Jonathan V. Last

Politically, Democrats are better off not pursuing impeachment. But they may not have a choice.

It's just a fact: Bernie is the guy to beat.

Step 1: Propose something ridiculous. Step 2: Cause chaos but don't deliver it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Stan Lee created an entire industry.

That is the lesson of the midterms

All the face of the world is changed.

The former can't admit that some good has happened during the last two years; the latter can't admit that plenty of bad stuff has.

Everyone in America should be angry about what happened in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Christine Blasey Ford, Brett Kavanaugh, and the conversations we need to have.

Can conservatives 'win' if Trump withdraws the nomination?

Pope Francis, Cardinal Wuerl, Theodore McCarrick, and the crisis of a church divided.

Serena Williams isn't a victim of anything except for being Serena Williams.

Only .03 percent of the electorate needed to be persuaded.

Is it so crazy to think he could actually run in 2020?

Trump says that Robert Mueller makes Joe McCarthy look like a baby. But was McCarthyism really a "rigged witch hunt"?

But if there is …

Who signed them, who are they with, and what about Jared and Ivanka?

There's no reason for conservatives to be defending this guy.

Republicans dismiss the Netroots Nation view of 2020 at their own peril.

Do liberals care about climate change, or do they just care about caring about climate change?

Is the president a shill for Big Formula? Maybe. That doesn't mean he's wrong.

Both entered politics as outsiders, but that is where the similarity ends.

There's always an undercurrent of political violence. Is it too late for our norms and institutions to save us now?

They aren't making any more of him.

She's not even close to a conservative, but people on the right embraced her anyhow.

On Wednesday that NFL announced that they had come up with a solution to their Kaepernick dilemma: They announced that players could stay in the locker room for the national anthem if they wanted to, but if they came onto the field for the "Star Spangled Banner," they had to stand.

Ben Shapiro's cover story in the magazine is getting all sorts of attention today and you should absolutely, definitely read it. It's a defining piece about why conservatives are losing young voters and what they need to do to win them back.

President Trump has a history of making big—very, very major—promises. No surprise there. If there’s any professional class more prone to exaggerated promises than politicians, it’s real estate developers. Last year, the Upshot tried to compile a list of things Trump promised would happen “soon”…

Just stop and think about it for a second. Seriously.

Whatever you're doing right now you should stop it and go read Kevin Williamson's long essay in the Wall Street Journal about what, exactly, happened to him at the Atlantic. It is fantastic and a perfect reminder of just what the Atlantic gave up when Jeffrey Goldberg capitulated to the Twitter…

I hate instant replay. Hate it, hate it, hate it.

When I first wandered into The Weekly Standard I worked at the front desk and answered the phones. It gave me a window into who was genuinely kind (they do not make human beings nicer than Gary Bauer) and who was not (no reason to name names). Because I'd grown up as a political junkie, I…

Everyone is focused on North Korea today and I would point you to Ethan Epstein's "Three Questions" piece about the upcoming (possibly?) meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un and Steve Hayes' piece on the dangers of such a meeting.

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…

So here we are.

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

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:

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 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.

I always kind of liked Steve Bannon.

Was Samuel Alito worth the Iraq war?

In 2017, the bar for what must be deemed politically incorrect, culturally appropriative, or just plain inappropriate was set to a new low, so low that only insects could limbo their way beneath it. What was determined to be bad in 2017? Oh, just the Rocky Horror Picture Show, nearly all Halloween…

It should go without saying that America is a Christian nation. It was founded as such and you could fairly say that there would not be an America today if America had not been Christian from the start. Go back and look at the Founders—today’s secularists wouldn’t believe some of the stuff George…

Last week, in a bit of viral marketing genius, Netflix tweeted this:

Roy Moore’s defeat in Alabama has taught the Republican party a number of things about the current political environment: (1) That no state is impregnable, no matter how red. (2) That there is, at least for now, a limit to what Republican voters are willing to forgive in a bad candidate. (3) That…

Fred Barnes always told me that the two most boring words in the English language were “entitlement reform.” Well, “net neutrality” is probably second on the list.

The new Star Wars movie is here. Or almost here. I don’t really know and I really don’t care. Do you?

The other day my pals at the Federalist ran a piece by Tully Borland, an associate professor of philosophy at Ouachita Baptist University, titled “Why Alabamans Should Vote for Roy Moore.” Mind you, that’s not “Why an Alabaman Might Vote for Moore”—this was not an explainer, or a reported piece.…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The indictment of Paul Manafort and Richard Gates is filled with interesting tidbits about their businesses and lifestyles. Some highlights:

Richard Rushfield is a maverick.

There's a new episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol up and it is, typically, intensely interesting.

If you can find the bootleg-Substandard from this week, good for you. Some endnotes and digressions from the show that wasn't:

With the norm-demolishing, nationalist-establishment civil war in America’s Republican party, we sometimes lose sight of what the other great disruptor is doing over in Europe.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest episode:

Some assorted thoughts on Trump versus the NFL:

Endnotes and digressions from the latest episode:

What happened to ESPN?

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

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

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

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

It’s been almost a week since the violence in Charlottesville, and we are still parsing the meta-story about what our president said in its aftermath and then expanded upon a few days later and then doubled back around to re-re-explain on Tuesday, just so people wouldn't get the wrong idea about…

End notes and digressions from the latest show:

Stuart Stevens is something rare in politics: A campaign strategist who can write. Stevens has run just about every kind of campaign there is—he helped win elections for Bob Dole, Haley Barbour, and George W. Bush. He got the guy from The Love Boat into Congress and ran Mitt Romney’s failed 2012…

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Over the years Irwin Stelzer has been one of my favorite economists. He is a direct, yet graceful, writer, a clear thinker, and an analyst possessing large amounts of both humility and charitability. I like to think of him as the anti-Krugman.

By now you’ve read about the ten-page “anti-diversity screed” that was published by an anonymous engineer at Google. Well, he’s no longer anonymous. His name is James Damore and yesterday Google fired him.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Ken Starr might be the most famous lawyer in America outside of the Supreme Court. He has served as a federal judge on the DC Circuit Court and later as solicitor general. He has practiced law and taught law, been the dean of Pepperdine’s Law School and the president of Baylor University. But his…

Whatever else you want to say about Anthony Scaramucci, he was a character. Maybe not a good character, but a character nonetheless. And while the White House will be a better, more stable place with him gone, in a certain way, I’ll miss him.

Data is the best. Or data are the best. Whatever. Everyone agrees that in politics, as in baseball, you can’t trust your own lying eyes. You have to look at the data.

A few years ago someone sold a script to Hollywood based on a Reddit post asking an interesting question: Could you destroy the Roman empire if you traveled back in time with a single Marine infantry battalion?

If you are an American man  born after 1945, you have almost certainly played with Legos. Earlier generations had Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, and Erector Sets, but Legos began taking over the world of building toys in the early 1970s. Meaning if you are under the age of 70, you likely played with…

I saw Dunkirk over the weekend. What a lousy movie!

As I write this, Jeff Sessions still has a job as America’s attorney general, though for all I know, he could be gone by the time you read this.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

The events of this dizzying week present us ample opportunities to take the Earth 2 Test. Imagine we’re on an alternate planet where Hillary Clinton won the election and the parties and players are flipped. Then ask yourself if you would care if she and the Democrats were doing it.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

So John McEnroe has gotten himself into all kinds of trouble this week.

I was a late convert to baseball. I never played it growing up—or even watched it, for that matter. I went to one Orioles game my freshman year of college and didn't stick a glove on my left hand until my junior year, when a couple buddies were heading out to have a catch and I tagged along. At…

Camille Paglia is one America's smartest and most fearless writers. Like Elvis, she's the kind of superstar who really needs no introduction—though it is worth pointing out that Pantheon has just published a collection of her essays on sex, gender, and feminism, titled Free Women, Free Men. It's…

It wasn't exactly May vs. Corbyn, but Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial primary was a shocker in its own right. The race pitted Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam (the heir to the Clintons' heir in the Old Dominion) against former representative Tom Perriello, a super-progressive who was attempting to sell…

On Sunday afternoon Rafa Nadal won his 10th French Open. It is difficult to overstate how impressive this achievement is.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Over the past 48 hours there have been dozens of news stories trying to inject President Donald Trump into the London Bridge attacks: "World leaders call for unity after London attack. Trump tweets the complete opposite." And "With his London tweets Trump embarrasses himself—and America—once…

* We started out this week with some watch talk that may or may not be SFW, depending on your physiological reaction to things such as the Patek Philippe Constellation.

So far as I can tell, I was patient zero for anti-anti-anti-Trumpism: the philosophy which says that it is not enough to avoid the subject of Donald Trump by criticizing the various hucksters, idiots, SJWs, and partisans who criticize him. Because President Donald Trump is the leader of the free…

Roland Garros is open for business!

Tom Ricks is disappointed in General H. R. McMaster. On May 15, during Donald Trump's hebdomas horribilis, McMaster, the president's national security adviser, appeared briefly outside the White House to attack a story in the Washington Post. The Post piece alleged that the president had revealed…

Tom Ricks is disappointed in General H. R. McMaster. On May 15, during Donald Trump's hebdomas horribilis, McMaster, the president's national security adviser, appeared briefly outside the White House to attack a story in the Washington Post. The Post piece alleged that the president had revealed…

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

There's a scene in the Brock Landers documentary—the movie-within-a-movie tucked away inside Boogie Nights—where Dirk Diggler explains how his work in adult films is actually a public service:

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

If James Bennett is remembered for anything, it's the formulation: "Democracy, immigration, multiculturalism . . . pick any two." A lot of people—in America, in France, all over the place, really—have come to see this proposition as reasonably serious.

After Neil Gorsuch was confirmed, most of America moved on to Russia, North Korea, the tax plan, and Rodrigo Duterte. But a small universe of Republican legal thinkers moved on, instead, to war-gaming the next Supreme Court vacancy.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Last May, I traveled to Rome with a small group of journalists. We met with bishops and cardinals. We toured the Scavi beneath St. Peter's and explored the Vatican Museums with a renowned art historian. We were welcomed onto the terrace atop the papal apartment, giving us an extraordinary view of…

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

I draw your attention to the New York Times, which earlier this week ran…wait for it…a devastating attack on the students and faculty at Middlebury.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

The grievance-industry racket is as old as the culture war itself. But rarely has it been practiced as transparently as it was this past week by the Human Rights Campaign.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

The grievance-industry racket is as old as the culture war itself. But rarely has it been practiced as transparently as it was this past week by the Human Rights Campaign.

So we're in the strange place where Paul Ryan—globalist, RINO, scourge of tru-cons everywhere—is now wholly aligned with Donald Trump—populist avenger, conqueror, and the truest of true-conservatives. They became teamed up in pursuit of a healthcare reform package that exactly no one really liked.…

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

There's a small movie coming out about Madalyn Murray O'Hair. Unless you're over a certain age and/or deeply invested in the intersection of the law and religious freedom, this name might not mean much to you. But half a century ago Madalyn Murray O'Hair was reasonably famous. She founded the group…

A few weeks ago Wellesley College invited Laura Kipnis to give a talk. Kipnis is not an especially controversial figure. She is a professor of media studies at Northwestern who teaches film and seems to be generally in line with old-guard feminism. Her one deviation was a piece she wrote for the…

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

A few years ago I wrote a piece where I asked whether or the '00s had been worse than the '70s. At the time, I thought it was a close call, one that could go either way. Today, I'm not so sure.

I am not generally a fan of President Trump, Trumpism, the alt-right, or anonymous internet trolls. But on the other hand, you have to pay respect where it's due. Let us now discuss the greatest act of pro-Trump trolling, ever.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Bill Bishop is one of my favorite sociologists. (He's not a real sociologist, mind you. He's a journalist. But he co-wrote one of my favorite sociology books, The Big Sort. If you haven't read it, run, don't walk.)

By now, I suspect you've heard about what happened when Charles Murray went to Vermont to give a lecture at Middlebury College. But perhaps you have not seen it. The video is here. It is instructive.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

I'm fascinated by the evolving taxonomy of conservatives in the age of Trump.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

I frequently point you to the writings of Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist and blogger who I think of as the liberal Theodore Dalrymple. His blog is called Slate Star Codex and he's pretty great.

Are you going to watch the Academy Awards this Sunday? Please don't. You'll only drive yourself crazy. If you love Donald Trump, you'll be outraged at all of the idiotic, self-important protests. If you hate Donald Trump you'll be exasperated that the idiots in Hollywood somehow managed to find the…

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

I don’t know about you, but I get a lot of laughs watching people on the left trying to climb the pyramid of grievances.

Since we now live in a world where Democrats have a "new standard" for Supreme Court nominees, it's worth gaming out what to expect from Dems at Neil Gorsuch's confirmation hearing. Will they pull some sort of unprecedented stunt? Perhaps by staging a walkout? Or a performance of "La Resistance"?…

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

I've known David Frum almost since I first came to Washington. A mutual friend of ours once described him thusly: "David is one of the handful of people in this town whose intellect is genuinely intimidating." That appraisal always struck me as pretty much correct.

I don't know about you, but I'm still recovering from Sunday night.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

J. L. Penfold died early on the morning of January 10. He was 71 years old. He was at home. And he was surrounded by his family. All of which are blessings.

There's a lot of important Trump news this week—the SCOTUS pick, his executive order on visas and refugees—but I'm going to deliberately ignore it because these are fast-moving stories.

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

I don't know about you, but I hate movie twists.

The response from Trump supporters, both in the media and in the wild, to Sean Spicer's Saturday press conference were instructive. It basically boiled down to:

The first official White House press conference is on Monday, but Sean Spicer called a Very Special Presser Saturday evening. Why? He had something he wanted to get off his chest. "[P]hotographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize…

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

We're into Day 4 of the Australian Open!

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

A year ago, as he prepared to give his final State of the Union speech, President Obama strode the halls of the Capitol while being interviewed by NBC's Matt Lauer. Lauer asked the president, in his friendly and earnest way, if he "takes responsibility" for the fact that Donald Trump was catching…

Over the weekend BuzzFeed published what it called "the definitive ranking" of Disney animation films. All 56 of them.

So what did Russia do to influence the election and does it matter?

Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

A year ago, as he prepared to give his final State of the Union speech, President Obama strode the halls of the Capitol while being interviewed by NBC’s Matt Lauer. Lauer asked the president, in his friendly and earnest way, if he "takes responsibility" for the fact that Donald Trump was catching…

There were two stories before Christmas that pointed to the possibility that we are now living in an alternate universe, or have diverged onto a new timeline, or pick your Fringe metaphor.

Have you ever heard of Marc Goodwin and Mikhail Gallatinov?

Some endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

Editor's note: The piece below first ran on THE WEEKLY STANDARD's website in May 2002, upon the release of Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones. It is reprinted here to commemorate Friday's release of the latest Star Wars movie, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which serves as a standalone…

One of the mini-classics of the '90s was the James Brooks movie As Good as It Gets. It's about a slightly deranged writer played by Jack Nicholson and the title comes from a scene in which Nicholson's character walks out of his shrink's office into the waiting room and mischievously asks the other…

Growing up in mitte middle-class New Jersey, I spent much of my adolescence riddled with an unbecoming status anxiety. I was forever worried that not having the right clothes, or the right backpack, or the right sunglasses, would mark me as not belonging to the smart set. The fact that there was no…

Growing up in mitte middle-class New Jersey, I spent much of my adolescence riddled with an unbecoming status anxiety. I was forever worried that not having the right clothes, or the right backpack, or the right sunglasses, would mark me as not belonging to the smart set. The fact that there was no…

I want to share a fantastic Bloomberg Businessweek piece on the Medallion Fund by Katherine Burton.

Over the weekend Ross Douthat had an interesting column about the"crisis of liberalism." "The 2016 campaign was a crisis for conservatism," he writes, "its aftermath is a crisis for liberalism."

Over the weekend I received emails from two very smart conservative lawyer friends about who President Donald Trump should nominate to take the late Antonin Scalia's seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The first mounted a strong argument for Joan Larsen—about whom I had known relatively little. When I…

Over at Slate Jamelle Bouie has been on a tear about how racist Donald Trump and all of his voters are. His case is not especially nuanced: "White Won" and "There's No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter." You can read Bouie's arguments in depth if you like, but the headlines give you a pretty good…

No one was more surprised than me when Donald Trump pulled off the greatest electoral upset since Truman beat Dewey. (Except maybe these folks.) But from this point on, all the clichés are basically true: He's our next president. Every American should pray for him and hope he's successful.

If you're one of those people who was surprised to learn that the national anthem is inherently racist, then you were probably surprised to learn that the Lego Group—the parent company that makes Legos—has decided to pull all its advertising in London's Daily Mail.

The 2016 election tested a number of questions about American electioneering, among which was how much organization matters in the modern political environment. The Trump campaign had very little organization and no get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation. The Clinton campaign went big on both. The…

The 2016 election tested a number of questions about American electioneering, among which was how much organization matters in the modern political environment. The Trump campaign had very little organization and no get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation. The Clinton campaign went big on both. The…

Since there will be an avalanche of post-election analysis on Wednesday, I thought it would be more helpful to give you some thoughts on what to look for tonight as the returns come in.

This has not been an especially ennobling election. Or a rewarding one. Or even entertaining. Pretty much everything about 2016 has been boorish and grotesque. But finally it is time to laugh.

A few weeks ago a group of public figures dubbing themselves Scholars and Writers , er, for America issued a "Statement of Support" that read, in toto:

Last week, Buzzfeed’s Katherine Miller observed that the most interesting thing about Donald Trump is what he reveals about other people. This depressing truth has been on display for the better part of a year as Trump has laid bare the cowardice of much of the Republican establishment, the toxic…

There are going to be lots of different ways to examine Donald Trump's impending loss. But I want to point to a very basic one that's so simple that it might escape notice: On election night, you should keep an eye on the raw vote totals.

Let's get this out of the way up top: This was, by far, Trump's most disciplined debate performance. For 32 minutes, he almost sounded like a normal presidential candidate and for the first hour he wasn't terrible. Trump even seems to have spent some time preparing. He knew the name of a Supreme…

Wednesday night will probably be the last time Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are ever in a room together. (Unless Madam President accepts the invitation to Trump's next wedding.) But other than as a historical footnote, this debate doesn't really matter.

Now that the presidential race is over, it's time to start thinking about what's going to happen to the Republican party next.

I've been telling you—for a couple months now—that Donald Trump is not going to be president. I've gotten a lot of pushback on this from readers who proclaim, variously, that the polls are wrong, that Trump is playing four-dimensional chess, that this is the second coming of Reagan, or that Beltway…

So you've got this buddy, Bob. You aren't as close as you used to be, but you grew up together and have a bunch of friends in common. And even though you're both busy with your lives, you get together every couple years to catch up.

There is one important sense in which Donald Trump "won" the debate on Sunday night: He did not implode. He wasn't "good," or attractive, or knowledgeable. He was coarse and whiny and unpleasant. He lied constantly. And he became the first presidential candidate in the history of our Republic to…

Bill Kristol uses a great quote from Churchill in the service of urging all of the various Republican/conservative factions to come together and remove Donald Trump from the ticket.

When you collect comics, there are all sorts of factors that determine the value of the book. Certain important comics (they're referred to as "key" issues) are high-value. So, for instance, Detective Comics #358 isn't worth all that much, but issue #359 is, because it's the first appearance…

One of the themes I visit over and over again is the difference between tactics and strategy. I keep ringing this bell because the two ideas aren't particularly well understood in the political realm.

The vice presidential debate doesn't matter. It never matters. And if you want proof, consider Lloyd Bentsen. In 1988, Bentsen scored the biggest knockout blow in the history of vice presidential debates, hitting Dan Quayle in a moment so vivid that it remains the most memorable moment of the…

I live in a little homogenized exurb about 30 miles outside of Washington. Way outside of the Beltway. Out in the "real Virginia," as George Allen once unfortunately put it. And over the weekend my little town had two craft breweries open. That's in addition to the brewery that opened last year.…

One of the theories I have about 2016 is that because the two most unpopular candidates in American history are running, the race tilts away from the candidate that has the country’s attention. When Hillary Clinton is front-and-center, as she's been for the last few weeks, she's losing. Ditto for…

"We need to start voting for leaders whom we actually want to see in office," Evan McMullin says as we sit together in a small conference room. "Or we will never get them."

Ninety-seven years ago this month, Bolshevik troops stormed the Winter Palace at Saint Petersburg in the coup de grâce of the Russian Revolution. As much as any other event, this triumph of communism would dominate and shape the remainder of the century. To get a sense of scale, consider that the…

"We need to start voting for leaders whom we actually want to see in office,” Evan McMullin says as we sit together in a small conference room. "Or we will never get them."

"We need to start voting for leaders whom we actually want to see in office,” Evan McMullin says as we sit together in a small conference room. "Or we will never get them."

Over at his excellent Kristol Clear podcast (to which you should most definitely subscribe,) Bill Kristol argues that Monday's debate could be a really big deal. His reasons include:

Stuart Stevens has found fame and fortune as a political strategist. He is one of the half-dozen or so campaign consultants in America who actually understands both politics and strategy and isn’t just grifting the needy, well-heeled marks who often find themselves compelled to run for office.

Let's talk some Hillary Clinton. First off, I'm totally unconcerned about her health. To begin with, as everyone knows (or should know) Hillary Clinton is immortal. That's why she drinks the blood of a unicorn every morning at sunrise. I'm sorry, what did you think Huma's real job has been all…

Tuesday night Newt Gingrich went on Brit Hume's new show on Fox News. Gingrich is a fascinating interview because, whatever his eccentricities, he's a visionary and one of the major figures of the last century of American politics. If you want to see full-bore Gingrich, go and take in his long…

In presidential politics, the phrase "ground game" carries an almost mystical sense of portent. It is invoked by journalists, partisans, and campaign consultants as a vehicle for tipping close elections. But does it really matter?

In presidential politics, the phrase “ground game" carries an almost mystical sense of portent. It is invoked by journalists, partisans, and campaign consultants as a vehicle for tipping close elections. But does it really matter?

The first week of the U.S. Open was reasonably entertaining, but I want to focus on two players, one current (Nick Kyrgios) and one recently retired (Andy Roddick) because I think they represent the opposite poles of why some of us love tennis.

There are two ways to challenge politically correct orthodoxies. One is to toss off outrageous remarks designed to épater les bourgeois. This requires little and accomplishes less. The other is to take the commanding orthodoxy, put it under a microscope, and dismantle it piece by piece. This is…

There are two ways to challenge politically correct orthodoxies. One is to toss off outrageous remarks designed to épater les bourgeois. This requires little and accomplishes less. The other is to take the commanding orthodoxy, put it under a microscope, and dismantle it piece by piece. This is…

The Clinton campaign has been pretty smart so far.

You might not believe this, but we're just four weeks out from the first presidential debate and behind the scenes, prep is well underway. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that Laura Ingraham is helping the Trump campaign prepare for the debates and may even wind up playing the part…

It was on Halloween night that I first realized there was a problem. My three children—dressed as Darth Vader, a pirate fairy, and Tinker Bell—were making their way down Lee Street, in Old Town Alexandria, Va. The houses were decked with spider webs and all manner of spooky, expensive-looking…

What I was trying emphasize with all the poll talk Wednesday is that this race is over. There is no coming back from where Trump is now. A candidate with high-favorables and a semi-competent campaign—say, Bob Dole—couldn't do it. A conspiracy-obsessed narcissist who is hated by 60 percent of the…

Are you enjoying the new Trump pivot? Like President Obama's pivot to the economy—coming soon to a theater near you since the spring of 2009—Donald Trump has been just about to pivot to the general election since the evening he wrapped up the nomination in Indiana. And yet, there's always a shiny…

I admire Tom Edsall a ton. Like Robert Putnam and Phil Longman, he's smart and honest and interesting and you don't have to be a fellow-traveler to profit from reading him.

Donald Trump is not going to quit the race. The Republican party is not going to push him off the ballot. He may have a brief surge in the polls at some point, because the first rule of politics is that all races tighten.

You should clear the decks and read Michael Barone's new piece in the American Interest. It's an examination of the future of the Republican party and I simply don't think you can have an informed view on the subject without drinking in Barone's thoughts first:

Pretty much the only reason conservatives have for supporting Donald Trump is the Supreme Court. "Think of SCOTUS!" is a superficially compelling argument. But only superficially.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was quick to endorse Donald Trump, waiting fewer than 24 hours after Trump had cleared the Republican primary field. He did so by releasing a 75-word statement at eight o'clock in the evening. And that was that.

