9
POPSCross The River, Burn The Bridge by Mark Steyn
There is no reason on earth why Nebraska should be the only state in this Union to have every dime of its increased Medicare tab picked up by the 49 others. So either that privilege will be extended to all, or to favored others, or its asymmetry will be balanced by other precisely targeted lollipops hither and yon. Whatever happens, it’s a dagger at the heart of American federalism, just as the bill’s magisterial proclamation that the Independent Medicare Advisory Board can only be abolished by a two-thirds vote of the Senate strikes at one of the most basic principles of a free society " that no parliament can bind its successors. These details are obnoxious not merely in and of themselves but because they tell us the truth about where we’re headed: Think of the way almost every Big Government project bursts its bodice and winds up bigger and more bloated than its creators allegedly foresaw. In this instance, the stays come pre-loosened, and studded with loopholes.
3
POPSDHS Sec.Napolitano: "The System Worked" on Attempted Al-Qaeda Plane Bombing For the first three months of this administration, they refused to use the word terrorism." Per Napolitano, "the system worked" (see the video, also at peekurl.com/vjvx1c2). Let's Roll 2 by Mark Steyn On December 25th 2009, the government's (post-9/11) security procedures all failed, and the only good news came once again from alert individuals: (Jasper) Schuringa, sitting in seat 20J, in the right-most section of the Airbus 330, looked to his left. "I saw smoke rising from a seat ... I didn’t hesitate. I just jumped," he said. "I searched on his body parts and he had his pants open. He had something strapped to his legs." The unassuming hero ripped the flaming, molten object " which resembled a small, white shampoo bottle " off Abdul Mutallab’s left leg, near his crotch. He said he put out the fire with his bare hands. Schuringa yelled for water, and members of the flight crew soon appeared with fire extinguishers.
10
POPS Let's Roll 2 by Mark Steyn If the facts remain broadly as outlined, this incident has serious implications for airline travel: A man is on the no-fly list but is allowed to board the plane. Everyone flying on an inbound long-haul flight to the United States is forced to hand over excessively large amounts of liquids and gels and put the small amounts permitted into separate plastic bags, yet the no-fly guy's material for bomb-making sails through undetected. This time the last line of defense worked. Next time, the paradise-seeking jihadist might get lucky and find himself sitting next to, say, Charlie Sheen, too immersed in a lengthy treatise on how 9/11 was an inside job to notice the smoldering socks in the next seat; or to the same kind of nothing-to-see-here crowd who thought Major Hasan's e-mails were "consistent with his research interests". (http://bit.ly/6qYzZd)
6
POPSVintage Moonbattery: Copenhagen's A Battle To Humble And "Redefine Humanity" So this isn't the place for rationality. It's the place to reverse the Industrial Revolution. You do have to read this entire self-caricature, though, because there's just so much I couldn't include. There's an entire section on how the people who disagree with him - the bullies who call him bad names - are angry because he's just too decent. Then there was a part about how we have to reign in "adventurers," which a cynical person might read as a pointed version of banal Blue State nannyism. "I'm too priggish to have fun so you're not allowed to have any either." The Guardian (http://bit.ly/691nUu)
3
POPSOnce More From The Top, Barack! by Mark Steyn “There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic, if somewhat hollow, uplift. Pause for applause.” It didn’t come but once at Oslo last week, where Obama got a bad press for blowing off the King of Norway’s luncheon. In Obama’s honor. Can you believe this line made it into the speech? “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.” Well, there’s a surprise. When you consider all the White House eyeballs that approve a presidential speech,
3
POPSCome Fry With Me: Mark Steyn Wow. 443,243 miles. How many flying polar bears does Dr. Pachauri kill in an average quarter? Well, not to worry, he probably offsets his record-breaking ursocide with carbon credits from carbon billionaire Al Gore. And in any case it's okay to devastate the planet on IPCC business " plus the occasional cricket match: So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match. And why not? Aside from a slight increase in the risk of polar bears dropping from the skies onto stray Indian bowlers and wicket-keepers, where's the harm? P.S. I like the headline on Dr. Pachauri's climate'n'cricket story: "Heat On Cricket Pitch Warms This Climate Change Laureate."
6
POPSThe Hole at the Heart of Our Strategy ~ Mark Steyn ...to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base. Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers recommend, judged people by their actions " flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own " taking out training camps in Afghanistan, rolling up insurgency networks in Fallujah and Ramadi, intercepting terror plots in London and Toronto and Dearborn. But we’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic .......
