Free Republic

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." Why? Is he moonlighting as a checkout clerk on the evening shift? Or is he stalking that nice lady in Lighting Fixtures? 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...

I’ve been listening to his economic speech in Independence, Missouri. He has basically echoed Nancy Pelosi’s line that opposing the bailout is unpatriotic. Here’s what he said: We are square in the greatest financial crisis of our lifetimes. And I am pleased to report that today, I will be returning to the floor of the Senate to vote on a bill that marks a decisive step in the right direction. The original proposal was flawed. I urged additions of taxpayer protections, stronger oversight, limitations on executive compensation and more protections for people’s bank accounts. I am pleased that these are...

For all the entirely false rumors about Mayor Palin banning books from the Wasilla library, the only candidate using agencies of the state to suppress views with which he disagrees remains Barack Obama. In Missouri, the Senator has managed to enlist various county officials to threaten TV stations running "untrue" anti-Obama ads. The Governor, Matt Blunt, responds: St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, and Obama and the leader of his Missouri campaign Senator Claire McCaskill have attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign....

An Alaska mayor writes to a California newspaper: “Dear Editor,” Palin wrote in 2002. “San Francisco judges forbidding our Pledge of Allegiance? They will take the phrase ‘under God’ away from me when my cold, dead lips can no longer utter those words.”

I dunno about a nine-point lead, Kathryn, but clearly the Obama campaign self-destruct effort managed to stall during Bailout Week. As a general rule, when economic matters are in the news, I would recommend Senator McCain go to Bermuda for a few days and play canasta on the veranda until everything quietens down. Obama and Biden are just as witless on the subject but at least their platitudes and class warfare don't actively depress their base - unlike McCain's nutty improvisations re Andrew Cuomo*. If only we could get back to the heady days when the Democrat-media axis was demanding...

LONDON — There is Europe and there is “Europe,” the fantasy kingdom wished into being by North American ideologues to turn their silly ideas into action movies. Once upon a time, this pretend continent was the left's dollhouse, a land where high government spending supposedly led to all manner of social good – so long as you avoided noting that Germany has fewer child-care spaces than the U.S., France has the lowest rate of unionization in the West, Italy's hospitals are filthy and ill-run and most of the continent's spending goes to the already well-off.

Jonah, why didn't the Obama guys and the AP figure that out? It's extraordinary that someone who wants to be our President and our Commander In Chief knows how to send an e-mail ...but not how to do a five-minute Google search.

Mad How disease   [Mark Steyn] The Washington Post's media man, Howard Kurtz, is mad as hell and he's not gonna take it for more than another couple decades or until the management buy-out offer improves: The media are getting mad. Whether it's the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches. Maybe it's a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated... Yes, indeed. Howie feels the press is being...

Jonah, re that incisive insight by Deeppan Pizza, I would hate to have to do as much parenthesizing as PC liberalism requires. I loved this bit: She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow... (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) That's true. Many years ago Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr sang "Me And My Shadow". Oh, wait... By the way, I'm no deep thinker but isn't the...

I agree with Mark K that Governor Palin, who kills elk for breakfast, shouldn't be seen to complain Obama-like about how beastly and mean her opponents are. Years ago in Britain there was a dialogue-free commercial in which a cute chick looked into the camera and put on her lipstick while the soundtrack played some smooth sax instrumental of "Put On A Happy Face". That's what Sarah should do: Put on a happy face. That said... If you read Obama's books, you know that his preferred voice is a detached, slightly unknowable cool. He is, in that sense, like an...

Re: Obama, the World's President [Mark Steyn] Kathryn, having decided to elect him President and Community Organizer-in-Chief, the World will not be happy if those hopelessly parochial Yank knuckledraggers decline to endorse the World's decision as to who should govern them and their ghastly backwater. Already, there are awful mutterings from The Guardian: The World's Verdict Will Be Harsh If The US Rejects The Man It Yearns For 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: But what of the rest of the world? This...

