April 30, 2005
The £83 million championship
Chelsea Football Club, owned by spendthrift Russian oil billionaire Roman Abramovich, has clinched the Premiership title.
They're undeniably deserving champions, and I'm glad the Blues won it instead of Arsenal. But the club lost £83 million last season, and who knows how soon Abramovich may get bored with his expensive new toy? All I'm saying is, Nottingham Forest were also champions once, so don't get cocky.
The fall of Saigon Ho Chi Minh City
Chrenkoff on the end of the Vietnam War:
Ejecting American imperialists out of the country: 2 million dead
Building communist utopia: 1 million refugees, hundreds of thousands of "reeducated" political prisoners, basic human rights suppressed, economy ruined while the rest of Asia is thriving
Admitting after three decades that your stupid communist policies have failed and the experiment is just about over: priceless.
Like China, Vietnam's economy is Communist in name only - but its political system, unfortunately, has hardly changed at all.
And we would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you meddling Liberals
Despite a daily parade of horrors emanating from the Gomery Commission, Canadians still believe the Conservatives harbor a secret "hidden agenda" to destroy the country:
The Liberal Party's strategy to portray Stephen Harper as an ideologue with a hidden agenda up his sleeve appears to be working.
Over half of Canadians still don't trust the Conservative leader, according to a poll conducted by The Strategic Counsel for CTV and The Globe and Mail.
Of the 1,000 people surveyed, 57 per cent said they believed Harper's Tories are keeping their most unpopular plans under wraps -- plans that many Canadians might find unpalatable should they come to fruition under a Conservative government.
"Clearly (Harper's) not been able to shed some of his history with the Alliance and Reform party," said Timothy Woolstencroft, a managing partner with The Strategic Counsel. "There is a real profound sense out there that Stephen Harper has got a hidden agenda. And the Liberals have been successful in implanting that image."
Every political party has its share of kooks, but a Conservative MP saying something offensive is going to get a lot more media attention than an idiot from the Liberals or NDP. That's not whining, that's a fact. When the campaign begins, Harper has to make sure the kooks keep their mouths shut. (Conservative bloggers should keep that in mind, too. The DUmmies almost certainly turned some American voters away from John Kerry last year, and the last thing we need is to see offensive blog posts appearing on a Liberal campaign ad.)
But the Conservatives' top priority should be setting out one of the most detailed election platforms in Canadian history. Let it all out on the table. Even if some of the policies (on health care, for example) are not popular, that would still be far less damaging than accusations of a "secret agenda" that the Tories are too cowardly and/or devious to reveal to Canadians.
Canadian voters are more comfortable with the devil they know than the one they don't, and that's why they keep going back to the Liberals, no matter how many times they get screwed by the NaturalGoverningParty. Stephen Harper has to make sure the voters know him well.
April 29, 2005
The sad thing is, it's not even shocking anymore
Zimbabwe has been re-elected to the UN Human Rights Commission. At least Canada (along with the US and Australia, but not Britain) spoke out against it, but why are democratic nations even legitimizing this mockery of a human-rights organization by staying on as members?
The UN looks more and more like Superman's Bizarro World every day.
A Blogging Business Proposal
Roger L. Simon and a bunch of other top bloggers are announcing two new ventures: a business that will sell advertising on several blogs at once, and a blogger "news service". The name? "Pajamas Media".
I've written to express my interest in joining up - but this doesn't mean I'm going to get rid of BlogAds, with which I've done pretty well. (Simon also praises BlogAds, and says this isn't meant to be a direct competitor.) More news should be coming out over the next few weeks. And call me optimistic if you want, but I bet this is going last a lot longer than Ariana Huffington's celebrity blog collective.
Told Ya
Bush's press conference was cut off in mid-sentence by CBS, NBC and Fox, all of whom had popular programs to air. ABC showed the whole thing, which undoubtedly angered all 12 fans of Jake in Progress.
Update: a reader tipped me off to this Washington Post story about the scheduling nightmare, in which one of my blog posts is cited.
I know it's blasphemous to ask this, but is it really necessary for the "Big 4" networks to cut into their programming for this kind of thing? Almost everyone has access to PBS, C-SPAN and the all-news channels, and no one seems to mind the fact that UPN and The WB - which don't have news divisions at all - disn't cover the press conference. In the age of CNN/Fox News/MSNBC, network news is looking increasingly obsolete.
"America lost, capitalism won"
There's a fascinating article about Communist-in-name-only Vietnam in the latest Economist.
Momentum stalls
Incredibly, Martin's "Let the Gomery Commission finish its work, and just forget about the fact that I called the last election before the hearings even began" line seems to be working:
A new poll shows that if an election was held today, the Liberals and the Conservatives would be neck-and-neck in the race for national support. The numbers show a boost for the Liberals in the past week, indicating a recovery from bombshell news from the sponsorship inquiry.
In the total sample of the poll, conducted for CTV and The Globe and Mail by The Strategic Counsel, Liberals are polling at 30 per cent and the Conservatives trail close behind at 28 per cent. (That two percent gap is within the poll's margin of error, meaning the parties are statistically tied.)
The NDP are at 18 per cent in this new poll, and the Green Party is at 10 per cent.
In Quebec, the numbers are less encouraging for the Liberals: They have 16 per cent support, compared to 55 per cent for the Bloc Quebecois and nine per cent for the Conservatives. [The Green Party is in third place, with 12% support, in Quebec. - DP]
"The grip they have on the province of Quebec is getting tighter and tighter and tighter," said pollster Allan Gregg of the BQ's continuing strength. "And the federalist forces appear to be in complete disarray."
Nationally, the numbers indicate Conservative support has weakened in the past two weeks, after a surge during the worst of the sponsorship inquiry revelations.
"In two weeks, as the news agenda shifts away from corruption to now election timing, they are now on the wrong side issue, and their support falls," Gregg said.
