Latest from Coffee House

Tuesday

18 Oct 2022

Cockburn

J.D. Vance owns Tim Ryan after Ryan calls him a racist

Cockburn watched with delight last night as Ohio’s Democratic candidate for US Senate, Tim Ryan, served up an absurd accusation against Republican candidate J.D. Vance — only to have Vance spike the allegation in Ryan's face with the force of Kerri Walsh Jennings. It all started when one of the debate moderators, in a blasé, 1960s Firing Line kind of way, asked Ryan for his opinion of the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that powerful Jews are conspiring to replace white Americans with minorities and foreigners. Ryan said he thinks the theory is nonsense, “grounded in some of the most racially divisive writings in the history of the world.

Cockburn

Sleepy Joe leads the work-from-home crusade

Rejoice, slackers of America! For there is a new figurehead leading your crusade for lunchtime naps, camera-off Zoom meetings and sea-level productivity. Yes, Joe Biden has, finally, excelled at something: he is the president that has spent most time at home. According to CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who has been meticulously keeping tabs of Biden's days off, since taking the White House as his official residence, the president has traveled to his home in Delaware fifty-five times. Whether he’s practicing his cycling skills, injuring himself while playing with his dogs naked or lounging in his $2.

Daniel DePetris

How long can Europe’s support for Ukraine last?

Can Ukraine sustain a war effort that is proceeding far better than most military analysts ever expected? Part of that answer, of course, depends on the extent to which the Ukrainian army can keep their troops in the field equipped, supplied, and motivated. That challenge comes as the Russian military increasingly relies on so-called “kamikaze drones” to strike deep into Ukrainian territory (on October 17, a Russian drone attack killed four people in Kyiv during the morning rush hour). But another factor that will determine success or failure is whether Europe remains onboard — or, more to the point, whether Europe’s support to Kyiv will continue as the war enters a dreary, unforgiving winter.

Matt McDonald

Carnage meets courtesy at the Georgia debates

Atlanta, Georgia Georgia’s leading political candidates crossed swords earlier this week at the Georgia Public Broadcasting studios for the Atlanta Press Club’s Loudermilk-Young debate series. Well, most of them did. A few contenders — from both parties — decided to swerve the chance to engage with their opponents, the public and the press. At least two of them — Lucy McBath and David Scott — are incumbent Democrats whose districts cover the Atlanta suburbs. Yes, the traffic is bad and their seats are basically locks, but those are hardly reasons to skip an opportunity to prove that the Dems are the "party of accountability" that "respects the press" rather than scorns it.

Monday

17 Oct 2022

Ben Kew

Is TRUTH Social doomed to fail?

Following his suspension from Twitter in the wake of January 6, the question of where Donald Trump would take his tweets was a matter of much public debate. At the time, his options were limited. The obvious choice was Parler, which had experienced rapid growth in response to Twitter’s censorship. Yet after Amazon pulled its web hosting services over concerns about “hate speech,” the company fast imploded. The only other possibility was Gab, though its reputation as a cesspool of racist bile meant it likely would have been a PR disaster that even Trump would have struggled to weather. Seemingly out of ideas, Trump started an online blog, although that project was short-lived. His only other prospect was to launch a new platform at which he would be the star attraction.

Gilbert T. Sewall

Los Angeles will never be multicultural heaven

A secret hour-long recording of an October 2021 meeting of Los Angeles city politicos surfaced last week, as California’s midterm election ballots arrived in the mail. Taking the city and nation by storm, the leaked audio exposed the cutthroat racial politics and deceit of elected officials who pretend to be tribunes of diversity. Los Angeles city council president Nury Martinez, councilman Kevin de León, and Ron Herrera, head of the 800,000-member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, were caught red-handed, plotting to increase Latino political power through proposed re-districting. Amid talking about who’ll help and hinder la raza, Martinez stated in Spanish that white, gay council member Mike Bonin’s adopted black child had acted “like a little monkey" at a parade.

Oliver Wiseman

Xi, Biden and a changed world

Biden knows that the world has changed Yesterday, while Joe Biden was picking up some competitively priced work outfits at a strip mall in Delaware (more on that later), Xi Jinping took to the stage in Beijing to deliver the opening address of the Chinese Communist Party conclave at which he is set to extend his rule into a second decade. Over more than two hours, Xi set out an uncompromising, nationalistic path for China’s future. The longest applause came as he took a hard line on Taiwan: “The wheels of history are rolling on toward China’s reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Complete reunification of our country must be realized, and it can, without doubt, be realized.

