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(edit)  A College Park man has been accused of attacking a motorist with a live power line knocked down by the Hurricane Irene.  According to authorities, on Sunday, August 28, 32-year-old Richard Bialczak tailed a man with his car and then got out and attacked him. Derek Edwards, 28, was driving home from work when Bialczak's car came up closely behind him.  Edwards said he tried to get away from Bialczak, but the suspect matched him turn for turn, until they reached Colesville Road in Silver Spring.  There, the victim encountered a downed power line, still charged with electricity, which...

On my radio show on Wednesday, January 19, Dick Morris flatly declared that Mitt Romney could not win the Republican nomination for president because of the health care plan Romney guided into law in Massachusetts in 2005. On the same day my friend and superb political analyst John Hinderaker of Powerline fame declared that it was over for Sarah Palin. “The time has come to put any thoughts of Sarah Palin running for President to rest,” John wrote.

The time has come to put any thoughts of Sarah Palin running for President to rest. I say that not because I dislike her; on the contrary, I'm a fan. I think she did an excellent job as a vice-presidential candidate in 2008 and has been an effective spokeswoman for conservative causes in the years since. But there is no way she is ever going to be elected President, and the sooner Republicans get over that idea, the better. SNIP No one with a 59 percent unfavorability rating among independents has the chance of a snowball in Hell of being...

If you haven't already seen it, don't miss Karl Rove's column in today's (Wall Street Journal). Rove explains the vicious strategy at the heart of Obamacare: pass terrible legislation, and then collect a toll by exempting your friends--those who pay you lots of money--from that legislation, while your enemies have to live with it. We have had various forms of corruption over the years, but I don't believe we have had, within memory, anything quite this disgusting. The worst malefactor here, besides President Obama himself, is AARP:[snip] We've heard a lot about "crony capitalism" in recent years, but this is...

We have received an avalanche of email messages responding to our dust-up with Mark Levin over the candidacy of Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and regarding our comments on Rush's suspension of the Buckley rule in favor of the (the Limbaugh Rule) Yesterday Rush crowed that the Limbaugh Rule (rules the day)Some readers have written to express their support, while some have written to express their disagreement with us. Some correspondents have condemned us as liberals, as RINOs, even as members of what Angelo Codevilla condemns as ("America's ruling class.")Speaking for myself, I would like to borrow the words of the...

The state Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld regulators' approval of the $1.7 billion CapX2020 power-line project, shooting down citizen complaints that the enormous project is unnecessary and would harm the environment. The decision was a big loss for the United Citizens Action Network, NoCapX2020 and Citizens Energy Task Force, who were challenging the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission's 2009 approval of the major transmission buildout. The groups argued that since energy demand has been declining the expensive new power lines aren't needed. They also argued that regulators didn't adequately address the impacts on wildlife in certain areas such as the...

Since the people at Powerline have made a big public announcement about it, I’ll just say that I’m not the least surprised that they’ve delinked LGF. Powerline has been going in a very bad direction recently; the “all Obama-hatred, all the time” focus is bad enough, but worse are their articles supporting European extremists like Geert Wilders (who wants to deprive Muslims of the freedom of religion and ban books) and outright fascists like the Belgian Vlaams Belang party. I’ve been considering removing them from my links for quite some time because of this kind of disturbing stuff, but I...

Those of you who watched the beginning of the All Star game last night will have noticed that, when President Obama threw the first pitch, the camera shot was a close-up that made it impossible to see whether his pitch was on target. I found this odd, and so did Andy McCarthy. I'll make an educated guess that this was done at the insistence of the White House to prevent embarrassment in case Obama's pitch was a poor one. To be sure, the White House ultimately could not prevent everyone from seeing a bad pitch (YouTube and all of that),...

People for the American Way, the left-wing smear machine, is (In the words of McClatchy press service) quietly targeting Frank Ricci, the Connecticut firefighter whose successful lawsuit for racial discrimination has proven to be so inconvenient for Judge Sotomayor. Specifically, People for the American Way, along with other such drive-by hit artists, is urging reporters to scrutinize Ricci's allegedly "troubled and litigious work history." So far, the lefty blogosphere, at least, has taken up the call. Ricci is on the list of witnesses Republican Senators will call at Sotomayor's confirmation hearing. But does this make his "litigious work history" an...

Victor Davis Hanson asks why so many Americans are depressed. Suggesting five themes that might provide an answer, he thinks it might be more than the economy that explains our state of mind. I agree, but none of Dr. Hanson's themes accounts for my despair. I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can't keep up and I can't stand...

