My friend and I sat sipping coffee in Yorkville, chatting about life and my upcoming birthday. I was a little distracted by the pile of work I knew I had waiting for me at home, including the barely-touched review copy of Salim Mansur’s forthcoming book, Islam’s Predicament.

While my friend and I chatted, somewhere halfway across town, Salim - in on a day trip from London, ON - was sitting stuck in traffic. He was thinking that if he wasn’t running so late for his meeting, he would call me.

Wouldn’t you know it that just as my friend and I were about to leave the café, Salim walked right past us?

“I was going to call you!” we cried in unison.

Confirming my cell number before rushing off, he promised to call me in 90 minutes. True to his word, within a hundred minutes we were strolling happily through Queen’s Park, playing Count the Hippies at the Toronto Word on the Street book fair.

We spent the afternoon talking of everything from politics to Jazz and all subjects between.

Salim’s book, Islam’s Predicament: Perspectives of a Dissident Muslim (Mosaic Press), will be released within the next month, and Salim will be joining Mike and I on Brass Balls Radio in two weeks time.

Interesting read in WaPo about a new author who was given less than zero support from her publishing house when it came to marketing. So she did her own, and has sold over 300,000 copies. Huzzah! Yay for grassroots!

A couple of my friends have used print to order services like LuLu and done pretty good - mostly from ebook sales. The idea being, of course, that people are more willing to take a chance and a previously unknown author if they don’t have to pay tons of overhead or shipping just to read them.

Putting together, marketing and selling an ebook or a print on demand book can be tough, because you’re the only employee in the publishing house. You don’t have PR professionals at your disposal, there’s no agent to fall back on for advice - you’re totally on your own.

Peter Bowerman wrote The Well Fed Writer and marketed it on his own. He made a fortune. I have a copy, and if you aren’t hoping for failure, you should too.

That said, he also has a book called The Well-Fed Self-Publisher which chronicles how he made a living selling The Well Fed Writer. He offers a free report to whet your appetite, if self-publishing is something you’ve been considering.

I bought The Well Fed Self Publisher in ebook format. Again, for the same reason I mentioned above - no extra costs, just the book. Yes it takes a while to get used to reading on the computer, but it’s worth it for the money you save, trust me.

Anyway, check out The Well-Fed Self-Publisher . If you’ve been thinking about it, stop putting it off and DO SOMETHING about it!!

John Hawkins at Right Wing News talks to Michelle Malkin about her book Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies.

You know in D.C. after the election, there was all this cocktail chatter talk and idle musing about what the Republican Party needed to do to recapture power. The simpletons think it’s all just about rebranding themselves, joining the Obama bandwagon, and remaking the Republican Party into the Democrat Party. The difference is that the Republican Party does not have this machinery in place: the unions on their side, the public schools, all of these non-profit organizations — then taxpayers subsidize political outfits like ACORN to help guarantee them a majority in perpetuity.

Check put the whole interview at Right Wing News, and be sure to grab a copy of Michelle’s best selling book, Culture of Corruption.

For the 4th week in a row, Michelle Malkin’s Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies is #1 on the NYT bestseller list.

Her collection of facts detailing the abuses of power by people who are now senior in the Obama administration - think TurboTax Tim Geithner, the “czars” that answer to no one except President Obama, the ACORN and Bill Ayers connections… the list is endless.

Culture of Corruption - the derogatory slogan the Democrats tried desperately to attach to the Bush administration - is the perfect way to sum up the nepotism, arrogance and flagrant disregard for the law evidenced by the behavior and practices of the Hope’n'Change administration

I strongly recommend reading the book - I made the mistake of listening to the Audible version. It’s terrible. The narrator is approximately 300 years old. It should have been Michelle herself.

Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Culture of Corruption at Amazon. They have the best prices: a little over $15 for a hardcover.

If you’re a fan of Malkin, you can also get her blog on your Kindle reader.

Currently reading Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom by Bruce Bawer.

I happened to borrow this copy from The Great Scaramouche, and she has it marked up on every page with her observations. It’s awesome. It’s like having an annotated version.

This will keep me occupied, along with the audio version of Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, on my 12-hour bus ride to NYC tonight. By the way, Bawer is coming to Canada in September!

I probably won’t blog over the weekend (you never know), so follow the madness on Twitter with

• @rightgirl
• @chipheadmike (Brass Balls Radio producer)
• @pinkelephantpun (Tabitha Hale, who will be tweeting the pictures from our adventure)

Have a great weekend!

