Is bilingualism supposed to work this way?

Most Canadians have been guilt-tripped into accepting Quebec's oppressive, often ridiculous language laws, so opponents have to take their victories where they can find them. Today's Supreme Court of Canada judgment on language restrictions in the education system does order the Quebec government to loosen the standard for immigrants to the province who - gasp! - want their children educated in English, so I guess it's better than nothing. But if you're a Quebec francophone who wants your children educated in Canada's other official language, well...you're outta luck, Frenchy:

The Supreme Court of Canada has rejected claims by francophone Quebecers to let their children attend English language schools.

Under Bill 101, parents must have received the majority of their schooling in English if they want their kids to be eligible for English education in Quebec.

The parents' lawyer, Brent Tyler (who handles a lot of these Quebec-language-law cases, and therefore must have the patience of Job) says the parents plan to bring their case before the UN Human Rights Tribunal. Good luck, Brent.

Update: Sari Stein, an anglophone Quebecker, notes that this legislation hurts the very francophones whose culture it's supposed to "protect".

Last Rites

I've lost count of how many times Pope John Paul II has survived reports of his impending death, but this really looks like the end:

Pope John Paul II, whose health deteriorated suddenly on Thursday, has received the Roman Catholic sacrament reserved for the sick and dying, Italian media reported.

Earlier the pope's spokesman said the pope developed a high fever Thursday because of a urinary tract infection, and was being treated at the Vatican with antibiotics. The development came one day after the 84-year-old pontiff began receiving nutrition through a feeding tube.

I am not Catholic, and I strongly disagree with many of the Church's political positions. But Pope John Paul II deserves no small share of the credit for bringing down the Communist butchers of Eastern Europe, and for that I will always be grateful. Another "lapsed Anglican", Johnathan Pearce of Samizdata, expresses similar sentiments:

I am going to put any reflections on his contribution to the Catholic church, or his views about abortion, etc, to one side and focus on a more worldly fact about his extraordinary life and career. The Pope was, in my view, one of the three or four great men (and one great woman) who helped bring the Soviet Union, that evil and decrepit empire, crashing to its knees. Along with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev [I'm not so sure about that one - Ed.] and arguably, the power of cheap television advertising, the Pope helped bring about communism's demise.

I do not share the Pope's faith, but in reflecting on his life on this Easter Sunday, it was hard not to suppress a lump in the throat. In my book, he is one of the giants of our age.

Quote of the Day

"I can explain this to you. I can't comprehend it for you."
- Ed Koch

(One of my readers mentioned this one in the comments section not long ago - and in my line of work, I'm tempted to use it about ten times a day.)

Terri Schiavo and our Brave New World

After 13 days without food or water, Terri Schiavo passed away this morning.

Just yesterday, via Bob Tarantino, I came across this Village Voice column by Nat Hentoff, one of the few columnists left in America not blindly beholden to the Democratic or Republican parties. Hentoff, an atheist and civil libertarian, called Schiavo's dehydration "the longest public execution in American history".

There's too much in the column to cite, and I ask you to read the whole thing. I also think Jay Nordlinger best captured my feelings about this whole matter in his NRO column:

Mrs. Schiavo has parents willing to feed her and watch over her. No one else need lift a finger. Terri Schiavo's continued existence is no skin off anyone else's nose. No one need bestir himself; no one has to visit; everyone can just go on doin' his thing: drinkin', buyin' Lotto tickets, chasing the neighbor's daughter — whatever. People can go on studying Shakespeare or exploring Patagonia. Terri's parents ask for nothing except that their daughter not be starved to death.

I believe that a lot of people simply want the case off their television screens. But they don't have to watch; and the media don't have to cover.
[...]
Maybe I'm dense, but I don't get it. Does deference to the natural order of things require starvation? A newborn would die of starvation — or dehydration — if not fed by his mother (or a caring other). Would that be natural? In a sense, I guess. No food, no continued material life — so has Momma Nature decreed! Terri Schiavo is not a child, but she is helpless to feed herself, and her mother wishes to feed her. (Why not?) People are often helpless, requiring the aid of others.

But this is beginning to sound like kindergarten class — and the Schiavo case does, it is true, return us to the basics.

If we don't know for sure whether someone wishes to live or die, we have always presumed she wants to live. That, it seems to me, has always been the natural order of things. But a woman was condemned to a slow, excrutiating death when we don't know what she really wanted - and the media, to its enduring shame, has framed this as a "right-to-die" issue.

Yes, death is part of life. It's going to happen to all of us someday, and I can think of circumstances where I'd probably prefer to die than be kept alive. But once you die, that's it. I don't know what happens when you do pass away, but you ain't coming back to the life you had just before. That's certain. And it's why, if someone is going to be "allowed to die", we'd better make darn sure that's what they want. (For a similar reason, the possibility of taking the wrong person's life explains my opposition to capital punishment - though opposing the death penalty can be really, really hard in some cases.)

I've been told this kind of thing has been going on for a long time, and in the "progressive" Netherlands they've already moved on to euthanizing newborn babies with serious illnesses and handicaps. But I feel like a line has just been crossed, and I don't like where we're going.

Rest in peace, Ms. Schiavo.

Jack Frost is back, and he's been drinking again

The snow was almost all gone, and when a predicted snowstorm didn't arrive on time, I confidently predicted we were never going to get it. Well, here's what contronted me this morning.

Message to Glenn: if you post any springtime photos of Tennesee today, your iPod and digital camera may have a little "accident".

The missing movies

Speaking of Hollywood, Bridget Johnson asks an excellent question in OpinionJournal: there are two more Che Guevara biopics in development (in addition to last year's Motorcycle Diaries) but where are the movies showing the horrors of life under Communism?

What feature films have showed the true nature of communism? There was "The Killing Fields," showing families torn apart, cities emptied, forced labor, bones littering the Cambodian landscape. Adding to the authenticity was its star, Oscar-winner and real-life survivor Haing S. Ngor, who would have been summarily executed had his intellectual background been discovered by the Khmer Rouge. As a cinematic achievement, it ranks as one of the best films of all time. As a historical testament, it shows that communism had nothing to do with betterment of the masses but stripped away everything that comprised the individual. Though this film should be required high-school viewing, not much else springs to mind that could counter the effects of pro-Marxist cinema.

How about a film on the Soviet Union, beginning with Lenin and the 1917 revolution, droning on to Stalin's purges with hundreds of thousands executed by firing squad, and millions forced from their homes or carted off to labor camps? We'd see Soviet bloc countries strangled under communist rule, Berlin divided with concrete and snipers, Nicolae Ceausescu destroying historic Bucharest. We'd see Soviet terror exported with the scorched-earth policy in Afghanistan.

Well, even The Killing Fields couldn't be made without Sam Waterston giving a big speech blaming Nixon for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Aside from that and the immortal Red Dawn, I can't think of many other Hollywood productions showing the sheer drudgery and despair of life in the Worker's Paradise. (Kolya and Farewell my Concubine are great, but they're foreign films.)

So why hasn't Gang of One or Ayn Rand's We the Living (made in Italy in 1942, albeit bastardized by Mussolini) been produced yet? Maybe it would force Hollywood to concede that, despite the excesses and blacklisting of the McCarthy era, the man may have had a point.

Read it before Michael Bay's lawyers see it

This blog, allegedly written by the director of Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys (and definitely for mature audiences only) is the funniest thing you will read all week. I guarantee it. Lest you think the "Snakes on a Plane" pitch is a crazy idea, it's based on a real movie set for release in 2006.

The real Hollywood hasn't caught up with satire yet, but it's gaining.

(via Galley Slaves)

The spin zone

Almost every headline I've seen about the latest oil-for-food report contains some variation on the phrase, "Kofi Annan cleared of wrongdoing". But Mark Peith, one of the investigators, says this is not the case at all:

The probe into the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal has not cleared UN chief Kofi Annan, an investigator said today.

Pieth, a Swiss university professor of criminal law, also accused Cotecna of repeatedly lying about its links to Annan’s son.
[...]
A key conclusion was that Kofi Annan never interfered in the awarding of the contract to the Swiss company, but should have better investigated possible conflicts of interest after a British newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph, reported the link between Kojo Annan and Cotecna in January 1999.

In an interview with swissinfo.org, Peith says Annan should not be forced to resign, but that he did not take proper action against a probable conflict of interest involving his son. (Headline: "Expert says Annan has no reason to resign".)

I am prepared to believe Kofi Annan was not actively involved in any wrongdoing - but it's an established principle that the leader of a body like the UN should not allow even the appearance of wrongdoing, lest the organization's credibility be damaged. Mind you, there's not much more anyone could do to further damage the UN's image, but this report doesn't help, especially in light of details noted by the Financial Times:

Yesterday's report by the independent Volcker Commission provides fodder both for those who want Mr Annan stay on, and those who would prefer he resign.

The report also cites a number of Annan family ties. Michael Wilson, Cotecna's vice-president for marketing operations in Africa, was a "childhood friend of Kojo Annan from Ghana", and considered Kofi Annan like an "uncle". Mr Wilson's father had been Ghana's ambassador to Switzerland and was a long-standing friend of Kofi Annan, the report said.

If there's any hope of saving the UN, Kofi's gotta go, and an outsider - someone not already tainted by the organization's culture of corruption and incompetence - has to take his place.

The mask slips again

George Galloway's RESPECT Coalition is holding a fundraising lunch at London's Al-Waha Lebanese Restaurant this Sunday.

The promotional materials read, "Enjoy a Syrian Sunday Lunch".

You have the right to free speech, as long as you don't offend us

Daniel Pipes required police protection (and had to endure a lecture from the Police Department's Hate Crimes unit) the last time he came to a Toronto university, and now 110 Chomsky wannabes have signed an "open letter" - repeating, as usual, the dishonest smears promoted by CAIR - against his upcoming appearance at U of T. (Well, actually, they "affirm Pipes' right to speak at our university", but then say "hate, prejudice and fear-mongering have no place on this campus." Given the, um, expansive definition of "hate" used by these people, we can translate this statement as, "Pipes is welcome as long as he doesn't say anything we don't like.")

For a charter member of the neoconservative cabal that controls the world, Pipes sure has a hard time giving a speech without a bunch of brownshirted yahoos trying to shout him down. (But we're the fascists, of course.)

(via Small Dead Animals)

Invasion of the Chickenheads!

Real dissidents in places like Cuba, Zimbabwe and North Korea risk imprisonment and even death by speaking out against their governments. Meanwhile, wannabe dissident Ward Churchill, who insists he lives in the most totalitarian tyranny the world has ever known, remains free to justify the murder of 9/11 victims, fantasize about publicly executing American politicians (so much for that "stop the death pentalty" crap) and call for replacing the U.S. government with an anarchist utopia - all the while throwing in a few weasel words to ensure he won't have to take responsibility should one of his cultists be inspired to kill more "little Eichmanns".

And the leftists love him enough to wear kooky hats in public, which would presumably make them an easy target for Chimpy McBushitler's death squads:

There isn't another country on earth where Churchill could make such a good living ranting and raving about how much he hates it (except maybe Canada, where he'd probably get a grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage). And deep down, I think he knows it.

(via LGF)

"Sunshine" means darkness

Korean human-rights groups smuggled videotapes from North Korea showing dissidents being summarily executed - only to find that South Korea's "Sunshine Policy" of appeasement is keeping the footage under wraps:

On a bleached and scratchy video image smuggled out of Kim Jong Il's closed regime, blindfolded prisoners are tied to white posts on a rocky landscape, shot three times, and dragged away. The rare video footage of summary executions in North Korea - a practice considered routine in the North but never captured on film - was taken by hidden camera March 1 and 2, and smuggled through China to South Korea.

But due to intense though indirect pressure by Seoul officials, the North Korean execution tapes, purportedly of "middlemen" who help refugees escape to China, are not yet available for viewing by Koreans in the South. The indirect censure adds to frustration among those documenting the gulags and torture in the North. They charge indifference in the South to evidence of manifold suffering by ethnic siblings across the demilitarized zone.
[...]
Seoul's effort to avoid broadcasts of negative images or facts about North Korea is part of a larger strategy dating to the Sunshine Policy and Korean summit of 2000. In this view, unification of North and South can't be achieved if the South criticizes or acts in a manner that the North deems hostile. [emphasis added]

When the North Korean Communists are finally overthrown, people in South Korea are going to have a lot of explaining and apologizing to do.

Bad news for Kofi

Another report on the UN oil-for-food mess comes out today, in which investigators will chide Kofi Annan personally for failing to prevent corruption in the program - much of it involving his son:

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan faces censure from investigators in the oil-for-food scandal, who will criticize him in a report to be released today for failing to prevent conflicts of interest in the massive humanitarian project, officials say.

The Independent Inquiry Committee, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, will also take the Secretary-General to task for failing to detect shortcomings in the internal UN bureaucracy that allowed problems in the oil-for-food program to continue until 2003, a UN official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
[...]
Prof. Luck said the first Volcker report and leaks from the one due today suggest that Mr. Annan was the product of a UN culture that turned a blind eye to corruption and conflict of interest.

