December 2015

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on the highs and lows of 2015.

I find the Review section of the Wall Street Journal to be must-reading. But I’m inevitably backed up because, well, who has the time? (The feeling is apparently not exclusive, considering the latest tagline for the paper is "People who don't have time make time to read the Wall Street Journal."…

Earlier this week, it made news that "Bringing Peace, Security to Syria" was listed as one of the top achievements in 2015 by the Obama State Department. If this is what peace and security in Syria look like, I’d hate to see the hellish charnel house the region would have to become for the State…

Michael Dirda isn’t a scholar, although he has the learning to do scholarly things. He isn't a critic, either, although his writing consistently shows a finely edged sensibility. The man isn't even a writer, strange as that is to say about someone who has written six books, edited another dozen or…

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, a rookie who ranks 99th in seniority, gave his maiden speech on the Senate floor in November. Normally, senators use such speeches to discuss why this or that legislation is needed. Sasse, a former college president and a historian by training (Yale Ph.D.) who has…

Annapolis

There’s no upside for me in reviewing Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If I say anything interesting about its plot, I'll be criticized for publishing spoilers. If I say anything critical, I'll be accused of raining on everybody's parade. If I praise it, I'll be attacked for excessive kindness and…

It is sad to walk down a poor street lined with $60,000 houses and to see, as one often does, a $45,000 car in one of the driveways. It is often some kind of macho Mustang, freshly washed, gaudy of hue, souped up, and glittery with detailing. What are these people thinking? Why not get a perfectly…

It was a great year for the Obama administration’s foreign policy .  .  . says the Obama administration. The State Department even created a new hashtag to celebrate the White House's annus mirabilis—#2015in5Words. "Protecting Arctic Climate and Communities" and "Protecting Health of Our Ocean" are…

Sanger, Calif.

Well, we’ve endured 2015, the next to last year of the Obama administration. It's not been without damage to the country—both to its constitutional fabric and its standing in the world. But endured we have. One more year to go.

Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s top political strategist during the 2012 campaign. He knows what it feels like to lose, and he can hardly talk about that loss with anyone who hasn't experienced a campaign from the inside:

‘Qatar-based Al Jazeera—a quite credible and respected international news organization (contrary to [Mike] Ditka's assertion), the CNN of the Middle East .  .  ." (Sports Illustrated columnist Peter King, on the allegations of HGH use by Peyton Manning, Dec. 28, 2015).

In early December, Wired magazine published an interesting feature headlined “Mozilla Is Flailing When the Internet Needs It the Most." It seems that Mozilla, which makes the popular Internet browser Firefox, has seen its share of the market decrease "from 21.3 percent of browser usage in November…

‘I am a poetry lover. My knowledge of American poetry is fairly vast. And yet, I always find myself coming back to the beautiful simple elegance of 'Caged Bird,' by Maya Angelou. It's .  .  ." (Shonda Rhimes, New York Times Book Review, Dec. 22, 2015).

For a man who delved into the lives of others, not all that much is known about the life of Cornelius Tacitus, historian of Rome under the empire. He was born in 56 or 57 a.d. and is thought to have died around 125 a.d. His family came from Narbonensis (the modern Provence), or possibly from…

In recent weeks, The Scrapbook has not been unique in coming to three related conclusions about the Hillary Clinton machine. One, she’s already doubling down on running a "War on Women," identity-politics-driven campaign. Two, Hillary Clinton is such a terrible candidate and this female-centric…

The experience of being thoroughly beaten can prove to be a key turning point in life. Approached intelligently, a shattering failure can prompt rewarding questions: What could have been done differently? How could defeat have been avoided? Was the failure the result of a weakness or an opponent’s…

Within weeks of announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in June, Donald Trump seized the lead in virtually every national poll of GOP voters and has held that lead ever since. The Real Clear Politics average has Trump polling at 35.6 percent, with a 17-point spread…

In a recent investigative piece on Massachusetts General Hospital, the Boston Globe casts light on the practice, common in certain hospitals, of “double booking" surgeons. In the name of efficiency, a particularly in-demand surgeon will participate in two procedures scheduled at the same time by…

With a little more than a year left in his presidency, Barack Obama has lately been in an elegiac mood, projecting a certain nervous confidence—"I've got 12 months left to squeeze every ounce of change I can while I'm still in office"—as well as reflecting on the lessons of experience. Most of his…

The asymmetry of modern politics is clear to every conservative; painfully clear to several Yale undergraduates who asked me about it recently. Leftists, they pointed out, are hostile, nasty, and seem to have no concept of a civil conversation. Why? Because they are winning? Losing? Are…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with staff writer Jay Cost on the upcoming primaries and who among the remaining candidates has a real shot at the nomination.

POLITICO is reporting that Ohio governor and presidential candidate John Kasich has snagged a Democrat mega-donor: Ron Burkle.

Have you heard the news? The liberal arts, whose study antedates that old peripatetic from Stagira, are in jeopardy. In fact, they are in such a weakened state that public intellectuals are busy writing books with titles like In Defense of a Liberal Education, as if the study of man and man's place…

American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks penned a column recently on the culture of victimization. Brooks notes that "'victimhood culture' has now been identified as a widening phenomenon by mainstream sociologists." This culture disempowers the people it victimizes and prevents them…

It’s good news, of course, that the Japanese government has agreed to acknowledge the plight of the comfort women; the tens of thousands of women, many of whom who were Korean, who were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese military in the first half of the twentieth century. Japan has now…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on the Donald's Clinton cage match. Can the GOP learn something from his fight?

Ntokozo Qwabe, the student at Oriel College, Oxford, co-founder of Rhodes Must Fall, wants the statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from the campus because Rhodes was a "racist, genocidal maniac … as bad as Hitler." Mr. Qwabe is attending Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, running for President as a Democrat, released a few new web ads this afternoon.

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Diageo brand Smirnoff is trying to reverse declining sales of its leading vodka by focusing on … music?

The boss recently posed a very important question to Twitter:

Move over, Mystery Machine, Clintonworld has a new vehicle for the Secret Service to protect: Chelsea Clinton's $1,000 Bugaboo stroller (an import!)

The boss spoke with ABC News's Ben Bell in an interview published this weekend about the Republican nomination, what to expect in 2016, and Donald Trump's prospects in the race. Here's an excerpt:

Bill Kristol joined L.Z. Granderson, Mary Bruce, and Matt Dowd this morning on ABC's This Week:

Barack Obama is preparing for his final State of the Union Address, which he'll deliver January 12. And the president is not looking to slow down as the end of his presidency nears.

Happy New Year!

Guilty as charged. That's my response to anyone who accuses me of having spilled too much ink writing about what Janet Yellen might do, has done, and will do now that she has raised the Fed funds rate for the first time in a decade. By way of expiation, here is a look at some less-heralded…

A kid told the first lady of the United States that he will need to pop a pill in order to be able to deal with his excitment for Santa Claus. The comment came during Michelle Obama's annual NORAD Santa-Tracker phone calls with children, a transcript of which was released by the White House.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior editor Andrew Ferguson on his recent cover story "Jingle Hell" and why you can't escape Mariah Carey. And be sure to enjoy the last-minute Christmas savings on Jonathan V. Last's series of Virtues books published by our sponsor, Templeton Press. Order the…

"The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on Donald Trump's Yiddish and the 2016 race for the GOP nomination.

