427 articles
In today's 24/7 media age, the public image of a president—or president-elect!—is inescapable. But how did Americans perceive their presidents before mass media captured them for wide distribution? What was the everyday citizen's visual conception of a leader whose visage was understood only…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with reporter Alice Lloyd on how Trump can thank Obama for the ability to defund so-called 'sanctuary campuses.'
The creator of the McDonald's Big Mac, Jim Delligatti, died in his home outside Pittsburgh Monday at age 98. The former franchisee came up with the idea for the sandwich in the mid-1960s, and it's been a staple of fast food ever since.
Readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD had a clear advantage during Tuesday night's episode of Jeopardy! when the category of "Leaning Conservative" came up.
The WEEKLY SUBSTANDARD Podcast with Sonny Bunch, Jonathan V. Last, and Victorino Matus discussing Die Hard and other Christmas classics. Does anyone like eggnog? Plus the Substandard Holiday Gift Guide!
A controversial amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress's yearly defense policy package, would have required young women to register for the draft. On Tuesday night, Armed Services Committee staffers made known that this "draft our daughters" amendment, as critics call it, had…
Fred Barnes, the WEEKLY STANDARD executive editor, joined the Wall Street Journal's Mary Kissel Tuesday for the paper's Opinion Journal webcast. Barnes discussed his recent Journal op-ed about how incoming Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has the unenviable task of defending Barack Obama's…
House Democrats selected current minority leader Nancy Pelosi to continue her job when the next session of Congress convenes in January, fighting off a challenge for her post from Ohio representative Tim Ryan.
Mitch McConnell didn't have much to complain about on the night of November 4, 2014. In that day's elections, Republicans gained a net nine Senate seats, securing a majority and ensuring McConnell would become Senate majority leader. This was a crowning achievement in a turbulent year for the…
Helene Cooper, a New York Times journalist, says we should avoid taking an "American-centric" view of Fidel Castro's regime. She has a point: Ideally, we would take a Cuban-centric view of his rule, given that it was the Cubans themselves who either suffered or prospered under Castro's rule. And on…
Donald Trump has officially tapped his picks to run the Departments of the Treasury and of Commerce, according to the presidential transition. Trump will nominate Steven Mnuchin, the former Chief Information Officer at Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, for Treasury secretary, while Wilbur Ross, a…
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In the wake of Donald Trump's election, many colleges and universities vowed to become "sanctuary campuses" for students in the country illegally. The matter will take on a special urgency in the event that soon-to-be President Trump repeals the executive-ordered Deferred Action for Childhood…
Trivia question: Who wrote the first political autobiography? He flourished more than 300 years before Caesar, may have been a eunuch, and lived a very eventful life. The man who wrote it was a high official in an empire, became a national leader, the restorer of a city, arguably penned the first…
As John Tyler Wheelwright sat in Harvard's Holden Chapel listening to Charles Eliot Norton lecture on the fine arts in January 1876, "Ralph Curtis snapped at me a little three-cornered note—'Come to Sherwood's room after lecture. We are to start a College Punch.' " From that paper football sprang a…
In 1886, the young ornithologist Frank Chapman spent two afternoons wandering through uptown New York City. He had recently given up a career in banking for the sake of collecting bird migration data for the American Ornithological Union. A few years later, Chapman would originate the tradition of…
Senate Democrats are ripping Iran over threats issued by top Iranian officials to retaliate if Congress extends sanctions that the Obama administration has said are permitted under last summer's nuclear deal, according to conversations with lawmakers conducted by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
The religious detective, dating back at least to the early 20th century with Melville Davisson Post's Protestant layman Uncle Abner and G. K. Chesterton's Roman Catholic priest Father Brown, has continued to occupy a distinguished (and often lucrative) niche in the world of fictional sleuthing.
Ramallah
Opponents of Obamacare should be greatly encouraged by President-elect Donald Trump's pick of House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Price, an M.D., has advanced the most serious Obamacare alternative to date on Capitol Hill. His legislation…
Elaine Chao is the daughter of a shipping magnate. She was an administrator in the U.S. Maritime Administration in the mid 1980s. And when the calendar turned to the late part of the decade, she became chairwoman of the separate Federal Maritime Commission. Chao, who has had extensive government…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with online editor Michael Warren on Trump's HHS pick—a Georgia Republican doctor with a plan to replace Obamacare.
A decision by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has desk toy enthusiasts rejoicing. Buckyballs, the toys sold as a collection of 100 to 200 rare earth magnets that can be made into a myriad of designs, are legal again. And after fighting the Obama administration's Consumer Product Safety…
On November 16, United States District Judge Ed Kinkeade ordered Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey and New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman to be deposed by ExxonMobil lawyers in December. The two are further subject to legal discovery from ExxonMobil's legal team. These are…
The issue of repealing and replacing Obamacare is going to be central to the role of Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Donald Trump administration. The president-elect's choice for the job, Georgia representative Tom Price, has spent plenty of time working on the matter in his role as…
In a joint statement, Brookings Institution scholar William Galston and WEEKLY STANDARD editor Bill Kristol offer a defense of the "basic institutions and principles of liberal democracy" which they argue are under assault. Read the full statement below:
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Fred Barnes, in the Wall Street Journal:
Tuesday night, the College Football Playoff Selection Committee will declare which four teams would make the playoff if the regular season were to end today. A week from now, the committee will decree what four teams will make the playoff for real. As with all progressive-style "elite" or "expert"…
I called my mother on her 80th birthday last month. My brothers and sister and I were emailing each other as we've done every birthday of hers since she died more than six years ago. One of them remarked, "You know her phone is still working, right? You can hear her voice on her outgoing message."
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.
Tom Price, a Republican congressman from Georgia and orthopedic surgeon, is Donald Trump's choice for secretary of Health and Human Services. The New York Times reports:
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on the reactions to dictator Fidel Castro's death.
One might be inclined to laugh at footnote references on an early page of this deeply scholarly work to the Journal of the Society of Archer Antiquaries and the Henry North History of Dentistry Research Group Publication. But by so quickly dropping readers into such esoteric corners of published…
The man who attacked several people with a knife at Ohio State University Monday is of Somali descent and is a permanent legal resident of the United States. CNN reports:
President-elect Donald Trump's narrow victory of just more than 10,000 votes in Michigan was certified by the state's Board of Canvassers on Monday, officially making him the first Republican White House hopeful to win there since former President George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted "I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." As you can imagine, lots of people were outraged by this insane claim. But I don't know which is more insane: Trump's assertion of millions of fraudulent votes…
President Barack Obama has declared he might not follow the tradition of ex-presidents refusing to comment publicly on their successors. In a postelection press conference, he said:
Someone forgot to tell Albert Murray that progress has disenchanted our world. Or rather Murray—writer, thinker, and philosopher of the blues—never believed in progress, in the strong sense, in the first place. How could he? "Even in the best of times," Murray wrote, "the blues are only at bay."
Montreal
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The Oxford English Dictionary is a two-sided Kandinsky, a rare double image of grinding scholarship and popular acclaim. Unavoidably, perhaps, it is more widely esteemed than used. But somehow it has enough cachet that Mel Gibson is producing and starring in a movie about its first chief editor,…
In 1514, King Manuel I of Portugal gave Pope Leo X a white Indian Elephant named Hanno. When Hanno arrived in the Vatican—after sailing from Conchin, on India's southwest coast, to Lisbon and from Lisbon to Rome, he was an enormous sensation. He marched in parades and gave audiences. He was…
The Scrapbook has been experiencing déjà vu recently. Our memories of the vast left-wing paranoia during the Bush years had become hazy, but this week they all came flooding back. The left was already displaying unusual difficulty in coming to terms with Donald Trump's election victory, but then…
When I watch a football game, here’s most of what I see: either guys going out for passes and quarterbacks throwing the ball in their direction or blockers trying to push defenders aside to create holes for runners to charge through. In other words, I see almost nothing. Multiply me by millions of…
One's of Donald Trump's top aides joined a number of Trump loyalists Sunday in urging the president-elect not to appoint Mitt Romney as secretary of state, questioning Romney's loyalty and experience.
You could drive from Key West to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and never cross a state carried by Hillary Clinton. Thirty-two hundred miles, from the subtropics to the high north; from the Gulf Stream to glacier country. So much country and almost all of it colored red on the political map.
While left-wing Western leaders celebrate the late Fidel Castro—whitewashing much of Cuba's recent history in the process—it's worth remembering how total and insidious the Communist dictator's tyrannical regime was for the Cuban people. Over the years, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has documented some of…
A Kristol Clear Thanksgiving
Several world leaders on both sides of the Atlantic praised Fidel Castro after the Cuban president's death was announced after midnight Saturday. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama's comments summarized his White House's Cuba policy and predicted "history" would judge Castro's effect on Cuba and its…
In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Fred Barnes joins host Eric Felten to talk about Donald Trump's politically transformative use of Twitter technology. What promises will a President Trump be in a position to keep? Tod Lindberg tells us. And then Michael Warren Skypes in to talk about…
The Associated Press reports:
That's the easy part. President-elect Donald Trump went on YouTube to announce two of his goals. The first was to show the print and television moguls who have been coming and going from Trump Tower in an effort to work out a modus vivendi with the president-elect that he doesn't need them to get…
A majority of Americans—59 percent—want Donald Trump to stop tweeting and close his Twitter account now that he's been elected president. This is advice Trump is likely to ignore, and should.
