Power Line

Zachary Wood This episode flips the format, with my guest interviewing me for a change. Zachary Wood is a graduate of Williams College, where he was the president of a student group called “Uncomfortable Learning,” whose mission was to invite to campus outside speakers with a heterodox perspective (which is code for “conservative” for the most part). Invitees included Charles Murray... Source

Barack who? Is it just me, or is Obama the incredibly shrinking president, destined already to be remembered in the same league as John Tyler or Warren Harding? Charles Lipson, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Chicago, is out today with a terrific article at RealClearPolitics, “ Trump’s Methodical Destruction of Obama’s Legacy,” that walks through how President Trump is step-by... Source

Michael McConnell John Hinderaker joined me today to co-host this special edition of the show. Yesterday Facebook announced the creation of a 20-member oversight board that some media accounts describe as a “supreme court” to advise and in some cases rule on what kind of material can be taken down from the popular global site. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about this... Source

Phil Magness When the news broke yesterday that the New York Times‘s egregious “1619 Project” had won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, I knew the only thing to do was get Phillip W. Magness on the line. Magness, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, is the author of a brand new and indispensable book answering the factual errors and gross interpretive... Source

Joe Malchow The Wall Street Journal this morning includes an article from T.J. Rodgers, the retired founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductors, with the provocative title, “Do Lockdowns Save Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No.” Rodgers mentions in the first paragraph that much of the statistical work behind his article was done by our own Joe Malchow, who is Power Line’s Wizard of Oz behind the... Source

Terry Anderson It’s Earth Day today—and not just any old Earth Day, but the 50th anniversary. It’s passing rather more quietly than in many previous years because the coronavirus crisis is eclipsing everything at the moment. But a lot has changed since the first Earth Day. Not only is the environment in the United States, and in most places around the world, in much better condition than it was in... Source

Last week Dr. Jonathan Geach, an anesthesiologist treating some COVID-19 patients in Tennessee, wrote an article on Medium that created a sensation: “ Eight Reasons to End the Lockdowns as Soon as Possible.” Dr. Geach joined us today to review the article, and, since the COVID-19 story is moving so fast, preview a sequel on “Moving Goalposts” that he is readying for publication. Source

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