February 2018

On Tuesday, White House communications director Hope Hicks told House investigators her job sometimes requires her to lie and refused to answer questions about her time in the Trump administration. One day later, the longtime Trump aide has announced she is leaving the White House, reportedly in…

The Trump administration is revving up an effort to counter foreign state propaganda and disinformation, including from Russia, after a months-long funding lag and criticism from lawmakers.

Can a GoFundMe Bring Back a Beloved Theme Park? Probably not. But that’s not stopping a man in my native Cleveland who wants to bring back the famous Geauga Lake theme park. He’s started a GoFundMe to raise $20 million bucks to start bringing the park back. That’s a fraction of price you’d need to…

Mona Charen shook this year’s Trumpified CPAC by the shoulders.

Sometimes hoaxes work as a series, with bits of information being added one at a time and developed into a storyline. Fake news broke last summer that a Muslim judge had legalized two pieces of Sharia in Michigan. That was debunked at the time, with fact checkers pointing out that the “news” was…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, John McCormack and Haley Byrd discuss the upcoming special congressional election in Pennsylvania, the escalating culture war over guns, and Jared Kushner's no good, very bad day.

August Snow was one of last year’s sleeper hits—and deservedly so. The beautifully written, fast-paced thriller gave readers a tour of Detroit and its suburbs, and introduced them to a charming new literary hero: the half-black, half-Mexican lead character, the eponymous Mr. Snow.

Reviews and News:

The Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Californian Adam Schiff, have taken on an awkward, crosswise task with their memo rebutting the majority’s memo, which alleged FBI abuse of the FISA court process. The task is crosswise because it requires the minority to do two…

Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner’s year of security clearance struggles finally caught up with him Tuesday, when White House chief of staff John Kelly officially downgraded his access to classified material from “top secret” to “secret,” barring the president’s son-in-law from accessing…

“Pyongyang is a crucial node in the international network of proliferation that already includes China and Russia as primary providers, Pakistan and North Korea as active disseminators, and Iran and perhaps Saudi Arabia among the final consumers. No less unsettling is the prospect that North Korea…

The website “I Love My Freedom” published an article claiming that “millions RUSH to join the NRA after anti-gun lectures by the liberal media.”

Buckley's legacy, 10 years later. William F. Buckley, Jr. died 10 years ago today, so here's some worthwhile #content from the TWS archives you should read to remember the late great conservative heavyweight.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is at it again. In a report on “Male Supremacy,” an ideology that the group says “advocates for the subjugation of women,” it included American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, calling her someone “who gives mainstream and respectable face to some…

Iran has boosted its investments in militant and terrorist groups across the Middle East since the enactment of the 2015 nuclear deal, the nation’s top general who oversees U.S. Central Command said Tuesday.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, managing editor Christine Rosen and deputy online editor Jim Swift discuss the legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr. on the tenth anniversary of his death, the resurgence of the fringe candidate, and President Trump's most recent comments on the school shooting in…

We laid our grandfather to rest last weekend. Among his many honorifics—Claude the Wise, the Servant, the War Hero, the Parent, Her Majesty’s Loyal and Precious Cincinnati Reds Fan—was Claude the Catholic.

Stein’s Law—named for the late economist Herbert Stein, who was chair of Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers—goes something like this: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” (His son Ben Stein’s law, by contrast, is probably this.) It’s one of the few pithy economic phrases…

Reviews and News:

To ask coherence of President Trump is to ask too much of a man with the attention span of a tweet, and for whom cognitive dissonance is not something he spends nights losing sleep over. So we have had large tax cuts, putting money into the pockets of consumers, which will enable them to increase…

For recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a sigh of relief: The Supreme Court on Monday effectively upheld a lower court’s ruling that the White House cannot end DACA, which provides legal status to people brought to America illegally as children, until challenges to the…

In 2007, Warren Buffett took a $1 million bet on an investment. He won. In his annual letter to Berkshire-Hathaway investors, made public on Saturday, he detailed the wager’s final tallies.

Hurricanes Irma and Maria strafed much of the island of Puerto Rico and worsened what was already a perilous fiscal problem facing the island’s government. However, a reconstruction program that has finally kicked into high gear helped its surprisingly robust economy bounce back, and the employment…

CALLERY, Pa.

The Supreme Court heard arguments Monday morning in a case set to undo a seminal 40-year-old precedent that required all public sector employees to pay their union a “fair share fee” whether or not they’d elected to join.

For the past three years, Russian opposition activists say, authorities have attempted to erase any trace of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in the spot where he was murdered—on a bridge just outside the Kremlin. But on Tuesday morning, Russian officials will wake up to an inescapable reality: The…

What's in this week's issue? Get a preview of our articles and features in this video from editor in chief Stephen F. Hayes:

Facebook users questioned the legitimacy of a story posted Monday by Infowars and Zero Hedge, which claimed 300 people had signed up for “gun training” after an Ohio sheriff offered free classes for 50 teachers.

In this latest micro episode of the Substandard, Sonny, JVL, and Vic are as mad as hell at speed cameras and they aren't going to take it anymore! The cohosts discuss the D.C. speed camera vigilante and his fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

Donald Trump’s job approval rating may be heading downward.

Reviews and News:

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, guest host Jonathan Last is joined by Ethan Epstein and Alice Lloyd to talk about Mona Charen’s CPAC appearance and the difference between serial killers and spree killers.

The Vienna Philharmonic is in the United States this month, performing in New York and Florida under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel. As a New Yorker who attends concerts on a regular basis, I never miss a chance to hear the orchestra’s performances at Carnegie Hall. Two years ago I even had the…

On Saturday, the United Nations Security Council adopted a “30-day ceasefire” for Syria to be implemented “without delay.” As we might have expected, that’s when the shelling started.

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on March 12.

More than 200 players have been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Membership in the hall is a confirmation of baseball greatness, and when teams convene in late winter in warm climes to prepare for the new season, prospects who possess evident talent become subjects of fan enthusiasm, even…

What evangelicals gain and lose by doing business with the president.

London.

One stalwart Trump critic dared to take the stage at this year’s CPAC. “If we want an audience with young people, we have to separate ourselves from the men on our side who’ve behaved atrociously toward women,” said conservative writer Mona Charen—a think tank fellow, and TWS contributor—during a…

In Secretary Betsy DeVos’s latest deregulatory step, the Department of Education has said it will not investigate or take action on complaints from transgender students regarding the open use of restrooms in public schools.

The Missouri governor indicted Thursday on charges stemming from alleged sexual misconduct and blackmail has a history of extolling his ethical leadership.

“Russia Only Bought Facebook Ads After Trump Won The Election,” a headline from Milo Yiannopoulos’ site Dangerous.com claimed on Monday.

She doesn’t say so, but 2018 has been a tricky year so far for Arizona Senate candidate Kelli Ward. After months of polling strongly as an uncompromising, Trump-loving alternative to unpopular incumbent Jeff Flake, the conservative firebrand now finds herself squeezed between two new challengers:…

The Trump administration made clear on Friday, with what it described as the largest set of sanctions against North Korea yet, that it will continue to isolate Pyongyang even as the South seeks to engage with the North.

"If unions are so good and doing such a great job, why do they have to force people to pay them?" That’s the question Mark Janus, an Illinois child services specialist, posed to assembled reporters on Friday. It’s the Supreme Court who will give him an answer. His case will be heard on Monday.

Claims of “crisis actors” in the wake of the deadly shooting in Florida sounded off across the internet’s conspiratorial corners, garnering attention on sites such as Gateway Pundit and True Pundit.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump tossed out a characteristically jarring idea: Arm teachers. His original statements were less than clear, so at a White House public forum he clarified: “I don’t want teachers to have guns, I want certain highly adept people that understand weaponry, guns—if they…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, editor at large Bill Kristol discusses President Trump's CPAC speech, how the President has fared so far, and the future of the conservative movement.

President Donald Trump on Friday delivered a free-wheeling speech to CPAC, a campaign-style barnburner that went over well with the raucous crowd. And on his way out, he casually got around to the important stuff: major new sanctions on North Korea.

