Power Line

Ricochet

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Steven Hayward, John Yoo, and "Lucretia" bring you a whisky-sodden perspective on the week's big headlines, and occasional deep dives into law and philosophy. Listen to the Three-Whisky Happy hour, along with more than 40 other original podcasts, at Ricochet.com. No paid subscription required.

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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Getting Right with Free Speech

The 3WHH bartenders raise their glasses high for the first 100 hours of Trump II, which bid to replace FDR's famous "Hundred Days" for breathtaking executive action. You'd think that this is Trump's first term, and metaphysically, Steve argues, it is. In just the way we've come to expect of Trump in all things, he may have turned the usual presidential cycle on its head. Even John, champion of executive power, is impressed. And one more miracle: he actually gets rare praise from Lucretia for his Newsweek article concluding than Biden's pardons were much worse than Trump's blanket pardons or all the J6 protesters. From there we get to the main event, a three-part discussion of a single issue—in this case free speech and how to understand the First Amendment correctly. Steve argues back to first principles, in which the freedom of conscience and thus free expression was grounded in reason, that is, free speech was essential to deliberation about right and wrong, and how we should be governed. By nearly imperceptible degrees, in the 20th century the protection of "free expression" was re-grounded in moral skepticism (if not nihilism), which is why nude dancing and F-bombs on t-shirts became "protected speech." This is not progress. From there we move on to wondering if the time has come to revisit the libel standard of New York Times v. Sullivan, which has enabled our mainstream media to behave with increasing recklessness. And we think: Yes! Yes it is. And along the way, some digressions into Animal House, Spongebob Squarepants, and other cultural totems. And we depart briefly from our new proprietary bumper music from Cosigner to use a very topical old tune (from lefties!), "Immigration Man."

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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Non-Jejune Edition

Nothing "jejune" about this edition, except perhaps for the first-ever use of "jejune" in a podcast, but it is the perfect term to describe Joe Biden's "farewell address," which, aside from its jejune content, is a most welcome sound, since he will be gone in about another 48 hours, never to be heard from again one hopes. This week we take up three topics—one from each of the bartenders: Behold, President Biden amended the Constitution on Friday—all by himself! Aside from the obvious absurdity and low comedy of it, what does it tell us about the state of leftist presumption? Special counsel Jack Smith released his magnum opus, which seems more of a parvum opus if not an opusculum (ask your nearest Latin geek), Finally, Biden's farewell address—and presidential farewell addresses in general—was our third topic (summary: it was absolutely Biden's opusculum). Once again we have custom proprietary exit bumper music from our pal Steve Tootle and his indie band Cosigner.

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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: From Emigrating to Immigrating

With this episode the Three Whisky Happy Hour emigrates into its very own identity on Ricochet and Steve's new group Substack, "Political Questions," but not to worry—the old Power Line Show will live on in its old format as an interview show. The 3WHH, meanwhile, is rebooting with some new formats. We'll be doing some show with a single-subject format; on some we'll do a round robin of hot topics and reflections on currtent news items, and we'll even have some guests from time to time, as well as emergency shows when somethingbig happens—or we get a new single malt in whose virtues we just have to share. And having completed our emigration to a new logo and format, it seemed only logical that we'd take up as our primary focus this week the issue of immigration, with an attempt at an orderly procession through the key aspects of the matter: How much is too much? Should we have an immigration pause? What's up with the H1-B visa controversy anyway? How should skills-based immigration be done, and should we move to some kind of point- or auction system to regulate immigration. And finally the big one: what about birthright citizenship? We throw down pretty hard on this issue, and our three bartenders nearly get into a brawl about several of these questions. So don't think alone when you can drink it all in with us!

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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Special Happy New Year's Edition

Since so many of our fellow conservative podcasts are taking the holidays off, we decided to do another special mid-week edition to observe the new year, and gear up for some changes. Last year's end of year show featured some low-probability but plausible predictions for 2024 (inspired by the late Wall Street guru Byron Weins' annual practice, which was often right), and unlike other shows that never track prediction accuracy (like the McLaughlin Group, which had a terrible record once someone checked), we decided to do a scorecard. Steve was 0 for 6; John was 5 for 8 (depending on how you score partial credit); Lucretia didn't make any new year's predictions, but pointed out that ALL of her mid-year predictions came true, especially J.D. Vance for running mate. We offered a few new low-probabilty predictions for 2025, but you'll have to listen to get them. Steve offers one of his as a teaser: some time in 2025 an elite or major university (could be a state flagship) will fire their president and senior administrators, and bring in a team to "clean house," which will mean closing whole departments and programs that teach anti-Semitic ideology, and eliminating faculty positions attached to these poisonous programs. From there we resume our unfinished argment from last week about discrimination and the 14th Amendment, and come to some unsatisfactory conclusions. Now the news: We're taking this weekend off from our usual Saturday show, and won't be back until January 11 or so. We're going to be re-tooling the podcast with some format changes. Stay tuned for details as they become available!