Ben Domenech

Will the Nury Martinez fallout break Los Angeles politics?

The resignation of Nury Martinez, the first Latina president of the Los Angeles City Council, is a dramatic development that could have wide ranging ramifications for the future of LA politics. In the wake of the release of an October 2021 conversation where Martinez and other council members made racist remarks in the context of a discussion of redistricting, acting council head Mitch O'Farrell has also demanded the resignations of Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, saying the "people's business cannot be conducted" until they step down. https://twitter.com/MitchOFarrell/status/1580386608729112576 There are immediate consequences to this explosive story, but then there are also potential long-term implications which are worth considering.

Sunday

16 Oct 2022

John Pietro

The right’s dangerous embrace of soft isolationism

Traditionally, the GOP has been the favorite of those concerned with safety and national security. The party of Ronald Reagan emphasized the need for strong engagement abroad, a willingness to project power when necessary, and a commitment to the free world. Yet the contours of the conservative movement have begun to change in recent years, calling into question the GOP’s credibility on the issue of security. The growing support for a sort of soft isolationism is a problem. It is also fundamentally not conservative. Prominent voices from the American right have been carrying the banner of soft isolationism for years, from Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance to Senator Josh Hawley and former president Donald Trump.

Saturday

15 Oct 2022

Peter Van Buren

Elon Musk should kill Twitter for good

Nothing would be better than for Elon Musk to buy Twitter and then kill it. Take it offline. Delete it. Make it go away. What's the point anymore? Like some aged European monarchy, the service has become too inbred to say anything useful. It exists now as a giant push survey, claiming the appearance of action equals action. Even the cancellation of people, for which Twitter has become uniquely known, is like a magic spell that you have to believe in for it to work. Live outside the Twitter demographic and it does not matter. Listening to people talk, you'd think Twitter had the power to raise the dead, or, more often, the opposite. Twitter is the physical embodiment of what Glenn Greenwald describes as Democrats criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology.

Roger Kimball

A history lesson for Donald Trump

I take a page from history. On Thursday, the Committee (you know which one) voted 9-0 to subpoena the former president. Of course, he might refuse to comply with the subpoena. What then? Here’s one scenario, per CNN: "Contempt. The full House, which is controlled by Democrats until at least January, could vote to hold him in contempt of Congress, something it’s done with several other uncooperative witnesses "Referral. After a contempt of Congress referral, the Justice Department could then prosecute, as it did with Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon and plans to do with his once economic advisor Peter Navarro "Prosecution. If found guilty, as Bannon was, Trump could theoretically face a minimum of thirty days in jail.

Friday

14 Oct 2022

Dave Seminara

Why does the media never call world leaders ‘far left’?

Italy is about to have its first female leader and the American left is furious. Giorgia Meloni grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Rome and was raised by a single mother, after her father, a communist, fled to the Canary Islands and was later convicted of drug trafficking in Mallorca. She wrote in her autobiography that her mother planned to have an abortion when she was pregnant with her but changed her mind at the last minute. Meloni worked as a nanny, a waitress, and a bartender before getting into politics, but she’s no AOC. Meloni, 45, is the leader of the right-wing populist Brothers of Italy party, which recently won Italy’s general election with 26 percent of the vote. She’s widely expected to be named Italy’s first female prime minister.

Oliver Wiseman

The Fetterman fuss about nothing

The Fetterman fuss about nothing This week, John Fetterman sat down for his first on-camera interview since he suffered a stroke just a few days before the Democratic primary in May. Fetterman’s circumstances — running for Senate while recovering from a major medical incident — are highly unusual. Dasha Burns and her NBC colleagues conducted an exemplary interview given these circumstances. They allowed Fetterman the use of closed caption software that he says he needs to overcome the auditory processing difficulties he has dealt with since the stroke. In questioning Fetterman about his health, Burns was tough but sympathetic.

