Alejandro de Tomaso, RIP

The Argentinian-born, Italian-based creator of the Pantera and Mangusta passed away at age 74 on May 21. The Economist notes that the Ford-powered Pantera became famous in America after Elvis Presley shot one.

The Wolfowitz non-scandal

Bill Kristol, grand high priest...er, rabbi of the evil Jewish neo-con conspiracy!!! has more details in The Weekly Standard. It looks like Vanity Fair is primarily responsible for the misinterpreted quote, but left-wing media outlets like The Independent are distorting it even further. (That paper's headline read something like, "WMDs just a convenient pretext for war: Wolfowitz.")

Lies, damned lies, and The Independent

Over the next few days, you're going to hear a lot about Paul Wolfowitz's alleged "admission" that the WMD issue was just a pretext the Americans used to go to war, "for bureaucratic reasons".

That was a blockbuster story in The Independent today. And it's complete bullshit. Charles Johnson has a link to the full transcript of the Wolfowitz interview, and the way the Daily Fisk (and/or Vanity Fair, which originally quoted Wolfowitz in an article scheduled to run in the July issue) took his comments out of context is absolutely shocking.

(Of course, the Pentagon itself released the full transcript of the Vanity Fair interview. Will that satisfy the IndyMedia/Independent/Bush-is-Hitler crowd? I doubt it.)

Bush v. Hitler, continued

Lileks dealt with this comparison in one of his syndicated columns last year:

Guess who made this statement: "I am literally comparing Bush and his cronies to Hitler, only Hitler had a smaller vision."

Note to Dr. Bozo: There's a quick way to see if your nation's leader is worse than Hitler. Criticize him loudly in the news media. Using one's index finger, probe back of head for bullet hole. Nothing? You might want to rethink your rhetoric.

Have you signed the petition yet?

Bush v. Hitler

Unlike his fellow conspirozoids, who merely say Bush is as bad as Hitler, Mikey Rivero says the President is even worse.

Really.

Hitler served in the German infantry for three years in WWI. He was wounded three times in combat and was awarded the Iron Cross for his bravery. Bush weaseled his way into the National Guard so he could have an excuse to get out of Vietnam and then went AWOL for a year.

Sure, Hitler was a bad man, but he wasn’t as bad as what we got; A coward who bribed and manipulated his way into office and then robbed the American people blind.

Actually, America's economic downturn began before Dubya became President. And Hitler became chancellor of Germany with barely 40% of the popular vote, which considerably less than Bush got in 2000. But an inability to tell the difference between a majority and a plurality is the least of this guy's problems.

(There's that little Holocaust thing, for example. Of course, Mikey doesn't believe that happened - hence his recent enthusiasm for Nazi UFO cultist Ernst Zundel.)

Update: this "Bush is worse than Hitler" rant was actually written by one of Rivero's readers. Mind you, Mikey never posts a message he doesn't agree or sympathize with. Either way, it says all you need to know about what type of person reads whatreallyhappened.com, doesn't it?

Aaronovitch on anti-Semitism

"There is no all-powerful Jewish lobby," writes David Aaronovitch in the Wanker. Aaronovitch writes for one of Britain's most anti-war, pro-Palestinian newspapers, but for some "progressives" it doesn't matter: he has a Yid last name, so he (and other Jews who write for the Guardian) must be in Sharon's pocket.

Last March an Ian Henshall, who describes himself as "chair of the UK's alternative media umbrella group, INK", wrote an open letter to the editor of the Observer, to complain about the journalist Nick Cohen's support for an attack on Iraq. "Cohen," said Henshall, "has written publicly about his loyalty to his Jewishness, so (is) there is any connection between this and his apparent support for the coming war?" Henshall continued, "Just before anyone calls me anti-Semitic, could I point out that my current hero is Uri Avneri, and the bravest people in the world are the Jews who are resisting the occupation and Sharon's ethnic cleansing." Henshall, incidentally, is also a disseminator of internet stories with headlines such as, "What were 120 Israeli spies doing in America a few months before the 9/11 attacks?"

This month J Hall suggested to me that the infamous Galloway documents could have been the work of "the Jewish lobby". A Medialens regular, David Bracewell, posts this week to criticise "Israeli fascism" and adds, "if ever there was an inflammatory, racist, insidiously exclusive term, 'anti-Semitism' is it. It baffles me why the supposed victims of racism would want a term all for themselves." Supposed? And not one of the assembled lefties took him up on it.

Read the whole thing.

An unfortunate choice of words

Yesterday, I wrote that "Canadian aboriginals need their own Hernando de Soto," referring to the Peuvian economist. Reader Jim Greenway wrote to remind me of another Hernando de Soto, the likes of whom natives definitely don't need:

I had to bust out laughing at reading this. Another Hernando de Soto was a lesser-known conquistador who went road-tripping around the southeastern U.S in an unsuccessful gold hunt. de Soto y vatos wasted umpteen "aboriginals" while stomping around Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. His M.O. was to ride into a village, demand the whereabouts of any gold as well as food for his men, and leave after kidnapping some guys for porters and some of las chicas for, well, you can guess. Several thousand of the locals died at the Battle of Mabila in middle Alabama (hey, good news spread fast & de Soto developed a rep). Disease and hunger largely wiped out de Soto's gang - it was a real road trip from hell for everyone involved. de Soto himself died on the trip and was probably buried in the vicinity of the Mississippi River.

If I were halfway well-known, yesterday's quote would have been taken out of context and made the top story on CBC by now.

Iraqi WMDs: the world grows impatient

Salon's Jake Tapper describes how the Bush administration, frustrated by its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is backpedalling from its original claims - and how other members of the "coalition of the willing" are growing increasingly disillusioned. (Link requires you to sit through an "ultramercial" for a new series on Showtime.)

So far, in post-Saddam Iraq, they've found just about everything I expected them to find - horrendous torture chambers; evidence of Saddam's cynical manipulation of the "genocidal" sanctions; at least one children's prison; proof of French, German and Russian cooperation with and weapons sales to Saddam's regime; documents showing "journalists" and "peace activists" on Saddam's payroll; even some evidence of "diplomatic" links, albeit at a relatively low level, with Al-Qaida. Everything, that is, except the weapons which were cited as the main justification for the war.

Some say the Brits "sexed up" their much-cited "dossier" on Iraq's WMD capacity, to make the threat look more imminent, but I remain unconvinced that the coalition was perpetrating a fraud; if they were committing a massive hoax, they would have faked a massive WMD find by now, and they certainly wouldn't have tolerated early, embarassing reports on "smoking guns" which turned out to have more benign uses. I think they just couldn't comprehend the possibility of not finding anything, and now they've been left wide open for criticism and conspiracy theories.

I still make no apologies for supporting the war; anything that gets rid of a maniac like Saddam, and could lay the foundation for a more democratic Middle East, is a good thing. But even a pro-American commentator like myself may find it increasingly hard to trust the Yanks again, so heaven knows what the knee-jerk America-haters must be thinking.

On a positive note, the last times I felt so uneasy about something like this were during the initial reports of the Jenin "massacre" and the looting of "170,000 items" from the Baghdad museum. And we all know how these turned out.

Another Canadian hero

A former Canadian soldier foiled an attempted hijacking of a Qantas flight the other day.

Moxie makes the big time

Check out her biggest fan.

Rewriting history at NaziMedia

First Michael Moore was caught removing the "Payback Tuesday" article from his website after the GOP gained seats in the 2002 elections, and now IndyMedia is trying to hide the notorious "we support our troops when they shoot their officers" photo.