Another survey shows pretty much the same thing - Liberals at 27%, the Conservatives at 25. Andrew Coyne says Conservatives should resist the temptation to lash out at the electorate, lest they come across like a right-wing Canadian version of the Democratic Underground kooks:
But look, folks, I'd drop the "sheeple" bit, if I were you. I get a strong feeling of deja vu, reading some of the comments: it's the same sort of stuff you read on Democratic boards in the States. Blaming the people is the consolation of losers. If you haven't yet persuaded them to see the world the way you do, pick up your socks. Hone your message. Or better yet, have one.
April 28, 2005
Good Riddance
If there was ever a time when it's appropriate to speak ill of the dead, this is it:
J.B. Stoner, an unrepentant white supremacist and anti-Semite convicted in the civil rights-era bombing of a black church, has died. He was 81.
Stoner died Saturday of complications from pneumonia in a nursing home in Walker County in northwest Georgia.
A Georgia native, Stoner was one of the angriest voices in opposition to the civil rights movement. At age 18, he revived a dormant chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Chattanooga, Tenn. A few years later he headed the Stoner Christian Anti-Jewish Party.
Stoner was a suspect in the 1958 bombing of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., but he wasn't indicted until 1977. The church was empty at the time of the bombing.
At his trial, he was convicted in part on the basis of venomous statements he made at the time.
When asked if he made a hateful quotation found in an old newspaper clipping, Stoner replied, "I don't think I said that, but I wish I had." A mostly white jury found him guilty in 90 minutes.
[...]
In an interview last year from his nursing home, Stoner bedridden and partly paralyzed remained unapologetic, saying: "A person isn't supposed to apologize for being right."
More on this thoroughly loathsome human being here. Hopefully, it won't be much longer before all of these unrepentant old segregationists are gone for good.
Coincidence?
The newspaper for the Australian Communist Party - actual, honest-to-God Stalinists - is called The Guardian.
Two awards
Jean Chretien will be accompanied by two Mounties, in dress uniform, when he accepts an award from a Philadelphia gay-rights group this evening. I have no problem with that (the Mounties were provided by the Canadian Tourism Commission, which undoubtedly knows that the gay-and-lesbian tourist market can be pretty lucrative), but it's telling to contrast this with the time the U.S. military wanted to give medals to Canadian snipers in Afghanistan.
The enemy we dare not name
James Lileks on Hollywood's post-9/11 cowardice about using Islamofascist killers as bad guys:
For some, the very act of mentioning Islamist terrorism is a political act, since it plays into the Bushitler/RoveCo Hate Axis scheme to shove McDonald's hamburgers down everyone's falafel hole. We can make movies about brave soldiers fighting Islamist extremists when Hillary's in power — until then, ixnay on the Uslimsmay.
Hence this strange silence. It's like making a movie at the height of the civil rights era about the horrible injustices suffered by redheads. Originally, the terrorists of "The Interpreter" were from the Middle East. Likewise the terrorists who set off a nuclear bomb in "The Sum of All Fears"; they were changed to neo-Nazis. It's a miracle the 2001 film "Pearl Harbor" didn't show Hawaii attacked by militia members outraged over Waco.
[...]
Just what you expect from the Grating Generation, perhaps. It makes you nostalgic for the '80s, when Michael J. Fox fled in terror from pursuing Libyans in "Back to the Future." When that movie looks braver than modern post-9/11 drama, you know something's missing. Guts, for starters.
The only exception is Team America: World Police, and even in that film the main villain was a ronery North Korean. The Hollywood set keeps warning that America has become a Christian theocracy, but movies and TV shows can slander and smear Christians unreservedly - and the producers pat themselves on the back for being so "brave" about it. But God forbid we make the 9/11 hijackers look "evil" or anything! Liberal sensitivity undoubtedly has a lot to do with it, but I think the real reason was explained by a British cartoonist asked why Ariel Sharon was more heavily criticized than Arafat: "Jews don't issue fatwas."
I'm almost afraid to see the politically-correct horror that is Kingdom of Heaven, which was given the CAIR seal of approval last week. (In the early forties, did producers screen their WW2 epics for the German-American Bund to make sure no one was offended?)
Update: it's one thing to acknowledge that America (and the West) is at war with Islamic radicals, and something else entirely to slur all Arabs as "Bin Ladens". But that should go without saying.
Losing Toronto
The Liberals are still leading in T.O., but not by much:
Support for the federal Liberal Party in their Greater Toronto Area stronghold has fallen sharply since the June 2004 election according to a new survey by Environics Research Group conducted between April 21 and 26.
The survey of 992 residents shows that across the Greater Toronto Area, 41 percent of eligible and decided voters would support the Liberal Party if an election were held today. This represents a 10-point drop from the 51 percent of the vote that the Liberals won in the GTA in the June 2004 election, when they virtually swept the region. Both opposition parties have gained ground. The Conservative Party now has the support of 35 percent of GTA voters (up seven points since the election); while the New Democratic Party now has the support of 21 percent (up six points since the election). One in ten (11%) GTA voters are undecided about which party might deserve their support.
In the "905 belt", the Liberals and Tories are pretty much tied.
How to make American Idol interesting
This might just be the greatest website of all time.
I actually caught the last few minutes of Idol last night, in which the infamous Scott Savol survived while hard-rock sellout Constantine was voted out. If Savol makes it further, I think I'll start watching regularly.
Press Conference Tonight
President Bush will take to the airwaves at 8:30PM Eastern to talk about Social Security.
Wanna know how you can get these poll numbers up, Mr. President? Don't schedule a press conference during 'Survivor', 'CSI' and 'The Apprentice'. Really, why do politicians always hold these things on Thursday night? Why not Friday, when no popular shows are on?
Update: why can't something like this be pre-empted instead? (Considering the dreadful anti-Bush poetry Rosie writes on her blog, I think it would be hilarious if her big "comeback" TV movie was pre-empted by a Bush press conference.)
Another "values" campaign
Paul Martin is musing about another election campaign in which the Tories will be portrayed as eeeeevil neoconservatives out to destroy everything true Canadians hold dear. Just like 2000 and 2004, in other words:
Speaking at his Langevin Block office across from Parliament Hill, where he conducted a whole range of back-to-back media interviews yesterday, Martin offered sneak peeks into how he plans to fight an election when his government falls.
