September 2017

This week on the Confab, national correspondent Peter Boyer talks with host Eric Felten about the revival of missile defense efforts in the face of North Korean rocket advances. And associate editor Ethan Epstein comes by to discuss Russia's promotion of Black Lives Matter in social media ads.

Reviews and News:

It’s put-up or shut-your-tweet time for the president. He has been promising to Make America Great Again by replacing free trade with protectionism, and now has enough opportunities to do just that in cases involving aircraft, dishwashers, solar panels, steel and cars from Korea and, of course,…

Berlin

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned Friday afternoon, amid reports that President Trump was considering firing him over his use of private jets for government business, which provoked a public outcry over misuse of public funds.

The Brady Campaign's Brass Balls. House majority whip Steve Scalise went back to work yesterday, and it was an emotional day on Capitol Hill. But, to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, you never want to let a crisis go to waste. Insert the anti-gun Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Here's their welcome…

Today on the Kristol Clear Podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol talks with host Eric Felten about everything from Twitter's new logorrhea to the civil war in the Republican party.

Reactions to the death of 91-year-old Hugh Hefner this past week seem to waver between tributes to his pioneering role in the postwar Sexual Revolution–and horror at the consequences of his pioneering role in the Sexual Revolution. My own view of the aforementioned Revolution is that it would have…

President Donald Trump's nomination of Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals breaks new ground for at least two different kinds of legal "engagement"—in the world of social media, and with a judicial philosophy that some conservatives have rejected as…

GOP lawmakers are waiting on the White House to act on recommendations from top officials to send lethal defensive aid to Ukraine.

The State Department announced Friday that it would pull more than half its embassy staff out of Cuba after a series of apparent sonic attacks that left diplomats with a host of strange medical issues, from hearing loss to balance problems.

Watchers of Ukraine’s NewsOne television channel on September 25 were treated to what was suggested to be a congressional hearing in Washington about corruption in the National Bank of Ukraine (the NBU), which is the Ukrainian equivalent of the Federal Reserve Board.

Reviews and News:

Endnotes and digressions from the latest episode:

“The American university was once the center of academic freedom,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions in his speech at the Georgetown Law Center this week. It was “a place of robust debate, a forum for the competition of ideas.” But over the years it has become “an echo chamber of political…

Things keep getting worse for Tom Price, the Health and Human Services secretary who has taken numerous chartered private or government jets to travel around the country and the world, all on the taxpayer’s dime. Nearly every day the total bill for Price’s known flights keeps going up—the latest…

Before we get into a brawl over whose tax cut is better than whose, wouldn’t it be wise to ask: Should we cut taxes at all? And if so, why?

Sanctions hurt everybody. That’s the problem with imposing them on a reckless and brutal regime. Instead of pressuring the few in charge, you punish the people as a whole. Sometimes that’s necessary, but it’s never ideal.

Excerpts from the keynote address by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch at a luncheon celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Fund for American Studies, Washington, D.C., September 28

With all the drama of medieval jousting, or a good old fashioned tractor pull, liberal champions collided last week in separate contests: Buddhism vs. the environment and animal rights vs. art.

The 1973 tennis match between the 29-year-old female champ Billie Jean King and the 55-year-old former champ Bobby Riggs was many things. It was one of the great “pseudo-events” of all time, fitting perfectly Daniel Boorstin’s definition in his 1962 book The Image as “dramatic performances in which…

Since Donald Trump took office, the growth of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and the increasing capability and diversity of its ballistic missile force have made that country the most urgent threat to U.S. national security. Observers as diverse as Mark Bowden in the Atlantic, Michael Auslin of the…

A few years ago, some friends of mine, weekend musicians, started jamming together and formed a cover band called the Porch Lights. To be honest, their big world tour is a bit slow in developing. Conquering the globe one backyard at a time, they haven’t quite made it outside of our neighborhood,…

Don’t miss the newest episode in the Internet video series Conversations with Bill Kristol. The Weekly Standard’s editor at large talks with University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor about Shakespeare’s Rome. How do politics contend with philosophy? Can a republic survive becoming an empire?…

At long last, The Scrapbook has developed proof of foreign meddling in our democracy. Justice Department documents lay the plot bare: a secret deal between a foreign power and two former administration officials at the highest echelons of the U.S. government.

Last week, President Donald Trump picked a fight with the NFL, arguing that players like Colin Kaepernick who take a knee during the national anthem should be fired. As he has done so many times before, the president kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy. Maybe the commotion will work to his…

I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed reading a collection of speeches. This may be due to the fact that most or maybe all I’ve read are political, and political speeches, even those authored by literate and capable politicians, lose their significance almost immediately. But perhaps the more important…

If the president’s tax plan is enacted, it will go down in history as the Trump Tax Cut of 2017. And it should, for both the tax reductions and the strategy for enacting them reflect his personal intervention and desires.

The victory of Roy Moore, a populist and religious fundamentalist, in the Alabama Senate primary last week can be seen in two different ways: continuity with the recent past of GOP politics and a radical break from it.

As Kim Jong-un’s cavalcade of menace has proceeded across the 2017 calendar, revealing a North Korean arsenal that now includes a hydrogen bomb and missiles capable of reaching New York City and Washington, D.C., America’s strategic posture has been old and familiar (if now more colorfully…

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on September 22 formally rescinded the Obama administration’s commands that universities use unfair rules in sexual-misconduct investigations—rules that had the effect of finding more students guilty of sexual assault. And she appears also to be preparing for far…

The Scrapbook visited Los Angeles for the first time around 20 years ago, and it was a delightful experience in most every way. One oddity stood out, though: the sheer number of homeless people. We don’t mention this to denigrate the needy, but the experience of being approached on nearly every…

Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t known for being particularly chatty on the bench, preferring to listen to arguments at the Court rather than engaging in the noisy sparring that some of the supremes seem to think passes for being judicious. Thomas doesn’t go out of his way to draw attention to…

“When I was in law teaching,” recalled Antonin Scalia in a speech just days before his 1986 nomination to the Supreme Court, “I was fond of doing what is called ‘teaching against the class’—that is, taking positions that the students were almost certain to disagree with, in order to generate some…

The last time Republicans advanced a serious plan to overhaul the tax code, Madonna had a No. 1 hit and Back to the Future had just been released on VHS. The new Republican tax plan harkens back to Ronald Reagan’s 1986 reform package, promising a future of stronger growth with less economic…

Berlin

Kurds in northern Iraq control their own land, maintain their own military, and share a common culture and language. They also have an overwhelming desire to separate from Iraq and become an independent state. But can a de facto nation become a real country if it isn’t recognized by the diplomatic…

On September 22, ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame tweeted out a link to an Internet article written by another notorious ex-CIA agent, Philip Giraldi. The article was headlined “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” The article appeared on the Unz Review website, a dumping ground for anti-Semitic…

I used to have this annual argument at Christmas with my brother-in-law, a well-regarded film editor in Hollywood. I would arrive brimming with complaints about a movie like Argo, said to be “based on actual events” but with an entirely fictitious Keystone Kops-like airport chase scene. I would…

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) painted watercolors throughout his European childhood. Like his family, the dependents of the peripatetic Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent, watercolors were portable and picturesque. Sargent continued to paint watercolors in the 1870s as a student in Paris and in the 1880s…

Space comes to Wisconsin. I'm a huge fan of the website Atlas Obscura. Every neat place I've wanted to visit (especially abandoned things) is on there, and many places I've visited have been because of their site. Part of my bucket list is derived from there, too. Their newsletter is a welcome…

If Richard Cordray runs for governor of Ohio, he would be the only Democratic candidate with a national fundraising base, the potential to send the progressive grassroots into hyperdrive and the only Democratic candidate that has already twice won statewide races.

Election officials from the Kurdistan Regional Government announced Wednesay that last weekend’s referendum on independence passed, overwhelmingly. With a turnout of 72 percent of more than 4.5 million eligible voters, nearly 93 percent voted in favor of realizing the Iraqi Kurds’ longstanding…

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On this latest episode, the Substandard discusses Kingsman: The Golden Circle and the Matthew Vaughn oeuvre, i.e., JVL on Layer Cake and lots of it. Sonny celebrates a big-league win, JVL stumbles across a LEGO home wrecker, and Vic loves free supermarket samples. All on this week’s Substandard!

For months we’ve been hearing that the Russian government meddled in last year’s presidential election to aid the candidacy of Donald Trump. And now news has emerged that part of that dastardly campaign was supporting ... Black Lives Matter?

It’s a classic case of man bites Blue Dog. The southern Arizona chapter of the Indivisible Project, a leading organizer of anti-Trump progressives, protested outside Democratic Rep. Tom O’Halleran’s office Tuesday for supporting a crime bill making it easier for the government to deport…

President Trump announced on Wednesday the broad outlines of a sweeping tax reform package that would simplify and cut taxes. He praised the framework as “a middle-class miracle” and “a tax code to put American jobs first.”

