November 2017

White people love Subarus. Google's spy cars have documented the "street view" of much of the United States (and the rest of the world). But what are some applications of all of this data scientists could use? Google's folks decided to analyze the types of cars parked on the street to see if they…

When the Congressional Accountability Act (CAA) passed in 1995, the vote was 98-1 in the Senate and 390-0 in the House. However, in light of recent allegations of sexual misconduct against Rep. John Conyers and a settlement with at least one former staffer, the "accountability" promised by the…

The White House is moving forward with a plan to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo. The New York Times reports Tillerson could be forced out “within the next several weeks.”

Senator John McCain, a key Republican swing vote on the upper chamber’s tax reform legislation, announced Thursday morning that he will vote yes despite reservations about what he sees are the measure’s imperfections.

On Aug. 19, 2012, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill received one of the biggest gifts of her political career. While discussing abortion in the case of rape, her Republican opponent Todd Akin said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.” Almost…

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On this latest episode, the Substandard discusses the works of Denzel Washington. Sonny reviews Roman J. Israel, Esquire. Vic expounds on the deliciousness of disco fries. And JVL loves his “Marwel” helicarrier. Plus an iWatch story that will leave you, um, drained.

Alas, if recent polls are right, Roy Moore is likely to win his Senate race in Alabama. That means we’ll have to spend at least the next two years doing something that fills me with abject dread: hearing the name "Roy Moore."

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

The GOP tax plan cleared its first major hurdle in the Senate Wednesday afternoon, after a motion to proceed to amendments passed on a 52-48 party line vote.

Will the president accept just about anything on tax reform? He seemed to suggest as much at his rally in Missouri Wednesday. “If they send it to my desk, I promise all of the people in this room, my friends, so many friends in this room—a great state—I promise you I will sign it,” Donald Trump…

As if there was a need to remind everyone that American politics has lost its marbles and then pulverized them with a steamroller, here are five observations from recent domestic events and the president’s Twitter feed.

Over the weekend, Will Leitch had a very smart piece about the NFL in New York magazine. You can read it here. I like Leitch a lot and this essay if very much worth your time. He contends that a variety of factors have converged to cripple the NFL—safety, politics, oversaturation—and that football…

There’s no denying it now: In the hurricane of sexual harassment scandals felling powerful men from Kevin Spacey to Matt Lauer to, now, Garrison Keillor—no one is safe. Not even women of paramount grace and accomplishment who engage in a single instance of wrongthink. Yesterday the beloved Dame…

Fly the friendly skies! Some airlines are better than others, but all airlines have some great flight attendants. American Airlines has Bette Nash, who, at 81, has been in the industry for 60 years. Turns out, she's also a bit of a celebrity! The Washington Post has a fun feature on her:

This week on the Daily Standard Podcast, deputy online editor Chris Deaton talks with host Eric Felten about today's presidential Tweetstorm.

Rupert, Idaho

As the Trump administration seeks to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power, it will probably want to close the barn door as well, now that the horse has gotten out.

The Alabama special Senate Election is a bit of a rollercoaster. Republican Roy Moore held a real lead over Democrat Doug Jones for most of the race—until the Washington Post and other outlets published credible allegations that Moore had inappropriate sexual contact with teenagers while he was in…

President Trump retweeted three incendiary videos from a fringe far-right British activist, called for a boycott of CNN, floated the firing of NBC executives for propagating “fake news,” and suggested an investigation into the 2001 death of an aide to then-Rep. Joe Scarborough: a matter the far…

Longtime Today host Matt Lauer was fired Wednesday morning after a complaint of sexual misconduct, the latest public figure to fall from grace during a remarkable moment of cultural reckoning. As NBC is one of President Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags, he wasted no time crowing about it.

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Let’s hope all this talk from a small group of senators about inserting “triggers” into the tax bill triggers an outpouring of common sense among everybody else.

The Senate Budget committee voted to move forward on the Republican tax bill Tuesday afternoon, a small but substantial step forward for the GOP overhaul, which will now go before the full Senate for debate. “I think we're going to get it passed,” said President Donald Trump at a White House…

On Monday Washington Post columnist Christine Emba wrote a piece headlined “Let's Rethink Sex.” It's a commendable essay in a lot of ways, but the headline is a bit misleading in the sense that it advocates rethinking a view of sexuality that much of the country never signed on to in the first…

Abu Khatallah, the first person publicly charged in connection with the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, was acquitted of federal murder charges Tuesday after a grueling seven-week trial.

A federal judge ruled against a deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday, declining to issue a restraining order against the Trump administration for installing its own selection for acting director of the agency.

WaPo O'Keefes Project Veritas. What happens when one of the right wing's best known provocateurs gets caught? He spins. This is what happened Monday when the Washington Post kneecapped Project Veritas's James O'Keefe, posting an absolutely bombshell story alleging that O'Keefe sent an activist…

Wonder Woman isn’t the only Amazon who’s beating people up. Municipalities across the country are competing to land the second headquarters of the giant online retailer of the same name, including an offer by Chicago to give tax revenue collected from Amazon workers directly to Amazon. But…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Tony Mecia talks with host Eric Felten about the hoops and hurdles facing Republicans in their push for tax reform.

President Trump was planning to meet with Democratic leaders Tuesday to discuss a deal to prevent a government shutdown next month. But Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer canceled the meeting Tuesday morning after Trump attacked them on Twitter and said he didn’t expect to strike a deal.

Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore made his first public appearance in nearly two weeks Monday night, dodging press and refusing to take questions at a rally in Henagar, Alabama, as he railed against “malicious and false attacks which reflect the immorality of our time.”

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There are regular old games, then there are Authentic Games. Tuesday Morning Quarterback judges teams by the latter.

The president’s crack Monday afternoon about “Pocahontas”—aka Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren—was classic Donald Trump.

In a 1971 story (“Nora”), Washington novelist Ward Just wrote about a senator in trouble. “If you’re an architect or a lawyer and you get into trouble, you can resign and go practice somewhere else,” Just wrote. “If you’re a politician and get into trouble, that’s the end of it.”

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un seems increasingly addicted to scaring the world by firing ballistic missiles. After a lull of over two months, the regime fired another on Wednesday, the 16th this year. The launches have become more frequent and more aggressive. In August and September, the regime…

Greg Schiano will not get the head-coaching job at Tennessee. Indeed, he may never again get a top-level head-coaching job.

Independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is in the lead for the Democratic nomination according to a new ranking by the Hill. Last week, Hill reporters interviewed Democratic insiders and reported that although no candidate is clearing the field, Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden,…

In the two weeks since sexual misconduct allegations began to surface against him, Senator Al Franken has repeatedly apologized to the four women who have accused him of groping them. He’s said he’s “embarrassed and ashamed,” and insisted that “we have to listen to women and respect what they say.”…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Mark Hemingway talks with host Eric Felten about the fight over who is in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

When Auburn upset #1 Alabama in the Iron Bowl on Saturday evening—a day after #2 Miami managed to lose by double-digits to #70 Pittsburgh (5-7)—it seemed like chaos was once again reigning over college football. And in a sense, it was. Yet, at the same time, Alabama’s loss actually helped shrink…

I'm delighted, of course, by the news that Prince Harry, the Prince of Wales's personable younger son, is now engaged to Meghan Markle, described by Wikipedia as an "American actress, model, and humanitarian." I wish them both health and happiness.

In this latest micro episode, the Substandard discusses the Justice League box office debacle. JVL and Sonny talk damage control—can a reboot save the day? We also chat about (yes, dudes chattin'!) the inappropriateness of hugs. Vic and JVL explain the magic of Silver Spoons to Sonny.

The most remarkable thing about actress Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry is not that the princess-to-be is a woman of color—her mother is black, her father is white—or that she’s older than he is and has been married before. What’s really remarkable is that none of this would-be fodder…

Following reports that the U.S. voted in opposition to a U.N. resolution “combating Nazism and … practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” pundits and activists have cited the decision as demonstrative of the…

A few years ago I wrote a piece called “Bitcoin Is Dead” and about once a week since then I’ve gotten an email from some aggrieved techno-utopian saying, “Oh yeah? How about issuing a correction—bitcoin rocks!”

