. Now that he’s slipped away—dying in California on August 3 at age 98—it’s possible to see that he might well have failed to find his way.

Joe Biden was a liberal hero, fighting for birth control, when Maureen Dowd came for him. It was September 1987, and Robert Bork was before the Delaware senator’s Judiciary Committee. Biden was arguing that married couples have a right to privacy; Bork, in Biden’s retelling of the Supreme Court…

The extremely fertile period of European intellectual history that runs from about 1749 (Rousseau becomes famous) to 1889 (Nietzsche goes mad just as he’s becoming famous) spawned nearly every idea that has bewitched and bedeviled us since. It also spawned a new social class entirely devoted to…

Before the fake news of the Onion, before fake TV newscasters such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, there was Orson Welles and his 1938 dramatization of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. No radio program has ever been examined as thoroughly, in books, film, and television. Coverage leans…

Just about six weeks ago, I had the honor of participating in a tribute at Ashland University for Peter Schramm, who had been diagnosed with a terminal disease. It was a very moving event, and Peter summoned all his energies to give truly wonderful and memorable remarks (which you can and should…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the August 10, 2015 issue.

Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican, released a statement Sunday praising the immigration proposal from presidential candidate Donald Trump. ""This is exactly the plan America needs," said Sessions. "Not only would the plan outlined in this paper work, but more quickly than many realize.…

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has doubled his support in the Democratic presidential primary since June while frontrunner Hillary Clinton has seen her support among primary voters nationally drop by more than 20 points in that same time. That's according to a new poll from Fox News that shows…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Will Brewbaker reading his casual essay "Talk to the Hand."

Jeb Bush delivered a thoughtful and clear-eyed speech on Tuesday about the threat posed by ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism. It was a forward-looking speech that offered a compelling strategy to deal with this growing threat (something we haven’t heard from Hillary Clinton).

Google wants a management structure more like Berkshire Hathaway’s. Berkshire Hathaway wants growth more like Google’s. Monsanto and Terex want to be more like Apple and other companies that minimize their tax burdens. And China wants to be more like the U.S., or at least its central bank wants to…

President Obama claims, as Bill Kristol noted in his editorial in the latest issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, that no country in the world has expressed opposition to his deal with Iran, with the exception of Israel. But that's not accurate. Canada, the United States' biggest trading partner—and,…

A new Gallup poll shows that 55% of Americans disapprove of President Obama’s handling of Iran compared to 33% who approve. This seems to support other recent polls that show the public doesn’t like the administration’s Iran policy. A Quinnipiac poll shows that voters disapprove of the Iran nuclear…

According to CNN:

A new ad from Veterans Against the Deal features the father of U.S. Army specialist Clay Farr, who was killed by an Iranian bomb in Iraq in 2006. In the 60-second spot, Patrick Farr describes the day he learned of his son's death and expresses his opposition to a deal that will reward the regime…

President Obama visited Kenya and Ethiopia during his recent trip to Africa, and the hotel bill for the president and his entourage totaled approximately $412,390.86 for the Ethiopia stay alone. A contract with the Hilton in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa was posted online recently:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on whether or not the Obama White House will throw Clinton under the bus.

How much do Americans love football?  Enough that more of them will tune in to a meaningless exhibition game in August than viewed the Stanley Cup finals.  As the Chicago Sun Times  reports, last week's

Roll Call's Simone Pathé reported on Thursday that, "[a] new campaign finance reform political action committee expects to be among the top five outside groups to assist campaigns this cycle."

Well, one minor mystery of the American presidency was clarified this week.

With South Carolina removing the Confederate flag from its capitol grounds, state and local Democratic parties seem to have developed an urge to purge. Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports on an effort to get rid of the party’s founders:

Santiago, Chile

Joe Biden has been consulting with a prominent Democratic operative in South Carolina about a possible run for the White House, the New York Times reports:

On MSNBC's Morning Joe program this morning, Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O'Malley told Mika Brzezinski he'd like to see the number of Democratic debates tripled before votes are cast in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

It’s either the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, says President Obama, or it’s another Middle East war. Opponents of the Iran nuclear agreement argue that this is simply a scare tactic the White House is using to get Congress to sign off on a lousy deal. 

Maryland's Republican governor Larry Hogan is angering immigration activists with his decision to comply with a federal immigration enforcement directive. The Washington Post reports that Hogan actually made the decision "with no fanfare" in January that Maryland will notify federal immigration…

The pro-Hillary Clinton opposition research super PAC Correct the Record has a new post criticizing Carly Fiorina's record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. The blog post notes Fiorina, a Republican candidate for president, was named "one of America's worst CEOs" and that HP fired or laid off 30,000…

My three-year-old daughter and I typically wrap up our evenings with a pre-bedtime stroll around our northwest Washington, D.C., neighborhood. The nightly ritual ends back at home when I pry the fistful of coins she invariably finds on our walk out of her hands.

