Latest from Coffee House

Sunday

8 Dec 2019

Is it God’s will that President Trump will meet with Prime Minister Corbyn?

Perhaps it truly will take place. Maybe it will happen.Imagine the scene. President Trump sits with his nose upturned as if a member of his entourage is suffering the effects of an enormous curry. Prime Minister Corbyn sits with a look of vague discomfort, as if he is meeting a friend's drunkenly abrasive wife. Their handshake is tense and their words are limited. (They have some common ground. As someone else — not me — suggested they are both unfriendly if not hostile towards the idea of Nato.)Afterwards, Trump says ‘Grandpa Jez’ is a ‘crazy guy’. ‘But we have to work together,’ he shrugs diplomatically. Corbyn tells the British press that he grilled the president on his sexism, racism and Islamophobia.

Friday

6 Dec 2019

Anonymous

Confessions of a White House staffer: Nato and nutty professors

While it’s a bit disappointing to be back at work after a few days off for Thanksgiving, the staff definitely seems to be in a cheerier mood than normal thanks to Christmas being just a few weeks away. We were finishing up the final touches on the White House Christmas decorations over the weekend, including making some last minute edits on Melania’s video reveal. It almost seems like a waste to spend so much time on preparations, because we know the media is going to dump on them anyway.But we were able to get back at the media in a small way — scheduling the press tour of the decorations for 5 a.m. on a Monday morning. It was pretty satisfying to see them shivering out in the cold with bags under their eyes.

Thursday

5 Dec 2019

Stephen L. Miller

Pelosi’s rush to impeachment

‘Breaking news’ sirens sounded over the Twitter webs when Nancy Pelosi announced she is instructing House Democrats to draft articles of impeachment against President Trump. I hope you’re all sitting down. I’m as shocked as you are. Shocked!Of course, no news is breaking here. Pelosi is doing what anyone with a political pulse knew was inevitable when the Democrats took the House in 2018. It was only ever going to be a question of how and when. The head-scratching part of the ‘when’ is that Pelosi’s announcement comes only a day after the House committee hearings featured a professor at Hogwarts and a woman throwing full-sized cats at Rep. Matt Gaetz.

Dominic Green

Bernie Sanders leans into anti-Semitism

Just as Hollywood's racist liberals love a Magical Negro, so young socialists love a Magic Grandpa who promises to shake the money tree, annul student debt and hand out free subsidies to the kulaks. Not all socialism is the same, though, and not just because some of it is national socialism. The Chinese communists under Deng Xiaoping declared ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. America's Magic Grandpa, Bernie Sanders, is a socialist with American characteristics, a millionaire whose life was recently saved by the insertion of an ingeniously capitalist heart stent into his clogged arteries. Being rich, Bernie could, if he needed it, expect to receive a replacement kidney without it first being cut out of a tax defaulter.

Roger Kimball

Impeachment really is a pathetic clown show

First it was COLLUSION! Can you believe it? Trump was colluding with the Russians to steal the election from its rightful owner, H.R. Clinton. For a brief and shining moment, ‘collusion’ filled the airwaves and cyberspace. The president of the United States was colluding with Vladimir Putin, whose puppet he was. John Brennan, the excitable talking head who somehow became director of the CIA despite voting for Gus Hall, perpetual candidate for the US presidency on the Communist ticket, declared that Trump’s behavior was ‘nothing short of treasonous.’ Yikes.That show had a good run, almost two years.

Daniel McCarthy

Impeachment doesn’t work

So, impeachment it is. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will begin articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, and the vote will probably take place before the year is out. The inevitable is, it turns out, inevitable. Henry Kissinger knows something about impeachment. Not because his boss, Richard Nixon, was almost impeached, but rather because Kissinger is a realist. And the reality of impeachment is that it doesn’t work — the threshold for launching impeachment proceedings is low enough that it can be done frivolously, for merely partisan purposes. But the threshold for removing a president from office is so high that it has never been met, and it almost certainly won’t be met in the case of Donald Trump.

F.H. Buckley

American breakup: secession is much closer than we think

The United States is ripe for secession. Across the world, established states have divided in two or are staring down secession movements. Great Britain became a wee bit less great with Irish independence, and now the Scots seem to be rethinking the Act of Union (1707). Czechoslovakia is no more and the former Soviet Union is just that: former. Go down the list and there are secession groups in nearly every country. And are we to think that, almost alone in the world, we’re immune from this? Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided. I’ve seen it already. Before moving to the United States, I lived in a country just as divided, without the kind of fellow feeling required to hold people together.

