Vacation Time

I'm off to PEI this afternoon. Back July 12. I am taking the laptop with me (so I can watch some DVDs during the six-hour ferry ride to Nova Scotia, potentially longer if the ship is blocked by angry crab fishermen again), but there likely won't be any new posting until I get back.

See you in a few weeks.

Steyn interviewed

John Hawkins landed another interview with the world's greatest columnist. A couple of excerpts:

In London, the most competitive newspaper market in the world, papers thrive by encouraging distinctive controversial voices. In America, the average Gannett or other monodaily prefers a tone of self-regarding dullness. As my friend John O'Sullivan put it, "They neither offend nor delight" - as a matter of policy. Yes, they're broadly "liberal," but not in a lively virtuoso engaging way, only in a dreary J-school way. I think they're missing the point here. They don't realize that they do have competitors now, in new media. In 1978, having driven your print competitors out of business, you could afford to be a dull city newspaper. I don't believe you can now.
[...]
I stopped [writing for the National Post] because they fired the Editor and Deputy Editor and various other folks I liked, like the Marketing lady. I'm all in favour of firing people, but not if the guys you replace them with aren't as good. So I left. The National Post was one of the great adventures of my journalistic life, not just because it was a conservative venture in a liberal country, but because it brought a tremendous brio and humor to a torpid newspaper culture. There seemed no point in sticking with the paper on its slide toward smugly conventional Trudeaupian mediocrity. Today the paper still has some great individual voices - Robert Fulford, George Jonas, Andrew Coyne - but it has no coherent identity, and the reality of an over-regulated media environment in a one-party state means that the current owners have compelling reasons to remain Liberal Party courtiers. Conrad Black, the paper's founder, was a very rare exception to that rule.

He also recommends some of his favorite blogs, but he inexplicably left out this one.

Another moderate

Dr. Ahmad Dewidar, head of the Islamic Society of Mid-Manhattan, has met with President Bush, Governor Pataki and Kofi Annan. But I doubt he talked like this during those meetings:

"The Zionist community numbers only three million, but they control the government, the politics, the economy, and the media in the U.S. At the same time, the Islamic community numbers 11 million, but its influence is weak. There are a number of reasons for this."
[...]
"Many are interested in preventing our influence in society – first and foremost the Zionist lobby, which influences the media at present, so that we cannot spread our ideas and spotlight our leaders and our successful models. Even when a Muslim tries to work in the media, he has to contend with five million media employees who are controlled by the Jews."
[...]
"As for the American policy of controlling the region... The American regime believes in a [certain] ideological or religious program, which is like the New Testament for it. [This program] is the result of a great intellectual effort by a man who is powerful and influential among the intellectuals, who is called Sharatsky [sic; apparently referring to former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky] – a Jew in origin. [His idea] boils down to the claim that in order for America to live in security, it has to change the perceptions in the Middle East regarding the [people's] sense of participation in the political process, and regarding freedom, democracy and education. This, [according to him,] is because the oppression of these [Middle Eastern] societies leads to extremism, which is ruining their countries and America... This Jew has despicable goals, and we see their effects today in America's actions in the region, imposing its opinion and its outlook on democracy, education, and political involvement on our [Arab and Islamic] countries."

Societal collapse imminent

That's what some people are saying in response to this, anyway. I remain unconvinced. (But hey, if we're all tree-worshipping pagan sex slaves twenty years from now, I'll apologize.)

Meanwhile, you can make of this what you will:

An exodus from Stephen Harper's office has decimated the Conservative leader's PR team as he strives to appear more friendly and election-ready.

That brings to four the number of public relations strategists to call it quits in recent weeks. Jim Armour and Mike Storeshaw left earlier this month for private-sector jobs.

For the love of God, Steve, don't base the entire campaign around the gay-marriage issue. It's like giving the media and the Liberals a loaded gun.

