320 articles
At this point, the evidence is irrefutable: The Obama administration got Iran wrong. So did the international foreign-policy establishment. So did the New York Times and nearly every major center-left media outlet in the United States and Europe.
The Trump administration stumbled a bit out of the gate with its response to the ongoing anti-government protests in Iran, but quickly recovered with strong expressions of support for peaceful protesters and condemnation of the Iranian regime. After a day of silence on Friday, a State Department…
The Marriage of Figaro debuted in Vienna in 1786. The audience was so enthusiastic that, after just two performances, Emperor Joseph II ordered posters put up in the theater warning the public against too many encores, “to prevent the excessive duration of operas.” Mozart directed a second…
Few goods reflect a culture’s welfare, tastes, and very zeitgeist like food. Black-and-white images of hungry Londoners gripping loaves of bread define our perception of England in the mid-1800s. (They gripped Dickens’s, at least.) In times of decadence, spoiled Americans order an appetizer of peas…
We are living in the age of the retread. From Beauty and the Beast to Baywatch, 2017 saw a Hollywood bereft of ideas and artistic courage rehashing—er, sorry, “rebooting”—long-since retired films and franchises.
As we prepare for 2018—which absolutely, positively, has to be better than 2017—we’ve followed the example of the great Chris Wallace and asked the TWS staff for predictions for next year along four vectors: politics, sports, entertainment, and foreign policy.
Second Thoughts: London’s Metropolitan Police Service, aka Scotland Yard because its original entrance was located on Great Scotland Yard, is re-considering two rules that seem to have had consequences that could easily have been foreseen.
For most of November and December, an unusual modern art exhibition down from New Haven didn’t seem to be getting its due notice. At least whenever I returned to these beautifully installed, dark back galleries of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the rooms holding Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the…
As we prepare for 2018—which absolutely, positively, has to be better than 2017—we’ve followed the example of the great Chris Wallace and asked the TWS staff for predictions for next year along four vectors: politics, sports, entertainment, and foreign policy.
In 2017, the bar for what must be deemed politically incorrect, culturally appropriative, or just plain inappropriate was set to a new low, so low that only insects could limbo their way beneath it. What was determined to be bad in 2017? Oh, just the Rocky Horror Picture Show, nearly all Halloween…
After the Trump administration announced it would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, almost every news report I read contained some version of the phrase “upending decades of U.S. policy.” The night before the announcement, on December 5, the AFP News Agency tweeted: “#BREAKING President…
Special counsel Robert Mueller may be the most well-known figure in the special counsel's office (SCO), but the attorneys Mueller has assembled for his investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russian government during the 2016 election are a prosecutorial dream team. The SCO…
It certainly stands to reason that the news most likely to unite a nation divided against itself would win so little notice in a year like 2017. Maybe we just don’t want to overcome our differences in fearsome awe of the intergalactic Other, OK? The popular appetite for otherworldly updates is…
As we prepare for 2018—which absolutely, positively, has to be better than 2017—we’ve followed the example of the great Chris Wallace and asked the TWS staff for predictions for next year along four vectors: politics, sports, entertainment, and foreign policy.
Because this year’s schedule meant football on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, TMQ didn’t watch any. But how can you miss me when I won’t go away? My holiday gift to readers is a column-length expansion of Tuesday Morning Quarterback’s A Cosmic Thought item.
As we prepare for 2018—which absolutely, positively, has to be better than 2017—we’ve followed the example of the great Chris Wallace and asked TWS staff for predictions for the coming year along four vectors: politics, sports, entertainment, and foreign policy.
While you sift through all the end of the year Best Books/Movies/Moments lists, they can present a daunting task. You had high ambitions about how much reading you would get done throughout the year and set an over optimistic Goodreads challenge. Now you have mere days to meet a yearlong goal, and…
Everyone had a good laugh last week at the expense of Matthew Petersen, chairman or commissioner at the Federal Election Commission since 2008, who had been nominated by President Trump to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In a televised hearing before the Senate…
Basketball is “Indiana’s Game,” says the slogan of the state’s NBA franchise, the Pacers. It’s not Hoosier imagery of burnished hoops nailed to barn doors, the scent of popcorn inside a gym, keeping warm in winter with the exhalations of 5,000 spectators under the same rafters. It’s two of those…
‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the land, pundits are trying to figure out where the voters stand—now that Republicans have passed their tax bill, Santa Trump’s gift to his adoring fans.
Are you a bitcoin billionaire? After today, probably not (too soon?), but Remy has another instant classic over at ReasonTV.
This week on the Kristol Clear podcast, editor-at-large Bill Kristol makes the case for the people who mattered most in 2017.
Well, it's not every day that Guitar World has an eye-opening political report, but here we are. In a normal year, it would be shocking enough to learn the Pentagon had a secret multimillion dollar program to investigate UFOs. But since it's still 2017, the least “normal year” in recent memory…
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The movie The Post arrives at a perfect cultural moment. As women today forcefully assert their presence, Katharine Graham is finally getting the spotlight she has always deserved. Notably, her glaring omission from All the President’s Men has now been rectified.
Among the many reasons to give the book Scalia Speaks for Christmas are its collected speeches on religion. And of these speeches, my favorite is “Being Different,” which the justice gave in 1992 to the Judicial Prayer Breakfast Group, an informal gathering of judicial officers in the Washington,…
From time to time I’m forced to confront the ugly little corollary to my heart-leaping, car-singing, year-round love of Christmas music. Forced usually by Muzak, and more times than ought to be strictly necessary by enthusiastic choirs at midnight mass, I admit that there are Christmas songs that I…
When President Trump and Congress come back to Washington in January, will infrastructure be first on the to-do list? My new piece for the magazine looks at the White House’s plans for building new roads and bridges. Here’s an excerpt:
Hollywood these days is investing more and more resources into rebooting old franchises. And not just in movies. Last week, a new blue-ribbon committee to investigate and eliminate sexual harassment in Hollywood announced that its chairwoman would be Anita Hill.
This tax calculator is the most useful tool I've found online to estimate how the new tax law passed by the Republican Congress and awaiting the president's signature will affect U.S. taxpayers.
For better or worse (mostly worse), Donald Trump was 2016’s person of the year. For better or worse (almost entirely for the better), 2017’s person of the year has to be Publius.
The deadly derailment of an Amtrak train near Tacoma, Wash., last week prompted a tweet from Donald Trump. The accident, the president wrote, “shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in the Middle East while our…
As 2017 goes the way of the Titanic, it’s time to survey the lexical flotsam and jetsam bobbing in its wake. Which arcana drifted to the surface this year, much to our puzzlement? Which new coinages made it to the life rafts and can expect to keep afloat? Which flared brightly and then fizzled,…
We all know the phrase “killing them with kindness.” But is there now such a thing as “suing them with kindness”? Yes, if you happen to be the legal team of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, arguably the most successful pop musician of the past two decades.
Shocked by Donald Trump’s election, Democrats adopted a strategy of resistance that’s simple and blunt: Anything Trump is for, they’re against. It’s turned out to be one of the least successful strategies a political party has ever pursued. Yet Democrats have stuck to it.
