Latest from Coffee House

Friday

3 May 2019

Why Elizabeth Warren’s college debt plan sucks

Last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, hustling to get to the left of her rivals in the crowded Democratic field, proposed that the federal government forgive up to $50,000 in student loan debt for people in households earning less than $100,000 a year (amounts forgiven would shrink at higher income levels). The proposal is projected to cost $640 billion, though some estimates suggest the figure could be north of $900 billion. As one might expect, Warren’s proposal disproportionately benefits affluent families, since working class and low-income households are much less likely to have attended college at all — much less to have racked up substantial student debt.

Dominic Green

Free Louis Farrakhan!

Poor old Louis Farrakhan. There he was, happily vomiting hatred as one of the talented tenth of octogenarians who can navigate a Facebook page, doing no harm other than to Jews, white people, race relations, and the minds of the morons who follow him — and then he’s expelled from the kingdom of Zuckerberg along with Milo Yiannopoulos. It’s the stuff of Farrakhan’s nightmares: purged by the minions of a white Jew, and cast into the media wilderness with a gay Trumpist. It couldn’t have happened to a nastier person. Actually, it could, but it won’t. There are even nastier people that Farrakhan on Twitterbook and Instaface, but they do their vomiting in languages other than English.

Thursday

2 May 2019

Barbara Boland

House Democrats never wanted Barr to show up for the Thursday hearing

Did House Democrats actually want Attorney General William Barr to show for Thursday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing? No chance. The Committee knew at latest Sunday that Barr did not plan to appear under the additional strictures Democrats had decided to impose on a typical House hearing. They could have sent a subpoena. Instead, they waited for Thursday to advance the #ChickenBarr narrative and assert that the Attorney General is somehow evading the withering interrogation Democrats had planned. Democrats hoped a Barr questioning would provide their dozens of presidential contenders with viral YouTube moments.

Cockburn

When in the course of Human Events

The eccentric debut of Raheem Kassam and financier-attorney Will Chamberlain’s new Human Events is here. Ronald Reagan’s favorite magazine is now Raheem’s roundhouse. So how does it look? Not the worst. Eager to solidify the bridge between the Trumpzine of today and the conservative periodical of old, the site is highlighting a forty-something Trump shaking hands with the Gipper. ‘This is no time for “peacetime” Republicans,’ say the editors, dissolving any pretense of partisan non-affiliation. ‘This is a time for brawlers. And we are here to brawl.’ On tap for week one: Donald Trump Jr., Chamberlain’s legal analysis of the Mueller exoneration, the popular populist Italian writer Alessandra Bocchi and Conservative Inc. grandee Dennis Prager, among others.

Barbara Boland

Barr prompts a new low in MSNBC media madness

Coverage of Trump has caused mainstream news media to deviate from standard journalistic norms on too many occasions to count, but nowhere was their Trump Derangement Syndrome more in evidence than in Wednesday’s coverage of Attorney General William Barr and his testimony on the Mueller report. A major cable news network cut away from coverage of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in order to ‘fact-check’ the Senate Judiciary Chair and to call the Attorney General a liar. Apparently, this political analysis had to be done in real time, interrupting testimony from one of the nation’s most powerful senators. The words that got MSNBC so riled up were uttered when Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham said, ‘No collusion. No coordination.

Wednesday

1 May 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump is dining out on the soul of William Barr

William Barr took paternity of the Mueller report during his testimony before Congress today, declaring ‘It’s my baby.’ All that was missing was him breaking out into song, ‘I’ll say yes, sir, that’s my baby/No sir, I don’t mean maybe/Yes sir, that’s my baby now.’ Indeed it is.Barr may be Attorney General, but there was no Solomonic splitting of the baby. Barr fought a battle with an invisible Robert Mueller for possession, claiming that his old pal’s letter to him complaining about ‘public confusion’ as a result of the rollout of the report was, in fact, ‘snitty.

Michael R. Auslin

China’s war on Islam

The Reuters photo could be mistaken for a shot of one of America’s ‘supermax’ prisons, the ones where the most dangerous criminals are held. An endless green security fence, topped with coils of barbed wire, punctuated by soaring octagonal guard towers with 360-degree views, all fronting what looks like a massive concrete wall or side of a building. Yet the Chinese workers walking outside the fence give away the truth. The picture is not of a US prison, but rather a Chinese ‘re-education’ center in vast Xinjiang, in the country’s far west. According to research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, there are 28 such massive detention camps in Xinjiang, most built within just the last several years.

