October 2016

Two weeks ago, a Monmouth poll found that Democrat Evan Bayh had a 6-point lead over Republican Todd Young in the Indiana Senate race, but that same pollster now finds the race tied:

If the election weren't bad enough already, those living what Washington Free Beacon managing editor Sonny Bunch calls "the politicized life" have taken their virtue signaling fight to... beer.

We've heard some weird political arguments this year. The strangest of them is raging in California, where else? There the hotly contested question revolves around an electoral initiative known as Proposition 60.

Democrats have all but gone to war with FBI director James Comey. Their anger at him comes after Comey sent a letter to Congress last week that announced he would be reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private server as secretary of state. But President Barack Obama, who…

Below is an excerpt from this week's Kristol Clear newsletter, written by WEEKLY STANDARD editor Bill Kristol. Sign up here to receive Kristol Clear in your inbox every Monday morning.

To help her reach a decision on who to pick as a running mate, Hillary Clinton's team separated three dozen Democrats into seven "food groups," according to hacked emails recently released by WikiLeaks.

South Carolina representative Trey Gowdy slammed Harry Reid in multiple interviews Sunday and Monday for his accusation that FBI director James Comey may have violated the Hatch Act, which limits the political activity of executive branch employees, in reopening the investigation into Hillary…

The National Football League continues to serve up boring games for its fans who have responded by not watching them. I received a number of responses to my recent article on this lamentable trend and the "action" in the days following publication did not show much promise that things would be…

In his final days as the minority leader and with the Democrats on the verge of retaking a majority in the chamber, Harry Reid suggested that FBI Director James Comey potentially violated the Hatch Act in a letter, after praising his work on the Clinton email scandal earlier this year. It's the…

Last week I noted that DNC head Donna Brazile denied that she leaked questions to Hillary Clinton in advance of a Democratic primary debate. The denials of Brazile, who was working at CNN at the time, were particularly bizarre in the face of a leaked email showing her giving Clinton's team a…

A savvy friend, a lawyer with political and government experience, writes:

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Las Vegas

Two years ago, I wrote a piece in these pages about my multi-year struggle to see Gianolorenzo Bernini's greatest bust—possibly his greatest sculpture—his Constanza, which lives on the top floor of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, the national sculpture museum. The Bargello, whose…

When long-time Hillary Clinton aide and confidant Huma Abedin came under fire in 2012 for alleged links to a radical Islamic group, the legendary Clinton damage-control squad sprang into action, with one member of the unofficial team telling another, "We don't f*ck around when it comes to Huma."

Early Morning in New Haven....

Draper, Utah

Tim Kaine kept returning to one telling word Sunday. Hillary Clinton's running mate appeared on ABC News's This Week and was on-message responding to Friday's news that FBI director James Comey is looking at a new source of emails in Clinton's home-brew server scandal. "This is an unprecedented…

In an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Donald Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, complained about the independent candidacy of Evan McMullin. The conservative former CIA agent and congressional staffer has been gaining on Trump in Utah (an historically strong Republican state) and…

A special edition of editor William Kristol's weekly Kristol Clear podcast on the news that the FBI is again revisiting Hillary's emails, thanks to Anthony Weiner.

In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Fred Barnes joins host Eric Felten to talk about the cage fight Donald Trump has fashioned for himself and House Speaker Paul Ryan. Ethan Epstein gives us the over-under on Trump's chances to win Nevada. And Andrew Ferguson reports on the epic…

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When Obamacare was first passed, Vice President Joe Biden famously said it was a "big f—ing deal." Now, though, there's a surprising level of bipartisan agreement that it's a big honking disaster. There had been many warning signs, but last week it became official: Obamacare premiums are going up…

Bill Kristol says the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its director, James Comey, should come forward as soon as possible with the nature of their reopened investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server. Joining Cokie Roberts on ABC's Good Morning America Saturday morning, the WEEKLY STANDARD…

French authorities spent this week razing the notorious Jungle migrant camp, which THE WEEKLY STANDARD visited last winter. The Jungle was a shocking place. What made it unusual in the recent history of European migration is that it resulted from an actual obstacle being placed in migrants' way.…

In only ten days the voters will have spoken and Donald Trump will be planning his move to Washington—to the new Trump International hotel, in which he says he will be spending lots of time. The hotel is spitting distance from the White House where the Obamas are making certain everything will be…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the recent revelations that the FBI is again looking into emails related to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Editor William Kristol's weekly Kristol Clear podcast, on why you should root for the Cleveland Indians, his recent editorial on conservatism and populism and nationalism, and the future of the post-Trump GOP.

The mystery of the "unrelated investigation"—by which the FBI director James Comey says the Bureau came across new emails-of-interest involving Hillary Clinton—didn't last long. The New York Times is among sites reporting that the FBI found the emails in question on devices belonging to disgraced…

Joe Buck, the multipurpose Fox sports broadcaster, has called almost every World Series for the last two decades, beginning with the revival of the New York Yankees dynasty in 1996. Ever since, he has been criticized for banality, bias, and boredom, or as I like to call them, the triple Zzz's.…

Students at George Mason University awoke Monday morning to a three-paragraph message warning them that they will not be coddled on campus.

The FBI has reopened its investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state after the discovery of new, relevant emails.

Charles Krauthammer writes in his syndicated column Friday about the United Nations's cultural agency's recent decision to condemn the state of Israel—and the Obama administration's apparent acquiesence to the global campaign by nations hostile to Israel against the United States's strongest ally…

Reports have it that Hillary Clinton is considering Joe Biden for secretary of state in her administration. The bench of popular, high profile Democrats isn't exactly deep these days and Biden has always been particularly interested in foreign policy, so on a superficial level recruiting Biden for…

In his weekly column at the Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti takes note of Clarence Thomas's 25 years on the Supreme Court. Taciturn on and off the bench, Thomas has in recent days spoken at the Heritage Foundation as well as to WEEKLY STANDARD editor Bill Kristol on Conversations.…

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Bob Dylan, as everyone knows, was awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Everyone, that is, with the possible exception of .  .  . Bob Dylan. Several days after the award was announced, the committee that makes the decision still had not been able to contact Dylan. So either he didn't know…

In the small town of Geneva, Ohio, 50 miles to the northeast of where the Indians and Cubs split the first two games of the World Series, Donald Trump lit into something just a tad less American than baseball or apple pie: Obamacare.

The press has a weakness for perennial stories, but while some are benign—presidential pardon for Thanksgiving turkey, overdue medal for wartime hero—others are not so benign and deeply irritating as well. One instructive example is when a well-known media property changes hands: There is always…

He is 80 years old now. He was 31 when his A-4 was hit by a missile over Hanoi on October 26, 1967. You wonder if it occurred to John McCain, on the anniversary of that date, how improbable his life has been since then. How fortunate, in fact, he is to have had a life at all. He could have drowned…

Patrick J. Buchanan, a fervent Donald Trump supporter, wrote recently and approvingly that Trump’s campaign embodies "the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy."

The American university, once idealized as an ivory tower, is at risk of becoming an ideological echo chamber. Once scholars gazed out at a distant world from their monastic perch, debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Now scholars seem to gaze out at the world from a single…

Mervyn King served as governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013—which means that the worst global financial collapse since the Great Depression happened smack-dab in the middle of his watch. What better person to explain what caused that 2008 debacle and how to prevent a recurrence than…

No good deed goes unpunished, even if you are House speaker, third in line to the presidency, and didn’t want the job in the first place.

Perhaps the last place in America to see normal people is at PetSmart, the large national chain selling birds, guinea pigs, mice, turtles, lizards, and supplies for these and just about every other animal, excluding elephants, otters, walruses, panthers, and perhaps a few others. Where else can one…

Bob Dylan, as everyone knows, was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Everyone, that is, with the possible exception of .  .  . Bob Dylan. Several days after the award was announced, the committee that makes the decision still had not been able to contact Dylan. So either he didn't know…

In 1976, the science historian Loren Graham visited a fox farm in the countryside outside Novosibirsk, in Siberia. He was there to observe the experiments of Russian biologist Dmitri Belyaev, who, since the 1940s, had been selectively breeding Siberian foxes for domestication. Belyaev had reported…

One of the most striking features of the British cemetery at Gallipoli is the attention given to honoring the diversity of the dead. Final farewells from loved ones carved upon stone plaques line the footpaths up the hillsides where the Ottomans rained down machine-gun and artillery fire. Fallen…

In her section on memoirs here, Eva Brann reflects on her discomfort with at least one type of praise: “How much sweeter," she writes, "to be serenely sure of having been underestimated than to have to sink through the floor shamed by clueless overpraise." Hammering the point home, Brann adds:…

When Obamacare was first passed, Vice President Joe Biden famously said it was a “big f—ing deal." Now, though, there's a surprising level of bipartisan agreement that it's a big honking disaster. There had been many warning signs, but last week it became official: Obamacare premiums are going up…

On the third page of We Are Not Ourselves, it is said that Big Mike lives in an apartment on whose walls the only piece of art is a painting of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. If not a friend to the world of fine art, Mike is a great friend to his fellow Irish immigrants in Woodside,…

What if a computer program revealed what people want to read, even down to the punctuation? It could tell the likelihood of any given book becoming a bestseller. It could tell whether a given book had been written by a man or a woman. It could even tell who wrote it, as long as there was a large…

In many ways, for those who dislike the apologetics of C. S. Lewis and/or the fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams (1886-1945) is the most approachable of the Inklings. He was more connected to the ideas and people of the present moment than were Lewis, who never read newspapers and called…

Draper, Utah

The press has a weakness for perennial stories, but while some are benign—presidential pardon for Thanksgiving turkey, overdue medal for wartime hero—others are not so benign and deeply irritating as well. One instructive example is when a well-known media property changes hands: There is always…

An investigative article in the Sunday, October 23, Washington Post detailed the Obama Justice Department’s actions to hamper the Drug Enforcement Administration's aggressive efforts to stop the deadly diversion of pain medications. The article draws on testimony from multiple sources indicating…

Last week, Buzzfeed’s Katherine Miller observed that the most interesting thing about Donald Trump is what he reveals about other people. This depressing truth has been on display for the better part of a year as Trump has laid bare the cowardice of much of the Republican establishment, the toxic…

In recent years, Dwight Eisenhower has emerged as the Democratic party’s Republican of choice. Barack Obama's many sycophantic accolades have even compared Obama to the cool-headed soldier who liberated Europe. It's all there: a general who warned against the military-industrial complex, a…

We’ve heard some weird political arguments this year. The strangest of them is raging in California, where else? There the hotly contested question revolves around an electoral initiative known as Proposition 60.

Las Vegas

Around every election, basic cable stations dust off their copies of All the President’s Men and start airing it. For better or for worse, Watergate is still central to modern politics and especially modern journalism. It's encouraging, of course, that we still want to believe no American,…

It's been more than a week since Originalists Against Trump issued their public statement opposing the election of Donald Trump. William Baude of the University of Chicago Law School and Stephen Sachs of Duke Law School organized the project; both worked on drafts of the statement, and Sachs also…

A new poll of four swing states from Quinnipiac University shows Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump slipping in three likely must-win states.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on how WikiLeaks releases are impacting the 2016 presidential race.