Hawkish Republican senators are advising President Donald Trump to decertify the Iran nuclear deal in October, a move that critics of the agreement see as a key step in changing U.S. policy toward Iran.

Is Jared Kushner trolling us? News reports are out saying that Jared Kushner is registered to vote in New York... as a female. Left-leaning groups are pointing to this as an example of Kushner's incompetence (and to be fair he did repeatedly make flubs on forms needed to serve as a top adviser to…

Controversial firebrand Roy Moore’s primary victory Tuesday over appointed Alabama senator Luther Strange to run for the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions wasn't even close. Moore won the race by nearly 10 points.

Few if any Americans are associated with more apocryphal quotes than Thomas Jefferson, but the false notion that he said, “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” is among the easiest to dispel. Because Jefferson never would have said something so idiotic. Of course dissent can be patriotic, but…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Tony Mecia talks with host Eric Felten about the details in the tax reform bill that is supposed to be announced later today.

Reviews and News:

Republican leaders plan to unveil a tax plan today that dramatically cuts taxes on businesses, eliminates many deductions and credits, and drops tax rates for most individual taxpayers, a senior Republican source told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

How bad is grade inflation in the humanities? So bad that when U.S. News & World Report issued its annual college rankings last week, it gave more credit to schools for graduating students in math and the hard sciences than it did in other disciplines. According to the publication’s press release:…

Unmasking. Leaks. Wiretaps. The mounting surveillance scandals of 2017 are suddenly threatening one of the most effective intelligence-gathering programs in U.S. history.

Is President Trump right about football being "crummy" or is this just the man who largely helped kill the USFL lashing out? Why put this on the front burner? Join Gregg Easterbrook and editor in chief Stephen F. Hayes as they discuss week three of the 2017 NFL season on the Tuesday Morning…

With all precincts reporting, former Alabama supreme court justice justice Roy Moore defeated former state attorney general Luther Strange 54.6 percent to 45.4 percent in the Republican Senate primary to finish out Jeff Sessions' term.

The Republican tax reform gets its big introduction on Wednesday by way of a presidential speech in Indiana. President Donald Trump will deliver an afternoon address in Indianapolis, joined by, among others, the state’s Democratic senator, Joe Donnelly.

Have you ever arrived sober to a party that’s been going on too long? Half the people are lurching around, glassy-eyed and happy. The other half are furious, slurring their way through nonsensical arguments.

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

Washington stands by to see which brand of Trumpism will carry the day in a Alabama's special election primary between Luther Strange and Roy Moore, a race that has become something of a proxy war for the Republican Party. Polls close at 7 p.m. ET Tuesday and THE WEEKLY STANDARD will be tracking…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior editor Lee Smith talks with host Eric Felten about the Kurdish independence referendum.

Four assistant college basketball coaches are among 10 people arrested on federal charges as the result of a wide-sweeping bribery and corruption investigation carried out by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.

Iran has ramped up its illicit activities in Syria and Iraq, the U.S. military's top general told lawmakers Tuesday, and the Islamic Republic has been boosted in such pursuits by the funds it received under the 2015 nuclear deal.

Tennessee senator Bob Corker announced Tuesday that he won't run for reelection next year, putting to rest weeks of speculation about the influential Republican's potential retirement from the Senate.

Construction began Tuesday in San Diego on eight prototypes of a proposed southern border wall, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced, with the six contractors chosen by the federal government expected to complete work within the next 30 days.

Can we send the Boy Scouts an economics textbook? I love popcorn. It's my favorite snack. I was also a Cub Scout once, and selling Trail's End popcorn was my least-favorite fundraising activity. (Selling magazine subscriptions for my Catholic grade school was much easier.) My mom, saint that she…

In this latest micro episode, the Substandard reflects on the life and times of the late wrestling legend, Bobby "the Brain" Heenan.

Communism had some good parts, and the New York Times is on it.

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Recent NFL seasons have begun with waves of negativity: the Ray Rice controversy to start the 2014 season, the assault on the airwaves by DraftKings and FanDuel at the start of 2015, the Tom Brady suspension in the first month of 2016. This year it’s President Donald Trump denouncing NFL players as…

A trio of Republican senators are hoping to solve the DACA problem, and they have reason to believe President Trump will get on board. The senators, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Orrin Hatch of Utah, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, have introduced the Solution for Undocumented Children through…

I deployed to Iraq from 2006 to 2007, during a time when every single day you worried that a random IED, rocket, or mortar attack would take your life. (Al Anbar province was a bad place to be in those days.) Yet Sundays were special. Because on Sundays, the Armed Forces Network would broadcast as…

On September 9, at the beginning of the women’s final of the U.S. Open, Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys walked onto the court carrying flowers. The rest isn’t worth overanalyzing: Stephens won the match in a rout as Keys struggled with her nerves and her mobility. It’s that they were both there…

We’re suffering a period of remarkably low labor-force participation. The national unemployment rate was only 4.4 percent in August, but just 62.9 percent of the U.S. population is working or looking for work. Ten years ago, before the recession, the number was 65.8 percent. There are around 7…

“I was very proud of the Senate Democratic Leader, Chuck Schumer. He could speak New York to the president.” So said Nancy Pelosi, showing the distance between hard-left San Franciscans, for whom every belief is a red line they cannot cross, and pragmatic New Yorkers of both parties.

To many of those commenting on Donald Trump’s maiden address to the United Nations, especially if otherwise disturbed by the president’s character, his emphasis on state sovereignty was a welcome dose of diplomatic normalcy. For example, David Ignatius of the Washington Post found this theme…

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon blasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Monday night, saying he wears the top GOP lawmaker's contempt as "a badge of honor."

Protesters in pristine pulmonary health didn’t stop chanting until chairman Orrin Hatch asked “Where’s the damn police?” and the damn police showed up. Sen. Lindsey Graham traveled miles off script and actually had saliva on his lips as he vowed to thrust “a stake in the heart of single-payer…

Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported Monday that the White House is expected to announce it will accept about 40,000 refugees in fiscal year 2018—a dramatic drop from the 110,000 refugees President Obama authorized for 2017, and a substantial reduction from the 50,000 quota Trump set in an executive…

The people of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq voted today in a referendum on independence from Baghdad. It could take a few days to tally the votes, but there can be little doubt about the result. The Kurds have struggled for self-determination for a century. In January 2005, the non-governmental…

European officials are signaling openness to cracking down on Iran’s support for terrorism and improving on the 2015 nuclear deal, which one diplomatic official attributed on Monday to the Trump administration’s tough talk.

Here's a joke. It's from the late Mitch Hedberg: "I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny." Mitch's jokes tended to…

The Supreme Court on Monday canceled scheduled oral arguments on President Donald Trump’s travel ban after the White House released new immigration standards that supersede it.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about how the President has only succeeded in reviving what had been a fading NFL protest movement.

North Korea’s foreign minister accused the United States Monday of declaring war against the Kim regime, the sharpest escalation yet of tensions between the two nations.

Disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner has been sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for exchanging lewd text messages with a 15-year-old girl, a case which sunk his marriage to Huma Abedin and rattled Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.

Some assorted thoughts on Trump versus the NFL:

Reviews and News:

Where do things stand now that the great presidential football uproar weekend is over? Donald Trump’s comments in Alabama on Friday about NFL players—primarily former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick—protesting police by kneeling during the national anthem set people off in a most…

Announcing the adoption of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, then-Secretary of State John Kerry said that the agreement marked a “measurable step away from the prospect of nuclear proliferation, towards transparency and cooperation.” The administration, though, was far from transparent or…

Angela Merkel and the alliance of her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with the Bavarian social conservatives of the Christian Social Union (CSU) won Sunday's German federal elections, granting Merkel her fourth consecutive term as chancellor. But that is not the real news out of the…

This week on the Confab, Gordon Chang talks with host Eric Felten about the new US sanctions on North Korea and the prospects for military action on the peninsula. Tony Mecia talks about the tax reform bill being worked up on Capitol Hill.

