This week’s show features two guests who just happen to be married, which certainly makes recording convenient! Our first guest is Debra J. Saunders, the White House correspondent for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and former opinion columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. President Trump called on Debra last Friday in his daily virus briefing, and beyond the immediate story I was most... Source...
This special mid-week edition offers an alternative to the all-virus/all-the-time coverage currently smothering all other topics right now, this time featuring Robert Bryce talking about his brand new book A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations. The book is a companion to his documentary film Juice: How Electricity Explains the World that will be available on streaming services... Source...
My guest this week is Jeremy Carl, currently a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and formerly a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where he directed the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy. His political writing and commentary has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, National Review, Politico, the Economist... Source
Conrad Black argued this week that Franklin Roosevelt deserves to be regarded as a conservative champion, or at least that conservatives should steal him away from Democrats. FDR himself argued that Democrats should steal Lincoln from Republicans, so why not return the favor? Steve takes up this exotic perspective with Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, “Lucretia... Source
Cliff Bates Our parochial news media seem only interested in reporting on the state of things here in the U.S. and in their favorite European vacation spots like France and Italy, but of course the COVID-19 pandemic extends into Eastern Europe as well, where most countries are also on some degree of quarantine or lockdown. I decided to check in with Clifford Angell Bates, a friend based in Warsaw... Source...
Sarah Hunt There’s gonzo, and then there’s Sarah Hunt. Hunt is the humorist/policy activist who came up with the moniker “Green Nude Eel” in response to the preposterous extravagances of the utopian environmental left and in particular a certain freshperson congresscritter whose name shall not be uttered here. But Hunt, the founder of the Joseph Rainey Center, a boutique Washington think tank... Source...
Brian Sullivan This bonus episode features the insights and observations of Brian Sullivan, a serial entrepreneur in the domain of health care and medical device innovation. He is the founder and CEO of Celcuity, a biomedical research firm currently working on highly specialized cancer research. Brian, a long time friend of Power Line in Minnesota, has been sending along his unique thoughts on the... Source...
It may be too strong to say that China and the United States are engaged in “germ warfare,” but the Chinese propaganda effort, aided by our own irrepressible fifth column in the media that seems to want to take China’s side against the U.S., reveals that the COVID-19 episode may prove an inflection point—a crisis for the Chinese regime akin to the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union—that... Source
Mark Mills I’m posting this week’s episode a couple days ahead of our usual weekend schedule to keep up with the fast-moving news cycle of the most important story of the week—no, not necessarily the coronavirus, but rather the oil price war that broke out last weekend between Saudi Arabia and Russia. The timing may not be purely coincidental, as I discuss with my guest this week... Source...
How in the heck did Joe Biden’s mummified campaign come back to life? Or is it just back to zombie status—still dead, but up and moving and menacing the living? That’s the main subject of this week’s fast-paced, high energy episode featuring Power Line’s own John Hinderaker and listener favorite “Lucretia.” (Our conclusion is that Democrats decided they are more the party of creeping socialism... Source
What do you do if you are a center-left thinker confronting the train wreck of the Democratic nomination contest just now, with the strong possibility that socialist Bernie Sanders will be the nominee? Might we actually have an election where some liberals will leave the country if they win? This week’s episode takes up the scene with Damon Linker, senior correspondent for The Week... Source
This week’s episode, featuring listener favorite Lucretia, Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, was taped while the Nevada caucuses were in process, but now we know that Bernie Sanders has crushed it. He’s the Coronavirus of the Democratic Party—a long latency period that has now broken out into an unstoppable epidemic. It’s over: the only question now is who Sanders will pick as his... Source...
This week we violate the legendary first rule of Fight Club with Tevi Troy, author of the wonderfully gossipy new book Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump. Troy, a veteran of the George W. Bush White House and author of several previous books about overlooked aspects of the presidency, takes us on a tour of some of the legendary feuds and personality and power clashes in... Source...
Stanley Kurtz It is not news that the humanities and social sciences have been degraded by the sustained assault from the left for several decades now, but Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center provides illuminating new details and perspectives in his recent report for the National Association of Scholars entitled The Lost History of Western Civilization. The broad outlines of this... Source...
Brad Thompson Prof. C. Bradley Thompson of Clemson University has written a superb new book, the first of two volumes, about the American Founding, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It. In my opinion this book deserves to take its place alongside Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon Wood’s... Source...