For two hours on December 19, Paul Ryan loved his job.
Hans Keilson was not quite 23 years old when, in December 1932, he came home from his hospital job to news from his mother. “Someone named Loerke called,” she said. “He called to congratulate us. He’s going to recommend your novel for publication.” The call had been from the poet Oskar Loerke, on…
The other day a friend told me that my name came up at the funeral of someone I didn’t remotely know. I told her, this friend, that I assumed that the person who brought it up was doubtless the minister, priest, or rabbi officiating at the funeral. She said it was the minister. I added that I knew…
The unexpected risks of lives spent online.
I met Chris Gibson early in his first congressional race, at a campaign breakfast my family hosted at our house in upstate New York in April 2010. The sun was out that morning but winter was still in the air, as it often is there at that time of year. The fields and orchards of the Hudson River…
When a fire at an electrical substation knocked out power for half a day at the Atlanta airport recently, airlines canceled more than 1,400 flights and thousands of passengers were stranded. Some sat in the airport terminal in the dark, while others waited on planes out on the tarmac for hours.
Pope Francis has told Catholic media that his annual World Communications Day speech, watched by tens of millions around the world, will be dedicated to addressing “fake news.” Journalists are “fundamental” to democratic society, said the pope, and in doing their job “shouldn’t fall into the ‘sins…
There are plenty of people working to make the world a better place. Doctors vaccinate children in Africa. Researchers hunt cures for cancer.
For those willing to take it seriously, the question of Trump-ian national security and foreign policy has always been the extent to which the disruptive if not incendiary rhetoric of Donald Trump, the man, would be matched by a Trump administration effort to remake U.S. policy in accordance with…
Back in the 1990s, when I was a student at Cambridge, I met Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret. A party had been arranged in her honor by the historian J. H. Plumb. There was jazz and dancing; the champagne flowed. Her Royal Highness drifted around, making excruciatingly banal conversation…
Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot.
On December 18, a Twitter user with a large following tweeted out a conspiracy theory: The charges against Senator Al Franken, that he had groped numerous women over several years, were “likely a Roger Stone / FOX set up job.” Three days later, the user added a sensational twist: “I didn’t accuse…
On the morning of December 12, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson took the stage at the Dean Acheson Auditorium to conduct a year-end town-hall meeting with his anxious and largely skeptical State Department staff. The event was keenly anticipated and the venue packed. No one in attendance—not even…
From time to time I’m forced to confront the ugly little corollary to my heart-leaping, car-singing, year-round love of Christmas music. Forced usually by Muzak, and more times than ought to be strictly necessary by enthusiastic choirs at midnight mass, I admit that there are Christmas songs that I…
The Obama administration will be remembered for a number of disgraces in foreign affairs, prominent among them its terrible deal with Iran and its dithering over the war in Syria. Deserving of a place on that list is America’s acquiescence in Russia’s attack on Ukraine, to which the Trump…
Earlier this month, the Department of Education released the latest figures on high school graduation: After rising every year for five years, the national rate hit an all-time high of 84 percent in 2016. Good news, surely.
On December 21, Ambassador Nikki Haley delivered the remarks below to the United Nations General Assembly. The resolution then before the U.N. chastised the United States for its decision on December 6 to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and demanded the rescission of that policy. After…
Sometimes The Scrapbook thinks that the D.C. city government exists solely so that Congress won’t be the most incompetent political entity in Washington. We’re no strangers to writing about the effects of terrible regulations, and we really have to give D.C. credit for cooking up this one: The city…
Is it perverse to find ghost stories relaxing, even restful? Compared with the grim realities of the news and the appalling horrors of the last hundred years, even such outstanding classics as M. R. James’s “Count Magnus,” Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar,” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener”…
Fun times in Richmond! As regular readers are aware, yesterday Chris Deaton reported on the Virginia House of Delegates race that was ultimately decided by one vote. Or was it? Republican David Yancey went into the recount leading by 10 votes over Democrat Shelly Simonds. But then seemingly lost by…
If you are a fan of true-crime TV shows, you know that sometimes we don’t know why people do what they do.
The U.N. General Assembly voted Thursday on a resolution that rebukes the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, calling it “null and void,” with 128 votes in favor, 9 against, and 35 abstentions.
Congressional Republicans are calling for answers on the Obama administration's reported efforts to derail an initiative that tracked Hezbollah’s international web of criminal activities, efforts that former officials said were fueled in large part out of a desire to secure the 2015 nuclear deal…
Women are more likely to have been sexually assaulted by the age of 44 if they didn’t go to college, according to a new study from the University of Michigan. The study, spearheaded by sociology professor and researcher William Axinn, found that the risk of “experiencing forced intercourse” is more…
It should go without saying that America is a Christian nation. It was founded as such and you could fairly say that there would not be an America today if America had not been Christian from the start. Go back and look at the Founders—today’s secularists wouldn’t believe some of the stuff George…
For better and worse (mostly worse), Donald Trump was undoubtedly 2016’s person of the year. For better or worse (almost entirely for the better), 2017’s person of the year has to be Publius.
There are good arguments and bad arguments, valid arguments and invalid arguments. And then, in another category, there are sadistic arguments. Unfortunately, we’ve witnessed a few of those this week on the subject of tax reform.
The Trump administration has given the green-light for the commercial sale of some lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine, a move that lawmakers and experts hailed as a sharp reversal from Obama-era policies. But some also hope the decision is an intermediary to a bigger step: sending defensive…
The staff of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and contributors weigh in on the most pressing holiday question: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?
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On this holiday micro episode, the Substandard discusses A Christmas Carol (apparently based on a book). Which version is your favorite? Who's the best Scrooge? And could the best version not even be called A Christmas Carol? Listeners' note: The Substandard is off next week so we encourage you to…
We didn’t think congressional Republicans could pass a major tax bill without creating something worse than the status quo. The party’s ideological confusion and fractiousness, its thin majority in the Senate, the president’s penchant for distracting tweets: We assumed the worst. And yet the tax…
Correction, 12/21/2017: The piece originally said that "If you have children under the age of seventeen, while you’re getting an additional $1,000 per child, you’re losing their personal exemption, which was worth $4,050 per child. (So you’re still short by $2,050, per child.)" It has been amended…
It was one of those too-rare instances when a lot of clicking and digital pulling-on-threads and serendipitous stumbling-on-facts actually resulted in something other than another hour lost down the internet rabbit hole.
It was a joyous celebration on the White House lawn Wednesday afternoon, and deservedly so. Republicans in Congress passed their tax cut bill, their biggest legislative achievement all year, amid some difficult circumstances—particularly their little-room-for-dissent Senate majority. Donald Trump…
The Peruvian parliament will vote today on whether Peru’s president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, has a “permanent moral incapacity,” and is unfit to hold office. Before the vote, he will have 60 minutes to defend himself. If found “morally incapable,” Kuczynski could be removed from office as early as…
Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about the passage of the GOP tax bill.
Senate Republicans announced Wednesday afternoon that they would not attach measures providing additional funding to Obamacare in a year-end spending bill to keep the government open.