The Washington Post calls attention to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey about how much Americans are prioritizing Obamacare relative to other health care issues this election season (emphasis mine):

The Republican National Committee has mishandled the Donald Trump situation from the word "go". Rather than recognizing him for what he was—a toxic interloper who would rain destruction upon the party brand—it instead treated him just like any other candidate.

Republican senator Marco Rubio is maintaining a six-point lead against Democratic congressman Patrick Murphy, according to a University of North Florida (UNF) poll released Thursday.

Politics makes strange bedfellows—even stranger than normal in the 2016 election season. On Thursday morning, Republican presidential nominee tweeted a grateful message to left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore:

Oprah Winfrey is excited about the election: "I see that we're about to have a woman president," she told talk-show host T.D. Jakes. And that's important not just for the mundane matters of governance—for finding someone competent to sit in the big chair—but for the larger impact it has on society:…

Bill Kristol, editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, joined Jay Caruso and Neal Dewing of the Fifth Estate podcast to discuss the future of conservatism after the 2016 election, among other topics:

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A colleague at the Dallas Morning News used to gibe when I wrote editorials about water issues: "You turn on the tap and water comes out, right?" he would gig me in a what's-the-big-deal? tone of voice.

There are going to be lots of different ways to examine Donald Trump's impending loss. But I want to point to a very basic one that's so simple that it might escape notice: On election night, you should keep an eye on the raw vote totals.

Donald Trump was down by six percentage points to Hillary Clinton two weeks ago, five last week, and three in the new Fox News poll in the presidential race. This isn't a surge. But Trump is gaining. And there's pattern behind it.

One last story from the trove of Democratic insider emails released by WikiLeaks. This one comes courtesy of our friends at the Washington Free Beacon, whose headline we just ripped off: "Emails: Liberal Think Tank Freaked Out at SNL's Criticism of Donors."

The WEEKLY SUBSTANDARD podcast with senior editor Victorino Matus, senior writer Jonathan Last, and Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon, on books that become movies.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on the future of the GOP.

A new Hillary Clinton ad from EMILY's List, a PAC for female Democrat candidates, uses a popular meme to make the former secretary of state, senator, and first lady into a smarmy millennial mascot. In a gender-bending riff on the "Most Interesting Man in the World"—a commercial for Dos Equis beer…

In the latest issue of Commentary, WEEKLY STANDARD senior editor Andrew Ferguson reviews the latest nonfiction offering from Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech. Here's an excerpt from the review:

Florence, Italy

In the spring of 1975 the dominoes were falling in Southeast Asia: The Khmer Rouge were exterminating Cambodia's urban populations and Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. By the end of the year Lao king Savang Vatthana was under house arrest.

After much controversy, the Pentagon is suspending its attempts to recover bonuses overpaid to thousands of soldiers in California more than 10 years ago.

The Cleveland Indians pitching staff was masterful Tuesday night, but they had an awful lot of help from the Cubs, who struck out 15 times. Starter Corey Kluber had nine in six innings, stud reliever Andrew Miller had three over two innings, and closer Cody Allen struck out the side in the ninth.

New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte shot back at Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren Wednesday, after Warren reiterated Donald Trump's charge that Ayotte was "weak" during a rally in New Hampshire Monday.

One of Obamacare's key architects said Wednesday morning that Americans weren't being penalized enough for forgoing health insurance coverage, which he characterized as "probably the most important thing experts would agree on" as it relates to improving the law.

Most Americans feel pessimistic about the state of their nation—74 percent, according to the annual Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) American Values Survey released Tuesday. And most (61 percent) feel neither party represents their views—compared to 48 percent who said the same in 1990.

Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio has held on to a slight lead over Democratic congressman Patrick Murphy ahead of their final Senate debate in the Sunshine State Wednesday.

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Republicans may have an opportunity to salvage the election on the congressional level by making an explicit pitch to voters that they can stop Hillary Clinton on Obamacare and taxes. Online editor Michael Warren joined MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday to discuss the lessons of 1996, as well as why…

Clarence Thomas has been on the Supreme Court for a quarter-century. And Jeffrey Toobin has loathed him for nearly all twenty-five of those years. For more than two decades, the New Yorker author and CNN pundit has written of Thomas time and time again in only the most contemptuous terms.

In 2008, the year that Barack Obama was elected as president, the combined annual profits of America's ten largest health insurance companies were $8 billion. Under Obamacare, the ten largest health insurers' annual profits have risen to $15 billion. This is another fine example of the natural…

The Obama administration has tried to put a good face on the news this week that Obamacare premiums are spiking an average of 25 percent for 2017. The department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the increases under the heading, "More Than 70 Percent of Consumers Can Find Marketplace…

Now that American victims of terrorism can sue Saudi Arabia on allegations of facilitating 9/11, the kingdom's counterterrorism record is under the microscope like never before.

Occasionally a younger person will ask me for counsel on getting an essay published. Usually, I have two suggestions.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

The World Series this year feels a little like Noah's Ark, or John Woo's Face Off—lots of stuff in twos. Like Theo and Terry. The Chicago Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein built the long suffering NL franchise into a winner, just like he did with the Boston Red Sox, which won the…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior editor Lee Smith and deputy online editor Chris Deaton on the 2016 World Series, which begins Tuesday night in Cleveland where the Indians face off against the Chicago Cubs.

As House speaker Paul Ryan tries to weather a Trump imbroglio, his GOP counterpart, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, remains silent on the election.

Economist and scholar Charles Wolf Jr. has died at the age of 92. The RAND Corporation, Wolf's home for more than 60 years, has released a statement.

When Florida Democrat Randy Perkins faced off against his Republican opponent Brian Mast at an editorial board meeting last month, the two had some unpleasant exchanges, including one in which Perkins badgered Mast, a wounded veteran, about his health care:

Over at Commentary, Max Boot has some enlightening analysis of the fight to retake Mosul, and why the Republican nominee's comments are foolish:

Among the revelations from the hacked John Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks is quite a bit of evidence of media malpractice. But perhaps the most damning bit involves interim Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile:

Evan Bayh's true address might be the swamp Donald Trump wants to "drain." The former Democratic senator, running in Indiana to reclaim his old seat, has faced an onslaught of negative news about his years of residency outside the Hoosier state, his post congressional-work, and his vote for…

It is, as my sister put, the epitome of #BarringtonProblems. In Barrington, Rhode Island, a ritzy suburb of Providence, a letter to the editor chastising women who wear yoga pants has spurred mass protests.

Can Republicans salvage their congressional majorities in the Year of Trump? Each day brings conflicting evidence. Donald Trump's stalling poll numbers are depressing performance for Republican Senate candidates in swing states like Nevada and Florida, and some are predicting big losses for the GOP…

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Justice Clarence Thomas's critics have long slandered him as "lazy," simply because he only rarely asks questions during oral arguments. But such criticism is entirely misguided, especially when one considers that Justice Thomas is the Court's most prolific opinion-writer, year in and year out (as…

Earlier this month, Republican senator Kelly Ayotte committed what was supposed to be a devastating gaffe when she said Donald Trump would "absolutely" be a role model for her children. But a new poll released Tuesday morning suggests the first-term New Hampshire senator is still very much alive…

Most parent-offspring biographies consist of either the offspring's fond but warts-and-all reminiscences of his or her famous parent. Or are Mommie Dearest exposés of the famous sire or dam's parental barbarity. Ruthless is the other way around: Ron Miscavige is the 80-year-old father of a famous…

The Framers of the Constitution envisioned Congress as the keystone of our political architecture, but Americans today do not see it that way. For the last 100 years or so, people have tended to pay almost exclusive attention to the executive. In presidential election years, this means people have…

A right-wing news website worked with a far-left activist to disrupt the Republican primary opponents of Donald Trump. Politico reports:

"Zach Wood may look black but as far as I'm concerned, he's white." This was one of many disparaging comments posted on Yik Yak when I invited Charles Murray to speak at Williams College last spring.

U.S. lawmakers are urging members of the United Nations' cultural body to oppose a resolution that will effectively sever Jewish and Christian ties to holy sites in Jerusalem, only a week after the body passed a similar, controversial measure.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Mark Hemingway on his recent story about how WikiLeaks is impacting the 2016 presidential race.

Former Pennsylvania attorney general and Hillary Clinton ally Kathleen Kane received 10 to 23 months of jail time on Monday, months after resigning her position upon being convicted of multiple criminal offenses, including two felony counts of perjury.

Over the weekend the Washington Post published a review of Jay Solomon's book, The Iran Wars, written by New York Times reporter Elaine Sciolino. That one of America's top three remaining newspapers assigned a review of a book written by a reporter from another of the big three (Solomon is a…

Draper, Utah

Below is an excerpt from this week's Kristol Clear newsletter, written by WEEKLY STANDARD editor Bill Kristol. Sign up here to receive Kristol Clear in your inbox every Monday morning.

Despite Hillary Clinton's repeated assurances that her use of a personal email account and server was not an issue in the security and preservation of her correspondence as secretary of state, evidence continues to pile up to the contrary. Not only did Secretary Clinton use her own personal…

Republicans are still fighting tooth and nail to maintain their majority in the Senate, but their prospects in the House don't look nearly as dubious, even with the X-factor of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy looming over many office-seekers.

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Perhaps he just wants to take David Carr's old media criticism job at the New York Times when his term is up. (Sorry, Jim Rutenberg!) But whatever his motivations, it's become increasingly clear that Barack Obama enjoys nothing so much as playing media critic.

Hillary Clinton’s " 'choice of a white suit for Wednesday's -debate harkened back to the not-so-distant past, when suffragists wore white to promote their struggle to gain the right to vote,' Booth Moore, a senior fashion editor for The Hollywood Reporter and Pret-a-Reporter, told ABC News .  .  .…

Brigadier General Joe Heck, U.S. Army Reserve, spent last week on active duty at the Pentagon. A doctor, he was assigned to the Joint Staff surgeon's office. In 2008, he was deployed to Iraq, where he ran an emergency room in a combat hospital outside Baghdad.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

In advancing public policy, you expect the person who holds the moral high ground to win. The battle is who's able to conquer that high ground and keep it. Unfortunately, the moral high ground is often a matter of perspective, and the political right has been cast far too readily as the villain by…

Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump by double digits among likely voters, according to the latest ABC News poll released Sunday.

On Sunday, Donald Trump's son Eric told ABC's George Stephanopoulos how proud he is of his father.

Clarence Thomas began his tenure on the United State Supreme Court on October 23, 1991—25 years ago this Sunday. The associate justice recently joined Bill Kristol for an episode of Conversations that looks back at Thomas's life, his time on the Court, and issues of culture and society. Watch the…

The game wasn't much fun to watch. It was one of those blowouts with things pretty much settled long before the fourth quarter was over. There were the usual penalties, with the officials meeting to discuss whodunit and what to call. These provided opportunities for what are described by the…

Justice Thomas at 25 Years on the Court

Donald Trump believes he has lost the presidential election. That's the only reasonable explanation for the Republican nominee's decision on Saturday in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to reiterate his claim that the more than 10 women who have accused Trump of past acts of sexual assault are liars.…

In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Fred Barnes has his racing sheet at the ready to handicap the crucial down-ballot races. Then we talk with Alice Lloyd about Donald Trump's most fervent grass-roots supporter; and we talk with Steven Hayward about Trump's most scholarly, intellectual…

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A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he's being probed and scanned. He said he hadn't seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.