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It’s been more than five days since President Trump figuratively stood by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. As he was leaving the White House last Tuesday to spend Thanksgiving with his family at Mar-a-Lago, Trump stopped to talk with the press and told them Alabama does not need to send a…

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t say Sunday if she believed the multiple women who have accused Democratic Rep. John Conyers of sexual misconduct, and instead encouraged “due process” as a congressional ethics committee probes allegations made against the 88-year-old lawmaker in multiple…

On his way out the door, Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), left a parting gift for President Trump. Announcing his immediate resignation on Black Friday—when Americans are traditionally more focused on recovering from their tryptophan hangovers or…

President Trump tweeted Saturday night a link to a sycophantic website that traffics in conspiracy theories and has aligned itself to the alt-right and white nationalist movements. Here’s the Trump tweet, which promotes MAGAPILL.com’s “President Donald Trump Accomplishment List”:

The New York Times published a subtly frightening article over the weekend. The piece is a profile of a 29 year old Ohio man who is perhaps most notable for his very banality. He dines at Panera and Applebee’s. He plays video games and likes Seinfeld. Just married, his wedding registry was at…

This week on the Confab, executive editor Fred Barnes talks with host Eric Felten about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's strategy for passing tax reform in the Senate.

Time waits for no man. Though one man waits for no Time. At least, that’s President Trump’s preemptive justification for not winning Time’s “Person of the Year” award this year.

The White House is downplaying the potential for a showdown at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Monday, when President Trump’s pick to lead the agency shows up along with the pick by the agency’s former director.

Thanksgiving has come and gone, diets have been broken, and some 88 percent of us have eaten turkey, carving up some 46 million birds in the process. The hunter-gatherers are safely home from the malls—or at least most of them are. The less courageous stay-at-their-computers are resting their…

People like me are always praising the value of limited government (and we’re right). But exactly how limited can it get?

One of the rituals of Thanksgiving weekend is heading out to see a movie. And so, with that in mind, let me do you a mitzvah: Do not see Justice League. Under any circumstances do not go to see Justice League.

The Russian Revolution, the centennial of which has just passed, changed the world in more ways than one can count. But one little-noticed way in which it affected American intellectual life was by giving us Ayn Rand.

Donald Trump’s recent recap of his 12-day, five-nation trip to Asia was overshadowed by, in typical 2017 fashion, something seemingly extraneous: the president’s sip from a bottle of Fiji Water in the middle of his address. Political media and late-night comedians seized upon this unscripted moment…

Last summer, to prepare for the upcoming movie version, I reread Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Christie was the bestselling writer of the 20th century and Murder on the Orient Express is one of her most famous works. But I found it almost agonizingly tedious. It reads more like…

Actor Earle Hyman, best known, if not altogether justly, for playing Grandfather Huxtable on The Cosby Show from 1984 to 1992, died November 17 at the age of 91.

B.D. McClay on adultery, friendship, and the story of a life—a review of Sally Rooney's novel 'Conversations with Friends.'

We were genuinely surprised one morning last week to open the pages of the Washington Post and find an obituary for Bobby Baker, who had just died on his 89th birthday. We were surprised that his obituary was on the obituary page and not the front page, where stories about Baker usually used to run.

As the reckoning over sexual abuse finally reaches Bill Clinton, with handwringing by some of his former defenders in the press and in politics, one Clinton White House veteran is following developments with particular interest—and a large measure of skepticism.

It would be hard to invent a more pallid or inadequate title than Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer for the exhibition that has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Divinity, of course, is always an asset and Michelangelo is a name to conjure with. But neither of the words that…

If you asked any ordinarily informed citizen if the State Department considered North Korea a state sponsor of terrorism, the answer would likely be “Of course.” And yet for nine years, from the end of the George W. Bush administration until November 20, the world’s most sinister and repressive…

Now it can be told: In 1968, I was one of those who got “clean for Gene.” I cut my hair and put on a jacket and tie to campaign for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic primaries of that year. Those of us who did so understood without having to have the matter explained to us that we were…

A notice came last week from a newspaper I subscribe to. Since “offering check payments is becoming increasingly difficult to support,” the paper is “looking to move all our readers to digital payment methods.” The letter was bossy and presumptuous but the upshot was clear. There’s no longer anyone…

The Scrapbook has long been a connoisseur of bogus quotations—homely sayings attributed to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson that sound nothing like what these men would have said. Nowadays, thanks to the Internet and email, these misattributions are everywhere. Some historical figures seem to…

In the new Justice League movie, Batman, Wonder Woman, and other superheroes from DC Comics join forces to (what else?) save the world. While Superman is not a leading character in the film, it all takes place in his shadow. If last year’s Batman v Superman depicted a world coping with the fact…

In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) Daniel Bell argued that modern capitalism abetted two conflicting tendencies: It encouraged hedonistic self-gratification in the cultural sphere while needing sober hard-working adults in the economic sphere. A defect in the thesis is that there…

Of course the supporters of Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, are standing by their candidate, despite credible charges of sexual misconduct involving underage girls. That is what partisans do. They avow principles that they say they will never surrender, then anoint leaders…

When I got back from India in April 1969, I knew instantly everything had changed. A ’60s commando with a backpack, I could feel it even before I got out of Kennedy Airport: an aura of resentment, a light smog of paranoia, a lurch in the American vibe I’d left the year before when everything seemed…

Donald Trump is confident he can get a comprehensive agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. As one diplomat in Washington recently put it, the president is more optimistic than anyone else for peace in the Middle East. Trump told Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority,…

In the first 10 months of the Trump presidency, the blueprint for peeling back regulations has looked something like this:

In 1986, President Reagan signed the largest overhaul of the U.S. tax system since the New Deal. The law simplified the tax code and substantially reduced individual rates for the second time in Reagan’s presidency—the top rate coming down to 28 percent from 50 percent. When Reagan had appealed for…

The Scrapbook knows there is little that real Americans find so tiresome as lifestyle complaints from East Coast elites who graze up and down the moneyed Acela corridor (“when the waiter finally brought the petits farcis provençaux the vegetables were criminally underdone!”). But allow us this one…

This week on the Tuesday Morning Quarterback Podcast, Gregg Easterbrook discusses his most recent column, and explains why teams should try more onside kicks. Plus, a discussion regarding why year-round football is a bad idea.

Can you hear me now? Apparently, one of president Trump's top economic advisors faked a bad connection while in a meeting with Democratic senators on tax reform to get the President to stop talking. Yikes.

This week on the Kristol Clear podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol talks with host Eric Felten about the role U.S. power can play in promoting peace, and the gratitude we share at our good fortune to be with family and friends for Thanksgiving.

At 12:30 p.m. Thursday, the NFC North-leading Minnesota Vikings (8-2) will visit their lone division challenger, the Detroit Lions (6-4). It will be the only hour of the day it can be said that Thanksgiving football is better than Thanksgiving basketball.

Everyone has their two cents about how to talk politics, or not talk politics, or how silly we’ve become for talking about politics, at Thanksgiving. We suggest looking forward instead of dwelling on the miserable present: It’s never too early to speculate about who’ll jump into the next…

Doug Jones’s Senate campaign called Roy Moore a sexual “abuser” in an advertisement released Wednesday, its bluntest attack yet against the Republican candidate’s alleged history of pursuing teenage girls sexually, some of them underage.

“This is my truth,” says Donna Brazile, the two-time DNC chairwoman of her self-contradictory bestseller.

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The trial of Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the first person to be publicly charged in connection with the 2012 Benghazi attacks, is becoming mired in discord, as the government and defense appear at odds over explosive intelligence that could put a dent in the government’s portrayal of Khatallah as the…

Longtime congressman and civil rights icon John Conyers is under fire for a previously undisclosed settlement with a former staffer who claimed she was fired for rejecting Conyers's sexual advances. Buzzfeed broke the story that after the woman was fired in 2014, she filed a complaint with…

In 1986, President Reagan signed the largest overhaul of the U.S. tax system since the New Deal. The law simplified the tax code and substantially reduced individual rates for the second time in Reagan’s presidency—the top rate coming down to 28 percent from 50 percent. When Reagan had appealed for…

When I got back from India in April 1969, I knew instantly everything had changed. A ’60s commando with a backpack, I could feel it even before I got out of Kennedy Airport: an aura of resentment, a light smog of paranoia, a lurch in the American vibe I’d left the year before when everything seemed…

This is due to an industry-wide move to offer players in-game purchases. There are many kinds of items you can buy in today’s video games. One common type is an “item box,” which is also known as a “loot crate.” You don’t buy the loot crates directly, of course. First, you purchase in-game currency…

J is for Jihad, and S is for Stupid Children's Books. As a new father, I have already seen the crazy amount of stupid products made for children. The biggest offending category is actually children's books, many of which are terrible. Some are just poorly written, but others are worse: They are…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, associate editor Ethan Epstein talks with host Eric Felten about Google and Putin's English-language media outlets.