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The evidence clearly suggests that Russia tried to influence in our election last year, and more broadly, Russia is actively trying to destabilize the U.S. both politically and culturally. Russians are running a 24/7 propaganda operation on D.C. airwaves, for crying out loud. They're not even being…

If you think monetary policy is getting boring, think again. True, Fed chair Janet Yellen had no surprises for us earlier this week. To contain the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed printed more than one trillion new dollars to finance its purchase of the assets that it now plans to sell. That took…

Can the former head of the College Democrats win a seat as... a Republican? At POLITICO Magazine, Tim Alberta has a great feature on Wisconsin's Kevin Nicholson. A veteran with a great resume, Nicholson wants to snatch up Sen. Tammy Baldwin's seat. But first, he has to convince GOP voters in…

Just as she told the public she would, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded the Obama administration’s controversial guidance on Title IX Friday. A new set of guidelines—in the form of an interim “Q&A on Campus Sexual Misconduct”—will take its place until replacement rules receive full notice…

This week on the Kristol Clear Podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol talks with Eric Felten about Donald Trump's address to the United Nations.

The Graham-Cassidy bill to block-grant Obamacare's spending and provide waivers from Obamacare's regulations to the states seemed to be on death's door Friday afternoon.

President Donald Trump is scrapping his controversial blanket ban on travel from six Muslim-majority countries in favor of placing individual targeted restrictions on more nations, the Wall Street Journal first reported Friday.

“It looks like tin foil balled up and woven through bubble wrap,” observes Katrina Bridges, 52, a federal employee on her lunch break outside the LBJ Education Department building on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in September. We’re looking at a sliver of an impressionistic metal landscape of the…

Reviews and News:

Endnotes and digressions from the latest episode:

The fate of America's latest attempt at comprehensive health care reform may hinge on the opinions of a late night talk show host. I've nothing against Jimmy Kimmel; topical political jokes are the meat and potatoes of late-night comedy. And in fact, Kimmel has a reputation for joking about the…

On his last day in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump held his final bilateral meeting of the week with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. It was the leaders’ first one-on-one meeting since Erdogan’s trip to Washington in May. Here’s how Trump introduced…

Out of 100 members of the United States Senate, precisely one man—Alabama's Jeff Sessions—endorsed candidate Donald Trump while the Republican presidential nomination was hotly contested. So it's not terribly surprising that the Senate GOP primary to replace President Trump's attorney general is…

Bubble-dwellers everywhere in American culture are prone to make comparisons that become hackneyed over time. In music criticism, someone’s going to liken a songwriter to Dylan. In political punditry, someone’s going to call a bad guy Voldemort. And in baseball, someone’s going to compare Joey…

The Dallas Independent School District has plans to change up to 24 school names with connections to slavery or the Confederacy, according to the Dallas Morning News. The district has compiled a list of problematic names they’ve placed under review, a list that, expansive as it is, could be even…

To many of those commenting on Donald Trump’s maiden address to the United Nations, especially if otherwise disturbed by the president’s character, his emphasis on state sovereignty was a welcome dose of diplomatic normalcy. For example, David Ignatius of the Washington Post found this theme…

Middlebury College wants to prevent future violence of the sort visited on professor Allison Stanger by thugs trying to keep author Charles Murray from delivering a lecture. The ever-so-brave administrators’ solution? Don’t let anyone talk who might be the target of violence.

On September 9, at the beginning of the women’s final of the U.S. Open, Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys walked onto the court carrying flowers. The rest isn’t worth overanalyzing: Stephens won the match in a rout as Keys struggled with her nerves and her mobility. It’s that they were both there…

In a crisis pregnancy center in the heart of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, a counselor receives an online message. The sender says that she’s pregnant and scared and that she has no one to talk to. She has an appointment scheduled at an abortion clinic that very day. After a brief exchange with the…

A doctor of The Scrapbook’s acquaintance was alarmed when he heard that the American College of Physicians was revisiting its official policy on physician-assisted suicide. Alarmed, because the ACP has traditionally been a staunch opponent of having doctors prescribe death. Would the organization…

When my grandparents—proud, independent, Greatest Generation types—consented to move into a retirement community, they offered to give one of their cars to us grandkids. They didn’t need and couldn’t keep two cars, and they offered this vehicle free of charge. It was a lavish gesture, especially…

Stories about expensive presidential vacationing appeal to very few people outside reporters and political hacks. For all our belief in equality, we Americans will tolerate a touch of royalism in our presidents. Barack Obama’s travel may have cost taxpayers around $10 million a year, and Donald…

As they devise a strategy to place a tax bill on President Trump’s desk, Republicans in Congress are grappling with thorny issues: What can pass the Senate? How much should they add to the deficit? How will tax changes play with voters in 2018?

In Brad’s Status, a 47-year-old man takes his 17-year-old son on a tour of Boston’s colleges. A onetime journalist whose award-winning website went bust during the financial meltdown, Brad Sloan runs a nonprofit in Sacramento that seeks to match donors with other worthy nonprofits. His wife works…

How bad is grade inflation in the humanities? So bad that when U.S. News & World Report issued its annual college rankings last week, it gave more credit to schools for graduating students in math and the hard sciences than it did in other disciplines. According to the publication’s press release:…

HORRIFIC DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN, CONT. EARLIER THIS YEAR, we fearlessly predicted that a new era was dawning in American life ("Horrific Days Are Here Again," by Andrew Ferguson, January 22, 2001). Since the government was no longer being presided over by a liberal Democrat, we reasoned, Democrats and…

At the United Nations, President Trump warned North Korea that its jefe “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” If need be, Trump said, the United States would “totally destroy North Korea.” For its part, North Korea has said it would deliver “the greatest pain and…

Unmasking. Leaks. Wiretaps. The mounting surveillance scandals of 2017 are suddenly threatening one of the most effective intelligence-gathering programs in U.S. history.

One day, when he was running for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter was asked what he thought about Hubert Humphrey. In fairness to Carter, it should be remembered that Humphrey—the former vice president and 1968 Democratic candidate—was lurking in the background that…

We’re suffering a period of remarkably low labor-force participation. The national unemployment rate was only 4.4 percent in August, but just 62.9 percent of the U.S. population is working or looking for work. Ten years ago, before the recession, the number was 65.8 percent. There are around 7…

During the George W. Bush presidency, Democrats were vehement and clamorous defenders of Americans’ civil liberties. They inveighed against the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs as though the agency were spying on ordinary Americans in their homes and generally behaving like the East…

President Donald Trump’s new willingness to deal with Democratic leaders of Congress has conservatives worried. Is the president really with us anymore? Is he going to help his fellow partisans in Congress hold the line of spending, or is he going to become a Rockefeller-style Republican, cutting…

What happened to Hillary Clinton en route to her appointment with destiny? Her new book, What Happened, portrays her as a lifelong fighter on behalf of noble causes, a woman whose quest for the power she deserved was thwarted by a cabal as vast as the one she once said had been after her husband…

Remembering Jerry Pournelle (1933-2017).

This online psychic cleaned up. Down in Texas, a Democratic state legislator is facing trial for misdemeanor charges for a few of a series of accused fraudulent acts. This story is all kinds of crazy. The legislator is Dawnna Dukes, who is in her 12th term in the Texas House. Here's a taste of the…

For months, GOP leadership from both houses of Congress along with Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin and NEC director Gary Cohn have huddled over Republican plans for tax reform, laying the groundwork for a plan each group could support.

President Trump announced on Thursday new economic sanctions on “individuals, companies, financial institutions that finance and facilitate trade with North Korea.” Making a statement in New York at the beginning of a meeting with South Korean president Moon Jae-in and Japanese prime minister…

Forty years ago the economists Finn Kydland and Ed Prescott wrote a paper (for which they later won the Nobel Prize) observing that there are situations when the government makes a promise it can't be expected to keep, and that policy inevitably reflects that reality.

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What happened to ESPN?

On this latest episode, the Substandard discusses mother! and movies they never want to see again. Sonny admits he used to love Baskin Robbins bubble gum ice cream—two treats in one! JVL just might pay 7 euros for Irish ice cream. Vic refuses to pay $60 for steak. It’s a classic First World…

There has always been one feature that distinguishes Lindsey Graham from his almost-peers in the Senate: a self-deprecating sense of humor. This characteristic often obscures another engaging characteristic of Graham’s: raw courage.

On the same day last week, two Democratic women published political memoirs. One was a frank and engaging tale of butting heads with the media and doing battle with an upstart populist progressive. The other was written by Hillary Clinton.

The squeeze is on Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Donald Trump’s campaign who has become a major target of special counsel Robert Mueller’s aggressive investigation. The latest details from the Washington Post describe email evidence that Manafort offered “private briefings” about the Trump…

Many football enthusiasts are asking—what’s happening with quality of play? Join Gregg Easterbrook and editor in chief Stephen F. Hayes as they discuss week two of the 2017 NFL season on the Tuesday Morning Quarterback podcast.

After a months-long slide in the polls, President Trump has enjoyed a small bounce-back so far in September.

Jimmy Kimmel has recreated himself. Where the late night comic once stood, an inflatable liberal tube man now waves franticly and flaps hysterically to warn about the evils of rolling back Obamacare. It's not funny, and worse, it's not even original.

