It's Open Line Black Friday!

by Mark Steyn
The Rush Limbaugh Show
November 23, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/9033/it-open-line-black-friday

We hope you had a good Thanksgiving. On this morning after I'll be back behind the Golden EIB Microphone for three hours of substitute-host-level Open Line Black Friday on America's Number One radio show. The fun starts at 12 noon Eastern/9am Pacific. Hope you'll dial us up either via the iHeart Radio app or on one of over 600 stations across the fruited plain, such as our old friends at WNTK New Hampshire, where you can listen to the full show from anywhere on the planet right here.

Here's a story I touched on briefly with Ed Henry on Wednesday's "Tucker Carlson Tonight" that seems to me of broader significance:

So I may have a few more thoughts on that later today. And I'll be back after Rush this Friday evening with the latest in The Mark Steyn Club's current audio adventure - The Scarlet Pimpernel.

It's Black Friday at the Steyn Store, too, because SteynOnline is turning sweet sixteen: We hung out our humble shingle on the Internet at Thanksgiving 2002, and we're thrilled we're still here, even as the livelier blogosphere of the early twenty-first century has been all but obliterated by the boring one-size-fits-all control-freak social media cartel. At any rate, in honor of our sixteenth birthday, we're offering sixteen per cent off all my books and CDs over at the Steyn Store.

That applies not only to my solo bestsellers, but also our two climatological bestsellers - Climate Change: The Facts and "A Disgrace to the Profession": The World's Scientists - in Their Own Words - on Michael E Mann, His Hockey Stick, and Their Damage to Science, Volume One - and my bestselling cat album and Christmas album, too. And the regular savings on our Steynamite Christmas specials are additionally enhanced by that sixteen per cent birthday discount. And you even get it on our digital downloads, like "Cat Scratch Fever". So just shop till you drop as you normally would, and the discount will be applied to your basket as you check out. But only through Monday!

~If you're looking for something a little different for your loved one this Christmas, how about two on the aisle for the first ever Dennis Miller/Mark Steyn tour? There's also a chance to meet me and Dennis after the show. And there's a fifteen per cent discount on tickets if you enter the promo code HOLIDAYS and you book before midnight on Monday.

Alternatively, there's a stateroom waiting for your nearest and dearest on the second annual Mark Steyn cruise (following our sell-out inaugural voyage last year).

And don't forget the present that lasts all year: A one-year gift membership in The Mark Steyn Club, which this holiday season comes with a special personalized Christmas card from yours truly and a gift-boxed special USB stick with three of our most popular Tales for Our Time for your pal or relative to listen to in the car or perambulating through the wilderness or almost anywhere else. That would be The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine and The Thirty-Nine Steps.

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See you on the radio at noon Eastern - and do give me a call.

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39 Reader Comments

Fran Lavery • Nov 25, 2018 at 22:00

It was a rich Open Line Black Friday! I had to listen twice (Rush 24/7) to catch every fine detail but it was worth it. I put up the daily chores for the second go. There weren't a ton of callers but the ones who called in were pretty solid. I'm not sure that it would be an easy task to fill Rush's shoes on the EIB but, gee, Mark, you really step up to plate every single time.

I'm so proud to be a member of your online club. It's a humbling experience being a mere single listener in the vast audience of listeners to a Rush but add to that belonging to this Mark Steynee online club, it can't help but pump me up a few notches every time Rush asks you to take the reins. But I would try a more positive approach when promoting your books on air. Instead of "buy my lousy books and unlistenable cds," how about "you haven't lived until you have all of my books and cds." Then you'll hear some ca-Ching a ding a lingin' just in time for the holidays.

Mark replies:

I don't like to over-promise, Fran.

Fran Lavery

Fran Lavery • Nov 26, 2018 at 01:06

It seems to work for that pillow guy. Just sayin'.

Steven Payne • Nov 24, 2018 at 04:52

I wonder why we always say "bow and arrow", as in "he shot him with a bow and arrow". We never say "he shot him with a gun and bullet". If we just said they shot him with a bow, would there be a question as to what the bow fired, a spear, a knife, a sword, etc.?
Yes, I occupy my mind with such trivial things.