Reporting on the Mueller indictment, the New York Times headlined its article, in typical Gray Lady fashion, “Moscow’s Hand Swirled in U.S., but Whether It Tipped Election Is Unclear.” Presumably, an election victory due to the machinations of a foreign “hand” can hardly produce a legitimate…

Which party is going to win control of the Senate in the midterm elections? It’s a simple question. But also a difficult one. And right now, I’m in the middle of the process of building a model that will try to shed some light on it by calculating win probabilities for every Senate contest.

Reviews and News:

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s February 16 indictment of 13 Russians and three Russian companies for interfering with the 2016 election fits with much that we already know. The Russians were opportunistic, stirring the pot and turning up on both sides of the partisan divide. This holds true not…

It wouldn’t be a week at the Trump White House if there weren’t talk of a staff shakeup, and that’s how this week appears to be closing. First, CNN reported Thursday the Pentagon was “considering options” for moving national security adviser H.R. McMaster into a four-star general role back at the…

At the height of his influence in the 1960s and ’70s, Billy Graham was a man about whom nearly every adult in America had an opinion. He was everywhere—his weeklong evangelistic “crusades” packed stadiums around the globe; innumerable books and articles carried his byline; his face appeared on the…

For decades, Republicans have been stuck with the epithet “the stupid party,” and they’ve often deserved it. But there’s been a switch in the Trump era. Democrats now are the stupid party.

On election night 2016, political activist Jess Self wasn’t in much of a partying mood. She’d just spent four days knocking on doors in neighboring Nevada. Her efforts helped elect a Democratic U.S. senator and representative and pass two controversial ballot measures.

The big news out of Chicago, city of my birth and upbringing, is murder. According to a reliable website called HeyJackass!, during 2017, someone in Chicago was shot every 2 hours and 27 minutes and murdered every 12 hours and 59 minutes. There were 679 murders and 2,936 people shot in the city.…

For a few weeks now, Nashville mayor Megan Barry has been embroiled in quite the sex scandal. It seems Barry has been engaged in an affair with the police sergeant who was the head of her security detail. (Both are married.) For an added layer of unseemliness, Barry seems to have taken a lot of…

If you have lived almost any kind of active life, after age 50 someone you know dies every day. Not necessarily someone you knew well. Not necessarily a spouse, a child, a parent—one of those whose death is like a part of yourself, crushed and torn away. But someone you knew, yes: an acquaintance,…

In 2003, when J. M. Coetzee was announced the recipient of that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the news wasn’t met with outraged cries of “Who?” or “Why?” With nine brilliant novels under his belt, along with a haul of prestigious literary awards—including a hitherto unprecedented two Booker…

Black Panther is the least superhero-y of the Marvel superhero movies. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), its protagonist, gets some unearthly abilities from drinking the juice of a plant, but I can’t tell you what they are really, and the movie is delightfully uninterested in exploring them. What’s more…

To someone watching snowboarding for the first time, it might look like a mix of skiing, surfing, and skateboarding. Some competitive snowboarding events are races and feature obstacles or emphasize speed; others award higher scores for better tricks. They are fairly recent additions to the Winter…

On February 14, a deeply troubled young man named Nikolas Cruz walked into the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Cruz, 19, took an AR-15 rifle out of a black duffel bag and began firing at students in the hallways and in classrooms. In all, he murdered 17 people and injured…

By acclamation the Art Institute of Chicago is already one of the great museums of the world, but earlier this month it laid hands on a work that its director called a “transformative acquisition.” The work is by the absurdist painter-provocateur-conman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). The New York…

A few months ago in these pages, our Ethan Epstein rhapsodized about his alma mater, Reed College (“My Old School,” November 10). He praised its rigorous academics and one particular course, the decades-old mandatory freshman humanities class that covers ancient Greece, Rome, and the Bible. Because…

I was struck by the convergence of two stories in a recent edition of the New York Times.

Just a few days before America’s Pastor, Billy Graham, succumbed to Parkinson’s or cancer or pneumonia (when you’re 99-years-young, ailments tend to arrive in multiple-choice fashion), I was walking through Washington’s new Museum of the Bible with my family. As local museums go, the Bible museum…

In 1960, already a movie buff, educated by Bill Kennedy, the ex-film-actor host of CKLW’s programs featuring old Hollywood classics, I took the bus from my east-side Detroit home to the Fox Theatre downtown. I vividly remember watching Victor Mature, all muscles, and Hedy Lamarr, all allure, in…

Nikolas Cruz delighted in torturing animals. The Florida school shooter is reported to have killed frogs and squirrels, and sicced a dog on a neighbor’s piglets. Cruz’s social media feeds were replete with images of dead and maimed critters, apparently hurt by his own hand.

Foz do Iguaçu and Ciudad del Este,Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay

In 1885, nearly broke from bad investments and dying of cancer, Ulysses S. Grant spent his final days writing the bestselling memoir that gave his family financial security after he was gone. The story of Grant’s swan song seems memorably American, touched by the mythic national themes of boom and…

The Scrapbook takes a fairly dim view of the field known as “economic development.” We’re not opposed to governments facilitating economic growth when they can, but there are very few things government can do, proactively, to spur economic activity—though we can think of many, many things…

Since January, the most important person in the campaign for the Italian elections coming on March 4 has been a missing person. Sad selfies of Pamela Mastropietro, a troubled 18-year-old from Rome, have appeared on the front pages of Italy’s newspapers since her body was found, chopped up, rinsed…

Update, 9:36 p.m.: Manafort attorney Jason Maloni emails in the following statement "on behalf of Paul Manafort:

At the height of his influence in the 1960s and ’70s, Billy Graham was a man about whom nearly every adult in America had an opinion. He was everywhere—his weeklong evangelistic “crusades” packed stadiums around the globe; innumerable books and articles carried his byline; his face appeared on the…

Just a few days before America’s Pastor, Billy Graham, succumbed to Parkinson’s or cancer or pneumonia (when you’re 99-years-young, ailments tend to arrive in multiple choice fashion), I was walking through Washington’s new Museum of the Bible with my family. As local museums go, the Bible museum…

In a crowded nine-way Republican congressional primary in Texas, former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw has decided that the best way to break out of the pack in his run for Congress is to run for Congress—literally. February 20 marked the first day of Crenshaw’s 5-day, 100-mile run through a congressional…

Florida senator Marco Rubio was grilled about his views on gun control before a stadium-sized live audience on CNN on Wednesday night. Some of the questions and comments were tough and smart; others were viciously ad hominem and stupid. But Rubio stood there and articulated why he opposed the…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, Alice B. Lloyd and Jim Swift discuss Wednesday's White House listening session and CNN's town hall on guns. Also, is Marion Le Pen a classical liberal? Why is CPAC featuring her?

Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians on Friday for their efforts to interfere with the U.S. political process. In the days since, President Donald Trump has taken to Twitter, pushing back hard on suggestions that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin, denying that he said Russia…

In Brave, a book she was writing even before Harvey Weinstein’s reckoning kicked off last fall, actress and activist Rose McGowan tells her life’s story as a series of brain-washings: “Here’s the thing about cults,” she begins, “I see them everywhere.”

Reviews and News:

In this week’s super episode, the Substandard reviews Marvel’s Black Panther. JVL has plenty of questions, two of which aren’t rhetorical. Vic discusses his “blowout” lunch. Sonny reveals his own origin story.

On Tuesday, Walmart’s value, as reflected in its stock price, dropped by more than 10 percent. That’s nearly $31 billion. It had a bad quarter and in no small part suffered as a result of complications with its online inventory restocking system—it ran out of some items in demand and so couldn’t…

Neal Katyal is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells. He has served as acting solicitor general of the United States and orally argued 35 cases before the Supreme Court. Also, he appeared in House of Cards, playing himself. That’s a pretty…

Promising to “do something about this horrible situation,” President Trump on Wednesday met with survivors of last week’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, to listen to their accounts of the tragedy. Among those who joined the president were Vice President Mike Pence and Education Secretary…

A half-century after her death, Carson McCullers is best known for The Member of the Wedding, her 1946 novel about a motherless 12-year-old girl who watches the planning for her brother’s nuptials and feels distanced from the rest of the family. Adapted for stage and screen, McCullers’s story is…

Students and teachers who survived a deadly high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, last week expressed opposition to arming teachers as a response to the threat of mass shootings during a CNN town hall with lawmakers Wednesday night.