Ugh. I took a walk in the nice warm sunshine this afternoon. Had some letters to mail, and wanted a passion tea lemonade from Starbucks. I decided that instead of hitting one of the standalone ‘bucks, I’d go to the one in my local Indigo Books. Or Obama Books, as it should be rechristened (methinks “christened” might not be the best word to use, but oh well).

I counted no less than NINE books with either his face or his name on them. And not one of them was in the political section upstairs. The most ironic one was probably “Great Speeches” that had Alfred E. Mulatto’s face on the cover. Not Churchill (we shall fight them on the beaches), not Kennedy (ask not what your country can do for you), not Lincoln (government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth), but Barack put-em-to-sleep Obama. He may be many things: Historical, well dressed, something else I’m sure, but he is not a great orator. Bush you could listen to for the mistakes; like watching F1 for the crashes. Reagan was a passionate speaker. Clinton was emotive and kept the crowd’s attention. But Obama? Most people prefer to read the text of his speeches rather than actually listen to them. I harbor a guess that if he had them read aloud by William Shatner, his Neilsen Ratings would go up considerably.

I shrugged off this amusement and wandered to the business section. I figured I’d be Obama-free down there, since he never really had anything to do with business throughout his “career” as an Official Black Man™ and Community Organizer™. Alas, it was not to be:

Good Lord, is there hope (not to be confused with Hope™) left for America (and Canada, by extension)? Americans are graduating in illiterate droves, unable to string two sentences together that don’t involve the words “like” or “bling”. Now we want them to bore the ass off potential bosses, subordinates, investors and board of directors? Is that really a good idea?

For those of you who have been lining under a rock for the last seven years or so, you may only know Ezra Levant for his kerfuffle with Canada’s “human rights” apparatus, after his now-defunct magazine the Western Standard printed the cartoons of Mohamed. His struggle - and the struggles of others in Canada whose speech and “tone” have been deemed offensive - has been outlined in Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights. I had reviewed this book back in March and called it “bone-chilling”. Mike and I also had Ezra on Brass Balls Radio.

But there’s more to Ezra Levant than just being gang-raped by a band of quasi-judicial thugs. Did you know he has two other books?

Fight Kyoto, published in 2002, discusses the negative effect the enviro-hooey Kyoto Accord would have on Canadian industry and the public at large.

And The War on Fun details how health lobbies (modern-day prohibitionists) are cracking down on vices that the public enjoys. Drinking. Smoking. Eating. It’s timely, considering the current discussion in the U.S. about sugary drinks and the evil Cheerios. That’s right. We have Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and now Big Breakfast. I think (but am not sure) that The War On Fun is out of print, but the link above will take you to Amazon where you can buy it used (and dirt cheap). Now might be a good time for Americans to read this, while drinking a contraband Coke and eating Chinese take-out.

Speaking of out-of-print, I just snagged myself a copy of Kathy Shaidle’s earlier book, A Catholic Alphabet. She has made this available in e-book form via Lulu. The collected articles are a lot like Kathy: Short, quirky, full of pop-culture trivia, and with hidden depths.

…OR…

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Mark Steyn Human Rights Show Trial!

Mark Steyn’s latest offering is Lights Out: Islam, free speech and the twilight of the west. The first section of the book is the offending Maclean’s articles that Mohamed El Masry and the Sock Puppet Three found “flagrantly Islamophobic“. These articles are presented in all their hateful glory, along with a point-by-point of why the thin-skinned law students were so offended, and a rebuttal from the Islamophobe himself.

Beyond that are further articles collected from Steyn’s various outlets that further prove what a hater he is, but that the Sock Puppet Three just didn’t have the time between prayers to scour for his calls to genocide. Or whatever it was they were yelping about at taxpayer expense for a year. Ho hum.

I was pleased to see the book included one of my all-time favorite Steyn articles: My Sharia Amour (not “flagrantly Islamophobic”).

There was a momentary silence, just long enough for me to start backing upstage nervously. And then the crowd went wild! The guys in the balcony cheered deliriously and hurled their machetes across the orchestra pit, shredding my pants. An Afghan wedding party grabbed their semi-automatics and blew out the chandeliers, sending them hurtling to the aisle, where they killed a Japanese camera crew. Tough luck, fellers, but that’s what happens when you get between me and my audience.

Lights Out is a hefty little book; a hardcover of 322 pages. But each article takes no more than a couple of minutes to devour, and you’ll miss the book when it’s finished.

Order it from the Steyn Store or from Amazon.com.

Lights Out, Mark’s new book about Islam and the West, arrived from Steyn HQ yesterday. A review will be forthcoming. In the meantime, Steyn fans can order direct from the Steyn Store.

I think I’ll go to bed early again tonight, and spend more quality time with Mark.

And coffee.