So there's a bounce.

How did it get to this point?

Is there any politician as ill-suited to a city as Hillary Clinton is to Philadelphia?

Finally, something went right for the Democrats in Philadelphia on Wednesday night.

You may not remember this, but four years ago Bill Clinton spoke on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. And it turned out to be the hinge of the campaign against Mitt Romney.

Day one of the Democratic convention was dominated by disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters. The protested in the city; they chanted and booed inside the arena. And so even though 90 percent of Sanders voters now say they're supporting Hillary Clinton, the Sanders vanguard was still fighting.

If you're curious how Donald Trump could win the election, just game out what the Democrats should do in Philadelphia next week versus what they probably will do.

We can pretend that Hillary Clinton's vice presidential pick matters, but it doesn't. In fact, it may matter even less than usual. Very few voters like or trust Clinton, so instead the campaign is turning into referendum on Donald Trump.

Byron York has an interesting piece Thursday about the Trump team's bizarre eagerness to get into a fight with John Kasich. You should read the whole thing, but the short version is this: Kasich, either out of pique or self-interest or principle, didn't want to participate in the convention in his…

Well, it's finally here, the moment we've all been waiting for, when Donald Trump is formally enshrined as the face, the body, and the soul of the Republican party. I hope it works out for them ...

One of the truths I've come to believe over the years in covering conventions is that they play differently in the hall than they do on TV. I'm not in Cleveland, so I can't tell you how it played to the room, but on the screen, Chris Christie's show-trial indictment of Hillary Clinton came across…

Trumpism is a many splendored thing. It encompasses both support for the Iraq war and opposition to it. On a meta-level, it condemns supporters of the Iraq war and also forgives them.

The Drudge siren is blaring that Mike Pence is Trump's VP pick. I'm not sure I believe it, though, for a couple reasons.

I got a chance to hunker down with the new issue of National Affairs over the weekend. (I was on a commuter train full of drunk, sunburned Millennials, going from the Jersey Shore to New York City on a Sunday night. This is, I think, the optimal setting in which to consume National Affairs.)

Three stories Wednesday morning out of Trump World on the vice presidential front. The first is CNN reporting that the Trump children want Mike Pence while Big Orange is leaning toward Christie. The second is the New York Times with a quote from Trump where he says that he has five finalists, two…

While Washington elites spent Monday fussing about the merits of Mike Flynn versus Mike Pence, real America was rocked by leaked pictures of Lego's newest super set, the 71040 Disney Castle.

Over the last several years people have been led to believe a number of ineluctable demographic truths, most of which turn out to be almost exactly wrong. (I wrote a book about this a few years back, which can loosely be summarized as: "Everything you think you know about demographics is wrong.")

Michael Cimino died last weekend. If you recognize his name at all, it's probably because you remember that he was the guy who won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Deer Hunter in 1979.

Wimbledon started on Monday, which gave me—finally!—something to cheer about.

How bad is Hillary Clinton, really?

The Daily Signal reports today that the Department of the Interior has declared visitors to the parks "are welcome to use restrooms that best align with their gender identity."

Mary Eberstadt has new book about religious freedom called It's Dangerous to Believe.

Several months ago it became clear that Trumpism is a corrosive force that corrupts everyone in Donald Trump’s orbit. What makes Trumpism corrupting is that it is not possible to pick and choose from the Trump buffet. You cannot endorse the border fence, hope for a good Supreme Court appointment,…

Wendy Warcholik and Scott Moody are a husband and wife research team who have spent the last couple years working on what they call the Family Prosperity Index. What they've done is create a database of indicators that demonstrate--in rigorous, econometric terms--what many conservatives have…

Two weeks ago the Obama administration issued a federal edict decreeing that every public school in America allow students to use whichever bathroom they choose, under pain of lawsuit and/or loss of federal funding.

There aren't many political philosophers who operate on the level of Harvey Mansfield. By which I mean that it takes a special kind of smart to be able to explain serious philosophy in a way that even chuckleheads like me can understand it.

Have you been to the movies lately? If so, you may have noticed that just about every other weekend there's a new comic book movie out: Deadpool, Batman v. Superman,Captain America, X-Men. If you're a comic book fan (like me) this is pretty great.

One of my little life goals has always been to get an Antarctica Zippo lighter from the McMurdo base at the bottom of the world.

Check out this piece from Bloomberg Businessweek about the Hualalai resort community in Hawaii. It's basically the best gentrification story ever; one in which a bunch of billionaires discover a high-end place run by millionaires and decide to they want to get rid of the riff-raff. The short…

In Philadelphia sports lore, there is a famous phrase: “For who? For what?" In 1995, the Philadelphia Eagles were thought to be one player away from Super Bowl contention. In the offseason they signed the NFL's best free agent, Pro Bowl running back Ricky Watters. In the final minutes of the first…

It's not every day that you get a long, tortured analogy likening the Republican party to the post-revolution Soviets. But it's the post-Indiana Trump Day, so buckle up. Here we go.

If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, then a few months from now America may be treated to something it has never seen before: a presidential nominee being called to testify in his own defense while being sued for fraud.

My earliest memory of running—of making an effort to run as fast as I could—comes from first grade. There were a lot of footraces at school that year. They were short distance sprints across the blacktop and back. Maybe 75 yards. As often as not, I won. My only real competition was John Scotto, a…

For two weeks now Donald Trump has been whining that he is the victim of sinister, shadowy forces colluding to deny him the Republican presidential nomination. This miniature campaign began with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which Trump complained about the Colorado convention, calling it…

One of the hallmarks of Trumpism is that signing on with Trump means that you can't just support the wall and leave it at that-you're required to defend every stupid thing he says, ever, until infinity. Don't take my word for it. Here's Trump Super-Fan Ann Coulter: "It's like constantly having to…

Four bits of news from the front lines of World War T in the last week or so.

With the New York primary in the rear window, let's take a break to talk about something other than politics and, you know, the utter destruction of civilization.

You will recall Donald Trump's promise to bring you only "the best people."

Of all the arguments against Donald Trump, the softest has been his poor prospects for victory in the general election. True, he has consistently polled worse against Hillary Clinton than have Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and virtually every other person who ran. But polls change. And if Trump were to…

Donald Trump's delegate momentum is slowing down.

Over at Steve Sailer’s blog, one of his commenters has found an interesting post from economist Brad DeLong back in 2003. For those of you who don't remember the early '00s, DeLong was a deputy assistant secretary at Treasury under Bill Clinton who became one of the stars of the lefty blogosphere,…

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the creation of Trumpism. The p.c. insanity on college campuses. Globalization and the hollowing out of the working class. ISIS in Paris and San Bernardino. The broadcast media that donated $1.898 billion in free media to the cause. Let's stipulate all of…

In November 1993 an unlikely book appeared at the top of the bestseller lists. William J. Bennett’s The Book of Virtues was a tome: 832 pages of moral instruction. People ate it up. Newsweek called it “just what this country needs,” and Time said it “ought to be distributed, like an owner’s manual,…

If you had to come up with a description for the response of institutional Republicans to Donald Trump, it would be this: Too late.

With Marco Rubio dropping out tonight, you’re going to hear a lot of theorizing about why he lost. It was the Gang of Eight. It was Trump. It was the anger. It was the out-of-touch elites. None of this is correct.

Sean Trende has an important piece on delegate pluralities this morning. Here's a flavor of it:

How strong a frontrunner is Donald Trump? That depends on how you look at him. The chassis of Trump’s campaign—the rally crowds, the poll numbers, the primary wins—looks like that of a traditional frontrunner. But under the hood he's running a pure insurgent campaign not unlike what Howard Dean and…

After two debates in which Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio took a blowtorch to Donald Trump, the freshman senators decided to lay up.

Watching Mitt Romney’s excellent speech yesterday reminded me of my departed friend and colleague Dean Barnett.

There has been much talk about the rupture, collapse, and/or abandonment of the Republican party as the result of Donald Trump’s rise. The most interesting and serious comment came from Senator Ben Sasse, who declared that if Trump becomes the GOP nominee, "conservatives will need to find a third…

In theory, Ted Cruz’s best states are behind him. But at the Detroit debate, Cruz was clearly the class of the field and it's clear that no one should count him out as the delegate race moves into its next phase.

There’s a classic scene in First Blood where John Rambo declares, "Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off!"

Over the course of the last 48 hours, the Rubio campaign pulled one of the great head-fakes in recent political history by telegraphing that they weren’t at all interested in attacking Donald Trump at tonight's debate.

In his indispensible newsletter, the Transom, Ben Domenech makes a profound observation about tonight’s debate: The best way to become the "Not Trump," is to beat Trump. And the way to beat him isn't to argue that he's a meanie or detail his ideological inconsistencies. It's to go full-alpha and…

One of the (many) oddities of the 2016 Republican race is how perverted our language has become in categorizing the candidates. Marco Rubio is the "establishment" candidate. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are "anti-establishment." Neither of these definitions really fits what's going on.

The February 13 debate in South Carolina provided a clarifying moment for this year's GOP presidential race. Donald Trump claimed that the administration of George W. Bush had engaged in a massive conspiracy to mislead the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "They lied," Trump…

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio need a pep talk from Herm Edwards: “You play to win the game. You play to win the game."

The first time I saw Justice Antonin Scalia in the flesh was in college. He came to speak at my school, which was a broadly apolitical place. There were no protests. He gave a brief talk on the idea of originalism—easily the most engaging lecture of my four years—and then he took questions. For…

Hillary Clinton’s loss to Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary wasn't as bad as she'd feared. It was worse. Sanders's margin of victory — 60 percent to 39 percent — was the largest ever by a Democrat who wasn't a sitting president. It was a come-from-behind win: Eight months ago, Sanders was…

Bernie Sanders: The first twelve minutes of his speech have nothing to do with politics. Instead, he opens with a mini-lecture on the dialectic of history: suffrage, segregation, Jim Crow, gay marriage. Once he launches into the political portion of his remarks, the speech has a shape, with themes…

One of the most striking things about the New Hampshire primary, on the GOP side, was how none of the Republican candidates (other than Donald Trump) played to win. Stuart Stevens wrote about this earlier in the week and it's completely true: Trump took a commanding-but hardly unassailable…

Hampstead, N.H.

Portsmouth, N.H.

Londonderry, N.H.

Manchester, N.H.

Bedford, N.H.

Atkinson, N.H.

Atkinson, N.H.

Portsmouth, N.H.

It was 11:30 p.m. on the night of the Iowa caucuses and Hillary Clinton had a decision to make. She was ahead of Bernie Sanders by less than 1 percent of the vote count and most of the precincts were in. But her lead was shrinking. If she waited much longer, her victory speech might turn into a…

Exeter, N.H.

So here we are at last. The voters have started to speak and what they've said so far is quite different from how the race had been portrayed in the media. Nate Silver estimates that through mid-December, Donald Trump dominated 54 percent of the media coverage of the Republican primary campaign.…

Winners and losers from Iowa, ranked:

To my mind, Barack Obama has always been wildly over-rated as a speaker. He has a great voice--really Saruman-caliber pipes. But his delivery is erratic and his material is rarely anywhere near as good as people think in the moment. His 2004 Purple America convention speech, for instance, might be…

With Donald Trump skipping the debate to consort with Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum (because he cares so very much about veterans), Ted Cruz had a golden opportunity to make a strong closing pitch to Iowa voters. He missed it.

Is this the greatest fight night ever? In a word: Yes. We're less than eight hours away from the debate kickoff and we don't even know for sure if the Republican frontrunner will be on stage.

With very little warning, the Republican primaries began in earnest at the Charleston debate on January 14, closing out a year of fundraising and polite jockeying. What had once been a field of 17 declared candidates—with 8 or 10 of them being serious, substantive contenders—was, by the end of the…

The Charleston debate may have been more consequential than it looked at first glance. For starters, neither Jeb Bush nor John Kasich nor Ben Carson registered. (Except for Bush’s bizarre decision to make his most impassioned argument of the campaign in service of the rights of Muslim citizens from…

The Republicans are back onstage in a debate that presents some interesting strategic opportunities.

Walter Russell Mead has a typically incisive post about the economic problems rippling outward from China. He points out there are actually two issues here—China and the China Bubble:

There are new polls out of the Democratic early states and they aren’t especially good for Hillary Clinton. ARG has Bernie Sanders at +3 in Iowa. That's probably an outlier, but the trend is pretty clear: Clinton has led by double digits in Iowa since October. Now Sanders is suddenly within single…

Florence King passed away this week and National Review’s Jack Fowler has written a lovely and touching obituary. What's especially touching is that Fowler does not whitewash King's eccentricities. He recounts what a difficult writer she was to deal with and even talks about how her unbelief seemed…

You no doubt remember Melissa Click, the University of Missouri journalism professor who was caught on camera demanding “some muscle" to remove a journalist who was covering protests in a public space.

While you were off enjoying Christmas and New Year's you may have missed an amazing story: Down in Ecuador a man met a woman. They fell in love. And now the woman is four months pregnant with his child. Amazing, right? Stop the presses!

If you're one of those people who likes to collect examples of bias in the mainstream media, I have a prize piece for your scrapbook. And it's been hiding in plain sight for the last five months.

Tom Nichols has a thoughtful and pretty persuasive piece over at the Daily Beast arguing that Trumpmania is the direct consequence of the militant PC radicalism that has infested American society over the last decade or so.

This review deals largely in spoilers concerning The Force Awakens. Normally, I don't think spoilers actually spoil much, but for this case the viewing experience is greatly enhanced by coming to the movie cold. So I'd suggest you really not read this until after you've seen it.

This story originally appeared at the Washington Free Beacon.

As college campuses shut down for winter break, the Maoist insanity that gripped American higher education this fall hit a new high-water mark. At Harvard, little laminated posters began appearing in the student dining halls with instructions on how students should discuss sensitive political…

Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens wide at midnight tonight and I don't want to get out over my skis here, but it's pretty much the most important movie in the history of cinema.

Tuesday's debate wasn't boring, exactly. There was a good deal of substance and some demolition derby, too. Also, there was some real news toward the end when Trump doubled down on staying in the Republican party and not running a third-party candidacy if someone else is the nominee. But I don't…

It looked like a four-man race going in. It looks even more that way coming out. The nominee is likely to be either Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Chris Christie. I don't know where the polls will go, but you could argue that all four of them helped themselves at the Las Vegas debate.

In this week's magazine, I have a long piece about the campus protests that engulfed colleges across the country this fall. The story is by turns absurd, comedic, and worrisome.

The Obama administration—easily the most ideologically progressive in modern American history—has been accompanied by both liberal triumphalism and liberal outrage.

Last week, the best and worst of Donald Trump were on display within about 48 hours of one another.

Having a decidedly anti-romantic view of college, I find myself not entirely opposed to the student radicals besieging campuses across the country.

I'm ready to concede that Donald Trump is the most anomalous figure I've seen in presidential politics. He has defied the laws of electioneering so many times-reversing his favorable-unfavorable numbers despite universal name identification; thriving in the wake of incidents that would have sunk…

We have yet to find a term for the student protests going on across the country that beats Mona Charen’s “snowflake fascists” and last week the precious little Maoists at Princeton got the biggest scalp since Tim Wolfe: They brought down Woodrow Wilson himself.

There are a few tentative observations to be gleaned in the aftermath of the Paris attacks:

Last week was one of those quiet Election Days where, on the surface, nothing much happened. But the “nothing much” might actually be something. We may have seen voters begin to pump the brakes on runaway liberalism.

There were a few weird moments at the debate last night, but none was stranger than the crowd reaction when John Kasich and Jeb Bush were talking about immigration. Both were unapologetically pro-amnesty. Neither bothered to make concessions about how problematic the breakdown of the rule of law is…

It’s a rare debate where no one comes out feeling like they won. Some thoughts on how the field performed:

Going in, Chris Christie was the guy to watch at the undercard debate. He’s moving in New Hampshire, he handled his relegation with grit, and people are finally starting to see what a talent he is.

Tonight’s debates on Fox Business should be notable for a number of reasons:

It seems like the Christmas season starts a little earlier each year. A couple years back I was shocked when Costco put out Christmas items the week after Halloween; now the Christmas decorations are on sale weeks before trick-or-treating. And this year, even the War on Christmas has come early.

Pope Francis’s synod on the family adjourned on Sunday, October 25, after an acrimonious three weeks. This assembly of bishops, like a similar one last year, was convened because the pope is interested in changing Catholic teaching on divorce, remarriage, and, to a lesser extent, homosexuality.

Before it recedes entirely into the rearview mirror, it’s worth one last look at CNBC’s debate debacle (debatacle?) which was, as my buddy Michael Graham put it, a trainwreck into a dumpster fire.

Tonight’s debate showed that the GOP field is smaller than it looks. Technically, there are still fourteen people running, but the winnowing is far along. We probably have a final six and possibly a final four.

The Bush hit on Rubio was obviously premeditated, so it wasn’t gaffe or a mistake. It was a revealing measure of his political talent and judgment. Let’s count the ways in which it was strategically ill-conceived and tactically incompetent:

In a lot of ways, tonight’s Republican debate looks like the lowest-stakes of the three debates so far. We know what the candidates all look like in a debate setting; we know which lanes they're each slotted into. And while there will be ten candidates on stage, the field really isn't that big…

Ben Domenech gets right to the heart of what we see in the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer:

Everyone talks about “chaos” in Congress just because Republicans haven’t chosen a new speaker of the House. If you want to see real chaos, look at Rome, where Pope Francis’s synod on the family has been a shambling disaster since the moment it started.

Going into tonight, the conventional wisdom was that Bernie Sanders would try to genially introduce himself, the candidates would mostly stay in their own lanes, and that Hillary was a bleeding target. Not so much.

I've been saying for the last few weeks that Hillary Clinton's campaign is in a window of danger. Tonight might be the moment of maximal peril.

There is a sense among the Republican establishment that Donald Trump’s candidacy is, to quote Bob Odenkirk, a traveshamockery. That is, Trump is contaminating conservatism and diminishing the chances a Republican will win in 2016.

About 48 hours after Pope Francis decamped from America's greatest city, reports started circulating in the press-later confirmed by the Vatican-that the Holy Father had secretly met with Kim Davis, that Kentucky clerk who refused to grant same-sex marriage licenses. Davis, you'll recall, has been…

We're two weeks from the first Democratic debate and to be honest with you, I can't tell right now if we are underestimating Hillary Clinton's weakness, or her strength.

Pope Francis spoke at the United Nations Friday morning and his remarks were, more or less, what was expected: a long push for climate change legislation mixed with concern about the world’s unjust economy. So in general, there wasn’t much to see. But in their particulars, some of the pope’s…

Pope Francis spoke to Congress this morning and Ross Douthat had an observation which helps a great deal in understanding the man:

If you've followed the technology world over the last five years, you know that the three buzziest trends in Silicon Valley have been "social media," "mobile computing," and the "sharing economy."

After his morning visit with President Obama, Pope Francis ambled over to St. Matthew’s Cathedral (which is easily the most beautiful building in Washington) to meet with America’s bishops. 

Say this for President Obama: His troll game is strong. During his opening remarks welcoming Pope Francis, he abandoned his “freedom to worship” language and instead said: “People are only free when they can practice their faith freely.” And that, “We in the United States cherish our religious…

On the continuing question of whether Pope Francis is a menace or a farce, the Holy Father offered another data point during an interview with members of the media aboard his flight to the United States on Tuesday. CNN’s Rosa Flores asked a pretty straightforward question about Francis’s refusal to…

Because presidential politics are as much about in-group signaling as actual policy, Ben Carson is locked in a media-generated controversy about whether or not he’d be down with having a Muslim president. Carson was asked about this deeply-important question on Meet the Press. He said no. And when…

It’s hard to exaggerate how shocking it is that Scott Walker is out of the 2016 race on September 21.

Back in 1999, The Weekly Standard ran one of my favorite cover lines ever: The New Europe: Menace or Farce? I often think of that question when I watch Pope Francis.

Say what you will about the Romney 2012 campaign, but Stuart Stevens is bright, perceptive, and candid—always worth listening to. So I was struck by his observation about Donald Trump during the course of an interview with New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman: “For Donald Trump to win, everything we…

It's fight night again and if the second GOP debate is anything like the first (no guarantees on that, by the way) then whatever happens tonight will shape the next several weeks of the race.

Cloning is one of those ethical problems that seemed terribly urgent twenty years ago, but which, for some reason, dropped off of our collective radar. Ever wonder why? Well now the New Atlantis has the definitive answer.

We have a debate coming next week and far from fading, The Donald is now in the strongest position he's thus far occupied. He's at 28 percent in the RealClear average. He's got leads of +7 and +15 in Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively. And he's running closer to Clinton in general election…

You've probably now heard of Ashley Madison, a dating website set up explicitly for married people looking to have affairs. Their entire system got hacked--not just member accounts and credit-card info, but internal company data, too. And the most interesting stuff to come out of it isn't about…

Let's check in with the big 2016 news from last week: Jim Gilmore? He gone. From the CNN debate, that is. I expect he'll be formally gone from the race soon and whoever manages to scoop up his support will be in the driver's seat to Cleveland.

You might think that you want to talk about the Greatest Debate Ever, but we're going to set that aside and let it breathe for a week. It was glorious, but there are more things in heaven and earth Donald Trump. For instance: Remember Ebola?

I live out in Real Virginia, which is to say the part of Virginia that is technically a D.C. exurb, but is populated almost entirely by normal people. My neighbors are teachers and plumbers and soldiers and engineers. Plenty of the folks out here work for the federal government, but none of them…

Best debate ever, right?

Tonight is fight night and it could be the first inflection point we've seen in the race since June, when Donald Trump began his rise. In 2012 not every debate mattered, but the ones that did mattered a lot: Gingrich's rise came through the debates and Perry's collapse began not with his memory…

You didn't think that the Donald was going to pay a price for insulting John McCain, did you?

The lone bright spot last week was the release of Ryan Anderson's much-anticipated (by me, at least) book on Obergefell and the future of marriage. It's called Truth Overruled: The future of marriage and religious freedom and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

We turn now to the suburbs of Philadelphia. Waldron Mercy Academy is a private school in Merion Station which takes children all the way from daycare at three months through eighth grade. It is not cheap—tuition for grades one through eight is $13,250 per year. Its campus sits nestled around an old…

In this week’s newsletter, I talked about Donald Trump’s electoral prospects in the context to two other reasonably successful, non-traditional candidates: Jesse Ventura and Ross Perot. My basic point is that voters are more likely to support fringe candidates than the establishment often assumes.…

Before we begin discussion of Donald Trump, we must start with Kevin Williamson's epic burn from a few weeks ago, because it's the truest thing you've ever read:

Look, it's not the end of the world.  

AEI reports that Ben Wattenberg has died. I met him only once but had admired him for years, and it strikes me that he stands as a particularly important figure today. Not for his intellect, though it was keen; or for his energy, though it was abundant. No, what marked Wattenberg foremost was his…

Bernie Sanders isn't Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare. He probably doesn't even crack the top five on Hillary's watch list. (I'm pretty sure it's Elizabeth Warren who keeps people awake at night Clintonland. Though, just for kicks, imagine what would happen if Michelle Obama decided to run. Do you…

You may recall Brendan Eich. The cofounder and CEO of Mozilla was dismissed from his company in 2014 when it was discovered that, six years earlier, he had donated $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8 campaign. That ballot initiative, limiting marriage to one man and one woman, passed with a larger…

Let's stipulate to a few things concerning the Republican 2016 field:

I took a 7:00 a.m. train this morning from Washington to New York and about an hour into my trip, I made my way to the café car for a cup of coffee. Standing at the little bar/work area was Martin O’Malley. He was just hanging out.

Matthew Continetti wrote a great column last week about Bernie Sanders' quixotic quest for the Democratic nomination:

Everyone is talking about the New York Times piece exposing how utterly wrong, willfully blind, and insanely dangerous Paul Ehrlich is, and has been, for the last forty-seven years. There’s video, too.

Over the last few years, the gay marriage movement has transformed from "equality for all" to "bake me a cake." As it picks up steam, the movement looks more and more totalitarian, both at home and abroad. Witness the latest news from the Great White North:

The Guardian had a story last week about the soon-to-be completed Abraj Kudai, a new hotel in Mecca which will have 10,000 guest rooms, 70 restaurants, four helipads, and five floors reserved for the sole use of the Saudi royal family.

