Free Republic

In this first anniversary of the Fifteen Days to Flatten the Curve, I looked back to what SteynOnline was leading with one year ago:Is there nothing this virus can't do?'Deerfield Testicle Festival On Hold'The entire western world's testicular fortitude has been on hold ever since. Also from SteynOnline a year ago:A national tragedy is unfolding in Italy. Meanwhile, China has no new domestic infections and has re-opened Wuhan. Having successfully exported it to every other country, they're now the only nation without it. Hmm, that couldn't have gone any better had they planned it...~With all this bad news, we could...

Having failed to get anywhere with the Taliban, the Pentagon is now going after Tucker Carlson. Who ought, in theory, to be an easier target. It began last week when Tucker noted that Joe Biden had emerged from his basement for "International Women's Day" and held a White House event touting the US military's recent achievements on that particular front - including such brilliant innovations as better maternity flight suits for pregnant pilots. (Do the growing numbers of pregnant males get paternity suits - or is that still just a courthouse thing?) Given that the brass no longer even try...

Usually, in this line of work, if you're lucky, you get a moment - a year or two when you're the in-thing - and you hope to hold enough of that moment as it slowly fades away to keep you going till retirement. Rush did something unprecedented in the history of TV and radio. Commercial broadcasting began in the United States in 1920: The Rush Limbaugh Show came along two-thirds of a century later, became the Number One program very quickly, and has stayed at the top all the way to today - for a third of the entire history...

It is with profound sadness that we announce the death of Rush Limbaugh, a giant of American broadcasting, a uniquely talented performer, and a hugely generous man to whom I owe almost everything. Rush died this morning, after a year-long struggle with lung cancer. I was scheduled to guest-host today's show. Instead, as you can hear, his beloved Kathryn will be introducing a special program put together by the EIB team to celebrate a great man's life and legacy. It's a hard thing to do - compressing a glorious third-of-a-century into three hours - but Snerdley, Kraig, Mike, Allie and...

Happy Presidents' Day - or Presidents Day (the style is variable) - to all our American readers. You can find our two-part forty-five-song Presidential Medley here and here. Usually, after the mostly-peaceful peaceful transfer of power, I update our special to take account of the new guy - in this case, the purported forty-sixth. But for some reason, this time round, I just thought, aw, screw it. ~As I've been saying for some months, we are aswirl in a blizzard of lies: Covid-19 originated in bats or pangolins. New York did a way better job of handling it than Florida,...

I remember when Christians used to actually believe in Christianity. Those were the days. (Some still do, but their numbers are shrinking.) Back then, you could still visit an average (Protestant) church and hear a pastor actually teach real doctrine and share authentic insights. You could hear his thoughts on how to live an upright Christian life, or on why bad things might happen to good people, or how Christian marriages might be improved. And you could hear it all supported by actual Bible passages. After the sermon, you could hear the congregation sing hymns affirming the importance of obedience,...

My old Speccie comrade Toby Young has a nostalgic piece pining for the days of "Mid-Atlantic Man", a coinage of Tom Wolfe for the age when David Frost et al would be jetting back and forth from Heathrow to JFK on the Concorde every week. Toby calls them, rather less glamorously, "Nylons" - as in the boarding pass: "NY-LON." In my Broadway and BBC days, I did it myself for a while, although obviously not at the same dizzying heights as Frostie. All that's gone now - even if you have your own plane, as a private jet tycoon discussed...

Good Morning/Afternoon, MEGARushBringsUpTheCensorshipThatIsGoingOnDITTOS!

Mark Steyn's Brilliant Commentary on the January 6 2021 Riots at the U.S. Capitol. Tucker Carlson Show, January 6, 2021.

Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” fill-in host and show regular Mark Steyn decried elements of the COVID-19 response, including fiscal measures taken by Congress, and the ever-changing proclamations made by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Good Morning/Afternoon, MEGAWELCOMEBACKRUSHDITTOS!

Powerful interview. https://youtu.be/IZp8e3Mcmdc

For what it's worth, Rush's fill in today said Sidney Powell will be on the show today. He didn't mention exactly when except "today".

Good Morning/Afternoon, MEGAPrayersForRushDuringTreatmentWeekDITTOS!

There are two elections taking place in America - one on the quaintly named "Election Day", the other in the weeks (and possibly months) before and after. Having access to what he calls some "deep-in-the-weeds" data, Powerline's Steve Hayward writes: Early votes cast already supposedly favor Biden (assuming respondents are being truthful with surveyors that they have in fact cast their ballots), but of people saying they intend to vote in person on election day, Trump is ahead almost 3 to 1 in some states. My conclusion: Trump is going to win a landslide among votes cast on election day....

Just before I went on air with Tucker last night, word came that the directors of the FBI and National Intelligence needed to rush onto our screens right now with an emergency news conference on "election security". In a country where judges extend mail-in deadlines at random and postal workers dump completed ballots in the trash and multiple vote forms are sent unsolicited to addresses of foreign nationals, "election security" is a joke of which all US citizens should be ashamed. As I've said on Rush and elsewhere, the looming chaos of November 3rd is a conscious choice.

Good Morning/Afternoon, MAGAGetWellPresidentDonaldJ.TrumpOurPatriot!DITTOS!

Last night Joe Biden stayed in a Cleveland hotel - his first sleepover in over six months, since March, when he took to his basement in Delaware. The great thing about the Biden campaign is that it doesn't require Biden to campaign. Here's yours truly two days ago on the fake-speech format of his ad blitz: If you're just the casual semi-engaged "low-information voter" (as Rush used to say), your impression is of Joe giving speeches, tirelessly, night after night, in between Jeopardy and Ellen and Entertainment Tonight. You could CGI in the rear end of Harry Truman's railroad car...

Instantaneous expert commentary on presidential debates is almost entirely useless - and I include my own contributions thereto, whether or not they qualify as "expert". What lasts are strange, weird, arbitrary, peripheral aspects. Twenty years ago, in the first debate, Al Gore came on like the class know-all and drowned out Bush's answers with great heaving sighs; he was over-rouged, like an English pantomime dame, and (per my late colleague Bob Novak) excessively large. So then came Round Two. This is from my Daily Telegraph/Chicago Sun-Times column of October 13th 2000: The second presidential debate is proving a difficult one...

Happy Labo(u)r Day! That's what the day used to be about: putting the "u" in Labor. You can't spell labour without you, and without you and your labour this planet would be a primitive state of nature, red in tooth and claw. Consider the words of Peter J McGuire, General Secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, proposing the very first Labor Day a mere century-and-a-third ago. The new day would be an occasion, he said, to honor those "who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold". What a crazy! All the grandeur we...