June 2017

New South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s June 29-30 White House summit will likely ease the discomfort felt by many in his home country over alleged “Korea passing” by the Trump administration. Korea passing included a combination of factors: a prolonged impeachment process in Seoul, followed by a…

On this episode of the Kristol Clear podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol talks with Eric Felten about his favorite mystery and thriller writers, just in time for choosing books for the beach.

After a few months off and a shaky start, Roger Federer looks ready to swing and glide on the grass courts of Wimbledon. He’ll need every talent he can muster to win a title that almost always makes a veteran fail.

On Monday, the Trump administration issued a warning to the Syrian regime. If Syria conducted another chemical weapons attack, the regime would "pay a heavy price," the White House said. It was a sign that President Trump intends to enforce the "red line" President Obama threatened Bashar al-Assad…

The Washington, D.C. rapid transit system was restored to full capacity Sunday, meaning it now runs as fast as a moped instead of a riding mower. The “Metrorail” had undergone significant repairs since last June, creating service disruptions on multiple train lines week after week. Sometimes this…

Reviews and News:

Supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music, a master comparable in greatness of stature with Aristotle in philosophy and Leonardo da Vinci in art. No overstatement whatsoever attaches to this, the opening of the entry for Johann Sebastian Bach in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. So vast and…

He was, by any strict measure, not the best ever to play his game. That would be Jack Nicklaus or, maybe, Tiger Woods. Perhaps Ben Hogan. Or Bobby Jones. But you could certainly make the argument that Arnold Palmer was the greatest ever for the game. And it isn’t even close. No other golfer has…

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on July 3.

It’s often said that reforming the U.S. health care system amounts to reshaping one-fifth of the economy. It’d follow, then, that voters would hold the GOP’s grotesquely unpopular health bills against its reputation on economic issues. But historic polling shows that the public doesn’t relate the…

The heads of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe are threatening to use their subpoena power if the White House does not respond “appropriately and fully” as to whether it has documentation of conversations between the president and fired FBI director James Comey.

The rhetoric on the Republican bill in Congress to overhaul Obamacare has been a bit overheated, to say the least. Specifically, the preferred criticism of the bill seems to be that it will kill hundreds of thousands of people.

It’s been a stressful week for Donald Trump. Diplomacy with China is going nowhere fast. His party’s Obamacare replacement is floundering in the Senate. The constant irritation of a hostile press is rankling more than ever.

Nevadans living in 14 of Nevada's 17 counties who want to purchase coverage on the state's Obamacare exchange won't have any insurers to choose from next year, after two insurers decided to exit the marketplace for 2018.

Reviews and News:

Sizzling steaks, burgers on the grill, bratwurst with a dollop of spicy mustard—what’s not to like?

Moonshine always reminds me of the time the great P. J. O’Rourke got hold of a jug of the stuff in college and it caused him to be struck blind. It seems that O’Rourke and some of his buddies in Ohio went down into Kentucky looking for moonshine to bring back for a party that night. He drank from…

In the 1962 D-Day ensemble The Longest Day, an aging Henry Fonda plays the small but important role of General Ted Roosevelt Jr. General Roosevelt, three decades older than the troops he is leading, hides his cane in order to persuade his superiors to allow his participation in the invasion, then…

There are two great weapons Vladimir Putin uses to leverage the West and push his foreign policy. One is nuclear weapons, and the other is natural gas. Thanks to the American energy revolution, Russia’s control of the European energy market is slipping, and may wind up gone altogether.

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on July 3.

More than 60 Republicans and Democrats in Congress are supporting a bill—the Federal Accountability in Chemical Testing (FACT) Act (HR 816)—that would improve disclosure by federal agencies about hundreds of expensive, slow, and outdated animal tests. Which is good news. Because if taxpayers and…

On Monday, the House Armed Services Committee released a draft of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. It included $103 million to keep the second-most controversial plane in the Air Force’s fleet, the A-10, flying.

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, host Eric Felten talks with author Garrett Graff about his new book, Raven Rock, about the secret history of the government's plans for surviving a nuclear holocaust.

So John McEnroe has gotten himself into all kinds of trouble this week.

Reviews and News:

When President Obama’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities finally stepped down from his post in late May—four months after President Trump took office—he explained his reasoning to the New York Times. “I think it’s getting to be a time that’s appropriate for me to step aside,”…

The French director François Truffaut, who conducted a famous series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, said afterward that he had found him to be a “neurotic” and “fearful” and “deeply vulnerable” man, but this was precisely what had made him an “artist of anxiety.”

My wife looked at her phone and uttered an expletive. I didn’t know why. Maybe we had failed to pay a bill or maybe Cynthia had forgotten to do something related to work. We’re both high-strung, and I wished for the millionth time that stress wasn’t so contagious, that it didn’t pass so easily from…

Maybe the welfare of Indian kids should come before the interests of tribal governments. That seems to be the conclusion of the Arizona Supreme Court last week, which allowed a child born to a member of the Gila River Indian Community in 2014 to be adopted by non-native parents.

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on July 3.

One of the major hang-ups of the Senate GOP’s stalled health bill is how the legislation approaches Medicaid and insuring low-income populations. The Better Care Reconciliation Act overhauls the state-federal program so dramatically that many individuals who want insurance and otherwise might have…

The legislation faces opposition from both conservatives for not doing enough and from moderates for cutting too much.

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, Preston Cooper of the American Enterprise Institute joins host Eric Felten to find out why, whether good times or bad, the price of college tuition keeps going up.

A question no one’s asked out loud with regard to the ongoing Illinois state budget negotiations is what happens if—or when—the state becomes unable or unwilling to pay its bills a few years down the road.

At Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the Army chief of staff, General Mark Milley, recently handed out for the first time certificates of graduation to recruits who completed basic training. Thankfully, they stopped short of giving recruits medals for learning to march and orienteering badges for…

Reviews and News:

The prolific children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952) began her most famous work, Goodnight Moon, by describing how In the great green room / There was a telephone / And a red balloon. This 1947 classic has sold 27 million copies and, along with such other bestsellers as The Runaway…

For most of their history, video games were a fringe pastime, the loser kid brother to traditional entertainments like sports. Gamers were doughy nerds who subsisted on Doritos and Mountain Dew and feared women and sunshine.

Years ago the popular sociologist Vance Packard told me that he hated to have one of his books paired with another in a review. “All a review like that ever says is, ‘This book is better than that one,’ ” he complained, “and you can’t use a quote like that in an ad.”

On May 29, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a law creating a statewide regulatory framework governing ridesharing services. The impetus for the law was clear—overriding the city of Austin’s onerous ordinances that prompted the sector’s leaders, Uber and Lyft, to stop operating in the state capital…

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on July 3.

Intelligence agencies are supplying the House Intelligence Committee with information about unmasking requests made by three former Obama administration officials, a spokesman for the committee chairman told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

James Clapper has this right: An "alternative approach" to North Korea is needed. The former director of national intelligence made the claim in Seoul this week at a seminar hosted by the Joongang Ilbo (a major South Korean newspaper) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, host Eric Felten talks with Erica Wagner, author of the new book Chief Engineer, about Washington Roebling, the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge.

The firm that created the now-infamous "Russian dossier" on President Trump published before his inauguration is stonewalling investigators who want to know more about its connections to the Democratic Party and the FBI is refusing to confirm if it has documents showing a relationship with the firm.

In a major victory for religious freedom, the Supreme Court ruled today that states cannot exempt churches from benefiting from state programs solely because they are a church.

The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration’s revised travel ban its first legal victory on Monday, agreeing unanimously to consider the ban this October and allowing the ban to go partially into effect until then.

The “Fight for $15” suffered a hit with the release of a study that hints at the negative effect that Seattle’s dramatic minimum wage increase has led to reduced wages for low-income workers.

Reviews and News:

Bill C-16, which recently received Royal Assent and will soon become law, is the most recent bill to threaten free speech and to mandate that individuals adopt a social constructionist philosophy of gender. Those who refuse to use gender neutral pronouns such as “they” or “zi” and “zir,” or who…

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise and fellow Republican lawmakers, there has understandably been a debate about the tenor of our political discourse. Is it too nasty? Does heated rhetoric incite violence? Do we all need to tone down the hyperbole?

Among Israelis and Palestin­ians, there’s little optimism about renewed American efforts to negotiate a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. In Ramallah and Jerusalem, officials, journalists, and policy analysts have watched as industrious U.S. activity in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama…

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on July 3.