YOU get a baby, YOU get a baby, EVERYONE GETS A BABY! If you're not hip to the popular memes kids are using, that's an Oprah reference. Amazon mistakenly sent out an email to lots of people yesterday—perhaps hundreds of thousands—suggesting somebody bought something off of their (in most cases…

Comes this week from the Brookings Institution a new survey by John Villasenor demonstrating that undergraduate students at four-year colleges and universities have no idea what the First Amendment means.

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Michael Warren comes by to talk with host Eric Felten about what to make of CNN's report that, during the campaign, Paul Manafort was the object of a federal wiretap.

To understand the pragmatic realities of federal governance in the 21st century, one must recognize the existence of a fourth branch of government: the administrative state. We have some two million federal bureaucrats with extraconstitutional legislative powers. Not only do they write the reams of…

Even if you hold no religious beliefs, you might want to consider adopting some simply for the sake of your wedding. That’s the conclusion I reached after attending several secular nuptial ceremonies in the years after college. There was little worse than listening to vows that had been made up by…

Once again officials within the FDA are proposing to put other interests over the needs of dying patients, predominantly children.

At the end of July, Kentucky senator Rand Paul advocated and voted for the so-called "skinny repeal" bill of Obamacare. "Skinny repeal is better than no repeal," Paul said on Fox News. "The reason I will advocate and vote for skinny repeal is that it's the best I can get."

The forces driving North Korea’s nuclear weapons program are reminiscent of Cold War strategies pursued by the Soviet Union. Most notable was Moscow’s decision in the mid-1970s to deploy 243 SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) with three independently targetable warheads apiece and…

There are two campaign commercials from House hopefuls in 2018 worth considering as a pair. The first one is from Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Dan Helmer, a Democrat challenging at least seven others in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District to face Rep. Barbara Comstock.

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United Nations Watch—President Trump’s first address to the United Nations General Assembly was a bit of a hodge-podge. At times, it sounded as if it were a message to Americans that Trump would be defending them and their interests even if (and especially when) those interests contradicted the…

Fiery social conservative Roy Moore is on the verge of upsetting Sen. Luther Strange, President Trump's preferred candidate, in a closely watched special election in Alabama.

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, deputy managing editor Kelly Jane Torrance talks with host Eric Felten about the President's speech before the U.N. general assembly.

Lasers to the rescue. One of the beautiful parts about my commute into Washington, D.C., from suburban Virginia is crossing the Potomac. Before we moved offices in 2015, I'd drive by the Lincoln Memorial every day. It was like living in a movie. Now, even though our new office is merely two streets…

President Donald Trump will sign the Graham-Cassidy health-care bill if it passes Congress, CNN first reported Tuesday.

The Graham-Cassidy health reform bill is notable for how much its policy caters to governors—no matter their party affiliation. Its private-market provisions are premised on a simple plan: Take the money projected to be spent on four key Obamacare-driven expenditures, including the Medicaid…

Vice President Mike Pence departed New York City immediately after President Trump concluded his speech before the United Nations General Assembly Monday morning to attend a Senate policy lunch in Washington, D.C. to help wrangle votes on the latest Obamacare repeal effort.

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Ye gods the Bills at Panthers game was awful to behold, and not just because no touchdown was scored. Dropped passes, missed assignments, overthrown receivers—these guys are paid millions of dollars a year and the owners wallow in public subsidies. How could the result be so crummy? The game is…

President Trump gave his first address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, addressing the problematic states of Iran and North Korea, the conflict in Venezuela, and making a pitch for the sovereignty of nation-states.

Ever since John Kelly was tapped as White House chief of staff, right-wing news outlets have been publishing articles making harsh allegations about Donald Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster.

The Trump White House has yet to roll out its much-anticipated, comprehensive, government-wide Iran policy review, but administration principals have met over the last few weeks to iron out details regarding the nuclear deal with Iran, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. On…

The Mueller investigation is heating up, and it doesn’t look good for Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. CNN reported Monday that federal investigators wiretapped Manafort’s phones under “secret court orders” both before and after the 2016 presidential election:

Kentucky GOP senator Rand Paul met with reporters Monday in his Capitol Hill offices to discuss his opposition to Graham-Cassidy, the last-ditch effort to repeal and replace Obamacare that would turn most of Obamacare's funding into block grants and provide waivers from Obamacare's regulations to…

Walking toward the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday afternoon, I could hear the speaker’s voice long before I picked him out among the crowd gathered by the Reflecting Pool. His voice crackled through the loudspeaker and rolled across the water as he led his audience in the refrain:

President Trump tweeted the following about North Korea on Sunday morning:

Before you spend $2 billion on your own submarine... Read this! Only a few hundred individuals on this rock have the spare cash to drop on such a craft, but still, Bloomberg Pursuits has a feature on this privately made submarine. Might be good for preppers, one would think, until you read that:…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer John McCormack talks with host Eric Felten about the prospects for Graham-Cassidy, the GOP's last chance this year at undoing Obamacare.

On this latest micro episode, we discuss sugar and spice and all things pumpkin spice. Vic questions the origins of the Pumpkin Revolution. JVL educates his listeners on the flavors of each season—how on earth did grapefruit become the flavor of summer? Sonny loves grapefruit sprinkled with…

A week is a long time in politics, and the days grow short as you reach September. Teresa May began last week with a victory, the passage of the EU withdrawal bill, previously known as the “Great Repeal Bill,” through the House of Commons. But her week ended with a harbinger of defeat. On Friday,…

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In 1954, when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I paid tribute in an editorial for the Daily Tar Heel to a distinguished predecessor at that illustrious student paper, William T. Polk, who had died unexpectedly. Jonathan W. Daniels, the journalist and editor who…

Long before I ever even picked up a golf club, I wanted to be the kind of person who golfed regularly. A Real Golfer, in other words. Even as a child, I loved the manicured, tightly controlled aesthetic of golf courses—​just the right (which is to say, minimal) amount of “nature” for my…

Donald Trump is back in his hometown for a full week of meetings surrounding the convening of the United Nations General Assembly. The president’s anticipated speech before the GA isn’t until Tuesday, but Trump has a packed schedule starting Monday, including bilateral meetings with the leaders of…

The start of classes was just a week away when white supremacists clashed with counterprotesters in Charlottesville. The town that is home to the University of Virginia is now synonymous with American carnage. At the heart of the August 12 riot that left one young woman dead sat Robert E. Lee atop…

Lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee are hinting at still-secret details related to Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal that the president could use to back up a potential October decertification.

Saturday night’s middleweight fight between Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin perhaps exceeded expectations. The showdown pitting two of the sport’s top pound-for-pound fighters, the undefeated 35-year-old fighter from Kazakhstan known as Triple-G, and the man who is now, after Floyd…

Fred Barnes talks with host Eric Felten about the president's newfound willingness to deal with Democrats. Jenna Lifhits profiles the man in charge of soft power in an administration unenthusiastic about soft power.

If I were a Republican strategist, which I’m pleased to say I’m not, I would pay especial attention to Shelby Steele’s op-ed “Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism” in the August 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Toward the close of his article, Steele writes that “the great problem for…

In President Trump’s politics, “the overall impression matters more than the details,” writes Newt Gingrich in his book Understanding Trump. This is not only true and insightful, it also explains Trump’s conduct of late.

Josh Cobin seems a good enough guy. A little pudgy, maybe, with his hair thinning on top and a beard borrowed from a Civil War officer—one who forgot to get a trim before Mathew Brady showed up to take the battalion photograph. At 29, Josh is probably a little old for the sloppy look he affects. A…

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Something has gone missing from American politics. Since the beginning of the new administration in January, public debate focused on general ideas has largely disappeared. Yes, President Trump has a few issues he consistently supports, such as limitations on immigration and lower taxes; and yes,…

For those of us who wish (or hope) that Donald Trump may ultimately settle into something resembling a conventional president, his ex-chief strategist Stephen Bannon offered a glimmer of encouragement last week.

The President has decided that enough is enough. Until a few weeks ago, he relied on Republican leaders in the Senate and House—majority leader Mitch McConnell and House speaker Paul Ryan—to convert his wish list into legislation. They assured him they could do so relying solely on Republican…

What the media won't show you about the lawnmower kid... A click-baity Facebook page affiliated with conservative blog Independent Journal Review is being mocked for suggesting that media wouldn't show photos of the 11-year-old boy the White House used as a PR ploy mowing the White House lawn.…

Homer and his successors described Odysseus as polytropos, in reference both to his boundless craftiness and to the literal “many turns” he took on his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. If ever that epithet were due for a deserved comeback, it would be in reference to Robert…

Weekly Standard editor at large Bill Kristol talks about the controversy over Chelsea Manning's Harvard fellowship, Hillary Clinton's self-pitying book tour, and Constitution Day.

