411 articles
A bipartisan health reform proposal headlined by Governors John Kasich and John Hickenlooper would preserve Obamacare and instead provide states more flexibility under the existing law, according to an outline of the plan released Thursday.
Men's studies actually exists, but not for the reason you think. I was confused at first when I saw that a college actually had a men's studies department. The idea of "men's studies" is usually a trope used to bash the existence of "women's studies" and is (usually) not a serious proposal. Yet,…
The United States will close three Russian diplomatic facilities in retaliation for the Kremlin’s expulsion of American diplomats, the State Department announced Thursday.
The resignation of A.R. Bernard from the White House Evangelical Advisory Board was nearly ignored amid the slew of high-profile departures from White House advisory councils in the wake of President Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville. And for good reason, as Bernard had begun…
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We’ve all heard the ubiquitous urban legend: “Large retailers ruin local economies.” Typically, big-box critics assert that mega-retailers cause lower wages, lower prices force mom-and-pops out of business, and profits aren’t reinvested locally.
In this latest episode, the Substandard discusses The Trip to Spain and ranks road trip movies. We also debate if ’90s rock music counts as classic rock. Special guest host Mike Warren saw Smash Mouth live. Vic saw Bell Biv DeVoe. And Sonny saw Sponge. Plus The Dark Knight on IMAX, spray painting…
On the evening of Oct. 14, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered one of his famous Fireside Chats to a national radio audience. What used to be called Community Chest drives—local campaigns to raise money for social-welfare charities—were about to be launched, and FDR wished to pay…
"Make no mistake,” writes New Yorker editor David Remnick, “white supremacists are now at the forefront of American politics.” That platitudinous “make no mistake” put us in mind of Joe Queenan’s observation years ago in these pages. The phrase is “an underhanded way of clinching an argument…
When is a college acceptance letter not a college acceptance letter? When a school suddenly realizes that it has 800 more freshmen than it knows what to do with. This is what happened last month at the University of California, Irvine, which—in an effort to reduce that number—started rescinding…
The Fourth Amendment is in a sorry state. The constitutional provision intended to protect us and our property from unreasonable searches and seizures has been weakened over decades—a fact that ought to be of acute concern at a time when surveillance technology is increasingly intrusive and…
The flooding and rain continues in Texas (and now Louisiana, too), but the White House is already talking about getting an emergency relief spending package through Congress next week. The Washington Post reports the funding “is expected to only be a partial down payment and serve in part to…
As the summer of 2016 wound down, the University of Chicago’s dean of students sent a letter to the school’s incoming cohort of freshmen telling them not to expect the sort of coddling that had become worryingly commonplace at elite American colleges. His welcome to the class of 2020 aimed to…
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans mixed it up the first several months of 2017, concocting a doozy of four parts discord and one part accomplishment. Candidate Trump made antagonism with the GOP establishment a selling point of his campaign. While that approach earned votes at…
President Donald Trump kicked off his party’s major push for tax reform with a speech in Springfield, Missouri, Wednesday, pledging to reduce the burden of taxation on America’s companies and workers and calling for Democratic support.
The Waffle House way. In times of disaster, it's pretty rare for a Waffle House to close. The company is famous for its disaster response, keeping stores open on a limited menu to keep people dry, warm, fed, and happy. In Houston, two stores have closed, but the company's disaster apparatus jumped…
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, associate editor Ethan Epstein joins host Eric Felten to talk about what the response should be to the Kim regime's ballistic provocations.
Controversial activist Linda Sarsour is being called out widely for her efforts to solicit donations for a leftist organizing group under the guise of Hurricane Harvey relief.
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The president travels to Springfield, Missouri, on Wednesday to deliver a speech about tax reform. Congress will take up this next legislative agenda item when it returns from its August recess after Labor Day. But don’t expect Donald Trump to roll out a detailed set of proposed reforms and changes…
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has issued subpoenas to two associates of Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, CNN reported Tuesday.
President Obama’s former ambassador to Syria said Monday that Bashar al-Assad, cemented by support from Iran, has essentially won the Syrian civil war and will maintain his grip on power.
Donald Trump might be going nowhere with the implementation of his legislative agenda. But when it comes to executive-branch immigration policy, the administration continues to make real if typically glacial progress.
Are you smarter than a college student? This was the favorite tactic Fox News's Jesse Watters employed on Bill O'Reilly's former show. Watters would go out and embarrass college students to show how smart he was and how dumb they were with man-on-the-street interviews. Mediaite caught Watters, who…
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, deputy managing editor Kelly Jane Torrance discusses how Iran is also helping the Taliban to destabilize Afghanistan.
A new poll in the Alabama Senate GOP primary runoff shows a dead heat between Republicans Roy Moore and Luther Strange. Harper Polling reports:
Seven months after taking office, President Donald Trump finally announced how his administration plans to fight the longest-running war in American history. “My original instinct was to pull out—and, historically, I like following my instincts,” Trump told the nation in a prime-time address…
All the Atlanta Falcons had to do was run straight ahead and they would have won the Super Bowl. Yet they got cute, and paid a price.
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I’ll remember Mike Cromartie as a fellow Christian and my friend. I met Mike in the early 1980s. We were roughly the same age and had some of the same interests—at the top of the list, politics and religion. Mike became a master of evangelical Christianity and its involvements in politics in his…
President Donald Trump is off to Texas Tuesday—specifically Corpus Christi, the coastal town south of Houston where Hurricane Harvey first made landfall in the Lone Star State.
Donald Trump’s remarks following the killing of a young paralegal by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, generated widespread opprobrium—and no one was more cutting than many of the president’s fellow Republicans. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio were just a few among the…
Let’s call her Jane. She’s 32 and a junior vice president at a big investment bank. The firm’s attempt at more manageable hours has made it possible for her to reshuffle her work and stay on after having a baby. But growing responsibilities to clients pull her away from her new role. She totes…
President Trump thinks the Gorsuch appointment to the Supreme Court is one of his biggest achievements of his presidency. Another major success may await him: the redirection of the lower federal courts, such that there will be more Republican than Democratic appointees, and thus a more…
Title IX is a Nixon-era federal law barring sex discrimination in schools. Under the Obama administration, it became a mandate for colleges to adjudicate claims of sexual misconduct with an imbalanced extrajudicial standard. The Department of Education’s infamous “Dear Colleague Letter” of April…
I love grocery shopping, so much so that two weeks ago I drove three hours round-trip to see the German grocer Lidl's foray into the U.S. And so naturally, on Monday, I went to check out Whole Foods on the day that Amazon’s purchase took effect.
Lakewood, Colorado
President Donald Trump on Monday defended his pardon of Arizona’s Joe Arpaio, who as sheriff of Maricopa County defied a court order to stop his hardline immigration policing and earned a citation for contempt of court last month. Trump’s comments came at a joint press conference with the president…
North Korea fired a missile that passed over Japan, the Pentagon confirmed Monday evening.
There are few people in this life who you are always, every time, happy to see. Mike Cromartie was one of those people. It wasn't just because he was a Christian, though that was a big part of it. If I hadn't known of Mike's faith, I would have quickly concluded he was a Christian anyway. He didn't…
'Whole Paycheck' no more? Amazon has come in and taken charge of Whole Foods, and their first order of business is to roll back prices like D-FENS in Falling Down. (Minus the racism, of course.) The once-online-only giant plans to integrate the Whole Foods supply chain into their Prime Pantry…
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, executive editor Fred Barnes comes by to talk about his recent article, "For Better or Worse, Trump and the GOP Need Each Other."
President Donald Trump is lifting restrictions banning local law enforcement from using surplus military equipment, overturning an Obama-era policy that restricted police access to heavy assets like armored vehicles, riot shields, and grenade launchers.
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Recently, French president Emmanuel Macron addressed the Polish government with perhaps the most scathing criticism of any European leader to date. Polish citizens, he said, “deserve better” than the current government, which “has decided to isolate itself in the workings of Europe.”
It would be nice, in a way, to be a progressive. You’d be confident you know the direction History is moving. And you’d have faith that the direction in which History is moving is the direction in which History should be moving.
Because there are so few of them, any movies about Americans living east of Los Angeles and west of Chicago will nowadays be labeled “important” on first sight. Taylor Sheridan, who grew up on a Texas ranch and moved to Wyoming after 20 years of intermittently rewarding acting work in L.A., has…
While vacationing this past June at the Outer Banks, I stopped one afternoon at a small bookstore in the sleepy coastal town of Buxton. After navigating past romance, mystery, and local fiction to the classics corner (Moby-Dick and the Odyssey make the best beach reading), I was arrested by the…
As presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised he would make really great deals that would bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. “We will get our people off of welfare and back to work—rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor,” President Trump said in his…
President Trump and his Never Trump antagonists have found something they agree on. They both want to separate Trump from the Republican Party.
