Free Republic

It isn’t easy being a public-sector-union leader these days. “This is beyond insane,” said Steve Smith, president of the Providence Teachers’ Union in Rhode Island, reacting to the city’s latest outrageous provocation. “Let’s create the most chaos and the highest level of anxiety in a district where teachers are already under unbelievable stress. Now I know how the United States State Department felt on December 7, 1941.”

How mean-spirited are House Republicans? So mean-spirited that they would end federally funded cowboy poetry! Tuesday, Harry Reid, Majority Leader, took to the Senate floor to thunder that this town ain't big enough for both him and the Mean-Spirited Kid (John Boehner). "The mean-spirited bill, HR 1 ... eliminates National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts," said Reid. "These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there...

Ross Douthat, the token conservative at The New York Times, is, tonally, the very soul of moderation. For those of us of a more foamingly right-wing bent, he can, indeed, be excessively mindful of his readers' sensitivities - and a fat lot of good it does him. So this week he writes about some of the consequences of the sexual revolution - all very sober, very measured. At the Times website, the commenters immediately retreated to the most cobwebbed tropes: bozack of dc thinks "nonmarital sex is an unalloyed good thing, a part of personal fulfillment", and that any suggestion...

Andrew, I don’t agree with everything Nick Cohen says (particularly in those passages where he himself feels obliged to lapse into equivalism) but he’s right about liberalism’s retreat into a cowed quiescence, both in Pakistan and in the heart of the west. By way of a (so far) less bloody example: "A prominent British imam has been forced to retract his claims that Islam is compatible with Darwin’s theory of evolution after receiving death threats from fundamentalists." This is not in Lahore or Cairo but in London, at what is described as “a prominent mosque which also runs one of...

The Democrat palace guard of America's dying monodailies are doing a grand job in reporting the current stand-off in Wisconsin. A headline in The New York Times sums up the media's bizarre enthusiasm for sacrificing what remains of their reputations in order to protect the cause: Billionaire Brothers' Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute The dogged John Hinderaker of Powerline is endeavoring to get some answers from the shy and retiring Eric Lipton as to the basis for certain aspects of his story. But I find the headline alone so perverse you wonder how, even at the Times, it could...

The trick in this biz is never to be right too early. Kathy Shaidle writes: "Remember during the gay ‘marriage’ debate, we were scolded: ‘Nobody’s talking about polygamy, you bigoted hicks’?" Why, yes. Yes, I do.

Listening to lifelong regime toadies belatedly call for the seizure of Mubarak's assets or calibrate the precise moment when it's safe to demand the overthrow of the strongman you've happily served all your life, I'm reminded of the Hakim of Bahrain's visit to London for the Queen's Coronation in 1953. Late in the evening, at the end of the banquet, the diminutive Sheikh Salman came upon the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, sitting at the bottom of a staircase, and attempted to ingratiate himself with a view to winning support for some land claim Bahrain had against Qatar. It had been...

Remember the way all those Curly Fry Lightbulbs governments are forcing us to use are going to lead to massive savings in our energy bills? The great Australian wag Tim Blair draws my attention to this story from The Scotsman: "Cutting carbon emissions through reducing energy consumption may not be as effective as it seems, if consumers spend the money they have saved on environmentally unfriendly products, an economic think-tank has warned. A report on energy and pollution from the Fraser of Allander Institute at the University of Strathclyde, in partnership with accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), has claimed that the "rebound...

Way back when America's daily papers were actually profitable, there was a cynical formula used by editors to determine news values that ran something like this: One dead American equals ten dead Frenchmen equals one hundred dead Russians equals one thousand dead Africans. The dying monodailies of the Democratic Party's court eunuchs have refined the formula: Six million dead in the Congolese civil war don't equal one Iraqi prisoner being led around Abu Ghraib on a dog collar - because there's no way to blame the former on Bush and Rumsfeld. Likewise, in domestic terms, if a mentally deranged loner...

Well, that's what Perry Mason would have called it. But 21st century Europe is a long way from Erle Stanley Gardner. On Tuesday, in a story headlined "Austrian Court Upholds Islam's Blasphemy Rules", Nina Shea reported: Today, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a young Viennese mother, was convicted under section 283 of the Austrian penal code of vilifying religious teachings for her negative commentary on Islam in a lecture before a political-party gathering in Vienna; she was fined 480 Euros. Sabaditsch-Wolff, a diplomat’s daughter, had lived and worked for several years in various Middle Eastern Muslim countries, and at the lecture in question...

At the New York Conservative Party conference in Albany the other week, I was asked about the party's role in state politics. I replied that in a multiparty system it's very important to have some sort of force to the right of the right-of-center party - to arrest the tendency of the "mainstream" right to drift across the spectrum and wind up taking the rest of us to the same destination as the lefties want to go but at a slightly slower speed. A useful illustration of that role can be seen in Europe's current debate. Asked on TV about...

As I was leaving Fox News last night, I glanced up at the monitor and caught Juan Williams expressing mystification to Sean Hannity as to why Republicans in Congress were wasting the country's time on a "little thing" like abortion. Gee, I dunno. Maybe it's something to do with a mass murderer in Pennsylvania, or Planned Parenthood clinics facilitating the sex trafficking of minors. From the Office of the District Attorney in Philadelphia:

Dear Mark, I find it odd that you'd see a secular protest of millions of Egyptians against a tyrant to be "dark." This is what America stands for -- our ideals are winning. The Islamic extremists have not caught on with the Arab youth. Moreover, these changes are inevitable. Half the Arab population is below 24. They see on al jazeera how corrupt their governments are, and how life is in the West. They are becoming modern. They will not submit to dictators. We can either stand for our principles and embrace change, or we can cling to tyrants and...

If you missed my TV and radio appearances this week, here's a recap of my thoughts on Egypt: This is not a happy ending but the beginning of something potentially very dark. The end of the Mubarak regime is the biggest shift in the region in 60 years, since Nasser overthrew King Farouk's dissolute monarchy and diminished London's influence in Cairo. We are witnessing the unraveling of the American Middle East - that's to say, of the regimes supported by Washington in the waning of British and French imperial power after the Second World War. The American Middle East was...

The Guardian has a report from the Greek-Turkish frontier - or "Europe's border", as a German member of the 175-strong Frontex security team describes it: "In 2009 some 3,600 migrants managed to slip across the frontier not far from this market town; in 2010 that number shot up to 36,000, helping explain why Greece has become the favoured port of entry for 90% of illegals pouring into the EU. "They come at all hours of the night and day," said Orestiada's police chief, Giorgos Salamangas, in his icon-bedecked office. "And they're coming not just from the Middle East and Asia...

Muzzammil "Mo" Hassan chopped off his wife's head, and then claimed it was because she'd been spousally abusing him. This was not in Yemen or Waziristan but in Buffalo. Despite the chutzpah (if he'll forgive the expression) of his defense, yesterday the jury took less than an hour to find him guilty of murder. The Hassan case was fascinating not just because his entire public identity was a fraud but because the media so enthusiastically promoted that fraud.

HAPPY BOXING DAY! Sunday, 26 December 2010 We hope you had a good Christmas. Mark returns to the airwaves this coming week to guest-host America's Number One radio show, The Rush Limbaugh Show, live this Wednesday and Thursday - and join us tomorrow, Monday, right here for more audio entertainment exlusively from SteynOnline

I know the on-again off-again nature of SteynOnline in recent months has sorely tried readers’ patience. Rather boringly, I have some health issues that demand somewhat more attention than I’ve been able to give them. So rather than keep driving you nuts by showing signs of life on the home page for a day or two and then lapsing back into sleep mode for a week, we’re going to close up shop for a while.

Ninety-one years ago, King George V proclaimed that "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" would be observed throughout the British Empire as a commemoration of the cessation of hostilities in the Great War a year earlier. It still is. Two years ago, just before Remembrance Day, I was in the Crown Colony of the Turks and Caicos Islands and saw the islanders' preparation for their ceremonies. In parts of Europe, Armistice Day is also observed. And of course it is Veterans Day in the United States. This essay, written for the first November 11th after...

In the Nineties, the “culture wars” were over “God, guns and gays”. The overreach of the statists has added a fourth G: Government itself is now a front in the culture war, and a battle of the most primal kind. Is the United States a republic of limited government with a presumption in favor of individual liberty? Or is it just like any other western nation in which a permanent political class knows what’s best for its subjects? Pat Cadell, the former Carter adviser and Democratic pollster, surveying popular discontent over the summer distilled it to a single question: "Who...