Wednesday

4 Dec 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump hates being the butt of ridicule

Donald Trump, never one to miss a slight, canceled a scheduled Nato press conference on Wednesday, going into a snit about a video showing various panjandrums, including Justin Trudeau, yukking it up over his antics at the summit, including his impromptu and lengthy press conferences. https://twitter.com/PnPCBC/status/1202008162997538817 Trump employed the term 'two-faced' and he was emphatically not referring to the DC Comics character who first battled Batman in 1942. Instead, Trump, as is his wont, sought to depict himself as a victim of the condescension of both European elites and Congress.For now, the real target of his ire appears to be the congressional lawmakers who keep stealing the headlines from him.

Dominic Green

Trump is saving Nato

It’s almost Nato as usual when Emmanuel Macron calls Nato ‘brain dead’. It’s Nato as usual, and Donald Trump as usual, when Trump, who not long ago called Nato ‘obsolete’, chastises his bromantic partner Macron for being ‘insulting’ and ‘disrespectful’. It is unusual for Nato when Trump calls off a press conference and calls blackface artist Justin Trudeau ‘two-faced’.

Tuesday

3 Dec 2019

Karol Markowicz

Will Michael Bloomberg break double digits?

The big news on Monday this week was that latecomer billionaire presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg had ‘surged’ past Sen. Kamala Harris in a new poll by Hill-HarrisX. By Tuesday the big news was that Harris had departed the race. Was it Bloomberg’s stellar 6 percent showing that did it? Unlikely. The Harris campaign had had issues, as documented in a recent New York Times piece detailing the deep mismanagement of her campaign. One of the death blows in the piece was this line: ‘Today, her aides are given to gallows humor about just how many slogans and one-liners she has cycled through, with one recalling how “‘speak truth’ spring” gave way to “‘3 a.m.

Michael Tracey

Kamala Harris’s downfall has been obvious for months

The most meme-friendly and amusing explanation for Kamala Harris’s demise is that she was splattered by Tulsi Gabbard over the summer and never recovered. There’s some truth to that: Kamala had never been challenged on her record in a high-pressure national setting before, and the moment someone finally turned up the heat, she crumbled. The New York Timesarticle last week presaging the end of her campaign noted that donors were so flustered by her performance that they demanded she ‘strike back at Ms Gabbard more aggressively’, which was a tad ironic given on that same night Kamala had infamously declared herself a ‘top-tier candidate’ who need not trouble herself with the insignificant pesterings of a minor contender like Tulsi.

Monday

2 Dec 2019

Dominic Green

Prince Andrew has never looked more guilty

Prince Andrew has already lost his case in the court of public opinion. His floundering and implausible BBC interview about his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein saw to that. ‘Randy Andy’ also seems to have forfeited the confidence of his own family: after the interview was broadcast, he was summoned to Buckingham Palace and relieved of his public duties. After last night, and a second broadcast by the BBC’s investigative Panorama program, The Prince and the Epstein, it is impossible not to conclude that Andrew is an unreliable witness to his own life: on screen, Andrew’s already flimsy alibis dissolved in the acid of Panorama’s evidence and testimonies.

Marlo Safi

Hungary isn’t afraid to call ‘Christian persecution’ what it is

Following Donald Trump’s election, there was hope that the US would aid Christian communities overseas, especially in Iraq where the population of Christians was reduced by over 80 percent since the US invasion. The Obama administration was less receptive to a focus on persecuted Christians, often opting to use euphemistic terms. Christian persecution became known more as a series of sporadic, unrelated incidents rather than a phenomena. The US has invested significantly in helping rebuild Iraq, but the effectiveness of our aid has been limited, and some people on the ground in Iraq claim they never saw the entirety of the aid themselves.

Saturday

30 Nov 2019

Caroline McCarthy

Doorbell cameras offer a window to the wild

On the grainy video, the first cat trips a motion detector. A light suddenly bursts on, and anyone watching the video feed can now see the side of a house, a driveway, a white pickup truck. Behind the first cat, a second cat appears, and then a third, both of whom seem more perturbed by the light. They leap up a wall at what appears to be the back of the house, disappearing into the night while a fourth cat and then a fifth appear, following the path of the first cat, who lumbers casually away and out of view. The timestamp on the bottom right-hand corner of the video footage reads 1:33 in the morning.The cats on the video are not house cats; their long, slouching bodies are those of the American cougar, also known as the catamount, puma, or mountain lion.