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Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

An 11-year-old boy from Virginia got his wish to mow the White House lawn after writing a letter to President Trump earlier this year.

A terror attack in a crowded London tube train left at least 18 hospitalized Friday morning, according to multiple reports.

It has taken just under eight months for the signature issue of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—the construction of a border wall along our southern border with Mexico—to become negotiable. You could almost hear Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer grinning as they typed their statement out…

Every time The Scrapbook is cut off in traffic by a Tesla—it seems to be happening more frequently these days for some reason—we deprecate Elon Musk under our breath. It’s no doubt highly irrational on our part: Musk owns the company but he’s not driving the car. And what we mind even more than the…

By now there have been quite a few movies made about the Kennedys, and naturally we assumed that Chappaquiddick, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, would be another brazen attempt to make craven excuses and burnish the legend. However, early reviews suggest it might be…

Plenty are the benefits of new technologies, but several news items in the last week are making us yearn for the days of Rolodexes, Polaroid photos, and library card catalogs with actual paper cards.

Something has gone missing from American politics. Since the beginning of the new administration in January, public debate focused on general ideas has largely disappeared. Yes, President Trump has a few issues he consistently supports, such as limitations on immigration and lower taxes; and yes,…

Barbecue is a Southern food, and a special one. The food writer Jeffrey Steingarten says it is “simply the most delectable of all traditional American food." It originated in the 18th century in eastern North Carolina with whole-hog barbecue, in which the entire pig is cooked. While that tradition…

American liberals think of themselves as champions of the excluded and ill-treated, friends of the little guy persecuted by the system. Their instinctive sympathy for the disadvantaged and overlooked is evidence of a charitable worldview and a peculiar inheritance of Christian humanism. For a…

The statue wars continue: Last week protesters at the University of Virginia draped a tarp over a bronze of Thomas Jefferson, declaring the monument “an emblem of white supremacy” and demanding that the students of Jefferson’s university be subjected to racial reeducation.

In President Trump’s politics, “the overall impression matters more than the details,” writes Newt Gingrich in his book Understanding Trump. This is not only true and insightful, it also explains Trump’s conduct of late.

Now that the latest season of Game of Thrones has ended, fans of the show may be wondering: What now? How do I fill the void? One could, of course, reread George R. R. Martin’s books, or check out Maurice Druon’s The Accursed Kings, a series of seven historical novels that partly inspired Martin.…

Long before I ever even picked up a golf club, I wanted to be the kind of person who golfed regularly. A Real Golfer, in other words. Even as a child, I loved the manicured, tightly controlled aesthetic of golf courses—​just the right (which is to say, minimal) amount of “nature” for my…

Beirut

Stephen King’s It was the bestselling book of 1986 and the source material for an enormously successful two-part miniseries on ABC in 1990 that has been shown regularly on cable TV ever since. The ridiculously overlong novel reads like King is parodying himself; the miniseries is obvious and…

For those of us who wish (or hope) that Donald Trump may ultimately settle into something resembling a conventional president, his ex-chief strategist Stephen Bannon offered a glimmer of encouragement last week.

Even if you hold no religious beliefs, you might want to consider adopting some simply for the sake of your wedding. That’s the conclusion I reached after attending several secular nuptial ceremonies in the years after college. There was little worse than listening to vows that had been made up by…

"I will immediately terminate President Obama’s illegal executive order on immigration. Immediately.” That was Donald Trump speaking on the day he launched his presidential campaign: June 16, 2015. The executive order he was referencing was the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. It…

In 1954, when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I paid tribute in an editorial for the Daily Tar Heel to a distinguished predecessor at that illustrious student paper, William T. Polk, who had died unexpectedly. Jonathan W. Daniels, the journalist and editor who…

Once again officials within the FDA are proposing to put other interests over the needs of dying patients, predominantly children.

Josh Cobin seems a good enough guy. A little pudgy, maybe, with his hair thinning on top and a beard borrowed from a Civil War officer—one who forgot to get a trim before Mathew Brady showed up to take the battalion photograph. At 29, Josh is probably a little old for the sloppy look he affects. A…

The October Horse

The Trump White House has yet to roll out its much-anticipated, comprehensive, government-wide Iran policy review, but administration principals have met over the last few weeks to iron out details regarding the nuclear deal with Iran, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. On…

The Scrapbook will admit to a certain fascination with Bill and Hillary Clinton. We’ve read and enjoyed—if enjoyed is the right word—all their mammoth autobiographical works. The latest addition, by the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, is titled What Happened. It seeks to recount…

The Cambridge spies—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—who burrowed into the heart of the British establishment and betrayed its secrets to the Soviet Union have been the subjects of dozens of nonfiction books and inspired numerous novels, including some by…

To understand the pragmatic realities of federal governance in the 21st century, one must recognize the existence of a fourth branch of government: the administrative state. We have some two million federal bureaucrats with extraconstitutional legislative powers. Not only do they write the reams of…

Mark Green, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is a firm believer in fostering democracy abroad.

If I were a Republican strategist, which I’m pleased to say I’m not, I would pay especial attention to Shelby Steele’s op-ed “Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism” in the August 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Toward the close of his article, Steele writes that “the great problem for…

CIA director Mike Pompeo cancelled a scheduled appearance at Harvard Thursday after the university hired Chelsea Manning, a former Army private and leaker who Pompeo described as an “American traitor.”

One of the primary challengers to Donald Trump’s top Senate rival says she’s sticking with the president after his immigration deal with Democratic leaders.

Species, are like a construct, man. If you're a Twitter addict like I am, one account you must follow is New Real Peer Review. They showcase amazing academic papers that will totally blow your mind. From a Ph.D thesis they showcased on Tuesday by Megan Molenda LeMay, here's an out-of-this-world…

Many Americans, particularly on the right, have comforted themselves with the notion that fears of an oncoming Chinese century are overblown. Per capita incomes in China remain well below those in the capitalist West, and the country’s arguably irresponsible stimulus policies have led to a…

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell resigned Thursday from his position at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, one day after the school announced it would bring Chelsea Manning to its Institute of Politics as a visiting fellow for the upcoming year.

Nobody knew MAGA could be so complicated.

The man in charge of internal security of the nation's intelligence services says there is so much leaking of classified information right now that "we’re not dealing with it." Bill Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center made the admission in a recent…

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On this latest episode, the Substandard grapples with the “monster” at the box office: Stephen King’s It. Why do horror flicks do so well? JVL loves his sweater vests, Sonny ranks sweaters, and Vic is mad as hell and isn’t going to take this anymore!

On Wednesday, a group of four Republican senators—South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, Louisiana's Bill Cassidy, Nevada's Dean Heller, and Wisconsin's Ron Johnson—revealed the text of their 140-page health-care reform bill.

On Wednesday night Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer dined with Donald Trump. Following the meeting, the Democrats announced that they had reached a deal with the president on DACA, to give permanent amnesty to the 800,000 or so DREAMers who are, through no real fault of their own, in the country…

Some of Kid Rock’s best-known work is mashups of genres and past hits. He made a fortune fusing rap and metal. He created a worldwide chartbuster mixing “Werewolves of London” with “Sweet Home Alabama.” Now he’s sewing a political image cut from the theatrics of Idiocracy’s President Camacho and…

In a normal Republican White House, it would be unnecessary for the press secretary to state, on multiple occasions, within a single briefing, that “The president is a Republican.” But this is not a normal Republican White House, so that is the position in which Sarah Huckabee Sanders found herself…

You may remember the grim warnings of draconian budgets cuts issued by liberal pundits, congressional Democrats, and the Obama administration in early 2013. That was just before “sequester” took effect—a result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which ordered automatic, across-the-board budget cuts…

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi came away from their Wednesday White House dinner with a simple message: President Donald Trump is ready to reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and he doesn’t mind not getting a border wall in return.

The Trump administration has completed its comprehensive review of America’s Iran policy, according to an administration source, setting the stage for a possible recalibration of the nuclear deal with that country, which Donald Trump campaigned against in last year’s election.

On Wednesday Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin doubled down on a threat from the president to stop trade with any country that does business with North Korea.

Can the bodega be killed? Probably not. But two ex-Googlers (ugh) want to try, per a write up from Fast Company:

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, associate editor Ethan Epstein talks with host Eric Felten about why the new UN sanctions against North Korea fail to impress.

Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy on Wednesday released a last-ditch health-care bill that aims to replace Obamacare’s architecture with a block grant given annually to states to defray individuals’ insurance costs.

Despite a packed legislative calendar, House Speaker Paul Ryan says he’s still confident that Congress will have tax reform legislation on President Donald Trump’s desk before the end of 2017.