Ivanka Trump, the White House official and daughter of President Trump, will be leading the U.S delegation to the closing ceremonies of the Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. According to senior administration officials, Ivanka will leave for Seoul on Thursday on a commercial flight, arriving in…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, reporters Haley Byrd and Andrew Egger discuss bad right-wing responses to the Parkland school shooting, Robert Mueller’s new charges against an obscure foreign lawyer, what’s next for immigration legislation, and the life of evangelist Billy Graham.

Trump-supporting Twitter users the world over logged on Wednesday morning to find their follower counts diminished. Appearances suggest the targets of this so-called Twitter "purge" were suspected bot accounts, and unverified users whose tweeting patterns reflect those of Russian bots: Locked out…

Top Democratic leaders are calling to provide the FBI and Department of Homeland Security with hefty funding boosts to expose and counter Russian election interference ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

In this latest micro episode, the Substandard reflects on the Lenten season. What are the theological implications for the hosts? JVL and Sonny "grill" Vic about his Lenten sacrifice.

For an institution in crisis—and the Metropolitan Opera, contending with multiple allegations of sexual abuse of minors against longtime conductor James Levine, as well as a years-long decline in ticket sales, is just that—the Met’s fundamentals are remarkably sound.

In the wake of the Florida school massacre that left 17 innocents dead, there’s been a push to renew the Assault Weapons Ban. “Courage and conviction led to an assault weapons ban once before. Let’s do it again,” tweeted Bill Clinton, who signed the Assault Weapons Ban into law in 1994. The federal…

Three answers to one question Tuesday night summed up the Republican primary in the Indiana Senate race. During the campaign’s opening debate, the moderator asked the trio of candidates running to replace incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly to name two spending cuts they would vote to make right away.…

Reviews and News:

On Wednesday CNN anchor Chris Cuomo retweeted a story from the Tab, which claimed the author (a 20 year-old with an expired ID) was able to purchase an AR-15 in five minutes.

Yesterday the U.N. Security Council convened on “the Palestinian question.” This is a regular, and regularly absurd, occurrence. The absurdity reached a new level, however, with a theatrical display of pique by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.

Is the Trump administration doing anything about an Iranian airline violating U.S. sanctions? The White House so far hasn’t commented on Mahan Air, which the Wall Street Journal reported Monday has been buying “U.S.-made jet engines and parts through Turkish front companies over the past several…

We have reached a point—in fact, we probably reached it a while ago—where it is no longer useful to speak of “the Russia scandal” as though there exists a fixed, agreed-upon definition of it.

I’m a conservative student at UCLA and a member of the Bruin Republicans. Last week, my club invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus as a fundraiser for our group. About 24 hours after making his invitation public, the leadership of the Bruin Republicans changed their minds and rescinded the…

Before sunrise on Saturday, December 14, 1799, George Washington woke up so sick he could barely breathe. His wife Martha summoned George Rawlins, a Mount Vernon overseer, who knew just what to do. He opened a vein in the former president’s arm and drained about 12 ounces of blood. Three physicians…

When is Texas going to turn blue?

To someone watching snowboarding for the first time, it might look like a mix of skiing, surfing, and skateboarding. Some competitive snowboarding events are races and feature obstacles or emphasize speed; others award higher scores for better tricks. They are fairly recent additions to the Winter…

Work with ICE? Nah, I quit. You all remember Kim Davis, don't you? She was the woman in Kentucky who refused to do her job (and refused to quit) because she disagreed with the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage. Davis was an inherently flawed spokeswoman for traditional marriage.

“The U.S. district attorney has announced that he will be pursuing charges of treason against the former President Barack Obama,” a false headline from Averific ran over the weekend.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, digital editor Jonathan V. Last and senior writer John McCormack discuss gun control, immigration, movies, and the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference.

Arizona senator Jeff Flake plans to introduce a proposal offering temporary protection for “Dreamers” in exchange for funding for the construction of President Donald Trump’s border wall when the Senate returns next week.

Four days after his surprise indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for conspiracy against the United States, special counsel Robert Mueller revealed a new plea deal Tuesday, with Russia-connected lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan. Mueller charges that Van Der Zwaan lied to FBI…

Reviews and News:

In a short, powerful piece in National Review, Rick Brookhiser concludes that "the conservative movement is no more. Its destroyers are Donald Trump and his admirers."

Will President Trump’s interest in new legislation to toughen federal background checks on gun purchasers last? As White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement Monday morning, Trump is “supportive of efforts to improve the federal background check system” and has spoken…

The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski was born in the ancient capital of Lvov, but cherishes no early memories of the city. Lvov was occupied by the Germans at the time of the poet’s birth. After the Red Army occupied the city at the end of World War II, Zagajewski’s family was forcibly repatriated—or…

Internet hoaxes, like bad stand-up comedy or chain restaurant themes, often struggle with originality. That’s why you’ll see old stories re-emerge year after year.

In the wake of a high school shooting that left 17 dead in Parkland, Florida last week, lawmakers are considering a bill to bolster current laws that have failed to prevent people with criminal backgrounds from buying firearms.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, editor in chief Stephen F. Hayes discusses what the recent Mueller indictments mean. Also, Charlie and Steve discuss America's best and worst presidents, in honor of Washington's birthday.

In October 1797, 42-year-old John Marshall arrived in Paris with Charles Pinckney and Elbridge Gerry, the three of them constituting an official American commission charged with defusing tensions arising from the larger war between England and France. Both belligerents were seizing American ships…

In less than a month, voters in Pennsylvania’s 18th District will head to the ballot box for one of the most interesting special elections of the year. Democrat Conor Lamb and Republican Rick Saccone will be vying to fill the seat vacated by resigning Republican Rep. Tim Murphy. (The pro-life…

Reviews and News:

Donald Trump spent a big chunk of the Sunday before Presidents Day tweeting—about the Mueller investigation, the “fake news” media, and NASCAR. But in one tweet, Trump highlighted new poll numbers. And they weren’t even his own!

“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” That, of course, was President Barack Obama's rather lame joke, delivered during the third presidential debate of 2012. He was ridiculing Mitt Romney’s assertion that Russia is America’s…

Over the weekend Black Panther grossed an astonishing $218 million at the box office in spite of the fact—or perhaps because—it is the least superhero-y of the Marvel superhero movies. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), its protagonist, gets some unearthly abilities from drinking the juice of a plant,…

The Russia-probe indictments announced Friday certainly sound quite ominous. The Russia-based Internet Research Agency “had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Derogatory information was posted online against various…

When I first encountered Jeff Bell, he was debating Bill Bradley, the Democratic candidate for Senate from New Jersey. Bell was the Republican candidate and the underdog to Bradley, a famous basketball star at Princeton and later for the New York Knicks. It was 1978.

An ex-convict named Abraham Shakespeare thought he had hit the big time in 2006. He won $30 million in the Quick-Pick, one of Florida’s state lottery games. Women flocked to him, including one named Dee Dee Moore, who had a genius for embezzlement. By 2008, Shakespeare was a missing person. Police…

To those who knew him well, Jeffrey L. Bell was a real-life George Bailey: an accomplished and decent man who shaped important events by helping others achieve their own greatness, mostly without recognition himself.

Who didn’t love Ron Howard’s Splash back in 1984? Tom Hanks falls in the ocean and nearly drowns but is rescued by the beautiful mermaid Daryl Hannah. She follows him to New York, and they have a romantic idyll until she’s captured by the authorities. “Nobody said love’s perfect,” says Tom’s…

The president is setting the theme for the November congressional elections: We—he prefers “I” but might deign to share credit with Republican incumbents—have upped the pace of economic growth from below 2 percent to above 3 percent, created millions of new jobs, and cut taxes to put more money in…

The Good Place is the most unexpectedly profound show on television. NBC’s afterlife sitcom, which just concluded its second season, stars Kristen Bell as an impostor in paradise and Ted Danson as her supernatural overseer. It begins by skewering shallowly sentimental ideas of heaven and then…

In his first public indictment of 2018, special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday announced charges against 13 Russian nationals and three organizations for conspiring in secret to destabilize America’s political institutions.