I sense a trend here.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Hope

Mark Steyn on the legendary Bob Hope, 100 years old today.

Hire Lileks!

Sign the petition!

Weep for South Africa

Thebo Mbeki takes time off from proving HIV doesn't cause AIDS to defend his pal, Robert Mugabe. In the Guardian, of course.

Hysteria? What hysteria?

The drugstore across the street (and located about 3,000 km from Toronto) is selling paper SARS masks for $2.19 each. This would be ridiculous even if they worked. Which they don't.

Shariah in Baghdad

An extremely disturbing story in this morning's Washington Post: Islamic law courts have begun operating in Iraq, and Shi'ite clerics have set up "vice committees" to punish anyone who's not complying with their medieval beliefs.

Donald Rumsfeld is taking a lot of heat right now for his admission that Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction may have been destroyed before the Anglo-American invasion. Frankly, considering the horrors they have uncovered in Iraq, I don't think that made the war any less justified. (And I don't think these trailers they found were used to make Baby Milk, but that's another story.) But if Iraq is allowed to become another Islamofacist hellhole, subject to the rule of hardline clerics trying to revive the glories of the 14th century, that would be unforgivable.

The naysayers have been proven wrong about almost every "crisis" which has erupted in Iraq since the war began (brutal street fighting, hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, a military "quagmire" that lasts for years, thousands of items looted from museums, etc.), and I hope Iraq's post-liberation problems can be quelled before long. If they can't, and if Iraq becomes a Shi'ite theocracy, the war will have been a counterproductive step. The Americans and British have to stop the clerics. Now.

New town, same old crap

The National Post reports that the new community of Natuashish, Labrador, where the Innu of Davis Inlet were moved to try and escape that community's pervasive social problems, is already blighted with alcoholism, violence and vandalism. In other words, we're seeing exactly what everyone in Newfoundland knew was going to happen, but everyone was afraid to say.

Colby Cosh has some thoughts on this, to which I'd like to add that many of the Innu's problems - and those of aboriginals all over Canada - stem from a refusal to give residents of native reserves the right to own their own property. All reserves are either the property of the federal government or, pursuant to land-claims agreements, property of First Nations groups. Either way, every aboriginal's home is owned by somebody else, and that's a recipe for disaster. (As the Post notes, many residents of Natuashish have been forced to take other families into "their" houses, just like the way they'd shove three families into a one-family apartment in the USSR.) Why take care of the place in which you live, when some bureaucrat controls what you can do with it?

Most First Nations groups, of course, will scream bloody murder at the suggestion that - horrors! - private property is a solution to native woes. Why...the First Nations had no such thing as private property! Everybody shared everything they owned! That would mean "assimilation," as though aboriginal culture is so fragile that it would disappear as soon as you let a native own his home.

Yeah, whatever. They didn't have snowmobiles or motorboats, both of which are used on "traditional" hunts, either. You can't have it both ways, guys. There's something shockingly racist about a system that denies the right of private property to people just because of their ancestry; the fact that aboriginal "leaders" demand to keep such a system in place betrays a dependency and self-loathing almost too complex to comprehend.

The great Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has demonstrated how the people of the Third World can lift themselves out of poverty through the freedom to own their own property and develop it as they see fit. Canadian aboriginals need their own Hernando de Soto.

Jacoby on the "road map"

Jeff Jacoby says the "road map" for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement is meaningless without democratic reform in the Palestinian Authority, and an end to anti-Jewish incitement from official PA institutions.

If I hear Arafat described as "the democratically elected leader of the Palestinian people" one more time, I'm going to break something. The man's dubious election was in 1994, and the PA, despite occasional promises to the contrary, hasn't come close to holding any more Presidential elections since then, despite promises to do so - not even between 1994 and 2000, before the latest intifada started.

Treacher has been assimilated

He's the latest to get an MT-powered weblog.

Why wasn't I told about this before?

Newhouse News Service has an archive of James Lileks columns, most of which I've never read before, going back to the beginning of 2002.

Why isn't this man in every newspaper in North America? (Yes, I know two papers in the same market would never be able to run the same columnist, making it impossible for Lileks to be in every newspaper. I was being facetious.)

Is there a genocidal tyrant they won't support?

Nat Hentoff says the Stalinist 'International Action Center,' and its 'International ANSWER' front group, are joining several American black organizations in supporting Robert Mugabe:

Here at the Voice, I received a press release from the African Liberation Day Coalition 2003. The headline: "Blacks Assert Hands Off Zimbabwe," addressed to the "U.S. and British governments," accused by this coalition of recolonizing Africa. The demand: "money for reparations and not occupations."

Will A.N.S.W.E.R. invite Robert Mugabe to address its next demonstration for "Peace and Justice"?

Next thing you know, these guys will be supporting Kim Jong Il. Hey, wait a minute...

Chretien is losing it...

...assuming it was ever there to begin with. Relations between the U.S. and Canada have been strained ever since we decided not to join the Iraq war, but we aren't mortal enemies yet. Our beloved Prime Minster, it appears, won't be happy until the Yanks have closed the border completely:

Jean Chrétien, the Prime Minister, offered strong criticisms yesterday of George W. Bush, the U.S. President, attacking both his economic stewardship and his conservative social policies.

Mr. Chrétien, who is to speak on the global economy at next week's G8 summit in Evian, France, contrasted his own performance with that of Mr. Bush. He noted that under the Republicans, U.S. economic growth has become weaker and unemployment is rising, while Canada is enjoying strong job creation and growth of 2.5% expected this year.
[...]
While Mr. Chrétien claimed to have a good rapport with Mr. Bush, he said he disagrees with him on most major issues because of their ideological gulf.

"Of course we don't think alike on many issues. On social issues, he is a conservative. I am for free choice on abortion. He is not. He is against gun control. I am for it. [Chretien did not, as far as is known, say "He is against wasting a billion dollars on a completely useless gun registry. I am for it."] He is for capital punishment. I am against it. I am a Liberal," he said.

During the conversation, Mr. Chrétien went out of his way to praise former Democratic president Bill Clinton and noted the two leaders remain close friends and continue to golf together.

You know, I think Cretin has a point about the deficit issue. (More eloquent commentators than I, such as Andrew Sullivan, have pointed out the lasting damage Bush could be doing by racking up such huge deficits.) But what kind of jackass rants about the President on the eve of a major summit with the same President?!?

I'd never say a Canadian Prime Minister has no right to criticize or disagree with an American President. Sometimes it's necessary. But this is ridiculous. Keep it up, Mr. Chretien. You'll make sure the Americans never cooperate with us again.

Moron.

More missiles in Iraq...

...and NBC reports that many of the components are of French and German origin. It doesn't appear that the missiles are outside the range Iraq was allowed under the 1991 agreement, but it's becoming increasingly clear that those sophisticated Europeans sold Saddam millions of dollars' worth of weaponry in defiance of sanctions.

Hope for Colombia?

The Christian Science Monitor says the civil war in that tragic country could be winding down, thanks to President Uribe's military crackdown against rebels, and an increasingly popular program to reintegrate leftist and right-wing guerilla fighters into society.

Memo to Canada's soldiers:

Get used to your 40 year-old Sea King helicopters, 'cause we're going to keep 'em for another 11 years.

The federal government has secretly approved a $307-million maintenance contract to keep the aging Sea King helicopters flying for another 11 years, Sun Media has learned.

