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James Delingpole writes on Mark Steyn’s court case.
When I first read, many months ago, that the notorious US climate scientist Michael Mann was suing the notorious right-wing bastard Mark Steyn for defamation, I admit that I felt a little piqued.
Obviously a libel trial is not something any sane person would wish to court; and naturally I’m a massive fan of Steyn’s. Nevertheless, after all the work I’ve dedicated over the years to goading Mann, I found it a bit bloody annoying that Steyn — a relative latecomer to the climate change debate — should have been the one who ended up stealing all my courtroom glory.
What made me doubly jealous was that this was a case Steyn was guaranteed to win. In the unlikely event it came to court — which I didn’t think it would, given Mann’s longstanding aversion to any form of public disclosure regarding his academic research — the case would fall down on the fact that defamation is so hard to prove in the US, especially when it involves publicly funded semi-celebrities who are expected to take this sort of thing on the chin.
Since then, though, much has changed. It now looks — go to Steynonline.com for the full story — as if Steyn is going to be up there on his own, fighting and financing his case without the support of his magazine, National Review; that the outcome is not as certain as it seemed at the beginning; and that this hero deserves all the help we can give him.
Why? Well, the fact that I even have to explain this shows what a cowardly, snivelling, career-safe, intellectually feeble, morally compromised age we inhabit. By rights, Mann v Steyn should be the 21st-century equivalent of the Scopes monkey trial, with believers in free speech, proponents of the scientific method and sympathetic millionaires and billionaires all piling in to Steyn’s defence with op eds, learned papers, and lavish funds to buy the hottest of hotshot lawyers.
Instead, what do I read? Crap like, ‘Steyn’s out of order: he shouldn’t have been so rude about the judge who mishandled the initial hearing.’ (OK, maybe he shouldn’t — but what are you supposed to say about judges who mishandle your case? ‘Nice job, ma’am’?) …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the disaster the president has crafted with his moves in Syria.
It must be maddening spinning for the White House. The White House says Obamacare is fine, so the media spinners parrot that again and again — until the White House admits all is not well. The White House insist the president never promised you can keep your health care, so the spinners repeat that one — until the White House sort of apologizes. You do wonder if the pundits ever get tired of being hung out to dry.
Nowhere is the lunacy of the spin more evident than on Syria. You had a flock of liberals declaring the president’s about-face on Syria’s weapons of mass destruction was a brilliant move and he’d been right to insist we have no interests there. And then, three years after conservatives demanded stronger action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the president declares himself “frustrated.” (Oh, and the WMD deal isn’t really disarming Assad, just as conservative hawks predicted.) I suppose it really has been a disaster all along.
The disaster, of course, is the president’s. It was his insistence on doing nothing — over the objections at various times of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta — that has brought us to this sorry state of affairs. As a former Republican official put it, “This rests entirely on his shoulders.”
Notwithstanding, we should not absolve aides and advisers of all responsibility here. ABC’s Jonathan Karl mused that Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power is “haunted” by the debacle. He reminds us that her whole career was built on making an argument about the responsibility to protect when you have a crisis like this. And now she’s saying, it’s the biggest crisis in a generation and the United States is effectively doing nothing. Well, she could have quit. That is what people of principle do in order to call attention to a disastrous and immoral policy. But if that’s personally untenable because the lure of power is too great, she should be “haunted” by the atrocities unfolding on her watch. …
Michael Barone issues a challenge over mandatory minimum sentences. If they’re so unjust, why doesn’t the president issue pardons?
… So I tend to agree with Judge Ponsor when he laments that “defendants sentenced before the [2010 Fair Sentencing Act] was passed still languish today, serving out sentences that virtually all members of Congress now recognize as excessive.” This is indeed an anomaly and seems unjust.
But I disagree sharply with his next sentence. “And there is not a darn thing anyone can do about it.” But there is someone who can do something about it, even in Congress does not follow the judge’s suggestion and pass a law scaling back those sentences.
That person is President Obama. The president can pardon any offender and he can also commute part of a sentence, as George W. Bush did when he commuted Scooter Libby’s jail term but declined to extend a full pardon.
Obama’s rewriting of the Obamacare law is constitutionally dubious; there is a serious argument that he has not been performing his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the law. But the Constitution is clear in giving the president the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment” (Article II, Section 2).
Unless my constitutional interpretation is way off, the president could commute the sentences of all or some of those serving time under sentences that could no longer be imposed under the 2010 law, which Judge Ponsor hails and which President Obama signed.
There is a “darn thing” someone could do about the anomaly Judge Ponsor cites. He sits in the Oval Office, where the buck supposedly stops. Perhaps someone should ask him about it.
Oliver Stone normally turns to students seeking affirmation from the immature. This failed recently when he visited a conference of libertarians. John Fund with the story.
… Stone began by trying to make what he must have thought was an outreach to the audience by resurrecting and agreeing with the Old Right chestnut that “Roosevelt lied us into World War II.” He followed that up with highly personal criticism of Obama — claiming, in effect, that the president has been brainwashed by his national-security advisers into becoming pro-war. “The man stunned us with a lack of spine, he’s a weak man,” he mourned.
Many of the students agreed with panel’s general criticism of America’s military commitments. One noted that America still has 54,000 troops in Germany and 39,000 troops in Japan a full 70 years after World War II and a full 25 years after Communism’s collapse. But then a spirited group of Latin American students attending the panel decided to directly challenge Stone’s left-wing support for Latin dictators from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chávez.
Two months before Chávez’s death last year, Stone praised him on CNN, declaring with a straight face: “He represents hope and change, the things that Obama stood for in our country in 2008.” This past Thursday, in anticipation of the event, the Latin American students published an “Open Letter to Oliver Stone” that declared: …
So while hospitals in India are cutting into the work of U. S. brain surgeons, other Indians are after the rocket scientists. The NY Times reports on India’s launch and subsequent control of a mission to orbit Mars. Most amazing is the price tag; just about one tenth of our latest Mars probe.
While India’s recent launch of a spacecraft to Mars was a remarkable feat in its own right, it is the $75 million mission’s thrifty approach to time, money and materials that is getting attention.
Just days after the launch of India’s Mangalyaan satellite, NASA sent off its own Mars mission, five years in the making, named Maven. Its cost: $671 million. The budget of India’s Mars mission, by contrast, was just three-quarters of the $100 million that Hollywood spent on last year’s space-based hit, “Gravity.”
“The mission is a triumph of low-cost Indian engineering,” said Roddam Narasimha, an aerospace scientist and a professor at Bangalore’s JawaharlalNehruCenter for Advanced Scientific Research.
“By excelling in getting so much out of so little, we are establishing ourselves as the most cost-effective center globewide for a variety of advanced technologies,” said Mr. Narasimha.
India’s 3,000-pound Mars satellite carries five instruments that will measure methane gas, a marker of life on the planet. …
Late Night from Andy Malcolm.
Conan: Billy Ray Cyrus has come out with a hip-hop version of ‘Achy Breaky Heart.’ Experts say it’s the first time in music history that fans of hip-hop and country have hated the same thing.
Fallon: Congratulations to my buddy Charlie Sheen. He’s marrying for the fourth time. Charlie said, “I just know this is the woman I’m going to be with for the rest of my February.”
Conan: Boston Market offered a free dessert to couples. So she may be disappointed you took her to Boston Market on Valentine’s Day. But when she left halfway through the meal, you got two free desserts!