It’s relatively common for terror organizations to claim credit for atrocities that they actually had no part in. When a casino was targeted for an arson attack on the Philippines last year, for example, ISIS claimed the “credit.” (The word, in fact, should be “blame.”) Yet it later emerged that…

After dedicating three days of floor time and casting a grand total of four votes on different proposals to address the precarious future of 700,000 unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the country as children, the United States Senate is taking a week off. And when lawmakers return from…

As noted in our most recent fact check, false information is easily spread in times of chaos and confusion. Early reports are often incorrect or incomplete and information surrounding the horrific school shooting in Florida on Wednesday is no exception.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, Andy Ferguson and Adam Rubenstein discuss "white and black," the craziness raging on college campuses, identity politics, and manufactured controversy targeting Bari Weiss.

On February 6, 2018, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy took flight, demonstrating a capacity to lift 60 tons to low Earth orbit while playfully sending a Tesla Roadster on a trajectory that will take it beyond the orbit of Mars. To add to the coup, two of the Falcon’s three booster stages flew back to land…

What should be the requirements for the next vice-chair of the Federal Reserve? At present these are elementary, I believe, and each one points to the same person.

Reviews and News:

Most Americans have probably heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant. There are different versions of the story, but the basic idea is that a group of blind men encounter an elephant, and they each touch different parts of it. One man feels the tail, another the leg, another the ear,…

On January 19, the Pentagon released its new National Defense Strategy. The second paragraph of the 14-page declassified summary painted a dire picture. “Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding,” the Defense…

Bob Corker would like you to know that he’ll stick around Washington a little bit longer, if you want him to. The Tennessee Republican announced his retirement on September 26, 2017, in a short humblebrag celebrating both the power he’d accumulated and the sacrifices he’d made.

There’s been a lot of rancor in Washington over immigration this past month—you may recall President Trump’s concern about immigrants from s—hole countries, the ensuing s—storm in the media, and the less-memorable government shutdown. Four separate immigration bills were shot down in the Senate on…

What did we learn from infrastructure week about the Republican party’s priorities on spending and deficits during the Trump administration? In the new issue of the magazine, my colleague Haley Byrd and I write on this question. Here’s an excerpt:

In 2015, Arizona became one of the first states to adopt an intrastate equity crowdfunding policy, which permits state residents to buy stock in a startup. Arizona State Representative Jeff Weninger, a small business owner who knew firsthand the need for new ways to raise capital, authored a…

Our collective descent into ignorance is alarming enough on its own, but when you combine it with a reinvigorated sense of political correctness, the result is a level of outrage that seems to neatly correlate with general stupidity. And so it was when Jeff Sessions spoke to the National Sheriffs’…

One night over dinner, Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner decided to write a satire skewering the postbellum culture of excess. They took their novel’s title from a line in Shakespeare’s King John: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily . . . is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” The…

Readers will be aware of the war on junk food. We think, for instance, of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s unsuccessful attempt to ban large soft drinks from the city, the FDA’s ban on trans fats, and the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that fast food chains prominently display…

"Drain the swamp." The phrase went from catchy rallying cry to grating cliché in the space of a year. But phrases often become clichés because they signify some important truth. The swamp does, in fact, need draining: Our federal bureaucracy has become so expansive, power-hungry, and unaccountable…

I write of cats as a dog person. For most of my life, an extreme allergy fueled my aversion to cats in general, but the individuals I got to know didn’t help their cause. In college, thanks to a roommate who owned her, I lived with a cat named Sophie. I appreciated Sophie as an aesthetic object:…

Paul Ryan, of all people, was in a defensive posture about his commitment to fiscal discipline. Speaking on February 13 to Maria Bartiromo of the Fox Business Network, the speaker of the House insisted that the two-year budget deal Republicans in Congress had just brokered was a necessary…

"In this article we locate, interpret, and critique the figure of the ‘bad’ white mother, focusing on the critically acclaimed AMC drama, Mad Men. Advancing feminist and postcolonial approaches to myth, we uncover a prevailing ‘white consciousness’ that relies on racializing logics in, first of…

Say what you will about Donald Trump’s intellectual acumen, but he does have a certain flair for drawing attention in directions he desires—or better yet, prompting his detractors to say things he wants them to say. This may not be “genius” in the usual sense of a much-abused term, but it’s a…

Speaking in Japan a couple of days before the Pyeongchang Olympics began, Vice President Mike Pence delivered a welcome message: “We will not allow North Korean propaganda to hijack the message and imagery of the Olympic Games,” he said. Unfortunately, Pence was not doing double duty as an…

In between episodes of our podcasts, you will want to tune in to the latest of the Conversations with Bill Kristol (conversationswithbillkristol.org), this one featuring veteran Republican political strategist and commentator Mike Murphy. The main topic is the outlook for the midterm elections and…

Electing a billionaire agitator to the presidency may have its advantages. Such a man can break conventions that should long ago have been broken and advance policies that more established politicians might believe in but fear to execute.

Contrary to the dire warnings of Democrats, Republican-backed tax reform has not brought about the end of the republic. Instead, most voters are discovering that their take home pay is on the rise, as the government is withholding less from working Americans.

The Scrapbook is pleased to announce that, after a brief hiatus, the Daily Standard Podcast has returned to the digital airwaves at WeeklyStandard.com with a new host, Charlie Sykes. A longtime journalist, author, commentator, and radio host, Charlie will bring decades of experience and insight to…

The State Department is denying that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday described Hezbollah as a legitimate actor in the Lebanese government, after the secretary’s comments drew harsh criticism from regional experts.

On January 9, President Donald Trump sat down with a group of about two dozen members of Congress and told them in front of the nation that he would sign “whatever” bill they could come up with to protect nearly 700,000 Dreamers from deportation. Although Trump listed his priorities—securing funds…

An impermanent high-art graffiti gallery in Queens was, for the five years since its whitewashing by a real estate developer, considered another casualty of cold-hearted capitalism. Its absence was a monument to the unwinnable war against the Man. Now the building owner who erased it has to pay…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Michael Warren and deputy online editor Jim Swift discuss gun control efforts in the wake of the Parkland school shooting, whether or not the Senate's open-ended immigration debate will yield any results, the White House's security clearance…

What evangelicals gain and lose by doing business with the president.

President Trump on Thursday gave his first public comments after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida that left 17 dead on Wednesday, pledging to take action “to secure our schools” and “tackle the difficult issue of mental health” to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

A series of bills introduced Monday in the Hawaiian state legislature could harbor a new era of regulation of the video game industry. The bills, introduced by state Rep. Chris Lee (D-Oahu), go straight at the most vocal complaint among gamers today: loot boxes.

In the wake of the tragic school shooting yesterday in Parkland, Florida fake photos began to surface, spreading misinformation and false accusations surrounding the event.

America doesn’t need “more philosophers” Sen. Marco Rubio said in a 2015 presidential debate, echoing politicians on both sides of the aisle who have, unfortunately, derided education in the humanities.

Reviews and News:

On this week’s episode, the Substandard discusses the Clint Eastwood oeuvre. Sonny reviews The 15:17 to Paris and finds himself strangely drawn to it. JVL tears into the coverage of North Korea at the Olympics. Why is Vic wearing a trenchcoat to the theater?

Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday expressed confidence in John Kelly and the “remarkable job” the retired Marine general is doing. The embattled White House chief of staff came under fire last week for his handling of domestic abuse allegations against former staff secretary Rob Porter.

When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meets with Turkish officials tomorrow, he’ll have plenty of unpleasant topics to discuss. At the top of Turkey’s list of grievances is American support for the YPG, or the People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish-Syrian militia that has wreaked devastation on ISIS…

There was an interesting announcement on Wednesday for Ben Rhodes, formerly the Obama White House deputy national security adviser. Rhodes, you may recall, caught some flack at the end of Obama’s presidency for admitting to the New York Times that he was manipulating the media in his efforts to…

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

Renowned professor of psychology at Harvard and a prolific writer, Steven Pinker is the author of several prize-winning books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. This week Pinker releases a new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case…

You can get away with a lot if you're a bullsh*tter... Our Books and Arts editor Adam Keiper shares this fascinating thread about a Reddit user who BS'd his way to lots of internet karma... by making a ton of stuff up. He even gave a speech at Harvard about his "accomplishments."