It also approved an option to extend IMP's new contract by six years -- to 2014 -- and forked over $148.1 million for it. That brings the total earmarked to keep the Canadian Forces' 28 Sea Kings flying to 2014 to $307 million, including taxes.

(via Bourque)

A Saudi step backward

After what appeared to be some soul-searching and self-criticism in the Arab press after the Riyadh bombings, things are returning to normal. The Saudi Information Ministry, which controls all media in that country, has ordered the firing of a liberal newspaper editor:

An editor whose newspaper was in the forefront of a campaign against Muslim extremism was removed from his post Tuesday, managers at the paper said.

No reason was given for the dismissal of Jamal Khashoggi, who joined the Al-Watan newspaper in March, one manager said on condition of anonymity.

Staffers at the paper said Al-Watan's manager fired Khashoggi but that the decision came from the Information Ministry. Under Saudi press laws, the government approves the hiring and firing of newspaper editors. Newspapers are privately owned but government guided.

Al-Watan has run a number of stories, editorials and cartoons critical of extremists and the way in which the country enforces its religious values.

I knew this sort of thing was going to happen. How long will it be before we hail yet another "sign that the Arab press is growing more free and independent"?

(via InstaPundit)

Update: it's business as usual at the Arab News, too.

Ya know what I hate?

People who leave messages on your voice mail that go on for about 5 minutes, usually with the same stuff repeated 3 or 4 times. That's what I hate.

(It's even worse at home - my ancient answering machine doesn't allow you to delete a message halfway through, or even fast-forward.)

Not Neil Young!

This can't be happening. I've come to expect this whiny martyr crap from the likes of Michael Moore or Tim Robbins, but...Neil Young?!?

"I think the world today, at least the US and to some extent Britain now, is experiencing this kind of Big Brother thing," he ruminates, the day after completing his string of solo performances at London's Hammersmith Apollo. Close up, the Toronto-born Young looks lined and weatherbeaten, but his mental focus is sharp.

"The real point was, somebody asked the president what he thought and he said, 'It's America, it's a free country, they can have their opinion, but there's nothing we can do about it if nobody goes to their shows or plays their songs,'" Young growls. "But he's so out of touch that his advisers haven't told him that their record sales spiked upwards when that happened, and while the airplay went down the sales went up and their concerts all sold out."

Say it isn't so, Neil. Tell me you were misquoted. Tell me you know the difference between criticism and censorship. Tell me you know better than to honestly think you're going to be deported for criticizing the President. For God's sake, tell me you have more sense than this.

Why photo radar is stupid, reason 348

A British driver recieved a speeding ticket for travelling 104 mph in a 70 mph zone. What's the problem, you ask? He was an ambulance driver, delivering a liver to a hospital for transplant. The guy even had his flashing lights turned on, but it doesn't matter. He could lose his job if convicted.

Incredibly, the authorities have determined that this was not a medical emergency which would excuse his high rate of speed. If there's ever been a case which exposes the folly of "speed cameras," and the way they don't allow for a police officer's discretion in determining whether a ticket should be issued, this is it.

A hero's death

A Canadian CF-18 pilot was killed when his plane crashed during a training exercise yesterday. His name has not been released.

Canada's outdated fighter jets have been literally falling apart over the past few years, just like the Sea King helicopters Chretien once bragged about refusing to replace. If it turns out this man was killed because his equipment couldn't handle the training exercise on which he was sent, the responsibility must lie with a government which has neglected the armed forces for a decade.

Sharon uses the "O" word

It seems almost impossible to believe. But just a few days after accepting the "road map" setting forth an Arab-Israeli peace settlement (with staggeringly unrealistic deadlines), Ariel Sharon - the new Hitler, the baby killer, the most evil Joooooooo in the history of the universe - has decried his nation's "occupation" of Palestinian territory.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon spent Monday defending his agreement to a U.S.-backed peace plan, and used surprising language to do so. "We don't like the word, but this is occupation. To keep 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is bad for Israel and the Palestinians."

This marked the first time Sharon has used the word "occupation" to refer to Israel's presence in West Bank and Gaza Strip.
[...]
"We need to reach a political arrangement (with the Palestinians). I want to say clearly I will do everything to reach a political arrangement because I think it's important for Israel," Sharon said.

This came after Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas agreed to meet this week for the second time. They will discuss the "road map" to Mideast peace, which Sharon's government voted narrowly to accept on Sunday.

The real test of whether this "road map" is going to work will be seen in Palestinian schools and mosques, and on Palestinian television and radio. Hamas and other genocidal militias are simply beyond the point where they can be reasoned with, and must be dealt with by force. It is the endless incitement against Israelis, the endless glorification of "martyrs" in official Palestinian institutions, which probably does the most to prevent any possibility of peace. It has to stop. Now.

I'm skeptical. But I hope and pray it will actually happen. Just as peace with Egypt happened under the leadership of Likudnik Menachem Begin, wouldn't it be amazing if this seemingly endless dispute ended under a Sharon government?

Essential reading

Sunday's Boston Globe featured a fascinating profile of Victor Davis Hanson. It seems almost impossible to believe, but he was actually fingered as a Unabomber suspect at one point. Even more amazingly - and this is going to break the hearts of Republican bloggers - he's still a registered Democrat.

Castro's millions

"Noted activist" Ted Glick, in a FrontPage symposium, tried to explain away Fidel Castro's recent crackdown by saying, "most of us continue to understand that Cuba's actions must be seen in the context of over 44 years of efforts by the U.S. to destroy their attempt to build a society without Enron-style criminals, on the one hand, and millions of homeless beggars, on the other."

Forbes - hardly an unbiased source, but much more trustworthy than this nitwit - estimates Castro's net worth at $110,000,000.00 - about 10% of his nation's Gross Domestic Product. Where did he get it, Ted? ("The people of Cuba are so grateful that they willingly gave up one meal a day to let their leader live in luxury. Viva la revolution!")

Memorial Day

I almost forgot: I hope all my American readers are enjoying Memorial Day. Don't forget to remember the people to whom this day is dedicated.

Chrysler does the impossible

They've built a vehicle even uglier than the Pontiac Aztek. The Dodge Kahuna is just a concept for the time being, but it's being considered for production. For God's sake, guys, do something about that front end. It looks like one of the Sand People.

Eurovision and liquor

This Australian blogger watched the entire Eurovision song contest and lived to tell about it, though not without a lot of alcohol to dull the pain. (See his May 26 entries.) The wacky Austrian guy finished 6th out of 26 contestants!

(via Gareth Parker)

You gotta see this

Mike Peckham, who helped me set up the new site, has produced the funniest 404 page ever.

Zimbabwe and the Churches

The Spectator has details of the Church of England's shameful refusal to criticize the growing catastrophe in Zimbabwe. Nolbert Kunonga, the Anglica Bishop of Harare, is a notorious crony of Robert Mugabe and has grossly abused his position - and the Church has done almost nothing.

Kunonga’s sycophancy towards the Zimbabwean despot affronted several of his fellow clergy. But he knew how to deal with their protests. He recently secured a court order banning more than a dozen churchwardens and members of the congregation from worshipping at the cathedral after they complained noisily about his pro-Mugabe sermons. Last April the United States added Kunonga to the list of corrupt public officials and villainous policemen who are banned from travelling to the United States.

It is one thing to remain quiet about Kunonga in Harare, where it takes real courage to speak out against the Zanu-PF regime. The bigger mystery is the silence from Lambeth Palace. To be fair, pressure has been brought behind the scenes. In the wake of the US ban, George Carey wrote a private letter to Bishop Nolbert in which he declared, ‘I am more than a little concerned of [sic] how less than circumspect you have been about your affiliation with the regime you appear so keen to support.’ But neither George Carey nor his successor Rowan Williams have publicly condemned the Harare prelate.