I was once reasonably dignified. I dressed like a gentleman and luxuriated in the cultural heritage of Western civilization. My three places of residence—my home, my office, and my mind—were free of clutter and arranged so as to allow me both to make the most of my days and to begin to venture out…

This week, I've been reading Kirsten Powers' new book The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech. And it's fantastic.

Quick: When was the last time Hillary Clinton had a "good" week? I don't remember either.

Moving to the suburbs is usually discussed either in the quiet tones of moral caution or with gallows humor. For me, the experience was a glorious fulfillment. Twelve years of apartment living had convinced me that you ain’t no kind of man unless you have stairs. But I wanted more than just the…

Our contestants for most depressing story of April 2015 so far include Iran, Baltimore, and the nothing-to-see-here media response to a likely jihadist shooting in suburban Texas. But there is worse out there, so let's look behind door number four.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a smart op-ed about the Garland attack by former federal prosecutor George Parry. He points out the left’s agonized reaction to Garland—We’re for free speech! But these people using free speech are horrible and hateful!

For the better part of a year, Smith College has been telegraphing that it would soon accept transgender student applications. On Monday, the women’s college flung open the curtain on its new admissions policy. And whether it realizes it or not, Smith has inadvertently done a great deal of damage…

If you went only by the media, you'd think that Rand Paul was a legitimate contender to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Time magazine put him on its cover, calling him "The Most Interesting Man in Politics." Politico magazine said --literally--the same thing. Top Obama aides agree.…

David Catanese has a long profile of Jeb Bush in U.S. News & World Report. It’s well worth reading. But this line really stuck out:

Look, this is happening. It's a thing. Remember the jokes that started in 1992 with "two Clintons for the price of one"? Remember the incredulity of people in 1999 when it was quietly suggested that the first lady of the United States might decamp to New York and place a Senate seat into her carpet…

Out on the Twitters, people have been generally down on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign logo. The New York Times’s Nate Cohn said it looked like a hospital sign. Others suggested it looked like the Cuban flag. Or the Fed-Ex brand. Box CEO Aaron Levie said it looked like it was drawn with MS Paint.…

While everyone else was concentrating on Indiana and Iran last week, a much smaller piece of news broke that was of little interest to the wider world. It was so microscopic that I would have missed it entirely, if not for Sonny Bunch's indispensible blog, Everything's A Problem.

In economic theory, "signaling" is an action one party takes that has, superficially, no plausible economic explanation. The reason the action is undertaken isn't because the action itself is helpful, but because the action transmits important information to a second actor.

If you pay any attention to the ways in which radicalism dominates the culture of the university these days, you're likely to feel as though you've gone through the looking glass. "White privilege." "Trigger warnings." "Rape culture." All of this (and much else) has turned academia into a bizarre,…

Is Hillary toast?

It’s worth keeping score on how progressives are reacting to the Clinton email problems. Some of them (like Eugene Robinson) are tentatively pushing the issue now, one assumes because they don’t especially like Clinton and think that this might be the moment to pull a more liberal challenger into…

Over at Reason, Pete Suderman has a great piece about how Japan is looking to robots to help care for its geriatric citizens. It’s funny and creepy and you should totally read it.

In today’s edition of Kristol Clear, the Boss notes an interesting exchange on This Week with George Stephanopoulos:

We all know that Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and the Patriots are big, filthy cheaters. (They are also awesome.) But evidence is beginning to pile up suggesting that on the specific charge of intentionally deflating footballs, they might be not guilty.

The New England Patriots are my guilty sports pleasure.

Having followed Romney around in both 2008 and 2012, I was always convinced that the odds of him running in 2016 were high. For one thing, the man has a decades-long history of running for office, over and over, even after voters reject him. He’s a career politician without a “career” in politics.…

When young men and women join the armed forces, their families understand the seriousness of “the knock.” When a soldier is killed, the Department of Defense dispatches officers to find the next of kin, knock on their door, and inform them of the loss, face to face. “I used to have a terrible fear…

You can tell a lot about a society by its taboos. Several weeks ago, America reeled when Adrian Peterson—the great NFL running back of his generation—was indicted on charges of “reckless or negligent injury to a child.” Peterson is alleged to have disciplined his son by “whooping” him—these are…

As a rule, one should not panic at whatever crisis has momentarily fixed the attention of cable news producers. But the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which has migrated to both Europe and America, may be the exception that proves the rule. There are at least six reasons that a controlled, informed…

I met Chris in first grade. Both new to the school, we were wary of each other that year, but by the following September we had become best friends.

America has a long history of superstar entrepreneurs becoming gurus, motivational speakers, or even politicians. Very few of them become public intellectuals. But that's more or less what Peter Thiel is. Though perhaps that's not quite fair to him. You might just as well say that he was an…

Over at the New Atlantis, Alan Jacobs has a post arguing that Twitter has changed in a fundamental--and fundamentally unpleasant--way. A sample:

George R.R. Martin’s A  Song of Ice and Fire might be the most daunting mountain in the history of fantasy fiction. The cycle includes five fat books so far, totaling over 4,500 pages, and Martin suggests that at least two more volumes will be needed to conclude the story. Compared with Tolkien’s…

One February day in 2012, the U.S. government granted its 8,112,504th patent to a corporation called Personal Audio. The company’s invention was described as a “system for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence,” which sounds complicated and impressive. The…

Last week was a very, very bad week for Hillary Clinton.

A buddy of mine who works in tech has been telling me for years that we're all doomed. The problem, he says, is that there are too many systems that are too unsecure. When Stuxnet hit, the only aspect of the hack that surprised him was that the American security establishment was willing to show…

Fifteen years ago I had a discussion about movies with a genuine public intellectual, one of the great foreign-policy minds of his generation. At the time, he had young children. He tried to convince me that A Bug’s Life was a great act of cinema. “For the first 20 viewings or so, it’s just a good…

The affair ended as suddenly as it began.

To avoid having to directly quote the great Winston Wolf, let's begin with a gentle reminder that the midterm elections are still 6 months away and that a lot can happen in 25 weeks. The economy could take off. Unemployment could plummet. People could decide that they're thrilled with Obamacare.…

Nobody loved Shai Agassi and his company, Better Place, more than Tom Friedman. Friedman dedicated two slobbering, wide-eyed, wet-kiss columns to Agassi's Better Place in 2008. You can read them here and here. 

Springfield, Va.

Big news: Up in New Jersey, Jeff Bell is running for the Senate.

It would be ironic if Hillary Clinton had a second presidential campaign torpedoed because of another politician's foreign policy.

Though raised Catholic, I was educated by Quakers, and from an early age I took my politics from the Society of Friends. They were for the United Nations and against pollution and—this being the late 1970s—terribly concerned about the bomb. We heard a lot about nuclear war at school. Our little…

"Bitcoin" is the most widespread, cryptographically-secure Internet currency. It was created in 2009 by someone (or someones) who referred to themselves as "Satoshi Nakamoto." Once it was released into the wild, the bitcoin currency ecosystem operated on a public, inalterable schedule. We know…

Harold Ramis died on Monday morning. Having written, directed (or written and directed) five of the funniest movies of the last 40 years, I think it's safe to put him on the short list for Funniest Guy of His Generation.

A couple weeks ago the great Kay Hymowitz gave New York Times readers the vapors by writing a data-driven account of how single motherhood creates sub-optimal outcomes for both the mothers and their children. The piece was titled, "How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids."

As Colorado’s new law permitting—encouraging?—the recreational use of marijuana went into effect, many of our country’s finest journalists felt the need to share the details of their experience with the ganja. Some came to celebrate the state’s new liberality, others to condemn it. 

One of the government’s slyest powers is the right to grant licenses. As a piece of law, the license is rooted in the idea of communal interest: In areas of life where the general public can easily be harmed by bad actors, the government seeks to mitigate harm by credentialing certain actions.…

1.) So just how bad is this George Washington Bridge traffic incident?

Two days after Christmas I found myself in a doctor's office in New Jersey at eight o'clock in the morning. As I sat in the waiting room, a middle-aged woman came in and began a discussion with the receptionist. It seemed that her daughter, who would turn 26 on December 31, was trying to figure out…

On the one hand, this is a pretty dour Thanksgiving. Iran has just won an enormous diplomatic victory, which not only sets them on the road to nuclear weapons but makes the fecklessness of the Western powers clear to the world. Harry Reid's decision to destroy the filibuster signals an escalation…

Ocean Grove, N.J.

Americans are methodically dealing with the Kübler-Ross stages of Obama-care grief, with our national healing process moving briskly through roughly one stage per week: (1) denial upon realizing that the website HealthCare.gov didn’t work; (2) anger at the realization that the technical back-end of…

Every time you think that we've finally touched bottom on Obamacare, some new problem emerges. So what began merely as a dysfunctional website became a broken and mis-designed system. When it turned out that lots of people were paying more for their plans, it then turned out that others were having…

“We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around.”

Since first writing about the conduct of the National Park Service yesterday, events have accelerated somewhat.

While everyone else has spent the last few days obsessing about Gravity, the government shutdown, and the real possibility that the NFC East division champ will have six wins, it’s quietly been an interesting week for sociology nerds who think about marriage.

Happy times are all alike, nestled in the comfortable batting of peace, growth, and stability. Every unhappy time is unhappy in its own way.

It’s easy to become inured to the state of abortion in the United States, but every so often someone sends a shock to the system.

Sunday was September 15. It's an important anniversary, because it's the day that gave us President Barack Obama.

Last week, the New York Times ran a piece on the dire demographic problems facing Germany. The short version: Germans aren’t having enough kids, and as a result the economy is in trouble and there are all sorts of logistical problems—vacant buildings that need to be razed; houses that will never be…

Big deal on Drudge yesterday about WWE wrestler Darren Young possibly breaking kayfabe and coming out to TMZ. (Although the timing of this suggests at least the possibility that this is a work and not a shoot.) Whatever. It’s been months since Jason Collins and the media is thrilled.

The most interesting House primary of the 2014 cycle began in June in the 13th District of Illinois. It pits freshman Republican congressman Rodney Davis against an insurgent candidate named Erika Harold. Davis is a political operative who won his seat last year nearly by accident. Erika Harold is…

This week’s issue of Time magazine features a cover story by Lauren Sandler about “The Childfree Life.” In the second paragraph, Sandler mentions my book about demographics, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting. (Now available as an audiobook!) Here’s what she says:

You may have heard that last week Pope Francis said that gay Catholic priests were a-okay.

Last weekend was a big one for nerds.

We're way past overload on Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman commentary, but there is a tiny tributary of the story that has been largely overlooked. And it's worth a moment because it points to a larger problem regarding both the state and the public.

'Time was when the whole of life went forward in the family,” the historian Peter Laslett once wrote, “in a circle of loved, familiar faces. .  .  . That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors.” Laslett was writing in 1965, as he lamented the decline of the family over…

Out in my corner of exurbia, businesses post a lot of signs. Not billboards or paid advertising, but little self-made placards that stick in the ground like the campaign paraphernalia you see before elections. They jut up lamely out of the grassy beds that run along the sidewalks next to strip…

The Internet had a conniption last week when Jeb Bush spoke at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference and made the following remark:

This week we have entry #5,740,412 in the ledger documenting "Why Not Every Market-Based Outcome Is Optimal." And that’s the Yahoo purchase of Tumblr.

It's a truism that no president makes it through a second term without some scandal. President Obama is no exception.

In 2005, Steve Sailer wrote a cover story for the American Conservative theorizing that the divide between red and blue states was driven in large part by the cost of family formation. Sailer dubbed this the “Dirt Gap” (referring to the price of homes with yards), and his general thesis was that…

Over at Real Clear Politics, Jean Yarbrough has a response to a New York Times op-ed defending Michael Bloomberg's soda ban. The Times piece was written by Sarah Conly, a Bowdoin College professor who seems to specialize in coercive paternalism.

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on California’s Proposition 8, which defines marriage as being between couples of the opposite sex. Today they’re hearing them on the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman at the federal level. Like Roe…

I was in second grade when I first became convinced that things fall apart.

Just before Christmas there was a lot of public concern about America’s declining birthrate, which closed out 2012 at its lowest point since 1920. But in trying to understand why American fertility is on the wane, it’s important to understand that fertility decline is a global phenomenon.…

The New York Times has finally discovered that fiscal cliffs aren’t the only thing that menace the modern nation-state. There’s a demographic cliff, too. A couple weeks ago, the Times’s Ross Douthat wrote a column about America’s bleak demographic future and suggested that the reason we aren’t…

Ross Douthat has gotten himself in trouble for writing about demographics and the latest Pew report on the decline of America’s birth rate. Douthat has the temerity to suggest that having babies is important for public welfare, that Americans aren’t having enough of them, and that the root cause of…

In many respects, the 2012 election played out as a close cousin of the 2004 contest. A vulnerable incumbent president in a bad political environment faced a weak challenger who lacked a core ideology and who articulated no clear vision for the country. In both campaigns the challenger chose to…

The mini-storm over Mitt Romney, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Big Bird pitted two visions of the show’s finances against one another. Mitt Romney claimed he’d cut funding so that Sesame Street would have to air commercials. Big Bird defenders imagined a world in which a lack of…

Last week, I spent some time talking about demographics and the latest CDC birth numbers. There were a number of interesting aspects to this data, but the big takeaway was that the percentage of first-child births has hit an all-time low. As I said last week, this suggests that we're slowly…

It's demographics time again! Last week, the CDC released its preliminary birth data for 2011. Much of the analysis focused on the raw number of births, which declined for the fourth straight year. America's general fertility rate is now the lowest it's ever been. Which is not great news.

Professor Stephen Schneck is a conundrum. He’s a Catholic who works for the Catholic University of America (CUA). But he’s involved with the group Catholics for Obama—despite the church hierarchy’s view that the president is attacking the religious freedom of Catholics. He’s pro-life. But he…

One of the ways you can tell that Obama's magic is gone is the lack of insane, iconographic art surrounding his campaign this time. In 2008 Obama art was beyond parody. There was an entire meme about The One riding on unicorns.

Lots of people have already unpacked the philosophical and logical problems with Mitt Romney’s belief that 47 percent of the country is basically free-loading off of everyone else (and voting Democratic). I’m struck, however, by how the moocher theory was presaged during the primaries in the…

The Democratic party underwent an ideological evolution in Charlotte last week. They are no longer a pro-choice party. They’re the party of abortion.

Tampa

Ever since DC Comics decided to reboot their entire universe of characters, they’ve been trawling the diversity waters. They’ve done all sorts of stunt casting with their characters. In June, for instance, they turned the Green Lantern gay.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a funny piece about political mixed marriages. It opened with an anecdote about a husband and wife who belong to different parties and the dilemma they faced during a presidential election. The husband was going to be traveling on Election Day, so he gave his…

Charlotte

Tampa

St. Petersburg

There’s a bizarre moment in John Cassidy’s short New Yorker item on Paul Ryan. It’s not when Cassidy likens Ryan to Michele Bachmann or even when he claims that, by choosing Ryan, Romney “has thrown in his lot with the most ideological wing of his party.” That’s just Cassidy’s analysis, and while…

In for a penny, in for a pound: PJ Media's John Boot has an excellent piece on the five biggest conservative ideas smuggled into The Dark Knight Rises. Sample awesome: 

Because conservatives are scrooges, the good folks at Americans for Tax Reform have gone through the fine print to find out what our Olympians will have to cough up to the IRS should they be lucky enough to win any medals in London.

Over the weekend Jason DeParle had a long, interesting piece on marriage in the New York Times. The gist of the piece is this couplet: (1) Marriage is a key driver of economic prosperity for families and married parents are more likely to have prosperous, healthy, stable families than single…

Last week I wrote a long exegesis on microtasking and the future of temporary, remote workers. I only dabbled in microtasking on Amazon's Mechanical Turk exchange, but reader D. Bush uses it often and writes in about her experience:

Tired of journalism’s glamour and prestige, I decided to take a second job last week. I went to Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk website—a sort of virtual job fair matching thousands of businesses and online workers—and got a microtasking gig. It didn’t take long. I filled out a few forms, proved I was…

Last April, the Iranian Oil Ministry and the National Iranian Oil Company noticed a problem with some of their computers: A small number of machines were spontaneously erasing themselves. Spooked by the recent Stuxnet attack, which had wrecked centrifuges in their nuclear labs, the Iranians…

So Batman is gay. Well, maybe.

I was never in any danger of succumbing to golf. As a teenager, I worked three summers looping at a local country club and spent a lot of time around the game. I understood its appeal: the satisfaction of precise physical motion, the thrill of hunting for new and better equipment, the quiet and…

Since I wrote about Naomi Schaefer Riley being fired by the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, the story has moved along somewhat.

Late last night, in a shameful example of editorial cowardice, the Chronicle of Higher Education fired Naomi Schaefer Riley. Naomi is a good friend of mine, a sometimes contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and a fine writer. And the story of what happened to her is highly instructive.

On Friday, March 9, an Oregon jury reached its verdict in the case of Levy v. Legacy Health System. The jurors deliberated for just six hours before concluding unanimously that the plaintiffs, Ariel and Deborah Levy, had been wronged by the defendant and were due $2.9 million in compensation. The…

The world is heading for demographic catastrophe. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe for 40 years, to the point where, today, Israel is the only First World country where women have enough babies to sustain their population. The developing world is heading in the same direction,…

Talking Points Memo has a good story about President Obama's latest incident of historical illiteracy at a speech where he got both U.S. and world history wrong in the course of lecturing Republicans about being know-nothings. Here’s a sample, from TPM:

Earlier in the week we noted that Mitt Romney won 9 delegates from Guam, where only 215 people voted. That's impressive efficiency. But it's nothing compared with the work Romney's campaign did in American Samoa last night. Romney won 9 delegates from American Samoa, too. Want to guess how many…

A few days ago, Time crunched the numbers and found that Mitt Romney has—so far—spent $17.14 for every vote he's won. But over the weekend, Romney hit what must surely be the biggest value-play in recent political history.

This might be the most horrifying story you'll see all year. From Aimee Green at the Oregonian:

I'm as shocked as everyone else to hear about the death of Andrew Breitbart this morning. I didn't know Breitbart well, but I knew him well enough to like him a great deal. 

In the conflict between the Obama administration and the Catholic church over mandated contraceptive coverage in health insurance policies, it’s easy to understand the motivations of the church. Catholics object to artificial contraception—and to abortifacients and sterilization, reimbursement for…

Mitt Romney had a good night at the debate in Mesa last night. But after the debate (as well as during) the Romney campaign flooded the press with the kind of emails that make the candidate so hard to love.

On Saturday, February 4, a national poll from Rasmussen Reports showed Rick Santorum as the only Republican to lead President Obama in a head-to-head matchup. The next morning, a PPP poll showed Santorum suddenly leading Mitt Romney in Minnesota. So the Romney campaign responded with what are…

For several weeks now the Romney campaign has used a visual header for its press releases attacking Newt Gingrich. Here it is:

Last summer I wrote about China's truly astounding penchant for faking Western products. The Chinese will fake everything from toys to entire Apple stores.

Rick Santorum had a pretty good week. He finished a distant fourth in the Nevada caucuses, but the turnout was so low--down nearly 25 percent from 2008--that the event became yet another indictment of the front-runner. A Rasmussen poll showed Santorum as the only Republican in the field beating…

I read an essay by a senior editor at the Atlantic recently that began, “I finished up Middle-march two days ago, and had a good debate about it on Twitter.”

On the last weekend of January, priests in Catholic churches across America read extraordinary letters to their congregations. The missives informed the laity that President Obama and his administration had launched an assault on the church. In Virginia, Catholics heard from Bishop Paul Loverde,…

Drudge has a story about Obama getting off of Air Force One in Arizona, greeting Republican governor Jan Brewer, and immediately giving her a piece of his mind. Evidently our president did not appreciate something Brewer wrote about him. According to the pool report, they had a testy exchange from…

During one of his lesser moments in South Carolina, Mitt Romney insisted he would never apologize for his success, “success” being his preferred euphemism for titanic wealth. Surely, he’s right. He should no more apologize for being wealthy than we should want him to do so. To a greater degree than…

Manchester, N.H.

A couple weeks ago Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Michael Kranish and Scott Helman’s book The Real Romney. It was not entirely unfriendly to Mitt Romney, but neither was it entirely fair. For example, the authors tip their hand as to their own views and agendas in the following passage:

Manchester, N.H.

There’s a line of thinking you often hear from Republican-types about how markets are never wrong. You think a certain CEO’s lavish compensation is ridiculous? Nonsense, those types tell you. You think that a CEO’s VORP—that’s a baseball stat that translates, in this case, to the CEO’s marginal…

Manchester, N.H.

Concord, N.H.

Manchester, N.H.

Derry, N.H.

Windham, N.H.

Northfield, N.H.

Rockingham, N.H.

Manchester, N.H.

Bedford, N.H.

Marshalltown, Iowa

Mason City, Iowa

John Hinderaker has a great catch from Obama's latest 60 Minutes appearance with a line that is, even by our president’s own standard of self-regard, jaw dropping:

Over at the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein reacts to a Romney video Ben Domenech highlighted this weekend. In the clip, Mitt Romney, who is responding to a young Mike Warren’s question at Vanderbilt, talks about the similarities and differences between Romneycare and Obamacare and says, among…

There are three basic theories to explain why Mitt Romney hasn’t been able to build support above the 30 percent level, despite being the heavily favored frontrunner for most of the past six years: (1) Republicans distrust Romney because of his history of flip-flopping. (2) Republicans view Romney…

Frank Miller has a rant about Occupy Wall Street that’s going around this morning. It’s not a real shock—Miller has been on the side of law and order since The Dark Knight Returns and earlier this year he published a graphic novel, Holy Terror, about the clash of Islam and the West. So he’s been a…

Last week the United Nations Population Fund released a report heralding the birth of the world’s 7 billionth person. The milestone is important, the United Nations explains, because their calculations now project that global population is likely to hit 9.3 billion by 2050 and could go as high as…

On October 12, Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, filed for bankruptcy. The move took most of America by surprise—​

It’s never good when the New York Times covers comic books. 

Rick Perry is not always his best defender. For the last two weeks, Mitt Romney has hammered Perry over a Texas law the governor signed which allows children of illegal immigrants to pay in-state college tuition. At the Orlando debate, for instance, Romney said sardonically, “To go to the…

President Obama’s speech to the United Nations, which he delivered this morning in New York, is filled with lots of little surprises. (For instance, “the United Nations helped avert a third World War.” Really?) But the big surprise is that he’s made his address to the General Assembly into a…

Once upon a time we had a president who sulked that his relatively uneventful tenure denied him the chance to thrust his way into greatness. In the days after 9/11, the New York Times carried a quotation from a “close friend” about Bill Clinton’s misfortune: “He has said there has to be a defining…

Just to close the loop on President Obama’s claim that GM is “now making a profit for the first time in decades,” reader D.B. sent along GM profit-loss statements from 1990 to 2000. The tally: GM had mounting net losses in 1990, 1991, and 1992. In 1993 they turned things around, posting a net…

It seems entirely possible that the only thing keeping consumers away from the Chevy Volt is its price point. It’s basically a $41,000 Honda Civic with better mpg, a quieter ride, and an upgraded interior. So the big brains at GM have decided to address the price issue by making a more expensive…

Yesterday I pointed to President Obama’s alarmingly statist “reasonable” view of his government’s handling of Chrysler and GM. But in focusing on Obama’s ideology, I missed the bigger story. To refresh, here’s what Obama said:

Here’s the good news about Obama’s luxury RV bus tour through middle America: For the first August of his presidency he’s not pushing the cock and bull line about this being a “recovery summer.” It’s a whole new president!

In 2006 Hasbro released the Marvel Super Hero Squad line of action figures. The figures are little​—​only about two inches tall, on average​—​and made of plastic. They are rendered in what is known as the “super deformed” style: small, stumpy arms and legs, oversized heads, and hands with four,…

Of all the email I received from yesterday’s post on GM’s Chevy Volt sales numbers, hands down the best was from reader J. W.:

The New York Post had a long story on fertility rates yesterday, centered on the idea that lots of college educated women—and particularly Manhattan women—no longer want to have kids.

The July sales numbers are out and the Chevy Volt continues to electrify (get it?) the country. GM sold … 125 Volts last month!