"It is certainly a culture that breeds a reluctance to criticize one's peers and a reluctance to be a whistle blower," he said.

Advantage, Roger L. Simon.

60 years after Auschwitz...

...another regime is gassing political prisoners to death, according to Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

I recently returned from debriefing North Korean defectors in Seoul who told me of their involvement in the Pyongyang regime's gassing of political prisoners, dating back to the 1970s and continuing into the 21st century. I traveled to South Korea after officials in Seoul refused to grant a visa to Dr. Lee Byom-Shik (a pseudonym) to come to the United States to serve as a key witness about alleged murders by gassing in North Korea. He was to testify at a Simon Wiesenthal Center conference on human rights abuses in North Korea.

Since 2002, defectors among the flood of refugees from North Korea have detailed firsthand accounts of systematic starvation, torture and murder. Enemies of the state are used in experiments to develop new generations of chemical and biological weapons that threaten the world. A microcosm of these horrors is Camp 22, one of 12 concentration camps housing an estimated 200,000 political prisoners facing torture or execution for such "crimes" as being a Christian or a relative of someone suspected of deviation from "official ideology of the state." Another eyewitness, Kwon Hyuk, formerly chief manager at Camp 22, repeated to me what he asserted to the BBC: "I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. . . . The parents were vomiting and dying, but until the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."

Meanwhile, a human-rights organization has released a video which purports to show North Koreans being summarily executed by firing squad for the crime of helping people escape the country.

Correction: it has, of course, been 60 years since Auschwitz was liberated, not 50. My mistake.

Right Honourable Movie Critics

Deadly, a low-budget movie based on the Paul Bernardo/Karla Homolka case (starring That 70's Show's Laura Prepon in the Homolka role) is set for release soon, giving Canadian politicans an irresistable opportunity to show their righteous indignation. Mike Brock, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Toronto, asks whether this is really the business of our elected officials.

Of course, this is not exclusively a Canadian phenomenon. It seems like American politicians are frothing at the mouth over a different TV show/movie/CD/video game every week, and the same thing happens in every other country where there are politicians looking for the chance to score cheap political points at the expense of sleazy Hollywood types. That is, every country on earth. (Except for North Korea, where a sleazy Hollywood type is running the country.)

Personally, I had no idea anyone was making a film about the Bernardo case until Dalton McGuinty told me - and as sure as the day follows the night, what would otherwise be a forgettable slice of direct-to-DVD dreck (produced by "True Crime Ivestments, LLC") will become essential viewing when politicians get angry about it.

Stupid vs. Evil

Two responses to the question, "What are your hopes for Iraq parliament?" [sic] on the BBC website illustrate the difference. First, there's "DRL", from Milton Keynes, England:

I also wonder what emphasis can be put on the much touted 58% turnout for the coalition's elections, when the turnout for Saddam's elections was a lot more than that. Anybody like to enlighten me?

And then there's "Nina" from Toronto, who presumably has the right to vote in my country:

I hate to say this to Iraqis, but I pray for chaos and civil war: it's the only way to stop Bush's policies and show that peace can never come through force. If Iraq gets peace, Bush wins credibility. It cannot be allowed to happen.

(via Small Dead Animals)

Miracle in Zimbabwe

According to The Times, opponents of Robert Mugabe are starting to believe they can win the upcoming (and certainly rigged) election, and they aren't shy about saying so:

A few weeks ago, eager to confer legitimacy on the parliamentary election, Mr Mugabe ordered his youth militia to curb their violence and permit at least the semblance of democracy. The strange new atmosphere of calm — unseen for five years — has breathed unexpected life into a contest that had seemed certain to end in crushing victory for the ruling party.

Two months ago, Mr Tsvangirai would have been lucky to draw half the crowd. No one would have dared to raise their hands in the MDC’s traditional salute. Those wearing MDC T-shirts at rallies would pull them off as they left to avoid a beating. Yesterday thousands poured on to the streets sporting full MDC regalia, waving and cheering, though 150 were subsequently arrested.

Unfortunately, Heaven knows what Mugabe and his "war veterans" will do if they can't win their rigged election.

Blackmailing Newfoundland and Labrador

Just when it looked like the Newfoundland economy had turned a corner, news reports suggest the Atlantic Accord - which will give Newfoundland and Nova Scotia a much greater share of offshore oil revenues - may not pass a vote in the House of Commons:

Federal cabinet minister Geoff Regan says Conservative Leader Stephen Harper's threats to vote against a Liberal money bill jeopardizes the offshore revenue deal worth billions of dollars to Atlantic Canada. Harper has suggested his party will vote against Bill C-43, claiming it contains provisions concerning the Kyoto Accord to reduce emissions blamed for global warming. Regan says if the Conservatives defeat the budget bill, the changes to offshore revenue sharing will also be defeated. Part 12 of Bill C-43 authorizes Parliament to provide an estimated $2.6 billion into Newfoundland and Labrador's coffers over eight years. Nova Scotia would receive some $1.1 billion. Regan says he is concerned. He says the Liberals have no plans to remove the revenue-sharing deal from the main bill, as the budget is the place where it makes sense to have it.

The St. John's Telegram has more details (the story can be found at their nightmarishly designed website, but you have to go through the "News" menu to find it):

The Liberals tabled Bill C-43 late Thursday — shortly before Parliament recessed for Easter.

If all three opposition parties vote against it, the government could fall.
[...]
[Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe] said if the Liberals want support on Kyoto they should produce a bill devoted to that issue, not just lump Kyoto provisions into the budget legislation.

“You cannot ever turn your back on your province on an important issue like this, even if it meant your party says, tough stuff, you have to sit in the last seat, last row,” Hearn said.

This decision is exactly what we've come to expect from the Liberals: scummy, and also politically smart. No one has lobbied and agitiated more for this offshore deal than Newfoundland Conservatives - but if C-43 fails and an election is called, you know the Liberals will use it as the centerpiece of their campaign in Atlantic Canada. Would it work? Probably not, if voters are made aware of what really happened, but it would put the Conservatives on the defensive.

If I were a Conservative (or NDP) MP from Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, I would ultimately have to vote for the bill. What the Liberals are doing is sleazy and dishonest - but if the offshore deal fails it would be devastating for this part of the country. It's blackmail - and it may work.

Happy Easter

Alas, I did not take my own advice about refraining from too much chocolate. But who can resist Cadbury's Mini Eggs?

This is the holiest time of year for the Christian faith, so it's a good time to salute the Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, for bravely speaking out against Robert Mugabe:

A prominent Roman Catholic Archbishop and outspoken critic of President Robert Mugabe called Sunday for peaceful street protests aimed at overthrowing the longtime ruler, saying this week's parliamentary elections are certain to be rigged.

``The people are so scared,'' he said of the political climate in Zimbabwe ahead of the elections. ``You are not going to get that where people are so cowardly.''
[...]
Ncube believes Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party will easily win Thursday's poll, but he said the vote already is tainted by years of violence, intimidation and repressive laws. He pointed out that the military will be overseeing the count, and he accused them of cheating for Mugabe.

Ncube confirmed the comments to the AP but was more guarded in an interview conducted over Zimbabwe's state-monitored telephone lines. Calls for unauthorized protests are punishable by up to 20 years in jail under Zimbabwe's harsh Public Order and Security Act.

Don't eat too much chocolate

It's a much-needed long weekend, and I'm going to my grandmother's place for a few days. Back Monday morning. Happy Easter to all my readers, and I hope the Cadbury Easter Bunny brings you lots of cream eggs.

Quote of the Day

"Kyrgyz prtstrs vrthrw gvrnmt, prsdnt lvs cntry"

- headline on FARK.com

The actual story can be found here. Welcome to the free world, my Kyrgyz friends.

Sorry, deserters

Once again, we learn that Iraq ain't Vietnam:

The Immigration and Refugee Board has denied refugee status to Jeremy Hinzman, the U.S. soldier who fled to Canada to avoid the war in Iraq.

His lawyer, Jeffry House, said he would ask the Federal Court to review the decision.
[...]
Deserters from countries with compulsory military service have been granted refugee status in Canada. But since Hinzman volunteered for military service, this case was considered different.

If he had been granted refugee status, some critics said would have opened the door for even more U.S. deserters to arrive in Canada.

Now, where are we going to find new hosts for CBC Radio?

I get results

Daimnation!, March 22: [NASCAR is] looking at putting a road-course race in Toronto, Montreal or somewhere in between. A race at the Montreal F1 track would be a blast - but if I had my way, they'd bring Mosport back up to standard and hold it there.

TSN.ca, March 24: Mosport International Raceway in Bowmanville, Ontario, is the leading candidate to land a NASCAR stock car race as soon as 2006, according to a report in the Toronto Sun.

I'd also like a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, and I want Arrested Development renewed for another season. I'm just sayin'.

Teaching hate

Two teachers at an Islamic school in Ottawa have been suspended for praising and encouraging a violent, anti-Semitic story written by a student. (Apologists for this kind of thing will say the story was "anti-Zionist" instead of anti-Jewish, despite the repeated references to killing "Jews" and the charming illustration of a Star of David in flames.)

Two teachers at the Abraar Islamic school in Ottawa were suspended yesterday pending an investigation into the encouragement or incitement of hatred against Jews expressed in a young student's violence-laden writing project.

"God bless you, your efforts are good," the teacher wrote on the title page. "The story of the hero Ahmed and the hero Salah is still alive. The end will be soon when God unites us all in Jerusalem to pray there."
[...]
Mrs. Sherazi declined to name the student, for privacy reasons, or the teachers until the investigation is complete. "Then we'll see what action we decide we want to take," she said.

Mrs. Sherazi, a 32-year-old teacher who took over as principal in recent months, does not speak or read Arabic. She expressed surprise about the drawing and the story, even though it had reportedly been displayed in a glass case at the school. [emphasis added]

(via Nealenews)

One-sided Survivor

The "Ulong" tribe has lost every immunity challenge so far, and has now been reduced to three members. Normally there would have been a merge or reshuffle by now, but I think this year they're just going to let the tribe completely die off.

Last night, I figured James was in trouble when the "impenetrable" knots he supposedly learned in the Navy were untied by the Koror tribe with relative ease. When he made that snarky comment about Ibrahim and "Allah", I knew he was toast. Does anyone think they would have shown that if he hadn't been voted off?

Fake But Accurate II: Armed and Fabulous

After the Terri Schiavo story heated up, ABC reported on a cynical memo allegedly circulated among Republican Senators, which described how the GOP could use the controversy to shore up its pro-life base. But Power Line - which was instrumental in breaking the Rathergate story - has raised some serious questions about the memo's authenticity.

Is Mary Mapes working for ABC now?

If you think the Guardian is too conservative...

...here's the newspaper for you:

Many newspaper readers might be surprised that the Morning Star is still published, others might dismiss it as a historical anomaly. But - somehow - the paper lives on even after the collapse of its beloved communism.

Not without a struggle. Because unlike the other daily papers on the news racks, it depends on fund-raising drives by its readers, needing £16,000 in monthly donations and the proceeds of "jumble sales and second-hand book sales" to keep the paper afloat.
[...]
The newspaper is still linked to the Communist Party - but the editor says that the paper now appeals to a much wider spectrum of the broad left, rather than a narrowly dogmatic set of followers.

This includes contributions from people like Ken Livingstone, Jon Pilger and George Galloway, he says. This follows other famous writers including Virginia Woolf. [emphasis added]

How the Nazis stayed popular

A new book, Hitler's People's State (set to be published in English next year), argues that the Nazis kept ordinary Germans mollified with a generous welfare state, full employment and low taxes - mostly paid for with wealth plundered from the Jews and the conquered nations of Europe:

A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.

Once the robberies had begun, a sort of "snowball effect" ensued and in order to stay afloat, he says Germany had to conquer and pilfer from more territory and victims. "That's why Hitler couldn't stop and glory comfortably in his role as victor after France's 1940 surrender." Peace would have meant the end of his predatory practices and would have spelled "certain bankruptcy for the Reich."

That may help to explain the Nazi invasion of the USSR, too. The book sounds interesting - though its thesis will almost certainly be abused by idiots all over the political spectrum, who will argue that low tax rates and/or social programs are "just like what the Nazis did". (You know someone in Germany is already saying the Americans conquered Iraq to get the oil to pay for tax cuts, because Bush is Hitler!!!.)

Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit...

Disney has talked about making a "Passion of the Christ for kids", but I hope this isn't what they have in mind:

A church trying to teach about the crucifixion of Jesus performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny and breaking eggs, upsetting several parents and young children.

Patty Bickerton, the youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God, said the performance wasn’t meant to be offensive. Bickerton portrayed the Easter rabbit and said she tried to act with a tone of irreverence.

(via Tim Blair)

Can we question their patriotism now?

If this ain't treason, the word has no meaning anymore.

The same edition of the Thistle also accuses the Anti-Defamation League of being a Mossad front organization - and backs up the claim by linking to one of the most rabidly anti-semitic sites on earth, 'Radio Islam'.

Appeal denied

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has turned down the appeal to reinsert Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. I guess the Supreme Court is the next - and, one way or the other, final - stop.

