John H. Hinderaker

John H. Hinderaker (born September 1950) (the name is pronounced hinder-rocker) is a conservative American lawyer and a blogger at the Power Line weblog, as well as a fellow at the Claremont Institute. Hinderaker is best known for promoting a conservative ideology regarding foreign policy.

He is an advisory board member of the North Star Legal Center, the legal arm of the Minnesota Family Council/Institute; the NSLC also is "instrumental in giving definition and professional credibility to the conservative pro-family legal position in Minnesota."[1] He is a 1971 graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and completed Harvard Law School in 1974. Power Line has promoted outsiders as candidates to be Dartmouth alumni trustees, such as T.J. Rodgers, founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor.

Hinderaker at one stage used the handle "Hindrocket" on his political blog.

Hinderaker's positions on controversial scientific issues includes skepticism about the alarmist views of global warming dating back to 1992[2]. In April 2006, he wrote that "scientific support for [the anthropogenic global warming] theory is weak.[3] On other issues, he has written that "Darwin's theory of macroevolution is plainly wrong, on strictly scientific grounds"[4]and that "benefits of embryonic stem cell research have been vastly oversold".[5]

He once, in an intentionally hyperbolic sentence, described George W. Bush as "[a] man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius ... like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another." [6]

60 Minutes controversy

Hinderaker was one of the first on the blogosphere to allege how the Bush National Guard document included in a '60 Minutes' report might have been a hoax, since the document used proportional fonts which are common on modern word processors but were only available on certain IBM "Composer" models in 1972.[7] However, forensic document specialist Dr. Philip Bouffard stated, "I found nothing like this in any of my typewriter specimens," and that the documents' fonts were "certainly consistent with what I see in Times Roman."[8] Furthermore, Dr. Bouffard doubted that President Bush's commanding commanding officer would've used the IBM "Composer" because of its size. It is also unlikely that he would've used a machine that required the user to type each line twice as the "Composer" did.[9]

CBS later apologized for the story, saying that the documents could not be verified.[10]

Powerline: Blog of the Year Fame

John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson and Paul Mirengoff are the three authors of Powerline, each with contrasting yet complimentary styles. Time magazine wrote: "It was a good mix. Johnson is soft-spoken, with a straight-out-of-Fargo Midwestern accent, but he's the site's anchor, the guy who gets up at 5 in the morning, reads all the papers and makes sure he's on top of the big issues of the day. He blogs under the name the Big Trunk. Mirengoff, who goes by Deacon on the site, is the details man, the close-focus, line-by-line analyst. Hinderaker, a.k.a. Hindrocket, is the ranter, always willing to go over the top with a big speech and flights of fancy. He's also the mediagenic one. He's a clear and forceful speaker--he's a litigator by day, after all."

External links

• Faegre and Benson Official bio
• North Star Legal Center