It may well be, as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter suggests, that Donald Trump represents "the final stage of a dumbed-down America"—a process that seems to have begun, by Carter's reckoning, with George W. Bush. Trump, writes the novelist Richard Ford in the Times Literary Supplement, is "a…

Editor William Kristol's weekly Kristol Clear podcast on why Trump is toast, and why it's now time for smart Republicans in Congress to start running against Hillary. Also, a review of Thursday's Al Smith Dinner fiasco, and why it became emblamatic of everything wrong with politics today in one…

The United States will harshly retaliate against any bank or company caught doing business that involves sanctioned Iranian entities, despite a recent announcement from the Treasury Department that had been broadly interpreted as loosening American sanctions against previously prohibited…

In a leaked memo, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his Trump-loving board member and early investor Peter Thiel—in the name of intellectual diversity.

Indiana Senate candidate Evan Bayh remains dogged by charges that he bailed on his home state before seeking a return to Congress this year, with a new revelation that the former Democratic senator didn't stay overnight in his Indianapolis condo once during his last year in office in 2010.

In his column at the Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti writes about the crisis of intellectual conservatism in the Age of Trump. Here's an excerpt:

President Obama spoke behind a campaign sign reading "Clinton/Kaine" in Florida on Thursday. But Donald Trump wasn't the only Republican on his mind.

Imagine for a moment that Arnold Schwarzenegger's agent received a script called The Accountant in 1992 because its producer and director hoped against hope he would star in it. In this film, Schwarzenegger would play an emotionless genius who cooks the books for evil governments and crime…

As recently as last month, the White House insisted that illegal immigrants are "are not eligible to collect benefits associated with the Affordable Care Act." But undocumented immigrants accessing the Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, could be forgiven if they thought otherwise.

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The day after Donald Trump refused to say if he would accept the results of the election after making claims of "large-scale voter fraud" and a "rigged" system, more than 20 top Republican elected officials—including governors and secretaries of state—told THE WEEKLY STANDARD they have faith and…

Elsewhere in this issue, our colleague Mark Hemingway surveys the revelations contained in the WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from Clintonista John Podesta. Without giving too much away (see "Scandal? What Scandal?"), it will not surprise you to learn that the emails confirm two obvious points:…

In a recent essay for Bloomberg entitled "Why Populists Lose Elections," Pankaj Mishra reviews John Judis's new book The Populist Explosion, identifying Donald Trump as a right-wing populist who has riled up disaffected, working class whites. This is reminiscent of a summer essay for the Wall…

Liberal pundit Jonathan Chait has a new book coming out in a few months titled Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Transformed America. The Scrapbook doesn’t necessarily intend to plug the book, but if he's reading this, you're welcome. Anyway, galleys are now being sent out to…

Brigadier General Joe Heck, U.S. Army Reserve, spent last week on active duty at the Pentagon. A doctor, he was assigned to the Joint Staff surgeon’s office. In 2008, he was deployed to Iraq, where he ran an emergency room in a combat hospital outside Baghdad.

If a cultured American is one who can hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger, then an educated Briton is someone who gets the jokes in 1066 and All That, W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s 1930 pastiche of patriotic legends and schoolroom clichés. In that loving spoof,…

"But free government would be an absurdity did it require citizens all like Abraham Lincoln; yet it would be an impossibility if it could not from time to time find leaders with something of his understanding." —Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided For months it has been clear that in one…

The Framers of the Constitution envisioned Congress as the keystone of our political architecture, but Americans today do not see it that way. For the last 100 years or so, people have tended to pay almost exclusive attention to the executive. In presidential election years, this means people have…

No one will be surprised by the general theme of this book: the enduring tension between the federal and state governments, between the center and the periphery of the American political system. Not unique to the United States, the distinctiveness of the pull between central and other American…

A friend is in town for medical tests. We had a pasta lunch in the complex where he’s being probed and scanned. He said he hadn't seen so many doctors since he was quarantined for tuberculosis as a child in the 1950s.

Imagine for a moment that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s agent received a script called The Accountant in 1992 because its producer and director hoped against hope he would star in it. In this film, Schwarzenegger would play an emotionless genius who cooks the books for evil governments and crime…

One last story from the trove of Democratic insider emails released by WikiLeaks. This one comes courtesy of our friends at the Washington Free Beacon, whose headline we just ripped off: “Emails: Liberal Think Tank Freaked Out at SNL's Criticism of Donors."

A colleague at the Dallas Morning News used to gibe when I wrote editorials about water issues: “You turn on the tap and water comes out, right?" he would gig me in a what's-the-big-deal? tone of voice.

It’s no easy feat to condense the subject of religion, much less comment on its themes, within 256 pages. Similar efforts like Stephen Prothero's God Is Not One and Huston Smith's The World's Religions have done so at nearly twice the length of A Little History of Religion. But Richard Holloway,…

Students of Leo Strauss owe a debt of gratitude to Kenneth Hart Green and the University of Chicago Press for this volume.

On March 5, 2015, John Podesta, former White House chief of staff and longtime Clinton family confidant, received an email from his daughter. “I'm heading back to NY tonight. Any chance you're staying in nyc b/c of weather (or scandal)?" she asked. Podesta responded, "What scandal? A few e-mails…

Hillary Clinton’s " 'choice of a white suit for Wednesday's -debate harkened back to the not-so-distant past, when suffragists wore white to promote their struggle to gain the right to vote,' Booth Moore, a senior fashion editor for The Hollywood Reporter and Pret-a-Reporter, told ABC News .  .  .…

In the spring of 1975 the dominoes were falling in Southeast Asia: The Khmer Rouge were exterminating Cambodia’s urban populations and Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. By the end of the year Lao king Savang Vatthana was under house arrest.

When I was growing up in a picturesque Vermont town, some family friends used to show old movies in a theater at the local college. From time to time, they invited me to go along. Almost always, I had some sort of excuse for staying home, where I would end up doing absolutely nothing. They showed…

Most parent-offspring biographies consist of either the offspring’s fond but warts-and-all reminiscences of his or her famous parent. Or are Mommie Dearest exposés of the famous sire or dam's parental barbarity. Ruthless is the other way around: Ron Miscavige is the 80-year-old father of a famous…

The two major party conventions, the three presidential debates, and various scandals large and small—all these features of the 2016 presidential general election have come and gone. Now the campaign draws to a close. And one outcome seems increasingly likely: Donald J. Trump will lose.

Occasionally a younger person will ask me for counsel on getting an essay published. Usually, I have two suggestions.

The game wasn’t much fun to watch. It was one of those blowouts with things pretty much settled long before the fourth quarter was over. There were the usual penalties, with the officials meeting to discuss whodunit and what to call. These provided opportunities for what are described by the…

"Zach Wood may look black but as far as I’m concerned, he's white." This was one of many disparaging comments posted on Yik Yak when I invited Charles Murray to speak at Williams College last spring.

It may well be, as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter suggests, that Donald Trump represents “the final stage of a dumbed-down America"—a process that seems to have begun, by Carter's reckoning, with George W. Bush. Trump, writes the novelist Richard Ford in the Times Literary Supplement, is "a…

Elsewhere in this issue, our colleague Mark Hemingway surveys the revelations contained in the WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from Clintonista John Podesta. Without giving too much away (see “Scandal? What Scandal?" on page 28), it will not surprise you to learn that the emails confirm two…

President Barack Obama tried to reassure the American public on Thursday that his health care legislation "worked," amid competition and cost issues in multiple states and skepticism from both sides of the aisle.

A Supreme Court nominee must be confirmed by the Senate in order to be appointed by the president. But for months now the Republican-controlled Senate has refused to consider the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama's choice to fill the seat opened by the death of Justice Antonin…

With Donald Trump's path to the White House looking less likely by the day, Republicans are rightly worried about maintaining control of the U.S. Senate should Hillary Clinton become president.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on Wednesday's presidential debate.

When Syrian opposition activists pushed John Kerry to take a tougher line with Russian president Vladimir Putin last year, the secretary of state asked them, "What do you want me to do, go to war with Russia?"

Despite rebukes from fellow Republicans and assurances from surrogates that Donald Trump really would accept the results of the presidential election, his campaign appears to be all-in helping him joke about the matter.

Talking with Fox News's John Fox on Thursday, Stephen Hayes talked about Donald Trump's knack for turning legitimate issues into outlandish conspiracy theories.

New figures released by the Census Bureau Thursday show undergraduate and graduate enrollment at colleges and universities dropped 1.2 million—or 6 percent—from 2010 to 2015. The drop accompanies an overall decrease in school enrollment at all levels from 78.6 million to 77.1 million during the…

Last week, Liberty University president and Moral Majority scion Jerry Falwell Jr. embraced campus opposition to his support for Donald Trump after the release of a lewd videotape and allegations of sexual assault against the candidate. But Falwell has since reportedly silenced one student seeking…

Las Vegas

Bill Kristol joined MSNBC's Morning Joe on Thursday morning and responded to Donald Trump's refusal at the debate the previous night to say he would accept the results of the presidential election.

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Las Vegas

Virtually everyone around Donald Trump has offered assurances in recent days that the Republican nominee will accept the results of the election on November 8. Then on Wednesday, Trump refused to do so. And with his answer, he lost the debate and ensured, if it wasn't already a certainty, that he…

Third presidential debates usually don't matter. And there's a reason. The candidate who's behind tries to avoid mistakes made in the earlier debates and sound more clear-minded and knowledgeable. The candidate who's ahead simply plays it safe.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on Tuesday's debate.

Let's get this out of the way up top: This was, by far, Trump's most disciplined debate performance. For 32 minutes, he almost sounded like a normal presidential candidate and for the first hour he wasn't terrible. Trump even seems to have spent some time preparing. He knew the name of a Supreme…

On Twitter, Bill Kristol discusses Donald Trump's refusal to say he would accept the results of the election.

Hillary Clinton gave a perfunctory debate performance Wednesday night. Facing criticism for her private email server, her record at the State Department, and the Clinton Foundation, she leaned heavily on tiresome talking points, the kind she has repeated again and again on the stump for 18 months.

Hillary Clinton said Donald Trump "thinks belittling women makes him bigger" and that he "goes after their dignity [and] their self-worth." Clinton went hard after the Republican nominee at the third presidential debate Wednesday, in reaction to the news that a number of women have accused Trump of…

When asked by moderator Chris Wallace Tuesday about his repeated claims that the election was "rigged" and whether he would accept the results of the election should he lose, Donald Trump replied: "I'll look at it at the time."

During Wednesday's presidential debate, Chris Wallace asked Hillary Clinton about the extent of her abortion support.