There’s a protest of sorts happening among some of President Trump’s Cabinet officials and top advisers. It was Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, who kicked things off on Friday by way of an interview with the Financial Times. Following the president’s broadly criticized…
"I think we gave the fans what they wanted to see," Floyd Mayweather said after his ten-round technical knockout of Conor McGregor Saturday night. Indeed the fight, pitting an undefeated boxer with 49 wins going into the bout, against a mixed martial artist who’d never boxed professionally,…
I’ve accepted it—it’s not going to happen at the U.S. Open. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal will never meet in the final there. I had hoped there would be a chance this season, but now that the draw is out, the best they can do is the semifinals.
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President Trump brings an outsider's perspective to the long debate over the Senate filibuster. An overwhelming majority of the Senate disagrees with his desire to kill the filibuster, which means he doesn't have a prayer of winning. But he's not entirely wrong, either.
President Trump’s new strategy for Afghanistan shows considerable reflection among the president and his top advisers on many military questions but deep confusion on the issues of “nation-building” and democracy.
Fred Barnes joins host Eric Felten to talk about the new campaign book "Devil's Bargain." Ethan Epstein comes by to urge Republicans to reach out to African-American voters rather than just trying to discourage them.
For many years General Franco’s regime used the slogan “Spain is different” to attract tourism. Spain had sun and great beaches, unlike, say, Germany and Belgium, but the country was also a dictatorship and lagged economically and socially. We were indeed different from the rest of Europe. Today,…
Every few years, somebody gets pushed out of a job for suggesting that one group of people, on average and in part due to biology, scores differently from another group on some measure of attitude or aptitude. Ten years ago, it was DNA pioneer James Watson, who said blacks registered below whites…
Like many, perhaps most, Americans, I had never heard of the professional football quarterback Colin Kaepernick until he became better known for kneeling before games than for throwing passes during games.
For all the millennials “feeling the Bern,” Time has come to a startling realization: “Young Americans Are Actually Not Becoming More Progressive,” the magazine announced last week (with a parental sigh). Republicans, you’ll remember, were predicted to have a “young-people problem” in 2016, but 37…
Much ink has recently been spilled because of America’s statues of Confederate generals; in Charlottesville, wicked men flying Nazi flags caused blood to be spilled as well. In hopes of avoiding further violence, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, recently removed its Confederate statues in the…
Circuses feature sideshows and main events. So it is with the circus that performs daily at the Trump White House when it comes to trade policy. The sideshow currently on offer is the renegotiation of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that creates a more-or-less free trade area…
On the eve of Hurricane Harvey making landfall in Corpus Christi, President Trump pardoned former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Baseball badassery. A lot of people (wrongly) think baseball is a soft sport. It's true that, unlike football or hockey, there's not a lot of fighting. Of course, getting beaned with a 100 mph fastball is no picnic. But when there is fighting in baseball, it's a big deal. So, yesterday as we put…
This week on the Kristol Clear podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol talks with host Eric Felten about the president's topsy-turvy week. Does Donald Trump have a strategy, or is he just lurching from thing to thing?
Donald Trump’s top economic adviser said on Thursday said that the Trump administration “can and must do better” in addressing America’s racial divisions.
Most conservatives find the Trump presidency highly distressing for a variety of totally valid reasons—the ideological mishmash, the dysfunction, the lack of any political principle guiding the nation’s chief executive. But there is one part of the present era I can’t help enjoying, and that’s the…
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A dozen years ago a friend and I, both of us new to the Capital, hosted a political fundraiser. It was the first time either of us had attempted such a thing, and the politician was a member of the Peoria school board—our home town—running for the Illinois state assembly named Aaron Schock. (You…
Things went from bad to slightly worse between Donald Trump and Republican leadership in Congress Thursday. It started—as it always seems to—with a series of presidential tweets.
While vacationing this past June at the Outer Banks, I stopped one afternoon at a small bookstore in the sleepy coastal town of Buxton. After navigating past romance, mystery, and local fiction to the classics corner (Moby-Dick and the Odyssey make the best beach reading), I was arrested by the…
Seven months after taking office, President Donald Trump finally announced how his administration plans to fight the longest-running war in American history. “My original instinct was to pull out—and, historically, I like following my instincts,” Trump told the nation in a prime-time address…
The classic books about presidential campaigns don’t fixate on chronology. They only use chronology—the run from primaries to conventions to debates to the election—to tell a bigger story, one that transcends the campaign.
When is a college acceptance letter not a college acceptance letter? When a school suddenly realizes that it has 800 more freshmen than it knows what to do with. This is what happened last month at the University of California, Irvine, which—in an effort to reduce that number—started rescinding…
The Delta Sigma Phi fraternity chapter at the University of Michigan had what it thought was a delightful theme—antiquity on the Nile—for a party kicking off the school year. They invited guests to come as a “mummy, Cleopatra, or King Tut, it doesn’t matter to us. Get your best ancient Egyptian…
As presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised he would make really great deals that would bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. “We will get our people off of welfare and back to work—rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor,” President Trump said in his…
It would be nice, in a way, to be a progressive. You’d be confident you know the direction History is moving. And you’d have faith that the direction in which History is moving is the direction in which History should be moving.
In mid-October 1956 I became a visitor to the Middle Ages: I matriculated at Oxford. Robed in gown and white tie (mysteriously called “sub-fusc"), I stood with other freshmen before the celebrated classicist Sir Maurice Bowra, who intoned ritual sentences of Anglo-Latin (no broad "A"s) and we…
Last week the president feigned striking a blow for lower college costs with his proposal to make junior colleges free for all attendees meeting minimal academic standards. True to form, the president has taken on something not heretofore considered an impediment to college attendance with an…
The Fourth Amendment is in a sorry state. The constitutional provision intended to protect us and our property from unreasonable searches and seizures has been weakened over decades—a fact that ought to be of acute concern at a time when surveillance technology is increasingly intrusive and…
Donald Trump’s remarks following the killing of a young paralegal by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, generated widespread opprobrium—and no one was more cutting than many of the president’s fellow Republicans. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio were just a few among the…
When we think of trendy endeavors, it’s the fashion and entertainment industries that come to mind, not anything so serious as science. But the new issue of Scientific American is out, and it’s proving yet again that the Bunsen-burner crowd is every bit as modish as the Kardashians.
For all the millennials “feeling the Bern,” Time has come to a startling realization: “Young Americans Are Actually Not Becoming More Progressive,” the magazine announced last week (with a parental sigh). Republicans, you’ll remember, were predicted to have a “young-people problem” in 2016, but 37…
For many years General Franco’s regime used the slogan “Spain is different” to attract tourism. Spain had sun and great beaches, unlike, say, Germany and Belgium, but the country was also a dictatorship and lagged economically and socially. We were indeed different from the rest of Europe. Today,…
"Make no mistake,” writes New Yorker editor David Remnick, “white supremacists are now at the forefront of American politics.” That platitudinous “make no mistake” put us in mind of Joe Queenan’s observation years ago in these pages. The phrase is “an underhanded way of clinching an argument…
During the 2016 presidential primary campaign, Jeb Bush took to calling Donald Trump the “chaos candidate.” It didn’t seem to have much effect at the time, but Bush was prescient: The chaos candidacy is now the chaos presidency. And yet, as Henry Adams once wrote, while order is the dream of man,…
Every few years, somebody gets pushed out of a job for suggesting that one group of people, on average and in part due to biology, scores differently from another group on some measure of attitude or aptitude. Ten years ago, it was DNA pioneer James Watson, who said blacks registered below whites…
Let’s call her Jane. She’s 32 and a junior vice president at a big investment bank. The firm’s attempt at more manageable hours has made it possible for her to reshuffle her work and stay on after having a baby. But growing responsibilities to clients pull her away from her new role. She totes…
President Trump’s new strategy for Afghanistan shows considerable reflection among the president and his top advisers on many military questions but deep confusion on the issues of “nation-building” and democracy.
Columbia, South Carolina, is known for its excessive heat, and that’s about it. The place has its benefits, and the weather is splendid for nine months out of the year, but like some other state capitals—Harrisburg, say—it’s not a destination. When I’m in Washington and tell someone I live in…
Always on the lookout for good writing with a little kick to it, The Scrapbook is pleased to announce its discovery of American Consequences, a new magazine edited by none other than our valued contributing editor P. J. O’Rourke. This is the first magazine P. J. has edited since stepping down from…
Much ink has recently been spilled because of America’s statues of Confederate generals; in Charlottesville, wicked men flying Nazi flags caused blood to be spilled as well. In hopes of avoiding further violence, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, recently removed its Confederate statues in the…
In the last issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Tony Mecia wrote about a California farmer facing fines for planting wheat in a contested wetland (“Plowed Under,” August 21/August 28). The farmer has since settled with the Justice Department: John Duarte agreed to pay $1.1 million in fines and mitigation…
Because there are so few of them, any movies about Americans living east of Los Angeles and west of Chicago will nowadays be labeled “important” on first sight. Taylor Sheridan, who grew up on a Texas ranch and moved to Wyoming after 20 years of intermittently rewarding acting work in L.A., has…
Safe spaces and 'ze' badges. Scottish student Madeleine Kearns writes in the Spectator about her bewildering first year at a U.S. college, where she and other free thinkers felt compelled to create their own unsafe space: "We met in a disused convent in Hell’s Kitchen and discussed campus-censored…
The Trump administration is considering sending lethal defensive aid to Ukraine, defense secretary Jim Mattis said during a visit there Thursday.
