Power Line

If I stay overseas any longer, it’s pretty clear the usurpation of the 3wHH will morph into the “The McRibb Happy Meal Podcast” if I don’t put a stop to it, so I made sure to disrupt this week’s episode once again from London, this time while finishing off a bottle of Poit Dhubh (potch-goo), as fits the real show. I didn’t stick around for long as it was the dinner hour over here in London... Source

I can’t believe I had to crash my own podcast today to blunt the slow-rolling coup that Lucretia and John Yoo started last week in my absence, but by the miracle of the internet I did just that, dropping in for a few minutes between drams of whisky and dishes of haggis. We kick around the Joe Manchin news, whether the White House will invent a new term for economic distress—”recessionyx”... Source

I can’t believe I left the car keys to the podcast sitting on the kitchen counter when I left for overseas, and now Lucretia and John Yoo have snatched them up and usurped the usufructs of the 3WHH. After they finally get clear of their ritualistic but obligatory abuse of me, they get down to important subjects, like Philly cheese steaks and other delectables, President Biden’s latest ailments and... Source

In this second half of my conversation with Geoff Shepard (part 1 here, if you missed it), we walk through the famous “smoking gun” Oval Office tape of June 23, 1972, which was the final straw that led to Nixon’s resignation in August, 1974. Except we’ve got the facts all wrong about what was actually being discussed. Shepard walks through the matter, and then moves on to his devastating evidence... Source

The big news story this week was the appearance of the fetching Fawn Hall Cassidy Hutchinson before the Watergate January 6 select committee, which somehow put us in the frame of mind of “Cassidy” by the renowned poetic duo of Weir/Barlow: Lost now on the country miles in his Cadillac I can tell by the way you smile, he is rolling back [to the West Wing] Come wash the nighttime clean Come grow the... Source

Writing about the Watergate scandal in the 1980s, political scientist John Marini said “The passage of time has not resulted in greater clarity concerning what it is we should have learned from the event, perhaps because we still lack an authoritative account of it.” Having reached the 50th anniversary of the most famous “burglary” in history, we may be coming closer to have a complete... Source

Has there been a more momentous week for the Supreme Court ever? The Court went three-for-three on the key cases this week ( Carson, on school choice; Bruen, on gun rights: and Dobbs, overturning Roe and Casey), not simply on the decision of the specific cases at hand, but the broader reasoning behind the decisions. Indeed this week may come some day to be be seen as the equivalent of the infamous... Source

When it comes to energy, is the Biden administration simply stupid, or blindly ideological? Yes—we should embrace the power of “and,” because these possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Indeed the Bidenistas appear to be both dumb and ideological. Yesterday I ran into energy expert extraordinaire Robert Bryce—we’re at a murky gathering at an undisclosed location—and we sat down for a hearty... Source

With Steve and Lucretia still locked in mortal combat over how best to understand equality, equity, prudence and related issues, and divided as bitterly over Edmund Burke as they are over whisky styles (with Steve recklessly wading in with a new piece on the Burke question just this week), this week’s episode brings on a neutral party to serve as a tie-breaker: Jean Yarbrough, the Gary M. Pendy Sr. Source

The penultimate chapter of my recent biography, M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom, summarizes the enduring literary, philosophical, and historical contributions of his last two books, The Theme Is Freedom, and Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Digging into the audio archives of the Philadelphia Society, I found two talks Stan gave—one in 1994... Source

A frequent recurrence to the fundamental principles of the Constitution, and a constant adherence to those of piety, justice, moderation, temperance, industry, and frugality, are absolutely necessary, to preserve the advantages of liberty, and to maintain a free government. —Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 This week’s conversation offers up some new whisky choices while continuing with a... Source

When Arizona Governor Doug Ducey appointed the noted libertarian lawyer Clint Bolick to the Arizona Supreme Court in 2016, the left freaked out (so what else is new), calling his appointment “chilling.” The Center for American Progress gasped, “Mr. Bolick has spent the last quarter century working — at times quite successfully — to make the law more friendly to anti-government conservatives. Source

Two favorite guests and friends join us at the bar for this week’s happy hour, to hash out bar fights they started in less reputable watering holes. Jeremy Carl argues in The American Conservative that there needs to be “A Republican Counter-Elite,” while Glenn Ellmers continues to spark controversy with his article a year ago, “Conservatism Is No Longer Enough,” and now, last week... Source

The 20th anniversary is known as the “China anniversary,” and can you still use that if your predominant mode is breaking China? In any case, the Power Line crew assembled for a live (by Zoom) VIP webcast this week that featured a rare appearance by our technical director Joe Malchow, who is usually our behind-the-screen Wizard of Oz figure. Among other things, Joe shared a sacred relic... Source

This week’s review of the news is more wide-ranging than usual, starting with the question of whether the release of Top Gun: Maverick will turn out to be one more small indicator that the backlash against the cultural left is gaining steam. After all, the left hated the original Top Gun in the 1980s, because it was said to be an emblem of Reaganite jingoism, and since the sequel involves... Source

This is the week we learned that there is a reason we’ll miss Jen Psaki at the White House (plus a shout out to the forgotten Dee Dee Myers, who looks pretty good in retrospect); that the Anthony Scaramucci duration-in-office scale remains useful for marking the tenure in office of Nina Jankowitz (who nonetheless lasted longer than CNN+); that the Defense Production Act can apparently solve our... Source

There are so many things that seem . . . wrong about the 2020 election, and now comes the new documentary film “2000 Mules” offering some visually compelling circumstantial evidence, along with a few examples of direct testimony of voting misbehavior in nursing homes and other locales. A lot of readers and listeners have been asking about the film, so Lucretia and both took it in this week... Source

Owing partly to travel schedules that prevent our normal and proper Friday evening happy hour to debrief the week, combined with the shocking leak of the prospective Supreme Court opinion in the Dobbs case, we decided to declare a special mid-week happy hour with Scott and John joining in the libations, along with a special guest, the noted Whisky-McRibb pairing expert, John Yoo, coming to us from... Source

This is the week the world was introduced to the O’Brien of the 21st century, Ms. Nina Jankowicz, aka the “Mary Poppins of disinformation” (her own term), who is going to lead the Biden Administration’s new Ministry of Truth in the Department of Homeland Security—the very same government agency that leftists once despised because it might be able to spy on our library books because of the Patriot... Source

Now that my biography of M. Stanton Evans is out, time to go back and take in Stan in his own words in podcast form. A previous podcast featured several of Stan’s greatest comedy chops, so this one highlights some of his serious work. I decided to highlight here just four aspects of many that draw chiefly from one of his enduring books that everyone should have on their shelf of indispensable... Source