Kathryn, having decided to elect him President and Community Organizer-in-Chief, the World will not be happy if those hopelessly parochial Yank knuckledraggers decline to endorse the World's decision as to who should govern them and their ghastly backwater. Already, there are awful mutterings from The Guardian: The World's Verdict Will Be Harsh If The US Rejects The Man It Yearns For 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: But what of the rest of the world? This is the reaction I fear most. For...

As National Review's in-house demography bore, I've been struck this last week by the left's fierce hostility to Sarah Palin's fecundity. One gentleman - well, okay, maybe not a "gentleman" but certainly an impeccably sensitive progressive new male - wrote to me from Shelton, Washington: This abortion prohibitionist hag won’t cut it among women with brains.And BTW she is a good example of reproduction run amok. 5 kids; 1 retard. I wonder if the bitch ever heard of getting spayed. Each to her own, Mister Sensitive. You can be a 44-year old mother of five expecting her first grandchild and...

Roger Kimball muses today on an old WFB line: In the early 1960s, Bill Buckley famously observed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. After my post last weekend re Governor Palin, a number of readers modified the thought along the following: I would rather be governed by the first 500* names in the Wasilla, AK phone book than by the editors of The Harvard Law Review. (*Presumably reduced from 2,000 because, what with all those five-kid households, there probably aren't...

By the way, a propos the post below, I would caution our pal David Frum to ease up on this kind of analysis: The Palin choice will intensify GOP support among downscale white voters - while adding to the GOP's difficulties among more educated white voters.You'd be surprised how crowded it is down at the "downscale" end.

As National Review's in-house demography bore, I've been struck this last week by the left's fierce hostility to Sarah Palin's fecundity. One gentleman - well, okay, maybe not a "gentleman" but certainly an impeccably sensitive progressive new male - wrote to me from Shelton, Washington: This abortion prohibitionist hag won’t cut it among women with brains.And BTW she is a good example of reproduction run amok. 5 kids; 1 retard. I wonder if the bitch ever heard of getting spayed. Each to her own, Mister Sensitive. You can be a 44-year old mother of five expecting her first grandchild and...

I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin - whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin - as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn't worked since he was an extra in Deliverance.How's that narrative holding up, geniuses? Almost as good as your "devoted husband John Edwards" routine?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...

Credit where it's due [Mark Steyn] I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin - whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin - as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn't worked since he was an extra in Deliverance. How's that narrative holding up, geniuses? Almost as good as your "devoted husband John Edwards" routine? I trust even now Maureen Dowd is working on a hilarious new column mocking proposed names for the...

Over in the Frumistan province of the NR caliphate, our pal David is not happy about the Palin pick. I am - for several reasons. First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while...

The hostess with the moosest   Mark Steyn Over in the Frumistan province of the NR caliphate, our pal David is not happy about the Palin pick. I am - for several reasons. First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor...

Over in the Frumistan province of the NR caliphate, our pal David is not happy about the Palin pick. I am - for several reasons. First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. The Hostess with the Moosest

Over in the Frumistan province of the NR caliphate, our pal David is not happy about the Palin pick. I am - for several reasons. First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while...

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 13, 2008, while Mr. Steyn was in residence as a Eugene C. Pulliam Visiting Fellow in Journalism. ON AUGUST 3, 1914, on the eve of the First World War, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk and observed, "The lamps are going out all over Europe." Today, the lights are going out on liberty all over the Western world, but in a more subtle and profound way. Much of the West is far too comfortable with state...

Lights Out on Libertyby Mark Steyn [clip] Norman Podhoretz, among others, has argued that we are engaged in a second Cold War. But it might be truer to call it a Cold Civil War, by which I mean a war within the West, a war waged in our major cities. [clip] I started keeping a file on pig controversies a couple of years ago, and you would be surprised at how routine they have become. Recently, for instance, a local government council prohibited its workers from having knickknacks on their desks representing Winnie the Pooh’s sidekick Piglet. As Pastor Martin...