Nathan Picarsic and Emily de La Bruyere

It’s time for the US to revoke China’s ‘normal trade’ status

In April 2022, six weeks after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden signed legislation to suspend Russia’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status. “Revoking PNTR from Russia,” he said, “is going to make it harder for Russia to do business with the United States… The free world is coming together to defeat Putin.” PNTR status, also known as Most Favored Nation (MFN) status, is a designation granted among World Trade Organization members. Receiving nations are awarded all trade advantages that any other nation receives. Revoking PNTR status from Russia was a strategic move. It opened the door to deliver comprehensive economic strikes against Moscow and sent a clear signal to markets.

Thursday

13 Oct 2022

John Pietro

The Russia-Iran axis that’s menacing Ukraine

Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine is coming up on its eighth month, and the costs to the Kremlin’s military have been immense. Increasingly isolated on the world stage, Vladimir Putin has joined the world’s club of pariah states, the only group willing to give him support. Chief among his allies is the Islamic Republic of Iran, a state with similarly imperialistic designs and global isolation. This axis has been brewing for some time — the two nations worked together extensively in Syria, for example — but the relationship has reached new heights as the Russian armed forces buckle under the strain of war. Perhaps the most potent symbols of this relationship are the hundreds of Iranian drones flooding into Ukraine to fill a gap in Russia’s weapons inventory.

Teresa Mull

Obama’s border chief: Mayorkas is a ‘scumbag’

In front of the whole world, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threw the Border Patrol agents he oversees — and our country's reputation — under the bus. Now, two leading border chiefs are ushering the DHS secretary toward the exit. Mark Morgan, head of the US Border Patrol under Barack Obama, has dubbed Mayorkas "the most dangerous man in the Biden administration" and is calling for his impeachment. Morgan also slammed the DHS head for choosing "to withhold the truth." Former ICE director Tom Homan is equally blunt: "He should resign.

Roger Kimball

Alejandro Mayorkas has no shame

Who is the worst cabinet secretary in Joe Biden’s administration? I know that the competition is stiff. Ponder, if your stomach can take it, secretary of state Antony Blinken, the stuffed shirt to end all stuffed shirts. Or secretary of defense Lloyd “Stand Down” Austin, the man who, with General Mark “White Rage” Milley, has transformed the US military into a racially obsessed reform school for budding transsexuals. Halloween is coming — and the Biden administration could field the entire team. But for this quarter’s top prize must surely go to Alejandro Mayorkas, the man in charge of the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security.

Cockburn

Elon Musk vs Ian Bremmer: who’s telling the truth?

Cockburn wasn’t surprised to hear that Elon Musk had found himself in yet another spat, but he was somewhat shocked to hear that this one was a matter of national security. This week's he-said-she-said involved political scientist Ian Bremmer. In a newsletter sent to his Eurasia Group subscribers, Bremmer wrote that Tesla CEO Musk had told him that Putin was “prepared to negotiate,” but only if Crimea remained Russian, if Ukraine accepted a form of permanent neutrality — and Ukraine recognized Russia’s annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. So, not asking too much then. Musk hit back in response to a tweet asking whether Bremmer's statement was true, replying: “No, it is not. I have spoken to Putin only once and that was about eighteen months ago.

Wednesday

12 Oct 2022

Teresa Mull

The tricky debate over fossil fuels on Native American land

The Biden administration has found itself between a rock and a hard seam of coal. A cohort of Native American tribes have realized just how sacred — and lucrative — their lands really are, and they’re not trusting the promises of an old white man this time. “When the administration says, ‘We're going to create all these millions of jobs if we just switched over [to renewable energy] today,’ they haven't shown us the fine print that says where those jobs are coming, which region, doing what,” Daniel Cardenas, chairman of the National Tribal Energy Association and member of the Pit River Tribe, told Fox News Digital in an interview. "When you start questioning them there, then they start getting defensive.

Oliver Wiseman

Meet the Democratic misfits

Misfit Democrats This week, almost identical critiques of the Democrats’ midterms strategy came from two surprisingly different sources. Leftist senator Bernie Sanders expressed his “alarm” at the idea that Democrats could “cut the thirty-second abortion ads and coast to victory.” It would, he said, “be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy.” Former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville agreed: “A lot of these consultants think if all we do is run abortion spots that will win for us. I don’t think so. It’s a good issue. But if you just sit there and they’re pummeling you on crime and pummeling you on the cost of living, you’ve got to be more aggressive than just yelling abortion every other word.