NASCAR to Canada?

They're looking at putting a road-course race in Toronto, Montreal or somewhere in between. A race at the Montreal F1 track would be a blast - but if I had my way, they'd bring Mosport back up to standard and hold it there.

Either way, I'm there. At Atlanta this past Sunday, Carl Edwards surged ahead of Jimmy Johnson in the final turn to win by 0.028 seconds.

You don't have to be Aryan to be a Nazi (but it helps)

Mein Kampf is a big best-seller in the Muslim world, and now The Guardian reports that Jeff Wiese, who carried out a massacre at his high school on a Minnesota Indian reservation, was an aspiring Nazi (sorry, "Libertarian National Socialist Green"):

Jeff Weise, the 17-year-old named in newspaper reports as the gunman in the Red Lake school shooting, may have been investigated last year in connection with a shooting threat to the school, according to posts made on a Nazi website.

On April 19 2004, he posted to the talkboard: "By the way, I'm being blamed for a threat on the school I attend because someone said they were going to shoot up the school on 4/20, Hitlers birthday, and just because I claim being a National Socialist, guess whom they've pinned?"
[...]
He went on: "It's hard though, being a Native American National Socialist, people are so misinformed, ignorant, and close minded it makes your life a living hell."

The banner on "Nazi.org" (I ain't linking to it) is a Nazi flag colored green instead of red, and as the party's name suggests, their philosophy is an insane mixture of racial separatism, anti-semitism - and radical "deep ecology" environmentalism, complete with links to the likes of Earth First! and Grist magazine. Some of their environmentalist stuff could have been written by David Suzuki, while their articles about the Middle East could have been written by John Pilger.

It's so hard to tell the radical right and radical left apart these days.

Update: as usual in a case like this, one is left wondering how the shooter got access to the guns he used. Weise, it appears, stole at least some of the weapons (as well as a bulletproof vest and police car) from his grandfather, the local police chief.

School shootings seem more common in the United States than in other countries (even accounting for population differences), and unless America has a disproportionate number of homicidal maniacs, relatively lax American gun laws would appear to be the main reason. I'm not sure this particular case can be blamed on them, though.

Lord of Hate

Lord Ahmed, a Labour Party peer in the British House of Lords, invited rabid Jew-hater Israel Shamir to Westminster to give a speech about how Joooooos control the media.

He has not been expelled from the Labour Party. I am not holding my breath for it to happen.

(via Dodgeblogium)

NBC's Office

I'm finally starting to warm up to BBC's The Office, and now an American version begins airing on NBC this Thursday. The New York Sun's David Blum says the Americanized Office, against all expectations, is actually quite good.

I'm skeptical, but I'll give it a shot. All in the Family, Sanford & Son and Three's Company were all copied from the Brits, so there's no reason this kind of thing can't be done well. And the participation of Anchorman's Steve Carell and King of the Hill writer Greg Daniels certainly makes it sound promising.

In case you were wondering, a list of Btitish shows copied by the Americans - and vice versa - can be found at Wikipedia.

Quote of the Day

Law professor Mary Cheh on the Schiavo case:

"If I were the judge who got assigned to this by the computer, I'd flee the country."

The Washington Post article in which Cheh is quoted cites several constitutional experts who say Terri Schiavo's parents are unlikely to overturn the decision to remove her feeding tube, even in federal court. We'll see.

Update: U.S. District Judge James Whittemore has denied the parents' request to have the feeding tube reinserted. The matter is bring appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Livingstone: Free Press Kills

Maybe they call him "Red Ken" because he'd like to see the kind of journalism they had in the old Soviet Union:

London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone today blamed the press for the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dr David Kelly, the Government scientist at the centre of the row over the Iraq war dossiers.

“I do think, when journalists are saying to me, ‘I’m only doing my job’, I’m sorry they are the thin end of a wedge and at the other end of the wedge you have Rwanda and the holocaust people who say, ‘I am only doing my job. I’m only following orders’.”

Livingstone will bend over backwards to defend anti-Semitic, hatemongering "spiritual leaders" from the Muslim world, but he compares newspaper reporters to the Nazis. Interesting.

(via Harry's Place)

Obligatory Schiavo post

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this tragic case, but Lileks' comments are - as usual - worth repeating:

The Schiavo matter is the Elian Gonzalez case of 2005, a person who stands at the nexus of a variety of irreconcilable issues. Some people wouldn’t care at all if she died, unless she had been the sole occupant of a hospital in Baghdad leveled by an errant Tomahawk; then you’d see her face in every protest march. Some see another step towards the triumph of euthanasia – they stop at the idea of someone being starved against the wishes of her parents, and there’s not another fact that matters. Then there are the people for whom this is an opportunity for horrid mockery, the people who care about nothing (but will find someday that nothing cares so much about them it has taken over their hearts completely.) Others demonstrate their enthusiasm for pawing through the casket to find the silver lining. Then there are those who brim with passion not just for the state-approved quietus, but with fury for those who oppose it. Fury and impatience. I’m not talking about the people who regard Schiavo as brain dead and believe her guardian should be allowed to carry out what he insists are her wishes, without the state’s intercession – I mean those who show up on message boards and comment forums sneering about vegetables-in-pampers, and have a good larf pointing at the christers with their imaginary friend in the sky who tells them that an angel will come down and give her a brain like the Wizard of Oz or somethin’. It’s this combination of nihilism, cynicism and a flat nasty refusal to even consider the possibility of transcendence, puffed up with that brackish snarkier-than-thou style that makes the Comic Book Guy the patron saint of the Usenet.

I'm a nominal Christian at most, and I deeply resent the implication that only a religious nut would get upset about someone's life being ended without her consent. (The less said about the open mockery being directed at the "brain-dead" Schiavo, the better, except that it says more about the people doing the mocking than about their alleged targets.)

On the other hand, it's certainly possible to oppose the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube while being suspicious, to say the least, of politicians' sudden interest in the matter. (See Dalia Lathwick's Slate article on the subject.) The only other times I can think of a legislature holding special sessions to deal with individual cases were several decades ago, when you needed Parliamentary approval to get a divorce in Canada. (Well, someone told me the Polish legislature held a special sitting to rush through a soccer player's citizenship application in time for the World Cup, but I think that's an urban legend.)

In short, I don't think anyone should rush into making up their minds on this case. Of course, I may as well ask people to stop breathing, for all the good it would do.

The wave spreads

It's not getting nearly as much attention as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, or even last year's Rose Revolution in Georgia, but the people of another former Soviet republic have risen up against a tyrant:

Thousands of protesters, some armed with clubs and Molotov cocktails, overran Kyrgyzstan's second-largest city Monday, forcing police to flee as the government lost control of the impoverished southern region of the former Soviet republic.

Although Central Asia is the last and largest bastion of post-Soviet dictators, Akayev was regarded as the region's most reform-minded leader. But in recent years he has increasingly cracked down, and his reputation was tarnished in 2002 after police killed six demonstrators protesting the arrest of an opposition lawmaker.
[...]
The opposition is convinced that it is being shut out of political life in this mostly Muslim nation of 5 million people. Although Islamic militants have conducted raids in Kyrgyzstan in previous years, religion does not appear to be playing a role in the latest protests.

Russia condemned Monday's protests, as it did last year with Ukraine.

Vladmir Putin must be getting nervous, and the region's other tyrants - most notably Alexandr Lukashenka of Belarus and the certifiable Saparmyrat Niyazov in Turkmenistan - must be absolutely terrified. Good.

Google's dreadful judgment

I've been critical of Google News for including conspirozoid and Islamofascist "news" sources, but that hasn't stopped me from making it my default web page. This might be the last straw, however.

A successful convention

On Friday, just as the Conservative Party policy convention was starting, it looked like the party was so divided it would probably split up again. On Monday, according to John Ibbitson, the party looks stronger than ever:

Conservative delegates woke up Saturday morning suddenly aware that their party was once again on the verge of schism. Deputy Leader Peter MacKay had placed the whole conference in jeopardy by warning that a resolution approved Friday at a policy workshop to weight delegate selection in favour of ridings with larger memberships (good for the Alliance side; bad for the PC side) would tear the party apart. Newspaper headlines were devastating, completely eclipsing Mr. Harper's Friday night speech, which was perhaps the best of his career.

Some of the core conservative policies will offend voters in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. Others will offend francophone voters in Quebec. But at least the policies have been openly debated and affirmed by both sides of the conservative coalition. The Liberals can no longer accuse the Conservatives of a hidden agenda; it's there for all to see.

Ezra Levant, Greg Staples and Peter Rempel have more.

Cleaning up Haifa Street

Haifa Street, a thoroughfare in what used to be Baghdad's old city (before Saddam bulldozed it in the 1980s), has been an insurgent stronghold since the city fell almost two years ago. But according to John Burns of The New York Times, there are definite signs that the tide is turning:

American soldiers call the street Purple Heart Boulevard: the First Battalion of the Ninth Cavalry, patrolling here for the past year before its recent rotation back to base at Fort Hood, Tex., received more than 160 Purple Hearts. Many patrols were on foot, to gather intelligence on neighborhoods that American officers say have been the base for brutal car bombings, kidnappings and assassinations across Baghdad.

If Haifa Street is brought under control, it will be a major step toward restoring order in this city of five million, and will send a wider message: that the insurgents can be matched, and beaten back.

John DeLorean, R.I.P.

The creator of the world's best known time machine has passed away at age 80:

John Z. DeLorean, an automotive innovator who left General Motors Corp. to develop a radically futuristic sports cars only to see that venture crash spectacularly as he fought federal drug charges, has died at age 80.

DeLorean died late Saturday at Overlook Hospital in Summit, N.J., of complications from a recent stroke, said Paul Connell, an owner of A.J. Desmond & Sons Funeral Directors in Royal Oak, Mich., which was handling arrangements.
[...]
DeLorean's company collapsed in 1983, a year after he was arrested in Los Angeles and accused of conspiring to sell $24 million of cocaine to salvage his venture.

DeLorean was later cleared of defrauding investors, but continuing legal entanglements kept him on the sidelines of the automotive world, although his passion for cars did not abate. After declaring bankruptcy in 1999, he said he wanted to produce a speedy plastic sports car selling for only $20,000.

Whatever questionable activities he may have been involved with later in life, the man did approve the creation of the Pontiac GTO, an act for which every car lover owes him a debt of gratitude. And while the underpowered DeLorean never lived up to the hype, you gotta admit that the car (designed by the legendary Giorgetto Giugiaro) looked pretty darn cool in 1981. Had the company made it to the summer of 1985, when Back to the Future was released, who knows what might have been?

(DeLorean image via this site, which has everything you ever wanted to know about the car.)

"We have been brought from darkness to light."

Today is the second anniversary of the American-led invasion of Iraq. Husayn, an Iraqi blogger (and, Eric Alterman would say, a CIA/Mossad agent), has written an extraordinary post on the subject:

To may outsiders, like those who protested last year, who will protest today. This was a fools errand, it brought nothing but death and destruction. I am sheltered in Iraq, but I know how the world feels, how people have come to either love or hate Bush, as though heis the emobdiement of this war. As though this war is part of Bush, they forget the over twenty million Iraqis, they forget the Middle Easterners, they forget the average person on the street, the average man with the average dream.

Hope has been the greatest product of the last two years. No doubt, many have died, many have died by accident or due to crimes. But their sacrifices are not, and will not be for nothing. I refuse to let it be, and my countrymen stand with me.

There is more. There is much more. Read it all.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, "peace" protestors are trying to adopt the purple-stained finger as a symbol of their cause. How dare they.

Elmasry's freudian slip

To be honest, I can't really make much sense out of this column by Mohammed "All Israelis are legitimate targets" Elmasry, which appears to suggest that the Islamic faith is threatened by females leading Muslim prayer services and Muslim groups sending sending condolences to family members of slain RCMP officers. But I have to ask, considering Elmasry's past, what he meant by this curious choice of words:

Growing instances of Muslims dying to fit in, and losing so much in the effort, are deeply connected to ways in which North American Muslims have been steadily losing their civil liberties since 9/11.

In fact, they are replacing Blacks as the ethno-cultural group most targeted by racial profiling through police and other civil authorities; and sadly, they are replacing Jews as the group most singled out by hate-crime perpetrators. In today's sad reality, not a single place of worship in Canada or the U.S is spied on more than mosques. [emphasis added]

(via Kathy Shaidle)

A new era in F1

Another victory for Renault, this time with Fernando Alonso behind the wheel. Michael Schumacher being passed by Red Bull driver Christian Klein might be the enduring image of the 2005 season. Ferrari does have a new car coming out soon, and you can be sure they're rushing it into production. (Both Red Bull drivers, by the way, finished in the points again.)

BAR, last year's surprise team, courted a storm of controversy by deliberately pulling both its cars off the track near the end of the Australian GP so they could install new Honda engines for Malysia. (The FIA closed that loophole shortly thereafter.) At Sepang, the BARs were the only cars running brand-new, unused engines - and they both blew up within three laps of the start. How can Honda, the company that makes the world's most reliable cars, also make the world's most unreliable F1 engines?