If you put Marco Rubio's many opinions of Donald Trump and Election Day the last several months into a paragraph, there's a cohesive, though not entirely coherent progression in there:

If there's a Republican on the ballot this year who deserves to be called the anti-Donald Trump, it might be Colorado's Mike Coffman. The Denver-area congressman is testing whether his strategy—running as the spiritual opposite of the GOP presidential nominee—won't pay off in a tough swing district.

The continuing revelations about the Patrick Kennedy's efforts to hide or downplay the classified emails on Hillary Clinton's server will be overshadowed for the next two days by the third presidential debate Wednesday in Las Vegas. But this clear and compelling Wall Street Journal editorial offers…

President Obama and Hillary Clinton love to talk about the "20 million people" who've allegedly been added to the health insurance rolls under Obamacare. But in truth, a lower percentage of Americans have private health insurance now than in 2007, even though Obamacare is the law.

The Obama administration won't provide Congress with a range of details about a recent announcement that cleared the way for doing business with Iran, including Iranian firms controlled by sanctioned military and terrorist groups, according to congressional sources and experts who spoke to THE…

Wednesday night will probably be the last time Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are ever in a room together. (Unless Madam President accepts the invitation to Trump's next wedding.) But other than as a historical footnote, this debate doesn't really matter.

There are many admiring things to say about Bob Dylan. While he may not be the hardest-working man in show business—the title once held by the martyred James Brown—he's still pretty close, recording and touring continuously at the age of 75. He's probably written more publishable songs, music and…

While serious foreign policy debate, like any kind of serious policy debate, has been virtually absent in this election, not talking about problems doesn't make them go away. In fact, the world has gotten much more dangerous under President Obama, and dealing with it will be a key challenge of the…

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George Santayana remarked in one of his books that there is no good reason for a philosopher to make his living teaching in a university. He would probably be better off as the man who collects umbrellas and checks coats in a small, seldom-visited museum. And Santayana's onetime colleague at…

In this down year for conservatives one bright spot has been the renaming of George Mason University's law school in honor of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

The historian Jeffrey Herf's profound new book shows that German-animated left-wing terrorism targeting Israel was not a tactic but rather part of a long-war strategy to destroy the Jewish state. Academic study and journalism on the now-defunct East German Communist state and radical West German…

Olivier Roy is one of France's most distinguished scholars of Islam, and author of, among many other books, Globalized Islam, Holy Ignorance, and The Failure of Political Islam. Joint-chair of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and Political and Social Sciences department at the…

A new undercover video series from conservative investigator and provocateur James O'Keefe is already shaking up the 2016 race. The stated goal of O'Keefe's "Rigging the Election" series is unveiling the "dark secrets at the highest levels of the DNC and Clinton presidential campaign" and within…

Less than 24 hours after the FBI released documents confirming discussions of a bargain between the FBI and State Department over reclassification of at least one classified Hillary Clinton email, the spokesman for the State Department categorically denied that any such discussions ever happened.

If further evidence were needed that this country faces two choices going forward on health care, a leaked Hillary Clinton email just provided it. The choices we face are (a) the repeal of Obamacare and its replacement with a conservative alternative, or (b) a government monopoly. Obamacare cannot…

How do baseball managers pick their own six pack in a liquor store, I wonder? Do they have a designated slot in the cardboard carrier—say, front-left—for the lager, and the ale must be middle-left, and the bottles go 'round in a horseshoe shape until they reach the front-right: the last, the best,…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with frequent contributor Adam J. White on the future of the Constitution and the Supreme Court in 2016, and the new 'Originalists Against Trump' letter.

The Senate Democrats' official campaign arm is pulling its remaining ad dollars from the Florida Senate race, a decision it said was not linked to Republican Marco Rubio's debate showing against challenger Patrick Murphy Monday night.

Donald Trump's unconventional candidacy has dragged together a ragtag band of boosters, a new celebrity subclass born out of online obscurity. Bill Mitchell, online radio upstart and Trump's unofficial Twitter mascot, is its king.

A top staffer at the progressive advocacy group Americans United for Change was fired from his post on Tuesday after he was caught on camera claiming the organization paid mentally ill people to instigate violence at campaign events for Donald Trump.

For the first time ever, the Democratic platform is explicitly calling for a repeal of the Hyde amendment, a longstanding budget measure that prohibits federal funding of abortion except in very rare cases.

It's been a heck of postseason so far, with the highlight of course the Dodgers' Clayton Kershaw coming out of the bullpen on one day's rest after a 100-pitch-plus start to save the deciding game in the division playoff against the Washington Nationals. (Then, two days after that, Kershaw pitched…

Members of Hillary Clinton's inner circle agreed to leverage support for Israel with donors but to remain silent on the subject around Democratic activists, according to hacked emails published by WikiLeaks.

House speaker Paul Ryan has issued a statement condemning President Obama's decision to lift trade restrictions with Cuba, the Carribbean island nation still controlled by Fidel and Raúl Castro's Communist regime. Obama announced Friday the United States would be lifting the limits to importing…

Darrell Issa has been in plenty of fights since entering politics, but he's never had to battle for reelection. The Southern California Republican has rarely had a serious challenger in his eight terms in Congress and has never won less than 61 percent of the vote in a primary—until this June.

In her latest column for the Washington Examiner, WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor Noemie Emery offers a brief recent history of philandering and promiscuous politicians:

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A Secret Service agent assigned to protect former President Bill Clinton performed "network assessments" and information technology troubleshooting for the Clinton Foundation and also provided research on security issues for Bill and Hillary Clinton's email server in Chappaqua, New York. These…

There was a recurring sketch on the late, great, still-underrated comedy show SCTV in which two farmers in overalls, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, reviewed obscure foreign films and highbrow fare with one common feature: They showed people and things exploding. "I'll tell you one film I really…

California is one of the newest parts of North America. Not long ago—just a couple hundred million years ago, which isn't much on a geologic timescale—North America ended, roughly, in Nevada. To the west of Nevada was the Pacific Ocean, and in it, a great chain of islands that no longer exists. The…

Like almost every Republican incumbent in a battleground state this year, Florida senator Marco Rubio had to survive the Donald Trump portion of a debate Monday night before he could focus the event on his own race. He succeeded in doing both—and he took advantage by outmaneuvering Democratic…

Besides choosing the next president, voters have a second and equally important obligation on November 8. They must elect a strong and clear-minded Congress to protect the country against the extreme policies of both candidates. It will take a Republican Congress to do this.

During the election of 1940, the married Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, gave speeches from the apartment of his editor girlfriend, Irita Van Doren (who helped write them for him), while the campaign train of President Franklin D. Roosevelt made routine stops at a certain small town in New…

On Monday, senior writer Stephen Hayes replied to partisan criticisms of his recent reporting on failed efforts by a State Department official to convince the FBI to reclassify an email on Hillary Clinton's server.

Donald Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, tweeted an op-ed from Republican medical doctors critical of Obamacare with an accompanying message Monday afternoon.

Andrzej Wajda, the Polish film and theatre producer and director who restored his country's consciousness of its torment at the hands of its Russian and Nazi German enemies, died on October 9 in Warsaw at the age of 90. His body of work made him an outstanding personality in the past 60 years of…

Hillary Clinton said something during the second presidential debate that demands fact-checking. Referring to her senatorial victory in 2006, she claimed: "67 percent of the people voted to re-elect me when I ran for my second term, and I was very proud and very humbled by that." It's not the…

A Christian pro-Israel group flooded the United Nation's cultural arm with thousands of condemnatory emails Monday, after the body passed a draft resolution last week denying Jewish and Christian ties to holy sites in Jerusalem.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on his weekend story exposing attempted foul play at the State Department.

The latest CNN/ORC polls, released Monday, show bad news for Republican Senate candidates in the battleground states of Nevada and North Carolina, following strong numbers in thoes states for Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Amid ongoing concern that President Obama will bail out his insurance company allies who've lost money selling Obamacare, his own Justice Department has now effectively admitted that he has no legal authority to do so. In a brief filed in federal court, the Justice Department argues that the…

The January 1973 issue of National Lampoon boasted a now-infamous cover: a man's hand aims a revolver at a wary dog, above the headline: "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released several documents Monday morning confirming discussions between officials at the State Department and at the FBI about a "quid pro quo" to reclassify documents stored on Hillary Clinton's private email server. Among the 34 released documents, which are…

The new novel by Ian McEwan is a loose retelling of Hamlet narrated by an erudite, morally engaged fetus. Remarkably, the project is not ridiculous.

An independent conservative presidential candidate with no national name recognition has statistically tied the two major-party candidates in Utah. The latest Rasmussen poll of Utah finds Republican Donald Trump with 30 percent support, independent Evan McMullin with 29 percent, and Democrat…

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The Department of Education's proposal to broaden the existing borrower defense to repayment rule will give college students new grounds to sue their schools for loan forgiveness. Underemployed grads and downtrodden dropouts can claim they were misled and never got their federally loaned money's…

John Kerry painted a dire picture of impending climate doom Friday in Kigali, Rwanda. At a meeting of parties to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an early climate agreement, the secretary of state said in part:

If the U.S. election season looks too depressing, you might consider following the presidential primaries in France instead. A week ago, the French magazine Le Point—which lies on the French center-right but is very far from the intellectual conservatism in the British or American sense—dedicated a…

Just a few weeks ago, Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that "one of the most successful environmental agreements in history" was actually now a huge driver of climate change. Late last week, Kerry went further, saying that "HFCs [hydrofluorocarbons], which was supposed to be the solution,…

My allegiance to the Chicago Cubs—which may actually bring something other than misery this year—began in earnest when the team hired Harry Caray to announce their games in 1982. My eternal affection for Harry goes beyond his broadcast brilliance: A long time ago, he helped my adoptive grandfather…

It is a symptom of the deplorable state of intellectual life today that readers of this magazine can guess the lineaments of the story told in Hannibal the instant they read early in its pages that classical Carthage, the city on whose behalf the great captain of the title fought against Rome, was…

In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Fred Barnes comes by to talk about whether Donald Trump's historic negatives are going to drag down GOP chances to hold on to the Senate and House. And Michael Warren reports on the Republican Party's raging civil war.

Americans are buying guns. A lot of guns. Gun sales set new records last month as, it seems, they have been doing almost every month since the election of Barack Obama as president. If you talk to people in the industry, they will tell you that Obama is the best salesman for guns in American…

Any effort to reform the Republican nomination process is going to have to go through the Republican National Committee, and, by extension, the state parties whose members comprise it.

Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan

A senior State Department official repeatedly pressed the FBI to change the classification of emails stored on Hillary Clinton's private server, according to FBI interview summaries set to be released in the coming days. Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management, discussed…

Editor William Kristol's weekly Kristol Clear podcast on the state of the presidential race and Donald Trump's decision to double-down on vitriol as a campaign tactic. Also, what will the long-term effects of Trumpism be on the GOP?