The Empire is good. If you're an Amazon Prime subscriber, do watch this video confirming Jonathan Last's 2002 opus.
Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot.
North Korea isn’t much of an early adopter of technology. Compared to its neighbors, the Hermit Kingdom is the tech laggard of Asia. China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have all been technology powerhouses for decades, while nighttime satellite images of North Korea still show the country as a…
The Trump administration is sanctioning five high-profile individuals under the Magnitsky Act, the Treasury Department announced Wednesday, a move that a top Kremlin critic says is likely to rile Russia.
Think you have heard the last of the Republican tax plan that now seems certain to become law? Think again.
Surprise! North Korea has rejected Rex Tillerson’s request for unconditional talks with the United States.
Since Europeans have taken to professing amazement and horror at the doings of our president, it seems appropriate to tell then what amazes us about their doings.
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For progressives and members of the resistance determined to find evidence of fascism, the story was too good to disbelieve. A report in the Washington Post last weekend claimed that “the Trump administration has informed multiple divisions within the Department of Health and Human Services [HHS]…
A procedural hurdle in the U.S. Senate means the House of Representatives will return on Wednesday to vote on a slightly modified version of the tax bill it passed Tuesday. After House speaker Paul Ryan gleefully gaveled the vote, but before the Senate parliamentarian determined three provisions…
Congress is on pace to pass tax reform. Polling shows that Republicans support it, and, well, Democrats don’t. In the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Affordable Care Act was similarly passed along partisan lines.
It may well be impossible ever to make a film adaptation of The Great Gatsby that can successfully live up to the full majesty of the novel. Hollywood has tried it five times, each with disappointing results despite impressive casts including Robert Redford and, most recently, Leo DiCaprio. The…
Pending certification on Wednesday, a recount of a Virginia House of Delegates race has resulted in a one-vote win for the Democratic candidate, turning what was once ca 66-34 Republican majority into a 50-50 split.
Shame worked in Alabama. That's what Tom Nichols argues over at the Washington Post:
This post had been updated.
Today on the WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast, senior writer Tony Mecia talks with host Eric Felten about the House vote on the tax bill.
On this special year-end episode, the Substandard reviews (criticizes), dissects (tears limb from limb), and discusses (goes off on) Star Wars: The Last Jedi. JVL shares his thoughts on missed payoffs. Sonny tries to explain astral projection. Vic wonders why Snoke is wearing a gold lamé tunic.…
As Republicans prepare to celebrate their tax reform victory, a potential disaster lurks right around the corner.
Ukraine is living through its bloodiest year in the conflict on its eastern border since it began in 2014, the Trump administration’s envoy for the crisis said Tuesday.
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Santa hasn’t even begun to pack his sleigh and already an NFL head coach, two general managers, and three coordinators have been shown the door, along with numerous head coaches and athletic directors cashiered at Power Five football programs. Plus an NFL owner just agreed to give himself the boot…
Voting on the final Republican tax bill begins Tuesday, and a pledge Monday afternoon from Maine senator Susan Collins that she would support it all but sealed the deal—she’s the 50th vote in the Senate, and Vice President Mike Pence, if needed, can provide vote number 51.
Chilean voters on Sunday stepped back from a precipice. In a runoff election pitting former president Sebastian Piñera against Senator Alejandro Guiller, sanity prevailed, albeit by a slightly anorectic margin of 54 to 46. Piñera election to a non-consecutive second term was a roller coaster ride.…
Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins said Monday afternoon that she will vote for the final version of the Republican tax bill, likely guaranteeing that it will pass the upper chamber this week.
How will tax reform impact you? It hasn't passed just yet, but it just might! The New York Times has a basic calculator worth checking out. And Maxim Lott has one that's a little more advanced. Neither are perfect, but worth examining to get a broad sense of how the tax reform bill might benefit or…
Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about the president's national security speech.
In its early, scrappy days, Twitter captured the hearts of Americans with a seductive promise: famous celebrities tweet, you can tweet back at them, and if you’re lucky, they might read your tweet. Such interactions seemed to offer a peek behind the curtain into the world of Hollywood spangle. We…
The Obama administration hobbled a covert initiative that tracked Hezbollah’s web of criminal activities, allowing millions of dollars to fall into the hands of the Iran-backed militia, according to a Politico report. Efforts to stymie the initiative, former officials told Politico, were fueled in…
“Another entry from the authoritarian handbook,” says David Axelrod. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes thinks it’s a “hunt” for “ideological subversives.” The public is financing “lies” to “eviscerate environmental protections,” according to Robert Reich.
Last week, in a bit of viral marketing genius, Netflix tweeted this:
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The Tax Foundation on Monday said the final GOP tax bill would increase the national debt by $448 billion over the next decade, far less than the estimated $1.5 trillion in lost tax revenues under the bill.
President Donald Trump will deliver remarks Monday afternoon on his new national security strategy, a comprehensive set of priorities, challenges, and proposed solutions required by law of every administration since that of Ronald Reagan. Appropriately, Trump will deliver his Monday speech at the…
Americans really don’t care about a “war on Christmas” anymore.
President Trump told reporters Sunday evening that he is not considering firing special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation into Russian election meddling has been a constant irritant to the White House. At the same time, however, Trump and his allies are stepping up their campaign to…
This week on the Confab, senior editor Andrew Ferguson talks with host Eric Felten about the impact on journalism and on the culture more broadly of Rolling Stone magazine.
Chris McDaniel, a state legislator, is leaning toward challenging Sen. Roger Wicker next year in Mississippi in the Republican primary, saying the GOP’s stunning loss of a Senate seat this week in a special election in neighboring Alabama hasn’t discouraged him from running.
Nearly half a century ago, when I was a preschooler in Soviet-era Moscow, two thick magazines appeared in our home. They had plain, pale-tan covers, but I could tell they were quite special to my parents. In those magazines’ pages was a riveting story—what I could understand from my precocious…
In December 1943, Winston Churchill contracted pneumonia on a visit to North Africa and found himself banned from work and laid up in bed. While convalescing, he asked his daughter Sarah to read him Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It proved just the tonic. “What calm lives they had, those…
Joe Hagan has written what promises to be the standard biography of Jann Wenner—standard, because it’s hard to imagine anyone working up the energy to take another stab at it. Fifty years ago, at the age of 21, Wenner founded Rolling Stone magazine, and he’s been editor in chief ever since. Thanks…
The second season of the Netflix show The Crown, released on December 8, is compellingly watchable television, a luscious treat for any recovering Downton Abbey addict or sedulous follower of the British royal family. The series is also an intelligent consideration of some crucial years of…
If you’re ever looking for a hearty chuckle, the Nation never fails to deliver. It fashions itself as a “progressive” magazine—if your notion of progress is reviving Marxist nostrums of yesteryear.
Seeking a gift for the American who has everything? (And don’t so many of us.) Let me suggest two of my favorite books published in 2017: Carl Cannon’s On This Date: From the Pilgrims to Today, Discovering America One Day at a Time or the late Antonin Scalia’s Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law,…
In France, all right-thinking people know instinctively what the pensée unique is—the socially acceptable view on any subject that ensures a Parisian won’t get axed from the better dinner parties and weekends in Normandy. The Democratic party, which remains a more coherent concatenation than the…
Editor at large Bill Kristol talks with host Eric Felten about the fallout from Tuesday's defeat of GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election.
