Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Saturday

Matt McDonald

On the ground with Obama, Warnock and Abrams in Georgia

College Park, Georgia Former president Barack Obama came down to Georgia stump for Senator Raphael Warnock and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. But more significantly, the 44th president of the United States dedicated a good chunk of his stage time on Friday to mocking Warnock’s opponent Herschel Walker. In a move reminiscent of his 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech — which supposedly provoked Donald Trump to run for the presidency in 2016 — Obama performed a stand-up bit to demonstrate that Walker’s proficiency as a Heisman Trophy-winning football star did not equip him to serve in the US Senate. “Let’s do a thought experiment,” Obama said. “Let’s say you were at the airport, and you see Mr. Walker, and you say, ‘hey!

barack obama stacey abrams raphael warnock georgia

Friday

Oliver Wiseman

All signs point to a red wave

All signs point to a red wave It’s now just under two weeks until the midterms. Judging by the mood music on both sides of the aisle, all signs point to a very good night for the Republican Party. In the last few weeks, Democratic anxiety that their summer bounce had faded has morphed into something approaching a full-blown panic. The party’s closing message has shifted away from abortion and democracy — themes that many Democrats had hoped could deliver a stronger-than-expected showing come November — and onto the economy and healthcare. Look at the flight paths of the party’s big beasts as well as where last-minute money is being spent, and it all indicates a party playing defense — and struggling.

Om Malik

Why we should stop worrying and learn to love AI

Whether on British television news panels or late-night TV in America, it is hard to get away from talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Even the president of the United States has weighed in on AI, introducing an "AI Bill of Rights." The popular thing is to amplify the current media narrative — that AI will render millions jobless. It will eventually become more powerful than humans and destroy its creators. Just Google “AI doomsday” and then run and hide under the covers. I will be the first to admit that all technology has a dark side. Email came with spam and scammers; mobile phones came with robocalls and endless tracking by companies like Facebook. Artificial intelligence, too, will be used for nefarious purposes.

Thursday

Josh Hammer

Now is the time for a strong social conservatism

President Biden’s recent interview with transexual TikToker Dylan Mulvaney is a clarifying event for anyone who pays attention to America’s culture wars. The first notable aspect of the interview was the mere fact that it happened — that the president of the United States, in the home stretch of a midterm election season, deemed it a prudent use of his time to sit down with such a radical activist. The second notable aspect of the interview is what our senile commander-in-chief said in the course of his conversation. At one point, Mulvaney asked our hapless supremo if he thinks states should be permitted to “ban gender-affirming health care.

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Matt Purple

Democrats are losing because liberalism has become cruel

Welp, so much for the blue wave. That towering electoral tsunami, which was to deluge the midterm races in a soggy detritus of worn masks and Planned Parenthood pamphlets, has given way to a stark reality: 2022 is a Republican year. It was always a Republican year, as some of us have been pointing out. Voters simply weren't about to prioritize third-trimester abortions over rising crime and the price of beef. So it was that Jill Biden this week was dispatched to campaign in Rhode Island. Rhode Island. And while she no doubt made a pitstop at Brown to hobnob with her fellow doctorates, she was mainly there to campaign for endangered Democrats. In Rhode Island. A Democratic congressional PAC, meanwhile, is dumping money into deep-blue New Jersey.

John Pietro

The strange alliance between progressives and natcons on Ukraine

If you listened only to the rhetoric of so-called national conservatives, you would think progressives were their polar opposites. But on the issue of foreign policy, it seems like they can find some common ground. It was reported on Tuesday that the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to President Biden asking him to negotiate with Russia. It was later reported that the same letter had been hastily withdrawn after massive backlash within the Democratic Party. The missive was apparently written and signed in June, updated recently, and somehow carelessly published without all of the signatories’ consent. Either way, it seems to represent something real within the Democrats' progressive wing.

Wednesday

Jennifer Sey

When will Fauci admit the ‘open schools’ parents were right?