Villeneuve qualified behind Sauber teammate Felipe Massa again, and spun out about halfway through the race. The smart money says he won't finish the season.

Not antiwar, but on the other side

"Peace" activists all over the world are mourning the fall of Saddam Hussein today, and in London an Iranian refugee group wanted to address the crowd to speak out against American intervention in their country - but also to denounce Iran's theocratic fascist government.

The "Stop the War Coalition" wouldn't allow it:

You are aware that in an act of protest against the threats of military intervention by the US and its allies inIran, 5 Iranian asylum seekers have set off on foot from Birmingham on 12th March to join the national anti-war demonstration in London on March 19th. They are undertaking this action both to highlight and oppose the threats against Iran and to appeal to progressive and freedom loving people in Britain to support their struggle against the barbaric regime in Iran. We phoned your office on Friday, 11th March to ask for support for the protest walk and to ask about the possibility of a representative from the walk saying a few words from the platform at the end of the march. We were told to explain our position and, upon my explanation, were told STWC "can not allow any statement against the Islamic regime in Iran from the platform."

Some London NaziMidiots, naturally, accuse the Iranians of being CIA agents.

(via Harry's Place - which also notes that turnout at protests all over Europe has been absolutely dismal)

"The new Stasi"

That's what Tina Brown, last seen editing one of the biggest flops in magazine history and hosting a TV show nobody watches, calls bloggers.

I should be offended, but to be honest, I'm kind of glad to see someone like Brown implicitly admitting a Communist secret police force was a bad thing.

(via Roger L. Simon)

Update: more vicious - and grossly inaccurate - anti-blog smears in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Are there any fact-checkers at that paper?

Suspicions confirmed

The Times reconstructs the events leading up to Rafik Hariri's death, and concludes that the Syrians were indeed responsible:

The Times has learnt that Mr Hariri had enraged the Syrians by inspiring a UN resolution demanding that Syria stop interfering in Lebanon. US and UN officials repeatedly warned Syria not to harm Mr Hariri in the months before his death.

In mid-January, under pressure from Damascus, the Lebanese Government withdrew his 70-strong security detail, and immediately after his death the scene of the bombing was swept to remove any evidence of Syrian complicity.
[...]
In August, under pressure from America to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, Syria had engineered changes to the Lebanese constitution to allow its ally, President Lahoud, to extend his term of office.

But Mr Hariri had his revenge. Using his close ties to President Bush and President Chirac of France, he secretly helped to bring Resolution 1559, calling for Syria to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, before the UN Security Council. “1559 was his baby. He was very proud of it,” a UN official said, though Mr Hariri’s aides played down his involvement.

Poor Baby Assad had no idea what forces he was about to unleash upon the region - and will eventually destroy his tyrannical rule.

War cry of the idiots

Thinking people do not have to be told why the "Bush is Hitler!" slur is outrageous, ignorant and offensive - but that doesn't mean you shouldn't read Victor Davis Hanson's column on the subject:

At first glance, all this wild rhetoric is preposterous. Hitler hijacked an elected government and turned it into a fascist tyranny. He destroyed European democracy. His minions persecuted Christians, gassed over six million Jews, and created an entire fascistic creed predicated on anti-Semitism and the myth of a superior Aryan race.

Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination. Nowhere do we see that more clearly among writers and performers who pontificate as historians when they know nothing about history.

What's so surprising?

Blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh, writing for Tech Central Station, says there's no reason to be surprised at people in the Middle East demonstrating for democracy and freedom:

President Reagan [being interviewed as the Berlin Wall fell] entertained all of this commentary and questioning, and then, at the end of the interview, he asked for a little extra time to say something. The former President freely admitted that the events going on in Eastern Europe were momentous. But he asked why it was that anyone should be surprised that a people enslaved for over four decades should want to agitate for their freedom. The surprising thing was not that people wanted to be free. Rather, it was that they were enslaved in the first place.

But the agitation for democracy that is currently going on in the Middle East is upsetting these authoritarian and totalitarian attempts to brainwash and intimidate their people. These Middle Eastern democrats belief that the quality of their present lives matter, that they -- and not a gang of ruthless dictators -- should be the ones who determine the shape and direction of their lives.
[...]
But in the end, we should remember that the fight to help Middle Eastern democrats is aided most all by the deeply-rooted desire of a long-captive people to break the bonds that have shackled them for generations, and to achieve the freedom that so many of us take for granted. And as President Reagan advised us, we should stop being surprised and astonished that people all over the world want to be free. Denials of liberty are social and political anomalies that should be eradicated to the greatest degree possible. To the extent that the international system is capable of it, it should suffer tyrannies with the same degree of patience and forbearance human beings employ to suffer diseases.

And if you are not astonished by the refusal of an individual to suffer a personal disease, then you shouldn't be astonished by the refusal of an entire region to suffer the disease of tyranny. Call the events in the Middle East "thrilling," if you wish. Call them "wonderful," "splendid," "encouraging," "hopeful" and "promising." Just don't call them "surprising." There is no surprise to be had at all.

How CSIS dropped the ball

Good analysis here of our intelligence service's errors just before and after the Air-India bombing. Most alarmingly, CSIS is still destroying wiretap evidence:

In the wake of the acquittals, fresh questions are being raised about those early mistakes, and about whether CSIS is better equipped today to probe terror threats.

Just three months ago, a Montreal judge told government lawyers it was "totally unacceptable" that CSIS had destroyed the original notes of interviews with terrorism suspect Adil Charkaoui. During the 2001 trial of former Canadian resident Ahmed Ressam, the so-called millennium bomber who was convicted in the U.S. of plotting to blow up the Los Angeles airport, U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour said he was "very troubled that the tape recordings (from CSIS) don't exist anymore." He added: "Apparently, this is the Canadian way of doing things."

CSIS was unprepared for a major terrorist attack in 1985, and I fear they aren't much more prepared today.

The Air-India verdict

It's the top story on every Canadian newscast today, but I haven't written anything about it until now, because I simply don't know what to say. As an unabashed anti-terror hawk, I hate seeing terrorist suspects walk free - but I'm also a libertarian-leaning criminal defence lawyer, and as such I have to accept that a person should not be convicted if there remains a reasonable doubt about his guilt.

Christie Blatchford, no bleeding heart, writes that no other outcome was possible, considering the government's shoddy case:

A two-decades-old case with the best evidence long destroyed by agents and bureaucrats of the victims' own government; a passel of disreputable witnesses motivated by naked self-interest, few of whom could be relied upon to accurately report even the time of day; an alert group of surveillance-aware, careful suspects from an immigrant community that once was largely impenetrable: That's what made up the Air-India prosecutorial case.

All but 54 of the 289 tapes made of calls to and from Mr. Parmar's home were being routinely erased, even after the bombing, while CSIS brass continued to stall requests from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for help. Most of those tapes were never transcribed properly, let alone verbatim.

There's much, much more, and even if you aren't a Globe and Mail subscriber you can read the whole thing by searching for "Blatchford" on Google News Canada. The scariest thing about this disaster is that it reveals, in glaring detail, the incompetence and unpreparedness of our anti-terror services - and you a lot of dubious characters have been following this case very carefully.

329 innocent people, including 160 Canadian citizens, were killed in the Air-India bombing. A list of victims can be found here. And some of their killers are having a grand laugh today.

Respect my authoritah!

Jeremy C. Wright, a Canadian who runs the Ensight technology blog, was stopped at the U.S. border by some Officer Barbrady-wannabe who doesn't understand this whole "e-mail" thing:

Him: Why would you visit someone in the states you’d never met (I mentioned I was planning to visit several people whilst down there)

Me: … (This was two hours in, and minutes before I demanded to be released)

More details here. Most Canadians - probably even me - would have come back from such an interrogation spitting fire at "ignorant Americans and their trigger-happy, paranoid border guards", but Wright handles the matter with genuine class.

Bizarro World II

University of Sydney Economics (!) Professor Tim Anderson in the Green Left Weekly ("The Leafy Obergruppenführers"):

There is no general climate of fear [in Cuba]. People do speak freely, criticising their government, but criticising the US government far more. Cubans also participate at much higher levels than Australians in political system.

Bizarro world I

Eric Margolis (uh-oh) in the Toronto Sun:

...the man most responsible for pushing the Arab world towards political change is not George W. Bush, but his nemesis, Osama bin Laden. For over a decade, bin Laden has agitated for the overthrow of the corrupt, despotic Arab regimes supported by the U.S., and their replacement by a traditional Islamic democratic consensus.

He couldn't resist

On his way to the opening of a Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, Kofi Annan couldn't pass up the opportunity to pay his respects to the UN's favorite Jew-killer:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's decision to lay a wreath at the grave of Yasser Arafat while on his way to the dedication of a Holocaust museum in Israel is infuriating New York politicians and Jewish leaders, some of whom are labeling Mr. Annan's gesture "outrageous," "grotesque," and an example of "mindless incompetence."

The secretary-general joined world leaders in Israel on Tuesday to commemorate the opening of a new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. His visit Monday to Mr. Arafat's grave rankled some representatives of the United Nations' host city, who said Mr. Annan had damaged the world body's already poor public image and may have further imperiled U.N. plans to expand into neighboring parts of Turtle Bay.
[...]
A spokesman for Mr. Annan, Fred Eckhard, responded to the Sun yesterday: "Kofi Annan is secretary-general of an organization made up of all nations, and so he could not be in the region without also paying a call on the new president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Arafat's grave lies within the compound of the president's residence, and the secretary-general, like every international visitor to the residence, paid his respects at Arafat's resting place."

"I find it troubling when people elevate the status of a terrorist, especially at a time when the Palestinian people have put him behind them. There's no yearning for the good old days. People are still angry about the corruption and the raping of the country in terms of economic exploitation. You can go without laying a wreath," Mr. Hoenlein said.

If Kofi Annan went to Kosovo, would be feel compelled to stop by and visit Slobodan Milosevic in prison?

It's not just the Holocaust

There are people who don't believe Stalin did anything wrong, either. Some of them (probably most of them) are teaching at American universities.

Conspirozoid field day

Paul Wolfowitz (Volf-o-vitz, according to the BBC) has been nominated by President Bush to run the World Bank. Hernando de Soto would have been my first choice, but any decision which can piss off Guardian and Nation readers this much can't be all bad.

Sometimes the media can be too balanced

Deborah Lipstadt was scheduled to appear on C-SPAN to discuss her new book about being sued (unsuccessfully) by Holocaust denier David Irving - so, in the interest of fairness, C-SPAN decided it had to air a speech by Irving, too:

Yesterday (3/15), leaders from more than 40 nations gathered in Jerusalem to dedicate a new, expanded Yad Vashem Holocaust museum.

Deborah Lipstadt, Holocaust scholar at Emory University (pictured), will deliver a talk at Harvard University this evening (3/16), promoting her new book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. C-SPAN wished to broadcast Lipstadt's talk on the network's BookTV program, but informed Lipstadt that a recent speech of Irving's (recorded by C-SPAN) would need to be broadcast as well.
[...]
C-SPAN, that is, sought out an 'opposing view' to Lipstadt's confirmation of the Nazi Holocaust. Lipstadt refused to be cast side-by-side with Irving, on the grounds that Holocaust denial does not merit public debate. Cohen asks the appropriate question: 'For a book on the evils of slavery, would C-SPAN counter with someone who thinks it was a benign institution?'

David Irving's shoddy methodology and blatant fabrications have been debunked time and time again (most notably in Lying About Hitler by Richard Evans, an expert witness for the defence at the Irving/Lipstadt trial). A short visit to his website (I won't link to it, but it's not hard to find) confirms his racist, anti-Semitic, pro-fascist views. It's disturbing, to say the least, to see people who should know better deciding these views are worthy of being given an audience.

I don't believe the people at C-SPAN are Holocaust deniers, but I do think they're showing absolutely appalling judgment here. Irving should have the right to express his vile opinions, but that doesn't mean C-SPAN or any other network is obligated to put him on television.

It's been going on longer than we thought

The conventional wisdom about Robert Mugabe is that he was a reasonably fair, democratic ruler in his early years as President of Zimbabwe, and that he only recently became a murderous tyrant. But in this Independent story about a part of the country which supports the opposition (and is being starved of food and oil by the government), there is a disturbing passage which suggests Mugabe has been at this for many, many years:

No one needs to tell the people of Lupane how dangerous it can be to stand up to Mr Mugabe. In the two years between 1982 and 1984 as many as 50,000 people died in a vicious pogrom, dubbed euphemistically by Mr Mugabe himself as the Gukuruhundi: "The rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rains." The rain fell in the form of the notorious Korean-trained 5th Brigade. People were forced to dig their own graves and shot, or bodies were tossed into disused mines. Later the victims were herded into camps to be tortured and killed.

Their commander is now Perence Shiri, the chief of the Zimbabwean air force. He took his orders from Emmerson Mnangagwa, then head of state security, now speaker of parliament. Official figures put the death toll for dissidents - those that opposed Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF party at 20,000. Locals say the real figure is more than twice that. One of the worst atrocities, the massacre of 62 men, women and children, was in 1983 at the (now dry) Cewala river in Lupane.