In my time at Jesus College, Oxford (1956-58), I must have passed Eric Kennington’s evocative bust of T. E. Lawrence scores of times. It stood in the college lodge, on Turl Street, and portrayed a famous alumnus who had led an early life as an archaeologist before he became a British officer and…

I.

Joe Scarborough isn’t just a onetime congressman turned cable-TV talker, nor even just a handsome face. No, he is a rock ’n’ roller, a singer, a guitarist, and a (more than) prolific songwriter. He is—if the publicity hoo-ha accompanying his new extended-play recording is to be believed—“this…

George W. Bush has been painting for several years now, but has only recently become an artist. His first paintings, mostly of world leaders, were remarkably well received, even by an art establishment that had hardly been friendly to his administration. And yet, although those early paintings were…

With its adversarial structure and set procedural rules, the trial can be a perfect dramatic vehicle, offering the strategy and suspense of a sports event alongside the seriousness of life and death. The Big Trial subgenre of American fiction dates back at least as far as James Fenimore Cooper’s…

Late Friday night, Utah senator Mike Lee issued a lengthy statement (which is well worth reading in full) ripping and ridiculing the Senate GOP health care bill:

In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, executive editor Fred Barnes tells host Eric Felten what to take away from the Democrats' special election defeats. Karlyn Bowman talks about what pollsters have and haven't learned from 2016's polling fiascos.

Reviews and News:

Once upon a time, it didn’t matter if a clock tower in Spoleto kept time slightly differently than a tower in Assisi and far differently than one in Rome. In Why Time Flies we read about the experts in Greenwich who run data from 80 labs around the world into an algorithm that favors the more…

Just when it looked as if the professionals in the Trump administration had taken over administration of trade policy, leaving the president to handle the rhetoric, someone in the Trump camp recalled that some 70 years ago—in 1947—23 nations signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),…

"In my opinion,” wrote Admiral Lord Charles Beresford to Leo Maxse, the editor of the British conservative magazine National Review, in April 1915, “Churchill is a serious danger to the State. After Antwerp, and now the Dardanelles, the Government really ought to get rid of him.” Six months later,…

Even in famously abortion-friendly California there is justice for abortion foes. On June 21, the San Francisco County Superior Court threw out 14 of the 15 felony counts that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra had brought against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the anti-abortion…

A former Obama State Department official suggested Friday that the administration would have “done more” about Russian election interference if it had been clearer earlier that one of the Kremlin's central objectives was to denigrate Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.

Following through on a campaign promise, President Donald Trump on Friday morning signed legislation aimed at reforming the famously dysfunctional Department of Veterans Affairs.

Weeks after Germany’s Cabinet announced a plan to fine social media companies over their users “hate speech” and amid efforts to push similar restrictions across the European Union, authorities are cracking down on individuals whom they have deemed to have crossed a line. The New York Times…

Today on the Kristol Clear podcast, editor at large William Kristol talks with host Eric Felten about the Senate leadership's proposed repeal, replace (or at least rethink) of Obamacare. Can support be built for healthcare legislation that is rushed?

As Theresa May went to Brussels Thursday for the opening of the two-day European Council summit, a European Union official warned that she was in for a “humiliating” experience. If so, May will feel at home on foreign soil.

Reviews and News:

Tweet On Thursday morning, after the Senate Republicans unveiled their version of the bill passed last month in the House of Representatives, four conservative senators expressed their opposition to the bill as written (while leaving open the option to eventually support an amended bill). At least…

Fifty years ago today, Ronald Reagan captured the hearts and minds of America's youth. The general view of the late 1960s is that it was a time when drugged-out hippies and anti-war protests took over the country. But there was another concurrent, subculture growing, too: A rising tide of…

My wife looked at her phone and uttered an expletive. I didn’t know why. Maybe we had failed to pay a bill or maybe Cynthia had forgotten to do something related to work. We’re both high-strung, and I wished for the millionth time that stress wasn’t so contagious, that it didn’t pass so easily from…

Hagatna, Guam

John Adams, in his bitter old age, complained that George Washington was too much worshiped by the American people. Washington’s talents were at best superficial, Adams growled, and that the great man was “illiterate, unlearned, unread” was a fact Adams considered as “past dispute.” Historians have…

In April, Democrat Jon Ossoff got 48 percent of the vote in the special election to pick the new House member from Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District outside Atlanta. He came in first but was forced into a runoff with Republican Karen Handel, who got 20 percent to finish second. In the runoff,…

George W. Bush has been painting for several years now, but has only recently become an artist. His first paintings, mostly of world leaders, were remarkably well received, even by an art establishment that had hardly been friendly to his administration. And yet, although those early paintings were…

The French director François Truffaut, who conducted a famous series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, said afterward that he had found him to be a “neurotic” and “fearful” and “deeply vulnerable” man, but this was precisely what had made him an “artist of anxiety.”

Editor's Note: The e-mail was drawn from the excellent work of Sid Stafford. You can read his original here.

In the first two years of the Obama administration, “Read the bill!” was an effective anti-Obama­care rallying cry. Republican congressmen, as well as conservative and Tea Party activists, demanded that legislation weighing in at more than 2,000 pages and affecting one-sixth of the economy be…

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise and fellow Republican lawmakers, there has understandably been a debate about the tenor of our political discourse. Is it too nasty? Does heated rhetoric incite violence? Do we all need to tone down the hyperbole?

French Guiana

Sizzling steaks, burgers on the grill, bratwurst with a dollop of spicy mustard—what’s not to like?

When President Obama’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities finally stepped down from his post in late May—four months after President Trump took office—he explained his reasoning to the New York Times. “I think it’s getting to be a time that’s appropriate for me to step aside,”…

In the 1962 D-Day ensemble The Longest Day, an aging Henry Fonda plays the small but important role of General Ted Roosevelt Jr. General Roosevelt, three decades older than the troops he is leading, hides his cane in order to persuade his superiors to allow his participation in the invasion, then…

He was, by any strict meas­ure, not the best ever to play his game. That would be Jack Nicklaus or, maybe, Tiger Woods. Perhaps Ben Hogan. Or Bobby Jones. But you could certainly make the argument that Arnold Palmer was the greatest ever for the game. And it isn’t even close. No other golfer has…

Years ago the popular sociologist Vance Packard told me that he hated to have one of his books paired with another in a review. “All a review like that ever says is, ‘This book is better than that one,’ ” he complained, “and you can’t use a quote like that in an ad.”

Maybe the welfare of Indian kids should come before the interests of tribal governments. That seems to be the conclusion of the Arizona Supreme Court last week, which allowed a child born to a member of the Gila River Indian Community in 2014 to be adopted by non-native parents.

Joe Scarborough isn’t just a onetime congressman turned cable-TV talker, nor even just a handsome face. No, he is a rock ’n’ roller, a singer, a guitarist, and a (more than) prolific songwriter. He is—if the publicity hoo-ha accompanying his new extended-play recording is to be believed—“this…

At Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the Army chief of staff, General Mark Milley, recently handed out for the first time certificates of graduation to recruits who completed basic training. Thankfully, they stopped short of giving recruits medals for learning to march and orienteering badges for…

Moonshine always reminds me of the time the great P. J. O’Rourke got hold of a jug of the stuff in college and it caused him to be struck blind. It seems that O’Rourke and some of his buddies in Ohio went down into Kentucky looking for moonshine to bring back for a party that night. He drank from…

On May 29, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a law creating a statewide regulatory framework governing ridesharing services. The impetus for the law was clear—overriding the city of Austin’s onerous ordinances that prompted the sector’s leaders, Uber and Lyft, to stop operating in the state capital…

With its adversarial structure and set procedural rules, the trial can be a perfect dramatic vehicle, offering the strategy and suspense of a sports event alongside the seriousness of life and death. The Big Trial subgenre of American fiction dates back at least as far as James Fenimore Cooper’s…

"Where do we get such people?" That's a question generally posed when we are witness to astonishing military skill and courage. The question is often intended to be rhetorical, and that's a mistake. With military heroism, we are dealing with emotionally charged, life-and-death matters, and they…

Among Israelis and Palestin­ians, there’s little optimism about renewed American efforts to negotiate a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. In Ramallah and Jerusalem, officials, journalists, and policy analysts have watched as industrious U.S. activity in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama…

Once upon a time, it didn’t matter if a clock tower in Spoleto kept time slightly differently than a tower in Assisi and far differently than one in Rome. In Why Time Flies we read about the experts in Greenwich who run data from 80 labs around the world into an algorithm that favors the more…

Supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music, a master comparable in greatness of stature with Aristotle in philosophy and Leonardo da Vinci in art. No overstatement whatsoever attaches to this, the opening of the entry for Johann Sebastian Bach in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. So vast and…