What to watch tonight. If you're looking for something new and interesting to put on tonight, check out Errol Morris's Wormwood tonight on Netflix. It looks fantastic. The Times gave it a positive review, saying:
Virginia Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott has been accused of sexual harassment by a woman who served in his office.
Latkes, jelly doughnuts, and chocolate coins filled the White House last week for the president’s annual Hanukkah Party. But this Hanukkah was different from all previous Hanukkahs.
Donald Trump’s Friday morning appearances were an amusing reminder of a central presidential incongruity: He loves and supports law enforcement, except the ones trying to enforce the law on him.
In a March 2016 speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, Donald Trump declared that if he became president, he would “move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” His choice of phrase—“eternal capital”—perhaps bears some…
Winning isn’t everything, nor is it the only thing for Democrats in special elections this year. Political observers had built up Tuesday’s Alabama Senate vote as yet another put-up-or-shut-up moment for Washington’s minority party, suggesting that a loss by Doug Jones there would be another…
For the last five weeks, most of the political world has been (rightly) focused on the wild race for the Alabama Senate seat that l Jeff Sessions vacated earlier this year to become attorney general. But other key races didn’t stop while Democratic senator-elect Doug Jones was beating…
Thérèse Dreaming, by the Polish-French painter Balthus, is undeniably creepy. Creepy enough to launch, in this day and age, an online petition demanding it either be removed from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, or that “context” be added to the display. The museum abstained from any action,…
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Roy Moore’s defeat in Alabama has taught the Republican party a number of things about the current political environment: (1) That no state is impregnable, no matter how red. (2) That there is, at least for now, a limit to what Republican voters are willing to forgive in a bad candidate. (3) That…
Could we be seeing some voluntary turnover at the White House come New Year? I explore this question in a piece for the new issue of the magazine. Here’s a preview:
Frank Bruni had an interesting column the other day in the New York Times. Naturally, it was about Donald Trump, and naturally, it registered disapproval. But the point was more psychiatric than political: Entitled “Donald Trump Could Really Use a Friend,” it assembled a host of testimonials to…
If there’s one modern pricing phenomenon The Scrapbook loathes, it’s the add-on surcharge—a deceptive little proviso in the consumer/service-provider compact whereby the latter essentially says to the former, “We’re going to fleece you, but not tell you by how much until later.” There’s nothing…
In the wake of Democrat Doug Jones’s surprise win over Republican Roy Moore in the Alabama special election to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate, pundits and prognosticators were scrambling to make sense of the new political landscape. The verdict was almost all bad for the Republican party.
Washington was surprised to learn that Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser for strategy, will be leaving her post early in the new year. Powell, one of the few veterans of the George W. Bush administration to take a senior role under Trump, had been something of a rock of normalcy in…
Despite the best efforts of the president and the Republican National Committee, voters in Alabama didn’t elect a man credibly accused of sexual predation to the U.S. Senate.
The propulsively entertaining but problematic new movie I, Tonya reminds us that it’s been nearly a quarter-century since the figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the back of the knee by a baton-wielding goon. The attack was the outcome of an insane white-trash conspiracy to give Kerrigan’s…
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker recently announced that he would continue pushing for rules that would require individuals to complete a drug test when applying for food stamps. Instead of free groceries, able-bodied adults with no children who test positive for drugs would be pointed toward rehab,…
Every four years we elect a president. And every four years someone emits a squeak of protest that the method we use for electing presidents under the Constitution—the Electoral College—is unfair, undemocratic, antiquated, or unpopular and should therefore be eliminated. Most of the time, this is…
The occasion of Murray Kempton’s centenary—he was born December 16, 1917—has attracted little attention. As a columnist for the New York Post and later Newsday he wrote more about New York than Washington or national politics, but one had a right to expect a biography or maybe a few essays or a…
Very few congressional Republicans wanted Roy Moore to win. They knew, for one thing, that Democrats were prepared to link them to him for at least the next three years. Rather than make it clear that Moore had no place in the GOP, however, many referred blithely to “the will of the people” and the…
The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is currently engaged in a legal battle with the city’s Metro system. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has declined to run Christmas ads from the church. The ad design is fairly subtle in its suggestion of the Nativity—an outline of shepherds…
Every Sunday evening, the press office at the Environmental Protection Agency receives emails from the New York Times and Politico asking for EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s public schedule for the coming week. The press office ignores the emails.
Covering the Trump presidency has not always been the media’s finest hour, but even grading on that curve, the month of December has brought astonishing screwups. Professor and venerable political observer Walter Russell Mead tweeted on December 8, “I remember Watergate pretty well, and I don’t…
For a Republican to lose the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions one year after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Alabama by 28 points, everything had to break just right for the Democrat. And it did. Turnout was high in heavily African-American Democratic counties. It was low in rural and…
On May 23, the Wisconsin Department of Justice (WisDOJ) received a call from the state’s ethics board. An employee rummaging around in the basement of the building had found a filing cabinet full of material from the now-defunct “John Doe” investigations into the state’s Republican governor, Scott…
Fred Barnes always told me that the two most boring words in the English language were “entitlement reform.” Well, “net neutrality” is probably second on the list.
#Adulting is hard! CNN has an unintentionally funny look at 26-year-old "new" adults who are having trouble leaving the nest and finding health insurance.
The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 along party lines Thursday to reverse the Obama-era internet regulations known as “net neutrality,” arguing over dire Democratic warnings that the change would help consumers and promote competition among internet providers.
Nikki Haley on Thursday presented what she described as undeniable evidence that Iran is supplying arms to militants in Yemen and charged that Tehran is fueling conflict in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria—activities that she said fly in the face of United Nations resolutions.
The second season of the Netflix show The Crown, released on December 8, is compellingly watchable television, a luscious treat for any recovering Downton Abbey addict or sedulous follower of the British royal family. The series is also an intelligent consideration of some crucial years of…
Reviews and News:
In this seminal episode, the Substandard discusses Darkest Hour. Is it better than Dunkirk (take a wild guess)? JVL explains to Sonny how watches work. Sonny recalls his Chris Farley-like interview with Gary Oldman. Vic's Elf on the Shelf turns into Annabelle. Plus JVL on the real Churchill and the…
Very few Congressional Republicans wanted Roy Moore to win. They knew, for one thing, that Democrats were prepared to link them to him for at least the next two years. Rather than make it clear that Moore had no place in the GOP, however, many referred blithely to “the will of the people” and the…
Before Rod Rosenstein began his testimony before the House Judiciary committee on Wednesday, a Justice Department source told me the deputy attorney general would be “calm and very well versed in the law.” Since Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself, Rosenstein has overseen the FBI’s…
For many California families, the accelerating housing crisis affects not just their budget, but their way of life. Every year over the past decade, the state estimates, 100,000 fewer units of housing have been built than were needed to keep up with demand. The result has been spiraling housing…
Ranking the best national chains. Tom Sietsema, the Washington Post's food critic, spent some time at D.C.-area chain restaurants. His rankings are as critical as they are for D.C.'s finest food purveyors. Biggest loser? Buffalo Wild Wings. Biggest winner? Cracker Barrel. Sonny Bunch's favorite,…
Republican lawmakers and officials are feeling a moment of relief after the defeat of embattled GOP candidate Roy Moore in Alabama’s special election Tuesday.