For much of my life we didn't divide people into age groups. Today, some of the millennials are making a bad showing and taking a beating for it. As Dr. King would suggest, let's judge them by the content of their character.
While the Democrats reflect and Secretary Hillary Clinton wanders around the wilderness (literally), here are some observations for the establishment of both parties, the #NeverTrumpers, and those still in shock—i.e. the vast majority of Beltway insiders who somehow overlooked "flyover country" and…
"I have no worries" about Donald Trump's presidency, the Dalai Lama said this week. Lacking the Dalai Lama's spiritual serenity and cosmic confidence, we do have some worries. But we also have some hopes.
Los Angeles
Four themes flow together at one of the most remarkable points in American history—the evening when Abraham Lincoln for the last time proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving. It was April 11, 1865: two days after the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox; four days before…
They squabble, scrabble, and squawk. They peck at the last windfalls, out under the fruit trees, until they're—I don't know, drunk maybe on the hard cider of the apple mash or rendered hyperactive by some mad avian sugar rush, and then they strut through the yard, chests puffed out, spoiling for a…
Last week was the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which the Washington Post observed by inviting the ubiquitous novelist Joyce Carol Oates to review a memoir by the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, the man whose 8mm movie of Kennedy's shooting by Lee Harvey Oswald may well be the…
On November 16, United States District Judge Ed Kinkeade ordered Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey and New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman to be deposed by ExxonMobil lawyers in December. The two are further subject to legal discovery from ExxonMobil’s legal team. These are…
In the annals of academic condescension, there can be few equivalents in modern times to the letter, signed by 110 (and counting) college presidents, addressed to President-elect Donald Trump. “In light of your pledge to be 'President for all Americans,' " it declares, "we urge you to condemn and…
The religious detective, dating back at least to the early 20th century with Melville Davisson Post’s Protestant layman Uncle Abner and G. K. Chesterton's Roman Catholic priest Father Brown, has continued to occupy a distinguished (and often lucrative) niche in the world of fictional sleuthing.
To those who believed, sequentially, that Donald Trump would drop out soon after entering the GOP primary field; that this or that outrageous provocation of his would fatally turn off primary voters; that while he might be winning primaries, he had a ceiling of support among Republicans in the…
"I have no worries” about Donald Trump's presidency, the Dalai Lama said this week. Lacking the Dalai Lama's spiritual serenity and cosmic confidence, we do have some worries. But we also have some hopes.
Impresario of his father’s legacy, Christopher Rothko plays Vasari to papa Mark (1903-1970). Simultaneously pious and market-driven, his apotheosis of the painter is two things at once. Elegantly packaged, it is a promotional tool for sustaining his father's cult status and attendant asset value.…
The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540. Its members, the Jesuits, famous for their brilliance, courage, and missionary zeal, were also suspected across Europe, over the next 200 years, of Machiavellian politicking. In 1773, Pope Clement XIV abolished the order, but Pius VII restored it toward the…
The Scrapbook has long suspected that the first rash of antipathy toward Sarah Palin—the immediate, vituperative, sputtering hatred that was manifested within hours of her announcement as John McCain's vice presidential pick—was triggered not by her politics but by her family. Palin has a gaggle of…
Mitch McConnell didn’t have much to complain about on the night of November 4, 2014. In that day's elections, Republicans gained a net nine Senate seats, securing a majority and ensuring McConnell would become Senate majority leader. This was a crowning achievement in a turbulent year for the…
The Scrapbook has been experiencing déjà vu recently. Our memories of the vast left-wing paranoia during the Bush years had become hazy, but this week they all came flooding back. The left was already displaying unusual difficulty in coming to terms with Donald Trump's election victory, but then…
I called my mother on her 80th birthday last month. My brothers and sister and I were emailing each other as we’ve done every birthday of hers since she died more than six years ago. One of them remarked, "You know her phone is still working, right? You can hear her voice on her outgoing message."
One might be inclined to laugh at footnote references on an early page of this deeply scholarly work to the Journal of the Society of Archer Antiquaries and the Henry North History of Dentistry Research Group Publication. But by so quickly dropping readers into such esoteric corners of published…
When I watch a football game, here’s most of what I see: either guys going out for passes and quarterbacks throwing the ball in their direction or blockers trying to push defenders aside to create holes for runners to charge through. In other words, I see almost nothing. Multiply me by millions of…
Norman Mailer entered Harvard in the fall of 1939, just as World War II began. His famous novel about part of that war, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948, and at age 25, like Lord Byron, he awoke to find himself famous. Sixty years later, looking back on the book’s immense success—it…
The Oxford English Dictionary is a two-sided Kandinsky, a rare double image of grinding scholarship and popular acclaim. Unavoidably, perhaps, it is more widely esteemed than used. But somehow it has enough cachet that Mel Gibson is producing and starring in a movie about its first chief editor,…
President Barack Obama has declared he might not follow the tradition of ex-presidents refusing to comment publicly on their successors. In a postelection press conference, he said:
In today’s 24/7 media age, the public image of a president—or president-elect!—is inescapable. But how did Americans perceive their presidents before mass media captured them for wide distribution? What was the everyday citizen's visual conception of a leader whose visage was understood only…
It seems only appropriate, in Merrie England, that the lighthearted humor of a very British cartoon canine brightens the mornings of newspaper readers each day. Fred Basset first appeared in the Daily Mail on July 9, 1963. The philosophical basset hound, his nameless middle-aged owners, and…
On election night, Pennsylvania shocked the country by voting for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in 28 years. Just days before, Pennsylvania had been written off by experts who assumed the state’s streak of voting Democratic would continue. But in addition to proving them…
A majority of Americans—59 percent—want Donald Trump to stop tweeting and close his Twitter account now that he's been elected president. This is advice Trump is likely to ignore, and should.
The insertion of Nigel Farage into the dealings between President-elect Donald Trump and Prime Minister Theresa May’s government has yet to make the U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship more special, but it has already made it more complex and unpredictable. Is this Twitter-begot triangle a preview of…
Trivia question: Who wrote the first political autobiography? He flourished more than 300 years before Caesar, may have been a eunuch, and lived a very eventful life. The man who wrote it was a high official in an empire, became a national leader, the restorer of a city, arguably penned the first…
As John Tyler Wheelwright sat in Harvard's Holden Chapel listening to Charles Eliot Norton lecture on the fine arts in January 1876, "Ralph Curtis snapped at me a little three-cornered note—'Come to Sherwood's room after lecture. We are to start a College Punch.' " From that paper football sprang a…
You could drive from Key West to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and never cross a state carried by Hillary Clinton. Thirty-two hundred miles, from the subtropics to the high north; from the Gulf Stream to glacier country. So much country and almost all of it colored red on the political map.
In 1886, the young ornithologist Frank Chapman spent two afternoons wandering through uptown New York City. He had recently given up a career in banking for the sake of collecting bird migration data for the American Ornithological Union. A few years later, Chapman would originate the tradition of…
Someone forgot to tell Albert Murray that progress has disenchanted our world. Or rather Murray—writer, thinker, and philosopher of the blues—never believed in progress, in the strong sense, in the first place. How could he? "Even in the best of times," Murray wrote, "the blues are only at bay."
Over the weekend Ross Douthat had an interesting column about the"crisis of liberalism." "The 2016 campaign was a crisis for conservatism," he writes, "its aftermath is a crisis for liberalism."
The day following his stunning electoral victory, Present-elect Donald Trump announced his plan for his first 100 days in office. Trump outlined a few ambitious objectives in his School Choice and Education Opportunity Act that could reshape America's educational landscape. Trump's education plan:
Who now gives much thought to the presidency of Warren G. Harding? Who ever did? Not us.
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with AEI resident fellow Andy Smarick on his recent story "With Smugness Toward None..."
Every November, the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Studies assembles at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington. In even-numbered years, it has become tradition for leading conservative and libertarian lawyers to ponder how the recent election would affect the courts and the…
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President-elect Donald Trump has offered Nikki Haley the role of United State ambassador to the United Nations. The two-term Republican governor of South Carolina has reportedly accepted:
Keith Ellison, the Minnesota congressman who is seeking the chairmanship the Democratic National Committee, is beginning to feel the heat for his past profession of radical views and associations with extremists. At the New York Times, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman report that "some…
There seem to be at least two Donald Trumps on how to deal with Saudi Arabia, and it's difficult to know which one will trump the other in office.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.
While half of American voters have stomped through the Garden of Progressive Delights, Illinois is ever more shackled by insider deal-making, special interests of the liberal kind, and an autocratic Democratic machine. Case in point: As if organized labor hasn't wrung enough out of the nearly broke…
Alabama attorney general Luther Strange has decided to run for the Senate to succeed Jeff Sessions. President-elect Donald Trump has picked Sessions to be the U.S. Attorney General.
The international agency responsible for monitoring last summer's nuclear deal with Iran is deliberately not reporting on Iranian activities that may indicate Iran is violating the deal, setting up a potential confrontation with the incoming Trump administration, according to nuclear and…
This week on The Weekly Substandard, Sonny Bunch, Jonathan V. Last, and Victorino Matus discuss the new sci-fi thriller Arrival, plus their favorite alien-invasion movies of all time, their favorite Thanksgiving dishes, and—best of all—their favorite rest stops!
