October 2015

If one were to build the archetype of a reactionary, it would probably look a lot like Montague “Monty” Rhodes James. Born in the village of Goodnestone, Kent, James grew up in an environment surrounded by history and legend. His father, the Reverend Herbert James, was an Anglican curate and the…

On February 29, 2012, Hillary Clinton emailed an office manager in the office of the secretary at the State Department. The request was brief but urgent: "I forgot there is a white briefing book on my desk that needs to be stored overnight."

For years, the British government and a network of anti-Guantanamo activists have agitated for the release of Shaker Aamer. Now their wish was finally granted. Aamer has been released from Guantanamo. He is receiving a hero’s welcome in the UK, where much of the media has treated him as an innocent…

Coming soon to a central bank near you, in time for the Christmas shopping season, an increase in interest rates, courtesy of Janet Yellen and her colleagues on the Federal Reserve Board’s monetary policy committee. Or perhaps not. Folks living in euroland can expect the gift that keeps on giving,…

In one of the newly released Hillary Clinton emails from the State Department, Clinton talks with Stephen S. Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. They discuss meeting, his new book, and more. 

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly claimed that, “The State Department has confirmed that I did not send nor receive material marked classified."

It’s tempting, when writing about modern art, to devote more attention than is useful to the kinds of market forces that bestow, say, Jeff Koons ’s totalitarian visions or Damien Hirst’s intellectual posturing with the imprimatur of respectability. After all, so much modern art has become uniformly…

This morning, Washington Post fact checker Glen Kessler decided to fact check Marco Rubio's statement at the latest GOP debate that Hillary Clinton lied about al Qaeda's involvement in the September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi. In public, Clinton initially attributed the attack to spontaneous…

Interesting political debates typically have what could be called primary effects. In Wednesday night's case, those would include the Bush-Rubio exchange, which did a lot of good for Rubio and a lot of damage to Bush, and the Cruz assault on the moderators, which was dazzling.

The recent spike in suicidal terror attacks in Israel by mostly teenage Palestinian Arabs was allegedly sparked by the fire bombing of an Arab house near Jerusalem, and the death of an Arab infant and his parents. Because that horrific arson followed several non-lethal attacks by Jewish fanatics…

Today's highlight in unseemly fundraising letters comes from Rep. Kathleen Rice (D - NY - 4).

In 2012, Jeb Bush wanted Marco Rubio to be one heartbeat away from the presidency, but Bush's campaign is now suggesting that there are troubling things in Rubio's past that would make him a "risky bet" as a presidential candidate. On Thursday night, David Catanese of U.S. News and World Report…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the state of the GOP 2016 field, the new leadership in the House, and how the new GOP blood in the Senate can make a difference.

The chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Rep. Michael McCaul (R., TX), is trying to get the White House to pay attention to what Iran is doing around the Middle East. Earlier in the week, McCaul wrote a letter to Obama arguing that the clerical regime “has demonstrated hostility…

The Republican candidates for president were remarkably unified in the (few) policy preferences they espoused at their debates on Wednesday night. All support cutting taxes and reducing regulation, and all oppose crony capitalism. The candidates may be remarkably diverse in terms of ethnicity and…

Hillary Clinton was confronted by a voter who pressed her on the Whitewater, Benghazi, and deleted email scandals. 

Opportunity Lives has posted a video of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan titled, "Speaker Ryan: A Personal Journey." 

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley slammed his main rival, Hillary Clinton, for flip-flopping on guns. 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Jonathan V. Last on how last night's debate was a disaster for Jeb Bush.

Today, in his remarks to the House of Representatives following his election as speaker, Paul Ryan reiterated his belief that “we can renew the America idea.”  This recalls Ryan’s excellent speech on the fateful night of the Obamacare vote, on March 21, 2010, when he proclaimed,

Kiev

Congressman Paul Ryan became the fifty-fourth speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thursday morning. The 45-year-old Wisconsinite received 236 votes, while 75-year-old Democrat Nancy Pelosi of California received 184. Daniel Webster, a Republican backed by members of the Tea Party, received…

Charlie Rose defended Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in an interview this morning with Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio. Rose seemed after Rubio said Clinton lied about the Benghazi terror attack. 

It probably isn’t true that CNBC asked the Republican candidates to wear a metal plate with a number around their necks and face the camera, no smiles allowed. But this was less a debate, with the otherwise able CNBC reporters and analysts teasing out the candidates’ views on economic issues, than…

Boulder, Colo.

What were they thinking?  I’m referring to the CNBC questioners in last night’s Republican presidential debate.  They started the 2-hour session by asking Donald Trump if he was conducting “a comic book version” of a campaign? Mike Huckabee was asked to rate Trump’s “moral authority” to be…

Boulder, Colo.

In a post debate interview with CNN, Jeb Bush was obviously frustrated (though he denied it):

Tonight’s debate showed that the GOP field is smaller than it looks. Technically, there are still fourteen people running, but the winnowing is far along. We probably have a final six and possibly a final four.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer John McCormack on the CNBC GOP Debate.

Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus lashed out at debate host CNBC for the way it moderated tonight's Republican debate.

Earlier tonight moderator John Harwood, of CNBC and the New York Times, attacked Senator Marco Rubio's tax plan on the grounds that it disproportionately benefited the top one percent of earners. Rubio insisted the premise of his question was wrong, but Harwood stuck to his guns. Here's the…

Senator Ted Cruz seized an opportunity to get a massive applause line at tonight's CNBC debate by attacking the moderators for their line of questioning:

The Bush hit on Rubio was obviously premeditated, so it wasn’t gaffe or a mistake. It was a revealing measure of his political talent and judgment. Let’s count the ways in which it was strategically ill-conceived and tactically incompetent:

Debate moderators confronted Marco Rubio about missing Senate votes during his presidential run. The Florida senator responded:

Hillary Clinton dodged a question about whether she accused her Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders, of sexism in comments earlier this week.

In the undercard Republican debate on CNBC, Lindsey Graham bemoaned politicians who lie for political points:

Boulder, Colo.

As Jordan Fabian of The Hill reports:

In its handling of health care for veterans, the VA’s ineptitude and corruption have been widely exposed and condemned.  Though, of late, Hillary Clinton has been saying that it wasn’t as bad as all that. In her view, the real problem is not long wait times covered up by falsified records which, in…

After Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party defeated Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, a giddy New York Times assured Canadians, “Your long national nightmare is over.”  The Times scribe felt “like a broken human after almost 10 years of Harper rule.” Oh, the suffering!  Mr. Trudeau is different, she…

In a lot of ways, tonight’s Republican debate looks like the lowest-stakes of the three debates so far. We know what the candidates all look like in a debate setting; we know which lanes they're each slotted into. And while there will be ten candidates on stage, the field really isn't that big…

Lincoln Chafee’s abortive presidential candidacy was treated by many as a joke, but the focus of the former governor and senator’s campaign was deadly serious: His was the stridently anti-war candidacy.

Mike Tyson endorsed Donald Trump in an interview with Huffpost Live:

The Florida Republican party has released video of Hillary Clinton supporters being unable to name an accomplishment of the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state. To make matters worse, the supporters the Florida GOP interviews are at a Clinton campaign event.

Paul Ryan, the leading Republican candidate to be the next speaker of the House, will support John Boehner's final budget deal. 

Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden, is a doctor of education. Ben Carson, a Republican presidential candidate, is a medical doctor. 

That’s what many defense experts are saying about the two-year budget deal that’s being cut by congressional leaders and the White House.  Byron Callan, longtime analyst for Capital Alpha Partners, which provides research to financial firms, rates the prospective deal as “defense positive.”

