January 2018

Texas is the Democratic white whale. Every election cycle, some enterprising statewide (or national) Democratic candidate tries to flip the state by winning the governorship, a senate seat, or the state’s electoral college votes. And recently, they haven’t had much success. Texas has elected…

The end of video? When I was younger, I recall a photoshop the Sidney (Ohio) Daily News did on the front page of Tonya Harding becoming a wrestler. The story was about the wonders of digital photo editing technology, and was essentially the first "fake news" I ever saw. Now, such technology is…

Every time I’ve taken a bus ride (i.e. Greyhound) I’ve felt the need to write about the experience. Today, we’re taking a bus from Sonoyta to Santa Ana, an even smaller town farther south. ...

The FBI on Wednesday expressed “grave concerns” about the public release of a Republican-drafted memo that reportedly contains allegations of FBI partisanship and surveillance abuses, a rare display of public displeasure from the usually taciturn agency.

House Oversight Committee chairman Trey Gowdy announced Wednesday that he will not be seeking re-election and will instead be returning to work in the justice system.

Brenda Fitzgerald, whom President Trump tapped as CDC director last year, announced her resignation Wednesday, one day after it was reported she had purchased stock in a tobacco company one month into her leadership last year.

Republican members of Congress travelling to an annual retreat at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia on Wednesday morning were involved in a train wreck with a garbage truck, a House Republican aide told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Every week we ask interesting people what they think President Trump should read. In the past, we've talked with Harvey Mansfield and Ben Shapiro, among others. This week we spoke with Charles J. Sykes, best-selling author of How the Right Lost Its Mind.

Lawmakers and experts are hoping for the best after the Treasury Department released what was seen as an underwhelming, congressionally-required public report on Russian oligarchs and senior political figures late Monday night.

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Eleven months ago—before Donald Trump had to accept any of the disappointments of lawmaking—the new president stood before a joint session of Congress and called for, among other things, the passage of a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.

The State of the Union address is perfect for President Donald Trump. His showmanship and sense of dramatic timing; the endless applause and moving stories, lovingly told; the pleasure he takes in enunciating truths no one could disagree with—it’s almost as if the whole cockamamie tradition were…

President Trump delivered a relatively straightforward State of the Union address with few surprises and almost none of the glibness he often exhibits in public appearances. Trump began with an optimistic tone to tout the recently passed tax cuts, offered platitudes on trade and infrastructure, and…

I was flying cross-country Tuesday night and didn’t see Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address. The instant reviews were predictably mixed. Trump supporters, even reluctant ones, seemed to like it. His critics hated it. 

It’s time for the January 2018 Hypocrite of the Month awards. The nominees are . . .

During his first state of the union address Tuesday night, President Donald Trump repeatedly called for bipartisanship, painted hopeful images, and told inspiring stories about guests in the crowd. But a year’s worth of partisan battles cut through the president’s optimistic rhetoric.

President Trump’s second annual address to Congress passed Tuesday night without him mentioning a sole word about entitlement spending, continuing a deviation from the economically conservative Congress he inherited.

Every State of the Union address experiences lengthy interruptions for applause, which is watched closely. Are only Republicans cheering? What about the Democrats? Did Chuck Schumer just roll his eyes?

Of the few minutes of his first State of the Union address that Donald Trump spent on foreign policy, he devoted the most time to North Korea.

Anyone who hoped that Donald Trump might diverge from his predecessors' penchant for a laundry list of promises must be disappointed.

Donald Trump began his first State of the Union Speech calling out to the honored guests sitting with first lady Melania Trump and then touting the tax cuts passed by the GOP in late December:

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Major League Baseball will expand its experiment of starting extra innings in certain games with a runner at second base.

It's about the infrastructure, stupid! Tonight's State of the Union address is rumored to be heavy on the infrastructure spending rhetoric. At Reason, Christian Britschgi observes "The point of infrastructure spending is to build infrastructure, not create jobs." Amen.

Can anyone think of a better way for the Grammys’ to commemorate the #MeToo movement than to have a failed politician with a long history of protecting alleged sexual harassers read from a book that includes a slimy accusation against our female U.N. ambassador? Because the show organizers…

Republicans and Democrats are at odds over the Trump administration's decision Monday to hold off on new sanctions that target Russia’s intelligence and defense sectors.

Last night we slept in the desert. We dug a pit in the sand for a fire, and desecrated the surrounding brush for wood. This was probably against the rules, it being a national park and all, and we each feel terribly guilty. But the hot dogs were delicious, wrapped in tortillas with refried beans…

The Word of God Online has some fake news it would like to share.

Roll over Ronald Reagan. When President Trump delivers his first State of the Union address, he will do so as the most conservative president of all time. At least, that’s what the Heritage Foundation seems to think.

In this week’s magazine’s editorial, “Night Falls on Venezuela,” we took 1,200 words or so to describe the desperate state into which the country has fallen. To sum up: The people of Venezuela are starving to death. Bands of hungry looters roam the streets of its cities, the currency is worthless,…

Blow out the candles and cut the cake! On February 4 Jerome Powell will turn 65. The day before, he’ll replace Janet Yellen as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the first non-economist to hold the title in 40 years.

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You may not believe this, but in the United States there are more weeks without football than with it. How can that be!

Tuesday night is Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address, the annual event where the president speaks to a joint session of Congress with lofty rhetoric about where the country is and where he wants it to go. The Constitution doesn’t require the chief executive to deliver the State of the…

The state of our union is divided and anxious.

Steve Bannon, the nationalist agitator who served as Donald Trump’s chief political strategist for most of 2017, invited observers last year to compare Trump’s inaugural address with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speech at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos a few days earlier.…

Years ago, during the long-forgotten administration of George H.W. Bush, I looked in on a friend of mine who had been “tasked”— the military jargon was just then creeping into civilian life – with writing the president’s State of the Union address.

The House Intelligence Committee on Monday voted along party lines to publicly release a secret GOP-drafted memo on alleged surveillance abuses targeting the Trump campaign, according to the panel’s top Democrat.

If there were ever an occasion for President Trump to create some buzz for his health care agenda in 2018, it was on Monday morning, in a case of man-meets-moment. Trump introduced new Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar before the Cabinet official’s swearing-in ceremony, one day before…

The end of the Chief Wahoo era. Given my lifelong Cleveland Indians fandom, Chief Wahoo has long been part of my sports wardrobe. The New York Times reports that Wahoo's reign as team logo ends in 2019, the year Cleveland will again host the MLB All-Star Game. The trademarks will still be owned by…

Amid the flurry of rumors stemming from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has faced accusations that she had an affair with Donald Trump, accusations which she has denied.

A bill to restrict abortion will come to the Senate floor for a procedural vote Monday night.

In this latest micro episode, the Substandard discusses the Australian Open and the greatness of Roger Federer. Plus JVL professes his love for the Williams sisters, more Battle of the Sexes, and the time Agassi's wig almost came off.

The House Intelligence Committee is set to meet Monday evening amid a heated a party-line battle over a secret, GOP-drafted memo that Republicans want released publicly. A committee aide told THE WEEKLY STANDARD ahead of the meeting that a vote on releasing the memo publicly is “possible.”

FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe is stepping down from his post at the FBI, NBC News first reported Monday.

Facebook users have flagged a recent article announcing new legislation that “makes it legal for atheist doctors and nurses to refuse care to religious patients.”

As I said last week, it’s pretty clear that the Eagles are now America’s Team.

The plan was to leave Puerto Penasco today and bike to Sonoyta, a border town 60 miles north. The road in between is smooth, lightly traveled, and has a generous shoulder on both sides. The only problem was the wind, which pushed directly against us and picked up speed the further we pedaled on the…

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The Trump administration is expected to provide lawmakers with a report Monday that calls out Russian president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, a document that has had Russian elites worried for months.

The Trump administration on Thursday released a framework for a compromise immigration deal to members of Congress. The plan calls for a pathway to citizenship for people brought to America illegally as children, increased spending for security on the U.S.-Mexico border, and new restrictions on…

The trial and conviction of Larry Nassar, team doctor for USA Gymnastics and osteopathic physician at Michigan State University, has exposed something rotten at the heart of an American Olympic sport.

Roger Federer, 36 years old, looked worried. After having a big lead—just three games away from winning the Australian Open—he slipped, and slipped badly. First he was tied up. Then he fell behind. Then, improbably, Marin Cilic won the fourth set.

In the late 1930s, or perhaps it was as late as 1940, my father and uncle, the screenwriters Philip and Julius Epstein, sought to join the American armed forces. The Army turned them away; it apparently considered their anti-fascism premature. That, at any rate, is family lore, and I have every…

In October 1956, shortly after being honorably discharged from the Army at age 23, Lee Edwards found himself in Paris. There he fell into the rhythms of expatriate life, smoking Gauloises, frequenting cafés, and writing fiction. It was in French newspapers that he read of the Hungarian revolt…

“How odd of God / To choose the Jews,” a scrap of verse by the English journalist William Norman Ewer, has over the years had many answering refrains. “Not odd, you Sod / The Jews chose God” is one; “What’s so Odd / His son was one” is another; and a third goes “This surely was no mere…

Not everybody likes Alsatian wine. Good. That means more of it for me. The slim, green adolescent bottles with sloping shoulders and no hips are distinguished by pollen-yellow labels, often bearing medieval-style lettering. Something happens to grapes in this region of France that makes them taste…

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Hundreds of wealthy donors and several Republican officials involved with the powerful Koch network gathered at the Renaissance Indian Wells Resort just outside of Palm Springs, California, on Saturday for an annual fundraising conference.