Daily or weekly prayers and devotions? All the religions do that. Guilt and repentance? Ditto. All the major (and some of the minor) religions preach peace and love (though not all really follow it).

Only Christianity gives us crisp, salty fried pig fat for breakfast, and for that alone I am thankful to be a Christian.

Ok, I’m half kidding. Yesterday I once again finished reading one of my all time favorite books:

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

I read it every year during Lent. It always makes me smile, by humanizing Christ in a way that the language of the Bible doesn’t allow for. Where the Bible is cold, hard recitation of the facts, Lamb is fiction, but you want to believe it.

Have a blessed Easter everyone.

Sounds like a party, doesn’t it? Shakedown in the USA! Wear your clogs!

Thing is, the little book by this outspoken Canadian seems to be a bit of a Yankee Doodle Hit. Leastwise according to my Amazon statistics.

So if you haven’t ordered it yet, here’s your chance to a) get an awesome book about the damage done by good intentions, and b) help this site by purchasing it via my affiliate links.

What are you waiting for?

You are sitting in your office, going about the business of your business, when someone presents themselves at reception, saying they’ve come to confiscate your hard drive, your hard files and any peripheral e-storage devices. They have no warrant to back them up, and they don’t need one. They are from the government. They are valiantly fighting for the cause of human rights. You do not have the right to turn them away, and you must give them all they request.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have read Shakedown on a windy, rainy night. Maybe then I wouldn’t have written Ezra with a short email review: Bone-chilling.

While not necessarily the horror of Stephen King, Shakedown is a series of Orwellian tales perhaps worthy of the Twilight Zone. In Canada, Section 8 of our Charter (what passes for a constitution in this country) protects the proletariat from illegal search and seizure. Except when it doesn’t. Like, where the “human rights” commissions are involved.

Operating completely outside the law of the land, these “human rights” commissions and tribunals across the country have no set operating procedure. Every case is different, civil law and the Magna Carta have no bearing, and rules are made up as they go along. In addition, though they portend to be a wall of defense between hatred and the population, their employees and cronies are some of the largest purveyors of hate in the country.

If, for example, you and I were to write about niggers and kikes in an effort to foment hatred and possibly violence, the aforementioned Gestapo of the “human rights” rackets would invade our personal files and steal our computer equipment. Yet if one of their employees - past or present - did the same thing under a pseudonym, it would all be in the cause of fighting hatred.

Tell me, dear readers - especially those outside of Canada - does what I’ve written make you feel like you’ve fallen through the looking glass? Me too. The Queen of Hearts (in this case, Jennifer Lynch) passes judgment on intention and tone, branding people from all walks of life to be outside civilized society. Well, almost all walks. Like, for example, you can’t really be charged if you are a lesbian, or a Muslim. After all, you are one of your precious protected people. You are free to make spurious claims - at no cost to yourselves - against small business owners, private citizens and anyone who you may feel has slighted you. In turn, they must pay and pay throughout the process of being found guilty (for no one is ever found not guilty - ever), and then pay again upon being found guilty.

In Shakedown, Ezra Levant tells us these tales of horror, in his usual witty and bombastic manner, as well as telling us of his own infamous dealings with the Alberta “Human Rights” Commission for daring to report on a news story that Muslims found offensive.

Money quote: You can always ignore a racist. You can’t escape from the government.

Ezra has waged an almost three year battle to denormalize the “human rights” apparatus in Canada and to expose their unconstitutional practices to the sunlight of public opinion. Shakedown is his story, along with the stories of many other less connected Canadians who have suffered at the hands of the Court of Marsupial Magistrates.

Is this a book just for Canadians? No. Any country that subscribes to a politically-correct orthodoxy at the expense of common sense (I’m looking at you, Britain) is at risk of having quasi-judicial bodies break the law of the land in an effort to protect people from being offended.

Shakedown by Ezra Levant is available as of Tuesday, March 24th in Chapters/Indigo branches across Canada, and worldwide via Amazon. You can pre-order it through Amazon today.

UPDATE: D’uh. I thought it was a little odd that the book would be launched on a Tuesday, and I was right. It in fact launches today, Monday the 23rd of March. I actually saw it in Indigo last night after dinner.

I go through dozens of stories every day about atrocities in the Muslim world. I make no excuses - I hate them. But when I read something like this, the skeptic in me perks up.

The book is called The Imam’s Daughter because “Hannah Shah” is just that: the daughter of an imam in one of the tight-knit Deobandi Muslim Pakistani communities in the north of England. Her father emigrated to this country from rural Pakistan some time in the 1960s and is, apparently, a highly respected local figure.

