Space comes to Wisconsin. I'm a huge fan of the website Atlas Obscura. Every neat place I've wanted to visit (especially abandoned things) is on there, and many places I've visited have been because of their site. Part of my bucket list is derived from there, too. Their newsletter is a welcome daily break from the voluntary hell that is political Twitter. This week, they have a look at what happened when remnants of the Sputnik IV satellite came back to earth. It landed in the land of cheese, the Packers, Steve Hayes, and John McCormack: Wisconsin. Manitowoc, to be precise:

What Gintner said about the cops and the garbage truck is what happened.

If Richard Cordray runs for governor of Ohio, he would be the only Democratic candidate with a national fundraising base, the potential to send the progressive grassroots into hyperdrive and the only Democratic candidate that has already twice won statewide races.

Still, there is plenty of reason to suspect the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau might avoid the risk of making his time as the agency’s first and only leader a central issue in 2018. The hints he’s dropping about running could even be a ploy to stay in his current job longer.

He has been a lightning rod for controversy since President Barack Obama illegally recess appointed him to the position (at a time the Senate was not

Election officials from the Kurdistan Regional Government announced Wednesay that last weekend’s referendum on independence passed, overwhelmingly. With a turnout of 72 percent of more than 4.5 million eligible voters, nearly 93 percent voted in favor of realizing the Iraqi Kurds’ longstanding dream of independence. Still, the vote is non-binding and many analysts believe the referendum is largely a bargaining chip for the KRG to secure better terms from the Iraqi central government—either more power for the Kurds in Baghdad, or more autonomy for the KRG and perhaps eventually independence.

Baghdad is dead set against the referendum and disputes the legality of the ballot.

Reviews and News:

What was news like before the 20th century? Pretty much the same as it is now...only sung, in verse.

James Joyce’s unpunctuated rigmarole of numerical spangablasm: “Joyce was good. He was a good writer. He makes me grumpy a lot, especially Ulysses, but he was good. There are at least twenty irresistible qualities to Ulysses. At or near the top of the stack, at least for me, is the way he traffics in what I call ‘hyperrealistic unnecessaries.’”

Scott Beauchamp reviews Evan Kindley’s Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, a history of the “reciprocal relationship between power and precariousness played out among poet-critics in the first half of the

On this latest episode, the Substandard discusses Kingsman: The Golden Circle and the Matthew Vaughn oeuvre, i.e., JVL on Layer Cake and lots of it. Sonny celebrates a big-league win, JVL stumbles across a LEGO home wrecker, and Vic loves free supermarket samples. All on this week’s Substandard!

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For months we’ve been hearing that the Russian government meddled in last year’s presidential election to aid the candidacy of Donald Trump. And now news has emerged that part of that dastardly campaign was supporting ... Black Lives Matter?

CNN had the exclusive news Wednesday: “At least one of the Facebook ads bought by Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign referenced Black Lives Matter and was specifically targeted to reach audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore ... The sources said it appears the ad was meant to appear both as supporting Black Lives Matter but also could be seen as portraying the group as threatening to some residents of Baltimore and Ferguson,” Dylan

It’s a classic case of man bites Blue Dog. The southern Arizona chapter of the Indivisible Project, a leading organizer of anti-Trump progressives, protested outside Democratic Rep. Tom O’Halleran’s office Tuesday for supporting a crime bill making it easier for the government to deport gang-affiliated immigrants. Only 11 Democrats, including the moderate freshman O’Halleran, voted in favor the House-passed legislation.

The local Indivisible Project chapter’s leader, however, cited more than just one bill in explaining her group’s activity to the Arizona Republic:

"Tom has a history of voting for the Trump agenda," said Kristen Randall, a founder and leader of

Hawkish Republican senators are advising President Donald Trump to decertify the Iran nuclear deal in October, a move that critics of the agreement see as a key step in changing U.S. policy toward Iran.

Trump is required to certify to Congress every 90 days whether Iran is fully implementing the deal and whether continued sanctions relief is in America’s vital national security interests, among other conditions. If he does not, lawmakers have 60 days to debate reimposing nuclear deal sanctions.

Florida senator Marco Rubio said he is meeting with administration officials this week and has advised the president to decertify.

“There are grounds for it,” Rubio told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Is Jared Kushner trolling us? News reports are out saying that Jared Kushner is registered to vote in New York... as a female. Left-leaning groups are pointing to this as an example of Kushner's incompetence (and to be fair he did repeatedly make flubs on forms needed to serve as a top adviser to his father-in-law), but maybe Kushner did it on purpose. Surely, nobody here has purposefully ticked the wrong box on a form just for fun. Even robots like Kushner.