It did not take the attack on Charlie Hebdo to reveal that the Islamic world has a terrible problem. For quite some time, that’s been clearer than day. This is not an assertion made from outside Islam or against Islam. On New Year’s Day, the president of Egypt, in a major speech, called for a…

"In my opinion,” wrote Admiral Lord Charles Beresford to Leo Maxse, the editor of the British conservative magazine National Review, in April 1915, “Churchill is a serious danger to the State. After Antwerp, and now the Dardanelles, the Government really ought to get rid of him.” Six months later,…

In 1926, the British author Henry Green (1905-1973) published the first of nine novels that would gain him critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. His mother didn’t quite know what to make of them. She loved to read, but didn’t partake of much fiction, so wasn’t sure how to assess her son’s…

In my time at Jesus College, Oxford (1956-58), I must have passed Eric Kennington’s evocative bust of T. E. Lawrence scores of times. It stood in the college lodge, on Turl Street, and portrayed a famous alumnus who had led an early life as an archaeologist before he became a British officer and…

The draft health care bill released by Senate Republicans on Thursday contains a number of differences with the House bill. One provision, a holdover from Obamacare, prompted a lawsuit from the House of Representatives in 2014.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he does not have tapes of his conversations with fired FBI director James Comey Thursday. But the top Democrats overseeing Russia probes in the House and the Senate said the president's statement still left questions unanswered.

Senate Republicans unveiled a 142-page bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare on Thursday. The bill can only lose two GOP votes and still pass the Senate, but several Republicans expressed opposition or concerns about the bill in its current form. In a joint statement, conservative senators…

The Senate GOP has revealed its closely guarded alternative to the American Health Care Act, which stitches together significant changes to Medicaid intended to unify disparate Republicans and modifies the House approach to Obamacare regulations in a way that still provoked the immediate ire of…

With multiple–and potentially overlapping–investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election under way, a top Republican is trying to ensure that the House Intelligence Committee probe doesn’t interfere with the work of special counsel Robert Mueller.

Two years ago, the NBA’s New York Knicks drafted Kristaps Porzingis, a 7’3” superweapon who can shoot, run, and jump. He’s unique. The team’s general manager, Phil Jackson, called him a “unicorn” on Wednesday. Porzingis is only 21 years old but has withstood the withering heat lamp of playing ball…

Reviews and News:

Charleston, S.C.

In the wake of Philando Castile's death at the hands of a police officer in Minnesota, much is being said about whether the National Rifle Association should have weighed in.

Timothy S. Huebner has produced a valuable study of American constitutionalism, a study that could do enormous good if people read it. Gracefully written, it is also lengthy and scholarly, which means that readers must possess two qualities—patience and intellectual candor—to appreciate the…

President Donald Trump tweeted a somewhat cryptic message about China and North Korea on Tuesday: “While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!”

In DC Confidential, New York Law School professor David Schoenbrod describes how Congress degenerated from a responsible legislature, one that took responsibility for difficult decisions, to a body continually looking to dodge blame. The book is an absolute delight. Schoenbrod begins with an…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, deputy online editor Chris Deaton talks with host Eric Felten about how and why the Democrats came up short in their quest to wrest the 6th congressional district of Georgia from Republicans.

A Department of Homeland Security official on Wednesday compared the behavior of Kremlin-linked hackers seeking to disrupt the 2016 election to that of burglars casing a neighborhood, with a few “rattled” doorknobs and a few successful entries.

Prominent evangelical leaders are condemning the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Iraqi immigrants, which include Chaldean Christians, as part of a deal struck with the Iraqi government to remove the country from the Trump administration’s travel ban.

The Senate Judiciary Committee tackles social and philosophical questions out on the edges of constitutionality. They process proposed constitutional amendments, and their subcommittee on the Constitution oversees constitutional rights’ protection and enforcement. It was only a matter of time,…

The heads of the House Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian election interference met with special counsel Robert Mueller Tuesday, the latest in a string of closed-door conversations between Mueller and lawmakers since last week.

Reviews and News:

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

Ivanka Trump, assistant to and daughter of the president, trekked to Capitol Hill Tuesday for a meeting with Senator Marco Rubio to discuss the Florida Republican’s ideas on expanding child tax credits. The mini-summit provided the internet with a photo of Rubio greeting Ivanka at the Capitol in an…

Six thoughts about Georgia’s 6th congressional district:

Between the fundraising and national attention, it all appeared just peachy for Jon Ossoff. Then Georgia voted.

In the race to fill the seat vacated by President Trump’s budget director, Republican real estate developer Ralph Norman on Tuesday beat his Democratic opponent in South Carolina’s 5th congressional district.

After a school year marked by outbursts of protests, some of which escalated into violence on college campuses, the Senate Judiciary Committee convened a hearing to discuss the assault on the First Amendment occurring in higher education.

Iranian officials are slamming a freshly approved crop of congressional sanctions as a breach of the 2015 nuclear deal and have vowed to take reciprocal measures. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are underscoring the need for penalties on Tehran and dismissing the recent rhetoric as par for…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, Eric Felten talks with associate editor Ethan Epstein about North Korea's brutal treatment of the young American tourist Otto Warmbier, who returned from imprisonment in a coma last week only to die Monday.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin on Tuesday morning defended the Trump administration’s 2018 budget and discussed his department’s plans to increase internal accountability and cooperation with private hospitals.

All this time, the national headlines about health care reform in Congress have prioritized the terms “CBO” and “pre-existing conditions.” Not nearly enough attention has been paid to “Medicaid.”

Democrats are lining up to challenge Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock in the 2018 midterms in Virginia’s 10th district. The field includes Army veteran Daniel Helmer, former union leader Kimberly Adams, one-time Obama administration official Lindsey Davis Stover, and state senator Jennifer…

Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin said Tuesday that legislation President Trump will sign today that makes it easier to fire VA employees represents a step the VA needs to take in order to bring accountability back to the troubled agency.

Reviews and News:

"Fostering kids is not an easy thing to do,” Christi Dreier of Round Rock, Texas, recently told the Wall Street Journal. Dreier and her partner have fostered several children and adopted three of them. Complaining about a bill that recently passed the Texas house of representatives, she explained,…

Nathan Thrall is a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, where he focuses on the Arab-Israeli conflict. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, Thrall has also written for Commentary, which is to say he’s a writer who specializes in…

Do we need another biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald? Since Arthur Mizener's inaugural one of 1951, there have been a number of successors including Andrew Turnbull's (1962) and, most commandingly, Matthew Bruccoli's "standard" one of 1981. This new one by David S. Brown concentrates, as the blurb…

Where is President Trump’s response to the terrorist attack in London? Not the June 3 attack, when three Muslim men in a van drove over several pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing many more in a market. Eight were killed and nearly 50 injured, and it prompted a series of tweets from Trump…

President Donald Trump offered “deepest condolences” Monday to the family of a college student who died shortly after returning home from North Korea, where he had been imprisoned for supposedly removing a poster from a wall.

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Michael Warren joins host Eric Felten to discuss the lack of response by President Trump regarding the terror attack in London on Sunday night.

After Corey Stewart narrowly lost the Republican nomination for governor of Virginia to Ed Gillespie, he declared, “There’s one word you won’t hear from me, and that’s ‘unity.’” Apparently his supporters don’t agree.

Democratic donors have poured tens of millions of dollars into the most expensive test run in the history of House campaigns.

Could "cultural appropriation"—a term that applies to everything from a drug company’s poaching an ancient herbal remedy to Katy Perry in cornrows—ever be banned by international law? Not exactly, but a U.N. committee that convened last week has been working on it for 17 years. The 189-member group…

When you travel to a country like France, Spain, or South Korea, you notice something about the lifestyles of the professional classes there: Unlike in America, they still smoke cigarettes. The U.S.'s lawyers, professors, and bankers, meanwhile, long ago gave up the devil's weed.

The company that is the 12th biggest in the U.S., larger than all the big banks, is staunchly anti-union. It's putting mom-and-pop retailers out of business and driving even big chains into bankruptcy.

Reviews and News:

Public radio doesn't quite know what it wants us to think about the anti-addiction medicine Vivitrol.

More than eight years after they finished the new Yankee Stadium, I still get confused when I climb out of the subway at 161st and River Ave. Whoa—where did it go? The lot that used to hold the ballpark is empty. The stadium, I forget every time I visit the Bronx, is across the street. It's like a…

York, England

There are a lot of problems plaguing the Trump administration and hampering the White House from completing its agenda. President Trump's poll numbers remain low. The Republican House is fractured and in the Senate, the GOP majority is razor-thin. Democrats are unified and fervent in their…

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday that the president is working to discredit and "take down" special counsel Bob Mueller, just as Mueller's probe is beginning.