Near Sawrey, Cumbria

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Back in May, when Trump won the Indiana primary, I felt like such a dope. I was actually waiting for someone to tell me what we were going to do. Just days earlier, we'd all stood on the platform together, refusing to get on the Trump Train.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan is not only merited. It is inspiring, thrilling, reassuring. It restores a bit of faith in the prize itself. In recent decades the Nobel committee had taken to honoring fashionable charlatans or, at best, writers of limited scope and only…

Republican Abraham Lincoln waged his Civil War with malice towards none. Republican Donald Trump is waging his intra-party civil war with malice towards just about everyone. Bodies will be strewn across the political landscape, and the projected body-count is rising.

Obamacare enrollment is projected to flatten or even decline next year, according to a new report from Standard and Poor's, leading to a possible increase in insurance costs.

Ignoring the besieged, carefully coiffed elephant in the room, House speaker Paul Ryan delivered remarks over the course of 45 minutes Friday in a starkly worded critique of Hillary Clinton and progressivism. It set the table for a Clinton presidency, the stakes of it—and the significance of a…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior editor Andrew Ferguson on his story "Bob Dylan, Nobelist".

While there was little doubt where his sympathies lay, it was not until Thursday that Donald Trump fully and publicly embraced the most conspiratorial aspects of right-wing American politics. Witness his speech in West Palm Beach, Florida, in which Trump engaged in the sort of rhetoric once…

Republican senator Kelly Ayotte and Democratic challenger Maggie Hassan are statistically tied in the New Hampshire Senate race, days after the incumbent lawmaker rescinded her support of presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Political scientists usually define a party as a team united around common principles for the purposes of winning elections.

The saga of Jaber al-Bakr, the 22-year-old Syrian migrant and terror suspect who hanged himself in a Leipzig jail cell last week, is more or less over. But his story does illustrate the complexities, the dangers and ­dilemmas, of immigration policy here and in Europe. Bakr, who was from Damascus,…

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Wesley College has been practicing Queen of Hearts justice: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards."Such is the finding of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which announced this week that the Dover, Delaware, school has been rather jumping the gun when it comes to punishing those…

This past week we got a master class in how to deploy opposition research in a presidential campaign. During the second debate, a question from CNN's Anderson Cooper led Donald Trump to assert that he "did not kiss women without consent or grope women without consent." At that point, the floodgates…

A writer by the pseudonym of Run Mitt Run has written an appeal to Donald Trump to withdraw from the race—for his own good. Here's an excerpt:

Bob Dylan's Nobel prize is a culturally revealing moment, not only about the miserable state of modern literature but the even-more-miserable state of modern music criticism. Let's get this straight: Dylan can't sing and can't play. The musicians who did most to disguise these facts, the Band, were…

In this down year for conservatives one bright spot has been the renaming of George Mason University’s law school in honor of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

For 100 years, from the late 1800s to the late 1900s, nearly every American K-12 public school shared several defining features. Whether you found it in a rural town, a major city, or a sprawling suburb, you could say for certain a number of things about that school. It was run by a government body…

After decades of futurists’ predictions, driverless cars are finally out on the streets—in limited commercial tests in San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, and Pittsburgh. At the moment, they're still unreliable; for instance, a driverless Uber car in Pittsburgh took a shortcut the wrong way up a…

Among the writers who have had a consequential effect on the issue of race in America, Albion W. Tourgée (1838-1905) may be the least noticed, for reasons unclear. This is the latest of several recent treatments of his life and work that have left him, still, in unmerited obscurity. Perhaps one…

Besides choosing the next president, voters have a second and equally important obligation on November 8. They must elect a strong and clear-minded Congress to protect the country against the extreme policies of both candidates. It will take a Republican Congress to do this.

The saga of Jaber al-Bakr, the 22-year-old Syrian migrant and terror suspect who hanged himself in a Leipzig jail cell last week, is more or less over. But his story does illustrate the complexities, the dangers and ­dilemmas, of immigration policy here and in Europe. Bakr, who was from Damascus,…

There was a recurring sketch on the late, great, still-underrated comedy show SCTV in which two farmers in overalls, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, reviewed obscure foreign films and highbrow fare with one common feature: They showed people and things exploding. “I'll tell you one film I really…

There are many admiring things to say about Bob Dylan. While he may not be the hardest-working man in show business—the title once held by the martyred James Brown—he's still pretty close, recording and touring continuously at the age of 75. He's probably written more publishable songs, music and…

Policing has always been a difficult job. It has recently become more so. On a daily basis, officers around the country find themselves yelled at, protested against, and even targeted for assassination. They are scorned by the left as brutes and distrusted by the right as the enforcers of big…

Americans are buying guns. A lot of guns. Gun sales set new records last month as, it seems, they have been doing almost every month since the election of Barack Obama as president. If you talk to people in the industry, they will tell you that Obama is the best salesman for guns in American…

It is a symptom of the deplorable state of intellectual life today that readers of this magazine can guess the lineaments of the story told in Hannibal the instant they read early in its pages that classical Carthage, the city on whose behalf the great captain of the title fought against Rome, was…

My allegiance to the Chicago Cubs—which may actually bring something other than misery this year—began in earnest when the team hired Harry Caray to announce their games in 1982. My eternal affection for Harry goes beyond his broadcast brilliance: A long time ago, he helped my adoptive grandfather…

There is an old saw that the English and the Americans are two peoples divided by a common language. While there is a certain element of humor in this, there was more than an element of truth in it during the war years (1942-45) in the European Theater. Niall Barr highlights this and other…

The new novel by Ian McEwan is a loose retelling of Hamlet narrated by an erudite, morally engaged fetus. Remarkably, the project is not ridiculous.

George Santayana remarked in one of his books that there is no good reason for a philosopher to make his living teaching in a university. He would probably be better off as the man who collects umbrellas and checks coats in a small, seldom-visited museum. And Santayana’s onetime colleague at…

So the November 24 deadline for reaching a comprehensive agreement with Iran over its nuclear program—itself an extension of an earlier deadline—has come and gone with a whimper, and with another extension. The frenetic, feverish, and foolish pursuit of a deal by the Obama administration, marked by…

This past week we got a master class in how to deploy opposition research in a presidential campaign. During the second debate, a question from CNN’s Anderson Cooper led Donald Trump to assert that he "did not kiss women without consent or grope women without consent." At that point, the floodgates…

When Syrian opposition activists pushed John Kerry to take a tougher line with Russian president Vladimir Putin last year, the secretary of state asked them, "What do you want me to do, go to war with Russia?"

"Things taste better when you make them yourself, and they taste doubly better when you’ve hunted the animal yourself. Whether you're fishing for the salmon, or going hunting for a boar, that's a big part of it. You feel more connected to what you're doing, to what you're eating, you cook it…

Near Sawrey, Cumbria

Wesley College has been practicing Queen of Hearts justice: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards."Such is the finding of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which announced this week that the Dover, Delaware, school has been rather jumping the gun when it comes to punishing those…

The 2016 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature has posed the question for Republicans, whose party has nominated Donald J. Trump for president:

It had been a long day, and I was famished. I'd flown to New York the previous night, and the plane was delayed three times. I walked into my hotel room at 1:00 a.m. After five hours of sleep, I woke to prepare for my midday speech. Between the event itself and chatting with attendees afterwards, I…

Darrell Issa has been in plenty of fights since entering politics, but he’s never had to battle for reelection. The Southern California Republican has rarely had a serious challenger in his eight terms in Congress and has never won less than 61 percent of the vote in a primary—until this June.

FIREWORKS FOR THE FEW IN THE SPRING OF 1993, President Clinton stalled runway traffic at the Los Angeles airport so he could receive a $200 haircut aboard Air Force One at the hands of the gifted Christophe. Or maybe he didn’t—the facts of the case have never been established to The Scrapbook’s…

Sensing an opportunity to make big gains in Congress on November 8, top Democrats have stepped up their efforts to link congressional Republicans to the nominee of their party, Donald Trump.

A top senator is condemning the United Nations’ cultural organ for approving a draft resolution Thursday that effectively denies Jewish and Christian connections to holy sites in Jerusalem, after more than two-dozen countries, including U.S. allies, abstained from voting on the measure.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on the allegations against Trump, and sex scandals throughout U.S. political history.

Top advocates for presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump set the table for the final stretch of the campaign Thursday with dueling, scathing messages that cut to the core of each nominee's weaknesses.

The federal government's National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is hosting a series of three "Edit-A-Thons" to "improve Wikipedia entries related to gender equality." The collaboration is part of NARA's "Amending America" initiative celebrating the 225th anniversary of the Bill of…

The Nobel Prize committee awarded Bob Dylan with the prize for literature Thursday, which will no doubt prove to be a controversial selection. The issue is not that Dylan is yet another obscure figure the committee named apparently to score political points, nor that he writes in a language little…

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Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on Thursday. Here's a look back at some of what THE WEEKLY STANDARD has had to say about the musician:

Now that the presidential race is over, it's time to start thinking about what's going to happen to the Republican party next.

Greenville, Alabama, is a small city of about 8,000 right off I-65, south of Montgomery. It's best known for Bates House of Turkey, a popular lunch stop on the way down to the white-sand beaches of the Gulf Coast. It's also an important stop on the map for Tesla owners.

An observer of this summer's party conventions would get the idea that the use of military force is almost always and everywhere wrong and ill-advised. Any reference to the use of force was drowned out at the conventions by chants of "America First" and "no more war." With the exception of Donald…

I've been telling you—for a couple months now—that Donald Trump is not going to be president. I've gotten a lot of pushback on this from readers who proclaim, variously, that the polls are wrong, that Trump is playing four-dimensional chess, that this is the second coming of Reagan, or that Beltway…

So you've got this buddy, Bob. You aren't as close as you used to be, but you grew up together and have a bunch of friends in common. And even though you're both busy with your lives, you get together every couple years to catch up.

After John Podesta's apparently hacked emails were leaked by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign finds itself under fire after documents showed aides discussing ways to undermine the Catholic church.

Noam Chomsky would seem an irresistible figure for lampooning by Tom Wolfe, whose career has been devoted to eviscerating the preening of America's bien pensant class. Since the Vietnam war, when he looked like nothing less than Dennis the Menace's father, Chomsky has been the very model of…

Minnesota governor Mark Dayton liked it, but couldn't keep it—his staunch support of Obamacare, that is, which he dropped on Wednesday with a tough assessment of the law.

Days after House speaker Paul Ryan said he would begin focusing solely on preserving the GOP's House majority, a new poll of congressional races may get Republicans feeling and seeing blue.

Roger Waters—predictably—got there first. The uncomfortably dumb former Pink Floyd singer took a break from his usual anti-Semitic antics last weekend to instead lay into Donald Trump. Closing out the Desert Trip festival in Indio, California, on Sunday night, Surrey-born Waters branded the…

The news that Hillary Clinton's campaign maintained lists of journalists for friendly leaks and helpful advice—Maggie Haberman and John Harwood of the New York Times, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, etc.—is not news, exactly. Some would argue that the more interesting story would be a list of…

During an appearance on On the Record with Brit Hume Tuesday night, WEEKLY STANDARD senior writer John McCormack discussed House speaker Paul Ryan's decision to focus entirely on House races and not campaign with Donald Trump. Ryan made the announcement on a conference call Tuesday with House…

In a rush to beat out the latest iPhone, Samsung rolled out its Galaxy Note7 with one minor flaw: The battery. I'd hate to be the engineer who had to explain that one to company vice chairman and heir apparent Lee Jae-yong: "You see, sir, well, it's the battery. No big deal. It just, on occasion,…

An email thread released by Wikileaks appears to reveal skepticism in Hillary Clinton's camp about a nationwide $15 minimum wage, reflecting doubt among some liberal economists about the key progressive agenda item.