Last March the city council in San Bernardino voted 5-0 to kill their red-light camera system. Since the cameras were installed in 2005, the program had brought them little but grief. In 2008, the city was caught shortening the timing of yellow lights in order to gin up more citations. Later that…

If you obsess about demography for long enough, eventually you find all sorts of off-speed proposals to deal with the world's falling fertility rate. One of which is called "Demeny voting."Named for demographer Paul Demeny (who is now the editor of the Population Council's Population and…

The End and the Beginning Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy by George Weigel Doubleday, 590 pp., $32.50

Last week I wrote a piece about the great comic book bubble of 1993. Today I got a note from Ron Forman, who owned one of the regional distribution companies that Diamond drove out of business, setting the bubble in motion. Ron helpfully adds that it was The Return of Superman and Turok #1—think of…

What Tolstoy wrote about families is true of economics: Boom times are all alike, but every crash is disastrous in its own way. That’s why stories about bursting bubbles are always instructive. There are lessons in the smallest of them, even the bubble that led to the comic book crash of 1993. 

A couple weeks ago I went into high nerd dudgeon over the decision by the big brains at DC Comics to have Superman renounce his U.S. citizenship. Turns out, that was only the second dumbest thing DC did last month.

If your dishwasher isn't performing the way it used to (because of an obscure political-environmental battle in Spokane, Washington) there may be hope for fixing your "new and improved" dish detergent. Reader P.J. writes in with the results of some rigorous practical trials:

Pursuant to the discussion of Superman's pending renouncement of his American citizenship, Claremont McKenna professor John J. Pitney goes all high-brow, quoting James Madison quoting Gouverneur Morris at the Constitutional Convention:

Superman is about to renounce his U.S. citizenship. The nerd press is reporting that in a story written by David Goyer in Action Comics #900, Superman becomes disgusted with the U.S. government, renounces his citizenship, and becomes a “citizen of the universe.” Awesome.

During a span of 22 months the website WikiLeaks.org morphed from a digital anarchist demonstration project into a semisuccessful international campaign against the American government. WikiLeaks solicited classified documents and then orchestrated a global media typhoon around them. The…

Thanks to the Nanny State we have low-flow toilets, dishwasher soap that doesn’t work, encroaching bans on plastic bags, and a looming mandate outlawing good light bulbs. But wait—there’s more!

President Barack Obama released his federal budget for the 2012 fiscal year. It begins with this sentence: 

Over at the New Republic, Ed Kilgore has an interesting and perfectly reasonable piece about Tim Pawlenty's electoral challenges in the 2012 presidential election. (Kilgore's read tracks somewhat with Jay Cost's, though he's a little less bullish on Pawlenty's prospects.) But one moment in…

Back in 2007 I wrote a long-ish piece on the Google Books project. The stripped-down conclusion was that Google's attempt to scan and digitize every book ever written would be determined in the courts because, fawning tech writing to the contrary, Google's scheme represented two structural…

Oh, Almighty Google Machine--I kid! We know you're not evil. You're the most benevolent algorithm ever. But every once in a while, Google (which owns YouTube) drops a little data point about how it sees the world.

Last week Fred Barnes, Robert Poole, and I all wrote about how highways work and how government planning types often try to “improve” them. None of this, however, is new. A friend sends along Joan Didion’s wonderful 1976 essay “Bureaucrats,” concerning the imposition of car-pool (or High-Occupancy…

In 2008 the Virginia Department of Transportation began work adding a fourth lane to the six-mile stretch of I-95 between the Springfield interchange and the exit for Virginia State Road 123. This is likely of very little consequence to you, but it was a life-changing moment for me: I live not far…

Hey everybody--it's the Age of the Electric Car! Sales numbers for the Chevy Volt are out and you'll never guess how many of these future machines consumers gobbled up in the month of February. Go ahead and try. I'll wait.Is that your final answer? Okay. Well the real number is:

On an August night 15 years ago, I drove to Coney Island to play basketball. Arriving just after dinner, I set up camp at a court on the corner of Mermaid and 25th Street, nestled beside a large public housing project. I ran games late into the night with a small group, including a hulking…

Two excellent bits of reader email on the removal of phosphates from dishwasher detergents. The first is from a reader who has been pumping up his new detergent by adding his own phosphate. He notes that the customer review section of one trisodium phosphate product on Amazon features people…

Midway through John Heilemann's big New York magazine piece on Obama Season 2 is this bit of gold:

Like the nearly simultaneous release of Deep Impact and Armageddon, Chemical Engineering News also ran a cover story last week about the expunging of phosphates from dishwasher detergents. (You can read my version of the story here.)

For the last five years, Nick Sprayregen has been fighting for his property rights in New York City's Manhattanville. A small business owner in West Harlem, Sprayregen owns a local self-storage chain. In 2005, nearby Columbia University decided that it wanted to expand its campus, so it began…

Last week Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acknowledged that Iran’s uranium enrichment program had suffered a setback: “They were able to disable on a limited basis some of our centrifuges by software installed in electronic equipment,” the Iranian president told reporters. This was something of an…

A couple days ago, Ted Turner jumped on the one-child bandwagon at the Cancun climate change farce, lecturing the audience about the planetary virtues of sub-replacement fertility. Among the creepy untermensch solutions Turner proposed to solving the world’s population “problem” was the selling of…

The Pittsburgh Steelers have been involved in honoring the heroes of Flight 93 almost from the very beginning, from owner Art Rooney II, to the coaching staff, to both former and current players. Two weeks ago, they hosted a dinner to raise money for the Flight 93 Memorial and yesterday CBS ran a…

Cue Dennis Green. In the last week or so we've gotten confirmation about what the Stuxnet worm was designed to do: Blow up centrifuges.Eric Chien at Symantec has the technical details for the nerds. The NYT has the layman's report for the techno-phobes. Key takeaways:

Why has Barack Obama failed so spectacularly? Is he too dogmatically liberal or too pragmatic? Is he a socialist, or an anticolonialist, or a philosopher-president? Or is it possible that Obama’s failures stem from something simpler: vanity. Politicians as a class are particularly susceptible to…

It seems that everyone has their own favorite moment of our president’s mirror-gazing. Here are some sent in by readers.

A reader sends in a classic Obama moment that I completely missed. Here's Ryan Lizza in a 2004 profile of Obama for the Atlantic:

Like baseball players taking comfort in rituals, in times of uncertainty politicians look to historical trends. For Barack Obama this week, those trends are a mixed bag.

Among the many strange moments in Barack Obama's post-election press conference last week was this self-pitying complaint from the leader of the free world:

Cognitive Surplus

The age of the electric car is here. Everyone says so. There it is emblazoned on the cover of the latest Wired magazine: “The age of the electric car is here. CHARGE!” In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman laments that the Chinese are embracing the electric car while America (sigh) is again…

NPR's ombudsman ombudswoman ombudsperson Alicia Shepard has now spoken about the corporation's firing of Juan Williams. Here she is dealing with her chief concern about how this all looks:

Phillip Longman--who ranks just beneath Batman in my pantheon of heroes--has a great piece at Foreign Policy about the demography of aging societies. Longman's point is that the world is getting a lot older: "[T]he global population of children under 5 is expected to fall by 49 million as of…

New York has two Democratic senators, both of them up for election this year. In the first race, Chuck Schumer has a commanding lead. In the other, Kirsten Gillibrand may be in trouble.

The Courier-Post has a blockbuster story this morning about the NJ-3 race between Democratic incumbent John Adler and Republican Jon Runyan.It seems that the third candidate in the race, an unknown named Peter DeStefeno, who is running on the "NJ Tea Party" line, is actually a Democratic plant.…

When last we left Nick Sprayregen, the New York businessman was fighting Columbia University and New York City over Columbia’s proposed takeover of the Manhattanville neighborhood. Columbia has been working closely with the city to invoke eminent domain on the university’s behalf. Sprayregen and…

The computer worm Stuxnet broke out of the tech underworld and into the mass media this week. It’s an amazing story: Stuxnet has infected roughly 45,000 computers. Sixty percent of these machines happen to be in Iran. Which is odd. What is odder still is that Stuxnet is designed specifically to…

For the last several months, Chinese officials have been floating the idea of relaxing the country’s famed “One-Child” policy. One-Child has long been admired in the West by environmentalists, anti-population doomsayers, and some of our sillier professional wise men. In Hot, Flat, and Crowded…

More than any other sport, professional tennis is a caste system. The top players are invited to tournaments as “seeds.” Players with lower rankings apply for wild cards or exemptions into the field. Further down the food chain are players who must participate in “qualifier” tournaments—the winners…

Yesterday Howard Dean came out against the Ground Zero mosque and, for his trouble, was criticized for throwing in his lot with Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Assorted Evil Monsters, et al. Today, Dean's own grassroots organization has come out against him. The group Democracy for America (which was…

Barring cataclysm, Connecticut Republicans will nominate Linda McMahon to run for Chris Dodd’s vacant Senate seat on August 10. McMahon is a political neophyte. Her chief credential is that she was CEO of America’s largest professional wrestling outfit, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).

Big news out of England yesterday where BAE unveiled "Taranis"--the first stealth UAV. With two weapons bays, the super-drone will not only be able to strike ground targets, but will be capable of engaging aerial targets as well. An air-to-air UAV (or UACV) is interesting enough. But what makes…

Foreign Policy has an excellent piece by Golnaz Esfandiari revising downward the importance Twitter played in the Iranian uprising last year. Some of the great take-aways:

Through a combination of family generosity, stinginess, and luck, I managed to go 35 years without doing business with a professional car salesman. So when the hour finally arrived for me to put on my big-boy pants and buy a car, I took the task seriously. I wanted to bring robust econometric…

Remember when President Obama assured nervous Democrats that "the big difference here and in '94 was you've got me"? Oops. In the last few months Obama worked to get four high-profile Democrats elected: Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine, Martha Coakley, and Arlen Specter. Each of them lost, by an average…

March 23, 2010: President Obama signs Obamacare into law.

Or at least someone to blame. Greece was not the first European country to suffer from a financial collapse during the Great Recession--that distinction fell to Iceland, which melted down in October of 2008. Icelanders are still reeling. 

A few weeks ago, Palle Christiansen, Greenland’s minister of finance warned that his country was facing an existential threat from immigration. Yet unlike the far-right politicians of Europe who take up this theme, Christiansen was not fretting over foreigners coming to his country’s shores, but…

There was a hubbub recently when Tilikum, a resident of Orlando’s SeaWorld theme park, attacked and killed one of his trainers, 40-year-old Dawn Brancheau. People were surprised that a killer whale would kill. But then, killer whales have been misunderstood for a long time. 

Howard Dean has resurrected his "Hit the Bat" gimmick in an effort to raise money to "fight for a public option" in the healthcare bill.It looks hokey now, but it's worth remembering that "Hit the Bat" was the first serious political fund-raising success on the internet. By September of 2003, Dean…

Here's a picture of a soldier from the 3rd Infantry standing guard over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier during the blizzard last month. It's a reminder that some jobs never stop.

It was nice that Canada was able to scratch out an overtime (or do they call it "stoppage time"?) win in hockey yesterday. Word is that they care an awful lot about hockey up there, and since the Vancouver Olympics had all those problems, it's nice for the home team to end on a high note. With any…

The first week of February, a group of more than 75 celebrities met in a studio on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles to re-record “We Are the World.” The occasion was the January earthquake in Haiti, which left the bedraggled, destitute country even more bedraggled and destitute. 

I'm consistently amazed at how much Google resembles the Microsoft of the mid-'90s. Which is to say, a company with a core business so successful that it hides the fact that they fail at nearly everything else they touch. We all know how great Google's search-served ad product is. It accounts for…

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent piece this morning about Obama's decision to kill NASA's Constellation program, leaving America completely out of the low-Earth orbit game: "For the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the U.S. will have no access of its own for humans into space -- and no…

Ron Brownstein has an interesting piece in National Journal about President Obama’s problems with blue-collar voters. His argument is that the cross-tabs in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, in which Democrats bled working-class white voters, resemble the key characteristic of the 1994…

A lot of people have been looking to find someone to blame for President Obama's failures: the Constitutional order, the right-wing noise machine, the dull, dim-witted American people. Funnily enough, one person rarely seems to get fingered. Jay Cost makes the case that the only one to blame for…

Last week I noted that the Washington Generals are hiring, which was occasion to relive some of the storied franchise's great moments: Red Klotz's invention of the barnstorming losers; their 6-13,000 record against the Harlem Globetrotters; and their final victory against the Globetrotters, in…

Jobless claims rose unexpectedly this week, but not all of the news is bad. Some firms are still hiring. Ever dream of traveling the world and losing thousands of basketball games in a row? Well the Washington Generals are looking for you!From the Generals' website:

In this month's Wired, Chris Anderson launches another of his counter-intuitive, techno-supremacy arguments: That we are on the verge of another American industrial revolution, only this time it will be carried out in micro-scale by DIY entrepreneurs. I like Anderson a ton--he's one of those guys…

An amazing piece in the Post today about Tim Tebow's "celebrate life" Super Bowl ad:

The New York papers were crazy yesterday over a little incident with Rex Ryan, coach of the almost-AFC-champion Jets. While in Florida for Super Bowl week, Ryan attended an MMA fight where during a half-time interview he told the raucous crowd, "Hey, I just want to tell everybody in Miami here: Hey…

There's a new crowd-sourced site dedicated to keeping track of all of Google's privacy, anti-trust, bias concerns--it's called Google Monitor.It aggregates all sorts of interesting Google news, like this WSJ story about the search giant using house ads to advertise its China policy. (Unmentioned on…

Writing about lost technology last year, I noted how worrisome it was that today NASA would have trouble building even a Saturn V rocket, which was, once upon a time, the engine of the entire agency.Well, a friend sends along this video of an enthusiast who built his own 1:10 scale Saturn V last…

Whole Foods--once the darling of cultural liberalism--is now being criticized by the left. Mother Jones denounced Whole Foods twice last week and attacked the company for being insufficiently serious about climate change. (If Whole Foods isn't, who is?) It's funny how no one on the left seems to…

When Iceland's financial system collapsed in the fall of 2008, the country's future became scarily uncertain. Simultaneously, Iceland's stock market crashed (down 77 percent in one day), the krona rapidly devalued (down more than 50 percent against the euro), the housing bubble burst, unemployment…

For the perpetual adolescent, one of life's little joys is the weekly trip to the comic book shop. But, as I've written before, President Obama's omnipresence has reached into even this little corner of the world: Nearly every week I find some new bit of Obama-worship in comic-book form. But this…

Yesterday io9 carried a fantastic story on the Antikythera machine, a bit of ancient tech that's becoming more and more interesting:

Remember the headline from a few days ago about the impending supernova from "nearby" recurring nova T Pyxidis? T Pyxidis is a star which goes boom every 20 years, but hasn't had an event since 1967. This week some astronomers suggested T Pyxidis is headed for supernova, one of the aftereffects of…

For those of you not obsessed with the celebrisphere, Casey Johnson--equally famous for being a Johnson & Johnson heiress and Tila Tequila's "fiancé"--died last night from an apparent drug overdose. It's all very sad, of course. But what's interesting--in a horrifying, end-of-civilization kind of…

Professional libs have begun bolting from the health-care reservation, but what about the cultural leftists who joined onto the Obama bandwagon first, and Obama's policy agenda second? During the campaign, one of Obama's most prolific artist-supporters was Ray Noland, aka CRO. Of the many bits of…

Gallup's poll putting Obama's job approval at 47 percent got a lot of attention today, but Gallup's demographic breakouts from Monday are at least as interesting because they show a lot of week-to-week movement during November and the first week of December. Highlights: * Obama is doing poorly…

Paul Krugman writes: "President Obama now plans to address the conference on its last day, which suggests that the White House expects real progress." Sure. The same way his last trip to Copenhagen was a sign that America was making a strong push for having the Olympics in Chicago.

A new survey by Frank N. Magid Associates reports a stunning and terrible problem with many Americans' understanding of hi-definition television. The Magid group claims that 43 percent of HDTV owners don't subscribe for hi-def service -- in many cases, the study suggests, because they don't know…

Goldfarb mentions Andrew Revkin's decision not to publish "private" -- though publicly available -- emails which cast the purveyors of climate change in a bad light. Just in case you were inclined to give Revkin the benefit of the doubt, here's another small data-point on him. Revkin's blog is…

Aaron Sorkin--who brought us the reliably Democratic The American President, The West Wing, and Charlie Wilson's War -- has spent the last couple years working on adapting odd-ball non-fiction to the silver screen: He wrote the Facebook movie and the screenplay for a film based on Moneyball. But…

The USS New York was met with appropriate fanfare last week when she was commissioned in New York. Now there's word that her sister ship, the USS Somerset has scheduled her keel-authentication ceremony for December 11 at the Northrop Grumman Avondale yard in Louisiana. Like the New York, the…

Unsurprisingly, Michael Barone has an interesting and incisive roundup of numbers from last night that go deeper than the top-line results. Some nuggets: Bergen County, New Jersey, a 56%-42% Corzine constituency in 2005, came within a point or two of voting for Christie. Westchester County, New…

East Brunswick, New Jersey

So when do we think Margaret Carlson files her column for Bloomberg? In a column datelined yesterday, Carlson takes after Sarah Palin for meddling in the NY-23 race. Carlson writes, "Early October saw Scozzafava in the lead. She now trails Democrat Bill Owens. Hoffman is within a few points of…

Mixed messages coming from NJ today. The first is a shock poll from Quinnipiac suddenly jumping Corzine to +5. This result looks a little suspect. Quinnipiac's last poll (whose survey period ended 8 days before this one's began) had Christie +1. That's an awfully big, awfully fast swing. Casting…

In 1934, a small band of veterans of the First World War gathered at Sunrise Rock, an outcropping of stone in the Mojave Desert. There they raised a modest, handmade white, wooden cross, about five-feet high. At the foot of the cross they placed a plaque that read, "The Cross, Erected in Memory of…

Googled

Three weeks ago I walked out of my front door at 6:30 A.M., headed for the office. I made three turns in short succession, bringing me to Old Bridge Road, the local thoroughfare that leads, four miles away, to an entrance to I-95, the main north-south artery into Washington. After 20 minutes on Old…

While some unpatriotic cynics were critical of the Nobel Committee handing the Peace Prize out to President Barack Hussein Obama, Harvard was proud to support its distinguished alum with a quickie press release, helpfully explaining that "International leaders immediately lauded the selection of…

I'm very sympathetic to the liberal, good-government argument that building big sports complexes with public money is a bad idea because it benefits owners and teams and disadvantages taxpayers. But here's liberal blogger/economist Ryan Avent discussing Chicago's Olympic bid and (a) admitting the…

It occurred to me last year that Obama's theory of foreign policy, which ventured past soft power and into the realm of "smart power," might be more aptly described as "iPower." That's because it centered largely on the belief that -- by dint of his background, intellectual, and charismatic gifts…

A little while ago I wrote about the comic-book industry's obsession with Barack Obama. Since then, the pace has only picked up. The second issue of IDW's Barack Obama biography is out now, titled The First 100 Days. The Obama's dog, Bo, has gotten his own comic book. This week brings yet another…

Barack Obama is, you might have heard, America's first postracial president. In his celebrated speech to the 2004 Democratic convention, he assured viewers that "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America." And, early in…

The new video Drudge has up is a truly disgusting example of today's gutter politics. Listen closely to how these kids are "supporting" our president "Mmm-mmm-mmm, Barack Hussein Obama!" It's sad that we live in a time when even schoolchildren are taught to smear the president.

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The art world's love affair with the Obamas has now widened from visual arts to music with news of the Jazz Institute of Chicago's new epic composition, "Honoring Grace: Michelle Obama.: Though some minor flaws need to be addressed, Chicago flutist Nicole Mitchell's "Honoring Grace: Michelle Obama"…

Looking back on it, it's hard to understand how the recent Iranian revolution failed. Sure, the mullahs had guns, tanks, an air force, police, the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij, and imported terrorist thugs on their side. But the Iranian protestors had Twitter. Who could have predicted that an…

The English Premier League has dominated European soccer in recent years. Nine of the last 12 Champions League semifinalists have come from the Premier League, and an English team has been in the final for each of the last five years (two played each other for the trophy in 2008). The Premiership's…

Scott Horton's national-security analyses have drawn a fair amount of attention on this blog in recent days. But when it rains, it pours. In his latest Harper's post, he mocks John Yoo's recent op-ed discussion of FDR's defiance of statutory restrictions on national-security wiretapping activities:…

One of the weirder aspects of Obama worship is the insistence that he's some sort of athletic demi-god. There was the incredible report of him doing curls with 70-lb dumbbells in sets of 10. Then the talk about how he was able to hang with Div. I players on the basketball court. And now we have the…

Everyone makes mistakes. It's not a crime for a reporter to have to make a correction to a story every so often. But isn't Scott Horton past the point of reasonable error and deep into reckless territory? Today Adam White catches Horton deliberately misreading stories from the Wall Street Journal…

Ad Age has a great story about Burger King's attempt to force a $1 double-cheeseburger onto its menu. The $1 double-cheeseburger is a fast-food white whale--enormously seductive, but ultimately elusive. It simply can't be sold for profit. McDonald's has tried, and failed. Burger King, whose…

I was only a Michael Jackson fan of the third rank. Too young to have known him in his Jackson Five days, I glommed on when Thriller was released in 1982. I was 8 years old then, and his music was geared precisely to my sensibility. Despite my descent into a lifetime of fandom, I never owned either…

Who knew that Mark Penn was a secret admirer of Christina Rosen? Penn's WSJ column on smartphone addicts is great and contains this fantastic bit: I once worked with a candidate for Senate who emailed me from the podium during a debate.

I've never seen any polling data on this, but my guess is that Starbucks baristas probably vote, as a class, like Prius owners. I'd be pretty surprised if they didn't go 75-25 for Kerry and 85-15 for Obama. Walking these guesses a little further down the lane, I suspect that, in general, baristas…

Matt Continetti buries the lede: The big news in the Palin Runner's World interview is that she ran a sub-4 hour marathon a couple of years ago--3:59:36. That's after the age of 40 with four kids behind her. That's pretty awesome. (Compare that to Al Gore's 4:58 in in 1997 or Michael Dukakis's 3:31…

On February 17, the Navy took delivery of its first refurbished W76 warhead. The W76 is a nuclear payload that sits atop the Trident II missiles carried by America's Ohio-class submarines. As such, it represents an important part of the country's nuclear arsenal. The refurbishment of the aging W76s…

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Everyone knows the old joke about New Jersey--"What exit?" I grew up just off Exit 4 of the Turnpike, and the entire premise of the gag is ridiculous. People in New Jersey don't calculate the geographic and social differences among them by highway off ramps. We use malls.