“Was it a mistake in so many states, in so many localities to see schools closed as long as they were?” an ABC reporter asked Dr. Anthony Fauci on October 16. His response: “I would say that what we should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that…” That was news to all of us parents who were called racists for raising the issue when it counted. For speaking of “deleterious consequences” during the height of the pandemic, we “open schools" parents were demonized and shut down. As the Chicago Teachers’ Union put it in a characteristic (but now deleted) tweet from December 2020, our push to reopen schools was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.

Teresa Mull

A healthy Fetterman would have lost the debate too

Last night’s debate between Pennsylvania US Senate candidates Republican Mehmet Oz and Democrat John Fetterman, was, as The Spectator’s own Ben Domenech described it, “political malpractice.” Watching Fetterman mumble, stumble, stutter, and glitch his way through answers made Joe Biden on a bad day sound like FDR delivering his stirring “Fear Itself” speech. But stroke or no stroke, Fetterman has no record to laud, and the policies he promotes are indefensible. Fetterman showed why he is unfit to serve right off the bat when the moderators (the real stars of the show) asked the candidates, “What qualifies you to be a US senator?” Both Oz and Fetterman seemed to confuse this basic question with “Why are you running?

Oliver Wiseman

The Alaska GOP votes to punish Mitch McConnell

What to watch for in the governors’ races Given the razor-thin margins and an array of races that range from the compelling to the indecent (more on that later), the focus during these midterms has been on the Senate. That’s understandable, if not inevitable. But in thirty-six states, voters will also be selecting their next governor. Those races are of great local significance, of course. But they are also part of the national picture. Here are some of the trends to watch. Blue-state blues It’s possible that the most eyebrow-raising result come election night is not in a closely watched swing state like Georgia or Pennsylvania, but in deep-blue New York.

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Letting John Fetterman debate was political malpractice

Like the proprietors of a gimp show at a carnival, Pennsylvania Democrats apparently get off on making the average viewer of their sideshow candidate feel deeply uncomfortable. Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, hobbled by a stroke that has done significant damage to his capacity, was wheeled onto stage at the sole Pennsylvania Senate debate against Dr. Mehmet Oz where the performance was cringe-inducing to a point that it made you want to change the channel, as if upon returning perhaps the dark joke that this man could be a senator would be over. This was a travesty.

john fetterman
Stephen L. Miller

Hillary is the queen of election denial

Hillary Clinton has an ominous warning ahead of the 2024 election: right-wing extremists, she said this week, are already planning to steal it. If they were, she would certainly know something about it. Hillary has been shrieking about “vast right-wing conspiracies” since the 1990s when she and her husband were mapping out their political futures of “Eight for Bill, Eight for Hill.” The poor woman just can’t catch a break. You'd have to hood Hillary like a falcon to stop her from talking about how elections have been stolen from her. She claimed that about the 2016 election, in which she seemingly forgot the state of Wisconsin existed for 104 days.

Daniel DePetris

America and Russia are finally talking to each other again

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu haven’t really been on speaking terms. That is, until last weekend, when the two defense chiefs conversed with each other twice in three days. The readouts released by the Defense Department are about as brief as brief can get. They don’t tell us much about what was said, other than the general observation that Austin, a former four-star army general, swatted away Moscow’s explanations for the war in Ukraine. What the conversations illustrate more than anything is just how rare they've been. Indeed, the reason why so many news outlets wrote about the Austin-Shoigu calls was because they were extraordinary.

Monday

Paul du Quenoy

Why Trump is soaring as Boris falls

“In order to make our country successful, safe, and glorious again, I will probably have to do it again,” said former president Donald J. Trump at a rally in Texas last Saturday. It was yet another hint that he will seek the presidency in 2024. Over the weekend, British politics simultaneously fluttered at the possibility that former prime minister Boris Johnson might return to office following the resignation of his successor Liz Truss. Trump and Johnson share more than a scintilla of similarity. Large and blond, both men made their way into politics as flippant populist spoilers, antagonizing establishment critics while inspiring outsiders who felt excluded from elite decision making.