Watching Zimbabwe these past few years is like watching an entire nation slowly commit suicide - and the world, numb to tales of murder and corruption from Africa, seems content to let it happen.

Never trust a state-controlled newspaper

Washington Post managing editor Philip Bennett says the Chinese People's Daily blatantly twisted and altered his words in the infamous interview he gave to the paper.

Did he really expect anything less?

I almost forgot

Today is Eat an Animal for PETA Day. I forgot all about it until this evening, but fortunately I had all-meat pizza from Louis Gee's for lunch. (I wish I'd remembered to have bacon for breakfast, though.)

To be honest, I can't remember the last day I didn't have meat. If you haven't eaten any yet, get to Wendy's right away. (Their pick-up window is open late, you know. Dave Thomas insisted.)

Long Live Schlock

I don't know about you, but it makes my heart glad to find out someone has created a tribute page for Cannon Films, the company that made all these Charles Bronson/Chuck Norris exploitation films in the '80s. Take some time to read the corporate history, which describes the founders' heated battle to make the more successful Lambada movie just after Cannon went bankrupt.

My favorite Cannon release? Probably 1986's Delta Force, a combination '70s disaster movie and '80s kill-'em-all-let-God-sort-'em-out action flick. George Kennedy plays a priest, Robert Forster and a bunch of Israelis play Arab terrorists who hijack an "ATW" airliner, Chuck Norris pretends to be a CBC radio reporter to get into Lebanon, and Lee Marvin (R.I.P.) just kicks ass.

The oldest hatred - right here

B'nai Brith says antisemitic hate crimes in Canada were up 47% last year:

A "chilling" new audit shows a record number of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada last year.

Almost one-third of all incidents occurred in March and April, when Israel launched countermeasures against terrorist groups in the Palestinian territory. Klein said that seemed to fall in line with a historical pattern surrounding Israeli military activity.

The report notes the existence of an antisemitic hate website created by a teenager right here in Newfoundland, where the entire Jewish population - 140 people - could probably fit on a couple of school buses. Then again, as the Prime Minister of Malaysia showed, you don't need a significant number of Jews living near you to hate them.

In a related story, police have decided not to press charges against Mohamed Elmasry, head of the Canadian Islamic Congress, for his remarks about Israelis on Michael Coren Live. I'm wary of hate-speech legislation on libertarian grounds, and I agree that Elmasry's nauseating comments do not merit criminal prosecution.

Frankly, I'm kind of glad he told us what he really believes. Otherwise I might have thought he's some kind of "moderate".

Breaking news: Bardot still alive, still disgusting

Brigitte Bardot is a Front National-supporting fascist, so we shouldn't be surprised that she's upset because the Canadian government won't do as she says:

On the eve of the protests, retired French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot had harsh words for Prime Minister Paul Martin and Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan.

"I wrote for years to all Canadian prime ministers, but it hasn't done anything to stop it. Nothing!"

Speaking of fascists, Stephen Schwarz has a devastating profile of anti-semitic, pro-tyranny conspirozoid Justin Raimondo in FrontPage.

Another day, another interview

I was interviewed by Ann Budgell for Radio Noon, the lunchtime program for CBC Radio One in Newfoundland, earlier this morning. The interview should air sometime between 12:30PM to 1:30PM Newfoundland time (11-12 EST) today, and can be heard here.

I think the interview went quite well - though, as usual, I'm already thinking of dozens of things I should have said. (How on earth did I go through a whole interview about blogging without mentioning Rathergate?) The interview was inspired by Zerb's Toronto Star column about the Toronto blog bash, and I was a bit surprised when Budgell brought up some of the "personal insults" some bloggers have directed at Zerbisias. I mumbled something about them occasionally crossing the line and Zerb responding with some pretty strong criticism of her own; I should have noted that some bloggers, especially Bob Tarantino, have written some extremely intelligent, devastating critiques of her columns.

I'll have to keep that mind next time I'm interviewed, I guess.

Update: the interview didn't air today, presumably because of time limitations. Budgell told me that could happen, and if so it should be broadcast tomorrow at the aforementioned time.

Clarification: Zerb takes offence to my writing that she "responded in kind" to personal insults. What I meant is that she's responded with some very strong criticism of bloggers, but in retrospect, I agree that it hasn't really descended to the level of personal insults. I've amended the post accordingly.

Piercing the curtain

Cell phones and VCRs are slowly eroding the wall between North Koreans and the modern world:

The construction of cellular relay stations last fall along the Chinese side of the border has allowed some North Koreans in border towns to use prepaid Chinese cellphones to call relatives and reporters in South Korea, defectors from North Korea say. And after DVD players swept northern China two years ago, entrepreneurs collected castoff videocassette recorders and peddled them in North Korea. Now tapes of South Korean soap operas are so popular that state television in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, is campaigning against South Korean hairstyles, clothing and slang, visitors and defectors have said.

"In the 1960's in the Soviet Union, it was cool to wear blue jeans and listen to rock and roll," said Andrei Lankov, a Russian exchange student in the North at Kim Il Sung University in 1985, who now teaches about North Korea at Kookmin University here in the South. "Today, it is cool for North Koreans to look and behave South Korean, as they do in the television serials. That does not bode well for the long-term survival of the regime."
[...]
In the recording studio of a radio station here, Seong Min Kim, a former North Korean Army captain who is now the director for the South Korean radio station Free NK, explained how Chinese cellphones in North Korea have enabled him to nurture sources there.

To crack down on home viewing of imported videotapes, the North Korean police developed the strategy of encircling a neighborhood in the evening, cutting off electricity, then inspecting players to find videotapes stuck inside, according to Young Howard, international coordinator of the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, a Seoul-based group. Recent defectors have also told Mr. Howard that police cars with loudspeakers have patrolled neighborhoods, warning residents to maintain their "socialist lifestyle" and to shun South Korean speech and clothing and hairstyles, he said.

They haven't figured out this "peace" thing, have they?

Remember the "Hell's Satans" episode of The Simpsons, in which a biker gang leader complains to Marge that he can't get his clothes clean, even after hitting, stomping and shooting them? That's the first thing I thought about last week, when the IRA responded to the family of one of their murder victims by generously offering to kill his killers.

Now, with even some of the IRA's strongest supporters disowning the group, Sinn Fein deputy leader Martin McGuinness is speaking out - against the family members of IRA victim Robert McCartney, for harming the "cause" by their incessant demands that his murderers be brought to justice:

A Sinn Fein leader publicly criticized the family of a Catholic man killed by IRA members, warning Monday that their relentless campaign for an arrest in his death could diminish support for their cause.

He said if they continued to make direct challenges to Sinn Fein, which is the largest Catholic-backed party in Northern Ireland, they would "dismay and disillusion an awful lot of people, tens of thousands of people who support them in their just demands."

350,000 and counting

UN envoy Jan Egeland says the death toll in Darfur could be five times higher than originally thought:

The number of people who have died in Sudan's war-ravaged Darfur region could be as high as 350,000, according to a senior United Nations official.

Egeland has also warned that women are still being systematically abused and raped. He met with senior officials in Khartoum, telling them that the situation was out of control in Darfur.

On the contrary, I think the situation in Darfur is playing out just the way "senior officials in Khartoum" want it to.

People Power in Beirut

The people of Lebanon have responded to last week's large pro-Syria rally with an even larger rally against the Syrian occupation:

Hundreds of thousands of anti-Syrian protesters flooded central Beirut Monday, calling for Syria's complete withdrawal and demanding answers about the assassination of a popular former prime minister.

"They are also demanding answers. They want to know who killed Rafik Hariri."
[...]
There was no official count of Monday's crowd, but The Associated Press estimated it at 500,000 people. However, organizers told Reuters that a million people had joined the protest.

Mackey Frayer said there could be a ban on such rallies after today. She said the government doesn't want dueling rallies "that could cause friction and in the end cause violence here."

More photos here. My use of "people power" in the post heading - the same term used by Filipinos when they overthrew Marcos in 1986 - is strictly intentional.

Sometimes a state legislature is just a state legislature

Paging Dr. Freud...

Grovelling before the Chinese

The Drudge Report, linking to this interview Washington Post managing editor Philip Bennett gave to China's state-controlled People's Daily, emphasizes his comment that "I don't think US should be the leader of the world".

Such a sentiment is hardly surprising coming from an American newspaper editor, but what's really depressing is the apologetic tone Bennett takes before a representative of a communist propaganda rag. He tosses in a few token criticisms of China's repressive government, but mostly it's non-stop Bush-bashing, America-bashing and assurances that, no, his paper isn't obsessed with Chinese political prisoners and stuff like that. If the interview is accurate - and that's a big if, considering the source - Bennett has embarassed his profession. The editor of a proud, fiercely independent paper like the Post should not be lowering itself to the level of a state-controlled, heavily censored rag like the People's Daily.

Yong Tang: Since the standard is not applied equally in the world, it is damaging Bush's effort to promote the so -called democracy, isn't it?

Bennett: It depends upon what you are trying to achieve. I guess the question I would ask is: if you look around the world in strategically important places, is the US actively engaged there promoting democracy or not? I don't think there is much evidence that promoting democracy is what the US is doing. It is what it says it is doing.
[...]
Yong Tang: So the world order should be democratic?

Let me give an example. Democracy in one sense means the majority decides, but it also means the rights of the minority are protected. As UK late Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, democracy is the least bad system that we have ever thught of. So democracy is never perfect. It always has problems. Our democracy here in the US has many contradictions, problems and challenges. So democracy is not a cure that could turn everything bad into good. It has its own advantages and its disadvantages.
[...]
Yong Tang: The Washington Post often describes China as a dictator communist regime without democracy and freedom. Why is the newspaper so fond of playing with such negative words?

Bennett: I disagree with that. First of all, Neither The Washington Post, nor the New York Times, nor any other big newspapers, refer to China today as a dictatorship regime. We don't use these words on the paper any more. Now we say China is a communist country only because it is a fact. China is ruled by the Communist party.
[...]
Yong Tang: But it seems to me that the Washington Post stories about China are still focused on such things like political dissidents?

Bennett: No, it is not true. If You look at all the stories published on the major newspapers about China last year, you would find the widest variety of stories of any time since US journalists were allowed back in China.
[...]
Yong Tang: What is your personal impression on Chinese leaders?

I hope the next time when I come to China, I would be able to meet with people from People's Daily.

Passports and black boxes: the final word

Shortly after I wrote this entry on Saturday, a reader calling him- or herself "yyjz6m" - and whose real name, I bet, rhymes with "Blantonia Merbisias" - commented that the official 9/11 report said two of the hijackers' passports were found, and that "That's two more passports than black boxes!!"

How this proves the Project for a New American Century had foreknowledge of (or masterminded) 9/11 is beyond me. But, in any event, another reader noted that one of the 9/11 flight recorders was found - the one for United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania en route to Washington, DC. And the recording - which has not been released to the general public, but was played for relatives of the crash victims - makes it clear that the plane was indeed hijacked by Islamofascists.

Of course, if you're a conspiracy theorist, this proves nothing. The fact that it hasn't been released to the public "proves" the recording doesn't really exist (and that, therefore, several of the 9/11 victims' families are in on the whole thing). Or, maybe, the recording is a CIA/Mossad/Masonic fake. If you really, really want to believe Paul Wolfowitz is more evil than Osama bin Laden, the possibilities are endless.

Geordies in the Final Four

Just a few days after their 3-1 win over Olympiakos in UEFA Cup play (which means only a major collapse this Wednesday will keep them out of the quarter-finals), Newcastle beat Spurs 1-0 this afternoon - thanks mainly to goalkeeper Shay Given, who made two absolutely astonishing saves just seconds apart in the second half. They join Blackburn, Man U and Team France in the FA Cup semi-finals.

If Shearer must leave after this season (and, boy, I hope he doesn't) at least he has a real chance at hoisting two trophies, something I never would have thought possible back in December. Come on you Mags!

Seumas in Wonderland

Seumas Milne, in a bizarro-world Guardian column (which, among other things, claims that the Americans and Israelis prevented peace-loving democrat Yasser Arafat from holding Palestinian elections after 1996):

The US brands Hizbullah, the largest party in the Lebanese parliament and leading force among the Shia, Lebanon's largest religious group, as a terrorist organisation without serious justification.

Serious justification:

In April 1983, the U.S. embassy in Beirut was struck by a 400-pound suicide truck bomb, which killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, and wiped out the CIA's Middle East bureau.

Lamberth ruled in May than Iran was responsible for the attack because of its support for Hezbollah. "It is beyond question that Hezbollah and its agents received massive material and technical support from the Iranian government," Lamberth wrote.

Where? Where does The Guardian find these people?

Is there anything this man hasn't lied about?

In addition to questions about his ancestry, Ward Churchill is now in trouble for copying other artists' paintings and selling them as his own, plagiarism (and threatening the writer whose work he copied) and lying about his service in Vietnam.

I don't believe Ward Churchill should be fired for his political views. I believe he should be fired - without the six-figure buyout package being discussed - for being a fraud and a liar.