Over at the First Things blog Wesley J. Smith notes an amazing tidbit from the New York Times' correspondence page. The letters concerning the NYT's fascinating Freeman Dyson profile were, naturally, quite hostile to Dyson, who has the gall to question climate change science. No surprise there.…

There was a time in my life when I was skeptical that the ability to access the Internet on your cell phone could be of any possible use. That was before I got snarled in a giant traffic jam south of Waterbury, Connecticut, at 11 P.M. one night. For a while, my wife and I made the best of it, but…

As it turns out, Bernie Madoff was a pretty reliable contributor to Democrats. OpenSecrets has a list of his campaign contributions. It's pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. Since 1992 he's given $2,000 to Hillary Clinton, $12,000 to Chuck Schumer; $102,000 to the DSCC (will they give that money back?).…

Yesterday John McCormack pointed out excellent stem-cell pieces by Yuval Levin and Robert George & Eric Cohen. Will Saletan's piece in Slate also deserves to be read. Saletan is a measured proponent of embryonic stem-cell research and his piece is a caution to his confederates about not delving too…

Last May, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story about AngryRenter.com, a website which served as a rallying point for disgruntled souls opposed to a prospective Bush administration foreclosure bailout. AngryRenter.com had collected 44,500 signatures for a petition, but Journal reporter…

On a recent Friday morning, there was an auction for a Nintendo Wii on the website Swoopo.com. At 9:45, the auction was set to end in 20 seconds, and the Wii was about to sell for $34.05--a bargain for an item that retails for $250. But Swoopo uses a very curious auction process, one that may not…

Mark Bowden's amazing profile of Col. Cesar Rodriguez makes as good a case as you'll ever see for the F-22. Bowden's over-arching argument is that air supremacy is the sine qua non of American war fighting and that said air supremacy comes at a cost. The question is simply whether we pay that cost…

In the NY Post, Damon Root takes up the cause of Nick Sprayregen, the landowner who's standing up to Columbia University in their attempt to use eminent domain to expand their campus. In the latest development, Sprayregen filed a petition with the state appellate court; but this is just the first…

A couple weeks ago we had word of a forthcoming Austen-meets-horror novel mash-up called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Well there must be a real Austen boomlet going on in the Fangoria world because yesterday Variety reported that Will Clark is set to direct Pride and Predator, which seems to be…

In a moment of weakness, Goldfarb sent me this brilliant essay on Battlestar Galactica by Robert Farley. Writing as a concerned Colonial citizen, Farley makes that case that during the recent unpleasantness, Vice President Tom Zarek and Lieutenant Felix Gaeta--who lead a mutiny onboard the…

Over the weekend the New York Post ran a long piece by Charles Platt about working at Wal-Mart. Platt, a former staffer at Wired, took an entry level job at Wal-Mart in an attempt to see what the company looks like from the inside. His account is quite interesting, and worth the read. Some tidbits:…

In the span of four months, Iceland's financial crisis became an economic meltdown which in turn became a political one. Last week the country's prime minister, Geir Haarde, called parliamentary elections for May, two years ahead of schedule. Three days later, Haarde resigned, his coalition unable…

Don't fly Aeroflot: Flight attendants initially ignored passengers' complaints and threatened to expel them from the Boeing 767 jet unless they stopped "making trouble". As the rebellion spread, Aeroflot representatives boarded the aircraft to try to calm down the 300 passengers. One sought to…

Yes, that's the actual title. Coming to stores in May is Seth Grahame-Smith's mash-up which features the full text Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with zombie scenes added in. And yes, there is a Facebook group for it. The End Times will commence in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . .

The comedy world's aversion to mocking President Obama is well documented. But this morning I heard a new radio ad for the local fast-food chain Jerry's. For years, Jerry's has run a radio campaign based on the idea that the founder, Jerry, is having little conversations with various celebrities,…

I was unhappy to see the New York Times report today that, despite decades of hysterical reports to the contrary, the Amazonian rain forests are actually doing quite well. My displeasure is a result of reading an early galley of David Grann's fantastic book, The Lost City of Z, which is about Col.…

Well that was fast. Now, what's the over-under on the date of his Nobel Prize? Let's set the opening line at 2011.

Matt Labash's opus on the death of Detroit spent a lot of time with Detroit News reporter Charlie LeDuff. Today LeDuff has another Detroit story almost too terrible to believe: A body found encased in ice in an abandoned warehouse. The body had been there for at least a month. Plenty of people saw…

Reading through the clippings on Iceland I came across a London Times piece on David Oddsson, the former Icelandic prime minister who is now chairman of the central bank. Oddsson did more than his share to contribute to Iceland's economic catastrophe and is now the most hated man in the country. So…

Last October, Iceland's financial system collapsed. The broader economy went bust as a result. Infrequent riots began occurring in November and soon became a weekly event in Reykjavik's main square, in front of parliament. Last week, the riots became daily, with police using force to break them up.…

Approximately 24 hours after voicing deviationist thoughts about the importance of President Obama's inauguration, Venus Williams lost to Carla Suarez Navarro, an unseeded Spaniard at the Australian Open. Let this serve as notice. The Great Eye is watching. Always watching.

Even the coverage of the Australian Open was wall-to-wall Obama talk yesterday, with stalwarts such as Darin Cahill, Mary Carillo, and James Blake going on and on and on and on about the 44th American president. The one person trying to opt out of the chatter? Venus Williams. Some excerpts from her…

Without making value judgments one way or another, one is struck by how backward-looking and partisan President Obama's inaugural speech was. All inaugurals are principally forward-looking (you can peruse the entire oeuvre here) and Obama's was no exception. But what was exceptional was that nearly…

On December 9, the Families of Flight 93 group sent a letter to President Bush. Progress on the national Flight 93 memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, had stalled, and the families were seeking the president's help: They requested that he seize, by executive order, a parcel of private land…

The national Flight 93 memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, has been at a standstill as the National Park Service tried to negotiate the purchase of the final piece of land from owner Michael Svonavec. Svonavec's land was the last crucial parcel needed for the planned 2,231 acre national park and…

The situation in Iceland has not improved since the county's financial system went into meltdown in October. The krona was refloated on currency markets early this month and has sagged dramatically since then. It now sits at about 177 kr per euro. And now comes word that the unemployment rate has…

While the financial crisis has gripped the rest of the world, my investments have been doing quite well. Not my traditional investments, mind you. My house is worth a fraction of what I paid for it in 2004, and my 401(k) is more like a 201(k) these days.

Our long national nightmare is over: Word is out in tech circles that all of Fox broadcasting will be in HD starting in 2009. Which includes Fox News Channel. No longer will the visages of Brit Hume and Megyn Kelly be clouded in hideous low-definition. It's a great day for America.

Manhattanville, New York

Over at the First Things blog, Kevin Palischek notes the passing of Col. John W. Ripley, who was one amazing Marine: In late March 1972 twenty thousand North Vietnamese communists launched an offensive designed to reach Saigon and achieve a military and psychological victory over the South…

Someone in Starbucks's legal department made a big oops. The company put together a promotion for today where they would give out a free drip coffee to people who had voted. Only this might run afoul of some election laws, so at the last minute they amended the giveaway to everybody. So head to…

Arrived at the office this morning to find a voicemail waiting for me from the Obama campaign. Their get-out-the-vote effort is so extensive that they had a live person calling me work. Even the volunteer seemed a little surprised. Here's the message she left me: My name is Caroline, I'm a…

So it turns out that not only is Sarah Palin completely vindicated in the state-trooper non-scandal, but the New York Times has discovered that maybe that gulag down at Guantanamo isn't such a bad idea after all. Here's the WSJ taking apart the Times: In their 1,600-word dispatch "Next President…

Reykjavik

In a piece on the economic crisis in Iceland in this week's magazine I noted how the government's inept response to the troubles made a bad situation much, much worse. One of the obvious mistakes the Icelandic central bank made was to lower the interest rate from 15.5 percent to 12 percent, after…

Sitting through the Very Special Episode of Obama for President tonight felt awfully familiar. It's like one of those required assemblies from middle school: hectoring, tedious, and transparently silly. But it did have one unexpected effect on me. Never before have I noticed how wonderful…

I met Dean Barnett in 2006. By that time we'd been friends for almost five years.

The Gormogons point us to this fantastic bit of parody: What it would look like if John Woo, Kevin Smith, and Wes Anderson directed attack ads for McCain. Really top-notch stuff.

Last week, Michael Barone wrote a column about Obama supporter's various attempts to silence critics titled "The Coming Obama Thugocracy." Sunday's Washington Post carried another example to be added to the list. Last week a hotel in Prince George's County posted a McCain message on its maquee,…

I've long thought that Starbucks was an excellent indicator of America's economic health because it was a well-run company whose product is the perfect embodiment of affordable, expendable luxury. If consumers really are anxious about their economic lives, a daily SBUX purchase is the easiest thing…

The MLB seems open to pushing back the start of Game 6 of the World Series (assuming the Phillies haven't clinched the championship already) in order to accommodate Barack Obama's giant TV ad. If you ever got the sense that literally the entire world is bending over backwards to help Obama's…

Tina Brown's Daily Beast looks as if it's trying to live up to its legendary namesake. In today's edition, Scott Horton purports to describe how Bill Kristol made Sarah Palin. Horton begins with this telling story: In June 2007, a cruise liner sponsored by the political journal The Weekly Standard…

Round 1: What's the fastest way to bailout Real People?

Round 1: What's the fastest way to bailout Real People?

High off of the Redskins' improbable 4-1 start, Daniel Snyder is monkeying around even more with D.C. talk radio. Snyder's company, Red Zebra Broadcasting, owns two news-talk stations in the area, the conservative TNT 570 and the liberal WRC 1260. Now Michael Calderone reports that for the duration…

Variety's Todd McCarthy isn't so much a movie reviewer as a tribune of absolute truth. This morning he's got the verdict on Oliver Stone's W.: Oliver Stone's unusual and inescapably interesting "W." feels like a rough draft of a film it might behoove him to remake in 10 or 15 years.

Sibley Memorial Hospital is generally acknowledged as the best place to have a baby in Washington, D.C. Located in the ritzy Palisades neighborhood, Sibley is just a few blocks from the Potomac, surrounded on three sides by trees. The delivery suites, outfitted with dark-wood cabinets and soothing…

I thought Gwen Ifill's most biased question last night was this one: Sen. Biden, we want to talk about taxes, let's talk about taxes. You proposed raising taxes on people who earn over $250,000 a year. The question for you is, why is that not class warfare and the same question for you, Gov. Palin,…

Round 1: Forget the bailout, what's up with the bailout process?

Round 1: Forget the bailout, what's up with the bailout process?

Round 1: Where do you stand on the Paulson bailout plan? Obama says that Main Street was suffering long before Wall Street and that we have to move swiftly and wisely. Also, he says that he's put forward proposals to make this plan work better, most importantly to make sure we bail out the…

Round 1: Where do you stand on the Paulson bailout plan?

I've always maintained that if we wait long enough, eventually we'll see George W. Bush blamed for everything that has gone wrong in the world, ever. Exhibit #5,246 is this: magician/mentalist/oddball David Blaine blames Bush for the failure of "Dive of Death" stunt on Wednesday night.

A few weeks ago I suggested to my blog friend Kathy Nelson that she read the excellent SNL oral history, Live From New York, as it contains some revealing bits about Al Franken. I had read the book years ago, however, and had forgotten how damning some of the stuff in it was. Kathy has the goods.…

Jim Treacher has a fall-over-funny, Onion-esque item: Misspelling Found in Palin's Personal Journal By Markos Moulitsas Special to the New York Times Saturday, September 20, 2008; A1 Media Bubble, Sept. 20 -- John McCain's presidential campaign is reeling this morning upon allegations that his…

John McCain said today that if he were the president, he would fire SEC Chairman Chris Cox. Some Democrats have made hay of this statement, asserting that because the SEC is an "independent agency," the president can't fire the chairman. For examples of that criticism, see that ABC blog post linked…

Today wasn't the first time Barack Obama asked his supporters to "get in the face" of people who disagree with Sen. Obama. In fact, yesterday's Chicago Tribune carried an illuminating story on the "Obama Action Wire"--Obama's flash-mob tool designed to disrupt media criticism of the candidate in…

CBS.com's Jon Friedman has what must be the most bizarre analysis of why Palinpalooza is doomed: The primary reason why the Palin bubble will burst is that the media will decide that they are bored with her. They'll need to move to shine a light on a fresh issue or individual. This is how the world…

A columnist for The Guardian warns American voters that the world will not easily forgive us if we decline to be led by The OneTM. But first, there's this British worry over the manner in which the sycophantic American media has rolled over for Sarah Palin: I watch as the Democrats stumble,…

The Obama campaign is harping on a talking point about how Sarah Palin's speech needs to be discounted because it was written by a former Bush speechwriter. This is one of the silliest complaints on record. Especially when Obama's star scribe, is a former Kerry speechwriter. Somehow, this fact…

Joseph Bottum notes that Sarah Palin did not mention abortion in her speech last night, prompting Amanda Shaw to reply: Sarah Palin didn't talk about abortion, and I don't think she needed to. . . . When she stood up on the stage before all of America, with her pregnant daughter by her side and her…

Mickey Kaus has a typically thoughtful, elegant, and counter-intuitive assessment of why, exactly, the press has been so irresponsibly hostile toward Sarah Palin. I won't spoil it, but it involves a detailed accounting of the how the internet and traditional media have evolved over time in a new…

Joseph Bottum has a bracing post looking at the reaction in some precincts of the left to the smears being spread about Sarah Palin and her family. When some commenters on the Daily Kos site complained that the smearing of Palin was beyond the pale, other commenters objected to the objection.…

Philadelphia Daily News columnist Fatimah Ali warns that, "If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring crime, homelessness--and hopelessness!" I'm not sure about the race and class war stuff, but I'm sure we will see a huge…

Is Sarah Palin about to approach Chuck Norris levels of legendary awesomeness? Sarah Palin Facts says yes! Death once had a near-Sarah Palin experience. Sarah Palin always beats the point spread. Sarah Palin uses French Canadians as bait to catch giant king salmon. When Sarah Palin booked a flight…

The genius of Borat was always lost on me, but these videos of Jason Mattera at the Democratic convention last week are fall-over funny. Mattera went around trying to get Democratic radicals to sign a petition to improve the quality of life for terrorist detainees. As Mattera explains to one mark,…

With the convention on-hold, I made a pilgrimage to the Mall of America this morning, and I mean it as no insult to say that the Metro Twin Cities area is what New Jersey would have been like had everything gone right. In any event, the MoA is a place of many wonders, not the least of which is its…

Jay Cost has a characteristically astute observation about the Palin pick: I think many people are surprised to discover that McCain intends to carry a positive message into the fall. Many of us had assumed that this election would be a referendum on Barack Obama, with McCain serving as an…

As just one example of how Obama used last night to shift the focus of his campaign, he altered one of the most well-known lines from his primary stump speech. During the last several months, one of Obama's signature lines, used in both speeches and ads, was: Because we are at a defining moment in…

Denver Having followed Barack Obama around on the campaign trail quite a bit, I found tonight's big speech to be of the middle-rank, at least by his own standards. At his best, Obama is a riveting orator--his Iowa caucus victory speech was gob-smacking in the brilliance of both its rhetoric and…

The set at Invesco which people have been talking about is even worse in person. Because while it's clearly striving for grandiosity, it doesn't achieve it. Instead of evoking the Acropolis or the Lincoln Memorial, it looks like a side entrance to Caesar's Palace in Vegas. Of course, it may look…

The first thing that jumps out from Biden's speech is that the tone seems to appeal to the Jacksonians in the Jacksonian / Academic divide that Michael Barone explored during the primaries. He talks about "honor" and fighting and bloodying the nose of neighborhood bullies and the bearing of…

President Clinton seems willing to put his arms around Obama in a way Hillary wasn't. He actually does say that Obama is ready to be president and defender of the Constitution (though not, interestingly, commander-in-chief). And he mounts a short defense of Obama by saying that in 1992 he, too, was…

Denver After visiting the Manifest Hope gallery, I did a dispatch with tons of pictures of the new Obama iconography. Some of it has to be seen to be believed. I was so moved by the change and the hope, that I dropped $20 on an Obama T-shirt: OldTestamentObama.JPG As you can see, this is more of an…

Charles Krauthammer and others have noted the odd grandiosity of Obama's creation of a miniature Greek temple for the backdrop of his acceptance speech tomorrow. But it seems to me that what Obama is likely trying to do is not suggest an Olympian setting, but rather to invoke the Lincoln Memorial,…

Denver

Denver It sounds like a joke: How many pro-life Democrats can you fit in a room? All of them! This afternoon, about 60 people gathered for a town-hall meeting of pro-life Democrats. Of this group, about eight were speakers and another dozen (at least) were media. Maybe the joke is right. That said,…

Politics aside, when Hollywood is finally ready to make The Dick Van Patten Story, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer should get the call. Schweitzer: Schweitzer.jpg Patten: Patten.jpg

Denver One of Mark Warner's selling points for Obama is that "We need a president who understands the world today." Yet one of the most troubling aspects of Obama is his consistent misreading of history. McCain pointed to one of these misunderstandings this afternoon: [Obama] suggested that the end…

Denver

The RCP Blog has a great moment from former Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson who, at an anti-war rally today, said: "We should be led by Osama bin Laden," he said, then quickly corrected himself. "I mean Obama and Biden."

Denver EMILY's List held a "Women Vote!" gala reception this afternoon, which I was forced to attend through a wi-fi hook-up. Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton all took the stage. Clinton went first in a speech remarkably similar in tone to the address she gave yesterday. She began…

Denver One of the hidden wonders of this glorious convention is the lengths to which the Democrats have gone to be environmentally friendly. The media goodie bags, for instance, were filled with eco-worship products including pens made of recycled materials and a plastic bottle to carry water in so…

The Mile High city isn't noted for its living arts, but it is home to a production called Iraq War: The Musical. I'd love to see it, but unfortunately performances are suspended this week and won't resume until Friday. But to give you a taste of what it seems to be about, here's the promotional…

Denver Four years ago, the gals at Emily's List refused to let Matt Labash cover their big event in Boston because no boys were allowed. Today the press people at Emily's List told me that they wouldn't be able to give me a credential for tomorrow's event where they're bringing Nancy Pelosi,…

Denver Four years ago, the gals at Emily's List refused to let Matt Labash cover their big event in Boston because no boys were allowed. Today the press people at Emily's List told me that they wouldn't be able to give me a credential for tomorrow's event where they're bringing Nancy Pelosi,…

Denver Hillary Clinton wasn't invited to address the DNC's Hispanic Caucus until early this morning. Nevertheless, she showed up at the Colorado Convention Center shortly after 10:30 for her first public talk to convention goers about Barack Obama. It was revealing in both what she did and did not…

Denver

Denver

Denver Obama Messiah is a great clearinghouse for Obama worship. There's the usual iconography. But there's also great hidden stuff, like a link to this Denver yoga center which is offering a special class called "OmBama--Yes We Can." Here's the description: OMbama Yoga classes! Enjoy these…

Midlife crises come early to the perpetual adolescent. Mine began, in a slow, simmering way during the summer of my thirty-second year. I felt pangs of mortality and decrepitude. Worse, I saw the gradual creep of grown-up responsibility leaching into my life. So I latched, quite suddenly, onto the…

Denver Well, those dull, superstitious Clinton voters are back. Here's the Philadelphia Inquirer's Dick Polman demanding that Bill and Hillary Clinton use the convention to put into their place those Clinton voters who still have reservations about Obama: "[I]t would greatly help the Democratic…

Are you a right-thinking progressive appalled by the world George W. Bush has created? Are you tired of having Republican corporate pigs like AT&T profit from your text messages? Then try Credo Mobile! That's the pitch Credo Mobile is making. Billing itself as a company that supports progressive…

FORGET LIMBAUGH AND NPR: There is no higher form of radio than sports talk. I grew up in Philadelphia where I was spoiled by America's best such station, the all-local WIP. The station played an important part in my adult formation. As a young boy educated by Quakers, I was confused by the strange…

FORGET LIMBAUGH AND NPR: There is no higher form of radio than sports talk. I grew up in Philadelphia where I was spoiled by America's best such station, the all-local WIP. The station played an important part in my adult formation. As a young boy educated by Quakers, I was confused by the strange…

Nicholas Kristof writes today about the dazzling rise of China. I don't mean to over-extrapolate his argument, but he seems to be suggesting that in a generation, China will be the world's leading culture and economy. At least I think that's what he's getting at here: Now the world is reverting to…

The Clinton campaign made a big show of rending their garments over the sexism they encountered during the primaries. Comments like this one from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review's Salena Zito probably won't help matters in Hillary Land: This convention is Obama's moment -- his hour to welcome America…

IN FRANK MILLER's The Dark Knight Returns, there is a moment where Alfred, the family butler, recounts a story from Bruce Wayne's childhood, a few years after the murder of his parents:

The Obama campaign announced today that they raised $52 million in June, reversing their trend of three straight months of steep fundraising decline. It's an impressive total (though it still doesn't match his February haul of $55 million). Anyway, good for the Obama campaign. But it's worth…

If you were forced to name the high-water mark of television, the 1981 Granada production of Brideshead Revisited would be a fine choice. Starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Claire Bloom, John Gielgud, and Laurence Olivier, Brideshead ran a luxurious 659 minutes, gliding smoothly along the…

The Obama campaign released a statement this week commemorating the 36th anniversary of Title IX. Goodness knows the 36th anniversary is a big one. Custom holds that people normally mark that important milestone by exchanging gifts made of heavy water. But the Obama campaign had something even…

Over a million South Koreans poured into the streets in recent weeks to protest the return of American beef to the Korean dinner table. Fears of Mad-Cow Disease have sparked the largest demonstrations since Korea democratized two decades ago. Given that not a single American has contracted the…

Further developments on the counting your chickens front: Director Spike Lee, whose movies often cast a sharp eye on U.S. racial politics, predicted a presidential victory for black Democrat Barack Obama that would mark a "new day" for the United States. "It's going to be before Obama, 'B.B.,' and…

Barack Obama's elitism runs even deeper than previously thought. Not only does the man from Hawaii, Morningside Heights, Cambridge, and Hyde Park look down on the grubby rubes in Altoona who go hunting after church. Not only does he bowl like a (10-year-old) girl. But it turns out that even his…

I'm a little nervous about making fun of the latest bit of Obama-as-mesiah stuff from the San Francisco Chronicle because I'm not entirely sure whether or not it's satire. Here's Mark Morford explaining that Obama just might be a "Lightworker": I find I'm having this discussion, this weird little…

There's a lot of it going around and most of it seems, to me at least, a little unfair. For instance, Drudge is linking to this Daily News story mocking Clinton for spending $109,823 per delegate. The reporter goes on and on coming up with other things she could have done with all of that…

Chicago's Cardinal Francis George has placed Fr. Pfleger on leave. The Sun-Times has the whole scoop. Choice details include: * Pfleger was asked to take a voluntary sabbatical; he refused. * After being placed on involuntary leave, Pfleger was asked to leave the rectory. * Pfleger had previously…

1_obamasmall.JPG Artist Ron English (whose website is called Popaganda) has created a portrait fusing the faces of Barack Obama and the Great Emancipator. Because, you know.

For the Clinton bitter-enders out there, comes big news: Rickey Martin has endorsed the Senator from New York! From the campaign: "These elections will have historic repercussions both in the United States and the world. Senator Clinton has always been consistent in her commitment with the needs of…

More than any other politician in recent memory, Barack Obama has been the subject of iconography. His campaign's official posters often portray Obama in a beatific light--clad in a white shirt and silver tie, eyes squinting and looking into some middle distance above the camera, a nimbus of wispy…

The American Idol finale last night provided a ray of hope for the McCain campaign. How is that, you ask? Follow along with me on the most tortured political analogy of the decade. If. You. Dare! Okay, so the Idol final pitted David Cook against David Archuleta. For non-Idol watchers, Cook is a…

Men's Fitness now has him ranked as one of the 25 "fittest guys" in America. Along with, you know, Tiger Woods, Wladimir Klitschko, Brady Quinn, and assorted other professional athletes and dudes with 5 percent body fat. Is there anything he can't do?

How could I have missed this one? ObamaForward8.jpg

The general consensus seems to be that last night's results settled the Democratic nomination fight. But I'm not exactly sure why that is. For months now--since South Carolina--it has been pretty obvious which states Obama would win and which Clinton would carry. It seemed clear all along that…

I'm so over the Rev. Wright stuff. The question I've been obsessed with all day is this: How good a baller is Obama? My interest was first peaked by a New York Post photo of Obama putting up a shot over UNC's enormously over-rated Tyler Hansbrough. Evidently, the Big O played in a scrimmage with…

Any lingering doubts that the Obama campaign is a cult of personality should be erased by this news that the campaign is offering a "limited edition" car magnet for donors who give $15 or more before Wednesday. The campaign is marketing its own collectibles! (Will donors get a certificate of…

Now that E.J. Dionne is asking whether or not Obama is Adlai, we're on the cusp of it becoming conventional wisdom.

mccain-705533.jpg

Upon first witnessing Barack Obama on the campaign trail, I thought he might be something different, or maybe even new, in American politics. The more I saw of him, the more I suspected he was a conventional figure--basically this generation's Gary Hart. But some time around Wisconsin it occurred…

Power Line notes that Barack Obama has picked up an important endorsement--from Hamas. Why do they like His Hopeness? Because "He has a vision to change America." Another victory for the Change AgendaTM! It's interesting to note how clear-eyed America's enemies are about what Barack Obama stands…

A couple months ago I asked whether or not Barack Obama's sonorous voice resembled the Voice of Saruman in its power to enthrall and persuade. (You can get the full geek here.) But now geektastic reader B.G. sends in a note wondering if Obama's latest bitter/cling problems don't also have an eerie…

My friend Jody Bottum once suggested that there are three basic stories in fiction: (1) boy meets girl; (2) a stranger came to town; and (3) there once was a man a long way from home. I've long held that the same is true for advertising. Advertisements can be classified into three basic pitches:…

The federal government has had difficulty honoring the heroes of Flight 93. Fundraising for the national memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed on 9/11, lags, and the project has yet to break ground. And even simpler honors have so far eluded Congress.