Google honcho Eric Schmidt has announced that his ubiquitous search engine will move to “de-rank” RT and Sputnik, two Kremlin-owned news sites. At an event in Canada over the weekend, Schmidt accused RT—a television network and website—and Sputnik—an online news service and radio station—of…

In this week’s Thanksgiving episode, the Substandard takes on Justice League. But just how bad is it? Like, Suicide Squad bad? (JVL: Yes.) Sonny runs us through a Thanksgiving bracket: pecan vs. pumpkin pie? turkey vs. stuffing? Vic judges a whiskey competition (Sonny couldn’t have been happier for…

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The big play of the 2010 Saints’ Super Bowl victory was a surprise onside kick. The big play of the 2016 Alabama college national title win was a surprise onside kick. These weren’t just plays that worked in ho-hum contests—they were plays that won championships. Yet the surprise onside remains…

On November 7, Democratic lieutenant governor Ralph Northam became the governor-elect of Virginia, beating Republican Ed Gillespie by a nine point margin. Two days later, the political world shifted almost all its focus to Alabama. Various news outlets have now reported that while Republican…

Had enough of theoretical arguments about free trade—of complaints by establishment Republicans and the business community that President Trump is leading us from the glorious era of free trade into a recession induced by his protectionist policies? Well here’s a tangible example that should help…

For nearly two weeks, the White House has been tiptoeing around the sexual assault allegations against Roy Moore, neither condemning nor defending the embattled Senate candidate, who has been accused of pursuing teenage girls for dates as a grown man and even touching a 14-year-old girl sexually…

A stark divide has emerged between the White House and Senate Republicans on Roy Moore’s ongoing candidacy for the Alabama Senate. President Donald Trump has not formally endorsed Moore, who’s been accused of sexual assault and pursuing inappropriate relationships with teenage girls while in his…

A pop-cultural fixture—in life, in prison, and now in death—mass murderer and master manipulator Charles Manson embodied the evil underbelly of the free-loving 1960s. And from his conviction in 1971 for seven counts of murder, to his death Sunday at age 83, California kept him alive.

Occupational Licensing Stinks. At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf laments the declining right to earn a living. While criticism of occupational licensing is not a new or novel concept (we've covered it extensively), I did learn something sort of horrifying: Tree trimmers and cosmetologists in some…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Tony Mecia talks with host Eric Felten about where tax reform goes now, and the senators who might be hurdles to its passage in the Senate.

President Donald Trump announced Monday that the United States would once again designate North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, reversing a change made under the George W. Bush administration.

Pennsylvania’s kaleidoscopic regions—divided by geography and socio-economics—make predicting its electoral outcomes a perpetual guessing game. But Pennsylvania also suffers the sentence handed down by James Carville. He once described the state as Paoli (suburban Philadelphia) and Penn Hills…

The New York Times suspended one of its star reporters Monday after allegations surfaced that he had made inappropriate sexual advances toward younger colleagues throughout his career.

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Donald Trump’s predictable unpredictability on Twitter has gone from a frustration to a mere annoyance for Capitol Hill, his cabinet, and his White House staff. Amazingly enough, Washington seems to have factored Trump’s tweets into the complex equation of how government works. But the president…

If you had told me last year that there was going to be a competitive Senate election in Alabama before 2017 was over, I would have probably smiled politely and slowly backed away. The idea of a close Senate race in the Yellowhammer state should be absurd. Trump won the state by 28 points,…

This week on the Confab, executive editor Fred Barnes scores the Trump presidency. And Ethan Epstein talks about a strange fix for the failing Washington Metro system.

This week on the Kristol Clear Podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol talks with host Eric Felten about the need for accountability, responsibility, and deliberation in our politics.

It was a busy news week.

With Thanksgiving approaching, can't we all agree? Thanksgiving is a tough time for the politically inclined (even worse for the disinclined, I suspect!) This year, I think we can all come together and put our disagreements aside to agree on a simple truth: mayonnaise is disgusting.

A top foreign correspondent at the New York Times said Friday that the Obama administration deliberately downplayed al Qaeda’s strength in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election.

The wave of sexual abuse allegations against men from Harvey Weinstein to Roy Moore has prompted significant reflection among liberals about how Bill Clinton’s misdeeds were handled and how his accusers were treated in the 1990s.

Correction, Nov. 17, 3:27 p.m.: Fact Check originally wrote that state law prohibited Neal from owning or making a gun. In fact, he was prohibited under the Federal Gun Act. The piece has been updated accordingly.

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Special counsel Robert Mueller in mid-October issued a subpoena against the Trump campaign to obtain Russia-related documents from over a dozen campaign officials, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

President Trump was understandably thrilled by the House’s passage of its tax-cut bill Thursday. On Twitter he called the vote a “a big step toward fulfilling our promise to deliver historic TAX CUTS for the American people by the end of the year.” Trump did not celebrate in the Rose Garden with…

One of the more puzzling aspects of Paul Manafort's indictment for conspiracy, money laundering and other charges was the line items detailing the he epic sums he reported spending from Cyprus-based accounts on antique rugs in Northern Virginia. There's really no reasonable way, THE WEEKLY STANDARD…

On March 20, 1974, a new French restaurant opened on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was called Le Cirque (The Circus), and it soon became the hottest ticket in town. It was partly known for its lavish meals—where Daniel Boulud and David Bouley, among others, earned their fame as chefs. But Le…

Sunday Hill Farm, Wiltshire

There are many ways to judge a president—polls, approval ratings, legislative successes, foreign breakthroughs, memorable speeches, and historic moments. But there’s a better way than any of these, and Fred Greenstein, a professor of politics emeritus at Princeton University, has developed it.

Two weeks ago in these pages we wrote about a court drama embroiling the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass. The museum is being sued to stop it from selling 40 works of art from its collection. The sale is intended to finance what the museum’s board of trustees calls its “New Vision,” a plan to…

As the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare withered on the vine, the self-described socialist senator from Vermont rushed to fill the political vacuum. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All Act of 2017 is a single-payer proposal that shamelessly attempts to harness the popularity of…

Democratic euphoria over the party’s sweeping November 7 election triumph in Virginia lasted, undisturbed, for all of four days—until the airing of that week’s installment of Saturday Night Live jarringly altered the mood. SNL, which, in the Trump era, has seemed like the comedy auxiliary of the…

If you've ever thought that sitting at a bar and watching sports on TV is too boring or that barroom billiards or darts lacks excitement, don’t fear—there’s a new trend popping up in cities around the country.

Asked about allegations Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore dated and engaged in appropriate conduct with teenage girls several decades ago, Alabama state senator Dick Brewbaker commented, “I do not buy the idea that suddenly because it’s now the U.S. Senate, she felt like she had to come…

What won’t our loftier cultural institutions do to attract youthful patrons? In an age in which symphony pops concerts feature music from video games, it would seem not much. But the envelope was recently pushed in Pittsburgh.

Every month, we eagerly anticipate the arrival of our GQ magazine. There are few other places where The Scrapbook can glean instruction on how to wear capri-pants-for-men without our calves looking chunky. This month is no exception. For fresh out on newsstands—assuming there is still such a thing…

Poor David Copperfield, to add to the other humiliations of his boyhood, at school is forced, for reasons too elaborate to go into here, to wear a sign that reads, “Take Care of Him. He Bites.” I have been thinking of that sign in connection with a sign I should like to make for myself that reads:…

Midway through the remarkable new documentary Jane comes a scene that could stand for its whole improbable story. Twenty-something Jane Goodall, not yet a credentialed scientist but doing the work of several, sits with a telescope on the floor of an African forest watching chimpanzees in a tree,…

The moment its doors officially open, the new Museum of the Bible, with its prime real estate in the capital, will be the nation’s most prominent institution dedicated to educating the general public about Judeo-Christian ideas and history. But it is far from the first attraction built by…

Since Donald Trump became president, Democrats have been engaged in an astonishing display of judicial obstruction. “Senate Democrats have indiscriminately forced the Senate to take 47 cloture votes on judicial and executive nominations since Trump took office,” notes Carrie Severino in National…

What role does the Bible play in Americans’ lives? A century ago the answer to that question would have been straightforward: It was the most important book in the home, perhaps read daily, and the place where major events in a family’s history (births, deaths, marriages) were recorded. It was…

