Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog

Last night, I was talking to a friend of mine from Moldova. We were talking about Russia. I told him about Ildar Dadin, the political prisoner, whom I’ve written about. And Dadin’s wife, Anastasia Zotova, with whom I’ve done a podcast. I further told him about the law under which Dadin was convicted and imprisoned.That is Article 212.1 of the Russian Civil Code. If you protest the government three times within six months, without the government’s permission, you are subject to five years in prison (where terrible, sometimes murderous, things occur).My Moldovan friend said, “If people knew the law, they
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My favorite part of the speech was Booker's explanation that "the next attorney general must bring hope and healing to this country." As, you know, so many AGs have done.

The shortest honeymoon on record is officially over. Normally, newly elected presidents enjoy a wave of goodwill that allows them to fly high at least through their first 100 days. Donald Trump has not yet been sworn in, and the honeymoon has already come and gone.Presidents-elect usually lie low during the interregnum. Trump never lies low. He seized the actual presidency from Barack Obama within weeks of his election -- cutting ostentatious deals with U.S. manufacturers to keep jobs at home, challenging 40-year-old China policy, getting into a very public fight with the intelligence agencies. By now he has taken
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Noting that cyber warfare was not an issue until after Hillary Clinton lost, Charles Krauthammer argues that Democrats appear to be united in their efforts to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidency:I don’t want to impute a general conspiracy here, but it looks as if the Democrats, on their way out the door, are trying to leave behind as many landmines as they can to at least cast doubts on the legitimacy of the Trump victory. All of a sudden, as we have seen, they’ve gotten interested in Russian cyber warfare, which the administration appeared to be extremely nonchalant about until they
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With a Wednesday-night Senate vote, the Republican-led 115th Congress has begun to repeal Obamacare. The outgoing president’s signature law is a $2 trillion scrawl of cost overruns, climbing premiums, skyrocketing deductibles, decreased competition, and canceled health plans for at least 4.7 million Americans. It can’t be scrapped soon enough. But GOP House and Senate leaders should replace it in a way that lets Democrats help build a patient-centered system atop the ruins of Obama’s failed adventure in government medicine.It will take serious, steady work to enact a market-friendly Patient Power–based alternative to this wretched law. Democrats would vote in lock-step
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The Justice Department’s inspector general has announced that his office will conduct a review that will focus principally on FBI director James Comey’s public statements regarding the Clinton e-mails investigation during the 2016 campaign.These were the three highly unusual announcements describing the status of the investigation in which no charges were filed: (1) the detailed presentation on July 5 of: the evidence uncovered against Hillary Clinton, a legal analysis of the applicable criminal statute, Comey’s determination that an indictment was not warranted, and his opinion that no reasonable prosecutor could disagree with his assessment; (2) the October 28 letter to
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This afternoon, a Washington, D.C., radio station pulled a pro-life group’s advertising spot after receiving complaints from listeners. The ad was purchased on WTOP by the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA) -- a pro-life lobbying group dedicating to electing pro-life politicians -- in order to alert listeners to facts about Planned Parenthood and call for support in the GOP’s effort to defund the abortion organization. The full ad went as follows:It’s a fact: Planned Parenthood is America’s largest abortion business, nearly a million abortions in the last three years. Its executives were caught on tape bragging about selling baby body
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Ken Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard (and previously an economist at the IMF and at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System) is annoyed by those primitives who object to the abomination that is a negative interest rate policy.Bloomberg:[C]ritics of negative interest rates are “ignorant” in their analysis of the unprecedented measures forced on central banks across the world over the past years, according to U.S. economist Kenneth Rogoff.It’s impossible to analyze the effects of the “early experiment” with negative rates because central banks were left to themselves amid a global fiscal retrenchment, Rogoff, a professor
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During his hearing today, Democrats directly questioned General Mattis on past statements that indicated opposition to women in ground combat. Here's how CNN described the exchange:Mattis repeatedly dodged direct questions about whether he opposes women serving in combat positions or gays in the military, despite Gillibrand reading back his past comments to him.In one case, she quoted a passage in Mattis' book, "Warriors and Citizens," in which he decried the military being subject to societal pressure on causes like women in combat."We fear that an uninformed public is permitting political leaders to impose an accretion of social conventions that are
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New Jersey senator Cory Booker announced some novel requirements for U.S. attorney general yesterday. Booker was testifying against fellow Senator Jeff Sessions’s nomination for the attorney-general position, breaking an informal Senate tradition against such formal testimony.As attorney general, Booker said, Sessions would be “expected to defend the rights of immigrants and affirm their human dignity.”Who knew that an attorney general is in the business of “affirming the human dignity” of immigrants? One might have thought that impartially enforcing U.S. laws and ensuring justice for Americans was responsibility enough.But let’s say that “affirming the human dignity” of immigrants was, in fact,
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