Jay Cost has a smart post about numbers, dynamics, and the humility of predictions: I agree that Clinton is more likely to lose than win. I also do not necessarily disagree with these low estimates. However, I disagree with the way these estimates are occasionally presented. There is sometimes an…

Pete Wehner has a very interesting piece on the Obama speech today. He echoes the Jay Cost question from yesterday, but then goes further, pointing out that the entire episode, and the widely-praised speech, actually feed all of the major anti-Obama narratives: (1) That he's actually a conventional…

Jay Cost offers up what could be the most damaging question to be asked of Obama in reaction to his speech (in the context of the Democratic primary). He writes: My concern with the speech is the following. I am not sure what I think about Obama's claim that he never heard Wright make incendiary…

Lego has created videogame series where well-known franchises get portrayed not in normal videogame graphics, but in a videogame rendition of Legos. There's Lego Star Wars; coming in October is Lego Batman; and in a few weeks Lego Indiana Jones will hit shelves. Of note in the new game is the…

Madison, Wisconsin

Jay Cost has some very interesting thoughts on the Democratic party's superdelegate problem, which he believes is indicative of the larger trend in American politics of neglecting the role of the political party: It seems to me that the Democrats are in the midst of a robust, valuable debate about…

One of my pet theories about acting is that at least half of the work an actor does is with his voice. That's why the ranks of great leading men are filled with exceptionally powerful and wonderful voices (think George Clooney and Paul Newman and Russell Crowe and Alec Baldwin). British actors tend…

Paul Waldman has a very interesting piece on Obama's use of narrative. It includes this striking passage: [I]f he should find himself facing Obama, McCain will discover that his own weaknesses fit in neatly with the story Obama tells. Where Obama is young, dynamic and optimistic, McCain is old,…

Madison, Wisconsin Last night a whole bunch of Clinton supporters gathered in the Monona Terrace convention hall. The campaign claims there were "more than 5,000" on hand. I'm not sure there were that many, but there were certainly more than a few thousand. It was a packed, super-energized crowd…

Milwaukee, Wisconsin One of the additional weirdnesses of yesterday's Michelle Obama event was that before the program began, they played the now famous Dipdive music video on a giant screen behind the podium:

Madison, Wisconsin

Sometime before Barack Obama's strong showing on Super Tuesday, the Washington Post observed that the senator had been campaigning across this great land on a "platform of hope and change." Whether or not the Post was being arch, they had it about right.

Milwaukee

There's a lot of this going around these days. Jonathan Stein at Mother Jones has the best distillation of the growing uneasiness with the High Church of Obama: This is our moment to do what? To march? To organize? No. To vote for Obama. As if simply by voting for one man, we make a mark upon this…

(1) Hillary Clinton was in Ohio Thursday, she won't get to Wisconsin until Saturday. Bill Clinton was in Texas on Friday. So who did the campaign roll out to carry the banner in Wisconsin? Ann Lewis. Just in case there was any doubt that Clinton was going to tank the Badger State. (2) On Friday we…

Last night the Obama campaign sent out an email boasting of having had more than 300,000 donors since January 1. As of 9:40 this morning the number was 331,241. They've set a new goal of 500,000 donors by March 4 and they say that people who contribute from here on in will have their donations…

Last night the Obama campaign sent out an email boasting of having had more than 300,000 donors since January 1. As of 9:40 this morning the number was 331,241. They've set a new goal of 500,000 donors by March 4 and they say that people who contribute from here on in will have their donations…

His Excellency talks about the "dead-cat bounce", noting that cats will bounce on the street after falling from a ten-story window even though they have been killed by the fall. One of the many charming lessons of physics, however, is that cats often survive falls of more than seven stories, while…

His Excellency talks about the "dead-cat bounce", noting that cats will bounce on the street after falling from a ten-story window even though they have been killed by the fall. One of the many charming lessons of physics, however, is that cats often survive falls of more than seven stories, while…

Nothing ever happens during voting days, but campaigns always try to make news anyway. The Clinton campaign just put out the most bizarre press release I've ever seen. During the course of it they note that: 1) Polls are now open! 2) "HRC" called into the Steve Harvey show this morning. 3) "A Few…

Nothing ever happens during voting days, but campaigns always try to make news anyway. The Clinton campaign just put out the most bizarre press release I've ever seen. During the course of it they note that: 1) Polls are now open! 2) "HRC" called into the Steve Harvey show this morning. 3) "A Few…

Perhaps concerned by the impact of America Ferrera's constant cheerleading for Hillary Clinton, the Obama campaign announced today that Dule Hill will be leading two Obama rallies in North Dakota today. You may remember Hill from such roles as "Charlie" on The West Wing and "Gus" on Psych. But I'll…

Perhaps concerned by the impact of America Ferrera's constant cheerleading for Hillary Clinton, the Obama campaign announced today that Dule Hill will be leading two Obama rallies in North Dakota today. You may remember Hill from such roles as "Charlie" on The West Wing and "Gus" on Psych. But I'll…

For a reporter, going to New Hampshire in primary season is like going to the ballpark: No matter how many times you've been, you might see something you've never seen before.

Columbia, South Carolina

St. Helena Island, South Carolina At the risk of picking nits, President Clinton was asked a question tonight about what role he would play in his wife's administration. Here's how he responded: I will do everything I can to help her think through these problems. I will not be in her cabinet - it's…

St. Helena Island, South Carolina At the risk of picking nits, President Clinton was asked a question tonight about what role he would play in his wife's administration. Here's how he responded: I will do everything I can to help her think through these problems. I will not be in her cabinet - it's…

Beaufort, South Carolina With only 15 hours left until the polls open here, the Clinton campaign has unleashed a devastating one-two punch: First, it seems that "fashion mogul, business entrepreneur, author, top model and mom Kimora Lee Simmons" has endorsed Hillary Clinton. I know what you're…

Beaufort, South Carolina With only 15 hours left until the polls open here, the Clinton campaign has unleashed a devastating one-two punch: First, it seems that "fashion mogul, business entrepreneur, author, top model and mom Kimora Lee Simmons" has endorsed Hillary Clinton. I know what you're…

Beaufort, South Carolina It had occured to me that the Clinton campaign's sudden pushing of resources into South Carolina might mean that they knew (or believed) something contrary to the polls, which had Barack Obama as a heavy, double-digit favorite here. Moments ago the Clinton campaign…

Beaufort, South Carolina It had occured to me that the Clinton campaign's sudden pushing of resources into South Carolina might mean that they knew (or believed) something contrary to the polls, which had Barack Obama as a heavy, double-digit favorite here. Moments ago the Clinton campaign…

Barnwell, South Carolina

Orangeburg, South Carolina

The United Nations has backed a $100 million film fund. The idea behind the project, Variety reports, is to combat stereotypes in movies. "For a lifetime, it seems, I have agonized over the way stereotypes, reinforced by popular culture and the media, can set the emotional and political stage for…

Manchester, N.H.

A look at the entrance poll crosstabs should be worrisome for the Obama camp. Compare it also to the results in New Hampshire: Clinton won NV women 51 percent to 38 percent. Clinton won voters over 45 in NV by a slim margin. But she won voters over 60 by a 2-to-1 margin. Think about how that…

A look at the entrance poll crosstabs should be worrisome for the Obama camp. Compare it also to the results in New Hampshire: Clinton won NV women 51 percent to 38 percent. Clinton won voters over 45 in NV by a slim margin. But she won voters over 60 by a 2-to-1 margin. Think about how that…

Las Vegas Underneath the headline that Clinton won the Nevada caucuses are two other notes: (1) Edwards finished with 4 percent. That's right. Granted that number is an over-performance compared with the caucus site I attended where only 8 of the 495 voters were for him. At what point does Edwards…

Las Vegas Underneath the headline that Clinton won the Nevada caucuses are two other notes: (1) Edwards finished with 4 percent. That's right. Granted that number is an over-performance compared with the caucus site I attended where only 8 of the 495 voters were for him. At what point does Edwards…

Las Vegas

Las Vegas

Las Vegas

Las Vegas Nevada District Court Judge James Mahan has ruled that the 9 at-large caucus sites in Nevada casinos are just fine. The attorney for the state teacher's union says he "probably won't" appeal the decision. So everything stays the same except that the Clinton organization probably made some…

Las Vegas Nevada District Court Judge James Mahan has ruled that the 9 at-large caucus sites in Nevada casinos are just fine. The attorney for the state teacher's union says he "probably won't" appeal the decision. So everything stays the same except that the Clinton organization probably made some…

Las Vegas One of the bigger stories here is a lawsuit that's been filed against the caucus which seeks to shut down the caucus locations in nine Nevada casinos. The back-story is classic: Harry Reid was the leading force in moving Nevada's caucus up on the calendar to give it meaning for the first…

Las Vegas One of the bigger stories here is a lawsuit that's been filed against the caucus which seeks to shut down the caucus locations in nine Nevada casinos. The back-story is classic: Harry Reid was the leading force in moving Nevada's caucus up on the calendar to give it meaning for the first…

Las Vegas First the Clinton campaign gave us the "Middle-Class Express" bus. Then there was the "Hill-a-Copter." Yesterday the campaign unveiled a a 737-800 they're calling "Hill Force One." Make it stop.

Las Vegas First the Clinton campaign gave us the "Middle-Class Express" bus. Then there was the "Hill-a-Copter." Yesterday the campaign unveiled a a 737-800 they're calling "Hill Force One." Make it stop.

Henderson, Nevada

Las Vegas For those of you wondering why there's no good polling on the Nevada caucus, it's because pollsters aren't sure what's going to happen here on Saturday when the caucuses take place. This is the first time Nevada has had meaningful caucuses, and no one knows how to model the turnout. The…

Las Vegas For those of you wondering why there's no good polling on the Nevada caucus, it's because pollsters aren't sure what's going to happen here on Saturday when the caucuses take place. This is the first time Nevada has had meaningful caucuses, and no one knows how to model the turnout. The…

Las Vegas One of the most interesting post-Iowa developments in the Clinton campaign has been watching Bill Clinton take on the traditional role of running mate/hatchet man. Of course, traditionally "running mate" means "vice president," but this is an important time in our nation's history. Our…

Las Vegas One of the most interesting post-Iowa developments in the Clinton campaign has been watching Bill Clinton take on the traditional role of running mate/hatchet man. Of course, traditionally "running mate" means "vice president," but this is an important time in our nation's history. Our…

Las Vegas

Las Vegas The Clinton campaign has been circulating emails on two lines of attack against Obama that will probably be on display at tonight's debate. The first is that Obama voted "present" 129 times while serving in the Illinois state Senate. The Clinton camp use these votes to pain Obama as…

Las Vegas The Clinton campaign has been circulating emails on two lines of attack against Obama that will probably be on display at tonight's debate. The first is that Obama voted "present" 129 times while serving in the Illinois state Senate. The Clinton camp use these votes to pain Obama as…

Various staffers at the Democratic debate have told me that Dennis Kucinich will be allowed into the debate in a few minutes, but the Nevada Supreme Court has yet to speak and no one will say anything officially. Meanwhile, the Kucinich camp sends out the following release: LAS VEGAS, NV - Still…

Various staffers at the Democratic debate have told me that Dennis Kucinich will be allowed into the debate in a few minutes, but the Nevada Supreme Court has yet to speak and no one will say anything officially. Meanwhile, the Kucinich camp sends out the following release: LAS VEGAS, NV - Still…

Las Vegas In even-less-serious news, it's a big day on the 'tween front. The Clinton campaign announced that America Ferrara and Amber Tamblyn have endorsed the senator from New York. Can you feel the excitement? Ferrara is the star of Ugly Betty. You might know Tamblyn from such TV shows as Joan…

Las Vegas In even-less-serious news, it's a big day on the 'tween front. The Clinton campaign announced that America Ferrara and Amber Tamblyn have endorsed the senator from New York. Can you feel the excitement? Ferrara is the star of Ugly Betty. You might know Tamblyn from such TV shows as Joan…

Las Vegas No matter how many jokes you want to make about how strange the Nevada caucus is, they can't really approach the reality of the thing. Exhibit A on our tour of the bizarre is the fact that the Democratic caucuses will be held here on Saturday, and 9 of the 1,700 caucus sites will be in…

Las Vegas No matter how many jokes you want to make about how strange the Nevada caucus is, they can't really approach the reality of the thing. Exhibit A on our tour of the bizarre is the fact that the Democratic caucuses will be held here on Saturday, and 9 of the 1,700 caucus sites will be in…

Andrew Ferguson has a fantastic essay on the insanity of the college admission process, which reminds me of one of Hillary Clinton's most appealing campaign lines: Whenever she talks about making college easier and more affordable for the middle class, she promises to do away with the FAFSA, or…

Andrew Ferguson has a fantastic essay on the insanity of the college admission process, which reminds me of one of Hillary Clinton's most appealing campaign lines: Whenever she talks about making college easier and more affordable for the middle class, she promises to do away with the FAFSA, or…

Concord, New Hampshire Today is, paradoxically, a quiet news day in New Hampshire. The candidates jet from spot to spot and, aside from the rumors of internal staff shake-ups, there's nothing really to report until the results start coming in this evening. So, for your entertainment, here are the…

Concord, New Hampshire Today is, paradoxically, a quiet news day in New Hampshire. The candidates jet from spot to spot and, aside from the rumors of internal staff shake-ups, there's nothing really to report until the results start coming in this evening. So, for your entertainment, here are the…

Dover, New Hampshire

Salem, New Hampshire Whatever else there is to be said about Hillary Clinton, she shows up on time. Almost always. Barack Obama is . . . less punctual. We'll leave it at that. There's a basketball game in the Salem High gymnasium, so Obama's event is in the auditorium next door. It seats 750 and…

Salem, New Hampshire Whatever else there is to be said about Hillary Clinton, she shows up on time. Almost always. Barack Obama is . . . less punctual. We'll leave it at that. There's a basketball game in the Salem High gymnasium, so Obama's event is in the auditorium next door. It seats 750 and…

Nashua, New Hampshire Well, first the big news: Viggo Mortensen is campaigning here with Dennis Kucinich today. ("If by my life or death I can protect you Dennis, I will. You have my sword . . .") Then there's the more mundane campaign stuff. There was some talk yesterday contrasting Barack Obama's…

Nashua, New Hampshire Well, first the big news: Viggo Mortensen is campaigning here with Dennis Kucinich today. ("If by my life or death I can protect you Dennis, I will. You have my sword . . .") Then there's the more mundane campaign stuff. There was some talk yesterday contrasting Barack Obama's…

All in all, this is a bad night for Hillary Clinton. She wasn't able to damage Obama and she weakened her own case for being the mature, serious candidate. Let's take a look at what happened: * Clinton tries to gently attack Obama at first, seeking to label him a flip-flopper. She then becames a…

All in all, this is a bad night for Hillary Clinton. She wasn't able to damage Obama and she weakened her own case for being the mature, serious candidate. Let's take a look at what happened: * Clinton tries to gently attack Obama at first, seeking to label him a flip-flopper. She then becames a…

Manchester, New Hampshire A little secret about tonight's debate at Saint Anselm College: The press doesn't even get to be in the same hall as the actual event. We're in a gymnasium a few buildings away watching the broadcast on giant-screen TVs. If you're watching from the comfort of your own…

Manchester, New Hampshire A little secret about tonight's debate at Saint Anselm College: The press doesn't even get to be in the same hall as the actual event. We're in a gymnasium a few buildings away watching the broadcast on giant-screen TVs. If you're watching from the comfort of your own…

Durham, New Hampshire After a jarring moment last night where she was booed by sizable crowd of Obama-supporting Democrats, Hillary Clinton got back on the trail this morning at a rather odd venue: a tiny bagel shop next to the University of New Hampshire's Durham campus. About 50 voters have come…

Durham, New Hampshire After a jarring moment last night where she was booed by sizable crowd of Obama-supporting Democrats, Hillary Clinton got back on the trail this morning at a rather odd venue: a tiny bagel shop next to the University of New Hampshire's Durham campus. About 50 voters have come…

Milford, New Hampshire

Concord, New Hampshire After dominating the youth vote and expanding the voter base in Iowa, Obama is out to do the same in New Hampshire, holding a lunchtime event at Concord High School. Banners here suggest that (boys tennis aside) CHS athletics aren't particularly notable. But the school did…

Concord, New Hampshire After dominating the youth vote and expanding the voter base in Iowa, Obama is out to do the same in New Hampshire, holding a lunchtime event at Concord High School. Banners here suggest that (boys tennis aside) CHS athletics aren't particularly notable. But the school did…

Portsmouth, N.H. It's 5 degrees outside, the intersections near the Pan-Am hangar where Obama's first event is this morning are plastered with placards urging us to "Stop Global Warming," and I'm parked next to two Priuses. Welcome to Obama Nation. A lot's being said about Obama's youth bulge in…

Portsmouth, N.H. It's 5 degrees outside, the intersections near the Pan-Am hangar where Obama's first event is this morning are plastered with placards urging us to "Stop Global Warming," and I'm parked next to two Priuses. Welcome to Obama Nation. A lot's being said about Obama's youth bulge in…

Ottumwa, Iowa

Union City, California

Reading Steve Hayes's post on Romney and ordinary Americans, I'm surprised that this hasn't yet caught up with the former Massachusetts governor. Particularly with moments like this from a couple weeks ago: At times, the wealth of the Romney family clashes with voters' more modest circumstances.…

Reading Steve Hayes's post on Romney and ordinary Americans, I'm surprised that this hasn't yet caught up with the former Massachusetts governor. Particularly with moments like this from a couple weeks ago: At times, the wealth of the Romney family clashes with voters' more modest circumstances.…

Bill Kristol notes the oddness of Hillary Clinton speaking as if she had been co-president during the 1990s, but it's actually odder than the boss knows. I spent the early part of the week following Clinton around Iowa and was struck by two formulations she used to talk about her role as first…

Bill Kristol notes the oddness of Hillary Clinton speaking as if she had been co-president during the 1990s, but it's actually odder than the boss knows. I spent the early part of the week following Clinton around Iowa and was struck by two formulations she used to talk about her role as first…

In 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded a company called Google, about which you likely know quite a bit. The outgrowth of work Page and Brin began in 1996 on hypertextual search engines, Google has moved from darling little high-concept innovator to Microsoft-like behemoth in record time.…

The Hollywood writers' strike has placed the Democratic frontrunners in something of a bind, forcing them to choose between unions and the entertainment industry executives who are some of their most important big-money contributors. The responses of Senators Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have been…

Wellesley, Massachusetts

Stop the presses! Today comes word that Paul Weyrich has endorsed Mitt "Agent of Change" Romney. Says Hot Air: "This one strikes me as a big deal." Me too. As His Eminence noted last week, the Romney campaign appeared to have found its footing by abandoning its quest to be seen as the Authentic…

Stop the presses! Today comes word that Paul Weyrich has endorsed Mitt "Agent of Change" Romney. Says Hot Air: "This one strikes me as a big deal." Me too. As His Eminence noted last week, the Romney campaign appeared to have found its footing by abandoning its quest to be seen as the Authentic…

IMG_0011low.jpg A life-size replica of the original G.I. Joe at

Ramesh Ponnuru continues to make the case for John McCain and, both practically and ideologically, he's not unpersuasive. Ponnuru sees McCain as an excellent conservative candidate: He is solid on almost all of the important issues: the war, judges, entitlements, abortion, trade ... Even on taxes,…

Ramesh Ponnuru continues to make the case for John McCain and, both practically and ideologically, he's not unpersuasive. Ponnuru sees McCain as an excellent conservative candidate: He is solid on almost all of the important issues: the war, judges, entitlements, abortion, trade ... Even on taxes,…

With its marijuana coffee shops, the Netherlands has a reputation for being the most drug-friendly country in Europe: the epitome of the continent's permissive cultural attitude to illegal drug use. The Dutch have long favored "harm reduction" rather than law enforcement in their drug-related…

Hillary may be edging out Obama in total fundraising, but he's holding his own in Hollywood, Variety reports. In the third quarter, Obama pulled in $580,000 from the film, TV, and music industries while Clinton snagged $530,589. (Edwards was a distant third with $96,052.) Variety attributes the…

Hillary may be edging out Obama in total fundraising, but he's holding his own in Hollywood, Variety reports. In the third quarter, Obama pulled in $580,000 from the film, TV, and music industries while Clinton snagged $530,589. (Edwards was a distant third with $96,052.) Variety attributes the…

ONE OF THE UNTOLD successes of the Bush administration has been the progress made in the fight against illegal drugs. During the past six years, during which John Walters has been director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, drug use among the most critical American age groups, 12- to…

People are calling Academy AwardTM-winning director Jonathan Demme's Man From Plains his most terrifying film since Silence of the Lambs! That's what I'm calling it, anyway. In case you've missed it, Jonathan Demme, worried that his Manchurian Candidate remake wasn't enough on the nose, has decided…

People are calling Academy AwardTM-winning director Jonathan Demme's Man From Plains his most terrifying film since Silence of the Lambs! That's what I'm calling it, anyway. In case you've missed it, Jonathan Demme, worried that his Manchurian Candidate remake wasn't enough on the nose, has decided…

Newt.jpg Cyber Newt

Chicago

As a general principle, the best athletes shouldn't be our favorite athletes. We should appreciate greatness, of course. But actually rooting for Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Barry Bonds reflects a character deficiency. Like rooting for the Yankees.

Eminent domain appeared in the presidential campaign recently when Sen. John McCain addressed the Supreme Court's 2005 Kelo decision. In a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, McCain called Kelo "one of the most alarming reductions of freedom in our lifetimes." In the course of defending property rights,…

Until last week, I had been going to A.V. Ristorante, a modest Italian restaurant on New York Avenue, for as long as I'd been in Washington--longer even. During my college years in Baltimore, my friends and I would sometimes escape to D.C. for the evening. We would eat dinner at A.V. Afterwards, we…

An ambitious private initiative to help American Internet service providers (ISPs) identify jihadist websites they are unwittingly hosting was unveiled the other day in Washington. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) will lend its translation capabilities and the expertise of its…

I wrote a piece last week for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about American internet service providers who host websites for jihadists. In the course of reporting the piece I came across an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Texas called The Planet. According to both MEMRI and a whois search, The Planet hosts…

Of all the betrayals of childhood, one that still stings came at the hands of the Weekly Reader. Every six weeks or so the teachers at my progressive little Quaker school would distribute copies of the Reader, and we would seize on it as an alternative to school work. The Reader was a short…

The Transformers is a strange movie. By any normal standards it should be a mess, but it has a lot of things going for it--not least of which is its awesome depiction of military hardware. The movie includes a bunch of cheesecake shots of the F-22, a satisfying exhibition of the A-10's 30mm cannon…

There is a power plant in Old Town Alexandria, the old port city nestled along the Potomac River just south of Washington. It was built by the Potomac Electric Power Company (Pepco) in 1949, at the north end of town, hard on the bank of the river. Back then, the neighborhood was industrial and…

[img nocaption float="right" width="319" height="480" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8870[/img] Ketchikan

[img nocaption float="right" width="319" height="480" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8869[/img] Sitka

[img nocaption float="right" width="640" height="426" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8868[/img] Yakutat Bay, Alaska

[img nocaption float="right" width="640" height="426" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8867[/img] Juneau

The Inside Passage

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THE THEOLOGIAN David Hart famously wrote that Europe is dying of metaphysical boredom. That may be true. But surely unseriousness has something to do with it, too. For the latest example of European dithering, we turn to the Republic of Ireland.

When the design for the Flight 93 permanent memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was first announced in September 2005, there was a minor eruption. The winning plan, titled "Crescent of Embrace," was remarkable. Like many modern monuments, it was intentionally antisymbolic. Nothing about it would…

NEXT TO MATHEMATICS, theology is the discipline least conducive to journalism. So certain precincts of the press should be forgiven their recent headlines about the Vatican and the realm known as limbo.

LT. CMDR. KEVIN J. DAVIS, call sign "Kojak," was flying the No. 6 plane with the Navy's Blue Angels at an air show on April 21 in South Carolina when something went terribly wrong. For reasons still unclear, Davis's F/A-18 Hornet crashed in front of the crowd of 100,000. Among those in attendance…

NuteGunray.jpg Nute Gunray

TWO RECENT STORIES from the Wall Street Journal point to a deep--and unexpected--revelation about the evolving nature of globalization, a term that we hear a lot but understand only dimly.