Perhaps the most cheering aspect of our American democracy is the optimism meeting a new president and his administration. In two months, Donald Trump will move into the White House and bring with him a host of ideas and people to implement them in order to advance the interests of American…
If the spirit of the Obama administration endures anywhere, it will be in the form of a policy directive from a small office in the Department of Education. The prime example of fiercely ideological federal overreach of the Obama years, the 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter from the department's Office…
State-run North Korean media—the only kind there is in that Stalinist country—often make hay of bad news out of the South. When a ferry sank off of South Korea in 2014, killing 300, for example, it drew attention to shoddy rescue efforts. And now with Seoul in the midst of a bona fide political…
Since 1992, even before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, U.S. policy has been based on the premise that Beijing's Communist leaders value Hong Kong's autonomy. The theory was that Beijing would not want to damage Hong Kong and so could be relied upon not to undermine Hong Kong's…
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Arrival is one of those movies that works very hard (and very cleverly) to convince you it's one thing until it takes an astounding turn in its last third and you realize you've been seeing a story about something else entirely—precisely at the point when it suddenly deepens, enriches itself, and…
Donald Trump's incoming administration will not further investigate former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's private email server scheme nor her family's charitable foundation, MSNBC's Morning Joe reported Tuesday.
As a general organizing principle, if Nancy Pelosi is for something, it's probably a bad idea. What, you ask, could be wrong with chocolate ice cream? And yet, when one learns that the House minority leader has a scoop on a sugar cone every morning for breakfast, the stuff immediately goes from…
Few tasks have proven more intractable for the show business biographer than constructing a viable, comprehensive, and, above all, convincing life of Orson Welles (1915-1985), a cultural iconoclast whose sheer range of entertainment media personae—actor, director, master of ceremonies, broadcaster,…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on how Trump is not the first presidential candidate of his kind, but the first to win.
The following is an excerpt from the Nov. 21 Kristol Clear newsletter—which you can have delivered to your inbox each week by signing up here.
In the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and a Republican Congress, Minnesota representative Keith Ellison has emerged as a leading contender to chair the Democratic National Committee. Ellison resides on the far-left fringe of the Democratic party. But perhaps it is a fringe no more.…
Republicans should have no trouble repealing the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. They can invoke the procedure known as reconciliation, which means only 51 votes in the Senate will be needed to kill the unpopular health insurance plan. Since there will be 52 Republicans in the new…
The Fall 2016 issue of the Claremont Review of Books features a review well worth your time by Jeremy Rabkin, a professor at the splendidly named Antonin Scalia Law School (previously the George Mason University Law School). The professor has written on Randy Barnett's new book, Our Republican…
Over the weekend I received emails from two very smart conservative lawyer friends about who President Donald Trump should nominate to take the late Antonin Scalia's seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The first mounted a strong argument for Joan Larsen—about whom I had known relatively little. When I…
From the Foundation for Constitutional Government:
It's impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine without finding another story about Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly. Ms. Kelly secured her place in the pantheon of star reporters/pundits/celebrities by her fearless grilling of Donald Trump and, lately, by helping to unseat Fox supremo Roger…
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Turkey's Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, appears as the sole person in his country's politics who knows what he wants. Erdogan seeks absolute power and acts against all obstacles to his ambitions. He is eager to identify new "enemies" whose purported conspiracies he believes justify his…
As Election Day approached, there was renewed interest in former President George H. W. Bush's magnanimous handwritten 1993 note to his successor, incoming President Bill Clinton. In it, Bush offered Clinton encouragement and wished him great happiness in office, then closed patriotically, "You…
This week, Bob Dylan finally gave the Nobel people an answer to their offer of the Literature Prize—he's happy to accept, but he's afraid he's too busy to go pick it up. Everyone's having a good chuckle at that. Nonetheless, the Nobel Prize-committee has explained that declining to accept in person…
Incoming Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday that President-elect Donald Trump and the Republicans controlling Congress do not have a mandate to implement their agenda.
In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Fred Barnes joins host Eric Felten to talk about Donald Trump's prospects for having his way with the Senate when it comes to Obamacare; John McCormack tells us whether the Senate is going to nuke the filibuster; and Ethan Epstein shows how a minor…
Will President-elect Donald Trump crash the Iran deal on day one, as he said on the campaign trail? If so, Barack Obama's signature foreign policy initiative, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), will melt into air. Obama allies and Iran deal supporters at home and abroad are already…
Incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said the government will not have a registry of people "based on a religion" but did say he would not rule out anything with respect to preventing radicalized people from entering the United States. Speaking with Chuck Todd on NBC's Meet the Press…
Not long after the election, the front page of the Washington Post featured a wonderful piece about how Bill and Hillary Clinton lost touch with their home base and with it the White House; along with that came a number of other good stories about how and why. So far so good, as the paper's A…
It's...the Jobs Game!
Editor William Kristol's weekly Kristol Clear podcast, where he discusses why Trump's transition is going better than many expected. Why the Sessions, Pompeo, Flynn team gives conservatives reasons to both hope...and worry, and how Trump continues to be blessed by the quality of his enemies.
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If we’re going to create more manufacturing jobs in our country, we ought to look at businesses that have successfully created jobs that don't involve silicon or staring at a screen all day. America's craft brewers provide a constructive example, since breweries are manufacturers whose products are…
Lost in the momentous events of the recent election was the news that the citizens of the District of Columbia overwhelmingly approved a "state constitution" for the proposed state of New Columbia. This presages a renewed public campaign for D.C. statehood. One can easily imagine how much the…
A literal reading of scripture and faith in an interventionist God strengthen church attendance. According to a new academic study of what drives a mainline Protestant church to die out or succeed, preaching these two theological precepts makes all the difference.
In 1789, the young Frenchman Charles-Jean-Francois Depont wrote to Edmund Burke and asked for his impression of the nascent French Revolution. Enthusiastic about the revolution, Depont hoped that the British statesman and philosopher would affirm its success. An endorsement, however, was not…
So much ink and punditry is being expended on gossip about how President-elect Trump might cast his play, that too little attention is being paid to the plot. Not that the cast won't matter: Those with roles at key agencies can contribute to the success or failure of the drama now unfolding here in…
On Friday, four Republican senators introduced a bill that would prevent the Obama administration from paying certain insurers in what they say amounts to a "bailout" of Obamacare.
The U.S. Surgeon General granted that the country's worsening opioid epidemic received due attention amid the long election season, but said alcohol-related issues are still costlier to the public after the release of a government report on drug addiction and abuse this week.
Philip K. Howard writes in the American Interest of the signal and opportunity of the Trump Revolution:
Iran will likely use the Obama administration's final weeks to try to procure nuclear-related materials in violation of last summer's landmark nuclear deal, a top lawmaker told the THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Please see full update below.
Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison is the progressive favorite for Democratic National Committee chairman. If Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders get their way, he'll replace disgraced Donna Brazile, who replaced disgraced Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as the party's chief organizer.
Three-term U.S. House member Mike Pompeo of Kansas has been selected by Donald Trump to head the Central Intelligence Agency. A cursory glance at his biography shows he's eminently qualified. Pompeo was first in his class at West Point, served as an Army officer during the cold war in Europe, and…
I began teaching at the University of Virginia at the height of the turmoil over the Vietnam War. Dissent was everywhere: There were marches on Washington and on campus. But there was always something different about the angry UVA students. For instance, upon returning from one march on Washington,…
After all the wild stories in an unpredictable year, we are now at last moving into a news cycle that is reassuringly predictable, with discoveries as foreseeable and unstoppable as the coming of the cherry blossoms in April or the choking of the Caps in May. Suddenly, we are told, The Presidential…
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Having failed in their attempt to paint energy companies with the same brush as tobacco companies, environmental activists have switched tactics and are now accusing publicly traded oil and gas corporations of hiding the true costs of climate change to their businesses. The effort threatens to…
Baby boomers had reason to feel slightly more decrepit than usual last week when it was learned that Robert Vaughn, the veteran character actor who played the debonair secret agent Napoleon Solo on the popular television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68), had died at the age of 83.
The most crushing defeat for Democrats on November 8 was quite obviously Hillary Clinton’s. The party's next most significant loss, however, may well be that of Brad Avakian. He was an obscure candidate for what might seem to be a relatively inconsequential position. But as it turns out, Oregon's…
Will President-elect Donald Trump crash the Iran deal on day one, as he said on the campaign trail? If so, Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), will melt into air. Obama allies and Iran deal supporters at home and abroad are already…
A good historian is inevitably a revisionist. Why write if you have nothing new to offer? But of course, not all revisionists are good historians. Whole forests have been cut down in the name of publishing some novel insight that obscures the past rather than enlightens. John Bew, a professor in…
As a general organizing principle, if Nancy Pelosi is for something, it’s probably a bad idea. What, you ask, could be wrong with chocolate ice cream? And yet, when one learns that the House minority leader has a scoop on a sugar cone every morning for breakfast, the stuff immediately goes from…
Readers who regularly partake of our abundant offerings at weeklystandard.com will have to forgive us for shamelessly ripping off what follows from our colleague Jonathan V. Last’s online update last week of the latest p.c. doings at the Lego Group, which we thought was too piquant not to share…
IN A PERFECT WORLD—heck, in a merely rational world—President Bush’s strategy for combating the economic downturn and battered stock market would be obvious: He’d use the huge Social Security surplus to cut taxes, stimulate the economy, and increase stock values. That surplus, after all, means the…
Minneapolis
Republicans should have no trouble repealing the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. They can invoke the procedure known as reconciliation, which means only 51 votes in the Senate will be needed to kill the unpopular health insurance plan. Since there will be 52 Republicans in the new…
Baby boomers had reason to feel slightly more decrepit than usual last week when it was learned that Robert Vaughn, the veteran character actor who played the debonair secret agent Napoleon Solo on the popular television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68), had died at the age of 83.