It's not an academic question: Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said yesterday that he's ready to provoke a collapse of the government. In many ways, Martin appears to be envisioning a replay of last year's campaign — or at least the last two weeks of it, when Liberals rebounded from almost-inevitable defeat to shaky survival, largely by becoming the underdog and portraying a Harper government as a threat to health care and Canadian social values.
The only differences this time, the Prime Minister signalled yesterday, is that education will replace health care as the big-ticket item and that Martin believes the differences between Liberals and Conservatives will be even more sharply defined.
"I can tell you in terms of the next election campaign, we've set out that areas like education are going to be very important to us," Martin said.
"It may well be (a replay), but it's being brought into even sharper focus. If the Conservatives vote against child care, that's an indication of their values. If the Conservatives vote against climate change, that's an indication of their values. If the Conservatives vote against a budget which is fiscally responsible and which essentially fulfills the government's objectives because in fact what the Conservatives want to do is to play partisan politics with the Bloc Québécois, that is the perspective of their objectives," he said.
Canadians know what they're getting with the Liberals, Martin said, because this year's budget laid it out in some detail. That budget, though, is in the midst of being adjusted as part of a new deal with the NDP.
"I mean our agenda is pretty clear. Canadians know exactly where we want to take the country and they know the fundamental differences between ourselves and Stephen Harper," Martin said.
Here's another reminder as to why the Liberals will be smearing the Tories instead of running on their own record:
Fictitious hourly charges, in some cases chalked up to employees who didn't exist for work that was never done, were used to pad his sponsorship bills to the federal government, a former ad company owner has testified.
Paul Coffin, president of Communication Coffin, said the padding was recommended by Chuck Guité, the bureaucrat who ran the program.
[...]
Asked whether he was told to provide fake invoices, Coffin admitted he was. Under sustained questioning from Justice John Gomery, he eventually said by whom: "It was Mr. Guité."
When Guité retired from the public service in 1999, Coffin contributed $500 to his farewell party. He also bought Guité's 26-foot Bayliner cruiser for $27,000.
And when he owed $5,900 to Guité for boating accessories like a generator and spare propeller, he told his friend to produce a bogus invoice. "I probably told him `send me a bill ... for the amount of the money owing to you and just put down the name of one of my clients and I will be able to put it through my books as an office expense,'" he said.
Coffin also hired Guité's company, Oro Communications, paying him $15,000 in the winter of 2000 to work on a sponsorship deal for a Trois-Rivières auto race. The project ultimately failed.
The inquiry also heard how Coffin's company profits suddenly doubled in 1998, after the bulk of the sponsorship commissions started rolling in. Those increased revenues resulted from dubious billing practices. Coffin admitted using "misnomers" to pad his invoices to the government so they would match amounts agreed upon beforehand.
He would also charge commissions on contracts where he did little more than hand off money to sub-contractors, and told how "production fees" came to encompass time spent at meetings, visiting sporting events and travelling with his wife.
In the nothing-surprises-me-anymore department, there's talk that Martin may dangle Senate appointments and patronage positions in front of Conservative and independent MPs, to increase his chances of passing the budget. I'm kind of surprised he hasn't offered me anything, to start writing nicer things about him. (It'll take one of these, Mr. Prime Minister.)
Who was Ali Alwan?
More details about a Canadian citizen allegedly killed in Iraq by U.S. forces:
A Canadian man who was killed in Iraq last week – possibly by U.S. troops – lived near Toronto for years and also held Iraqi citizenship, the CBC has learned.
Some media cited unidentified sources who said he may have died after U.S. forces "tracked" a target, using a helicopter gunship, but Foreign Affairs said it's still investigating conflicting reports of the death. The deparment didn't release his name or other details.
However, the CBC confirmed on Wednesday that Ali Alwan, 44, had dual citizenship and lived in the Toronto suburb of Newmarket for at least seven years until last August.
Then he packed up his apartment and travelled to Iraq with his wife Thuraya and two children.
His boss, Vijay Doobay, said Alwan told him that he would return soon.
"A month or two, he said. There was every indication, in my mind, he was going to return."
Alwan was a skilled mechanic and drove tractor-trailers for a living, delivering Canadian auto parts into the United States.
"He wasn't really enthused about crossing the border as much as he was," Doobay said. "He was making five trips a week from Newmarket across to Michigan and back, and he'd always been held up at the border, because of what he told me, because of his race."
There are two possibilities: either Alwan was driving a truck for a contracting firm helping to rebuild the country, or...
I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but this is starting to look awfully suspicious.
Elephant Burgers
That's what they're eating in Zimbabwe, where the news gets more and more surreal by the day:
Fresh from his disputed victory in Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections, President Robert Mugabe has turned his sights on the country's wildlife reserves in a bid to feed thousands of malnourished villagers.
Zimbabwe's national parks have been ordered to work with rural district councils to begin the wholesale slaughter of big game. National park rangers said they had already shot 10 elephants in the past week. The meat was barbecued at festivities to mark 25 years of independence. Four of the animals were reportedly shot in view of tourists near Lake Kariba, the largest man-made lake in Africa and a major wildlife haven.
Five years after ordering white-owned farms to be confiscated, the Mugabe regime has turned a country once known as the breadbasket of Africa into a famished land. An estimated 4 million rural poor suffer from food shortages.
The wildlife directive is a major blow to efforts by conservationists to rehabilitate a wildlife sector devastated by Mr Mugabe's confiscation policy. The chaotic farm invasions saw party militants storming into conservation areas - private and state-owned - to slaughter animals. Unscrupulous South African hunters also joined in the looting, paying hefty kickbacks to politicians to go into conservation areas and shoot lions, leopards and cheetahs for trophies.
[...]
Food ran out in Zimbabwe soon after the election and the country has experienced acute power and fuel shortages over the past two weeks. Basic commodities have disappeared from shops. Mr Mugabe has said he will jail manufacturers whom he accuses of creating shortages to encourage people to revolt.
Update: the New York Times has posted a video feature on the Zimbabwean nightmare.