The Battle of Jutland reverberates powerfully in the history of naval combat, and it does so with a resonance that equals or exceeds that of such history-shaping sea struggles as Salamis in 480 b.c., Lepanto in 1571, Trafalgar in 1805, and Leyte Gulf in 1944. Now, in Jutland, Nicholas Jellicoe…

It is now hard to imagine, but before the mid-1960s most books, and not only on art historical subjects, appeared without a speck of color. It was not as if color printing technology was unavailable, but we had been conditioned by the circulation of millions of black-and-white photographic images,…

There are many pressures in reporting a breaking news story—getting the facts and getting them out before the next guy perhaps paramount among them. But The Scrapbook thinks that those pressures notwithstanding, a fine publication such as the New York Times could find time to avoid the hoariest of…

In this episode of the Confab, executive editor Fred Barnes talks with Eric Felten about why the GOP should focus, not on broad tax reform, but on tax cutting. And literary editor Philip Terzian talks British politics in the wake of Theresa May's disastrous snap-election.

It was a bad week for the president of the United States and might prove to have been a career-ending week for the chair of the Federal Reserve Board. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is investigating whether Trump obstructed justice in connection with the FBI probe into Russian activities…

Reviews and News:

When is the Nightly News the Nitely News? When ratings are lousy.

So, The Mummy. The question that bedevils me as I begin this review is how I can get to the end of it. Like Lucy in Peanuts, I am now counting words to see how quickly I can get to 700, which fills my slot here at The Weekly Standard. That was 53 words. I'm 8 percent of the way there. Can I make it?

Journals like this one exist, generally speaking, not to praise politicians but to chastise, to upbraid, or at least to criticize them. And so, after hearing about the terrible shootings at the Alexandria baseball field the morning of June 14; after making the mistake of sampling the incivility and…

Newt Gingrich defended President Trump against allegations that Trump's firing of James Comey was a crime. Gingrich's legal interpretation: "the president cannot obstruct justice." I'm not a lawyer, but neither is Newt Gingrich (he holds a Ph.D. in European history), and if I can google some legal…

Today on the Kristol Clear podcast, Democrats may want to impeach President Trump for anything or nothing, and Republicans may want to try to protect him, but Bill Kristol argues it isn't politics that will determine who wins that high-stakes contest, but the outcome of Special Counsel Robert…

President Trump announced Friday that the U.S. would strengthen economic and diplomatic sanctions on Cuba, undoing an Obama policy of more open relations with the Castro regime that Trump called "terrible and misguided."

Nerds the world over go all out for Bloomsday. It's June 16, the anniversary of James Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle's first date in 1904, also the day Joyce chose for the events of Ulysses—three characters, Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, going about their lives in Dublin. Revelers…

I was a late convert to baseball. I never played it growing up—or even watched it, for that matter. I went to one Orioles game my freshman year of college and didn't stick a glove on my left hand until my junior year, when a couple buddies were heading out to have a catch and I tagged along. At…

President Donald Trump on Friday confirmed that he is the subject of an investigation by special counselor Robert Mueller in a tweet was inflammatory even by Trump standards.

"The fight is on," tweeted Conor McGregor, the Irish mixed martial arts fighter, Wednesday, confirming that he and Floyd Mayweather are squaring off Aug. 26 in Las Vegas. The 40-year-old Mayweather is coming out of retirement for a pay-per-view windfall that many believe may exceed the $250 million…

It was two years ago Friday when Donald Trump descended an escalator inside Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president. Did he drag the country's political conduct with him? "Any debate about civility in politics begins with Trump," New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush tweeted on Thursday.…

The news that Bob Dylan cribbed parts of his Nobel speech from SparkNotes, of all places, serves one excellent purpose: It has quieted down the high-brow Dylan fans who were competing to see who could overpraise the lecture most. (Don't worry, they'll be back.) The first cheerleader was the Nobel…

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced last week that it will be adding 3-on-3 basketball to the standard hoops presence at the Olympics in 2020. The new format will follow the rules established by FIBA, which has has been hosting international tournaments the past several years.

Reviews and News:

Carl Bernstein: Bradlee didn't have a thing about Teddy Kennedy 'cause I've heard Bradlee say that Teddy's problem is he can't keep his cock in his pants, and remarks like that.

Huge demonstrations once again swept through Russia on June 12, as thousands took to the streets in over 160 cities to protest the corruption and authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin's regime. This followed street protests by Russia's emerging opposition in February and March that were the biggest in…

Havana

A dozen men accompanying Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to America last month have been criminally charged for attacking protesters who had gathered outside the Turkish ambassador's home in Washington D.C.

Is the deck being stacked against President Trump? It's beginning to look that way since a special counsel was appointed a few weeks ago to investigate possible ties between Trump—or any breathing body in his campaign last year—and the Russians.

So there I am Tuesday morning, wheezing away on my exercise bike, trying to stay alert to telltale signs of the inevitable coronary thrombosis, when, for the first time in many, many years, I switch on the TV to watch Morning Joe.

The special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—and the possible involvement of the Trump campaign or associates thereof—continues to move along, and not in the direction the White House would prefer. The Washington Post reported Wednesday night that the…

Havana

"Fostering kids is not an easy thing to do,” Christi Dreier of Round Rock, Texas, recently told the Wall Street Journal. Dreier and her partner have fostered several children and adopted three of them. Complaining about a bill that recently passed the Texas house of representatives, she explained,…

In DC Confidential, New York Law School professor David Schoenbrod describes how Congress degenerated from a responsible legislature, one that took responsibility for difficult decisions, to a body continually looking to dodge blame. The book is an absolute delight. Schoenbrod begins with an…

It is now hard to imagine, but before the mid-1960s most books, and not only on art historical subjects, appeared without a speck of color. It was not as if color printing technology was unavailable, but we had been conditioned by the circulation of millions of black-and-white photographic images,…

Timothy S. Huebner has produced a valuable study of American constitutionalism, a study that could do enormous good if people read it. Gracefully written, it is also lengthy and scholarly, which means that readers must possess two qualities—patience and intellectual candor—to appreciate the…

Free speech may have become a vanishingly rare thing on university campuses, but it turns out that at least one variety of free speech is still protected: T-shirt marijuana advocacy.

This is the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë, and to celebrate it comes a biography by the British writer Claire Harman. Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart isn't the first literary life she has penned: Her biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson appeared to critical acclaim…

Is the deck being stacked against President Trump? It's beginning to look that way since a special counsel was appointed a few weeks ago to investigate possible ties between Trump—or any breathing body in his campaign last year—and the Russians.

There are many pressures in reporting a breaking news story—getting the facts and getting them out before the next guy perhaps paramount among them. But The Scrapbook thinks that those pressures notwithstanding, a fine publication such as the New York Times could find time to avoid the hoariest of…

When is the Nightly News the Nitely News? When ratings are lousy.

Public radio doesn't quite know what it wants us to think about the anti-addiction medicine Vivitrol.

York, England

Journals like this one exist, generally speaking, not to praise politicians but to chastise, to upbraid, or at least to criticize them. And so, after hearing about the terrible shootings at the Alexandria baseball field the morning of June 14; after making the mistake of sampling the incivility and…

Huge demonstrations once again swept through Russia on June 12, as thousands took to the streets in over 160 cities to protest the corruption and authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin's regime. This followed street protests by Russia's emerging opposition in February and March that were the biggest in…

This past week, at least a dozen French people, most of them journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, were gunned down during an editorial meeting by the brothers Chérif and Said Kouachi, two French Muslims who may have returned recently from waging jihad in Syria. French citizens…

So there I am Tuesday morning, wheezing away on my exercise bike, trying to stay alert to telltale signs of the inevitable coronary thrombosis, when, for the first time in many, many years, I switch on the TV to watch Morning Joe.

More than eight years after they finished the new Yankee Stadium, I still get confused when I climb out of the subway at 161st and River Ave. Whoa—where did it go? The lot that used to hold the ballpark is empty. The stadium, I forget every time I visit the Bronx, is across the street. It's like a…

So, The Mummy. The question that bedevils me as I begin this review is how I can get to the end of it. Like Lucy in Peanuts, I am now counting words to see how quickly I can get to 700, which fills my slot here at The Weekly Standard. That was 53 words. I'm 8 percent of the way there. Can I make it?