In December 2015, newly elected Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari declared that the terrorist group Boko Haram had been “technically defeated” after intensive military efforts. The Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), a consortium of military units from Benin, Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and…

President Trump on Wednesday threw his weight behind Sen. Chuck Grassley’s immigration plan, urging the Senate to pass the “responsible and commonsense” proposal based on the White House’s immigration priorities and threatening to veto proposals that contain further Democratic concessions.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Michael Warren talks about the long-awaited Infrastructure Week, and associate editor Ethan Epstein joins to discuss the Olympics, North Korea's 'Smile Diplomacy' and its coverage by the American press.

California congressman Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday that the panel is negotiating with the FBI about narrowly redacting sensitive information contained in a memo intended to counter a Republican document alleging surveillance abuses.

The roll-out Monday of the White House budget proposal revealed a $1.5-trillion infrastructure plan, the expected funding to address the opioid problem, and, of course, funding for border security initiatives, including the southern border wall. But it’s a controversial revision of a USDA program…

Reviews and News:

On Tuesday, Politico and Morning Consult published a poll showing Republicans ahead of Democrats by one point in the generic ballot. This is an improvement for the GOP—Morning Consult put Democrats ahead by four in its last two polls and had them up by 10 in December. The poll also shows Trump with…

Update, 2/15/18: On Wednesday evening the Bruin Republicans announced on their Facebook page that they had decided that internal disagreement among their board was too great to continue hosting the Yiannopoulos event. That the university respects free speech rights and that it was the club’s…

The Trump administration recently announced that it will “reassess” American aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA). That’s the agency charged with overseeing Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 and, of equal importance, their descendants. The United States will…

Are Republicans in the Trump era deficit-hawks-in-name-only? Or does the party still have faithfulness toward reducing the federal deficit in meaningful ways. Between last week’s Republican-forged budget deal that ended a severely flawed, but effective, system of spending caps and the advent of…

Happy Valentine’s Day. Before you celebrate by heading out and swiping right, let’s have a talk about marriage.

Last February 14, "Ask Matt Labash" dissented from Valentine's Day. One year later, the editorial staff submitted a question (under the name "All Out of Love") asking if he felt any different now. His response, written with his characteristic flourish, was, "No."

We ended up staying in Ciudad Juárez a third night in order to attend a political rally for presidential candidate Maria de Jesus Patricio Martinez, better known as “Marichuy.” The University of Ciudad Juarez hosted the event in a large lecture hall. There was standing room only for the students…

On Monday, Democrats outperformed Hillary Clinton in two state legislative special elections in Minnesota (senate district 54 and state house district 23B). These races didn’t generate the flashy headlines that some others have—neither seat changed hands and Democratic overperformance was below…

After a brief hiatus, the Daily Standard Podcast has returned with a new host: Charlie Sykes. A longtime journalist, author, commentator, and radio host, Charlie brings his decades of experience and insight to our daily podcast.

The freewheeling, open process that was expected to define this week’s high stakes immigration debate in the Senate is off to a slow start. On Tuesday morning, the chamber did what it does best—that is, not much.

FBI director Christopher Wray fended off accusations of political bias at the bureau Tuesday, amid controversy over a GOP memo that suggests misconduct by officials at the FBI and Department of Justice.

Senator Bob Corker made headlines last October when he became the first GOP senator to announce he would not seek reelection in 2018—then quickly ignited a public spat with President Donald Trump, with the two trading barbs on Twitter. Over a period of weeks, Corker called the Trump White House “an…

Facebook users marked an article published last month by Deep State Nation as potentially containing false information.

It’s a bit disconcerting that a church would see litigation as an acceptable way to pursue its mission here on Earth. Yet last fall the Archdiocese of Washington sued the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, and we must say that it did so on pretty good grounds.

For more than 20 years, Saeb Erekat has been the main Palestinian negotiator in the “peace process” with Israel. This week (writing in the New York Times) he attacked the ability of the United States to be the “sole broker” or even an “honest broker” in peace talks between Israel and the…

Reviews and News:

President Trump drew a line in the sand on immigration reform in a Tuesday morning tweet, telling Congress that the freewheeling negotiations that began Monday are “our last chance” to grant legal status to nearly 2 million people brought to America illegally as children.

The Trump administration’s top spy chief quietly criticized the White House in written testimony Tuesday, warning lawmakers that U.S. allies are questioning America’s ability to keep its international commitments amid looming threats from China and Russia.

Voter fraud is a favorite topic for hoax websites, especially when it comes to the 2016 election.

“We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation,” President Trump said in his inaugural address. On Monday, the administration attempted to make good on that promise by announcing what many in the media mistakenly called a…

If there was any enthusiasm for President Trump’s infrastructure proposal on Capitol Hill on Monday, it was hard to find. Republican Bill Shuster, the chairman of the House Transportation committee, gave a perfunctory statement noting the White House’s framework while hardly endorsing it.

The recent clash between Iran and Israel is the latest indication that there’s some unfinished business to attend to in Syria even with the decline of the civil war and the territorial defeat of ISIS. In the skirmish over the weekend Iranian troops launched an Iranian-made attack drone against…

“Anthropology 212: Cultural Freedoms: Hate Speech, Blasphemy, and Pornography,” a course on freedom of expression at Princeton University has been “reluctantly” cancelled, Professor Lawrence Rosen informed his students in an email obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Rosen’s email, sent at 2:07 p.m. on…

Lawmakers in the Senate voted overwhelmingly Monday night to move forward with a contentious immigration debate this week. Let the race to 60 votes begin.

Two of the top Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are calling on former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice to explain an “unusual email” she sent on the day of President Trump’s inauguration.

Who among us hasn’t said, “I’m so mad I could beat my television with a hammer”? Finally, the National Rifle Association has acted on the impulse.

Editor's note: It has been our great privilege to publish dozens of articles over the years by Jeffrey Bell, and it was with great sadness that we learned of his death over the weekend. You can read a tribute to Jeff by his colleague Rich Danker elsewhere on this page (as well as other tributes,…

A plane that took off from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on Sunday crashed, killing all 71 people onboard.

The Issue with Steve Hayes. Want to know what is in this week's magazine? Lucky for you, our editor Steve Hayes is putting together a brief video preview. Check it out here.

In this latest micro episode, the Substandard takes on the Olympics. How do the hosts feel about ice dancing? Vic is mildly interested in the winter games. JVL can't get enough. Sonny hates them.

Many of America’s cities are struggling. Once-strong communities have experienced post-industrial collapse, rampant unemployment, and brain drain. Crumbling infrastructure, the opioid crisis, and a host of lesser pathologies have contributed to instability and frustration among citizens and leaders.

An older online myth resurfaced this week, claiming that Malboro was set to release marijuana cigarettes in four states.

Reviews and News:

Jeff, who died suddenly at age 74 on Saturday evening, was primed to be on the vanguard. Starting in the mid-1970s, he turbocharged the policy agenda that culminated with Reagan’s landslide election and a mandate for massive tax cuts. But Reagan (“The only great man I ever worked for, though I…

The Man Booker Prize is Great Britain's most prestigious literary award. It is conferred annually on a novel, written and published in English, and guarantees a considerable boost in sales plus global fame (and about $70,000 in cash) for the novelist. In the United Kingdom, and in various parts of…

The bipartisan budget deal sealed by Congress in the early hours of February 9 was a win for the Pentagon—but not as big a win as it might initially appear. Having jacked up the defense top-line for this fiscal year and next, defense hawks in Congress will be tempted to congratulate themselves for…

It’s finally infrastructure week at the White House. The administration plans to release its legislative proposal on infrastructure Monday morning, including $200 billion in federal spending over the next 10 years.