April 27, 2005
Another desperation move
I didn't think I could get any more shocked by Paul Martin's desperate moves to save his government, until I read this:
Prime Minister Paul Martin says corporate tax reductions are still possible, despite his budget deal with the NDP, but only if the Conservatives throw their support behind the move.
Martin's announcement, repeated Wednesday by his finance minister, paints Stephen Harper's Tories into a tight political corner - if they bring down the minority government, the Liberals can blame them for blocking billions in tax cuts.
"We have pulled the large corporate tax cuts out of this budget to be pursued in a separate piece of legislation," Martin told The Canadian Press in an interview Wednesday.
"And that separate piece of legislation we'll introduce as soon as the Conservatives or somebody say they will support it.
"The corporate tax cuts remain intact. It's going to be up to the Conservatives to tell us whether or not they will support them."
The government has consistently refused to table a separate piece of legislation to pass the Atlantic Accord, on the premise that there would be no time to pass every piece of legislation attached to the budget separately. Looks like they found some time - and some money.
I don't want to know what these guys are going to try next.
Backtracking already?
That's what it sounds like to me:
Paul Martin was on John Gormley Live (650am Rawlco - Saskatoon) this morning via phone - briefly. He's learned to fill airtime with drawn out repetition to put off speaking to callers or facing new questions.
Early in the interview, he acknowledged that even with the support of Jack Layton his government's fate rests on the independants in parliament. Gormley did pin him down on one question, though - if the NDP demands for $4.6 billion in spending on social programs and the environment were valid, why wasn't the spending in the budget in the first place?
Martin replied that the NDP extortion was "simply an acceleration of the existing liberal government agenda" that adding it to the budget now was just "bringing it forward"...
Then - he added that the $4.6 billion "won't be spent unless we can be assured that at least 2 billion in debt can be brought down".
I wonder if Jack Layton knows this?
Andrew Coyne, who friggin' owns this story these days, notes that Martin will be dipping into the government's contingency reserve to pay for his agreement with the NDP (the "Pact of Steal", one Shotgun reader calls it). I guess, if you consider the Liberal party to be the very embodiment of Canada itself, this would be a national emergency.
Essential pre-election reading
Nomination Watch, a new blog dedicated to finding out who's running for what party in the next election. (Via Paul Wells, who also has must-read posts about the Layton-Martin pact here and here.)
One interesting rumour: former "Rat Packer" John Nunziata, booted from the Liberals in 1996 for speaking out against their failure to abolish the GST, may run for the Conservatives this time around. (Anyone remember Nunziata's run for the federal Liberal leadership in 1990? No?)
A man can change his mind, can't he?
Paul Martin didn't always think Alfonso Gagliano was such a bad guy. No matter what Martin says on the campaign trail, never forget - and never let him forget - that he was finance minister when Adscam was going on.
(via Adam Daifallah at The Shotgun)
Creeping Fascism!
What is happening in America, when you can't even make a joke about killing the President on the radio without getting a visit from the Secret Service?
Damn you, Ashcroft!
(via LGF)
Update: it gets worse: if you exhort people to go join the Taliban and take up arms against American soldiers, there might be consequences for you! It's worse than Nazi Germany, I tells ya!
A celebration of totalitarianism
Anne Appelbaum says next month's WW2 victory celebrations, which President Bush and other Western leaders will attend, is being used as a propaganda opportunity by crypto-Stalinist Vladmir Putin:
Try, if you can, to picture the scene. A vast crowd in Red Square: Lenin's tomb and Stalin's memorial in the background. Soldiers march in goose step behind rolling tanks, and the air echoes with martial music, occasionally drowned out by the whine of fighter jets. On the reviewing stand, statesmen are gathered: Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North Korea, Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former dictator of Poland -- and President George W. Bush.
That description may sound fanciful or improbable. It is neither. On the contrary, that is more or less what will appear on your television screen May 9, when the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II is celebrated in Moscow. I have exaggerated only one detail: Although Kim Jong Il has been invited, his attendance has not yet been confirmed. But Jaruzelski is definitely coming, as are Lukashenko, Bush and several dozen other heads of state. President Vladimir Putin of Russia will preside.
[...]
To its credit, the White House is trying to mitigate the impact of what is, at the very least, an extraordinarily bad photo opportunity and is nicely blossoming into a full-fledged controversy as well. Bush will go to Latvia before Moscow, to meet with the Baltic leaders -- all now members of NATO and therefore U.S. allies -- and afterward will visit the Georgian Republic, where a democratically elected president has recently taken power in the teeth of Russian opposition. But if we are to avoid turning the anniversary of the end of World War II into a celebration of the triumph of Stalinism, more should be done. To begin with, Congress should vote on a resolution proposed this month by Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.), which calls on Russia to condemn the Nazi-Soviet pact as well as the illegal annexation of the Baltic states. "The truth is a powerful weapon for healing, forgiving and reconciliation," the resolution states, in a burst of unusual congressional eloquence, "but its absence breeds distrust, fear and hostility."
Bush, too, should show that he understands what really happened in 1945. Every recent U.S. president has visited Auschwitz, and many have visited concentration camps in Germany, too. Perhaps it's time for American presidents to start a new tradition and pay their respects to the victims of Stalin.
It hasn't gotten as much attention as his remarks about the collapse of the USSR being a "catastrophe", but Appelbaum notes that Putin recently justified the Nazi-Soviet Pact in a recent interview. I was cautiously optimistic about Putin when he was first election - but the more I learn about him, the less I like him.
I shoulda known
Syria may have withdrawn its soldiers from Lebanon, but its intelligence agents are still spread throughout the country.
Totalitarian dictatorships don't usually stop occupying countries without pulling some kind of trick like this.
The forgotten Rachels
Many other young women with that name have been killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - but none of them were pro-Palestinian terror dupes, so no one will be writing a play about them anytime soon:
"My Name is Rachel Thaler" is not the title of a play that is likely to be produced anytime soon in London. Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following the February 16, 2002 attack, when a suicide bomber approached a crowd of teenagers and blew himself up.