The Trump administration has done a laudable job handling the North Korea crisis it inherited. The Obama administration had neglected the gathering North Korean threat under a policy called “strategic patience.” This followed a negotiated “deal” at the end of the Bush years that lifted important…

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Is cutting the corporate tax rate merely a sop to the wealthy, as a report recently published by the Institute for Policy Studies alleges? It's an important question, since a corporate rate cut is a prominent feature of every tax reform proposal currently on the table.

Ten years ago, AMC’s Mad Men dazzled us with a new type of high-concept, prestige-format television drama. In the show’s second episode, Don Draper gives a particularly soaring speech about America, hope, and—yes—the value of advertising.

The president’s effort to help get tax reform passed by the end of this year is in full swing. Tuesday night Donald Trump held a bipartisan dinner at the White House with three Republican senators on the Senate Finance committee and three moderate Democrats up for reelection next year in swing…

We're back from a memorable TWS cruise. Not memorable just—or even mainly!—because the first night at sea was the roughest we've encountered in any of our 15 cruises. In fact, we've dispatched that experience down the memory hole of historical events that need not be recalled or spoken of again. We…

In late August, the Los Angeles city council voted to end the city’s celebration of Columbus Day. That same week, across the continent, a furor was foaming over the fact that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was considering taking down the iconic statue of Columbus atop a pillar in the circle…

Should the Texans be panicking? Who is Tom Savage? It's September, so the inevitable is still in the future . . . Join Gregg Easterbrook and editor in chief Stephen F. Hayes as they discuss week one of the 2017 NFL season on the debut episode of the Tuesday Morning Quarterback podcast.

When the White House first announced its intent to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program last week, many speculated that President Donald Trump was planning to use the issue as part of a grand bargain to win additional funding for immigration enforcement and a border wall.

About that iPhone presentation... It's been 10 years since Apple deployed its first overhyped phone, so how about a reunion of sorts. (How much money have you given Apple in the last 10 years? Maybe don't overthink that ...) In January of 2007 the iPhone debuted, and Steve Jobs gave a public hype…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about whether Donald Trump is trying to remake the Republican party, or just make an exit from the GOP.

Tuesday is a big day for fans of Apple’s iPhone: The company announced a slick new iPhone, called the iPhone X, with features including a bigger screen, thinner edges, and facial recognition for security.

For some months now, the House Intelligence Committee, led by Rep. Devin Nunes, has been investigating whether there were political motivations to the the Obama White House’s “unmasking” of American citizens who were named in intelligence reports. Nunes has previously stated that he has seen…

In July, I noted that Sputnik Radio—an honest-to-God Russian propaganda outlet—had started broadcasting on Washington D.C. airwaves:

Ah, September. The air is turning crisp. Soon leaves will show colors; the holidays are in prospect; everyone looks better in sweaters. Yours truly loves autumn and its September-to-Christmas parade. Each year we live through two days that are not September-to-Christmas to earn the privilege of…

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On this latest mini episode, JVL interrupts our Fall Sports segment with an airing of grievance—namely that the show is tearing apart the cohosts and destroying their friendships. Sonny and Vic are sure it's fine.

A year from now will mark the start of the traditional campaign season for the 2018 midterms​—​which will see all the seats in the House of Representatives plus a third of the Senate up for grabs. Obviously, these contests are too far away to estimate results, but a general outline is coming into…

When he won election, Donald Trump—along with his national security adviser Michael Flynn, his all-purpose counselor Stephen Bannon, and, perhaps, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner—was fond of the idea that Russia and Iran, comrades-in-arms in Syria, weren’t natural partners. Flynn was particularly…

The White House has a new argument for why President Donald Trump fired James Comey earlier this year: The FBI director possibly committed perjury. At her Monday briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders faced a question about former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s recent…

Earlier this year, the LA Times reported: "TSA quietly launches new 'enhanced' pat-down procedure." The Times noted that TSA would not describe precisely how the new procedure is different from the old one: "TSA officials declined to detail the new universal procedure or the previous pat-down…

The cache of al-Qaeda documents captured in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin-Laden will soon be released to the public, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Monday.

Here's a long read for you. Over at Wired UK, there's a very interesting read on the future of urban warfare. Here's the teaser: "Cheap Chinese-made sensors. Mad Max-style vehicle mods. Consumer drones turned into mortar-dropping weapons. The fight against Daesh is showing the high-tech, higher…

A key Senate panel showed its disdain for the Trump administration’s proposed steep cuts to the foreign aid budget—first by agreeing to spend more than what the president had asked for and then by issuing a report condemning the president’s “"apparent doctrine of retreat"

A vote is expected Monday evening on a new round of U.N. sanctions against North Korea. Unfortunately, in a bid to win Russian and Chinese support for the resolution, the measures proposed by the United States have been watered down. Removed has been what would be one the most useful tools in…

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Is Donald Trump a rogue Republican—an independent president rather than a party leader? Or is he simply remaking, in fits and starts and with the establishment kicking and screaming, the GOP in his own image? This is a central political question of Trump’s presidency, one coming into focus as the…

Eight months into its current session, Congress has passed no major legislation.

The millennials—perhaps you may have read about them somewhere along the line—are the largest generation in American history. Roughly speaking, they were born between 1980 and the early 2000s and this wide span, plus the sheer magnitude of their numbers, has created a taxonomy problem: There are so…

Conservative book publisher Regnery, which has published major conservative authors such as Mark Levin and Ann Coulter, has made a startling announcement: They no longer want anything to do with the New York Times’s best-sellers list. According to the Associated Press, “Regnery is annoyed that its…

The “hate list” generating Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) already has the media firmly in its pocket. If the SPLC calls, say, Bell Curve and Coming Apart author Charles Murray a “white supremacist,” why, so will the Washington Post. And now corporate America seems to be jumping onto the SPLC’s…

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Even before the Senate failed to pass a weak health care reform bill in mid-July, congressional Republicans were rationalizing their failure: Health care wasn’t their issue, they reasoned. But tax reform—now there was something they could win with.

And then there were four. Vacancies on the Federal Reserve Bank’s seven-person board of governors, that is, now that vice-chair Stanley Fischer has tendered his resignation for “personal reasons”—widely believed to be his wife’s health.

In tax reform, the negotiators from the Trump administration and Congress who are thought to be in charge are called the Big 6 by Washington insiders. But there’s also a Big 4, a group of supply-side economists who are playing an influential role.

In June 2012, when President Obama issued the executive order known as DACA—“deferred action on childhood arrivals”—he had a good moral case but a bad legal one. The order allowed illegal immigrants who had entered the country as minors—people who hadn’t come to America of their own will—to apply…

On August 30, New America president Anne-Marie Slaughter terminated the left-leaning think tank’s relationship with scholar Barry C. Lynn and his Open Markets program. Slaughter says that Lynn was not abiding by New America’s “standards of openness and institutional collegiality.” He says he was…

If more congressmen like Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., start heading for the exits, it will become harder for Republicans to defend their House majority next year in what figures to be a challenging election cycle.

The best day of Sen. Luther Strange’s election campaign was Aug. 8, the day President Donald Trump tweeted that he had “done a great job representing the people of the Great State of Alabama” since being appointed to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions and giving his “complete and total…

We're going to 20! My Cleveland Indians are red hot right now, having won 15 games in a row. Impressively, the Indians also won 14 straight last season. An Ohio roofing and window company celebrating its 15th anniversary thought it'd be a fun contest to offer customers a 100 percent refund on work…

The House of Representatives Friday passed a White House-backed bill that provides $15 billion for hurricane relief while raising the federal debt ceiling and funding the government until December.

Whirlpool’s washing machine division has been rapidly losing market share to Korean competitors Samsung and LG. The company’s response is a reflection of the upside-down times we live in and a cautionary tale about interfering with free markets.

Give the Trump Education Department credit for rescinding the Obama Ed’s “Dear Colleague” letter of 2011 and opening a discussion about the meaning of Title IX. Under that law, “No person shall . . . on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected…

Reviews and News:

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Many are horrified by the ascent of protectionist, isolationist, and nativist ideas on the political right – and rightly so. Fewer have noticed, however, that developments on the political left also bode ill for those want to see the world’s liberal democracies united against their common enemies,…

Eight months into the Trump administration, a long-awaited campaign to unwind Obama’s legacy on Title IX appears to have begun in earnest. Early Thursday afternoon in a speech at George Mason University, Betsy DeVos condemned the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague Letter,” that has had an…

San Francisco

With the North Koreans claiming to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb this week, President Donald Trump on Thursday reiterated that “military action would certainly be an option” against the rogue regime. “I would prefer not going the route of the military, but it’s something certainly that…

San Francisco

Every schoolboy ought to know—but probably doesn’t—the famous couplet from Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy”: “Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep / Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.” George Orwell, though he held that Kipling did not “understand the…

Remembering Pulitzer-winning poet John Ashbery, last of the New York school.