Do we need another biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald? Since Arthur Mizener's inaugural one of 1951, there have been a number of successors including Andrew Turnbull's (1962) and, most commandingly, Matthew Bruccoli's "standard" one of 1981. This new one by David S. Brown concentrates, as the blurb…

The Battle of Jutland reverberates powerfully in the history of naval combat, and it does so with a resonance that equals or exceeds that of such history-shaping sea struggles as Salamis in 480 b.c., Lepanto in 1571, Trafalgar in 1805, and Leyte Gulf in 1944. Now, in Jutland, Nicholas Jellicoe…

Best Washington Press Release Ever

In the wake of Wednesday's shooting at a practice for the congressional baseball game, politicians and pundits—appropriately—have made much ado about renewing bipartisanship and mutual respect in politics. Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi made statements of unity that were roundly praised; Bernie Sanders…

The Senate almost unanimously approved legislation Thursday that slaps sanctions on Iran and Russia.

Yesterday, following the news that a Republican congressmen was shot playing baseball, along with four others, in Virginia, the New York Times wrote what one conservative website is calling the "Worst Editorial In Human History." Discussion of it has dominated social media, and even a number of…

The Senate voted Thursday to impose new sanctions against Russia for its efforts to disrupt last year's presidential election through cyberattacks against the Democratic party and state election rolls.

On this latest episode, the Substandard unravels The Mummy and questions the feasibility of a Dark Universe. But what other Extended Universes would we like to see? A Garry Marshall Universe, of course! JVL praises Rafa Nadal, Vic enjoys Virgin America, and Sonny rants against avocado toast, all on…

Reviews and News:

Camille Paglia is one America's smartest and most fearless writers. Like Elvis, she's the kind of superstar who really needs no introduction—though it is worth pointing out that Pantheon has just published a collection of her essays on sex, gender, and feminism, titled Free Women, Free Men. It's…

Atlanta

London

During a recent Seattle City Council meeting, member Tim Burgess sought agreement on a juvenile justice issue by noting that "even some of our Republican friends" favor criminal justice reform. Council member Kshama Sawant, a socialist, stood to oppose what she saw as Burgess's unfounded claim, the…

President Trump has authorized his secretary of defense, James Mattis, to determine American troop levels in Afghanistan. Mattis confirmed this Wednesday morning in a hearing before the Senate Appropriations committee. "At noon yesterday, President Trump delegated to me the authority to manage…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, executive editor Fred Barnes discusses Wednesday's attack on House Republicans practicing for the annual congressional baseball game.

Any given weekday, there are about 20,000 people in the United States Capitol complex—which has nearly 20 buildings sprawled over nearly 300 acres. Across those many buildings, there are dozens of tunnels, nooks, crannies, and thousands of different rooms. It's a daunting place and difficult to…

The intra-Arab rift that has set Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt against Qatar is now in its second week. A feud that seemed to begin as a principled stand against Doha's support for terrorism—one flash point was Qatar's recent payment of nearly $1 billion to Iran and to…

Tuesday afternoon, as I do most days, I went to the YMCA near my house in Alexandria. On the way in, I said hello to my neighbor and her daughter, who is in my own daughter's class at the Lutheran school about a mile up the road. I ran a couple of miles on the treadmill listening to podcasts and…

President Trump announced late Wednesday morning that the man who shot up a baseball practice of Republican members of Congress in Northern Virginia has died. James Hodgkinson, an Illinois man who opened fire Wednesday morning and injured five individuals, including House Republican whip Steve…

Ed Gillespie, the Republican hope for a revival in Virginia, squeaked out a narrow victory Tuesday night over a populist Corey Stewart to win the GOP nomination for governor.

Reviews and News:

President Donald Trump released a statement Wednesday morning following reports of a shooting at a baseball practice of Republican members of Congress.

Update 3:02 p.m. The hospital treating Steve Scalise reports that he is out of surgery and in critical condition.

If you're interested in curious cultural phenomena, you may have taken notice of the tiny Pacific nation of Niue—an idyllic Polynesian Eden, which is depopulating itself so dramatically that it will soon turn spontaneously into a wildlife refuge.

Rock Hill, S.C.

A college preparatory school for black and Latino boys opened in Washington, D.C., last year to a burst of public interest—and the inevitable question from the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation's Capital: What have you done for girls lately? In the city's newest public high school,…

The most strident Trump critics have a problem. There's no evidence Jeff Sessions, the attorney general and former Alabama senator, colluded with Russian officials to sway the election toward Donald Trump. This was the implication of questions from Democratic senators at Tuesday's Senate…

It wasn't exactly May vs. Corbyn, but Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial primary was a shocker in its own right. The race pitted Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam (the heir to the Clintons' heir in the Old Dominion) against former representative Tom Perriello, a super-progressive who was attempting to sell…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Michael Warren recaps Tuesday's Senate Intelligence Committee hearing where Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified about his actions during and after the election.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday afternoon on Russia's potential interference in the 2016 election. Sessions also faced questions on President Trump's handling of the James Comey firing, the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, and…

Jon Ossoff, the Democratic nominee in the special election to replace Tom Price in Georgia's 6th congressional district, is the progressive hope du jour. He has a small lead in an average of polls against his opponent, Republican Karen Handel, ahead of the vote next Tuesday. The district favors the…

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said he has seen no reason to fire the special prosecutor investigating the Trump campaign's ties to Russia.

What the Golden State Warriors accomplished Monday was, as it had been most nights of the NBA season, amazing. Not because they won and did so in emphatic fashion—12 months ago they were a juggernaut, Kevin Durant made them a cyborg, and their victories typically have been inevitable. Rather, they…

In a horrific war in which millions perished, the massacre at Malmedy does not figure large. In the history of fake news, however, it is a landmark deserving of recognition.

Last winter over lunch, CNN anchor Dana Bash got the idea to profile powerful women serving in politics and government. She and two female colleagues were mourning Hillary Clinton's failed campaign when inspiration struck. There would be a web series. To celebrate women. But it needed a name. Why…

Strange news from Wisconsin. A student at James Madison Memorial High School in Madison has petitioned to have the name of her school changed, arguing, “The significance of this name in association with my school has a negative effect on memorials [sic] black students. The lack of representation I…

Reviews and News:

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday that special counsel Robert Mueller should be allowed to proceed in his investigation of Russia's election meddling, and said he'd advise President Trump not to fire him, a step some of Trump's close allies have said he is considering.

There's something about kids: their wide-eyed innocence, their unimpeachable earnestness, their progressive ideas about gender politics. After all, as everyone knows, elementary school students are the foremost political thinkers the internet has to offer. Oh, you didn't know that? Well, it's a…

Who is running the White House's defense against claims of obstruction of justice and others stemming from the ongoing Russia investigation? From the looks of it, it's Marc Kasowitz, the outside counsel of President Donald Trump.

Lena Dunham, the HBO celebrity and Democratic activist, had an op-ed in the New York Times over the weekend arguing against a regulation under consideration by the Trump administration. According to a leak, conscientious objectors could opt out of the Obamacare mandate that forces American…

Donald Trump's campaign changed the political playbook in elections across the country. But if Republicans in greater Atlanta retain an imperiled House seat next Tuesday, it will be thanks in so small part to their having called a familiar play.

In this latest micro episode, the Substandard reflects on the passing of Adam West and ranks the Batmen from best to worst. Sonny and Vic embrace West's campy take on the Caped Crusader. Jonathan has a slightly different take. Pow! Bam! Zap! All on the latest Substandard!

After a brief and uncharacteristic pause, Donald Trump has unloaded on James Comey. Today on the Daily Standard podcast, editor in chief Stephen Hayes comes by to talk about the President's strategy against his former FBI director.

Reviews and News:

On Sunday afternoon Rafa Nadal won his 10th French Open. It is difficult to overstate how impressive this achievement is.

President Trump has three rules for operating in the world of government and politics. Time learned of them from a White House official and describes them this way: "When you're right, you fight. Controversy elevates message. And never apologize."

Barack and Michelle Obama are setting lifestyle standards most Americans could only dream of, but there's no shortage of publications urging us to dream.

Paris

President Trump may not realize it, but he needs House Republicans more than they need him. If they keep the House in next year's midterm election, Republicans can block Democrats from impeaching him. But if Democrats take over, Republican won't be able to prevent them from taking up impeachment.

Last week, several Arab states, including Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, put Qatar on notice. They removed their diplomats from Doha, closed airspace and ports to Qatari vessels, expelled Qatari nationals, and prohibited their own nationals from visiting the country.…

The fallout from last week's Senate Intelligence committee hearing with former FBI director James Comey continues. The White House—and Donald Trump's new outside counsel Marc Kasowitz—has decided on two messages, each distilled into two of the president's Sunday morning tweets.