4
POPS "Truth to Power" by Mark Steyn He came; he saw; he stimulated: “If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.” I suppose so. He could invade somewhere and force the natives to accept degrading roles in NEA-funded performance art. He could take out the Iranian nuclear program by carpet-bombing it with unreadable literary novels. That is, if you “accept the premise” that the United States is the most powerful country in the world. Rocco Landesman may, but it’s not clear, from his actions (or inactions) in Eastern Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, that the president does. But, even so, it seems an odd pitch to “American artists.” Rocco Landesman, Speaking Goof to Power, isn’t the first Obama groupie to enjoy the kinky frisson of groveling obsequiousness, but he’s set an impressive new standard in public revelation thereof.
3
POPSMark Steyn: Obama a Tough Guy, at Least With Fox News I don't know why he'd be surprised. When a man has spent his entire adult life in the "community organized" precincts of Chicago, it should hardly be news that much of his Rolodex is made up of either loons or thugs. So when Communications Commissar Mao Ze Dunn starts berating Fox News for not getting into the same Maosketeer costumes as the rest of the press corps, you begin to see why the Chairman might appeal to her as a favorite "political philosopher". So the troika of Dunn, Emanuel and Axelrod were dispatched to the Sunday talk shows to lay down the law. We all know the lines from "The Untouchables" " "the Chicago way," don't bring a knife to a gunfight " and, given the pay czar's instant contract-gutting of executive compensation and the demonization of the health insurers and much else, it's easy to look on the 44th president as an old-style Cook County operator: You wanna do business in this town, you gotta do it through me.
9
POPSLimbaugh Bad, Mao Good by Mark Steyn and famously nondivisive figures like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson expressed the hope that, with Mr. Divisive out of the picture, the NFL could now "unify." The second quotation " hailing Mao " was uttered back in June to an audience of high school students by Anita Dunn, the White House communications director. I know she uttered it because I watched the words issuing from her mouth on "The Glenn Beck Show" on Fox News. But don't worry. Nobody else played it. So if I understand correctly: Rush Limbaugh is so "divisive" that to get him fired Leftie agitators have to invent racist sound bites to put in his mouth. But the White House communications director is so undivisive that she can be invited along to recommend Chairman Mao as a role model for America's young. From my unscientific survey, U.S. school students are all but entirely unaware of Mao Tse Tung, and the few that aren't know him mainly as a T-shirt graphic or "agrarian reformer."
10
POPSNobel Tops 'SNL' for Obama Joke by Mark Steyn What "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy" did he make in those first 12 days? Bowing to the Saudi king? Giving the British prime minister the Walmart discount box of "Twenty Classic Movies You've Seen A Thousand Times"? "Er, Barack, I've already seen these." "That's OK. They won't work in your DVD player anyway." For these and other "extraordinary efforts" in "cooperation between peoples", President Obama is now the fastest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in history. Alas, the extraordinary efforts of those first 12 days are already ancient history. Reflecting the new harmony of U.S.-world relations since the administration hit the "reset" button, The Times of London declared the award "preposterous," and Svenska Freds (the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society) called it "shameful." Why, only the other day, very conversationally, the administration floated the trial balloon that it could live with the Taliban returning to government in Afghanistan.
5
POPSWOW: Richard Warman Revealed This story is truly a tale to marvel at. To savour this part of the story, you ought to start at the very beginning. Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant have survived years of literal hell being hounded by this man. and now, incredibly, he is being exposed as the slug he is. Amazing turn of events.....stay tuned!
5
POPSUnited Nations; Trade Union & Social Club For Tin Pot Tyrants by Mark Steyn which of them is more unreal. To be sure, Colonel Qaddafi peddled his thoughts on the laboratory origins of “swine flu” and the Zionist plot behind the Kennedy assassination. But, on the other hand, President Obama said: “No nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” Pardon me? Did a professional speechwriter write that? Or did you outsource it to a starry-eyed runner-up in the Miss America pageant? Whether or not any nation “should try” to dominate another, they certainly “can,” and do so with effortless ease, all over the planet and throughout human history. And how about this passage? “I have been in office for just nine months " though some days it seems a lot longer. I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted, I believe, in a discontent with a status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences . . . ”
2
POPSThe Long Retreat ~ Part I by Mark Steyn to it, perhaps not publicly (just as the US agreement to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey was not make public during the Cuban Missile Crisis). The Obama Administration's diplomatic strategy is, I believe, wise and comprehensive"but it needs to show more than public concessions over time. A few diplomatic victories wouldn't hurt. Golly. We know, thanks to Jimmy Carter, Joe Klein, and many others, that we critics of President Obama’s health-care policy are by definition racist. Has criticism of Obama’s foreign policy also been deemed racist? Because one can certainly detect the first faint seeds of doubt germinating in dear old Joe’s soon-to-be-racist breast: The Obama administration “needs to show more than public concessions over time” " because otherwise the entire planet may get the vague impression that that’s all there is . Especially if your preemptive capitulations are as felicitously timed as the missile-defense announcement, stiffing the Poles . .