In June 2012, when President Obama issued the executive order known as DACA—“deferred action on childhood arrivals”—he had a good moral case but a bad legal one. The order allowed illegal immigrants who had entered the country as minors—people who hadn’t come to America of their own will—to apply…

If you’re still wondering how Donald Trump, a man whose approval rating sits at 36 percent in a September 6 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, ever became president, well, here’s a clue: That same poll has Hillary Clinton’s approval rating at 30 percent.

Eccentric Culture

Kurt Andersen may be right in supposing that what looks like Americans’ increasing inability to distinguish fantasy from reality is the big topic of our times, and there are at least 2 or 3 of his 46 chapters in Fantasyland in which he does justice to his subject. His rapid tour d’ horizon on New…

A year from now will mark the start of the traditional campaign season for the 2018 midterms​—​which will see all the seats in the House of Representatives plus a third of the Senate up for grabs. Obviously, these contests are too far away to estimate results, but a general outline is coming into…

Last month the Village Voice announced it was ending its print edition, a 62-year run of muckraking reporting, cultural criticism, opinion, advocacy, and opposition—opposition to authority, to anything, sometimes to everything. Founded in 1955, by Norman Mailer among others, the Voice was America’s…

So the eminent author and social scientist Charles Murray gave a speech at Harvard last week. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be terribly newsworthy—eminent authors give speeches at distinguished universities every day of the week and sometimes even on weekends.

Beautifully designed and thoughtfully edited, this is both a celebration of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s writing and a gust of fresh wind in the continuing movement to secure her place in American literature. Millay (1892-1950) authored 10 books of poetry in her lifetime and was hailed as one of the…

Even before the Senate failed to pass a weak health care reform bill in mid-July, congressional Republicans were rationalizing their failure: Health care wasn’t their issue, they reasoned. But tax reform—now there was something they could win with.

The publication of a new translation of the Aeneid by poet David Ferry at the age of 93 is an outstanding achievement. Having also translated Virgil’s other masterpieces, the Eclogues and Georgics, Ferry has spent two decades in the company of this great Roman poet.

The effort to repeal and replace Obamacare isn’t quite dead. It will officially expire on September 30 without any further congressional intervention. According to guidance handed down by the Senate parliamentarian just before Labor Day, the end of the federal fiscal year is when this year’s budget…

In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush worried less about rallying the nation to action against the terrorist threat than about warning an enraged public that the campaign would not end anytime soon. The president referred to the emerging “global war on terror” as a…

When he won election, Donald Trump—along with his national security adviser Michael Flynn, his all-purpose counselor Stephen Bannon, and, perhaps, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner—was fond of the idea that Russia and Iran, comrades-in-arms in Syria, weren’t natural partners. Flynn was particularly…

Reading about an exhibition that’s about to open at the Milwaukee Art Museum—“Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair”—took me back to the night long ago in Cincinnati when my teenage daughter and I saw this African-American extravaganza live. 

In tax reform, the negotiators from the Trump administration and Congress who are thought to be in charge are called the Big 6 by Washington insiders. But there’s also a Big 4, a group of supply-side economists who are playing an influential role.

On August 30, New America president Anne-Marie Slaughter terminated the left-leaning think tank’s relationship with scholar Barry C. Lynn and his Open Markets program. Slaughter says that Lynn was not abiding by New America’s “standards of openness and institutional collegiality.” He says he was…

Last week the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., removed from its website a study absolving the Obama administration of any blame for its inaction in the face of the Syrian genocide. The study had been scheduled for release amid much hoopla at a September 11 event hosted by the U.S.…

We Americans are a resilient people, but like resilient people everywhere, we need the occasional interlude of rest and relaxation. Which is why after two weeks of something like a national nervous breakdown over equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee, we welcomed the approach of Labor Day, the…

Blindsided congressional Republicans worried Thursday about whether President Trump's surprise fiscal deal with the Democrats would mean more shocks are ahead on issues such as tax reform.

One day after President Donald Trump shocked Washington by endorsing a Democratic debt ceiling plan that would fund the government for three months and provide money for hurricane relief, the Senate passed the plan by an 80-17 vote.

Trumpism corrupts, Kurt Schlichter edition. I hope Jonathan V. Last will forgive me, but I'd like to add another case to the "Trumpism Corrupts" dossier. It's Townhall.com's Kurt Schlichter. A former Army colonel and a trial lawyer who was a little-known writer in the late 1990s and early 2000s,…

President Donald Trump has fiscally conservative Republicans in a serious bind.

Ta-Nehisi Coates—national correspondent for the Atlantic, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, National Book Award winner—has a new essay out Thursday, which makes it something of an intellectual holiday for America's liberals.

House Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday voiced his disagreement with President Donald Trump’s decision to adopt the short-term timetable Democrats have advocated to raise the federal debt limit, a plan he called a “ridiculous idea” on Wednesday—but stopped short of criticizing the president himself.

I was apprehensive as I flew to Boston on Wednesday. Protests were being organized for the lecture I was to give at Harvard that evening, and the intel made me think that another Middlebury might be in the works. Many of Harvard’s undergraduates are infected by the same virus that’s been going…

For the last three days the NFL has been vacillating over what to do about this weekend’s game featuring the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the Miami Dolphins. The problem is that Hurricane Irma, with its torrential rainfall and 150 mph winds, is forecast to make landfall near Miami around game time…

On this latest episode of the Substandard we discuss the 40th anniversary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and rank the Steven Spielberg oeuvre. Jonathan returns from hiatus, Sonny mourns the loss of his raison d’être, and Vic’s grill plan goes up in flames. Plus ice cream, surfing, and Pearl…

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Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal will always have London and Sydney and yes, even Paris. But in 2017, and likely forever, they won’t have their long-awaited clash in Queens.

The crisis between the United States and North Korea shows no signs of abating. Indeed, Pyongyang escalated its provocations last week, firing a missile over Japan on August 29. Critics of the president cite his brash approach to Pyongyang as a factor behind North Korea’s belligerency. Some also…

Nearly a month ago, it looked as if Donald Trump could be setting himself up to leave the Republican party. His departure could either be official or de facto, but the signs were beginning to suggest that Trump, who has no real ties to the GOP establishment or its infrastructure, was putting…

Few Americans noticed, but this past June, Muammar Qaddafi’s longtime spy chief Abdullah Senussi was apparently released from prison in Tripoli, where he had been sentenced to death in July 2015 for decades of officially sanctioned murders of his fellow Libyans. If Senussi was not…

“This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man's laws, not God's—and if you cut them down . . . d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.”

The U.N. Human Rights Council has an election coming up in October, which can mean only one thing: A new slate of human rights abusers are poised to be elected to the U.N.'s top human rights body.

President Trump sat at the inflection point of a horseshoe with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell on either side of him and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi just to McConnell’s left. A reporter asked him if he would support Congress bunching aid money for Hurricane Harvey relief with a three-month…

All hail the price gougers. As Irma bears down on Florida, people are stocking up on bottled water. Let's recall not but a week or so ago when, in the wake of Harvey, people were using social media to shame those who sold bottled water at a price they were not used to. Or, now, let's look at social…

On Wednesday morning, House Speaker Paul Ryan called Democrats’ plans to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government for just three months “a ridiculous idea.” Hours later, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi announced that President Trump had agreed to help them do just that.

A friend sent me an article, accompanied by several photographs, from the July 5 Daily Mail about the celebration of the playwright Tom Stoppard’s 80th birthday. The photographs, chiefly of English actors whom I’ve watched with much admiration on PBS and in the movies over the years, confirmed my…

The Southern Poverty Law Center invests almost 20 percent of its nearly $320 million endowment fund in offshore equities and other investments. The 2016 annual report of the Alabama-based civil rights organization reports $69,093,576 of "non-U.S. equity funds" among the assets comprising the total…

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Has there been an administration in the modern era where the internal debates are hashed out in so public a manner? Consider Tuesday, when two members of Donald Trump’s cabinet spoke out forcefully on unresolved policy questions.

A “hypocrite,” in modern political parlance, is someone who holds two opinions thought by political opponents to be incompatible. And so, since political views are always colored by circumstances and rarely align with each other with perfect philosophical consistency, the word has become a kind of…

Texans are suffering. Texans need help.