She was a British citizen, born in London, where her grandparents still live. Yet I doubt that anyone at London's Royal Court Theatre or most people in the British media, have heard of her. "Not a single British journalist has ever interviewed me or mentioned her death," her mother Ginette told me last week.
Thaler's parents donated her organs for transplant (helping to save the life of a young Russian man), and grieved quietly. After the accidental killing of Rachel Corrie, by contrast, her parents embarked on a major publicity campaign. They traveled to Ramallah to accept a plaque from Yasser Arafat on behalf of their daughter. They circulated her emails and diary-entries to a world media eager to publicize them.
Among those who published extracts from them in 2003 was the influential British leftist daily The Guardian. This in turn inspired a new play, "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which opened this month at the Royal Court Theatre, one of London most prestigious venues. (The New York Times recently described it as "the most important theatre in Europe.")
The play is co-edited and directed by Katharine Viner, the editor of The Guardian's weekend magazine, and by film star Alan Rickman (of Die Hard and Harry Potter fame). Their script weaves together extracts from Corrie's journals and e-mails.
[...]
It is ironic to reflect that there have been some real victims of the Intifada called Rachel — and it is hard to believe that these critics have ever heard of them. All these other Rachels died within a few months of Corrie, but — unlike her — in circumstances that weren't disputed. They were deliberately murdered: Rachel Levy (17, blown up in a grocery store), Rachel Levi (19, shot while waiting for the bus), Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband, son and father while at home celebrating a Passover meal), Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, leaving three young children), Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 16 while at home).
More here.
No going back for Afghanistan
Television was banned under the Taliban. Now, Afghanistan has its first superstar TV host:
With his spiky hair, ripped jeans and beaming grin, the music show presenter Shakeb Isaar makes an unlikely corrupter of youth.
The front man for daily youth show Hop has become Afghanistan's first celebrity television presenter. Everywhere he goes he is mobbed by crowds, although the fan mail is punctuated with death threats from al-Qa'ida.
Shakeb, 22, is one of the talents driving a television revolution in a land where viewers were used to nothing more exciting than folk singers and speeches by government ministers.
The channel behind this revolution is Tolo TV, the country's first private station, which went live in Kabul in October with a mix of entertainment and investigative journalism the like of which Afghans had never seen before.
The formula has been a success; the station has beaten its state rival in the ratings war to grab 80 per cent of the viewers. But it has also provoked fury among conservatives.
[...]
However, the show that has made the most fuss is Hop. The shows are popular with a young generation hungry for entertainment. Thousands of them vote by SMS every week for their favourite singer on Hop's sister programme, Top 10.
By Western standards it's pretty tame. Any hint of cleavage or gyrations by the Bollywood and Uzbek dancers is cut and the station would not dare show Afghan women dancing.
However, Hop has been condemned by the conservative establishment. Fazl-e Hadi Shinwari, the chief justice, branded Shakeb a corrupter of youth.
The presenter does not feel intimidated. "That's nothing," he said. "The Taliban and al-Qa'ida have said they will kill me. But I don't care. This is the new Afghanistan and they are not a part of it."
Does anyone think this will make a difference?
Yes, I'm going to watch ABC's shocking!!! "expose" of American Idol, and I bet you will, too. But really, even if they definitively prove the competition is rigged, I don't think it's going to hurt the ratings that much. Even the program's most dedicated viewers are almost certainly suspicious of the way it's really run, but as long as Simon keeps making snarky comments and contestants keep butchering old Motown standards, I doubt they really care. It's like Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs or George W. Bush not fulfilling his National Guard commitments - by and large, the press may think it's an important issue, but the supporters do not.
There is one exception: I only watch American Idol (and Canadian Idol) during the first few weeks, when the hopelessly untalented, deluded auditioners are shown. It's hilarious precisely becuase the contestants are so convinced they're good - and if it turns out these auditions have been staged by the producers, the joke is ruined. Who wants to watch people pretending to sing badly?
April 26, 2005
Agreement Reached
Paul Martin and Jack Layton have reached a deal on the federal budget:
The New Democrats and Liberals have reached an "agreement in principle" to secure NDP support for the Liberal government on the budget vote, said NDP Leader Jack Layton.
Negotiations between Prime Minister Paul Martin and NDP Leader Jack Layton were continuing all day over a compromise in the budget that could fend off a snap election.
Layton said at a 5:30 p.m. ET news conference that he's agreed on a deal with the government that will see more money put into environmental and social programs through the budget.
"This budget isn't perfect, but it's better and it's balanced," he said.
Martin will hold a news conference later this evening in Ottawa.
This might not be enough to keep the government alive, though:
The Globe and Mail reported Tuesday that the Liberals may have lost the support of at least one Independent, Chuck Cadman.
Lawrence Martin, a columnist for The Globe, told CTV's Canada AM that Cadman had originally sounded like he would vote to prop up the government. But his constituents want him to vote to bring the government down.
"Mr. Cadman, a key figure in this fight, said yesterday he would vote to defeat the Liberals," Martin said.
"So that decreases the chances, even if this package is accepted by Mr. Layton, that the Liberals can hold off the election until the fall or the winter."
The combined Bloc Quebecois-Conservative alliance would amount to 153 votes, with 151 for a Liberal-NDP combo. That leaves three Independents.
Independent Carolyn Parrish has said she will vote for the Liberals because she doesn't think Canadians want to go to the polls. Ex-Liberal David Kilgour has not clearly stated how he would vote.
Meanwhile, a poll conducted after Martin's televised speech last week suggests that the event did not help boost his Liberals.
The Decima Research poll, conducted Thursday to Sunday, put Conservative support at 32 per cent, compared to 27 per cent for Liberals. The NDP received 21 per cent support, and the Bloc Quebecois came in at 58 per cent in Quebec.
Update: Andrew Coyne puts the tentative deal in context and asks, "is there anybody this guy can say no to?"
Canadian killed by U.S. forces in Iraq?
That's what Canadian Press is reporting:
Foreign Affairs is investigating whether a Canadian in Iraq was killed by U.S. forces on Saturday, a senior government source told The Canadian Press.
The unidentified Canadian died on Saturday, said Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Cloe Rodrigue.