Republicans in Alabama are facing a nightmare scenario in their upcoming special election—either they elect to the Senate Doug Jones, a Democrat who does not share their values on important issues like abortion, or Roy Moore, a Republican who has been credibly accused of sexual improprieties with…

The Islamic State's smattering of remaining strongholds in Iraq and Syria are under siege. At the height of the self-declared caliphate’s power in mid-2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s men controlled large swaths of both countries. Today, the jihadists hold only a few towns straddling the Iraqi-Syrian…

What are the Saudis trying to do in Lebanon? They have clearly forced the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri. Do they want to destabilize the country? Destroy its government? Is the new Saudi approach another example of the often-alleged incompetence and overreach of the crown prince,…

Widespread allegations of sexual harassment have in recent weeks rocked legislatures across Europe and North America. In London, harassment claims have brought down one cabinet minister and are threatening to bring parliamentary business to a standstill. In Brussels, the European parliament has…

If I tell you that Martin McDonagh is one of the most imaginative writers of our time, I expect you will immediately think he writes science fiction or fantasy—because the word “imaginative” has now devolved into a subset of the fantastic, the surreal, the unearthly. That is not the case with…

If Americans think our nation is painfully divided, two statistics from across the Atlantic might put their minds at ease. The first is the percentage of British voters who chose, in a binding referendum last year, to abandon the European Union: just slightly under 52 percent. The other is the…

The urge to vote for the outsider—the dissenter, the maverick, the troublemaker hated by those elites—is a reasonable one. Political parties become stale and predictable, their officeholders self-seeking and cowardly. The ordinary voter, exasperated by his elected leaders’ inability or refusal to…

If cleverness has often been a sign of decadence throughout history, the attempt to be too clever by half is an even more reliable marker of cultural decline. And a fondness for complicated rationalization, a proclivity for sophisticated excuse-making, and a tendency toward rushed and forced…

Birmingham, Ala.

Earlier this week, we published a scorecard of where Republican senators stood on the allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. With the #MeToo campaign hitting the other side of the aisle in the upper chamber—Al Franken has been accused by news anchor Leeann Tweeden of groping and…

Trump already to the left of Obama on trade? At the Daily Beast, Lachlan Markay has an item on how the Trump White House is welcoming the far-left trade skeptics that Barack Obama's administration left out in the cold. One need only look at the folks President Trump has appointed on trade,…

On Thursday, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) tweeted that Congress had passed a bill that would provide U.S. troops with the biggest pay increase in eight years.

Anyone who has followed the career of Al Franken should be unsurprised to learn that he was a jerk to Leeann Tweeden. Because if you go back to Live from New York, Tom Shales’ brilliant oral history of Saturday Night Live, Franken appears as a lying, drug-abusing (and distributing), jackass.

A moderate paid leave policy made quiet progress this week, as a popular proposal authored by Nebraska senator Deb Fischer found its way into Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch’s tax reform markup.

The House of Representatives passed its tax reform bill on Thursday on a 227-205 vote. All Democrats present and 13 Republicans voted against it.

A federal judge declared a mistrial in the corruption case against Sen. Bob Menendez on Thursday after jurors informed him they were intractably deadlocked. The jurors had been deliberating since last week.

It's becoming increasingly unlikely that Roy Moore will be elected to the Senate—or, perhaps, endure as the Republican nominee for the seat once held by Attorney General Jefferson Sessions. But in the event that Judge Moore wins his election, it is interesting to note that more than a few…

For conservative and libertarian lawyers, the Federalist Society’s annual convention in Washington is the unrivaled social event of the year: a nationwide class reunion, plus prom, plus the Oscars—with after-parties‚ all rolled into one. And it goes on for three days, starting today.

The best regular season in sports is heading toward its climax. On Halloween, 17 teams still had a shot of making the College Football Playoff (CFP), and I predicted that many top teams would lose in the weeks to come. Two weeks later, the number of undefeated or 1-loss teams has dropped from 17 to…

A Los Angeles news anchor and former model on Thursday accused Sen. Al Franken of sexually assaulting her during a USO tour to the Middle East in December 2006.

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On this week’s episode, the Substandard discusses Murder on the Orient Express. Sonny and Vic are on board but JVL calls it a trainwreck! Sonny visits a Chinese buffet, JVL’s watch talks smack, and Vic gets all out of joint talking about dowels. Plus a “Gene” review, rejected Halloween candies, and…

As Jonathan Adler writes here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Judge Roy Moore is “constitutionally illiterate” on some basic issues. He also happens to be biblically illiterate in a crucial particular.

What did President Trump accomplish on his 12-day, 5-nation trip through East Asia? Not much, at least not substantively—and that’s judging by the president’s own remarks at the White House on Wednesday. Speaking to cameras and the press pool from the Diplomatic Room, the president provided a…

In a desperate ploy for attention to their newish, clickbaity opinion section, THINK (check out the “hot take” rubric on its description of the GOP tax plan as a “dumpster fire”), NBC News has turned to a reliable source of outrage with a column by Travis Reider titled, “Science proves kids are bad…

Every week we ask interesting people what book they think President Trump should read. In the past, we've talked with Bret Stephens and Chris Matthews. This week we ask Garry Kasparov.

The would-be Dian Fosseys who have built a cottage industry of issuing pronouncements about the Millennials In The Mist have suffered yet another blow. For the better part of a decade, these generational gurus have been prattling on about how those of us born, roughly, between 1980 and 1995, don’t…

An attorney for Roy Moore failed to defend his client Wednesday from multiple allegations of past sexual misconduct printed in theWashington Post, and instead questioned the credibility of a separate accuser’s account and attacked her celebrity representation, Gloria Allred.

A nationwide network of Catholic prep schools offered exclusively to low-income families is warning that the House version of tax reform contains provisions that could devastate their funding model, and could spell the end of an educational program that has graduated tens of thousands of low-income…

President Donald Trump on Wednesday gave a speech that was long on self-congratulation, but thin on concrete diplomatic victories from his 12-day Asia trip—and silent on everyone’s most pressing question, whether Trump still supports Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about the president's speech detailing his trip to Asia.

Creepy Christianity and Roy Moore. Yesterday, we looked at some of the concerning behavior and statements of religious figures in Alabama concerning Roy Moore. There are, if you'll forgive, moore things to report. And they're not good.

Democratic senators grilled a federal judicial nominee, known as Texas’s witty “Tweeter Laureate,” on Wednesday over his past tweets about bacon and Alex Rodriguez. Seriously.

Will Republicans hold the Senate in 2018?

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President Trump came home from his Asia trip with a significant political conundrum on his hands: What to do about Roy Moore. For days, the White House has been publicly cautious in rendering any judgment on the credible sexual misconduct allegations against Moore, even as Republican senators and…

Asked about allegations Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore dated and engaged in inappropriate conduct with teenage girls several decades ago, Alabama state senator Dick Brewbaker commented “I do not buy the idea that suddenly because it’s now the U.S. Senate, she felt like she had to come…

Washington’s beleaguered public transit agency, WMATA, has curtailed service and hiked fares significantly in recent years. (Oh, and it has also killed somebody.) It has recently declared that it needs another $30 million cash infusion from the jurisdictions that subsidize it to stay afloat.

There are, in essence, three things wrong with the federal tax code. They are, in descending order of importance, that corporations pay an absurdly high rate; that the code is a labyrinthine mess that turns the work of paying one’s taxes into a nightmare; and that marginal individual rates have in…

Let's talk about bad preachers. Because some are sticking by Roy Moore, and hoo boy, does one in particular have some very unpreacherlike things to say.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer John McCormack joins host Eric Felten to talk about the GOP's Roy Moore mess.

Nearly a month ago, I wrote “There's an Awakening Against Sexual Assault, So Why Is No One Talking About Bill Clinton?” It took long enough, but there is a growing chorus of voices on the left demanding that Clinton’s crimes not be ignored. The disturbing allegations against Roy Moore appear to…

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday rejected accusations that he had lied in previous congressional testimony about his knowledge of contacts between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, insisting to House lawmakers that his answers on the matter “have not changed.”

Former New Republic editor Peter Beinart has an exquisite, anguished, self-flagellating meditation at the Atlantic’s website Tuesday. Beinart, a white, Yale-educated man, has come to the realization that he benefited from a certain kind of affirmative action in his New Republic days. “White men…

News about the Alabama Senate race is moving fast. Less than a week ago, most election watchers were still focused on off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Maine and other states. But on Thursday, the Washington Post published accounts of four different women who, as teenagers, were…

Investment companies that run index funds—which merely seek to replicate the ups and downs of a broader market index and that entail no investment strategy by any managers—are becoming ever more popular, with a greater proportion of our retirement savings are going into them. Forty percent of all…

Lawmakers are still waiting on the Trump administration to advise the Supreme Court on a case that, if taken up, would potentially allow American victims of Palestinian terrorism to collect a reversed multimillion dollar judgment, sources on and off Capitol Hill told TWS.