Not long after the election, the front page of the Washington Post featured a wonderful piece about how Bill and Hillary Clinton lost touch with their home base and with it the White House; along with that came a number of other good stories about how and why. So far so good, as the paper’s A…
The recriminations and agonies among the defeated have begun, and they are enough to break your heart. Hillary Clinton, who has been in the political world her entire adult life, is treated as a tragic figure by some. Jonathan Alter writes in the Daily Beast that
Few tasks have proven more intractable for the show business biographer than constructing a viable, comprehensive, and, above all, convincing life of Orson Welles (1915-1985), a cultural iconoclast whose sheer range of entertainment media personae—actor, director, master of ceremonies, broadcaster,…
My family and I recently moved to Virginia Beach. It is, according to my calculation, the 13th time we’ve moved since my wife and I were married 20 years ago and the 20th time I've moved in my 43 years.
On November 8, Donald Trump won a decisive victory in the Electoral College, capturing 306 of its 538 votes, more than any Republican in nearly thirty years. Even so, he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. Ballots are still being counted, but the latest tally by Dave Wasserman of the Cook…
Supersleuths in the mode of Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Hercule Poirot are an endangered species. With scattered exceptions, the Great Detective has fallen out of fashion in favor of mere smart people—driven cops, dogged private eyes, curious amateurs—without special deductive powers.
Who now gives much thought to the presidency of Warren G. Harding? Who ever did? Not us.
If we’re going to create more manufacturing jobs in our country, we ought to look at businesses that have successfully created jobs that don't involve silicon or staring at a screen all day. America's craft brewers provide a constructive example, since breweries are manufacturers whose products are…
Did Donald Trump just win the biggest arbitrage bet in history? Having been elected leader of the free world, it sure seems like he did. What was Trump’s presidential campaign strategy, after all, if not an arbitrage play on the value of media coverage found in the difference between media exposure…
Historians have to make strategic decisions before they even pick up their pens. The most freighted of them is whether to tell a story or advance an argument. The two can be done simultaneously, as Edward Gibbon long ago proved, but it’s hard to pull off. Academic historians have preferred argument…
In October 1975, on a lonely stretch of Exmoor, an incompetent hired hitman pointed a 1910 Mauser at a voluble, unbalanced British homosexual named Norman Scott, at which point the gun jammed several times. The only casualty of that strange evening: Scott’s dog, a famously pleasant Great Dane named…
After all the wild stories in an unpredictable year, we are now at last moving into a news cycle that is reassuringly predictable, with discoveries as foreseeable and unstoppable as the coming of the cherry blossoms in April or the choking of the Caps in May. Suddenly, we are told, The Presidential…
As Election Day approached, there was renewed interest in former President George H. W. Bush’s magnanimous handwritten 1993 note to his successor, incoming President Bill Clinton. In it, Bush offered Clinton encouragement and wished him great happiness in office, then closed patriotically, "You…
Arrival is one of those movies that works very hard (and very cleverly) to convince you it’s one thing until it takes an astounding turn in its last third and you realize you've been seeing a story about something else entirely—precisely at the point when it suddenly deepens, enriches itself, and…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on how Trump is uniting the GOP.
Nebraska senator Ben Sasse has come under fire for this tweet:
Ohio congressman Tim Ryan, who has served in Congress since 2003, announced in a letter to colleagues Thursday afternoon that he would challenge Nancy Pelosi in House Democratic leadership elections.
A group of Democratic lawmakers met with an alleged member of a terrorist organization during a trip funded by an anti-Israel nonprofit last spring, according to government documents obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
WEEKLY STANDARD editor William Kristol provided his post-election analysis with the Brookings Institution's William Galston and Boston College professor Susan Shell at Harvard University last week. Moderated by Harvard professor and frequent Conversations with Bill Kristol guest Harvey Mansfield,…
Discontent with Obamacare—and with the delivery of health care more broadly—unites most Americans across our other divisions. That discontent creates enormous opportunities and risks for our president-elect.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said there should be an investigation into Rudy Giuliani's alleged knowledge of FBI activity in the lead-up to Director James Comey's letter to Congress about the review of additional emails related to the Bureau's investigation of Hillary Clinton.
Now that Donald Trump has won the presidency, one of his transition team's top priorities should be ensuring that the candidate who came to power on a pledge to drain the federal swamp of corruption and self-dealing is not pulled into the mire upon his inauguration. The problem is not Trump's…
It is common knowledge that Puerto Rico is a financial mess and that it arrived at its current predicament due to its government's unwillingness to make difficult decisions. Ex-Governor Luis Fortuno made an attempt to return the island's finances to sanity, but his efforts cost him his reelection…
Over at Slate Jamelle Bouie has been on a tear about how racist Donald Trump and all of his voters are. His case is not especially nuanced: "White Won" and "There's No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter." You can read Bouie's arguments in depth if you like, but the headlines give you a pretty good…
When Democrats thought they had a lock on the White House and the Senate, retiring Senate minority leader Harry Reid made one thing abundantly clear: If necessary, Democrats would get rid of the Senate's 60-vote hurdle to confirm a Supreme Court justice—just as they had done for other judicial and…
The other night, my wife and I went out to dinner with our friends Jen and Jay. Ordinarily, we like to keep things simple. We'll head over to their cottage on the Chesapeake Bay. Jay will smoke meat or steam top-neck clams. We'll dig a pit on the beach, gather dried driftwood, and do what grown…
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House speaker Paul Ryan stepped in Wednesday to block an effort by some House Republicans to partially resurrect earmark spending, six years after the practice was banned. Here's the Wall Street Journal with the report:
Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, has proposed a $26-billion "emergency" supplement to next year's defense budget. Speaking on the floor of the Senate Wednesday, the freshman Republican noted the threats from a resurgent Russia, an aggressive China, and a…
Bernie Sanders had teased supporters via email, "This is something you'll want to watch"—referring to his Wednesday night speech and book talk with columnist E.J. Dionne at George Washington University. Less predictably, Sanders tore into the Democratic National Committee with a fire he'd held back…
No one was more surprised than me when Donald Trump pulled off the greatest electoral upset since Truman beat Dewey. (Except maybe these folks.) But from this point on, all the clichés are basically true: He's our next president. Every American should pray for him and hope he's successful.
When in doubt, confess. In grade school, assigned to write a theme demonstrating colorful language, I swung into action and, only a few lines in, let flow from my pencil this satisfyingly cynical simile: "a laughter as mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx." The words all but begged to be written.…
Among all the uses conservatives can think of for a Trump executive order or Supreme Court nominee, there's one, too often forgotten, that ought to come first. Religious freedom—scholarly and practical advocates say, in a nod to the founders—is not just the first freedom in the Bill of Rights but…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on the Trump transition.
Top Republican senators tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD they don't know what a Donald Trump administration will mean for Ukraine, but they plan on urging his team to support the country in its fight against Russian aggression regardless.
President Barack Obama spoke about the mindset of young people put off by last week's election results during a speech in Greece Wednesday, urging them not to deviate from the values that ensure "lively, open debate" amid a nationwide swell of protests and school walkouts.
President-elect Trump's advisers are indicating he will likely stick to the shortlists released during the presidential campaign when given the chance to name a Supreme Court nominee.
Americans awoke on the morning of 11/9 to a different political world. There is only one word to explain what happened, and it is called democracy.
If you're one of those people who was surprised to learn that the national anthem is inherently racist, then you were probably surprised to learn that the Lego Group—the parent company that makes Legos—has decided to pull all its advertising in London's Daily Mail.
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Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who received media interest amid President-elect Donald Trump's attacks on fellow Latino-American judge Gonzalo Curiel during election season, "demurred" from commenting on the campaign when asked Tuesday evening if she felt any apprehension about the result.
"It was around 9:20 p.m. when conventional wisdom died," wrote the Wall Street Journal's Neil King on election night. That was the moment when the New York Times's website began projecting that a Donald Trump victory was more likely than not, and it became abundantly obvious that the presidential…
Have a question for Matt Labash, ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.
Florida governor Rick Scott told reporters Tuesday that he wouldn't rule out a run for Senate in 2018, the year voters will choose his successor on account of his being term-limited.
Political coalitions are tricky things to manage in the United States. Ours is a country of more than 320 million people but only two major political parties—so each side's voting bloc tends to be unstable at the margins, where national elections are actually won and lost. It is hard to build a…
The newly elected House Republican conference voted to nominate Paul Ryan for speaker on Tuesday, a little more than a year after first being elected speaker. Ryan will now face a full vote of the House of Representatives in January, when the new Congress is called into session.
As House Republicans meet on Wednesday to discuss their plans for next year, three of them are attempting to bring back the practice of earmarking.
Donald Trump's incoming chief strategist and senior counselor, Steve Bannon, has described House speaker Paul Ryan as the "enemy" and has called for his removal from the speakership. But Ryan said at the Capitol Tuesday he is moving past that criticism and called on his fellow Republicans to "look…
If you have had food delivered to your home or office from a favorite restaurant that doesn't offer in-house delivery service, chances are you've used a service called GrubHub.
