Today, Wednesday, I started the day with Dan & Amy on AM 560's Morning Answer in Chicago. I hadn't seen Amy since I appeared at the station's big conservative wingding with Sean Hannity, Dana Loesch et al last fall, and she was kind enough to put in a word for my Christmas album - because, as Dan pointed out, Labor Day has come and gone so the seasonal sleighlist can't be far away.
Aside from that, we talked about my new book, climate change, free speech, the migrant tide sweeping over Europe - and a little bit of Donald Trump. Click below to listen:
Re the demographic character of the "Syrian" "refugees", look at this video of the fleeing "families". Where are the women? Where are the infants? Where are the oldsters? Or even the late middle-aged? It is a - what's the word? - army of young Muslim men.
~Dan's question about "bipartisan extremism" arose from this column of mine:
"A lot of people say we should have a universal health-care system run by the state like the British," Broockman told me in July 2014. "A lot of people say we should deport all undocumented immigrants immediately with no due process."
Because the first position is "left" and the second position is "right", the pollsters split the difference and label such a person a "moderate". But he isn't actually a moderate, so much as bipartisanly extreme. In practice, most "moderates" boil down to that: They hold some leftie and some rightie positions... In other words, people who like their Medicare and food stamps ...but, like Trump, think there are too many unskilled Mexican peasants flooding into a country with ever diminishing social mobility and no hope of economic improvement without a credential that requires taking on a quarter-million dollars in debt.
The recent poll showing Trump with 25 per cent of the black vote suggests he might have more crossover appeal than all the more obviously moderate types like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio.
While we're on the subject of Trump, this response by John Nolte to Jonah Goldberg's attack on "the Trumpen proletariat" is worth reading. Jonah's piece was headlined "No Movement That Embraces Trump Can Call Itself Conservative". But my problem with the 21st-century US "conservative movement" as defined by the Republican Party is more basic: The conservative movement may well be conservative but it isn't a movement. What, in fact, has it succeeded in "moving"? It's pretty obvious that Boehner, McConnell and the rest of the timeservers have moved Obamacare into the same category as abortion and the federal Department of Education - something to which every candidate is notionally opposed, but nothing ever gets done about. And so it goes for everything else, from federal spending to illegal immigration.
If America had a genuine free-market party system as Canada, Britain, Oz, the Continentals, etc, instead of a two-party cartel, the GOP would be history. In the current election up north, only one of the five parties goes back beyond half-a-century: the NDP dates to the Sixties, and the Greens, Bloc Québécois and the present iteration of the Tories have all been features of political life for less time than your typical US senator. America's institutionally frozen two-party one-party state might have something to commend it if it worked for both parties, but the reality is that it works very well for one party and hardly at all for the other. Republican establishment politics is mostly bollocks - exemplified by the current donor-favorite's ad, in which the son and brother of two of the last four presidents purports to be a Washington outsider. In a 50/50 nation, 50 per cent of the electorate is entitled to a less risible choice.
~As for that book of mine we were talking about, that's my very latest - "A Disgrace to the Profession", the story of the 21st century's most famous graph and the damage it has done both to science and public policy. It's available personally autographed by yours truly direct from SteynOnline. But, if you can live without my Professor Sir John Hancock, FRS, PhD, it's steeply discounted at Amazon. And, if you can live without paper, it's also available in Kindle and Nook. We're still the Number One climatology bestseller, beating Michael E Mann's Dreary Predictions.
~Still to come this week, I'll be with Jim Lakely at Heartland, Ben Mathis at KickAss Politics, my old chums at Ricochet and, of course, Hugh Hewitt.