Fran Lavery

Steven Payne • Nov 24, 2018 at 17:08

I'm feeling new lyrics for another Appalachian type banjo song about weaponry, this time, coming over me, Steven. You occupy yourself with trivial things at times, but what is trivial to one person is treasure to another's active brain.

Did you catch Mark's reference yesterday to Ocasio-Cortez's shoes going on display in a museum, illustrating the Democrats intense desire to hold in high esteem a "woman's right to shoes"? Oh, my, the things Mark says that slip through the cracks in my brain! I have to suggest the man behind the Golden EIB provide Mark with a little laughter box next year that Mike can turn up when the audience is supposed to wake up out of their Black Friday stupors and laugh.

Steven Payne

Fran Lavery • Nov 25, 2018 at 03:36

Fran, I think I need to hook you up with my brother. He's the banjo player (banjoist?) in the family and he's very good. He's also in the bluegrass business or what you might call Appalachian music. Me, I'm mostly in the odd comment business these days.
BTW, I did not catch Mark's joke at all until I read your comment. "Oh, it's a play on right to choose"! Duh, maybe you're right. Maybe Mark needs a laugh track.

Fran Lavery

Steven Payne • Nov 25, 2018 at 09:34

How's that odd comment business paying these days, Steven? Maybe I should get into that line of work. They say if you find work you love, it's like not working at all.

Babs from Cali

Steven Payne • Nov 25, 2018 at 20:05

Love your sense of humor.

Steven Payne

Babs from Cali • Nov 25, 2018 at 21:05

Why thanks, Babs. I use the club to work on my stand-up routine.... while sitting down.

Steven Payne

Fran Lavery • Nov 25, 2018 at 21:18

I can tell you this, Fran. Steyn pays as well as Zuckerberg. I get the same money for a post here as for a post on Facebook.

Brian Buehler • Nov 23, 2018 at 22:18

Why don't we treat our borders the same way we treat our homes? We have friends but don't hand them the keys to it. We invite them to stay over but don't let them take over our homes while we pay for it. But the left wants us to allow "strangers" to walk in, take over, and we pay for it. We wouldn't allow anyone to move into our homes and have us pay for it so why should we allow people to just come in from anywhere and pay for them?

The problem has been that when we opened up the world and it became more accessible, we've created the narrative that their country is now our backyard and we should be able to go there whenever we want. That isn't and shouldn't be true. Nations have no obligation to allow anyone in, otherwise, why have passports. More people means more low income housing and apartments needed to give them a place to stay that isn't a tent. More people also means a longer wait time to see a doctor when you need one. More people means more food needed to feed them. More people in America means more resources needed to take care of them. They talk big on conserving resources yet what they're doing goes against that narrative. If our resources are going to run out in a few decades like the climate change gurus say, how is more people in our country going to help save our resources?

Fran Lavery

Brian Buehler • Nov 24, 2018 at 16:58

They don't really care about resources running out, Brian. That's just like the gaudy item in their display window to lure the doped-up masses into their tyranical lair. They don't care about how babies are actually babies inside the womb, about how many endangered bird species they kill with their giant and hideously wasteful carbon footprint wind turbines, with their endless stream of bridges, trains and bus lines that nobody uses, with the forests they mismanage to safeguard that another bird or prairie chicken subspecies that could fly or scamper to another location temporarily, like a rooftop, or a cozy berm when the trees are being thinned out to save the forest. They want to drive people out of their minds, their homes and destroy what we have and make the affordable thing like regular homes and electricity the latest luxury items.

They don't even care that they don't know how to educate our youth, our number one resource, from K through college. If they cared then why would they not fix their mistakes? No, instead, squeeze the last few drops of curiousity out of our students by testing them to death. Put the teachers in charge of so much paper work they forgot how to teach basic reading, writing and math skills and just know how to hammer what will be on the tests into the young brains at the prime of their abilities to learn and soak up information. To that end, send the tests off, get the resulting scores but never, no never actually lay eyeballs on where the students erred, therefore, by this method, never find out where the students are slipping up. But they keep it up, add more lame programs and more years to the required school attendance years, and this way, totally control the minds coming out of the school system.