In the course of what CNN informed its viewers and readers was a gold-medal-winning diplomatic performance, Kim Yo-jong, the U.S.-sanctioned sister of Kim Jong-un, signed a guest book belonging to South Korea’s president Moon Jae-in. “I hope Pyongyang and Seoul get closer in our people's hearts and…

For a stupid but explicable reason—American culture is bored, indulgent, tribal, and unthinking—Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of North Korean dicator Kim Jong-un, was memed (flatteringly) because she gave Vice President Mike Pence “side eye.” As the Washington Post's Philip Bump tweeted (before…

It’s likely that only the most hardcore Vogue readers remember it—and presumably Anna Wintour and company are hoping that even they will one day forget it—but back in 2011, the venerable fashion magazine posted a glowing profile of Asma al-Assad. Yes, that Asma al-Assad: the wife of the Syrian…

At first blush, universal basic income sounds like something dreamed up on a California commune or in a late-night college bull session. The idea: Just give people money. Ask nothing in return. Impose no requirement to work or to look for work. And don’t just give taxpayer money to people living in…

The bad news is that share prices have been plummeting, wiping billions in value off the holdings of investors and pension funds. The good news is that share prices are plummeting by thousands of points on the Dow, taking froth off markets and restoring monetary policy to its proper place in our…

Friday’s Washington Post featured an op-ed by an old Washington hand, late of the State Department, who was right in the middle of the dossier affair, a Mr. Jonathan M. Winer. His byline bio identifies him as “a Washington lawyer and consultant,” and “a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of…

GOP lawmakers are raising concerns about surveillance abuses in a controversial memo, weeks after shepherding through the renewal of a surveillance authority. The apparent contradiction has civil liberties advocates asking, what gives?

The controversial FISA memo, a GOP-drafted documents alleging surveillance abuses against the Trump campaign, generated an expansive array of responses from political commentators and pundits when it was released last week. After discussing the FISA memo, Fox News’s Judge Jeanine Pirro told viewers…

Nick Meyer, 40, became briefly famous a few weeks ago for allegedly stealing more than $1 million of wine from his banker boss. As Goldman Sachs president David Solomon’s personal assistant from 2008 until 2016, Meyer’s job involved such chores as the transport of hundreds of bottles of extremely…

President Donald Trump on Friday offered words of praise and support for a disgraced former staffer who resigned earlier this week over allegations of domestic abuse.

Breaking: The New York Times is now a “white supremacist paper.” That’s according to Sarah Kendzior, columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, frequent NBC News contributor, and writer for Fast Company. Talk about all the news that’s fit to print!

Reviews and News:

If it takes a special talent to make a boring topic interesting, there’s an inverse talent possessed by those who take interesting topics and make them boring. In American Niceness, Carrie Tirado Bramen, associate professor of English at SUNY Buffalo, takes a fascinating topic—one long overdue for…

The Portrait of a Lady, one of the greatest novels in the English language, ends rather inconclusively. “I have not seen the heroine to the end of her situation,” wrote Henry James in his notebooks. On the other hand, he added, the work “is complete in itself—and the rest may be taken up or not,…

Senator Rand Paul was not happy. A 652-page budget and appropriations deal, worked out by congressional leadership, was unveiled at midnight Wednesday, a mere 24 hours before the shutdown deadline.

Rob Porter, the now-former staff secretary at the White House, was given the benefit of the doubt when credible allegations he had physically abused his ex-wives emerged this week. That’s how deputy press secretary Raj Shah put it in his briefing to the press Thursday, a day after Porter tendered…

When Matt Gaetz came to Washington last year, he could easily have been mistaken for the typical freshman member of Congress. The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call ran a short profile of him under the headline “The Least Interesting (Fresh) Man in the House.”

In 1990 the comedian George Carlin memorably mocked the tendency to replace the word man with person. “Little kids would be afraid of the ‘boogie-person,’ ” Carlin scoffed. “They’d look up in the sky and see the ‘person in the moon.’ Guys would say, ‘Come back here and fight like a person,’ and…

Pop star Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl halftime song-and-dance routine got, umm, mixed reviews. The Scrapbook, though, watched the performance with rapt attention, and we have to say that to our eyes and ears Timberlake was simply stunning.

In recent months, we’ve been wondering how journalists are getting any work done, what with all the Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs they’ve been singing. In January, workers at Slate and Vox Media—which includes the websites Curbed, Eater, Recode, SB Nation, the Verge, and, yes, Vox—announced…

There are many ways Republicans can lose control of the House and Senate in November. But there’s only one way they stand a good chance to hold both chambers. It’s to run on the tax cuts.

A story for our times: It took place, of course, on Twitter, though it was first written up in the trade publication Inside Higher Ed.

It was a Frenchman who gave his surname to the term chauvinism, and it was a Frenchman, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose prosecution for sexually assaulting a hotel maid in New York in 2011 now looks like the earliest tremor of the #MeToo movement.

It has been over a half-century since the heralded British political theorist Michael Oakeshott published his most acclaimed work, Rationalism in Politics. Oakeshott put forward the thesis that since the 18th century the culture and politics of the West have come to operate under the sway of a…

Roger Federer has a wonderful serve and all the strokes. He’s the right height, 6-foot-1, and the right weight, 187 pounds. He’s fast and light on his feet. On the court, he no longer has a weakness, now that he slugs one-handed backhands rather than slicing most of them. There’s one more essential…

Statesmanship, like its popular cousin leadership, is an elusive quality to identify, if only because it varies from the context of one political order to another. In monarchies and dictatorships, the lines of a society are drawn horizontally, with classes of elites, the military, and bureaucrats…

Not many people knew he was named Berlin. A roly-poly, soft-spoken man with a scruff of white hair and a big belly, Berrell Long lived quietly in a rundown house in Fries, Virginia. Thin, patchy wallpaper held the place together. There was no insulation, so he had to pile logs in a dirty old…

If you should find yourself in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, you might be surprised to discover a U.S. naval vessel moored on the Pothong River near the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum. It is the USS Pueblo, a modest craft launched in World War II, recommissioned by the Navy in…

One year and a day after Betsy DeVos was confirmed as secretary of education, she sat in her seventh-floor office, a vast and soulless space in one of the unloveliest buildings in Washington, and reflected upon the process that brought her there.

Milwaukee

The 2018 Winter Olympic Games have opened in the mountains of northeastern South Korea. The next two weeks will showcase some of the finest athletes in the world: men and women who’ve trained relentlessly and, whether they win a medal or not, deserve our esteem and best wishes. The United States…

It is a conceit of the Trump administration that its foreign policy is entirely different from that of Barack Obama. Even in an otherwise conciliatory State of the Union address, Trump strove to set himself apart from Obama, touting his own policy of “maximum pressure” on North Korea as an example…

With Republicans in charge of the White House and Congress, you might expect to see some budgetary restraint. Or at least some gesture to fiscal conservatism. You would be wrong. Consider the bloated budget deal the Senate arrived at on February 7.

When the House Intelligence Committee released its memo arguing that the FBI and Department of Justice had abused the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by using political opposition research as a basis for repeated surveillance requests, James Comey expressed perfectly the inconsistent…

You are going to pay more for your next washing machine. To understand why, let’s look at what happened at Whirlpool’s headquarters in Benton Harbor, Mich., in 2011. The company was feeling pressure from foreign competition. Its stock price had fallen by half. It had announced plans to slash 5,000…

Steal, Eagles, Steal! If your team hadn't won a title in 58 years, wouldn't you steal a chair? This Eagles fan (read: NOT JVL) did, and got off easy: $125. If you can afford going to the Super Bowl, $125 for a memento like this is an absolute steal, if you'll pardon the pun.

Danny Tarkanian made a new friend last year. The insurgent candidate, who is running in the Nevada Republican primary to unseat incumbent Sen. Dean Heller, obtained the endorsement of former deputy assistant to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka. He couldn’t be happier.

We arrived in Janos late in the afternoon and parted ways with Sanchez, the truck driver who gave us a lift, after a quick dinner of enchiladas and steak. As the sun was setting we biked a few miles outside of town to a nature preserve, called Janos Biosphere Natural Reserve, where a group of…

This week on the TMQ Podcast, Gregg Easterbrook breaks down the Super Bowl with Philly Superfan special guest Jonathan V. Last. In case you missed last week's column, do read it here.

Lawmakers in the Senate are expected to pass a bipartisan two-year budget deal ahead of a midnight government shutdown deadline when it comes to a vote Thursday evening, leaving the ball in the House’s court.

On Tuesday, Missouri Democrat Mike Revis won a special election for the state’s 97th House District, barely flipping a district that Donald Trump won by 28 points. Democrats are happy about the victory, using it to argue that voters are generally unhappy with the Republican party. Republicans,…

The release of additional texts between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page has some outlets reporting that the messages implicate President Obama for interfering in the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email.

Reviews and News:

On this week’s episode, JVL continues to bask in the glow of a Super Bowl victory. But how about those Super Bowl ads? What to make of Solo? Your cohosts list their favorites. Sonny reviews Hostiles. Plus a hostile review by “Gene”!