This special edition of the Power Line Show offers a panel discussion on impeachment held this week at Berkeley Law School, which Steve moderated. Its purpose was not to rehash or thrash out the specific issues of the Trump impeachment as much as to illuminate what the founders had in mind when they wrote impeachment into the Constitution, and what we have learned from the two rare instances of... Source
Peter Myers The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is always a good occasion to ponder his legacy, which shifts with the lengthening of history and the dramatic changes in the racial politics of our moment. And who better to comment than “Lucretia,” Power Line’s international woman of mystery, along with special guest Peter C. Myers, who is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin... Source...
This week’s guest is Stephen F. Knott of the Naval War College, discussing his terrific new book, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency: The Decline into Demagoguery and the Prospects for Renewal, just out from University Press of Kansas. Knott, one of the nation’s pre-eminent scholars of Alexander Hamilton, thinks the American presidency has slipped from the modest republican design of the... Source...
Harold Rood The fuss over President Trump’s decision to kill Iranian General Qasem Soleimani is causing the usual hair-on-fire reaction among the media and foreign policy elites. Everyone is playing the parlor game of wondering how Iran might respond, and how we might respond to Iran’s well-develop capacity for “asymmetric warfare.” Steve Hayward gets to wondering what the late professor of... Source...
Our final episode of 2019 brings together the entire Power Line gang—John, Paul, Scott, and Steve, along with “Ammo Grrll” Susan Vass—for a look at the current scene and a look ahead to next year. Consisting of excerpts from a recent Power Line VIP member live video chat, John Hinderaker hosts as we review the farce of impeachment, the state of the Democratic nomination contest (including how big... Source...
There are several new wrinkles in the saga of the New York Times‘s egregious and ideological “1619 Project,” which can only mean one thing: time for another episode with “Lucretia,” Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, and scourge of all things politically correct. New developments in the story include a stinging letter to the editor of the New York Times magazine from five eminent... Source...
Nils Gilman Is it possible for conservatives and left-of-center thinkers to have a civil and substantive conversation in the Era of Trump? Steve Hayward decided to find out, and the result is this completely gonzo episode. Steve sat down for a long and appropriately boozy dinner recently with Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute, for a grand tour... Source
This episode is either an excursion into intergenerational conflict, or the pilot for a 21st century version of The Odd Couple, where Oscar and Felix are a Millennial and an aging Baby Boomer. This week’s episode is actually a crossover show with The Young Americans, hosted by Millennial sports and wonk prodigy Jack Butler of the American Enterprise Institute. Jack recently read Steve Hayward’s... Source...
A few days late because of the holiday week, “Lucretia,” Power Line’s international woman of mystery, joins Steve Hayward once again to resume their series critiquing the “1619 Project,” this time taking up the examples of Alexander Stephens, Booker T. Washington, and W.E. B DuBois, among other thinkers, as well as noting the peculiar objections to the 1619 Project coming from . Source
More than 50 years after Lyndon Johnson launched the “Great Society” and its “war on poverty” that its architects said would eliminate all poverty in America in ten years, we still have poverty and a legacy of failed experiments in social engineering (Model Cities, anyone?) Author Amity Shlaes is out this week with her latest book, Great Society: A New History, that gives us a fine-grained look... Source...
This week Steve Hayward hosts Henry Olsen going through the inside baseball of the unfolding Democratic presidential primary season, but also the inside baseball about . . . baseball! Did you know that the Houston Astros colluded with the Russians and Ukrainians to steal the 2017 World Series! So runs the allegation, with hearings no doubt to follow. In any case, Steve actually stumps Henry by... Source...
John Tamny of Freedom Works and RealClearMarkets joins Steve Hayward this week to discuss his provocative new book, They’re Both Wrong: A Policy Guide for America’s Frustrated Independent Thinkers, just out this week from our friends at the American Institute for Economic Research. Tamny is one of the great imaginative and original contrarian thinkers of our time on matters of economics and policy... Source
Dr. Sally Satel The opioid crisis has been prominent in the news for the last several years, while more recently the controversy over vaping has erupted to new heights, with the Trump Administration proposing to ban many vaping products. There are some glaring contradictions and ironies between our attitudes and policy responses to both issues, but it takes someone of Sally Satel’s perception to... Source...
Whither American conservatism is the question on everyone’s mind these days. Recently I gave a short talk about this topic with the central thought that the American conservative movement was now entering a distinct third phase of its modern existence, though I took the opportunity to say a few words about my first mentor, the late M. Stanton Evans, and what can be learned from his disposition... Source...
What do you get when you combine “Lucretia,” Power Line’s ever popular international woman of mystery, with John Yoo, whose only mystery is his fondness for McDonalds? You get an episode that talks about fake burgers, the evils of soy, the importance of cooking with fat, fast cars, and even Starsky & Hutch. Oh, we also go into the impeachment circus currently unfolding in Washington... Source
