(Steven Hayward) That was quite a dramatic scene on the House floor Friday night when Kevin McCarthy walked up the aisle and confronted Matt Gaetz. I’m not a good enough lip reader to know what passed between them, but fortunately we have the experts at Bad Lip Reading on the job, and they have decoded it for us: Everything changes once you know what McCarthy and Gaetz were actually saying#118thCongress #KevinMcCarthy #MattGaetz
Category: Power Line Blog
Tales from the Public Sector
(Steven Hayward) Mass transit—the holy grail of urban progressivism (Quest for the Holy Rail, as I sometimes put it, or, A Desire Named Streetcar)—is struggling right now. The Wall Street Journal reports today: Several of the nation’s largest urban mass-transit systems are at a crossroads, with ridership still depressed three years into the pandemic and federal aid running out. . . The ridership shortfall is forcing transit authorities to question their decades-old
Thought for the Day: University Fraud?
(Steven Hayward) William Deresiewcz, reflecting on his experience teaching in Yale’s English department more than a decade ago: At Yale, in an English department that was perennially ranked in the top ten, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on this basis. A Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University, that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find
Mainstream Media Confesses Russia Hoax At Last
(Steven Hayward) The Washington Post, today: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters Russian influence operations on Twitter in the 2016 presidential election reached relatively few users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, and the Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior, according to a study out this morning. The study, which the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics
The Daily Chart: What Sanctions?
(Steven Hayward) There’s long been reason to doubt that economic sanctions on rogue nations are effective means to restrain their behavior. Certainly our on-again, off-again sanctions on Iran haven’t had much effect on the regime. So the cu…
When Elvis met Nixon
(Scott Johnson) I’m traveling this morning and unable to adhere to my schedule for Power Line. For readers who may be unfamiliar with it, I thought I would take the liberty of revisiting the story of Elvis’s 1970 White House visit in connection with our celebration of the anniversary of his birth yesterday. Yesterday I focused on Elvis’s recorded work while acknowledging Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis — Last Train to
Abbott to Biden: Do Your Job
(John Hinderaker) Joe Biden is finally visiting the southern border–a small slice of it, anyway, in El Paso. The town has been frantically cleaned up, Potemkin-style, for the president’s appearance. But Texas Governor Greg Abbott isn’t fooled. Today he hand-delivered to Biden the letter that is embedded below. Abbott’s letter calls on Biden to do his job. It chastises him for violating his constitutional duty to enforce the laws: All of this
House GOP Causing Panic on the Left
(Steven Hayward) The media and the left were content to munch popcorn this week as House Republicans struggled to select a Speaker, but now that the deed is done largely on terms dictated by the so-called “Chaos Caucus” (I prefer Rebel Alliance), they are starting to wring their hands about how terrible this is. Which means they are worried. Which means the outcome is probably good. There is a disturbance in The
Racialize Everything
(Steven Hayward) The first rule of leftist politics today is racialize everything. Example 12,186:
Scientific American became a woke joke quite a while ago now. Remember this one from two years ago:
How about this for an alternative headline to the H…
The Left’s War On Children
(John Hinderaker) Liberals love to talk about children, but in many ways, their policies are devastating to the young. Education is near the top of the list: liberals run our public schools, and they are almost uniformly terrible. Schools are run for the benefit of teachers’ unions, administrators and diversity consultants. The kids are just disposable fodder. Covid school shutdowns were a recent instance of liberal hostility toward children. They set Kevin