A neighbor has parked his classic Jaguar in front of my apartment building for the last two months. Around it are a new BMW, a Mercedes, and two Audis.
Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post took time recently to accuse Republicans, specifically Representative Barbara Comstock of Virginia and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina of sounding “altogether too complacent, too passive and too resigned” to Roy Moore’s failed U.S. Senate candidacy. Moore,…
It was a close call, but China finally edged out Congress for the Hypocrite of the Year Award. Congress grabbed the lead when Republicans, who bemoaned the wreckage President Obama did to the nation’s credit by adding some $7 trillion to $9 trillion to our national debt, decided that adding to our…
Today, after years of Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule, it is difficult to imagine that two decades ago one of Russia’s major television channels could regularly lampoon the country’s leaders in a puppet show (titled Puppets, or Kukly in Russian). In late November, that show’s head…
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Birmingham, Alabama
Last night, a Democratic candidate won a Senate seat in deep red Alabama.
Very few songs have joined the Pop Christmas Canon in the last forty years with only two at present being considered for inclusion, in my estimation: The Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" and Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne." Both differ from most of the other songs in the oeuvre by the fact that…
Doug Jones’s victory in Tuesday’s special Senate election in Alabama is an “embarrassment,” as one Washington Republican told me. Embarrassing because it’s Alabama, one of the most GOP-friendly states in the country. Embarrassing because the party’s candidate, Roy Moore, was perhaps one of the only…
In the game of electoral addition, Republicans find themselves calculating a doubtful future in California. A dizzying carousel of unfavorable statistics reminds the national party that the Golden State, once reliably red, is now hostile political territory. Decades of changing demographics,…
The New York Times suggested there would be two lessons from a Roy Moore victory: “It would illustrate the enduring limitations of Democrats in the South and suggest that the tug of partisanship is a forbiddingly powerful force.”
THE WEEKLY STANDARD live-blogged the Alabama Senate special election between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones on Tuesday night. Moore campaigned under the shadow of credible allegations of sexual misconduct when he was in his 30s, though by the end he had the support of both President…
How we got here with Roy Moore. On Twitter, Alex Burns has a (sad!) look back at how the GOP arrived at today's predicament with Roy Moore. It's a choose your own adventure. Remember those? Except with this one, Republicans always lose.
Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, White House Watch columnist Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about the President's latest problematic tweet.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that no matter who wins Tuesday’s Senate election in Alabama, Republican Luther Strange will remain in the seat until the end of the session this year.
In this latest micro episode, the Substandard gets ready to watch Star Wars: The Last Jedi. JVL hasn’t been this excited since Revenge of the Sith. Vic wonders if Luke will drive a Nissan. Sonny has already seen it—and what he reveals will leave you stunned. Set for stun!
There’s a specter haunting Donald Trump’s presidency: the specter of powerlessness.
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Last week, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell inked a five-year contract that is expected to pay him up to about $200 million. This agreement has a little implication and a big implication.
On October 26, the National Archives was supposed to release the last of its remaining records on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The date was chiseled in a 1992 statute. Around 88 percent of the records had already been made public, but there were still 3,200 documents that…
Tonight, Alabamians will cast their ballots in what’s probably the most consequential election of the year for national politics. Republican Roy Moore and Democratic candidate Doug Jones are in a tight race for the Senate seat currently held by Luther Strange (who was appointed to replace Attorney…
Last week, President Donald Trump openly acknowledged what everybody knows: that Jerusalem in the capital of Israel. He promised that the United States would build an embassy there and thus defied America’s foreign policy establishment, the European Union, the British foreign secretary, the French…
It’s Election Day in Alabama, and what might have been a sleepy affair—replacing long-time senator Jeff Sessions with another conservative Republican—has been anything but. The wildly divergent polls show everything from a relatively modest victory for the Republican, former state supreme court…
How does an accused sex offender go about getting elected to public office? With Alabama’s special Senate election taking place Tuesday, Republican Roy Moore has chosen to pursue a bold strategy: putting on the full armor of Trump and vanishing almost entirely from the voters’ view.
Members of the Republican National Committee are responding to the news that Joyce Simmons, committeewoman for Nebraska, resigned her post Monday in response to the RNC renewing its support for Roy Moore.
The end of free speech? Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason has an excellent cover story about how "the left eats its own and the right shows its true colors." Here's my favorite part:
Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer John McCormack talks with host Eric Felten about the closing days of Tuesday's Alabama special election for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions.
The new Star Wars movie is here. Or almost here. I don’t really know and I really don’t care. Do you?
Birmingham, Alabama
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A Fox News poll released on Monday shows Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones ahead of Republican Roy Moore by 10 points. That’s different from what other polls are showing—the RealClearPolitics average has Moore up by 2.5 points, with polls ranging from Fox’s 10-point lead for Jones to a 9-point…
The Republican National Committee reversed its decision to withdraw financial support from Roy Moore’s Senate campaign last week, in the wake of President Trump’s endorsement and Moore’s gains in the polls.
Die Hard is a Christmas movie. We know this because the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland—honestly, one of the great cultural institutions of the Washington area—screens it as part of its Holiday Classics series each December. (Though I would argue that Die Hard II…
If we’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that the Republican party, even when handed full control of the American government, is so riven and otherwise dysfunctional that it simply can’t govern. The one consolation Republicans have is that voters seem to intuitively understand that while…
A job shuffle that would put Senator Tom Cotton in charge of the CIA is one of the worst ideas to come out of the Trump administration.
Here’s the president’s message to Alabama voters ahead of Tuesday’s special election for the U.S. Senate: “Get out and vote for Roy Moore.” That’s what Donald Trump said Friday in Pensacola, just across the state line in Florida and well within the Mobile media market.
On inauguration eve 1991, in Rhode Island, the departing governor, Edward DiPrete, had a morsel of news for the incoming governor, Bruce Sundlun.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors filed evidence late Friday afternoon to demonstrate that Paul Manafort violated a court-mandated gag order by contributing to an op-ed defending himself in a Ukrainian newspaper.
There was a time in the not-too distant past when the government’s monthly labor report was the most eagerly anticipated and influential of all economic data, and could move markets. Unemployment and a rising number of workers dropping out of the labor market meant the Great Recession had not run…
In the wake of President Trump’s official endorsement of Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore, the Republican National Committee chose to resume funding Moore’s campaign for the U.S. Senate, a move that state-level members of the RNC greeted with a range of sanguinity.