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On this week’s episode, the Substandard reviews Logan Lucky and ranks the Soderbergh oeuvre. Sonny does Internet research, Mike goes mulching, Vic asks: What’s mulch? Plus: Sonny makes Old Fashioneds (and his own simple syrup) and Gene Shalit returns! All on this week’s “Dick York-Dick Sargent”…
Donald Trump has been president for just over seven months.* The 2020 election is more than three years away. So why is his chief pollster asking if Republicans would vote for him in a presidential primary today? That’s what Tony Fabrizio asked 1,500 self-described Republican or Republican-leaning…
Most people think that the 1st Amendment guarantees free speech. But the philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that free speech requires more than just the absence of legal strictures. The “tyranny of opinion” of the majority has the same effect as censorship enforced by law. When everyone lives…
In a series of tweets, the Republican Party of Virginia attacked Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam on Wednesday for calling for the removal of Confederate statues.
What a bore. Are you a Tesla fanboy? So much so that you pressure your friends into buying one of the heavily subsidized electric sports cars so you can get referral points? (They are expensive!) Well, you're in luck. The fine minds at Tesla have launched a new incentive to further motivate you:…
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Tony Mecia talks to host Eric Felten about a farmer's costly fight with the feds over a field of wheat. (Follow the story here, and the follow-up here.)
President Trump returned to demanding money from Congress for his border wall on Tuesday night, just a couple of weeks before the issue takes top billing in a showdown over keeping the government funded beyond September.
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Bob Ley is one of ESPN’s all-time great personalities. With Chris Berman (of “back-back-back-back . . . gone!” fame), Ley is one of the last two original SportsCenter anchors still with the company. His longevity isn’t attributable to some Milton Waddams fluke: He is sharp and versatile, having…
The president’s speech at his political rally in Phoenix Tuesday night was a disjointed ping-pong between a prepared address and Donald Trump’s own extemporaneous comments. In other words, it was a typical Trump campaign speech.
At his campaign-style rally in Phoenix Tuesday night, President Donald Trump reconfirmed one of the laws of his presidency: For every sane, measured presidential action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
President Donald Trump ditched the TelePrompTer during a wide-ranging campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona Tuesday night, and set Twitter ablaze with hot takes.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Tuesday that the administration’s new Afghanistan strategy is designed to send a message to Taliban insurgents: You have no path to victory here.
Over at CBS News, frequent TWS contributor Michael Graham has a column on the dilemma of Afghanistan. "The bad news for President Trump," Graham writes "is that Afghanistan is a no-win proposition: Stay, and you keep losing American lives and treasure. Go, and you risk a future attack planned in…
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about President Trump's Afghanistan policy speech.
In a primetime speech Monday night, President Trump offered his plan for the war in Afghanistan. The president did not articulate his new war strategy in full, and it is doubtful that the modest troop increase will lead to “victory,” which the president said is his goal.
The Treasury Department on Tuesday unveiled new sanctions targeting Russian and Chinese entities it said have continued to aid North Korea following recent United Nations sanctions against the Kim regime.
This summer, the Shakespeare Theater Company has brought Othello to the stage for its annual “Free For All,” a decades-old Washington, D.C., tradition that offers a Shakespeare classic to the public free of charge. And, no, it’s not like most other freebies. Unlike Costco samples, junk mail, and…
Since the turn of the 21st century, NFL ratings have steadily increased, and Tuesday Morning Quarterback has gotten steadily longer. Then a year ago this time, I took a year off to complete my next book. Untoward things happened in TMQ’s absence. Donald Trump was elected. Waffle-flavored Oreos came…
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...by the clouds.
Donald Trump provided some much-needed clarity about his plan for Afghanistan in a speech to the nation on Monday. The United States won’t be withdrawing anytime soon. We won’t announce in advance our departure dates. We’re not doing nation-building. Afghan security forces will be the offensive…
A group backed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., launched a new ad campaign Tuesday against Kelli Ward — the primary opponent of Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. — attacking her over "crazy ideas" and "embarrassing behavior" during her time as a state senator and her primary campaign…
Republican lawmakers praised President Donald Trump’s announcement Monday that he would maintain U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and base further action on conditions on the ground rather than a predetermined timeline.
President Donald Trump opened his statement of policy on Afghanistan and South Asia by offering a rare allowance that he had changed his mind about an issue—namely, about withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan. “My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my…
President Donald Trump announced a troop increase for the U.S. war in Afghanistan, promising Monday night that “our troops will fight to win” our nation’s longest-running conflict while acknowledging his own change of heart on U.S. foreign policy.
Did you get to see totality? Most of you didn't, but our own Chris Deaton was back home in the Midwest and posted this beautiful shot, just post-totality, from Elkton, Ky. Chris reports that "The total eclipse looked like the end of days." In Washington, it was sort of a bust unless you had a…
Zoe Katz, a 22-year-old college student, waited six months to go public with her side of the scandal that's darkened her senior year at the University of Southern California. She waited not because she fears retribution from an abusive partner, as her school’s Title IX office reportedly insists.…
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, deputy managing editor Kelly Jane Torrance talks with host Eric Felten about what to expect from tonight's presidential address on the war in Afghanistan.
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In a primetime speech Monday evening, President Trump is expected to announce the deployment of several thousand more American troops to Afghanistan. We doubt this will be enough to win the war, but it is better than the alternatives offered to the president. A complete withdrawal would have been…
Throughout the entire length of the administration’s internal debate about Afghanistan, President Donald Trump was torn between two competing impulses: his desire to end the 16-year-long war, and his need to win. When it came time to make a decision on Afghanistan, which he will announce in a…
Boston, Mass.
This week on the Confab, senior writer Michael Warren talks about the terrible week in Trump. John Yoo tells us what new technologies mean for the rules of war.
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had already heard the name Benjamin Banneker by the time the Maryland-born free black wrote to him on August 19, 1791. Banneker, a farmer and self-taught man of scientific pursuits, lived near the Quaker Ellicott brothers in what is now Ellicott City, just north…
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Central Bank, est. 1913, seeks new Chair, to assume duties Feb. 5, 2018: Applicants will be considered even if they have graduate training in economics, although a doctorate might prove a deterrent to selection. Patience to sit through long staff meetings discussing arcane forecasting issues…
The departure of Steve Bannon from the White House won’t have a big impact on the day-to-day operations of the West Wing. An economic nationalist who served as Donald Trump’s political id (as well as his chief strategist), Bannon was effectively sidelined back in April, after he was removed from…
With the departure from the White House of strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who helped shape the so-called nationalist-populist program embraced by Donald Trump in his unlikely path to election, a new phase of the Trump presidency begins. Given Trump’s nature, what comes next will hardly be…
This week on the Kristol Clear podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol looks at the president's reaction to Charlottesville and asks whether the conservative movement will split irrevocably over Trump.
Can you hear me now? Unfortunately, not too well if you're one of the diplomats previously stationed in Cuba, due to hearing loss resulting from a covert sonic device. At the Free Beacon, Adam Kredo and Susan Crabtree report that the U.S. government is hiding key details about these mystery attacks.
It’s been almost a week since the violence in Charlottesville, and we are still parsing the meta-story about what our president said in its aftermath and then expanded upon a few days later and then doubled back around to re-re-explain on Tuesday, just so people wouldn't get the wrong idea about…
Steve Bannon, a key populist voice in the Trump administration, is out as White House chief strategist, the Drudge Report first reported on Friday.
President Donald Trump is meeting with his national security team at Camp David today to consider a thorny question: What course should the United States pursue for the conflict in Afghanistan, its longest-running war?
Several websites pushed out a fresh accusation of plagiarism against First Lady Melania Trump—and once again, the alleged source for the supposedly ill-gotten words is former First Lady Michelle Obama.
The New York Times is upset with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. It seems that under the cloak of “rampant secrecy” has set out to “weaken an agency once known for transparency.”
