Free Republic

~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...

So Why is Mark Steyn No Longer at National Review? I didn't even find him in the contributing editors section. I do go to www.steynonline.com but reading Steyn was a good 40% of why I subscribe to NR.

We all know the top "rated" talk shows but do the ratings reflect your preferences? Are the highest rated necessarily the most talented? (video)

In After America (available here, he pleads, and the profits of which go to support my free-speech pushback against Michael E Mann), I write inter alia about Fort Hood, and in particular the disgraceful statement by General Casey, and the Pentagon's absurd decision to classify what happened as "workplace violence": In the days after the slaughter, the news coverage read like a satirical novel that the author's not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch-22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you muse openly on pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the...

On Wednesday, I wrote about the Mozilla CEO in trouble for a five-year-old donation to Proposition Eight, the successful California ballot measure that banned gay marriage - if only until America's robed rulers declared the will of the people to be "unconstitutional". Brandon Eich is a tech genius: Aside from co-founding Mozilla and creating Firefox, he also invented JavaScript. Apparently, the disgusting homophobic hatey-hatey-hateful belief that marriage is a sacrament between a man and a woman is not incompatible with knowing your way around a computer.Nevertheless, unlike Hollywood director Brett Ratner, Mr Eich declined to eat gay crow. And so...

I have written for years about America's absurd paramilitarized bureaucracy: the federal Secretary of Education who employs not a single teacher but is the only education minister in the western world with his own SWAT team; Virginia's beverage regulators with their crack sparkling waterboarding team; USDA's Bunny Team Six; Wisconsin's Deer Team Six; the IRS agents ready to take out your W2 with an AR-15... Apparently the only government department without a military force at its disposal is the military. So when a lone shooter opens up at an army base, Fort Shock'n'Awe has to call 911 and "shelter in...

When the "Climategate" e-mails were leaked five years ago, a lot of us speculated that it could all end up in the courts, given the evidence that climate scientists were pocketing large sums of government money on the basis of a scientific consensus they were manipulating behind the scenes. But it's typical of our upside-down political and cultural environment that when this issue does reach the courts, it will be in the form of a lawsuit against the climate skeptics. Steyn and the others are being sued for criticizing Mann's scientific arguments. In the case of the Competitive Enterprise Institute,...

You don't have to be sued by Michael E Mann to have a certain antipathy toward him. It's been fascinating to discover how many people there are who believe in "anthropogenic global warming" and believe in climate science but really, strongly dislike Mann, his methods, and his promotion of himself as sole proprietor of Global Warming, Inc. I quoted a few of them the other day, but you have to be both secure in your career and have a certain toughness to come out against him in public. Here's a small case study. Michael Liebrich lives in London. He's a...

Every side in the political debate has a natural tendency to appeal to freedom of speech when they feel threatened—but to ignore (or initiate) threats to the free speech of the other side. My favorite example is from the early 1990s, when the Yeltsin government dispossessed Russia's Communist Party of the vast holdings it had amassed in the decades when it controlled the state. The Communist Party screamed in protest, denouncing the supposed attack on its "property rights and freedom of speech." Which was pretty rich, considering that the Communists had just spent 70 years ruthlessly stamping out everyone else's...

So let’s just cut through that crap and remind ourselves briefly what we know about the plaintiff. Michael Mann was an obscure young physicist-turned-climatologist who rose without trace in 1998 with the publication in Nature of his ‘hockey stick’ chart showing dramatic and apparently unprecedented late-20th-century global warming. There followed almost instant fame, on which Mann has traded ever since — gaining tenure at Penn State University, drawing millions in public funding for research, often called on by the Guardian and the New York Times to sum up the state of climate science. Al Gore used a version of Mann’s...

Well, I can't speak for Dr Mann or my co-defendants, but I want to put it in front of a jury - in part because I loathe "settling" and regard it as a malign and corrupting influence on the American "justice" system. Nobody's guilty or innocent any more, are they? It's all about the settling. But the pressure to "settle" means that, for a litigious goon like Dr Mann, simply launching suits relieves him of the need to win them. Nuts to that. He wanted this case, so he can have it and take it to a jury.

These are all reasons that the lawsuit should have been summarily thrown out. It goes beyond the legitimate scope of libel and defamation laws and constitutes an attempt to suppress opinions that are considered politically correct. But it gets worse. Consider the specific argument Mann is making, as summed up in the report I linked to above. "In the articles, Mann says in his lawsuit, the think tank and the publication ignored more than half a dozen investigations that found no scientific wrongdoing, focusing almost exclusively on the Penn State inquiry in order to call him a fraud. CEI also...

John Kerry played the same old card he always plays - Vietnam: I have to tell you, my friend, I've been, quote, attacked before - by people using real bullets, not words. This would be a pretty funny line from the characteristically tin-eared Kerry applied to almost anyone from the Belgian Deputy Tourism Minister on up. But it's especially hilarious directed at Mr Bennett, who's a veteran of two of Israel's toughest special-forces units and could undoubtedly kill the Secretary of State with his bare hands were he minded so to do.

Barry Rubin, a great strategic thinker and cartographer of the emerging post-American world, died today in Tel Aviv. I read him regularly and cited him in After America re the collectively insane urge of almost everyone Nidal Hasan encountered as he wafted upwards through the US Army to look the other way and not see what was staring them in the face: As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, Major Hasan was the first mass murderer in US history to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the rationale for the crime he was about to commit. And he gave it to...

I'm sure even now some New York Times type is tutting that Buckley's movement has fallen into the hands of vulgar bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who lack his dash and élan. As it happens, back in 2000 some fellow in the San Francisco Chronicle made exactly that point about a lout called Steyn disfiguring Buckley's National Review. But, in reality, Bill was, as he would say, the fons et origo of a conservatism that came out swinging — sometimes literally, as in a famous TV encounter of 1968. Bill Buckley would have fought this present battle with...

At the end of a week in which yet another Obama State of the Union has been a bust, this story seems oddly emblematic. It comes from Fleet Street's Daily Mail, the US having taken on the condition of the Soviet Union to the point where you have to turn to the foreign press to read anything interesting about the regime. Anyway: President Obama's high school pot dealer who he thanked in his yearbook for the 'good times' was beaten to death by his lover after a series of fights over flatulence and drugs, MailOnline can reveal today.Raymond Boyer, known...

I'm a little overwhelmed by your generosity in the wake of Judge Weisberg's ruling in the Mann vs Steyn case. Readers from not only America but also Canada, Ireland, Norway, India and Australia, among others, have swung by the SteynOnline store to help prop up my unsought sojourn in the DC Superior Court by buying my book on free speech and various other products. However, Neil McNeill in Toronto writes: Dear Mark, The battle with Mann is critical to so many people. Let little guys like me support your fight. If I buy $100.00 worth of mugs, you only have...

This column originally appeared in the January 27th print edition of National Review: America is a land of acronyms, and, useful as they are, acronyms can quickly curdle into jargon. SLAPP stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation" — i.e., using legal action to cow an opponent into silence, and withdrawal from the public square. It was coined in the Eighties by Penelope Canan and George W. Pring at the University of Denver, and in the Nineties they turned it into a book: SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out. And it proved so influential that by the Oughts various jurisdictions...

On Tuesday morning, January 21st, I filed a motion with respect to Dr Michael Mann's defamation suit against me, National Review, Rand Simberg, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. I did so because I felt the procedural fiasco the case has been reduced to since last July 10th thanks to the incompetence of the previous judge, Natalia Combs Greene, required what I called "an act of jurisprudential hygiene" from the new judge, Frederick Weisberg. Unfortunately, the DC Superior Court seems disinclined to clean up its act. I appreciate that, to those who followed the fun and frolics of my free speech...

Has there ever been a better story? It's like a version of Titanic where first class cheers for the iceberg Yes, yes, just to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’ is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon footprint...