Newman's Own's future depends on what happens in tax reform. I've always had a special place in my heart for the late actor Paul Newman, whose childhood home was three streets over from mine. His charity/business, however, is at risk of being put out of business if a provision isn't included in the…
In an interview that aired Friday with ABC News, Beverly Young Nelson, the woman who alleged that Roy Moore sexually assaulted her at age 16, admitted that she added a note underneath the Roy Moore inscription in her high school yearbook. Nelson provided the yearbook in a press conference last…
This week on the Kristol Clear Podcast, filling in for Bill Kristol is Michael Warren, who talks with host Eric Felten about the multi-vehicle smash-up that was this week in Washington.
On Friday, Fox News claimed that one of Roy Moore’s accusers forged some of a yearbook inscription which had previously been used to substantiate Moore’s connection with the alleged victim.
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Athens, Alabama
As special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators continue to bore into President Trump’s inner circle, Republicans have intensified their attempts to discredit the investigators as partisan hacks. As news began to break last weekend that former national security advisor Michael Flynn had struck a…
A beautiful simplicity seems to unfold when Ronnie O’Sullivan constructs a century break, potting 100 points’ worth of balls on a single visit to a snooker table. No one ever described snooker as an easy game, but when O’Sullivan begins to flow, he makes each moment look natural. Obvious, almost.…
President Trump on December 6 ended all hope of Middle East peace, recklessly encouraged terrorism, and ruined U.S. relations with all Arab countries.
We might as well go ahead and admit it: There are moments when it seems as though The Scrapbook and the New York Times inhabit different universes. This happens with increasing frequency—and not just when we confront those blast-furnace editorials or the rank opinionizing in its news columns. The…
In May, when deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” we welcomed the news. So did the president. “As I…
Pollsters, pundits, and public intellectuals identify declining levels of trust in America’s civic institutions as a threat to social and political order. Public opinion data bear out that trust has indeed waned in recent decades. The great majority of citizens in the early 1960s broadly viewed the…
Of the many things that a young fellow, barely knee-high to a grasshopper, might aspire to be when he grows up, one that doesn’t often come to mind is “grifter.” Yet in my early 20s, intoxicated by the demimonde allure of pulp novels by Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, I was reminded of a time…
American progressives, we often have occasion to reflect, don’t seem altogether happy. The reasons for their unhappiness are many—they live in a center-right country that often refuses to heed their counsel—but surely the chief reason for their grief is this: that in the progressive mindset,…
Back in 2013, in my last weeks as a high school senior, with plenty of free time on my hands, I wrote a survival guide for future students. This tome, full of wit and wisdom, remains unpublished, safely stored on a laptop buried somewhere in my closet. Which is just as well. I now realize Tina Fey…
It's long been publicly understood that the International Olympic Committee is a den of jobbery and payoffs. Which only raises the question, just how corrupt does an Olympic team have to be to get the IOC to sit in judgment of them?
The Scrapbook has been impressed, during the past several months, by some things President Trump has not done.
There's a song I’ve started to play on the piano. It’s called “Money,” a fairly straightforward arrangement by Burt Bacharach. The only problem is Liza Minnelli’s eyes. They keep staring back at me from the opposite page.
One day in October, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton approached Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor to pitch the majority leader an idea: In the tax reform bill, Republicans should repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate, the tax penalty most Americans lacking federally approved health insurance must pay.…
On December 5, the Republican National Committee formalized its support for Roy Moore by sending $170,000 to aid his campaign in the race’s final week. The decision came days after President Donald Trump announced his endorsement of Moore. The money is a pittance in the world of modern campaign…
Darkest Hour is a movie about the first three weeks of Winston Churchill’s premiership in May 1940, and it is balderdash. In a razor-sharp National Review critique, Kyle Smith takes out after the movie for shrinking Churchill “down to a more manageable size” by portraying him as undergoing an…
There are plenty of understandable objections to the tax bill sailing through Congress. Some people think it will increase the deficit. Others cry foul that it is being rushed through without sufficient deliberation. And there are those who like big government and frankly oppose the idea of letting…
As we celebrate this Christmas season (or this “holiday,” for Christ-haters), I don’t wish to be a killjoy to the world. But reflecting on the year gone by, it’s hard not to notice that we have lost a few of our favorite things: Tom Petty, political moderation, our dignity.
As special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI circle ever closer to the Oval Office, Washington is convulsed by speculation that the president may take drastic action to cut short the investigation. Donald Trump has escalated his Twitter attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department, and there is a…
Congressman Trent Franks announced his resignation from Congress Thursday evening, saying he was unwilling to undergo an Ethics Committee investigation into conversations about surrogacy he had in recent years with two female staffers.
As we celebrate this Christmas season (or this “holiday,” for Christ-haters), I don’t wish to be a killjoy to the world. But reflecting on the year gone by, it’s hard not to notice that we have lost a few of our favorite things: Tom Petty, political moderation, our dignity.
Gaming TripAdvisor. Surely, you've used sites like Yelp!, TripAdvisor, or others when visiting strange news places. What if one of the top-rated restaurants there was a complete fake? That's what VICE UK's Oobah Butler, a clever prankster, did with his backyard shed:
The chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee said Thursday that the committee will never support Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate who has been accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls.
Sen. Al Franken took a quick glance up at a jam-packed Senate press gallery as he entered the chamber Thursday, preparing to ask Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan, who was presiding over the chamber, to allow him to make the speech that would end his political career.
Minnesota Sen. Al Franken announced Thursday morning that he would resign from the Senate amid allegations that he forcibly kissed or groped several different women. Franken’s resignation would trigger a special election for the seat in the 2018 midterms and allow Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton to…
After a week spent limping along under the weight of accusations of sexual misconduct, Sen. Al Franken announced his resignation from the Senate Thursday morning.
The adjectives “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” (but, curiously, never Orwellesque or Kafkian) are some of the most overused and abused in the English language. They’re oft employed, one suspects, by those with hazy memories of paging through the Cliffs Notes of 1984 or The Hunger Artist a couple of…
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On this disaster of an episode, the Substandard discusses The Disaster Artist and cult classics. From Kentucky Fried Movie to Office Space, what counts and what doesn’t? And speaking of episodes, one of the hosts suffers a major breakdown that leaves the studio in chaos. Plus tips on how to handle…
Bill Cosby. Bill O’Reilly. Harvey Weinstein. Kevin Spacey. Charlie Rose. Matt Lauer. John Conyers. What drives these men to engage in such terrible behavior? The Book of Genesis may offer us some answers.
About three in ten Republicans want someone other than Donald Trump to be their party’s presidential nominee in 2020 according to the Public Religion Research Institute. It’s easy to see how that number could make some Trump supporters nervous and some anti-Trump Republicans hopeful. If a third of…
Less than a week ago, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser was pleading guilty to lying to the FBI and cooperating with Robert Mueller’s investigation, but things might be looking up for the president. Both houses of Congress have now passed a version of his signature tax reform plan (or…
It’s become a joke around Washington that every week is “infrastructure week” at the White House, a policy focus derailed usually within the first few hours of Monday by news developments (or President Trump’s tweets).
Maybe he retires, but doubt the doubters—Eli Manning is a great player and person. Editor Stephen F. Hayes and Gregg Easterbrook debate Eli Manning's legacy. Be sure to read this week's TMQ for more.