The Catholic Church in Britain has behaved in a similarly shameful fashion. Pius Ncume, Archbishop of Bulawayo, has suffered increasingly brutal harassment for his criticism of the Mugabe regime. When a human-rights group brought him to the UK for a speaking tour, the Catholic hierarchy reacted with something verging on horror:

When the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, the vigorous US-based group which fights for freedom and human rights in Zimbabwe, proposed that Pius Ncube should visit London, the news was greeted with dismay. The Catholic bishops did not show delight and gratification at the chance to give moral support to a fellow Christian in his lonely battle against terror. Incredibly, it seems that Ncube was asked to reconsider his plan. At the time of the Bishops’ Conference, during Low Week after Easter, the Catholic establishment looked set to block the Ncube visit.
[...]
In the end, a deal of sorts was hammered out. Ncube would come to Britain, but a publicity ban would be put on the visit. The Zimbabwe Democracy Trust had been planning to make the most of its illustrious visitor, with interviews tentatively planned on Breakfast with Frost, Newsnight, Channel 4, etc. Some had even been formally booked. They were cancelled. In the end, the Catholic Church, rather than celebrating their remarkable guest, and sending the message of support back to Zimbabwe, hustled him through Britain as if he were an escaped convict.

What in heaven's name is happening? It's very simple: Robert Mugabe is an African leader ostensibly taking land for wealthy people and giving it to the poor. (Of course, the land is really going to ZANU-PF cronies, which should surprise no one.) If Mugabe was a Latin American dictator supported by the Americans, you know the Anglican and Catholic churches would be falling over themselves to condemn him - as they should. But an African socialist? Silence.

As with Fidel Castro, the churches are hypnotized by the leader's "socialist" ideals and calls for "social justice," even while he's brutalizing and oppressing his people. It's enough to make you think they've begun worshipping a new god.

Two blockbusters in The Sunday Telegraph

1. British investigators have found Irqi plans for a missile with a 600-mile range - far exceeding the range allowed under the 1991 ceasefire agreement. UN investigators, needless to say, knew nothing about it.

2. The Islamofascists who carried last weekend's suicide bombings in Morrocco were followers of Abu Qatada, a Muslim cleric who preached at London's notorious Finsbury Park mosque. (Sample speech: "The time of victory is near. All over the world, Muslims are sacrificing more and contributing more to the struggle. May Allah accept us all to be slaughtered.")

How to save Mercury (and why it will never happen)

Car and Driver says the Marauder, which was supposed to boost the image of Ford's bealeagured Mercury division, is a flop. Less than 3,000 were sold in the second half of 2002, and not without massive rebates. (As the magazine notes, this "muscle car" can't accelerate as quickly as a V6 Honda Accord.)

Mercury will be Oldsmobiled unless something is done. The division does not sell one product which isn't a rebadged Ford, and Mercurys (Mercuries?) suffer from the same image problem as Buick: no matter what they sell, they're going to be percieved as softly-sprung, mushy-handling cars for retirees. Save for the early Cougar, Mercury really hasn't been relevant since the early 1950s.

Here's my radical suggestion for a Hail-Mary attempt at saving the company. Mercury should specialize in selling European Ford models that we can't buy over here: the Ka microcar and its StreetKa convertible variant, the Fiesta hatchback, the Fusion crossover vehicle, the Accord-fighting Mondeo and Galaxy minivan. None of these are available over here, and all of them look very interesting. After Peugeot, Renault, Fiat and Rover were driven from this side of the Atlantic (by angry buyers, who watched their vehicles rust away to nothing), Volkswagen has had the moderately-priced European car market all to it itself. It's an underserved market for which Ford already makes the product. (It's telling that Ford's hottest car in North America, despite persistent quality concerns, is the European-designed Focus.)

It's so crazy, it just might work. And it will never happen.

Why? Because Mercury already tried it. Almost nobody remembers this, but the European-market Ford Sierra and Scorpio were sold under the ill-concieved "Merkur" name for a few years in the mid-'80s. The cars were generally well-recieved by the American automotive press (and I had a particualar fondness for the Sierra-derived XR4Ti as a junior high-schooler), but Lincoln-Mercury dealers had abolutely no idea how to sell the vehicles, or even pronounce the name. It was a half-assed, half-hearted attempt to sell Euro-Fords in North America, but it was certainly enough to turn Ford away from ever trying it again.

And that's too bad, because the only other way to save Mercury would be to invest heavily in products exclusive to the division (like the 1990s Cougar), and it's hard to see Ford doing such a thing. If the division can't straighten itself out, it will almost certainly pass away like Plymouth and Oldsmobile, and that would be a shame.

"Freedoms" in Saddam's Iraq

A disturbing article in the San Francisco Chronicle, describing how Muslim fundamentalists are taking over government institutions in post-Saddam Iraq, is marred by the reporters' insistence on contrasting the present situation with the "rights" women had under Saddam Hussein. The article is headlined, "Women losing freedoms in chaos of postwar Iraq," and it contains this passage:

Although Hussein's secular Baath Party created one of the world's most despotic regimes, it allowed Iraqi women personal rights and freedoms unparalleled in the Persian Gulf. Women could drive, travel abroad alone, study in universities, serve in the army and work side-by-side with men. Iraqi women, who make up at least 55 percent of the population and are among the most educated in the region, can become anything, from college professors to lawyers. They choose whom to marry and whether to marry at all.

These were privileges,, not rights. The difference is that privileges are granted to the people by a government wielding absolute power, while rights are inherent and cannot be taken away by the rulers - not without relatively limited infringements which the government would have to justify before the courts, anyway. In 1979-2003 Iraq, Saddam Hussein's word was law. Period. He might have allowed women to do more than they would be allowed in Arab states like Saudi Arabia, but if the circumstances required it - if he had to curry favour with Islamist clerics, for example - these "rights" could have been taken away at any time, and the women affected would not have been able to do a damn thing about it.

The article is still worth reading, because the invasion of Iraq will be all for naught if Muslim radicals are allowed to seize any measure of power. The last thing the world needs is another Iran (or Saudi Arabia). But let's not kid ourselves about what "freedoms" existed under Saddam. There weren't any.

Does Christopher Hedges know about this?

If so, I'm sure he'll be outraged by what happened to a notorious, warmongering right-wing ideologue - Madeleine Albright - when she gave the commencement address at Smith College last Sunday. To be fair, Albright was able to finish her speech, but the yahoos made a yeoman effort to shut her down:

As soon as the speaker began, a chorus of shouts and boos came from the back of the assemblage. The heckling continued until almost the seven-minute mark in the speech, when the speaker finally addressed the protesters and promised to meet with them afterwards if they would quiet down.

By then the screams and catcalls had returned. One more protester was surrounded by police, after which it was relatively smooth sailing for the final few paragraphs of the speech.

Air Canada vs. Westjet

A friend sent me this one. (Apologies to my Amurrican readers, but I think you have to be Canadian to find this funny.)

Air Canada and WestJet decided to engage in a boat race. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance. On the big day, WestJet won by a mile. Afterward, the Air Canada team was discouraged by the loss.

Morale sagged.

The next year WestJet won by two miles. Humiliated, Air Canada laid off the rower for poor performance and gave the managers a bonus for discovering the problem.