The mask slips

The leader of Germany's extreme-right NPD, which has a disturbingly large following in the former East Germany, is praising Hitler as much as he can get away with:

“ADOLF HITLER was a great German statesman,” the bête noire of the German Establishment said as he sat in a room darkened by bombproof shutters.

So he is careful. There are no busts of the Führer in Herr Voigt’s bunker-like office, just maps of Germany as it was, various German and neo-Nazi flags and a poster that declares: “May 1945, Nothing to Celebrate.”

Can someone tell me how this isn't fraud?

As late as 11PM on Thursday, long after top management had almost certainly decided to fold the company, JetsGo was still selling tickets on its webpage:

Discount airline Jetsgo Corp. was selling tickets and taking bookings until just before it pulled the plug on its operations yesterday — even though it knew as early as Wednesday it could be forced to shut down.

"This isn't like a store where you can just close the doors and people stop shopping," Kofman said. "It's a complex business."
[...]
An angry Ontario Consumer Minister Jim Watson, meanwhile, said Jetsgo's bosses should be arrested and charged for "hoodwinking" an unsuspecting flying public.

Jetsgo's shutdown sparked outrage among customers, some of whom bought tickets just before the airline shuttered its website and grounded its planes.

JetsGo was the third airline run into the ground by founder and CEO Michael LeBlanc. He's the Malcolm Bricklin of the Canadian airline industry - and God help me, I actually believe he'll convince people to invest in his fourth airline before too long. (There's a possibility JetsGo could reorganize and relaunch, but the brand name is tarnished beyond repair now.)

The National Post says that on top of rapid over-expansion, safety concerns were the final nail in JetsGo's coffin - kind of unnerving, considering I was on a JetsGo plane just a couple of weeks ago:

Jetsgo's abrupt decision followed a recent move by Transport Canada to place the carrier under its magnifying glass. The inspection, which raised several safety-related issues and "deficiencies" with Jetsgo's operations, was launched after a botched landing by one of Jetsgo's planes in Calgary earlier this year -- one of several recent incidents involving Jetsgo aircraft.

"My officials came to me ... telling me we were going to issue a notice, that if in 30 days, there were no corrections to some of their practices, we were going to remove their certificate," Mr. Lapierre said.
[...]
Adding to Jetsgo's financial difficulties were mounting safety concerns, including 57 incidents deemed serious enough for investigation, according to government documents.

"They had grown the company so fast that some vice-presidents were [responsible for] training staff in addition to their management duties."

Drinking with the enemy

Antonia Zerbisias' thrilling story of infiltrating a right-wing blogger bash can be found here. (Memo to Zerb and Charles Johnson: I was joking about 51 being "old".) Zerb concludes that we bloggers are "eager for recognition from the old media they sneer at" - and, well, I plead guilty. Gosh darn it, I love seeing my name in Canada's highest-circulation daily newspaper. I'm also honoured by her saying we deserve our own TV show. (Personally, I want a show where I drive around America in an 18-wheeler with my pet chimpanzee, solving mysteries, helping people in need and always staying one step ahead of Sheriff Lobo.)

Yes, Zerb and I did get into a little argument about 9/11 conspiracy theories, in which she expressed her disbelief that all the hijackers' passports were found in the wreckage. I did a google search for that this morning, and the only sources I found were a couple of widely republished conspirozoid articles which give no source for the story. I did find this CNN report from Sept. 16, 2001, which says one of the passports was found several blocks from the WTC site. (At the U.S.S. Intrepid museum in New York, you can see a display case showing documents spread several blocks around the site. A lot of papers much flimsier than a passport survived intact.) And the Village Voice's Geoffrey Gray, in an article largely sympathetic to 9/11 conspiracy theorists, notes that Mohammed Atta's passport was also miraculously found - in his rental car at Boston's Logan Airport.

Nice try, Zerb.

JetsGone

- JetsGo was supposed to start flying out of Gander within a month (replacing Westjet, which ends its unprofitable service to central Newfoundland in early April).

- a surreal scene I saw on CTV NewsNet during my lunch hour: the Conservatives were demanding the federal government reimburse stranged passengers for the money they spent on now-worthless tickets, and Liberal Transport Minister Jean Lapierre replied that we're living under a free-market system and that, unfortunately, these things happen. It's Bizarro World! (I sympathize with anyone who lost their trips and their money because of JetsGo's sudden collapse, but I have to agree with the Honourable Mr. Lapierre on this one. In all but the most exceptional circumstances, government should not be in the business of giving people refunds. Otherwise, we'd have to use taxpayers' money to reimburse people who paid for miracle weight-loss cures advertised in the National Enquirer.)

- Westjet - which JetsGo is trying to set up as a scapegoat for its disastrous failure - plans to substantially increase capacity and add new routes to fill the void left by JetsGo. (Dear Westjet: Please, please, please come to Deer Lake or Stephenville. Sincerely, Damian P.)

- Enterprise Rent-A-Car is offering special rates to stranded JetsGo passengers. Hey, the trip might take longer, but at least you know the highway isn't going to go out of business.

Quote of the Day

Harry at Harry's Place, in response to an obnoxious anti-blog column in The Times by Simon Jenkins:

"So while the British press have been obsessed with who has been shagging who at the Spectator or where Charles and Camilla are going to tie the knot, most of the blogs I read have been discussing democratisation in the Middle East. Exactly who is dumbing down discourse?"

(See Tim Blair and Scott Burgess, too.)

3/11/04

One year ago today, 191 innocent people were brutally murdered by Islamofascists in Madrid, who detonated ten backpacks filled with explosives and left on commuter trains. The people of Spain promptly blamed...the Americans, for leading their country into war with Iraq, and ousted the Aznar government in the subsequent general election.

A year later, some Spaniards are coming to realize that Islamist grievances against their nation long predate 9/11, and that pulling out of Iraq will not make them immune from further attacks:

Immediately after the March 11 massacre, most Spaniards saw the attack as al-Qaida's revenge for sending Spanish troops to Iraq. Today there's a realization al-Qaida's footprint in Spain is much older and deeper: the country had long been a haven or transit point for Islamic militants.

Officials now believe the main motive for the train bombings that killed 191 people was not so much Iraq as Spain's arrest of dozens of al-Qaida suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, including three charged with helping prepare them, Reinares said.

(via Barcepundit, who has posted a list of 3/11 victims here)

Greatest Drudge Report headline ever

Underneath a photo of you-know-who arriving late at court yesterday: "Bananas in Pajamas".

Update: that was today's headline in the Sun, too.

But whatever you do, don't question their patriotism

The UAW supports the troops - as long as they drive the right cars and support the right politicians:

Some U.S. Marines say they were surprised by the decision made by Detroit auto workers about parking. It all started with the cars some Marines drove, and what was on them.

Marines at nearby Marine Corps Reserve Center say on Tuesday morning, the director of security at the UAW told them that while they support the troops [but of course! - Ed.], Marines driving foreign vehicles or sporting a President George Bush bumper sticker were no longer welcome to park there.

As U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Lee Cooper explained, "We’re very appreciative, but on the other hand, it’s kind of discriminating between, let’s say a lance corporal going through college can only afford a 15-year-old vehicle and it happens to be a Nissan."

(via Lileks)

Jetsgoing nowhere

JetsGo Airlines, which purchased new (used) planes and announced new routes not too long ago, has come crashing down:

Discount airline Jetsgo isn't going anywhere - announcing early Friday that it is grounded, effective immediately.

"We are very concerned about our customers and the significant hardship that this action causes. In the meantime, we encourage our passengers to contact their travel agent or an alternative airline."
[...]
Hours after the company issued its release, its website was still active with no note to travellers on the situation.

Right to the end, it appears, the company maintained the same high level of service for which it was known throughout the land. Good thing I already used the voucher they gave me when I complained about my disastrous JetsGo flights last February.

Still, competition is good, and I hate seeing an airline - especially one as cheap as JetsGo - go out of business. Hopefully they'll relaunch before too long. With new management, of course.

Was it something I said?

One of my readers is removing me from his bookmarks because of something I wrote. Not about the war on terror, gay rights, guns or euthanasia, but...

I was going to post this in your comments but as I'm dropping anyone who links to Jackson or Hilton from my bookmarks it seemed silly to go through a registration process to tell you I'm dropping you from my bookmarks.

Buh-bye, Damian. I usually enjoy your stuff, but this is non-negotiable.

He really wouldn't like my plan to start podcasting a daily audio recreation of events in the Michael Jackson trial. (Seriously, a few people have complained about my posting that mugshot, and in retrospect I should have used a less disturbing image. The inside of a slaughterhouse, perhaps.)

When political correctness clashes

Two recent examples of progressive principles being sacrificed on the altar of dhimmitude:

- a British anti-discrimination bill will not include gays and lesbians as promised, for fear of offending Muslim voters.

- the Prime Minister of Norway has criticized IKEA for failing to include women in its furniture assembly manuals, a decision the company made to avoid upsetting the delicate sensibilities of people in Islamic countries who can't handle seeing a woman putting together furniture. (Whether the Prime Minister of Norway should also be a furniture-catalogue critic deserves a post of its own.)

Many leftists who could care less about offending Christians will bend over backwards to avoid an accusation of "Islamophobia". (Last May, some British gay rights activists found out the hard way what happens when you don't.) And this sort of thing seems to be getting more and more common.

A white Bronco was seen leaving Neverland Valley

Have you seen this man person?

Update: earlier today, I was going to make a snarky comment about how Jacko's lawyers - who, from what I've read, have done a masterful job considering they have the most diffcult client on earth - should have gotten a massive retainer up front. But according to "Fox 411", they haven't been paid in three months.

Whatever you do, don't mix with the natives

Castro has decreed that Cubans who work in tourist resorts and hotels are not allowed to have any contact with the capitalist scum (mostly Canadian) staying there:

A new tourismministry regulation prohibits employees from having any contact of a personal nature with foreigners, be they tourists or ex-pats. It goes beyond the normal rules that apply to hotel staff around the world. No gifts, no tips. And here everyone from the waiter to tourism executives have 72 hours to inform a superior of any non-professional contact that even a member of their family has had with a foreigner. Most Cubans that tourists meet while at resorts are employed by the tourism ministry.
[...]
If a foreigner says anything derogatory about the Cuban government, employees of Cuba's largest industry, tourism, are now obliged to report it.

Yeah, but Cuba is suffering under a crippling American embargo/has given everyone free education and health care/blah blah blah.

Happy retirement, Dan

Dan Rather's final broadcast begins a few minutes from now.

I'm shedding no tears for Dan, and the less said about the tongue bath he's getting in the mainstream media (especially from Tom Shales) the better. Still, even I have to admit that Walter Cronkite is a classless asshole. (But we already knew that.)

Boston Rob Rules

Bribing the bus driver to slow down your opponents on The Amazing Race? That's sleazy. Getting your opponents to pay the bribe for you? That's genius.

I'm probably in the minority here, but I'm perfectly happy with Romber winning another million dollars.

David Duke's new hero

Take a bow, Ken Livingstone. You must be so proud. In the unlikely event that anyone asks Red Ken about this, it will be entertaining to see how he denounces the racist, anti-semitic, homophobic David Duke - after months defending the racist, anti-semitic, homophobic Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi.

In other moronic-convergence news, John Pilger sneers at the gay-rights movement in the latest New Statesman. As Johann Hari writes, "Intriguing how often the extremes sound similar - I defy anybody to spot the difference between a Robert Fisk piece and a Pat Buchannan article". (Speaking of Fisk, is anyone surprised by his recent cheerleading for the Syrian occupation of Lebanon? Is there any dictatorship these people won't support?)

We welcome diversity, as long as you agree with us

Behold the website for Oregon's Ocean Haven Inn, which proudly proclaims "We Welcome Diversity" - and then says people who voted for Dubya are not welcome to stay, "due to his environmental destructive policies".

No Hummer drivers allowed, either. (No word on Range Rover, Suburban or G-wagen drivers.) Ironically, if you showed up in a clapped-out '66 VW Microbus that probably pumps out 15 times as many greenhouse gases as a brand-new Hummer H2, you'd likely be welcomed with open arms.

(via Best of the Web)

Jacko's gonna moonwalk

All Michael Jackson's lawyers have to do is show a reasonable doubt about his sexual-abuse allegations, and yesterday they got a key prosecution witness to admit he lied in other legal cases involving his family.

Jacko's career will never recover, but the man(?) is not going to jail anytime soon. No way.

Where to get your Super Bowl tickets

NFL players and coaches are allowed to buy a certain number of Super Bowl tickets, and it's an open secret that many of them re-sell the tickets for a profit. Now Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Tice is being investigated for scalping:

Minnesota head coach Mike Tice is being investigated by the NFL for allegedly heading up and profiting from a Super Bowl ticket-scalping operation within the Vikings organization, a violation of NFL rules that league sources say has been going on for years.

