5
POPS With a Wink and a Smile by Mark Steyn But, on Debate Night, the official Obama website was still boasting that he would meet Ahmadinejad “without preconditions”. “My friend John McCain voted 422 times against tax cuts for the middle classes. Let me repeat that so the American people are clear on this. My friend John McCain voted 673 times against tax cuts for the middle classes.” The problem was that it all sounded drearily senatorial. When Regular Joe Six-Pack Bluecollar Biden tried to match her on the Main Street cred, it rang slightly wacky. “Look,” he said, “All you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie’s Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me, where I spend a lot of time.” As for Katie’s Restaurant, ah, I’m sure it was grand but apparently it closed in 1990. In the Diner of the Mind, the refills are endless and Senator Joe is sitting shootin’ the breeze over a cuppa joe with a couple other regular joes on adjoining stools while Betty-Jo...
4
POPSRe: Obama, the World's President [Mark Steyn] You mean economic sanctions? Expulsion from the Olympics? Moving the Oscars to Belgium? Jonathan Freedland isn't spelling it out but he's not happy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/10/uselections2008.barackobama/print Mark Steyn said: British reports on the presidential campaign are weirdly reminiscent of coverage of pre-independence elections in ramshackle parts of Africa where the Colonial Office has picked out the chap it wants for Prime Minister six months earlier only to discover at the last minute that the wretched natives are too dim to go along with it. If you think Iraq isn't ready for democracy, it's apparently years ahead of America. As for the planet boiling, wait till November 5th.
4
POPSThe Lady Who Can Hunt Caribou And Serve Up The Stew....... Mark Steyn Third, real people don't define "experience" as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party's corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol.
5
POPSCredit Where It's Due [Mark Steyn] I trust even now Maureen Dowd is working on a hilarious new column mocking proposed names for the Governor's first grandchild. Perhaps Richard Cohen can just take the week off and they can rerun his insightful analysis comparing the Palin nomination to Caligula making his horse a consul. Whereas we sophisticates all know that if McCain were as smart as Obama he'd have nominated a dead horse to be his consul. No wait...
3
POPSThe battle for free speech rages in Canada Article: "Free Dominion was served with a human rights complaint last summer which was later dropped. Currently, we are in the midst of one defamation suit initiated by Richard Warman, and we have been served notice of another suit by Warman, as well as notice of a joint suit by Warman and Warren Kinsella. Ezra Levant is fighting a human rights complaint before the Alberta Human Rights Commission, and he has been served with notice of a defamation suit from Richard Warman. Mark Steyn is fighting several human rights complaints, and he is suffering almost daily abuse on Warren Kinsella’s blog. The most vocal writers who have been fighting the human rights commissions have been threatened with lawsuits and worse. Blogger Mike Brock even received an email that read, “I hope that type of sentiment comforts you the day you find yourself staring down the barrel of a 12 gauge shotgun, Mike.”
4
POPSCanadian Human Rights Committee Under Investigation handles Section 13 complaints. So after years of lonely struggle they must be celebrating the motion to investigate the CHRC. Yet Ezra warns of the long road still ahead for Canadians trying to restore freedom of speech in their country: As Winston Churchill said after the breakthrough British victory at El Alamein, "this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal hearing on the Section 13 complaint against Maclean's magazine et al. begins on Monday in Vancouver. The Canadian Association of Journalists has formally applied for standing as an intervenor on behalf of Maclean's, but there is a dissenting voice. Visit Steyn Online and Free Mark Steyn! for links to all the reports and opinion as next week's kangaroo courtroom drama unfolds.