Dear Lawmakers,

Nigeria, once known only as Africa's most populous country, now mainly makes headlines for the eruption in its northeast of the brutal jihadist force, Boko Haram ("Western education is prohibited"). Boko Haram has occupied parts of Nigeria and invaded neighbors, including Niger, Cameroon, and Chad.…

During a speech in Iowa Tuesday, Hillary Clinton's Southern accent made a comeback. In the Midwest.

A new poll this morning released by CNN finds that Jeb Bush is at 3 percent of the vote. Donald Trump, by contrast, leads the field with 39 percent.

A federal judge has ruled that the state of Utah can cut off funds to Planned Parenthood, reversing an earlier decision requiring the state to keep funding the abortion provider.

Hillary Clinton may be planning to close a lot of schools. At a town hall event today in Keota, Iowa, Clinton said she would keep open "better than average" schools:

President Obama went golfing in Hawaii yesterday and called the press over when he reached the 18th hole. The commander in chief then made what ABC News describes as a 40-foot chip shot:

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with staff writer Michael Warren on Ted Cruz's Iowa hopes. But will the establishment strike back?

Two years ago, Forbes broke the news that famed rap group the Wu-Tang Clan had created, and would soon be auctioning, a single copy of their latest album, Once Upon A Time in Shaolin. Literally, a single copy.

The quixotic Lindsey Graham for President campaign never really left the station. Although he turned in a lively performance at several of the undercard debates and was a favorite of reporters to cover on the trail, Graham failed to not just excite but to even draw interest from voters in his White…

Monday's editorial would be hilarious if it were not that so many liberals fail to see the humor. The Old Grey Lady is concerned about "A New Cuban Exodus," driven by "hopelessness at home …and fear that the unique treatment Cuban immigrants receive from Washington could end, now that diplomatic…

This review deals largely in spoilers concerning The Force Awakens. Normally, I don't think spoilers actually spoil much, but for this case the viewing experience is greatly enhanced by coming to the movie cold. So I'd suggest you really not read this until after you've seen it.

The top Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, is pledging to find a cure Alzheimer's disease. Clinton, who is 68 years old, wants the federal government to spend $2 billion a year until a cure is found.

Chelsea Clinton announced yesterday that she and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, are expecting their second child.

Lindsey Graham may have been approaching zero in the polls when he bowed out of the race for the Republican nomination Monday, but his exit, and the aftermath, are noteworthy for a few reasons.

Glenn Beck spoke recently with Fox News about his vision of a doomsday scenario. No, this apocalypse had nothing to do with Islamists capturing Megiddo and starting a world war with Rome and Jerusalem, nor did this Armageddon include either Rosemary's progeny or the trial lawyer Al Pacino. Beck's…

Conservative critics like to carp about the New York Times and National Public Radio being woefully out of touch with, oh, about half the country. Events over the weekend demonstrate why those criticisms, while often tedious, continue to have merit.

The latest video from the Hillary Clinton campaign, titled "How the Republicans Steal Progress." The video depicts Republicans as Grinches:

The latest episode of Conversations With Bill Kristol features Leon Kass:

Ten prominent policy experts have released a new Obamacare alternative published by the American Enterprise Institute. The most important part of any Obamacare alternative is how it would address the longstanding inequality in the tax code (which favors employer-based insurance over individually…

President Obama acknowledged that he lacks "a little credibility" that his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had to fight America's enemies. Obama made the remarks in an interview with National Public Radio.

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley said on CNN today that the Democratic National Committee is actively trying to help Hillary Clinton.

Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, defended presidential candidate Ted Cruz at a rally last night in Alabama:

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the December 21st, 2015 issue's Books & Arts section.

I was on Morning Joe earlier this week, and had been planning to defend my editorial in the previous issue claiming Donald Trump was exceedingly unlikely to be the Republican presidential nominee. As I walked into the green room at 30 Rockefeller Center, one of the show's producers mentioned they…

In tonight's Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton offered praised for the fight against ISIS:

The top Democrat running for president accused her Republican counterpart of being "ISIS's best recruiter." Hillary Clinton made the charge against Donald Trump in tonight's Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire:

Reporters are being put on the ice (rink) for tonight's Democratic party primary debate in New Hampshire.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done slowly. That is official Federal Reserve Board going-forward policy. The announcement of the Fed's first interest rate increase in almost a decade, an upward move of 0.25 percent from near zero, says, and twice, that future increases…

This story originally appeared at the Washington Free Beacon.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, took to the Senate floor to give the first of a series of addresses on the separation of powers. The senator talked Thursday about the need for Republicans to hold themselves to the Constitution the same way they demand Democrats do. He asked what…

The latest theatrical installment in the Star Wars franchise, The Force Awakens, hit theaters nationwide Friday. There's plenty of good reading on the Star Wars universe for everyone from the die-hard fan to the casual viewer. Here are a few recommendations while you're waiting in line at the…

Donald Trump, fresh off his endorsement from Russian president Vladimir Putin, defended the dictator on MSNBC Friday morning. Watch the video below:

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on Trump shouting his love of Vladimir Putin, and why the Democrats are hiding their debates with a consciously poor debate strategy.

In 2008, Donald Trump, the current Republican presidential frontrunner, said, "Hillary is a great appointment," and called EPA administrator Lisa Jackson a "brilliant person, a great environmental person."

Donald Trump told Sean Hannity that he's "honored" by Vladimir Putin's endorsement of him:

Unfortunately for the Democratic National Committee and its chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, this Saturday's Democratic presidential debate seems to conflict with some other events that are likely to prevent many people from watching:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when out on the stump

Clementine Churchill (1885-1977) is best known as Winston Churchill's wife. But as Sonia Purnell's deeply researched and readable biography demonstrates, she was much more than that. Clemmie—she allowed only Winston to call her Clemmie—was both a supportive and loving wife, yet developed sufficient…

Ted Cruz has as good a chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 as Donald Trump or Marco Rubio. But there are serious doubts whether he can win the general election.

In the wake of the San Bernardino attacks, Americans must confront the undeniable reality of homegrown Islamist terrorism. We must also confront how little we have learned since 9/11 about Islam and about the Muslims who are our fellow citizens. In recent days our public officials—at least the…

The launch party for this book featured a reading from the Greek tragedy Ajax by Sophocles. Emmy-winning actor Reg E. Cathey played the tragic hero, brought to despair by his feeling that the Athenian military leadership had betrayed him, and by his sense of revulsion for an atrocity he had…

The walls are going up all over Europe; we shall not see them lowered in our lifetime. The dream of "ever-closer union," and the eventual merging of nations into a United States of Europe, is over. From the white cliffs of Dover in the west, where David Cameron refused to follow Brussels's orders…

In 1775, Fort Ticonderoga was known as the "Gibraltar of the New World." So when Ethan Allen— who was never one to think small — learned of the unpleasantness at Lexington and Concord, he proposed to muster his troops, the Green Mountain Boys, at the tavern in Bennington that was more or less their…

Throughout the debate over the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Obama administration insisted that its approach to brokering a deal with the mullahs is guided by a simple principle: "verification, not trust." Of course, by the time a deal was…

Russia's aggressive moves in the Middle East have raised speculation about a new Cold War. A more accurate description would reference the geopolitical, historical, and cultural factors underpinning Russia's imperial ambitions in the south—ambitions that preceded the Cold War and took root in the…

'The history of the Reformation is very largely a history of books and publication," writes Marilynne Robinson in an essay on the schism within Western Christianity and one of the great seismic movements of the last millennium. On the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation comes this…

At minimum it is unseemly, at maximum an example of chutzpah as practiced in Silicon Valley. Having shot themselves in the foot, some prominent tech billionaires want the president to bypass Congress and minister to their wound. They have poured cash into his campaign coffers, and now is payback…

Let's begin with the conclusion: Barack Obama is releasing dangerous terrorists against the recommendations of military and intelligence professionals, he's doing so at a time when the threat level from radical Islamists is elevated, and he is lying about it. He is lying about how many jihadists he…

Every morning, I make an egg for my son. The task doubles as a chance for daydreaming, a rare occurrence when you're the parent of a toddler. I strap Henry into his chair, toss a few Cheerios in his direction, and get to work.