End notes and digressions from the latest show:
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The Islamic State (ISIS) quickly claimed responsibility for the van attack in the popular Las Ramblas area of Barcelona on Thursday. At least 13 people were killed, and dozens more wounded, when a terrorist drove the vehicle into pedestrians. Amaq News Agency, the group’s propaganda arm, declared…
For the first time, Donald Trump has inserted himself into a 2018 Republican primary against an incumbent. The president tweeted Thursday morning that it was “great” to see Trump nemesis Jeff Flake of Arizona get a Republican challenger. “Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake…
Floyd Mayweather says he’s in for the fight of his life with Irish mixed martial arts champion Conor McGregor in their much-anticipated Las Vegas bout on August 26. “He's a lot younger,” Mayweather told ESPN last week. “When you look at myself and Conor McGregor on paper, he's taller, has a longer…
ISSUE 5! The American Original, the McLaughlin Group, is back. . . . Or is it? And while John McLaughlin has left the earth, a new pilot episode has just been released with our Washington Examiner colleague Tom Rogan as host. Rogan, a former panelist, considered McLaughlin a mentor . . . but didn't…
One of the leading public intellectuals who formulated and argued on behalf of a coherent ideology around Donald Trump now says he “sorely regrets” supporting the Republican president. Writing Thursday in the New York Times, Julius Krein says his optimism about Trump and Trumpism was “unfounded.”
Tennessee senator Bob Corker issued a sharp critique of Donald Trump Thursday, adding to a chorus of Republican criticism around the president’s handling of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
President Donald Trump tripled down on his controversial reaction to the violence in Charlottesville, taking to Twitter Wednesday to decry the growing movement to remove Confederate statues and monuments.
Let's cut to the heart of a big problem with Trump's remarks about Charlottesville over the last few days: They were ignorant and inarticulate.
President Donald Trump’s response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville has drawn repeated criticism from Republican lawmakers. On Thursday, the president fired back.
Even Bob Gibson wasn’t this merciless. In what has to be a new best worst first pitch of all-time, 17-year-old Jordan Leandre plunked a photographer standing several feet behind and to the left of home plate before Wednesday’s game between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals at Fenway.…
When the U.S. entered World War I, the thousands of soldiers who headed to Europe were joined by combat artists attached to the American Expeditionary Force.
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On this week’s episode, the Substandard discusses The Dark Tower, the best and worst Stephen King film adaptations—i.e., rankings!—and this summer’s box office doldrums. Sonny reveals himself as a Stephen King scholar. JVL thinks Tolstoy > Stephen King (he must be joking). Vic hated the deli slicer…
Vice President Mike Pence is returning from his Latin American trip to Washington on Thursday, a day earlier than planned. Could a decision on the war in Afghanistan be in the offing?
Around dinnertime on August 14, President Donald Trump tweeted about the “truly bad people” who played a role in the Charlottesville race riots. Less than 24 hours later he highlighted some “very fine people” who were there, too.
Okay, maybe I’m soft. Maybe I (stupidly) believe that some drugs are not the same as others, and shouldn’t be treated with as much contempt in sports. And yes, I feel it’s unfair when an athlete pays the full price for a mistake she made because she wasn’t paying attention, rather than trying to…
Stuart Stevens is something rare in politics: A campaign strategist who can write. Stevens has run just about every kind of campaign there is—he helped win elections for Bob Dole, Haley Barbour, and George W. Bush. He got the guy from The Love Boat into Congress and ran Mitt Romney’s failed 2012…
Evaluating the violence in Charlottesville and the reaction to it from public officials and commentators requires basic levels of reason and decency. To botch it reveals some terribly unflattering trait: It could be related to political or partisan obsession, ego, honest-to-goodness insensitivity,…
Must free trade come with social justice? That's what Canada is saying, reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown reports."[A]s we head into NAFTA renegotiations this week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his administration want to expand the rules to include sections on gender issues, climate…
A Republican-aligned opposition research group is set to accuse Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray of violating the Hatch Act by positioning himself for a run for governor of Ohio while in office.
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, Law professor James Cooper talks with Eric Felten about the all together too many jobs that require government permission in the form of occupational licenses.
Vice President Mike Pence is returning from his Latin American trip to Washington on Thursday, a day earlier than planned.
The representatives from Canada and Mexico who came to Washington on Wednesday to discuss the North American Free Trade Agreement were greeted by U.S. officials taking a hard line on negotiations.
The White House named a new communications director Wednesday: longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks, whose tenure with Trump predates even his presidential campaign.
The U.S. is deploying special forces on the ground in Lebanon to provide training for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) for missions that partner with Hezbollah—Iran’s most valuable terrorist ally—against ISIS. Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon told the U.S.-based Al-Hurra Arabic TV network that American…
Herewith a few subjects pertaining to North Korea that have all but vanished from public discourse: the country’s gulag (thought to hold upwards of 200,000 political prisoners); chronic malnutrition in the countryside while a ruthless dictator grows morbidly obese; and intensified efforts to…
There’s a 2010 episode of The Office where the bumbling Michael Scott illustrates how bad he is with money: “This has not be a blockbuster year for me financially. My Blockbuster stock is down.”
Reviews and News:
American politics is at present dominated by two sorts of commentator. The first are those who will never find anything good to say about Donald Trump. Nothing he says and nothing his administration achieves will ever be praised by them for any reason. Any new development is an excuse to remind the…
On Tuesday, Republican lawmakers called for moral clarity and sharply criticized remarks made by the president after he again assigned blame to "both sides" for the violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
President Trump played a surprisingly small role in the Republican primary for the Alabama Senate seat held by Jeff Sessions before he became attorney general.
Family connections used to take me occasionally to northeast Mississippi, and when my wife and I were feeling adventurous, we would drive the 35 miles or so north to Tupelo to visit the birthplace of Elvis Presley.
There’s a reason why it was necessary for President Donald Trump to denounce specifically and unequivocally the white nationalists whose demonstration last weekend in Virginia became violent—not the “many sides” who were also protesting, or violence in general. It’s true there were left-wing…
President Donald Trump’s business advisory council, which was hemorrhaging members following Trump’s series of responses to a white nationalist rally over the weekend, disbanded itself on Wednesday.
There are reports that White House aides were caught off guard by Donald Trump’s Tuesday press conference in which he said the “alt-left” deserved blame for the violence in Charlottesville last weekend and that there were “fine people” on both sides of the white nationalist rally there. Trump “went…
The Trump administration warned U.S. citizens Tuesday about the risks of traveling to Iran, including the potential for arrest and detention.
The Department of Justice is compelling a broad set of Internet records related to an organization established to coordinate anti-Trump protests during Inauguration Day, prompting a legal fight, according to multiple reports this week.
In an explosive, combative Tuesday press conference, President Donald Trump blasted media coverage of white nationalism, defended groups who assembled to protest the removal of a Charlottesville statue of Robert E. Lee, drew an equivalence between “both sides” of protesters, and accused “alt-left”…
Nice little show you got there... In Boston, a bizarre extortion trial involving movie-stereotype union Teamsters and celebrities from the hit television show Top Chef resulted in a verdict of not guilty for the Teamsters. Interestingly, "at least three witnesses testified that a top [mayoral] aide…
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Michael Warren comes by to talk about the president's master class in how to lose friends and alienate people.
Another day, another defection from President Donald Trump’s manufacturing council.
President Trump’s statement on Charlottesville caught my attention roughly halfway through: “We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal,” he said. Trump was invoking the Declaration of Independence, which indeed set forth that truth, and on which we were founded as a…
A California farmer who was facing millions in fines for planting wheat in a disputed wetland has agreed to settle with the federal government.
Hassan Rouhani was sworn in for his second term as president of Iran on August 5, surrounded by fresh flowers, fervent followers, and around 500 foreign officials. Representatives of the United Kingdom, France, the United Nations, and the Vatican rubbed shoulders with the Syrian prime minister,…
Last week, insurance giant Anthem announced it was pulling out of the Obamacare exchanges in Nevada, leaving most of the counties within the state without even one insurer to cover demand in the individual marketplace. This latest development only increases the pressure on Congress to do something.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani vowed Tuesday that Iran would drop the nuclear deal “within hours” if the United States attempts to impose new sanctions on his country.
Big news: We are pleased to announce the relaunch of Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the celebrated weekly NFL column by Gregg Easterbrook. Easterbrook will debut on THE WEEKLY STANDARD website next Tuesday, Aug 22.
For more than six months, the White House has been a chaotic mess—its internal processes disordered by feuds, its diplomacy and relations with Congress undermined by leaks and backbiting, its external communications confused by an undisciplined boss. John Kelly, made chief of staff in early August,…
“Cal State Will No Longer Require Placement Exams and Remedial Classes for Freshmen,” reads a Los Angeles Times headline. Don’t think that the 23-campus California State University system dumped remedial ed because its entering students are so well-prepared academically these days that they don’t…
President Trump gave a much better statement Monday on the dismaying events in Charlottesville than he did on Saturday. But while he now is willing to call out the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists as “evil,” he still won’t use the T word—“terrorism.”