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Prep football playoffs have begun in many states and are about to kick off in Texas, home of the Dillon Panthers of Friday Night Lights renown and center of high-school football culture. The crazed Texas playoff system invites countless schools to gargantuan sets of brackets that produce 12 state…

Attorney general Jeff Sessions has told political allies in Alabama that he is not considering running for his old Senate seat as a write-in candidate in next month’s special election. That’s according to a spokeswoman for Sessions at the Department of Justice, Sarah Isgur Flores, who also tells me…

“Iran has never had a better friend than Obama,” Donald Trump tweeted in December 2013, as U.S. negotiators were finalizing a deal with Iran over the country’s nuclear program. So began Trump’s long campaign of ridiculing Barack Obama for the latter’s hopelessly gullible view of the Iranian regime.…

Most Republican senators have been quick to distance themselves from Roy Moore since allegations emerged in the Washington Post late last week that he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl when he was 32 and pursued relationships with three other teenagers. With legislators having time to review…

GOP senators are further distancing themselves from Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore as allegations that he made sexual and romantic advances on teenage girls escalate.

While the allegations of sexual misconduct and assault against Roy Moore have seriously cast the viability of his Senate candidacy in doubt, some Republicans are now calling for his expulsion if he still wins the Senate race in deep-red Alabama.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said Monday that he would vote for Democrat Doug Jones over Judge Roy Moore in the Alabama special election for Senate and would support expelling Moore if he wins.

Breitbart News sought this weekend to discredit the Washington Post and a woman who accused Roy Moore of trying to initiate sexual encounters with her when she was a minor, but the right-wing tabloid ended up doing the exact opposite.

Don't you miss baseball? Yes, the people who update you constantly, starting in November, about how many days until spring training are a little weird, and you should have an offseason, but it's easy to miss something once it's gone. To that end, Bill Kristol announced the two winners of his…

Sunday morning, a video of a man tossing his Keurig coffee machine from a second-story balcony made the (g)rounds. It’s been tweeted more than 13,000 times between just the original poster and one who implored his followers to “retweet to offend a liberal.” The destruction owes to the manufacturer…

A new accuser has come forward with an accusation of sexual assault against Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Attorney general Jeff Sessions has told political allies in Alabama he is not considering running for his old Senate seat as a write-in candidate in next month’s special election. That’s according to a spokeswoman for Sessions at the Department of Justice, Sarah Isgur Flores, who also tells me…

Four recent judicial nominees from President Donald Trump have received “not qualified” ratings from the American Bar Association, most notably Brett Talley, a 36-year-old lawyer who has never tried a case. In response a post on MSNBC’s website claimed that neither Barack Obama nor Bill Clinton…

The New Jersey judge in Sen. Bob Menendez’s federal corruption trial sent the jury home to “clear their heads” Monday after jurors informed him they were deadlocked on a verdict.

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, associate editor Ethan Epstein talks with host Eric Felten about the president's Far East tour.

On this latest micro episode of the Substandard, Sonny and Vic discuss the greatest television show of all time, Stranger Things 2. At least it's the greatest show since Stranger Things, which was the greatest show since Game of Thrones, which was the best show since The Wire and The Sopranos.…

When President Trump talks tough on trade to one or several of our “partners,” he is being rude and wrecking the world trading system—in the words of the New York Times, adopting a “starkly unilateralist approach.” Yet when he politely raises America’s problems with that system in private, praises…

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Mary Carillo is, hands down, my favorite professional athlete of all time. She was born and raised in New York City and came of age in the 1970s when American tennis was at its apex. She was a top-30 player and she won the 1977 French Open mixed doubles titles with John McEnroe but what I love…

The allegations made against U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama, published in the Washington Post last week, would seem to be indisputable. In his 30s, according to the Post’s story, Moore cultivated romantic relationships with teenaged girls and in one case initiated sexual contact with a…

Roy Moore and his defenders have questioned the timing of a Washington Post story that includes the first-hand account of a woman who said that Moore, now 70, initiated an intimate sexual encounter with her when he was 32 years old and she was 14. “To think grown women would wait 40 years before a…

President Donald Trump, said White House aide Kellyanne Conway on Sunday, “is not as focused on this as he is his major 13-day trip abroad.” The “this” is the question of Roy Moore and his political future after the Washington Post’s bombshell report last week that included, among other…

Are Republicans going to lose the House in 2018? And if they do, will it be President Trump’s fault?

The notion that the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution should be an occasion for serious reflection is apt. Inasmuch as the past is never past (as Faulkner said), the catastrophic outcome of the revolution appears lost to most of our post-moderns.

This week on the Confab, executive Fred Barnes and senior writer Michael Warren talk with host Eric Felten about the anti-Trump wave that threatens Republicans in 2018.

This week on the Kristol Clear Podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol talks with host Eric Felten about the unfortunate parallels between Britain's Tories and the GOP.

They have come to Bonn, Germany, some 25,000 diplomats, scientists, and lobbyists from some 200 nations to put flesh on the bare bones of the climate agreement signed two years ago. That’s when members of the congregation, gathered in Paris, pledged to limit further global warming to 2 degrees…

Roy Moore has a story, and he is sticking to it. One day after a damning Washington Post story alleging that Moore, the GOP candidate in the upcoming Alabama Senate election, sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and sought out relationships with three other teenagers between the ages of 16 and 18,…

Since the Washington Post published its bombshell report Thursday—in which a woman alleges that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore molested her when she was a 14-year-old and Moore was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney—almost all Republican senators and President Trump have said that Moore…

On Tuesday night, as the Virginia returns were coming in, I wasn’t surprised—at all—by Ed Gillespie’s loss. He finished right around where Ken Cuccinelli did while running for governor and where Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, and John McCain did in Virginia while running for president. Virginia is a…

Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., said Friday she believes allegations about Roy Moore and demanded this type of misconduct end.

The Senate campaign arm of the Republican Party on Friday severed ties with Roy Moore, one day after the Washington Post reported that Moore had sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and pursued inappropriate relationships with several other teenagers while he was a district attorney in his 30s.

Congressional negotiators approved a series of measures to counter Russian activities and influence in this year’s annual defense bill, including an authorization for providing Ukraine with lethal defensive aid and an initiative to bolster counter-propaganda efforts.

Winners this Election Day ranged from governors-elect Ralph Northam and Phil Murphy to new Virginia state rep. Danica Roem, far from the first transgender legislator in the land, and the 93-year-old new mayor of Tinton Falls, New Jersey. But they weren’t the only ones: The legal marijuana industry…

In the wake of the New York City truck attack that killed eight and for which ISIS claimed responsibility, President Donald Trump tweeted that "the Military has hit ISIS 'much harder' over the last two days." However, there is no direct evidence of a spike in anti-ISIS strikes, and the broader…

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So far, the White House is urging people to be “cautious” about the allegations against Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore of Alabama documented in a Thursday article in the Washington Post. Citing 30 sources, the Post reports four teenage girls who now say the thirtysomething Moore asked them on…

To those feverishly speculating, whether in glee or in terror, that the election results in Virginia and New Jersey portend loss of GOP control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections a year from now, I ask this question: What difference does that prospect make not as of January 2019…

Having failed to repeal and replace Obamacare, congressional Republicans have turned their attention to tax reform. Given the disappointing track record of the 115th Congress, a victory on taxes is a political must-win. However, the history of tax reform is mostly one of failure and suggests that…

I was in New England for a few days last week and found myself at breakfast one morning with a group of Armenian academics, born in Lebanon but now settled permanently in and around Boston. By any measure, they were a distinguished group—historians, physicians, political scientists—and for them, of…

Ed Gillespie ran a perfect campaign for an election that didn’t happen. Ralph Northam ran a sloppy campaign with the same election in mind. Northam won, no thanks to his own efforts, and will become governor of Virginia in January.

It's always a source of delight when liberal pieties collide. Which is what happened last week in Laguna Beach, California, when Art had it out with the Environment—and Art lost. What made the contretemps doubly delicious was that the art in question had been promoted as an environmental statement.

Donna Brazile's new book, Hacks, is doing boffo box office. So much so that the day after the book’s official release, Amazon was sold out of hardback copies.