In a lighter moment of William Blake's life, a friend encountered him and his wife Catherine reading Paradise Lost in their garden. Naked. Blake supposedly told the friend, "Come in! It's only Adam and Eve, you know."

The Washington Post has been filled with gender of late. On December 5, a front-page article trumpeted successes in getting toy stores to eliminate separate boys' and girls' aisles. The British branch of Toys "R" Us has been won over online as well, removing gender labels from its website, though…

Recently, the Atlantic magazine held a summit in Washington on gay rights. Describing what took place as a "summit," however, might be generous. As far as civil discourse goes, what took place was more of a nadir. And it is a worrying sign that the antidemocratic mania we've seen on college…

There is a video on the World Wrestling Entertainment's website called "Donald Trump's Greatest WWE Moments," which invites you to "Watch Donald Trump put his money where his mouth is in some of his most memorable WWE appearances." The video lasts for three minutes. In it, you can watch Trump slam…

As college campuses shut down for winter break, the Maoist insanity that gripped American higher education this fall hit a new high-water mark. At Harvard, little laminated posters began appearing in the student dining halls with instructions on how students should discuss sensitive political…

Imagine that your local grocery store is suddenly owned by the state. All the store's products and prices are set by central planners; who control when deliveries are made and which goods are sent to what stores. These stores routinely stock out-of-date products no one wants and refuse to carry new…

The self-regard of journalists, the plain old-fashioned infatuation they feel for themselves and for their jobs, is familiar to readers. But this past week, even by the onanistic standards of the trade, the Washington Post set a new high-water mark for professional narcissism.

With just over a month until the Iowa caucuses, the Republican nomination field is taking clearer form. Of the original 17 candidates, only 4 can be said to remain in top contention: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson.

In many ways, the current TV scene resembles a time warp. From The Muppets to Fargo, it's a good season for nostalgia. As the first ads for a miniseries revival of The X-Files begin to air, production is well underway on another '90s cult classic: Twin Peaks. Of course, the sudden spate of remakes,…

It's said that hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. At first blush, that's Ukraine. On a recent visit to Kiev, we heard account after account of the problems facing Ukraine, the two most serious being corruption and the ongoing conflict with Russia. Two doozies, to be sure.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens wide at midnight tonight and I don't want to get out over my skis here, but it's pretty much the most important movie in the history of cinema.

A new group called the Energy Equality Coalition launched on Thursday. The group's goal is to "end taxpayer subsidies and ensure a level playing field for middle-class American energy consumers."

"The United States and our partners are not seeking regime change in Syria," John Kerry said in Moscow this week. The announcement that the White House is fully in line with the position of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's Russian and Iranian sponsors caught some by surprise. Others argue that…

Tuesday's debate wasn't boring, exactly. There was a good deal of substance and some demolition derby, too. Also, there was some real news toward the end when Trump doubled down on staying in the Republican party and not running a third-party candidacy if someone else is the nominee. But I don't…

"London property has become the bitcoin of the global kleptocracy," says British journalist Ben Judah. Indeed, 37,000 properties in the British capital are owned by offshore companies. That's about 10 percent of all property in central London. And much of this property was purchased using money…

Aziz Ansari, for those of you recently emerged from your post-Obama-reelection survival bunkers, is a very funny comedian, known mainly as Tom Haverford on NBC's now defunct Parks and Recreation, as well as approximately 17,000 stand up specials. His new series Master of None, a half hour "dramedy"…

President Obama's National Drug Control Strategy in 2010 first proclaimed the major policy goals of the administration's approach to the drug problem and the goals were to be met by 2015. Not only have they not been met, in critical instances, the policies have been going in the wrong direction,…

The once-frontrunner in the presidential race, Jeb Bush, is now the anti-Donald Trump candidate. He began this new phase of his candidacy in Tuesday's Republican debate in Las Vegas. And in an appearance last night on Fox News' Hannity, Bush continued his broadsides against Trump:

Billionaire Investor Sam Zell says Donald Trump should not be understimated.

Open warfare has broken out between the respective presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio for Florida, just 24 hours after the Republican senators traded barbs and debated their records in Las Vegas.

The Obama administration is set to release another 17 detainees from Guantánamo Bay. The New York Times reports that the defense secretary has notified Congress of the iminent transfers:

The day after a well-received debate performance that involved a contentious exchange with rival Marco Rubio about immigration, Texas senator Ted Cruz joined Fox News's Bret Baier and faced some difficult questions about his own murky position. The interview, aired live on Fox Wednesday night,…

The Republican National Committee posted a video of Hillary Clinton admitting that Obamacare creates adverse incentives. During an exchange between Clinton and a questioner, Clinton noted, "we have built in some unfortunate incentives that discourage full-time employment."

Chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Richard Burr, has reportedly asked staff to review comments Senator Ted Cruz made during Tuesday's Republican presidential debate, as they may have included classified information.

Donald Trump walked into the final GOP debate of 2015 trailing Ted Cruz in Iowa but leading the field in New Hampshire and national polls. It seems unlikely that anything that happened in Las Vegas will change that dynamic.

Saturday's Wall Street Journal revealed that the Federal Reserve has been conducting numerous exercises to explore would it could to arrest the growth of asset bubbles as well as the risks inherent in doing such a thing (as opposed to nothing about it, which has been the standard operating…

After retaking the House of Representatives, Congressional GOP leaders beat a consistent drum for fundamentally reforming our tax system, an elusive goal since the historic 1986 tax reforms.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on last night's CNN GOP debate.

President Obama needs to accept that our current conflict is as much against the idea of radical jihadism as it is against the physical presence of ISIS. Furthermore, by failing to define the religious-political ideology underpinning the enemy, the president contributes to an environment where all…

With a deadline looming, congressional leaders unveiled "sweeping" tax and spending legislation late last night. The result makes one wonder whether congressional Republicans negotiate directly with President Obama on these deals, or whether they just send corporate lobbyists‎ to do so, thereby…

Dissenting from his eight fellow Justices in 1964, John Marshall Harlan II accused the Warren Court of stretching the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause on the judicial activism rack. Essentially, Harlan argued, the "One Person, One Vote" doctrine—as the Reynold v. Sims ruling quickly became…

The Frank Luntz focus group, broadcast in part last night on Fox News, found that Chris Christie may have had a breakout night in Las Vegas:

Some passing observations on the Republican debate in Las Vegas:

If there was one moment of Tuesday's GOP debate that has the most potential to alter the race, it had to be the heated exchange between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz over immigration.

