Latest from Coffee House

Friday

19 Aug 2022

No, 44 percent of pregnant women didn’t miscarry after the Pfizer shot

Feminist author "Dr." Naomi Wolf is making the rounds with a bombastic new claim that nearly half of pregnant women in a Pfizer vaccine trial miscarried. It's not true. Several media outlets have touted Wolf and her analysis, with her blog being shared all over social media. The doctor (of English literature) claims she has 2,500 volunteers and hundreds of lawyers combing recently released Pfizer documents. This makes it even more astounding that they so wildly misinterpreted the data available to them. Wolf's egregious claims center on the document linked here — a report of adverse effects in subjects who took the Pfizer vaccines prior to March 2021.

Roger Kimball

Donald Trump has enemies everywhere

I think that Michael Anton is correct that “the people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again.” “The people who really run the United States”: that would be denizens of the Swamp, the bureaucratic elite, their media and academic mouthpieces, worker bees in the ambient welfare jelly and the nomenklatura who win elections and circulate in and out of the corridors of power. It’s a powerful, nearly monolithic force, a monument to special privilege and two-tier justice — and the prospect of dismantling it is daunting to say the least.

Oliver Wiseman

How Trump survived primary season

How Trump survived the primaries With just a handful of states left to vote, primary season is almost over. And no results in Florida and New York next week, or Massachusetts and New Hampshire next month, will change the basic story when it comes to the Republican Party: if this primary season was a chance for the GOP to make a decisive break with Donald Trump, it did not take it. Some had wondered if this round of voting would demonstrate that re-litigating 2020 was a dead end — and might prove the start of a blossoming post-Trump brand of conservatism that moves on from the former president’s hang-ups, mixes the best of Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin and leaves the party light on baggage ahead of an important contest in November.

Thursday

18 Aug 2022

Daniel DePetris

Ukraine is convinced that time is on its side. So is Russia

As the war in Ukraine approaches its six-month anniversary this coming Wednesday, the fighting shows no sign of stopping. Peace talks are a figment of the imagination, as Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky remain just as committed to achieving their objectives today as they were when the war first broke out. The Russians continue to pound residential areas with artillery in the Donbas, hoping to slowly capture more territory after months of slow, high-cost maneuvering in the Donetsk region. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, are settling on a new strategy in the south, harassing Russian supply lines deep into Russian-occupied territory.

Ben Domenech

A GOP of Trump’s choosing?

With the collapse of Liz Cheney's political career in Wyoming, Donald Trump's supporters are fully ensconced in the vast majority of critical candidacies headed into November. He and his supporters have remade the GOP, at least for the moment, into a party devoted to the Trumpian America First agenda and running on that set of priorities — at least when it comes to the lip service they give to border concerns, trade, anti-globalism and culture war issues. But will this be a Republican Party that actually delivers on these priorities should they receive voters' endorsement in November? That’s a more questionable proposition. The core problem that many traditional GOP forces have with a Trumpian agenda is one of prioritization, not of positioning.

Cockburn

In defense of Sanna Marin, Finland’s partying PM

Party politics is done somewhat differently in Finland. While Boris Johnson was hounded out in Britain for some miserable looking cake and wine, over in Helsinki, his counterpart finds herself in hot water for simply having too much (seemingly legal) fun. Sanna Marin, the country's thirty-six-year-old prime minister, is now facing criticism after a video of her partying with friends was leaked online. It features the Social Democrat leader throwing shapes to music with various Finnish artists, TV presenters and Instagram influencers — and all seems a fairly innocuous affair. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvP84_orIXc&feature=emb_title&ab_channel=OldQueenTV Not so for her critics.

Peter Van Buren

How much, really, changes post-Roe?

It was sad to see the glee with which pro-choice advocates welcomed the news that the ten-year-old Ohio rape victim was real. Surprisingly she lacks a nom de guerre yet, something like Victim Zero, Baby Doe or Child Jane. She went from victim to martyr to symbol within a news cycle or two. The story just received new life as Indiana, where the abortion was performed, has since voted to ban most abortions. We know now an illegal alien who should never have been in the United States (his status is never to be talked about again of course as it's outside the narrative) twice raped the ten-year-old.