“You dirty son of a bitch.  .  . somebody’s got to beat you up and I hereby appoint myself.” Thus Edward Lansdale recalled addressing the CIA station chief in Saigon in the mid-1950s, when Lansdale was a CIA operative under cover of assistant air attaché at the American embassy. Whether or not his…

The story of The President and the Porn Actress (our era’s The Prince and the Showgirl) isn’t going away. The tale of pseudonyms and secret payments made through here-today-gone-tomorrow Delaware corporations has proved to be far juicier than anything so tired as an allegation that Donald Trump was…

Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22 at the age of 88, lived most of her adult life in Portland, Oregon, where she and her husband Charles—who taught French at the local university—quietly brought up their three children. I suspect that Le Guin, who herself majored in French at Radcliffe, must…

Returning from Davos, the gathering of the global elite who had never before seen fit to invite this exhibitionist television celebrity, familiar with the bankruptcy courts, to eschew Big Macs in favor of canapés for a few days, Donald Trump faces a more demanding test next Tuesday, when he…

Simona Halep, the #1 player in women’s tennis, sat on her Australian Open bench late in her semifinal match against Angelique Kerber and smiled. It wasn’t a good smile. It was a look of irony and extreme frustration. Halep’s serve had just been broken and she now trailed 6-5 in the third set, one…

The recent federal government shutdown (bringing with it colorful talking sticks, fake news, and finger-pointing festivities) that started when the parties couldn’t agree on how to include DACA protections as part of a continuing resolution, has given new life to the conversation surrounding…

The Trump administration hit 30 Russian and Ukrainian entities with sanctions Friday in an effort to pressure the Kremlin over its role in the continued violence on Ukraine’s eastern border as well as its occupation of Crimea.

When the daughter of President Trump’s pick to lead the Midwest Environmental Protection Agency introduced her mother at an all-staff meeting earlier this month, she detailed how her mom helped her beat her driver’s license test after she failed the first time.

Capping his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump on Friday declared America “open for business and competitive once again” in a speech that trumpeted the country’s economic strength under his administration.

All of the different states in Mexico have their own identity, even more so than our United States, I'm told. Today was our first full day of biking in the state of Sonora, and it's a drastic change from Baja, California. Sonora is rural, and today we passed endless fields of cotton, alfalfa, and…

I've never stuffed a note in a bottle, and tossed it into the ocean. But I seem to have done the bibliographical equivalent, and the evidence has washed up on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.

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Donald Trump very nearly had the special counsel investigating him fired, until the top White House lawyer told the president he would resign rather than give the order to the Justice Department. That’s the gist of the latest bombshell story from the New York Times, which reports President Trump…

As the technology empowering Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchains have been in the news a lot lately. Bitcoin, of course, has both roiled markets and is making world governments nervous about the possible creation of an alternative currency while simultaneously thrilling investors in…

In July 2016, Theresa May won the Tory party leadership contest, and thus became the U.K.’s prime minister, for one simple reason. There was no one else. It was less than a month after the Brexit referendum had upended Britain’s political order. The only thing her predecessor, David Cameron, was…

The Centers for Disease Control alarmed the public in early January when it announced that the topic of its next monthly public health briefing would be preparing for nuclear war. But the agency soon changed the subject to something it deemed more urgent: this season’s flu outbreak.

The once-great nation of Venezuela hardly looks like a state anymore, far less a great one. This week government forces finally caught up with Oscar Pérez—the former action-movie star and police officer who led a ragtag band of pro-democracy protesters. He and six of his confederates were killed in…

On January 22, President Trump announced the imposition of a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels and a 20 percent tariff on imported washing machines. The Trade Act of 1974 allows the president to impose duties when an imported product becomes “substantial cause of serious injury” to the…

B.D. McClay on 'Eternal Life,' the new Dara Horn novel that takes the long view of longing.

We’ve all seen parking places designated for the handicapped and for expectant mothers, but leave it to China to take that trend to a new and controversial level.

The Post is about a little-known and relatively minor incident in the annals of newspapering—how the Washington Post made itself a player in the Pentagon Papers story, the biggest scoop of 1971, after it was beaten to the punch by the New York Times. And it merges that account with a female…

Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, has always had about her the air of the schoolmarm. It didn’t surprise us that she was the person who at last discovered the secret to dealing with United States senators: treat them like kindergartners. During the government shutdown last weekend,…

That government shutdown, by the way, which stretched from midnight on the night of Friday, January 19, to sometime in the late afternoon of Monday, January 22, was more talked about than real. Some federal agencies took the day off, and here in Washington the traffic on Monday morning was easier…

The online headline in the New York Times was pretty shocking: “School Shooting in Kentucky Was Nation’s 11th of Year. It Was Jan. 23.”

The Philadelphia Eagles are headed to the Super Bowl, and while the region is rejoicing, the city’s tourism board is no doubt cringing at antics of the legendary local fans, which are best summed up by the recent headline in the New York Daily News: “Another Eagles fan arrested for punching police…

January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.

In that wonderful movie Patton, George C. Scott’s title character imagines himself in a one-on-one tank battle with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel—the winner wins the war. Donald Trump, who hates the Washington Post and therefore its owner, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, may have a similar vision of…

In the spring of 2017, the Democratic party kicked off a debate about whether pro-life Democratic candidates should be tolerated anywhere in the country. The controversy began in the middle of middle America: Bernie Sanders and Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez attended a “unity…

It is remarkable that the January 20-22 government shutdown was greeted with a collective shrug from the public. Compared to Newt Gingrich’s epic 1995-96 tussle with Bill Clinton and Ted Cruz’s showdown with Barack Obama in October 2013, this one barely registered on the national radar.

The Trump administration did not condemn Turkey last week after the country’s military began attacking Kurdish forces in northwestern Syria. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders exemplified the administration’s response: “We hear and take seriously Turkey’s legitimate security…

Santiago, Chile

In the winter of 1949, the first secretary of defense, James V. Forrestal, announced his impending retirement from office.

Back when Donald Trump was merely a small dark cloud on the horizon of American politics, many of us were already worried about the state of American conservatism. Five years ago, I suggested in these pages that Eric Hoffer’s famous observation of decades ago applied to the conservative movement.…

Many Republicans and Trump-supporting commentators have embarrassed themselves in recent weeks with their wild-eyed and absurd conspiracy theories about the “deep state.” While the insurrectionist language from some of them might please the InfoWars corner of the conservative movement, it’s deeply…

Charlie and the Tide Pod Challenge. Over at McSweeney's, there's some fine content (as usual) mocking the young kids who are sticking Tide pods in their mouths.

It’s Virginia Woolf’s 136th birthday, meaning she’s had plenty of time to finish her description of the child orbiting the lake by foot and how it brings to mind the circular nature of life. After all, the kid made it just five steps, and it was a century ago.

Last night we joined two of Davi's friends for beers at a local brewery. Both women are now full-time residents of Mexicali, but living in the border town for the sake of their engineering careers in the United States. Special SENTRI passes allow them to commute back and forth every day. We woke up…

Lawmakers working toward a bipartisan agreement to pass additional border security measures and guarantee protections for nearly 700,000 unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the United States as children are preparing for the White House to get involved in the debate, after the…

In a paper published online yesterday, scientists in China reported that they had successfully cloned macaques—a species of monkey commonly used in biomedical research. This announcement of the birth of the first cloned primates is another in a long line of “firsts” in the history of cloning,…

Special counsel Robert Mueller spent much of 2017 making quiet progress in his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but that has changed in the new year. Mueller’s team has interviewed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, will soon meet with former White House strategist Steve…

The pace of all things Trump and Russia is accelerating. Every day comes news of either campaign or administration workers having been interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, or new revelations about the content of intra-office FBI text messages—or the news that many such messages…

As House Republicans and Democrats battle over the release of a secret memo alleging surveillance abuses against the Trump campaign, Senate Republicans are not giving in to the prevailing heated rhetoric.

Before there was MERYL STREEP! there was Meryl Streep: a sensitive, subtle actor who gave terrific performances in movies like Sophie’s Choice, A Cry in the Dark, and the Bridges of Madison County. But some time around the turn of the century, it became impossible to see her name in anything but…

The basic math of the 2018 Senate elections shows a challenge for Democrats. In order to win control of the upper chamber, the party need to successfully defend all 26 of its seats up for election (some of which are in highly red states like Missouri, Indiana, North Dakota, West Virginia, and…

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On this latest episode, the Substandard tackles (so to speak!) the playoff picture. JVL soars like an eagle. Vic hates getting interrupted. Sonny recounts his basement-dwelling years. Plus a discussion of post-9/11 war movies and a review of 12 Strong.

“Breaking: Trump’s ENTIRE wall just got paid for by ONE person & you won’t believe who!”

President Trump told reporters Wednesday that he welcomed the chance to speak under oath to Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. "I'm looking forward to it, actually," Trump told reporters during an impromptu briefing in the West…

Last fall, the most talented young men in tennis gathered for a competition in Milan. There were no ranking points at stake—just money. It was a way to relax and show off your skills, and not worry about being upset. Turns out this was the perfect stage for Hyeon Chung, a 21-year-old from South…

I have fond memories of watching Jerry Lewis's annual muscular dystrophy telethon, even though, let's be frank: The event made for wretched TV, even by the standards of the 1970s. Jerry Lewis, rest his soul, would ramble interminably about the plight of people afflicted with the disease until it…

“You’re my type of guy,” President Donald Trump is reported to have told the Czech President Miloš Zeman, a fervent critic of Muslim immigration into Europe and an avowed Trump admirer, in a phone conversation held before POTUS’ inauguration. To his chagrin, however, the Czech head of state was not…

Dear Matt,

Kids these days... Don't know how to code all too well, according to a report by HackerRank. As TheNextWeb reports:

The House Intelligence Committee is now home to dueling memos over alleged surveillance abuses related to the 2016 election. Democrats on the committee have crafted their own secret document in response to a Republican-drafted memo that outlines alleged FBI misconduct against the Trump team, as…

Congress has just two weeks to come to a consensus on how to codify protections for the Dreamers—roughly 700,000 unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the United States as children—before government funding runs out February 8, or risk another shutdown scenario.

We spent an unexpectedly luxurious night in Bosques del Condor, a rustic campground in La Rumorosa (translation: "the one who tells rumors," because of the wind that blows and whispers through the canyon). When the sun goes down here the temperature plunges immediately, and we were relieved to find…

Reports emerged Monday that Vatican officials have been pressuring two Chinese Catholic bishops to resign their offices in order to be replaced with bishops favored by the Chinese government. The Vatican has not confirmed or denied the reports.

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It was one of the ironies of the George W. Bush presidency that a supposedly unlettered president should appoint to the federal government’s cultural endowments two chairmen who were the most accomplished men ever to hold their respective positions. To the National Endowment for the Arts, Bush…

A man calling himself Nicolas De-Meyer was arrested in Los Angeles last Tuesday. His crime: allegedly stealing $1.2 million worth of wine from his boss, David Solomon, president of Goldman Sachs.

The recent assault by Turkey’s military on Kurds in northwestern Syria has presented a conundrum for the administration: Turkey is our (strained) NATO ally while the Kurds have been one of America’s most important friends in the region, with Kurdish forces fighting valiantly alongside Americans in…

On Tuesday, January 22, President Donald Trump announced the imposition of a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels and a 20 percent tariffs on washing machines. Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974 allows the president to issue duties when an imported product becomes “substantial cause of…

In less than two months, the 2018 election will head straight into Trump-land: the southern suburbs of Pittsburgh. Last October, Republican Rep. Tim Murphy resigned (he was facing ethics issues regarding his treatment of employees and had encouraged his mistress to get an abortion—not a great look…

In the wake of the U.S. military’s crushing defeat of ISIS in the heart of the Middle East, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson laid out the Trump administration’s pathway forward in Syria in prepared remarks he delivered at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. He included a vision of America’s…

Two days after tweeting a link to an uplifting story in the New York Times about experimental prenatal surgery to treat a baby boy for spina bifida, Planned Parenthood of Maryland deleted the tweet. The article about the "small person who had surgery before he was even born" was a follow up on an…

You surely saw the news: At 8:07 on January 13, a quiet Saturday morning in Honolulu, Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency sent out to a million cell phones a text that read, “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

Caricature-extraordinaire Alex Jones claimed on Tuesday to have in his possession THE secret FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) memo that congressional Republicans are calling to be declassified so as to demonstrate surveillance abuses.

Uncovering the TUSD Deep State. Imagine if your local school district had a secret document. The purpose of this document is to blacklist and retaliate against employees. That's what the Arizona Daily Star's Hank Stephenson uncovered at the Tucson Unified School District.

NBC’s Lester Holt, on assignment in North Korea, is offering his viewers that most unusual of treats: a “rare look” inside the famously reclusive country. In fact, so rare was Holt’s visit to a Potemkin ski resort outside of Pyongyang—it has, after all, been visited previously only by the likes of…

In this latest micro episode, the Substandard discusses the nominees for this year's Academy Awards. Sonny thinks The Shape of Water is in great shape to win. JVL wonders if a movie that's not woke even has a shot. Vic fears that Darkest Hour and Dunkirk split votes? And where's Wonder Woman?

CIA director Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that the agency had, until a year ago, not been paying enough attention to North Korea, even as the Hermit Kingdom worked to advance its weapons capability.

A “best practice” among those who spread false information is sloshing it around with the tiniest bit of truth. Some, however, ignore this and go straight to peddling absolute falsehoods.

It’s not surprising that members of Congress would have a habit of repeating a short list of talking points, given how often they face the media and how important it is for them to stay on message. But that tendency was more apparent than usual last week during a feud over a stopgap spending…

Before biking into Tijuana, we took a tour of the San Ysidro border crossing, the busiest land crossing in the world. Two agents at Customs and Border Protection generously came into work early to show us what they do day to day. At 7 a.m. the place was already a parking lot, packed with traffic…

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So the Patriots are heading back to the Super Bowl for the 278th consecutive year. The last time New England did not make the Super Bowl, the Hapsburgs were still on thrones. Gosh is it exciting when the same team wins over and over and over!

Top House Republicans met Saturday amid mounting calls for the release of a memo about alleged surveillance abuses by federal officials, a document that Democrats describe as a partisan stunt meant to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller.

The First Amendment to the Constitution does not impose, as some believe, “a wall of separation between church and state.” That phrase comes from a letter by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to Connecticut Baptists, cited approvingly by Supreme Court decisions in 1878 and 1947.

After a two-day impasse, enough Senate Democrats agreed to pass a short-term continuing budget resolution Monday, the first step to ending a government shutdown that began early Saturday morning. The measure passed overwhelmingly, with just 18 senators, mostly Democrats, opposing. The House of…

In last year’s U.S. Open final, Madison Keys couldn’t sprint, or bend properly, or swing her racket without feeling pain. Her upper leg injury slowed her and frustrated her, and eventually left her in tears after a 6-3, 6-0 defeat against Sloane Stephens. Keys says the sadness lasted a while, for…

Time dulls the sharp edges of painful memories, but some events are so traumatic that they are burned into our psyches where they live on forever.

A short-term funding bill to end a three-day government shutdown passed the House Monday evening after getting a thumbs-up from the Senate earlier in the day.

Thrusters, go! Apollo 13 it's not, but NASA found out a way last month to fire up thrusters on the ancient Voyager spacecraft that haven't been used in 37 years. It's a neat story:

“Republicans Just Killed The Bill To Make Sure Troops Get Paid During Shutdown,” or so ran a headline from Addicting Info, flagged as potential fake news by Facebook users.

At first, it seemed like a joke. Because the name of the South Korean city where the Olympics will occur in February—Pyeongchang—sounds so much like the North Korean capital—Pyongyang—many joked that scores of spectators would accidentally turn up in North Korea expecting the Olympics, only to be…

You’ve got to feel for Robert Mueller.

The Philadelphia Eagles routed the Minnesota Vikings 38-7 in the NFC championship game on Sunday, which means they will play the despicable New England Patriots in the Super Bowl in two weeks. They are America’s team now, and you should root for them. Here’s why:

Lawmakers in the Senate reached an agreement to end the government shutdown Monday afternoon, but congressional Democrats who voted down a spending bill that would have kept the government open on Friday because it did not include a replacement for the expiring Deferred Action for Childhood…

My life is entirely in the hands of near strangers and new acquaintances. On other bike trips I’ve traveled with close friends, but this time it’s an army of mercenaries. Yesterday and today all those hired deckhands came together to push this trip out of drydock. We arrived in Tijuana early this…

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Trump negotiated toward a bargain on immigration reform that could have satisfied both parties and reduced the likelihood of a shutdown, the New York Times reported hours before government funding expired at midnight Saturday. Democrats would have…

Donald Trump and the White House have greeted the government shutdown, which has been in effect since the Senate was unable to pass a continuing budget resolution by early Saturday morning, as an opportunity to push this point: Democrats are extremists on immigration.

On January 17, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told us what she’s really up to. She was the keynote speaker at the American Enterprise Institute conference “Bush-Obama School Reform: Lessons Learned.” There she gave a tough-but-fair appraisal of the costly failed federal attempts at education…

Conservative criticisms of the modern university are as old as modern conservatism itself. And yet criticism has not led to a reformation of the university. Quite the opposite: Despite conservative complaints, our universities have continued to drift even farther away from the ideas and forms that…

Among the notable deaths of 2017, one went virtually unnoticed: that of Russian émigré writer and maverick intellectual Lev Navrozov, who passed away exactly a year ago, at the age of 88. Yet Navrozov, with whom I had a somewhat tumultuous personal acquaintance, was once a figure of some prominence…

If you’ve read any election coverage in the last 12 months, you probably know that college-educated voters don’t like President Trump. In the 2016 election, Trump made significant gains with non-college-educated white voters but lost a significant number of traditionally Republican, affluent,…

Activists who oppose abortion doubted Donald Trump when he was a candidate because he had once described himself as "very pro-choice." A year into his presidency, however, they happily point to victories he has achieved for them.

Kristol Clear #182: The Super Bowl Divides TWS!

Considering they were protesting what they call “the greatest human rights violation of our time,” the crowd that gathered on the National Mall Friday morning for the March for Life was oddly upbeat. Church and school groups who had traveled across the country to show their opposition to 45 years…

We arrived in San Diego late last night and took an Uber to the International Travelers House, our hostel accommodations for as long as we’re in the city. It’s a collection of brightly colored beach homes right in the heart of downtown San Diego, and its costing us $44 a night instead of the $209…

This week on the TMQ podcast, Gregg Easterbrook and Stephen F. Hayes preview the AFC/NFC championship games, and discuss Gregg's most recent column.

Speaking last year to Louisa Thomas, a writer for the New Yorker, Nick Kyrgios summed up his complicated life as a tennis pro: “I like going out on the practice court and training with my mates,” he said. “But I don’t know about fully engaging and giving everything to it. It’s just a game. It’s…

The New Normal. Slow growth. Persistently low inflation threatening to morph into Japanese-style deflation. Stagnant wages. Rising inequality. The American Dream converted to a nightmare. All the result of the metastasizing of the regulatory and entitlement states, say the Republicans. No, it’s the…

On the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. government shut down.

Today is the March for Life, the annual pro-life demonstration that takes place around the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. In a first, President Trump addressed the rally via satellite from the Rose Garden. (George W. Bush addressed the group over the phone.) It's worth considering Trump's…

Lawmakers in the House overwhelmingly voted down a motion to adjourn Friday morning, with just 12 hours to go until a government shutdown.

"I'm Grant Wishard, a journalist at The Weekly Standard, and I plan to bike the entire U.S. Mexico border, from Tijuana, Mexico to Brownsville, Texas, starting January 17th." Yes, you read that right. Currently I'm in JFK airport waiting for a connecting flight to San Diego International. The…

Kal Ho Naa Ho is one of the most successful Bollywood movies ever. It’s a tragic love triangle among three very attractive Indians that made good inroads outside of the Indian market due to its setting: It all takes place in New York City. A better-known international setting than, say, Mumbai or…

Every week we ask interesting people what book they think President Trump should read. In the past, we've talked with Bret Stephens, and Harvey Mansfield, among others. This week we spoke with Ben Shapiro, editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire and author of Project President: Bad Hair and Botox on the…

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About a year ago, just as Donald Trump was waiting be inaugurated, two twentieth century novels skyrocketed up the bestseller list. One was George Orwell’s 1984, which topped Amazon’s sales rankings that week. The other was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which repeated the feat two weeks…

Facebook users were skeptical of a McClatchy DC report on Thursday that the FBI was investigating whether “Russian money went to [the] NRA to help Trump.”

Donald Trump’s characteristically blunt remarks on immigration have, predictably, provoked widespread outrage from foreign governments and the media, but they raise an important issue that needs serious discussion.

The House Intelligence Committee on Thursday released an interview members had this fall with Glenn Simpson, honcho of Fusion GPS. Much of the questioning involves how, and for whom, the firm commissioned the controversial Trump “dossier” compiled for Fusion by former British spy Christopher…

Saturday is the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, so in the brand-new issue of the magazine I take a look at four lessons we can learn from Year One of the Trump presidency. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s safe to say that Donald Trump’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels will do nothing to dissuade his most ardent supporters. These are the people who eagerly accepted the notion that “grab ’em by the pussy” was “locker-room talk.” They are not dissuaded by the multiple women who have…

Five nights a week, Sunday through Thursday, from 1973 to 2012, Milton Rosenberg elevated AM radio and the cultural tone generally in Chicago. Milt Rosenberg died on January 9 at the age of 92. His two-hour talk show was nothing if not anomalous. A University of Chicago professor, his academic…

It’s not every day that a quarrel breaks out among friends over something that happened in 1858. But so it was in the second week of January when First Things published online a review from its February issue of the memoirs of Edgardo Mortara, a man born into a Jewish family in Bologna in 1851 who…

Donald Trump is historically unpopular. At the end of 2017, the three major polling aggregators—the Huffington Post Pollster, Real Clear Politics, and FiveThirtyEight—put his approval rating at 40.4, 40, and 37.9 percent respectively. According to FiveThirtyEight’s historical averages, this is the…

What the president doesn’t understand about Haiti.

There is a specter haunting American popular culture: the specter of Donald Trump.

The first year of the Trump presidency was like the election that preceded it: unpredictable, norm-shattering, and disorienting. From the “American carnage” in his inaugural address to the kerfuffle over whether he referred to countries in Africa as “s—holes” or “s—houses,” Washington and the…

We are living in an era of political panic. Some of President Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters in 2016 were motivated to overlook his shortcomings by desperate fear that our system of government was near death and only the most extreme measures could save it. A poll conducted by PRRI and…

I’m a former English professor, so I’m familiar with the jargon literary theorists often use—aporia, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and the French différance, a favorite word of the impenetrable Jacques Derrida—but in a recent book review I came upon an academic-sounding word that I had never seen…

In 1997, The Scrapbook saw a funny New York Times headline: “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.” Astonishingly, we noted, “the possibility that longer sentences and less parole might be playing a large part in that falling crime rate” had failed to penetrate the furrowed brows at…

Readers may remember Charlotte Allen’s September 12, 2016, cover story on high-speed rail in the Golden State: “Bullet Train to Nowhere: The Ultimate California Boondoggle.” Allen memorably visited “a 1,600-foot viaduct spanning the Fresno River on the rural outskirts of Madera,” which was just…

In 2016, during the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Bard was feted by dozens of books, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, performances of his plays, lectures, and a Shakespeare Day gala attended by Prince Charles himself. The London Tube map replaced the names of its…

As far as lunch deals go, Subway’s $5 footlong sandwich has been a hit with consumers. The company sees the promotion as a way to revive interest in its restaurants, which have struggled to attract diners in the last few years. In January, Subway brought the deal back for a limited time and now…

In nine days in early December, eight young people died of overdoses in Fairfax County, Va., the second-richest of the 3,007 counties in the United States. Mass events like these happen frequently and in all sorts of places. A half-dozen people died in the small Rhode Island town of Burrillville in…

The Scrapbook has deep reservations about the Trump era, but we’re only human—sometimes we indulge in a small chortle or two at the discomfiture his victory caused certain parties. For instance, we took way more pleasure than we probably should have in Politico’s interview last week with the Obama…

On January 16, the New York Times ran a lovely piece on music therapy for the elderly. Kaitlyn Kelly, a music therapist at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the Bronx, teaches residents, most of whom suffer from dementia, to write and sing their own songs.

I was surprised last week to learn that plans for the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago have run into local opposition.

Now that we have one full year of the Trump presidency in the history books, isn’t it time for Trump’s conservative critics to acknowledge his election was worth it?

It was a measure not only of his robust good health but the vitality of his public commitments that Bruce Cole’s sudden death last week came as such a shock to so many people—and that they were shocked to discover that he was 79. He seemed so much younger. Bruce had become one of the key figures in…

There are many serious and well-justified complaints against the decrepit Washington Metro system, but sometimes there’s a happy surprise.

During the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times alleged that the Trump campaign had offered to make John Kasich “the most powerful vice president in history,” through a novel division of duties: The vice president “would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.” The president,…

By any traditional standard, Israel won its 50-day war against Hamas in 2014. It incurred far fewer casualties than its Palestinian adversary. It rooted out much of the Gaza Strip’s terrorist infrastructure, including tunnels the militant group had burrowed to transport fighters into Israel. And it…

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a “reboot,” whatever that means, of a 1995 Robin Williams movie about kids magically transported inside the world of a board game. Sony Studios knew that the new Jumanji was likely to be a hit from the reaction of preview audiences, but no one expected it would…

Lawmakers in the House voted to advance a short-term spending bill Thursday night, a critical next step in keeping the government up and running before funds run out at midnight on Friday.

Does America really have only 11 main cultures? That's what a new map by Colin Woodard suggests, and it has lots of people arguing. I grew up in Yankeedom (Cleveland), went to school in the Midlands (Saint Louis), and now live in Tidewater. Naturally, Saint Louis and Cleveland are more similar to…

Update, 9:54 p.m. ET: The Senate voted overwhelmingly 97-2 to proceed on the House CR late Thursday night. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell objected to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s attempt to force a cloture vote Thursday night, pushing the final vote closer to the government shutdown deadline…

Senators agreed Thursday to reauthorize a controversial surveillance authority a day before its expiration, clearing a final hurdle on the turbulent path to the president’s desk.

President Donald Trump said during his campaign he was in favor of keeping marijuana regulation a states’ rights issue, according to a recording released Thursday by the Colorado Springs Gazette.

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In one part of the room, lawmakers and public health experts debated whether an increase in opioid abuse among Medicaid expansion states could be a direct result of Obamacare policy. In the other part by himself—a shock, I tell you—was Rand Paul.

It’s not every day that a quarrel breaks out among friends over something that happened in 1858. But so it was in the second week of January when First Things published online a review from its February issue of the memoirs of Edgardo Mortara, a man born into a Jewish family in Bologna in 1851 who…

In this latest mega-episode, the Substandard discusses the works of director Paul Thomas Anderson—JVL reveals himself to be a PTA scholar. Sonny reviews Phantom Thread. Vic reveals his favorite bathroom in D.C. JVL is writing Eagles fanfiction. And Sonny still hates coconut.

President Donald Trump split with Republicans in Congress on a key aspect of the party’s short-term government funding measure Thursday morning.

A West Wing source says the White House is “cautiously optimistic” that a government shutdown can be avoided by the Friday spending deadline. Questions remain: Can the House pass its continuing resolution (which leadership spent Wednesday whipping on) to fund the government for another month?…

In 1898, when the 42-year-old George Bernard Shaw stepped down as drama critic of London’s Saturday Review, he introduced his successor, Max Beerbohm, 26, with these words: “The younger generation is knocking at the door, and as I open it there steps sprightly in the incomparable Max.”

The 45th annual March for Life in Washington arrives on the heels of one more Pew survey about declining faith—this latest indicating that only 4-in-10 Millennials think of Christmas as a religious holiday. All of which raises a new question for those gathering on the Mall in what P.J. O’Rourke has…

Donald Trump is historically unpopular. At the end of 2017, the three major polling aggregators—the HuffPost Pollster, Real Clear Politics, and FiveThirtyEight—put his approval rating at 40.4, 40, and 37.9 percent, respectively. According to FiveThirtyEight’s historical averages, this is the worst…

Facebook users questioned the validity of multiple articles covering a movement in California that recently declared independence from the state.

On Tuesday night, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker seemed rattled. In a special election in the state’s 10th Senate district, Democrat Patty Schachtner beat Republican Adam Jarchow, taking over district that voted for Trump by 17 points in 2016. Walker responded by firing off a series of tweets that…

How China infiltrated the U.S. classroom. Over at POLITICO, our own Ethan Epstein has a good look at how China has used soft power to exert influence with American students via funding "Confucius Institutes."

After nearly six months and lots of frustration, Novak Djokovic has returned to tennis. For now. For the best he can do. And what that is? No one knows—not even him.

On Wednesday afternoon, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy offered his theory as to why aliens have not yet made contact with human civilization.

Former White House aide Sebastian Gorka vehemently denied charges from a Democratic congressman that he endorsed a Hungarian neo-Nazi political party during a congressional hearing Wednesday.

Retiring senator Arizona Jeff Flake accused President Donald Trump of reckless disregard for the truth Wednesday, saying that the White House had launched an “unrelenting daily assault on constitutionally protected free speech.”

A miracle on ice? The two Koreas have announced that they will field a joint women’s hockey team at next month’s Olympics in Pyeongchang. The two countries will march in together under one flag, though will only complete as a team in women’s hockey. Still, it will be the first time the Koreas have…

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Republicans are scrambling to pass a short-term spending bill to keep the government up and running, just 72 hours before a shutdown deadline.

Senate leadership won just enough votes Tuesday night to advance the renewal of a controversial surveillance authority due to expire by the end of the week, the latest bump in the authority’s turbulent road to passage. Lawmakers will likely cast a final vote on the bill this week, paving the way to…

National security adviser H.R. McMaster met with his counterparts from Japan and South Korea (Shotaro Yachi and Chung Eui-yong, respectively) in San Francisco this weekend, as Jonathan Swan of Axios first reported. The meeting, which had been planned months ahead of time, nonetheless came shortly…

It's a calm Saturday morning in August of next year. Suddenly, across the nation, 12,000 Tesla Model S sedans start up at the same time. They engage Tesla's vaunted autopilot feature and head out onto the road. Some of them make their way to local gas stations. Some to electrical substations. And…

Diplomatic “talks” are often little more than that—gabfests—but Tuesday’s meeting in Vancouver signals a hard-headed determination to deal with the problem of North Korea. The talks, hosted by the U.S. and Canada, brought together 20 nations, primarily those that aided South Korea in the Korean War…

After Oprah Winfrey’s explosive Golden Globes speech, the internet has been abuzz with Oprah-related chatter, attracting fake news and false information.

Amid floundering bipartisan negotiations over a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) replacement plan and a key spending caps deal, Republican leaders are trying to shore up enough votes to pass another stopgap funding bill before a government shutdown deadline on Friday.

The blast waves from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury continue to ripple through Washington. Today, the New York Times reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has subpoenaed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to appear before a grand jury.

Fake news has recently sprung up regarding President Donald Trump’s alleged use of the term “shithole,” claiming that Senator Dick Durbin has “revealed why he lied about Trump saying” the word.

In this latest micro episode, things get hairy (and husky!) when the Substandard debates the merits of the coconut. Sonny goes on a hate-filled tirade against the drupaceous fruit. JVL and Vic rush to its defense. Who hasn't dreamed of eating Maryanne's coconut cream pie on Gilligan's Island? Who…

As Washington stares down the barrel of a government shutdown, the White House is refusing to back down from its budget terms. Appearing on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning, press secretary Sarah Sanders said Congress must pass a continuing resolution now, then try to find a bipartisan deal on…

In a speech at JPMorgan’s 36th annual health care conference earlier this month, Bill Gates argued that investments in high-tech biomedical treatments for diseases like cancer could also help develop better ways to control the kinds of infectious diseases that afflict underdeveloped countries.

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If a season of neurological hazards, political controversy, public subsidies, and bad officiating has left you wondering why Americans like football so much, Sunday was your answer. First, David outscored Goliath in Pittsburgh, then the triple-comeback contest in Minnesota built up to the best…

Like any savvy investor, I am always on the lookout for signs that the economy may be overheating, that things may be getting a bit frothy. Of particular concern are exotic businesses that pop up at the very end of economic booms, selling products or services that will be the first items struck off…

Another week means another round of questions about Russian interference for associates of the Trump campaign. Fox News reports that on Tuesday, former White House adviser Steve Bannon will testify before the House Intelligence committee. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is also…

He was twice on the cover of National Review. He was the subject of admiring profiles in the Washington Post, Time, and, yes, THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Throughout his first term as governor of New Jersey, he was described time and again as a “rising star” of the GOP and a certain presidential contender.…

An article published on December 6, 2017, claimed that Donald Trump’s administration had cut a Veterans Affairs program for homeless veterans while the number of homeless veterans increased.

Will the reboot of 'The Office' be woke? And if so, will it be funny? Reason's Ed Krayewski asks "at what point will The Office become problematic?" Turns out, those thinkpieces have already been written. From February of last year, there's: Unpopular Opinion: “The Office” Is Very Problematic in…

A conspiracy theory has regained popularity and circulation on Facebook this week regarding Klaus Eberwein’s suicide and alleged connection to the Clintons.

The presidency of Donald Trump, nearly a year old, has revived a political debate that began in earnest in sixteenth-century Europe: does a nation require leaders of good moral character in order to flourish?

How far will an advocacy group go to back its endorsement? We’re about to find out via the actions of the Club for Growth in Wisconsin’s Republican primary for the Senate.

A major theme of the Trump administration lies in its effort to discipline the regulatory state, with the Justice Department playing a key role. In November Attorney General Jeff

Last week, I wrote that I thought Donald Trump was dangerous but that it would be a “tragic mistake” to remove him. Here’s why: The 25th Amendment. There’s been a lot of talk recently about invoking that amendment in order to remove Trump from office.

The Australian Open, like the rest of the Slams, has its own character. The temperatures often transition rapidly from hot days to cool nights. The fans are festive and loud, and cheer from close seats in tight stadiums that are even noisier if the roof closes. And then there’s the attitude of the…

A question of grammar is at the center of President Donald Trump’s latest battle with the media.

There must be a specter of bad timing that haunts good athletes, like some ghost that breathes allergenic dark matter into a player’s airway and makes him cough up the moment. It appears in about two and a half seconds: Which is how long it took the ball to leave Mookie Wilson’s bat, bounce toward…

President Trump’s administration made a significant policy move on Friday—extending the Iran deal by waiving nuclear sanctions, while simultaneously issuing new, non-nuclear sanctions against Iran in light of the recent protests there. But you’d be forgiven for forgetting all about that, because a…

The Bundy family are anti-government extremists. The ranchers have been behind two armed standoffs with the federal government—a showdown in Nevada over cattle grazing rights in 2014 and the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge building just outside of Burns, Oregon, to protest…

Kristol Clear #181: Martin Luther King Day

For the packed house at the American Enterprise Institute on the evening of January 8, Charles Murray needed no introduction. We were there to celebrate the 75th birthday of the author of Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, and Coming Apart and to mark his transition to emeritus status at the…

Immigration policy is a complicated issue. Or perhaps one should say immigration policies are complicated, since we have many different immigration laws and practices which interact in complex ways. I'm no expert on those policies, and in fact have adjusted my thinking about elements of them over…

“Forgive me Lord, for I knew not what I was doing.”

'Do you know," Thomas Jefferson wrote tantalizingly to John Adams in the summer of 1815, “that there exists in manuscript the ablest work of this kind ever yet executed, of the debates of the constitutional convention of Philadelphia?” Unfortunately for him, Adams never had occasion to read these…

The Amish help build America's biggest concerts. Who would have thought that some of the most technologically advanced live music shows out there are brought to you, in part, by Lancaster County's Amish population:

The Australian Open starts on Monday and we’ll have coverage of the tournament throughout the fortnight from my favorite tennis writer, Tom Perrotta.

Donald Trump has a strange ability to inspire contradictory thoughts, some of which are sensible, some of which are not.

U.S. diplomat John Feeley announced Thursday he would resign from his post as ambassador to Panama, the same day President Donald Trump provoked controversy by reportedly demeaning immigrants from central America and “shithole countries” in Africa.

This post has been updated.

As the deadline draws closer for the Trump administration to decide whether or not to certify Iranian compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal and another decision on sanctions, U.S. aerospace giant Boeing will be watching with extreme interest. The outcome has the potential to scuttle a pair of…

Him too. Back in the halcyon days of 2009 it was revealed that David Letterman had engaged in deeply inappropriate workplace behavior. The late night host had multiple affairs with women who worked under him, including an intern who was then just a college student.

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Like any dutiful Washington swamp creature, I’ve spent the last few days holed up with Fire and Fury. Which is not, if you’ve been in news-cycle hibernation, the new fragrance from Ivanka. Rather, it is a book by Michael Wolff about life inside Mar-a-Lago North, aka the Trump White House.

Robert Mueller was supposed to be fired by now. That was, at the end of 2017, the fervent hope of both Democrats eager for a Saturday Night Massacre rerun and of some burn-it-all-down fans of the president. They saw the document demands by GOP lawmakers and their challenges to the impartiality of…

Imagine being repudiated by Stephen Bannon, the most repudiated man since Rasputin. Any ordinary person would feel obliged to slink off to the remotest mountains of Madagascar, never to be heard from again. But Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart News blogger whom Bannon disowned as a colleague 15…

One fact of the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency is that the policy results have been pretty conservative. For some conservatives, this is enough to sustain a great enthusiasm for Trump and his presidency. For others, like me, the concerns about Trump’s erratic behavior, his casual…

If there were any doubt about the numerous reports that President Trump referred to Haiti and nations in Africa as “shithole countries” in a Thursday meeting about immigration with lawmakers, it melted away with a statement from the White House that did nothing to deny it.

On New Year’s Day, Donald Trump fulminated on Twitter that the United States had “foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt…

Recently I visited a small university town. A friend recommended I visit a certain downtown coffee shop known for its exquisite espressos and Americanos. “It’s pretty hipster,” my friend warned, and it was. Everyone present was between the ages of, I guessed, 17 and 35. The men wore clothes that…

For 37 years, efforts to open the remote Alaskan tundra known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling for oil and natural gas got nowhere. It’s a barren, uninhabitable area that looks like the surface of an asteroid. But environmental groups and their Democratic allies treated it like a…

It should have been a simple vote to reauthorize an important law, but ideologues allied with exhibitionists to turn it into a circus. Throw in a badly informed Trump tweet, and we had a carnival of folly—which is to say, an ordinary day on Capitol Hill.

Writing history, and especially the history of the ancient world, is an uncertain business, in which the truth is as elusive as in metaphysics. Modern historians of the classical world necessarily rely heavily on the works of the ancients. And the supreme historians among the ancient Greeks had to…

Federalist 68, by Alexander Hamilton, is not much read today. It consists of a defense of the original Electoral College in which the electors, chosen by the people, would assemble in each state and deliberate on their choice for president. This version of the Electoral College never really took…

'My neighbors probably think I’m nuts,” says Cory Gardner. The fresh-faced senator is from tiny Yuma in northeastern Colorado, a 3,500-person town with “horrible cell service” to the point where he doesn’t get reception inside his house. So when the secretary of state calls, Gardner does what the…

We will admit to still sometimes shaking our head at the realization that Donald Trump is the president of the United States, though apparently not just his ardent fans but liberal America, too, is now ready to embrace the idea that billionaire TV stars are a good recruiting pool for the Oval…

In a recent conversation with an administrator who spent years at one of Manhattan’s most prestigious prep schools, I brought up the subject of gifted education. “I don’t know what you mean,” she responded without a trace of irony. “Every child is gifted in his or her own way.” In a culture where…

The most potent form of nostalgia is for a time you never knew in a place you do and imagine was at its peak before you came along. For me, that would be the 1950s in New York City, set to the cool, light strain of the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” I can never get enough…

You've probably read recently about the wave of unrest in Iran that has led to at least 24 deaths and 8,000 arrests. Many of the protesters have chanted for the “death” of Iran’s leaders, President Hassan Rouhani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

If there were any doubt about the numerous reports that President Trump referred to Haiti and nations in Africa as “shithole countries” in a Thursday meeting about immigration with lawmakers, it melted away with a statement from the White House that did nothing to deny it.

Trade experts, lawmakers, and investors panicked across the board Wednesday night after Reuters reported Canadian officials were increasingly convinced President Donald Trump is planning to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Texas senator Ted Cruz on Thursday suggested that President Donald Trump buck members of the foreign policy establishment who are “desperately” trying to save the 2015 nuclear deal and not waive sanctions lifted under the agreement ahead of a series of related deadlines.

Federalist 68, by Alexander Hamilton, is not much read today. It consists of a defense of the original Electoral College in which the electors, chosen by the people, would assemble in each state and deliberate on their choice for president. This version of the Electoral College never really took…

Mmmmm. Delicious Laundry Pods. As we know from science™, laundry pods are unlikely to kill you. But that hasn't stopped folks from wanting to regulate the innovative little cleaning pods. Canada, as behind as it often is, has a tweet asking Canadians if they know the health risks of consuming…

Earlier this week, Senator Dianne Feinstein released some 315 pages of closed-door testimony by Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Fusion GPS was the firm paid by Democrats to compile the dossier alleging ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

This week on the TMQ Podcast, Gregg Easterbrook and Steve Hayes discuss the cost of the NFL moving to Las Vegas. Will gambling ruin the NFL?

We all know by now that retweets do not equal endorsements. But it’s apparently time for a reminder that an actor’s performance does not equal an endorsement of the character he or she is playing either.

Customs and Border Protection told THE WEEKLY STANDARD this week that testing continued on eight prototypes for a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border. The prototypes were commissioned earlier this year to give officials ideas for what types of structures they ultimately want to build. “Through the…

Every week we ask interesting people what book they think President Trump should read. In the past, we've talked with Bret Stephens and Christina Hoff Sommers, among others. This week we spoke with the political philosopher Harvey C. Mansfield, Professor of Government at Harvard University and…

Robert Mueller was supposed to be fired by now. That was, at the end of 2017, the fervent hope of both Democrats eager for a Saturday Night Massacre rerun and of some burn-it-all-down fans of the president. They saw the document demands by GOP lawmakers and their challenges to the impartiality of…

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The “Shitty Media Men” list that came into a short-lived existence during the Harvey Weinstein awakening enjoyed a second life of sorts Tuesday and Wednesday, in the form of a viral controversy about its creator and a pending magazine story about the #MeToo movement. The result is that we now know…

On this latest episode, the Substandard talks about Bright and the sustainability of the Netflix model. Where does all that money come from and how long can this last? Sonny and JVL break it all down. Vic explains his absence.

A House intelligence committee-led (HPSCI) effort to reauthorize Section VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), including Section 702, is headed for a showdown on the House floor against privacy advocates Thursday afternoon, and the vote could be closer than Republican leaders…

A tweet from President Donald Trump Thursday morning sowed confusion about the White House’s position on a key intelligence program and imperiled the already shaky efforts to renew the federal government’s ability to monitor the communications of terrorists and other threats.

On Tuesday, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, jumped into the race for Arizona’s now-open Senate seat. Arpaio is, to put it mildly, controversial. He was recently pardoned by President Trump for contempt of court (the case related to racial profiling), he’s publicly questioned whether…

For the packed house at the American Enterprise Institute on the evening of January 8, Charles Murray needed no introduction. We were there to celebrate the 75th birthday of the author of Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, and Coming Apart and to mark his transition to emeritus status at the…

After striking a conciliatory tone on immigration reform in a meeting with lawmakers Tuesday, President Trump returned to tougher line on Wednesday, insisting that any legislation reinstating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program must also include funding for a border wall.

The Iranian political demonstrations now under way have roots in the Arab Spring upheavals that began in December 2010 in North Africa. The starting point was Tunisia, the rare success story of the Arab Spring—despite two major terrorist attacks in 2015 and this week’s protests against austerity,…

President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. court system as “broken and unfair” on Wednesday, one day after a federal judge in San Francisco issued a temporary injunction to prevent the White House from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

C is for Crazy Children's Books. There's a new book project being hawked on Kickstarter called C is for Consent: "a board book for babies, toddlers, and thoughtful parents." Consent is important, but is this really an appropriate concept for babies and toddlers? Especially given that the term…

Legislation that attempts to make good on President Donald Trump’s October demand to fix the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is still facing obstacles, days before Trump is due to decide whether to issue sanctions waivers that would keep the agreement alive—or kill it.

An article gaining traction and trust on certain social media platforms reported that an individual lost their job “for frowning during [a] workplace discussion about Trump.”

The flu is coming—and eventually, another pandemic. Consensus says, we’re not prepared. But don’t take it from me. There have been warnings.

“My neighbors probably think I’m nuts,” says Cory Gardner. The fresh-faced senator is from tiny Yuma in northeastern Colorado, a 3,500-person town with “horrible cell service” to the point where he doesn’t get reception inside his house. So when the secretary of state calls, Gardner does what the…

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The fight over a key surveillance authority is pitting House committees against each other and fueling intraparty tension, as lawmakers dive into the debate over the power’s renewal this week.

On Sunday night at the Golden Globe awards in Beverly Hills, Oprah Winfrey accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award and delivered what many considered an inspiring speech. Since then, the center-left media have been abuzz with talk of a Winfrey presidential run in 2020. Gayle King,…

Say, where are those new sanctions on Iran? The White House was said last week to be considering new, non-nuclear sanctions against Iran in response to the anti-government and anti-regime protests—and the violent response by government forces. The administration last week did sanction five…

Did the Supreme Court uphold a “1952 Law Outlawing Islam in Government”?

A Tuesday poll from ABC15/OHPI shows Joe Arpaio skyrocketing to the top of the Republican Primary for U.S. Senate in Arizona.

I always kind of liked Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon, the bomb-throwing media figure and nationalist mascot who was once one of Donald Trump’s most trusted advisers, stepped down on Tuesday from his post as executive chairman of Breitbart.

Lawmakers who met with President Donald Trump to continue bipartisan negotiations for a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) replacement Tuesday afternoon expressed some optimism for striking a deal before the March deadline, yet key disagreements remain.

There's no such thing as a free gift! When I worked in Congress as an aide, I took a meeting with representatives of a foreign government about trade issues. They gave us all little business card holders as de minimis gifts. An older colleague, after the meeting ended, took all of them and threw…

While Donald Trump postponed plans to hand out “Fake News Awards” on Monday (we’re kind of hoping one of the grownups in the White House caught wind of the scheme and is working to shut it down completely), that did not stop the Committee to Protect Journalists from its own silly contest, as the…

In this latest micro episode, the Substandard takes on the ultimate Hollywood farce—the Golden Globes! Did Best Picture really deserve to go to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, Back and to the Left? And what is the shape of water, anyway?

About 28 million people live in Texas. Imagine a population the size of Austin has cholera, and one the size of Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, Arlington, and Corpus Christi faces the imminent threat of famine. Add Plano, Laredo, and each of the 167 cities down the line…

If you want to understand the weird and wacky world that David Bowie was inhabiting during what was undisputedly his golden period of creativity, a good place to begin is to watch the 1975 fly-on-the-wall BBC documentary Cracked Actor. It depicts an alien-like-skeleton-figure, with a snow-white…

While U.S. politics have witnessed any number of distressing trends in recent years, one of the more disturbing is the decline in support among Republicans for free trade. The rise of Donald Trump, who regularly blamed American economic ills on China and trade deals such as the North American Free…

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Jon Gruden is the new head coach of the Raiders, a high-profile move that may or may not pan out in football terms but is certain to ensure round-the-clock ESPN coverage when the franchise relocates to Las Vegas in 2020. Once at Vegas, the team will be known to this column as the Sinners. If NFL…

Lawmakers in the House of Representatives are expected to vote Thursday on whether to renew a controversial surveillance power that Trump officials say is vital for protecting against terrorism and other national security threats.

In October, we recounted Tennessee senator Bob Corker’s speedy journey from being a cautious ally of Donald Trump to being one of the president’s sharpest critics. By the end of that journey—or that leg of the journey—the Tennessean was calling the White House an “adult day care center” and…

Following the recent protests across Iran and the impending deadlines related to the nuclear deal, President Trump faces a few big choices this week—and on some of them, his staff in the White House still isn’t quite sure what he’s going to do.

Republican lawmakers are gearing up to debate an uncomfortable question they won’t be able to put off much longer: Resurrect earmarks, or leave the controversial practice dead and buried?

The forecast for November 6, 2018 is a Democratic tsunami.

Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, is vice chairman of the little known Joint Economic Committee. Congress created the committee in 1946, its job basically to review economic conditions and recommend policy improvements. Economic concerns dominated in those post-war years, but today, Lee told…

On Wednesday, January 3, Donald Trump tweeted:

I have no idea whether President Trump enjoyed the holidays. But it looks like they may have helped his approval rating, at least temporarily.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling is continuing to tighten, with NBC News reporting Monday that Mueller has informed the White House that he will seek an interview with the president.

Pave Breezewood. I'm back from my trip to Cleveland (where I covered the Browns #PerfectSeasonParade), and as is tradition, I had to drive through the godforsaken town of Breezewood, Pennsylvania. Over at the Examiner, Salena Zito has an appreciation of the place. One thing's for sure, having…

Presumptive 2020 Democratic front-runner Oprah Winfrey is responsible for unleashing any number of ills on the world: Dr. Phil; James Frey; The Butler. But give her credit for this: In the aggressively philistine world of reality television, Winfrey has been a lone voice stressing the importance of…

Was the Peach Bowl the real national championship game? Since the University of Central Florida took down Auburn 34-27 on January 1, the school’s athletic director has been making that case. Ignore for a second the fact that UCF’s weak schedule killed their chance of making it to the College…

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Cleveland, Ohio

We’ve known for some time that Donald Trump poses a severe challenge to conservatism. What we’re only just beginning to appreciate is that Hillary Clinton poses a challenge, too. The challenge may be stated in the form of a question: Does the right favor the prosecution of Clinton, or not?

The world has not seen the last of the anti-regime protests that have swept Iran in recent weeks, the Trump administration’s intelligence chief said Sunday.

As someone who covers the Trump White House daily, I’m having a hard time figuring out what I think of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. On the one hand, the book is full of suggestions and half-truths that Wolff treats as fact. That might be forgiven if the author were writing a gossipy exposé—except…

The Republican tax overhaul significantly undoes the Affordable Care Act by removing the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Next, the GOP House has their sights on Medicaid reform.

Zichron Ya'akov, Israel

BREEZEWOOD — Rick Sheridan has been a banker, a factory worker, and a commercial truck driver. A Kent State University journalism school graduate, he has also worked as a reporter, editor, and photographer for local northeastern Ohio papers, dabbled in the dairy business, owned his own photography…

On Wednesday night, before Washington was completely consumed by Michael Wolff’s West Wing tell-all, Politico published a piece feeding into a different frenzy: the notion that Congress was concerned President Trump might be mentally unfit for office.

If Trump set your teeth on edge in 2017, prepare for a grinding 2018. The story coming out of the White House is that the need to garner congressional support for his tax cut forced the president to restrain his reformist-populist-belligerent instincts until his signature legislation was on the…

In the sundry debates about the Western canon that periodically vex our culture, attention is always focused on those who have been excluded from it, with the implicit assumption that some malign force is behind that omission. Far less discussed but no less important is the question of who has…

In 1878, Chester Alan Arthur held one of the most powerful and lucrative patronage positions in the federal government: collector of the Port of New York. Thanks to the percentage system by which he was paid, Arthur took in about $50,000 per year at a time when the president earned half as much.…

Three pros vs. 100 kids. Japanese television always seems to have strange innovations, so it should come as no surprise that they recorded three professional soccer players playing 100 kids. Fascinating.

Capitol Hill Republicans are working to keep the focus of the Russia story on the dossier created by an opposition research firm hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, Fusion GPS. The dossier was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. Senate Judiciary…

The new year is less than a week old, and so far, the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS is reporting there have been no strikes against the terrorist group ISIS in Iraq. A single strike on New Year's Eve day near Bayji, Iraq was the last such attack. The four days with no strikes matches a previous…

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“I’m not sure a lot of people will come at midnight,” said the sales clerk who picked up the phone at Kramer Books when I called Thursday evening, wondering whether they were bracing for a crowd later that night.