Fact-Checking Heather Mallick

Mallick, in a coumn titled "In praise of savage, messy marriages" (which might just be the quintessential Heather Mallick column title), calls Elsie Wayne "the Mel Lastman of Moncton."

Wayne is from Saint John, about two hours' drive from Moncton. But hey, these Maritime communities are all the same, right?

Why didn't I think of this before?

Jeff Gordon's divorce lawyers are trying to argue that he's entitled to more than 50% of the matrimonial assets because of his inherently dangerous occupation. The Smoking Gun has a copy of Brooke Gordon's Reply, in which she denies that NASCAR driving is dangerous (uh, huh) and notes that, in any case, there has never been an American case where someone is entitled to unequal division because of his hazardous job.

My admittedly brief QuickLaw search doesn't reveal a Canadian case where the argument has been advanced, either. But if I have a matter that just can't be settled amicably, it might be worth a shot as an "in the alternative..." argument - especially here in Newfoundland. Brooke's Reply specifically singles out commerical fishing as one of the most dangerous occupations.

Hate to say I told you so...

Newsday reports on several Iraqi doctors who confirm what we ("we" meaning those who don't rely on John Pilger as an authoritative journalist) knew all along: that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the deaths of children that useful idiots blamed on UN sanctions, and that he turned these deaths into a propaganda bonanza.

Now free to speak, the doctors at two Baghdad hospitals, including Ibn Al-Baladi, tell a very different story. Along with parents of dead children, they said in interviews this week that Hussein turned the children's deaths into propaganda, notably by forcing hospitals to save babies' corpses to have them publicly paraded.

Under the sanctions regime, "We had the ability to get all the drugs we needed," said Ibn Al-Baladi's chief resident, Dr. Hussein Shihab. "Instead of that, Saddam Hussein spent all the money on his military force and put all the fault on the USA. Yes, of course the sanctions hurt - but not too much, because we are a rich country and we have the ability to get everything we can by money. But instead, he spent it on his palaces."
[...]
Doctors said they were forced to refrigerate dead babies in hospital morgues until authorities were ready to gather the little corpses for monthly parades in coffins on the roofs of taxis for the benefit of Iraqi state television and visiting journalists. The parents were ordered to wail with grief - no matter how many weeks had passed since their babies had died - and to shout to the cameras that the sanctions had killed their children, the doctors said. Afterward, the parents would be rewarded with food or money.

"The mukhabarat would go all over Iraq gathering the dead bodies, put them in coffins, make a whole line, put them on top of taxis and make big propaganda out of it," said the former agent, who asked that only his first name, Walid, be published.

(I remember that babies-in-freezers story being reported by a BBC reporter in the Guardian, of all places. It was widely dismissed at the time.)

And here's what Saddam, the great Muslim hero, really thought about the tenets of Islam:

What troubles him most, he said, was not being allowed to release the children's bodies to Muslim parents who wanted to follow the Islamic practice of burying the dead as soon as possible. In the hospital's neighborhood, a religiously observant, Shia Muslim district long called Saddam City, bereaved parents took the policy hard.

"Some of the families tried to take their children by force, so sometimes we needed to call the police to persuade them to keep them here for the parade," Khadoum said. "They went crazy."

The Pilgers, Fisks and Chomskys spent years blaming the Americans for all the little children who were being killed as a result of sanctions, and the lefties ate it up. (Pilger even filmed a documentary called Killing the Children, and heaven knows the degree to which he collaborated with Saddam's regime to get it made.)

And they will never, ever admit they were wrong. Never.

Uday: "save me!"

Sky News reports that Uday Hussein is negotiating his surrender with coalition forces in Iraq. He reportedly "fear[s] for his life at the hands of vengeful Iraqis."

Poetic jusice. Sky also reports that Saddam might be alive, but in "questionable" mental health. (Yeah, that's a news flash.)

The middle east is a playground, where no kid wants to play with the Jew. (And the teacher says, "that's your friggin' problem, yid")

When it comes to the Israeli-Arab conflict, the militant terror groups are not the real problem. I'm dead serious. The real problem stems from the Arabs' absolute refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

A despressing example comes from the World Table Tennis Championships in Paris, where Saudi and Yemeni players forfeited their matches rather than compete with an Israeli:

[Gay] Elensky lives in Nantes, and normally plays in the French national league. This was the 19-year-old's first go-round at the world championships. Yemen's Hani Al-Hammadi showed up at the table for his qualifying match Monday, but walked away when he saw Elensky waiting. The next day, Saudi Nabeel Al-Magahwi refused to play the Israeli.

"All I wanted to do is play," Elensky said. "I'm disappointed, but I don't think it's the fault of the players."

Indeed, the Arab players might have been responding to pressure from their respective governments. Witness what happened to poor Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi, Pakistan's top tennis player, who partnered with an Israeli player for the doubles competition at Wimbledon. He made it further than any other Pakistani player in a Grand Slam event - and was nearly banned by his country's tennis federation. (This was Pakistan. God only knows what the Saudis would have done.)

You see things like this all the time. An American diplomat calls for a minute of silence for Israeli, as well as Palestinian, civilian victims at a mock UN in Bahrain, and attracts widespread protests. State-run television in Egypt - a country at "peace" with Israel, but which pointedly renamed the street on which the Israeli embassy sits after Mohammed al-Dura - broadcasts a miniseries based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Arab League's most prestigious think-tank publishes Holocaust denial.

These aren't the actions of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. This is what the fabled 'Arab Street' wants. And it's a sign of a culture that does not want peace with a Jewish state, regardless of the circumstances. A culture driven to madness by its obsession with 'Zionism'. A culture that would keep on hating the Jews, even if Israel gave the Palestinians a state with no strings attached.

And if there's ever going to be peace, that has to change.

(via Pejman)

When fishermen attack

A protest against DFO in Port au Choix, on Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, resulted in more damage to DFO vehicles and equipment Wednesday night.

There have been several increasingly ugly demonstrations since the cod fishery was closed several weeks ago (including the thrashing of the DFO office here in Corner Brook - for which, as far as is known, no criminal charges have been laid). And maybe it's just the crowd I hang out with, but I can tell you that a serious backlash is brewing among Newfoundlanders who don't work in the fishing industry.

Yes, we do exist.

Roger Grimes said the provincial government would look the other way if this sort of thing took place, while federal fisheries minister Robert Thibault took one look at riots in New Brunswick and said DFO might give in to some of their demands after all. And now we're reaping the whirlwind.

If you thought Christopher Hedges was bad...

...wait 'til you see the commencement address Cynthia McKinney gave before graduates of UC-Berkeley's African Studies program.

It's really something. Take 50 random NaziMedia postings, put 'em in a blender, and you'll get something like this. Here are some of the highlights:

Every night on the streets of America, over a quarter of a million veterans sleep as our forgotten homeless. That's the thanks of a grateful nation.

...important provisions of the Voting Rights Act expire in 2007. (Should've read Snopes.com, dumbass.)

And here it is: the money quote, the commencement-address quote to end all commencement-address quotes...

On page 60 of The Project for a New Century report, Rebuilding America's Defenses, the author writes:

Now, I don't know what they meant by that bit of advice. But I do know that such research has been conducted already, according to news reports, in Israel and in apartheid South Africa.

And I bet this woman got a standing ovation. It's a gut feeling I have. And frankly, that's way more disturbing than what happened to Hedges.

Update: Bill Herbert has the quote from page 60 of the dreaded PNAC report, in context. Whether out of malice or mere stupidity, McKinney has it all wrong. But you already knew that.