The November 7 elections, in which Democrats took governorships in Virginia and New Jersey and most of the other closely contested offices, have been analyzed and debated in the way off-year races always are. The winners interpret their wins as a sign of imminent triumph; the losers make excuses.

The Washington Post last week featured this arresting headline: “ ‘A breach of trust’: A preschool, a church and a change in mission.”

Tax reform looked like it was in peril. Influential business groups, including real estate agents and homebuilders, opposed it. Lobbyists were working feverishly against it. Opinion polls showed the public was as unenthusiastic as many members of Congress.

It's possible Celino Villanueva Jaramillo is the world’s oldest man. Born in 1896, he is now 121 according to Chilean government records, making him four years older than the current Guinness World Record holder, the Guardian reports.

I used to despise the relative obscurity of my alma mater, Reed College. The name of the Portland, Oregon, liberal arts school has spurred more than a few quizzical looks in Washington when I’ve mentioned it. “Reed? Where’s that?” This has been a persistent source of chagrin and insecurity about my…

The generic, everyday name is “bear can.” The original model of the bear-resistant food container, pioneered by Garcia Machine Inc., is a black cylinder with countersunk lid, unsmashable, too large to be carried off in a bear’s mouth, with a blank surface that offers no purchase for paws or claws.…

Ned Price is not happy.

When the series Enterprise went off the air in 2005, the consensus was that the whole Star Trek enterprise (so to speak) was exhausted: The show’s ratings were too low to keep it on the air and the franchise’s two most recent movies were critical stinkers that fared poorly at the box office.

We are living through the golden age of the cinema of Sacramento. Oh, you didn’t know there was such a thing? There is. It’s new. Very new. In 2015, the Sacramento radio station NOW 100.5 could find only eight movies filmed in part in Sacramento over the previous 30 years, and in all of them it was…

With each passing week, more and more congressional Republicans are announcing their retirements. Their reasons are varied. Jason Chaffetz of Utah quit Congress to take a job as a Fox News commentator. Several members not seeking reelection, like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem and Tennessee’s Marsha…

There have been very few Renaissance men since the Renaissance—and they weren’t exactly thick on the ground even in their glory days. No modern figure is more worthy of that appellation than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who was not only the greatest German poet, playwright,…

In November 2014, a female member of Brown University’s debate team had oral sex with a male colleague while they watched a movie. Eleven months later, she filed a complaint with Brown, accusing him of sexual assault.

Broadcasting from the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, KUFW-FM offers a mix of regional Mexican and ranchera music, the sort popularized by Selena, Los Tigres del Norte, and Vicente Fernández (aka El Rey de la Canción Ranchera). And there are commercials—lots of them—advertising everything…

It's impossible to know—and difficult even to contemplate—what sort of nihilistic depravity could drive a man to do what Devin Kelley did on the morning of November 5. Kelley killed 26 and injured at least 20 at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas.

"You are no good." These were not the words Gregor Piatigorsky, a nervous performer, needed to hear as he warmed up before playing a concerto with the New York Philharmonic. The man who uttered them, the conductor Arturo Toscanini, then said, “I am no good.” The effect on Piatigorsky was immediate…

You might think that a meeting of junior ministers at France’s Élysée Palace is nothing to get excited about. But French president Emmanuel Macron’s black labrador-griffon, Nemo, apparently found talk of inner-city investment a little too exciting late last month.

I remember as a kid hearing John, Robert, and Teddy Kennedy all using in speeches various paraphrases of these lines from a play by George Bernard Shaw: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’ ”

Since there's a lot to cover today, like why Roy Moore shouldn't ever be a member of the U.S. Senate, please accept my condensed afternoon links.

House Republicans reversed course Thursday on their plans to scrap the adoption tax credit. Kevin Brady, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, issued a statement that an amendment to the committee's bill would restore the adoption credit and make other tweaks to the bill. The…

Judge Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for Alabama's upcoming special Senate election, denies allegations that he romantically pursued teenagers as young as 14 when he was in his 30s. Even if the allegations are true, one statewide elected official in Alabama said it's "much ado about nothing."…

Senate candidate Roy Moore allegedly sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl when he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney in Alabama, according to an explosive new report by the Washington Post.

After reports came out that President Donald Trump did not take questions during a press conference in China, several pundits, journalists, and former Obama administration officials criticized this decision.

GOP Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia announced on Thursday that he will not seek re-election in 2018, citing the upcoming end of his tenure as chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Let’s say that someone—maybe Jack Donaghy, or Steve Jobs, or God—appeared in a dream and asked you to come up with the worst idea in the history of the internet. What would you tell them?

I bumped into Chris Matthews on the Acela this past week. He was on tour to promote his new book, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, I asked the veteran MSNBC anchor about his new book, and about what the president should be reading. “Should the president read your new book?” I asked. Matthews…

In the mid 1950s, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev initiated the process of “De-Stalinization.” Much of this was political: Khrushchev liberalized the Stalinist political system (without, alas, dismantling it) and freed many gulag prisoners. But a big part of De-Stalinization was purely aesthetic.…

As Oscar Wilde might have said, to lose one minister is unfortunate. To lose a second minister in the space of two weeks looks like carelessness, especially when the minister appears to have pursued secret diplomacy at odds with the positions of the Foreign Office,. To place a third minister under…

Twelve or so years ago I heard that well-known political scientist Jackie Mason on the subject of the political rhetoric of the day, specifically on that of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. In his characteristic Yiddo-staccato accent, Mason, as memory serves, said:

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On this week’s episode, the Substandard takes on Thor: Ragnarok, Sonny lectures JVL on the immorality of buying fake Lego, and Vic fears his father-in-law has hijacked his woodshop class. Plus tips for day-long drinking!

In November 2014, a female member of Brown University’s debate team had oral sex with a male colleague while they watched a movie. Eleven months later, she filed a complaint with Brown, accusing him of sexual assault.

More Election Day Fallout—The White House pushed back Wednesday on the conventional assessment that the Democratic wave election in Virginia and elsewhere reflected poorly on Donald Trump: The president’s party always faces “headwinds” in elections in the first year; Virginia was trending…

This post has been updated.

Philadelphia

The judge overseeing the federal case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Wednesday issued a gag order to prevent lawyers, defendants, and witnesses from making public statements that could prejudice the jury.

Greta Van Susteren, APP Baron? You of course remember Greta from her long tenures on CNN and Fox News and her brief one on MSNBC, right? Now, she's about to release an "APP" that she wants you to install on your phone. It's called Sorry:

Last night, Democrats scored some significant wins in Virginia’s House of Delegates. Some of the best handicappers said that Democratic control of the chamber was highly unlikely, but once every race is called, Democrats may end up taking the chamber.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, On the 85th anniversary of the "Holodomor," TWS contributor Andrew Stuttaford talks with host Eric Felten about the Soviet Union's murder, by starvation, of 4 million Ukrainians.

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As the House Ways and Means committee proceeds with the markup of its landmark tax reform proposal, one change that seems inevitable is the curtailment of the modest reforms of the myriad home ownership tax breaks contained in the original legislation. These included capping the deduction for…

House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday pushed back against criticisms of the provision repealing the adoption tax credit in the Republican bill to overhaul the tax code, saying the bill overall would benefit families. "It is a tax credit that goes to higher income individuals. Middle and low income…

Noting the universally negative coverage that he garners from the national media, Donald Trump recently declared that he loves “regional media.” At this point, he probably loves South Korean media as well.

Unless you live in Virginia’s Prince William County, you have no idea who Rich Anderson is. Anderson is a fine fellow who was a capable, moderate local politician whose career was cut short last night. And his story ought to set off warning bells to elected Republicans, at all levels, across the…

Republican Ed Gillespie didn’t just lose his race for governor in Virginia on Tuesday. The former George W. Bush aide and Washington lobbyist led the GOP ticket in what ended up being a huge rout for the party. From gubernatorial nominee Ralph Northam to the lieutenant governor and attorney general…

With a week to go before Virginia’s governor’s election, Democrats were wringing their hands.

Democrats won handily on Tuesday. They took the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, held the governorship in Virginia and scored important victories in down-ballot races. So what should election watchers take away from these results?

(This post has been updated to account for additional vote returns reported Wednesday.)

The doubts are gone now about Virginia: It really is a Democratic state. The election of Ralph Northam, a bland and ideologically fuzzy candidate, as governor is all the proof that was required.

The following is an archival version of our Election Night 2017 live blog. Posts are in reverse chronological order.

