Free Republic

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...

There was a song Ray Charles used to hum in the back of his car on the way to the gig. A few hours later, on the way back from the gig, he'd hum it all over again. The paying customers in between never got to hear the tune, only Ray's chauffeur. "Cat said, 'You hum it so much, why don't you record it?' recalled Charles. "I said, "cause I don't even know the words."' The driver pointed out he could learn them. So he did: "Georgia, Georgia The whole day through Just an old sweet song Keeps Georgia On...

... 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...

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...

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...

But, aside from the music, the American contribution to soccer has been minimal, and American interest in it even, er, minimaller. Every four years, the same bien-pensants who urge the Administration to be more "multilateral" and to work through the UN also commend the virtues of the World Cup: the game is supposedly more poetic than American sports, as subtle and nuanced as French foreign policy. But Americans like their international competitions to be international in the sense of the current "international coalition against terror" at Kandahar airbase - that's to say, overwhelmingly American but with a few token Canadians....

Here at SteynOnline every cutting-edge pop culture reference has to be at least three-quarters of a century old. So, watching the IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, I found him a dead ringer for Guy Kibbee, the beaming befuddled sugar daddy who was a mainstay at Warner Brothers in the early Thirties. Mr Koskinen is a Democrat sugar daddy who has given generously to his party since the Seventies: He's not the kind of sober civil servant you'd appoint if you were looking to signal to America that King Barack's revenue collectors are cleaning house and returning, chastened, to their previous role...

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...

If nothing else, l'affaire Bergdahl brings into sharp focus one of the problems that has bedeviled the entire "war on terror" concept from the beginning - that there's no agreement on what it is. Is it a war? Is it a counter-terrorism campaign? Is it law enforcement, in which the "accused" are "brought to justice" and tried in regular courtrooms with all-American dream-team legal representation? The Afghan end of this thing is the nearest to a conventional war there is. A sovereign state was invaded and its government toppled. But the toppled party never quite went away, and they're assuredly...

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,...

Ever since 9/11, the United States has taken an expansive definition of "aiding and abetting" terrorism. To cite merely the latest example, this morning a chap called Khairullozhon Matanov appeared in US District Court in Boston. Who is Mr Matanov? He's a 23-year-old cab driver from Quincy, Mass, and a Kyrgyzstan national. He appears to share the same general view of "the horror that is America" as the acclaimed war hero Bowe Bergdahl, so there's no reason to hold that against him. But he was also a buddy of the Tsarnaev brothers. On the evening after the Boston Marathon bombing,...

THE WAR ON WOMEN ...in New York: An elderly Pakistani immigrant beat his wife to death with a stick after the doomed woman made the mistake of cooking him lentils for dinner instead of the hearty meal of goat meat that he craved, according to court papers. Noor Hussein, 75, was so outraged over the prospect of eating the vegetarian fare that he pummeled his wife, Nazar Hussein, 66, inside their Brooklyn apartment until she was a "bloody mess," prosecutors said in opening statements of his murder trial Wednesday. Mr Hussein used "a stick that the family had found in...

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...

Two days ago, I wrote that for me the real issue in the upcoming Mann vs Steyn trial is not so much my own personal freedom of speech but the broader freedom to speak given "the climate of fear that Mann and his fellow ayatollahs of alarmism have succeeded in imposing on an important scientific field": If you're older, tenured, sufficiently eminent and can stand his acolytes jumping you in the parking lot and taking the hockey stick to you, you'll acknowledge that his greatest achievement is distinguished mainly for its "misrepresentations" and "falsifications". But, if you're a younger scientist,...

It 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? There's something slightly weird about taking a hashtag - which on the Internet at least...

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...

A week before the 2012 election, I wrote: Someone at the highest level of the United States government made the decision to abandon American consular staff to their fate and cede U.S. sovereign territory to an al-Qaeda assault team — and four out of five Sunday news shows don't think it's worth talking about. In the smoking ruins of that consulate in Benghazi, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought for hours and killed 60 of the enemy before they were overwhelmed, waiting for the cavalry that never came. They're still waiting – for Candy Crowley, David Gregory, Bob Schieffer, and...

It 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?

As readers may know, Big Climate alarmist and self-garlanded Nobel Laureate Michael E Mann is suing me and others for mocking his hockey stick. The latest development is that my co-defendants have appealed to the DC Court of Appeals to hear their appeal on whether or not they're allowed to appeal to the Court of Appeals. If the appeal to the Court of Appeals on whether they can appeal to the Court of Appeals is successful, they'll then appeal to the Court of Appeals to hear the appeal proper. That sound you hear is me putting a screwdriver through my...