THE POST-OSCAR ATTACKS on Al Gore for living in a mansion that consumes 20 times as much energy as the average American house were enjoyable, but unfair. Gore's consumption of fossil fuels has nothing to do with the arguments he has been advancing about climate change. After all, his thesis is…

LAST WEDNESDAY MORNING, while most people kibitzed about Scooter Libby over their morning coffee, Captain America was murdered on the steps of the federal courthouse in New York. Captain America (real-life identity: Steve Rogers) is survived by his crime-fighting partner, Bucky, and his girlfriend,…

There have been two disturbing pieces of news from Britain in recent weeks. The first came earlier this month when the King Fahd Academy, an Islamic school in Acton, admitted that it uses some pernicious textbooks. The books refer to Jews as "apes" and Christians as "pigs." When confronted by the…

In an essay for THE WEEKLY STANDARD some years ago, John Derbyshire argued, persuasively, for the retention of Anglo-Saxon geographic nomenclature: The question is rhetorical: Having been given the novels of George Borrow (Lavengro, Romany Rye) to read at an early age, I happen to know that rom…

Clint Eastwood is out promoting his twin WWII movies, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. The subtext of these films does not exactly bolster Eastwood's reputation for intellectual seriousness. Now his campaigning has reached a new low, with these remarks: Clint Eastwood said his…

Debra Saunders has a discouraging column about recent goings on at San Francisco State, where the student body has finally decided to take a stand against religious intolerance. You may be able to guess where this is going: This story starts with an "anti-terrorism rally" held last October on…

A while back, Irwin Stelzer had an excellent joke about America's energy policy: I was asked many years ago at a gathering of government and industry experts to lay out an energy policy for America, to cope with a supply interruption. Two words: "aircraft carriers." Funny, that. In the intervening…

In the beginning, there was the MUD. The first Multi User Dungeon, Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw's "MUD1," came online at the University of Essex in 1979. A text-based computer adventure game, much like the board game Dungeons & Dragons, the MUD allowed players at remote terminals to interact and…

IT IS DIFFICULT to grasp the full tragedy of the Allen Iverson trade. The Answer was only the second player in the history of the NBA to be put on the trade block while leading the league in scoring. And the Sixers did not really "trade" Iverson. They held a fire sale.

On the other side of the Atlantic, a mini-scandal is brewing over the decision by British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith to call off a bribery inquiry that would likely have implicated the Saudi royal family. According to the BBC, the Serious Fraud Office was investigating allegations that…

FERTILITY RATES around the world are dropping for a variety of complex reasons (see "The Population Sink" and "Darwin's End"). While population itself continues to increase--the United States, for instance, recently passed the 300 million mark--this is the product of waning demographic momentum.…

Museums are always changing, and the change is rarely good. In 1999, David Brooks recorded the decline and fall of the Smithsonian's Museum of American History in these pages. The changing presentation of the monuments on the national mall, well covered in THE WEEKLY STANDARD by Andrew Ferguson and…

THE FOLLOWING is a story about revolutions and their young.

With last weekend's finale of the U.S. Open, Andre Agassi's farewell tour is now complete. It's easy to love sports, but hard to love athletes. Agassi was the rarest of breeds: an athlete worth admiring and loving.

With last weekend's finale of the U.S. Open, Andre Agassi's farewell tour is now complete. It's easy to love sports, but hard to love athletes. Agassi was the rarest of breeds: an athlete worth admiring and loving.

THE DISCOVERY AND INTERCEPTION of the London air plots was a reminder that, while our intelligence capabilities have improved since September 11, 2001, our airport-security apparatus remains antiquated. Had the terrorists executed their plan, they would have had a high probability of success.…

A year ago, before the Supreme Court issued its decision in Kelo v. New London, the abuse of eminent domain was practically invisible. Today it's a hot-button issue in nearly every state in the Union--not least in Ohio, where the state supreme court last month unanimously blocked the city of…

IT IS DIFFICULT, maybe even impossible, to render critical judgment on a movie such as World Trade Center. The normal aspects of appraisal are meaningless. It would be absurd to measure the film by its pacing or its cinematography. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is whether or not it feels…

THE CLEANFLICKS business model was relatively straightforward. When it launched in June 2000, the Utah-based movie-rental company would buy a popular film on DVD (or VHS tape, in the early days) and make a digital copy of it on a computer. They would then use video editing software to remove or…

A car dealer in Washington, Don Beyer Volvo, is offering a new promotion. If you buy one of their cars, the dealership will give you free tickets to Al Gore's global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Mr. Beyer is a Democrat in good standing, having been lieutenant governor of Virginia and…

ACROSS THE GLOBE, fertility rates are falling. Most industrialized countries are already below the replacement rate of 2.1 children born to the average woman; many more will fall below that crucial mark in the next 25 years. By 2080, world population will probably have peaked around nine billion,…

THERE'S GOOD NEWS and bad news on the World Cup front. The bad news is that, despite the instructions your media overlords have given you, no one in America is watching the great quadrennial soccer carnival. Sure, if you read only the headlines ("World Cup Ratings Soar"; "World Cup Scoring with…

THOSE WHO IGNORE HISTORY are doomed to repeat it. One of life's more satisfying ironies, however, is that the same fate often befalls those who fixate on history. Consider the coming train wreck of Sony's PlayStation 3.

PHILLIP LONGMAN is the most important man you've never heard of in Washington.

ON MAY 18, the newly appointed New Jersey public advocate, Ronald Chen, released his report on the use of eminent domain. Commissioned by Gov. Corzine, Chen's study is a model of judiciousness and tenacity. It sends a clear message to those bent on abusing the power of eminent domain--in other…

THOSE OF US SADDENED by the declining fortunes of the newspaper industry had hoped that shrinking newspaper staffs would have at least one salutary effect: fewer journalism-school graduates. This has not proved to be the case. In 2005, newspapers cut 2,000 jobs; this spring more people graduated…

IN SEPTEMBER of 1984, an ABC/Washington Post poll asked registered voters whether they preferred a Democrat or a Republican to represent their congressional districts. By a 15-point margin, respondents favored Democrats. On Election Day 1984, Democrats lost 14 seats in the House. In 1996, a similar…

"ENTITLEMENT REFORM." Few words in the English language make readers turn the page faster.

AS GOES BIGGIE, so goes the state of intellectual property.

AH, SPRING. Snow melts, flowers bloom, and a Democrat's fancy turns to thoughts of impeachment.

IF NOTHING ELSE, South Dakota's new antiabortion law created a rough national consensus on a difficult issue: Abortion-rights groups see the law as the fourth sign of the apocalypse; opponents of abortion see it as a tactical blunder. Few people on either side of the abortion divide would be…

AMERICA HAS AN IMMIGRATION PROBLEM. We're not sure precisely what it is, or how to fix it, or if the cure would be worse than the disease. And even if we knew those answers, we're far from reaching a consensus that might, someday, when the political climate is just right, move us toward taking…

[img caption="Matt Continetti, desert bandito." float="right" width="400" height="300" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8864[/img] Somewhere in the Pacific

Puerto Vallarta

Mazatlán

Cabo San Lucas

Down Mexico Way

Long Branch, New Jersey

THERE'S A WONDERFUL SCENE in the movie Traffic in which a captured drug kingpin, played by Miguel Ferrer, is being interrogated by two federal agents. Ferrer says to them disdainfully: "You people are like those Japanese soldiers left behind on deserted islands who think that World War II is still…

DISCUSSION about rogue regimes is usually bifurcated. On the one hand are weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand are human-rights abuses. But make no mistake: These issues are inseparable. We care whether or not a country has WMD capabilities only because of its record on human rights. This…

LET US FIRST praise Hilary Clinton. Whatever her other faults may be, she always shows up to the State of the Union dressed like a professional. She's wearing a stylish gray suit tonight. Most of our devoted congresswomen look like they got lost on the way to a Texas Tech rally. On to the list:

IN PHYSICS, the law of entropy states that all systems tend toward increasing disorder. Which means, roughly, that the universe is always getting messier. In politics, the Law of Interest Group Entropy states that all advocacy groups tend toward ridiculousness. Which means, roughly, that no matter…

SAM MENDES has the unenviable distinction of having directed one of the three most undeserving Best Picture winners in the last 30 years. In 1999, his directorial debut, American Beauty, won the Oscar and then, immediately, began sliding to oblivion. A paint-by-numbers critique of American…

ON AUGUST 30, with the flood waters rising in New Orleans, Harrah's CEO Gary Loveman appeared on CNN to reassure a battered nation. "We hope to work with Gov. Barbour in Mississippi in particular to get at least temporary casinos open as quickly as possible and get everybody back to work," he said.…

WHAT DOES MODERN HISTORY have to teach us about the age of American empire? The final chapters of the British Empire offer lessons and parallels aplenty. Empires don't last forever, and the combination of martial victory, popular ennui, and liberal anti-patriotism is a dangerous mix for a…

This week marks THE DAILY STANDARD's four year anniversary and, as you may have noticed, we've done a bit of an overhaul. In addition to the cosmetic changes is one big addition: the Worldwide Standard.

JOSS WHEDON has had a curious career. He broke into movies by writing the script for the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The movie, directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, was something of a disaster. Five years later, Whedon brought the Buffy concept to television, where it met with enormous success and…

THE CHARACTER of American movies has changed a great deal over the years. To take but one striking example: During the course of earlier wars, Hollywood churned out patriotic films depicting the valor of our troops, the menace of our enemies or simply the pluck of those who kept the home fires…

THE BEST MOVIES are usually both earnest and smart (The Insider). Many successful movies are superficial and smart (Die Hard). And every so often, you can find an enjoyable movie which is superficial and stupid (The Fast and the Furious).

BY MY ROUGH COUNT, there are 13 procedural crime shows on network television right now; they represent the only significant dramatic challenge to the plague of reality television that has descended on our landscape. Consider that the four networks have 77 hours of primetime space to fill every week…

IF YOU FIND YOURSELF yearning for a bit of real magic after sitting through Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas's computer-generated confection, you should keep an eye on your local theater for Deep Blue.

IT IS NOW SAFE to declare the Star Wars prequels a failure. Whatever their merits as films, the three panels of George Lucas's new triptych, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith have failed to add permanently to the Star Wars mythology. Try to name one character or…

THE MEDIA clichés are already hardening around Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, just hours after becoming Pope Benedict XVI. Will they brook any dissent from the caricature they're drawing?

THE WASHINGTON POST'S COVERAGE of Pope John Paul II today featured on page 1, among other things, a news "analysis" by Hanna Rosin. It had a promising title, "His Legacy: A Papacy and Church Transformed." Yet by the fifth paragraph of her 2,000-word piece, one got the impression that Ms. Rosin…

IN A SENSE, all movies are "gimmick" movies. We pay money to see dinosaurs walk the earth, or Pacino and De Niro on screen together, or Meg Ryan take her shirt off. Even so, there are gimmick movies and there are gimmick movies.

In her article Provocative Snapshots of a Many-Layered Issue in today's New York Times, Virginia Heffernan writes:

A SURVEY of the muck soon to be celebrated at the Academy Awards confirms William Goldman's sad truism: Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood.

Somewhere in the Caribbean

Road Town, Tortola

Philipsburg, St. Maarten

Somewhere in the Caribbean

Nassau, Bahamas

LAST SEPTEMBER, CBS NEWS president Andrew Heyward promised a full accounting within "weeks, not months" of his network's attempt to pass off as genuine four fraudulent memos about President Bush's long-ago service in the Texas Air National Guard. Last Monday--nearly four months later--CBS released…

OVER AT POWER LINE, John Hinderaker has found one of the most egregious bits of media bias yet recorded. (Hinderaker found the story at a smaller blog, The San-Antonio Express-News Watch.) It seems that yesterday ABC News posted a call on its website for help from readers:

THE THORNBURGH-BOCCARDI PANEL makes a great show of its agnosticism about the question at the heart of the CBS scandal: Are the memos CBS presented authentic? On this score, the CBS Report is certain in its uncertainty: "The Panel was not able to reach a definitive conclusion as to the authenticity…

MARY MAPES is right. In a response to her firing from CBS News, the former star producer accuses CBS of "scape-goating" her and says that her dismissal is the result of "corporate and political considerations."

IN A DOCUMENT shot through with agnosticism, perhaps the most agnostic section of the CBS Report is a six-page segment toward the end titled, "Whether There Was a Political Agenda Driving the September 8 Segment."

THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW has a long, proud history of ignoring the story of the forged documents used by Dan Rather and CBS News. You'll recall that the scandal first broke on September 9, 2004, when a group of bloggers publicly questioned the validity of the four CBS memos. In the ensuing…

FEW WRITER-DIRECTORS range as widely in tone and composition as Wes Anderson. His debut, the 1996 film Bottle Rocket, was a jittery, loose, and very independent comedy. Two years later, he made Rushmore, a film with movie stars and a tightly-scripted plot. Rushmore was still a comedy, but its humor…

HOWARD DEAN WAS NEVER VERY good to John Kerry. On November 1, the day before the election, Dean's blog posted six lengthy entries and mentioned Kerry just twice. On Election Day, Dean's blog led with a post proclaiming "Dean, Man of the Year," and then followed with other posts about the election.…

A YEAR AGO TO THE DAY, I stood, alone, on the banks of the Brandywine River, and raised a quiet voice of criticism against The Return of the King. Suspecting that it would win critical praise overdue from The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers--as well as the Oscars those movies deserved--I…

[img caption="The July 2003 cover of Vanity Fair." float="right" width="220" height="311" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8857[/img] BEFORE LINDSAY AND HILARY, before Amanda, before Kirsten and Britney, even before--if you can imagine--Mary-Kate and Ashley, there was Natalie. Miss Portman, just 23…

SO IT'S COME TO THIS: I'm John Kerry's last defender.

THE 2004 ELECTION may not be over, but it is finished, and Wednesday-morning quarterbacking always makes results look perfectly rational. At every point in the campaign (save the first presidential debate) John Kerry was the candidate who had the embarrassing iconic moments: windsurfing, botox,…

BY NOW, you have no doubt heard that President Bush is "creating more terrorists" with his neoimperialist wars on terror, Iraq, Arab nationalism, etc. The meme has gotten so out of control that even mostly sensible people such as Mickey Kaus are spouting it. Sayeth Kaus:

BOTH MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES have their own pet rationalizations for defeat at the polls. When Republicans lose, they invariably complain that the system is rigged against them. Defeat is blamed on corrupt city-machine politics, special-interest money, gerrymandered districts, a changing…

IT REMAINS TRUE that people beset by an unhealthy thirst for politics tend to see politics everywhere. This monomania was most recently on display with the left's embrace of Roland Emmerich's fine disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow because they thought it was an assault on George W. Bush.

Round 1: Will we ever be as safe and secure as we used to be?

Round 1: Kerry: Are you too wishy-washy?

FIRST things first:

HOW DID Bush and Kerry do tonight? A mixed bag for both. Let's look at the scorecard.

IF YOU TRAWL the posting boards at FreeRepublic.com long enough, you'll go mad. Hundreds of voices are shouting, spitting, and clamoring for attention at any given moment. The night of Wednesday September 8 was no different. Following the 8 P.M. airing of CBS's 60 Minutes hit on President Bush's…

Breaking their silence on the CBS forgeries, the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk finally mentioned the scandal yesterday afternoon. In a post titled Blog Report, CJR finally turned to the biggest media story in recent memory; they gave it five sentences:

HAVE YOU ever wondered how Hollywood makes so many bad movies? If the movie-making process was random, then some small percentage of films every year would be good just by chance. Yet the product put out is so relentlessly bad that it defies probability: The people who make movies must be doing…

DURING THE AUGUST 19 edition of PBS's NewsHour, Tom Oliphant unspooled. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence--and it's easy when you leave out the exculpatory stuff--is what keeps this story in the tabloids," the Boston Globe columnist sputtered, "because it does not meet basic…

New York

New York

New York

New York

IF YOU'RE going to be in New York, you ought to see a show. There's the usual Broadway fare, such as 42nd Street and The Lion King--assuming the talent shows up (the New York Post last week reported that anti-Bush actors were talking of calling in sick to avoid performing for Republicans). There's…

New York

New York

Boston

LOCATED FOUR BLOCKS from the White House, the National Archives are best known as the home of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The two founding documents are beautifully displayed in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom. Every day tourists line up for the exhibit, and after…

Boston

Boston

Boston

Boston

Boston

Boston

MY NAME is Jonathan and I'm a Philly fan. In 1995, the Philadelphia Eagles made what was then the biggest free-agent signing in sports, acquiring star running back Ricky Watters for $6.9 million per year. In his first game as an Eagle, Watters found his new team losing in the fourth quarter to the…

Boston

THOSE OF YOU who have paid attention to popular culture over the last three years know about Hollywood's uncomfortable views on terrorism.

WITH SAVED! having gone wide last week, the rest of America now has a chance to see Brian Dannelly's satire of life at an evangelical high school. Or, as the film's producer, Michael Stipe, put it: Saved! is "like those monster vampire high school kind of movies, only here the monsters are…

IT WAS ABOUT SEVEN YEARS AGO when I first learned of my relationship with Charles R. Laster. Laster was delinquent on his Maryland state income taxes between January and December of 1992. He owed the state $588.55. The state put out a lien on him.

PART Dune, part MacBeth, and part Plan 9 from Outer Space, The Chronicles of Riddick may be the most expensive B-movie ever made. Budgeted at $120 million, Riddick is director David Twohy's sequel to his 2000 effort, Pitch Black, which was budgeted at $23 million. Money, like power, often corrupts.

THE GOOD NEWS is that at no point during Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban do Harry and Ron head out to the Hogwarts swimming pool.

LIKE MOST BOYS, I was a comics fan. Everyone has favorite superheroes, and mine were garden-variety: Batman, the Flash, Superman.

IT IS UNHEALTHY when a political movement becomes monomaniacally obsessed with an opponent. The monomania causes them to do strange, self-destructive things. For instance, the movement often rushes to embrace cranks. Guided by the rantings of these cranks, the movement then becomes so obsessed that…

Update: Among the winners at Tuesday night's Golden Trailer Awards was Return of the King (Best Drama), The Cooler (Best Romance), Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (Best Action), A Miami Tail (Trashiest), and The Stepford Wives (Most Original). Northfork took home the Golden Fleece award, while The…

IF YOU SPEND ENOUGH TIME watching Inside the Actor's Studio and listening to DVD commentary tracks, you learn that, since they have very little other work to do, actors are forever agonizing over "choices." Of course everyone involved in the production of cinema makes choices and these thousands of…

PRESIDENT BUSH is fond of implying that anyone who questions whether or not liberal democracy is compatible with the radical Islam prevalent in much of the Middle East is a racist.

MOST OF THE Monday-morning quarterbacking done in the wake of the 9/11 Commission has been unfair. One federal agency, however, really could have taken steps to stymie the attacks--the FAA. By simply changing its guidelines on how to handle hijackings, the Federal Aviation Administration could…

IT IS INTERESTING TO NOTE that in the five films which he has directed, Quentin Tarantino has shot not a single love scene. It's not that he has an aversion to sex, per se. There's the sodomy forced on a bound and gagged Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction; there's the momentary Clinton-style copulation…

SOMETIMES, the safe choice is the risky choice. Hollywood has learned that, for the time being at least, comic-book movies are gold. After the disastrous performance of 1997's Batman and Robin, movie studios turned away from comics. Then Avi Arad came to power at Marvel, the giant comic publisher,…

IN APRIL 2003, Brown University president Ruth Simmons invited more than a dozen members of the Brown community to serve on a Committee on Slavery and Justice. The committee lay mostly dormant until March of this year, when its existence was made public (Brown arranged for the news to break in the…

HURRY. Get your Wonderfalls quick. Before it's too late.

TODAY the New York Times expressed its opinion about Richard Clarke and the 9/11 commission. In an editorial this morning, the paper hunkered down to the tough job of assigning blame for underestimating the threat of terrorism. It will be little surprise in whose direction the gray finger points.…

AS THE BRIGHT LIGHTS in Hollywood have run out of ideas for movies, they've made a habit of turning to other artistic mediums for source material. One time-honored tradition--pinching the theater--has come back in vogue ("Chicago"), but the multiplex is a monster which needs constant feeding. So…

THE POLITICAL WORLD spent this past week analyzing Ralph Nader's decision to run for president, but lost was this nugget from Sunday's "Meet the Press" appearance:

WHEN WESLEY CLARK formally bows out of the race later today, it's won't be because, as his son has recently charged, the media did him in. It will be because the man, by some accounts a decent fellow who served his country well, was not ready for prime time.

ON THE EVE of the 1996 election, I had a long conversation with a friend on the Dole campaign who was traveling with the candidate as he made his last-minute hopscotch across the country. I had just offered him condolences on the race when he corrected me. Speaking from an airport pay phone in the…

Concord, New Hampshire

Manchester, New Hampshire, Thursday, January 22

Bedford, New Hampshire

New Hampshire, Wednesday, January 21

Manchester, New Hampshire, Tuesday, January 20

Manchester, New Hampshire

FOR A LONG TIME, it was "the movies" that people went to see. Then it was "films." And then "indie films." For a certain segment of the movie-going audience--and for critics stuck reviewing "Waterworld"--the indies were a godsend: highbrow fare that proved how much could be done with a literary…

IT HAS BEEN WIDELY OBSERVED that Dean for President--or, as the partisans call it, "Dean for America"--isn't so much a political campaign as a movement. But if that's true of the Deaniacs in general, it's doubly true of their virtual selves. The online Dean world isn't so much a virtual community…

AS WILLIAM GOLDMAN is fond of saying, this was the worst year in Hollywood history.

BACK IN 2001, in the golden age of cinema, when studios routinely put out classics like "A Beautiful Mind," "Moulin Rouge," and "I Am Sam," Hollywood observers dismissed the Academy of Motion Pictures' snub of "The Fellowship of the Ring" with a wave of the hand. "Oh don't worry," the sophisticates…

THE REASON I checked out of "24," the intriguing Fox network series, was that the show suffered from Sudden Supporting Character Death Syndrome. Every interesting supporting character--the policewoman with the Macy Gray hair, the girl from "Roseanne"--was dispatched, often in a grisly manner, and…

LONGTIME READERS will remember Allen Barra, formerly of the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Barra is the sportswriter who relies solely on math for his evaluation of athletics and worships at the high church of statistics. He is the bright light who, days before Super Bowl XXXVI, wrote:

THE ADAGE that every generation gets the president it deserves applies equally well to popular culture. We get the TV shows, pop songs, and cinema we deserve. Movie stars, too. The greatest generation got Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, and Cary Grant. (Bogart and Tracy served stints in the Navy.)…

MY BIG IDEA, the one that's going to let me to quit my day job, join the Metropolitan Club, and buy Kay Graham's old place in Georgetown, is this: A pay cable channel for kids. Think of it like HBO, but airing only kid shows, 24 hours a day. You could charge $15, $20, maybe $25 a month and parents…

YES, IT'S CHRISTMAS TIME ALREADY. Today "Elf" lands in theaters. It's the first Christmas movie of the season and, while I haven't done comprehensive research on this, I believe it's the earliest Christmas release in recent memory. In case you're wondering why a movie about Santa Claus and the…

THE INITIAL IMPULSE is to declare that "The Matrix: Revolutions" does for "The Matrix" what "Return of the Jedi" did for "Star Wars." That isn't, however, entirely fair. It would be more accurate to compare "Revolutions" with "Attack of the Clones." After all, while "Jedi" might have cast…

"SHATTERED GLASS" is a slim, reedy film. It presents the now-familiar story of Stephen Glass as a cautionary tale and then offers up a hero in the person of Chuck Lane, the New Republic editor who fired Glass. As a journalism movie, "Shattered Glass" is middle-rank, not up to the standards of "The…

WHEN YOU REVIEW MOVIES you occasionally have to go to more than one screening a day. This isn't any sort of hardship, but it can result in bizarre pairings. The weirdest movie day I've had was in the summer of '98 when I saw "Saving Private Ryan" at 10:00 a.m., followed, a few short hours later, by…

THIS PAST WEEKEND marked the beginning of prestige season at the movies. The rollout of Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" will be followed in the coming weeks by "The Matrix: Revolutions," "The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King," "Cold Mountain," "The Human Stain" and other high-profile releases.…

IT'S NOT NEWS to report that trailers are often better than the movies they advertise. Some of the best trailers in recent years--"The Phantom Menace," "Mission: Impossible 2," "Pearl Harbor," "Eyes Wide Shut"--have been for movies which can only be charitably considered middling. Are movies…

"I think [the Dixie Chicks] will go down as one of the biggest acts in the format, and by doing so--by staying true to their country roots and to country music--they will be a turning point for the industry. They're showing what can work and be country and have its own identity and not have to…

IT'S AN OPEN QUESTION as to whether or not a great movie will ever be made about September 11. Historical events don't always lend themselves to good filmmaking. The Holocaust has translated well; Pearl Harbor has never been done justice. It is a small mercy that no Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer…

IF YOU JUDGE by the pictures, the Makkah Hilton is a nice place to stay. There's just one catch, as the Web site notes. The five-star hotel "is exclusively sited within the Holy City which, by national and religious law, is only accessible to visitors of the Muslim Religion." This law is something…

BLAIR HORNSTINE has settled her lawsuit against Moorestown Township. Hornstine is the recent graduate of Moorestown High School who sued the town in order to remain sole valedictorian. The settlement was reached late yesterday afternoon. According to the settlement papers, Blair Hornstine will…

HOWELL RAINES'S appearance on "The Charlie Rose Show" last Friday was filled with delicious moments. Andrew Sullivan (channeling Leon Wieseltier) has done a small dissection and other journalists have merrily piled on. It now seems possible that Raines could become not just a disgraced editor, but…

Moorestown, New Jersey

A DARK CLOUD sat low over Smith College on graduation Sunday. The venerable women's school had inexplicably decided to celebrate its 125th commencement by inviting a controversial ideologue to speak. Naturally, the campus and community shot into action. As guests filed into the quad for the…

"BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER" is the best show in the history of television.