Barack Obama's victory last night was no doubt historic, and the Democrats, as expected, extended their leads in the House and the Senate. But their victory was no landslide, despite what appeared to be overwhelming advantages. Obama won around 52 percent of the popular vote, defeating John McCain by between five and six points. That's nothing like the true landslides of the past: Reagan by ten points in 1980 and 18 in 1984; Nixon by 23 in 1972; or even Bush by eight in 1988. And yet, with hindsight, it is remarkable how much Obama had going for him. After...

Obama outlined, in the vaguest terms possible, countless billions or trillions of new federal spending. How would he pay for it? By "closing corporate loopholes"--like what? The idea that Obama's orgy of spending can be funded by "closing corporate loopholes" is frankly childish. By increasing taxes on the top 5% of taxpayers, i.e., precisely those who are grossly over-taxed already. The top 5% already pay 60% of all federal income taxes. And by "eliminating programs that no longer work." Really? Which ones? No one seriously imagines that Obama--let alone the Democratic Congress!--has any intention of eliminating any significant government programs.

This is a post that I meant to do several weeks ago, when the Public Editor of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, wrote a column titled "The Painful Images of War". The column addressed the issue of whether news outlets like the Times should publish pictures of dead or wounded American soldiers, even over the objections of the military and the soldiers' families. Hoyt quoted a Times photographer whose graphic images of a dead U.S. serviceman were controversial: "Looking at photographs of the gravely wounded or dead is a profoundly affecting and emotional experience,” she said. “However, I do...

This past Friday Michelle Obama gave essentially the same stump speech in Charlotte, North Carolina that she had given the week earlier in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Based on the stump speech, Yuval Levin calls Mrs. Obama "The unhappiest millionaire." Levin's NRO column carries a link to the C-SPAN video of Mrs. Obama's North Carolina speech. It is well worth watching. Levin characterizes the pervasive themes of Mrs. Obama's stump speech as the "gospel of bitterness." Levin finds Barack Obama to be preaching a similar gospel, albeit one that benefits from "a peppier and more upbeat stump speech[.]" Senator Obama's enormous...

Our friend Jim Hoft has been doing a great job at Gateway Pundit examining the case of the dirty trick played on John McCain this week. I asked Jim to summarize his findings for us. Here is his report:

One of our most faithful readers writes from Baghdad, where he is serving as an officer in the Army Reserve: I'm back over here for my fourth Army Reserve stint since 2004. What a difference a year makes. In late 2006 and early 2007, just after surge had been announced, many commentators and thinkers -- in uniform and out -- thought that Anbar was hopeless, a lost cause. Just google "Anbar Lost" to see what I mean. Nowadays, it has been weeks since we lost a soldier in Anbar. More incredibly Iraqi Army units, composed of Anbari Sunnis, have deployed...

italics/bold mine:Yesterday the news was full of accounts of the Clintons' 2000-2006 tax returns. At the top of the stories -- as in the "deep background" report by Andrea Mitchell and the NBC investigative unit -- reporting their total income of $108 million over the past eight years (including 2007) was their $10 million in contributions to charity. The stories appear to be based in large part on the summary provided by the Clinton campaign, rather than on the returns themselves. Here is the summary's description of the Clintons' charitable contributions: CHARITABLE CONTRIBUTIONS: $10,256,741 The Clintons donated $10,256,741 to charity...

Muqtada al-Sadr apparently has had enough; he's offered a "truce" if the Iraqi government will stop attacking his men. I'm not close enough to the situation to know whether it would be better to accept the truce or continue disabling Sadr's militia, but the proposal seems like a clear indication that things haven't gone as Sadr intended. This episode might prove to be, as President Bush suggested, a defining moment in Iraq's post-war history. The main knock on Maliki's government has been that it is a Shia instrument that has sometimes been infiltrated by radical Shia elements. Sunnis have often...

America, and especially the America of our imagination, is the land of self-making and the self-made. Our presidential politics are far from the exclusive domain of the self-made, but our most interesting presidents (e.g., Johnson, Nixon, Clinton) tend to come from that category. Barack Obama is the quintessential self-made man. He hails from the periphery, not just of our society but of our geographic boundaries. Lacking any relevant connections, he created his own -- with the Ivy League, with the legal elite, with community activists in a town where he was stranger, with black nationalists in that same town, and...