Ben Sixsmith

Newsweek and the misunderstanding of ‘white death’

If you were concerned about ‘white death’ you can rest easy. Newsweekis here to tell us that the rise in white mortality is due to white people not knowing how fortunate they are. You think I’m kidding? The article proclaims that new research has found the ‘anxiety of whites’ is based on ‘a misperception that their dominant status in society is being threatened, which is manifesting in multiple forms of psychological and physiological stress.’ What a relief! And what poor tools. If only we could emphasize to them that their perceived loss of status is based on misperception, they could stop taking fentanyl. The research has been conducted by Arjumand Siddiqi and her colleagues from the University of Toronto.

Bradley A. Thayer and Lianchao Han

Michael Bloomberg’s Chinese appeasement

Michael Bloomberg’s entry into the race for the Democratic nomination for president has been underwhelming so far. As the race tightens, one of myriad problems for the candidate will be his close ties to the major national security threat posed by the US’s strategic rival — China under the leadership of the Chinese Communist party (CCP).Bloomberg panders to the CCP and to its leader, Xi Jinping, recently labeling him 'not a dictator' but rather just a politician, like any other duly elected leader, who has to satisfy his constituents. When challenged, Bloomberg stressed the point, saying 'no government survives without the will of the majority of its people, OK?' Xi, like all leaders, 'has to deliver services'.

Thursday

28 Nov 2019

Matthew Lynn

A US-UK free trade agreement will bring benefits on both sides of the Atlantic

It will no doubt be met with furious resistance in parliament and on the streets. There will be an outcry over chlorinated chickens. There will be scare stories about the National Health Service being sold off. And the farmers will be angry at the prospect of the country being flooded with food that is far cheaper than anything they can produce. Even so, assuming the Conservatives win the election, we leave the European Union and Donald Trump wins re-election to the White House (OK, I will agree the hypothetical is doing some heavy lifting in that clause), Britain and the United States are going to attempt a comprehensive free trade agreement. That will be a big deal. America and the UK are, respectively, the biggest and fifth biggest economies in the world.

Wednesday

27 Nov 2019

Martin Vander Weyer

There’s no need to mourn the loss of Uber’s London license

Early experiences of Uber in London did not encourage me to become a regular user. My first driver thought I wanted to go to Birmingham when the ride had been booked from Clapham to Mayfair. The next was a furious driver who would have seen off Lewis Hamilton at Hyde Park Corner. Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer the pottering black cab with its opinionated Essex-dweller at the wheel and the possibility of paying in cash. So my own modus operandi is unaffected by Transport for London’s decision not to renew Uber’s license in the capital and I’m not in the least upset about it. OK, life today is all about apps, cashless convenience and the individual’s right to make choices and take risks.

Will Lloyd

Why are politicians so obsessed with authenticity?

Every politician who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is the height of inauthenticity. Fortunately for lovers of comedy, many politicians are too stupid and too full of themselves to notice this. Every election year, another squad marches hopelessly into the enfilade of the inauthenticity firing line. Think of Bush I visiting the National Grocers Association Convention in Florida back in 1992. Bush ambled towards an exhibit where a new type of checkout scanner was the hallowed attraction. The fancy device could read torn barcodes and weigh groceries.

Anonymous

Confessions of a White House staffer: talking turkey

The Rose Garden became a makeshift petting zoo this week as POTUS played host to several animals before heading to the Winter White House for the Thanksgiving holiday. Shockingly, I am not referring to Rudy Giuliani and his comms team, which is headed up by a 20-year-old with less work experience than a McDonald’s fry cook.Instead, the press shop wranglers had to use their skills on Conan, the special forces dog from the al-Baghdadi raid, and Butter (or was it Bread?) the turkey. Realistically, it was not that different from keeping Playboy’s Brian Karem from crossing the rope line, except for when the turkey briefly escaped from his handler in upper press. Hopefully no one tells Janet why there are feathers on her desk.

Chadwick Moore

NASA’s multi-billion dollar Mars reality TV show green-lit for another season

The American businessman and astronomer Percival Lowell first popularized the notion of life on Mars in 1906 when he described vast canals observed on the planet, some spanning the equivalent distance of Boston to San Francisco. He believed an intelligent Martian civilization was in peril, their world drying out and dying, and they had constructed as a planet-wide irrigation system to move water from Mars’s polar ice caps to the rest of the planet.American folklore has it that the idea of Martian intelligent life was so pervasive that a 1938 radio drama of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, about a Martian invasion, ignited mass panic when millions of people believed it was a real newscast.