Ben Domenech

Tulsi Gabbard’s road not taken

Tulsi Gabbard has been a de facto outsider within the Democratic Party for a long time. Now, she's finally made it official, leaving the party she served first in the Hawaii State House and then in Congress for eight years. Tulsi also announced a new Substack and a podcast as her next moves. Gabbard's path to this moment was marked by fascinating developments within the culture wars that came to characterize the Obama-Biden era of the Democratic Party. Once viewed as a rising star within the ranks — she was the first Hindu woman and the first female combat veteran in Congress — she was unanimously elected as vice chair of the party in 2013.

Cockburn

Study: it’s not Adam Levine’s fault

After love rat Adam Levine and wife Behati Prinsloo were pictured smiling on a beach were released, it seems that all is well after his cheating scandal erupted two weeks ago. The forty-three-year-old Maroon 5 singer denied cheating on his pregnant wife, after model Sumner Stroh claimed that they had a year-long affair in a TikTok video. Following her admission, two other women came out with messages purportedly from Levine. But could his conduct be down to science? An August study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior journal seems to think so. The authors concluded that infidelity may be contagious. That’s right, hanging out with sleazebags could make you one too.

Tuesday

11 Oct 2022

Ben Kew

Can Venezuela’s exodus become America’s gain?

Since the onset of Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian crisis back in 2015, around 6.8 million people have fled the country in search of refuge. The most popular destinations include neighboring countries Colombia and Brazil, as well as a host of other Latin American countries. Many who can afford it have also found safe passage to Europe. Yet many of Venezuela’s poorest and most disaffected are setting their sights on another destination entirely: the United States. At the height of the country’s troubles between 2015 and 2018, the number of Venezuelans apprehended by US officials never exceeded 100 people a year. Fast forward to 2022, and more than 150,000 Venezuelans have arrived this year already.

Charles Lipson

Russia’s brutal strategy of war is failing

Ukraine’s devastating attack on the Crimean Bridge and Russia’s sickening response — deliberately targeting civilians — perfectly encapsulate how these adversaries are fighting this war. Ukraine has a coherent strategy, effective operational design, and close coordination among its forces. Russia is failing because it has none of this. The centerpiece of Ukraine's strategy is eviscerating Russian combat power without getting into a raw slugfest that would sacrifice its own troops. That means knocking out Russian combat power without a head-on battle, wherever possible. How does Ukraine do that?

Monday

10 Oct 2022

Rebeccah Heinrichs

Why is Biden giving up on nuclear deterrence?

What’s more alarming than President Trump trying to frighten Kim Jong-un with “fire and fury”? President Biden trying to frighten Americans with Putin. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” the president riffed at a New York fundraiser, while fretting to supporters about his need to find that elusive off-ramp for the Russians. Biden’s loose talk about Putin’s formidability contrasted with US handwringing fits a pattern. Pervasive throughout Putin’s war has been far too much focus on what the United States should do to help Putin find these mythical off-ramps, and on how to restrain Ukraine to prevent it from getting nuked.

Daniel DePetris

How the Ukrainians personally humiliated Putin

The Russian army has been the source of an endless list of shortcomings and embarrassments over the last eight months. There are simply too many of them to count, from the failure to move through Kyiv’s suburbs in March to the sinking of the flagship Moskva in April to the loss in September of more than 3,000 square kilometers of territory in just days. But by far the most humiliating to Vladimir Putin personally was last weekend’s attack on the twelve-mile bridge that connects mainland Russia with Crimea, the peninsula Moscow annexed in 2014. That bridge, which cost more than $7 billion to build, was one of Putin’s pet projects, a visible signal to the world about Moscow’s staying power in the region.

Saturday

8 Oct 2022

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Vladimir Putin is simply mad

Vladimir Putin is mad: not in the cognitive but in the emotional sense of the word. He is an odd mixture of the cold, the plotting, the calculating, and the bloodless; the emotional, the impulsive, the hotblooded, and the sentimental. He is mad, in other words, in precisely the way that Adolf Hitler was mad. And like Hitler, Putin is disconnected from the world of fact but not of logic. This is a fundamental truth about the man that I think the West had never experienced before February. His condition became apparent in the diatribe against the West that he gave on Friday, which corresponded almost exactly to Hitler’s customary rants.