Mike Rogers, the former Michigan congressman who chaired the House Intelligence committee for four years, is no longer working on the transition team for President-elect Donald Trump.
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The election of Donald Trump signals bad news for the Iran nuclear deal, Barack Obama's signature foreign policy initiative. Calling it "the worst deal ever negotiated," the author of The Art of the Deal has threatened to tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on day one of his presidency.
Donald Trump, like Ronald Reagan, becomes president as the head of the Republican party and leader of a political movement. For Reagan, joining the party with the conservative movement was painless. They fit nicely. For Trump, merging the party with his populist movement won't be as easy. But it's…
Donald Trump's newly tapped senior advisor Steve Bannon has previously expressed open disdain for Republican House speaker Paul Ryan, dubbing him an "enemy" and calling for his removal from the position. But House Republicans brushed off the possibility that Bannon's attacks on Ryan would drive a…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer John McCormack on President Obama's Monday press conference.
Hong Kong
Over the weekend, pictures of a Hezbollah parade in the Syrian city of Qusayr showed Hezbollah fighters using American-made M113 armored personnel carriers (APCs). If the vehicles were transferred by the Lebanese Armed Forces, a recipient of U.S. aid and equipment, to Hezbollah, as some analysts…
An unadvertised (so far) sale is underway at the Hillary Clinton campaign store, including the "Woman Card" the campaign issued in April to tweak Donald Trump. When the card was introduced, the campaign wrote:
A town-gown culture clash in Oberlin, Ohio reached a fresh level of absurdity last week. At local mom-and-pop store Gibson's Bakery, a shoplifting incident straight out of Spike Lee's oeuvre amplified into a boycott, followed by a counter-effort by the community: a "cash mob" to help keep the shop…
Rudy Giuliani is a close friend of Donald Trump and was one of his most ardent advocates in the presidential campaign. And now he is a finalist for secretary of state. But it would be a mistake to install him at State for two reasons.
Since Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat last week, there have been a lot of stories about Clinton campaign hubris. Specifically, the Democrats seemed to badly whiff on a lot of campaign fundamentals: don't nominate someone under FBI investigation who has no retail political skills; have a clear…
Reince Priebus provided some clarity to his new job as White House chief of staff Monday morning and how it will coexist with the role of Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon as Donald Trump's top political adviser, with the outgoing head of the Republican National Committee confirming that part of his work…
In the state of Oregon, the secretary of state is charged with auditing public accounts, managing elections, and administering public records. It's a glorified administrative role, which for whatever reason is an elected office in the Pacific Northwestern state.
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With everything he said on the campaign trail, it was inevitable that the relationship between President-elect Donald Trump and the European Union would start off on the wrong foot. But if Trump appreciates that the liberal democracies of Europe are still the best friends that America has in the…
How could they? It's the question being asked by all the world's press and much of our own. How could the American people, after all they have learned about Donald Trump's private vulgarity, his boasting and confabulation, his wild and tacky business career—how could they vote to place him in the…
The United Nations' nuclear watchdog may have delayed releasing a report which revealed that Iran has again violated last summer's landmark nuclear deal amid efforts by the Obama administration to protect the deal, a top nuclear expert told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Some indigenous North American tribes still whale, at a subsistence level. The whaling is allowed because whale populations have rebounded beautifully since commercial whaling ended, and because whaling is an important part of the tribe's culture, tradition and history. I've spent years trying to…
Dear Readers:
In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Donald Trump shocks and shakes up a complacent political establishment right and left. Will he be able to meld his brand of populism with traditional GOP conservatism? What will that hybrid look like and will it succeed? Fred Barnes joins Confab host…
"Republicans Dominated The Senate Races, Except The Ones Who Dumped Trump," the Daily Caller reports. Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway calls the story an "important read - and critical to remember moving forward. Still waiting for those stories on how Trump helped down-ballot [Republicans]…
In an editorial "Elephant and Man at Harvard," the Crimson advocates openness and understanding in the coming age of Trump. Harvard's campus daily champions diversity of political opinion, largely absent on the Ivy League campus, as an essential priority post-election.
While your attention was diverted to America's elections, a fierce debate was underway among Israel-bashers. The debate is over the precise parameters of the obviously essential boycott of Israel. And it took place, quite properly, in the pages of The New York Review of Books, where just how much…
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Apocalypse now. “Dear God. What have you done? After Brexit and this election … a world is collapsing before our eyes. Dizziness," was the cri de coeur of Gerard Araud, France's ambassador to the U.S., apparently unaware that anything that discomfits the French pleases a vast number of Americans.…
On Fox News's Special Report Thursday night, host Bret Baier and panelist Laura Ingraham discussed the role of former House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers in heading up national security planning for Donald Trump's transition. Both mentioned that conservatives are concerned with his…
The 2016 election tested a number of questions about American electioneering, among which was how much organization matters in the modern political environment. The Trump campaign had very little organization and no get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation. The Clinton campaign went big on both. The…
"Democracy has not saved us from a distinct decline in the standard of our public men," the Liberal prime minister William Gladstone told his biographer, John Morley, towards the end of his life. And he had no doubt that "For all this deterioration one man and one man only is responsible: Disraeli.…
Vice President-elect Mike Pence will serve as head of Donald Trump's transition to power, replacing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, according to three sources with knowledge of the plans.
Tucked among the anguished headlines in last week's editions of the Washington Post was this poignant update: "In election's wake, D.C. statehood becomes a dream deferred." The quotation from Langston Hughes was no accident, of course: "Dream deferred" makes it clear that the Post regards statehood…
Amid aftershocks of the Trump victory, education policy experts are picking through his campaign promises and proposals looking for ideas they can work with, and wondering what they can expect. Streamlining the Department of Education? Likely. Hacking off the tentacles of its undue influence?…
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With the election over, connoisseurs of Russian influence operations will want to redirect their attention to lower Manhattan, where the world chess championship is getting under way at the South Street Seaport.
After all of the dark speculation in the media over whether Donald Trump and his supporters would gracefully accept losing to Hillary Clinton, the reaction of her supporters to the sudden reversal of fortune inflicted by voters has been something to behold. To summarize: The world is literally…
Detroit
Have a question for Matt Labash, ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.
An alternate version of the Exodus story circulated in antiquity—one so bizarre it might as well have occurred in an alternate universe. In this version, the pharaoh decided to cleanse Egypt of lepers and other "unclean" people, confining these unfortunates first in quarries, then in an abandoned…
After all of the dark speculation in the media over whether Donald Trump and his supporters would gracefully accept losing to Hillary Clinton, the reaction of her supporters to the sudden reversal of fortune inflicted by voters has been something to behold. To summarize: The world is literally…
In 2013, when the world found out that Angela Merkel had been the target of American wiretapping, Western journalists seemed ready for the fainting couches. The United States, it turned out, had used its embassy in Berlin to house its eavesdropping operation. But how naïve could these journalists…
One more unforeseen consequence of Donald Trump’s election victory: College students who have been spending too much time binge drinking or binge watching now have a handy excuse for not turning in that required paper on time or for being unprepared for that exam. They can blame it on the election.…
They meant it. There have been five national elections in the past decade. In four of them—2006, 2008, 2010, and 2014—voters gave notice to the politicians who are supposed to lead them. They were different elections and different times, and the results invested power in different political…
Tucked among the anguished headlines in last week’s editions of the Washington Post was this poignant update: "In election's wake, D.C. statehood becomes a dream deferred." The quotation from Langston Hughes was no accident, of course: "Dream deferred" makes it clear that the Post regards statehood…
Americans awoke on the morning of 11/9 to a different political world. There is only one word to explain what happened, and it is called democracy.
As impassioned calls to curb income inequality, including through a growing movement to establish a “guaranteed basic income," have increasingly dominated the political conversation here and abroad, Edward Conard's contrarian argument for pro-growth policies—including those that inevitably increase…
How could they? It’s the question being asked by all the world's press and much of our own. How could the American people, after all they have learned about Donald Trump's private vulgarity, his boasting and confabulation, his wild and tacky business career—how could they vote to place him in the…
The late great Donald Westlake signed letters (and emails) “Onward." This wonderfully opaque valediction leaves altogether unclear the writer's own sentiments toward the addressee or the character of his relationship to the correspondent. What does "Onward" really mean? Presumably we all go onward…
"This could blow up in her face! Hillary Clinton may have lit the fuse for her victory celebration a little too soon—by planning an Election Night explosion of fireworks over the Hudson River, The Post has learned.
London
Conservatives are reptiles. This is the message that progressive talking heads and Democratic campaign consultants heave at America’s impressionable swing voters: Conservatives are cold, lethargic, calculating creatures who peer out at the world through diamond pupils in swampy green eyes, and who…
Discontent with Obamacare—and with the delivery of health care more broadly—unites most Americans across our other divisions. That discontent creates enormous opportunities and risks for our president-elect.
Wilkie Collins was quite literally a colorful character. His doctor described his attire at dinner as sometimes featuring “a light camel hair or tweed suit, with a broad pink or blue striped shirt, and perhaps a red tie." On another occasion he appeared wearing a low-cut shirt "dashed with great,…
There’s something reassuring, even comforting, about competence—not genius, but rather the elusive combination of craftsmanship and care that can sometimes be more welcome than the unexpected. Competence is why Marvel Studios, which has been making superhero movies since 2008, has become the most…
The election of Donald Trump signals bad news for the Iran nuclear deal, Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative. Calling it "the worst deal ever negotiated," the author of The Art of the Deal has threatened to tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on day one of his presidency.