Central to the rise of the island of Singapore as one of the world's most important cities are its location on one of the planet's most important waterways and crossroads and its potent mix of the behavioral values of two cultures—British and overseas Chinese.

From its inception, Christianity has been known as the religion of the cross. Among Christians, the cross is a symbol of Christ's passion and its part in the economy of salvation. To non-Christians, it is what St. Paul termed it: a scandal and a folly. How did a token of degradation inflicted…

Social change can be tough on humor. A few years ago I read a book of stories and sketches by James Thurber, who I remembered as being very funny, and felt as the comedian Chris Rock remarked about watching the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, "Not many laughs." S. J. Perelman, another writer I…

This week on the Confab, executive editor Fred Barnes tells host Eric Felten about the rules Trump lives by. And senior writer Michael Warren talks about how living by those rules helped get the president in his Comey mess.

Reviews and News:

Cake is having a moment.In fact, it has been a long moment, a golden hour in the slow oven of history. With an audience of 14 million—more than half the Brits watching TV at the time—The Great British Bake Off, launched in 2010, is the most popular television program of recent years. Indeed, it has…

The president remains a protectionist. His administration? Not so much. That is possible because there are two strong and often opposing forces at work in Washington. One is the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, sometime resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The other is the Trump…

Dorit Rabinyan's latest novel chronicles nine months in the lives of Liat, an Israeli woman, and Hilmi, a Palestinian man. The two young adults come separately to New York to study and to make their fortunes. When they meet in the autumn of 2002, they fall immediately in love. But it isn't long…

Wonder Woman is a superhero movie about a very attractive person who was fashioned out of clay. She resides on an island on which only women live. It is in the Mediterranean Sea but hidden behind a gigantic magical cloud. She leaves it and emerges into World War I-era Europe so that she can get…

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Friday called on four Arab states to end an economic blockade of the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. "We call on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt to ease the blockade against Qatar," Tillerson said Friday afternoon at the…

While everyone was watching James Comey's testimony on Thursday, House Republicans gave their colleagues in the Senate a major bargaining chip in their ongoing negotiations for financial reform.

President Donald Trump on Friday announced plans to streamline and simplify the "dense thicket" of regulatory red tape that drives up costs and slows construction projects to a crawl.

In April, the American solar manufacturer Suniva filed a petition under Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974, asking the U.S. International Trade Commission for new tariffs on solar cells and the establishment of a minimum price for solar modules imported into the United States. Last month, the…

Today on the Kristol Clear podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol talks with Eric Felten about what it means, over the long haul, for Republicans to be the party of Trump. And, who had the worse week, Donald Trump or Theresa May?

Washington is still trying to make sense of James Comey's congressional testimony yesterday. My immediate reaction is here. A very smart lawyer—a friend of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and no fan of Donald Trump—emails this sharp analysis, which questions the reasons for and legitimacy of the special…

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Reviews and News:

At Evergreen State College, the revolution will be televised. And it already has been, thanks to the smartphone.

Many Trump critics relished a recent Quinnipiac poll showing that President Trump's job approval had fallen to a new low, at a net -23 percent (34 percent approve, 57 percent disapprove).

Without having to pour a single free drink, the Capitol Hill bar that promised to buy a round every time President Trump tweeted Thursday morning during James Comey's must-watch congressional testimony drew at least 500 customers. That was Union Pub general manager Ashley Saunders's best guess…

London—Theresa May has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Britain's general election. By 5:00 a.m. EST, with 649 of 650 seats having declared, Britain looks set for a hung parliament. May's Conservatives have won 318 seats—6 short of the 326 needed for a majority, and 21 seats less than…

In recent decades, Portland, Oregon, has acquired a reputation as one of America's most tolerant and liberal cities. In practice, this means there are taxpayer-funded sex changes for municipal employees and lots of bike lanes, but comparatively little tolerant liberalism. The city government has…

What did we learn from James Comey, the fired FBI director, when he testified on June 8 before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee? Not enough to prove Donald Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors warranting impeachment, as the president's most strident opponents were hoping. Neither…

A college preparatory school for black and Latino boys opened in Washington, D.C., last year to a burst of public interest—and the inevitable question from the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation's Capital: What have you done for girls lately? In the city's newest public high school,…

Atlanta

Barack and Michelle Obama are setting lifestyle standards most Americans could only dream of, but there's no shortage of publications urging us to dream.

It's not hard to understand why Donald Trump was frustrated with FBI director James Comey. In the weeks before the inauguration and the weeks that followed, Comey repeatedly told Trump that he was not under investigation as part of the FBI's probe into Russian attempts to influence the 2016…

Wonder Woman is a superhero movie about a very attractive person who was fashioned out of clay. She resides on an island on which only women live. It is in the Mediterranean Sea but hidden behind a gigantic magical cloud. She leaves it and emerges into World War I-era Europe so that she can get…

From its inception, Christianity has been known as the religion of the cross. Among Christians, the cross is a symbol of Christ's passion and its part in the economy of salvation. To non-Christians, it is what St. Paul termed it: a scandal and a folly. How did a token of degradation inflicted…

Give National Public Radio some credit: In an All Things Considered feature, reporter Martin Kaste actually interviewed some anti-leftist protesters and did not present them as crazy people. Also to NPR's credit, the story, "Trump Supporters Accuse Liberal Communities of Hostility Toward Free…

Social change can be tough on humor. A few years ago I read a book of stories and sketches by James Thurber, who I remembered as being very funny, and felt as the comedian Chris Rock remarked about watching the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, "Not many laughs." S. J. Perelman, another writer I…

To see it, you need to ascend to the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wend your way to the northernmost corner. Here is the American art gallery. Slip through the long hall of bottles and vases, and past the earthy and sometimes gritty works of the Ashcan school. Stop in…

Strange news from Wisconsin. A student at James Madison Memorial High School in Madison has petitioned to have the name of her school changed, arguing, “The significance of this name in association with my school has a negative effect on memorials [sic] black students. The lack of representation I…

Dorit Rabinyan's latest novel chronicles nine months in the lives of Liat, an Israeli woman, and Hilmi, a Palestinian man. The two young adults come separately to New York to study and to make their fortunes. When they meet in the autumn of 2002, they fall immediately in love. But it isn't long…

Cake is having a moment.In fact, it has been a long moment, a golden hour in the slow oven of history. With an audience of 14 million—more than half the Brits watching TV at the time—The Great British Bake Off, launched in 2010, is the most popular television program of recent years. Indeed, it has…

In the Time magazine issue published after the 2008 election—whose cover depicted Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt—Peter Beinart anticipated a new “era of liberal hegemony” that would last until “Sasha and Malia have kids.”

Paris

Surveys consistently rank Scandinavian countries the happiest on earth. But now, even they are getting ticked off by the Palestinians.

Last week, several Arab states, including Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, put Qatar on notice. They removed their diplomats from Doha, closed airspace and ports to Qatari vessels, expelled Qatari nationals, and prohibited their own nationals from visiting the country.…

Rock Hill, S.C.

In a horrific war in which millions perished, the massacre at Malmedy does not figure large. In the history of fake news, however, it is a landmark deserving of recognition.

President Trump has three rules for operating in the world of government and politics. Time learned of them from a White House official and describes them this way: "When you're right, you fight. Controversy elevates message. And never apologize."

Central to the rise of the island of Singapore as one of the world's most important cities are its location on one of the planet's most important waterways and crossroads and its potent mix of the behavioral values of two cultures—British and overseas Chinese.

Even in Texas, where everything's bigger, the little guys can still win one. In the latest case, the little guys are the nearly 40 private music museums across the Lone Star State. Their defeated foe? A plan backed by Governor Greg Abbott, Austin politicians, and the state's preservation board to…

Many Trump critics relished a recent Quinnipiac poll showing that President Trump's job approval had fallen to a new low, at a net -23 percent (34 percent approve, 57 percent disapprove).

At Evergreen State College, the revolution will be televised. And it already has been, thanks to the smartphone.