Bloggered

Maybe I'm just getting snotty and stuck-up now that I'm not on Blogger anymore, but is anyone else having a lot of trouble with the Blogspot sites these last few days? It seems like Jim Treacher and Tim Blair have dropped off the face of the earth. (Or maybe they were offed by Ted Rall and Margo Kingston, respectively.)

Update: Tim heard our anguished cries and made his own move. Reset your bookmarks accordingly.

Another one

CSIS has arrested a Montreal man with alleged ties to Al-Qaida.

Norway? Denmark? Same difference

The Norwegians, who played no part in the Iraq war, can't understand why Bin Laden's deputy singled them out as terrorist targets in a recent audiotape:

The message played on al-Jazeera was being studied by US intelligence analysts last night to confirm that it was Dr al-Zawahiri speaking. The voice on the four-minute, heavily edited tape had an Egyptian accent, the country of Dr al-Zawahiri’s birth. He said: “Oh Muslims, muster your resolve and hit the embassies of America, England, Australia and Norway, their interests, their companies and their employees. Set the ground ablaze under their feet. Kick these criminals out of your homelands.
[...]
Norway expressed surprise at being marked out as a possible target for terrorist attack after it was accused of being part of the “occupying enemy” by Osama bin Laden’s deputy (Lars Inge Staveland writes).

“This is a misunderstanding,” commented an anchorman on Danish television last night, suggesting that al-Qaeda had mixed up the two Nordic countries. Unlike Norway, Denmark did contribute troops and weapons to the war against Iraq.

Here's a question: even if al-Zawahiri did name the wrong country, do you think his followers will give a damn if someone goes out and slaughters lots of Norwegians? France has opposed pretty much everything the Americans have done since the Afghan campaign ended, but that didn't stop Islamofascists from attacking French workers in Pakistan or a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. Germany opposed the Iraq war, but al-Qaida cells have been captured in Germany. Ultimately, no matter what our countries do, we're all infidels. And we should be particularly concerned here in Canada. If these guys can't tell Norway from Denmark, it's hardly a stretch to imagine them thinking Toronto or Halifax are major American cities.

(By the way, why is bin Laden's deputy making the audiotapes now? Was their Osama sound-alike sick that day?)

Heroines

The wives of the 75 dissidents jailed by Castro last month are speaking out.

Let's see Svend Robinson nominate them for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The non-looting of Iraq's cultural heritage

Officials of the National Museum of Iraq are savaging the international media for reporting that 170,000 of its items were looted after the fall of Baghdad.

Officials at the National Museum of Iraq have blamed shoddy reporting amid the "fog of war" for creating the impression that the majority of the institution's 170,000 items were looted in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad.

A carefully prepared storage plan, used in the Iran-Iraq war and the first Gulf war, ensured that tens of thousands of pieces were saved, they said. They now believe that the number of items taken was in the low thousands, and possibly hundreds.
[...]
Donny George, research director, said: "There was a mistake. Someone asked us what is the number of pieces in the whole collection. We said over 170,000, and they took that as the number lost.

"Reporters came in and saw empty shelves and reached the conclusion that all was gone. But before the war we evacuated all of the small pieces and emptied the show cases except for fragile or heavy material that was difficult to move." Some pieces were hidden in the vaults of the central bank and others at secret locations, he added.

33 priceless artifacts appear to have been stolen, and the significance of that should not be downplayed. It would still be one of the greatest art heists of all time. But it's a far cry from 170,000.

The worst thing is that the "170,000 items looted" meme has now entered the popular imagination, and we're going to hear lefties and paleoconservatives complaining about it for years.

The conspirozoids hit a new low

This graphic was posted on rense.com, a favorite source for conpirokooks right and left. Keep this one in mind next time you see the site referenced on IndyMedia, the Michelle Landsberg-approved "Center for Cooperative Research," or other "progressive" websites.

Via Marduk, who is rapidly becoming to the conspiracy freaks what LGF is to the Arab media.

Bastards

A group of Ottawa Senators fans were harassed by assholes in New Jersey the other day. Christopher Johnson is furious, and so am I. When Canadians thrash the Americans for being "bullies," this is the sort of thing we're talking about. It's completely inexcusable - as was the harassment directed at an American children's hockey team by Montreal residents a few months ago, which Johnson also notes.

Just remember where all the planes were diverted on 9/11, guys. Remember.

Bastards

A group of Ottawa Senators fans were harassed by American hockey fans in New Jersey the other day. Christopher Johnson is furious, and so am I. When Canadians thrash the Americans for being "bullies," this is the sort of thing we're talking about.

From the country that gave you Hitler...

Next time a European complains about how unsophisticated we North Americans are, remind them of Austria's 'Eurovision Song Contest' entry. (Stop whatever you're doing and watch the video!)

(via Silent Running)

You like me, you really really like me

This is a great honour.

Breaking news

No details yet, but all the cable-news websites are reporting on an explosion at the Yale Law School building.

Update: this AP report says the blast originated in the mail room.

Update II: CNN says the building was empty at the time. Keep your fingers crossed.

Update III: mercifully, it looks like there were no injuries. But authorities have confirmed it was a bomb.

Al-Qaida? I guess you can't completely rule out the possibility, but I really doubt it. God knows how many nuts have a grudge against Ivy League law schools.

Update IV: the Prof has lots of updates, suggesting the explosion was in an empty classroom.

"Jeering=Censorship" department

New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges tried to deliver a Chomskyite commencement address before graduating students at a college in Rockford, Ill., but he was booed off stage 18 minutes into his 20-minute speech. This, of course, is more proof that America is turning into a dictatorship. Censorship! McCarthyism! Boo!

Of course, the left has never hesitated to screech and bawl at university commencement speakers who didn't meet their approval - witness what happened to former President Bush when he got his honorary degree at the University of Toronto in 1997. For that matter, look what Daniel Pipes - who hasn't even been addressing graduating students, but simply trying to deliver his opinions on the Middle East conflict - has to go through just about every week. If there's anyone on earth more intolerant of dissenting opinions than the NaziMedia crowd, I haven't heard of them.

That said, I had to sit through a lot of far-left nonsense when Newfoundland-born labour leader Nancy Riche made the commencement speech at my graduation from MUN in 1995. (At one point, she actually said Canada's social programs made us "better people" than Americans. Yes, "better.") If I could make it through that crap without booing, surely the people in Rockford could have at least let Hedges finish, and maybe jeered or slow-clapped him at the end. Lefties might not be able to tolerate speakers with whom they disagree, but conservatives should.

We are better people, after all.

The Readers Have Spoken

It wasn't unanimous, and I'm not even sure it was a majority, but a lot of regular readers say the white-on-black template was hard to read. So be it. If this new design is good enough for Stefan Sharkansky, 'tis good enough for me.

Decent Lefties

A number of American left-wingers, including Todd Gitlin, Dissent's Michael Walzer and bloggers' whipping boy Eric Alterman, have signed a petition protesting Castro's latest crackdown against independent journalists and dissidents.

The only conclusion that we can draw from this brute repression is that the Cuban government does not trust the Cuban people to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from disinformation. A government of the left must have the support of the people: It must guarantee human rights and champion the widest possible democracy, including the right to dissent, as well as promote social justice. By its actions, the Cuban state declares that it is not a government of the left, despite its claims of social progress in education and health care, but just one more dictatorship, concerned with maintaining its monopoly of power above all else.