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Ben Domenech

The data is in and the cost of school closings was terrible

Monday's release of the nation's report card on the academic performance of schoolchildren is just the latest stunning measure of how closed schools damaged young Americans. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which looks at the test scores of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading, is a devastating indictment of the nation's political leaders and teachers' unions, who collaborated to shut down schools and keep them shut for in-person learning long after those across most of the West had already reopened. We're only just beginning to comprehend the wreckage, which has had significant effects on school districts across the country, even after it was clear they could reopen safely. When Covid first arrived in America, its danger to young students was unclear.

randi weingarten
David Marcus

A Republican takes the lead in… New York?

After two weeks of tightening polls in the race for governor of New York, a survey released Friday showed a one point lead for Republican challenger Lee Zeldin in his race against incumbent Kathy Hochul. This is a political bombshell in the making, and one would have expected some kind of major pivot or shakeup from the Democrats. But thus far, at least on the issues that matter most, Hochul’s tank has been empty, despite a weak effort on Saturday to address rising crime in the subway. This past week, Hochul was on Long Island, not far from Zeldin’s home, to talk about a state initiative to fix potholes. Yes, potholes.

Cockburn

JustStopOil protesters attack waxwork King Charles with chocolate cake

The JustStopOil activists are on the loose around Europe again. This time they’ve chosen to stop off at Madame Tussauds in London — the museum of life-sized wax replicas of famous celebrities and icons. So, who did they set their sights on? Kylie Jenner? Taylor Swift? Or any of the other gas-guzzling, private plane flying celebs? Nope. This time twenty-year-old Eilidh McFadden and twenty-nine-year-old Tom Johnson covered a waxwork model of King Charles III with chocolate cake. https://twitter.com/JustStop_Oil/status/1584491199771316225 Perhaps in their simple minds, this gesture made sense. Two fingers up to the Establishment and all that. But the new king is known for his extensive environmental campaigning.

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Friday

John Allen Gay

Why Israel won’t give lethal aid to Ukraine

Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz announced this week that Israel would maintain its policy of not supplying weapons to Ukraine. This drew criticism, including charges that Israel has a moral obligation to help Ukraine and is instead foolishly prizing its relations with Russia. Critics also note that Israel’s archenemy Iran is providing weapons and advisors to Russia. They further point out that Israel’s Ukraine arms embargo puts it out of step with Israel’s most important partners in the West, especially the United States. Yet aiding Kyiv is a far riskier bet for Jerusalem than for most Western capitals. This is no easy call, and the one Israel made is probably the right one.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Steve Bannon is off to the slammer

Tabloid conservatism is the felicitous phrase that Sam Tanenhaus, one of our most astute analysts of the modern right, gave to the approach that Donald Trump, who faces various possible indictments, and Steve Bannon, who has just been sentenced to four months in prison and a measly $6,500 fine for failing to testify before Congress’s January 6 Committee, concocted as an alternative to the stuffy establishment mode that had prevailed in the GOP. A self-proclaimed populist, Bannon turned the website Breitbart.com into a juggernaut on the right and propelled the Trump campaign to victory. Absent his hard-edged approach, which included bringing various former Bill Clinton inamoratas to a debate with Hillary, it seems doubtful that Trump would have won in 2016.

Oliver Wiseman

Joe Biden starts to swing at Elon Musk

Lessons from Liz Ever wish your politics were a little more British? As Liz Truss heads to the exits after just six weeks in power, making her the shortest serving prime minister in the country’s history, that may seem a strange question. Westminster shenanigans feel more ignominious than enviable at the moment. Not to my colleague Matt Purple. Observing the Downing Street meltdown from Washington, he wonders what it must feel like to hold incompetent leaders accountable. He writes: If British politics has lately been ugly, grant it this much: at least they don’t have to stand for bad leaders. Truss was never a saint or a sun god; she was merely the current leader of the Conservative Party. Ho hum.