The resignation of a quiet but powerful West Wing aide is raising all sorts of questions. Rob Porter, who issued a statement Wednesday saying he would be leaving his position as staff secretary to President Trump, has been credibly accused by both of his ex-wives of abusive behavior. It’s not clear…

Every year since 2010, the venerable baby food company Gerber has chosen a “Gerber baby.” This year’s winner is 18-month-old Lucas Warren of Georgia—the first Gerber baby with Down Syndrome. Lucas’s mother, Cortney, entered her son into the company’s annual contest, which drew around 140,000…

The national governing body of physician training, the American Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), limits the number of hours doctors in training can work in a given week. Generally speaking, on average, residents can be at the hospital for only 80 hours over a seven-day period. This…

If ever a snare were set for a conspiracy theorist, it would most certainly be the "Steele dossier" released for public consumption by BuzzFeed in January of last year, alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It has the perfect ingredients for a conspiracy: opposition…

Day Zero approaches in Cape Town. This Guardian feature about the water crisis in South Africa is fascinating.

Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin reassured lawmakers Tuesday that the department is preparing sanctions against corrupt Kremlin-linked people who are listed in a classified version of a report mandated by Congress.

Reviews and News:

Yesterday we biked from Cananea to Agua Prieta. The hospitality we’ve been shown throughout the trip has been legendary, but our connection in Agua Prieta beats all. Remember the stranger we met in the gas station in Cananea who escorted us into town? His name was Luis Ramirez and he connected us…

Arthur Jones, an outspoken white supremacist and Holocaust denier, has unsuccessfully run for public office in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas since the 1970s. But he is now set to win the the Republican primary on March 20 in the race for Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District, his eighth attempt…

Senate leaders announced Wednesday afternoon that they reached a massive two-year budget deal after weeks of negotiations in hopes of averting a government shutdown when funding runs out Thursday at midnight.

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill to form a select committee to investigate the U.S. Olympic Committee’s role in enabling decades of sexual misconduct involving USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, who was sentenced in January to 40-175 years in prison for sexually abusing dozens…

The Florida Supreme Court became one of the first courts in the world to air its proceedings live on Facebook.

The successful launch on Tuesday of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket—“the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two,” as the company is proud of saying—marked an important milestone for the entrepreneurial space company and for the overall U.S. launch industry.

On Tuesday, THE WEEKLY STANDARD noted multiple media outlets were were confirming the existence of a second anti-Trump "dossier" authored by Cody Shearer, a longtime associate of the notorious Sidney Blumenthal, who as a very checkered history of finding himself at the center of Clinton scandals…

At this point the Pyeongchang Olympics really should be re-christened the Pyongyang Olympics. What should have been a celebration of South Korea's titanic cultural, economic, and political achievements is degenerating into an event that will instead normalize the barbarous North Korean regime that…

Donald Trump used his State of the Union address last week to celebrate U.S. and coalition gains against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The president reminded his audience that a year earlier he had “pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the earth. One year later,…

So regulation is not always a bad idea after all.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon did not appear Tuesday to deliver planned testimony before the House Intelligence committee. Ranking member Adam Schiff said in a statement that Bannon’s lawyers “informed the Committee that the White House continues to prohibit Mr. Bannon from…

When the young Muslim known as “Mo” decided he could no longer live in America, the Islamic State wasn’t his destination of choice. Initially, he said, he wanted to migrate to Saudi Arabia to study at the University of Medina—but he couldn’t get in. A diet of online propaganda convinced him the…

A bill intended to clarify and alter a set of long-delayed Obamacare menu labeling rules passed the House Tuesday, as restaurant owners continue to prepare for a May 7 compliance deadline.

Wawa Shabbawa? Yep, that's what it sounds like: Shabbat at a Wawa. A local performance artist, Brian Feldman, came up with the concept. Turns out nobody really went because they're obsessed with Wawa, like Feldman is. Now, a Shabbat at a Sheetz? That's another matter entirely. They'd probably have…

During the trophy presentation after the Super Bowl, Philadelphia Eagles head coach Doug Pederson, tight end Zach Ertz, and MVP Nick Foles each began their interviews with mentions of their faith.

State Dept. Official Reportedly Passed On Second Trump ‘Dossier’ Written by One of Clinton’s Most Discreditable Supporters

George P. Bush, the Texas land commissioner and son of the former Florida governor and Donald Trump rival Jeb Bush, tweeted his unmistakable support for the president’s agenda on Tuesday, in response to an endorsement from Donald Trump, Jr. of his reelection campaign.

Northern Mexico is everything Cormac McCarthy promised it would be. The landscape has taken a Western turn ever since we left the border town, Nogales. On two-lane roads we passed rolling fields of blonde grass and gnarled black trees. The asphalt frequently gave way to dirt and rocks, leaving us…

Not so long ago, ISIS held territory in Syria and Iraq equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom. Yet the U.S. and allied forces have slowly but systematically pried virtually all that real estate from its grip. ISIS will have to change tactics.

Dick Durbin would like to have a word with the professoriate. It seems that the phrase “chain migration”—a technical term used for decades by university-based demographers to describe family-based migration patterns—is in fact racist. The Illinois senator suggested as much last month, after…

Reviews and News:

Will Super Bowl 52 be the event that changes how the football establishment thinks? About going for it on fourth down, of course.

With just three days remaining until a government shutdown deadline, House Republicans on Monday night moved forward on a stopgap funding measure that is likely to breeze through the chamber on a party-line vote but will face slim odds in the Senate.

“Today is the end of [liberal education at Kenyon College],” Fred Baumann, a professor of political science at Kenyon, proclaimed last week to a panel and its audience. The panel had been convened to discuss the retraction of professor and playwright Wendy MacLeod’s latest play, The Good Samaritan.

Will there be another government shutdown this week? “I sure hope not,” said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley on Fox News Monday. But it doesn’t sound like there’s much hope for finding a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and border wall funding, which held up a budget…

Ryan T. Anderson is the Heritage Foundation’s William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow and one of my favorite writers in Washington. He’s got an uncanny ability to combine razor-sharp arguments with kindness and good faith. He’s the best kind of public intellectual: One who tries to clarify ideas…

Senator Susan Collins is currently championing a bill that will hike the Passenger Facility Charge (PFC) levied by airports on ticket prices. Supposedly the move would fund improvements to their infrastructure.

For Rose McGowan, it was only a matter of time. She’s an ice-cold operator who’ll verbally shiv with military precision anyone who crosses her. She’d have to be, to survive the hellhole of Hollywood hypocrisy with her sanity mostly intact. It was only a matter of time, then, before she’d turn on…

The current scandal between Google and James Damore presents our culture with a choice: Should we safeguard opportunity for individuals simply because they are individuals, or limit individual opportunity in order to pursue the advancement of groups? It's a question as old as liberal democracy…

If you hold stock—and most Americans do—the financial news of the last few days has been pretty jarring.

The House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Monday to publicly release a Democratic memo intended to counter a now-public Republican document that alleges surveillance abuses against a former Trump campaign adviser.

Reince Priebus, Sith Lord. Vanity Fair has a delightful (profanity laced) interview with Anthony Scaramucci about his brief tenure in the White house. Mooch's take on Washington is so wrong, it's laughable:

The Eagle has landed but JVL is still flying high in this macro episode of the Substandard. Has the torch been passed? Wentz vs. Foles—what happens now? Plus bedlam on the streets of Philadelphia!

According to the RealClearPolitics average, 42.2 percent of poll respondents approve of Trump’s job performance. FiveThirtyEight has Trump’s approval rating at 42.5 percent among voters and HuffPost Pollster has him at 41.6 percent. And in all three of these aggregators, the basic story is the…

The House Intelligence Committee is expected to vote Monday on publicly releasing a memo that Democrats say rebuts a Republican document alleging surveillance abuses that was released Friday.

Reviews and News:

Donald Trump says the House Intelligence committee memo on the FBI’s application to surveil an associate of his campaign “totally vindicates” him in the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The memo, authored by Republican Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes, does…

Philly Does It Whew! We were almost without an online editor there. If Brady’s Hail Mary pass had succeeded, and had been followed by a two-point conversion and then an overtime victory, it would have taken Jonathan Last months to recover—and who would have organized and edited all the excellent…

Will exposed creep Louis C.K. try to make art that honestly confronts what he did—or will he go the way of Woody Allen?