There's a saying in politics, "when you're explaining, you're losing." It's applied a few ways, but it generally means that in situations in which politicians have to explain away a scandal or gaffe, as they're explaining, their supporters become somewhat dismayed or begin to question the…

You might think that you want to talk about the Greatest Debate Ever, but we're going to set that aside and let it breathe for a week. It was glorious, but there are more things in heaven and earth Donald Trump. For instance: Remember Ebola?

It was late last year when former Florida governor Jeb Bush mused that he might have to “lose the primary to win the general [election]” in 2016. Bush’s oddly phrased point was that rather than try to appeal to the most conservative voters in the GOP base, he’d instead hew to the center. That would…

Vice President Joe Biden is hearing from friends and political allies that he should get in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. The Wall Street Journal reports:

That, supposedly, is the first question asked in Pentagon and White House briefings during time of crisis. Now, as Kristina Wong of The Hill writes,

I live out in Real Virginia, which is to say the part of Virginia that is technically a D.C. exurb, but is populated almost entirely by normal people. My neighbors are teachers and plumbers and soldiers and engineers. Plenty of the folks out here work for the federal government, but none of them…

Dispatches from the front tell of Bernie Sanders surging into the lead in the New Hampshire polls. From the time he began what was then viewed as a quixotic campaign for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, Sanders’s chances have been laughed off and his successes explained away. He is,…

The New York Post reports that Senator Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has expanded on his rationale for opposing the White House's Iran Deal:

Last week, political pundits began likening Donald Trump, running for the Republican presidential nomination, to an earlier and for many, a beloved president. Trump also has been comparing himself—frequently and favorably—with Ronald Reagan.

Carly Fiorina says she disagrees with her Republican rival for president Donald Trump on the issue of Planned Parenthood. Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday that "we have to look at the positive also for Planned Parenthood" and said abortions were just a "small part" of what the…

While cyber security incidents and computer system breaches such as the recent Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack grab the headlines, a recent government reports shows that more mundane non-cyber incidents have skyrocketed as well. A graphic in a recent Government Accountability Office…

The Center for Medical Progress has released another video highlighting the questionable and possibly illegal conduct of Planned Parenthood. This time, Holly O’Donnell, a former procurement technician for medical research firm StemExpress, reports that Planned Parenthood would take fetal organs…

The federal agency that oversees individuals on probation, parole or supervised release in Washington, D.C., is looking to expand options for "counseling and behavioral interventions" for offenders under its charge. The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency for the District of Columbia…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on why Bernie Sanders, not Donald Trump, is more important in the 2016 cycle.

Iraq veteran Robert Bartlett appeared with Megyn Kelly of Fox News last night to discuss his opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran. Bartlett was severely wounded in 2005 in Iraq by an Iranian bomb, which also killed or injured several of his friends. Watch the interview below:

Tuesday morning on CNN, Donald Trump expressed interest in keeping most taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Later that evening, he defended the organization again in during an appearance on Sean Hannity's show by repeating the deeply dishonest talking point that abortion is a "small part" of…

The boss of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy is upset about the fouling of the Animas River in Colorado last week and says, as Tomothy Cama of The Hill reports, that  

Los Angeles County, like nearly all of California, is suffering from a drought. California is also a state known for its edgy environmental regulations, as it bans the commercial use of California-made WD-40, for instance. Los Angeles County follows in this tradition, in that it adopted an…

A new poll shows Vermont senator Bernie Sanders leading Hillary Clinton by seven points in the New Hampshire Democratic primary: 

The Detroit Free Press is reporting:

SB Nation reports that New York Jets quarterback 

In Ohio, the State Judicial Conduct Board has ruled that judges can't decline to marry only same-sex couples because of their personal religious beliefs. But the Judicial Conduct Board's ruling went much further than that:

These days, it's hard to feel sorry for the EPA, but a public hearing that aired on CSPAN Tuesday morning may spur some sympathy.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen Hayes on Donald Trump and whether the rules of political physics apply to him.

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is considering a run for president, according to Politico:

Donald Trump is down nine points among Republican primary voters nationally, according to a post-debate poll from Rasmussen Reports. The real estate magnate and reality TV star still leads the crowded primary field, but with 17 percent support Trump is down nine points from Rasmussen's pre-debate…

A new poll of likely GOP caucusgoers in Iowa finds that Marco Rubio and Ben Carson made the most positive impression in the first Republican debate.

A new poll of New Hampshire GOP primary voters conducted after the first presidential debate shows Donald Trump stumbling, and John Kasich and Carly Fiorina getting significant bumps in support. The poll from Franklin Pierce University and the Boston Herald finds Trump with 18 percent, which is…

In the days before the Fox News debate last week, Donald Trump said he wasn’t looking to attack any of his Republican rivals unless he was attacked. That’s changed, apparently.

