Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:40:43 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Mark Steyn :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Mark+Steyn istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/political-viagra/79550/ Mon, 9 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The short version of the Democratic Party primary campaign is that the media fell in love with Barack Obama but the Democratic electorate declined to. "I felt this thrill going up my leg," said MSNBC's Chris Matthews after one of the Senator's speeches. "I mean, I don't have that too often." Au contraire, Chris and the rest of the gang seem to be getting the old tingle up the thigh hairs on a nightly basis. If Obama is political Viagra, the media are at that stage in the ad where the announcer... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-fallen-heroine/79066/ Mon, 2 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST "Someone wins, someone doesn't win, that's life," Nancy Kopp, Maryland's Treasurer, told The Washington Post. "But women don't want to be totally dissed." She was talking about her political candidate, Hillary Clinton. Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. "Healing The Wounds Of Democrats' Sexism," as the Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-nopec-fix/78627/ Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 EST I was watching the Big Oil execs testifying before Congress. That was my first mistake. If memory serves, there was lesbian mud wrestling over on Channel 137, and on the whole that's less rigged. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz knew the routine: "I can't say that there is evidence that you are manipulating the price, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not." Had I been in the hapless oil man's expensive shoes, I'd have answered, "Hey, you first. I can't say... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/taking-it-personally/76634/ Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 EST "That's enough. That — that's a show of disrespect to me." That was Barack Obama, a couple of weeks back, explaining why he was casting the Reverend Jeremiah Wright into outer darkness. It's one thing to wallow in "adolescent grandiosity" (as Scott Johnson of the Powerline website called it) when it's a family dispute between you and your pastor of 20 years. It's quite another to do so when it's the 60th anniversary celebrations of one of America's closest allies. Last week, President Bush was... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/as-it-goes-with-israel/76261/ Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Almost everywhere I went last week — TV, radio, speeches — I was asked about the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state. I don't recall being asked about Israel quite so much on its 50th anniversary, which as a general rule is a much bigger deal than the 60th. But these days friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist Entity. Assuming President Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic fancies don't come to pass, Israel will surely make it to its 70th birthday. But a lot of folks don't... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/obamas-spell-is-broken/75836/ Mon, 5 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Four score and seven years ago ... No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR's First Inaugural, or JFK's religion speech, or (if like Garry Wills in The New York Review Of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln's Cooper Union speech of 1860. And, of course, the Senator's speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates'... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/biofuels-debacle/75415/ Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the US Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: "How To Win The War On Global Warming." Where to begin? For... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/macchiato-chorus/75028/ Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Our lesson today comes from the songwriter Frank Loesser: "Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition." Or as Barack Obama and his San Francisco pals would put it: God and guns. Loesser got the phrase from Howell Forgy, a naval chaplain at Pearl Harbor, who walked the decks of the New Orleans under Japanese bombardment exhorting his comrades. When the line came to Loesser's ears, he turned it into a big hit song of the Second World War: "Praise the Lord and swing into position Can't afford to sit... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/already-guilty-at-6/74654/ Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Is American public education a form of child abuse? A week ago, The Washington Post's Brigid Schulte reported on a student named Randy Castro who attends school in Woodbridge, Virginia. Last November at recess he slapped a classmate on her bottom. The teacher took him to the principal. School officials wrote up an incident report and then called the police. Randy Castro is in the First Grade. But, at the ripe old age of six, he's been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/good-time-for-mccain/74276/ Mon, 7 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "Three o'clock in the morning And it looks like it's gonna be another sleepless night …" That's Crystal Gayle from the opening of her hit song, "Talking In Your Sleep," Number One on the Billboard Country charts in 1978. No, hang on a minute, it's Hillary Clinton's new campaign theme. In Crystal's case, her sleepless night was caused by her husband lying next to her talking in his sleep, moaning in ecstasy and whispering sweet nothings to some other gal. But Hillary learned to snore through... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/sir-edmund-hillary-clinton/73861/ Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST About this business of Hillary coming under intense sniping, I have some sympathy. The Clintons got away with this sort of thing for so long that you can't blame them for wondering how they missed the memo advising that henceforth the old rules no longer apply. Bill, being warier, was usually canny enough to set his fantasies just far enough back in time that live cable footage was unlikely to be available — his vivid memories of entirely mythical black church burnings in his childhood, etc... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/defending-the-indefensible/73486/ Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST "I'm sure," said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries and strawberry shake sound profound, "many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed." Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose legions of "spiritual advisors" at the height of his Monica troubles... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/wright-and-wrong/73013/ Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The Reverend Jeremiah Wright thinks that, given their treatment by white America, black Americans have no reason to sing "God Bless America." "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America," he told his congregation. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human." I'm not a believer in guilt by association, or the campaign vaudeville of rival politicians insisting... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/farewell-to-guilt/72578/ Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Well, we will have Hillary Clinton to kick around some more, at least for another few weeks. The Mummy (as my radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls her) kicked open the sarcophagus door and, despite the rotting bandages dating back to Iowa, began staggering around terrorizing folks all over again. "She is a monster," Obama advisor Samantha Power told a reporter from The Scotsman — and not a monster in a cute Loch Ness blurry long-distance kind of way but something far more repulsive and in your face... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/civilized-conservatism/72148/ Mon, 3 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST If you were running one of those Frank Luntz machine-wired focus groups to produce the ideal conservative leader for America, I doubt you'd come up with an urbane patrician harpsichordist semi-resident in Switzerland and partial to words like "eremitical" and "periphrastic." "It's the epigoni, stupid" is not a useful campaign slogan — although, in fact, a distressingly large number of political candidates are certainly epigoni ("a second-rate imitator"). But William F Buckley Jr was a... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/clintons-melancholy/71776/ Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST On the day that Margaret Thatcher was toppled by her own party, I ran into an old friend, a hardcore leftist playwright, Marxist to the core, who wasn't as happy as he should have been. He jabbed me in the chest. "You bastards on the right!" he fumed. "You wouldn't even let us be the ones to drive the stake through her heart." I'm sure in America's Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy there are similar mixed feelings this week. The Clintons have met their Waterloo but it's not some doughty conservative... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/empty-tent/71065/ Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST It's looking like a grim pick of the daisy petals for conservatives: McCain. Clinton. Obama. He loves us not. She loves us not. He wants to waft us upward on a great uniting bipartisan marshmallow of "hope" and "change" so he can implement down-the-line by-the-book highly partisan hopeless unchanged liberal policies. How did it get to this? I was on the radio with Laura Ingraham an hour or so before she introduced Mitt Romney's farewell appearance at CPAC, and she played Stevie Wonder's... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/mcclinton-consenus/70686/ Mon, 4 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST President McCain? Or Queen Hillary? Henry Kissinger said about the Iran/Iraq war that it's a shame they both can't lose. Conservatives have a slightly different problem: It's a shame that neither of them will lose — that, regardless of who takes the oath come January '09, the harmonious McCain-Clinton consensus policies on illegal immigration and Big Government solutions to global warming will prevail. Where's Neither-Of-The-Above when you need him? Alas, the only Neither-Of-The-Above in the... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/orwell-would-be-proud/70269/ Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST My favorite headline of the year so far comes from The Daily Mail in Britain: "Government Renames Islamic Terrorism As 'Anti-Islamic Activity' To Woo Muslims." Her Majesty's Government is not alone in feeling it's not always helpful to link Islam and the, ah, various unpleasantnesses with suicide bombers and whatnot. Even in his cowboy Crusader heyday, President Bush liked to cool down the crowd with a lot of religion-of-peace stuff. But the British have now decided that kind of mealy-mouthed... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/menace-to-the-times/69844/ Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Have you been in an airport recently, and maybe seen a gaggle of America's heroes returning from Iraq? And you've probably thought, "Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old 'Support Our Troops' fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service." No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/theyre-no-james-bond/69436/ Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST This week's issue of The Economist has a heartrending vignette from one of the most ruthlessly capitalist industries on the planet: "In 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/you-feelin-hucky/69011/ Mon, 7 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Confronted by Preacher Huckabee standing astride the Iowa caucus smirking, "Are you feelin' Hucky, punk?" many of my conservative pals are inclined to respond, "Shoot me now." But, if that seems a little dramatic, let's try and rustle up an alternative. In response to the evangelical tide from the west, New Hampshire primary voters have figured, "Any old crusty, cranky, craggy coot in a storm," and re-embraced John McCain. After all, Granite State conservatism is not known for its religious... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/no-simple-solution/68766/ Wed, 2 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST It's tempting to rerun my column on Pakistan from a month ago. Not because I predicted the assassination of Benazir Bhutto or offered any other great insight, but rather for the opposite reason: "Everyone's an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything: General Musharraf should do this, he shouldn't have done that, the State Department should lean on him to do the other… Well, I dunno. It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate when offering advice to Islamabad."... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/by-the-numbers-2007-12-17/68186/ Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST This is the time of year, as Hillary Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate "the birth of a homeless child" — or, in Al Gore's words, "a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child." Just for the record, Jesus wasn't "homeless." He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic overregulatory... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/wimpsville-relativism/67861/ Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Last week the Bush Administration decided to "freeze" the interest rates of certain types of mortgages for five years. You've probably caught the tail end of news stories about "subprime" home loans, lots of foreclosures, etc. Never a happy moment when the bank takes the farm. So now the government has stepped in and said that, if you fall into a particular category of Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARMs, in the biz) and you're worried that it's getting way too adjustable, don't worry: The nanny... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/freedom-from-offense/67405/ Mon, 3 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST The holiday season is here and that means it's time to engage in the time-honored Christmas tradition of objecting to every time-honored Christmas tradition. Australia is a gazillion time-zones ahead of the United States — it may even be Boxing Day there already — so they got in first this year with a truly fantastic headline: "Santas Warned 'Ho Ho Ho' Offensive To Women." Really. As the story continued: "Sydney's Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say 'ha ha ha' instead, the Daily... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/perfect-nominee/66981/ Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Only five weeks to the earliest Primary Day in New Hampshire history, and still, whenever I'm being interviewed on radio or TV, I've no ready answer to the question: Which candidate are you supporting? If I could just sneak out in the middle of the night and saw off Rudy Giuliani's strong right arm and John McCain's ramrod back and Mitt Romney's fabulous hair and stitch them all together in Baron von Frankenstein's laboratory with the help of some neck bolts, we'd have the perfect Republican... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/for-what-the-thanks/66648/ Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays. Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: in Continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from December 22nd to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/without-a-script/66295/ Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST From CBS News: "In Toluca Lake, Calif., near Warner Bros. studio, writers converged on a house that serves as a location shoot for 'Desperate Housewives.' "'We write the story-a, Eva Longoria,' about 30 strikers chanted, referring to one star of the hit ABC show." Wouldn't that rhyme be better as a taunt? "Who writes the story, huh? Eva Longoria?" Heigh-ho. Maybe the rewrite guys don't show up to the protest until the first draft of chants has nosedived into the asphalt. Get a suite at the... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/real-crossfire/65450/ Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST As far as I know, the movie Deliverance has featured in political discourse just the once. Back in 1996, Pat Buchanan, hot from his triumph over Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary, warned the country-club Republicans that he was coming to get them "like a character out of Deliverance." In the film, you'll recall, a quartet of suburban guys spend a nightmare weekend in the backwoods, in the course of which one of their number winds up getting strapped to a tree and sodomized by a mountain man... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/general-starks-war/65002/ Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST On Thursday, Congress attempted to override President Bush's veto of the S-CHIP debate. S-CHIP? Isn't that something to do with healthcare for children? Absolutely. And here is Representative Pete Stark (Democrat, California) addressing the issue with his customary forensic incisiveness: "The Republicans are worried that they can't pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/asymmetric-warfare/64547/ Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question the other day. He noted that on February 22nd 1946, a mere six months after the end of the Second World War, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that "Long Telegram" in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the way up to the fall of the Berlin Wall... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/assassination-theories/64106/ Mon, 8 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Last week, a London court began pondering the vexed question of whether Diana, Princess of Wales was, ahem, murdered. There was so much public suspicion, declared the coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, that it was time for the rumors to be either "dispelled or substantiated." So who killed her? On the night of Diana's death, there were apparently two top agents for MI6, the British secret service, on the loose in Paris, and possibly a third, if you believe that Henri Paul, the chauffeur, was... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/campus-in-the-clouds/63685/ Mon, 1 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST "I'm proud of my university today," Stina Reksten, a 28-year-old Columbia graduate student from Norway, told The New York Times. "I don't want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom." Isn't it always? But enough about Iran, let's talk about me! The same university that shouted down an American anti-illegal-immigration activist and the same university culture that just deemed former Harvard honcho... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/say-ah-for-nurse-hillary/63254/ Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Our theme for today comes from George W Bush: "Freedom is the desire of every human heart." When the President uses the phrase, he's invariably applying it to various benighted parts of the Muslim world. There would seem to be quite a bit of evidence to suggest that freedom is not the principal desire of every human heart in, say, Gaza or Waziristan. But why start there? If you look in, say, Brussels or London or New Orleans, do you come away with the overwhelming impression that "freedom is... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/failure-to-understand/62744/ Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST This year I marked the anniversary of September 11th by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn't exactly planned that way, just the way things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio colossus Howie Carr and heard him reading out portions from the official address to the 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the Governor of Massachusetts. 9/11, said Governor Patrick, "was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States". "Mean and... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/from-september-to-september/62264/ Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Oh, it's a long, long while from September to September. This year, the anniversary falls, for the first time, on a Tuesday morning, and perhaps some or other cable network will re-present the events in real time — the first vague breaking news in an otherwise routine morning show, the follow-up item on the second plane, and the realization that something bigger was underway. If you make it vivid enough, the JFK/Princess Di factor will kick in: you'll remember "where you were" when you "heard... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/measure-of-hypocrisy/61836/ Tue, 4 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST The catchphrase of America's famous cowboy humorist Will Rogers was "Never met a man I didn't like." Judging from the activities at the men's room of the Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills, many of the patrons of said facility evidently feel the same way. George Michael, the stubbly boy rocker of the Eighties, was arrested therein for attempting to play footsie with an undercover cop. "Guilty feet have got no rhythm," as George famously observed on his hit song "Careless Whisper." After... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/withdrawal-recalled/61360/ Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST George W. Bush gave a speech about Iraq last week, and in the middle of it he did something long overdue: He attempted to appropriate the left's most treasured all-purpose historical analogy. Indeed, Vietnam is so ubiquitous in the fulminations of politicians, academics and pundits we could really use anti-trust legislation to protect us from shopworn historical precedents. But, in the absence thereof, the President has determined that we might at least learn the real "lessons of Vietnam."... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/untouchable-expanding/60894/ Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST At the funeral of Iofemi Hightower, her classmate Mecca Ali wore a T-shirt with the slogan: "Tell Me Why They Had To Die." "They" are Miss Hightower, Dashon Harvey and Terrance Aeriel, three young citizens of Newark, New Jersey, lined up against a schoolyard wall, forced to kneel, and then shot in the head. Miss Ali poses an interesting question. No one can say why they "had" to die, but it ought to be possible to advance theories as to what factors make violent death in Newark a more likely... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/inconvenient-truth-2007-08-13/60355/ Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's web site and look at the "US surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48, you might notice something has changed. Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for US temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top Ten altogether, and most of... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/one-way-multiculturalism/59930/ Mon, 6 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST How will we lose the war against "radical Islam"? Well, it won't be in a tank battle. Or in the Sunni Triangle or the caves of Bora Bora. It won't be because terrorists fly three jets into the Oval Office, Buckingham Palace and the Basilica of St. Peter's on the same Tuesday morning. The war will be lost incrementally because we are unable to reverse the ongoing radicalization of Muslim populations in South Asia, Indonesia, the Balkans, Western Europe and, yes, North America. And who's behind... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/infantilizing-citizens/59393/ Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Do you know Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison? If you do, don't approach them. Call 911 and order up a SWAT team. They're believed to be in the vicinity of McMinnville, Oregon, where they're a clear and present danger to the community. Mashburn and Cornelison were recently charged with five counts of felony sexual abuse and the District Attorney, Bradley Berry, has pledged to have them registered for life as sex offenders. Oh, by the way, the defendants are in the Seventh Grade. Messrs... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/haleh-esfandiari/58902/ Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST How do you feel about the American hostages in Iran? No, not the guys back in the Seventies, the ones being held right now. What? You haven't heard about them? Odd that, isn't it? But they're there. For example, for two months now, Haleh Esfandiari has been detained in Evin prison in Tehran. Ms. Esfandiari is a U.S. citizen and had traveled to Iran to visit her sick mother. She is the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, which is the kind... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/habitable-world/58455/ Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is it because Al Gore and a bunch of elderly rockers organized an all-star stadium gala on its behalf? The colossal flopperoo of Live Earth is a heartening reminder that there are some things too ridiculous even for global pop culture, and one of them is the Reverend Almer Gortry speaking truth to power ballads. Why did so few people feel the urge to rock against climate change? Touchingly enough, the organizers put it down to the weather... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/wrong-direction/58028/ Mon, 9 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST There are many things wrong with U.S. health care, as there inevitably are with any health care system. The question is whether America wants to go down the British-Canadian-Cuban route, to name three government medical systems Michael Moore admires in his new film Sicko. Cuba, of course, is a totalitarian state, and even Hollywood celebrities, though they like to visit, wouldn't want to live there. (Incidentally, the best health treatment available on Cuba is at Gitmo.) The United Kingdom, by... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/jumping-the-fence/57664/ Mon, 2 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST On the eve of Independence Day, the people of this great republic declared their independence from the United States Senate under the stirring battle-cry, "No legislation without explanation!" The geniuses who'd cooked up the "comprehensive" immigration bill's "grand bargain" behind the scenes in the pork-filled rooms had originally planned to ram it through in 48 hours before Memorial Day. And, right to the end, the bipartisan Emirs-for-life of Incumbistan gave the strong impression they... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/societal-suicide/57220/ Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST A year or so after the Ayatollah Khomeini took out an Islamist mob contract on Salman Rushdie, the novelist appeared, after elaborate security arrangements, on a television arts show in London. His host was Melvyn Bragg, a long-time British telly grandee, and what was striking was how quickly the interview settled down into the usual cosy lit. crit. chit-chat. Lord Bragg took Rushdie back to his earlier pre-fatwa work. "After your first book," drawled Bragg, "which was not particularly... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/pies-in-the-sky/56792/ Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST The other day, six Anglican archbishops called for the church to bless the unions of same-sex couples. The Anglican Church of Canada is about to have a big vote on the issue, and depending which way they swing it will either deepen the schism within the worldwide Anglican Communion or further isolate the Episcopal Church of the United States. But never mind all that. What struck me was the rationale the archbishops came up with. This gay thing, they sighed. We've been yakking about it for years... MARK STEYN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/undocumented-americans/56282/ Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST I forget where I was when I first heard the phrase "undocumented worker." Possibly it was after swimming the Rio Grande and emerging dripping on the northern shore to be handed a fake Social Security number and a driver's license. But I assumed, reasonably enough, that this linguistic sleight of hand was simply too ridiculous to fly even with the American media. I underestimated my colleagues, alas. The "undocumented" are, as it happens, brimming with sufficient documents to open bank accounts...