The Church of SkyNet. Silicon Valley is a strange place, filled with smart, strange people. It should come as no surprise, then, that creating religions and churches out of thin air should be something left to folks in real America.

Controversial firebrand Roy Moore’s primary victory Tuesday over appointed Alabama senator Luther Strange to run for the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions wasn't even close. Moore won the race by nearly 10 points.

One way to view the result is simply to say that all politics are local. Strange was appointed to Sessions’ vacant seat by disgraced then-Gov. Robert Bentley, who was in the middle of a major sex and corruption scandal that led to his resignation. As the state attorney general, Strange called on the Alabama legislature to suspend the impeachment investigation.

Few if any Americans are associated with more apocryphal quotes than Thomas Jefferson, but the false notion that he said, “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” is among the easiest to dispel. Because Jefferson never would have said something so idiotic. Of course dissent can be patriotic, but it isn’t inherently so. What one is dissenting from matters. Were members of the German American Bund, who protested the U.S.’s anti-Nazi policies in the 1930s and ‘40s, enacting the “highest form of patriotism?” I’d like to think the question answers itself.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Tony Mecia talks with host Eric Felten about the details in the tax reform bill that is supposed to be announced later today.

The Daily Standard podcast is sponsored by Away Travel: Your luggage shouldn’t cost more than your plane ticket. Away Travel’s luggage is designed with the highest quality materials, and still under $300. For $20 off a suitcase, visit AwayTravel.com/standard.

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Reviews and News:

In 2013, José Manuel Barroso, then president of the European Commission, launched a project called “New Narrative for Europe.” The goal was to create a stronger sense of European identity by calling on artists, writers, scientists, and students to reaffirm “the values of human dignity and democracy.” It was a complete failure. What happened?

When ISIS moves into the neighborhood, a family must decide what to do with Hamlet—bury it, or burn it.

Guggenheim removes art featuring live reptiles and videos of dogs on treadmills after it received “explicit and repeated threats of violence.

Republican leaders plan to unveil a tax plan today that dramatically cuts taxes on businesses, eliminates many deductions and credits, and drops tax rates for most individual taxpayers, a senior Republican source told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The plan, developed by GOP representatives from the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, is an outline of proposals that would be the biggest change to the U.S. tax code in more than 30 years. The proposals must still pass legislative committees in both houses of Congress, which could change or drop parts of it as lobbyists and individual members weigh in. But House Speaker Paul Ryan is calling it a “unified framework” that has broad Republican support.

How bad is grade inflation in the humanities? So bad that when U.S. News & World Report issued its annual college rankings last week, it gave more credit to schools for graduating students in math and the hard sciences than it did in other disciplines. According to the publication’s press release: “U.S. News made a slight change in the methodology for National Universities to better predict graduation rates. In determining whether a school is graduating students at the expected level, U.S. News incorporated the proportion of degrees awarded in the science, technology, engineering and math fields. This was done to better reflect research showing that students in STEM fields generally graduate at lower rates compared

Unmasking. Leaks. Wiretaps. The mounting surveillance scandals of 2017 are suddenly threatening one of the most effective intelligence-gathering programs in U.S. history.

For months, administration officials have been publicly pressing lawmakers to reauthorize Title VII of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which expires in December. Their efforts are focused on Section 702, which permits the surveillance of foreigners abroad who are likely to communicate intelligence information. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats described 702 as the “crown jewels” of the intelligence community during his February confirmation hearings.

Is President Trump right about football being "crummy" or is this just the man who largely helped kill the USFL lashing out? Why put this on the front burner? Join Gregg Easterbrook and editor in chief Stephen F. Hayes as they discuss week three of the 2017 NFL season on the Tuesday Morning Quarterback podcast.

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With all precincts reporting, former Alabama supreme court justice justice Roy Moore defeated former state attorney general Luther Strange 54.6 percent to 45.4 percent in the Republican Senate primary to finish out Jeff Sessions' term.

Some of the big winners of the night, aside from Moore, were the pollsters who were right on the nose: Four out of the five final polls in the RealClearPolitics average were within one point of the 9-point margin of victory.

While some pundits have portrayed the defeat of Strange as serious loss for President Trump, who endorsed Strange early and campaigned with Strange over the weekend, that analysis seems to be overdone.