Monday

29 Apr 2019

Michael Tracey

The madness of the Democratic impeachment crusade

Since the release of the Mueller report, with each passing day comes a new and increasingly strident demand to impeach Donald Trump. The New York Times, Washington Post, and various prestige magazines are cluttered with such demands, casting impeachment as an imperative for the survival of American democracy. Mueller might have affirmatively concluded that no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia ever came close to being established, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats and their journalist allies from barreling full-steam ahead down this rabbit hole.

Ben Sixsmith

Why do terrorists attack houses of worship?

With the mosque shooting in New Zealand, the bombings of churches in Sri Lanka and the attack on a synagogue in Poway, California, each of the major monotheistic religions have had places of worship attacked by terrorists almost within a month. Houses of worship are a common target for racial and religious supremacists. In the United States, there have been, within the last decade, neo-Nazi shootings at a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a black church in Charleston, South Carolina and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. These events have kept alive a grim tradition, going back to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963, where Ku Klux Klansmen attacked a church with dynamite and killed four little girls.

Sunday

28 Apr 2019

Roger Kimball

It doesn’t matter who Trump runs with: he’ll still win in 2020

At this point, we can relegate the admonitions and advisories to the small print reserved for the disclaimers about possible side effects on bottles of medicine and past-performance-is-no-guarantee-of-returns notices on mutual-fund prospectuses. Sure, it is possible that Donald Trump will lose the presidential election in 2020. It is also possible that he will choose not to run. Many things are possible. But as I have explained in these virtual pages — taking care to post those cautionary bulletins — it is likely that Donald Trump will run again for the presidency in 2020 and it is very likely that he will win and win by a much larger margin than his victory in 2016. I set forth my thoughts on the subject at the end of March.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

The new normal of Poway

During the Passover Seder, Jewish families sing a poignant, and sadly, all too true song: וְהִיא שֶׁעָמְדָה לַאֲבוֹתֵיֽנוּ וְלָנֽוּ. שֶׁלֹא אֶחָד בִּלְבָד, עָמַד עָלֵיֽנוּ לְכַלּוֹתֵנֽוּ.

Saturday

27 Apr 2019

Dominic Green

The New York Times’s latest error of judgment: this anti-Semitic cartoon

Easter worshippers who opened Thursday’s copy of the International Edition of the New York Times were treated to a cartoon to warm the cockles of white supremacists, Islamists and lovers of ‘Edelweiss’ everywhere. The cartoon, apparently by a Portuguese artist named Antonio Antunes Moreira of Espresso, depicted a blind Donald Trump, resplendent in the kippah he wears at all times except when the cameras are near, being led by Benjamin Netanyahu in the form of a sausage dog, wearing the Star of David dog collar that all sausage dogs wear. Some people published something, and now all those over-sensitive Jews are blaming the entire New York Times for it. How thin-skinned they are.

anti-semitic cartoon tropes new york times

Friday

26 Apr 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Joe Biden is already under Trump’s skin

During his speech today at the NRA convention in Indianapolis, Donald Trump shot himself in the foot. ‘Now we’re going after the rest,’ he announced about Obamacare. ‘We had it done except for one vote,’ he added, in another swipe at John McCain. It’s a pronouncement that will surely feature prominently in forthcoming Democratic political ads about Trump’s relentless efforts to target healthcare. He also signaled that he has a proclivity for indulging in conspiracy theories, claiming that ‘Democrats are obsessed with hoaxes, delusions, and witch hunts. That’s what they’re obsessed with, that’s what they wanna do. And we can play the game just as well, or better, than they do.

Thursday

25 Apr 2019

Matt McDonald

The 2020 primary’s pivot to video

‘Charlottesville, Virginia is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history. We know it by heart,’ says a freshly sanded Joe Biden over swooping strings, in tight focus and excruciating high-definition. As the camera cuts closer, you can just about notice his watery eyes flicking from one side of the autocue to the other. The former vice president is taking up arms in ‘the battle for the soul of America’, and he’s doing it on YouTube. The build-up to elections used to center upon television air-time: CNN town halls, fierce attack ads, appearances on late-night talk shows. But the humanoid sociopaths over in Silicon Valley changed all that in the Obama era. Now the key battleground is social media, and the hunt is on for a viral moment.

Wednesday

24 Apr 2019

Dominic Green

Who remembers the Armenians?

‘Who remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Hitler asked in August 1939. Raphael Lemkin did. In 1944, Lemkin, a Polish-born Jew, published the theory of ‘genocide’. Lemkin’s models were the ongoing genocide of Europe’s Jews, and the Meds Yeghern, the ‘Great Calamity’ of 1915-16: the systematic murder of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turkish state and its local helpers. Today, on the 104th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide, we should remember the Armenians — and not forget the disgraceful denial of the genocide by the modern Turkish state. In 1915, some two million Armenians lived in Ottoman Turkey, three-quarters of them in six provinces of eastern Anatolia, on the borders of Russia and Persia. By 1918, 90 percent were gone.

Dominic Green

Let Trump speak!

Donald and Melania Trump will visit Britain in June for their first state visit, and the people of Airstrip One are preparing a right royal welcome. Last time, the plebs floated a giant orange baby in the sky, and marched in the streets of London. This time, they’re planning a traditional British welcome, including medieval rituals like the Trolling of the Guard, the Naked Protest at the State Banquet, and the Insulting of the Closest Ally. The constitutional status of the Insulting the Closest Ally ritual is murky, but the key part of the procedure is ostentatiously refusing to invite the American president to address the House of Commons. Many Americans carry a copy of the Constitution in their pockets, and whip it out whenever their rights are threatened.

Tuesday

23 Apr 2019

Freddy Gray

Without the Mueller probe, Trump is sunk

For so long, Democrats thought that the Mueller investigation would bring down President Donald Trump. The truth could be the opposite: without the Mueller investigation, President Trump is sunk. For two years, all that FAKE NEWS, as he so often called the allegations of collusion with Russia on Twitter, was the BEST NEWS Trump could have hoped for. The whole story was such obvious elite media madness that it induced mass sympathy towards him among the saner public. Trump knew that. Hence all the tweeting. For two years, Trump could make out that he would have already Made America Great Again were it not for the establishment collusion WITCH HUNT, and most people would say he had a point. Take away Mueller, and the heavy impeachment talk, and support for Trump starts to vanish.

Barbara Boland

Islamic terror and the Left’s pretzeled language

After years of Obama-era State Department obfuscations and Orwellian redactions, it was heartening to hear Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lay the blame for the ‘horrific wave’ of bombings at international hotels and Catholic churches across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday where it belongs: at the feet of ‘Islamic radical terror.’ Pompeo stated at a press conference Monday that ‘radical Islamic terror remains a threat’ and that the US, along with international partners, is working against the ‘evil’ of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other radical Islamist groups. That’s a far cry from the antics of the State Department under Obama.

Saturday

20 Apr 2019

Ben Sixsmith

Keep the modernists away from the Notre-Dame restoration

One heartening if dimly consoling result of the disastrous fires that swept through Notre-Dame cathedral has been the willingness of politicians and philanthropists to pledge their financial and institutional support towards its reconstruction. Yes, some of them might have an eye on acquiring good PR. Yes, believers might question the nature of their attachment. Still, it good to know that people will not watch the decline of beauty and tradition with absolute indifference. The reconstruction, though, will be fiercely contested. Already, modernists are sidling into the conversation with progressive platitudes and philistinic schemes. You might think the widespread shock and sadness that the fire caused represented love and admiration for Notre-Dame as it was.

Friday

19 Apr 2019

Michael Tracey

Robert Mueller pursued every avenue to dispel the collusion myth

If the report released Thursday proved anything, it was that Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors had an extremely broad mandate to investigate all conceivable angles of the theory that Donald Trump and/or his associates colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Page after page of the report describes the elaborate lengths Mueller went to ascertain whether there was any truth to this theory. And using the most emphatic language available to a prosecutor working within the confines of his legal remit, Mueller concluded with virtual certainty: No. There was no collusion.

Christine Mikolajuk

What if Congressmen weren’t allowed to hire accountants to do their taxes?

Here’s a wild idea: what if Congressmen and women weren’t allowed to hire accountants or lawyers, use software or go to H&R Block to fill out their tax returns? What if, like that brave 10 percent who do their taxes themselves, Congress had to sit down and do their taxes on their own? Their first time would be atrocious: wading through hundreds of pages of tax code, endless provisions, starting their forms out from scratch when they got something wrong. All this with the fear of making a mistake and getting audited, with nobody to blame but themselves. It would be glorious: our legislators would be forced to acknowledge how monstrous the tax system is.

Thursday

18 Apr 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump didn’t obstruct justice…because his surrogates wouldn’t do his dirty work

Total exoneration? Pshaw! The Mueller report makes it clear that Trump, to use his own evocative language, was and remains a bad hombre. But whether any more voters conclude that he’s one than already had is an open question.If you like, you can read the efforts of the New York Times reporters reading the Mueller report. There are some nice salacious tidbits. Informed by Jeff Sessions about the appointment of a special counsel, Trump slumps in his chair in the Oval Office and announces, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.’Not quite.

Roger Kimball

The Barr is raised

Thursday, and press report And one clear call for me. And may there be no moaning of the Barr When we set out to see. —Apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson OK, Possums, here it is in redact and white (drum roll, please): The Mueller Report, 448 color-coded pages, replete with almost 900 redactions. Who says the government isn’t effective at education: over the last months it expanded the vocabulary of many Americans by putting that nice word into general circulation. So quickly was the report edited and rushed into print that the Surgeon General’s warning against operating heavy machinery while or shortly after dosing up on the report was omitted. So let me supply the defect and warn you: the report is boring.

Matt McDonald

The Mueller report is out – read it here

The Mueller report was published this morning on the Justice Department’s website. Perhaps understandably, a fair few people are interested in seeing what the Special Counsel has to say, and many weren’t able to get on the site. Spectator USA to the rescue: here’s the full report.

Wednesday

17 Apr 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

How will Trump react to the release of the Mueller report?

President Trump isn’t supposed to be watching television at 9:30 am tomorrow. The White House has scheduled him to attend events that are supposed to make him look above the fray. But that’s also when Attorney General William P. Barr will take a breather from targeting asylum seekers and hold a press conference on Thursday morning to discuss the release of the Mueller report.If his previous performances are anything to go by, Barr’s comments will be directed directly at Trump in another bid to curry favor with him. Meanwhile, Trump himself is saying that he may conduct his own press conference: ‘Maybe I’ll do one after that, we’ll see.

Caroline McCarthy

Astrology apps are the safest place for venture capitalists to invest

Google co-founder Larry Page popularized the term ‘moonshots.’ But venture capitalists, apparently, are looking to the stars. An app called Co-Star, which provides slick digital versions of horoscopes and astrological birth charts, has raised $5 million in funding. An investor who put money into an ‘Uber for astrological readings’ company expresses excitement about the $2.1 billion market for ‘mystical services.’ Erin Griffith, the author of a recent New York Times feature on the subject, took a lighthearted angle toward the subject while nevertheless acknowledging that there really is business potential. Millennial women, she writes, have ‘traded [astrology’s] psychedelic new-wave stigma for modern Instagrammy witch vibes.

Tuesday

16 Apr 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

The genesis of the #NeverBernie movement

Is a #NeverBernie faction starting to emerge among Democrats? Sanders is on a roll after his appearance at a town hall meeting on Fox News where he garnered the applause of many in the audience and attracted several million viewers. He attacked Trump as a ‘pathological liar’ and defended his sweeping healthcare — BernieCare? — plan. After Bret Baier asked how many in the audience were willing to trade in their current plans for Medicare for All, a majority raised their hands, much to his surprise. President Trump was clearly irked by Sanders’s successful foray into hostile territory, tweeting “So weird to watch Crazy Bernie on @FoxNews. Not surprisingly, @BretBaier and the “audience” was so smiley and nice.

Chadwick Moore

Step aside, First Ladies: it’s Chasten Buttigieg’s time to shine

Jackie Kennedy oversaw a restoration of the White House and transformed the First Residence into a museum of American art and history. She also arranged for the Mona Lisa to tour America (a move that caused riots in Paris). Betty Ford, candid about her struggle with drugs and alcohol, established the nation’s preeminent addiction treatment center. Rosalynn Carter attended cabinet meetings and was the president’s emissary to Latin America and Melania Trump is a paragon of grace, elegance and style for American women to admire. But it’s time to step aside, First Ladies, because there’s a big, goofy, gay nerd coming through and his name is Chasten Buttigieg.

Dominic Green

Notre-Dame is a sign of the times

Notre-Dame is the symbolic heart of Paris and France, and a symbol of European Christianity second only to the Vatican in Rome. The apocalyptic destruction of a monument of such beauty and significance would be a sign of the times at any time. In our time, however, no one seems sure of what the sign means. I doubt I was alone in my first response. When I saw footage of the falling, burning spire, I assumed that this was an act of terrorism rather than, as seems most likely, an accident caused by renovation work. This is a sign of the times, even though it would be incautious to admit it in polite society.

Roger Kimball

Donald Trump, fundraiser extraordinaire

While we all ponder the mysteries of the Notre-Dame fire, let me say a word or two about a golden nugget of domestic news. Donald Trump, in the first quarter of 2019, raised over $30 million for his re-election campaign, more than the top two Democratic candidates combined. According to the AP news story, the overwhelming majority of donations were $200 or less, with an average donation of $34.26. You can look that up under ‘Populism, 21st-century American.’ All told, the Trump campaign has almost $41 million on hand (in addition to the $45 million brought in by the Republican National Committee). As a point of comparison, the Obama campaign at this point in the 2012 election cycle had about $2 million stashed away.

Daniel McCarthy

The curious candidacy of William Weld

Good news for Team NeverTrump: they have their man — a declared 2020 primary challenger to Donald Trump, and it’s exactly the man they wanted, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, a man who has graced a presidential ticket before, Mitt… Sorry, Willard… No, wait… Will... William. As in William Weld. The other former Republican governor of Massachusetts who once had a spot on a national ticket, as the Libertarian party’s 2016 nominee for vice president. Romney has carpet-bagged his way to the US Senate, after all, a perch from which he can write Washington Post op-eds to show how woke he’s become.

Paddy Ryan

We should be watching Chinese meddling, not Russian

‘Russian influence’ is everywhere these days, especially if you’re a liberal. From the White House to Brexit, the Donbass to the Baltics, the specter of Russian expansionism is inescapable in the news. But have Western media identified the wrong zeitgeist? For a malevolent power, Russia is all too conspicuous. Real mastery of subterfuge entails a degree of subtlety. ‘Russia is very aggressive...up-in-your face,’ says Donald N. Jensen, of the Center for European Policy Analysis. ‘China seems to be a bit more discreet...even when it fails, you don’t really know it.’ Chinese meddling may go unnoticed in Europe and North America, but it is more conspicuous in Australia and New Zealand.

Monday

15 Apr 2019

Cockburn

Donald Trump’s Notre-Dame fire solution would ‘destroy’ the building, says French fireman

Times of crisis call for great leadership. Tragedy struck today in Paris when the 856-year-old Notre-Dame Cathedral caught fire. As Cockburn writes, the spire has just fallen. The premiers of France’s allies have been quick to offer words of condolence. ‘My thoughts are with the people of France tonight and with the emergency services who are fighting the terrible blaze at Notre-Dame cathedral,’ tweeted British Prime Minister Theresa May. ‘Shocking pictures from Paris. A landmark, World Heritage site and one of the most beautiful buildings in French history, Notre-Dame is on fire. We hope no one is hurt. Our thoughts are in Paris,’ wrote Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

Will Lloyd

Democrats, not Republicans, will dismantle Obama’s legacy

Last week Barack Obama, grayer, wearier and older in every way, was in Berlin at one of his foundation’s conferences for ‘emerging leaders’ in Berlin. After wheeling out a few cringe-inducing platitudes like ‘I don’t have a regular meditation practice’ Obama did say something genuinely interesting about where the Democrats are heading going into 2020. He warned that elements of the party were becoming a ‘circular firing squad’ who targeted those ‘straying from purity’ on a variety of issues.