4
POPSCanadian free speech The suit names: • Ezra Levant (famous for his stirring YouTube video of his confrontation with the Canadian Human Rights tribunal after he published the “Mohammed Cartoons”) • FreeDominion.ca (Canada’s answer to FreeRepublic.com) • Kate McMillan of SmallDeadAnimals.com • Jonathan Kay of the National Post daily newspaper and its in-house blog • and me, Kathy Shaidle of FiveFeetOfFury.com
4
POPSFree Speech A Casualty Of 'Hate' Powers
What had happened is that one of the chapters of Steyn's New York Times' (and for that matter Canadian) No1 bestseller America Alone had been excerpted and published by Canada's largest weekly magazine. The Canadian Islamic Congress, through the agency of three law students, brought complaints against Steyn and the magazine before the federal human rights commission, and also before two provincial ones. (That's another Orwellian aspect to all this; there is no rule against double, triple or any other multiple jeopardy, as there is no limit to how many complaints can be lodged before different tribunals for the same words.) Since then more has come out that makes these Canadian tribunals or commissions seem even more like kangaroo courts than they already did, which is saying an awful lot. The Canadian Human Rights Commission it would not go ahead with the Steyn prosecution (though the Canadian Islamic Congress has just indicated it will appeal that decision)
5
POPSExcellent article that got Steyn sued for thought ("hate") crime. He got off this time, but as the percentage of Muslims and other non-Westerners rises in Canada and other Western nations it will become harder and harder to get away with publishing the truth about Islam, or the negative consequences of the Third World immigration/invasion of the West including the resulting rapidly progressing nonviolent genocide of Western Man including its Jewish sub component.
4
POPSRights Commission Dismisses "Hate Speech" Complaint The ruling means the CHRC does not believe there is evidence to support a complaint that the Steyn article was "likely to expose" Muslims to hatred or contempt. Announcing the decision (the CHRC does not publicize dismissals of complaints), Maclean's said in a statement that it "is in keeping with our long-standing position that the article in question, "The Future Belongs to Islam," an excerpt from Mark Steyn's best-selling book America Alone, was a worthy piece of commentary on important geopolitical issues, entirely within the bounds of normal journalistic practice."
4
POPSObama The Humble Savior Only last week, another of his pals bit the dust, convicted by a Chicago jury of 16 counts of this and that. "This isn't the Tony Rezko I knew," said the senator, in what's becoming a standard formulation. Likewise, this wasn't the Jeremiah Wright he knew. And these are guys he's known for 20 years. "I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people … . I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we........ It's a good thing he's facing it with "profound humility," isn't it? Because otherwise who knows what he'd be saying. But mark it in your calendars: June 3, 2008 – the long-awaited day, after 232 years, that America began to provide care for the sick.
6
POPSPfleger apology? Are you kidding me? Whisper your thoughts? Does he know who Mark Steyn is? Bewildering! And he supports Obama to curtail these oppressive times? LOL I think I felt my eyelashes curl. Oh, and by the way, he thought the "webcast was down". Seems there are things better said behind closed doors. Right, whitey?
4
POPS Your Car Can't Run On Congress' Hot Air: Mark Steyn substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on the market, supply, price or distribution of oil, natural gas or other petroleum product in the United States." Er, OK. But, before we start suing distant sheikhs in exotic lands for violating the NOPEC act, why don't we start by suing Congress? After all, who "limits the production or distribution of oil" right here in the United States by declaring that there'll be no drilling in the Gulf of Florida or the Arctic National Mosquito Refuge? As Rep. Wasserman Schultz herself told Neil Cavuto on Fox News, "We can't drill our way out of this problem." Well, maybe not. But maybe we could drill our way back to $3.25 a gallon. More to the point, if the House of Representatives has now declared it "illegal" for the government of Saudi Arabia to restrict oil production, why is it still legal for the government of the United States to restrict oil production?
1
POPSMark Steyn gets F2F with his accusers This is a bit of a long slog, but for those following the Mark Steyn case (author of America Alone) it is a MUST watch, as he gets to face his cowardly accusers at last. He kicks butt, lol. This is the 1st of 7 vids
3
POPS...Obama an appeaser? How dare you FTA: "Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It's one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks arethe end, talks without end. Because that's what civilized nations like doing – chit-chatting, shooting the breeze, having tea and crumpets, talking talking talking. Uncivilized nations like torturing dissidents, killing civilians, bombing villages,..."
3
POPSRe: Common Sense From Samuelson Mark Steyn Robert Samuelson's argument is so self-evident no politician can ever state it. A couple of weeks back, Statistics Canada reported that, after adjustment for inflation, Canadian wage-earners are earning less than in 1980. When advanced economies admit ever larger numbers of unskilled workers (plus a chain of relatives through "family reunification"), they are importing poverty. The President says this is to do "the jobs Americans won't do". For the sake of argument, take him at his word. So why won't Americans do them? Because they're a great way to ensure you live in poverty. So we import foreigners to be our poor people. Can we import just the right number to ensure that poverty doesn't "grow"? Unlikely. There are arguments to be made both for and against immigration, but you can't be in favor of mass unskilled immigration and then pledge to fight the "war on poverty". It's like spooning out a bathtub with a thimble while leaving the faucets running. corner.nationalreview.com
3
POPSMark Steyn: Grandma Got Over At The Press Club as the real deal. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Senator Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap — indeed, full-sized canyon — that’s opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That’s the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the Senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the Reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician… He does what politicians do.” The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician doing what politicians do seems to have affronted the senator more than any of the stuff about America being no different from al-Qaeda and the government inventing AIDs to kill black people.