Friday

7 Oct 2022

David Marcus

The last of the Covidians

They walk among us. The last of the Covidians. We see them every day, masked while walking their dog in the park, or alone in their car. We have that friend or loved one who badgers us about vaccines and boosters like a mid-level PR executive at Pfizer. There is also the social media warrior who will never admit they got anything wrong about lockdowns, that even with our economy and education system in shambles, we should be grateful. Let’s not forget the public health officials like Holy Saint Fauci, who we recently learned had a mega-millions windfall while Americans’ purchasing power plummeted into the poorhouse. “Oh no,” they warn, “don’t get complacent now! Winter is coming!

Cockburn

The Right Stuff gets review-bombed

Cockburn has been unlucky in love of late. He’s married. Third time’s the charm, as they say. But for the generations below, the dating world throws up a number of quandaries. In the post-#MeToo era, you can’t meet at work anymore. Bars and clubs took a big hit with Covid. That’s why so many younguns depend on app-based dating these days. But on Bumble and Hinge (Cockburn’s not well known enough for Raya yet), progressive virtue-signaling is apparently all-too-common. “Swipe left if you’re a Republican” and slogans about “dismantling the patriarchy,” “defunding the police” and “BLM/ACAB” plague the profiles of many users. What are the alternatives if you’re on the right? Cockburn always thought “church.

Oliver Wiseman

The wages of Biden’s energy mistakes

The wages of Biden’s energy mistake It would be naïve in the extreme to be surprised about a politician taking credit for things that go well but sticking his hands up with a “who me?” look of innocence when things go badly. Nevertheless, the incoherence of the White House response to OPEC+’s decision to cut oil production has been something to behold. In a testy joint statement Wednesday, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan expressed the president’s “disappointment” at the “shortsighted decision.” Deese and Sullivan crowbar in a half-hearted plug for the Inflation Reduction Act, arguing that the OPEC news underscores the importance of transitioning to green energy.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Biden goes nuclear

At a swanky fundraiser in Manhattan, President Joe Biden alluded to the prospect of “Armageddon.” The biblical reference was not intended to woo the Christian evangelicals who form part of the base of the Republican Party, but to alert bien-pensant liberal opinion that something a trifle more threatening than global warming looms large in world politics. For the “first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use [of a] nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going," Biden said. For anyone with lingering memories of the Cold War, his remarks about the prospect that Russian president Vladimir Putin might reach for the nuclear button was bound to stir alarm coupled with — dare I say it? — a smidgen of pleasure.

Thursday

6 Oct 2022

Roger Kimball

Just because Biden thinks he’s running again doesn’t mean he is

Tom Wolfe invented Al Sharpton in his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. In the novel, he was called Reverend Bacon. In a splendid case of life imitating art, Sharpton took his place as a fixture in the metabolism of Democratic politics that same year when he hitched his star to the case of Tawana Brawley, then fifteen, who falsely claimed she had been abducted and raped by six white men, some of whom, she said, were police. For reasons that are part of the inscrutable workings of the universe, Sharpton’s histrionic fabrications in that case catapulted him to a position of tribal leadership among Democratic presidential candidates.

Wednesday

5 Oct 2022

Lewis M. Andrews

Just how ‘over’ is the pandemic?

For all the confusion caused by President Biden’s recent declaration that “the pandemic is over,” and the familiar sight of administration officials rushing to qualify his comment, it raises a question: where does the Covid emergency actually stand? Having gone from draconian lockdowns to a summer of travel chaos in just over two years — with lots of political squabbling in between — it has been easy to lose track of both the remaining dangers and the precautions many health experts believe are needed going forward. Strictly speaking, Covid is still very much with us. The average number of daily cases in the US has floated between 50,000 and 60,000 since April of this year and the death toll remains fairly constant at 400 per day.

Cockburn

Fetterman blasts Dr. Oz for drinking wine at a football tailgate

John Fetterman has prompted a fierce debate in the hotly contested race for Pennsylvania’s US Senate seat (the Cook Political Report just moved the race from “leans Democrat” to “toss-up”) by attacking his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, for drinking wine at a Penn State football tailgate: https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1577304936345387009 Pennsylvania natives quickly came to Oz’s defense. The American Thinker compiled a list of spot-on responses, including one “Pennsylvania regular” who said she would totally drink wine because “Beer makes me have to pee.” Others pointed to the fact that Pennsylvanians are, in fact, normal people, and drink wine like those from other states. They even have wineries in Pennsylvania — 400 of them!