Roy Halladay, one of two pitchers in Major League Baseball history to toss a playoff no-hitter and a two-time Cy Young Award-winner, died in a plane crash Tuesday at age 40.

All Hail the Middle Man. (Or at least this one.) Meet Ryan Grant, a 28 year old who raids the clearance aisle at big box stores, and upsells items as a third party seller on Amazon. He started doing this to make some side hustle money, but then quit his job in accounting to do it full time. It…

A witness called before the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on campus anti-Semitism is drawing fire from pro-Israel groups for defending comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany and downplaying the targeting of Jewish students.

The resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister over the weekend is heightening congressional scrutiny of Hezbollah's wide-ranging influence in the country, with a top lawmaker calling on the Trump administration to reassess military assistance.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, executive editor Fred Barnes talks with host Eric Felten about today's Virginia gubernatorial election and why it has Democrats worried.

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While we’re distracted reliving last year’s election, a graver anniversary will be passing by. On Nov. 8, 1917, at 2:10 a.m., Vladimir Lenin’s soldiers stormed the Winter Palace after a two-day siege and found the men who’d fall to their coup. They stopped the clock in the former imperial dining…

Each new report of sexual harassment and assault that has come out in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein revelations—Kevin Spacey, James Toback, Brett Ratner–is followed by evidence that the predatory behavior was widely known, but that victims chose not to speak. Why? One reason is that sexual…

In week nine, many NFL head and assistant coaches were dressed in camo-stylized gear that suggested military fatigues. At attention along the sidelines were even larger than usual contingents of color guards from the services, dress-uniformed law enforcement officers, and other first responders.…

If Ed Gillespie wins tonight, it’s proof that Trumpism is triumphant in the Republican party. Gillespie may have been a longtime establishment party-insider, but he spent most of his campaign fighting on populist cultural issues. If Gillespie wins, so does Trumpism.

The word “hypocrisy,” as we’ve had occasion to remark in this space before, is among the most misused and abused terms in American politics—which, given the state of our discourse, is saying something. Generally missing in attributions of hypocrisy is the essential element of secrecy or…

What have we learned from the first day of marking up the House Republicans’ big tax reform bill? There’s a long way to go, with lots of tweaks and alterations to be made to the bill House Ways and Means chairman Kevin Brady released last week. There are plenty of factions in the House GOP…

Virginia and New Jersey—two states with a combined population of about 17 million—are voting today in the largest American elections since November 2016. Both states are choosing new governors and electing numerous state and local officials. So it’s worth asking: Who’s going to win? And what do…

Update, 11/6/17, 5:56 p.m.: Fact Check originally wrote that "at this time it is still unclear if Kelley’s conviction fell under the 1996 domestic abuse amendment to the Federal Gun Act of 1968."

In the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in Texas information was released that the shooter, Devin Patrick Kelley, received a bad conduct discharge from the U.S. Air Force that involved assault against his then-spouse and their child.

This latest micro episode of the Substandard takes a sudden detour (stay tuned for a future episode on Stranger Things 2!) when Vic discusses being spotted by a fan of the podcast. Sonny theorizes that Vic gets recognized because he genuinely likes talking with people while Sonny doesn’t. JVL takes…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, associate editor Ethan Epstein talks with host Eric Felten about the Japanese leg of the president's Asia trip.

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

In case you haven’t finished reading the 429-page House Republicans tax bill, go to pages 427 and 428 to see what it proposes to do regarding the Johnson Amendment. Passed in 1954 and named for its chief sponsor, Senator Lyndon Johnson, the amendment prohibits politicking by tax-exempt nonprofits,…

Consider this imaginary situation: A new chief of staff can organize President Trump’s harum-scarum White House operation into a crack, disciplined, and loyal team, or he can stop the president from tweeting. eThe catch is he can do one of these but not both. Which should he choose?

Detroit

Violence is endemic to American life. We know this because people are largely inured to it, at least when it happens to other people.

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Last week’s Senate hearings on Russia-linked social media accounts inciting political animosity gave us a vivid picture of one way in which the Russian government is making trouble in America. You don’t have to believe that Russian social media “bots” and “trolls” stole the election from Hillary…

There was a noticeable absence of anyone from the Trump administration on the five main Sunday talk shows. President Donald Trump himself was just two days into his marathon foreign trip to Asia, but there seemed to be no eagerness on the part of the White House or the rest of the administration to…

After a startling revelation from former Democratic National Committee interim chair Donna Brazile that the DNC had engineered the party’s primary election system in favor of then-candidate Hillary Clinton, President Donald Trump suggested that the primary was illegally stolen from Bernie Sanders.

Over the past two decades privilege theory has become the dominant theme in anti-racism education. In many ways it has become the only theme. White privilege is called upon to explain historical and current inequality, but also, crucially, as an antidote to inequality. During this time, privilege…

Election wonks don’t play favorites with polls. We love them all equally. (Translation: We do our best to judge them impartially based on their past accuracy, methodology, question wording, context and other relevant factors.) But it’s hard not to have a soft spot for surveys that offer something…

The federal adoption tax credit is a tiny sliver of federal spending—the $300 million spent annually equals less than 0.01 percent of the federal budget. But the House GOP's proposal to scrap this little tax credit as part of their overhaul of the tax code is already receiving a lot of pushback.

This week on the Weekly Standard Confab, senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about the Trump Team's difficulties weeding out the unqualified and the inept. Associate editor Ethan Epstein comes by to ask whether social media advertising is really powerful enough to have swung…

“Janet, thanks for dropping by the Oval Office. It’s a dump but I’m packing to leave for China to see my new best friend Xi Jinping, so I couldn’t get away to my New Jersey country club. He really likes me. I tricked him into letting us sell some beef in China while he is distracted by building…

Manafort, Paul Manafort. As folks comb through the Manafort papers, some interesting things are popping up. Like the fact the Manafort had three valid U.S. passports. Now, cyber security experts are hinting that Manafort's password for file-sharing sites was "bond007."

This week on the Kristol Clear Podcast, Weekly Standard editor at large Bill Kristol talks with host Eric Felten about Mueller investigation indictments, the GOP's tax bills, and the worthy World Series.

The news just broke that Bowe Bergdahl has been given a dishonorable discharge, with no jail time. People are outraged. Matthew Betley (a former Marine officer and author of a series of political action-thrillers), told me, "As a former Marine, I am literally sitting here with jaw on the…

In the midst of the current "take a knee" crisis in the NFL and the reaction of fans by lessening their support of pro football, football legend Y.A. Tittle passed away on October 8, 2017. Millions of fans remember his triumphs and gallantry, as player and as coach, especially decades ago when his…

Halloween marks the halfway juncture of the NFL regular season, and is a good time to assess who’s likely still to be suited up in January when most of the league has retired to the couch to drink boysenberry IPA and watch the playoffs. Tuesday Morning Quarterback proposes a new way to make this…

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The House Republican tax reform package met immediate resistance after it was unveiled Thursday. Some blue-state GOP reps were wary of the measure’s treatment of state and local sales taxes. Sens. Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Jeff Flake, and Bob Corker expressed their own concerns. The National…

The morning after a deadly terrorist attack in New York City, President Donald Trump tweeted “The terrorist came into our country through what is called the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery Program,’ a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based.”

Leave to one side for a moment the debate over whether Confederate memorials, many of them more than a century old, should be pulled down as an act of civic and moral hygiene. Nearly everyone can agree that the memorials themselves are artistically accomplished. Some of them are overwrought, some…

We can speak of “settled law.” Not so with biography. The verdict is always out on appeal, and the subject accountable to more litigation. Discovery yields new evidence, and additional litigants take up the case. This is especially so with Ulysses S. Grant.