I skipped out the door of the polling place last Tuesday as I usually do after voting, filled with patriotism and awe and reverence and gratitude for such a privilege—and a tinge of regret that so many of my fellow voters weren't going to share the experience, because they were too stupid or too…
Political coalitions are tricky things to manage in the United States. Ours is a country of more than 320 million people but only two major political parties—so each side's voting bloc tends to be unstable at the margins, where national elections are actually won and lost. It is hard to build a…
Donald Trump, like Ronald Reagan, becomes president as the head of the Republican party and leader of a political movement. For Reagan, joining the party with the conservative movement was painless. They fit nicely. For Trump, merging the party with his populist movement won’t be as easy. But it's…
Hong Kong
The 2016 election tested a number of questions about American electioneering, among which was how much organization matters in the modern political environment. The Trump campaign had very little organization and no get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation. The Clinton campaign went big on both. The…
Soon after Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13, the battle over who should fill the Supreme Court vacancy commenced. Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, took the position that it shouldn’t be President Barack Obama but the next president—whoever Americans choose—who…
When in doubt, confess. In grade school, assigned to write a theme demonstrating colorful language, I swung into action and, only a few lines in, let flow from my pencil this satisfyingly cynical simile: “a laughter as mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx." The words all but begged to be written.…
"It was around 9:20 p.m. when conventional wisdom died,” wrote the Wall Street Journal's Neil King on election night. That was the moment when the New York Times's website began projecting that a Donald Trump victory was more likely than not, and it became abundantly obvious that the presidential…
The other night, my wife and I went out to dinner with our friends Jen and Jay. Ordinarily, we like to keep things simple. We’ll head over to their cottage on the Chesapeake Bay. Jay will smoke meat or steam top-neck clams. We'll dig a pit on the beach, gather dried driftwood, and do what grown…
Dorset, Vt.
One more unforeseen consequence of Donald Trump's election victory: College students who have been spending too much time at binge drinking or television watching now have a handy excuse for not turning in that required paper on time or for being unprepared for that exam. They can blame it on the…
As soon as the surprise wore off that Donald Trump was elected president, attention turned quickly to Washington's favorite parlor game: Who will serve in President-elect Trump's cabinet and White House? But for all of the speculation about Trump's future chief of staff, Attorney General, Secretary…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the election, and looking forward.
On Thursday, Bill Kristol told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that he "would encourage my Never Trump friends to be open-minded about a Trump administration and willing to help."
The Obama administration will not penalize Iran for exceeding limits set forth in last summer's nuclear deal that pertain to the country's ability to stockpile nuclear-related material.
The WEEKLY STANDARD's Bill Kristol appeared on the latest episode of Mike Murphy's Radio Free GOP podcast, where they discussed their careers in politics and the nation's capital, and analyzed Donald Trump and the 2016 presidential election. Their conversation begins around the 30-minute mark below:
Donald Trump owes his victory in the Electoral College to three states he won by the smallest number of votes: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So it's fair to say that the 2016 presidential election was decided by about 77,000 votes out of than 136 million ballots cast. According to the…
President Barack Obama and his incoming successor Donald Trump met for about 90 minutes in what was described as an "excellent" first meeting between the two men Thursday.
A new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed that Iran is in violation of last summer's nuclear deal. According to the report, the regime in Tehran has again exceeded the deal's threshold for heavy water, marking the second such violation since the implementation of the agreement…
This week on The Weekly Substandard, Victorino Matus, Jonathan V. Last, and Sonny Bunch geek out on comic-book movies, issue corrections, and sample a new spirit. Plus the most trenchant political analysis of Election 2016 you will find on the Internet!
Opponents of the death penalty have made a serious tactical error. Rather than stress what is by far their strongest argument—the partially persuasive claim that the government should not, ethically, be in the business of killing people—they have instead stressed the "cost" of executions. The fact,…
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James Rosen has executed a smart idea that never occurred to William F. Buckley Jr.: He has assembled a collection of some of the best obituaries Buckley penned in more than a half-century as commentator, political activist, and public intellectual. Buckley aficionados, general readers, and the…
Far be it from a recovering ex-#NeverTrump pundit to proffer advice to our 45th president, but our leader-in-waiting could do a lot worse than to call up the American Enterprise Institute and invite Charles Murray to tea. Murray is the man who in his 2012 classic Coming Apart put a name to the…
Students at American University burned flags in protest of Donald Trump's election victory Wednesday.
A number of U.S. universities are giving students ample room to grieve in the wake of Donald Trump's election victory Wednesday.
First-term Republican senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire conceded Wednesday evening:
The House Republican caucus lost only five members on net in Tuesday's elections. After runoff elections are held in Louisiana, there will be 241 Republicans and 194 Democrats taking office in January. Among the new congressmen-elect are Brian Mast of Florida and Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Mark Hemingway on yesterday's election.
Precious college snowflakes at the University of Michigan-Flint can get the help they need following Hillary Clinton's stunning presidential loss.
As the seventh game of the World Series continued deep into the night last week, three things happened that were unusual, three things that make baseball the remarkable game it is. They had to do with rain, a meeting, and a player—three reasons the Cubs won the game, and thus the series.
Saying the presidency is "bigger than any of us", President Barack Obama complimented the big-picture message of President-elect Donald Trump's victory speech during remarks outside the White House on Wednesday morning, adding that his team would conduct a smooth transition to his successor's…
Hillary Clinton delivered her concession speech in the presidential race late Wednesday morning at the New Yorker hotel, blocks from the venue planned for her victory party the night before—where, not long after 2 a.m., Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta had taken the podium to send…
Forget Hillary and Trump. The biggest loser Tuesday night was Barack Obama.
When Justice Scalia died on February 13, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell vowed not to process anyone President Obama might pick for the vacancy, arguing that the next president should make the nomination instead. Senate Republicans stuck to that position, and so the vacancy is now Trump’s to…
Despite innumerable and sharp disagreements between them, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have surprisingly congruent positions on free trade, both suggesting it has adversely affected jobs and wages in the United States.
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One of the big arguments made by Donald Trump and his supporters was that the Republican nominee was capable of redrawing the electoral map. Specifically, they said, Trump would turn out the vote in rustbelt states that hadn't voted reliably GOP in decades. A lot of people found the suggestion that…
Donald Trump has done what Ronald Reagan did. He beat back a hostile press, smears by his opponent, outrage by foreign leaders, vast campaign spending by Wall Street and the wealthy one percent, and vows by actors and rock stars to leave the country if he was elected president.
Donald Trump has shocked the world and won the presidential election. But you shouldn't blame most of the polls for your surprise. Polling errors of about three percentage points are fairly common, as we've pointed out at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and as Nate Silver has explained at FiveThirtyEight.com.
Donald Trump has won the presidential election. He overcame the polls, the expectations, and the faith-based belief of the political establishment that he couldn't do it. As the results began to come in Tuesday night, as must-win states for Trump slid easily into his column, and as the Democrats'…
Senator Pat Toomey has been reelected in Pennsylvania after a tight race with Democrat Katie McGinty, likely securing the Republican majority in the Senate.
Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson was all but written off for most of his bid to defend his Senate seat. The first-term incumbent pulled out the eraser Tuesday night, and inked himself in for a return to the upper chamber in a shocking comeback victory over former Sen. Russ Feingold.
In crucial states for Trump's path to the White House, incumbent Republican senators have cruised to victory in what had been previously expected to be close reelection contests.
Republican representative Todd Young will defeat former senator Evan Bayh in the Indiana Senate race, NBC News reported just short of 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, giving the GOP a crucial hold early in its quest to maintain a majority in the upper chamber.
Republican senator Tim Scott has won reelection in South Carolina, according to the projection of the Associated Press. Scott, who was first appointed to the Senate in 2013 following the retirement of fellow Republican Jim DeMint, won the 2014 election to fill the remainder of DeMint's term. His…
The Associated Press has called Indiana for Donald Trump, whose vice-presidential pick is governor of the state, as the first polls close on across America.
I skipped out the door of the polling place this afternoon as I usually do after voting, filled with patriotism and awe and reverence and gratitude for such a privilege—and a tinge of regret that so many of my fellow voters won't share the experience, because they were too stupid or too lazy or too…
Lots of interesting reflections today from email correspondents on the election, America in 2016 and life in general. Here's one, from a teacher:
As voters head to the polls today, the partisan impulse for Republicans to support Donald Trump has never been stronger. But according to the final New York Times/CBS poll, only 39 percent of Republicans say Trump has been good for the party, while 41 percent say he's been bad for the party, and 16…
Before there was Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, and Bill Mitchell's Yard Signs, there was Vigo County, Indiana. The half-urban, half-rural area about 80 miles southwest of Indianapolis has voted for the winner of the presidential race in 30 of the last 32 elections, and…
The death this week of Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton's first attorney general, recalls the era of the failed independent counsel law. The law was passed in 1978, and Congress declined to reauthorize it in 1999, when Reno was still the attorney general. A product of Watergate and the infamous…
As doubts continue to linger over the efficacy of Obamacare, Colorado voters will decide whether they want to create the nation's first functioning single-payer system on Tuesday.
