UPDATE! Further to the audio below, the transcript of my conversation with Hugh about the bloodshed in Kiev has now been posted:
At the end of it, the reporter gave her name, and it turned out she was in Sochi. And that's what's been happening - that people have been sent to cover the Olympic Games, are finding that they're having to cover what's going on in Ukraine from there. It's a bit like as if - you remember Hitler's controversial 1936 Olympics - if he'd decided to occupy the Sudetenland during the '36 Olympics.
Putin is attempting to reconstitute the Soviet empire while we're watching ice-dancing.
Hugh also noted a late-breaking development in the trial of the century:
MS: Dr. Mann is a serial litigant. He's the guy with the hockey stick graph, and he sues everybody. And he's suing a fellow called Tim Ball up in British Columbia. And that case is now entering its third year, a nothing little case. And I don't want to spent three years on this guy down here. This is what he does. He uses the process as the punishment. So I've launched counterclaims to him for interfering with my rights to free speech, seeking damages of 20 million dollars. Now that's a lot of money. Obviously, I don't need the 20 million dollars, because I've got my royalties from the disco version of Marshmallow World.
HH: There you go.
MS: When he writes his check for 20 million dollars, I'm going to use it to defend and advance free speech in the United States and around the rest of the West where it is under threat from serial litigants like Dr. Mann, whose intention is to abuse the legal process by taking people out of the game with two, three, four, five year lawsuits that they have no intention of ever going to trial on. He's stalling - he filed this suit in Vancouver, and he's stalling discovery. He's stalling discovery in Virginia, and he's going to be stalling discovery in my case in a couple of weeks' time. This is just his modus operandi.
Hugh, like Obama, is a Constitutional Law professor, and seemed to like the cut of my jib.
**
Here's some audio from my weekly appearance on The Hugh Hewitt Show, in which Hugh and I discussed the Ukrainian situation - and the so-called superpower's response to it:
"John Kerry, the man who was advertising that he'd be the guy who could get America to pass the global test when he ran for president in 2004 – the world has decided he can't pass the global test," Steyn said.... "He's talking like some sophomore in his dorm room at two in the morning about how the greatest challenge is global warming. I'd love to see him walk around the streets and tell the people who are being gunned down what the biggest challenge the world faces is global warming."
Hugh brought up the Secretary of State's preoccupation with global non-warming rather than actual burning as an artful segue into the news that I'm countersuing Michael E Mann for $20 million. More on that here.