On CNN this morning, Donald Trump suggested that he's open to allowing Planned Parenthood to keep more than $500 million in taxpayer funding it receives every year. CNN's Chris Cuomo repeated the dishonest Planned Parenthood talking point that only 3 percent of its "services" are abortions and that…

As our friend Mollie Hemingway explains in The Federalist, Marco Rubio mopped the floor with Chris Cuomo on CNN Friday morning, finally establishing that a very young human embryo, while not self-sustaining or visibly human, is in fact human life: It is not dead, so it has to be living, and it’s…

About five hours south of San Francisco, where Kate Steinle was murdered in broad daylight by an illegal immigrant, another illegal immigrant has been charged with raping and savagely beating an Air Force veteran to death with a hammer.  According to police, Marilyn Pharis, 64, was sleeping in her…

When is a North Korean agent not a North Korean agent? Apparently when he’s ‘Cambodian.’

President Obama has decided to double down on his claim that Iranian hardliners “are making common cause with the Republican caucus.” In an interview with Fareed Zakaria that aired on Sunday, Obama insisted, “What I said is absolutely true factually. The truth of the matter is, inside of Iran, the…

Frank Gifford was the glamor face of professional football before the world learned that there was something glamorous about the sport.  Before it became a national obsession. Before there were Monday night games and Super Bowls. Back when star players had off-season jobs because playing in the…

A new ad from the group Veterans Against the Deal features retired Army staff sergeant Robert Bartlett, who in 2005 was badly injured while serving in Iraq. The supplier of the bomb that "cut me in half, from the left corner of my temple to through my jaw" was the regime in Iran. In the ad,…

Donald Trump says he wants to talk about issues.

Although Planned Parenthood's most recent controversy revolves around "fetal tissue" trafficking, the organization is no stranger to eyebrow-raising activities. A recent solicitation for participants for Planned Parenthood's Sexual Health Evaluation (SHE) study promised at least $70 with a chance…

Hillary Clinton still leads the Democratic field in Iowa, but according to a new Public Policy Polling survey of "usual Democratic voters" in the Hawkeye state independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is making gains there.

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley said that it was "outrageous" the Democratic National Committee is limiting the number of primary debates. O'Malley also called it "undemocratic."

Washington, D.C.,'s Rock Creek Park Tennis Center—site of the week-long Citi Open tournament that wrapped up Sunday—is more formally known as the William H.G. Fitzgerald Center after its major benefactor, a living monument to success and generosity. Fitzgerald, who died nine years ago at 96, was a…

On Monday, Hillary Clinton is unveiling her solution to college debt. The solution is nothing new — it makes taxpayers pick up the bill.

“We have already cut defense … about 30 percent over the last 10 years, and we’re still at war. We’re actively involved on multiple continents in real combat operations. We should not be drastically reducing our troop levels.” That, as Bradford Richardson of The Hill reports, is the position taken…

Republicans have been slow in recognizing the real damage Donald Trump is doing to their party.  The harm is not to the party’s image.  What Trump has done is exacerbate the increasingly bitter rift between the party’s leaders and its grass roots.  He’s made the GOP’s future dicey.

Jim Webb, the Democratic presidential candidate, has come out against President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. He made the case in a TV interview this weekend:

When the president of the United States travels, the White House and the Secret Service bring along a tremendous amount of communications equipment. Not only does the Secret Service set up a command post to coordinate communications for the visits, but secure connections are also needed for the…

In the wake of the undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood’s involvement in the trafficking of aborted baby tissue and body parts, the U.S. Senate has scheduled a vote to defund Planned Parenthood. It’s a fine first step by Congress in response to the horror revealed by the Center for Medical…

I was in my office, happily encircled by little piles of paper, drafting an article, when real life interrupted. 

Daša Drndić, a Croatian, has gained respect in her country as a novelist, literary critic, and playwright. After teaching in Canada and completing a master’s degree in communications in the United States, thanks to a Fulbright grant, she now teaches philosophy at the University of Rijeka. 

In May, President Barack Obama donned a yarmulke and spoke in a Washington, D.C., synagogue. He reminded his audience that Jeffrey Goldberg, a member of the congregation, once called him the “first Jewish president.” He claimed to be flattered by the characterization. And perhaps he was—most Jews,…

Chaka Fattah (né Arthur Davenport), the Democratic congressman who represents part of Philadelphia and its environs, has never been challenged in a primary election. Since he joined the House in 1995, he has never garnered less than 86 percent of the vote in his impregnable district.

President Obama is putting on the hard sell to market the nuclear deal he reached with Iran. On July 14, in announcing the agreement, he said: “This deal shows the real and meaningful change that American leadership and diplomacy can bring—change that makes our country and the world safer and more…

The country has been roiled in recent weeks by videos showing two Planned Parenthood executives chirpily telling pro-life undercover investigators that fetal organs could be had for a price. The executives—both themselves abortionists—explained that their techniques could be adapted to “crush”…

Juan Reinaldo Sánchez was drafted into the Cuban Army in 1967 and assigned to the Department of Personal Security, the branch dedicated to protecting Fidel Castro. Starting at the lowest rung, where he was assigned to the blocks where Cuba’s top revolutionary leaders worked, Sánchez quickly rose…

To paraphrase Lincoln, if we could first know where Iran is and whither Iran is tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. To evaluate the Iran deal, we need, to the degree possible, to understand the Iranian regime, its nature and its history, its past and present behavior. 

Keene, N.H.

Leonard L. Richards, professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), has given us a compelling and multi-faceted account of how the antislavery movement achieved its definitive triumph in the form of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. 

Vladimir Horowitz and Maria Callas, Ella Fitzgerald and Laurence Olivier, Sarah Bernhardt and Luciano Pavarotti—these transcendent performers communicated a point of view, an inexpressible feel for life. And they did so despite their spells of stage fright.

Ted Cruz, who in 1996 clerked for then-chief justice William Rehnquist and is now a first-term senator and GOP presidential candidate, has assumed the leadership of conservatives aiming to rein in a Supreme Court they fault for imposing on the country rights not found in the Constitution. This is…

John Kerry is bullish on the Middle East. He believes that the Iran deal will make it possible for the White House and Tehran to tamp down wars in places like Syria and Yemen. And—who knows?—maybe even solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Hillary Clinton is a reflection. Whatever the left wing of the Democratic party embraces, she reflects. Not in toto, however. That would locate her too far to the left and jeopardize her quest for the presidency. She’s a partial reflection.

Some years ago, while visiting T. S. Eliot’s native St. Louis, I took in a lecture on Eliot’s poem “Marina,” delivered by the Scottish poet and critic Robert Crawford. Most people will grant that T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) is a difficult poet, but after 20 years of reading him, I find that “Marina” is…

Traveling recently in what might be called “new frontline” states—Estonia, Ukraine, and Moldova—I was struck by the depth of concern I encountered about Russian propaganda. And not just propaganda aimed at the Russian population and neighboring countries. At a conference in Tallinn, a Politico…

Fresh off the triumph of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, there was more big space news this week. And it may turn out to be much bigger than our first look at Pluto—a veritable revolution in physics and space travel.

A reader writes to ask about the photo we’ve been using in our subscription ads (see the back cover of this week’s edition, or last week’s, for that matter). Is it real, he wonders, or Photoshopped to show the three men together? “If it is an actual photo, it certainly is very interesting: three…

It’s too soon to tell whether the world will be able to recover from its grief, but we suppose civilization must go on, if for no other reason than to preserve the memory of the deceased. We speak, of course, of the tragic killing of Cecil the Lion—the beloved symbol of Zimbabwe’s wildlife. To be…

No one quite knows what the first Republican debate will look like, who exactly will be onstage, or what it means that Donald Trump will be there, too. This, it seems, is the Republican National Committee’s solution to the debacle of the 2012 debates. The problems are memorable: too many primary…

In the uplifting, if somewhat confusing, film Tomorrowland, George Clooney plays a brilliant scientist who suffers from a broken heart. Long ago and far way, he fell in love with a girl named Athena when they were children. Athena was smart and spunky and seemed genuinely to like George Clooney as…

Just after midnight on August 2, 1990, an invasion force of approximately 100,000 Iraqi troops crossed into Kuwait. As mechanized and armored Republican Guard divisions breached the border and sped southward across the desert, Iraqi Special Forces commandos launched airborne and amphibious assaults…

I would like to address myself to the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refugees teeming to America’s shore, the homeless, the economically, socially, and mentally tempest-tossed. Also, I’d like to address the young, the hip, the progressive, the compassionate, and the caring. I’d like a word…

Donald Trump is not going to be the next nominee of the Republican party. The flamboyant businessman has made billions in real estate, but politics is another matter. He manifestly lacks the temperament to be president, and his conversion to the Republican party is of recent vintage. As the field…

Chuck Schumer is coming under fire from President Obama's former top political adviser, David Axelrod. The former advisor is using Twitter to question Schumer's decision to oppose Obama's nuclear deal with Iran. 

When Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that he would vote against the nuclear deal with Iran, he didn’t just take a position -- he rejected every major argument President Obama has made on the agreement’s behalf. Schumer argues this is not a deal that prevents Iran from getting nuclear weapons,…

Carly Fiorina explained on Fox News Sunday this morning that the presidential "race has just gotten started." And she is ready to go:

Donald Trump claimed that he cherishes women in an interview this morning on CNN:

Last night in Seattle, Washington, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders spoke to a crowd of 15,000 strong. Sanders spoke about income inequality. 

Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore will release his next movie in September in Toronto. Moore made the announcement on the Twitter live-streaming service Periscope. It'll premier at the Toronto Film Festival:

It’s not over. And it’s likely to end badly.

This week President Obama sealed his legacy as the most divisive president in modern times, who will leave behind both worsened race relations and a set of arguments about Iran that will surely feed anti-Semitism. 

On Friday, the government reported that the economy added 215,000 jobs last month, and that the  unemployment rate remained a low 5 percent. That could support a decision by the Federal Reserve Board to raise its key interest rate in September. But the absence of inflation and of a significant…

Donald Trump called up CNN this evening to rip into Fox News host Megyn Kelly, a moderator at last night's Republican presidential debate. "[Y]ou could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever," Trump told CNN.

President Obama defended the Iran deal at American University in Washington this week, inviting comparisons to President Kennedy’s address there in 1963. While some consider the allusion a masterstroke of political theater, the JFK comparison might not suit the president as well as he thinks.

Coming off a well-received performance in Thursday's 5 p.m. debate, Carly Fiorina appeared on MSNBC's Hardball, where host Chris Matthews grilled the Republican candidate over her onstage claim that Hillary Clinton lied. "Hillary Clinton lies about Benghazi, she lies about e- mails," Fiorina said…

Rarely do international sanctions look so, well, cheesy.

For the last year or so, the issue of whether or not cops have been too eager to punish -- and even kill -- African Americans has dominated the news. Yet, one very big story relating to cops and racial tension has been completely swept under the rug. Guardian reporter Spencer Ackerman has been…

President Obama is doubling down on his comparison of Republicans to hardliners in Iran. In an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Obama says, "What I said is absolutely true factually."

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was confronted this morning on national TV about the Democrats' truncated debate schedule:

In a post debate interview with Sean Hannity, Ohio governor John Kasich called a past immigration vote of his "amnesty." Watch here:

Last night’s debate in Cleveland won’t change the course of the Republican presidential race. But it’s likely to affect individual candidates and how they’re viewed. Some gained, some faltered, some were unaffected.

Cleveland 

If anyone believed Donald Trump would be any different in Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate, they were dead wrong. The Donald was his boastful, pugilistic, funny, and entertaining self, starting from the very first question of the night.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the GOP debate and whether Trump has hit his peak.

The man leading the GOP primary polls made it clear on Thursday night that he still has a high opinion of health care systems that are to the left of Obamacare. 

While Republicans debated in Cleveland, Hillary Clinton raised money from the Kardashians in California. Kim Kardashian hoped to get a selfie with Clinton. 

President Obama is responding to the Republican presidential debate by asking Democrats to give his party money. 

Tonight's debate was full of fireworks. And somewhat surprisingly, Donald Trump was arguably not the most confrontational candidate on stage. Senator Rand Paul provided some of the more memorable moments of the night by challenging the other candidates on stage. Here is a transcript of Paul's…

Best debate ever, right?

Chuck Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, has released a statement saying he will oppose President Obama's Iran nuclear deal.

In the first Republican presidential debate, Fox News's Bret Baier asked, "Is there anyone on stage -- and can I see hands - who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican party, and to pledge to not run an independent campaign against that person?"

The Huffington Post reports that Chuck Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, will oppose President Obama's Iran nuclear deal:

Carly Fiorina was the clear winner in a dull and relatively uneventful undercard debate Thursday evening. The former Hewlett Packard CEO was the most composed and effective of the seven candidates taking the stage in Cleveland, getting off a few memorable lines and detailed policy proposals.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with assistant editor Jim Swift on the first FOX GOP debate in Cleveland: who did well, who needed to do well, and who didn't do well.

Carly Fiorina tried to inspire the nation with a rift about how America is "being crushed by the weight, the power, the cost, the complexity, the ineptitude, the corruption of the federal government." She promised to fix that:

It's too soon to make any solid predictions about which candidates will benefit from the early debate featuring the GOP candidates who didn't make the cut for the primetime debate later tonight. But based on some instant reactions, it appears that Carly Fiorina has been turning heads of viewers:

On Thursday, Sergio Gor, the communications director for presidential candidate Rand Paul, tweeted a picture of what appears to be another presidential candidate's closing statements that he says were left in the hotel printer:

“We … say for first time non-violent drug offenders, no more prison. They are going to mandatory inpatient drug treatment because this is a disease, and the war on drugs has been a failure. . . . And what we need is a country and a President who will stand up and say this is a disease and we need…

Earlier today, a Twitter user with the handle @Ladysandersfarm questioned the Democratic National Committee chair's decision to limit the number of debates to six. 

Navy Lieutenant Commander Timothy White could be charged with a crime for trying to protect the United States.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Jay Cost about Donald Trump's supporters.

Cleveland

In the wake of the Democratic filibuster blocking a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, several politicians and pundits have suggested that Republicans must face down President Obama in a government shutdown in order to defund a barbaric organization that routinely kills premature infants in the…

Bill Hyers, a senior strategist in the Martin O'Malley presidential campaign, is calling the new Democratic debate schedule "less democratic."

In the wake of the Democratic filibuster blocking a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, several politicians and pundits have suggested that Republicans must face down President Obama in a government shutdown in order to defund a barbaric organization that routinely kills premature infants in the…

In the wake of the Democratic filibuster blocking a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, several politicians and pundits have suggested that Republicans must face down President Obama in a government shutdown in order to defund a barbaric organization that routinely kills premature infants in the…

There are two rival bills in Congress addressing campus sexual assault. A nominally bipartisan bill spearheaded by Democrats Claire McCaskill and Mark Warner focuses on heaping more requirements on schools to turn their disciplinary systems into witch-hunts. Republicans in the House of…

Tonight is fight night and it could be the first inflection point we've seen in the race since June, when Donald Trump began his rise. In 2012 not every debate mattered, but the ones that did mattered a lot: Gingrich's rise came through the debates and Perry's collapse began not with his memory…

A new OpinionSavvy/InsiderAdvantage poll shows Donald Trump doing better in the South than he is nationally. In Georgia, The Donald’s 30 percent is nearly double his closest competitor, Jeb Bush (17 percent), Ben Carson’s at 10 percent, and the rest of the field is single digits—or zero, as in the…

In his speech today at American University on the Iran nuclear arms deal, President Obama asked for critics to evaluate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on its own merits. “Unfortunately,” said Obama, “we're living through a time in American politics where every foreign policy decision is…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes in which he offers advice for Republicans ahead of Thursday night's Republican debate in Cleveland.

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley is blasting his party for limiting the number of presidential debates. It's been reported that the Democrats are planning to hold only six debates in the entire primary.

Many decades ago, on my first day as the designated conservative on the editorial page staff of the Los Angeles Times, I attended the morning editorial meeting presided over by our courtly editor, Anthony Day.

From Agency France-Presse:

Two Republican candidates for president have approached the politics of the controversy over Planned Parenthood in different and revealing ways.

Planned Parenthood now finds itself being heavily criticized after being caught on tape brokering fetal body parts. Fortunately for them, they have no shortage of allies in the media, including PolitiFact.

President Obama said that Iranian hardliners are "making common cause with the Republican caucus" in a speech today in Washington, D.C.:

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.

John Kerry’s visit to Asia this week – like Ashton Carter’s last month – is designed to offer reassurance that America’s commitment to the region remains unwavering in the face of increased Chinese aggression. Yet despite these visits, leaders in the region have profound doubts whether the United…

My recent visit to the National Geographic Museum’s exhibit, Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology, revealed what the modern museum must do to keep the turnstiles turning. And the exhibits, I learned, they are a’changin’.

Hillary Clinton recently sat down for a "Chair Chat" with the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic party, Jaime Harrison. During the interview, as in many of her speeches to people who live in the South, she put on a Southern accent that is absent from her speeches to Northerners.

Hillary Clinton is worried about Internet security. That's why she will not share videos of her granddaughter. 

Joe Biden considered resigning the vice presidency to help his dying son battle brain cancer. The revelation is buried in a New York Times story reporting that friends of the vice president are conflicted on whether he should challenge Clinton for the presidency.

Robert Conquest, a friend of this magazine, passed away Monday. The Telegraph's obituary is worth a read:

A new poll finds that Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders is in a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton in a newly released New Hampshire poll. The poll finds that Sanders "is currently the most popular Democratic candidate in the state."

A few weeks ago, the Center For Medical Progress started releasing undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood selling parts of aborted fetuses.

Americans have long been skeptical of the liberal arts. Frequently this takes the form of a discussion of whether a degree in history or literature is “worth it” in a purely economic sense. Annual reports highlight the top-earning college majors, subtly encouraging students to forgo a class in…

According to Iranian-based media, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif appeared on a panel today at Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations where he spoke about the nuclear agreement he negotiated with the P5+1 last month in Vienna. Zarif explained that the so-called snap-back sanctions…

Joe Biden, who is considering a run for president, posed today in front of reporters with Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Should Biden decide to run for president, he'd face Hillary Clinton, whom Power called a "monster" in the 2008 campaign.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on his story from the Voters First Forum in New Hampshire last night, and what we can expect Thursday night in Cleveland at the first debate.

The battle in Washington to stop Planned Parenthood from using public funds is heating up. Yesterday, even Democratic Senator Joe Manchin came out in favor of defunding the organization on the heels of undercover videos showing the organization selling fetal body parts, possibly in violation of the…

President Obama is calling on Democrats to watch the Republican presidential debate, which will air Thursday on Fox News.

On July 20, The New York Times published a story about the recent spate of undercover videos that show Planned Parenthood affiliates unethically and possibly illegally brokering fetal parts to medical researchers. The story, headlined "Planned Parenthood Tells Congress More Videos of Clinics Might…

Here are hot tips to help (1) libertarian and conservative students, (2) idealistic liberal female students, and (3) idealistic liberal male students navigate the bizarre world of safe spaces, othering, microaggressions, trigger warnings, alarming victimization statistics, and all the other…

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, signed this month by the six world powers with Iran lifts a UN arms embargo by 2020, sanctions against Iran’s ballistic missile program by 2023, most nuclear restrictions by 2025, and a cap on low-enriched uranium stockpile by 2030. Most sanctions…

Sometimes, those of us left in the common sense majority ask how things could go so wrong – how consensually accepted notions of justice could be scuttled so quickly—how respect for the rule of law could have fallen so low—that a major American city would find it acceptable to provide safe passage…

Goffstown, N.H.

If Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, Carl Icahn may be his ambassador or chief negotiator to China. Trump made the revelation in an interview this morning on MSNBC:

Senate Democrats blocked a bill on Monday night to defund Planned Parenthood without having watched the undercover videos documenting the organization's involvment in harvesting aborted baby organs and selling them to biotech companies.

The election is a "fight," Carly Fiorina said at the candidate forum tonight in New Hampshire. And she's ready to duke it out with "Hillary Clinton or whoever their nominee turns out to be."

Manchester, N.H.

Manchester, N.H.

It happened after World War II and it happened after Vietnam.  Now, after years of repeated deployments, the Army, as Robert H. Scales writes the U.S. Army is breaking down.

The New York Times notes that the Clintons have decided to contribute between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. “That may reflect their enhanced wherewithal” – they earned more than $30 million in the past year and a half, and, it would seem, want to share the wealth. Actually,…

Based on her latest column, Maureen Dowd is not a fan of Hillary Clinton's campaign run. But how do the Times's readers feel? It's a guilty pleasure of mine (or a bad habit) to read comment sections in order to gauge the mood out there. At the New York Times, however, comments are broken into three…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Lee Smith on the Iran Deal, how the voters are reacting to it, and why GOP candidates should own opposition to it in Thursday's debates.

The New York Times recently reported -- wrongly, as it turns out -- that Hillary Clinton was the subject of a "criminal" investigation for conducting official State Department business on her private email system. Many of the Times's liberal readers were upset about the paper's handling of the…

Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat for West Virginia who had previously supported funding for Planned Parenthood, announced today that he'll vote to defund the organization.

Libertarians in Colorado are flying high after their success in getting marijuana legalized in the state. In our little town of Aspen, there are now seven stores in which eager consumers – I perhaps should say addicts because one user recently held up a store, threatening staff with a hammer,…

While liberals have expressed their outrage at the cruel killing of Cecil the Lion while mostly ignoring the grisly Planned Parenthood videos, the response from conservative pundits has largely been to emphasize the moral hierarchy of the two crimes. Conservatives have argued that what Planned…

The latest episode of Conversations With Bill Kristol, featuring American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers:

On Fox & Friends this morning, Donald Trump asked viewers not to forget that:

One of the more frustrating things about the three years I lived in a “mixed” neighborhood in Northeast Washington, D.C., was the bus I was forced to rely on to get to work. The infamous X2, which promenades down H Street, not far from the U.S. Capitol, is a cornucopia of everything grating about…

In a new national poll, Quinnipiac asked the question in as straightforward a way as possible: "Do you support or oppose the nuclear deal with Iran?" And, "Do you think the nuclear deal with Iran would make the world safer or less safe?"

‘It’s as if he never existed,” a friend of a certain age (same as mine) said to me not long ago. He was referring to William F. Buckley Jr. When he died in 2008, at age 82, Buckley was eulogized as the most consequential American journalist of the second half of the last century: editor for 35…

We’ve previously touted the Conversations with Bill Kristol videos in this space. But the Foundation for Constitutional Government’s latest production is one you truly won’t want to miss. 

With Trainwreck, the comedy impresario Judd Apatow has once again made a movie about an irresponsible adult-child who is compelled to grow up by the end of the film. This was the plotline of both The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, the two box-office sensations that made Apatow’s career, and it…

For close to a century the Forest Arms apartments was one of the most prestigious addresses on Detroit’s Near Westside. But by the start of this decade, the city’s declining population, municipal mismanagement, and foundering economy had left the building reminiscent of postwar Berlin.

Denver

Over the weekend, the New York Times weighed in on an important issue facing the city of New York. It seems that the fairer sex, despite making up about half the city’s population, constitutes merely a third of the users of the city’s bikeshare system.

