Power Line

Lucretia and I held the first “classroom” for PLU (Power Line University) yesterday, with 110 people ultimately tuning in live for our first formal session on The Federalist Papers. We had a couple of technical difficulties—for some reason we kept failing to get the Chat window working right—and we had some hiccups admitting some live questions and comments from viewers, but we hope to have these... Source

Who knew that John Yoo is a total science fiction geek?! I’m going to have to go back and scour his law review article footnotes to see if I can detect esoteric references to Sci-Fi classics, which, it turns out, he has thoroughly familiarity. Ken Green channeling Jayne Cobb. Some time last year I did a podcast on science fiction with my old AEI writing partner Ken Green (who turned up with this... Source

As you may have heard, Stanford “University” embarrassed itself this week by issuing a list of 160 words or phrases that you shouldn’t use because they are not sufficiently “inclusive” or sensitive, including even “trigger warning,” because, Stanford helpfully explained, “The phrase can cause stress about what’s to follow. Additionally, one can never know what may or may not trigger a particular... Source

We get a steady stream of emails from readers and listeners who want to know if any of my or Lucretia’s college courses are webcast or otherwise available online, and unfortunately the answer is No, partly for legal reasons but also for some technical reasons (streaming live classes is not as easy as it might seem, and the recording quality is often poor). But we have for the longest time been... Source

What do you do when you wake up and see the news story of how the University of North Carolina is once again violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with a scholarship that specifically excludes white students from eligibility? Your first thought is that you need to call Mark Perry, except he’s already on the job! Perry, professor emeritus of economics and finance at the University of Michigan/ Source

John Yoo is back at last from yet another Italian junket—yes, Lucretia let him back across the border unharmed!—and hosts this week’s episode in which we clarify some of the over-hasty arguments from last week’s highly thymotic episode about exactly when and how it is legitimate to contest the Supreme Court over the application of the Constitution. This opening elided nicely into the sequels from... Source

We live in a time of “crisis addicts,” in which the left cannot shake its addiction to what might be called “crisis porn.” Remember Rahm Emanuel proclaiming in 2009, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”? He was merely stating openly what has been obvious for a century now—that governments use a “crisis” to expand its power and reach permanently, never entirely relinquishing new powers and higher... Source

Hoo boy, this week’s happy hour very nearly descended into a full-scale bar room brawl, even though we recorded in the morning over coffee instead of single-malts because John Yoo is still over in Rome! (And may not come back after this episode!) After noting a few late breaking news stories, such as Harvey Mansfield’s retirement and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s surprise announcement that she’s becoming... Source

With the new Supreme Court term under way, and with several potential landmark oral arguments already in the can, I decided to catch up with Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, and author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court. It turns out that the kind of confirmation battles that have become famous ever... Source

The whisky bar is short one bartender this week as John Yoo is overseas yet again to Italy for some nefarious purpose, so it’s just Steve and Lucretia slinging the 180-proof analysis of the Twitter revelations and other news headlines of the end of the week. But the main topic is following up on the mid-week conversation with Glenn Ellmers on “Hard Truths & Radical Possibilities... Source