Clipmarks | Mark steyn Clips

With a Wink and a Smile by Mark Steyn

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 11:59:07 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: 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...[you get the idea]

Clip Source: article.nationalreview.com

I have a couple of favorite snapshots from the evening. One was when Governor Sarah Palin said that John McCain hadn’t required her to check her principles at the door, and she still believed in drilling in ANWR and she was hoping to bring him round on that. And then she grinned and gave a mischievous wink into the camera, and to the nation.

“Don’t sell the American people short,” said Obama honcho David Axelrod. “They need more than a wink and a smile.” Okay, so how about this? Joe Biden mocked the McCain campaign’s energy policy as “Drill, drill, drill”, and the governor came back to correct the line: “It’s not ‘Drill, drill, drill’,” she grinned. “It’s ‘Drill, baby, drill!’”

By contrast, Senator Biden was glib and fluent and in command of the facts — if by “in command of the facts” you mean “talks complete blithering balderdash and hogwash.” He flatly declared that Obama never said he would meet Ahmadinejad without preconditions.

Tags: gov sarah palin, sen joe biden, vp debate

Re: Obama, the World's President [Mark Steyn]

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 04:43:27 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: 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.

Clip Source: corner.nationalreview.com

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.

The Guardian

The World's Verdict Will Be Harsh If The US Rejects The Man It Yearns For

Polling in Germany, France, Britain and Russia shows that Obama would win by whopping majorities, with the pattern repeated in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America

Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for..

For America to make a decision as grave as this one - while the planet boils and with the US fighting two wars -

indeed suggest a nation in, to quote Weisberg, "historical decline"

Tags: mark steyn, obama, worlds president, europe, africa, asia, middle east, latin america

Credit Where It's Due [Mark Steyn]

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:46:17 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: 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...

Clip Source: corner.nationalreview.com

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?

Tags: sarah palin, us media, john edwards

The Lady Who Can Hunt Caribou And Serve Up The Stew....... Mark Steyn

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:18:15 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: 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.

Clip Source: corner.nationalreview.com

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 having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.

Second, it can't be in Senator Obama's interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans' vice-presidential pick is "even more" inexperienced than the Democrats' presidential one.

Tags: gov sarah palin, john mccain, gun-rights, pro-life, energy independence

Free Speech A Casualty Of 'Hate' Powers

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:56:51 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: 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)

Clip Source: www.theaustralian.news.com.au

To be in breach of these hate speech provisions you don't need to say something untrue; you don't need to actually subject some group or person to hatred or contempt; you don't have to counsel violence. You only need to say something that the people who are chosen to staff these commissions -- and, trust me, this is not a representative cross-section of Canadian society, but more like the most ultra-PC university professor you know -- happen to think is likely to expose some group or person to hatred or contempt.

Once the commission thinks that, it can fine you, order you to pay money to those who complained, force you to apologise, and more.

That picture of an Orwellian nightmare, a nightmare where you can say something that is wholly true, and you can prove it is true, and yet you can be severely punished and stifled and forced to issue a bogus apology by hack bureaucrats, is the one that was and is facing Mark Steyn in Canada.

Tags: mark steyn, america alone, freedom of speech, canadian human rights commission, canadian islamic congress

Excellent article that got Steyn sued for thought ("hate") crime.

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:58:27 GMT

clipped by: Charlie Martel 732AD
clipper's remarks: 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.

Clip Source: www.macleans.ca

The future belongs to Islam

The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It's the end of the world as we've known it. An excerpt from 'America Alone'.

MARK STEYN | Oct 20, 2006

Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

Tags: steyn, islam, pc, immigration

Good: Case Dismissed

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:47:11 GMT

clipped by: Antara

Clip Source: www.ctv.ca

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has dismissed a Muslim group's complaint against Maclean's magazine.

The Canadian Islamic Congress had argued the magazine published an article in October 2006 that would likely expose Muslims to hatred and contempt.

The article, entitled "The Future Belongs to Islam," by Mark Steyn claimed that Muslims are on the verge of dominating Europe and the West because of a demographic shift.

The article claims that their greater numbers will eventually allow Muslims to dominate Western countries. The article goes so far as to quote a European imam who allegedly said Muslims are reproducing like "mosquitoes."

While commentators have said Steyn's demographic claims are way off-base, the CHRC concluded the views in the article, "when considered as a whole and in context, are not of an extreme nature, as defined by the Supreme Court."

Tags: whew, politics, canada, mark steyn, macleans

Rights Commission Dismisses "Hate Speech" Complaint

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:11:12 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: 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."

Clip Source: www.nationalpost.com

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.

The federal human rights commission is the only such body that properly deals with hate spread via the internet, although there have been some apparent exceptions, such as a recent order of the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission that a pastor refrain from "disparaging" comments about homosexuals in his internet postings and private emails.

Tags: mark steyn, macleans magazine, canadian human rights commission, canadian islamic congress, muslim law students

Free speech and the bigotry of Mark Steyn

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:04:22 GMT

clipped by: jklugman

Clip Source: johnquiggin.com

A case like this is obviously going to turn out badly whether Steyn wins, and gets an undeserved triumph or loses and gets to paint himself as a martyr. It will certainly do nothing to refute his claims. Rather it’s better to point out his fraudulent bigotry, starting with this ludicrous 9/11 conspiracy theory. I had a few goes at this back in the day, when people other than RWDBs took Steyn seriously. At this point, refuting Steyn is scarcely necessary (or wasn’t until this silly prosecution gave him oxygen).

Tags: mark steyn, free-expression, canada

Free Mark Steyn

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:08:58 GMT

clipped by: sillysam
clipper's remarks: An attack on free speech in Canada.

Clip Source: article.nationalreview.com

While only an administrative hearing, the human-rights travesty had the air and authority of an actual trial — except with few of the legal protections usually afforded the accused. Andrew Coyne, a journalist with Maclean’s, live-blogged the farce; his dispatches were as amusing as they were harrowing. The proceedings had no evidentiary rules — new evidence was routinely introduced without warning. Commissioners routinely recessed to determine the eligibility of evidence; legal representation would dash off mid-hearing to print Internet material to introduce as evidence; an “expert” witness was called whose chief credentials were academic papers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and still other witnesses were called under the prejudicial direction that “we anticipate that success in this case will provide the impetus for prohibiting discriminatory publications in the other provinces.”

Tags: free speech

Obama The Humble Savior

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:56:16 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: 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.

Clip Source: www.ocregister.com

Speaking personally, I don't want to remake America. I'm an immigrant, and one reason I came here is because most of the rest of the Western world remade itself along the lines Sen. Obama has in mind. This is pretty much the end of the line for me. If he remakes America, there's nowhere for me to go – although presumably once he's lowered sea levels around the planet there should be a few new atolls popping up here and there.

Nothing in Obama's resume suggests he's the man to remake America and heal the planet.

Yet at the same time as he's being stunned by the corruption and anti-Americanism of those closest to him, Obama's convinced that just by jetting into Tehran and Pyongyang he can get to know America's enemies and persuade them to hew to the straight and narrow. No doubt if it all goes belly-up, and Iran winds up nuking Tel Aviv, President Obama will put on his more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger face and announce solemnly that "this isn't the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad I knew."

Tags: mark steyn, obama, corrupt, anti-american, rezko, ahmadinejad, tel aviv

This guy is very smart

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:55:08 GMT

clipped by: _jaja_
clipper's remarks: He makes statements that were quotes from other prominent people, and when everyone gets mad about him saying it they didnt realize these statements came from people within their own religion...This shows the hypocrisy of the people doing the whining...

Clip Source: www.canada.com

Re: "Article demonized Islam, tribunal told," June 6.

I don't think there's any doubt that Mark Steyn's Maclean's article upset Canada's Muslim community and demonized Islam. However, it is not Steyn and Maclean's that Muslims should be angry with, but with Muslim spokesmen whom Steyn quoted. Steyn made this clear in a letter he wrote to the

June 8 Harper's Magazine. The statement comparing the growing Muslim population in Europe to mosquitoes was actually made by "a prominent Scandinavian Muslim, Mullah Krekar" boasting to a "respectable Norwegian newspaper" that Muslims would outbreed Europe. Krekar said: "We're the ones who will change you." Other statements that Muslims complained about to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal were made by different Muslim spokesmen. Steyn wryly suggested that the complainants should be suing their own co-religionists for bringing disrepute to their own religion.

Go right to the source

Calgary Herald

Published: Sunday, June 08, 2008

Pfleger apology?

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:09:39 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: 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?

Clip Source: michellemalkin.com

“This is a dangerous time in America, the freest country in the world,” Pfleger says, “where you have to whisper your thoughts.”

Canadian Human Rights Committee Under Investigation

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 03:54:13 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: 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.

Clip Source: pundita.blogspot.com

Consider how bleak things looked six months ago for free speech advocates in Canada!

Now comes the stunning news of a breakthrough. Ezra Levant writes:

The Conservative government has introduced a motion to Parliament's Justice Committee proposing an investigation into the abusive, corrupt practises of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Visit Ezra's site for a link to Nicholson's email and for the text of the motion. Ezra also summarizes other recent breakthroughs:

The government's proposed inquiry comes on top of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's announcement last month that she is investigating the corrupt and abusive conduct of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

And earlier this month, Ottawa police referred a criminal complaint about the CHRC to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who are now conducting a criminal investigation.

Marc Lemire and his attorney Barbara Kulaszka have done a magnificent job of bringing forward shocking evidence about the way that the CHRC

Tags: freedom of speech, canada, parliament's justice committee, investigation, macleans magazine, canadian human right commission

Your Car Can't Run On Congress' Hot Air: Mark Steyn

Sun, 25 May 2008 05:14:47 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: [continued] 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?

Clip Source: www.ocregister.com

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz knew the routine: "I can't say that there is evidence that you are manipulating the price, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not."

I'd have answered, "Hey, you first. I can't say that there is evidence that you're sleeping with barnyard animals, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not.

So instead the Big Oil guy oozed as oleaginous as his product before the grand panjandrums of the House Subcommittee on Televised Posturing, and then they went off and passed 324-82 the so-called NOPEC bill. The NOPEC bill is, in effect, a suit against OPEC

"It shall be illegal and a violation of this Act," declared the House of Representatives, "to limit the production or distribution of oil, natural gas, or any other petroleum product ... or to otherwise take any action in restraint of trade for oil, natural gas or any petroleum product when such action, combination, or collective action has a direct,

Tags: u.s.house, oil, gas, petroleum, nuclear, coal,