Roger Kimball

The farce of the ‘Anonymous’ Trump official

Remember 'Anonymous'? He — or, of course, she (or 'zhe' or 'they', etc.) — was the person who, back in September 2018, wrote an anonymous op-ed for our former paper of record, 'I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.' 'Anonymous' claimed to be a 'senior Trump administration official'. He took to the pages of the official fish-wrap because he didn’t approve of President Trump. He and 'like-minded colleagues...have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda'. Indeed, according to 'Anonymous', 'many of the senior officials in [Trump's] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda.' Who knows whether 'Anonymous' is for real — I mean, just how 'senior' do you suppose he (or, again, she, etc.

Caroline McCarthy

Digital media invented the Thanksgiving argument

Do a Google search for ‘thanksgiving politics’ and the results, well, show a trend.‘Have different politics from your family? Here’s how to survive Thanksgiving,’ says the Washington Post. ‘How to navigate awkward political conversations at the Thanksgiving table,’ USA Today warns. ‘How to avoid all-out political war at your Thanksgiving table.’ Thanks for the tip, NBC News. These days, the ‘how to get along with your troglodyte relatives’ news story is practically as customary at Thanksgiving as canned cranberry sauce.

Tuesday

26 Nov 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Will the impeachment inquiry stuff Donald Trump?

President Trump was talking turkey today. At the White House, he performed a solemn task. He pardoned what he referred to as 'the beautiful feathered friend, the noble bird'. In all, it was two turkeys that received, from the Chosen One, as his former energy secretary Rick Perry referred to Trump yesterday, his dispensation. Bread and Butter, who hail from North Carolina, can gobble further.Trump was intent on appearing in a magnanimous mood, but he couldn’t help resist throwing in a dig at Adam Schiff during his remarks, claiming that he had spared Bread and Butter from the indignity of having to appear before Adam Schiff. Indeed, a few hours before the event, Trump made it clear that another species of animal other than turkeys was really on his mind. He stated on Twitter, 'The D.

Monday

25 Nov 2019

Stephen L. Miller

Trump honors hero dog Conan. Media goes barking mad

There are a few scenes from the Trump presidency which belong in the pantheon of great American political imagery. There is of course Kanye West donning Trump’s trademark red MAGA hat for an Oval Office meeting. There is President Trump posing delightfully in front of a long dining table with every kind of fast food imaginable, like a presidential Willy Wonka, as he welcomes the Clemson Tigers football team with their Golden Tickets. And today, the American public and the world were (finally) introduced to Conan, the United States special forces Belgian Malinois credited with chasing down Isis mastermind Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, outside the White House.

Michael Tracey

MSNBC wages war on Tulsi the dove

MSNBC dropped all pretenses of neutrality at last week’s debate, not that its pretenses were ever remotely credible to begin with. Most of the time they’d at least attempt to play it straight, however perfunctorily. Of course, no one should have been under the illusion that running a debate well was within the repertoire of Rachel Maddow — one of the nation’s leading conspiracy theorists — whose very presence as lead moderator undermined the legitimacy of the entire affair from the outset. Even with the albatross of Maddow, though, it is conceivable that they could have striven for something resembling an impartial approach. Not surprisingly, that all went out the window when one particular candidate was targeted for open contempt.

Caroline McCarthy

Could Bloomberg’s huge ad buy backfire?

Around this time of the year, the biggest stories in the ad industry typically involve Black Friday and holiday campaigns. But then former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg decided to launch his bid for the presidency.After Bloomberg formally unveiled his campaign on Sunday with a video that cited his success rebuilding NYC’s economy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks (and credit there is well deserved), The Guardian reported that the financial technology billionaire had already purchased $30 million in TV advertising. That’s not a lot of money for Bloomberg, whose net worth is estimated at over $50 billion, but it’s a hell of a lot of ads.

James Adams

How tech is trying to solve America’s trash pile-up

Households in America produce 254 tons of trash annually and only 34 percent is recycled. Every person creates 1,316 pounds of trash destined the landfill, about the weight of a grizzly bear. America represents 4 percent of the world’s population yet produces 12 percent of the world’s waste and Germany recycles around twice as much as the US. The statistics tell one story. A different tale is that recycling programs across the country are failing as companies struggle to make money and the amount of waste that ends up as landfill is growing every year. It’s a depressing story of failed ambition confronted by market realities that has left the mountains of trash growing as a monument to American excess and unchecked environmental pollution.

