Free Republic

HEWITT: Mike O’Hanlon said this is common sense. Victor Davis Hanson said this reflects the evaporation of American power in the world, and it’s not going to be just Japan. It’s going to be everybody running to get their own guns. What do you think, Mark Steyn? STEYN: Yes, I tend to agree with that, and Victor is a believer in the American umbrella, which is the situation that’s prevailed since the Second World War, where some of the wealthiest countries in the world like Japan or like Germany were able to not, in a sense, put up the money...

The Toronto Star has one of those heartwarming miracle-operation hospital stories that newspapers run from time to time, whose meaning for American readers is something else entirely. A 33-year-old Oklahoma man called Jon David Sacker (right) urgently needed a double-lung transplant after his body rejected the ones he'd received two years ago. So he went to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, but was too weak to undergo the operation. The only possibility of saving him was something called the Hemolung Respiratory Assist System, which would stabilize his condition and buy time for the body to re-strengthen and for new...

In my weekly conversation with Hugh Hewitt, we looked at America at home and abroad on the nation's 238th birthday. I suggested to Hugh that, from Obama's point of view, everything was proceeding according to plan: MARK STEYN: Mr. Medvedev was, if you recall, Vladimir Putin's sock puppet as the nominal leader in Russia. And Obama was overheard saying 'Well, this'll be my last election, and afterwards, I'll have a lot more flexibility.' And we're now actually seeing what that flexibility means. We're seeing it in the retreat of American power not just across the globe, but actually the vanishing,...

...Paul Mazursky was middle-aged and still cool when I met him, and Down And Out In Beverly Hills had been a pretty big hit, and I thought he'd carry on making films like that for another quarter-century. It was not to be. But Hollywood is the poorer for it. ~Speaking of American Jews, in the wake of the murder by Hamas of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frenkel, Ben Shapiro has written a withering piece on "the Jew-hating Obama Administration". Whether or not they're Jew-haters, they're certainly very quiet: President Barack Obama said nothing about them publicly. His wife...

...The great organizing principle of 21st-century American life is that everything should be fiendishly complicated. If, say, an Italian wishes to take a leak, he strolls six feet across the corridor to the bathroom and unzips. To achieve the same end in America, a Keystone pipeline-long catheter has to be inserted snaking from his underwear out the front door, down the road to his employer's human resources department, on to the chief executive at head office, across town to the micturition management services company, over to the bodily fluids evacuation insurance provider, down the railroad track to the federal bureaucracy...

On my weekly visit to The Hugh Hewitt Show yesterday, Hugh and I discussed the Clintons and their money - Bill can't stop talking about how much they have, Hillary can't stop talking about how poor they are, and poor Chelsea has declared, from her $10.5 million apartment, that she's just too, too bored by money. On Hugh's show, I put it this way:The problem here is it's a Mitt Romney problem. When Mitt ran, people talked about Bain Capital, and a lot of people couldn't understand what Bain Capital did. You know, he would talk about Staples, but everyone...

... At any rate, ever since our suggestion that you might like to help out in this manner, we've had a steady stream of emails from readers explaining that this is all well and good but it's taxable income and what I really need to do is set up a 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 or 501(c)87 or some such as a vehicle for this campaign. To which the answer is: well, we certainly considered the possibility, and a few years ago I might have entertained the notion. But not anymore. The National Organization for Marriage, which was founded to protect the...

The Iraq/Syria border no longer exists: ISIS has simply erased the Anglo-French settlement of 1922. Jordan has just one border post with Iraq - the one I crossed all those years ago - and it's asking an awful lot of these lads to be more respectful of Jordan's sovereignty than they've been of Iraq's or Syria's. Where next? With Syrian refugees expanding the population of his country by 25 per cent, I wonder how Jordan's King Abdullah feels about being an "ally" of Obama's. Perhaps he nodded his head at the reported comments of the Polish Foreign Minister - that...

Following the news that global warming is to blame for those kidnapped Nigerian girls, Al Gore explains that it's also to blame for the unstoppable march of ISIS across Syria and Iraq. Fortunately, Secretary of State John Kerry has been keeping his eye on the big picture by devoting his energies to figuring out how to lower the oceans with renowned climate expert Leonardo di Caprio. It's a shame Leo's yacht is too big for the Tigris, since I'm sure he and John could settle this Iraq thing in nothing flat if they just anchored it at the Mosul Sailing...

In May 2011, in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, CNN's Fareed Zakaria wrote a column headlined "Al Qaeda Is Over": The truth is this is a huge, devastating blow to al Qaeda, which had already been crippled by the Arab Spring. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is the end of al Qaeda in any meaningful sense of the word. Al Qaeda is not an organization that commands massive resources. It doesn't have a big army. It doesn't have vast reservoirs of funds that it can direct easily across the world. Zakaria is famously a...

Guest-hosting for Rush a few days ago, I said if your kid is graduating from high school this week there has been no global warming his entire life. And immediately the usual drama queens emailed that I was a know-nothing denialist. But, just to nail it down, there has been no global warming for 17 years and nine months. That's since September 1996. The High School Class of 2014 has been blessed to have lived its entire life in a warming-free world.We're supposed to ignore this nigh-on-two-decade warming "pause" because the "97 per cent scientific consensus" tell us to. But,...

In Dennis Sullivan's photograph above, a landing craft from HMCS Prince Henry carries Canadian troops toward Juno Beach in the early hours of D-Day. Many years ago, I spoke to someone who'd been aboard the Prince Henry's sister ship, HMCS Prince David, who talked about the subtly different dynamic among the guys on those landing craft. The Royal Canadian Navy men at the front are concerned to make their rendezvous on time: They're in the middle of the mission, and they want to complete it. The infantrymen behind them are waiting for theirs to start. As the Prince Henry recedes...

My former National Review shipmate Dinesh D'Souza has pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws. As part of the general sclerosis of the "justice" system, he will not be sentenced until September 23rd. If the judge operates to the sentencing guidelines, D'Souza will serve 10-16 months in jail. He will also be, unto the end of his days, a convicted "felon", and thus, depending upon what sentence he serves, unable to own a gun, and, depending upon which state he chooses to make his home, unable to run for public office and/or vote. For a $15,000 infraction. (Not 20K, as...

Among the documents requested from me in discovery by Michael E Mann's Big Tobacco white-shoe legal team a couple of months ago was this column of mine from 2009: Here's what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by "peer review." When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann "consensus," Jones demanded that the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor," and Mann advised that "we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer...

t is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture at right is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria. Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week's Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared - on social media! - and that's all that matters, isn't it? Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn't actually involve standing with Ukraine, so #BringBackOurGirls...

Paul Weston of the Liberty GB party arrested for the following public quote of Churchill. "In The River War (1899), Winston Churchill's account of the Sudanese campaign, there's a memorable passage which I reproduce here while I'm still able to:" "How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism...

Like everyone else, Gavin McInnes has weighed in on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's observations on "the Negro". Mr McInnes concludes:This isn't about some old guy's views on slavery. It's about government control. We're not saying Bundy is the messiah and we accept him as our personal savior. We're saying the government is wrong. Let's stipulate that Cliven Bundy is a racist. Let's also assume, if only to save time, that he's Islamophobic, homophobic and transphobic. So what? Does that make criticizing the Bureau of Land Management "racist" or "homophobic"?

~On the other hand, tea-wise, the Johnson County Sheriff's Department is taking it to a whole other level. Two years ago, at 7.30 one April morning, a sleepy Bob Harte staggered to the front door of his home in Leawood, Kansas to answer a knock and found a fully-armed SWAT team outside preparing to use the battering ram. They shoved him to the floor, surrounded him with pointing rifles, and the whole rigmarole began... On the other hand, at least the Hartes and their kids are still alive. I've written often about the increasing tendency of American cops to police...

Happy Earth Day! April 22nd is the day when President Obama and the rest of the gang demonstrate their commitment to saving the planet by flying in to plant a tree somewhere. And say what you like but, when you're looking for fellows who know how to dig a huge hole, Obama and Harry Reid are pretty much at the top of the list. My township in New Hampshire is 90 per cent forested, but you can never have too many trees, so on Earth Day I always like to plant a couple more, get the tree cover in my...

Happy Easter, Happy Passover. On this Good Friday, we mark the tenth anniversary of Mel's movie, and over the weekend we'll have something with a lighter touch. Caroline Glick, my old colleague from The Jerusalem Post, has a column using a very Steynian word, "The Disappearance of America's Will": The most terrifying aspect of the collapse of US power worldwide is the US's indifferent response to it. In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East and beyond, America's most dangerous foes are engaging in aggression and brinkmanship unseen in decades.