How best to defeat Islamist terrorism? Expel ISIS from Iraq and Syria? Crack down on domestic radicalization? Work with Muslim reformers to dismantle the ideological roots of Islamism? Each of these would, of course, be admirable pursuits. But none of them seems to spring first to mind among…

Venezuela. Algeria. Russia. Even Saudi Arabia. These are countries that always seem to top the list when we consider who was hurt the most economically by OPEC's multi-year price war on oil. In 2014, when OPEC countries opened the petroleum floodgates in an attempt to break the U.S. fracking…

Chris Stewart gave a simple explanation for introducing a congressional resolution on missing American David Sneddon: "As a parent, it seemed the right thing to do." The Utah congressman's own son was the one who told him that his friend had mysteriously vanished—the first U.S. citizen to disappear…

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A new poll of likely voters in Utah finds the Republican nominee for president tied with the Democrat—a remarkable development in a state that has voted for every GOP nominee since 1964. In the new Deseret News poll, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are tied among voters in the Beehive State at 26…

Paul Ryan deserves credit and support for his decision to stop defending and campaigning for Donald Trump, says the Washington Examiner in a new editorial published Wednesday. Here's an excerpt:

College football's polls rank teams even before the season starts, speculating about how good teams will be before they ever play a down. But the Anderson & Hester College Football Computer Rankings (which I co-created) reward teams for what they've actually done this season, and only this season,…

Obamacare's days are really and truly numbered. Problems with the law are reaching critical mass. So the Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to prop up the system—and by "extraordinary," we mean illegal.

A recent New York magazine profile of the Manhattan minister Timothy Keller lists the types of congregants filling his auditorium pews: "A cross-section of yuppie Manhattanites—doctors, bankers, lawyers, artists, actors, and designers, some of them older, most of them in their twenties or thirties."

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

The Obama administration has cemented secret exemptions to last summer's nuclear deal that allow Iran to keep a still-unknown amount of uranium above what the deal's caps allow. That's according to top nuclear experts and sources who spoke to THE WEEKLY STANDARD after lawmakers called for greater…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Mark Hemingway on the state of the Trump campaign less than a month out and what's next for the GOP.

A senior State Department aide coordinated with the Clinton Foundation to identify assistance offers to Haiti that came from "Friends of Bill," as the charitable organization filtered requests to the federal government during Clinton's time as Secretary of State.

In a rather unorthodox move, the Donald Trump campaign sent a press release Tuesday afternoon with an acknowledgement that Trump was unlikely to win the election.

It's going to get worse.

"Wellesnet," the online Orson Welles news and fan site has noted that Donald Trump's campaign is coming, more and more, to resemble the doomed election bid of Charles Foster Kane in the 1941 film. One will remember that things for Citizen Kane started to come unraveled when he threatened, at a big…

An odd thing occurred in the world of sports recently: The Southern Conference (SoCon), an intercollegiate athletics league, decided to honor its commitments to North Carolina, refusing to pull four upcoming tournaments from the state. This, as other associations, both professional and amateur,…

When FDA officials can't agree, who gets the last say? For individuals afflicted with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), this question has had life-altering consequences, and the answer is still unclear.

The Russian government's alleged involvement in disrupting or influencing the 2016 elections in the United States is one factor that prompted the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to offer cybersecurity services to state, county and local election agencies. Just a month out from the elections,…

"Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame bun." If you were around when this commercial came out in 1984, that description of the McDonald's Big Mac just rolls off the tongue. My wife hasn't had a Big Mac sandwich in years yet she still remembers the jingle…

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When the National Gallery's East Building opened last weekend after three years of renovation, no discerning visitor could miss the influence of one critic. In 1998, THE WEEKLY STANDARD's Andrew Ferguson read I.M. Pei's then twenty-year-old design as a mark of the age—an unpromising one. Above all…

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is the name of a children's book published a decade ago, heavily influenced by the Harry Potter series. My oldest daughter read it when she was 9, along with its sequels; she liked it, didn't love it, never really talked about it. She's now 12, and last…

Feel free to forward the tweet storm reproduced below, by Twitter user @MBGlenn, to any Republican men you know who continue to support Donald Trump.

Monday morning, House speaker Paul Ryan did something that was unthinkable in the context of an ordinary presidential campaign, but inevitable in this one: He told GOP members of the House that he was no longer going to defend Trump in the wake of the leaked tape of Donald Trump lewdly discussing…

President Obama got a fair amount of good press a few weeks ago when it was reported that Americans' incomes had risen. But that was from 2014 to 2015. During 2016, Americans' incomes have dropped.

House speaker Paul Ryan all but cut and sprinted from the presidential race Monday, telling Republican members that he would spend the election's final month working to preserve the party's congressional majority instead of defending Donald Trump.

At the second presidential debate, Donald Trump continued to glom onto the line that his lewd 2005 Access Hollywood hot mic comments were "locker room banter." Indeed, soon after the release of the comments, Trump issued a statement declaring, "This was locker room banter," and immediately pivoted…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on Sunday night's presidential debate in St. Louis.

Multiple polls conducted after the Friday release of the Donald Trump Access Hollywood video show Hillary Clinton extending her advantage in the presidential race, with one survey of a four-way field giving her an 11-point lead.

St. Louis

On Monday, Bill Kristol asked why Donald Trump can't be "dumped from the ticket."

In Donald Trump's "apology" for his vulgar and sexually-charged "locker room" comments caught on tape in 2005, the Republican nominee for president asserted that his opponent's spouse, Bill Clinton, "said far worse to me on the golf course—not even close." At least one other golf partner of the…

The latest episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol features Elliott Abrams, former assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration and deputy national security advisor in the George W. Bush White House.

The Justice Department occupies a very delicate place our constitutional system. On the one hand, the attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president, who can fire his AG any time, for any reason or for no reason at all, which (as Justice Scalia explained) ensures that the people remain a…

Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen's National Day address—Monday marks the 105th birthday of the Republic of China—was remarkable in the issues that it foregrounded. What was notable, in fact, was how utterly quotidian Taiwan's first female leader's remarks were. The large majority of the recently…

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I was an ardent critic of the "PROMESA" legislation Congress passed this summer to help restructure Puerto Rico's debt for one primary reason: It was clear hat it would serve as a blueprint for the states that have overburdened pension funds to escape their own debts by shortchanging the…

"Excessive" is the word that Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch president of the Eurozone countries, used for the Obama Justice Department's decision in mid-September to seek mammoth fines from Deutsche Bank. The German bank's various mortgage-underwriting violations were committed in the days before…

St. Louis

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on Sunday night's debate.

The emergence Friday of the disgusting Trump tape was a gift to the Republican party. It provided an occasion, at the very last minute, for the party to dump a fundamentally unworthy and radically unfit nominee. At the very least it provided an occasion for the party to separate itself radically…

Donald Trump is a terrible champion for Republicans for many reasons—the recently released 2005 audio tape reveals the most egregious one. But his performance in Sunday's debate in St. Louis against an ineffective Hillary Clinton demonstrated just how ill-equipped Trump is to challenge the weakest…

What a weekend: Friday featured the Trump tape, the reactions, and the midnight pseudo-apology. Saturday featured a wild scramble as people reacted. Sunday had Trump's meeting with the women wronged by Bill and Hillary Clinton followed by the second presidential debate.

There is one important sense in which Donald Trump "won" the debate on Sunday night: He did not implode. He wasn't "good," or attractive, or knowledgeable. He was coarse and whiny and unpleasant. He lied constantly. And he became the first presidential candidate in the history of our Republic to…

On Sunday, Bill Kristol talked about some of the logistics of replacing Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.

Trump surrogate and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that no one would be defending Donald Trump's remarks about women, after a tape from 2005 released Friday caught the businessman lewdly bragging about sexual acts.

On CNN's State of the Union, Tim Kaine dodged questions from Jake Tapper about leaked documents showing that she once advocated for open borders.

The Obama administration is manufacturing a crisis with Israel in anticipation of a post-election diplomatic push targeting the Jewish state, and this past week launched a series of broadsides criticizing the Israelis through the media and in press briefings, according to congressional sources and…

Hillary Clinton's campaign has been critical of Donald Trump's alleged coziness with Russia. This could boomerang on Clinton, however, and not just because of her own lead role in the Obama administration's failed attempt at a Russian "reset." Perhaps because it hit the newsstands before the…

Bill Kristol uses a great quote from Churchill in the service of urging all of the various Republican/conservative factions to come together and remove Donald Trump from the ticket.

Clinical terms for Donald Trump's endless deficiencies of mind, heart and soul—narcissist, sociopath, racist, misogynist—don't fully convey his ugliness. But there is one word in American slang that covers all the bases. Summed up, Trump is a creep.

Embattled New Hampshire senator Kelly Ayotte says she will not be supporting Donald Trump, the Republican party nominee, for president. Ayotte, who faced a tough challenge from Democrat Maggie Hassan, released a statement Saturday morning in which she said she will write in Mike Pence, Trump's…

Former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has withdrawn her endorsement of Donald Trump.

Alabama representative Martha Roby is the latest Republican member of Congress to denounce her party's presidential nominee and call for him to step away from the presidential race. The three-term House member released a statement Saturday morning in response to the report that Donald Trump, in…

"We have to think of the future and not of the past. This also applies in a small way to our own affairs at home. There are many who would hold an inquest in the House of Commons on the conduct of the Governments—and of Parliaments, for they are in it, too—during the years which led up to this…

Stephen Hayes analyzed the problem correctly back in a piece in late July headlined, "Donald Trump Is Crazy, and So Is the GOP for Embracing Him." And he also prescribed the solution (short of persuading or forcing Trump to relinquish the nomination, which should also be explored):

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In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Michael Warren recaps the Veep debate; Jeffrey Anderson updates us on the Obamacare death spiral; and Ethan Epstein tells us about a lump of Taiwanese jade that looks like a cabbage—no foolin'!

If you ever worry about the quality of news on the Internet, consider a recent story at BuzzFeed from reporter Adrian Carrasquillo. The writer notes indignantly that Donald Trump's infamous campaign comments about Mexican immigrants were not unprecedented: Speaking on a radio talk show, in 2011,…

The Libertarian party seemed to have a once-in-a-generation opportunity this cycle. The public hates both the major-party nominees, and Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, seemed to fill a real niche.

Following the release of a 2005 video in which Donald Trump made obscene comments about how he gropes women and might commit adultery, Utah senator Mike Lee called on Trump to step aside so that someone else could challenge Hillary Clinton.