Wednesday

17 Aug 2022

Oliver Wiseman

Cheney’s last stand

Cheney’s last stand She may have lost the battle, but she has not lost the war. That was the defiant message from Liz Cheney as she conceded (unsurprising and widely predicted) defeat in yesterday’s Wyoming Republican congressional primary last night. “Our work is far from over,” said the scion of the Cheney dynasty who will be out of office next year. Cheney’s defeat means we now know the fate of all ten of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump in his final days in office. Four have announced their retirement. Four have, like Cheney, been ousted in primaries and two — Washington’s Dan Newhouse and California’s David Valadao — managed to survive their primaries.

Tuesday

16 Aug 2022

Cockburn

Unpicking the armed IRS agent hysteria

For a profession more hated than telemarketers and meter maids, last week the Internal Revenue Service put up a job ad that sounded so cool it even made Cockburn consider it. The IRS is in the market for a Special Agent, specifically one that can fire a gun and is “willing to use deadly force if necessary,” for its law enforcement division, Criminal Investigation (CI). The agency is set to double in size and is recruiting more staff following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, a Democratic spending bill which President Biden is set to sign today.

Peter Van Buren

The five stages of Mar-a-Lago grief

Another week, another silver bullet misses Donald Trump. Once more we suffered through the same endless roll of waves of crimes, accusations, near-indictments and just bad words to which we'd become accustomed during the Trump presidency. We went from "Trump has classified material under lock and key at Mar-a-Lago" to a group of people paying $1,800 to fly a banner reading "ha ha ha ha" over the resort to mock a Trump staying 3,000 miles away in New York. On cue, the regulars on MSNBC and CNN brought out their running-dog former CIA and FBI officers to tell us tick-tock, the walls are closing in, this time it will stick, Trump is going down, he'll be in jail before he runs again for office. If we can't stop him with the electoral system, we'll use the judicial system. This. Is. The.

Monday

15 Aug 2022

Teresa Mull

America is forgetting how to make stuff

Articles about the future and “progress” have been popping up a lot lately, with conversations revolving around the inevitable advancements in technology and automation. Where we should head next is the collective theme. To the metaverse? To outer space itself? But instead of setting our sights on colonizing Mars or creating a perfect alternate reality, we should slow our roll, focus on the here and now and consider whether the frenzied “progress” we’re in such a rush to make has demonstrated any benefit to real-life people. Manufacturing is a good place to start. Let this startling reality sink in, reported in 2017 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development: Between 2000 and 2010, US manufacturing experienced a nightmare.

Saturday

13 Aug 2022

Peter Van Buren

What is a classified document, anyway?

What is a classified document? Donald Trump seems to have lots of them — and the FBI sure wants them back. In the wake of my first book critical of the State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction program, Diplomatic Security began a deep dive into my life in an attempt to find something over which to prosecute me. A colleague passed on a bit of personnel gossip via his official email to my Yahoo! Account — and the chase was on. Diplomatic Security claimed I was in possession of “classified” material at home and referred my case to the Justice Department. The email in question was simply labeled “For Official Use Only,” or FOUO, a standard tag then automatically applied to all email sent by State in the unclassified system.

Friday

12 Aug 2022

Charles Lipson

Cleaning house at the FBI and Justice Department

The two most striking features of the FBI’s unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home are its bold intrusiveness and the public’s mistrust of the Bureau’s honesty and integrity. The Department of Justice could have used low-profile subpoenas to force Trump to turn over any documents, including the most sensitive ones. It didn’t. Instead, it sent carloads of federal agents to search the former president’s house. That raid was also unusual in a second sense. Although mishandling federal documents is a felony, it happens with some frequency, alas, and is almost never subject to full-scale raids. The blowback has been a Category 5 storm. The damage has grown because the FBI and Department of Justice remained silent for three days, refusing to explain their actions.

Oliver Wiseman

The uselessness of the CDC

The CDC confirms its own uselessness More than a year after Joe Biden declared victory in the battle against Covid, the CDC has called it: the pandemic is over. Well, sort of. Announcing the publication of revised guidance yesterday, CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti insisted that the updated advice “acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where Covid-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives.” Ignore Massetti’s throat-clearing. The guidance’s marked change in tone speaks for itself. All social distancing recommendations have been dropped and those exposed to the virus are no longer advised to quarantine for those exposed to the virus. Testing to screen for Covid is no longer recommended for people who do not have any symptoms.

Roger Kimball

Where is the FBI’s Rubicon?