He is also an incestuous child abuser, repeatedly raping his daughter from the age of five until she was 15, ostensibly as part of her punishment for being “disobedient”. At the age of 16 she fled her family to avoid the forced marriage they had planned for her in Pakistan. A much, much greater affront to “honour” in her family’s eyes, however, was the fact that she then became a Christian – an apostate. The Koran is explicit that apostasy is punishable by death; thus it was that her father the imam led a 40-strong gang – in the middle of a British city – to find and kill her.

Islamic culture is a God damned disaster, with rampant abuse of daughters. But this story is a little too tidy to be believable. There was never anything reported to authorities. All names and details in her book have been obscured, including her own, so there’s no room for fact checking. Oh, and please buy her book.

Remember A Million Little Pieces by James Frey? It was a memoir of Frey’s life as an addict, and turned out to be false. Many of his recollections were actually the experiences of others that he claimed for his own. Some of the story was outright fabrication. Then there was the Rosenblat Holocaust memoir that was scrapped earlier this year because it was bullshit.

Perhaps this girl really suffered through what she describes - it wouldn’t surprise me. I just think we need to treat these “memoirs” witha grain of salt, especially when there is no way to verify facts.

When I met Gerry Nicholls at a luncheon last week and requested an advance copy of his book Loyal to the Core (Freedom Press), I did so out of a sense of kinship, not out of a burning desire to read it. After all, Gerry is a staunch conservative, true blue, with hardcore street cred from his years with the National Citizens Coalition. But when the book arrived Monday morning, I held the package in my hands, dreading the moment I would have to open it and begin taking notes. You see, I will be interviewing Gerry tomorrow night for Monday’s Brass Balls Radio. So I had to rush through this book, ASAP.

Let’s face it folks, books about Canadian politics are epic in their dullness. Our politics are stale and English, dull as dishwater. I wanted to stab my eyes out so I wouldn’t have to read a tome about the NCC. But guess what?

The book is awesome!

I whipped through it in a day; I was riveted. The first half reads like a recruitment and fund raising tool for the NCC. Makes sense, since Gerry was the communications director there for years before he was promoted to VP. Despite the gung-ho love for the NCC displayed in this half of the book, the tidbits of gossip are enjoyable and make for quick page-turning.

Hey Fat Boy!

Fat Boy, AKA Stephen Harper, arrived on the NCC scene in the late 90s and things began to change. Harper was an uber-conservative with very little sense of humor, and his time at the NCC reflected this. Fewer piggie ads, more court challenges. But when he left the organization to become head of the Alliance, the NCC stopped being about the Citizens and became a Harper machine. They lost sight of their non-partisan mission and worked round the clock to get their boy elected to run the country.

Only to see him take office and suddenly forget his conservative principles. I can sympathize. As the former VP of my district association, I too worked to get Harper and the Conservatives elected. And once elected, they moved so far to the left that I felt like my vote was wasted.

So Gerry and the NCC team began to push back against Harper’s policies, as they had with every other PM over the years. Why should it matter that Harper had been NCC president? Turns out it mattered a lot. In 2007, the NCC fired Nicholls after 22 years of loyal service. Content to carry on as a Harper Machine, the NCC saw no longer saw reason to challenge the political status quo.

I guarantee that if this book had been written a few years ago instead of today, there’s a chance we would have a different Prime Minister right now. And I have to say, if this book sells well, it will hurt Harper’s future.

While the book is unlikely to appeal to all but the hardest wonks in the American audience, every Canadian remotely interested in politics and the state of the country should have a read of Loyal to the Core.

The book is officially released next week, but is available for pre-sale via Freedom Press.

I have here in my hot little hands an advance copy of Ezra Levant’s forthcoming book on the Canadian “human rights” racket: Shakedown.

It arrived this morning, but since I don’t really do mornings, I have just gotten to it now, and only as far as the foreword, by (naturally) Mark Steyn. In it he describes Ezra as “one of those shower units where the merest nudge of the dial sends it straight up to scalding.” I’ve met Ezra several times over the years, but putting Ezra+hot shower together will be a new thought for me. Hmmm. At any rate, when I die, I’m having Mark write the eulogy and the epitaph.

Ezra Levant will be joining us on Brass Balls Radio closer to the end of the month, and Mike and I are really looking forward to talking with him again about the abuses of our over-bloated human rights racket here in Canada. The book is due for release on March 24, but you can pre-order your copy from Amazon now.

Download MP3

You can get Larry’s book The Deniers via Amazon, with free super saver shipping on orders over $25US.

We taped a great interview with Kathy Shaidle today, regarding her upcoming book, The Tyranny of Nice.

Tyranny can be pre-ordered here. Catch the show on Monday!