They all are taught to be automatons and all taught to obey, all taught to repeat orders, follow the instructions to kick high at the same time and step together at the same time. Following commands is now all we can teach. And even that is only perfected by getting them to school earlier and earlier. The rhythm is monotonous, the subjects are monotonous, the orders are continuous and the brainpower is withering and creativity is being choked off. No fresh new ideas is actually a good idea. That's been working for the education system for decades and it should continue until the children are all registered as loyal Democrats and are idoctrinated in the Progressive group think.

Brian Buehler

Fran Lavery • Nov 25, 2018 at 03:26

What you say is true, but I wonder if there is something more. I feel that the generation that they've created and are creating are going to be much like the caravans that are coming to the US and the Islamic immigration flood of Europe. When America becomes unbearable because of their failed attempts to appease, they will leave in droves, scratching and clawing their way into Canada which by that time will be just as bad if not worse than America would be by then.

They also are teaching our nation that if you're not an entertainer, if you're not a sports athlete, if you're not a scientist that believes in climate change, if you're not a politician, if you're not a judge, or if you're not a social justice warrior that believes in their ideology, you have no power or influence in this country. You must be an elite just like them otherwise, you're a malfunctioning drone that needs to be recycled.

Fran Lavery

Brian Buehler • Nov 25, 2018 at 11:13

Bingo, Brian! Don't let them take our country. Fight for your life to hold on to it. You're probably just a young 'un compared to me. You've got the skills to articulate your thoughts. Run for office somewhere. Get in their faces somehow. Gum up their works. They have such bad ideas.

That's probably why they pushed the entire recycling thing, too. To make us feel one with things of a recycled nature. But they never think through the consequences of their ideas.

And I fell for it, too. There was a sense we were participating in the greater good. We felt a little better about how much trash we could recycle. We started noticing who wasn't recycling, who wasn't doing their part. Some in our neighborhood dutifully made it a habit like going to church on Sundays when recycling came to our town. When it began in our area about twenty-five years ago, the bins were only in the city then and we were out in the county fifteen miles away. We had to take a couple hours out of Saturday mornings to drive them in, separate and load them into precisely the correct bin opening. We wasted valuable time we'll never get back. We could've been learning how to play a musical instrument.

We started thinking of ways to save time, or make things out of the recyclables so we wouldn't have to haul as much. We thought of having alternate weekends for the drive. That didn't last for some reason. People whose turn it was suddenly had out of town engagements on their designated day. We spent money on gas, and it was wear and tear on the tires. You would arrive at the bins and see so many people park close up so you coudn't get your car up close enough. It was a real pain.

They finally passed mandatory recycling about five years ago, so they make all of these heavy duty, big blue plastic bins (I thought it was about not using plastic) so now you have two huge plastic bins to roll out each week. Growing up, we had one small tin trash can we set out each trash day. Taking out the garbage was not the big production it is today.

About six months ago, they filled out hearts with fear and trepidation with the rumor that we won't be able to recycle certain numbered plastics. Our recycling program might end entirely, even. Why? So much of one's life has been invested in recycling that you realize you could have read "War and Peace" twenty times over, not that you would have.

Because China, (China? What has China to do with this I asked), China is threatening us by not wanting certain numbers of the plastic. I had no idea China was the recipient of all of our great trash. But why exactly? Because of Trump and his trade and tariff policies it was explained to me. Now China is in a trash war with us? Well, fine. My first reaction was I could use a break from all of this recycling. Anyway, what is China doing with our trash? Don't they have enough of their own? They're probably using the good quality recycled goods to build new islands in their adjacent seas as strategic military bases from which to control their region and threaten our interests.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Just follow the trash!

Babs from Cali

Fran Lavery • Nov 25, 2018 at 20:19

Yeah, our city has donated to each home 3 huge plastic bins: one for trash, one for greenery and one for recyclables. I think it was all a scam to start a whole new industry around the world. The last big paradigm shift was the internet. The Left politicians needed a new cause for a new industry so they could make a fortune making the rest of us invest in the companies they already owned stock in. Gore got rich some how besides his movie. So they invented climate change to argue their position. Their initial mistake was to call it global cooling, I think, then they had to change it to global warming and finally, embarrassed, they changed it to something less specific: climate change. You know something's fishy the moment they can't get their terminology figured out.

Fran Lavery

Babs from Cali • Nov 25, 2018 at 23:14

I know, my daughter is out there, too, and the first thing you notice pulling in to the drive are all the bins. At least certain areas look clean. Garbage has to go. As for greens, you can put them back in the ground and grow your soil, so that seems an utter waste of bins, but recyclables? Who is really going to check your regular container to see if you separated things out. It's all one big game of people trying to get you to give them your hard earned cash and convince you of what is the moral thing to do. Yet they allow homeless to camp out in tents amid human waste and other debris. They know how to control the taxpayer but see if they know how, or even try, to control the underclass. They actually encourage bad behavior from that group. Progressive politics seem to be all about making people believe that the truly irrational is what is good for you and that you have to buy in and pay up if you know what is good for you.

Walt Trimmer • Nov 23, 2018 at 19:17

On the show today Mark was impressed with the concept of leasing land outside the US borders to process and house asylum seekers. I have one word for you: Guantanamo. Gitmo was set up this way and the idiot brother of Low Energy Jeb gave in to the first Judge the ACLU could find to issue the order that all the prisoners had the rights of every citizen.

Kate Smyth

Walt Trimmer • Nov 23, 2018 at 21:32

Offshore (regional) processing of unauthorised maritime arrivals to Australia has been a major deterrent to economic "asylum seekers" facing indefinite detention. The Abbott Government's implementation of "Operation Sovereign Borders" in 2013 has continued to be effective, though the boats (at their peak numbering hundreds per day) are likely to resume when that policy is scrapped under a Labor-led government.

Mark recommended Tony Abbott for Brexit duties in the UK, but he (and John Howard) could also provide useful advice for President Trump.

Walt Trimmer

Kate Smyth • Nov 23, 2018 at 23:09

I have actually been to Nauru! Talk about a deterrent!

Kate Smyth

Walt Trimmer • Nov 23, 2018 at 23:41

Yet the conditions are said to be far superior to the dire circumstances that "asylum seekers" are (said to be) fleeing!

Fran Lavery

Walt Trimmer • Nov 24, 2018 at 17:23

It does sound like a winning idea but we have to think the way the government and cartels think, because Mexico would take the lease deal, take the money and the entrance to the existing tunnels through which the majority of cartels presently smuggle drugs, weapons and humans, will just bring their tunnels out a little bit more. They can do whatever is required and the extended tunnels will snake directly beneath the newly leased land. They have an answer for everything, always will, until we decide we want to make a decision to control who and what comes into the country. That being said, they will always find a way to outsmart the Gringoes. It's every American for him or herself now. It really is. The Wild West is back and it's probably already in your neighborhood, bullet holes in your cars to prove it as the fellow from Rhode Island mentioned yesterday to
Mark. He had to get out! That's not the kind of place you want to call home anymore.

BallBounces in PEI • Nov 23, 2018 at 14:59

His heart was in the right place and at least he knew something worth dying for. In other contexts, progressives would be raging on his behalf that this group excluded "the other", didn't welcome the stranger in their midst, are supremacist, racist, etc. etc. Plus, I suspect, no transgender bathrooms, which kinda seals their doom...

Fran Lavery

BallBounces in PEI • Nov 23, 2018 at 19:59

I imagine their women folk must beat out our California girls, with all those beach boys protecting them for 60,000 years. If you even dream about laying eyes on them, you get to be a human pin cushion before you get past the bulkhead.

Perry Pattetic • Nov 23, 2018 at 14:37

What would they do to Merkel?
Do these islanders have a leader who tells them "we can do it!"
This is a case study and a message from God.
The US Army needs to study the effectiveness of pre-emptive strikes on defending our borders. Then act.
We are being invaded by foreigners, who will only be repelled by armed force.
Then we need to use armed force to remove the 30 million already here.
(I am not being serious about the God bit..)

Ray Winchester • Nov 23, 2018 at 13:35

Hi Mike, just watched clip from Ezra. Are you getting any of the $595 million dollars from the Canadian government. Are you a favoured media outlet?
So if you say nice messages about the government they give you free dosh. Wow, that is a new meaning for free press. Free money for the press who support you.
I just hope the Canadian public see through this. If they ever get to know.

Ray Winchester • Nov 23, 2018 at 11:39

I have read about these Islands in the past.
There are 2 islands left for the indigenous people.
I really admire Indian for leaving them alone and the UK before. They are more related to the Aborigines in Oz than anyone and must of been on the Andaman Islands for over 60000 years.
Everyone is warned not go near them as they do fire their arrows at helicopters or boats that go anywhere near them.
It would be great to know more about them, but our diseases would wipe them out.
Obviously a tragedy for the young man, but he could have inadvertently caused a genocide.
Maybe it is good to have some untouched places in the world. Especially for these proud people.

Fran Lavery

Ray Winchester • Nov 23, 2018 at 12:45

Yeah, poor guy, probably with a good heart but why, Why, WHY would anyone go to such an isolated place alone? Some people lack plain common sense. What else could it be?

Ray Winchester

Fran Lavery • Nov 23, 2018 at 13:25

Probably human curiosity. As I said everyone has stayed away from them for centuries probably because of the violence in the first place. But latterly, not to exterminate them. The Indians have populated all the other Islands and there are a few (and I mean a few) that have survived small pox and the like on these Islands but live like the Indians and lost all their previous skills and culture.
I don't think there is anywhere else in the world where something like that is untouched. This culture is 4-5 times older than the Indians in the US for example (who actually come from Europe caucasians originally - Russia).
The Andamans are from the first wave out of Africa, as science is aware of at the moment and undiluted.
So I could understand someone doing trying to see them. I really hope nobody else does. Maybe an invention in the future may look at their culture and ways. And we can leave them alone for another 60 thousand years.

Fran Lavery

Ray Winchester • Nov 23, 2018 at 14:12

This island may be a good place to send radicalized Muslims who want to spread the good part about converting to Islam, whatever that might be. Parachute 'em in!

Perry Pattetic

Ray Winchester • Nov 23, 2018 at 14:31

I think American Indians originated from Japan.
I am also of the opinion that Africa was not the origin of humankind.
Had Africa been the starting point, Africa would have given us great cities and cultures, because of the richness of its resources. I just don't buy the whole story of the evolution of the different races from Adam and Eve in Africa.
After all, it is still a theory.

Walt Trimmer

Fran Lavery • Nov 23, 2018 at 16:24

A combination of narcissism and idiocy.

Fran Lavery

Fran Lavery • Nov 23, 2018 at 19:57

.. to the tune of "Stranger in Paradise," from Kismet, just to set the mood for all the virgins waiting on the other side.

Owen Morgan • Nov 23, 2018 at 11:34

It seems that Arthur Conan Doyle knew a thing or two about the Andaman islanders.

Fran Lavery • Nov 23, 2018 at 10:06

This year has been marked by the continuation of the most highly frustrating political circuses ever with the Mueller investigation still going on. There never was evidence of collusion on Trump's part working with Russians to overturn the election. There never was any let up to Hillary making excuses for losing, there never was a wall funded by either the "USA! USA! USA!" or Mexico. There's no chance now Hillary will ever be locked up, James Comey walks free, the babies are still being aborted by the All-Caring Left, the birds are still being killed by ugly as hell wind turbines by the All-Concerned environmentalists, little baby girls are still legally getting their genitals cut off in certain states in the USA, fires are killing people fleeing their homes with many more unaccounted for, and yet the country sat down to big turkey feasts yesterday and talked about thankfulness.

There was finally a time when Republicans had the White House and the two chambers of Congress and we couldn't get done what the people wanted to get done: fix immigration laws, close the damn border and stop funding Planned Parenthood. There was a big backlash against Republicans at a time when the economy was expanding and unemployment was going down. America was starting to be great again but for some reason Americans don't want to continue down this path. Why?

I ask, who are the real turkeys in this country and would the people be better served today instead of shopping for discounts to focus on the year's big turkeys who are ruining this country as we speak?

Marty

Fran Lavery • Nov 23, 2018 at 11:33

The answer, alluded to here and there, now and then, is simply, "follow-the-money". Easy enough, this quest presents the obstacle to changing the road to perdition we face now and which would probably apply to how all great cultures, recent and past, have degenerated before us. It is too easy a solution to offer for if it was accepted by those who are paid to write and talk, they would not have anything on which to ply their trade.
La forza del destino rules!

John Shuba

Fran Lavery • Nov 23, 2018 at 11:40

There's A good question. We are in the midst of great prosperity, low unemployment and the only foreign policy problems we have are the ones that the media keeps conjuring out of thin air. Right now is,a pretty good time to be living if you are an American. Yet the so-called "party in power" can't do anything with it. Why?

Of course the RELENTLESS propaganda orchestrated by the Left, the media and the Democrats (parts of the same whole) has had its effect. However it may go farther than that. The only formulae that I can come up with is a combination of creeping decadence, selfishness and boredom with freedom. I'm a a college instructor and most of the students I meet, and nearly all are quite nice, don't care about American culture as opposed to the "multi-culturalism" they have drilled into their head at every turn. I sense that they resent this never-ending moralizing but they are to cowed (of disinterested) tobd o anything about it. That leave the fanstic lefty fringe of the student population to do the running.

Calvert Whitehurst

John Shuba • Nov 23, 2018 at 13:08

It's feelings, nothing more than feelings. Fifty years of increasingly doctrinaire progressives pursuing careers in - and gradually coming to dominate - the public sector, education, law, and the information and entertainment media have created a country largely populated by functionally illiterate, gadget-obsessed, fad-following sheep.

Walt Trimmer

John Shuba • Nov 23, 2018 at 16:56

Yesterday I saw you were a lawyer and now a college instructor. Is there some sort of addiction that is driving you to into despair? I will have you in my thoughts just like everyone has the Charlie Hebdo victims in theirs.

Regarding your legal training I always hear the that US has 3 co-equal branches of government. This is simply not so. The Constitution created the Supreme Court but gave Congress the power to create the Courts as it did in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Neither the Constitution nor Congress gave the Supreme Court the power of judicial review. This power was only assumed to be implicit by some of the Founding Fathers. The power was seized by John Marshall's Court in Marbury v. Madison. You can't be a co-equal branch when Congress could abolish you in legislation. Andy Jackson supposedly said, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" So the three coequal branches of government is a fiction for those who want the power of the courts to achieve their agenda.

My view of Judges has evolved into that they are politicians wearing black costumes. I live under the tyranny of the 9th Circuit. Consider if 79% of their rulings are overturned and that many more appeals to the Supreme Court are turned away, you can reasonably assume that 79% of 9th Circuit rulings are "extra"-constitutional and the citizens of the Circuit are denied justice. I would expect that the number of over-turned rulings should be much less than 10% to have the Courts to be considered fair. Therefore the 9th Circuit should be disbanded and replaced with a set of new judges. The old practice of allowing Senators to determine who is seated in District Courts within their state would have to disappear as the entire West Coast has nothing but Democrats in the Senate. Chances of it happening -- zero.

David Elstrom • Nov 23, 2018 at 09:29

Multicultural indoctrination is producing more and more young people who are fit only to be Darwin Award contestants—blind to reality right up to the moment they hit the natives' stew pot or hear the ISIS propaganda snuff-filmmaker yell, "Cut!"

David from Florida • Nov 23, 2018 at 09:00

Once again, when Reality butts up against Multicultural Delusions, Reality wins and someone dies.