Donald Trump may have been at the middle of the lineup during the Republican debate, but it was Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio—and their debate over national security, foreign policy, and immigration—who took center stage. The two Cuban-American, first term senators sparred in some of tensest…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on tonight's CNN GOP Presidential Debate

It looked like a four-man race going in. It looks even more that way coming out. The nominee is likely to be either Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Chris Christie. I don't know where the polls will go, but you could argue that all four of them helped themselves at the Las Vegas debate.

During Tuesday's Republican presidential debate, the Washington Post's Matea Gold tweeted this bleak picture of a debate watch party for Jeb Bush in his home state of Florida:

The Environmental Protection Agency misused tax dollars in the service of public propaganda, according to a legal opinion just handed down by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The misdeeds came during the agency's public-relations blitz to drum up support for its new Waters of the United…

Brands these days want to do all they can to connect with rich, tech savvy Millennials. They key to this newer, hipper generation is "engagement" with brands on the Internet and on social media.

Via Commentary's Noah Rothman, I see The New York Times is up with a feature on Florida senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio's new television ad airing in New Hampshire and Iowa. In the middle of describing the ad, the article contains this gem:

So dominant is Hillary Clinton's polling in the presidential primaries, notes the press critic Howard Kurtz, that the media have essentially stopped paying attention to the Democratic race at all. The logic, for a media organization, is simple: Why lavish limited resources on a fait accompli? The…

Tuesday's Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas is the final GOP primary debate of 2015. With about a month and a half before the first primary contest—the Iowa caucuses on February 1—it's become clear the field of plausible contenders is much smaller than the 13 Republicans who will debate…

Fred Barnes, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Chinese internet giant Alibaba's purchase of one of Asia's great newspapers, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post (SCMP), should be a cause for concern for all who value an independent press. While Alibaba executive vice chairman Joseph Tsai claimed that the company would continue to allow the SCMP…

Democratic leaders won't stop talking about their plan to ban anyone on the terrorism watch list from purchasing a gun, and it's not hard to see why. President Obama's approval rating on the issue of terrorism is in the gutter, and talking about the terror watch list gun ban helps shift the debate…

When the Democrats passed Obamacare (without a single Republican vote), part of how they were allegedly going to pay for it was through a "Cadillac tax" on expensive employer-based insurance. Yet, this week, many Republicans are working with Democrats to delay or even repeal this tax. For three…

Ted Cruz is not Rand Paul.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Jonathan V. Last on the upcoming STAR WARS movie, and his new book, The Christmas Virtues: A Treasury of Conservative Tales for the Holidays.

On Saturday, December 12, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia held local elections. Polling covered 343 constituencies, according to the Jidda-based Arab News. It was the third recent Saudi municipal balloting, following votes in 2005 and 2011. The 2005 election was the first since 1965, after 40 years.

Take that, Gerald Ford. Donald Trump, if he becomes president, would be the "healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency." His blood pressure and lab test results are "astonishingly excellent." His most recent medical exam showed only "positive results."

On November 28th, Tyson Fury did the unexpected—he beat Wladimir Klitschko, the Ukrainian pugilist who had gone eleven years without a loss. More importantly, in beating Klitschko, Fury, a 27-year-old Mancunian and the son of Irish Travelers, dethroned one of boxing's last true titans and captured…

President Barack Obama says his administration will continue releasing terrorists from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so long as those released are less dangerous than the jihadists currently fighting against the U.S. and its interests.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows Hillary Clinton crushing Donald Trump in a head-to-head general election matchup. While Clinton leads Trump by 10 points (50 percent to 40 percent) and Texas senator Ted Cruz by 3 points (48 percent to 45 percent), the likely Democratic nominee trails…

Ourzazate

Bill Kristol joined Nancy Gibbs, Robin Wright, and David Brody, yesterday on ABC's This Week:

The international conference on climate change attracted thousands of delegates from almost 200 nations. The Conference of the Parties21, so named for the parties that signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 and had come to Paris for what was their 21st conference, came to an…

When UNESCO voted in 2011 to admit the "State of Palestine" as a member despite the fact that there is no "State of Palestine," the United States suspended paying dues to the organization. This was done in accordance with U.S. law, because Congress had forbidden paying dues to any UN organization…

Cruz in Command

This is the moment I want to see from one of the Republicans facing off against Donald Trump Tuesday night:

It's official: Ted Cruz leads the polls in Iowa less than two months before the caucuses and may very well be in the lead for the Republican nomination. The newest poll from the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg has the Texas senator with 30 percent support among likely GOP caucusgoers, placing…

The boss appeared on Morning Joe Thursday morning and talked about Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie. He is confident one or more of them could defeat a talented demagogue like Donald Trump.

Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz delivered a foreign policy speech that was meant to carve out a position between the interventionist and isolationist wings of the Republican party. Instead, the candidate for the Republican nomination for president of the United States showed that his ship of state would…

"I'll build a stairway to Paradise," promised songwriter George Gershwin decades ago. Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen is about to try to do the same, taking interest rates up that stairway, from the zero level set during the hellish days of the financial crisis to the Paradise of normality or…

Gallup reports that

Members of an audience waiting to hear from Hillary Clinton in Oklahoma Friday audibly groaned when it was revealed the Democratic presidential candidate would be late for the event.

The Paris Climate Conference closes on Friday. All the set pieces of the expected drama have played out: an Obama speech, hand-wringing by Western Europe, pleas of poverty by China and India, and a draft agreement coming in just before the deadline closes.

A new ad from Future 45, "an independent organization devoted to educating voters about the challenges facing our country," highlights Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's role in the Obama administration's failed Syria policy.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on the week that was for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama.

Bloomberg reports that

As he's campaigned around New Hampshire over the last several months, Chris Christie says plenty of voters would approach him after his events to tell him, "You're in my top three." In an interview earlier this week with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the New Jersey governor shared a hopeful development on…

Marrakesh

Hillary Clinton may be low-energy. In an interview last night with NBC's Seth Meyers, Clinton admitted that the campaign "is incredibly demanding and exhausting."

Some shocking results from the latest New York Times poll:

When Ash Carter stood at the podium on December 3 to reveal the most profound social change in military policy in at least a half-century, he stood alone. Absent from the defense secretary's announcement that all ground combat jobs were to be opened to women were the uniformed service chiefs and…

Though the release of The Great Fire was probably timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide, this scholarly yet engaging account is concerned with the September 1922 burning of Smyrna, following its occupation by the Turkish nationalist army, and the mass slaughter…

Thomas Duesterberg offers a partisan’s perspective on a statesman’s career.

New York

Should the United States militarily defeat jihadist outfits in the Middle East? After 9/11 the answer seemed easy, but after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Barack Obama is not alone in arguing that large-scale offensive campaigns against radical Muslim movements aren't worth the cost. Even if…

The United States Navy, like its sister services, is first and foremost a war-fighting organization. Its reason for being, boiled down beyond recent recruiting slogans touting it as "a global force for good" or highlighting the Navy's important work in disaster relief and humanitarian assistance,…

On December 2, George T. "Joe" Sakato died at the age of 94. Enlisting in the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sakato was assigned to the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a fighting force consisting of second-generation Japanese Americans that saw heavy action in Europe. The 442nd…

"Cameron moved so far to the left," a journalist told me in London, "that he pushed Labour into the sea. Then it reemerged as a monster." That's not really why David Cameron's Conservatives won the May general election, but the vivid description of what happened next illustrates how bleak the…

While the campus grievance mongers cry for Justice! and continue their drive for power and safe spaces, I note an extraordinary story in the latest issue of Stanford, the bimonthly magazine of the Stanford Alumni Association. Take this in very slowly:

In the city where I live, one of the pop music radio stations shifts to an all-Christmas music format beginning in .  .  . oh, I don't know, late August?

When I first read Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which many critics consider to be one of the greatest American plays, I was puzzled. "What's Willy Loman's problem?" I said to myself. He was not like any salesman I knew—and I knew many because my father was a salesman, and so were most of his…

On December 6, Barack Obama addressed the nation from the Oval Office for just the third time in his tenure. The president sought to reassure the American people that he has a strategy for defeating ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), just days after supporters of the self-declared…

Newark, New Jersey, may have been an idyllic American pastoral in the days of Philip Roth's youth, but you wouldn't want to be a kid there in this century. Drugs, gangs, and the 70 percent single-motherhood rate aside, education had become ancillary to the purpose of Newark public schools.…

President Obama spent the weeks leading up to the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks talking about how ISIS was contained and shaming those who think the government won't do a good job screening the thousands of Syrian refugees he insists on America taking in. When reality suddenly eviscerated…

On January 15, 1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote proudly from Prague to his friend Baron Gottfried von Jacquin: "Here nothing is talked about except Figaro; nothing is played, blown, sung, and whistled except Figaro; no opera draws the crowds like Figaro. It's always Figaro. Certainly it's a…

In the National Football League, it is the year of the orthopod. Football, the cognoscenti like to say, is a game of injuries, but this year, it sometimes seems as though that's all that it is. That, and the blown call, anyway.

Key West

Contrary to popular belief, The Scrapbook is not interested just in affairs of state or in cultural controversies. The Scrapbook takes a healthy interest in trivial matters as well. Consider, for example, the new speaker of the House, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, whose boyish demeanor has caused a…

Christmas these days is signaled not by the music played in shops and the wreaths hung along lampposts, but by the increasingly heavy load of catalogues that begin arriving in the mail late in October. Pity the poor mailman, having to lug such stuff around. These catalogues give recycling a bad…

Coming soon to a girls' locker room in a high school near you: the Obama administration's transgender gendarmes.

"Some idiot just flew his plane into the World Trade Center," a friend told me over the phone, so I turned on the TV in time to see the second plane go into the south tower, and I watched the TV more or less constantly until late in the afternoon, when I took a break for a couple of hours before…

In naming German chancellor Angela Merkel its "person of the year," Time has made a bold departure from tradition. Often as not, the magazine gives the honor to a vague collectivity: "the Peacemakers," "the Whistleblowers," "The American Soldier," "the Good Samaritans," the "Ebola fighters," "the…

On a New Yorker panel nearly a dozen years ago, in the wake of the publication of his novel Snow, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk set forth an emphatic credo. "Our moral duty," he said, "is to pay attention to the humanity of everybody." And since the subject of the panel was "Literature and Politics,"…

On December 7, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a federal investigation of the Chicago police department. Recent history shows that the Obama Department of Justice cannot be counted on to perform a competent investigation, but at least this particular inquiry is not without cause. The city…

No, this is a disappointment. To read the 132 poems chosen by this volume's editor, Christopher Carduff, is to realize that John Updike is not a poet well served by the popular impulse that reduces a large body of work to a greatest-hits anthology.

A few days before the opening of its new term, the Supreme Court accepted for review a case from Texas that could prove one of the Court’s most important this year—provided that the justices actually get to decide it.

At full tide, 9 of the 17 Republicans running for the 2016 presidential nomination were current or former governors. There was a perfectly good reason so many were in the race: Governors have an advantage with voters. They are executives who make real-life decisions, not just talk about doing so.…

CNN is reporting:

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with staff writer Jay Cost on Trump and the polls.

While Ted Cruz has been willing to engage in back-and-forth debates with some of his GOP rivals—most notably and recently his Senate colleague Marco Rubio—the Texas Republican has refrained from disagreeing or distinguishing himself from the party's frontrunner, Donald Trump. At least publicly,…

The Obama administration is poised to remove sanctions on Iran as soon as January, after the United Nations's nuclear regulatory body—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—released a report concluding the country had pursued a nuclear weapons program until 2009, but had not done so since…

Reuters reports that:

Donald Rumsfeld once said that "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." He could have said the same for Presidents—we go to war with the president we have, not the president we might want or wish to have.

"The magazine of the Islamic State orders Muslim parents to withdraw their children from French schools and calls for them to kill those who teach there." Thus declares a recent headline in the French press.

In the fight over which policy riders get into the year-end CR/Omnibus, the Democrats are bluffing left and right..

In this week's magazine, I have a long piece about the campus protests that engulfed colleges across the country this fall. The story is by turns absurd, comedic, and worrisome.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded to Donald Trump's recent comments regarding Muslims.

Senator Ted Cruz will visit the Heritage Foundation Thursday to deliver a blistering attack on the Obama administration's handling of jihadist terror and the region that produces it.

Donald Trump seems to have dominated this year's White House Hanukkah Party.

The day after the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Attorney General Loretta Lynch attended a dinner in Washington held by the Muslim Advocates, a Muslim-rights organization. Lynch made no direct mention of the attacks but addressed the Justice Department's responsibilities in light of what she…

A prominent Hispanic political activist in Nevada who was once touted by the Jeb Bush campaign as a supporter has said he will caucus for Marco Rubio next year.

The New York Times has a short article today that seems primed to cause maximum alarm, headlined, "Jeb Bush's Tax Plan Would Cause $8.1 Trillion Budget Hole, Analysis Finds."

Just before Thanksgiving, Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), proposed an amendment that would essentially prohibit Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that purchase, repackage and resell home mortgages, from taking any steps to rebuild capital or to sell any of the government's…

The EU has never looked worse. Last week alone, Denmark rejected the deepening of ties with the EU in a referendum, France's anti-EU party received a leading number of votes in its regional election, and Sweden, Germany, and Austria have all reinstated border control—effectively ending Schengen for…

Marrakesh

The College Football Playoff Selection Committee's 4-team playoff field generated very little controversy this season, but the process—and the rankings that it yielded—raised two concerns for future seasons.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, went to the Senate floor yesterday evening to explain that the U.S. is engaged in a war with radical Islam. "We are at war," Sasse said. "Washington ignores what it cannot escape."

The secretary of state blasted the lead Republican presidential candidate in remarks today in Paris:

Not so very long ago, commentators used to talk about human evolution. No, not actual, Darwinian evolution. This evolution was more along the lines of wishful thinking. In the 19th century, Marx and his followers rejected so-called "bourgeois morality" (which properly recognized that humans, if…

In the wake of the San Bernardino shooting by a radicalized Muslim couple, House and Senate Democrats have spent the week pushing a dead-on-arrival measure to restrict gun purchases by those on the FBI's no-fly list.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on Donald Trump and his recent proposal to restrict immigration and travel by Muslims to the United States.

Latin American politics has a tendency to resemble the magical realism made famous by the "boom" generation of southern-hemisphere writers a few decades ago; just when you think you've reached solid, stable ground, everything shifts and you find yourself more disoriented than when you started. It…

The Washington Post is treating seriously Senator Harry Reid's claim that "the current Senate was 'the most unproductive Senate in the history of the country, and there are facts and figures to show that.'"

Crude trades below below $40. Copper has "sunk as low as around $4,440 in late November, the lowest in some six and a half years." Larry Summers is warning in the Washington Post that:

Texas senator and GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz declined on Tuesday to discuss the constitutionality of Donald Trump's call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States"--a ban that would also apply to Muslim U.S. citizens living abroad, according to a Trump…

On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan blasted Donald Trump's proposal to ban all Muslims from entering America..

The left, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, is now gunning for the bond markets. It isn't a surprise that all markets, including bond markets, move and change with supply and demand. This is a simple principle that guides businesses, investors, and markets around the world. However, much of the left…

In the near future, 18-year-olds in Cleveland, Ohio, will be able to vote and enlist in the military. But they won't be old enough to buy a pack of smokes.

I remain perplexed by the current "debate" over gun laws. After President Obama's speech on Sunday, a great many pundits seemed to have raced forward with evaluating the political considerations of pitching new gun control laws for 2016. However, it seems to me that the logical and rhetorical…

At least since President Obama referred to the Islamic State (ISIS/Daesh) as a "JV" team, his administration has been criticized for approaching the rapidly expanding terror organization with a lack of seriousness. Especially in light of last week's San Bernardino slaughter, the State Department's…

A top aide to Hillary Clinton is attacking Donald Trump for his proposal for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."

Law enforcement officials in San Bernardino and Los Angeles may have investigated Syed Farook one week before the shooting on the community development center on December 2, 2015, that left 14 dead and 17 injured, according to a review of police communications immediately following the attacks.

December 7, 1941 was, as President Roosevelt said a day later when he asked Congress for a declaration of war, "A date which will live in infamy." HIs speech lasted seven minutes. The attack united the American people who had been bitterly divided on the matter of entering the war that was…

Donald Trump, scourge of Gotham, running roughshod over all convention, meanly belittling all in his way, ugly red hair ablaze above remarkably histrionic gestures and facial expressions, is an almost perfect avatar of Batman's nemesis The Joker (Cesar Romero version).

In this week's edition of the boss's Kristol Clear e-newsletter (sign up here!)-- readers are asked to rank their top three picks for the GOP's 2016 presidential nominee. The boss's impressions of Iowans seem to be borne out by the new Monmouth poll.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the President's speech to the nation on terrorism.

He may be the Democrats' second choice in the polls, but Bernie Sanders has topped Hillary Clinton as the people's choice in Time magazine's annual Person of the Year vote.

Texas senator Ted Cruz has taken the lead in a new poll of likely Republican voters in Iowa. The Monmouth University poll has Cruz with 24 percent support in the Hawkeye State, overtaking Donald Trump (at 19 percent). In a close third is Florida senator Marco Rubio, with onetime Iowa leader Ben…

President Barack Obama lives in a "fantasy world" and is trying to "distract" from the challenges Islamic terrorism poses. That was New Jersey governor Chris Christie's takeaway from the president's Sunday evening address from the Oval Office. In an exclusive interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD…

Chris Christie called for Congress push to restore the National Security Agency's metadata collection program as part of its forthcoming spending bill. In an exclusive interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD Monday morning, the New Jersey governor and Republican presidential candidate also took on some…

To understand Donald Trump's surprising ability to remain at the top of the polls, it is necessary to understand why the attacks of his critics misfire. The best place to start is with the continually uncomprehending New York Times. A story on page 1 et seq. levels what its authors must consider…

Ben Sasse, a Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, went to San Bernardino last night to deliver a rebuttal to President Obama's speech to the nation on terrorism.

Or, the choice of Time Magazine readers anyway. Seems that Bernie Sanders, who at this time last year was a marginal figure in American politics, "has topped Hillary Clinton as the people's choice in Time magazine's annual Person of the Year vote."

The latest Conversation With Bill Kristol, featuring Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield:

Golfers have a hard time explaining the appeal of their game to those who do not play. And in fact, golfers sometimes have a hard time accounting for their passion even to themselves. The old quip about how a round of golf is a “good walk spoiled” seems to stick with a lot of people. But buried in…

Long before cannons, muskets, blood, and bitter sacrifices settled the question of American independence, a revolution occurred “in the minds and hearts of the people,” John Adams recalled late in life.

Whenever I feel a twinge of despair over America’s challenges—a not infrequent occurrence—I ask myself a simple question: “What year or decade would you like to return to?” It’s a useful exercise for anyone harboring undue pessimism about the future or gauzy nostalgia for the past. Americans have a…

Scrapbook friend and frequent Weekly Standard contributor Ike Brannon, a visiting fellow at the Cato Institute, emailed us last week upon hearing of the death of a legendary economist: 

At first she was the “Aunt From Hell,” with an #AuntFrom-Hell hashtag to match. Jennifer Connell, age 54, had sued her young nephew, Sean Tarala, for $127,000 over an incident at the boy’s eighth birthday party in 2011. Sean had impetuously jumped into Connell’s arms to greet her when she arrived…

By the late 19th century, the majority of working scientists, including geologists, had come to accept that the Earth was a very, very old place, as evidenced by an extensive fossil record. This acceptance had not come easily, but the unearthing of strange Triassic mammals and marine creatures and…

A reader writes: “I just finished reading Aaron MacLean’s article ‘A Family Affair,’ in your November 9 issue, reporting the recent retirement of General John F. Kelly from the Marine Corps. I am deeply grateful for the supremely moving description of General Kelly’s life and in particular…

Oh, holy Moses. It’s probably the headline of the year, and possibly even of the millennium. From Haaretz, November 23: “Jewish Law Was Never Meant to Be Set in Stone.”

Vladimir Putin has systematically worked to rehabilitate the image of Stalin, downplaying his record of mass murder while celebrating his role as the architect of victory in World War II. But Stalin almost lost that war before he won it. Disregarding multiple warnings from the West, and even his…

Who lured his cousin, confidant, and sovereign by promising him sex with one of their famously virtuous relatives, and then stabbed him repeatedly, remaining in the bloody murder chamber for more than three hours afterwards, to laugh and joke about it with his lackey-accomplices? We know from the…

At the University of Missouri, feminist professor Melissa Click cried out “I need some muscle over here!” to expel a reporter from the Concerned Student 1950 protest in a public quad. A more apt encapsulation of what conservatives feel ails academia—identity obsession, rights-curbing,…

Barack Obama says he wants the truth. On November 21, the New York Times reported allegations that military intelligence officials provided the president with skewed assessments that minimized the threat from ISIS and overstated the success of U.S. efforts against the group. The Times story was an…

This attentive, magnificently written, and profoundly researched biography of Henry Kissinger before he took office is stunningly good, and stuns as much for what it does not say as what it does. Earlier Kissinger biographers have tried to comprehend him, not quite in order to forgive his crimes…

New York Post columnist Michael Riedel has great timing: Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway arrives just as Times Square has once again become the center of controversy in New York. Sleaze and swindling are on the rise in the form of aggressive panhandling by costumed superheroes and cartoon…

Last week, CNN global affairs correspondent Elise Labott—who according to her Twitter bio is also a self-appraised “truth seeker”—was suspended from the network for two weeks for editorializing on social media. The offending tweet was this: “House passes bill that could limit Syrian refugees.…

When Hillary Clinton announced her opposition to the Keystone pipeline from Canada, she said climate change was the reason. In the first Democratic presidential debate (CNN), Martin O’Malley listed the greatest national security threats to America as nuclear Iran, ISIS, and “climate change, of…

If you were to acquire political information only from former and current officials of the Obama administration, you would think the Republican party is borderline seditious. President Obama himself regularly castigates Republican motives as un-American. Last week, in a typical tweet aimed at…

The federal technocracy, like the old B-horror-movie monster The Blob, grows by sucking all surrounding life into its amoeba-like digestive system. There are never enough bureaucratic controls or government programs to “incentivize” us—in the jargon—to behave in ways the technocrats think best.

How many literary genres and how many specialized backgrounds can one novel encompass? The latest from Gerard Woodward, a British writer frequently shortlisted for prestigious literary awards, has aspects of war, espionage, coming-of-age, comedy, mystery, saga, gay romance, and courtroom drama. It…

In a city where the sine qua non of life is failure, it is amazing that political miscarriages don’t receive more studious treatment. But in The Peace That Almost Was, Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, offers us a splendid treatment in this meticulously researched…

If you get your news from the headlines, you can be excused for thinking that “Minnesota men” pose a special risk of taking up the terrorist jihad at home and abroad. As the Wall Street Journal reported this past April, for example, “U.S. charges six Minnesota men with trying to join ISIS.” The…

Hearing about someone else’s office politics can often be like eavesdropping on his class reunion, the narrative too narrowly tribal to interest those of us beyond the clan. Even so, for more than half a century, books about the inner workings of the New Yorker have attracted a loyal audience. Dale…

The lowering of the state flag from the campus of the University of Mississippi in October is another salvo in the war over that emblem’s future. Voting 41-1 in the faculty senate, university officers cited many of the arguments—the divisiveness of the symbol, a sea change in public opinion, and a…

Friends of mine once saved for a trip to Europe by emptying their pockets at the end of each day and placing any money in a big plastic jug. Occasionally, when short of cash, they had to turn the jug upside down and withdraw a bill or two with a pair of tweezers, but the system worked. After a…

Next month the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, one of the most important cases this term. In 2008 Fisher, a white high school senior in Texas, applied for admission to the university and was turned down. She sued the school, claiming that its…

New York

It's inspiring when a leader meets a moment and takes charge. President Obama didn't come close to doing that Sunday night in his Oval Office speech.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on President Obama's speech to the nation tonight on terrorism.

President Obama will address the nation tonight at 8 p.m. EST. But before his speech on ISIS, Obama is meeting at the White House with a slew of celebrities as part of the Kennedy Center Honors Reception.

In an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Hillary Clinton appeared to liken the terror attack last week in San Bernardino with the "American assault on Planned Parenthood" the week before...

Talk about unbelievable. There is a surge of stupid statements from the left along with incredible (as in "beyond credulity") claims coming from those quarters that are so nonsensical that it's clear they place their ideology above all else.

Presidential Poll Results

President Obama used his address to the nation on ISIS and terrorism to push for gun control. "This is a matter of national security," Obama said from the Oval Office.

Thanks to a law recently passed by Congress and signed into law, federal law enforcement are unable to access phone records of the terrorists who killed or injured dozens of people in San Bernardino this week. The Associated Press reports:

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on guns, terrorism, and Trump.

Russian truck drivers angry about a new road tax moved their protest into Moscow on Friday. Traffic around the city was snarled by both truckers and police, who had set up temporary roadblocks to interrogate drivers they suspected might be on their way to join the revolt.

President Obama used the terror attack in California this week to push gun control. In his weekly address, Obama called the massacre an "act of terror" but then pivoted to talking about American gun laws.

Christmas came early this year for Janet Yellen and those of her monetary policy committee colleagues eager to begin raising interest rates. Just a tiny bit, but enough to show that they remember how to do that after eight years of holding rates to just about zero. First gift: Santa, disguised as a…

The U.S. Senate voted 52-47 on Thursday night to repeal almost all of Obamacare. The bill also stripped almost all federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the billion-dollar non-profit that performs more than 300,000 abortions each year. All Senate Republicans voted for the bill except Mark Kirk of…

The VA set out to send a stern disciplinary message to some scammers in the higher levels of its bureaucracy but, well you know, things happen. As Kellie Lunney of Government Executive reports:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Senior Fellow and frequent contributor Thomas Joscelyn on the recent mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

Retail politics has always been a cornerstone of running for president in the early states. How many New Hampshire diners visited, how many Iowa farm animals petted, and the list of South Carolina pastor endorsements are among the ways campaigns tally their performance leading into the caucuses and…

On Thursday, Defense secretary Ash Carter denied the Marine Corps's request to keep some combat roles exclusively open to men. "There will be no exceptions," Carter said in remarks announcing that all combat units must be open to women. "This means that, as long as they qualify and meet the…

On Friday, several news stations, including MSNBC, CBS, and CNN, went inside the apartment of the San Bernardino shooters, and aired what they saw.

Days after the ISIS-organized attacks in Paris last month, President Obama publicly criticized Republicans for being afraid of allowing women and children to enter the country as refugees from the Middle East. Obama scolded unnamed Republican politicians for rhetoric that would serve as a "potent…

In the Obama era, incremental conservative progress that gets signed into law is a rare thing.

It seems that:

In his interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, New Jersey governor Chris Christie explains that the Obama administration has got it wrong. "Iran is a greater threat than ISIS. If you're prioritizing the threats, which a president has to do, then I think that Iran is a greater threat than…

In a new national poll of possible Republican primary voters, Donald Trump has a large, 20-point lead with 36 percent support. The poll from CNN shows Trump's closest rival is Ted Cruz at 16 percent, with Ben Carson at 14 percent and Marco Rubio at 12 percent. On the other end of the poll, one-time…

In an article for Mosaic, Michael Doran writes:

The head of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, believes the Syrian refugees of today are like the European Jews of 1939. Wasserman Schultz made the claim in a conference call to explain how "out-of-touch" Republicans are with the Jewish community.

The other day, sitting around naked in a Bavarian hotel with a woman I'd just met, I thought of the best-mannered person I ever knew. Andrzej came from an elegant Warsaw family. I met him at the very end of his long and difficult life, when he was singing "Sto Lat" at his American grandsons'…

There are lots of good reasons for conservatives to cheer when various Republican candidates propose a consumption tax, or a tax on spending as some call it, or, in one of its most used forms, a value-added tax (VAT).

Anyone interested in the forces of globalization should read this book. Those interested in the movement of capital, people, and goods across North America, especially, should pick it up. Chad Broughton's report on the decline of manufacturing jobs in midsize towns in the Rust Belt, along with the…

Does the American left collectively share responsibility for the Islamic terrorist shooting in San Bernardino? The Scrapbook doesn't believe in such a sweeping judgment, but if one were consistently to apply the left's own logic, they end up indicting themselves.

In the years before his death in 1974, John Crowe Ransom was frequently mentioned in the same breath as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Frost as one of the great American poets of the 20th century. Ransom himself knew that this was an overly generous association; his reputation was founded…

The Obama administration—easily the most ideologically progressive in modern American history—has been accompanied by both liberal triumphalism and liberal outrage.

When Britain's Tory-led coalition government issued the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), the signal sent to Washington and the rest of the world was that London was in full-scale strategic retreat. The government's priorities were domestic. Getting the country's finances under…

You're worried. Okay, you're alarmed. Actually, you're panicked. Donald Trump will be the nominee and destroy the party. It's embarrassing for the GOP that Ben Carson has so much support. Marco Rubio will be judged by voters too young and inexperienced for the Oval Office. Ted Cruz would be a…

Ryan Coogler, who conceived and directed the new hit film Creed, is up to something very tricky with this effort to update the Rocky films to the 21st century. Creed is not a Cinderella story about a working-class chump who gets an unexpected shot at glory, as the original Rocky was. Instead, it's…

Not long after Russia's financial crisis, in 1998, I attended a conference on Eastern European stock markets. The keynote speaker was Richard Pipes, veteran historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. His talk included an examination of how property rights had evolved—or, rather, failed to evolve—in…

Phoenix

Obamacare has an incurable preexisting condition: It eats away at the private insurance market on which it relies. That market cannot survive Obamacare's hubristic mandates, and Obamacare cannot survive the collapse of that market. On their present course, both are doomed.

The fact that no one's spending much time discussing Social Security reform in the current presidential election is not necessarily a bad thing; campaigns can be terrible places to have serious discussions. Nevertheless, a few candidates and their advisers have put out vague plans: Senator Bernie…

The Trump phenomenon continues apace, immune to the boorishness and ignorance of its avatar. It does not seem to matter what Donald Trump says or does—he continues to lead the Republican field by a wide margin.

Back in October, the Council of the District of Columbia made news when a majority of its members pushed for the most generous paid-family-leave program in the country: a whopping 16 weeks. And we do mean whopping. Sixteen weeks is longer than the 12 weeks supported by Hillary Clinton and the 14…

When a flying wedge of Black Lives Matter activists called the Black Justice League invaded and occupied the president's office at Princeton University in late November, they issued the standard list of nonnegotiable demands. And as might be expected, Princeton's president Christopher L. Eisgruber…

New York

In one of Kingsley Amis's novels, the protagonist, Garnet Bowen, comes across his wife in the kitchen, helping their child into its coat to the accompaniment of "a song sung very loudly and badly" by Frank Sinatra: "You came, you saw, you conquered me," Sinatra sang.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush said he would "whup" leading Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton if he faced her next November. Speaking Thursday afternoon at the Jewish Republican Coalition's presidential forum in Washington, Bush addressed a receptive audience that gave him multiple standing…

At an event today in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton was asked whether Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones have the right to be believed. All three of those women accused Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton's husband, of some sort of sexual harassment or assault.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with assistant editor Jim Swift on his recent story "One Man Carnival" on Donald Trump's campaign rally last night in Manassas, Virginia.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that President Obama thinks that gun control would help deter terrorists. Earnest made the comments today at the White House's daily press briefing.

In a television interview Thursday, during which he responded to the killings in San Bernardino, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan asserted, "What we have seen—and a common theme among many of these mass shootings—is a theme of mental illness." In the context of the slaughter in southern California,…

To say Donald Trump's appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition's presidential forum in Washington was bizarre would be an understatement. Taking the stage around noon Thursday, Trump offered a somewhat quieter version of his rambling tough-guy shtick, boasting about his wealth, his awards, and…

Marco Rubio, the Florida senator running for president, ended his prepared remarks at Thursday's Republican Jewish Coalition presidential forum in Washington with a veiled shot at some of his rivals for the GOP nomination. "I have been a staunch supporter of our military assistance to the Jewish…

Marco Rubio took a swipe at his Republican rival Donald Trump over Trump's comments about the need for Israel to "sacrifice certain things" to reach a peace deal.

Texas senator Ted Cruz kicked off Thursday's Republican Jewish Coalition presidential forum in Washington with a speech filled with applause lines that revved up the crowd.

If you were watching Twitter while the San Bernadino shooting was playing out, you might have seen people, including politicians, condemning those who said they were praying for the victims.

Manassas, Virginia

In an interview this week with the Associated Press on his foreign policy and national security views, Senator Ted Cruz took a hard line against what he described as "torture" of terrorism suspects. As AP reporter Steven Peoples puts it, the Republican from Texas "rejects the idea that torture can…

ABC reporter Brian Ross called yesterday's California massacre "hybrid workplace jihad" this morning. Watch here:

Earlier this week, Texas senator Ted Cruz faced tough questions from NBC reporter Kasie Hunt over his definition of amnesty for illegal immigrants. After repeated questioning, Cruz told Hunt amnesty means "forgiving the law-breaking of those who come here illegally and having no consequences, and…

During shootings, and immediately after, many take to social media to offer prayers to those killed, injured, and affected. However, some are now mocking those who offer prayers.

In this week's edition of the boss's email newsletter -- Kristol Clear -- readers are asked to rank their top three picks for the GOP's 2016 presidential nominee. And this time he's added a special (optional) college football playoff game.

On Wednesday, CNN's Dan Merica asked Hillary Clinton if she thinks Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel should step down. Clinton ignored his question, refusing to offer the former Clinton aide a helping hand in his time of need.

As reported by The Hill, Bernie Sanders is:

Last week, the best and worst of Donald Trump were on display within about 48 hours of one another.

It turns out that Hamlet isn't the only work whose central plot device is a play within a play. Cole Porter's musical Kiss Me, Kate, which is playing at Washington, D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre until January 3, employs the same conceit, and to brilliant effect.

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel blasted Politico reporter Mike Allen for publicly revealing he's vacationing in Cuba later this year with his family. "I really don't appreciate that," Emanuel said, publicly expressing his displeasure.

A new poll of Republican primary voters nationwide shows reality TV star Donald Trump maintaining his lead for the presidential nomination with 27 percent support. Closest behind Trump are Florida senator Marco Rubio at 17 percent, Texas senator Ted Cruz at 16 percent, and retired neurosurgeon Ben…

Last month, Senator Tom Cotton keynoted the Federalist Society's Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture. Cotton noted he's a long-time Federalist Society member. "Back when I was a student and a lawyer, I belonged to the Federalist Society because I believed in individual freedom, constitutional…

All roads lead to Moscow. That's the message being given by hundreds of truck drivers across Russia who are staging massive protests against a new transport tax, called the platon. The platon took effect on November 15 and charges drivers a fee of 1.53 rubles (about $0.02) for each kilometer they…

In an email released by the State Department, John Podesta blasts David Axelrod for totally caving "in to right wing economics." Podesta, who is currently chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, was speaking ill of Obama's top political adviser in private emails with Clinton…

The husband of the top Democratic presidential candidate is continuing to seek donations to his family foundation. Bill Clinton, husband to Hillary Clinton, sent an email to supporters last night to ask for money.

News stories this week have brought attention back to the name Lori Berenson, and that was truly a blast from the past.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on Donald Trump and his conspiracy theory regarding the media and September 11.

California is reeling from a drought, rather like the one suffered by Israel in 1998-2002. California, with an 840-mile coastline on the world's largest ocean, has a water shortage; Israel, with a mere 170-mile coast line, does not. Israel invests in desalinization; California is building a…

On Tuesday, President Obama gave a press conference on a variety of issues, including climate change and the Planned Parenthood shooting.

The new Hillary for America ad features little kids reading notes to Hillary Clinton.

Another candidate is getting into the Marco Rubio-Ted Cruz feud over the NSA metadata program. Chris Christie was asked about Ted Cruz's vote to abolish the program in an interview this morning on MSNBC.

On October 11, the London Independent newspaper revived charges first made last year, by United Nations officials in Iraq, that the Islamic State (ISIS) has called for female genital mutilation (FGM) to be forced on women and girls living in the city of Mosul. ISIS seized Mosul in June 2014 and,…