As electronic cigarettes have proliferated and spawned a sub-culture of their own—vape shops, chai-latte flavored vaping fluid and even the “sport” of cloud chasing—few policies have seemed as intuitive as stopping children under 18 from buying them.  As almost all e-cigarettes contain nicotine,…

Businesses and investors are often subject to the whim of capricious government regulations. While appropriate oversight can be necessary and proper—beneficial for both the taxpayer and the overall business environment—when those in political office change their mind about pre-existing…

According to the conventional, Beltway wisdom, Bernie Sanders let Hillary Clinton off the hook when he declined to attack on the matter of her e-mails in the recent debate among Democratic contenders. Perhaps.  But one wonders how many friends that would have made him among his party’s core voters…

A new national poll of Republican primary voters finds retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson in the lead, overtaking reality TV star and New York businessman Donald Trump. The CBS News/New York Times poll found 26 percent of Republican primary voters polled support Carson, while 22 percent support Trump.…

A top Jewish immigration group -- an organization "Founded in 1881 originally to assist Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe" -- is fighting to bring Syrian refugees to America. The group is called HIAS, which once meant Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley is again hitting Hillary Clinton for being inconsistent on the issues. Except this time, O'Malley is pointing out one issue Clinton has been consistent on: advocating for Wall Street. 

The buying and selling of fetal body parts—a longtime problem highlighted by the July release of an undercover video of the medical Director of Planned Parenthood—has ignited a political uproar. Since Planned Parenthood is the country’s largest abortion provider, the trade in infant body parts…

In this week's edition of the boss's email newsletter -- Kristol Clear (sign up here!) -- he writes about the conundrum of being a Mets fan conflicting with the next GOP debate.

Two new polls released on Monday show Ben Carson up big over Donald Trump in Iowa: A Monmouth poll shows Carson ahead of Trump 32 percent to 18 percent (with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tied for third place at 10 percent each), while a Loras College poll shows Carson leading Trump 31 percent to 19…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on the state of Jeb!

Matt Lewis has a great new piece at the Daily Beast, "How Paul Ryan Went From Wingnut to RINO."

Martin O'Malley came out firing this morning in an interview on Morning Joe:

The latest episode of Conversations With Bill Kristol, featuring AEI president Arthur Brooks:

The Pentagon Friday announced the death of Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler, a soldier who had been serving in Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq. He died of wounds received during a hostage rescue mission. But in keeping with the Obama administration's insistence that the president ended combat…

A third of Americans have little or no confidence in charitable organizations. That’s according to a poll out earlier this month from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Many of those surveyed felt that leaders of charities were paid too much and that the organizations were not good at spending the…

One of the most memorable moments from the first Democratic presidential debate was an unexpected one. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic-socialist senator from Vermont who is leading the polls in New Hampshire, took a question about the email scandal that has badly complicated Hillary Clinton’s…

After the Great Depression, Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover for 30 years—and with great success. Even though Hoover’s policies were anything but market-oriented—he greatly raised spending, taxes, and tariffs in response to the 1929 Wall Street crash—Republicans took the fall for Hooverism. It…

The news is so bad these days, we could all benefit from journalists taking the time to report more inspirational tales. Thankfully, Time magazine is here to help, as evidenced by this uplifting headline: “How Che Guevara Didn’t Let Asthma Affect His Ambitions.” Wait .  .  . what?

Some 45 municipalities and communities make up Westchester County, the prosperous, heavily Democratic jurisdiction just north of New York City whose most famous residents are Bill and Hillary Clinton. Like many localities across the country, Westchester has long been a recipient of federal housing…

Anderson Cooper’s final question in the Democratic presidential debate on October 13 led to an interesting and revealing moment. He asked:

In the early 1920s, a small pack of American Legionnaires convened a regular card game above the Princess Theatre in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. During one session, a member of the group mused, out of the blue, “It would be kind of nice to be president of the United States, wouldn’t it?”

Sunday, October 18, isn’t just a day of baseball playoffs and pro football games. It’s “Adoption Day,” when all parties to the Iran nuclear deal must begin preparing to implement its terms. And while the Obama administration takes another opportunity to pat itself on the back for its achievement,…

Five years ago in these pages, I called The Social Network  “a two-hour exploration of a single question: Is Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, an assh—?” Now Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter of The Social Network, has just written a movie called Steve Jobs. It is a two-hour exploration of a…

Now that playoff baseball has returned with the onset of autumn, and baseball becomes more intense, more excellent, and more precious, I’m thinking again about Harvey Dorfman. Little known to most casual fans, he was one of the great men of baseball, for he taught his students and friends and all…

Bill Kristol’s latest conversation with University of Virginia literature professor—and TWS contributor—Paul Cantor is now available for your viewing pleasure at conversationswithbillkristol.org, and it’s vastly enjoyable. We hope we can get away with saying that he educates the boss (as he will…

New York 

The Scrapbook’s colleague Fred Barnes took time out from his book tour last week to email us an exclusive addendum to his new biography of Jack Kemp, coauthored with Mort Kondracke. 

Fog has played a defining role in some of our favorite movies, instantly setting the stage for either romance or menace. In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart always seems to be shrouded in fog or cigarette smoke, while Fred Astaire, in his first film without Ginger Rogers, A Damsel in Distress, woos Joan…

The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published, and in many languages. Often, new volumes on the three-year (1936-39) bloodbath recapitulate old themes: the ideological drama of fascist militarism versus a leftist republic;…

If one good thing comes out of the Bill Cosby Crisis, The Scrapbook is fairly certain what it will be. For as the New York Times reported in a recent story, the 60 or so institutions of higher learning in America that have, during the past few decades, conferred honorary degrees on Bill Cosby are…

Theodore Roosevelt summarized his approach to diplomacy with the maxim “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Time and again, President Obama has chosen the opposite tack. Perhaps nowhere has his policy of speechifying without substance to back up the rhetoric been more problematic than in the…

As the sun starts setting on a crisp fall evening, Marco Rubio takes the stage in the backyard of a former editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader for a classic New Hampshire campaign event, a house party. “I love this weather,” Rubio says. “It doesn’t make you sweat.” Rubio flashes a smile, and…

Vienna

What’s the biggest domestic public policy success of the last two generations? In our view, it’s the plummeting crime rate that began with a changed approach to crime in the Reagan years.

When you’ve been involved in presidential politics as long as Charlie Black, things get pretty simple. A good candidate is one who can communicate and isn’t mistake-prone. News coverage matters as much as ever. “The basic things don’t change,” he says.

Last year, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was asked a simple question: What was your proudest moment as secretary of state? Posed at a women’s forum, it was hardly hostile in intent. Clinton was unable to answer, and the resulting New York Times headline was brutal: “Hillary…

With the war in Syria becoming ever more complex and murderous, it’s worthwhile to revisit a guiding principle of Barack Obama: The use of American military power is likely to do more harm than good in the Middle East, and even in the region’s violent struggles, soft power is important, if not…

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) may be the best-kept literary secret in English—a secret hiding in plain sight. His collected works take up a long bookshelf: 47 novels and 18 works of nonfiction. Once, most educated English and American households owned some of those volumes; today, there are still…

Democrat John Bel Edwards and Republican David Vitter will face off in the November 21 runoff for governor of Louisiana. Edwards and Vitter were the top two vote-getters in Saturday's jungle primary.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the October 26, 2015 issue.

In a speech tonight in Des Moines, Bernie Sanders will hit Hillary Clinton for rewriting history on gay rights, according to the remarks as prepared for delivery.