Rodrigue added that the department is investigating the incident through its consular offices in Amman, Jordan.
She would not confirm the circumstances.
The Canadian Press reports that, according to a senior government source, there are reports that the U.S. military may have been involved.
The source said a man named Ali Alwan may have died after U.S. forces "tracked" a target using a helicopter gunship.
"The family wants the government to investigate," the source told The Canadian press. "They believe it was an attack by coalition forces."
Right now, we don't know anything about what Alwan - if that is indeed his name - was doing in Iraq. If he was innocent, he certainly wouldn't be the first innocent person accidentially killed by American forces. But if he was actively fighting alongside the "resistance", that's not going to stop him from becoming a Canadian martyr. For some segments of the population, it will make him more of a martyr.
Mickey Mao
If only Stalin and maybe even Hitler had lived through the 1960s. Then they might have become pop-culture icons, too:
The Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library – a group presumably formed to combat the work of their tireless foes, the Enemies of the Minneapolis Public Library – has a new ad campaign out to hype next year’s opening of the new downtown library. One side of the poster has a big picture of Mao; beneath him, it says, well, MAO. On the other side, a picture of the new library, with the letters MPL, for Minneapolis Public Library. From the Skyway News article on the campaign:
“What’s the connection? China sports the world’s third largest economy, while the library claims the nation’s third largest collection of books (per capita.)
“It’s a stretch, and a little weird, but it made us look, and that’s the point.”
Hmm. I’m curious: how many people do you have to kill, and how many books do you have to destroy, before you’re no longer a benign historical image to be used in a “clever” ad campaign? The campaign also features J. Edgar Hoover and Batgirl, because they, like Mao, were librarians at some point in their lives. “Mao Tse-Tung became a convert to Marxism while working as a librarian at Beijing University prior to launching a communist revolution in China,” the article explains.
Next up: Stalin shills for the church! Hey, he was a seminarian, once. See, it’s funny and clever when they didn’t kill anyone you know. Criminey.
At least one Canadian Prime Minister-to-be fell under Mao's spell during his college days. And Joey Smallwood gushed about late-sixties China in I Chose Canada - perhaps the most unreadable memoir ever written (in Smallwood's case, dictated) by a Canadian politician, and that's saying something - probably because Mao's economic policies so closely resembled his own.
Newfoundland under siege
Fishermen are fighting proposed changes to crab quotas by blockading St. John's harbour:
Crab fishermen were able to halt traffic in St. John's Harbour Tuesday, with one supply vessel parked outside the Narrows and another docked inside.
The Maesk Placentia, an offshore supply vessel that cancelled plans to leave port Monday night, pushed through the Narrows at lunch time Monday, with crab fishermen attempting to impede its progress.
After taking a sharp turn outside the Narrows, the Maersk Placentia eventually stopped and retreated back to the harbour.
Another supply vessel – the Maersk Chancellor – spent the night outside the harbour, instead of docking in the harbour as planned.
An Oceanex container ship has also been waiting to leave.
The St. John's Port Authority is considering a court injunction to halt the protest, now in its second day.
The fishermen are attempting to force the provincial government to drop a plan to assign quotas in the lucrative crab industry directly to plant owners.
The fishermen say production quotas will give processors too much power, and will rob them of the ability to sell their catches to the highest bidders.
CP reports that a Canadian Navy destroyer was unable to dock in St. John's, and that the blockade has spread to Bay Bulls, about 20 minutes outside of town. Last week, the fishermen blocked tanker oil tanker traffic in Placentia Bay, where the Come by Chance oil refinery is located.
I'd be a lot more supportive of our fishers' sudden enthusiasm for the free market if they weren't collecting employment insurance for most of the year. Either way, I have no time at all for this nonsense, especially when far more lucrative (though less romantic) industries are being affected. It's almost as bad as the situation in France, where farmers basically shut down the country every time their massive subsidies are threatened.
Update: some vessels squeezed through the blockade this afternoon.
Telling the truth will break up the country
The loathsome Alfonso Gagliano told Radio-Canada that the Gomery Inquiry will inevitably lead to Quebec separation. Mind you, he's not complaining about the multi-million-dollar sponsorship fraud that occurred on his watch, but about the fact that an inquiry was called in the first place:
Former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano has accused Prime Minister Paul Martin of wrecking the country and the Liberal party.
"He's going to destroy the party and break up the country," Gagliano said during a television interview with the CBC's French-language network.
Gagliano was Canada's ambassador to Denmark until Martin fired him over allegations of impropriety under the sponsorship program, which was his responsibility as public works minister.
Gagliano told Radio-Canada on Monday that the revelations at the sponsorship inquiry – called by Martin – will inevitably lead the country to break up.
[...]
"Of course, if [Quebec Liberal Premier Jean] Charest makes a miracle and forms a second government, it could possibly be put off," he told the broadcaster.
"But I think that at this stage, the separation of Quebec from Canada is not stoppable. It's a question of time. It's going to happen."
In other words: Canadians aren't mature enough to handle the truth, so the nation can only be preserved if they STFU and let their betters in the NaturalGoverningParty do what they want. That's the closest thing the Liberal Party of Canada has to a governing ideology - and it's kind of unnerving to realize that, for a decade, this country was run by Liberals who believe Paul Martin is being too honest.
Nothing to see here, move along
The Liberals are resisting a request by opposition parties for an RCMP investigation into suspicious judicial appointments:
The Bloc Québécois has asked the RCMP to investigate allegations that lawyers who volunteered for the Liberals during the 2000 election were later made judges as a reward.
In a letter of complaint released Monday, Bloc MP Richard Marceau asks the Mounties to investigate the recent allegations made by former Liberal organizer Benoit Corbeil.
[...]
The Conservatives have also demanded an official probe into the allegations.
But Justice Minister Irwin Cotler refused to call in the RCMP or the Canadian Judicial Council.
Paul Martin just keeps repeating his "the appointments are based on merit and chosen by a non-partisan panel" line, in the hopes that this scandal will go away. In the meantime, I can't help but notice the irony of a separatist party asking that the Mounties be called in (indeed, Canada-hating Quebec nationalists never hesitate to rely on Canadian courts, police or social programs whenever it suits their purposes), but this certainly merits investigation.
