Free Republic

On Friday I was back behind the Golden EIB Microphone on America's Number One radio show. (You can find a few moments from my guest-hosting stint here.) We were preoccupied, as apparently we will be well past Thanksgiving, by the third Broward County hand count of the fifth Palm Beach machine count, or whatever rubbish we're up to now. But I also mentioned, towards the end of the show, my ambivalent feelings about Stan Lee, the phenomenally successful Marvel Comics impresario who died a few days ago at the age of 95. Meeting him was one of the great moments...

There was a terrorist attack in Melbourne on Friday. I believe it's the fifth, publicly speaking, but I gather there's also a sixth one that's sub judice. An excitable fellow blew up his Holden Rodeo ute (that's "SUV" in American) on busy, crowded Bourke Street, a couple of blocks from Victoria's parliament. It unfortunately didn't cause quite the mass slaughter he'd been looking forward to when he loaded it up with gas bottles. So he staggered from the flaming vehicle, and a pedestrian, assuming the car detonation had been an accident, went to the driver's aid. And thus two migrants...

This is no ordinary Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth and much of Europe, and Veterans Day in the United States. Today we mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that brought to an end the most terrible war in history. Exactly a century ago - on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month - the guns fell silent on Europe's battlefields. The belligerents had agreed the terms of the peace at 5am that November morning, and the news was relayed to the commanders in the field shortly thereafter that hostilities would cease at eleven o'clock....

As I have said lo, these many years, when Republicans win elections, they have to win beyond the Margin of Lawyer. Otherwise, regardless of who won on Election Day, the Democrat always wins on Post-Election Day, because mysteriously all the missing ballot boxes found in dumpsters and recycling bins and the trunks of Democrat cars contain virtually no Republican votes. Alas, in the Sunshine State of Florida, the GOP's gubernatorial and senatorial candidates failed to win beyond the Margin of Lawyer, and as a result we're all discovering, two decades on, that the same institutional corruption that put US electoral...

A quarter-century ago - October 31st 1993 - Federico Fellini died from complications of a heart attack he suffered a day after celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary. His memorial service at Cinecittà in Rome a few weeks later was attended by 70,000 people. Twenty-five years on, for our Saturday movie date I thought I'd pick something from that heyday of "Hollywood on the Tiber". I came to Fellini's 1957 smash Nights of Cabiria the wrong way round - because I was writing something about Sweet Charity, the musical Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon drew from it a decade later. In...

As I wrote on Saturday, we're marking the twentieth anniversary of Canada's National Post by dusting off some yellowing columns, and my moldy old byline pic. We started on Monday with a shameful account of the tie that binds me to Tony Blair, while Tuesday found me inside Buckingham Palace and outside Bar Erotica. I said yesterday that a columnist has to get out of the house once in a while, but it helps if where you need to get to is just down the road. For much of 1999 and 2000, I was preoccupied with the US presidential primary...

Video Link In his segment with Tucker Carlson on October 25, 2018, Mark Steyn discusses the left's war on speech that they don't agree with, and he reflects on how he took on Canada regarding his "hate speech". During that time, a government official there admitted that they were trying to "de-normalize" Steyn. It's all very Orwellian. The left is actively trying to stigmatize, criminalize, demonize, and financially penalize any speech they deem objectionable. Not new news, but it's getting increasingly aggressive and dangerous.

In February 2017, Cary Katz and CRTV fired me, canceled my TV show, and sued me for $10 million. They lost, comprehensively. At which point they decided to double-down on their lawlessness and mendacity and refused to be bound by the judge's award of damages. Within days of CRTV's defeat going public ("Conservative Pundit Wins $4M From Network That Fired Him"), they then re-sued me, this time for a combined $20 million. So, for the benefit of the many lawyers among our readership who purport to be interested in this kind of thing, here's a handy guide to vexatious litigant...

I am reluctant to compare myself, an impoverished Canadian showtune queen, to a billionaire president of the United States, but I will confess that, late in the Kavanaugh shenanigans, it all began to ring a vague bell with me. A decade ago, when my battles with the "human rights" commissions got going up north, I was told by wise old birds to stay calm, let the process play itself out, don't rock the boat, etc. There was one lone dissenter who told me, no, no, if you do that, you're going to lose - and, indeed, I subsequently heard that,...

On September 19th the 94-year-old Charles Aznavour was on stage at the NHK Hall in Osaka, Japan. After a triumphant concert he returned to his home in Mouriès, the lovely olive-oil town in the south of France, and died there suddenly last Monday. It was a spectacular run for a man who outlived all his contemporaries, and indeed an entire musical tradition. His arrival nine and a half decades ago was the first of many unexpected plot twists: He was supposed to be born in America; his parents were only passing through France, awaiting final approval of their US visa...

On the day that Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as a judge on the highest court in the land, this new film is as appropriate a choice as any for our Saturday movie date: it was America's abortion absolutism that drove both the fanatical opposition to Justice Kavanaugh's nomination and the media blackout on the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell, and their opposition to anyone telling his story. Gosnell opens in movie theaters this coming Friday, but a few days ago The Mark Steyn Club Cruise hosted a special screening with filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer as we sailed through...

The sold-out Mark Steyn Club Cruise departed Quebec City just as a wild tsunami of an election result crashed on the Plains of Abraham and washed away the National Assembly. On Monday François Legault's brand new party, the CAQ (Coalition Avenir Québec), won 74 out of 125 seats and became the first government in half-a-century to be neither Liberal nor separatist. The CAQ is described as "center-right", but that term doesn't really cover it: Like many of the emerging parties in the new Europe - from Sweden to Italy, France to Hungary - M Legault concluded that the sweet spot...

Back in the Nineties Robert Altman released a droll Hollywood satire called The Player about a murderous studio executive, and included towards the end a parody action movie with Bruce Willis. A couple of weeks later Altman ran into the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who told him he'd seen The Player and liked the Willis parody. "That's where you went wrong," he said. "You should have made it for real," he advised Altman. Bruckheimer's made them for real for decades: Top Gun, The Rock, Con Air, Pearl Harbor, and franchises, franchises, franchises - Beverly Hills Cop, Bad Boys, Pirates of the...

Happy Constitution Day to all our American readers. Brett Kavanaugh's high school years continue to roil Washington. Charles C W Cooke concludes: "Unfair as it may be, the core calculation now will not be whether the charges are true (we don't know) or whether the timings and assumptions are fair (they are not), but what the various players consider the least dangerous course politically." Oh, my. To modify my old gag from the Obama years, Republicans are so good at folding they should be Chuck Schumer's valet. If you were Judge Kavanaugh, would you want to bet your future on...

This time last year, when Hurricane Irma swept up the spine of Florida, we tracked its progress in song, from "Key Largo" north to "The Swanee River". I'm not as familiar with the geography of the Carolinas, but, with Tropical Storm Florence afflicting our many readers in the neighborhood, I thought I'd take a trip to "Carolina In My Mind", as James Taylor put it. Which is not to be confused with "South Carolina On My Mind", which is the deputy state song of said jurisdiction. Carolina is one - or actually two - of the more hymned American states,...

The Florida gubernatorial race is being portrayed as a Trump vs Sanders proxy fight with a far left Bernie bro running for the Dems and a Trump-supported congressman for the Republicans. So it is necessary for the media to find what they can to destroy the latter. The Washington Post has certainly got the goods on the GOP's Ron DeSantis - because he made the mistake of attending a conference whose speakers included ...um, me: At the same conference, conservative author Mark Steyn praised Trump as the first politician to talk about immigration policy from the perspective of people already...

We hope our many readers on the Carolina coast are safe and well or, better yet, snug and cozy this weekend as Hurricane Florence batters the shoreline, and all residents within one mile of the Cape Fear River are ordered to evacuate. For most of us non-Carolingians, any mention on the Weather Channel of "Cape Fear" is as likely to evoke not the actual cape but a movie title (cf "Key Largo"). As I understand it, Cape Fear is the fifth oldest English place name in America, so christened by the petrified crew on Sir Richard Grenville's expedition of 1585....

Exactly three-quarters of a century ago this week the Number One hit in America was not a new record, but an old one. Which was an odd accomplishment, as the concept of "oldies" had yet to be invented. "All Or Nothing At All" had it all in September 1943, but it had had nothing at all for the previous four years. This is the story of how it, and its boy vocalist Frank Sinatra, came out on top... It was June 1939 and the singer Louise Tobin was in her room in the Lincoln Hotel in Manhattan, packing for a...

In a line much quoted since his death on Thursday, Burt Reynolds observed, "I may not be the best actor in the world, but I'm the best Burt Reynolds in the world." And he was. It made him a huge box-office star in the Seventies, and thus the best Burt Reynolds in the world cruised amiably through Smokey and the Bandit, Cannonball Run and variants thereof for a hugely lucrative decade. He took his bankability and invested it in things he liked - a football team, a petting zoo, and a lovely little theatre in Jupiter, Florida. Squire to an...

... One of the occupational hazards of this line of work is that at a certain point you've seen it all before. For example, not many people outside the United Kingdom retain any memory of Gordon Brown, Tony Blair's woeful and short-lived successor as prime minister. Mr Brown led the Labour Party to defeat in the 2010 election. Here's what I had to say about it at the time: The official "defining moment" of the campaign was Gordon Brown's unguarded post-photo-op dismissal of Gillian Duffy as a "bigoted woman." Mrs. Duffy, a plain-spoken working-class granny and lifelong Labour voter, had...