Yeah, the petition includes a de rigeur condemnation of the US trade embargo against Cuba, and accuses Castro of (unintentional) "collaboration with the most reactionary elements of the US Administration in their efforts to maintain sanctions". Whatever. (Note: I'm against the embargo as well, mainly because it's given ol' Whiskers and his disciples a convenient scapegoat for Cuba's self-inflicted problems, but I do not believe it's morally equivalent to Castro's repression.)

But it's a start. In the IndyMedia age, it's good to see some left-wingers are still principled enough to stand up against oppression when they see it. (Still, one can only wonder whether Castro would still be in power had these people started speaking up 30 or 40 years ago. It's not like Fidel became a brutal dictator just last week.)

Black on white or white on black?

I think this new design looks pretty cool, but a few people have complained that it's hard to read. Should I keep the reverse-text design or move back to a conventional black-text-on-white background look? Let me know via the comments section.

Lileks is on fire today

Go read the latest Bleat, right now. Money quote, in response to an Irish BBC viewer who posted some snarky comments about the "staged" rescue of Jessica Lynch: "every time I reach for a Guinness I remember that the Irish were neutral in WW2."

A few Palestinians get it

About 600 Palestinians demonstrated against "extremists" (AP's term) who launched rockets at Israel from their homes and orchards, resulting in an IDF crackdown.

Hundreds of residents of Beit Hanoun burned tires and blocked the main road Tuesday in a rare burst of anger at extremists who have prompted Israeli incursions by firing rockets from the town at Israeli targets.

“They (the militants) claim they are heroes,” Mohammed Zaaneen, 30, a farmer, said as he carried rocks into the street. “They brought us only destruction and made us homeless. They used our farms, our houses and our children ... to hide.”

We've seen what happens when one or two Palestinians dare to stand up against the genocidal fanatics who've infested their society. (They tend to find themselves murdered, and their bodies hung from a post in the town square, while PA security forces look on.) But a crowd of 600? Even Hamas or Islamic Jihad wouldn't try to kill them all. (Though if they did, you can be sure the Arab media would ignore it. Killing is only wrong when the evil Jooooooos do it.)

Congo: the coming genocide

The Independent says aid workers in northeastern Congo have discovered the bodies of 231 people - many of them decapitated or with their hearts, livers and lungs taken.

The French - yes, those French - have sent military officers to determine whether they'll send troops, and other EU member states (including Britain) are considering a request for soldiers from the UN. But where are the Americans? Have the Americans even been asked? Now that they've given humanitarian rationales for the invasion of Iraq (justified, in my opinion), they're going to look more than a little hypocritical if they don't do anything about yet another looming African genocide.

Juan Gato rules

Read this, and tell me I'm wrong.

The Washington Times follows my lead

They've updated their web site, too.

In case you haven't seen it...

...my referral page is pretty damn funny, if I say so myself.

Strangely, this is no sillier than what really gets posted to IndyMedia

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=6732#c0072

My 2 cents on Annika Sorenstam

$0.01: If she's good enough to make the cut and play with the men, she deserves to play with the men. Simple as that.

$0.02: I'm the last person on earth entitled to make predictions about golf, but I think she'll make the cut. Don't expect a "Miracle on Grass" where she comes anywhere close to winning the tournament, though.

The Landsberg-bashing continues. Good.

Bruce Rolston takes apart the Star columnist's latest conspiro-drivel. (His permalinks are bloggered - Gawd, I'm so happy to be away from Blogger! - so you'll have to scroll down to the entry headlined "She Just Keeps Digging". It's worth it.)

Update: Bruce fixed his links. Here it is.

Addictive site of the day

If you're at work, or if you're in the middle of anything else important, do not visit this website dedicated to 1980s TV commercials. Highlights include Alan Greenspan - yes, that Alan Greenspan - shilling for the Apple IIc in 1985. (The future Fed Chief says we'll be able to do all of our banking on our home computers. Sheeyah, right, Greenspan. Next thing you know, you'll say we can clone sheep.)

If you're reading this...

...you've made it to the new site. Hope you enjoy it!

Posting will begin in earnest before too long. In the meantime, I'm still trying to figure out how to add links (and a PayPal button) to the side of the page.

Special thanks to Michael Peckham, a longtime reader, for all his help in making this possible.

This (sniff, sob) is the

This (sniff, sob) is the nicest thing anyone's ever said about me:

What Is Your Animal Personality? brought to you by Quizilla

(via Sasha & Andrew)

The new Daimnation! is coming

The new Daimnation! is coming The URL is ready. The host has been bought. Movable Type has been downloaded. I'm just in the final stages of figuring it out, and before long I'll have broken the chains of Blogspot tyranny forever.

We should have seen this

We should have seen this coming: a few slack-jawed idiots have trouble figuring out The Matrix is a work of fiction, they kill people while trying to "escape the Matrix," and now the film's producers are being blamed:

The producer of The Matrix films has dismissed stories linking the movies with violent behaviour in the US.

However, Joel Silver, in London to promote The Matrix Reloaded, said the films were "fantasy".
[...]
In a report in the Washington Post, the film was named by two alleged killers, a woman from Ohio and a man from San Francisco.

They had each reportedly killed their landlord but had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

Before long, they'll be putting warnings at the beginning of each film, telling the audience that the work they're about to see is a work of fiction and that they shouldn't kill anybody after seeing it. It's coming, folks.

Landsberg's still at it The

Landsberg's still at it The Toronto Star's ultra-leftist columnist - er, make that the Toronto Star's most left-wing columnist - is defending her previous column praising conspirokook Barrie Zwicker. She says the National Post's editors ("a staunch voice for Bush America [which] brooks no dissenting voices" - a pretty astounding statement for an employee of the Star, a paper which brags about its refusal to employ any writers to the right to Sheila Copps) only savaged her to divert attention away from their own troubles. Landsberg has only been a conspiracy kook for a week, and she's already mastered Riveroian logic; just as the Jews had Mossad agent Chandra Levy whacked to divert attention away from the 80 billion Arabs they kill each week, the Post is only thrashing Landsberg so people won't notice how much money it's losing.

Landsberg also says the people who wrote her angry letters "didn't come up with a single argument or documented fact." Scroll down to my May 14 blog entries and you'll see the e-mail I sent to the Star in which I illustrate the similarities between Zwicker and Holocaust deniers, and note the work Bill Herbert has done debunking the kwazy konspiracy kooks' work. Either Landsberg never saw my letter, or she's lying. You'll just have to draw your own conclusion about that one. You'll also have to draw your own conclusions about this timeline Landsberg mentions in her article, which purports to show how the armed forces were in on the whole thing because they didn't shoot down any of the planes. (The site, needless to say, links to "What Really Happened", the even more blatantly anti-Semitic Rense.com, and other kook sites of even less renown.)

A question I've never seen put to the conspirozoids: even if fighter jets had been scrambled in time to intercept the hijacked airliners, what, exactly, were they supposed to do? We're not talking about a Piper Cub flying over Death Valley here. These were four large planes, with hundreds of innocent people on board, travelling over the most densely populated area of the United States. Had the planes been shot down, there almost certainly would have been fatalities on the ground. Can you imagine the outcry from the Riveros and Rupperts if the jets were destroyed before any suicide attacks were carried out? (Do a Google search on "TWA Flight 800" and you'll get the idea.)

testing...

One, two, three...sibilants, sibilants. One, two, three...sibilants, sibilants.