Your must-read of the day comes from the New York Times, and it’s full of interesting details about special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Michael Schmidt reports that Mueller has learned a lot of new information about the nature of Donald Trump’s decision-making in his first few months as…

[Spoilers]

The American left has always been more comfortable with domestic policy than foreign. Progressives are happy to talk about injustice at home. But what about injustice abroad? Are there circumstances in which the United States can use its power and influence to advance justice or to check repression…

"The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open,” said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg eight years ago. “A lot of times, I run a thought experiment, ‘If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?’ ”

The Senate's longest-serving Republican, Orrin Hatch of Utah, has announced that he will not seek reelection. Mitt Romney, as The Weekly Standard was first to confirm, intends to run for the seat. This news item provoked a characteristically fevered round of speculation and theorizing from the…

The optimism of Democrats about the midterm election is based on the assumption that political conditions won’t change between now and November 6. Indeed, some of them won’t.

Journalists like anniversaries, or at least this one does, and 2018 is an ideal vantage point from which to survey the past. It’s been a half-century now since the annus horribilis of 1968, for example, and a century-and-a-half since my favorite president (James Buchanan) died. But more to the…

Paris

There was a moment at the end of 2017 when, if you squinted hard enough, it seemed as though the Trump presidency might be approaching normal.

The new tax law is prompting the usual crocodile tears from liberals, who complain (falsely) that it is a giveaway to evil multinational corporations and “the rich.”

Let's not kid ourselves: It’s a weird time in our nation’s capital.

In a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, Henry Louis Mencken became not only one of America’s most memorable prose stylists, but also one of its most prolific ones.

It is odd to hear Westerners, hopelessly permeated with Marxism, dissect the nationwide Iranian protests as primarily an economic eruption, the suggestion being that the demonstrators are not that dyspeptic about the nature of the Islamic Republic. The New York Times’s Thomas Erdbrink, the Dutch…

Conservatives like to tout the benefits of federalism, and there are many. However, if states are the “laboratories of democracy,” there will always be a few mad scientists to contend with. One of the dumber things you’ll experience in driving across the country is that in Oregon you’re not allowed…

The past week has seen widespread anti-government demonstrations in Iran, and the regime of the ayatollahs has responded with violent repression—including deadly force. Meanwhile there have been no demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, which is just as far from democracy. Why not?

Last month, the New York Times reported what appeared to be a bombshell: The United States Department of Defense had squirreled away $22 million to fund the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. This “shadowy” program—run from “the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze,” as…

If you’ve been following British politics in recent years, you know that one of the reasons Tories have dominated in spite of less-than-stellar leadership is that the Labour party is even worse, having handed over the reins to a bunch of anti-Semitic loons. There’s been a campaign to expel the…

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement the West made with Iran in 2015 looked like a godsend for the mullahs’ regime. In exchange for suspending its nuclear weapons program for a decade, the ostracized Islamic Republic received $1.7 billion in cash and the promise of billions more…

There was a moment at the end of 2017 when, if you squinted hard enough, it seemed as though the Trump presidency might be approaching normal.

Eight years after his release from federal prison, Joe Ganim is ready to run.

Everybody agrees that it’s bad that North Korea is a nuclear state. It’s “unacceptable” as the president put it (although the world has already basically accepted it). But rarely considered is why North Korea went nuclear.

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During the whirlwind White House shakeup last summer, Steve Bannon lasted a few weeks longer than Anthony Scaramucci, but the Mooch is clearly trying to have the last word. And in covering the latest battle between Donald Trump and his ousted former strategist, Fox & Friends—the president’s…

On this Vic-less episode, listeners get a taste of life without JVL and Sonny’s congenial cohost as the two remaining Substandardites discuss the year that was in the movie biz, The Last Jedi’s box office success (and failure), and their favorite movies of 2017.

Yesterday evening, “President Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.” sent Steve Bannon a cease and desist letter threatening him with civil prosecution for “defamation by libel and slander, and breach of his written confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement.” Can they really…

We’re more than 11 months out from Election Day, and there are too many moving parts (changes in national environment, primary elections, possible retirements, fundraising, strategic decisions, and more) to know anything for certain.

Phantom Thread, the new film from There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson, leaves such a singular impression that it invites all the familiar descriptions: it’s hauntingly beautiful, achingly lovely, a sumptuous feast for all the senses; it’s a tour de force, the best of the year; I’ve…

We ask interesting people what book they think President Trump should read. In the past, we've talked with Garry Kasparov and Chris Matthews, among others. This week we ask Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War…

Michael Wolff couldn’t have asked for better publicity. His new book, Fire and Fury, doesn’t officially come out until January 9, but its salacious revelations about the infighting within the Trump campaign, transition, and administration dominated the political news cycle Wednesday, including the…

Republican senators on Wednesday night brushed off President Donald Trump’s tweet threatening North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with the size and power of his “nuclear button,” the latest in a series of heated exchanges between the two leaders.

Michael Wolff couldn’t have asked for better publicity. His new book, Fire and Fury, doesn’t officially come out until January 9, but its salacious revelations about the infighting within the Trump campaign, transition, and administration dominated the political news cycle Wednesday, including the…

Steve Bannon is a self-described Leninist who wants to destroy The Weekly Standard. Much worse, he's a notorious creep who promotes even bigger creeps like Paul Nehlen, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Roy Moore. So it is more than a little amusing to watch President Trump furiously attack Bannon in response…

Remember "Juicero"? Get ready for "Raw Water." The Silicon Valley company mocked for its pointless technology replicating squeezing (really) is in the news again after one of its founders was quoted in a New York Times story about "raw water." It is dumber than it sounds:

Media critics and anti-Trump skeptics are charging that President Trump may have violated Twitter’s terms of service Tuesday evening for initiating a nuclear button-measuring contest with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. “I think they're trying to decide if this kind of tweet—referring to a…

The new year is shaping up to be one of reckoning for public-sector unions. Just a few days before Christmas, Janus v. AFSCME got its slot on the calendar of the Supreme Court—which, with Neil Gorsuch on the bench, is not stacked in labor’s favor.

Republicans’ first victory of 2018 will likely be Judge Timothy J. Kelly’s denial of the plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction in English v. Trump following a hearing on the Friday before Christmas.

Sen. Orrin Hatch announced Tuesday that he would retire at the end of his term. Hatch’s retirement is interesting from a political perspective—former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, one of President Trump’s most vocal opponents within his party—may end up in the Senate. But it’s less…

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*Correction, 1/3/17: The piece originally stated that "President Trump will meet with Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and Chuck Schumer on Wednesday to start on the list with a discussion of the government funding bill." Officials from the White House, not President Trump, will be meeting…

The protests in Iran challenging the repressive Islamist regime present both an opportunity for the Trump administration, as one White House official puts it, and a challenge. The administration is quietly urging European and regional allies to join President Trump in offering support for the…

Back in December, lawmakers put off the long-term reauthorization of Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a powerful surveillance authority, amid a pre-Christmas legislative whirlwind. Now the House and Senate have until January 19 to agree on a reauthorization bill that…

The country’s economic outlook is, in general, very good. The stock market broke records in 2017. The nation’s unemployment rate stands at 4 percent and appears to be falling, with so-called discouraged workers (those who had given up looking for employment) now reentering the workforce. If the…

Was Samuel Alito worth the Iraq war?

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee, is planning a Senate bid to replace retiring Sen. Orrin Hatch in 2018, according to three individuals close to the situation.

Roy Moore's "Jewish lawyer" voted for Doug Jones. You remember the trainwreck where Kayla Moore brought up their Jewish lawyer as a rebuttal to charges of anti-semitism? He voted for Doug Jones. Not only that, he raised money for him, too!

Republican senator Orrin Hatch of Utah announced he would not seek re-election to an eighth term in 2018 in a video Tuesday afternoon.

Editor's note: Kayla Moore told AL.com two days after this story published she was referring to another lawyer the family has employed, Martin Wishnatsky. This story has been corrected to note the change.

Tuesday Morning Quarterback’s Authentic Games metric tracks quality victories in high-pressure situations, and has a decent track record at predicting Super Bowl pairings. During the regular season, I employ a super-sophisticated proprietary algorithm to determine what counts as an Authentic game.

If you’re around Washington D.C. this winter, you might want to consider swinging through the Renwick Gallery, located just a stone’s throw from the White House. A new display there, called “Murder Is Her Hobby,” features the work of Frances Glessner Lee, who used dollhouses to recreate real-life…

Donald Trump begins 2018 with a rare condition for his presidency: the biggest news story isn’t directly about him. That doesn’t mean the president hasn’t had a lot to say about the wave of anti-regime protests in Iran that have taken place since last Thursday. As Jeryl Bier reported, the Trump…

“Mournful, dazed, sullen, traumatized, self-absorbed, defensive, remote, morbid, bleak, bummed-out, alienated, unprotected, besieged.” That’s how a leading pop music critic describes the music of choice of “millennial and younger listeners . . . making their way into an era of accelerating income…

As far as elections go, 2017 wasn’t a good year for Republicans. Democrats won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, frequently outperformed their baselines in special elections across the country and won a senate seat in Alabama—arguably the most GOP-friendly state in the country.

You think you're getting my 2018 predictions? Dream on. I've been wrong enough the last couple of years, no way I'm sticking my neck out again. I'm upgrading. I'm asking instead for your predictions. So, dear reader, here are ten questions with multiple-choice answers provided. At the end of the…