'Angry in the Great White North' notes that one judge, appointed to Quebec's Superior Court in 2003, was an unsuccessful Liberal candidate in 2000.
Update: AGWN has crunched more numbers and found out that 60% of federal judicial appointments in Quebec since 1993 have donated to the federal Liberals.
Paul Wells, wisely, counsels against jumping to conclusions. Even diehard haters of the federal Liberal party, like me, must accept that some qualified judicial appointees will just happen to be Liberal supporters. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of whether certain judicial nominees were appointed despite their Liberal activism, or because of it - and in all but in the most egregious cases, that's probably impossible to prove.
I wish someone would dig into it, though.
The revolution spreads
While Vladmir Putin mopes about the collapse of the USSR and says Russia will move toward democracy "at its own pace", wink wink, protests against his rule are growing within Russia itself:
Here on the southwestern edge of the Urals, a popular uprising against a regional government is posing one of the most significant challenges yet to President Vladimir V. Putin's political control, raising the possibility that civic protest may be spreading into Russia from its periphery.
Heartened by the political upheavals in two of Russia's neighbors, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, thousands here have staged a series of demonstrations since February calling for the ouster of the president of the Bashkortostan region, Murtaza G. Rakhimov.
An ally of President Putin, he has served as the leader of this largely Muslim region, formally an autonomous republic within Russia, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He won re-election in 2003 in a contest in which his chief opponent withdrew from campaigning, reportedly at the urging of the Kremlin.
The issues are largely local, but the complaints against Mr. Rakhimov's government evoke those that were raised against the recently ousted leaders in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and are now increasingly heard about Mr. Putin. They include allegations of manipulated elections, increasing state control of business, and corruption.
While Mr. Putin's authority seems to remain solid, events here reflect an emerging sense of grievance and impatience that is increasingly being expressed to one degree or another on the streets across Russia.
[...]
In mid-April, with no elections on the horizon after two months of protests, some 200 opponents flew to Moscow to make their case, holding a rally and presenting to Mr. Putin's administration a petition with what they said were 107,000 signatures calling for Mr. Rakhimov's dismissal. Meanwhile, rallies here continued, and another is scheduled for May 1.
Mr. Bignov said the opposition leaders had made their case directly to Mr. Putin's aides, though he declined to say whom in the Kremlin they had met. Mr. Petrov said Mr. Putin was unlikely to agree, for fear that a precedent set here would ignite protests against other unpopular leaders.
Since Mr. Putin abolished regional elections, which he defended as a means to strengthen executive power, protesters in three other southern regions - Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Ingushetia and North Ossetia - have unsuccessfully demanded the dismissal of their leaders. So far, though, the protests here have been the most significant and sustained.
Putin hasn't sent in the tanks - yet:
The authorities here in Bashkortostan's capital have responded vigorously, though they have not yet forcibly cracked down. Two hours before the protest on April 16, Mr. Bignov and another opposition leader, Anatoly N. Dubovsky, were summoned by the Federal Security Service and questioned for five and a half hours, until the rally was over, as part of an investigation into charges of extremism.
Mr. Rakhimov's supporters, meanwhile, staged a large counterdemonstration in Lenin Square here, arriving in more than 100 buses and swarming the spot where the opposition had a permit to assemble.
Among them were several dozen young men, many in camouflage, who scuffled with Mr. Rakhimov's critics at least twice. They punched an elderly woman in the face and accosted the leader of the newly created People's Front of Bashkortostan, Ayrat Dilmukhametov, who was then whisked away in a civilian car for several hours of questioning by the security service. [Mr. Dilmukhametov was released that night, Mr. Bignov said later.]
"This is the agony of the regime," Mr. Dilmukhametov said in an interview moments before he was attacked, referring to efforts to disrupt the protest. "They are doing everything to bring these young people here and to organize them against their mothers."
April 25, 2005
Stomping on MG Rover's grave
Jeremy Clarkson is shedding no tears for Britain's last mass-market automaker:
So, infighting, lousy design and a factory that was no more suitable for car production than a stable. And to make matters worse the company had been targeted by extremists who were determined to make sure that no car made it onto the road. In his first six months as chairman [of British Leyland, MG Rover's doomed predecessor] Michael Edwardes had to deal with 327 different industrial disputes.
It’s easy to understand the motivation for all this unrest and hopelessness. It’s much more fun to stand round a brazier shouting “scab” at anyone in a tie than it is to spend all day bolting Prince of Darkness Lucas components onto a car that wouldn’t have worked anyway.
What’s more, it didn’t matter. Back then, everyone still had a sense that Britain ran the world, that Japanese cars were a joke and that the Germans were a bunch of war-losing bastards. They were all so arrogant, so far removed from the harsh reality of foreign competition, that they refused even to look at the competition.
And anyway Jim Callaghan would simply roll up the following week with another skipful of taxpayers’ cash. Over the years BL has cost the British government £3.5 billion.
That was Britain in the 1970s, and God knows where the country would be now if Margaret Thatcher hadn't been elected. British Leyland was a huge company once (the fourth-largest automaker in the world, I believe), and executives at Ford and GM - which just announced the recall of two million trucks and SUVs - should be paying close attention to this story. Glenn Reynolds has more on GM's problems at his MSNBC blog.
Hand in Hand
The most disgusting photo you'll see all day can be viewed here. If the neoconservatives control the White House, why the hell is President Bush holding hands with the leader of Saudi Arabia?
(via Matt Welch, who asks pretty much the same thing)
Without a shot being fired
It's getting remarkably little media attention, but the Syrians have all but completed the withdrawal of their troops from Lebanon. (Hey, you don't think the newspapers are downplaying this story because it makes Chimpy McBushitler and the neocon cabal look pretty good, do you? Nah...)
Syrian intelligence agents abandoned their main headquarters in Lebanon on Monday, leaving the nerve center from which they controlled much of the neighboring country's affairs for 29 years.