Thursday

21 Nov 2019

Chadwick Moore

Bored, groggy Democrats drag themselves to another debate

After months of nuclear-grade wokeness — from open borders, health care for illegals, and abortions for women with penises — followed by a disastrous LGBT town hall, and one debate from Ohio where they briefly transformed into moderates, we joined the Democrats live from Hotlanta Wednesday night unveiling their current form: bored, exhausted, over it, resigned to lose.The MSNBC/Washington Post debate from Georgia, moderated by three women and Rachel Maddow, should have been an opportunity for Democrats to flex their greatest, rather only, muscle: pandering to blacks. Instead the 10 candidates seemed half present, perhaps preoccupied counting dollars signs for whatever corporate board position they anticipate landing after this long media romp is finally over.

Wednesday

20 Nov 2019

Matt McDonald

The Democrats’ open mic night in Atlanta

Fear not everyone — there are only seven Democratic debates left this cycle. As if the prospect of a fifth in six months wasn't exhausting enough, the Atlanta bonanza kicked off after 11 hours of impeachment hearings. No wonder the spin room was more muted than usual. Host Rachel Maddow opened proceedings with an impeachment question, making the huge assumption that most viewers had watched them (they hadn't). Of the senators running, only Bernie Sanders didn't take the bait. 'We should not be consumed by Donald Trump', he said, 'we can deal with Trump's corruption, but we also have to stand up for the working families of this country.' Much of the night appeared like business as usual.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Gordon Sondland delivers the goods

In turning on Donald Trump, American EU ambassador Gordon M. Sondland, who was sporting a nifty $55,000 Breguet watch today, performed what amounted to a timely jailbreak from the administration. 'Was there a “quid pro quo”?’ he said before Congress. 'The answer is yes.’ Sondland, in other words, was done being a yes-man for Trump.He had to endure a pillorying from Rep. Sean Maloney, who sarcastically observed that it took three times for Sondland to get it right in his testimony, but he ended up delivering the goods. In fact, a bushelful, far more than the Democratic lawmakers might reasonably have expected. Adam Schiff made the Cheshire Cat look dour as he unraveled the Gordian knot, reciting Sondland’s key statements at the close of the hearing.

Matt McDonald

The myth of Mayor Pete

What is it about Mayor Pete Buttigieg that's going to most appeal to the people of Atlanta? Is it the years he spent in consultancy on the McKinsey payroll? Perhaps it's the large donations he's secured from a few Silicon Valley donors — because we know how much the new left loves billionaires. And in a heavily African American city, his unspeakable whiteness, Harvard degree and subtle homosexuality should go over a treat. There are several reasons why Buttigieg shouldn't be the candidate to beat tonight — he shouldn't even be a threat. Yet he heads to the Oprah Winfrey stage at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta tonight as the talking-point-in-chief. The mayor's recent rise can be attributed to a few factors.

Charles Lipson

The Founding Fathers’ focus group on impeachment, 1787

We recently learned that House Democrats are concentrating their impeachment drive on ‘bribery’ because focus groups liked it better than other terms Democrats have floated. The term never appeared in previous testimony; no one accused President Trump of bribery or even mentioned it. That omission is only a minor obstacle, apparently.Focus-group testing is widely recognized as the best way to deal with grave constitutional matters, as well as marketing breakfast cereals and e-cigarettes. It is not surprising, then, that legal scholars are scouring focus groups throughout American history to see what light they shed on the Trump impeachment.The most important of these earlier focus groups was that of the Founding Fathers, secretly convened in Philadelphia in 1787.

Roger Kimball

Adam Schiff, ‘Lt. Col.’ Vindman and the impeachment ratings flop

'No.' 'No.' 'No.' 'No.' That pretty much sums up yesterday’s testimony. 'Did you receive any indication whatsoever, or anything that resembled a quid pro quo?' Former envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker: 'No.' Devin Nunes to Tim Morrison, former NSC official: 'Did anyone ever ask you to bribe or extort anyone at any time during your time in the White House?' 'No.' This follows the responses of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the question of whether he was offered a quid pro quo: US aid in exchange for investigating Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings with the natural gas company Burisma: 'No.' Ditto Gordon Sondland, US ambassador to the European Union: was there a quid pro quo: 'No.