Sir, we have to land over there so I can use the bathroom. A non-stop flight from New York to Seattle had to divert to Billings, Montana because its toilets were full, the Billings Gazette reports:
Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, deputy managing editor Kelly Jane Torrance talks with host Eric Felten about politicians felled—and one not felled—by sex abuse scandals in recent days.
President Trump’s decision to “officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel” is a high-risk statement that acknowledges “the obvious.” His intent to move the US embassy from the beachfront at Tel Aviv to Jerusalem restates that obvious without necessarily raising the risk. By granting…
I’m not sure who coined the term “pervnado” to describe the torrential whirlwind of sexual harassment allegations roiling the already morally unhinged mirror worlds of show business, media, and politics. (Although, from the looks of it, we can thank headline writers at the New York Post for the…
President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced plans to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, describing the move as a “recognition of reality.”
This year’s strangest political story may be Elizabeth Warren’s attempted coup of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.
Les Whitten died over the weekend. Whitten was an investigative reporter who worked with famed columnist Jack Anderson, author of Washington’s Merry-Go-Round column. (Fox’s Brit Hume is another notable reporter who worked for Anderson.) However, Whitten was reasonably well-known in his own right.…
What happened to Trumpism? Sure, we still get the oh-so-Trumpy tweets, but many of the issues that Donald Trump ran on have been cast to the wayside in the 11 months (it hasn’t even been a year yet!?) of his presidency.
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Former Trump administration adviser Steve Bannon opined that Mitt Romney “hid behind” his religion instead of serving in the Vietnam War during a rally Tuesday night for Senate candidate Roy Moore.
Two years ago, when the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry, Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the court stressed that recognition of such of right would affect no one but the same-sex couples who marry. “Indeed,” Kennedy and his four colleagues stressed in…
Next Tuesday, we’ll finally know whether Republican Roy Moore or Democrat Doug Jones will become the next Senator from Alabama.
One day after President Trump formally endorsed Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate and accused sexual predator, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered this explanation for the move: the allegations against Moore are troubling, but the prospect of electing a Democrat is more…
Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore's account of when he began dating his wife Kayla would place the start of their courtship before her divorce from her first husband, according to court documents.
Birmingham, Ala.
The White House is currently insisting that President Donald Trump did not know in January that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russia, a felony for which he has pleaded guilty. But the administration’s own public statements, taken together,…
A bill that would pressure the Palestinian Authority to stop financially rewarding acts of terror against Israelis and Americans easily passed the House of Representatives Tuesday.
In the months since Robert Mueller began sniffing around the White House for evidence of electoral misbehavior, President Donald Trump has watched warily to see whether the special counsel would sift through his personal finances. In July, he told the New York Times such an action would amount to…
Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Tony Mecia joins host Eric Felten to talk about what's next in the tax reform saga.
The Lake Erie salt mine 1,700 feet beneath the lake is a modern marvel. Growing up in Cleveland, I had heard about this mine, but this was pre-YouTube and the modern internet that can showcase it in all its glory. Check out the video and the interview, it's pretty neat.
When it comes to Syria, Israel has a message and the government hopes a wider audience is listening. It was delivered in the form of two strikes inside Syria over the last week. By itself, an Israeli strike inside Syria is nothing extraordinary. The Israelis have long broadcasted their red lines in…
Democratic lawmakers are at odds about whether the president should declare Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a recognition he is expected to make Wednesday.
In this latest micro episode of the Substandard, Vic and JVL discuss the life and times of Jim Nabors and reminisce about classic ’60s reruns and spinoffs. Sonny spent his youth watching ESPN and playing NES.
This is a day of mourning for Americans who believe that our politics are broken, who yearn to reach across the aisle, stop the partisan bickering, and eradicate the influence of money, Big Business, the military, corporate media, parochial interests, anti-tax activists, the NRA, the AMA, the CIA,…
The holiday shopping season is on. American shoppers spent $655.8 billion during the 2016 holiday season and that figure could climb to $682 billion this year.
After President Donald Trump’s announced Tuesday that he was reducing the land size of two national monuments, Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear store, replaced its homepage with a statement claiming that Trump had illegally stolen that land.
Congressman John Conyers of Michigan announced Tuesday he would retire from Congress effective immediately, making him the first sitting congressman to resign amid the wave of sexual misconduct allegations that has swamped the nation in recent months.
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“Sure you won two Super Bowls, but what have you done for us lately?”New Jersey Giants to Eli Manning, benchwarmer.
A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, as the poet had it, but a flailing inconsistency isn’t a particularly good look either.
Any Republican tax bill is bound to be hotly criticized. That’s politics and the mainstream media. We were unprepared, however, for the outpouring of hysterical denunciation we’ve witnessed over the last several days as the GOP tax plan comes closer to final passage.
On the Monday following Thanksgiving, the principals of President Trump’s National Security Council met to discuss what the administration would do about recognizing the capital of the state of Israel. A federal law requires the U.S. embassy to be moved to Jerusalem unless waived by the president…
President Donald Trump on Monday announced his administration would reduce two vast national monuments in Utah, arguing that the monuments amounted to a federal land grab by past Democratic presidents.
Neil Young dings Apple, releases high quality archive for free. Neil Young is not happy with Apple, whom he accuses of watering down the quality of digital music. Fortunately, he has made his archive available, offering high quality master copies of his work via streaming:…
Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about the fallout from the Michael Flynn plea deal.
President Donald Trump was briefed that Michael Flynn had likely misled the FBI in late January, weeks before the former national security advisor was fired for lying about the extent of his contacts with a Russian diplomat, the president’s lawyer said Sunday.
During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump admired President Obama’s willingness to go around Congress and make law on his own authority. So it was reasonable to think that Trump, too, might become a unilateralist. But that isn’t happening.
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Fiction finds itself in a curious position in 2017, when the favored form of disparagement is to accuse opponents of peddling fake news. But fake news is a nearly perfect characterization of a good novel or short story, and fiction writers have proudly refined its production to an extent that makes…
President Donald Trump on Monday told reporters he feels “very badly” for his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, days after Flynn pled guilty to obstruction of justice for lying to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team about his interactions with Russian officials before President…
Donald Trump endorsed Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore on Monday morning with a pair of messages on the president’s Twitter account about political prudence.
Over the past couple of years, a succession of American tech executives have decamped to Beijing to pander to the dictatorial leadership there. Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, has shown a penchant for flattering the ruling caste in China; he has repeatedly visited the country that his company,…
On Sunday afternoon, the College Football Playoff Selection Committee awarded the sport’s fourth and final playoff spot to Alabama over Ohio State. It’s clearly the most controversial pick of the committee’s four-year tenure. One immediate question is this: What four-team playoff field would the…
When this fall’s rampant #MeToo movement rippled overseas, it found a far superior French hashtag—#BalanceTonPorc, meaning “squeal on your pig”—and an already pending piece of legislation.
Here’s what most folks are overlooking on the issue of Michael Flynn’s guilty plea on Friday: Mueller’s exchange for Flynn’s cooperation may not primarily concern what the former national security adviser admitted to lying to the FBI about. Perhaps Mueller is looking to pin down President Trump or…
No Kristol Clear today
This week on the Confab, executive editor Fred Barnes talks about the procedural battles in the Senate over judicial nominations. Then senior editor Andrew Ferguson discusses the New York Times ruckus over normalizing Nazis.