The American economy continues to grow, albeit slowly, and the jobs markets has been generating enough jobs to keep us at or close to full employment without triggering inflation. The economy added 156,000 jobs last month, not seriously out of line with the 75,000-125,000 jobs that observers such…

Donald Trump is a "dirty old man" and was not committing a youthful indiscretion during his lewd conversation with TV host Billy Bush in 2005. That's what Bill Kristol told CNN's Jake Tapper Friday afternoon in response to the released audio of that conversation, which featured the future…

Bill Kristol said the recently released audio of Donald Trump speaking lewdly about women is a "window into his character." Joining Kirsten Powers on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper Friday, Kristol reacted to the news, first reported by the Washington Post, that a private conversation between Trump…

The Washington Post has obtained a video recording of Donald Trump speaking lewdly about sex acts and his attempt to seduce a married woman. The video, which features a conversation between Trump and TV host Billy Bush that was inadvertantly caught on a hot microphone, was recorded just months…

Bill Clinton made headlines this week when he said that Obamacare "craziest thing in the world" because small businesses and individuals "who make just a little too much" to qualify for any of Obamacare's subsidies are "getting killed." Indeed, Obamacare's structure is so crazy that that those who…

Editor William Kristol's weekly Kristol Clear podcast on why Mike Pence gives conservatives worried about the future some hope, and the 2016 MLB playoffs.

In his latest weekly column, Matthew Continetti, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, questions an "inward-looking America"'s readiness to face global realities—"an anxious Europe, a bloodstained Middle East, [and] growing dangers to U.S. forces in the Pacific."

Scrapbook friend Mike Murphy, the political consultant extraordinaire whose travails at the end of the Jeb Bush campaign were memorably chronicled in these pages by Matt Labash ("Debriefing Mike Murphy," March 28 / April 4, 2016), has of late been hosting a wildly popular podcast called Radio Free…

When a government agency makes mistakes when doing a prescribed task, should Congress insist that it improve its performance, or simply tell it to dismiss the task altogether? When it comes to the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigation (OCI), we may soon find out.

Readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD have been treated over the years to countless examples of malpractice from so-called media fact checkers. Some of those fact checkers are worse than others. It's an open secret, and one the media don't want to acknowledge, that PolitiFact in particular is horribly…

Citing an "epidemic level" of veteran suicides, an urgent legislative response moved swiftly through Congress last week. But then it hit a wall.

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The award for the week's most depressing opening sentence in a news story goes to this gem by T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post:

A former top Treasury Department official told THE WEEKLY STANDARD Thursday that major international firms still do not want to do business with Iran, despite efforts by the Obama administration to persuade foreign banks and businesses to reengage there.

In the depths of the Great Depression, two progressive congressmen added a little noticed amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act that over the next 80 plus years grew like an octopus with its tentacles touching every single American. At its inception, the Jones-Costigan Amendment was intended…

In an interview with the Nieman Lab this week, New York Times editor Dean Baquet was asked about how the media are struggling to cover Donald Trump. He noted that this is not the first time during the course of a presidential campaign that the media has had hard time combat untruths, except that…

Variations on the same basic conversation are, no doubt, taking place all over the country: people asking, rhetorically, “How has it come to this?" Agonizing over what, if anything, can be done. Wondering, "Does it really have to be one of these two?" Sooner or later you come to the dead-end…

Chris Stewart gave a simple explanation for introducing a congressional resolution on missing American David Sneddon: “As a parent, it seemed the right thing to do." The Utah congressman's own son was the one who told him that his friend had mysteriously vanished—the first U.S. citizen to disappear…

Hillary Clinton doesn’t want to talk about Obamacare, but her husband clearly feels no such reluctance. Bill Clinton—who has his finger on the pulse of public sentiment to a greater degree than either President Barack Obama or Hillary—spoke rather freely about Obama's signature legislation early in…

Should anyone outside the military be forced to kill? Most people would say no. But with the ubiquitous availability of abortion—and the push to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia—doctors may soon find themselves required to take lives or risk being booted from the medical profession.

Readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD have been treated over the years to countless examples of malpractice from so-called media fact checkers. Some of those fact checkers are worse than others. It's an open secret, and one the media don't want to acknowledge, that PolitiFact in particular is horribly…

Greenville, Alabama, is a small city of about 8,000 right off I-65, south of Montgomery. It’s best known for Bates House of Turkey, a popular lunch stop on the way down to the white-sand beaches of the Gulf Coast. It's also an important stop on the map for Tesla owners.

David Wootton has written a long book to save science from something, even if he’s not quite sure what that something is. The demystification, deconstruction, and doubt of post-modernity, maybe. Or revitalized religious faith, from Radical Islam to Protestant Fundamentalism. Certainly, Wootton…

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is the name of a children's book published a decade ago, heavily influenced by the Harry Potter series. My oldest daughter read it when she was 9, along with its sequels; she liked it, didn't love it, never really talked about it. She's now 12, and last…

A  recent New York magazine profile of the Manhattan minister Timothy Keller lists the types of congregants filling his auditorium pews: "A cross-section of yuppie Manhattanites—doctors, bankers, lawyers, artists, actors, and designers, some of them older, most of them in their twenties or…

Arrington, Va.

Obamacare’s days are really and truly numbered. Problems with the law are reaching critical mass. So the Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to prop up the system—and by "extraordinary," we mean illegal.

Noam Chomsky would seem an irresistible figure for lampooning by Tom Wolfe, whose career has been devoted to eviscerating the preening of America’s bien pensant class. Since the Vietnam war, when he looked like nothing less than Dennis the Menace's father, Chomsky has been the very model of…

Antiquities, said Francis Bacon, are “remnants of History, which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time." The 17th-century English biographer and antiquarian John Aubrey was born in the year Bacon died, read his Essays as a child, and included him in his who's-who compendium of famous greats,…

Survivors of the old Ottoman Empire, my paternal grandmother included, were accustomed to beginning bedtime stories with a rather puzzling stock opening: “Once upon a time, there was and there was not .  .  ." Contradictory on its face, it actually made a lot of sense, especially when prefacing a…

The award for the week’s most depressing opening sentence in a news story goes to this gem by T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post:

Scrapbook friend Mike Murphy, the political consultant extraordinaire whose travails at the end of the Jeb Bush campaign were memorably chronicled in these pages by Matt Labash (“Debriefing Mike Murphy," March 28 / April 4, 2016), has of late been hosting a wildly popular podcast called Radio Free…

Back in the day, I threw papers for the Dallas Times Herald, the city’s afternoon daily. I was 12 years old when I took over a route of about 50 papers. I folded the papers and put them in a canvas bag about twice as big as a beach bag. I walked the blocks, pitching papers. Sometimes I'd ride my…

I've lately had the pleasure of being interviewed on John Batchelor’s cerebral radio program, which originates in New York but is heard all over the country. Since I am in Washington, and not New York, I speak to Mr. Batchelor by telephone—which means that his millions of listeners hear but do not…

An observer of this summer’s party conventions would get the idea that the use of military force is almost always and everywhere wrong and ill-advised. Any reference to the use of force was drowned out at the conventions by chants of "America First" and "no more war." With the exception of Donald…

Former President George W. Bush says every American citizen should vote in the presidential election, though he hasn't revealed whom he plans to vote for. But it won't be Donald Trump. We can be sure of that.

Vice presidential debates don’t matter. Lloyd Bentsen was widely thought to have clobbered Dan Quayle in 1988; the Bush-Quayle ticket won easily. Vice President Quayle did well against Al Gore in 1992; the Bush-Quayle ticket lost.

The next round of October baseball is underway Thursday afternoon with the Texas Rangers hosting the Toronto Blue Jays (the Boston Red Sox are in Cleveland to play the Indians Thursday), but for some people that's not enough. Instead of enjoying the baseball, some folks are sweating the…

McKay Coppins at BuzzFeed reports that independent conservative presidential candidate Evan McMullin will announce his running mate is 35-year-old Republican consultant Mindy Finn. Here's Coppins:

This election has made all the so-called political experts look like fools. Most of us thought that Trump would not enter the presidential race at all, that if he did he could not win the Republican nomination, and that if he nonetheless managed all that, he would still lose to Hillary Clinton in a…

"You put the 'B' in LGBT"—these lyrics from a song performed in the White House last week encapsulate the message of the third annual Bisexual Community Briefing hosted by the Obama administration.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Jonathan V. Last on the state of the race, one month out.

When you collect comics, there are all sorts of factors that determine the value of the book. Certain important comics (they're referred to as "key" issues) are high-value. So, for instance, Detective Comics #358 isn't worth all that much, but issue #359 is, because it's the first appearance…

In 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that poverty "in many cases is the root cause of terrorism." But a new World Bank study on ISIS recruits shows that Kerry's claim isn't true. "This result is consistent with a number of other studies that come to a similar conclusion: poverty is not a…

I can't remember not being a mediocre piano player, though there must have been a time when I was worse. I wasn't born vamping through the easy movements of Best Loved Classics and burying their tricky parts in clouds of pedal. (Take that, Moonlight Sonata!) No, my kind of musician is made—by going…

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine—then a former governor and candidate for the Senate—was asked in 2012 what he would do about illegal immigration. Kaine responded that he would require illegal immigrants to identify themselves and force them to pay a hefty fine that would be used to…

Birmingham, England

One of the weirder aspects of anti-Trump mania is its sniffy tone. And it's especially weird coming from card-carrying liberal Democrats. For two generations our culture and its institutions have been living under a liberal ascendency. The country's elites—the Bigs of the news media and Hollywood…

The Clinton campaign said Hillary Clinton agrees with vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine's controversial statement Tuesday that the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement eliminated Iran's nuclear program.

I’m famous! Or, well, actually I'm completely obscure.

In truth, farmers and environmentalists should be allies. The environmental and agricultural communities have more in common than conventional wisdom might suggest. Both desire to preserve our planet and its resources for future generations. I am not shy about saying farmers are the original…

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Ventotene, Italy

One of the themes I visit over and over again is the difference between tactics and strategy. I keep ringing this bell because the two ideas aren't particularly well understood in the political realm.

From September 25 to October 1, Donald Trump spent more than eight times as much on television and radio advertising as he did during the prior week, according to newly released tallies from the Associated Press. Trump also widened the map and adopted a more offensive posture, adding five…

In 1965, Michael Novak was a young academic living in Los Angeles when Stanford University hired him for a teaching position. He was a Dodgers fan, and as he wrote in his fine book, The Joy of Sports (1976), he moved his young family to Palo Alto only to discover that he couldn't tune in the…

A bit more than a month from Election Day, the electoral forecasts for Republicans differ between congressional campaigns and the one for the White House. The party's odds of retaining the Senate, once believed long, have improved substantially in recent weeks, as one-time toss-up races like…

Contributing editor and WEEKLY STANDARD movie critic John Podhoretz joined C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb on Q&A to discuss his career as a film critic and editor, movies, and how they've shaped the political landscape.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer John McCormack on Pence's debate win, and what Trump needs to do in the remaining days and debates of the 2016 race.