2
POPSPlease Send More Complaints Otherwise how will our taxpayer-funded hate police manage to keep their cozy sinecure? Happily, beginning on July 1, under Ontario's "human rights" reforms, Commissar Hall will have far greater powers to initiate prosecutions. Under the new proposals, " 'hate incident' means any act or omission, whether criminal or not, that expresses bias, prejudice, bigotry or contempt toward a vulnerable or disadvantaged community or its members." "Act or omission"? Of course. The act of not acting in an insufficiently non-hateful way can itself be hateful. Whether or not the incident is a non-incident is incidental. I quote from "Concepts Of Race And Racism And Implications For OHRC Policy" as published on the OHRC website: "The denial of racism used by so many whites in positions of authority ranging from the supervisor in a work place to the chief of Police and ministers of government must be understood for what it is: an example of White hegemonic power over those considered 'other.' "
4
POPSMark Steyn: Feed Your Prius, Starve A Peasant Insofar as history will recall him at all, he may have the distinction of being the first head of government to fall victim to "global warming" – or, at any rate, the "war on global warming" that Time magazine is gung-ho for. The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you've suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it's not "you" who's got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most-likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that, to date, the "carbon debt" created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse
3
POPSMark Steyn: Guns And God? Hell, Yes Europeans did "vote for their own best interests" – i.e., cradle-to-grave welfare, 35-hour workweeks, six weeks of paid vacation, etc. – and as a result they now face a perfect storm of unsustainable entitlements, economic stagnation and declining human capital that's left them so demographically beholden to unassimilable levels of immigration that they're being remorselessly Islamized with every passing day. We should thank God (forgive the expression) that America's loser gun nuts don't share the same sophisticated rational calculation of "their best interests" as do Thomas Frank, Obama, too many Democrats and the European political establishment. God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn't it. Complacent liberal Democrats ought to be able to look across the ocean and see that. Obama did give the speech in San Francisco, a city demographically declining at a rate that qualifies it for EU membership
2
POPSMark Steyn: Obama's Pastor Disaster All Sen. Obama will say is that "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." And in that he may be correct. There are many preachers who would be happy to tell their congregations "God damn America." But Barack Obama is not supposed to be the candidate of the America-damners. Obama is meant to be the man who transcends the divisions of race, the candidate who doesn't damn America but "heals" it – if you believe, as many Democrats do, that America needs healing. Yet since his early twenties he's sat week after week, listening to the ravings of just another cookie-cutter race-huckster. He's a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don't boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do.
1
POPSMark Steyn Remembers William Buckley::Hilarious Gore Vidal Encounter The idea that William F Buckley represents a civilized conservatism lost to uncouth savages will no doubt become received wisdom in the same way that, upon his death, Ronald Reagan's success was universally ascribed by the media to an avuncular geniality wholly alien to the vengeful knuckledraggers of the Bush era. But Bill was lethal with opponents on the opposite team and on his own side, dispatching a liberal Republican like his own Senator, Lowell Weicker, to the trash can of history and purging conservatism of its crackpots so thoroughly that conspiracy theories, principally a hallmark of the right in the Fifties, were by the Sixties the more or less sole province of the left, where they've remained ever since.
2
POPSPolitical Worshippers Of The New Messiah You Say You Want a Revolution_ Mark Steyn A few days ago, a local news team went to shoot some film at the Houston campaign headquarters for Obama. Behind the desks were posters of Che Guevara and Cuban flags. Needless to say, the news reporters were either indifferent to this curious veneration or too sensitive to mention it, and it was left to the right-wing extremist Roy Rogers fascists of the blogosphere to point it out. Do Obama’s volunteers even know who Che is? Apart from being a really cool guy on posters and T-shirts, like James Dean or Bart Simpson, I doubt it. They’re pseudo revolutionaries. But even so, to be born a U.S. citizen is, as Cecil Rhodes once said of England, to win first prize in the lottery of life. Not even Obama supporters want real revolution: your cities get torched, the economy collapses. Ask the many peoples around the world for whom revolution means not a lame-o Sixties poster above your desk but the carnage and horror of the day before yesterday.