Everyone knows that in January 49 BC Julius Caesar, about to lead part of his army across the Rubicon river, said “Alea iacta est,” “the die is cast.” Except that, according to Plutarch, what he really said was “Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος,” “let the die be cast,” and he did not so much say it as quote it, since the already-proverbial line came from the Greek playwright Menander. Anyway, in bringing an army across the stream that separated cis-Alpine Gaul from Italy proper, Caesar had committed treason. In crossing the Rubicon he had crossed a line, sparking the civil war that engulfed Rome and formalized the end of the Republic that had, as Caesar himself noted, been dead in all-but-name-only for decades.

Thursday

11 Aug 2022

Peter Van Buren

Merrick Garland is the Mar-a-Lago mystery man

Get it yet? The point of the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the January 6 hearings is all about one man. Nope, not Donald Trump: Merrick Garland. Either the FBI is trying to get Garland to indict Trump for something, and failing that to indict the highest ranking person near Trump, or Garland is already on the case himself. The reason for this is that nothing else worked. Democrats pointed the full national security apparatus at Trump, with the FBI doing yeoman-like work. They turned Robert Mueller loose with unlimited resources for a full year, going as far as to suggest Trump had obstructed an investigation that found him innocent. Alice in Wonderland stuff, that.

Wednesday

10 Aug 2022

Eli Lake

The FBI kills a mosquito with a howitzer

Since the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound on Monday, the Democratic Party’s resistance leaders have been tumescent. Former Justice Department officials are going on television to give an expert gloss to the prospect of the 45th president finally getting prosecuted. Former solicitor general Neil Katyal, for example, told MSNBC on Monday evening that if he was the former president’s lawyer, he would tell him to prepare for prison time. Marc Elias, the Democratic Party lawyer who commissioned the infamous Steele Dossier, went on Twitter to suggest the raid might mean Trump was guilty of destroying government property and thus ineligible to run in 2024. It feels like 2017 all over again. And that is what makes this latest episode of Get Trump a farce.

David Marcus

Don’t blame Texas for New York’s immigration ‘crisis’

To hear New York mayor Eric Adams tell it, you would think that a crisis has gripped the streets of our nation’s largest city as busloads of illegal immigrants arrive from Texas. Some of the new arrivals, courtesy of Texas Governor Greg Abbott — who wants to send a message about the very real crisis in his state — have been met in person by the mayor. He claims the city is now scrambling to take care of them. It’s a lie. Thus far, Abbott has sent 75, maybe 100 illegal immigrants to New York, a city of 9 million people, a city which, in fact, already has a population of 500,000 illegal migrants. Are we really to believe that a few dozen more from Texas has our system at the breaking point?

Cockburn

Keeping up with the Pelosis

As Cockburn scrolled through the gossip about Kim Kardashian's latest breakup (this time with Pete Davidson), he couldn't help but think of her show, a sloppy soap opera/reality TV series where drama runs with tear-stained makeup. Sound familiar? Cockburn couldn't help but think of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. After all, lately there's been enough drama in her family to fill at least three seasons of runtime (at a conservative estimate, of course). Pelosi, having successfully returned home from her long-awaited trip to Taiwan, is now engaging in another slap-fight with Xi Jinping. In an interview on NBC’s Today, she said of the trip, “Yes, it was worth it,” and “[Xi] is in a fragile place...he’s acting like a scared bully.

Cockburn

A tale of two Andrews

In a surprise twist that even Cockburn never saw coming, Andrew Yang and Andrew Cuomo, Democrats both, have denounced the recent raid on former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. The Thousand-Dollar-Yang tweeted out a long piece that declared that, while Yang didn’t want Trump as president, he did have serious concerns about what happened at Mar-a-Lago: A fundamental part of his [Trump’s] appeal has been that it’s him against a corrupt government establishment. This raid strengthens that case for millions of Americans who will see this as unjust persecution. It seems like this was authorized by a local judge and a particular FBI office without buy-in or notification of higher levels of government. But literally no one will believe that or make a distinction.

Oliver Wiseman

The known unknowns at Mar-a-Lago

Known unknowns at Mar-a-Lago I’ve felt rather left out in the thirty-six hours or so since Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago house was raided by the FBI. The rest of Washington is partaking in an orgy of certainty, reveling in their confidence of the legal meaning and political ramifications of the extraordinary development when very little is known beyond the basic facts. This is either concrete proof that we are, or are not, living in a banana republic. The raid is either a desperate establishment attempt to stop the Trump juggernaut from rolling to victory in 2024, or it has just saved him from political extinction. These many contradictory claims about the event are made with staggering certainty.

