SACRAMENTO — In the last year, I’ve made three driving errors that sparked the notice of the police. In my latest misstep, I carelessly rode my motorcycle 20 miles over the speed limit as I spent more time enjoying the sunny day than watching traffic signs. Previously, I drove my truck onto a street reserved for rail traffic as I followed GPS’s mistaken directions. In the final embarrassing incident, I swerved erratically at 3 a.m. at the tail end of a 14-hour trip — the result of tiredly messing with a finicky adaptive cruise control rather than (as the officer suspected) intoxication. In eac ..read more

“A Tale of Two Universities,” editorial cartoon by Shaomin Li for The American Spectator, April 4, 2024. The post A Tale of Two Universities appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics ..read more

Erick Erickson, a popular conservative writer and talk show host, made a brief splash within right-wing circles Monday with a National Review op-ed and follow-up monologue about the Right’s alleged departure from limited-government, free-market principles. I don’t know Erickson personally, but he seems to be a smart and decent man, and I have no interest in attacking him personally — or, for that matter, relitigating the internecine conservative debate about markets, economic liberty, and so on. But one of the arguments he made in his monologue stood out to me: I need you to understand the pr ..read more

Do you have a conservative face or a liberal face? Take a look in the mirror and answer yourself as soon as possible because it is quite possible that your ideology — at least what some robot thinks about it — will become public or end up in someone else’s hands sooner rather than later. READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: Christianity Is Simply More Fun Yes, the research is fascinating. And horrifying. Now Dr. Michal Kosinski has concluded that AI can identify whether a person is right- or left-leaning just by examining his or her face. He has concluded his investigation with 591 participants ..read more

This week, Congress moved closer to passing four separate bills with $95 billion in funding for Ukraine, Israel, Indo-Pacific allies, and the domestic submarine industrial base. This funding has been debated for months, with much of it intended for wars that have been going on — and likely will continue — for a while. In other words, it’s not new or surprising. Yet once again, it will be labeled “emergency spending,” a tool allowing legislators to double down on their fiscal irresponsibility. READ MORE from Veronique de Rugy: Washington’s ‘Job Creation’ Circus Is Hitting the Road Befo ..read more

In 1996, the prominent Protestant theologian Richard Hays published A Moral Vision of the New Testament, which asserted that the Bible teaches that sexual relations should occur exclusively within a marriage between a man and a woman. The book’s scholarship was considered to have significantly shaped Protestant thought by reinforcing the view that homosexual practices are morally unacceptable. The work was frequently cited given the prominence of the author — Hays was formerly dean of Duke University’s Divinity School — as well as his centrism on other topics, which made his perspective appear ..read more

This afternoon, President Joe Biden set out to make my job difficult. I’m fairly certain he doesn’t know I exist (we’ll keep it that way), and even if he did, he likely wouldn’t care. Nonetheless, as he affixed his signature to the massive omnibus spending bill that finally made its way to his desk, headlines proliferated. “US bans TikTok unless it is sold,” NPR reports. “Biden Sings a $95.3 Billion Aid Package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan,” the New York Times said. Financial Times wrote, “Pentagon rushes $1bn in weapons to Kyiv after Biden signs aid bill.” (READ MORE by Aubrey Gulick: Biden ..read more

With Joe Biden’s new elite supporters comes a new elite problem: The stock market. Democrats have historically been dismissive of the wealthy’s worries — Biden no longer can be. The unwinding of a stock market pumped up by interest rate reduction expectations could hit Biden’s elitist supporters at the worst possible time and could be the fatal blow to a candidate already politically encumbered by his economic performance. Democrats have historically claimed to champion the little guy. Biden styled himself as lunch–bucket Joe from Scranton — his return trip just days ago being only the most re ..read more

The tragic wildfire in Lahaina last August — America’s worst in more than a century, with nearly 100 deaths and 2,000 buildings and homes destroyed — left many on the lush island of Maui and beyond looking for answers. Hawaii Gov. Josh Green was quick to assign blame: “That level of destruction, and a fire hurricane, something new to us in this age of global warming, was the ultimate reason that so many people perished.” But was climate change really to blame? This past week, on April 18, the Western Fire Chiefs Association published an after-action report that examined possible causes for the ..read more

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder By Salman Rushdie (Random House, 224 pages, $28) Two summers ago, Salman Rushdie was stabbed by an Islamist radical while giving a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. The attack left him blind in one eye and his body and face nearly ruined. His memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, released last week, purports to give an account of the attack and his long recovery from it, though the book largely fails to make good on its seemingly electrifying premise. I had high hopes for the book, in light of the events that le ..read more