2
POPS Rest In Peace, Benazir "It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate." The State Department geniuses thought they had it all figured out. They'd arranged a shotgun marriage between the Bhutto and Sharif factions as a "united" "democratic" "movement" and were pushing Musharraf to reach a deal with them. That's what diplomats do: They find guys in suits and get 'em round a table. But none of those representatives represents the rapidly evolving reality of Pakistan. Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir's, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that "the whole of the western world" was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime'll get you a cup of coffee. We should be modest enough to acknowledge when reality conflicts with our illusions.
3
POPS Pakistan And President Musharraf Mark Steyn Everyone's an expert :General Musharraf should do this, he shouldn't have done that, the State Department should lean on him to do the other. Furthermore, confident believers in the usual dreary pendulum of Pakistani politics — corrupt democrats, followed by authoritarian generals, followed by corrupt democrats — overlook how profoundly the country's changed. Its political dynamic has a new player: Islamism. Miss Bhutto says, oh, don't worry about that, it's a lot of hooey got up by Musharraf to persuade Washington to prop him up for another half-decade. Pakistan is not Persia. For one thing, it's a country only 60 years old whose slapdash creation was one of the worst disasters of British imperial policy. Yet even those who thought so at the time would be astonished to find that, a mere couple of generations on, a regional afterthought is not only a nuclear power that has dispersed its technology around the planet but also a driving force of the world's first global insurgency.
2
POPS The Goran, It's All You Need To Know Al's Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to "alarmism and exaggeration" and identified nine major factual errors, ruled Michael Burton, an English High Court judge. His Honour was examining the vice-president's acclaimed crockumentary because the British Government, in its wisdom, has decided to force-feed it to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren. It would be nice to think it would have to be preceded by a warning that any resemblance between this film and any actual planet living or dead is entirely coincidental, but it seems more likely that the Nobel Peace imprimatur will completely insulate the picture from even the most modest quibbles. "The Armageddon scenario he predicts is not in line with the scientific consensus." I'll say. The scientific consensus of the IPCC suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere between 15 and 60cm, with about 30cm being most likely. An Inconvenient Truth insouciantly adds a zero to the worst-case scenario.
13
POPSThe Lowest of the Low Every time I believe the right-wing nutters have reached their bottom when it comes to smear tactics, I find myself being shocked back into reality. Now we have Rush Limbaugh, Michellle Malkin, Mark Styne and Senator Mitch McConnell attacking a 12-year-old boy whose family made use of the schip program to help pay for the medical needs he and his sister incurred in a serious automobile accident. They accuse this child of lying for political reasons. This is the same kind of thing Limbaugh and his cronies did to Michael J. Fox when he campaigned for stem cell research, when Limbaugh claimed Mr. Fox was faking his symptoms in order to gain sympathy. Do these people have no feelings whatsoever? To smear a sick child for their own even sicker political purposes is beneath contempt.
4
POPSA one-day guide to war supporters and their enablers
Excellent reporting by Glenn Greenwald, as always, here is more from the article: "Citing his fellow surge advocate, NYT "reporter" Michael Gordon (who, in turn, featured O'Hanlon as his principal "expert" in his pro-war front page article this weekend), O'Hanlon argues: Petraeus will argue that the overall situation has improved substantially this year. He will be right to do so, based on virtually any primary-source data I have seen. Identically, John McCain and Joe Lieberman said in a Wall St. Journal Op-Ed today that it is "undeniable" that "facts on the ground in Iraq have improved." Perhaps O'Hanlon, McCain and Lieberman have not "seen" this "primary-source data": Seven out of 10 Iraqis believe the U.S. troop buildup in Baghdad and Anbar province has made security worse in those areas, and nearly as many say their own lives are going badly, according to a new poll conducted by ABC News, the British Broadcasting Corp., and the Japanese broadcaster NHK."
1
Pops
Newest Clips
Latest Comments
Most Pops
Print
Save
Turn on live update