As Paul notes below, Barack Obama denies having personally heard the now notorious statements of Jeremiah Wright: The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. Obama reiterated this assertion in an interview on FOX News with Major Garret yesterday: None of these statements were ones that I had heard myself personally in the pews. One of them I had heard about after I had started running for president and I put out...

Over the weekend, Paul did a post that talked about demands that some conservatives are making on John McCain as the soon-to-be Republican nominee. I added some comments of my own; it's fair to say that both Paul and I are skeptical of the reasonableness of such demands. That prompted an email from talk radio host Mark Levin, the subject heading of which was "John, Did You Actually Mean to Write This?" This initiated an exchange between Mark and me, which, with Mark's permission, I'm reproducing below: John, did you actually mean to write this? If there are conservatives who...

This afternoon, I attended a reception for French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the French embassy in Washington. Sarkozy looks even better in person than on television. In addition to leading-man good looks, he’s charismatic and energetic. In the previous 48 hours, he had visited Africa, returned to France to negotiate with disgruntled fishermen, and flown across the Atlantic. Yet he looked like he had just returned from vacation. In his remarks, practically the first words out of Sarkozy's mouth consisted of an affirmation that the old days of a French government hostile to the U.S. are over, to be replaced...

Dennis Ross is perhaps the least successful diplomat in American history. And his lack of success isn't down to bad luck. Ross concluded that Yasser Arafat was a legitimate peace partner for Israel, and embarked on the fool's errand of trying to bring about peace between Israelis and Palestinians on that basis. Has any American diplomat ever misjudged an important matter so thoroughly? Ross now brings his analytical powers and judgment to bear on Iraq. He accuses President Bush, who has brought about both regime change and the rise of a constitutional government that's just about holding together, of engaging...

Diana West brings to our attention a dismaying story from Brussels -- the brutalizing by Belgian police of peaceful demonstrators from a group called Stop the Islamization of Europe, including a member of the European parliament. It seems that European states not only increasingly accommodate Shariah (Islamic law), but are taking sides against those who exercise what (outside of Islamic law) is their right to protest this development. JOHN adds: Here's the video. The The distinguished-looking guy who gets roughed up by the police first is Luk Van Nieuwenhuysen, the Vice-President of the Flemish Parliament..... (Go to Powerline to see...

A Free Republic poster writes that he's a regular reader who enjoys our views on a variety of issues. He writes that he's enjoyed our posts in which we use our skills as lawyers to weigh in on legal issues. He draws our attention to the cease-and-desist letter from an attorney representing the DNC to Free Republic. He asks whether the letter's threat of of a defamation claim is bona bide or not. In my view, the letter is sheer thuggery that recalls the same maneuever made on behalf of John Kerry in the 2004 campaign. He writes that the...

Many of you have been following The Power Liners and The Young Turks debate the Jose Padilla situation. Who's winning the debate? Who's winning the great Jose Padilla debate? 90% The Power Line guys 272 9% The Young Turks 28 0% It's a draw 1 Total votes: 301

The Steyn variations Mark Steyn found it too much fun not to join in Bill Bennett's inspired "Sandy Berger Lies" contest that has contributed so much to my anger management therapy this week. Seth Leibsohn has kindly forwarded Mark's three submissions. Mark's first submission comes complete with directions for recording: THE SANDY PANTS (from the film Slick Willie Wonka And The Shop-Lift Factory) Hey, everybody! Gather round, the Sandy Pants is here! What kind of archival material do you want? Classified documents? Confidential minutes? Intelligence briefings? Cables? You’ve come to the right place, because I’m the Sandy Pants! (Ooooooo!)

This is one of those rare Associated Press articles that is a pleasure to read. I almost suspect it was written by a closet Republican. It begins: House Democrats, insistent that they will hold lawmakers to higher standards, decided Tuesday that Rep. William Jefferson will not return to an influential committee until a federal corruption investigation involving him is completed. The dissonant note is introduced immediately. "Higher standards" and "William Jefferson" are hard to reconcile. The AP continues: At Pelosi's urging, the House last June stripped Jefferson of his [Ways and Means] committee assignment because of the corruption investigation that...

The 15-story towers and crackling cables that are planned to cut across the Northern Virginia countryside are just red lines on a map, a paper illustration of what could come. But for Cameron Eaton, who learned shortly after Thanksgiving that one of the proposed routes for a new high-voltage power line slices across her Fauquier County property, they have already brought the specter of financial ruin. She bought her 100-acre Delaplane farm last year, when it was an overgrown slice of land anchored by a rundown old farmhouse just off Interstate 66. She plowed all her savings into it. To...