The death of 83-year-old Charles Manson reminds us of two things, among others: It is usually a fallacy to believe that life in America in the recent past was somehow better than it is at present. And second, punishment for the crime of murder is not always the same as justice.
Henagar, Alabama
It is the worst of times, it is the best of times. The worst of times if you follow American politics. All is turmoil.
Mike Flynn's RNC speech didn't age well! Vic Berger helps us remember a simpler time, when rhetoric was rhetoric and you didn't have to worry about the pesky special counsel.
This week on the Kristol Clear Podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol discusses Michael Flynn's plea agreement with special counsel Robert Mueller.
Despite everything we know, or think we know, about the private life and opinions of Judge Roy Moore, I have no doubt that he will win the Alabama special election on December 12, and succeed to Attorney General Jefferson Sessions's old Senate seat.
Former national security adviser Mike Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to knowingly making false statements to the FBI, making him the senior most Trump administration official to be charged in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s wide-ranging probe.
President Trump has a growing Palestinian problem. Without steadfast U.S. insistence on Palestinian accountability and the supremacy of American law, it is about to get a whole lot worse for Israel and America.
The other day my pals at the Federalist ran a piece by Tully Borland, an associate professor of philosophy at Ouachita Baptist University, titled “Why Alabamans Should Vote for Roy Moore.” Mind you, that’s not “Why an Alabaman Might Vote for Moore”—this was not an explainer, or a reported piece.…
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Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., would be more likable were it not for the fact they’re craven opportunists.
Because it looks increasingly and unfortunately likely that we’re going to have to hear the phrase “Senator Roy Moore” before too long, journalists have moved on to the next question: Will the U.S. Senate make good on its threats, and perhaps refuse to seat the twice-booted judge, who has been…
It’s not always easy to sympathize with reporters for the New York Times, because so many of them act like . . . how to put it? . . . like reporters for the New York Times. But there are exceptions, and to their list we may now add the name of Richard Fausset. He writes (especially well) from…
Discussions to remove Rex Tillerson from the State Department and replace him with CIA director Mike Pompeo have been going on for months, even if State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert says White House chief of staff John Kelly is telling State the “rumors are not true.”
Some historians talk about a “reading revolution” in the middle of the 18th century, during which literacy rates rose and people came increasingly to prefer reading silently over reading aloud—mainly novels, a relatively new literary form. In The Social Life of Books, Abigail Williams, a professor…
When the nationalistic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party swept into the national legislature with 13 percent of the vote in the fall, the American op-ed industry boomed but Germans mostly took it in stride. The country has had populist parties since World War II, even extremist ones. They have…
"If we’re going to make the investments we need,” remarked President-elect Barack Obama in 2008, “we must also be willing to shed the spending we don’t. . . . We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness or exist solely because…
In Umberto Eco’s medieval whodunit The Name of the Rose, the narrator, a Benedictine novice, comes to realize that “books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.” Armed with this newfound awareness, he sees the monastery library in another light—not as a quiet, cloistered retreat…
"The defendant is guilty as sin,” said federal prosecutor Julieanne Himelstein. “And,” she added, “he is a stone-cold terrorist.”
Ever since Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960, book buyers have been treated to the quadrennial offerings of presidential-campaign tell-alls. Many of these offer very little beyond cheap political thrills—White’s 1960 book reads like JFK fan fiction—but the genre is not without…
Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has a reputation for being fair-minded. Al Franken (D-Minn.) is a Democratic member of the committee who balked at the nomination of a Minnesota judge to a federal appeals court.
Breaking news from the international environment beat: China last month launched a new electric-powered cargo ship from the southern port city of Guangzhou, according to the international business publication Quartz.
As a rule, I favor a strict separation between music and politics. Politics need not worm its way into every nook and cranny. Of course, sometimes composers like to impose politics on their music. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies declared that a string quartet of his was about the Iraq war: a depiction of…
Stephanie Green writes on the flowers and fame of Bunny Mellon, Jackie Kennedy’s confidante.
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was relieved of his duties in June 1781 as court organist to Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, the 25-year-old had every reason to believe he would achieve great success on his own. Conditions in Salzburg, the city of his birth, had become unbearable, owing in…
Thanksgiving morning, owners of a hipster Colorado coffeehouse chain, ink! Coffee, awoke to find themselves at the center of public controversy. One of their advertisements, a sandwich-board positioned on the sidewalk in front of one of their Denver locations, read “Happily gentrifying the…
This should have been a terrific week for Donald Trump. The Senate, even with its slim and quarrelsome majority, appears ready to pass the major tax overhaul the president has been pushing for. An attempt by a rogue federal agency to forestall the president’s appointment of a new director was…
It was Big Trash Day in my neighborhood. Notices had gone out that the city’s garbage trucks would pick up practically anything you put on the curb. Busted televisions, cracked porcelain toilets, cheap plastic outdoor furniture, and all your abandoned aspirations too—piles of books you never read…
In 1991, George Weigel arrived in Prague to research The Final Revolution, a book that told the story of Pope John Paul II’s influence on the collapse of communism. That book would show that Weigel understood John Paul from the inside, as the pope thought he needed to be understood, and would pave…
Donald Trump made a lot of promises when campaigning for president. To name just a few, he was going to build a wall along the border with Mexico (and have Mexico pay for it), end Obamacare, rebuild the nation’s bridges and airports, and deep-six the nuclear deal with Iran. He also promised to…
"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ” This was Sigmund Freud’s famous lament to Marie Bonaparte almost a century ago. It’s not clear that decades’…
Using the phony claim they are fighting voter fraud, racist Republicans have contrived voter ID laws designed to make it hard for members of Democrat-friendly ethnic groups to cast their ballots. Or so the liberal narrative goes.
The Scrapbook stopped caring about the Grammys ages ago. Like all entertainment awards, they’re not much a measure of talent. Long ago they devolved into the self-satisfied celebration of a self-satisfied industry. And in no way is the music biz more pleased with itself than in its politics, which…
About two-thirds into Laura Dassow Walls’s extraordinary new biography of Henry David Thoreau, she relates an anecdote that tells us more about the man than many a scholarly tome. On one of his many walks in or around Concord, Mass., a passerby accosted him: “Halloo, Thoreau, and don’t you ever…
When legendary editor Judith Jones returned stateside in the early 1950s after years of living in France, she was dismayed to find that there was little joy in American cooking:
Friends of The Weekly Standard are so prolific that it can be easy to lose track of all their projects—so we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a few recent books by some of our cherished and most frequent contributors.
At this very moment, I trust, a novelist somewhere is trying to weave Russia’s election-year meddling into the stuff of fiction. (I wish Keith Thomson would take it on.) Meanwhile, one of the most interesting literary stories of the last decade has gone mostly unnoticed—and this too, so it happens,…
We’re all taught in school about the scientific method—an idealized version of how researchers think up hypotheses, conduct experiments, study the evidence, and confirm or disconfirm their original hypotheses. In Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes…