Latest from Coffee House

Wednesday

13 Feb 2019

Merkel’s immigrant boom wreaks havoc in Germany’s prisons

Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than one million migrants into Germany has caused a crisis in Germany’s prison system. About half the prisoners in Berlin and Hamburg are now foreign-born, according to the latest figures in the German press, and in prisons across the country, German is becoming a foreign language. This surge in outsiders on the inside coincides neatly with the 2015 decision to allow in migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. All regions of Germany report a ‘very strong increase’ in the number of foreign and stateless prisoners, according to data from the past three to five years. Prisons throughout Germany are overcrowded and struggling to handle the influx in population.

Dominic Green

My day: Ilhan Omar

I woke up, thanked Allah for not letting the yahud across the street hypnotize me in my sleep, then crawled to the window and peeked over the sill. The black Volvo was gone. He must have got up early this morning, to stuff more money into the mouths of the other members of the Minnesota delegation. I got up, standing strong. My husband gets the kids’ breakfast. He’s like a brother to me. Really. It’s in our faith tradition. His support gives me time to do more for my people. There’s so much to do when I get to my office, I barely have time to wipe my feet on the Israeli-flag doormat that members of my progressive and diverse community gave me when I won my House seat by defeating the yahud Phyllis Kahn and Mohamud Noor, who I now believe to be a yahud.

Daniel McCarthy

The Democrats don’t have a star

As Donald Trump closed in the Republican nomination in 2016, pundits grasped for explanations. The Republican field was too crowded – but then, why should a crowded field help Trump rather than some other candidate? Trump hogged the limelight, then: he was a celebrity with an unfair advantage right from the start, and the media lavished undue attention on him. Of course, all of that attention was negative, but it’s true that Trump’s name and persona dominated the race almost from the minute he got into it. Trump’s celebrity gave him an opportunity, but he made the most of it, speaking many truths about American life and politics that professional politicians dared not utter.

Tuesday

12 Feb 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

The scariest news for Trump isn’t about a border wall

It’s classic Trump. A president who knows the virtues of suspense is not going to render a final verdict on the congressional spending deal – which Fox News host Sean Hannity deemed ‘garbage’ – until the very last moment, trying to make it look as though he’s the Decider, when he really has little choice about whether to sign off on it. El Paso, where he ranted last night about the need to finish a wall he never even started, was his personal Alamo.After the 35-day government shutdown, which tanked his favorability ratings, Trump can hardly afford to create déjà vu all over again with a fresh one.

Freddy Gray

How Trump could monster Beto O’Rourke in 2020

It will be a delicious irony when the 2020 Democratic nominee ends up being another rich white dude. Picture the scene in July next year, at the party’s National Convention in Milwaukee. After all the talk of a new, rich diversity, after all the noisy women candidates have canceled each other, after Cory Booker’s self-righteousness sets itself on fire, and after the superdelegates figured out another way to block Bernie Sanders, the Democrats have done the dumb thing and plumped for Beto O’Rourke. He gives a tiresome, Obama-lite oration on the need to put history back on track and rediscover a spirit of open-borderness. He gives the second half of the speech in Spanish. The media sings his praises.

Barbara Boland

Tentative budget deal would cut ICE beds by 22 percent

Congressional leaders reached ‘an agreement in principle’ Monday night on a budget deal to prevent another government shutdown, Sen. Richard Shelby told reporters, according to Reuters. The tentative deal is far short of the $5.7 billion for border security that President Trump had demanded to keep the government open in December. Instead, this plan sets aside $1.4 billion and allows the building for an additional 55 miles of barriers to be added to the approximately 700 miles of barriers that already exist, Congressional aides say. President Trump has repeatedly said that a wall is not required along all of the nearly 2,000 miles of border that Mexico shares with the United States.

Christopher Buskirk

Conservatives shouldn’t get too excited about Tulsi Gabbard

When Tulsi Gabbard announced that she would seek the Democratic nomination in Hawaii’s 2nd district in 2011 she was quickly endorsed by a laundry list of liberal institutions including the Sierra Club and Emily’s List. She was asked to speak at the 2012 Democratic Convention and by 2015 she was Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. National Democrats were eager to boost this rising star, but now that she is running for president they are just as eager to snuff her out. So why are Democrats giving her the cold shoulder? For starters, during the last election, Gabbard was not down with Team Clinton or the corruption that follows them.

Monday

11 Feb 2019

John R. Schindler

Trust me I’m a Russia hawk — the Democrats are going too far

If only President Richard Nixon could go to China, per the hoary Beltway cliché, perhaps only yours truly could write this column. Longer than just about anybody, I’ve warned the public about the threat to Western democracy posed by Vladimir Putin’s aggressive spies and weaponized lies. As a counterintelligence officer for the National Security Agency, I was combating Russian propaganda, what they call Active Measures, two decades ago. When the NSA contractor Edward Snowden defected to Moscow in June 2013, I called him out as the Kremlin agent he is — as the Kremlin subsequently admitted — which won me few friends among the great and the good.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Why is Ilhan Omar still on the House Foreign Relations Committee?

Ilhan Omar is a confused anti-Semite. In 2012, she thought Israel (translation: the Jews) controlled the world through hypnosis. Now, seven years later, she believes something else: ‘it’s all about the Benjamins.’ Both ideas are classic anti-Semitic tropes. In a piece for Commentary magazine late last month, Abe Greenwald dissected the trope that had inspired Omar’s 2012 tweet. He writes: ‘The history of mystical anti-Semitism is long indeed. It predates Christendom and thrived, at times, long afterward. Martin Luther wrote that “a Jew is as full of idolatry and sorcery as nine cows have hair on their backs, that is: without number and without end.

Josh Kaplan

Ilhan Omar is telling the truth. How is that anti-Semitic?

What moves the wheels of American politics? Is it a dedicated tireless commitment to public service? A strong desire to better the lives of constituents? A genuine ideology? Maybe sometimes, in the odd rare case. But more often that not, it’s money. Money funds elections, it funds events all over Washington, it funds lobbyists who work tirelessly to make their cause seem like the only thing worth caring about at any given moment. Single issue partisan groups like the NRA, J Street and Emily’s List spent over $300m in 2018, over $230m of which went directly to candidates. Call me naive, but it seems possible that those donations, often vital to win closely contested districts, could perhaps have an impact on those candidate’s views once elected.

Saturday

9 Feb 2019

Michael Warren Davis

Tulsi Gabbard is the perfect Democratic nominee…for 2024

Let’s make it clear right off the bat that Tulsi Gabbard will not be the Democratic nominee in 2020. The party’s base is so consumed with hatred for the president that only one criterion matters: which candidate can cast embody the spirit of The Anti-Trump. Do you hate the Orange Menace for his divisiveness, his crudity, his total lack of chill? Then lose yourself in Obama nostalgia with Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, and Joe Biden. Or are you looking for an all-out brawl, fascists v. reds, Spanish Civil War-style? Well, Elizabeth Warren is sharpening her tomahawk, and Bernie Sanders has his game face on. Gabbard is not the antithesis of Trump, in either temperament nor ideology. Quite the opposite: more than any of her colleagues, she resembles Trump circa 2016.

Tanya Gold

Candace Owens and the rise of the know-nothing public intellectual

Adolf Hitler ruined nationalism for everyone, says Candace Owens, which is something of a niche complaint. (She had nothing to say about the toothbrush mustache which, in the 1920s, was a sign of moral seriousness.) Owens is African-American, and a rising star in Trump circles in the way that if you are African-American, or gay, and a Trump supporter, you become a rising star, because the pool of talent is thin and the airwaves – I mean Twitter and Instagram - are fat. ‘Whenever we say “nationalism,”’ Owens said, like a woman reciting a wonky Wikipedia page from memory, ‘the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler.

Friday

8 Feb 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Special delivery from Jeff Bezos

Enquiring minds want to know what fallout the National Enquirer story about Jeff Bezos, the proprietor of the Washington Post, will have on the Trump presidency. The Post, to the ire of Trump, has relentlessly pursued Trump, focusing on his illicit business activities.

Tuesday

5 Feb 2019

Michael Tracey

Stacey Abrams gave a dignified response to the debauchery of the SOTU

Most State of the Union responses by the opposition party are painfully awkward. Stacey Abrams managed not to be, so that alone is an achievement. It’s hard not to grimace when reflecting on past responses featuring down-home heartland governors inexplicably sitting in diners, or perhaps Marco Rubio’s infamous water-bottle sipping episode, which earned him a life-long reputation for unquenchable thirst. Abrams seemed natural and amiable, without resorting to any especially tedious gimmicks (other than the silly backdrop of random people standing behind her. Why is this necessary?). She also made some compelling substantive points.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Judging by his State of the Union address, Donald Trump is out of ideas

Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech tried to strike a unifying tone. But it was unnerving to hear him talk of rejecting the politics of revenge and the need for compromise. Did Melania write it? The only humdingers centered on illegal immigration, but they were essentially a recitation of his greatest hits. The same old claptrap about MS-13 swarming over 20 states and caravans heading for the borders and squishy liberals failing to recognize the dire need for a border wall. When it came to NATO, he was on his best behavior, stating that he, and he alone, had cajoled its members into forking over $100 billion to beef up their militaries. His emollient approach was jarring.

Roger Kimball

Donald Trump chooses greatness — and so should we

Donald Trump is not always as charming as P.G. Wodehouse. Nevertheless, his magnificent State of the Union Address tonight put me in mind of this remark from the preface of Plum’s great novel Summer Lightning: ‘A certain critic,’ Wodehouse wrote, ‘made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.”’ Waxing utopian, Wodehouse wondered whether, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha, that critic had by now been eaten by bears. Had he survived, though, said critic would not be able to make the same complaint about Summer Lightning.

Barbara Boland

Technology is damaging hands – not just heads

Silicon Valley parents are famously strict about their children’s screen time, even as they dish out their ‘crack cocaine’ technology to the rest of the world’s youth. Last week, however, Tucker Carlson upped the ante: he called on Congress to step and ban children from smartphones, as they do with alcohol. Researchers have demonstrated a link between hours spent in front of a screen and depression and anxiety levels in children. But screen usage damage isn’t just in our heads; increasingly, it’s also in our hands. ‘Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior pediatric doctors have warned,’ reports the Guardian.

justin fairfax ralph northam virginia democrats

John R. Schindler

Wokeness eats the Virginia Democrats

If there’s one word which symbolizes American progressivism in 2019 it’s wokeness. Asking what it means constitutes proof that one is not woke. Although wokeness can best be viewed as the pop-cult wing of the late-Marxist heresy called intersectionality by academics, it’s really more a cultivated posture than a coherent political program. The challenge with wokeness is its fluidity. Its arbiters exist mainly on social media as an unelected Politburo of sorts, and their edicts can change without formal notice. What was sufficiently woke yesterday may not be deemed so today, with real-world costs for those eager to stay on the vaunted right side of history.

Monday

4 Feb 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

In ‘Executive Time’, the president is doing everything but presiding

Is Donald Trump a new Winston Churchill? Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who fancies himself an expert on history, entered the lists today to defend Trump from allegations that he’s spending too much time loafing on the job. Churchill, too, Gingrich suggests, was a late riser who enjoyed luxuriating in his pajamas in between delivering speeches denouncing the depredations of the Nazis. Today, Gingrich tweeted: ‘The distortions of the hate Trump movement are never more obvious than in the reaction to the President’s leaked schedule. The ignorance of history of the current elites is pathetic. Churchill slept late, worked late, took a nap every afternoon (getting into his pajamas).

Freddy Gray

Abortion and the new covert culture war

What connects the Ralph Northam story, the Covington story, and the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation story? Is it the dark side of social media? The perils of high-school? Catholicism in America today? It is all that. More than anything, however, it is abortion. Abortion is and arguably always has been the nuclear core of the culture war, yet these days it hides itself. The pitched media scraps between progressives and conservatives are often still about Roe v. Wade, we just pretend that they are not. We act as if the Ralph Northam story is about racism. It isn’t. It’s about what he said about fetuses, and the tasteless whooping for late-term abortions.