Urumqi, China

In "Aristotle on Economics and the Flourishing Life," the first in a collection of essays Economic Freedom and Human Flourishing, Harvey Mansfield writes, "What is a better person? It is one with a better soul. Aristotle's moral, political, and economic thought is based on the soul…Human beings…

When the Smithsonian opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture Museum last week, some of the day's loveliest moments involved President Obama and former President Bush, celebrating the event together with their wives and the American people. And rightly so: the museum is a…

During the vice-presidential debate Tuesday, Virginia senator Tim Kaine likened Hillary Clinton's stance on immigration to Ronald Reagan's 1986 immigration plan, a controversial set of reforms that, rather than cracking down on undocumented workers and heightening border security, was followed by a…

Even in this unconventional election, a highly conventional fact remains: A handful of swing states stand to decide who the next president will be. Meanwhile, early voting is already underway. And accusations that the system is "rigged" by cheaters seem to gain legitimacy as hacking attempts appear…

According to CNN's instant (scentific) poll of debate watchers, 48 percent said that Mike Pence won, while 42 percent said Tim Kaine won. That seems about right to me. Pence was better than Kaine on both substance and style.

Here's an interesting stat brought to you by Ana Swanson of the Washington Post: "A survey of 33 Japanese restaurants in the Washington area revealed that 12 were owned by Chinese Americans and 12 by Korean Americans. Only six were Japanese owned." And it's not just in the Washington area, mind…

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Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has released a letter addressed to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. In it, he asks Lynch a number of pointed questions about "side agreements" given to the Hillary Clinton aides who were also given immunity for cooperating in the email…

"No one has any other way left but—upward." (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, address at Harvard, June 8, 1978) After this ghastly campaign, whose ghastliness reached new heights with the performance of the Republican nominee in the first presidential debate, conservatives will have no other way left…

If Donald Trump had acted in the restrained and calm manner that Mike Pence did in the vice presidential debate, he might have won his debate with Hillary Clinton last week. At least he wouldn't have embarrassed himself, which is what happened in the clash with Clinton.

The Obama administration gutted an international ballistic missile embargo on Iran as one of several concessions made when the Islamic Republic released four American prisoners in January, Iran experts tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD. This has triggered criticism that the administration misled Congress…

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Farmville, Va.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on Tuesday's vice presidential debate in Farmville, Virginia.

In Tuesday's vice presidential debate, one of the closing questions for Senator Tim Kaine and Governor Mike Pence was about their personal faith and potential conflicts with their roles as elected officials.

Virginia senator Tim Kaine avoided addressing Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state Tuesday during the vice-presidential debate, after being asked whether the scandals surrounding Clinton are fueling lack of trust among voters.

In his opening statement at Tuesday's vice presidential debate in Farmville, Virginia, Senator Tim Kaine said:

Voters have a pretty low opinion of the media. Only 19 percent of Americans have a favorable view of them, according to one recent NBC News poll. There are a lot of reasons for why that is the case, but one that shouldn't be overlooked is that the media don't hide their contempt for voters. Take…

The latest surveys of swing states in the election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton find the GOP candidate lagging in critical battlegrounds, with both nominees still sitting below 50 percent in expanded three- and four-candidate fields.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Mark Hemingway on how PolitiFact and the Clinton Foundation share a major donor.

While stumping for Hillary Clinton on Monday, former president Bill Clinton criticized the health insurance market under Obamacare as "the craziest thing in the world."

Kenneth Woodward's new book Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama is out, winning a positive review from D.G. Hart in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal: "His subject is how Americans get religion, and the author's own formation as a Catholic both…

Quinnipiac University released several swing state polls on Monday that were, on balance, good news for Hillary Clinton. She had leads in Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—which suggests a fairly comfortable Electoral College win. Yet Donald Trump was shown with a five-percentage point lead…

A vulnerable Republican senator who has dissociated herself from Donald Trump walked back her characterization of the White House hopeful as a role model based on the admirable pursuit of running for president, creating a potentially awkward flash point in a toss-up contest.

I have long pointed out that PolitiFact is objectively biased. Surveys done by the University of Minnesota and George Mason University have shown that the supposedly impartial "fact checking" news organization rates Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims and twice as…

The vice presidential debate doesn't matter. It never matters. And if you want proof, consider Lloyd Bentsen. In 1988, Bentsen scored the biggest knockout blow in the history of vice presidential debates, hitting Dan Quayle in a moment so vivid that it remains the most memorable moment of the…

At the beginning of the baseball season, we announced in the Kristol Clear newsletter a contest in which you had a chance to pick the teams that would make the World Series, and the winner. We've got the entries, are dutifully keeping track as promised, and the payoff will be YUUGE.

After the Washington Post last week published a glossed-over history of how Hillary Clinton "wrestled with" allegations of her husband Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs in the run-up to his 1992 run for president, our own Andrew Ferguson tried to fill in the gaps in the Post's story. Here's an…

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The recent appearance of two generically related novels by Louis Begley justifies a look back at the career of this extraordinary writer. Or rather, his second career since his first was as partner in the New York corporate law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton.

Is there anyone concerned at the ugly turn the election has taken with the release of a few pages of Donald Trump's taxes from 1995? The ugliness is not that Trump's taxes have been revealed, per se, but that it was done, in part it appears, by getting an elderly lawyer to violate his duty of…

Last week the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia heard arguments challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. The Clean Power Plan, as it is called, is central to President Barack Obama's overall…

Ulysses S. Grant has been the subject of scores of biographies, but his character has long remained elusive to historians. Even Grant's closest friends found him hard to figure. General William T. Sherman noted that, despite having known Grant for decades, "to me he is a mystery, and I believe he…

I recently received a long email from an old friend, someone whose judgment I very much respect, making the case for Trump. I can't say I'm convinced, but I thought his argument interesting and eloquent enough to ask him for permission to share it. Here are substantial excerpts from his missive.

The State Department announced Monday that the United States had broken off talks with Russia of implementing a ceasefire agreement in the Syrian Civil war, as the Kremlin continued to back an aggressive bombing campaign in rebel-held parts of Aleppo.

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with online editor Michael Warren on the Trump tax release and the Hillary "basement" tape.

On a crisp fall day as the scent of burning firewood tickles one's nose, a flock of Canada geese flies through the dusk sky, the birds' trademark honks punctuating the breeze. This could be an encouraging image, because the best part about Canada geese is when they leave.

The Department of Defense issued its official implementation handbook for transgender service members and their commanders on Friday, just days before a Pentagon deadline for the military to provide gender transition medical care to members of the armed forces.

Four polls conducted prior to the first presidential debate suggested that the race in potentially decisive Colorado had become a dead heat: Trump narrowly led in two polls, while Clinton narrowly led in the other two. But the first poll of Colorado conducted since the first debate finds that…

The New York Times's report on Donald Trump's tax records from 1995 suggests the Republican nominee may have avoided paying federal income taxes for up to nearly two decades afterward. That's because Trump declared a loss of almost $1 billion from his business dealings, and U.S. tax law allows…

In a lengthy interview recapping some of the pivotal moments of his administration, President Barack Obama told New York magazine that he hopes his successors will not have an "imperial presidency."

The conventional wisdom among Donald Trump's supporters is that his success doesn't rely much on political ads. The evidence suggests otherwise. As Trump's ad spending has risen, the race has tightened. As it has dipped, his polling deficit has widened.

As doubts have grown over the accuracy of polling, many have argued that there's a better gauge for predicting electoral outcomes: betting markets. The idea is that the wisdom of crowds—especially when those crowds are putting their money where their mouths are—trumps surveys that are hobbled by…

What constitutes a "fair" price for a drug? Unsurprisingly, that depends on who's asking the question, as well as who's answering. To get a price that can actually be construed as fair, it is essential that these are not the same entity.

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On July 28, 2009, newly elected President Obama made a "guarantee" during an AARP town hall pushing the then-newly introduced Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare:

Moira Weigel opens with the man she was seeing when she began her investigation into courtship: "For weeks he had been trying to break off our thing in order to commit to another, longer-standing thing with an ex-ex he had started to call his girlfriend again, and then changing his mind. He wanted…

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) hates e-cigarettes. The devices, he says, are little more than an evil plot, "the new frontier in tobacco companies' quest to get kids addicted while they are young."

Barack Obama wants options on Syria. "The president has asked all of the agencies to put forward options—some familiar, some new—that we are very actively reviewing," said Anthony Blinken, deputy secretary of state. But force is not an option, since according to the White House there is no military…

When open enrollment in Obamacare starts next month, enrollees in four states will be able to choose plans from only one insurer.

The Jewish New Year--Rosh Hashanah--began Sunday night, so let me wish one and all a sweet and happy year. I must say an awful lot was going on in the last week of the old year--most notably, the Ryder Cup, college and pro football games, and the last weekend of the regular baseball season. Here in…

The new Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture treats conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas like a mere footnote while heralding the woman who accused him of…

Trump surrogates Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani offered a similar defense of their candidate Sunday, calling him a "genius" and emphasizing that his not paying taxes was lawful, in the wake of a New York Times report that said the businessman could have avoided paying income taxes for years.

On CNN's State of the Union Sunday, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had difficulty defending Donald Trump not paying income taxes.

In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, presidential debate veteran Fred Barnes on how, in his next Hillary face-off, Trump can recover from this week's disastrous debate performance. And Michael Warren takes us to the carnival that was the debate spin-room.

Maps are a mystery to me, and my worthlessness in navigating has been a family joke for two decades. Google Maps and turn-by-turn smartphone guidance were a revelation—they have saved me from embarrassment and being late at least once a week since 2007. I am utterly dependent on them.

In his latest assault on the separation of powers, President Obama seems poised to take unilateral executive action—in direct defiance of legislation he signed—to bail out insurance companies under Obamacare. In its above-the-fold story on Friday, the Washington Post mischaracterizes Obama's power…

A lifetime ago​—​on June 14, 2015, for example​—​people who worked in politics and elections thought that they understood with a fair sense of certainty how elections and politics worked. Politics, sort of like physics, had immutable laws, rather like gravity. Demography seemed to be one of them.…

Come the great Republican party split in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose splinter inspired no shortage of cocktails.

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A footnote in a book about Ronald Reagan led Gene Kopelson to drop by the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, in the fall of 2012. Kopelson is a physician, not an academically trained historian. But he had begun research on Reagan's presidential run in 1968, a campaign to which historians have…

As reported, the White House Friday struck "Israel" from a press release concerning the location (Jerusalem) of the memorial service for former prime minister Shimon Peres. But the White House has not always been so successful in "correcting" what it apparently believes is an error. A July 2015…

Ferris Bueller famously quipped "A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself." But people do believe in isms—and a few of them are at odds with the isms prized by the ruling political classes.

An old friend of The Scrapbook's posted on Facebook the other day an oblique commentary on this year's campaign: "I used to like the word 'tremendous' and not know the word 'bigly.' Those were happy days."

A country is heading for trouble when its most popular writers worry that their words will land them in jail. France is that way now. Two years ago, TV commentator and journalist Éric Zemmour published Le Suicide français, an erudite, embittered, and nostalgic essay about the unraveling, starting…