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Grace Curley

The Real Housewives of the Campaign Trail

As the November midterms draw closer, the spotlight isn’t just on the Democratic politicians: Their spouses are making waves too. A piece in Monday's New York Times fawned over First Lady Jill Biden, or “Dr. B”, as her students call her. The paper of record reports that according to a senior White House official, Jill “is the most requested surrogate in the administration.” That’s right. The best surrogate the White House has to offer midterm candidates is the woman who compared Latino Americans to breakfast tacos. That says as much about the numerous “rising stars” in Biden’s cabinet as it does about Jill. Her supposed popularity isn’t the only interesting tidbit in the piece.

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Kara Kennedy

The inevitable Boris Johnson

London, England When I checked the date that Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister, I thought it must have been wrong. July? The psychodrama that ensued felt as if it had been going on for years. If Boris’s tenure was the main show, Liz Truss’s stint as Britain's shortest-serving PM was the slapdash encore that no one asked for. You know, when the music restarts as you’re eyeing up a taxi home and secretly thinking the act needn’t have bothered. Boris’s downfall, the real one — not the multiple wobbles — began with Partygate. A steady drip of salacious stories for months, each one getting slightly more unforgivable, recounting incidences of Boris and members of his government breaching the strict lockdown rules he himself had set in place.

Thursday

Teresa Mull

The town John Fetterman ran is in ruins

Braddock, Pennsylvania Americans concerned about the economy — once again voters’ top priority — are turning their backs on the left. “Democrats’ momentum stalls amid economy worries,” reports CBS. “Republicans Gain Edge as Voters Worry About Economy,” echoes the New York Times. The Democratic platforms on policies that affect people personally — crime and public safety are other major concerns — are not winning. And there’s no one worse at delivering, and delivering on, the left’s failing messaging than John Fetterman, Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania’s US Senate seat. I’m a Pennsylvanian and have never understood Fetterman’s appeal. At all.

john fetterman
Peter Van Buren

Will the Supreme Court make it easier to sue the media?

Donald Trump is suing CNN for $475 million for defamation, claiming the network associated him with Adolf Hitler and portrayed him as a Russian lackey. E. Jean Carroll is in turn suing Trump for defamation in connection with him allegedly raping her. Mike “MyPillow” Lindell is being sued for $1.3 billion for defamation in connection with remarks he made about the 2020 presidential election being false. And way outside politics in America, a foreign English teacher in Thailand faces two years in jail for defamation over a negative online review of a resort he stayed at. What is defamation? Why is it so hard to prove in the United States but relatively easy to prove in most other countries?

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Matt Purple

How nice it must be to sack incompetent leaders

Liz Truss has resigned after only forty-five days in office, the shortest serving prime minister in British history. She's long come off as a stubborn and prideful figure, stuffed with confidence even if she doesn't express it well. It must have taken a momentous behind-the-scenes rebellion to convince her to go — and surely that's what happened. The past couple of weeks in British politics have been nothing short of mesmerizing. We Americans now understand how the rest of the world must have felt gawking at us for five years.

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Elle Gyges

Ben Sasse gets trapped between MAGA and woke academia

The 2022 midterm elections are less than a month away. And while the focus will be on the winners and losers, perhaps the more important story will be about the lawmakers who dodged the ballot entirely. Already this cycle, we’ve seen a remarkable number of retirements. Republican Senators Roy Blunt (Missouri), Rob Portman (Ohio), Richard Burr (North Carolina), and Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania) have all announced they will not seek reelection. Those familiar with the Senate will recognize these as some of its more bipartisan members. Earlier this month, another senator joined them: Ben Sasse from Nebraska. Yet his move is more provocative: he has four years left in his six-year term.

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Kara Kennedy

Why Liz Truss had to go

London, England Nobody in British politics really thought things could get worse than last night. Conservative MP Charles Walker told the BBC that the day was a "pitiful reflection" of the party; he added that there was "no coming back from it." Seasoned political editors described Wednesday as the most catastrophic day of their careers. The government victory on fracking — with 326 votes opposing the Labour motion to 230 backing it — was tarnished by claims of intimidation and bullying in the House of Commons. The home secretary, Suella Braverman was fired for sending official documents from her personal phone, something which is likely now a relief for her. Two other figures were said to have quit, but remained in their posts when questioned twelve hours later.