August 20, 2008 Canada's 'Human Rights' Revolution By David Warren In the time since I last wrote on the topic, Canada's various "human rights" kangaroo courts have publicly retreated on several fronts. Several ludicrous cases, brought against Mark Steyn's writings in Maclean's magazine, Ezra Levant's editorial judgements in the (now defunct in print) Western Standard, and Fr Alphonse de Valk's in the magazine Catholic Insight -- have been dismissed by the tribunals. This, after more publicity had been given to the cases than the human rights bureaucracies felt comfortable with. It should be mentioned that none of the defendants got...

Free Speech in an an Age of Jihad-The lamps are going out By Mark Steyn It’s an honor to be here, with so many people I greatly admire, including Rachel Ehrenfeld, and my comrade-in-arms from our struggle up north, Ezra Levant. I feel like giving a version of the Churchill speech in Fulton, Missouri, about how a Maple Curtain has descended across the forty-ninth parallel. It’s not quite that bad—yet—but if you do see a couple of guys bust into the Princeton Club in red coats on a dog sled, it’s the Royal Canadian Mounted Police snatch team, so just...

Here's Mark Steyn at the Heritage Foundation (January 10, 2007) expounding on the thesis of his great book, America Alone. If you haven't read the book yet, take the time to listen to this hour as it basically sums it up. It's tough to swallow, but Steyn's got a point...if you look at the demography, the Western world is willfully giving up the fight...

The Tony Snow International Appreciation Society [Mark Steyn] I was about to tell my own Tony Snow story when I realized it was the same as so many others - that of meeting the guy when you're an obscure peripheral fellow of no consequence and being amazed that he's familiar with your work and is gracious and affable and collegial and full of generous advice. So I thought instead, as an illustration of the range of his generosity, I'd pen a PS to this Corner post from six months ago about the great Australian wag Tim Blair being stricken by...

Maclean's magazine, Canada's Newsweek, was brought before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal for running an excerpt from Mark Steyn's book America Alone. The California websites introduced as evidence were FreeRepublic and Catholic Answers. The claim was that their discussion boards proved that Maclean's inspire hate-speech toward Muslims. The Washington Times reports: "Numerous Canadians and Americans following the hearing denounced the case as absurd and that it is a threat to free speech that a provincial tribunal is asserting jurisdiction over the writings of a best-selling author residing in New Hampshire, based upon an out-of-province complainant offended by the response...

Rush just said it. I trust Mark Steyn needs no introduction here.

TORONTO - The Canadian Human Rights Commission has dismissed a complaint filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress against Maclean's magazine. The Congress claimed an article written by Mark Steyn, entitled "The Future Belongs to Islam" and posted on the Maclean's website in October 2006, made a number of statements and assertions that were likely to expose Muslims to hatred or contempt. In its ruling, posted on Maclean's website, the commission acknowledges "the writing is polemical, colourful and emphatic, and was obviously calculated to excite discussion and even offend certain readers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike." But the commission also says that,...

News reports from the past few months has turned the phrase "human rights" into something of a joke. On the one hand, a group of Muslim activists has gone before four separate human rights commissions in a high-profile bid to censor critics of militant Islam -- realizing the worst fears of critics who, years ago, predicted that "human rights" would become an instrument of thought control. On the other hand, the places in Canada where real human rights are most at risk -- dysfunctional native reserves controlled by self-serving clans -- have long been explicitly exempted from the provisions of...

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has dismissed a hate speech complaint against Maclean's magazine. Brought by Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, the complaint was the centrepiece of a three-pronged offense against what he sees as Islamophobia in the national newsweekly, with columnists Mark Steyn and Barbara Amiel the main offenders. An identical complaint, brought with the help of three Muslim law students who became the public faces of the complaint, was rejected in Ontario on jurisdictional grounds. The third was heard this month by a British Columbia tribunal, which is now deliberating. Announcing the decision (the...

The Canadian Human Rights Commission, like any petty tyranny, has a strong instinct for survival. As I predicted last week on the Michael Coren Show, that instinct would cause them to drop the complaint against Mark Steyn and Maclean's. And so they did. With an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation and a pending Parliamentary investigation, they're already fighting a multi-front P.R. war, and losing badly. Not a day goes by when the CHRC isn't pummelled in the media. Holding a show trial of Maclean's and Steyn, like the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal did earlier this month, would be writing...

This is fully in accord with Mark Steyn’s precise observation that “so-called hate speech laws” are “not about facts,” but rather, “they’re about feelings.” Yet facts are really all that should concern us; the rocks Mahmoud Alkhazeh threw at the driver he confronted did not hurt more because they were accompanied by stinging words. Hate speech laws are an assault on truth telling, at precisely the moment when so few dare to tell the truth, and it is for that reason all the more urgently needed.

The short version of the Democratic Party primary campaign is that the media fell in love with Barack Obama but the Democratic electorate declined to. "I felt this thrill going up my leg," said MSNBC's Chris Matthews after one of the senator's speeches. "I mean, I don't have that too often." Au contraire, Chris and the rest of the gang seem to be getting the old tingle up the thigh hairs on a nightly basis. If Obama is political Viagra, the media are at that stage in the ad where the announcer warns that, if leg tingles persist for more...

IF we conducted an audit of civil liberties, the result would go something like this. If you are an alleged terrorist detained at Guantanamo Bay, suspected of waging murderous jihad against the West, you can count on a certain class of vocal Westerners defending your right to a fair trial. Fair enough. But if you're a right-wing commentator who publishes views that may offend the feelings of a minority group, don't count on much support for your rights: your right to free speech or your right to a fair trial. Go figure. Before we nut out that grotesque hypocrisy, it's...

Mark Steyn, the author of “America Alone,” is on trial in Canada for inciting hatred against Muslims in an article adapted from that book. Pakistan just asked the European Union to restrict freedom of expression so as to curb “offenses to Islam.” Finland recently gave a blogger 2 1/2 years in prison for “insulting Islam.” When Dutch police arrested the cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot, Amsterdam’s public prosecutor explained: “We suspect him of insulting people on the basis of their race or belief, and possibly also of inciting hate.” Against Muslims, of course.

In certain parts of Europe, "hate speech" already is a criminal act. When the late journalist and author Oriana Fallaci wrote books critical of Islam in 2002, she was sued in France. Later, Swiss and Italian judges ordered her to stand trial for "defaming Islam." In France, Brigitte Bardot — the former film starlet turned animal rights activist — has been convicted five times of "inciting racial hatred." In one instance, her crime was writing a letter to French officials, objecting to the ritual slaughter of sheep by Muslims. Sheep to the slaughter, sadly, is a perfect analogy for European...

[The Canadian Islamic Congress] took [Maclean's Magazine and author Mark Steyn] to "court," but not a real court. These tribunals [of the Canadian Human Rights Commission] have all the rigor of a student government star chamber. There are no rules of evidence and, again, truth is not a defense. Why bother with evidence at all? Hate speech is essentially defined as anything certain "victimized" people find offensive... And what about free speech? Dean Steacy, an investigator for Canada's national commission, explained it nicely: "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value." He gets points...

Usually, when a journalist is censored in a Western nation, American news organizations respond with collective outrage. But as a major attack on press freedom unfolds in Canada, America's mainstream media are silent. Neither the TV networks nor the major newspapers have reported on hearings last week at what amounts to a Stalinesque show trial in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist who now lives in New Hampshire and whose column appears in National Review magazine as well as several U.S. and Canadian newspapers, is facing charges before British Columbia's Human Rights Tribunal. His crime? Spreading "hatred." The...

The New York Times (NYT) is in the business of changing the American culture, especially what it perceives as really bad American habits. One of them is free speech. In an article (Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech) the NYT tried to address the issue of the different approach that American judicial system takes on the important issue of free speech. The article is a marvelous study in the architecture of deceit. What is omitted and what is included create a much distorted picture of the issue at hand. It all starts in the first paragraph: “A...

The pen is reputed to be mightier than the sword -- and probably is, over the longer stretches of history. Over the shorter stretches, the sword is definitive; or, as that great Leftist sage, Mao Tse-Tung, expressed it: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." With its monopoly on power, the State is equipped to suppress the truth. And yet the truth will not die, no matter how many people are punished for expressing it. They may die -- or be imprisoned, fined, compelled to publicly recant, or otherwise silenced and humiliated -- but the truth will...

Usually, when a journalist is censored in a Western nation, American news organizations respond with collective outrage. But as a major attack on press freedom unfolds in Canada, America’s mainstream media are silent. Neither the TV networks nor the major newspapers have reported on hearings last week at what amounts to a Stalinesque show trial in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist who now lives in New Hampshire and whose column appears in National Review magazine as well as several U.S. and Canadian newspapers, is facing charges before British Columbia’s Human Rights Tribunal. His crime? Spreading “hatred.” The...

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal. The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal will soon rule on whether the cover story of the October 23, 2006, issue of Maclean’s magazine violated a provincial hate speech law. Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial...

Author and columnist Mark Steyn’s week-long trial for “hate speech” began in a British Columbia courtroom on June 2. As previously reported in Pajamas Media, Steyn was accused of “flagrant Islamaphobia” after his bestselling book America Alone was excerpted in Canada’s oldest newsweekly magazine, Maclean’s, in 2006. If found guilty by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, Maclean’s could be ordered to stop publishing Steyn’s column, or other articles “likely” to expose Muslims to “hatred or contempt.” In other words, a magazine that’s been published for over a century in an ostensibly free Western nation will now be subject to...

AT its best, Western civilization has fostered freedom of speech and of thought. But Canada has a better idea. Last week, a Human Rights Tribunal in British Columbia considered a complaint brought against journalist Mark Steyn for a piece in the Canadian newsweekly Maclean's. The excerpt from Steyn's best-selling book "America Alone" argued that high Muslim birthrates mean Europeans will feel pressure to reach "an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots." The piece was obviously within respectable journalistic bounds. In fact, combining hilarity and profound social analysis, the article could be considered a sparkling model of the polemical art -...

If you want to look ahead to the United States under Barack Obama and a an expanded Congressional majority for the Democrats, consider Canada. Canada's greatest gift to the contemporary world of letters --- Mark Steyn --- is being persecuted for free speech in his home country.    Columnist Steyn is being hauled before something called the "Canada Human Rights Tribunal," a parallel legal system to the normal Canadian courts, without all the bother of due process, the presumption of innocence, a defined and limited legal venue, and protection for free speech.  Four Muslim law students complained about Steyn for accurately quoting Norway's...

Two American Web sites - one conservative, the other Catholic - are at the heart of a Canadian prov incial government hearing against Maclean's magazine, Canada's largest national newsweekly. The magazine was brought before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal after publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn's best-seller "America Alone" under the title "The Future Belongs to Islam." The first part of the hearing began last Monday and ran until Friday afternoon. The American Web sites introduced by the complainants are FreeRepublic, a popular conservative discussion forum, and Catholic Answers, an evangelism and apologetics site popular among young Catholics. Both...

What could Mark Steyn's punishment look like, if he's convicted by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal? It could look like this order, issued just last week by Alberta's human rights commission, against a Christian pastor named Rev. Stephen Boission. (The substantive ruling against Rev. Boissoin can be found here. See paragraph 357 where the right not to be offended "trumps the freedom of speech afforded in the Charter." And see a thoughtful response by the former executive director of the gay rights lobby, EGALE, here.) The kangaroo court judge in this case is a Tory patronage appointee, a divorce lawyer...