YOU MAY NOT remember this, but "The Matrix" earned a respectable, yet modest $27 million during its opening weekend way back in 1999. It went on to gross $171 million domestically, an impressive total. (As a rule of thumb, movies typically end up grossing about three times their opening weekend. In…

FIRST THINGS FIRST: I don't know Bill Bennett, I've never even met him, and I don't have any interest in his rise or fall. That said, what's happening to him tonight is silly.

SOMETIMES it's necessary to beat a dead horse. Many recriminations pieces have been written since the end of the war (here, for starters) and while they may seem like simple gloating, they're not. It's crucial to keep score on public commentators because if you bat .115 in the bigs, you get canned.…

FIRST, SOME STIPULATIONS: The war is not over yet. There is still much fighting to be done and many things could go wrong. Chemical weapons could still be used. More allied soldiers will die in fighting. There will be more civilian casualties. Yesterday's collapse of the regime in Baghdad was a…

THIS MORNING CNN reports that many Iraqi officials didn't show up for work in Baghdad and that the police are not on the streets. Also, the network is broadcasting footage of a massive anti-Saddam rally in the Saddam City section of eastern Baghdad. There are pictures of one man spitting on a…

A FEW DAYS AGO I wrote a piece about some of the ridiculous questions foreign reporters have been asking Brigadier General Vincent Brooks at the daily CENTCOM briefings. I thought I got it all out of my system. I was wrong. On April 3, an Al Jazeera correspondent asked Brooks:

LAST SUNDAY on "Meet the Press," Tim Russert confronted Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Al-Douri, with evidence of Iraqi human-rights abuses documented by Amnesty International. Asked for comment, Al-Douri demurred, saying, "Amnesty International is not reliable for me. . . . They…

IF THERE IS ANYTHING that can be said to be "enjoyable" about this war, it must surely be the delights of the CENTCOM 7:00 a.m. press briefings. Handled mostly by the able Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, they shed little light on the actual progress of the war, but give a clear look into the…

LOST IN THE CRIES of "Vietnam" and "quagmire" yesterday was this short but very interesting exchange between Tim Russert and Mohammed Al-Douri, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, on "Meet the Press": RUSSERT: Mr. Ambassador, is Saddam Hussein dead or alive?

I DON'T KNOW where the war is ultimately headed or how long it will take or if it will ultimately be judged by history as a success or failure. I do know this: The talk about the campaign in Iraq being bogged down and the coalition being in this for "the long haul" is, if not ridiculous, then…

LAST NIGHT American forces discovered atropine stashes in a hospital that was being used as a headquarters for Iraqi forces. The day before, they discovered chem suits and cipro on an Iraqi officer. Why would Saddam spend money on these protections for his military? He knows the United States won't…

FIRST, THE GOOD NEWS: At the Academy Awards last night Chad Lowe wore a yellow ribbon on his lapel. Going a step further, Jon Voight wore an American flag pin. And Adrien Brody, after a shaky, relativistic start to his speech accepting the Best Actor award, finished by saying, "I have a friend from…

DURING ONE RECENT press briefing, a Defense official observed that what America is seeing of the war is a series of scenes, but that they aren't seeing the whole picture.

ONE OF THE most encouraging developments of the past 72 hours is the fact that most Iraqis are eager to have Saddam Hussein removed is finally seeping into the mainstream. New York Times reporter John Burns said on PBS the other day, "Iraqis have suffered beyond, I think, the common understanding…

Editor's note: Now that war has begun, The Daily Standard will be deviating from its normal schedule. For the next several days we'll have morning and afternoon editions posted regularly and other reports posted throughout the day, so you'll want to check back with us often.

OVER THE COURSE of the last few months, every respectable argument against war in Iraq has fallen apart. In December the peaceniks insisted that inspections would work; even Hans Blix now admits that they have not. In January the peaceniks insisted that the United States was acting unilaterally;…

WAR IS SUCH a foregone conclusion that the interesting debates now revolve around postwar Iraq. Time magazine's cover story this week reports that the Bush administration has decided on an immediate course of action for the days and weeks following Saddam's fall: A wave of humanitarian aid will be…

IT'S 10:32 ON SATURDAY MORNING. The temperature hovers around 35 degrees, and the wind fans a hard, beating rain across the snow-covered field where Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001. Donna Wilt has just put on her badge and pulled her information kit together when three carloads of visitors pull…

THE URGE TO EMBRACE "Gods and Generals" is so strong as to be almost overwhelming. It is a beautiful, serious movie about the Civil War that holds tight to the trail of truth. It is well acted and scrupulously made. Anyone who has recently suffered through Hollywoodized history--Pearl Harbor, "The…

JUST AS THERE ARE Elvis men and Beatles men, there are DC men and Marvel men. Perhaps "men" is too strong a word, but nonetheless, among comic aficionados, there are two distinct camps. It has been a rough decade for DC lovers. The company has fallen on hard times and its properties have met with a…

SURELY THERE IS much sociology to be done on the buddy-cop movie. So far as my informal, non-academic training can pinpoint it, the buddy-cop genre crawled out of the primordial celluloid soup in the early 1980s with the seminal Eddie Murphy / Nick Nolte film "48 Hrs."

THE SPEECH IS DONE, but before the serious pontificating begins, let's turn to one of the most important questions: What's with the red suit? Every year the Power Women of Washington dig out their loudest red suits so that they'll stand out in the crowd when the cameras pan across the House…

THERE ARE MOVIE SNOBS and then there are movie-theater snobs. The movie-theater snob looks for big screens, high-end sound, legroom, and the newest innovation, stadium seating. If you're a movie-theater snob, chances are you worship at the altar of AMC theaters because they are the gold-standard of…

I WON'T SEE "CHICAGO."

IT'S A SAD FACT of life that longevity confers respectability. If you hang around long enough, eventually, you become revered, no matter how second-rate your work is. Take, for example, Helen Thomas. If the dim, crotchety White House correspondent was in her fifth year on the job, she'd be a…

AS A LITTLE bit of celebration, we're opening all of the Articles and Features from this week's magazine to the general public (meaning even non-subscribers). Think of it as our absolutely, positively not-gloating, post-election present to you. Read. Enjoy. Do not--under any circumstances--gloat.

"8 MILE," the movie opening today starring rapper Eminem, is a series of curiosities stacked high: Can Eminem act? Why is acclaimed director Curtis Hanson helming this roman à clef? Why is "8 Mile" being touted as a serious movie?

THE BIG STORY of last night's elections was that America overwhelmingly chose the Republican vision of the future over the Democratic vision (or lack of vision). The big story today is what the Democrats will do in the face of their resounding defeat. By all indications, they still don't understand…

THIS AFTERNOON DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe put out an alarming statement:

A DEFINING MOMENT isn't about reality, it's about unconscious public perception. For example: Dan Quayle will forever be remembered for his "misspelling" of the word potato, not because it was an important event, but because the public already suspected he might be a dummy. John Ashcroft will…

AS A RULE, every political movement gets the cranks it deserves. Still, nothing the Virginia Democratic party has ever done makes it deserve Nancy Spannaus.

FOR SOME DEPRESSING NEWS on the continuing struggle between art and commerce, consider this: Paul Thomas Anderson's first three movies made--in their combined total box office gross--less than "Tomb Raider" made in its first 60 hours of release.

IT'S A SIGN of how bad things have gotten for the anti-war left that at yesterday's "Prominent Citizens Oppose War with Iraq" press conference, a large placard sat next to the panelists at the front of the room that read: "UN Inspections--Not U.S. War." A little free marketing advice: "Make Love,…

LAST NIGHT on "Survivor," 14 unattractive exhibitionists tussled and jockeyed for position, all hoping to last 39 days on an island and win $1 million. This Saturday night, on "Surviving West Point," seven young kids will work together, all hoping to last four years at the famed military academy…

IF YOU'RE GOING to remake a movie, you'd better have a good reason. In 1995, Harrison Ford did a remake of "Sabrina" because, at 53, he wanted to see if he could transition from action roles into romantic comedy (by way of an answer, his next two films were "The Devil's Own" and "Air Force One").…

AS STEPHEN HAYES pointed out a few weeks ago, there was once a time when Bill Clinton understood the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US. It's been exactly a year since we re-launched weeklystandard.com, and to celebrate the occasion we've made some improvements. (No, we have not added a blog.)

THE DEMOCRATIC WHINERS--who have been free to state their policy on Iraq since the president threw down the gauntlet in his Axis of Evil speech eight months ago--are misrepresenting both his recent statements and their own.

THE MOVIE INDUSTRY is peculiar for many reasons, among which is this: The least important and most interchangeable artists in the community (actors) are the best known and rewarded, while the most-skilled and least replaceable artists (writers and editors) are virtually anonymous. To wit: Everyone…

IN YESTERDAY'S Washington Times, Jennifer Harper reported that, since December 7, 1941, 200 books have been written about Pearl Harbor. And since September 11, 2001, 400 books have been written about the attacks on that terrible day. I don't know of any study that's been done on media coverage of…

NOT TWO WEEKS AGO, the administration publicly concluded it didn't need to ask Congress' permission to attack Iraq. Now, President Bush is poised to pop the question. Capitol Hill should be pleased. For weeks, lawmakers insisted, loudly, that they expect to be part of any decision about Saddam…

A COUPLE WEEKS AGO, my colleague Richard Starr had a genius idea: On the morning of September 11, one of the networks should re-air, in full, its original broadcast from a year ago.

Clint By Patrick McGilligan St. Martin's, 612 pages, $35 The Sexiest Man Alive By Ellis Amburn HarperCollins, 411 pages, $25.95 WARREN BEATTY and Clint Eastwood are two very different types of movie star. Onscreen, Eastwood is a man's man, all gristle and guts. Beatty makes men nervous because, as…

NAMES ARE DESTINY. If you had a son in the late '60s or early '70s and named him Maximilian or Zacharia or Noah, you knew for a certainty that in 15 years he'd be in his room with his comic book collection, not making time upstairs with a girl named Brandy. If you named your daughter Brandy, at 15…

BRADLEY R. GITZ writes a weekly column for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and on July 25, 2002, his thoughts turned to drug legalization. Observing that Great Britain and Canada are considering decriminalizing marijuana, Gitz applauded and launched into an argument for legalizing mary jane here in…

ON SATURDAY, November 2, Washington, D.C., will be filled with people who don't believe in God. Or in any case, more full of people who don't believe in God than usual.

WEDNESDAY'S New York Times carried a front-page article by Neil A. Lewis headlined "Ashcroft's Terrorism Policies Dismay Some Conservatives." Lewis asserts that Attorney General John Ashcroft is becoming unpopular with religious conservatives who fear that their organizations may be investigated…

IF TINA BROWN were alive today, we wouldn't be able to escape talk of transgender buzz. The eighties were the gay decade. The nineties belonged to lesbian chic. Now it's a transgendered world. We have seen the rise of the transgender movie--"The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" (1994),…

BASEBALL now faces a perfect storm. On top of The Tie, on top of cryo-frozen Ted Williams's battling offspring, on top of steroid use, on top of Alex Rodriguez's $252 million contract, major league baseball faces another strike. What makes this storm so perfect, is the timing.

THE BRITS, so valuable for so many reasons, understand a great many truths, one of which is this: Everyone has their place in the world. Alas, the place of conservatives is standing athwart history and yelling stop until, Wile E. Coyote-style, history runs them down, hurtles onward towards the…

ONE OF THE QUIET WONDERS of the last year has been the swift reconstruction of the Pentagon. While New York City has gone through a long, public grieving process for the World Trade Center, Washingtonians seem almost oblivious to the impressive work of the Phoenix Project. But no longer. On July 4…

SUMMER is the season of the Hollywood blockbuster, the time of year when even the duds open to $30 million--or more. To the movie honchos, summer is a sure thing. And it shows.

HAVE YOU SEEN the ads for The Truth? They're the ones with the annoying, rebellious youths campaigning to expose the harmful effects of cigarettes and the wicked ways of the tobacco industry. The ads are designed to be, as they said on Madison Avenue ten years ago, edgy.

You will remember, of course, that Ronaldo is the most famous athlete on the planet--much more popular and well-known than Michael Jordan.

THE MAY/JUNE ISSUE of the Columbia Journalism Review has a sidebar that lists political magazine websites and their traffic numbers. For some reason this bit of text has been given a lot of attention as various sites bicker about the numbers and who's got more traffic and blah blah blah. (Everyone…

ONE OF THE LITTLE GAMES I play at the movies is keeping a list of Least Plausible Actors in the Role of a Ph.D. It's a long list.

Below are the names of the men and women who have given their lives fighting the war on terrorism. Our debt to them is too great to repay. But it is right that today we reflect on their names, and honor them in our hearts with prayers and gratitude.

STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, Attack of the Clones. There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the…

WE ARE LIVING in an age of evil. All people do, of course, but until very recently Americans had done a fine job of talking themselves out of believing in real, absolute evil. Now that the vacation from history is over and the president is focused on defeating an "axis of evil" and bringing…

THE WOMEN'S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION (WNBA) kicks off its sixth season this month, and the sports-positive feminism machine is already cranked up. Since its debut in 1997, the league has endlessly trumpeted its slogan--"We got game"--and relentlessly pushed the idea that the women of the…

"ON 9/11, when America was suffering a great deal," Gary Bauer recently said on ABC's "Good Morning America," "there was dancing in Jenin and some other areas in the Middle East. The Israelis lowered their flag and declared a day of mourning. So, I think we need to keep in mind whose side we're on,…

A FEW WEEKS AGO I wrote about America's need to remember the heroes of Flight 93. At the local level, a handful of places have made moves to memorialize Flight 93 and at the federal level, Rep. Jack Murtha is trying to create a national memorial, although when I spoke with his press secretary, he…

AS WE ALWAYS SAID growing up in New Jersey, you can take the boy out of the mall, but you can't take the mall out of the boy. My youth was misspent playing hours of Street Fighter in arcades, punctuated by runs to the Cookie Factory and other fine food court eateries. This has left me susceptible…

THE COUNCIL ON AMERICAN ISLAMIC RELATIONS had a poll on its website earlier this week. The query put to viewers was whether or not Ariel Sharon should be tried from war crimes. As you can imagine, the folks at CAIR regard this as an open and shut question.

IF YOU WANT to understand American popular culture, you have to read Daily Variety.

I HAD FRIENDS visiting from out of town last weekend and I gave them the grand tour of D.C. I showed them RFK stadium, St. Matthew's Cathedral, and the Mall. And as we drove past the Capitol I paused, as I always do when I look up at the rotunda these days, and said a small prayer of thanks to the…

THE FIRST AMENDMENT is alive and well at West Virginia University. Or rather, it's alive and well in two small, outdoor areas of the WVU campus that the administration has cheerfully set aside as free-speech zones. As long as students are within these zones--which are available on a first-come,…

FOR THE RECORD, I've never thought that the Internet would change the world. And now that blogging has come of age, I'm even more sure of it, because this "revolution" is a reactionary force. Blogging is returning us to a time when the written word was supreme and for that we should be grateful to…

THE DEFINITIVE Bobby Knight anecdote isn't the chair toss. It isn't the videotape of him man-handling one of his players. It isn't even the farewell speech at Indiana University where he said that his critics "could kiss my ass." If you want to see the real Bobby Knight, look back to the 1984…

IF THERE IS a single symbol of media overkill, it's the crawl. Resurrected in the first hours of Sept. 11, the crawl was originally meant to get critical information out to TV viewers while major events were unfolding on camera. Six months later, the cable-news networks still use the crawl, 24…

GENERAL Barry McCaffrey met Fidel Castro on Saturday night, Reuters reports. It was love at first sight.

UCLA, home to grown-up child actors and proto-Tri Delts, is a very noisy campus. There are street sweepers and leaf blowers, car alarms and lawn mowers, and a mercilessly loud game room in the student center. "That's why I actually left," says Ted Rueter.

PITY poor Vanessa Gusmeroli. On Tuesday night, the French figure skater gave an outstanding performance in the women's short program and got good marks--from everyone except the Canadian judge. The judge from the Great White North scored Gusmeroli 0.3 points behind the average of the other eight…

ON SUNDAY evening, NBC is going to pull itself away from first round coverage of men's singles' luge and broadcast a real sport: the NBA All-Star game. Starting at shooting guard for the East will be a 6' 6" journeyman from North Carolina, Michael Jordan.

A FEW weeks ago I wrote a column about sportswriter Allan Barra and his devotion to statistics. He has just sent in a response:

WHEN "Black Hawk Down" went into release a few weeks ago in New York and Los Angeles, the New York Times's Elvis Mitchell went on the attack. He claimed that it was riddled with "jingoism," had "a simplistic gung-ho spirit," and reeked of "glumly staged racism." He mocked the American soldiers in…

IT TURNS OUT that the politics of personal destruction does have cultural consequences.

Monday, January 21, 2002, Episode I: Justice

IN THE END, it was Andre Miller who drove me over the edge. Miller is a nice little point guard out of Utah who's in his third year with the Cleveland Cavaliers. He averages 15.8 points and 10 assists per game; he makes good decisions.

EARLY IN THE MORNING of September 15, I drove home to New Jersey. As dawn broke on the empty highways I realized that something curious had happened: An American flag had been hung from every single overpass between Washington and Philadelphia. It was the first evidence I saw of the wave of flags…

Editor's Note: On Saturday night Michael Jordan scored 51 points against the hapless Charlotte Hornets and became the oldest player in league history to score over the half-century mark. Two days later he dropped 45 on the division-leading New Jersey Nets. Wondering why he came back? Then read "The…

AT A TIME when college professors all across America are going hoarse complaining about diminished academic freedom and "chilling effects," a small group of teachers at Orange Coast College in southern California is applauding the crackdown on free speech.

WE'RE NOT LIVING in a golden age of cinema. Most years there are fewer than ten good movies made and great movies are even scarcer. There are many reasons for this, but I blame the "Waterworld" effect. In 1995, Kevin Costner's "Waterworld," a cross between "The Road Warrior" and Pirates of the…

EIGHTY-TWO DAYS after being suspended from teaching, Kenneth W. Hearlson has been vindicated. Sort of.

WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH disavowed the Holy Land Foundation last week, he said that the foundation's actions were "an affront to millions of Muslim Americans." The New York Times says there are "six to seven million Muslims living in this country." Most other newspapers and wire services report the same…

ORANGE COAST COLLEGE, maybe the prettiest community college in California, if not the world, recently gave in to ideological mau-mauing by a group of Muslim students. And now they've been caught red-handed. On September 18, political science professor Kenneth W. Hearlson was teaching his…

I THINK IT WAS Garfield who said, "Vacation is a state of mind." Or maybe it was Ziggy. Either way, it's demonstrably true: Vacation is what happens when you abandon the things that dominate your life. When you're a journalist, that means getting away from the news. Last August I took a vacation…

I REMEMBER a conversation I had with my friend John Podhoretz last March about the movie "Pearl Harbor." I proposed that based on the early evidence, "Pearl Harbor" would have the biggest opening weekend in box office history and might well wind up the fourth or fifth highest-grossing movie ever.…

ON SEPTEMBER 7 in the central Nigerian city of Jos, riots broke out between Muslims and Christians. The violence lasted for a week, and according to the New York Times at least 500 people were killed. As the local government struggled to return the city to normalcy it blamed an unusual suspect for…

DURING THE LAST FEW DAYS the administration has been coming under increasing pressure to step up its war efforts against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In yesterday's Washington Post, William Kristol wrote that the United States would need significant ground troops to unseat the Taliban and Charles…

NOW THAT TWO D.C. postal workers appear to have died of anthrax, perhaps the TV networks will retire those inappropriate "anthrax scare" and "anthrax anxiety" titles and replace them with a more apt headline-maybe "anthrax attacks" or "anthrax assault" or "anthrax murders." After all, "anxiety"…

WE MAY BE AT WAR, but that doesn't make our president any less polite. During his prime-time press conference on October 11, President Bush made a point of saying that the United States would track down "Mr. bin Laden." Why the honorific? The other President Bush was never so cordial in speaking…

"SURVIVOR RETURNS TO TELEVISION this Thursday. The third edition of TV's most-watched show is set in Africa and will again pit 16 American contestants against one another in contrived social combat. "Survivor" is the flagship of reality television, a genre that now comprises nearly 20 percent of…

EVERYONE HAS A FAVORITE Michael Jordan story. Mine is the one where, as a college student, he loses three consecutive games of pool to North Carolina assistant coach Roy Williams and then refuses to speak to him the next day. Or maybe it’s the one from 1998, when Jordan asks ESPN anchor Dan Patrick…

HOLLYWOOD HAS ALWAYS RUN ON THE PRINCIPLE that what worked before must work again—and again and again and again, in movie after movie, until theatergoers reach the point of throwing things at the screen. The most recent example of mindless repetition is gravity-defying martial arts. And the time…

Only Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres) knows whether he has been exposed to legal peril through his involvement with Chandra Levy. But whatever the facts may be, it is certain that he has strayed into dangerous political and moral terrain. After giving Condit cover during the opening gambits of Levy's…

SOME PERSONAL HISTORY: In 1973, the year before I was born, the Philadelphia 76ers went 9-73. It remains the worst single-season record in professional basketball. In 1983, I sat hypnotized in front of the television as the Sixers won the world championship; everyone I knew had a God-mad obsession…

Philip Kaufman came up with an ingenious bit of casting for his latest film, Quills, when he selected the dark and handsome twenty-six-year-old Joaquin Phoenix to play an eighteenth-century Frenchman named Francois Simonet de Coulmier. Of course, in real life, Coulmier was a seventy-two-year-old…

I love food. Not in a philosophical way, like M. F. K. Fisher, or in a sensual way, like the French. I love food the way a plumber from Pittsburgh loves football. I love bad food. This affinity for butter and eggs and anything with cheese is something I share in spirit with none other than the King…

Shows about Nothing

I struck out Frank Thomas the other day. He was sitting on an 0-2 count when I blew a 58 mile-per-hour rocket past him. A little something I like to call my high heater. He never had a chance.

There are conservatives, mostly among the followers of Russell Kirk, who hold a special place in their hearts for the old pulp fiction of Ray Bradbury. And there are others, mostly libertarians, who hold a special place in their hearts for the old pulp fiction of Robert Heinlein. But they may all…

A Sense of Where You Are

Reykjavik, Iceland

There's a well-known story told about Alfred Hitchcock -- one of those anecdotes of a famous man's childhood that are supposed to reveal the origins of all his later work. Hitchcock's father once gave his son a note and sent him down to the police station -- where an officer, following the note's…