The day after an immigrant from Uzbekistan murdered cyclists and pedestrians in New York, running them over with a rented pickup truck, NPR did an interview to highlight how such events make life uncomfortable for Muslims. They spoke with Hussein Rashid, a professor of religion at Columbia…

All politics aspires to the condition of entertainment. At least it does so these days, whether in London or in Washington. The British derive enjoyment from their national dramas, even when things go wrong—Dunkirk was the film of the summer. But that multi-series extravaganza known as Brexit makes…

Detroit

More than 16 years after the September 11, 2001, hijackings, America remains at war with jihadist groups around the globe. From South Asia through the heart of the Middle East and into West Africa, American forces are battling terrorist organizations that seek to control territory while threatening…

The first season of the Netflix show Stranger Things, released last year, immediately plunged its protagonists into danger. In the first episode we see 12-year-old Will Byers, one of a quartet of Dungeons & Dragons-playing nerds, waylaid by a dark shape on his way home along the wooded back roads…

Donald Trump’s feud with North Korea’s “Little Rocket Man” notwithstanding, the most likely major war on the horizon is one between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia that, thanks to years of experience and an increasingly lethal arsenal, has become part of the vanguard in Iran’s…

Robert Skidelsky, whose biography of John Maynard Keynes is unlikely ever to be surpassed, judged that his subject “never needed a Jehovah, because he had never experienced despair.” Skidelsky was speaking of religion and morals, a department where Keynes was a typical Bloomsbury hedonist. In…

Washington is nothing if not opportunistic. Take the activist group American Family Voices (please!). It is a classic D.C. sort of organization, what’s known in the trade as “astroturf,” which is to say, phony grassroots. It was among the political players this week trying to make the most of the…

George Papadopoulos was ambitious and underqualified, the kind of wannabe who fills the lower rungs of many a political campaign. This foreign policy adviser to the Donald Trump campaign would not have been even a footnote in the history of the 2016 election before he pleaded guilty to lying to the…

As a dutiful reader of the New York Times, The Scrapbook has for several years been aware of a new trend in the culinary arts. The trend: the preparation and consumption of insects.

Amanda Hess, a David Carr Fellow at the New York Times, who “writes about Internet culture for the [Times] Arts section,” recently took to its pages to tell us what she thinks of politicians who podcast. Executive summary: She doesn’t approve of them (“Politicians Are Bad at Podcasting,” Oct. 27).

Toothpaste, a 7,000-year-old product, is rarely a leading indicator. But the world’s top purveyor of the stuff—along with laundry detergent, dish soap, diapers, and other sundries—made a decision earlier this year that could portend a big shift in the advertising industry.

In the unpredictable and often baffling way that hip, new meaning can glom onto even the stuffiest of words, “curating” has emerged in recent years as a ubiquitous cultural tag for fashion, groceries, Instagram posts, Pinterest accounts, and much else. Grammy winner Usher “curated” a July 4…

I recently saw a sportswriter on social media paying tribute to a deceased editor he’d had the pleasure of working with. “The best editors are a psychologist, a friend, an idea person, a life vest,” he wrote. “Every story written is a trust fall into an editor’s arms.” I don’t doubt this sentiment…

The Berkshire Museum, a venerable, century-old museum of art and history in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is making enormous changes to its dowdy displays. Two years of planning, 22 focus groups (uh-oh), and two multimillion-dollar fundraising drives have yielded a “New Vision,” described as a bold,…

On the penultimate day of the Obama administration, less than 24 hours before the president would vacate the White House, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a press release meant to put to rest what had been a pesky issue for his office. “Closing the Book on Bin Laden:…

On October 30, special prosecutor Robert Mueller indicted President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and deputy chairman Rick Gates on 12 charges, including money laundering, false statements, and conspiracy against the United States, related to their work with Ukrainian…

The verdict in the corruption trial of Democratic senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey may come as early as this week. If Menendez is convicted of a felony, Democrats face big trouble.

Henry Kissinger aptly characterized two centuries of Russian foreign policy in his 2001 book Does America Need a Foreign Policy? “Throughout its history, with all its ups and downs,” he wrote, “Russia has conducted a persistent, patient, and skillful diplomacy: with Prussia and Austria against the…

My first contact with Leon Wieseltier was by letter. The year was 1977. Written on Balliol College, Oxford, letterhead stationery, the letter informed me that I was a force for superior culture in America, one of the few contemporary intellectuals worthy of respect, and through my writing the all…

We don't use the word “lie” with abandon in these pages. It’s used far too often in public life, to the point at which nearly every statement someone disagrees with is characterized as a “lie.” The L-word is tightly regulated in parliamentary bodies—in Congress, for example—and rightly so. Once you…

In 1971, when Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the aim was to protect the animals from “capture, branding, harassment, or death.” The law hailed wild horses as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.”

President Donald Trump on Thursday officially nominated Jerome Powell to replace Janet Yellen as chair of the Federal Reserve.

The biggest scandal that nobody is talking about has nothing to do with the Donald Trump White House or the connection between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Russia dossier. It involves New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat, who stands accused by the federal government of bribery,…

Republicans finally released a full working draft of their mammoth tax reform plan on Thursday. The 400-page Tax Cuts and Jobs Act doesn’t deliver the full Christmas list of tax priorities the White House requested in April, but it’s still a massive reorganization of the tax code that includes huge…

No matter what happened Wednesday night, this was a World Series for the ages.

There are many winners and losers amid the current political turmoil. Among the losers is the publishing industry. Indeed, The New Republic would like to know, Is Trump Ruining Book Sales? They posit that given the attention the administration demands with its many entertaining twists and turns,…

My first contact with Leon Wieseltier was by letter. The year was 1977. Written on Balliol College, Oxford, letterhead stationery, the letter informed me that I was a force for superior culture in America, one of the few contemporary intellectuals worthy of respect, and through my writing the all…

This is the first in a weekly series in which we’ll ask someone what they think the president should be reading. This week I spoke with New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2013 and the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the…

On her Sunday show, MSNBC host Joy Reid claimed that Hillary Clinton did not sit on the panel that approved the Uranium One deal.

“How will [insert bizarre news events from the past week] change Trump’s approval rating?”

On November 2, 1917—a hundred years ago this week—the British government sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, declaring its “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and promising Britain’s support in “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

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On this week’s 50th episode, the Substandard realizes there’s not much left to talk about. And yet: Sonny hates Suburbicon and JVL wonders when George Clooney will stop making movies. Vic operates a bandsaw (woodshop update!) and “Gene” reveals his top 10 candies.

Baseball is not obligated to resemble your imagination.

November 2 marks the centennial of Britain’s Balfour Declaration, the first international recognition of a Jewish homeland. The Declaration was enshrined in the Covenant of the League of Nations in 1922, and effectively reaffirmed by a United Nations vote in 1947. The Declaration was impelled…

Vice President Mike Pence made a relatively quiet visit to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday. According to the White House schedule, the visit consisted a series of briefings with CIA officials, but Pence also delivered prepared remarks to agents and employees there.

A mailer sent out by the Democrat party of Virginia depicts Republican candidate Ed Gillespie alongside President Donald Trump with the torch-bearing white supremacists from the rally in Charlottesville pictured below them.

The World Series of Poker has been a fixture on ESPN since the 1980s. But has its long-running presence on cable’s flagship sports network been the result of an egregious programming mistake all along? On the one hand, the word “entertainment” is officially part of the media behemoth’s name. Yet if…

Airport conspiracy. One of Harvey Weinstein's accusers, actress Rose McGowan, was recently served with an arrest warrant for cocaine posession. McGowan was earlier locked out of her Twitter account related to her allegations, saying: "TWITTER HAS SUSPENDED ME. THERE ARE POWERFUL FORCES AT WORK. BE…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, deputy managing editor Kelly Jane Torrance talks with host Eric Felten about Tuesday's terrorist attack in New York.

During a rare appearance before Congress Wednesday, a high-ranking North Korean defector told lawmakers that the U.S. should focus on shaping the flow of information into North Korea and urging China not to repatriate defectors.

President Trump proposed axing Obamacare’s individual mandate in a tax reform bill late Wednesday morning, to help offset the cost of reducing rates. To meet this year’s budget, an overhaul cannot increase the deficit by more than a projected $1.5 trillion over the next decade, and Republican…

Jimmy Didear was backed into a corner, with an elevator behind him, a glass partition to his left, and a wall to his right. Directly in front of him — almost in his face — was a VA police officer. He was asking questions, lots of them, about Jimmy and his service dog, Max. Not getting the answers…

Over at the Long War Journal, Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio have the first analysis of the massive trove of documents, files, and images which were recovered at Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, during the raid in which bin Laden was killed.

News broke Monday that the FBI is investigating what appears to be a suspect deal between Puerto Rico’s state-owned power company, Prepa, and a small Montana-based company called Whitefish Energy Holdings LLC. Under the terms of the $300 million contract, Whitefish was to assist in the rebuilding…

Nobody tell the media-critic-in-chief, but the New York Times seems to be nowhere near “failing.”

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Wednesday was supposed to be a big day in Washington for Republicans still searching for a big legislative accomplishment for Donald Trump’s first year in the White House. GOP leaders in the House of Representatives had planned to release their legislation Wednesday, which the White House is saying…