The problems just keep stacking up for Louisiana Republican David Vitter as he battles to stay alive in what's become a contentious race for governor. The two-term U.S. senator has been dogged by new allegations surrounding his use of prostitutes in New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the October 19, 2015 issue.

Jilted. That’s how policy makers here in America feel now that British Prime Minister David Cameron has dubbed his country’s relation with the People’s Republic of China as “a very special relationship”, trumping the merely “special relationship”, the term used by Winston Churchill in 1946 to…

For a while, it looked as if Republican senator David Vitter had a better-than-good shot at winning the 2015 governor’s race in Louisiana. For several months since last December, Vitter had led in the polls against the Democrat and two Republicans also running in the state’s open primary, which is…

Alexandria, Va.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the Republicans' good week.

The Boston Globe reports that Tom Stemberg, the founder of office-supply retailer Staples, has died. Stemberg started Staples with the help of Mitt Romney's Bain Capital investment firm, and the two men became friends.

On a fall afternoon in 2010, the unlikely trio of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took the stage of the Oprah show to declare their plan to remake American urban education. The scene, which turned ecstatic with the…

The remarks of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem about the role of the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the Holocaust have engendered a massive, and mostly critical response. It is important to define in more precise terms the role of the Mufti…

Vladimir Putin is tough. That's the message conveyed by the pictures showing him shirtless on horseback, cuddling leopard cubs, and throwing his judo opponents to the floor that flood media sites in both Russia and the west.

This weekend, Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center welcomes Juliette Binoche as Antigone in a new translation by Anne Carson, directed by Ivo van Hove. Sophocles’ Antigone tells the story of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, who defies the law of the city in favor of the law of the gods (as she…

Google has released the top questions about Hillary Clinton people were searching the day of the House's Benghazi hearing. Three were about Clinton and Benghazi, one was about whether or not she's still running, but the top one was about her age. "How old is Hillary Clinton?"

Late in yesterday’s Benghazi testimony — well after most of the media declared Hillary Clinton the runaway “winner” — there was an illuminating exchange about her email correspondence with Sidney Blumenthal.

Twenty-five minutes before the start of Thursday’s hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Charles Woods stood alone behind the witness table, marveling at the chaos around him. A gaggle of still photographers was rehearsing their movements for the arrival of former Secretary of State…

Hillary Clinton stumbled at the Benghazi hearing today on Capitol Hill. As the hearing moved well past its tenth hour, Clinton had a serious coughing fit that prevented her momentarily from being able to speak. 

Editor's note: As the new Star Wars film "Rogue One" approaches, we're looking back at senior writer Jonathan V. Last's "Case for the Empire." The following is an excerpt of a follow up case for the Empire at The Federalist.

In a "dear colleague" letter, Congressman Paul Ryan announced Thursday night that he's "ready and eager" to be speaker of the House of Representatives. You can read the full letter here:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Stephen F. Hayes on today's Benghazi hearing with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

During the House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing, Hillary Clinton's campaign sent out an email with her opening statement to the committee:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed an internet video for the Benghazi attacks in her conversations with family members of those killed despite having told a foreign leader two days earlier that the video played no role and having emailed daughter Chelsea that a terrorist group had carried…

Trey Gowdy, the Republican chairman of the House's select committee investigating the Benghazi attacks, spent several minutes at Thursday's hearing questioning former secretary of state Hillary Clinton over the unusual advisory relationship she had with an old friend who had business interests iin…

It will be some time before it’s clear whether the story of Ahmed Muhammad, aka “clock boy,” has a happy ending. After being arrested last month under suspicion of bringing a bomb disguised as a clock to his Texas high school, the 14-year-old won the world’s sympathy, a scholarship fund, gifts,…

Hillary Clinton acknowledged that the U.S. ambassador to Libya who was killed on September 11, 2012, in a terrorist attack did not have the secretary of state's personal email address.

A new Quinnipiac poll shows Ben Carson leading Donald Trump 28 percent to 20 percent, with Marco Rubio in third place at 13 percent and Ted Cruz in fourth at 10 percent. This is the first poll in four months that shows Trump losing Iowa, according to RealClearPolitics.  

FBI director James Comey refused to comment on the ongoing investigation into the use of Hillary Clinton's private email server. Comey refused to comment at a Capitol Hill hearing:

The Republican chairman of the House select committee on the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack told Hillary Clinton that his investigation is "not about" the former secretary of state, despite claims to the contrary from members of Congress in both parties.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Stephen F. Hayes, providing a preview of this morning's Benghazi hearing with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Bill Clinton was left at home this morning when Hillary Clinton departed her Washington, D.C. mansion on her way to Capitol Hill. The Democratic presidential candidate is testifying before the Benghazi Select Committee.

Secretary of State John Kerry spoke Wednesday at a Department of Energy event at the U.S. Navy Heritage Center in Washington, D.C., where he noted the official implementation of the nuclear deal reached with Iran this summer. Throughout the negotiations with Iran, that country's religious leader,…

A new poll finds that Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is beating Donald Trump in Iowa. The poll has been released by Quinnipiac University.

Congressman Raul Labrador of Idaho emerged from a meeting of the House Freedom Caucus tonight to announce that a supermajority of the caucus supports Paul Ryan as speaker of the House. "We tried to reach a consensus but we were not able to reach the 80 percent threshold" needed to issue a formal…

The Benghazi Select Committee holds an open hearing with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Thursday. Clinton has said she is willing to stay as long as there are questions.

Vice President Joe Biden announced today, standing alongside his wife Jill and President Obama, that he will not be seeking the presidency in 2016. 

An amazing amount of research, development, and human capital has gone into improving and advancing the cell phone. Today’s smartphone is a wondrous invention that scarcely resembles the early cell phones of two decades ago. 

One of the biggest objections among members of the House Freedom Caucus to Paul Ryan's conditions to serve as speaker is Ryan's reported desire to get rid of the "motion to vacate the chair." Under current House rules, any single member of the House may force a vote to oust the speaker (the measure…

CNN, which has been on the story of malfeasance and incompetence at the VA for a while now, reports:

It’s no secret that Donald Trump has contempt for Jeb Bush, some of it well-earned. And Trump’s recent remarks pointing out that “the World Trade Center came down” during George W. Bush’s “reign” have been rightly seen as a way to needle and flummox brother Jeb. In that, he’s been quite successful,…

Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio, writing in the New York Times:

Rarely is the New York Times accused of supporting Republicans—much less being a cog in the vast right-wing conspiracy. That, however, is exactly what David Brock, one-time conservative journalist-turned-Clinton supporter and founder of Media Matters for America, claimed on Monday when he fielded…

At a House GOP caucus meeting, Congressman Paul Ryan said he will run and serve as House speaker if he can be a unity candidate. What does that mean? Ryan's spokesman Brendan Buck writes in an email that Ryan will need "the endorsement of all the conference’s major caucuses" by Friday.

In 2012, Vice President Joe Biden told the story of President Obama deciding to send a Navy SEAL team to kill Osama bin Laden. Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state at the time, "hedged" her bet, according to Biden's telling of the story.

By the time you read this, it is possible that Vice President Joe Biden will have announced his candidacy for the presidency. Or not. 

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley is not giving his rival, Hillary Clinton, a free pass. Today on the View, O'Malley said that Clinton should be held accountable for what she did as secretary of state. 

Facing a leftward battle in the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton's camp has sent out signals that they're happy about Monday's win by Canada's Liberal Party, and their likely new prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Ben Domenech gets right to the heart of what we see in the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer:

Vice President Joe Biden will be eating lunch with President Barack Obama today at the White House. One wonders whether the 2016 presidential election might be a topic of conversation. 

From Bill Kristol's newsletter this week:

Team Hillary Clinton is happy with the election in Canada. Liberals won big there, as the National Post reports:

Vice President Joe Biden seemed to contrast himself with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in remarks today at the White House:

Two former high-ranking Obama administration officials say they did not know about the existence of Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was serving as secretary of state. They also refused to say whether they approved her use of such a server.

On CNN's Reliable Sources, former Washington Post journalist (and Clinton biographer) Carl Bernstein weighed in on the Hillary Clinton email scandal:

In last week's CNN debate, Hillary Clinton (and the other candidates) were asked:

Fred Kagan, writing for the New York Daily News:

According to records reviewed by THE WEEKLY STANDARD, former New York Senator Hillary Clinton wins the coveted "which person running for president from New York has voted in the most elections since 2002" contest.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Commentary's Noah Rothman on Donald Trump's candidacy and how he is upending the 2016 race, Jeb Bush's failure to defend, and the latest news on the attacks on Israel.

Congressional lawmakers and presidential candidates are currently debating criminal justice reform, offering to lessen the legal consequences for “non-violent drug offenders.” For most, the underlying motive is compassion for drug offenders, giving them the chance to avoid a criminal record. Yet…

Joe Biden plans to run for president, a congressman says on Twitter. A reporter says the vice president plans to make his 2016 announcement within two days.

On a crazy college football Saturday that saw Michigan State pull out about the most improbable win since Stanford’s band came onto the field against Cal 33 years ago, the LSU Tigers beat previously undefeated Florida and claimed the top spot in the Anderson & Hester Rankings.  In three weeks, the…

Bill Kristol said on ABC's This Week that "Joe Biden is going to get in, I'm quite confident." Watch here:

Congressman Mike Pompeo, a Republican member of the Benghazi Select Committee, told NBC's Chuck Todd that Hillary Clinton's handling of the investigation into the September 11, 2012 terror attack in Benghazi "worse" than Watergate.

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has released an ad taking her Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, to task. The ad focuses on immigration, foreign policy, national security, Benghazi, and (in Fiorina's words) "lying."

For Republican presidential candidates planning to run against Hillary Clinton, the critique of her record these days often begins and ends with Benghazi and her email server. This is partly because these are so damning but partly because there’s a near-universal assumption that Clinton has no…

China’s Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country “citizenship scores.” According to the ACLU, “China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of…

There was never any doubt that Democrats in Washington would launch an aggressive campaign to discredit the House Select Committee on Benghazi. The only question was when they’d do it.

On September 29, the State Department added British citizen Sally Jones to its list of foreign terrorists. Jones is a 46-year-old punk rocker who converted to Islam and moved from Kent to Raqqa to join the Islamic State in 2013. She is also newly widowed, having lost her 21-year-old husband, ISIS…

Hillary Clinton is running her first national television commerical, and amidst a cloud of scandal and falling poll numbers, she’s already playing defense. The ad claims that the House Republicans’ committee to investigate Benghazi “was created to destroy her candidacy.” That was hardly the purpose…

Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin was both critically acclaimed and fiercely denounced. Its detractors accused the Yale historian of relativizing the Holocaust by placing it in the context of the other acts of wholesale violence in the region, particularly the terror…

Nick Flynn writes in defiance of despair, and the poet’s fourth collection is as emotionally fraught as its title. Even the dust jacket art, which depicts an abandoned laundromat, is exhausted. My Feelings confronts suffering without flinching. The speaker sounds emotionally spent, but these poems…

There are times when economics is secondary to other policy considerations—not irrelevant, but secondary. Last week, when 12 nations on the Pacific Rim finally agreed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership after years of negotiations, was one such time. This gives President Obama a much-needed victory—if…

When was the last time a movie was just, you know, lovable? Guardians of the Galaxy, maybe—all the more so because its lovability was so unexpected, coming as it did from the Marvel comic book movie factory. The same is true of The Martian, a movie so spectacularly winsome it’s almost beyond…

One morning in August, the social science reporter for National Public Radio, a man named Shankar Vedantam, sounded a little shellshocked. You couldn’t blame him. 

We never thought we would find ourselves stocking a pantry in Arizona. But now that Phoenix is our winter base, there we were, on line at the deli counter of a supermarket located in one of the ubiquitous strip malls that we love because they are home to thrusting small businesses as well as huge…

Last week an Obama administration official bragged that the White House’s Syria policy is working out just as planned. Special envoy for Syria Michael Ratney said that the “Russians wouldn’t have to help [Bashar al-]Assad if we didn’t weaken him.”

It has long been good sport to make fun of the government. Ronald Reagan did it with a fine, almost deft touch. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” he would tell an audience, “are I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

At this point The Scrapbook has become somewhat inured to tales of woe regarding the American educational system. Generally such wails are merely preludes to a call to arms on the part of teachers’ unions and bureaucrats who want to expand government control over local schools and throw more money…

Time flies when you’re having fun. It’s been two months since the first Republican presidential debate. How do things now stand for the party upon whose success next year rest all of our hopes for constitutional government at home and a manageable world abroad?

Because The Scrapbook believes so strongly in gun safety, and teaching children about the importance of gun safety, we were surprised by a recent story in the Washington Post. It seems that a firearms shop in McLean, Virginia—forced recently to relocate to seek more retail space—has found a new…

‘Mister AL-len!” was the screechy cry of Portland Hoffa, announcing the entrance of Fred Allen on his popular radio show, Town Hall Tonight. Portland was Fred’s wife and sidekick on the show, at the time when it was one of the top three radio programs in the 1930s.  (The others were Jack Benny’s…

The British painter Howard Hodgkin came to the Frick Collection some years ago to lecture. After pained attempts to deliver a prepared talk, he abandoned his notes for a monologue. Zig-zagging through art in general, his own work, and the historical canon, he came to that curious contemporary…

When Jennifer Jacquet, an assistant professor in the department of environmental studies at New York University, was a child, she persuaded her mother to buy her a book called 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth. One of the simple things that the book induced her to do was to shame her…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the Books & Arts section from the October 12, 2015 issue.

Everyone talks about “chaos” in Congress just because Republicans haven’t chosen a new speaker of the House. If you want to see real chaos, look at Rome, where Pope Francis’s synod on the family has been a shambling disaster since the moment it started.

The next president of the United States will likely wish he or she weren’t. 

Hillary Clinton finds the FBI investigation surrounding her funny. At least, in an interview this afternoon with CNN, she laughed when CNN host Jake Tapper mentioned the investigation. 

In an interview with CNN, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton insisted that she's not so different than her main rival, socialist Bernie Sanders:

Bernie Sanders has never met a corrupt, inefficient, obsolete government agency or initiative he didn’t like.  The only thing he finds objectionable is that they aren’t being given enough taxpayer money.  Earlier in the week, during the Las Vegas debate, he bragged on his efforts to get the…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the Democrats' disastrous week.

Hanna Kozlowska at Quartz writes that:

Even if it were true that the “American people are sick and tired of hearing about [Hillary Clinton’s] emails,” as Vermont senator Bernie Sanders asserted on Tuesday (there is not a scintilla of evidence that that is the case, by the way), that’s an utterly irrelevant standard to apply when judging…

In Zimbabwe, forty elephants have been slaughtered.  Not by trophy hunters using elegant and expensive rifles.  The animals were poisoned with cyanide by poachers who were after the ivory. And, as Michael E. Miller of the Washington Post reports, Zimbabwe’s “environment minister Oppah Muchinguri,…

The debate earlier this week in Las Vegas was very good for Martin O'Malley. According to the O'Malley campaign, the Democratic presidential candidate has now had his most succesful fundraising period.

Rather than continue to battle with the relatively new House "Freedom Caucus," John Boehner decided to announce the end of his tenure as Speaker, leaving the door open for somebody else to take the reins. Kevin McCarthy, thought by many to be a certain successor, dropped out, citing an inability to…

So Bernie Sanders, who wants to make college education "free," just tweeted out the following:

In 1758, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a chastising letter to his former colleague (and editor of the Encyclopédie) Jean le Rond d’Alembert. Rousseau’s criticism centered on d’Alembert’s proposal for the establishment of a theater in Geneva, whose “Lacedaemonian” culture, he lamented, lacked the…

The White House is hitting back at Hillary Clinton a week after the Democratic presidential candidate claimed to have looked at the Trans-Pacific Parternship. The trade deal, the White House says, has not been released to the public. Clinton, for her part, claimed last week to have looked at the…

Hillary Clinton is now re-opening the door to support President Obama's trade deal. The same deal she helped negotiate but came out against last week. 

A new advertisement by the Republican National Committee compares Hillary Clinton to John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004.

In 1968, Jerry Angiulo, a Boston mafiosi, dodged a murder conviction. 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the first Democratic Debate, the 2016 election, and the state of the GOP race for the nomination. 

On Wednesday, Ellen DeGeneres tweeted, "Presidential candidate @BernieSanders​ is ready for his entrance onto my show."

Unfortunately, the United States’s strategies against the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) are fundamentally flawed and doomed to fail. A review of the U.S. Joint Doctrine demonstrates that we lack both clear objectives and strategies. This is recipe for failure. 

During the debate in Las Vegas, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Jim Webb how, if were he elected, “he would not be a third term for Obama.” Webb said that “there would be a major difference between my administration and the Obama administration,” and it would concern “the use of executive authority.”

Vice President Joe Biden praised the Democratic field after last night's primary debate in Las Vegas. 

Think of Mount Vernon these days and the first images that come to mind are those class trips—kids feeding goats, running through a straw-bale maze, and going on wagon rides. The last thing you'd associate with the home of George Washington is whiskey (indeed, our first president preferred Madeira…

U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power was talking tough, yesterday. As Nick Gass of Politico reports, in a speech before “Fortune's Most Powerful Women summit in Washington.”

Secretary of State John Kerry blamed Israeli settlements for Palestinian terrorism, in remarks made recently about the wave of terror attacks in Israel:

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported on October 7 that “the only concern” Beijing has regarding the October 16 White House summit between President Obama and South Korean President Park Geun-hye is a possible discussion of “deployment of the THAAD missile defense system in the South.” Yonhap…

A former top aide to President Barack Obama likened Bernie Sanders's debate performance -- and the way it was received by pundits -- to Obama's first presidential run in 2007. Dan Pfeiffer made the comment on Twitter. 

A focus group after last night's Democratic debate found that Bernie Sanders won the debate. The focus group was conducted by Frank Luntz. It aired on Fox News after the debate:

Debates produce winners and losers. And CNN, known to some as the Clinton News Network, saw to it the biggest winner was the Democratic contenders as a group. Recall that when CNN staged a Republican debate, most of the questions were aimed at getting each candidate to attack the others, producing…

Hillary Clinton looked competent, tough, and in control during Tuesday’s low-key Democratic debate in Las Vegas. Clinton excelled amid a field of hapless has-beens, would-be revolutionaries, and ideological outliers by delivering a solid performance and looking like the adult in the room. The…

Going into tonight, the conventional wisdom was that Bernie Sanders would try to genially introduce himself, the candidates would mostly stay in their own lanes, and that Hillary was a bleeding target. Not so much.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the Democratic Debate. 

Senator Sanders had been on a roll—until tonight. He had been playing a tent revival preacher in which he got himself, and his audiences of the faithful, worked up about the evil that has kept them in chains and from which he intends to free them before going on to use those same chains to whip up…

In tonight's CNN debate, Hillary Clinton described her Wall Street reform proposals as "tougher" than her opponents.

Hillary Clinton doesn't think she's the only flip-flopper at Tuesday's debate stage. During the Democratic presidential debate, she said, "everyone on this debate stage has changed a position or two."

During Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate, Bernie Sanders resuced Hillary Clinton. "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails," Sanders said, standing up for Clinton.

In Tuesday's Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton admitted that in fact the email issue is a "legitimate" one. Watch here:

During Tuesday's Democratic debate, presidential candidate Jim Webb ripped the Iranian nuclear deal, adding that the deal will allow Iran "to move forward and eventually acquire a nuclear weapon." Watch:

Bill Clinton sent an email to Hillary Clinton supporters in the middle of tonight's Democratic debate. Clinton says that Clinton is doing great. 

CNN's Anderson Cooper chose Hillary Clinton as the first target of tonight's first Democratic debate.

In his opening remarks, Democratic presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee trolled Hillary Clinton, saying he has "no scandals" and "high ethical standards." Watch:

A new poll by Fox News finds Donald Trump remains the leader of the Republican pack. Trump holds 24 percent of the vote, but is in a virtual tie with Ben Carson, who is getting 23 percent of the vote. 

Greg Mankiw, professor of economics at Harvard, has posed an interesting question on his blog.

The Department of Labor may soon be able to garnish your wages without a court order. 

The chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee is calling her vice chair a liar. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is now denying that Tulsi Gabbard was not invited to tonight's Democratic debate -- instead, the chair is saying that her vice chair chose not to come.

CNN host Anderson Cooper, who is set to moderate tonight's Democratic debate, was listed as a "notable past member" the Clinton Global Initiative's website along with a number of other big name journalists:

A recent study found that integrating women into Marine Corps combat units had a negative effect on unit cohesion and performance. President Obama's secretary of the Navy quickly dismissed the study by attacking the integrity of the Marines who participated in it, but the full study was never even…

A new poll of the Democratic presidential primary shows frontrunner Hillary Clinton remaining under 50 percent support against Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden. The Fox News poll, which was released the day of the first Democratic debate, shows Clinton with 45 percent…

I've been saying for the last few weeks that Hillary Clinton's campaign is in a window of danger. Tonight might be the moment of maximal peril.

Tonight's Democratic presidential debate promises to focus heavily on gun control. But it wasn't too long ago that the leading Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, touted her own gun usage and asserted that Americans don't "cling to guns."

It has been clear for some time that Republicans need just two things in order to repeal Obamacare—a winning alternative and political willpower.  The jury is still out on how much of the latter the party possesses.  But when it comes to uniting around a well-conceived alternative that can pave the…

Vice President Joe Biden will be at the White House tomorrow, the day of the first Democratic primary debate. The debate will be held across the country in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

On Monday, President Obama asked Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson about her faith:

I largely agree with Lee Smith’s take on the collision between Ruben Tejada and Chase Utley in the bottom of the 7th inning at beautiful Dodger Stadium on Saturday.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Utley isn’t “to blame for Tejada’s injury”— to me, Utley’s excessively late slide deserves a…

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has a habit of trying to have it both ways on the Iran nuclear deal

President Obama's former top political adviser, David Axelrod, took some shots at Hillary Clinton in a Slate interview from over the weekend. Clinton, Axelrod said, is on "double secret, super probation" after flip-flopping and declining to support Obama's trade bill that she previously championed.

With crime rising in America and police increasingly under siege, many Senate Republicans have decided it’s a good time to liberalize federal sentencing policies—and to do so “quickly.”  One has to wonder at Republicans’ timing.  At what would appear to be a Richard Nixon or Rudy Giuliani moment,…

Bernie Sanders has been noted, above all, for his consistency. He doesn’t change his mind.  Ever.  Except, maybe, a little bit on gun control.  And this inflexibility is considered a virtue among politicians.  Especially in this season, given his opposition. 

The latest episode of Conversations With Bill Kristol, featuring Paul Cantor:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the forthcoming Democratic debate, and Joe Biden's future regarding 2016.

Just in case Vice President Joe Biden decides to enter the Democratic presidential race in the next day, CNN will be prepared. According to a CNN correspondent, the network hosting the first Democratic debate has a podium on hand for Biden.

President Obama did not provide cover for Hillary Clinton in an interview last night on 60 Minutes. Obama said that the email scandal is a legitimate issue:

Last night Major League Baseball’s chief baseball officer, Joe Torre announced that Dodgers infielder Chase Utley was suspended for game three and four of the National League Division Series. In the seventh inning of Saturday night’s game, Utley went hard into second base to break up a double play,…

It was the middle of the night in Washington, D.C.—the early morning of September 30, 2015, in Iraq—when a three-star Russian general walked into the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, announced that Russian jets would soon begin airstrikes in Syria, and demanded that the United States stop flying combat…

Wooster, Ohio

If readers weren’t made aware already by the wall-to-wall coverage, Pope Francis was recently in Washington, D.C., where he met with the president, addressed Congress, and canonized a saint (Junípero Serra) at a mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. While local…

One of the advantages of progressive government in New York City these days is that the occasional actions and pronouncements of the city council provide a certain entertainment value to outsiders. Of course, this is easy for The Scrapbook to say, since we are located 225 miles from Gotham and can…

You can find them here and there, scattered across England: the small green mounds, the hillocks and filled-in ditches, the hints of straight lines that once cut through the landscape. Just beneath the long grass lies the rich silt, piled up by the wind or washed in by the rain in the 62 years…

If you are a person of a certain age—by which I mean a person who receives unsolicited mailings from AARP—and you don’t mind old-fashioned dirty talk, you will likely find yourself utterly entranced by a wonderful new documentary called Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead. That’s especially true if you…

REO Speedwagon’s legendary guitarist Gary Richrath, a native of my hometown of Peoria, passed away on September 13 at age 65, which is a ripe old age for a rock star. His death marks an end to a musical era​—​I encourage you to skip the schlocky ballads of the band’s latter years and listen to the…

It is understandable that Donald Trump’s vulgar attack on immigrants has nicer people up in arms, and that pundits are leaping to their computers to chastise Ben Carson for saying he might not want a Muslim to be president of the United States. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing if these comments…

After the workday, far too many of us come home and turn on our televisions or our computers. But some of us indulge in more traditional, non-electronic hobbies, and these hobbies have rituals, which seem mystifying to the outsider. For example, the now-defunct North American popular culture trivia…

There is a sense among the Republican establishment that Donald Trump’s candidacy is, to quote Bob Odenkirk, a traveshamockery. That is, Trump is contaminating conservatism and diminishing the chances a Republican will win in 2016.

Say what you want about the merits of her campaign, Hillary Clinton knows exactly who she has to pander to in order to raise the exorbitant sums needed to run for president. Unions have spent over $400 million in each of the last two presidential election cycles, almost exclusively on Democratic…

Perhaps it has a low bar to clear, but The Scrapbook still believes that the Washington Post is one of the country’s better daily papers. However, the professionalism that once was a point of pride for high-profile news organizations is vanishing, and the Post is no exception. There were two…

By any objective measure, Russia has made a strategic decision to challenge America for dominance in the Middle East. Despite depressed global oil prices and economic sanctions intended to curb his Ukraine adventurism, Vladimir Putin is pursuing an undisguised effort to expand Moscow’s military…

When CBS’s 60 Minutes Wednesday broadcast its lead story—reported by Dan Rather and produced by Mary Mapes—on the evening of September 8, 2004, it was given the anodyne title “For the Record,” as though it constituted little more than a disinterested historical footnote. In reality, the story was a…

In 1991 I wrote an essay for the American Scholar called “The Ignorant Man’s Guide to Serious Music,” in which I was both the ignorant man and the guide. The essay was about my love for classical music and my hopeless inability to get beyond the stage of a coarse admiration of it. Midway through…

Consider that in Republican Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, we have a presidential candidate who during his high school years in Houston was among several students who met twice a week to read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers and the even more…

The United States, President Obama said at the U.N. General Assembly last week, “worked with many nations in this assembly to prevent a third world war—by forging alliances with old adversaries.” Presumably, the president was not referring to his deeply flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,…

In 1970, the year after Jack Kemp had retired as quarterback of the Buffalo Bills, he was elected to the House from a district covering the Buffalo suburbs. He was 35. His chief concern was the suffering of his Rust Belt constituents, beset by plant closings and high unemployment. In 1973, he…

I thought I’d wait for the furor to die down a bit before I said anything. It’s been more than two months since Go Set a Watchman was published. Presumably reviewers, pundits, liberal arts professors, people with heightened sensitivity to the role race plays in contemporary society, and the 200…

The murdering of policemen to protest alleged police targeting of black people is not a new phenomenon. Nor are chants like “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” which featured at a Black Lives Matter protest in August. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army…

The latest political happenings—the rise of Donald Trump, John Boehner’s surprise resignation as speaker of the House of Representatives, Hillary Clinton’s slide against the septuagenarian socialist Bernie Sanders—remind me of a verse from the old Rolling Stones song “Jigsaw Puzzle”:

The Yom Kippur liturgy, just followed in synagogues around the world, repeats several times references to God as one who rescues captives. The central daily Jewish prayer as well refers to God who “supports the fallen, heals the sick, sets captives free.” And throughout Jewish history, the…

Charles Simic and I both grew up in Belgrade—then Yugoslavia and now Serbia—he later and harder than I. Immigrating, he has become a notable American poet and prosaist, winning numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. He has published 20 volumes of poetry and several…

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders slagged his chief rival, Hillary Clinton, for being inconsistent in an interview this morning on NBC News’ Meet the Press. 

President Obama is very proud of himself. And he said so last night at a fundraiser in California.

Strange as it may seem, Barack Obama has much in common with the storied matchmaker of Jewish legend. This Polish entrepreneur announced to the poverty-stricken rabbi of a poverty-stricken Polish town that she had found a match for his even more poverty stricken, unattractive son – no less than the…

Hillary Clinton met with Black Lives Matter earlier today, and is now taking to Twitter to call "racism ... America's original sin."

Chelsea Clinton is officially getting into the game. The former first daughter has sent out a campaign fundraising pitch on behalf of her mother's presidential campaign.

Russian warplanes have been conducting strike in Syria.  As have U.S. fighter-bombers.  And, lest we forget, France has been doing a little bombing there as well.  As Reuters reports: 

There has been speculation that John Kerry and Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif would be selected for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

All is fine and well in the House GOP conference, according to to the Republican rank-and-file.

So far in this campaign, Jeb Bush hasn’t said anything particularly memorable (if, that is, memory serves) but now he has come out with something pithy and quotable and certain to please one half the electorate and infuriate the other.

Marco Rubio is standing up for Israel after a series of Palestinian terror attacks targeting Jews in Israel. 

On Sunday, October 4, the Central Asian former-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan held national elections to its 120-member parliament. The main incumbent party, the reforming Social Democrats (SDPK) were returned to power, and the ruling president, Almazbek Atambayev, who is their leader, gained a…

Today, Young America's Foundation (YAF) is marking the anniversary of Che Guevara's death with an anti-Che campaign. 

President Obama will be heading to Oregon tomorrow to visit Umpqua Community College, the site of a shooting rampage last week. But Obama's not heading home directly after meeting with families of the victims. Instead, the president will attend a series of West Coast fundraisers immediately after.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on Kevin McCarthy's exit from the Speaker's race and what that means for the House GOP.

It was just over a week ago when House majority leader Kevin McCarthy first considered dropping out of the race for speaker.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Tod Lindberg on his new book The Heroic Heart: Greatness Ancient and Modern.

Barbara Starr of CNN is reporting:

House speaker John Boehner has released a statement following the announcement that majority leader Kevin McCarthy is dropping out of the race for speaker. Here's the statement:

Rumors are circulating that Vice President Joe Biden may announce his run for president in any day now, and many speculate his chances of winning the primary would improve as Hillary Clinton's scandals worsen. 

Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican and House majority leader, has pulled himself out of the running to replace House speaker John Boehner. National Review Online's Eliana Johnson broke the news:

The House Select Committee on Benghazi will be making public next week new documents that demonstrate Sidney Blumenthal was seeking business in Libya as he was advising then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on U.S. policy in the country. According to a letter from Chairman Trey Gowdy to Elijah…

Anticipating the big presidential debate on CNN, candidate Bernie Sanders is doing … well, not much of anything, to get ready.  Sanders, as Gabriel Debenedetti of Politico writes:

In an essay for Mosaic, a French professor writes that it's "The Twilight of French Jewry, the Twilight of France."

Last month, CNN hosted a Republican presidential primary debate. The main event was a 3-hour affair. 

A top Hillary Clinton aide from the State Department talked up the former secretary of state's support for the trade deal just yesterday in an interview with National Public Radio. The aide, who has been defending Clinton's policies publicly, is Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former director of policy…

During the White House's Summit On Worker Voice on Wednesday, Joe Biden had a clear message for labor unions—that Hillary Clinton might not be a reliable ally, but he would be. His speech focused on his sympathies for the labor movement, his friendship with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, and the…

The father of a Virginia television reporter who was murdered on air in August is calling for "commonsense gun control legislation" on behalf of the political committee of Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe.

In August, six Republican presidential candidates appeared at a forum to discuss education reform in New Hampshire hosted by Campbell Brown. Brown, the former NBC news anchor and CNN host, has just launched a news website, The Seventy Four, dedicated to covering issues related to education reform.…

Jeb Bush is qualifying some recent criticism of fellow Floridian and GOP rival Marco Rubio. Last week the former Florida governor said that the young senator does not have the “skills to fix things” as president. (See update below.)

As Reuters is reporting:

Manchester, N.H.

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has faced criticism for his stance on eminent domain from numerous conservatives including the Club for Growth, Rand Paul, and numerous scholars on the right. On Tuesday during Special Report, Bret Baier asked Donald Trump his opinion on eminent domain.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton sent an email to supporters about gun violence. 

Yeganeh Torbati of Reuters reports:

President Obama said today that the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal would cover "40 percent of the global economy." Obama also revealed that eventually the agreement will be made available to the public.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton on the Obama foreign policy, and how our allies are reacting to it.

The ACLU's website reports on how China's communist government is working with some of the country's biggest corporations to insitute an Orwellian system to "score" every citizen:

Today, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed that Russia has violated Turkish airspace for a second time. On Saturday, a Russian plane crossed into Turkish airspace near the Syrian border, and in response the Turks scrambled two F-16s. In a subsequent incident, Ankara said that a…

About 48 hours after Pope Francis decamped from America's greatest city, reports started circulating in the press-later confirmed by the Vatican-that the Holy Father had secretly met with Kim Davis, that Kentucky clerk who refused to grant same-sex marriage licenses. Davis, you'll recall, has been…

Joe Biden was the source for an August New York Times column that documented the vice president's son's deathbed plea that Biden run for president. Politico reports:

The AP reports that:

It has become common to liken Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders. They’re both “outsiders” who have seemingly bucked the system and have struck a nerve with the base of their respective parties. For Sanders, a self-described social democrat from the most liberal state in the union, his anti-Wall…

One of the least-reported substantial policy victories in recent years was stopping Obamacare’s insurer bailout through last fall’s CRomnibus bill.  Now we can attach a price-tag to that victory:  $2.5 billion.  That’s how much taxpayers would have been funneling to President Obama’s…

Democratic National Committee vice chair Tulsi Gabbard went on MSNBC last night to call for her party to have more presidential primary debates:

Hillary Clinton took a swing at President Barack Obama for being too strict on illegal immigrants. Clinton said, in an interview with Telemundo, that she would be less strict if she becomes president of the United States.

Mismanaging a baseball team will do it.  As James Wagner reports in the Washington Post:

Writing in the Washingtonian, Benjamin Freed sounds the alarm: Metro's Ridership Is Still Falling, and Fare Hikes Might Be the Only Way to Keep Its Revenue Up.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Lee Smith on what Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama have in common: they both want Iranian dominance in the Middle East.

Arkansas senator Tom Cotton will place a hold on three ambassador nominations until the Obama administration agrees to investigate and discipline officials within the Secret Service over a leak of private personnel information about a sitting congressman.

How happy in their jobs are government workers?  Well, the sovereign answer to that question would be: “Who cares?”  They have steady work and, for most of them, it is all indoors with no heavy lifting.  And they practically have to commit a felony to get fired. 

John Boehner announced that the election to replace him will be on October 29.

Whenever I read about the European response to the current wave of “migrants” to Europe, one of the first questions that comes to mind is, “Why?” 

Following last week's tragic shooting in Oregon, Hillary Clinton is making big promises on gun control. She's even gone so far as to promise "executive action" to restrict gun sales, even though such measures would be constitutionally questionable. Even President Obama, who has not exactly been shy…

This summer, EastBanc W.D.C Partners, a prominent development company, announced the construction of two residential towers with retail space in the West End of Washington, D.C., not far from George Washington University. Included in the development are plans for multiple squash courts. The squash…

The Democratic Party is doing nothing to promote the upcoming primary debate, scheduled for next week. Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg commented this morning that there has been "no mention of [the debate] on DNC's website, or in emails or social media."

Hillary Clinton believes she's the most transparent person in American history. The Democratic presidential candidate made the claim in a town hall this morning, hosted by NBC's Today Show:

Nothing can redeem the harrowing massacre that unfolded last week at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. But something does enter on the positive side of the ledger: A genuine American hero revealed himself that day.

Just after Scott Walker bowed out of the presidential race, the New York Times headlined “Scott Walker’s Dismal Finish Is a Fitting Result, Old Foes Say”:

The recent outrage over reports of systematic child rape by Afghan security forces may be justified, but sadly there is little novelty to the reports themselves. Even the Sunday New York Times article that brought the matter into public view cited a list of earlier dispatches addressing it:…

By most accounts, Joe Biden is very close to running for president. His entry would shake up the Democratic race. But could he possibly defeat Hillary Clinton?

Mary E. Buser came to Rikers Island in the early 1990s as a student intern in social work. Returning a few years later, she worked her way up the ladder and eventually found herself in the solitary confinement wing, evaluating screaming, self-mutilating inmates to determine their suicide risk. That…

Nineteen hundred ninety-five proved to be a landmark year in the digital music revolution. It was then that a brilliant German audio technician retooled his digital sound algorithm, that a record industry executive took the helm at a new studio, and that a line worker in a C D manufacturing plant…

That aesthetic discernment can exist entirely on its own, devoid of human warmth, is demonstrated by the lives of the art connoisseurs Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark. As leading arbiters of taste in their day, both enjoyed all the trappings of success. Berenson, the oracle on Italian…

Nearly everything that was expected to happen in the 2016 presidential race hasn’t, and many things that weren’t expected have. The rise of Donald Trump—even that he would run—was not predicted. Nor was the fall of Scott Walker or the weakness of Jeb Bush’s candidacy. Polls have proved to be…

It occurred to me not long ago that, given my age and station in life, I should probably not purchase any more suits. Gazing at the contents of my clothes closet, there can be little doubt that I have more than enough to see me through the balance of my working life, and beyond—if, lest we forget,…

In fall 1991, a member of the Slovenian parliament visited me at my office at the American Enterprise Institute to discuss her country’s campaign to join NATO. I recall the intensity of the conversation and how odd her zeal seemed to me at that moment. The Cold War was over. Slovenia’s fate as a…

All of us at The Weekly Standard were shocked and deeply saddened by the terrible news last week of the death in a cycling accident of our friend Jake Brewer, at age 34. The husband of contributing editor Mary Katharine Ham, Jake was not only a person of great achievement and remarkable promise,…

On a recent Saturday afternoon in Washington, several hundred children with cancer and their families filled Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. They came from all over the country, and from Canada, to participate in a two-day program called CureFest for Childhood Cancer.…

During the British election this past year, the press reported that a certain Janek (or John) Zylinski, a Polish prince living in Britain, had taken umbrage at the anti-immigration rhetoric of Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence party, and so did what has long come naturally to Polish…

Let me risk ridicule by mentioning the ruthless Vladimir Putin and the clueless Joe Biden in the same sentence: The emergence of Putin abroad and Biden at home could reshape the 2016 Republican presidential race.

With the new fiscal year for the federal government rapidly approaching, the irresponsible and dangerous game of chicken being played with national defense continues. For most of the year, the White House and Democrats have made it clear that they will block passage of defense authorization and…

Pick Eddie Lacy. That was the advice of at least one expert back in the summer. Not a single play of the regular NFL season had been run, but it was already a busy time for those who play fantasy football and the gurus who advise them. “Lacy’s mix of stability and upside over a full season” is…

‘Trigger warnings are nothing new. The practice originated in Internet communities, primarily for .  .  .” (“Why I Use Trigger Warnings,” by Kate Manne, assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell, New York Times, September 20).

Toward Ann Coulter I had always taken a “suffer little children to come unto me” attitude. Not that she ever came on to me or anything. It’s just that she’s a kid. She was born in 1961. I’ve got skinny Brooks Brothers neckties in the back of my closet older than that.

In his weekly address on September 12, President Obama touted the Department of Education’s new “College Scorecard,” the latest, greatest tool to help high school students and their families make informed (dare we say educated?) decisions when picking a college. The website offers students a means…

Chorus: Behold the Social Justice Warrior! A personage of noble rank and title A humor-free yet potent officer. Whose functions are particularly vital! Defer, defer to the Social Justice Warrior! News item: New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players has scrapped a production of The Mikado after criticism…

Seattle

When Immanuel Kant posed his celebrated question, “Was ist Aufklärung?” in 1784, little could he have supposed that he’d inaugurate an inquiry that has yet to end and is unlikely to end soon. Appropriately, Kant’s was a philosopher’s question, not that of a historian, a question that sought answers…

Black Mass is the latest cinematic portrayal of the life and career of James “Whitey” Bulger, the gangster who ran roughshod over Boston for nearly 20 years with the odd assistance of an F B I agent whose secret informant he was. Nine years ago, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed merged the plotline of…

It's been two weeks since a majority of Congress sought to register its disapproval of the Iran deal but fell short of the votes necessary to break a filibuster or override a presidential veto, and most politicians and commentators have moved on.

There’s little doubt that Yogi Berra, the legendary New York Yankees catcher who died at age 90 on September 22, was one of the greats. Before he ever suited up for the Yankees, he was at Omaha Beach on D-Day, not quite a month after his 19th birthday. And once he did step onto a major league…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Philip Terzian reading his casual essay "Hangers On."

Banned Books Week, the American Library Association’s annual self-advertisement, has now ended for this year. Bookstores will disassemble their earnest displays of “banned books,”and the semblance of normality will return to public libraries. And we will be left with the sobering thought that, in…

You have to give Barack Obama credit for consistency.

The only word to describe Friday’s job report is ugly. The private sector created only 118,000 new jobs in September, early estimates of job creation in July and August were lowered, average hourly earnings dropped a tiny bit, the labor force participation rate dropped to its lowest level since…

President Barack Obama talked about Hillary Clinton's recent disagreements with his Syria policy by saying "there's a difference between running for president and being president."

The Washington Post fact checker looks at "repeated, misleading claim that Planned Parenthood ‘provides’ mammograms." Michelle Ye Hee Lee's conclusion is spot-on:

Secret Service agents are famously willing to take it – as in taking a bullet for the President or anyone else for whom they are providing security.  They are also, it seems, willing to dish it out.  Though not quite so lethally.  Just in the nasty, bureaucratic, secretive ways of Washington.  From…

The latest Pew poll shows that Jeb Bush has fallen to 4 percent in the Republican field. Donald Trump leads the field with 25 percent; Ben Carson is at 16 percent.

The central Illinois music scene (the ostensible subject of my magazine piece this week) was amazingly fecund in the 1970s, and worthy of a self-indulgent blog post all its own. The alpha and omega of this time and place was REO Speedwagon, and Gary Richrath enjoyed an intensely loyal following…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the next House speaker, the House GOP, and whether they abide by the Peter Principle.

Well, so bad that even the stock market didn’t like it and it usually welcomes news that restrains the Fed from raising interest rates. But this morning, the NYSE opened over 200 points in the red.

The jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: 

Some new findings on how conservative voters think about energy issues from a bevvy of top-tier GOP pollsters ought to be required reading for the eventual Republican presidential nominee. While the new polls, commissioned by the ClearPath Foundation, offer some intuitive political messaging advice…

On Thursday morning, Jeb Bush said that Marco Rubio doesn't have the "leadership skills" to fix things and likened Rubio to Barack Obama:

At CNN, Dylan Byers is reporting "'60 Minutes' used 'planted' questions, Hillary Clinton email says":

Only a few months ago, Hillary Clinton's campaign was highlighting how frugal their operation is. That's already changed. 

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the Obama administration's Syria policy, and what Russia is doing there.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is leading a charge against against the thinkers on the left, apparently. As Politico reports:

The Republican congressional leadership has been nominally--but sometimes it seems only nominally--committed to repealing Obamacare and replacing it with a conservative alternative.  Now one of the two leading candidates for House majority leader—the number-two position in leadership—is Dr. Tom…

Impossible to imagine anyone predicting this six months ago, but as Matea Gold and John Wagner of the Washington Post report

The latest epside of Converstions With Bill Kristol, featuring Newt Gingrich:

There is plenty of brown-nosing in the latest batch of Hillary Clinton's emails released by the State Department.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest compared Vladimir Putin's bombing in Syria to George W. Bush's "military solution in Iraq in the last decade." Earnest made the comparison at the daily White House press briefing.