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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Osculate This!

Our final podcast of 2024 looks back on the top story and bottom story of the year, and you won't be surprised to see some symmetries in our answers. But then we move on to the main event—a question from a listener (initials RW) about whether the 14th Amendment, rightly understood, actually permits the federal government to outlaw private discimination. We go several rounds (but not really enough rounds) about aspects of this issue before realizing after we finished that we didn't reach a verdict. Perhaps we'll return to it in our first episode of 2025. The title for this week's episode is taken from Steve's nomination for the slogan of the year, which comes from a Twitter person who responded to the UN demanding that Americans give up meat to fight climate change with the phrase: "they can osculate my fundamental orifice!" You'll just have to listen to the end to get the translation. Announcement: We'll be back on January 1 with another special holiday midweek episode that will introduce some format changes, a review of our predictions from last year (guess who had the best record), and a fresh round of predictions for 2025 that will likely be mostly wrong.

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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Merry Christmas Edition

We were going to take up the transcendent matters appropriate for the climax of Advent, but the headlines won't let us! The dam started breaking this week about Joe Biden's unfitness for office, which, as the Wall Street Journal reported, began during the 2020 campaign. Just who has been president for the last four years? And aside from the perfidy of the complacent and compliant (to Democrats) news media, should there be a serious congressional investigation into what is clearly one of the greatest coverups in American history. Biden's senior staff and cabinet should have to answer uncomfortable questions about this, and perhaps face charges for decisions and actions they may not have had legal authority to make. We also review the drama of the last 72 hours over the Continuing Resolution to avoid a "government shutdown," with Steve arguing the outcome was a minor victory for conservatives, but needs to be followed up with more serious steps in the new Congress. From there, we note the important of Fani Willis getting her fanny handed to her, and then take up briefly some listener reaction to our mid-week show, especially Hadley Arkes's long note about what we missed about the Commerce Clause and the nearly forgotten case of Hammer v. Dagenhart. We ran out of time for a complete consideration, so next week!

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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Globull Threats to Liberty

This special mid-week holiday edition of the 3WHH makes up for the lost ground over the weekend, when schedules prevented the bar from opening at any of the usual meet-up times. Steve, this week's host, and Lucretia grill John Yoo about his latest article, "Globalization's Challenge to American Constitutionalism," published at the sparkling new website of the Civitas Institute, where Steve also appears for the first time today on a separate subject, "The Future of Conservatism in America." While Steve and Lucretia completely agree with John about the insidious threat of "internationalism" to our constitutional soverignty, they detect some tergiversations on John's part that seem to offer—or so they say—too many concessions to progressive jurisprudence. From there discussion turns to the drone epidemic, with Steve offering two complementary theories about what is going on (neither of which involve foreign actors, stealth sky ships, or aliens), and Lucretia offers her drama review for Broadway's newest stage sensation, who happens to wear judicial robes in her regular job. A dilemma indeed. And about that ABC News libel settlement with Trump, more theories to chew over. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that "Disney’s legal team was concerned that given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, appealing a negative district court ruling could have jeopardized the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan ruling that protects the media in defamation cases." This was Steve's hypothesis about the settlement.

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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Almost Live from Florence!

So your three bartenders weren't able to assemble even virtually this week for our usual format—John is away on a clandestine mission stalking the elusive McRib, while Steve and Lucretia are also largely indisposed. But fear not! We decided that in lieu of our usual snappy brickbats, we'd share with our insatiable fans the talks we gave a couple weeks back at the University of Florence about the American election. It was great fun and the student questions were great, but we're just offering here our introductory remarks. This a short episode—barely over 20 minutes. But never fear: we plan to be back with our usual format mid week, probably Wednesday or Thursday.

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مشاهدة الكل (٥٢٥)

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من ٥

‫٤٦٦ من التقييمات‬

I don’t drink whiskey anymore

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Dmitri from Soviet Union

But I love listening to Steve and John Yoo and the snarky comments from Lucretia. I wish they would invite Progressives on their show to debate controversial topics.
I Never Miss This Podcast

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OM Hoff

I never miss an episode, I owe my newfound intellectual and conversational brilliance to this podcast, and to the several others linked by host/participant or ideological sympathy.
Mr. Dogg

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Mr. Texas Dog

Near perfect. Related, my eldest son at age 14 went to a Red Hot Chili Pepper concert. Why? He asked his mother and not I. Anyway early Sunday morning, before church, he comes bounding out of his room wearing a “Mr. Dogg” t- shirt. I immediately asked him what he paid. $20. So after pointing out he couldn’t wear it around me, to school, to church or around anyone I knew, he sold it to me. What I didn’t know was that he bet all his friends $20 each that I would confiscate the shirt. And, and, he knew I would ultimately forget about the incident and much later found the shirt and took it to college. And I’m with Lucretia, drinking peaty scotch is like eating a salad constructed with bull nettle.
The Battle of Epping Forrest?

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Dale Stratton

What a marvelous musical outro!