Wednesday

Paul du Quenoy

Why Gen X is the Trumpiest generation

Republican fortunes are again on the upswing as the 2022 midterm elections loom. A series of Biden administration legislative wins over the summer, along with the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, appeared to be mitigating projected Democratic losses in November. But persistent inflation, a recessing economy, a worsening national crime wave, a slew of foreign policy embarrassments, and other gaffes have combined to put the Republicans back in a decisive lead. A New York Times/Siena College poll published on Monday gave the GOP a four-point advantage over the Democrats among likely voters. In most categories, the breakdown by age demographic is about what one might expect.

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Ani Chkhikvadze

Homage to Kyiv

It was 11:15 p.m. in Kyiv, just after the curfew, and the military had set up its checkpoints on the city streets. Finding your way home after hours can be a hazardous business. The city is paranoid about assassins and saboteurs, and in wartime few are above suspicion. Things were looking ominous until my friend Sasha declared: “we are late for breakfast.” The guards waved us through. This was the daily password, shared with those important enough to move around after curfew. Checkpoints and curfews were a few reminders of the war in Kyiv, where I was just before last week’s deadly air strikes. In the capital city, life was approaching some form of normalcy.

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Oliver Wiseman

The Democrats become the MSNBC party

The MSNBC party Today’s diary begins with a tweet from MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid. For that I apologize. But with the midterms looming, and Democrats getting nervous, one of her hyperbolic missives was notably typical of left-wing frustration: “It’s terrifying how many Americans will choose literal fascism, female serfdom, climate collapse and the reversal of everything from Social Security & Medicare to student loan relief bc they think giving Republicans the power to investigate Hunter Biden will bring down gas prices.” These are the ramblings of someone living in a hyper-partisan bubble. They exaggerate and demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of, or even curiosity about, their ideological opponents’ appeal.

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Cockburn

The craziness of the Kevin Spacey misconduct trial

An antihero, an allegation, a court case, a neo-Nazi. The Kevin Spacey trial has been a hell of a ride and it's barely begun. This week, Spacey has taken the stand as the first witness in his own defense in his sexual misconduct trial, brought forward by actor Anthony Rapp. Best known for his role in Star Trek: Discovery, Rapp claims that in 1986, Spacey, who was twenty-six at the time, invited Rapp, then fourteen, to his New York home. He alleges that Spacey picked him up, laid him down on his bed, grabbed his buttocks and pressed his groin into his body without his consent. Rapp first made his allegation in October 2017. In the eyes of the public, Spacey went from antihero to villain.

Christopher Sandford

How the British helped JFK navigate the Cuban Missile Crisis

The Atlantic alliance hasn’t always been quite as special as politicians on both sides of the sea like to pretend. To take just the last sixty years: there were the differing views on Vietnam that led Lyndon Johnson to assess the British premier Harold Wilson as "a creep," while Richard Nixon privately considered Ted Heath "weak" and "as crooked as a corkscrew" (which was saying something coming from him). In October 1962, however, the principal Western leaders really did have something special. Between them, they probably helped save the world from nuclear annihilation. When on October 16, President John F.

Tuesday

Grayson Quay

What I saw at the Restoring a Nation conference

Take a drive through Steubenville, Ohio, Patrick Deneen urged the crowd at the recent Restoring a Nation conference. In downtown Steubenville, he assured us, the “blessings of liberty” are on full display. I didn’t bother making the trip. I know what those blessings are. We have the same ones where I grew up, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, less than an hour away: a population that’s dropped 50 percent since 1940, record fentanyl overdoses, crippling brain drain, hulking husks of abandoned steel mills, empty storefronts on main street, the steady decay of once-beautiful public spaces and everywhere the poisonous fallout of family breakdown. The people I grew up with are dying — and the best the libertarians can offer them is a U-Haul.