Since there will be an avalanche of post-election analysis on Wednesday, I thought it would be more helpful to give you some thoughts on what to look for tonight as the returns come in.
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Predictably, a student production of Othello was scrapped last week at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario—because a white girl was to play the lead. Othello the Moor, the ill-fated hero of Shakespeare's tragedy, is a black man in the text and, since the middle of the last century at least, on…
From the Foundation For Constitutional Government:
Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte's announced "separation" from the United States and his anti-American rhetoric have left the four million Filipinos and Filipino-Americans like me who live in this country perplexed and troubled. Many of us have friends and family in the Philippines who benefit…
Like a new drug commercial with a list of side effects longer than the problem it solves, Donald Trump's campaign is leaving behind a wake of issues for the Republicans, the economy, and public policy in general. Despite Trump's distracting 3 am tweets, his unapologetic sexism, and his contempt for…
Pippa Passes, Ky.
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with various predictions on tomorrow's elections.
I spend a lot of time these days wondering if anyone has ever given more thought to a relatively meaningless vote than I have this year.
Wilmington, N.C.
This presidential election cycle has defied conventional wisdom in so many ways that the list is about as long as Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. Who would have thought a year ago we'd find ourselves here—with these specific candidates and many an "October surprise"—with less than 24 hours…
Rebuilding America Now PAC has a new ad airing in Northern Virginia attacking Hillary Clinton for her opposition to the name of the Washington Redskins football team.
If you'll permit me a personal note on Election Eve (and if you won't permit it, feel free to stop reading now!):
Look at the numbers, but look at the variables, too: Republican Todd Young is now firmly the favorite to win Indiana's Senate race, seizing control of a key toss-up race the GOP almost certainly must win to retain its majority in the upper chamber.
Just one week ago, the number-crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com gave Democrats 68.9 percent odds the party will take control of the Senate as a result of Tuesday's elections. The betting odds then were not that far from the peak likelihood predicted by the website: 74.6 percent, on October 18. Yet,…
Over the weekend, New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro wrote the following squib, "In 1 Unscripted Moment, Hillary Clinton Finds Joy in the Rain," which for reasons both unsurprising and only known to the editors, the Grey Lady saw fit to print:
The organizers of an anti-Israel conference held over the weekend at George Mason University restricted press access only to "movement outlets" that support economic warfare against the Jewish State, according to statements provided to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by a media coordinator for the event.
With fewer than 24 hours until Election Day polls open, the race for control of the United States Senate is as tight as can be. Republicans face substantial structural challenges. They are defending more seats this cycle, and the nomination of Donald Trump has turned a winnable presidential…
Republicans in tight races are closing out the election with ads blasting their Democratic opponents for supporting last summer's nuclear deal with Iran, while Democrats are remaining largely silent about the broadly unpopular agreement, according to media analysis provided to THE WEEKLY STANDARD…
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Suppose, for a moment, that Donald Trump is elected president Tuesday evening. It seems unlikely, but is not impossible; and we've faced the apocalypse a couple of times in recent memory.
Martin Kramer is the founding president of Shalem College in Jerusalem, where he also chairs the department of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. He is the author of several books, including Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, and The War on Error: Israel, Islam,…
After more than 20 years of planning, development, near cancellation, blood, sweat and tears, the construction of the James Webb Space Telescope is complete; it was was just completed. It took seven years longer than it was supposed to and went seven billion, two hundred million dollars over…
A savvy (if somewhat sadistic) friend writes:
On election eve, just how long are the odds that Evan McMullin will be our next president? The former CIA agent and independent conservative candidate has ballot access in just 43 states—32 in which his name is actually on the ballot and another 11 that allows his name to be written in. Despite the…
Here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, we already know the end results--at least when it comes to our campaign cocktails competition. We returned to Bar Pilar and tested out the finalist recipes submitted by you the reader. It's a hard job but somebody had to do it!
In the days since FBI Director James Comey wrote to congressional leaders revealing new information in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, Clinton defenders have been spinning furiously in an attempt to mitigate the potential political damage. They have attacked Comey, blamed a rogue band of…
As more and more of Hillary Clinton's emails come to light, previously obscure connections with and influences on Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state have also arisen. The latest batch of emails revealed one such case involving Clinton's daughter Chelsea and, by extension, the Clinton…
Monuments to Winston Churchill abound in the United Kingdom. You can remember the greatest man of the 20th century at his birthplace, Blenheim Palace, or by his grave nearby at Bladon. Then there are the Cabinet War Rooms in London, his country house, Chartwell, and, of course, the magnificent…
There's a reason presidents are wary of campaigning actively to elect their successor. Presidents are the past. Presidential candidates are the future. Presidents can raise money and draw crowds at campaign events. But speeches? That's asking for trouble.
It's finger-biting, tossing-and-turning-in-bed, stomach-churning time.
In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, executive editor Fred Barnes provides the definitive election-eve prognostication. Who will be president? Clinton? Trump? Or the Sweet Meteor of Death? Can the GOP, against all odds, hang on to the Senate? Is there time left for a November Surprise?
"I never vote for anyone. I always vote against." –W.C. Fields
Reviews and News:
Whenever an American presidential election threatens to produce a controversial or conservative victor, some of our intellectuals and celebrities swear that, should the dread event come, they're going to "move to Paris."
Being the one branch of government most removed from the chattering masses (the internet, in other words), the Supreme Court had never once held a live video webcast—until Friday afternoon, that is.
Three days hence those Americans not too lazy, or not seriously unhappy with the choice before them, will join the 37 million who have already voted. Hillary Clinton is hoping they will have taken on board Friday's jobs report. The economy added 161,000 jobs in October, and the reports for the past…
Greenville, N.C.
Yet another reason to hate early voting: It has eroded the journalistic exit-poll armistice, the agreement to embargo information about how Americans are voting until after the polls have closed. Without notice or discussion, mainstream news sources such as NBC and the New York Times have taken to…
With the news that Republican representative Todd Young had overtaken Evan Bayh in a new poll of the Indiana Senate race—an intuitive result, given the torrent of negative news against the Democrat—the GOP now has their noses in front in at least three and perhaps all five Senate contests…
Editor William Kristol's weekly Kristol Clear podcast, where Kristol makes his final predictions for the (seemingly never-ending) 2016 presidential race.
The Department of Education's broadened borrower defense to repayment rule, recently released in its final form, looks likely as ever to do far more harm than good. Despite widespread concern that the department's move was a dangerous "overreach" with collateral consequences, the expansion will…
A new poll of likely voters in Indiana finds Republican Senate candidate Todd Young leading his Democratic rival, former senator Evan Bayh, by five points. The new survey from WTHR and Howey Politics Indiana found Young, a three-term congressman, with 46 percent support, while Bayh has 41 percent…
One of the more humorous aspects of the Hillary Clinton email kerfuffle has been the former secretary of state's penchant for asking various staffers to print out her emails (the federal government's Paperwork Reduction Act notwithstanding) with the short instruction "Pls print." A search for the…
Chicago
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On Friday, Bill Kristol joined MSNBC's Morning Joe to discuss the state of the race.
It's not clear which was more laughable, the cluelessness on display or the hapless effort to hide the cluelessness on display. The Scrapbook is referring to the embarrassing story that went up on the snarky Mediaite website (sort of a cross between the Huffington Post and Gawker) during game seven…
This week, I led the latest quarterly call with a few key staff members of The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and nearly 50 farmers and ranchers, each a volunteer member of our agriculture advisory councils. We talked about our urgent efforts to defeat Oklahoma's "right to farm" ballot…
Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, and Kelly Ayotte, and of all you desperate GOP candidates, threading the needle between a working class base in thrall to a demagogue and another fairly large bloc that detests him: Ike feels your pain. So does John Kennedy, and a very large group of the best and the…
Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s announced "separation" from the United States and his anti-American rhetoric have left the four million Filipinos and Filipino-Americans like me who live in this country perplexed and troubled. Many of us have friends and family in the Philippines who benefit…
In late October, a jury in Oregon acquitted Ammon Bundy and six codefendants for illegally occupying a building in the federal Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in a remote eastern part of the state. The protest, the subject of national news coverage in January, was in support of local ranchers…
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past several months, let me be the first to tell you that this year marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death. There have been essays on nearly every aspect of the Bard's life: his religion, his money, his politics, his view of gender…
No history cries out for revision more insistently than Irish history. And no event in Irish history demonstrates this better than the Easter Rebellion—the centennial of which is now in full throttle—because no event better epitomizes the vexed question of what constitutes Irish identity and Irish…
Monuments to Winston Churchill abound in the United Kingdom. You can remember the greatest man of the 20th century at his birthplace, Blenheim Palace, or by his grave nearby at Bladon. Then there are the Cabinet War Rooms in London, his country house, Chartwell, and, of course, the magnificent…
A Washington Post writer observed last week that while the presidential election campaign "has been a late-night host's dream come true," that does not necessarily mean it has been everyone else's dream come true. The late-night TV hosts—Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah,…
As if America isn’t suffering from enough anxieties in 2016, you may have noticed the country is gripped by a nationwide epidemic of creepy clown sightings. In fact, someone in a clown costume carrying an axe was recently spotted in a park a few miles from my house. This isn't technically illegal,…
James Rosen has executed a smart idea that never occurred to William F. Buckley Jr.: He has assembled a collection of some of the best obituaries Buckley penned in more than a half-century as commentator, political activist, and public intellectual. Buckley aficionados, general readers, and the…
H.R. Gross worked alongside Ronald Reagan at radio station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1930s. Reagan did sports. Gross did news. But Gross’s tie to Reagan isn't his claim to fame.
