Well, it does, and it always did. Not only Stalin but Lenin and Trotsky were hungry for absolute power from the get-go. Trotsky bragged about the murder of the Romanov family, when the Tsar Nicolas II, his wife and five children and a handful of servants were shot, stabbed, and beaten to death by a…
Ramesh Ponnuru, not really up on the Constitution thing
Trump Derangement Syndrome! It’s everywhere! Not among Democrats, but among Republicans! Yes, it’s dismaying when “your president” acts like a two-year-old—because he is a two-year-old! So what’s a pundit to do? Well, “I know you are but what am I?” seems to be what may be called the “Ramesh Ponnuru defense”. Ramesh, writing in the…
Avik Roy, silently blowing both his own horn and the Republican Party
There was a time, not so long ago, when I praised Republican health care “expert” Avik Roy for his outspokenness on House Speaker Paul Ryan’s atrocious health care “plan” to repeal and replace Obamacare: “it’s curious”, Avik observed, “that extending tax cuts [to the rich] was a higher priority for the House than addressing the…
Mote and Beam Dept: WashPost does CNN
“CNN’s Russia story debacle came at the worst possible time for the network”, Paul Farhi reports for the Washington Post, describing the embarrassing collapse of CNN’s “exclusive” on a supposed Senate investigation of Wall Street bigshot/Trump insider Anthony Scaramucci’s supposed suspicious links with Russia: “When challenged on the particulars of the story, CNN acknowledged that…
Things that, if I had a wife, I would avoid saying to her
“The day the iPhone came out, June 29, 2007,” Tyler Cowen tells us, “I boasted to my wife that it would be one of the most important cultural events of our lifetimes, maybe the most important. I compared my purchase of one, which I wanted to justify, to going to see a “Don Giovanni” premiere…
Trevor Lawrence Quartet—“Trinkle Tinkle”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1y7uxSQexg With Eric Lewis, piano, Paul Beaudry, bass, and Ralph Penland, drums. Posted by FortressUSA FUSA
Avik Roy Couldn’t Like the Senate Republicans’ Health Care Bill More if He Had Written It Himself!
Back in the day, conservative health care maven Avik Roy put the wood to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Obamacare replacement legislation, remarking after Paulie “improved” the bill to meet Republican criticism, “it’s curious that extending tax cuts was a higher priority for the House than addressing the fact that the bill will make insurance unaffordable…
Shorter Krauthammer: Comey, Schmomey! Let’s talk about Israel!
I think I’ve gotten into the habit of saying nice things about Charles Krauthammer. In my most recent post relating to Charlie, I went so far as to exclaim “Thank God for Charles Krauthammer! Pretty much.”. Well, that was then. Time to get nasty. In his post that prompted my exclamation of “Thank God for…
The silence of the Donald, the pusillanimity of the Republicans
Okay, Donald Trump hasn’t been entirely silent. “Trump proposes a law that’s existed for 20 years”, snickers USA Today with well-earned glee, reporting on our president’s proposed crackdown on free-loading legal immigrants, who, naturally, aren’t free loading at all. Then there’s his epic links “faux pas”—running his golf cart onto a green because he’s too…
Ross Douthat, Lee Drutman, and Karen Handel explain it all for you
Scatter much? The Democrats sure don’t, if you can read the fine print of this graph, appearing in a report, Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond, prepared by the folks at “Voterstudygroup” and written by Lee Drutman, linked to by the not always to be ridiculed and scorned by me Ross Douthat. As Ross points…