Other potential violations of the

Other potential violations of the Geneva Conventions:

- Marc Cohn's "Walking in Memphis" (This one-hit wonder makes Michael Bolton sound like Solomon Burke)
- Roseanne sinigng the U.S. National Anthem
- "Shoot the Dog," George Michael's coldly recieved "protest" song
- Mariah Carey's "Dream Lover"
- Christina Aguilera's "Dirrrty"
- Jann Arden's remake of "Stand by Me" (one justifiable exception to the right of free expression: you shouldn't ever be allowed to cover "Stand by Me")
- Corey Hart's version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" ("dey wouldn't let poo Rudolph join in any rainda games")

The BBC says the rescue

The BBC says the rescue of Jessica Lynch was staged by the Americans. Bill Herbert and several other bloggers, who actually know something about military weaponry and special-forces tactics, say the BBC is full of crap. Who you gonna believe?

I didn't get a chance to write anything about this when the story broke, but I remember thinking, "you know, the lefties are going to be more outraged by this than by the discovery of mass graves all over Iraq." Just as they consider the 1990 babies-thrown-from-incubators hoax a greater moral outrage than Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait. (One "occupation," curiously, which they never got too upset about.)

Update: Wilbur Smith - whose blog I hadn't heard of before, but which I'll be reading a lot from now on - deserves most of the credit for debunking the BBC's story.

Fisk the fraud? Britain's Private

Fisk the fraud? Britain's Private Eye notes that on April 2, Fiskie filed dispatches from two different Iraqi towns - and it was almost impossible for him to have been in both places on the same day.

The satirical magazine further notes that the Americans had already entered one of the cities at the time Fisk was supposedly there, reporting that they were nowhere in sight.

It's a holiday up here,

It's a holiday up here, and the Toronto Star takes time off from shilling for the Kwazy Konspiracy Kooks to explain the origins of Victoria Day.

It's beautiful outside - and I'm in the office, preparing for a couple of trials. Life is one depressing defeat after another, until you just wish Flanders was dead.

A blockbuster in today's Washington

A blockbuster in today's Washington Post: Al-Qaida has obtained weapons from members of the Saudi National Guard. But don't worry: our Saudi allies are "investigating" the matter. (They've been aware of this illicit arms trade for quite some time, but say nothing has been done because of - I love this - "bureaucratic inertia".)

This is a good time to draw your attention to this excerpt from Mark Steyn's The Face of the Tiger, posted on his website:

There are only two convincing positions on the House of Saud and what happened [on 9/11]: a) They’re indirectly responsible for it; b) They’re directly responsible for it. There’s a lot of evidence for the former — the Saudi funding of the madrassahs, etc. — and a certain amount of not yet totally compelling evidence for the latter — a Saudi ‘humanitarian aid’ office in the Balkans set up by a member of the royal family which appears to be a front for terrorism. Reasonable people can disagree on whether it’s (a) or (b) but for Americans to argue that the Saudis are our allies in the war on terrorism is like Ron Goldman’s dad joining O.J. in his search for the real killers.
[...]
Instead of presenting Prince Abdullah with Israeli–Palestinian peace proposals, Americans ought to be handing him US–Saudi peace proposals: clean up your own education system and stop destabilising Asian Muslim culture, for starters. Washington (and London, too) needs to figure out what it wants from Saudi Arabia and whether it’s likely to get it from King Fahd and his bloated clan. We already know one thing we’re not going to get: the Taleban had two major allies before 11 September, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and it’s clear the royal house has no inclination to do a Musharraf. If the West has a medium-term aim in the Middle East, it ought to be the evolution of Arabic Islam into something closer to the more moderate Muslim temperament of Turkey or Bangladesh. I know, I know, all these things are relative, but even that modest goal is unattainable under the House of Saud.

Is this a sick joke?

Is this a sick joke? Is Bill Herbert pulling our leg? Did C-SPAN actually interview the Grand Dragon of the Kwazy Konspiracy Kooks, Michael Rivero?

A new low, even by

A new low, even by Palestinian genocide-bomber standards: the animal who killed seven Israelis on a Jerusalem bus yesterday was disguised as an Orthodox Jew.

I'm not sure what more to say. What more needs to be said?

Update: the bomber who killed a Jewish settler in Hebron the other day also disguised himself as an Orthodox Jew.

I can hear the IndyMidiots now: "they have no choice but to dress up as Jews, because the zionazis will arrest any Arab who tries to get on a bus."

By the way, these are the same people who threw a major hissy fit because the war in Afghanistan started during Ramadan. (Syria and Egypt launching a war of annihilation against Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973, of course, was perfectly okay.)

Victoria Day weekend, when summer

Victoria Day weekend, when summer officially begins, starts tomorrow. I'm taking Friday off and joining my folks in Terra Nova for a couple of days, so posting won't resume until Sunday.

Before I go, let me leave you with the peaceful, inspiring words of Yasser Arafat:

"In this day of mourning, the Israeli state was founded as a result of a colonial conspiracy and was established on Palestinian lands whose residents were expelled and massacred," said Arafat.

"For the past 55 years, martyrs, have fallen for the sake of the homeland, freedom and the return of the refugees," he said in the speech from his offices in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "Every Palestinian refugee knows that his identity will be restored to him only upon the return of his homeland, and he will not be submissive to a patron."
[...]
Arafat condemned what he described as "the subjugation of the land and the holy places by the Israeli occupation." He said he welcomed peace as the "strategic choice of the Palestinian nation" but accused the Israeli "rule of strength" of delaying peace initiatives in the region.

"Heh."

"Heh."

Steyn not fired? Mark Wickens

Steyn not fired? Mark Wickens and Kathy Shaidle both recieved letters from the Post saying Steyn's recent absence can be explained by his vacation, and that he has definitely not been fired. I certainly hope that's true, but Steyn's recent comments in the "letters" section of his website make it clear that he's royally ticked off with the direction in which the Aspers are taking the paper - and he says nothing at all about any vacation.

Update for Colby Cosh readers: yes, this post was written before Mark Steyn's vacation was mentioned on his website.

The U.S. ambassador to Saudi

The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia says the Saudis ignored American requests for additional security just before the Riyadh bombings:

Saudi Arabia ignored repeated U.S. requests to tighten security around residential compounds housing American citizens before this week's terror attacks, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia said Wednesday.

U.S. Embassy spokesman John Burgess added that Saudi officials had provided extra police patrols around the compounds after the United States made the request for more security. But the patrols stopped after two days.

The death toll for the attacks stands at 34. And in a staggering example of how the Americans will bend over, time and time again, for their Saudi "allies," the FBI is scaling down the number of agents it had planned to send to Riyadh from 12 to 6, because of concerns over Saudi "sensitivity."

Update: the Germans have expelled a Saudi diplomat for alleged ties to Al-Qaida. And the Saudi Defence Minister admits he funnelled millions of dollars to an Islamic "charity" which, according to a CIA report, funded Al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan.

Memo to the Democrats: for God's sake, make the Bush administration's ties to Saudi Arabia a major election issue. Until there's a major reckoning with that festering sore of a "kingdom," there will never really be justice for the 3,000 who died on September 11.

If this is true, I'm

If this is true, I'm never buying the National Post again. Ever. Sure, I'll read Blatchford, Fulford, Feschuk and Welch on their website. But the Aspers will never get another cent from me, that's for sure.

I can't wait for Maude Barlow and Antonia Zerbisias to protest this blatant example of an owner interfering in his newspaper's editorial decisions. (Yeah, right. Fire a left-wing writer, and they'll scream bloody murder. Fire a right</