Despite innumerable and sharp disagreements between them, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have surprisingly congruent positions on free trade, both suggesting it has adversely affected jobs and wages in the United States.
Chicago
Pierre Manent has written an extraordinary book. It contains one statistic and no policy analysis, yet should be essential reading for policymakers. It cites no scholarly books, yet should be essential reading for scholars. How does Manent manage to appeal to so many readers despite making so few…
The poet and novelist Ron Rash has said that “writing poetry and fiction are like AM/FM. They're on a completely different frequency." He says that poetry "for me is more intuitive. A story is not: a story is something you have to articulate." This distinction between the creative processes does…
"These are banner times for -penises onscreen. In the last 18 months or so, I’ve seen casually naked men in . . ." ("Last Taboo: Why American pop culture just can't deal with black male sexuality," Wesley Morris, New York Times Magazine, October 30).
Anton Vaino’s appointment in August as Vladimir Putin's new chief of staff intrigued Kremlinologists, Estonians (he is the grandson of one of Soviet Estonia's later quislings), and fans of the weird. Some years ago, Vaino (or someone acting on his behalf) penned a bizarre, densely written article…
Throughout the 2016 campaign, it seemed to be the consensus view in the media that Donald Trump is a uniquely dishonest creature, obliging the selfsame media to take extraordinary steps, such as explicitly calling him a liar in news stories. The Scrapbook has no problem with calling liars liars,…
Whenever an American presidential election threatens to produce a controversial or conservative victor, some of our intellectuals and celebrities swear that, should the dread event come, they’re going to "move to Paris."
On October 31, the Lebanese parliament elected Michel Aoun president, ending a two-and-a-half-year stalemate during which the country had no head of state. The presidency is reserved for the country’s Maronite Christian sect, so Christians there are celebrating the election of the controversial…
In a case awaiting review by the Supreme Court, the Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a friend-of-the-court brief making an argument for one of the nation’s fundamental principles—the equal protection of the law.
"To discuss issues of political and artistic import, forums will run in the gallery’s open-floor space. Artists, historians, philosophers, activists and community members will speak on pressing social issues facing the United States: violence in the media; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender…
Pippa Passes, Ky.
It's not clear which was more laughable, the cluelessness on display or the hapless effort to hide the cluelessness on display. The Scrapbook is referring to the embarrassing story that went up on the snarky Mediaite website (sort of a cross between the Huffington Post and Gawker) during game seven…
When John James Audubon created The Birds of America, his landmark pictorial survey of avian life, he was thinking of America in a broad sense—namely, the wildlife habitats in and around the whole North American continent. Most of the species in his massive, four-volume book were seen and drawn…
This past summer, as I sat in a movie theater about to watch Girl Shy (1924), a nine-decade-old comedy starring Harold Lloyd, I wondered what the uninitiated audience would think. This was a silent movie, and it isn’t easy to trade spoken dialogue for pantomime. And then there was the star of the…
Throughout 2015 and 2016, Donald Trump never led Hillary Clinton in a single public poll of New Hampshire. Until Thursday. A WBUR/MassINC poll shows him up by one percentage point, the ARG poll (which has a poor reputation) shows Trump up by five points, and the Boston Globe/Suffolk poll shows…
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer John McCormack on the potential path to victory for Donald Trump.
Throughout the 2016 campaign, there's been quite a lot of anguish about how to cover Donald Trump. It was collectively decided that his dishonesty necessitated extraordinary measures to inform the public he was a yuge liar. CNN started calling him a liar regularly in the chryon underneath their…
Activists who advocate for the destruction of Israel will gather at George Mason University this weekend to strategize about expanding their presence on campuses across America.
Hanover, N.H.
FBI investigators are building a case around alleged "pay to play" tactics at the Clinton Foundation, according to a report, and two sources cited in a separate account say they are confident in the increasing body of evidence. But the news comes amid tales of personnel conflict, both within the…
The next big new thing is here—Black Mirror—and you have to watch it now. The British television series, created by Charlie Booker, has recently begun its third season on Netflix and it deserves our limited attention spans. Why? Because Black Mirror theorizes the consequences of future technology…
Companies doing business with Iran risk U.S. sanctions unless they take heightened measures to avoid benefiting sanctioned entities like the Iranian military, according to a State Department statement provided to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The warning contradicts remarks made by Secretary of State John…
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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…
This has not been an especially ennobling election. Or a rewarding one. Or even entertaining. Pretty much everything about 2016 has been boorish and grotesque. But finally it is time to laugh.
Van Dyne, Wisconsin
Just eight months after President Obama announced a new Association of South East Asian Nation (ASEAN) economic initiative at a "first-ever" exclusive meeting with ASEAN leaders in the United States, America's new policy towards the group is in shambles. President Obama's premier trade initiative,…
Opponents of the Obama administration's Clean Water Rule claimed that it encouraged massive infringements on state authority by the federal government, according to briefs filed in federal court on Tuesday.
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Mark Hemingway on his recent editorial, "Yes, 'It's a Scandal.'"
Youngwood, Penn.
Donald Trump, whose recent campaign trips to Wisconsin suggested his campaign thought the Badger State might be in play, is losing to Hillary Clinton in a new poll of likely voters there. The Marquette University law school's survey found in a head-to-head match-up, Clinton leads Trump by 4…
The WEEKLY SUBSTANDARD Podcast with senior editor Victorino Matus, senior writer Jonathan Last, and Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon, on Tom Hanks and Anthony Weiner's third act.
We mastodons who still receive our daily dose of New York Times when the dead-tree version lands on our doorsteps with a dull thud got a special treat Tuesday, a textbook case of the way "the newspaper of record" goes about its business these days. The front page headline read: "Comey Role Recalls…
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…
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On Wednesday, Bill Kristol joined MSNBC's Morning Joe to discuss the state of the race. With regard to early voting patterns and other early indicators, Kristol said, "It still looks to me like Hillary Clinton wins."
With a three-to-one series lead in the World Series, the Cleveland Indians now face a game seven at home Wednesday against the Chicago Cubs after a 9 to 3 loss Tuesday against ace Jake Arrietta.
The College Football Playoff Selection Committee is charged with deciding which four teams to invite to college football's postseason playoff. It's hard to imagine an easier scenario for the 12-person committee than for there to be only four major undefeated teams, one from each of the four…
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…
In one of the few congressional districts where Republicans have a serious opportunity to pick up a House seat from the Democrats, the prospects for Minnesota GOP challenger Stewart Mills are looking even better than an appraisal made in The WEEKLY STANDARD six weeks ago.
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.
When I sit down on a barstool in my favorite watering hole in Peoria, Illinois to watch game 6 of the World Series Tuesday night, I will be proudly wearing the "Chicago Cubs: NL Champs" t-shirt I just bought.
A computer-related "theft of information" at the Clinton Foundation, confirmed by United States Secret Service personnel but so far denied by the Foundation, is prompting new questions about the Clintons' use of public resources for Hillary Clinton's private email server. The cyber crime committed…
A few weeks ago a group of public figures dubbing themselves Scholars and Writers , er, for America issued a "Statement of Support" that read, in toto:
House speaker and Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan said he "already voted" for Donald Trump during his state's early voting period, marking a public declaration of support weeks after making a private announcement that he would withdraw from defending and campaigning for his party's nominee.
The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior editor Christopher Caldwell on the Clintons and their scandals.
Guidelines published last month by the Obama administration protect banks doing business with Iran from U.S. sanctions even if their transactions end up benefiting sanctioned entities, according to Secretary of State John Kerry. That stance, experts and congressional sources tell THE WEEKLY…
Donald Trump should pledge to serve one term as president, suggested WEEKLY STANDARD editor Bill Kristol. Speaking with Brit Hume on Fox News Monday night, Kristol explained that such a pledge might endear the Republican nominee to swing voters who remain unsure about Trump but find Hillary Clinton…
Eighty years is a lot of history. In the latest addition to the Penguin History of the United States series, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910, Steven Hahn writes about the eight decades from 1830 to 1910 in a brisk and thought-provoking…
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An infographic on the front page of Tuesday's Financial Times informs us that "just 3 percent of [Trump or Clinton] voters expect their spouse or partner" will vote for a different presidential candidate than they will.
Whichever way you look, white Catholics have called it. They've been picking winning presidents since Nixon. And overall, American Catholics' growing diversity projects the nation's demographic future. Today, one third of American Catholics are Latino, and two thirds of Catholics under the age of…
Daycare used to be downright quaint: When I was a kid, my "daycare center" was Mr. and Mrs. Cummings' front yard across the street from my house. I walked there after school and under their careful watch I played every dangerous game that existed until my parents got home from work. The cost of…
The presidential race continues to be the main focus of most pundits, but next week the country will vote for the entire House of Representatives and a third of the U.S. Senate. What is the state of play in these races? Over the course of this week, I'm going to outline where things stand, starting…
The Humane Society of the United States raises gobs of money (annual budgets over $100 million) by portraying itself as an animal rescue and care organization—check out its tear jerk ads—when that is just a tiny part of its work. In truth, HSUS has become a radical organization with an agenda…