Pretty incredible quote here in the New York magazine interview with New York mayor Bill de Blasio. Several people have jokingly called the man a communist, but here he is arguing against private property rights more or less on the basis of "each according to his ability, each according to his…

James Madison’s Lesson on Free Speech. Over at National Review, our own Jay Cost has a look back at James Madison, free speech, and the times in which we find ourselves with antifa and the alt-right running around. Here's Cost: "None of this means that we should excuse the boorish and ignorant…

In this latest mini episode, Sonny, Vic, and JVL (he's back!) address the worst summer at the box office in years. Who's to blame? Fanboys, the lack of ideas at the studios, or China? Tune in (or download, really) to find out!

The Trump administration will end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Obama-era directive that provided work permits and protection from deportation for illegal immigrants brought to the country as children, after a six-month window, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced…

For a town accustomed to punting major policy issues, the Trump administration’s boot of DACA to Congress could nab it a Pro Bowl nod.

This article has been updated with information that Haley provided in her speech.

In July, the Senate Banking Committee held two hearings focused on what to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that purchase and securitize most of the nation’s mortgages. The Treasury placed the two mortgage giants into conservatorship at the onset of the…

With the NFL about to start, predictions are everywhere. TMQ’s Super Bowl picks come at the end of this column—along with the disclaimer, All Predictions Wrong or Your Money Back.

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was so disturbed by the clash of protesters in Charlottesville that he made a policy decision he may have to reverse: In a speech at the State Department on August 19, he repudiated hatred and racism before addressing what he called “a great diversity gap” in…

Canada’s NAFTA negotiator has now demanded that new chapters be inserted to the agreement which reflect the Trudeau government’s “commitment to gender equality and . . . improving our relationship with indigenous peoples.”

Will hundreds of thousands of young immigrants, brought illegally to the United States as minors by their families, suddenly be at risk for deportation? That’s what hangs in the balance with the Trump administration’s expected announcement that he will fulfill a campaign promise and rollback the…

Sten Skiöld was a week shy of 9 years old on "Högertrafikomläggningen" (right-hand traffic diversion) or H-Day, September 3, the momentous Sunday in 1967 when all the road traffic in Sweden halted a little before dawn. When it started up again, Sweden had gone from driving on the left to driving on…

President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama-era program under which young illegal immigrants who came to the country as children could avoid deportation and receive work permits, Politico reported Sunday.

Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, who after the departure of Jeff Sessions has emerged as the Senate's leading immigration hawk, says he would support the legalization of all current DACA recipients -- nearly 800,000 of them -- if Congress would at the same time pass measures to protect…

After the healthcare debacle, can GOP lawmakers regroup to pass tax reform? Senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about the Republicans' top legislative priority for the fall.

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Anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, famous for his surreptitious videotaping of conversations with abortion-giant Planned Parenthood officials about their dealings in fetal remains , just won his second court victory in a row affirming his right to learn about the identities of the Planned…

Read the latest issue of TWS! Matt Labash's cover story on the Antifa in Berkeley is going viral and for good reason, it's a must read. David Rutz at the Free Beacon says: "You'll never regret taking the time to read Matt Labash." Truer words have never been spoken. But don't stop at Labash, the…

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has obtained a draft of a letter President Donald Trump composed laying out his reasons for firing FBI director James Comey, the New York Times reported Friday.

To kick off the Labor Day weekend, Bill Kristol talks with Eric Felten about what national holidays say about a society.

Theater companies across the United States are readying productions of Richard III, An Enemy of the People, and other shows that can be pitched as a gloss on current events. Unfortunately, the show that offers the best response to our frenzied times is closing this weekend: Natasha, Pierre, and the…

As the White House debates whether to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Republican congressional leaders are pressuring the president to keep the Obama-era protections for illegal immigrants who came to the country as minors.

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Remember when Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, was on thin ice with President Trump? For a couple weeks in July, the president was passive-aggressively criticizing Sessions on a near daily basis. But ever since John Kelly took over as chief of staff at the very end of July, Trump’s uttered…

As white supremacists go, Joey Gibson makes for a lousy one. For starters, he’s half Japanese. “I don’t feel like I’m Caucasian at all,” he says. Not to be a stickler for the rules, but this kind of talk could get you sent to Master Race remedial school.

American cities are discovering a new public health threat. But don’t worry: They are passing laws against it—and will soon start collecting fines that go into city coffers.

Since the defeat of the Obamacare repeal effort in the Senate, President Donald Trump has seemed to be on the warpath against the upper chamber. He has made negative comments about a number of Republican senators, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Some reports suggest he may strike out on…

How’s this for irony: Dawn Bennett, who used to host a radio show called “Financial Myth Busting” (italics ours), allegedly attempted to use a voodoo curse to hobble investigators who were pursuing her on allegations of running a Ponzi scheme.

Michael Cromartie, by his wits and his Christian faith, created something out of nothing, what investor Peter Thiel calls going from 0 to 1. And he became an important and influential figure in Washington, though that wasn’t his aim.

Readers will recall that just before memories of the Confederacy became an existential threat to national unity, Americans were worried about another—and surely more plausible—menace to the United States. In early August, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator who has been successfully testing…

Empire

Actor Ed Skrein (don’t worry if you’ve never heard of him, The Scrapbook hadn’t either) was recently hired for a supporting role in a new movie adaptation of the Hellboy comic book franchise. He was to play a military man named Major Ben Daimio. Unbeknownst to the hapless young Skrein, however, in…

For several days in mid-August, Donald Trump found himself ensnared in a bizarre controversy over the “very fine people” marching alongside neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va. It was a stupid thing to say—he said it several times, of course—and he was roundly criticized for his failure to condemn…

To one who spends time in the archives of the first quarter-century of the American republic can avoid references to one Jonathan Robbins. Probably in reality the Irish tar Thomas Nash, the pseudonymous Robbins scarcely ranks up there with other major figures of the period. But then why is his name…

Last week, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market in a merger valued at $13.7 billion. And while consumers are already seeing lower prices at the organic chain (often referred to as Whole Paycheck), there’s much concern over the deal’s impact on jobs. As a Bloomberg headline put it, “Amazon Robots…

To read the second and final stanza of Catherine Chandler’s “Chasubles”—“Summer’s a smiling charlatan / camouflaged in green / where violet truths lie mantled in / the seen and the unseen”—one might think American religious poetry is now much as it was in Emily Dickinson’s day. The reclusive maid…

The crisis between the United States and North Korea shows no signs of abating. Indeed, Pyongyang escalated its provocations last week, firing a missile over Japan on August 29. Critics of the president cite his brash approach to Pyongyang as a factor behind North Korea’s belligerency. Some also…

When the new Congress convened in January, its immediate focus was the administrative state. After passing the Midnight Rules Relief Act to accelerate the process for nullifying the Obama administration’s major regulations, the House promptly passed the REINS Act—the Regulations from the Executive…

A friend sent me an article, accompanied by several photographs, from the July 5 Daily Mail about the celebration of the playwright Tom Stoppard’s 80th birthday. The photographs, chiefly of English actors whom I’ve watched with much admiration on PBS and in the movies over the years, confirmed my…

In 1996, Hamas gunmen shot to death David Boim, a 17-year-old American citizen waiting for a bus in the West Bank. At the behest of Boim’s parents, attorney Nathan Lewin filed suit against charitable organizations in the United States who solicited funds for Hamas. The unorthodox decision to seek…

As Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and untold others ramp up their campaigns for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, they’re going to be in for a surprise. A candidate neither they nor the political class regard as a serious contender is ahead of them in organizing a well-financed and unique…

Few Americans noticed, but this past June, Muammar Qaddafi’s longtime spy chief Abdullah Senussi was apparently released from prison in Tripoli, where he had been sentenced to death in July 2015 for decades of officially sanctioned murders of his fellow Libyans. If Senussi was not…

"We’re a nation of laws, not of men.” Politicians use this line so often that it has begun to sound like a cliché. It’s a loose rendering of a phrase John Adams put into the Massachusetts constitution in 1780, but the idea is a much older one. It was given its most distinct and memorable expression…

In 2012, Fareed Zakaria dedicated an episode of his CNN show GPS to exploring Canada’s skills-based immigration system, discussing why such a program accords with the modern economy. On Twitter, Zakaria proclaimed that “Canada has the most successful set of immigration policies in the world.” His…

One might think of Orlando as gateway to the land of amusement parks, but one would be wrong. The city’s heart beats with a more profound purpose. Its citizens yearn for Art. Their souls demand Poetry.

Hillary Clinton is hitting the road (or more likely the chartered skies) to promote her new memoir, due out September 12. It’s a book whose title might have better captured the author’s state of mind if it had included a question mark: What Happened.

 A friend sent me news that E. B. White’s saltwater farm on the coast of Maine is up for sale, and my mind leapt back nearly 20 years—an impressive leap for a mind in my condition—to a visit I’d made there to mark the 100th anniversary of White’s birth in 1899. I was on assignment for a magazine, a…

Fred Barnes writes in the Wall Street Journal: