Power Line

Historian Richard Samuelson turned up for Friday evening happy hour this week, with 14-year-old Oban in hand, to kick around this week’s less-than-neat headlines. Is it merely a coincidence that Jen Psaki chose April Fools’ Day to have the news come out that she’s going to join MSNBC? Irony is truly dead. Meanwhile, on the great existential question of the week—”Team Smith” or “Team Rock”—Lucretia... Source

It would be easier at this point to start a list that names of everything that is not caused or tainted by racism, because it is becoming absurd. The latest from Nikole Hannah-Jones is that tipping is a legacy of slavery. No, she really said this, on Twitter last week: This brought a hearty guffaw from economic historian Phil Magness, who has more than once prompted Hannah-Jones to take down a... Source

Is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson an originalist? Of course not. In no possible universe will we get a Justice Jackson who turns out to be a closet moderate or even conservative. The last Democratic Supreme Court pick who moved to the right was Byron White, appointed by President Kennedy. But for some reason she felt compelled to say this in her confirmation hearing: “I believe that the Constitution... Source

Freshly resupplied with Laphraoig and Glen Livet, Lucretia assumes hosting duties this week to examine—and cross-examine—Steve about his new biography M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom, which comes out officially on Monday. Lucretia walks Steve through how he came to know Evans (41 years ago now!), and why he think Evans is “the perfect conservative,” both in theoretical and... Source

Prof. Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and author, most recently, of The Crisis of the Two Constitutions, recently visited Berkeley to give a lecture on his book, and sit down with John Yoo and me to discuss what we’re calling the “Claremont Question,” which is really just a headline for several controversies. The largest is the “Trump question” and the character of... Source

Lucretia and Steve review the week’s news, and conclude that there’s a gathering storm of doom for the left. First, the incompetence of the Biden Administration from top to bottom is impossible to disguise effectively much longer. The attempt to blame inflation on Putin (because they can’t blame it on Trump after claiming for so long that it was merely a “transitory” supply chain issue) is... Source

The Ukraine crisis isn’t going away, and with recriminations on all sides making the rounds here at home, it seemed propitious to check in with Michael Anton, who, among other things, served on the National Security Council in two administrations. To say Michael is not happy with the state of play here at home is an understatement, and Lucretia and I fully join in. It doesn’t take long for us to... Source

A common theme making the rounds is that Vladimir Putin must be crazy or has badly miscalculated his interests, and therefore is extremely dangerous. In fact the problem may be much worse than that. Putin is not merely a tyrant as understood by the classics (though not modern political science or theorists of international relations, who no longer recognize tyranny as a distinct political... Source

The “fog of war” is even foggier in the age of 24/7 news and social media, so it is impossible to know what the hell is happening on the ground in the Ukraine, let alone in Moscow. High time, then, to check in with Col. Austin Bay, author of Cocktails From Hell and other books, Creators Syndicate columnist, and contributor to StrategyPage. I was delighted to discover that we’re both fans of... Source

Lucretia added to her intrepid legend by venturing into the asylum at Berkeley this week to record this episode in person with Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett about his new book (co-authored with Evan Bernick), The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit. To remind listeners, Barnett argued the Gonzalez v. Raich case that challenged the unlimited reach of the... Source