In recent decades, Portland, Oregon, has acquired a reputation as one of America's most tolerant and liberal cities. In practice, this means there are taxpayer-funded sex changes for municipal employees and lots of bike lanes, but comparatively little tolerant liberalism. The city government has…

What did we learn from James Comey, the fired FBI director, when he testified on June 8 before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee? Not enough to prove Donald Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors warranting impeachment, as the president's most strident opponents were hoping. Neither…

It's not hard to understand why Donald Trump was frustrated with FBI director James Comey. In the weeks before the inauguration and the weeks that followed, Comey repeatedly told Trump that he was not under investigation as part of the FBI's probe into Russian attempts to influence the 2016…

British voters have just shocked Europe—and perhaps themselves—by repudiating their conservative prime minister Theresa May. May called a snap election because it seemed an easy way to bolster her slender parliamentary majority as she began negotiating Britain's exit from the European Union. That…

Today's hearing with James Comey contains at least one rather revealing nugget unrelated to the Trump-Russia investigation—that the Obama Justice Department improperly tried to influence the the Clinton email investigation:

A Donald Trump tweet is the reason we have a special counsel investigation into Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 election and possible collusion between Trump associates and Russians, according to testimony from former FBI Director James Comey.

In this latest episode, the Substandard gets lassoed into reviewing Wonder Woman—is it the best thing to come out of the DC Comics Extended Universe? Is it better than Chav King Arthur? Jonathan brings a surprise to the studio—complete with sound effects! Sonny is not amused. Vic gets stranded in…

After weeks of anticipation, former FBI director James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, speaking publicly for the first time since President Donald Trump fired him last month.

Reviews and News:

President Trump is thinking about dispatching more troops to Afghanistan. Given his past insistence on withdrawing American forces, one might have expected this switcheroo to raise eyebrows in Washington and the media. Yet it hasn't.

The diplomatic crisis in Qatar saw a new development Wednesday as Turkey's parliament passed legislation permitting the deployment of troops to a Turkish military base in Qatar. The legislation was drafted prior to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain severing ties with Qatar,…

The determination to better relations between Washington and Moscow seems an ever more elusive goal. Yet this year's quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, now underway, rekindles memories of the time when just a reset did occur, during the darkest days of the Cold…

Two secret documents obtained by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz purportedly show that the Obama administration was eagerly trying to sponsor a final agreement between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority that would end the five decades of conflict in the West Bank.

On Wednesday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the prepared opening statement of former FBI director James Comey, kickstarting the most anticipated event in Washington since President Trump's inauguration.

A nation of Trumpster Fire watchers will be glued to our screens Thursday morning, in anticipation of bombshell revelations from former FBI director James Comey's testimony to Congress. CNN's countdown started with three days to go and on Sunday switched to an actual clock tick-tick-ticking down…

When on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Michael Warren and host Eric Felten discuss tomorrow's James Comey testimony today.

Fired FBI director James Comey will testify on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee about his dealings with President Trump, the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the U.S. election.

The fanfare that greeted D.C.'s first public college preparatory school for African-American and Latino young men—Ron Brown High School in northeast has given way to an inevitable nag from the ACLU. If they're not going to admit young women, the ACLU says, then D.C. should at least give girls a…

Reviews and News:

Scooter Gennett hit four home runs on Tuesday night. "Scooter Gennett" is not an anagram for "Mike Trout." Though it is only a "u" short of having the letters to spell "get out" and a "d" short of Scrabbling together his traditional position, "second"—which isn't often associated with power…

Is Jeff Sessions on his way out? That would be a reasonable interpretation of White House press secretary Sean Spicer's cautious response to a question during Tuesday's press briefing. Asked whether President Donald Trump still has "confidence" in his attorney general, Spicer said, "I have not had…

When British Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap general election back in April (the vote will be held this Thursday) the governing Conservatives were seen as a shoo-in. They were roughly 20 points ahead in the polls, May was liked and the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—seen as dangerous,…

What I needed, said my wife, was a cup of tea.

The architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, once warned his superiors, "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of…

It appears that the Treasury will soon be getting a champion of the pro-growth conservative crowd on its team in David Malpass, who has his confirmation hearing for Undersecretary for International Affairs in front of the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday.

David Edelstein is one of the better-known film critics in the country. He's been a critic for decades and is currently the chief film critic for New York magazine, as well as the film critic for NPR's Fresh Air and CBS's Sunday Morning. Like everyone else in his position, he recently wrote a…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, our new national correspondent, Peter J. Boyer, talks with host Eric Felten about how the Trump team, in the face of a special counsel investigation, is trying to de-Twitterfy their boss.

Reviews and News:

On Monday secretary of Defense James Mattis appeared to break with the Obama administration's position of the preceding eight years that there is "no military solution" to the conflict in Afghanistan. At an appearance with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the Defense and Foreign ministers of…

A reader alerts TWS Fact Check to a "news" story that the Supreme Court has banned public schools from teaching about Islam. The post, which has been making the rounds on Facebook for several weeks, claims that Justice Neil Gorsuch issued the deciding opinion in an April 10 ruling to restrict…

The Trump administration was notified ahead of Monday's decision by four Arab countries to cut diplomatic ties with Qatar. Qatar has long been considered the most recalcitrant of the Arab states when it comes to curbing its financing of terrorism. The Trump White House, in fact, celebrated the fact…

Donald Trump's tweets offer a window into his mind; they tell us, in real time, what occupies his consciousness (at least between the hours of 5 and 9 a.m., generally). But often more revealing than what the president does tweet is what he doesn't tweet.

Actor Peter Sallis died on Monday at the age of 96. Sallis was best known for voicing Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit films, as well as serving as a regular performer in the world's longest-running sitcom, Last of the Summer Wine.

"It is time to say, enough is enough," Theresa May announced on Sunday morning, as forensic teams were examining the sites of the Islamist attacks on London Bridge and Borough Market and armed police were raiding homes in east London. "We cannot, and must not, pretend that things can continue as…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, travel journalist Rudy Maxa talks with Eric Felten about the effects of terrorism on travel, and how recent attacks in England have hit right at the beginning of the high season for British tourism.

And another thing! The Substandard goes off on what drives us nuts in movie theaters. From cell phones to screen masking to the sticky floors of yesteryear, it's an airing of grievances, all on this latest mini episode of the Substandard.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the business lunch is slumping of late: The new trend, it seems, is for workers to eat meals at their desk brought from home instead, a development the Journal endorses as being healthier, less expensive, and more efficient to boot.

Hillary Clinton spread around the blame in a candid interview with Recode last Wednesday. She called her private email server a "nothingburger" and the Times endorsement of her candidacy a hypocritical reversal—they reduced up the scandal to "a matter for the help desk," after having "covered it…

Donald Trump's recent sojourn in the Middle East leaves the United States where it was before the president departed: His administration remains committed to containing Iran while philosophically adopting a pre-9/11 approach to combating Sunni Islamic militancy. Sunni Arab leaders have reason to be…

Reviews and News:

It wasn't long ago that painters were celebrities; when Picasso died in 1973, it was big news to everywhere. Paul McCartney wrote a song about it. In the 70s, painters and paintings were still a part of mainstream culture; around that time, though, the art world moved from modernist and…

Over the past 48 hours there have been dozens of news stories trying to inject President Donald Trump into the London Bridge attacks: "World leaders call for unity after London attack. Trump tweets the complete opposite." And "With his London tweets Trump embarrasses himself—and America—once…

Despite having the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia seldom troubles others and so draws little attention in the West. But last month's imprisonment of the governor of the capital, Jakarta, on charges of blasphemy has properly brought it to the front pages. It may signal that the…

President Donald Trump's initial public reaction to the weekend's terror attack in London came via his Twitter feed. "We need to be smart, vigilant and tough," tweeted the president, as the news came in that terrorists had crashed a van and stabbed several people in crowded areas of London. "We…

London

In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Fred Barnes talks about the tricky balancing act of Virginia GOP gubernatorial hopeful Ed Gillespie; and Lee Smith explains the international politics of Wonder Woman.

Earlier in May, Rotten Tomatoes deemed The Circle a cinematic flop. Over at the SubStandard podcast, Sonny Bunch described the book as "mediocre." And yet, the novel demonstrates what many fear about social media: its uncanny ability to subsume the individual. But should people flee from its…

We're out. But we might come back. That's what President Trump has decided to do about the Paris climate accord. We're out because the accord is unfair: It allows China to pollute while we can't. It kills millions of jobs. It requires us to pay tens of billions of dollars to foreign countries. And…

Fact Check: Did Obama Director of Intelligence James Clapper Deny Collusion Between Trump and Russia?

Maybe there will come a day when we can talk about big-budget Hollywood movies that happen to be female-driven in terms of whether we liked the movies or not.

American culture may be approaching the event horizon of politics, from which all matter(s), including harmless diversions, cannot escape. This includes the Twitter account We Rate Dogs (@dog_rates), which was sucked into the singularity on Thursday.

Twitter has a remarkable power to make well-credentialed people look like fools. Case in point: Joyce Chaplin, who is theJames Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University.