The league requires all players, coaches, and club personnel who buy Super Bowl tickets to sign a release stating they will not re-sell them at a profit. Still, the practice of scalping Super Bowl tickets is widespread within the league and is an open secret in many NFL locker rooms. Yet the practice in Minnesota is unique, league sources say, because it has been orchestrated by the head coach. And, according to people familiar with the scalping operation, Tice began facilitating the reselling of Super Bowl tickets long before becoming the Vikings' head coach in January 2002. Tice coached Minnesota's tight ends and then offensive line beginning in 1996.

Tarantino does it again

He's posted a lengthy, detailed, well-researched response to that Tom Axworthy gun-registry article I trashed the other day.

Danny's on a roll

Danny Williams' approval rating as Newfoundland premier is a stunning 86%, and the same poll says the Conservatives would get 73% of the vote if a provincial election were held today.

Of course, a provincial election is not being held today - though Newfoundland premiers (Smallwood, Peckford, Tobin) have a long, sordid history of calling ridiculously early elections when the polls show them far ahead. Williams, I'm sure, would be the first to acknowledge that his popularity won't stay this high forever. And in Newfoundland, where a lot of MHAs are personally popular regardless of their party affiliation, these polls tend to overestimate the number of seats the governing party will win. (In 1993, the polls put the Liberals ahead of the PCs by something like 40 points, but their margin of victory was less than 10%.)

Still, Newfoundlanders are obviously proud of what Williams has accomplished in the offshore dispute, and it would take a major scandal for the Tories not to win the next election. The Liberals' complete lack of credibility doesn't hurt, either.

Is there anyone in Newfoundland who thought Roger Grimes would still be leading the Liberals 18 months after he oversaw one of the worst electoral defeats in the party's history? I can only assume no one else wants the job. (Even though John Efford's federal cabinet position forced him to support the Martin government during the offshore negotiations, I'm sure most Newfoundland Liberals would like him to replace Grimes. But I don't think Efford would go for it, and I'd put my money on Burgeo-LaPoile MHA Kelvin Parsons.)

Marching for tyranny

The Associated Press says 500,000 people attended the Hezbollah-sponsored pro-Syria demonstration in Beirut today. That's a lot larger than any anti-Syrian demonstration to date, but there are hints that many attendees were there as "voluntarily" as the factory workers who used to attend huge demonstrations in downtown Bucharest:

Tuesday's rally was far bigger than the more than 70,000 anti-Syrian protesters who filled nearby Martyrs' Square on Monday. That was the biggest rally yet of anti-Syrian furor, as demonstrators waved Lebanon's cedar-tree flag and thundered, "Syria out!"

At least one opposition leader said the pro-Syrian government pressured people to turn out Tuesday and some reports said Syria bused in people from across the border.
[...]
In the outlying heavily Shiite regions of the Bekaa and the south, loudspeakers had urged followers to travel to Beirut for the protest.

Hezbollah officials denied the charges, saying it is part of a campaign to make the demonstration seem "imposed and involuntary."

This wire story, not surprisingly, goes out of its way to be fair to Hezbollah ("widely admired both within Lebanon and across the Arab world") and the Syrians ("Syria has had troops here since 1976, when they were sent as peacekeepers during Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war"). Across the Bay and Caveman in Beirut have much more.

So what could go wrong?

Daniel Pipes, who notes his own amusement at being dubbed a "neo-conservative" ("it has a certain cachet, given that no more than fifty Americans have been called neo-conservative, yet we allegedly drive U.S. foreign policy"), warns that the rapid democratization of the Middle East could bring more Islamofascists to power:

I too welcome these developments, but more warily. Having been trained in Middle Eastern history makes me perhaps more aware of what can go wrong:

This drive to power is nothing new. Already in 1979, Islamists exploited the shah’s fall to take power in Iran. In 1992, they were on their way to win elections in Algeria. In 2002, they democratically took over in Turkey and Bangladesh. Removing Saddam Hussein, Husni Mubarak, Bashar Assad, and the Saudi princes is easier than convincing Middle Eastern Muslim peoples not to replace them with virulent Islamist ideologues.

That, of course, is the ultimate dilemma: the possibility that the people of the Middle East, given the chance to choose their own leaders, may actually elect Islamist ideologues even more repressive than the likes of Mubarak or Assad. But the example of Iran is telling: an anti-American revolution in 1979 put the mullahs in power, but in 2005 its population is arguably more pro-American than that of any other Arab or Muslim country.

Unlike in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, the Iranians can't blame the Yanks for installing or supporting their oppressors. There's a lesson there.

The story you thought you'd never read in The Independent

The front-page story in Robert Fisk's newspaper: "Was Bush right after all?"

It is barely six weeks since the US President delivered his second inaugural address, a paean to liberty and democracy that espoused the goal of "ending tyranny in our world". Reactions around the world ranged from alarm to amused scorn, from fears of a new round of "regime changes" imposed by an all-powerful American military, to suspicions in the salons of Europe that this time Mr Bush, never celebrated for his grasp of world affairs, had finally lost it. No one imagined that events would so soon cause the President's opponents around the world to question whether he had got it right.

The mood at the White House, on Capitol Hill and in the punditocracy has been transformed. The weapons of mass destruction fiasco is forgotten, the deaths of US troops have slipped from the front pages. Even Senator Edward Kennedy, bitter Democratic critic of the invasion, admits that Mr Bush deserves credit "for what seemed to be a tentative awakening of democracy in the region".

While I'm finding it increasingly hard to contain my excitement, I think it's a bit too early to celebrate. A few more car bombs, and Lebanon could spiral into civil war-era chaos again. But if the last few weeks have made the isolationists, appeasers and "realists" question everything they know about the Middle East, it truly is a wonderful time.

Update: Geez, now everyone is saying it. If Heather Mallick writes a "maybe Bush was right" column, I'm going to check the skies for signs of the apocalypse.

Update II: Scott Burgess examines the leader (Brit-speak for "editorial") in the same paper, which bends over backwards to argue that Middle East democratization is just, you know, happening right now, and that the Bushitler had nothing to do with it.

If you'd predicted this in 1988, they would have locked you up

According to Consumer Reports, this is the most reliable car sold in North America:

They also say the most reliable small car is the Ford Focus. I can only assume they've gotten a lot better since they built mine.

Your one-stop Lebanon shop

Across the Bay (which is based in Beirut, I believe) has been on a roll these days - especially with this devastating indictment of Juan Cole's latest loathsome apologia for Middle Eastern dictatorships.

Why Sgrena was shot

It won't change the mind of anyone who believes the Americans deliberately tried to kill Giuliana Sgrena, but the Washington Times cites Italian media sources which say the Italian government deliberately did not tell the U.S. military all about plans to get her back:

Italian agents likely withheld information from U.S. counterparts about a cash-for-freedom deal with gunmen holding an Italian hostage for fear that Americans might block the trade, Italian news reports said yesterday.

The decision by operatives of Italy's SISMI military intelligence service to keep the CIA in the dark about the deal for the release of reporter Giuliana Sgrena, might have "short-circuited" communications with U.S. forces controlling the road from Baghdad to the city's airport, the newspaper La Stampa said.

That would help explain why American troops opened fire on a car whisking the released hostage to a waiting airplane, wounding Miss Sgrena and killing the Italian intelligence operative who had just negotiated her release.
[...]
There were conflicting reports on the extent to which Italian authorities had informed their American counterparts about the operation, in which a reported $6 million was paid for the journalist's release.

Mr. Calipari and another senior SISMI operative concluded the deal for her release on Friday in Abu Dhabi and then flew to Baghdad aboard a secret service Falcon executive jet to collect her, La Stampa said.

At the airport, they met an Italian military liaison office,r and U.S. military authorities issued them passes allowing them to travel around Baghdad carrying weapons, the newspaper said citing SISMI sources.

The sources said the Italians explained "the terms of the mission" and "the exact nature of the operation" to U.S. officials at the airport. Sources also said an American officer was instructed to wait at the airport for Mr. Calipari and the freed hostage.

But La Stampa also quoted diplomatic sources saying vital information was withheld from the Americans.

"Italian intelligence decided to free Sgrena paying a sum to the kidnappers without informing American colleagues in Iraq who, if they had known about this, would have had to oppose it, to have impeded the operation," sources said.

"If this was the case, it could explain why American intelligence had not informed the American military commands about the operation and thus the patrol did not expect the car with the Italians."

Whatever the truth, the affair aroused public opinion and put pressure on Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to take a tough line with President Bush.

Mr. Berlusconi won plaudits last year when Mr. Calipari obtained the release of two young volunteers kidnapped in Iraq known as the two Simonas, also through payment of a multimillion dollar ransom.

Berlusconi's decision to send troops to Iraq was an act of stunning political bravery. His decision to pay off kidnappers is an act of stunning political cowardice.

Warning: May Induce Vomiting

Ward Churchill appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher the other night. Hoo, boy. The entire video is here - or, if you've just eaten, you can listen to Jeff Jarvis' audio fisking. Maher's big idea is to set up a "Why They Hate Us" Pavilion at the 9/11 site, which makes me wonder why no one has suggested the same thing for the Oklahoma City memorial. ("The bombers were driven to commit this crime by gun control, race-mixing and black helicopters.")

Bill Maher, the great free-speech martyr, is not only still on TV, but he's on a cable network where he can actually use dirty words and stuff. And he can have on a guest who compares the 9/11 victims - sorry, the "technocratic elite" - to Adolf Eichmann. That's some repressive police state the Americans have down there, isn't it?

Kurt the Cardinal

Kurt Warner has signed a one-year deal with the Arizona Cardinals, aka Football Siberia. It looks like he'll be starting next season (Dennis Green has no confidence in Josh McCown, as he showed by inexplicably benching him halfway through the season), but if he can finish 8-8, that would have to be considered a victory.

As usual, the Bears missed an opportunity to land a competent quarterback. (Please, please tell me we're not really interested in Jay Freaking Fiedler.)

The babes are on our side

P.J. O'Rourke, correct as usual, once noted that you can tell whether a social movement is succeeding by the number of attractive women attending their demonstrations.

Our money's no object

The federal gun registry didn't save the four RCMP officers killed in Alberta last week, but that's not stopping Tom Axworthy (yes, he's related to Lloyd) from saying we have to keep pouring more taxpayers' money into it:

Gun-related violence stalks the land. Last Thursday, four Mounties were killed in central Alberta, the force's biggest loss of life in 120 years. In our major cities hardly a week goes by without gang-related shootings.
[...]
What was evident in the 1960s is even more true today: Violent gang warfare is on the rise and it must be stopped. To have livable cities, they must be safe and we should start by strengthening, not avoiding gun control.

Most of the criticisms have been about the cost of the system — "a billion-dollar overrun" is the usual grist of the mill. It is true that the gun registry program costs $100 million per year to run, but so what? It costs $125 million per year to run the passport office. Both duties are labour intensive. Saving lives and helping the police do their job better for $100 million per year is a bargain. The lesson for progressives is never let your opposition define the issue. A $1 billion spent over 10 years is hardly an eye-popping figure.

So, gun-related crime has been getting worse since the registry was implemented, and therefore...the registry is a "stunning success". Oh, and a billion dollars is "hardly and eye-popping figure". It all makes sense, especially when you don't think about what else could have been done with all that money. For God's sake, don't think about that.

There might be an article out there which more succinctly sums up the Liberal (with an upper-case "L") mentality, but I haven't found it yet. (Speaking of the Rochfort Bridge disaster, Colby Cosh has posted some of the most intelligent commentary on the subject.)

If a boatload of animal-rights fanatics were drowning ten feet away from you, would you go play golf or see a movie?

Self-loathing human Paul Watson's anti-sealing ship is in trouble off the coast of Nova Scotia, and he needs the Canadian government - the same Canadian government supposedly wiping out the seals for no reason other than to satisfy Newfoundlanders' blood lust - to come and save him:

A group of international conservationists were waiting to be guided back to land by a coast guard vessel on Sunday after their ship began taking on water off the coast of Cape Breton.

The 54-metre vessel was 15 kilometres from St.Paul's Island in the Cabot Strait when an Aurora aircraft spotted the blue boat. A coast guard ice patrol vessel, "Sir Wilfred Grenfell" based in St.John's, Nfld. happened to be in the area at the time and was expected to rendezvous with the "Farley Mowat" by mid-afternoon.
[...]
The group departed Halifax on Friday for the Magdalen Islands as part of a documentary on the birth of harp seals.

The ship's captain, Paul Watson, alleged that the delay was political harassment because the group was to meet Richard Dean Anderson, better known as TV star MacGyver, in a few days to document the seals.

The curious career of Giuliana Sgrena

Rusty Shackleford (King of the Hill fans will appreciate that name) suggests that Sgrena, the Italian journalist recently freed by her Iraqi captors and subsequently wounded (and her rescuer killed) by American troops, arranged her own kidnapping. I'm wary of conspiracy theories even when they come from my own side, so it's going to take a lot more to convince me of this. But there can be little doubt whose side she was on even before this disaster:

The daughter of a World War II veteran, Sgrena was one of the founders of the peace movement in the 1980s.

She then returned to the country periodically, focusing on the suffering of ordinary Iraqis brought about by a war she was vehemently opposed to.
[...]
Sgrena's outspoken anti-war stance should have endeared her to Iraqi insurgents fighting the US-led forces, said friends and colleagues shocked at her capture on 4 February.