Today we interviewed Mark Steyn on our radio show. We talked about his background in radio and journalism and about the role that Minnesota has somewhat weirdly come to play in the global jihad. Mostly though, we talked about Mark's new book, America Alone, which you can--and should--buy here. That is to say, we talked about demography; about the aggressive, world-wide expansion of Islam; about the loss of cultural confidence in much of the developed world; and the ways in which America--excluding Vermont, of course--continues to chart a different and more optimistic course. This was one of our best interviews...

Starts by explaining the war, then lets the Iranian President attempt to rebut.

The Associated Press trumpets the latest AP/Ipsos poll, with the headline: "Most Americans Plan to Vote for Democrats:" Republicans are in jeopardy of losing their grip on Congress in November. With less than four months to the midterm elections, the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that Americans by an almost 3-to-1 margin hold the GOP-controlled Congress in low regard and profess a desire to see Democrats wrest control after a dozen years of Republican rule. This is a howler, of course: the poll respondents wanted Democrats to win by 51% to 40%, not "almost 3-to-1." In any event, the AP...

[snip] Unlike Barnes and some other pundits (both friendly and unfriendly to the administration), I don't think there is any particular need for a staff shakeup. I think that while Barnes' call for resignations by such stalwarts as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney is well-intended, as a practical matter, such a course would be disastrous. Major changes in Executive Branch staffing at this point would only reinforce the claims made by the administration's critics. [snip]

March 29, 2006 Verdict: The New York Times Blew the Story Yesterday, five former judges of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject of the amendments to FISA that have been proposed by Senator Arlen Specter. Earlier today, we noted a remarkable contrast in the reporting on the hearing by the Washington Times and the New York Times. The Washington Times headlined its story, "FISA Judges Say Bush Within Law," and reported:A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did...

In previous posts I have pointed out the considerable evidence that CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is an American-based front organization for radical Islamic terrorism. Since CAIR promotes itself as a peace-loving group that exists only for the protection of the civil rights of Muslim-Americans, and that it raises funds only for humanitarian reasons, it would seem important that it take pains to disassociate itself from any activities that look terrorist-related. As time goes on, and as American citizens slowly wake up to the fact that we are in a war to the finish with savages whose only common...

Today’s Herald-Tribune, southwest Florida’s leading newspaper, published a letter to the editor demanding the impeachment of President Bush “because he lied about knowing the levies would be breached”. Perhaps this is a rant of another leftist kook who has given up on ‘Bush lied’ about WMD, but more likely it was the direct result of the lie that the Associated Press told earlier this week that, in fact, the President WAS told that the levies would be breached. It is little consolation that, under fire from hundreds of bloggers, AP has issued a retraction of its original story.

The title of this column is one of my favorite lines from William Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury. It is also a precise description of what is wrong with the American press, as two examples from the past week demonstrate. One concerns the blogosphere. The other concerns the nearly universal incompetence of the press in reporting on “the” Danish cartoons that are “causing” the Muslim riots. Faulkner’s character, Quentin Compson, on the day of his suicide at Harvard, reflects on his sister’s long-lost virginity with these words, “which, being believed, was, whether it was or not.” The first...

What a Party!by John Hinderaker  This hilarious account is from the New York Post's Page Six gossip column. The item is titled "Booted From Forbidden Aisle": Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) and Cynthia McKinney (D.-Ga.) got to the floor of the Capitol early and staked out seats reserved for Democratic senators. "Since none of these Democrats over there [in the Senate] filibustered Alito, why can't we have these seats?" Jackson argued. "That makes sense to me," McKinney replied, according to Roll Call columnist Mary Ann Akers. "Jackson went back to his office, leaving McKinney to protect the seats until...

Dick Morris thinks the Democrats have an opportunity to ride ethics issues and a general discontent with Congress to major gains in November. Today, though, he argues that the Dems are shooting themselves in the foot by attacking President Bush's efforts to keep the country safe from terrorism. Morris discusses the same Fox News poll we reviewed last week: Democrats who criticize President Bush for using warrantless wiretaps to elicit information about potential terrorist activity should be aware that the American people strongly support his decision to do so. The Fox News poll of Jan. 11 asked voters whether the...

