Second Presidential Debate: Obama’s Exploding Libyan Cigar

President Barack Obama’s response to the September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya was the defining issue of the second U.S. presidential debate. Obama claimed that the day after the attack on the U.S. Consulate there, he:

“…stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime.”

That was a lie. Accordingly, in the manner of a civil litigator cross-examining a lying witness, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave Obama a minute to retract or qualify his answer. Obama did not do so. It was his undoing. Read more

Biden’s Rand Card: Preparatory Advice to Paul Ryan

Will Joe Biden play the Rand card in tomorrow’s debate against Mitt Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan? How should Ryan respond if he does? Read more

Credit Where Credit’s Due: McGuinty’s Liberals Get One Right

Ontario’s government today announced that pharmacists are no longer among those prohibited by law from performing certain services. The government’s news release featured the fact that pharmacists will now be able to administer the flu shot. For those – especially seniors – who find it difficult or inconvenient to get to the more limited number of places where flu shots are administered, this is certainly an added convenience. But the bombshell change is this: “…pharmacists can now also: Renew or adapt existing prescriptions…”. That is a major, praiseworthy change. Read more

Hate the Sinner

The electoral efforts of we pro-reason, pro-freedom individuals have been undermined by our cowardice.

Thinking ourselves bold and brave, we write in unambiguous and unequivocal terms of ideas and principles; of reason and faith; of selfishness and altruism; of individualism and collectivism; of free markets and central planning; of capitalism and communism. We stand up, look into the eyes of our audiences, and speak about big institutions and abstract entities – “the government”, “the state”, “unions”, etc. – and about their irrationality, their coerciveness, and the like.

In doing so, we act out of fear; fear not because of what we write or say, but because of what we refrain from writing and saying. Fearing we’ll offend someone, we cower from the utterance of the very thing that must be said if freedom is to prevail. Read more

Canada, Leonard Peikoff, Iran, and Collectivism

On October 12, 2001, Canadian-born philosophy professor and author Dr. Leonard Peikoff (author of the recently released book “The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West are Going Out“) appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s political talk show. The appearance of course made its way onto YouTube, where the video has been viewed over 47,000 times, and 1452 comments have been made in response to it. Especially since being posted to YouTube, Dr. Peikoff’s views about the USA bombing or otherwise taking military action in Iran have often drawn the allegation – especially from libertarians, but not from Objectivists – that Dr. Peikoff, or Objectivism itself, is somehow collectivist in respect of war. The latest such criticism occurred on my own facebook wall. Accordingly, I take it upon myself to demonstrate that such allegations are false. Read more

Located: the Next Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada

A picture is worth a thousand words. So… Read more

Advice for Politically-Active Objectivists When Dealing with the Media/Public

A fellow Objectivist with not too much experience speaking with the media asked for a few pointers. I replied as follows.

I suppose the most important thing is to speak in steak-and-potatoes terms. Abstractions that are well understood by Objectivists often lack a conscious connection to the concretes in a non-Objectivist’s life.

There are some others that come immediately to mind: Read more

McKeever’s Minimal Maxims and Bon Arrows, Volume 2, Issue 4

One’s collection of skipping records gets larger as one ages. Skip…skip…skip…ski…sk…s….
Worse: One eventually learns that one got said skipping records at a flea market, and that they’ve never been anything but skipping records, since time immemorial.
Worst: nobody around me seems to hear the damned things skipping.

As soon as “bad” meant both “good” and “bad”, dictionaries became irrelevant, and freedom included slavery.

A socialist leader’s virtue is the ability to shrink, not to grow.

If nobody ever knew your name, you were never alive in the first place. We build the souls we leave behind. Build one that will stand the test of time. – Note to a friend.

Just Right: Paul Ryan and Al Quds Day

“Just Right” is a radio show that airs every Thursday from 11:00 AM until noon, on 94.9 FM CHRW in London, Ontario. The hosts are my good friends Robert Metz and Robert Vaughan. The show looks at science, culture, current events and more, and gives listeners an insight the value of which normally long survives the significance of the particular event being discussed. Today, I had the distinct pleasure of filling-in for the illustrious Mr. Vaughan, and of preparing commentary on two items I found to be particularly interesting this week. The first: Republican Vice-Presidential running mate Paul Ryan’s devout Catholicism, his affinity for the writings of Ayn Rand, and the fatal flaw in his approach to defending capitalism and individualism. The second: the true nature and goal of the wretchedly anti-Jewish Islamic “Al Quds Day” demonstrations, and the destructive effect of permitting the demonstration to be held on the grounds of a legislature (in this case, Queen’s Park, in Toronto). Read more

Wilful Blindness, Religion and Politics

On his blog, Sunmedia writer Warren Kinsella expresses some puzzlement about why his submitted column on politics and religion didn’t appear in today’s issue of the Sun. Given that a left-wing writer was actually coming to the defence of a Conservative Prime Minister’s privacy, it is a bit puzzling (perhaps a Conservative writer with more pull wanted to be the one to please the PM?). However, in my view, it’s just as well. Kinsella’s defence of the PM was not warranted. Read more

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