2
POPS The Long Retreat ~ Part II by Mark Steyn Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-Il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? Okay, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever farther west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon . . . Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto tsar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire " not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a . . .
3
POPSWhy Can’t The Silver-Tongued Post-Partisan Healer Seal The Deal? by Mark Steyn population outside the current system, why is it necessary to destabilize the arrangements of the 90 percent within it? Well, says the president, not so fast. Lots of people with insurance run into problems when they change jobs or move to another state. Okay, In that case, why not ease the obstacles to health-care portability? Well, says the president, shuffling his cups and moving the pea under another shell, we’re spending too much on health care. By “we’re,” he means you and you and you and you and millions of other Americans making individual choices over which he casually claims collective jurisdiction. And that, ultimately, gets closer than anything else he says to giving the game away. For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to “reform” health care. Most voters don’t buy it: They see it as Obama’s “war of choice,” . . .
7
POPSMark Steyn on ACORN: Community Organizing in Action by Publius And if necessary, that means conscripting all kinds of peculiar figures, including pimps, prostitutes and their various fictional or real dependents in foreign lands,and claiming benefits for them. And it’s absolutely outrageous that actually more of this wasn’t exposed in the campaign, because Obama’s connection to ACORN, and his willingness to give ACORN a role in the United States Census, puts a huge question mark over the reliability of government data, and over U.S. elections, not so much in blue and red states, but in purple states, it puts a big question mark over the integrity of those elections. HH: It was the second ACORN story this week. There was one in Florida about false registrations where indictments have come down, raising the specter perhaps of pattern and practice investigation by that U.S. attorney. But by itself, right now, we’ve got one corrupt ACORN official advising two young, undercover investigative journalists on how to
7
POPSThe Truth According To a Troofer: "America Had It Coming" Traveling through the Middle East about six months after 9/11, I was struck by the number of Arabs, from Egypt to the Gulf, who simultaneously believed (a) the Mossad were behind the attacks and (b) it was a great victory for the Muslim world. Van Jones would seem to be an American variant of the same phenomenon: a man who believes 9/11 was (a) blowback for the actions of the US government's war machine and (b) an inside job by the US government's war machine. No wonder the left derides those boorish enough to bring this stuff up: Why, surely all sophisticated persons know these positions are little more than lifestyle accessories or fashion hemlines. One season, everyone on the catwalk is agreed 9/11 was blowback by Jihadists for Social Justice. The next, everyone is equally agreed that Bush called up the White House Steel Melting Czar and buried the whole thing under "miscellaneous" in the budget. by Mark Steyn http://corner.nationalreview.com/
4
POPSDo You Notice Anything Shrivelling? by Mark Steyn . . . who conceive through donor sperm are getting it from the United States, mainly from men in Georgia and northern Florida. Canada’s future is now in American hands. You know how it is: you wait ages for a good sperm story and then they all come at once. It seems there’s also a shortage of the stuff in Sweden. But, in contrast to Canada, this is caused not by government intervention in supply but by a surge in demand, from Swedish lesbian couples anxious to conceive. So they headed off to the sperm clinic, whereupon the Sapphic demand ran into the problem of male inability to satisfy it. There appear to be higher than usual levels of non-functioning sperm. It’s a widespread problem: “Concern As Sperm Count Falls By A Third In UK Men” (the Daily Mail, 2004). Don’t ask me why: I’d blame Tony Blair’s cozying up to Bush were it not for "Sperm Counts Drops 25 Per Cent In Younger Men" (the Independent , 1996), so maybe it was John Major pulling out of the . . .
3
POPSLearning to Live with Islam by Mark Steyn Ah, right. That's the big worry, is it? If you're wondering why the link above doesn't go to Lucy Cockcroft's report itself, that's because the Telegraph's original story appears to have suddenly gone missing. Funny how that happens when the subject under discussion is Islam. I would imagine Sebastian Faulks was asked a straightforward question and gave an honest answer. Lux et veritas ("Light and Truth"), as they used to say at Yale. But I would bet that, in the long run, the Zakaria approach will prevail. (Full disclosure: Sebastian came to stay at my pad in New Hampshire to research a novel partly set in my neighborhood. Aside from a blazingly vivid description of the breakfasts I made him, don't pick it up if you're looking for glimpses of real life chez Steyn: He turned me into a woman and had sex with me. I thought of issuing a fatwa and burning down his publishers, but I'm not the type to make a fuss.)
8
POPSMark Steyn: The Suffocating Embrace of Nanny Government In the old days, you'd go to your doctor (or, indeed, believe it or not, have him come to you), he'd patch you up, and you'd write him a check. That's the way it was in most of the developed world within living memory . . . The British National Health Service is the biggest employer not just in the United Kingdom but in the whole of Europe. Care to estimate the size and budget of a U.S. health bureaucracy? According to the U.N. figures, life expectancy in the United States is 78 years; in the United Kingdom, it's 79 " yay, go socialized health care! On the other hand, in Albania, where the entire population chain-smokes, and the health care system involves swimming to Italy, life expectancy is still 71 years " or about where America was a generation or so back. Once you get childhood mortality under control and observe basic hygiene and lifestyle precautions, the health "system" is relatively marginal. One notes that, even in Somalia, which still has high childhood mortality . .
5
POPSBeat Me in St. Louis ~ Mark Steyn "Behave yourselves like your mom would probably tell you to do," Gibbs said when asked what piece of advice he would give to the demonstrators. Congressman Timeserver isn't my mom. And, if he were, I'd tell him to quit stealing my paper-route money. Meanwhile, inevitably, the usual "moderates" are getting suckered into denouncing "extremist" conservatives. (*Sic. I didn't know there were "Democratic town halls".)
5
POPSDISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTI… No, wait, That Bumper Sticker Expired January 20th Senator Barbara Boxer has denounced dissenters from Obama's health care proposals as too "well-dressed" to be genuine. Only the Emperor has new clothes. Thankfully, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has seen through the "manufactured anger" of "the Brooks Brothers brigade." Did he announce this in a crumpled suit? He's a Press Secretary who won't press. Apparently, the health care debate now has a dress code. Soon you won't be able to get in unless you're wearing Barack Obama mom-jeans, manufactured at a converted GM plant by an assembly line of retrained insurance salesmen. Any day now, Hollywood will greenlight a new movie in which an insane Sarah Palin figure picks out her outfit for spreading disinformation (The Lyin', The Witch And The Wardrobe). (Nancy Pelosi) "I think they're AstroTurf," she declared. "They're carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care." So, on Monday, the official White House Web site drew attention to the . . .
5
POPSElitists' Rules for The Working Class Interesting photo, no matter which way you break on that. Touching interaction between Crowley and Gates (who finally climbs down a little in his latest take* on this whole business, acknowledging he had something to learn about the cops. I’d add he still needs to acknowledge new lessons about race relations. * 'An Accident of Time and Place' "...I thank God that I live in a country in which police officers put their lives at risk to protect us every day, and, more than ever, I’ve come to understand and appreciate their daily sacrifices on our behalf." The Root By: Henry Louis Gates Jr. http://www.theroot.com/views/accident-time-and-place Obama looks like he’s ready to get these two and the awkward situation they represent out of his house. Either that or it shows us what we already knew. Crowley is a gentleman. Obama, as amply demonstrated by assorted bizarre international incidents, is not.
5
POPSA Liberty Issue by Mark Steyn Why doesn’t Ottawa introduce a National Doughnut Licensing Agency? You’d still see your general dispenser for simple procedures like a lightly sugared cruller, but he’d refer you to a specialist if you needed, say, a maple-frosted custard " and it would only be a six-month wait, at the end of which you’d receive a stale cinnamon roll. Under government regulation, eventually every doughnut would be all hole and no doughnut, and the problem would be solved. Even if the hole costs $1.6 trillion. How did the health-care debate decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own bodies? That’s the argument that needs to be won. And, if you think I’m being frivolous in positing bureaucratic regulation of doughnuts and vacations, consider that under the all-purpose umbrellas of “health” and “the environment,”
2
Pops
Newest Clips
Latest Comments
Most Pops
Print
Save
Turn on live update