The message - recorded under the guns of masked men - certainly clashed with her quest for "people and social classes that are not well known, in countries that are often forgotten, in order to describe the reality of their daily lives", said her partner, Pier Scolari.

More evidence, as if any were needed, that actively opposing the Americans isn't going to protect an "infidel" from Islamofascist kidnappers.

Forza Fisichella!

It's a miracle - not only did Michael Schumacher not win the first F1 race of the year, he didn't even finish. (He collided with Nick Heidfeld's Williams and spun off with about 15 laps left.) I was skeptical of these new qualifying rules, but if they help to mix up the field a little, as we saw in Australia because of the crazy weather during the first session, I'm all for it.

This win was long overdue for Giancarlo Fisichella, who was only awarded the victory in Brazil last year a few days after the race ended. It's wonderful to see him in a truly competitive car for once - I won't say the Renaults are as good as the Ferraris before the Italians bring out their 2005 car, but they're looking very good so far.

The star of the race was "washed-up" David Coulthard, who came fourth in the Red Bull. Christian Klein also finished in the points, and the Red Bull team - which doesn't have Ford's millions backing it anymore - already looks more competitive than Jaguar. Yes, Coulthard was lucky to get a good starting position, but he successfully held off the McLarens and Williamses all through the race. (Speaking of which, I still say Juan Pablo Montoya made a mistake in switching from Williams to McLaren. Mark Webber stayed comfortably ahead of both McLarens.)

The most disappointing performers? The BARs weren't competitive at all. And Jacques Villeneuve fell from fourth on the grid to 14th in the Sauber, while teammate Felipe Massa surged from 19th to tenth. If he doesn't pick it up soon, this comeback probably won't last the whole season.

It still looks better than Driven

The trailer for the new Magic-VW-joins-NASCAR movie, Herbie: Fully Loaded, is online.

(via Jalopnik)

Our best and brightest, ladies and gentlemen

There's not much I can say about Lloyd Axworthy's petulant, sarcastic "open letter" to Condi Rice that Bob, Greg and Outside the Beltway haven't already said, except this: there are no adjectives which can adequately describe the hypocrisy of a Liberal Party of Canada member calling the United States a "one-party state".

Some days you look at the kind of person who becomes an "elder statesman" in Canada, and you feel like crumbling up in a ball and weeping.

Thank you, Osama!

Some people still insist Ronald Reagan had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the fall of Communism. Gorby did it all, you see, and it's just sheer coincidence that senile old Ronnie was in the White House for eight years before the Berlin Wall crumbled. Now, with democracy stirring in the Middle East, they have to find someone who deserves the credit more than Dubya, and here's Timothy Garton Ash's nominee:

Has Osama bin Laden started a democratic revolution in the Middle East?

(via Tim Blair)

Greater love hath no blogger...

...than one who would actually read a Linda McQuaig book so the rest of us don't have to:

As soon as you see the recommendation from Noam Chomsky on the cover of the book, you can pretty much guess where McQuaig is coming from. I refer to the Chomskyan school of thought as American Monist: in short, the only actor on the world stage is America. It is the sole source of evil and depradation. Everyone else is motivated solely by love and concern for humanity, whilst America is, singularly, motivated only by greed, lust for power and a general animus for all things good, sunny and nice. Only America acts; everyone else is acted upon by the Hegemon, and can’t be blamed for the consequences of their actions. America is the Primus Mobilis. And America is bad. So, for example, the notion that an economy-based increased lust for oil is driving foreign policy is solely a characteristic of America; no other nation on earth appears to give a shit about oil. Certainly not France, Russia or China; McQuaig hardly mentions them.

Read the whole thing, and find out why I consider Tarantino the best blogger in Canada (tied with Colby Cosh).

Thank you, Mr. Malkin

The man who captured Adolf Eichmann has died:

Peter Malkin, who has died aged 77, was the Mossad agent who grabbed Adolf Eichmann from a street in Buenos Aires and spirited him to Jerusalem, where he was tried for war crimes.

"`My sister's boy, my favourite playmate, he was just your son's age. Also blond and blue-eyed, just like your son. And you killed him'," Malkin wrote in his memoir, Eichmann in My Hands, which was dedicated to his sister. "Genuinely perplexed by the observation, he actually waited a moment to see if I would clarify it. `Yes,' he said finally, `but he was Jewish, wasn't he?'"

Armanious killer arrested

The man who allegedly killed the family of Hossam Armanious - a Jersey City Coptic Christian who got into heated online arguments with Muslims - has been arrested. Originally suspected by many bloggers (including myself) to be an Islamic extremist, the accused killer is a neighbour named Edward McDonald, and police insist the motive was robbery:

The youngest member of the massacred Jersey City Coptic clan was butchered after recognizing a neighbor as one of the men who invaded her home.

"It was a robbery gone horribly wrong," Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio said yesterday. "It was a very scary situation. It was a crime of opportunity."

Now, it's possible the guy could be an extremist Muslim (just like John Walker Lindh, Lee Malvo, Richard Reid, etc.), but it seems increasingly unlikely - and the whole sad story provides a good warning against jumping to conclusions. (Just like Oklahoma City, which was also originally blamed on Islamofascists, you know we'll never hear the end of this from CAIR.)

The pressure builds

Lebanese troops have surrounded Syria's intelligence offices in Beirut. This CNN story does not say which say their guns are pointed:

Lebanese army troops and armored vehicles took up positions Saturday around the Syrian intelligence headquarters in Beirut.

Massive Lebanese protests and mounting international concern is pressuring Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

Update: Bashar Assad, speaking at one of these Ceausescu-style "popular demonstrations", says the Syrians will pull back their troops to eastern Lebanon.

Can we stop pretending it's not anti-semitism?

Britain's Muslim Public Affairs Council rushes to the defence of Ken Livingstone with a rant that begins with a Shylock reference and degenerates from there. (Livingstone obliged his new friends yesterday with a Guardian article accusing Israel of "ethnic cleansing", calling Ariel Sharon a war criminal and saying anti-Jewish attacks in Europe really aren't that big a deal.) Meanwhile, in Australia, pro-Palestinian demonstrators displayed placards with Jewish community leaders (and also Theodor Herzl) with big red "X"es over their photos.

Yes, in theory, it's possible to be "anti-Zionist" without hating the Jews. But it sure doesn't seem to work that way in practice.

The life and death of a "devil"

Today's Edmonton Sun has a feature on James Roszko, who apparently took his own life after killing four RCMP officers at a marijuana grow-op yesterday. Considering his reputation and violent history, the shootout and killings seem almost inevitable.

Sadly, the comments sections at my own site and The Shotgun have already degenerated into arguments about gun control and drug legalization. Guys, can't we at least wait until these brave officers are buried before we start arguing about politics?

"Look at me! I'm being controversial again!"

Ted Rall, who has somehow managed to avoid the death camps for the past four years, has scribbled a cartoon that says George W. Bush is worse than Hitler.

A few years ago, Rall could make me angry on a regular basis. But shock value tends to wear off after a while, and now he's kind of like this guy. At this rate, he'll be denying the Holocaust by 2007.

(via Michelle Malkin)

They're only killing Israelis. Not our problem

That, in a nutshell, is James Wolcott's position on Hezbollah, an organization that, until 9/11, had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group:

Couple of weeks ago on Tina Brown's Topic [A], Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman squawked about Iran's support for terrorism in general, Hezbollah in particular. Now I don't pretend to be the Mideast savant Jonah Goldberg is, but my dim understanding [he said it, not me - Ed.] is that Hezbollah's fight is with Israel, they pose no direct threat to the United States; ergo, let Israel fight its own battles, for which it is more than adequately equipped.

(Of course, when Israel does "fight its own battles", like in Jenin, people like Wolcott scream bloody murder. Literally. But I digress.)

Hezbollah and Al-Qaida may not be literally the same group, but they both spring from the same fetid swamp of murderous, militant Islamist ideology. You cannot move against one and ignore the other, any more than America in 1941 could have declared war on Japan but ignored Nazi Germany. To believe Hezbollah would just sit back, open a beer and declare victory after destroying Israel, you'd have to be...well, a Vanity Fair columnist, I guess.

The Kos kooks are singing the same tune, savaging Democrats Donna Brazile and Sen. Chuck Schumer for supporting the "neocon" Foundation for Defence of Democracies, which just released a book about Hezbollah:

So I took a look at the FDD website, here. Sure enough, the group is a regular rogues gallery: Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey, Gary Bauer, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Zell Miller, Frank Gaffney, J.D. Hayworth, Bill Kristol, Mark Foley, Clifford May ... and Donna Brazille, Frank Lautenberg, and Charles Schumer. Um, what is going on here? I thought these were solid Democrats?
[...]
So I guess I am very confused. What the heck are Brazille, Lautenberg, and Schumer hanging around with these folks? I understand about [Joe] Lieberman and [Zell] Miller, but I thought the others were solid Democrats.

In the Howard Dean/Kos Democratic Party, the very idea that you can be a Democrat and an anti-terror hawk is a scandal. The Republicans abandoned isolationism after Pearl Harbor, but the Democrats have embraced it after 9/11.

Good thing FDR and JFK, who took their country's defence very seriously, aren't around to see what a joke their party has become.

Officers Down

Four RCMP officers have been killed during a raid on a marijuana grow-op in Alberta:

At approximately 10 a.m. MT, a shootout broke out between police and a male suspect at a farmhouse in Rochfort Bridge near the community of Mayerthorpe, about 130 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

He added that not since the Northwest Rebellion of 1885 have so many police officers been killed in the line of duty.

The time to argue about how this will affect drug and gun-control policy will come later. For now, it is simply time to mourn.

State-sponsored genocide

Elsewhere in the "Hopeless Continent", a Janjaweed militia leader has admitted that the Darfur genocide - death toll, 100,000 and counting - is being orchestrated by the Sudanese government:

Musa Hilal, named by the US as a Janjaweed leader, told the group that militia attacks on ethnic Africans were directed by Sudanese army commanders.

Human Rights Watch said Mr Hilal made the allegations during a videotaped interview in Arabic, conducted in September last year.
[...]
The Janjaweed are alleged to have killed thousands and used mass rape against non-Arab groups.

More than two million people are estimated to have fled their homes and at least 100,000 are thought to have died during the crisis.

I think it was Mark Steyn who said we'll be swooning over the movie Hotel Darfur in ten years.

Great job, Bob

Robert Mugabe now admits his "land redistribution" scheme has been a disastrous failure - a failure he will cure with even more land seizures. And hey, he sure stuck it to Whitey, didn't he?

President Robert Mugabe confessed yesterday that millions of acres of prime land seized from Zimbabwe's white farmers are now lying empty and idle.

"President Mugabe expressed disappointment with the land use, saying only 44 per cent of the land distributed is being fully utilised," state television reported. "He warned the farmers that the government will not hesitate to redistribute land that is not being utilised."
[...]
The Commercial Farmers' Union said that Zimbabwe grew only 850,000 tonnes of maize last year, not enough to meet domestic demand. In 1999, the last year before the land grab began, Zimbabwe grew 1.5 million tonnes. Then, Zimbabwe also earned about £263 million from tobacco exports. Last year, production had fallen by more than 70 per cent and earnings were down to £77 million.

An Economist cover story a few years ago called Africa "The Hopeless Continent". I ain't arguing.

What liberal media?

A Freudian slip from BBC anchor James Naughtie:

THE BBC’s reputation for fair and balanced reporting was at risk last night after top broadcaster James Naughtie blurted out his pro-Labour sympathies.

The blunder came on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme. Mr Naughtie has frequently given Conservatives a rough ride in interviews while apparently giving Labour frontmen an easy time.

Yeah, this story's in The Sun, which is defiantly biased in the other direction. But Britons aren't forced to pay for it, either.

Bloggers n' booze

Photos of the Toronto blog bash can be found here. And Michael Kelemen has a slightly embellished roundup.

Yes, that Antonia Zerbisias actually showed up. (It's pronounced "An-to-NEE-a", by the way.) Made it out alive, too. (See? We're not such nasty people after all.)

Bob Tarantino, Zerb, and me:

Bruce Rolston, some guy whose name I've forgotten (sorry!), Kathy Shaidle's boyfriend Arnie, David Janes, Kathy Shaidle and Bob Tarantino's girlfriend (Heather, I think. I'm horrible with names):

Someone else whose name I've forgotten (sorry again!), Michael Kelemen, Anthony from the Meatriarchy, Zerb, Tom Forsyth and Mike Brock:

Mike Brock, unknown hiding person, Nick Packwood, Debbye ("American in T.O.), moi, and Damian Brooks:

Do we look anything like you expected?

Snowed in

Good news: I'm back from my trip. Bad news: in addition to having to go to work today, my driveway is covered in snow up to my waist.

Looks like I'll be using all my free time to shovel out today. At least I'll be able to tell my grandkids one of these "in my day, we had to walk 8 miles to school in snow right up to your waist" stories, and not be a complete liar about it.

Update: screw this. I'm getting someone to come plow it out.