Paul du Quenoy

The view from Palm Beach of the Mar-a-Lago raid

“Everyone here is simply stunned and the universal cry is ‘We are now a third-world country!’” Juliette de Marcellus, a long-time Palm Beach resident who stayed in town this summer, emailed me. The day before, dozens of FBI agents and three Justice Department attorneys raided (or “searched,” as the servile legacy media put it) the home of our island community’s most famous resident, former President Donald J. Trump. Palm Beach slows down considerably in the summer, though the first two years of the pandemic saw many residents and visitors stick around rather than face crime and Covid in northern locales. This year, the Island’s annual season petered out around May 1, with restaurant reservations and parking spots suddenly opening up and traffic noticeably thinning out.

Cockburn

Conspiracy theory: did Alex Jones’s lawyers leak his messages on purpose?

Alex Jones’s defamation trial exploded in spectacular fashion a week ago today, following the revelation that the Infowars founder’s lawyer had sent the full contents of Jones’s phone to the attorney representing the Sandy Hook parents suing him. Footage of Jones learning this while on the witness stand sallied forth across Twitter in a flurry of blue-check hysteria. NBC disinformation reporter Ben Collins tweeted: “Wow. Sandy Hook parents' lawyer is revealing that Alex Jones' lawyers sent him the contents of Jones' phone BY MISTAKE. “'12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of every text’ Jones has sent for years. “’You know what perjury is?’ the lawyer asks.” https://twitter.

Tuesday

9 Aug 2022

Amber Duke

Is this the right’s answer to woke corporatism?

Woke corporatism has taken over America. Nike nixed a sneaker launch featuring the Betsy Ross flag after noted anthem-kneeler Colin Kaepernick claimed it was offensive. Coca-Cola and other companies threatened to boycott doing business in Georgia over the state's new election security legislation. Levi's allegedly booted its president over her anti-school closure views during the pandemic, and nearly every major retailer features pro-Black Lives Matter or Pride Month messaging on its storefronts and websites. It can seem impossible as a conservative to avoid giving your hard-earned money to businesses that hate you. Even for moderate or apolitical consumers, it can be frustrating and tiresome to be hit with a wave of political messaging when you're just trying to purchase a product.

A Nike store in Manhattan (Getty Images)

Teresa Mull

Democrats pick a bad time to punish the energy industry

With its new Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the government is pulling one of those infomercial tricks where they throw in a third bottle of OxiClean ABSOLUTELY FREE! Acting as if the cost of everything hasn’t already been calculated and passed onto the consumer. The IRA, you see, contains a “Methane Emissions Charge” that will impose a $900-a-ton tax on oil and gas producers that will increase to $1,500 after two years. The left is patting itself on the back for their valiant work to cut greenhouse gas emissions drastically by 2030. But here’s the thing: the energy industry is already working hard to cut emissions; it’s in their interest to do so. And when the government fines them for not capturing enough methane, guess who gets to foot the bill?

Stephen L. Miller

Celebrities embark on a Ukraine safari

The saying goes that there is nothing that celebrities can’t make about themselves. As it turns out, that includes a war in Ukraine caused by an invasion of Russia that's already seen thousands of casualties. It's almost as though there are two wars happening at once: one on social media, where guerrilla clips from the front lines show bodies, shelling, and damage to homes, and one playing out in the pages of Vogue magazine. This week, it was revealed that Oscar-winning actress Jessica Chastain had visited with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. The photo was posted to his official Telegram account and was taken from his presidential palace. There were also several shots of Chastain seated at a table with Zelensky having a discussion of some sort.

James Snell

Is Britain really ‘on the brink?’

There’s a macabre joke in Britain these days that my friends and family also play. We compete to see who has had to wait the longest for medical treatment. It starts relatively innocuously. People talk of the ordinary things: like having to wait days to get an appointment with a doctor. They call up in the morning at 8 a.m., only to be told that all of the slots are gone. Best of luck tomorrow. Then someone will say that they’re waiting for minor surgery. Perhaps a small corrective procedure. It was put off first for the pandemic, and now is lost amid a sea of backlogged work. They wonder if someone has lost their details in the slush. Normally I win, although not always. My old general practitioner retired before the pandemic, and his practice was transferred over to another doctor.

