Scott W. Johnson is an attorney and writer known as a co-founder of the influential conservative blog Power Line. He contributed essays and reporting to The Weekly Standard from 2005 to 2018, covering topics ranging from higher education and political ethics to Middle Eastern affairs. His work often combined legal analysis with political commentary.
Few races for state attorney general receive or merit national attention. In yesterday’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor party primary, however, 5th District Rep. Keith Ellison defeated the endorsed DFL candidate and other contenders to run as the party’s candidate for the job. In addition to his day job…
Ilhan Omar bids to succeed Keith Ellison in Minnesota’s Fifth District.
In the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and a Republican Congress, Minnesota representative Keith Ellison has emerged as a leading contender to chair the Democratic National Committee. Ellison resides on the far-left fringe of the Democratic party. But perhaps it is a fringe no more.…
Minneapolis
Minneapolis
Minneapolis
Last April, six “Minnesota men" were charged with seeking to support ISIS. These "Minnesota men," as headlines across the country referred to them, were all young Somali Muslims who planned to leave the United States and take up the call to jihad in Syria (see "The Threat from 'Minnesota Men,' "…
If you get your news from the headlines, you can be excused for thinking that “Minnesota men” pose a special risk of taking up the terrorist jihad at home and abroad. As the Wall Street Journal reported this past April, for example, “U.S. charges six Minnesota men with trying to join ISIS.” The…
When CBS’s 60 Minutes Wednesday broadcast its lead story—reported by Dan Rather and produced by Mary Mapes—on the evening of September 8, 2004, it was given the anodyne title “For the Record,” as though it constituted little more than a disinterested historical footnote. In reality, the story was a…
Watching the influx of unaccompanied minors crossing our southwestern border daily, a reasonable man could conclude that we are living out the fevered dreams of a dystopian novel. The United States has lost a basic aspect of sovereignty. Control over its borders is a relic of the past.
Minnesota’s Keith Ellison made history as the first Muslim elected to Congress. He is a former member and local leader of the Nation of Islam who first ran for office as a Democrat in 1998 under the pseudonym Keith Ellison-Muhammad. He’s a voluble striver and a hustler emitting Marxist claptrap…
BARACK OBAMA FIRST VOWED to meet unconditionally with the leaders of America's foremost enemies in the YouTube Democratic candidates' debate on July 23, 2007. Since then he has reaffirmed and expanded on the commitment in a variety of contexts, promoting such meetings as a sort of panacea for…
Charles Enderlin is the France 2 Jerusalem correspondent who broadcast the incendiary account of the death of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura at the hands of Israeli troops operating in the Gaza Strip in September 2000. Based on film footage provided by a Palestinian cameraman, Enderlin's report has…
Twenty years before he joined Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin in Washington for that famous handshake--and proceeded to become Clinton's most frequent foreign guest at the White House--Yasser Arafat planned and directed the murder of an American ambassador and his deputy chief of mission. From the…
Minneapolis
ONE OF THE MANY FRONTS of the war on the Bush administration is the war on John Bolton. The New York Times's latest contribution to this assault is Warren Hoge's July 23 page-one story "Praise at home for envoy, but scorn at UN."
IS THE New York Times a law unto itself? When the Times published its December 16 exposé of the secret National Security Agency electronic surveillance of al Qaeda-related communications, reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau noted that they had granted anonymity to the "nearly a dozen current…
ARE THINGS GETTING BETTER IN ISRAEL? Charles Krauthammer recently observed that "the more than four-year-long intifada, which left more than 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians dead, is over. And better than that, defeated." Krauthammer believes that Israel's Gaza withdrawal was a success and…
MARY MAPES IS BACK. With her memoir, Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power, the former CBS News producer is trying to write a second act for her career. Sadly, if her book is any indication, her second act is just a repeat of the first.
WATERGATE spawned its own subgenre of suspense films featuring various arms of the United States government as the hidden masterminds of evil schemes. The first of these post-Watergate films was 1975's Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford as a CIA researcher (Joe Turner, codename…
EARLIER THIS YEAR, in a stunning rebuke to the school's administration, Dartmouth alumni elected two insurgent petition candidates to the college's board of trustees--Hoover Institution fellow and former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson and George Mason University Law School professor Todd…
WHEN NAVY JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL RECRUITER Brian Whitaker visited Yale Law School in October 2003 to meet with students interested in serving as Navy lawyers, his reaction must have been something like that of the man who was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail; if it weren't for…
AS SPECIAL COUNSEL to President Richard Nixon Charles Colson was known as Nixon's hatchet man and one of the most hated men in America. After he left the Nixon administration he was caught in the snare of Watergate. Although he was only peripherally involved in the scandal, he pled guilty and…
ON JULY 15, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals issued its decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld affirming the power of the president to designate the trial of enemy combatants by military commissions. Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts was a member of the unanimous three-judge panel which…
IF JOURNALISM were a profession, Peter Braestrup's 1977 book Big Story would be required reading in every journalism school. Braestrup's long subtitle is a little dry: "How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington." But his analysis…
LAST FRIDAY The Great Raid opened in theaters. The notices that greeted the film weren't mixed; they were almost uniformly negative, as exhibited by the collection of reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. But these reviews are utterly misguided.
A WEEK AGO YESTERDAY President Bush spoke before the more than 30,000 Boy Scouts attending the 16th National Scout Jamboree. The tragic deaths by electrocution of four adult Scout leaders on July 25 dominated news of the Jamboree, and the coverage of Bush's speech was perfunctory at best. Like many…
MINNEAPOLIS'S MURDER RATE peaked in 1995; that year the New York Times dubbed Minneapolis "Murderapolis." Gangs had taken over the city's poorest neighborhoods and gang crime had become highly visible. In 1996 three Minneapolis officers were dispatched to New York City to study the "broken windows"…
STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE missed an unusual opportunity to contribute to public understanding of current events in connection with the announcement of the compromise agreement on the filibuster reached by the bipartisan group of 14 senators on May 23. In his role as the cornpone…
WHEN THE HARVARD-YALE FOOTBALL GAME was played in Cambridge last fall, Yale students pulled off one of the great college pranks of all time. During the game a fake Harvard pep squad wearing red and white face paint distributed 1,800 pieces of construction paper on seats covering the Harvard side of…
WHEN LYNDON JOHNSON made the historic appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967, all was not sweetness and light. The honorable gentleman who had formerly served as Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan--West Virginia's Robert Byrd--believed that Marshall was too liberal and asked FBI…
Speaking out of both sides of one's mouth is an occupational hazard, if not an occupational necessity, for politicians seeking elective office in competitive races. It's not a pretty sight, and it supports a cynicism about democratic politics that is unbecoming. Catering to such cynicism, the…
MANY COMMENTATORS on President Bush's second-term appointments have linked the nominations of Secretary Rice to her position at State, Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank, and John Bolton to the United Nations as a troika making a particular statement. The Guardian, for example, published a column by…
AFTER 60 Minutes II broadcast its fraudulent story on President Bush's Air National Guard service on September 8, 2004 holy heck broke loose on the Internet. Virtually anyone with eyes to see the evidence that accumulated during the days after the report came to the conclusion that the documents on…
THE CAMPAIGN-FINANCE SCANDALS of Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection left a bitter aftertaste. Having secured his reelection, Clinton resorted to the favorite stratagem of presidents in need of political cover--the appointment of a bipartisan commission. The bipartisan commission was to study the reform…
WHEN WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY founded National Review in 1955 at the age of 29, he lit the fire that sparked the modern conservative movement. Buckley had already achieved notoriety--if not celebrity--with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. He attacked the undergraduate education on offer at…
WHEN MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. brought his campaign against segregation to Bull Connor's Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. Birmingham was among the most segregated cities in the country at the time; King called it a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln.…