Lisa De Pasquale returns to blogging at Townhall with a review of a faux children’s book called Goodnight Bush.

It’s amazing what passes for “brilliant” in leftists’ circles. These authors must have honed their skills in college by making “Bush is Hitler!” placards. The authors’ gags include a clock permanently set on 9:11, a copy of the Constitution that’s been written over in crayon, “a tiny scurrying Osama bin Laden” in place of the mouse that runs around throughout Goodnight Moon, and an “Ohio 2004” ballot box burning in the fireplace.

The text is just as subtle:

Goodnight Constitution. And goodnight evolution.

Goodnight old growth trees. Goodnight detainees.

Obviously, Goodnight Bush is meant for childish liberals rather than children. Accolades from the media are numerous and nauseating. The San Francisco Chronicle purrs, “Goodnight Bush stands to become a popular American political parody.”

Salon.com coos, “Seldom have an administration’s failings been set to such a lulling cadence.” Of course, one would expect Goodnight Clinton to be wrapped in plastic and sold in the back of the store with a “Sexually Explicit Material” warning label (or widely available in America’s public schools).

Alright, in the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I own this book. So I really can’t say much about Goodnight Bush, can I?

My stack runeth over with books!

It seems I currently have about five books on the go right now. I suppose it’s a side-effect of the blogging world: We all have a bad case of ADD.

Three that stand out from the stack are How to Eat Like a Hot Chick, Seventh Psalm, and Clintonisms.

How to Eat Like a Hot Chick - Jodi Lipper & Cerina Vincent

Chocolate cake for breakfast and a pound of spinach for dinner.

It’s as simple as that! We all have an inner Hot Chick (some of us are lucky to have an outer one, too), but she tends to get confused with all the diet rhetoric out there. And so much of what we read is dull, depressing DON’T. No thanks. Life is too short for Lean Cuisine. How to Eat Like a Hot Chick is a simple, smartly written little book that helps you pick what to eat, and when. Dates, family dinners, nights out at the bar. I must confess, I’ve read this little bible about five times, just because it’s so uplifting. Basically, anything can be cured/overcome if you just eat a pound of spinach. If only all of life was so simple!

Don’t confuse this happy little book with “Skinny Bitch”, which I also bought for the sassy title. That one is a PETA-infested vegan rant-preach. No thanks. This hot chick eats steak!

Seventh Psalm - Jonathan Bruce

Jonathan Bruce is actually two retired Air Force judges: John H. Schumacher and Bruce T. Smith. Together they wrote this fast-paced, international, Clancy-esque novel of Islamic terror. I started reading it as my bedtime book, but soon had to switch it to being my subway commute book. That would have been right around the part where a bus full of school children is taken hostage by two German terrorists-for-hire in the name of global jihad. I must confess, I still haven’t finished this one. First Mr. Right swiped it from me after reading the back cover, and realizing it involved the British SAS, and then another friend wants it after that. I must say I’m looking forward to getting it back! I really want to see if the German bitch gets it in the end.

Clintonisms - Julia Gorin

The Amusing, Confusing, and Even Suspect Musing, of Billary

A timely little answer to Bushisms, this will amuse you in between rounds of the Obama/Hillary Death Match. Her numbers are up, her numbers are down, Bill’s feeling our pain and our bottoms… It may have been written as comedy, but it’s rather chilling when you think that America suffered through eight years of these people, and if we’re not careful, we may have to do it again.

A book fair in Paris has become the subject of controversy with several Muslim countries announcing boycotts because the guest of honour is Israel.

Saudi Arabia has become the latest to withdraw, following Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria.

The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Isesco) has also urged its 50 members to pull out from the fair, which starts on 14 March.

By knowing that all these parasites won’t be sneaking in on their faux visas, didn’t this book fair just become 100% safer?

Really, is it any great loss to the book fair - let alone the entire world of literature - if the Muslims don’t want to play along? What kind of contribution would they have made, anyway (not counting dead bodies)?

In other news…

Early morning shoppers at a supermarket in Jeddah were left reeling yesterday, with some falling unconscious, after a well-built Syrian man clinched a knife and decapitated his 15-month-old nephew in front of his mother in the store’s fruit and vegetable section.

In a brutal murder that has shocked the city, the 25-year-old man beheaded the boy, who was out shopping with his mother — in full glare of shoppers and staff at Al-Marhaba supermarket on Sari Street around 9.30 a.m. The man, who is the boy’s maternal uncle, apparently killed the boy following a dispute with his sister and brother-in-law.

Eyewitnesses said that the man picked up a knife from inside the store and severed the boy’s head.

This is the viper we insist on nursing to our breast.