Two U.S. Army soldiers were killed and another five injured in Iraq Sunday while "conducting combat operations" according to a U.S. Central Command news release. A CENTCOM official told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the Army artillery unit was engaged in a "counter-fire mission against an ISIS mortar…
Reviews and News:
San Francisco.
A few thoughts about what happened in Charlottesville over the weekend:
The only thing likely protecting Steve Bannon’s job is the fact that everyone in Washington expects he’s about to lose it. Administration officials inside the West Wing are already acting as if Bannon is halfway out the door. On Meet the Press Sunday, National security adviser H.R. McMaster refused…
The white supremacists who demonstrated over the week weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, may have felt their numbers guaranteed anonymity—but social-media users have been poring over images of the rally to identify those participants who engaged in violent clashes with counterprotesters.
The Mooch now knows he wears women’s sunglasses. And he’s damn proud.
Helicopter commuting used to be something even middle class New Yorkers could afford. That is, until a fatal crash at the Pan Am building killed multiple people. With the rise of Uber, BusinessWeek documents the resurgence of affordable helicopter travel in Gotham.
On this latest micro episode, the Substandard discusses Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 35 years later (of course we mention Phoebe Cates). Plus the rise of mall culture and a mini ranking of the Cameron Crowe oeuvre. Which is better: Jerry Maguire or Almost Famous? Did someone just say Vanilla Sky?
GoDaddy, the web-hosting company, is terminating its relationship with the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, which has been offering incendiary apologetics for last weekend’s white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Earlier this year, WEEKLY STANDARD senior editor Christopher Caldwell wrote the single best piece on the opioid crisis in America. In Mosaic Magazine, he's just published another great piece on the topic of addiction: "Why There Is No Secular Substitute for Alcoholics Anonymous."
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Michael Warren discusses with Eric Felten the remarks the president made today about Charlottesville, and why those remarks should have been made Saturday.
Two days after neo-Nazis marched openly in Virginia, President Donald Trump has yet to explicitly condemn their behavior. But the president found a different target to denounce Monday after a black CEO resigned in protest from the White House’s manufacturing council.
Two days after violent clashes at a white supremacist rally in Virginia left one dead, President Donald Trump on Monday finally gave an explicit rebuke of the racist groups involved.
I’m a Guam hipster: I knew about it before it was cool. In fact, back in the halcyon days of June 2017 I was invited to the U.S. territory by a local business group. In those innocent times, the biggest safety risk seemed to be brown tree snakes: The Pacific island is utterly dominated by the…
Thomas More—knight and saint—is a familiar figure in the popular imagination. His speech to William Roper about giving even the devil the benefit of law—"What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on…
President Trump wants lawmakers to sign off on something his own Department of Homeland Security can’t yet provide. As Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported last week, “sources close to Trump say he’s dead serious about building an impressive wall and will go crazy when he realizes Congress has no plans…
Reviews and News:
There’s not much more that can be said about President Trump’s insufficient and equivocal statement on Saturday in response to a rally of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in Virginia that turned violent. Our editor-in-chief, Stephen Hayes, demonstrated that Trump has a recent history of being…
Students for Fair Admissions is at it again.
San Francisco
Donald Trump is an unflinching critic of anything and everything he finds un-American. On Saturday, he flinched.
Updated, 10:45 p.m.: Violence around a planned white nationalist rally in Virginia left three people dead and over a dozen injured Saturday, multiple news outlets reported.
This week on the Confab, Andy Ferguson takes us back 50 years to the Summer of Love. Fred Barnes tells us about a fight over billions of dollars in federal money for New York tunnels and train stations.
The war in Afghanistan is nearly 16 years old. It is the longest in our nation’s history. Many Americans wonder why our soldiers are still there. This widespread frustration is shared by our commander in chief. The Trump administration has not yet announced its plans for Afghanistan in large part…
In many quarters of the American news media today, seasoned journalists seem incapable of pondering those parts of reality that don’t complement their political worldviews. It goes beyond “bias”—we’re all biased. This is negligence.
In Chaos Monkeys, his memoir about his rocky career in high tech, Antonio García Martínez lists a few pithy rules for understanding how Silicon Valley really works. The best of these insider insights: “Company culture is what goes without saying.” That is, if you want really to understand the firms…
Reviews and News:
On November 12, 2015, officials in New York and New Jersey thought they had struck it rich. They had arranged a 50-50 deal with the federal government in which the feds would pay for half the cost of a new tunnel under the Hudson River, the renovation of Penn Station, and a lot more.
A presidential decision on a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, long delayed and the subject of bitter dispute inside the White House, may finally be at hand. Key members of the Trump administration’s war council met with the president on August 10 at the summer White House in Bedminster,…
Ten years ago, almost to the day, something went wrong with the American banking system. So horribly wrong that it almost brought down the entire system of international finance and caused what is now known as the Great Recession.
This week on the Kristol Clear podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol talks with Eric Felten about the North Korean crisis, the benefits of an organized White House, and Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure."
It’s a fallacy that young professional tennis talents struggle with pressure and nerves more than experienced players. Most of the gifted teens have mental advantages. They have skills and power, and know that they no one expects them to beat high-ranked players in top tournaments. Rather than…
Three Trump administration officials will soon travel to the Middle East to try brokering peace between Israel and Palestine, the White House announced Friday.
Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:
Reviews and News:
The summer of 1992 was owned by Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson—in that order, His Airness certainly would attest. It was 25 years ago this week that they led the Dream Team to Olympic gold in men’s hoops in Barcelona: an eight-game romp in which they outscored their opponents by 350 points. It’s…
As the federal investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller digs deeper into the business dealings of Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Donald Trump is changing his legal team.
President Donald Trump declared America’s opioid epidemic a “national emergency” Thursday, following the advice of his opioid commission after declining to do so two days prior.
The war in Afghanistan is nearly 16 years old. It is the longest in our nation’s history. Many Americans wonder why our soldiers are still there. This widespread frustration is shared by our commander in chief. The Trump administration has not yet announced its plans for Afghanistan in large part…
The Trump administration is conducting a comprehensive review of U.S. policy toward Iran. There is no doubt top national security officials view the Islamic Republic as a major threat, both in terms of regional instability and proliferation. This recognition represents the principal difference from…
Last week, insurance giant Anthem announced it was pulling out of the Obamacare exchanges in Nevada, leaving most of the counties within the state without even one insurer to cover demand in the individual marketplace. This latest development only increases the pressure on Congress to do something.
San Francisco
A little over two years ago, The Scrapbook was pleased to welcome a new work of history from Philip F. Anschutz, chairman and CEO of The Weekly Standard’s parent company. In The Scrapbook’s words, Out Where the West Begins profiled “an astonishing variety of business entrepreneurs, visionaries,…
Charlize Theron first appears onscreen in her mostly terrific new action thriller, Atomic Blonde, trying to heal her wounded body in an ice bath. She has bruises all over her back. Her face is swollen, one of her eyes blackened. She pulls herself out of the tub, dresses laboriously, and limps into…
On August 2, the White House press room was the scene of one of those dialogues of the deaf that so infuriate people outside Washington. Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s senior policy advisers, stepped to the podium to endorse an immigration reform bill sponsored by two Republican senators,…
So ingrained are religious prejudices in societies the world over that people tend to think that atheists are more likely to be serial killers—at least, that’s the way the New York Times reported a new social-psychology study in Nature Human Behaviour.
Disposing of a used couch in an urban neighborhood turns out to be a complicated affair.
A federal extortion trial in Boston last week showed that Teamsters members haven’t lost their knack for cooking up trouble. It all began in June 2014, when the reality TV kitchen competition Top Chef visited the city to film. Let’s just say things got a little hot in Beantown, and we’re not…
On a rainy afternoon in late November 2012, Matthew Kelley, a project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, pulled his truck over to the side of a road in Tehama County in northern California.
Thanks to the success of book series such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, the young adult, or YA, fiction market has become lucrative and culturally influential. With that in mind, New York magazine recently did a feature on the bevy of online critics whose opinions can make or break authors…
When an admirer once asked Harry Jaffa, the political philosopher who died earlier this month at the age of 96, what led to his interest in Abraham Lincoln, he answered without a moment’s hesitation, in a ferocious bark: “Plato!”
On November 12, 2015, officials in New York and New Jersey thought they had struck it rich. They had arranged a 50-50 deal with the federal government in which the feds would pay for half the cost of a new tunnel under the Hudson River, the renovation of Penn Station, and a lot more.
In Chaos Monkeys, his memoir about his rocky career in high tech, Antonio García Martínez lists a few pithy rules for understanding how Silicon Valley really works. The best of these insider insights: “Company culture is what goes without saying.” That is, if you want really to understand the firms…
I spent a dreary half-week in Helsinki a few years ago. It was mid-March. Short days, empty streets, damp snow blowing off the harbor. The Finns I met said: “Come back in July. There’s nothing like a Scandinavian summer.”
There was a time when I was surprised that many Americans—even fans of Turner Classic Movies—seemed to think that Alfred Hitchcock was a roly-poly Englishman who somehow ended up in Hollywood and got his start making movies there. The way the story goes, Hitchcock crossed the pond and made Rebecca…
Garry Apgar introduces his book by stating that Mickey Mouse “has been a part of our mental and emotional universe for over eight decades." Walt Disney launched the phenomenon in 1928 with his revolutionary sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, nurtured MM to stardom during Hollywood's heyday in the…
Henry James grew up with Thomas Cole’s View of Florence from San Miniato in the family parlor. Aspiring to become a painter, James took lessons from John La Farge; he had to settle for prose. The rest of his life he sought the company of expatriate painters like Frank Duveneck, James Whistler,…
When I was a small boy, polio terrified me. Each year, it would strike thousands of children like me—and you never knew when or where it would hit next. In the 1952 epidemic, a very bad year, there were nearly 60,000 reported cases in the United States and more than 3,000 deaths.
Hassan Rouhani was sworn in for his second term as president of Iran on August 5, surrounded by fresh flowers, fervent followers, and around 500 foreign officials. Representatives of the United Kingdom, France, the United Nations, and the Vatican rubbed shoulders with the Syrian prime minister,…
In many quarters of the American news media today, seasoned journalists seem incapable of pondering those parts of reality that don’t complement their political worldviews. It goes beyond “bias”—we’re all biased. This is negligence.
A presidential decision on a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, long delayed and the subject of bitter dispute inside the White House, may finally be at hand. Key members of the Trump administration’s war council met with the president on August 10 at the summer White House in Bedminster,…
It was in the mid-1980s that I first heard the term “politically correct,” from an older housemate in Berkeley. She had a couple glasses of wine in her and was on a roll, venturing some opinions that were outré by the local standards. I thought the term witty and took it for her own coinage, but in…
President Donald Trump intensified his rhetorical assault on Sen. Mitch McConnell Thursday, days after the Senate’s most powerful Republican said Trump had put “excessive expectations” on Congress to pass his legislative agenda.
President Donald Trump is open to preemptive military action against North Korea if negotiating with Pyongyang does not work, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham told conservative host Hugh Hewitt Thursday. “If negotiations fail, he is willing to abandon strategic patience and use preemption. I…
Fred Barnes has a good rundown of the state of play in the Alabama Senate race this morning. He rightly zeroes in on the most important question in the race right now: Will Trump's endorsement of of former Alabama attorney general Luther Strange, who was appointed to fill Jeff Sessions’s seat in…
In this latest episode, the Substandard discusses Atomic Blonde, the trailer for Death Wish, and the decline of 3-D. Jonathan offers a ranking that’s simply titillating, Sonny trolls for free booze (we love you Old Forester!), and Vic discovers cosplay for … Jurassic Park? Plus science fiction…
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We’ll soon learn the value of President Trump’s endorsement. In a bit of a surprise, he jumped into the unpleasant Alabama Senate race and put his stamp of approval on Republican Senator Luther Strange.
President Donald Trump is inching closer to abandoning the Republican party, even as the GOP is in the middle of an effort to remake itself in Trump’s image.
Last month, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled the city’s first-ever “cultural plan.” Although the details are murky, he hopes to tie funding for arts organizations to the “diversity” of their staffs and boards of directors. The city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, Tom Finkelpearl,…
In the past half-century, there have been two presidential elections that Democrats should have won by a landslide but did not.
Before his untimely passing earlier this year, political philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler offered up some timely reflections on Allan Bloom’s “souls without longing,” the elite students who comprise the bulk of Bloom’s study in his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. As Lawler…
President Trump has another Russian problem. Like other American presidents since 2001, Trump has been following in the footsteps of the failed Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-1989).
Congressional Republicans are attempting to pivot away from Obamacare repeal toward tax reform. But they continue to butt heads with a White House that’s unhappy with where they left the health care debate.
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about President Trump's heated rhetoric toward North Korea.
Democratic lawmakers are criticizing President Trump for unleashing heated rhetoric against Pyongyang this week, including his threat of “fire and fury” against the North Korean regime. That warning was "reckless and shows a serious lack of judgment," said House minority whip Steny Hoyer.
After President Donald Trump shocked his national security team with his off-the-cuff fire-and-fury remarks about North Korea on Tuesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is trying to walk back his boss’s comments—without saying Trump was off base.
Breaking news on the Russia investigation: FBI agents conducted a predawn raid on the home of Trump campaign operative Paul Manafort on July 26, according to a new report by the Washington Post. The agents had a warrant to seize documents and materials, although the significance of the documents…
Glen Campbell’s passing left me sad, and not just because I enjoy his music. Campbell was the first celebrity I ever met: Not only was our encounter memorable but it struck me later as an amazingly instructive lesson for how a person should conduct oneself when faced with an awkward situation.
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Orkney, Scotland
Six years ago, on a July Tuesday in Los Angeles, members of MS-13’s downtown cell got into a fight with a rival gang. “Porky,” its leader, was none too pleased.
On August 15, Alabama Republicans will begin to choose their candidate for the race to fill Jeff Sessions’ Senate seat. If none of the 9 candidates wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two will face each other in a runoff on September 26. And the winner of that contest will face the top…
Montreal
Whatever strategic planning the Trump administration has for a North Korea with nuclear weapons capabilities, there was no preparing for the president’s comments on Tuesday. The White House, including the national-security team, was unaware President Trump was preparing to speak publicly about…
If an award were given for winning awards, it would surely go, by acclamation and universal consent, to Robert Rauschenberg, the most beribboned figure in the history of art. Not only did he win almost every award you can think of, but others were invented so that he could win those as well. Had…
The chairwoman of the RNC responded to intra-party criticism of President Trump with a warning Monday.
President Donald Trump knows America has an opioid problem. But it’s not clear that he knows what to do about it.
Associate editor Ethan Epstein talks with host Eric Felten about North Korea's alarming nuclear advances.
President Donald Trump responded to reports Tuesday that U.S. intelligence believes North Korea has missile-ready nuclear weapons.
The Substandard weighs in on bad franchise name-changes and the horror that is the Krispy Kreme sugar bomb.
Sanctuary cities are finding themselves suddenly on the defensive, as the Justice Department and state legislatures are looking to force cooperation between local police and federal immigration enforcement.
Over the years Irwin Stelzer has been one of my favorite economists. He is a direct, yet graceful, writer, a clear thinker, and an analyst possessing large amounts of both humility and charitability. I like to think of him as the anti-Krugman.
Not all the news coming out of Evergreen State College is bad. Only most of it.
There’s a secret society in Silicon Valley. “Imagine an engineer at Google, let’s say he’s a conservative—a red meat conservative. Does he want to go work at the Heritage Foundation? Probably not,” Aaron Ginn, age 29, tells me at a “hacienda-style” D.C. bar called Mission, apparently in reference…
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By now you’ve read about the ten-page “anti-diversity screed” that was published by an anonymous engineer at Google. Well, he’s no longer anonymous. His name is James Damore and yesterday Google fired him.
The fallout continues from this weekend’sNew York Times article about the “shadow campaigns” for president forming around ambitious Republicans—including Vice President Mike Pence—ready for if and when President Donald Trump does not run for reelection in 2020.
Enough, already! It is time for the commentariat to stop attributing every vulgarity erupting from this administration to the fact that the president, like his now-defenestrated potty-mouthed spokesman, is a New Yorker.
“We do not seek a regime change,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on August 1, speaking of North Korea. “We do not seek the collapse of the regime . . . We’re trying to convey to the North Koreans: We are not your enemy. We are not your threat. But you are presenting an unacceptable threat to…
In July, when news broke that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met last year with a Russian lawyer and a former Russian intelligence officer who promised dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign, there was a media feeding frenzy. After months of speculation…
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.
The Washington Post outdid itself last week in the dog-bites-man department, trumpeting one of those yawn-inducing nonevents that have come to be hyped in the age of the Trump resistance. Here’s the ballyhooed breaking news item: A long-time EPA employee is retiring. Yes, that’s the story.…
Sen. John Cornyn thinks the White House will be on board with a bill he issued last week to beef up security along the U.S.-Mexico border. But that hasn’t stopped the majority whip from distancing himself from President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall.
This Congress isn't a failure, he insisted. It's just moving more slowly than many, including the president, might have hoped.
The State Department would not respond to a warning from Iran's president that it would be an act of political self-destruction for President Donald Trump to dismantle the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
President Donald Trump is only 200 days into his first term, but other Republicans are already eyeing the Oval Office.
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch found himself embroiled in controversy Monday, but unlike most Washington squabbles, this one was solved with a dictionary.
Is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on board with Attorney General Jeff Sessions's new effort to plug leaks in official Washington? Reporter Jenna Lifhits talks with host Eric Felten about the wide ranging crackdown on leaks.
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The war on White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster continues, with allies of Steve Bannon using sympathetic media outlets to push a narrative that McMaster is thwarting the will of President Donald Trump. Senior White House aides now wonder among each other whether Bannon himself and/or…
When I read that the University of Michigan was hiring a “Bias Incident Prevention and Response Coordinator” for the purpose of “[enacting] cultural appropriation prevention initiatives,” I wrote a letter to university president Mark Schlissel, which I pretty well knew was unlikely to reach his…
Bernie Sanders might be the most popular politician in all of America, and his constituents give him the highest approval rating in the Senate—but the Vermont social worker who just announced his intention to challenge Sanders says it’s all for show. “The electorate is ready to see who Senator…
The failed Republican effort to kill Obamacare had a saving grace. It’s small but significant. We now know the chief cause of skyrocketing health-insurance premiums since Obamacare was activated in 2013. And it’s not the “essential benefits” everyone is forced to buy, though they’ve often been…
Los Angeles
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Sunday that the Justice Department is not out to target and prosecute journalists, after mounting concern over how a newly announced crackdown on leaks could affect reporters.
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” The opening line to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 jeremiad The Population Bomb is a sober one. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
Of all the unanswerable questions in the universe, there’s one that brings the brightest minds of Broadway and Hollywood to their knees: What makes one musical or movie musical a hit and another a flop? A veritable ocean of cocktails flows over this question. But during the 1940s, the Hollywood…
What a week! Newly minted White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci goes nuts; White House chief of staff Reince Priebus gets fired and is replaced by retired Marine general John Kelly; General Kelly fires Scaramucci; Kelly then reassures Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had…
This week on the Confab, executive editor Fred Barnes asks what we learned about Obamacare's skyrocketing premiums from the Senate healthcare-legislation fiasco. And then senior writer John McCormack talks about how the legislative wreckage of repeal and replace may still provide a vehicle for…
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Who says that President Trump refuses to accept responsibility for anything? Just last week he bravely accepted responsibility for the soaring stock market and the good news emerging about the American economy, which grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent, more than double the first-quarter anemic…
More than a few times in recent years, tragic—and seemingly preventable—deaths have led to bills and legislation named after the victims. “Megan’s Law” gave us problematic sex-offender registrations. “Kate’s Law” was a failed attempt to deter illegal immigration. Such proposals are frequently bad…
Google Glass, the wearable robot eyeglasses rejected by consumers as a creepy invasion of personal privacy, has quietly been making a comeback, WIRED reports. Developers have made sure to keep their progress a secret this time, perhaps cowed by the proper thrashing they received from Matt Labash in…
An America thoroughly fed up with both politics and political correctness slogs through a surreally dirty, bizarre, and finally insane election season—and, when the dust settles, finds itself in the grip of Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has a stark message for the media and their government sources: Playtime is over at the Department of Justice.
I’ve been wondering what in the hell Robin Ventura was thinking since I was age 7, when the pup third baseman for the Chicago White Sox charged Nolan Ryan like he was an untrained bull calf loosed upon Pamplona. This was the sequence of events:
Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:
In his first six months on the job, President Trump has presided over an economy that is creating jobs at a pace that is 50 percent faster than under President Obama.
When I read that Montclair State University in New Jersey had removed shooting-obsessed adjunct professor Kevin Allred from its course roster, my first thought was: Now who’s gonna teach “Policitizing Beyoncé”?
It has been a rocky year for ride-sharing conglomerate Uber. On the one hand, they’re still bringing in the revenue, to the tune of in $8.25 billion in the second quarter of 2017. On the other, the company has blundered through a series of corporate missteps and PR disasters, ultimately resulting…
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Two days after the 2016 election, we had this to say about Donald Trump’s stunning victory:
One story going around among conservatives online Thursday was the production of a letter from Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster to one of his predecessors in the job, Susan Rice. The April letter alerts Rice, who worked in the Obama administration, that her security clearance has been…
We now live in an era when news cycles are lucky to last a full 24 hours, so please take a moment to clear your mind as we travel back in time to two long years ago.
A few years ago Boston honored Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy—the mother of President John F. Kennedy as well as Senators (and presidential candidates) Teddy and Robert Kennedy—by naming its newly reclaimed Greenway after her. Two of her daughters also achieved great success in public service: Eunice…
The Trump Education Department’s plan to change the Obama administration’s policy on campus rape accusations—a policy that has helped expel countless students who were innocent of any sex crime—set off a frenzied attack by interest groups. In joining this attack, major media outlets have continued…
Six years ago, on a July Tuesday in Los Angeles, members of MS-13’s downtown cell got into a fight with a rival gang. “Porky,” its leader, was none too pleased.
Of all the unanswerable questions in the universe, there’s one that brings the brightest minds of Broadway and Hollywood to their knees: What makes one musical or movie musical a hit and another a flop? A veritable ocean of cocktails flows over this question. But during the 1940s, the Hollywood…
We now live in an era when news cycles are lucky to last a full 24 hours, so please take a moment to clear your mind as we travel back in time to two long years ago.
Last month, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled the city’s first-ever “cultural plan.” Although the details are murky, he hopes to tie funding for arts organizations to the “diversity” of their staffs and boards of directors. The city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, Tom Finkelpearl,…
In July, when news broke that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met last year with a Russian lawyer and a former Russian intelligence officer who promised dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign, there was a media feeding frenzy. After months of speculation…
The Scrapbook is far too jaded and worldly wise to be shocked by the article in the Washington Post headlined “Transgender man gives birth to baby boy.” But we were taken aback by one outrageous, insensitive, gender-autonomy-denying detail: The poor infant is called a “boy.” How could they possibly…
Google Glass, the wearable robot eyeglasses rejected by consumers as a creepy invasion of personal privacy, has quietly been making a comeback, WIRED reports. Developers have made sure to keep their progress a secret this time, perhaps cowed by the proper thrashing they received from Matt Labash in…
Maybe those ever-so-secretive Russian hackers aren’t nearly as clever as we, or they, thought.
The Time of Our Singing
Orkney, Scotland
What a week! Newly minted White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci goes nuts; White House chief of staff Reince Priebus gets fired and is replaced by retired Marine general John Kelly; General Kelly fires Scaramucci; Kelly then reassures Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had…
Don’t miss the latest edition of “Conversations with Bill Kristol,” in which The Weekly Standard’s editor at large engages economist and TWS contributing editor Irwin Stelzer in a far-ranging discussion on politics, culture, and, as one might expect, economics.
Enough, already! It is time for the commentariat to stop attributing every vulgarity erupting from this administration to the fact that the president, like his now-defenestrated potty-mouthed spokesman, is a New Yorker.
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” The opening line to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 jeremiad The Population Bomb is a sober one. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
Two days after the 2016 election, we had this to say about Donald Trump’s stunning victory:
If an award were given for winning awards, it would surely go, by acclamation and universal consent, to Robert Rauschenberg, the most beribboned figure in the history of art. Not only did he win almost every award you can think of, but others were invented so that he could win those as well. Had…
Los Angeles
In the past half-century, there have been two presidential elections that Democrats should have won by a landslide but did not.
Walter Berns, who died last week at 95, was a scholar who spoke for a more serious and more confident America. He did his best service in the 1960s and ’70s, when America was at its least sober and self-confident.
The Trump Education Department’s plan to change the Obama administration’s policy on campus rape accusations—a policy that has helped expel countless students who were innocent of any sex crime—set off a frenzied attack by interest groups. In joining this attack, major media outlets have continued…
An America thoroughly fed up with both politics and political correctness slogs through a surreally dirty, bizarre, and finally insane election season—and, when the dust settles, finds itself in the grip of Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin.
Grade inflation has popped up again in the news, this time with the disclosure that it has spread to American high schools. High schools, public and especially private, now serve up 50 percent A’s to their students, just like the universities. It’s part of the college preparation track in high…
Before his untimely passing earlier this year, political philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler offered up some timely reflections on Allan Bloom’s “souls without longing,” the elite students who comprise the bulk of Bloom’s study in his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. As Lawler…
The failed Republican effort to kill Obamacare had a saving grace. It’s small but significant. We now know the chief cause of skyrocketing health-insurance premiums since Obamacare was activated in 2013. And it’s not the “essential benefits” everyone is forced to buy, though they’ve often been…
Minneapolis
"Tell me what you like,” John Ruskin wrote in 1860, "and I'll tell you what you are." By his tastes, D. J. Taylor is that white rhino in the taxonomy of professional writers, the man of letters. Early fossils of this species have been excavated from Grub Street in 18th-century London, where the…
The Washington Post outdid itself last week in the dog-bites-man department, trumpeting one of those yawn-inducing nonevents that have come to be hyped in the age of the Trump resistance. Here’s the ballyhooed breaking news item: A long-time EPA employee is retiring. Yes, that’s the story.…
West Virginia’s Democratic governor Jim Justice is expected to announce he is changing parties at a rally Thursday night with President Donald Trump, after Trump promised earlier in the day “a very big announcement” was to come during the event. The New York Times was first to report the news.
Big news about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in last year’s election, from the Wall Street Journal:
This week on the Kristol Clear podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol talks about how President Trump packs in months' worth of upheaval into just a week's time.
In The New York Times on Thursday, Lindy West has an op-ed on the recent announcement by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee campaign chairman Ben Ray Luján that the group would not impose a litmus test for Democratic candidates requiring them to be pro-abortion. West is a fairly radical…
Ken Starr might be the most famous lawyer in America outside of the Supreme Court. He has served as a federal judge on the DC Circuit Court and later as solicitor general. He has practiced law and taught law, been the dean of Pepperdine’s Law School and the president of Baylor University. But his…
Donald Trump’s base swooned when he roared on the campaign trail that he would build a wall on the Mexican border, and that Mexico would pay for it.
Former national security adviser Rice reportedly continued getting classified information.
The Justice Department is pushing back against a New York Times article that claimed it was preparing to investigate and sue universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against applicants not of the preferred race or ethnicity.
President Trump has made no secret of his plans to dramatically reduce both the budget of the State Department and the size of its workforce. The department is now preparing for those eventualities with some innovative and unconventional ideas, including "crowd sourcing... via the Internet" and…
Anyone who doubts the power of the bureaucracy ought to look into the quandary confronting ExxonMobil.
In this latest episode, JVL and Sonny review Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and rank the Luc Besson oeuvre. Meanwhile, Vic and Sonny rank their favorite Chinese buffet dishes—Sesame Chicken > General Tso’s! Plus JVL on his great baseball weekend and Sonny on his expanding Criterion…
Reviews and News:
The State Department outlined the administration’s legal justification for engaging the Syrian military in a letter to Sen. Bob Corker Wednesday. Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had written to the department in June to ask if the military had been properly authorized to…
General John Kelly may be trying to institute military-style discipline in the West Wing, but that hasn’t put a stop to the civil war happening over President Donald Trump’s National Security Council. If anything, the dawning of the Kelly era may have accelerated that war.
President Donald Trump got away from his populist roots with his support of the deeply unpopular Obamacare repeal bill. But while the president continues to push that legislation despite its crash landing in the Senate, he is also returning to aa core campaign issue: immigration.
I once worked in a small state agency that, among other things, analyzed legislation. At one point the agency’s head hired three new analysts. One of them was a woman in her early thirties—call her Leena. Her job was to brief other staffers on budget-related bills. When she first took the job,…
Whatever else you want to say about Anthony Scaramucci, he was a character. Maybe not a good character, but a character nonetheless. And while the White House will be a better, more stable place with him gone, in a certain way, I’ll miss him.
These are not the journals you’re looking for.
General John Kelly may be trying to institute military-style discipline in the West Wing, but that hasn’t put a stop to the civil war happening over President Donald Trump’s National Security Council. If anything, the dawning of the Kelly era may have accelerated that war.
Finance Committee chairman Orrin Hatch has insisted repeatedly that the window for health care has closed, and that the Senate’s time is better spent on other issues for now.
Data is the best. Or data are the best. Whatever. Everyone agrees that in politics, as in baseball, you can’t trust your own lying eyes. You have to look at the data.
Today on the Daily Standard podcast, deputy online editor Chris Deaton talks with Eric Felten about Arizona Senator Jeff Flake's new book taking on Donald Trump, Conscience of a Conservative.
The (really good) website FiveThirtyEight is tracking how often members of Congress vote with the positions favored by President Trump. A “Trump Score” of 100 percent indicates that a senator or representative has matched the White House’s stance on every bill to have been weighed up or down. The…
A few years ago someone sold a script to Hollywood based on a Reddit post asking an interesting question: Could you destroy the Roman empire if you traveled back in time with a single Marine infantry battalion?
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has turned down nearly $80 million of funding to combat propaganda and information operations from ISIS, Russia, and China, Politico reports.
President Donald Trump signed stiff Russia sanctions into law Wednesday morning, days after overwhelming congressional support for the bill painted the White House into a corner.
Reviews and News:
Two conservative senators will appear alongside President Trump at the White House Wednesday to announce a new version of their bill to restrict and reform legal immigration. Arkansas’s Tom Cotton and Georgia’s David Perdue have been coordinating with the White House on the legislation, which may…
Twenty years ago the guy in charge of picking up the beer and pizza for the Prosperity Caucus—a group of socially awkward hill staffers, economists, and various D.C. denizens interested in issues related to growth and prosperity—decided to go back home and run for Congress. It was an unexpected…
Advocates of high-speed internet proliferation normally make one of two pitches when selling the idea of widespread—often government subsidized—investment in broadband. The first is that we currently live in a “two Americas” digital paradigm, and without access to fast, reliable internet, many…
Recently the New York Times ran an op-ed from a columnist for the Times of London lamenting the timing of the release of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.
Is the multinational behemoth that owns Budweiser—AB InBev—a threat to American beer? Democrats seem to think so. In their populist campaign manifesto for 2018, “A Better Deal,” they warn, “In the last year, InBev which owns Anheuser-Busch and is the world’s largest beer company, struck a deal to…
When Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first appeared in print, in 1839, its wintry world of Christian revelry, chivalric honor, and Arthurian romance had long since vanished. Indeed, that world, or rather, medieval romantic literature as a whole, was antiquated even at the time the poem was written,…
The Senate confirmed Christopher Wray as the new FBI Director by a 92-5 vote Tuesday, filling the spot left vacant when President Donald Trump fired James Comey in May.
Two conservative senators will appear alongside President Trump at the White House Wednesday to announce a new version of their bill to restrict and reform legal immigration. Arkansas’s Tom Cotton and Georgia’s David Perdue have been coordinating with the White House on the legislation, which may…
The New York Times has noticed that, as President Trump faces “the sort of politically charged investigation that dogged Bill and Hillary Clinton when they were in the White House in the 1990s, he has consciously adopted a strategy from the Clintons’ playbook.”
Will post-Brexit Britain pry itself away from the hyper-regulated habits of the European Union? The American Enterprise Institute's resident scholar Claude Barfield comes by to talk with host Eric Felten about how a controversy over so-called chlorinated chickens may indicate complications to come.
Last week, North Korea launched its most ambitious missile test to date. And the response from the United States has been unambiguous. The Kim regime on Friday launched a Hwasong-14 intercontinental ballistic missile that experts say could reach the United States. American forces countered with a…
In a provocative excerpt of his new book, Arizona Republican Jeff Flake identifies hazards of the Trump aura that conservatives have abetted and must challenge today. They include: “the most egregious and sustained attacks on [President] Obama’s legitimacy” ... “the strange specter of an American…
The president is expected to sign a sanctions bill targeting Russia, Iran, and North Korea “very soon,” according to the chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations panel.
On this latest micro episode, the Substandard reflects on the late actor and playwright Sam Shepard. Vic remembers Shepard in The Right Stuff. Jonathan segues into G.I. Joe toys. Sonny has actually seen Days of Heaven.
Top lawmakers on the Senate's foreign relations committee are brushing off a retaliatory measure taken by Russia in response to a sanctions package that passed Congress overwhelmingly last week, describing the heated move as predictable.
The Trump administration has recommended defunding a $100 million-plus a-year Obama-era grant program designed to reduce teen pregnancy, to the screams of the liberal media. The program, created by Congress in 2010 during that brief and shining moment right after Barack Obama’s election when…
Reviews and News:
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Tuesday that President Trump has indicated to him that the administration is prepared to strike North Korea to prevent an attack against the U.S.
Lawrence Osborne’s Beautiful Animals is the novel of the summer—which will outlast the season a long time. Well reviewed in the New York Times, and acclaimed by fellow novelist Lionel Shriver in the Washington Post as a “great book,” Beautiful Animals is the story of a great crime. It is an account…
No contemporary political issue is more emotionally fraught: The LGBT lobby, enjoying its new political ascendancy, worries that religious conservatives wish to diminish the self-definition and harm the dignity of the wider LGBT community; meanwhile, religious conservatives, feeling beleaguered,…
Anthony Scaramucci is gone from his position as communications director because, the White House claimed in a Monday statement, Scaramucci “felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team.”
Some people endeavor to live an eco-friendly life. But why should your environmental activism stop just because you die? California legislators are debating a bill that would give morticians permission to dispose of corpses in a relatively new way—one in harmony with nature—known as “water…
Pamplona, Spain