Cockburn

Liz Cheney is no Obi-Wan Kenobi

Cockburn was finishing a bottle of brandy the other day when he nearly spat out his drink. A columnist from the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart, compared Liz Cheney to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Capehart said on PBS: I keep thinking about the scene in Star Wars: Episode IV, when...Obi-Wan says to Darth Vader, "If you strike me down, I will come back more powerful than you can imagine." And to me, Liz Cheney is Obi-Wan Kenobi. If she loses...she could very well come back more powerful than Donald Trump has imagined. After laughing hysterically for the better part of four hours, Cockburn decided to weigh Capehart's point. Unfortunately he was forced to conclude that Liz Cheney is nothing like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Here's why.

Monday

8 Aug 2022

Andrew Donaldson

The gerontocracy goes on a spending spree

Like characters in a dystopian novel, the elderly bore the worst of it. Dianne Feinstein, whose friends were already whispering about how there she really was, was found walking back and forth between her private room and common area, which she was required to come to over and over again just to get through the 16-hour ordeal. Chuck Grassley, only a year younger, confessed to taking 10-minute naps and struggling to stay awake, while lamenting how he missed his family. Patrick Leahy, 84 and coming off hip surgery, was lucky. He received more comments about the Batman sticker on his wheelchair than he did questions about why he was even there in the first place. “Pat, I’m glad you’re here,” the comparatively juvenile Tim Kaine (64) remarked. “We shouldn't have to suffer alone.

William Murchison

So he thinks he’s Reagan now, does he?

“We are Reagan,” a Biden “confidant” tells Axios. After how many hallucinogens, the story doesn’t say. Pretty many would be a fair guess. The story wherein occurred the remarkable comparison never rose more than a foot or so from the ground, likely due to its fantastic nature. Nor was the “confidant” ever identified, possibly to spare his or her children's playground embarrassment. Any comparison of Joseph Robinette Biden and Ronald Wilson Reagan, if it ventures beyond their service in the White House, is about as nutty as comparisons ever get. It might repay us to ask the basis of such a claim, however fruitless.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden’s big effing deal

Biden’s big effing deal In a timeless line from Annie Hall, Woody Allen tells a joke about two elderly women complaining about the restaurant at a Catskill resort. The food is terrible… and such small portions. Democratic praise for the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed the Senate this weekend, resembles an upbeat reworking of the famous quip. This legislation is amazing… and so tiny! For now, the president seems content to stick to simple lines about “delivering for working families.

Daniel DePetris

One year later, Biden is right to have left Afghanistan

A year ago today, the Taliban captured the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, dealing the US-supported Afghan government an embarrassing blow and setting in motion a blitz across the country that would eventually send Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his closest aides into exile. A week later, Taliban fighters entered Kabul virtually unopposed. American forces would leave the country two weeks later, cutting the cord on a two-decade war that cost the US over $2 trillion and tens of thousands of casualties. "We succeeded in what we set out to do in Afghanistan over a decade ago,” President Biden said from the White House last August 31. "Then we stayed for another decade. It was time to end this war.” Much has changed since the troops left.

Sunday

7 Aug 2022

Matt McDonald

Trump at CPAC Texas: America should kill drug dealers like China does

Donald Trump headlined CPAC Texas, delivering a series of broadsides to the Biden administration to a packed arena at Dallas’s Hilton Anatole. The more than 2,500 seats were filled — with even more guests lining the aisles. Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was supposed to introduce the 45th president — but found herself bumped at the expense of Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for reasons that remain unclear. Prior to the former president’s speech, a short film played on the large TV monitors. “We are a nation in decline,” a Trump voiceover began. “We are a failing nation.” Gloomy black-and-white footage followed, accompanied by thunder and rain sounds. A screenshot of Trump’s suspended Twitter account was perhaps the most moving image.

Michael Auslin

What has Pelosi’s Taiwan trip wrought?

In becoming the highest-ranking American politician to visit Taiwan in a quarter-century, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has become the dominant foreign affairs news story of the month, eclipsing, if briefly, Russia’s war in Ukraine. Yet beyond all the sound and fury, Pelosi’s trip changed nothing in the cross-Strait balance of power. What it did was to legitimize the “mission creep” bringing Taiwan and America closer together. Both supporters and critics of the trip were quick to invest Pelosi’s visit with major symbolic significance.