Ben Sixsmith

The wrong Turning Point

As high-minded as people who write about politics imagine themselves to be, we all love a good slapfight. The word ‘debate’ might have lofty intellectual connotations but the most prominent war of words in recent history culminated with William F. Buckley calling Gore Vidal a ‘queer’. It would be fun, then, to write something very mean about the newly launched Turning Point UK, but I don’t have the heart. Everyone involved seems frighteningly young, and constructive criticism might achieve more than mockery.

Stephen Daisley

Shouldn’t AOC have Googled Jeremy Corbyn?

They don’t have jobs, they can’t afford a house, but millennials have one thing going for them: They’ve finally found their Ronnie and Maggie, the political match-up to define their era. British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have held what the latter calls ‘a lovely and wide-reaching’ phone conversation and followed it up with some Twitter gushing about progressiveness and stuff. Quoth Corbyn: https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1092174819154710528?s=21 And the reply: https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1092210825228636161?s=21 One of the benefits of centrism collapsing is that left-leaning politicians no longer sound like human resources consultants.

Dominic Green

Meet Alexandria Ocasio-Corbyn

Imagine if Hillary Clinton had a nice, warm chat with someone that 85 percent of African Americans think is a racist, and then tweeted that it was ‘an honor to share such a lovely and wide-ranging conversation with you’. The media would erupt, and diagnose Clinton as a racist. Or imagine if Elizabeth Warren hit it off with someone who consorts with Holocaust deniers, terrorists, and 9/11 conspiracists, and looked forward to combatting their global enemies together. Again the media would excoriate Warren. And with good reason, because we judge people by the company they keep. So where is the disgust this morning about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour party? Corbyn is a career communist, a supporter of Castro, Chavez, and Maduro.

Sunday

3 Feb 2019

Will Lloyd

Christopher Wylie is a hypocrite

Christopher Wylie burst on to the international scene last year in a series of explosive articles in The Observer and The New York Times. Here was a charismatic, gay, vegan whistleblower for the digital age. Pushed by journalists, academics and tastemakers as the central node in a networked international conspiracy, the Wylie story supposedly showed that democracy could be ‘hacked’ by a coterie of dark money billionaires, Breitbart editors, Russian agents and tech weirdos. It also neatly explained away the problem that so many people voted for Brexit and Trump.

Friday

1 Feb 2019

Rob Crilly

The Democrats’ phony war on corporate PACs

It is the other litmus test for Democratic candidates for president. As well as embracing Medicare for All, we know by now that the progressive 2020 runner must also oppose corporate political action committee (PAC) donations. What better way to show disdain for Wall Street and the big donors? Cory Booker didn’t need to make his pledge when he tweeted his hat into the ring this morning. He took the vow last year. So too Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro and the rest. Some in that list don’t need to burnish their Leftist bona fides. But Booker, like Gillibrand, has centrist credentials (the horror!) and is frequently accused of being a Wall Street lackey. At one time he received more cash from financial institutions than any other senator.

Wednesday

30 Jan 2019

Cockburn

Revealed: Steve Bannon’s ‘most influential Catholics’ listicle

Cockburn was flattered to read BuzzFeed News’s claim that what Steve Bannon wants to read is a ‘Catholic Spectator’, but puzzled. The Spectator is a broad church, broad enough to accommodate atheists, Bible-bashers, even that notorious sinner Taki. But on further inspection, Cockburn realized that Bannon is talking about British weekly The Catholic Herald, and its launch in America. What the Herald should do, Bannon says, is cultivate ‘Catholic influencers and millionaires’, and to follow the strategy which has worked so well for BuzzFeed, by running listicles like ‘The 25 most influential Catholics in the US.’ Catholic BuzzFeed, perhaps? The ways of the Lord are more mysterious than Donald Trump’s tax returns.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is Donald Trump losing even more allies?

The knives are out for Donald Trump. ‘The President blew it,’ former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s Late Show about the government shutdown. Yesterday the intelligence chiefs disputed Trump’s assessments of Iran and North Korea. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed a measure decrying a ‘precipitous withdrawal’ from Syria and Afghanistan.And it’s only going to get worse for Trump. Roger Stone’s statement that the Mueller investigation is a ‘speeding bullet heading for his head’ offers a reminder that he has failed as badly at impeding, or even shuttering, the Mueller investigation as he did at constructing a border wall.

Tuesday

29 Jan 2019

Cockburn

The Trump presidency is taking its toll…on the once fresh faces of CNN anchors

Jim AcostaChris CillizzaChris CuomoOliver DarcyManu RajuJim SciuttoBrian StelterJake TapperJeffrey ToobinFareed Zakaria.

Rob Crilly

How the shutdown helped Trump

Donald Trump’s reputation took a battering during the shutdown. He said he would own it, and he did. He took the blame and then he took the hit when he agreed to end the partial federal closure without winning funding for his border wall. So what was the point? A new set of polling figures reveals the point with hard numbers. It turns out that while his stand was broadly unpopular across the country, his no-nonsense stance resonated with one critical cohort of voters – people in key battleground districts, those that voted Trump in 2016 but swung Democratic in the midterms. They gave him the win on the wall and border security.

Monday

28 Jan 2019

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

#MeToo has hurt women in the workplace

About a year ago, I found myself at an eclectic dinner party. In our mix were men and women of all ages in all stages of their careers. Conversation turned to the #MeToo movement and the way it had changed the national conversation about sexual harassment and assault. A high-powered lawyer at the table confided in us that several of his male friends and counterparts had come to him after noticing a troubling pattern. These men — who were working for different companies, across a wide array of industries — were committed to mentoring men and women. They were eager to ensure that their colleagues were being treated equally and being afforded equal opportunity, regardless of gender.

Cockburn

BuzzFeed aren’t paying out unused holiday to their fired staff and People Are Freaking Out

It’s a rough life, being a liberal media mogul. Balancing your aura of caring for your staff and their rights with the cut-throat demands of your investors is testing at the best of times...imagine how hard it gets when your business hits the skids. So pour one out for Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s CEO, for whom this week isn’t looking any easier than the last. After suffering the embarrassment of having BuzzFeed News’s major Russia scoop unraveled by Robert Mueller’s office, Peretti had the unenviable task of laying off hundreds of employees across the country. Their entire national desk was culled along with many other BuzzFeed News staffers, in cuts brutally staggered over several days.

Freddy Gray

Trump didn’t cave

Trump caved, Trump caved, Trump caved. That’s the incantation, and if you repeat it long enough, the words begin to feel right. The president’s capitulation was ‘total’, say the media heads. He has been ‘humiliated.’ Nancy Pelosi ‘took him to the cleaners’ and ‘kicked his behind.’ This, apparently, qualifies as high-level political analysis. The trouble is, it isn’t true. Trump didn’t cave. He backed off. He may have folded, temporarily, but what journalists and many Democrats struggle to understand is that elections are not won and lost in news cycles. The irony is that many of Trump’s opponents accuse him of having ADD, of being a Twitter addict who watches too much 24-hour rolling news.

James Mcnamara

‘She’s got major ovaries’ – why people like Kamala Harris

Block after block, thousands queued to enter Oakland’s Frank H. Ogawa Plaza to hear Sen. Kamala Harris announce her campaign for president. As police and security fielded anxious questions – ‘Will we get in? Will we see her?’ – the guard by me repeated: ‘I’m not sure, but don’t lose hope’. Hope was in the air. It was an atmosphere of a home crowd waiting to see a hometown team: here, the junior senator from California, a ‘daughter of Oakland,’ raised by immigrants in the East Bay, who served as District Attorney and California’s Attorney-General before becoming the second black female senator and first Indian American senator. As I spoke to people on the rope line, they told me why they came.

Sunday

27 Jan 2019

Daniel McCarthy

The NeverTrumpers never learn

One of the lessons of the Trump era has been that Trump’s establishment critics are incapable of learning anything or reforming their ways. The same political and policy analyses they unsuccessfully applied in 2016 — which told them there was no chance Trump would get the GOP nomination, let alone become president — now lead them them to think Trump will get ‘primaried‘ in 2020. Could they be right for once? Not really, but it’s worth remembering that four of the last five Republican presidents have faced primary challenges during the re-election campaigns. Getting primaried is in fact the norm for Republican presidents over the last half-century, with only George W.