Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

LOWEST APPROVAL EVER, SO FAR. Yikes! Democrats Hit Lowest Approval EVER. “This news comes from Quinnipiac University’s latest poll, which is hardly right-leaning to begin with. According to the RealClearPolitics Pollster scorecard, Quinnipiac tends to make fairly large errors that lean toward the Democrats almost all the time. Over the past decade, Quinnipiac leans about 7 points leftward.”

THE CIVIL SERVICE’S PARTISANSHIP PROBLEM: “Here’s a dirty secret about the federal government many Americans are just learning: It’s run by Democrats, even when voters elect Republicans. Presidents come and go, but the permanent federal bureaucracy remains the same, and it has a distinct partisan tilt. When Americans send a Republican to the Oval Office, they get a government still administered mostly by the other party. Yes, that makes a sham of democracy. But no president before Donald Trump was prepared to confront the problem.”

Solution: Abolish the civil service.

LEFTISTS HAVE A COMPULSION TO MAKE EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH AS UGLY AS THEIR SOULS:

Flashback: Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. “The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity,’ according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.”

LOL, GAYLE KING:

ME, TWO MONTHS AGO: End Home Rule for Washington, DC.

Trump, now: End home rule for Washington, DC.

Actually, I went farther: “The Constitution empowers Congress to create and govern such a district; it doesn’t actually require that district to exist. What’s now DC could be ceded back to Maryland, where it came from in the first place. Since Maryland is already a blue state, this wouldn’t affect its political makeup much.”

Also, if the District were abolished, its three (always Democratic) presidential electors would vanish with it, something that didn’t occur to me when I wrote my piece.

GOOD:

AT THIS POINT WE STILL DON’T KNOW THE STORY REGARDING THE CREW OF THAT ENDEAVOR AIR FLIGHT THAT CRASHED IN TORONTO. But that alone is suspicious.

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

HIS TOUGHEST TASK YET: Trump Promised to Fix McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—Will He Deliver? Heh. “While fixing McDonald’s ice cream machines may seem minor, it would be a symbolic reminder to Americans each day of Trump’s commitment to business innovation, solutions, efficiency and deregulation — core ideas that galvanize President Trump and the Republican voting base.”

RUSSIA IS A PAPER TIGER, AND NOW EVERYONE KNOWS:

ALL THIS FROM CUTTING OVERHEAD PAYMENTS TO UNIVERSITIES? ‘Uncertain, anxious, fearful.’ That’s the mood at 2025’s first big U.S. science meeting. Cutting overhead means more money for grants, not “downsizing.”

Plus:

In addition to fear for their livelihoods and public safety, scientists expressed fear for the longstanding prestige of the American scientific enterprise. Several speakers cited a post-World War II “social contract,” when scientists and government agreed that publicly funding basic research was a good idea and would eventually lead to economic and technological advances.

Was the public a party to that contract? You know, some of us warned during the Covid debacle that it was going to drastically hurt the image of science. Well, here you are.