Speaking of New York, The Scrapbook was walking through Central Park the other day when a police car came cruising down one of the interior roads. As it rolled by, almost as an afterthought, its loudspeakers blared “The sign says don’t walk!” and the car leisurely disappeared around the next…

Des Moines

Truth be told, The Scrapbook leans toward agnosticism on the question of diplomatic relations with Cuba, which were broken off in 1961 and restored last week, with much fanfare, by the Obama administration. Since 1977, the United States has had an “interests section” in Havana that is larger than…

In 1956, Doubleday published The Dragon in the Sea, the first novel by a California newspaperman named Frank Herbert. Even now, the book seems a little hard to pin down. It was, for the most part, a Cold War thriller about the race to harvest offshore oil—except crammed inside the thriller was a…

When Vita Sackville-West, daughter of the third Lord Sackville, recalled her childhood at the family’s ancestral home, Knole, she described “a person called Henry who from time to time came to the entrance and demanded to see Grandpapa, but was not allowed to.” So recounts Robert Sackville-West,…

The Iran deal turns out to be so no good, so very bad, so awfully ugly, that there is a chance—an outside chance—that a congressional process accepted by the administration because it seemed to virtually guarantee the deal’s survival might actually kill it instead.

Lately my home life has felt like a camping trip. I have been waking at 3 a.m. or so and staring. Stirring at night is one thing—rolling over, drifting into semi-consciousness, having a stray thought or two either to be remembered or not remembered in the morning—but staring is quite another. In…

The Weekly Standard is hiring an assistant to the literary editor. This is an entry-level clerical/administrative post with editorial duties and the opportunity to assist in the composition of the Books & Arts section. The ideal applicant will be interested in promotion and social media. Knowledge…

On July 21, the Pentagon announced that Muhsin al-Fadhli, an al Qaeda operative who had been wanted for more than a decade, was killed in an airstrike in Syria earlier in the month. Fadhli has been dead at least once before. In September 2014, the United States launched airstrikes against his…

Coined is like Malcolm Gladwell for investment bankers, with intriguing anecdotes to close the quick sale while obscuring the larger picture. Money matters: Over the last half-century, the world economy has swung from high inflation to financial crisis to zero interest rates. But Kabir Sehgal, an…

When the secretary of state says, as John Kerry did last week in his Senate testimony, that the Obama White House is “guaranteeing” Iran won’t have the bomb, you can be sure that—well, you can be pretty confident that he doesn’t mean it. And that someday soon he’ll pretend he never said it.

Across the Middle East, there is concern about the nuclear deal with Iran. By releasing frozen assets and removing economic sanctions, the deal seems to facilitate renewed aggression. Won’t that encourage more violence from Iranian terror proxies, like Hezbollah and Hamas? The international…

While watching Pollock for maybe the sixth time, I found myself intrigued anew by Ed Harris as the titular splatter king. Once again, I wondered what it was about his performance that kept me tuned in. It could have been the conviction with which he conveyed his alter ego’s determination to express…

BOGSAT: according to urbandictionary.com, a “Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around Talking” in “regularly scheduled daily/weekly worthless meetings.”

The original sin of President Obama, politically speaking, was pushing his health care plan through Congress with Democratic votes alone. For rejecting even a veneer of bipartisanship, he and Democrats have paid an enormous price.

As the 2016 elections begin to dominate the news, a recurring message has seeped into the narrative being spoon-fed to the American public: Millennials will be the key demographic and the single most important voting group. Really?

Is America, or Illinois, or Chicago the next Greece? The answers are “Yes, if .  .  . ,” “No, but .  .  . ,” and “Perhaps.” Greece joined what was then the European Economic Community even though it had no business applying for admission, and the existing members had no business allowing it entry,…

Well, looks like the terrorists finally have won. The satirical French paper Charlie Hebdo announced it would no longer draw pictures of Muhammad, just six months after Islamic terrorists stormed their Paris offices and massacred the staff. They are far from alone in backing down in the face of…

Barack Obama is not popular. This plain and simple fact may surprise those who read only legacy journalists, who often elide this inconvenient truth. A recent Associated Press write-up is illustrative:

One man was responsible for the deaths or injuries of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq. That same man is responsible for sowing sectarian conflict today in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. And yet, in the nuclear deal with Iran, this man, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the August 3, 2015 issue.

Department of Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson says that the Islamic State wants to be viewed as Islamic, but they aren't. 

ABC reports this morning that Vice President Joe Biden's political team is ramping up. ABC sources its reporting to Biden's political advisers. 

Here's part of Maureen Dowd's interesting and moving column in tomorrow's New York Times on Joe Biden:

A September 1989, feature in New York magazine by Edwin Diamond, titled “Trump vs. Stern: The Unmaking of a Documentary” closed with this line:

Hurry up and wait. Hurry to the announcement by the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary policy committee, and then wait for the next one. After 2,417 days of keeping its key interest rate at zero, on Wednesday of last week the Fed policy team decided that a few more weeks or months at that level might…