We noted here the mysteriously under-covered story of the three would-be terrorists who were arrested in Italy after vowing to launch an attack on America that would dwarf September 11. A reader sent us a link to this article, which has more: The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. - because it would tend to support President Bush's use of NSA domestic surveillance, according to media watchdog groups. News of a planned attack masterminded by three Algerians operating out of Italy was widely reported outside the U.S., but went virtually unreported...

Senator Schumer told Judge Alito that he cannot decline to say what he thinks about issues that may come before the Supreme Court, as John Roberts did, because unlike Roberts, Alito has a long record as an appeals court judge. But Roberts was only following the Ginsburg rule, and Ginsburg too had a long track record as an appeals court judge. Indeed, when Roberts' supporters invoked the Ginsburg rule, his opponents argued Roberts needed to say more than Ginsburg because he lacked a long track record that could provide insight into his judicial thinking. The unwillingness of nominees to discuss...

Scott Hennen of WDAY's Hot Talk writes: I have an idea. I'm fed up with Democrats and Republicans not supporting the President and our troops with the war effort in Iraq. So what better way to stop it than a grassroots Talkradio/Blogosphere led effort to gather signatures and call on Congress to STOP THE MADNESS? I floated the idea by email to Sean Hannity to lead the talk radio effort...he mentioned it on-air and said "great idea and we can deliver them to the desks of every member of Congress." I'd love it if Power Line would lead the effort...

John Hinderaker over at Powerline has copies of a letter to Ronnie Earle, and one of two motions to quash the two new indictments of Tom Delay. http://www.powerlineblog.com/ "Earlier today, Tom DeLay's lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, moved for dismissal of the second indictment which was procured by prosecutor Ronnie Earle. Here is DeGuerin's letter to Earle that accompanied the motion: "The judge who will hear DeLay's motions is a MoveOn.org supporter. But Ronnie Earle will have to come up with some answers if he wants to keep his prosecution of Tom DeLay alive."

Which, on the whole, is just as well. As of today, the New York Times has put its bizarro lineup of political columnists--Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Bob Herbert, Nick Kristof, Tom Friedman et al.--behind a $50 a year barrier called "Times Select." To which all we can say, in George Strait's immortal words, is: Goodbye, farewell, so long, vaya con Dios, Good luck, wish you well, take it slow. Easy come girl, easy go. It's not just that we won't be reading Krugman and the rest of the Times' menagerie any more. Neither will anyone else. So, while...

How would you defend liberal talk host Al Franken's lies if your company's future was at stake? After weeks of ignoring our Air America Radio scandal coverage, they're increasingly reactive to news developments. While the company refuses to respond to Michelle Malkin and myself directly, they're talking to others who publish follow-ups and news summaries. Their key tactic: outright issue deflection. Not only that, but there are serious questions today about Air America's new public relations push on the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club repayment issue, where $875,000 in taxpayer funds were apparently diverted to the liberal talk radio...

Less than a day after the New York Times botched its Air America scandal coverage with an inaccurate Al Franken quote, along comes the AP, to do it correctly. Wow, there's a way to kick your weekend off on the right foot! Apparently, AP felt the need to wait until almost 17 days since the Radio Equalizer's first piece, but hey, better late than never. Also, releasing the story on a Friday evening, going into a summer weekend does not exactly ensure a lot of coverage.

Did we really think amateur hour could last forever? Predictably, leftists have now begun to mount a more organized campaign to fight our Air America coverage. Elements of it have been leaked to the Radio Equalizer. In the earlier days of Air America's controversy over its apparent acquisition of $875,000 in taxpayer funds intended for the Bronx-based Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, nasty potshots and slurs from liberal bloggers were common.

IBM is partnering with a Texas utility to deliver broadband over power line (BPL) technology in the Houston area, joining the small but growing number of companies rolling out high-speed Internet service using standard home and business wiring. CenterPoint Energy and IBM are collaborating their efforts at a Houston technology center run by the power provider. At the technology center, CenterPoint has started a pilot program designed to demonstrate the capabilities of BPL in the home. BPL technology is touted as a way not only to provide broadband access to areas lacking DSL or cable connections, but also to improve...

June 12, 2005 Major E. Reports Our correspondent in Iraq, Major E., wrote this essay in response to a column he saw in his home-town newspaper which argued that Iraq is a lost cause. We've edited it slightly for length; click to enlarge the photos: The number one question I have been getting from friends and family back home is whether we are winning here in Iraq. In fact, what inspired me to write today was reading an op-ed published by the local congressperson in the Contra Costa Times, a paper I actually delivered for three years many moons ago.......