Puerto Rico won its first Olympic gold medal Saturday when Monica Puig defeated Angelique Kerber to take the top prize in women’s singles in tennis. Puerto Ricans on the island and off were ecstatic—like Hamilton author Lin-Manuel Miranda, who celebrated in a series of tweets—as Puig joined Puerto Rican sports legends like baseball Hall of Famers Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, and Roberto Alomar; boxing champions like Wilfredo Benitez and Miguel Cotto; jockey Angel Cordero, Kentucky Derby and Belmont stakes winner Bold Forbes, and the horse's owner, Esteban Rodriguez Tizol—my grandfather. I wish my mother were alive to have seen Puig's victory, but she probably would've been more excited by the fact that legendary Puerto Rican entertainer (and aging Latina sex kitten) Iris Chacon liked one of my tweets about the gold medal. Read more
My friend Jay Cost (a fellow non-fan of the current Republican nomination system) outlines a scenario in which Donald Trump could lose to Hillary Clinton by an electoral-vote tally of 396 to 142. This is certainly possible, if the Trump campaign goes into a complete tailspin. But if Trump gets out of the current turbulence he has encountered (or has created) and steadies his campaign, the issues of the day favor him. Moreover, he’s not really that far behind. Read more
Police were called to a meeting of the Multnomah County, Oregon, Democrats this weekend. According to the Oregonian, a "scuffle" broke out when a handful of Bernie Sanders supporters, led by one Leigh LaFleur (a prominent Wiccan supporter of the Vermont senator) disrupted the meeting by shouting. This prompted a "shoving match" when the meeting chair tried to boot LaFleur from the premises. Read more
The best in books and arts from around the web, including: David Cesarani’s final book, Christoph Irmscher on Teddy's hunting, how to live a shame-free life, and more. Read more
The national polls paint a grim portrait for the Donald Trump campaign. The current Real Clear Politics average of the two-way polls shows Hillary Clinton with a commanding 6.8 percent lead. While there is still plenty of time left in the campaign, it is difficult to overcome such a large deficit after the parties have already held their conventions. This problem is worsened by the fact that the undisciplined Trump seems to lack the wherewithal to right his wobbly ship. Read more
Poland’s government has passed a law, upheld by its constitutional court, "that significantly limits the rights of people whose property in Warsaw was seized during or after World War II, and their descendants, to apply for restitution," according to the New York Times. The law sets up hurdles virtually impossible to clear. Most important, the government has included a self-serving provision the denies the right of ex-owners to seek the return of property "used by the government." Anyone who did not file a timely claim under complicated and expensive procedures is deemed to "have agreed that the ownership of a given property should be passed onto the city of Warsaw." No Holocaust survivors whose buildings were confiscated by the Nazis or the Communists have been found who agreed to make such generous gifts of their buildings and other property to the city of Warsaw. Read more
Trump campaign manager Paul Manfort begged credulity earlier Sunday, when he told CNN's Jake Tapper that he was unaware of an offensive statement made by Carl Paladino, the real estate developer and failed politician who serves as co-chair of Trump's New York campaign. (Paladino lost the New York gubernatorial election by 30 points in 2010, and presently serves on the Buffalo school board.) Read more
In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Matt Labash recounts the Libertarian convention and the concomitant comic convention, while Jeffrey Anderson discusses what happened to the issues in the presidential race.
Independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer in the Middle East and South Asia, presented himself to frustrated Americans Sunday as a fresh-faced unifier with foreign policy experience. Read more
He was a big man, the biker with the belly and the handlebar mustache. Dressed in old jeans and a T-shirt, with cracked leather chaps and a black leather vest, he looked the part: an aging outlaw, a motorcyclist with a giant hog of a bike parked out on the street, a man with years of tattoos swirling up his thick arms. And there he was, hunched over the sink at a laundromat in the Black Hills of South Dakota, rinsing out baby clothes by hand while his wife made lunch for their kids in the shiny white RV parked directly behind his bike. Read more
The New York Times's Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns have a revealing look at the tumult behind the scenes in the Donald Trump campaign. The Republican nominee for president has been under seige, they report, from advisors and aides urging Trump to remain on message and focused on winning the White House. But Trump, the Times's sources say, doesn't appear to be heeding their calls as the New York businessman's poll numbers against Democrat Hillary Clinton continue to spiral downward. Read more
A correspondent calls to my attention a remarkable op-ed in the Plain Dealer in Cleveland by Phil Van Treuren, a Republican member of the Amherst City Council in Lorain County, Ohio. Read more
Editor William Kristol's weekly Kristol Clear podcast on the surprising reason why he can't vote for Hillary Clinton; Is it cut-and-run time for GOP on Trump campaign?; And the songs Bill would add to Obama's summer playlist. Read more
The best weekend reading from around the web, including: Joseph Bottum on A. M. Juster, an outside look at American democracy, Thomas P. Curtis on competing in the first modern Olympics, and more. Read more
Seventeen-year-old ISIS volunteer Kadiza Sultana was killed by a Russian bombing strike in Syria, according to the BBC. One extraordinary thing about her is that she was already, at her age, a widow: The ISIS fighter she had married (or been married off to) had lately been killed in action. What brought her to the attention of the BBC is that she was from Bethnall Green, in the heart of London’s historically cockney East End. Within the memory of, say, someone who went to London for graduate school in 1966, romantics could still think of Bethnall Green as a backwater of Dickensian proles who picked pockets, sold vegetables out of barrows and sang garrulous songs about booze and adultery. Read more
Earlier this week both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton revealed the broad outlines of their plans for the American economy. Trump aims to accelerate growth, Clinton to redistribute the economic pie. Both have serious political problems. The Donald managed to trump his own economic plan with what could easily be taken as a threat on the life of Mrs. Clinton, and with an insistence that President Obama is “the founder of Isis", both of which attention-grabbers dominated the news and distracted attention from an economic plan containing some sensible ideas. The strategy of using outrageous statements to focus the media on one of sixteen candidates participating in the preliminary scrum that was the battle for the nomination seems to work less well in a two-person playoff. Read more
The co-chairman of Donald Trump’s New York campaign said Friday that Khizr Khan, the father of a slain Muslim-American solider, "doesn't deserve" the title of a Gold Star parent. Read more
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is "discrediting conservatism." That's what Bill Kristol said Friday on CNN about the New York businessman and reality-TV star. Read more