So here we are.

Rarely have both exuberance and anxiety run simultaneously at the high pitch evident these days at gatherings of investors. The exuberants are the noisiest right now. Trump tax cuts have produced a surge in business after-tax profits—which even before the tax cuts were up double digits compared…

Update: Devin Nunes clarifies his comments as reported below. He tells TWS that his investigation will produce more reports, but he will release the information in a traditional manner.

In an attempt to defend the President Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” Patriotic Express accused Joe Kennedy of the gravest of sins: hypocrisy.

South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is renewing his call for a second special counsel in the wake of the release of a GOP-drafted memo that alleges politically-motivated surveillance abuses.

The House Intelligence Committee on Friday publicly released a GOP-drafted memo that alleges surveillance abuses against the Trump team, amid objections from the FBI, Department of Justice officials, and committee Democrats.

The highly-anticipated memo from Rep. Devin Nunes has now been officially released. You can read it in its entirety, for yourself, here.

We're in Nogales, Mexico, a large border city south of Tucson, Arizona. Jon crossed onto our side of the border last night with a new bike. The band is back together again, and the recent Kia Sorento unpleasantness has been resolved.

The Washington, D.C., metro area’s beleaguered public transit system (known as WMATA) trumpeted good news this week: “Crime on Metro in 2017 plunged to its lowest level in a more than decade,” stated a press release. “Last year, there were a total of 1,282 Part I crimes on Metro, a 19 percent…

Reviews and News:

This week on the TMQ podcast, Gregg Easterbrook and Stephen F. Hayes preview the Super Bowl and discuss Gregg's most recent column. Who will win the Non-QB, Non-RB MVP? Should the Eagles go for it on fourth down?

The new documentary The Final Year records the ups, the downs, the smiles, the frowns of President Obama’s foreign policy advisers during their last months in office. It was made for HBO but it won’t hit the small screen until later this year. For the moment it’s playing in a few theaters in Obama…

The only thing we can say with absolute certainty regarding the controversy over the Devin Nunes memo is this: It’s unwise to accept any claims made with absolute certitude about its contents and their meaning.

“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” Bill Murray asks in Groundhog Day. “That about sums it up for me,” a drinking buddy answers.

When Paul Ryan agreed in October 2015 to become speaker of the House, some Republicans worried he couldn’t handle the political side of the job. Known as a policy wonk and not a political fundraiser, Ryan had insisted that one condition of his taking on the job would be that he would spend his…

We’re likely to see the Memo—that’s the House Intelligence committee’s memo, written by GOP chairman Devin Nunes, alleging wrongdoing on the part of the FBI’s initial investigation into Russian meddling by Trump campaign associates—sometime on Friday. Whatever Nunes’s summary of the FBI’s FISA…

Person A isn’t completely persuaded that human activity is the greatest contributor to climate change. Person B believes men can give birth. In 2018, guess which person is more likely to be decried as “anti-science.”

In a nuclear world, nuclear weapons are needed to deter major attacks, but who should possess these instruments of deterrence? The United States has long been committed to stemming nuclear proliferation by both potential adversaries and friends. Today the challenge of keeping nonnuclear states from…

When I asked a top Washington defense lawyer a few weeks ago about William Burck, the answer was eloquent in its unambiguous simplicity: “Bill Burck is an excellent attorney.” The context of the question was the rumors being floated by congressional Democrats that Burck was at risk of conflicts of…

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was a success. The theater was unbeatable. The president’s special guests were particularly moving at this year’s address: a double amputee who somehow escaped from North Korea by sheer strength of will; a police officer who adopted a drug…

Shortly before Christmas, I got an email from the Washington Wizards basketball team. “You are in your 45th year with the Wizards!” it said. “We will be taking you and a guest on a trip to see your Wizards in Atlanta on January 27th.”

Garrison Keillor is an embittered old liberal whose political pronouncements range from the unfunny to the ungenerous. But the creator and longtime host of the radio show A Prairie Home Companion is also a talented writer and bewilderingly versatile entertainer, and we took no joy in hearing that…

Since he became famous hosting his children’s TV show, Bill Nye, aka “the Science Guy,” has spent the last couple of decades being an insufferable scold on climate change and other charged political topics. Aside from appearing on TV, Nye often has no particular expertise on the topics he’s…

Over the past five years, the State Grid Corporation of China has come close to performing a feat that the European Union, despite its 13 trillion euro economy, has failed at for two decades: create an electricity grid stretching across much of Europe, introducing efficiencies and economies of…

The Scrapbook has often touted the Conversations with Bill Kristol video series (available free at conversationswithbillkristol.org), but we are especially fond of the latest installment and suspect you will be, too. It’s an extended discussion of movies, TV, and popular culture with this…

On January 12 the Wall Street Journal reported that Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s attorney, paid a pornographic actress with the nom de scène of Stormy Daniels the sum of $130,000 in exchange for her signature on a nondisclosure agreement. The thing she was not to disclose was an “alleged sexual…

When J. Edgar Hoover died suddenly in May 1972, there had been one director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the previous 48 years. In the nearly 46 years since that day, there have been 15 of them.

When it comes to place names, The Scrapbook is decidedly reactionary. We finally, reluctantly, made our peace with the demise of Mukden and Peking, but until the day someone pours us a Mumbai gin martini, we’re still Bombay all the way.

If former FBI honcho James Comey’s Twitter feed is anything to judge him by, perhaps President Trump was right to can him—on the basis of his grating social media persona alone.

A recent study of abuses in for-profit postsecondary education highlights a reputational disparity within American higher education. For-profit programs and colleges are distrusted and maligned. Their proven value to populations for whom traditional college is out of reach and the various…

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…

Forget Detroit, let's all move to Italy. During the economic crisis, there were hundreds of stories written about distressed properties in Michigan. Now, in Sardinia, you can buy homes for $2. Of course, there are strings attached. As Thrillist reports:

March 23, 1994—Luis Donaldo Colosio, the leading candidate in Mexico's upcoming presidential election, is about to deliver a speech at a rally in Tijuana. It is assumed he will easily win. Loud music is playing. Colosio is being jostled forward by the crowd. They are chanting his name, excited to…

Philadelphia Eagles defensive end Chris Long is the first Super Bowl athlete this year to say he won't visit the White House if his team becomes champions. Like the Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry—the face of basketball’s signature franchise, who said after the NBA Finals last year, “I don’t…

When Twitter removed verified status from some controversial conservative accounts in November, alt-right provocateur Laura Loomer was undeterred. “I could be sad about this and let it ruin my night, or I could view it as a compliment,” Loomer tweeted. “I'll take this as a sign that I'm really…

For much of December and early January, Democrats held a double digit lead in the RealClearPolitics average for the generic ballot–a poll that basically asks a national sample of voters which party they intend to vote for in the upcoming congressional elections. Today, that advantage is down to…

Reviews and News:

On this latest episode of the Substandard, we talk about the impending Disney-Fox merger. Will the X-Men join forces with the Avengers? Will there finally be a definitive Fantastic Four? We also veer into a discussion of Lord of the Rings, JVL’s pregame jitters, Las Vegas, and the Breakfast Sampler…

“As a Catholic, Muriel believed in an afterlife,” Alan Taylor acknowledges in his splendid Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark. “But even someone with her fertile imagination could not picture what it might actually be like. . . . She had often longed to go there, she said, as if…

A recent study of abuses in for-profit post-secondary education highlights a reputational disparity within American higher education. For-profit programs and colleges are distrusted and maligned. Their proven value to populations for whom traditional college is out of reach and various good-faith…

President Trump has until Friday to decide what to do with the so-called Nunes memo, the document alleging widespread misbehavior at the FBI that the House Intelligence Committee voted along partisan lines to release to the public on Monday. Committee rules provide the White House a five-day window…

For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and…

Here’s an embarrassing admission from a longtime Patriots football fan: My childhood team was the Miami Dolphins.

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee is calling on the panel’s Republican chairman to halt the process of releasing a memo alleging that the Trump campaign was a victim of surveillance abuses, shortly before the document’s expected public release.