With the Syrians leaving, its Lebanese allies in the security services also were collapsing. Maj. Gen. Jamil Sayyed - often described as the enforcer of Damascus' policy - announced his resignation, and another top security commander left the country with his family.
Only a token Syrian force - about 300 soldiers, compared with a force of 14,000 only two months ago - remains for Tuesday's ceremony at a Lebanese airbase in the eastern Bekaa Valley to mark the official end of the Syrian presence.
The headquarters of Syrian military intelligence, at the border in the Bekaa town of Anjar, was a stark symbol of Damascus' power - the site where it decided policy in Lebanon, including who ran for office, who became a Cabinet minister and who was arrested.
A convoy of about a dozen vehicles pulled out of the site before sundown, heading for the nearby Masnaa border crossing on its way to Syria. The top Syrian intelligence chief in Lebanon, Maj. Gen. Rustom Ghazale, was in the convoy, witnesses said - though he was expected to return to participate in the farewell ceremony.
Lebanese troops took over the vacated positions in Anjar, apparently to prevent a repeat of celebrations by residents and anti-Syrian activists, who in evacuations of other sites have quickly swept in with Lebanese flags and paint to erase Syrian military symbols.
On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan dispatched a team to verify whether Syria has withdrawn all its troops from Lebanon, as it promised to do under an agreement with the United Nations. The verification team will be led by Senegalese Brig. Gen. Mouhamadou Kandji, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
This is a wonderful day for Lebanon - and everyone who wants to see a free, democratic Middle East.
The Savage Martyr
A political pundit is blasting Fox News for "blacklisting" him because of his politics. But it's not what you think:
RABID radio host Michael Savage is whining that he has been banned from the Fox News Channel after he dissed Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.
The controversial conservative — who was fired by MSNBC in 2003 after referring to a caller to his show as "a sodomite" who should "get AIDS and die" — recently burned more bridges by calling O'Reilly a "Leper-Con who poses as a conservative" and Hannity "another Republican bootlicker who began as a Rush [Limbaugh] understudy" on his "Savage Nation" radio show.
Savage claims that he's been bumped off four scheduled appearances on Fox News Channel in the wake of his caustic comments.
"These two are now acting the way the mainstream media has been acting for decades, thinking they are the gatekeepers of who shall be heard in the conservative world," Savage sputtered in a statement.
"Both are jealous of my audience and are trying to silence me because they do not want the competition."
Savage's new book is called Liberalism is a Mental Disorder. If Ann Coulter is the conservative Michael Moore, as some say, Savage must be the conservative Ted Rall.
You aren't supposed to say this at a university
Keith Urbahn, a columnist for the Yale Daily News, rightly castigates his classmates for wearing Che Guevara and hammer-and-sickle T-shirts:
Yet in observing our soon-to-be fellow students, immediately identifiable by those ubiquitous manila envelopes, I noticed something slightly amiss: the bizarre preponderance of communist apparel. In casually walking around campus Monday and Tuesday, I saw no fewer than three pre-frosh wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Che Guevara's pensive black and white face; another proudly sported the Soviet hammer and sickle.
While hardly evidence of a Red invasion of the Yale campus, the approval of communist emblems as acceptable pop culture icons is nothing short of disturbing. In eulogizing the symbols of communism, angst-plagued teens, aspiring leftists and hipster poseurs celebrate a murderous ideology responsible for over 85 million deaths.
[...]
Che Guevara is the consummate embodiment of Marxism and everything it stands for: mass murder, injustice and failure. Che's noble vision of serving the communist revolution was killing hundreds -- likely thousands -- of "state enemies" in the Cuban jungles as Fidel Castro's executioner. With the conviction of a true crusader for justice, he believed that "to send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary." His attempts at fomenting socialist uprisings and fighting bloody insurgent campaigns in the Congo and Bolivia were grand failures that led to his ignominious death.
Similar thoughts expressed here.
Adscam central
Andrew Coyne's blog is the place to go for all your Adscam-related news.
Meanwhile, Jack Layton is considering a deal to support the Liberals' budget (with some NDP-friendly changes) and possibly even to keep the government alive in a non-confidence vote. (The Toronto Star even says Layton may be offered a cabinet position.) It's disgusting and opportunistic - and probably a smart move for the NDP, whose only realistic shot at implementing its agenda is to hold the balance of power in the House of Commons.
Screw the Soldiers
Every year, around November 11, you always get some oh-so-sophisticated pseudo-pacifists complaining about how Remembrance Day "glorifies war". (I say "pseudo-pacifists" because these people rarely have a problem with Marxist guerilla movements, Palestinian suicide bombers or Iraqi "insurgents".) This attitude is not confined to Canada.
April 22, 2005
Where are the conspiracy theorists when we need them?
Maurice Strong, who had business ties to a Korean businessman caught up in the oil-for-food scandal, also served on the board of Power Corporation, which had ties with TotalFinaElf, an oil company which allegedly profited nicely from the oil-for-food scam. And who else served on the Power Corporation board with Strong? Paul Volcker, the man the UN hired to investiate the program:
The next chapter in the United Nations crisis may erupt over U.N. investigator Paul Volcker's membership on the board of one of Canada's biggest companies, Power Corporation, since a past president of the firm, Canadian tycoon Maurice Strong, is now tied to the oil-for-food scandal.
[...]
News of Mr. Volcker's spot on the board of Power Corporation first surfaced soon after the former chairman of the Federal Reserve was nominated by Mr. Annan to head the Independent Inquiry Committee last year.
At that time, a possible conflict of interest involved the Power Corporation's ties to the French bank BNP, which handled oil-for-food accounts, and to the French oil company Total, which also profited from oil-for-food business.
Mr. Volcker said then that he was a member of many boards of directors and that his role at Power would not affect his work. He would "occasionally pursue his avocation of salmon fishing with Canadian friends, sometimes including a Power Corporation executive," the committee said in a statement issued at the time, addressing his involvement with the company.
There may be nothing to all of this, but at the very least, you'd think the conspirozoid sites and leftist "alternative" media would be all over it. And you would be wrong. I guess it's not really a scandal if George W. Bush or the Jooooooos aren't involved.