1) As many liberal commentators have eagerly pointed out, coal is a dying industry, and it makes no sense to prop up a dying industry. The issue, however, isn't whether Trump's pulling out of the Paris Agreement is propping it up so much as refusing to kill the industry prematurely. About a third…

In this episode of the Kristol Clear podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol discusses the big questions about Trump's presidency with host Eric Felten.

South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham suggested Friday that a planned hearing next week with former FBI director James Comey could descend into a political "hit job" if the director focuses only on reported conversations between him and the president.

* We started out this week with some watch talk that may or may not be SFW, depending on your physiological reaction to things such as the Patek Philippe Constellation.

So far as I can tell, I was patient zero for anti-anti-anti-Trumpism: the philosophy which says that it is not enough to avoid the subject of Donald Trump by criticizing the various hucksters, idiots, SJWs, and partisans who criticize him. Because President Donald Trump is the leader of the free…

Of the generation of pianists who became well-known in the 1970s, famous in the '80s and great in the '90s, Murray Perahia and Maurizio Pollini are the remaining twin pillars. On the weekend of May 20, both of them were in Manhattan, at Carnegie Hall, playing exceptional programs to packed houses.

President Trump's budget request for defense spending is at once too much and not enough.

The White House is referring all questions about the investigation into Russian meddling the 2016 election, now under the direction of special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller, to President Donald Trump's outside counsel, New York litigator Marc Kasowitz. Trump had reportedly…

Nancy Pelosi didn't tell us it would take this long: Congress passed Obamacare in 2010 and we're still finding out what's in it.

Some eight miles west by south of the central North Carolina town of my boyhood, one comes upon red-clay dairy country, furnished with lush pastures and comfortable houses. Hawfields, as the neighborhood is called, dates from colonial times: The route of Cornwallis’s fateful retirement toward…

As the 2016 presidential campaign neared its final throes, the journalist Salena Zito offered an elegant explanation of the chasm between the political-media class, which beheld Donald Trump as an unelectable clown, and those Americans propelling him toward victory. "[T]he press takes him…

Last week the Washington Free Beacon reported that roughly half of Congressman Luis Gutiérrez's campaign expenditures were paid to his wife, who serves as his campaign manager. What is most noteworthy about this is that Gutiérrez does not really need to worry about campaigning.

When Weldon Kees disappeared, at the age of 41, he seemed on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent American poets of his generation. He had three collections to his name, and his work had been published in such periodicals as Sewanee Review, Poetry, Harper's, and the New Yorker. But on…

Vice President Henry Wallace once observed of his boss, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “He doesn't know any man and no man knows him. Even his own family doesn't know anything about him." It's not surprising that Wallace would think ill of a man who dumped him from the ticket while seeking a fourth…

So, one day I'm in an antique store, looking at a dresser. Now, there's no denying it's a pretty little thing: late 1800s, walnut burl, brass drawer handles, an elegant shape. But the sales sticker says $4,800, which is more than a little out of my price range, especially for a dresser I don't…

The Arthurian legends are among the most enduring stories in history. But when a $175 million film version casting Arthur as the lowlife foster son of a prostitute battling dragons and a campy Jude Law bombed at the box office, the reason for the movie's failure, in Hollywood's eyes, was simple:…

Not since 2011, when Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi was captured on a wiretap disparaging the size of her backside, has Angela Merkel suffered so grievously from the boorishness of allies. Donald Trump, on his first diplomatic visit to Europe, strong-armed the prime minister of Montenegro. He…

Long before he was a senator, comedian Al Franken made his entry into politics with a couple of bestsellers, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Franken found a ready audience for his political…

The New York Times really, really wants you to behave yourself environmentally on your travels this summer. In March the paper published "How to Have a Green Vacation." Come May (for those who may not have been paying sufficient attention in March) the Times published "Greening Your Summer…

In 1882, a Minnesota writer and politician named Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, perhaps the most popular work of pseudo-science of the 19th century. Its opening pages confidently set forth 13 propositions about the legendary island kingdom—notably that Atlantis was…

Last week the government of Lebanon announced that it was banning Wonder Woman, the latest cinematic treatment of a comic-book superhero, a film that's likely to be one of the summer's big blockbusters. Is it because the Amazonian princess's costume is a little too revealing for a Muslim-majority…

Despite having the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia seldom troubles others and so draws little attention in the West. But last month's imprisonment of the governor of the capital, Jakarta, on charges of blasphemy has properly brought it to the front pages. It may signal that the…

Donald Trump's recent sojourn in the Middle East leaves the United States where it was before the president departed: His administration remains committed to containing Iran while philosophically adopting a pre-9/11 approach to combating Sunni Islamic militancy. Sunni Arab leaders have reason to be…

Most Americans have thought about Thomas Jefferson much as our first professional biographer, James Parton, did. "If Jefferson was wrong," wrote Parton in 1874, "America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right." Unfortunately, Jefferson at present looks to be more wrong than right, at…

Occasionally you take a moment to look up from the day-to-day or hour-to-hour or tweet-to-tweet turmoil of the Trump presidency. You want a reprieve from the constant and enervating melodrama of the Trump era. You try to take a longer view.

Campaigning in a Munich beer tent on May 28, German chancellor Angela Merkel reflected upon Donald Trump's blitz through Europe at the tail end of his first trip outside the United States. "The times when we could fully rely on others are kind of over," she said. "We Europeans really need to take…

When Laura Campbell heard about new water regulations emanating from President Barack Obama's Environmental Protection Agency a few years back, she started calling up maps on her computer.

"Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (Knopf) conveys the shock and dismay many esteemed poets—like many Americans—have felt since the presidential . . ."

Ray Sprigle probably had no idea when he set out for the assignment of a lifetime that his journalism would become, to quote the overused cliché, "the first rough draft of history."

Expanding school choices for parents remains a heated debate, from states providing families vouchers for their children to attend private schools, to school boards creating magnet schools and other public alternatives, to states and districts granting charter schools freedom to innovate the way…

In the week following Salman Abedi's suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on May 22, a great deal was revealed about the perpetrator, most of it deeply unsettling.

Alexandria, Va.

Margaret Chan was quite taken by what she saw on her visit to Pyongyang in 2010. North Koreans had "something which most other developing countries would envy," she noted: a first-rate medical system with plenty of doctors and nurses. Not only that, there were no obesity problems, she enthused,…

As the 2016 presidential campaign neared its final throes, the journalist Salena Zito offered an elegant explanation of the chasm between the political-media class, which beheld Donald Trump as an unelectable clown, and those Americans propelling him toward victory. "[T]he press takes him…

President Donald Trump stated on Thursday that the United States would pull out of the Paris climate agreement, saying that it would not only help the economy of the United States but act as "a reassertion of America's sovereignty."

The United States has experienced a tumultuous last decade. It's endured an historic financial crisis, prolonged government dysfunction, eroding trust in public institutions, a farcical presidential election, and Twitter. No society should have to suffer any of these. But gaze upon the world for…

Long ago, or at least it seems, before "covfefe" and the Kathy Griffin fiasco, Donald Trump decided it wise to use social media to escalate a spat with Germany.

Billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer called President Trump a traitor if he makes good on his promise and exits the Paris climate change agreement.

Don't look now, but Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine isn't going how he expected.

Roland Garros is open for business!

In this new episode, the Substandard reviews Pirates of the Caribbean and Baywatch. Who's more overrated? Johnny Depp or the Rock? JVL admits he's a watchaholic, Vic has a soft spot for Donnie Brasco, and Sonny takes a hard line on thievery. Plus tales from the zoo, getting action at Action Park,…

The House Intelligence committee issued subpoenas targeting two Trump associates on Wednesday as part of its ongoing investigation into Russian election interference. The panel also reportedly subpoenaed three government agencies for information that could shed light on potential surveillance…

President Trump took to Twitter Tuesday morning to amplify comments he made during the European leg of his overseas trip. He controversially, and indelicately, invoked one of his key issues — trade policies that put America first, or fail to — in a meeting of E.U. leaders last Thursday, during…

National Security Agency analysts under the Obama administration improperly searched Americans' information, but the searches were conducted largely out of error, according to a review of publicly available intelligence documents reported on by Circa last week.

I'm fascinated by the photograph of the Beatles in the open gatefold of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released 50 years ago today. From left to right sit Ringo Starr, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, clad in colorful psychedelic military garb against a yellow…

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

Sean Spicer will no longer be taking any questions about the Russian investigation and the former FBI director who was once leading that investigation. That's what the White House press secretary told reporters in a short, off-camera briefing Wednesday, directing reporters to contact President…