You know, the Huffington Post turned into an extreme-left kook site so gradually, I hardly even noticed

Now they're comparing Bush to the BTK killer. As Glenn Reynolds notes, "that Hitler thing was getting sooo passé."

Why is it that these people never compare Bush to people like Stalin, Mao or Castro? Oh, right.

The £10,000,000 apology

Michelin is going to spend that much money refunding people who bought tickets to the United States Grand Prix, and handing out free tickets for next year:

Tyre manufacturer Michelin have offered a full refund on all tickets bought for the United States Grand Prix in Indianapolis, which went ahead without the seven teams that the French company supply. They also offered to hand out 20,000 free tickets for next year's race.

The development coincided with the launch of legal action in the United States against Michelin, Formula One, the FIA, the teams and Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which has potentially catastrophic financial consequences for those involved as it is open to anyone who bought a ticket to join.

Death of a totalitarian traitor

I don't usually put down 93 year-old recently-deceased great-grandmothers - but then again, most 93 year-old recently-deceased great-grandmothers weren't unrepentant spies for Stalin:

Melita Norwood, who died on June 2 aged 93, caused a brief flurry of excitement in 1999 when it was revealed that not only had she spied for the Russians for four decades, but that the authorities had known of her treachery but had done nothing about it.

Far more outrageous, in the view of the press, was the fact that Norwood treated public indignation about her treachery as a huge joke. She steadfastly refused to accept that she had anything to be ashamed of: Soviet Communism was "a good experiment, and I agreed with it… I would do it again," she told reporters.

If only Hitler had gotten little old ladies to run the death camps, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble.

In family law, no order is ever final

That's what they told us in law school, and here's more proof:

After their divorce, Hynes paid $300 a month in spousal support and $500 for each of their children. When his income as a family physician dropped, he decided to return to school to become a psychiatrist and a court terminated the support payments on the understanding that improving his professional credentials would benefit the family.

"Now, a court dismisses your claim, circumstances worsen, 20 years go by and you can come back and have another kick at the can," he said yesterday.

I presume this one will be going to the Supreme Court of Canada. For now, it only applies in Ontario, but it could still be persuasive authority in other provinces - especially since the ruling was based on the federal Divorce Act, not provincial legislation.

His best speech ever

Full text here. Some of President Bush's speaking appearances in the past have been absolutely painful to watch (he's not the orator Adolf Hitler was, as the CounterPunch crowd would say), but he seemed genuinely confident and resolute this evening.

I wish Bush had explained that the WMD issue was just one of several reasons for the invasion of Iraq, and I'm also a bit surprised he didn't address the allegations about Guantanamo Bay. Aside from that, I couldn't argue with any of it. In particular - and maybe I'm reading a bit too much into this - I was thrilled to see him acknowledge Saudi Arabia's role in the fight against Islamofascist terror:

Some of the violence you see in Iraq is being carried out by ruthless killers who are converging on Iraq to fight the advance of peace and freedom. Our military reports that we have killed or captured hundreds of foreign fighters in Iraq who have come from Saudi Arabia and Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and others.
[...]
Across the broader Middle East, people are claiming their freedom. In the last few months, we've witnessed elections in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon. These elections are inspiring democratic reformers in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Considering he was holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah not too long ago, I think this is a sign of progress. Let's hope he's finally putting some pressure on.

The classical liberal's worst nightmare

Bob Tarantino says the Conservatives are planning to campaign on the issue of repealing same-sex marriage legislation should they form a majority government. He thinks it's a very bad idea, and so do I:

One can only assume that to be the case; which is to say, the Tories better have some pretty staggering poll numbers. Because it seems they want to have their cake and eat it, too: after arguing that the proper forum for the decision on same-sex marriage was Parliament (which is probably correct), they now have to come up with some rationale for ignoring the decision of Parliament (or the impending decision) and trying to substitute a different decision of Parliament. Which, in and of itself, is fine: just because a legislature makes a decision one day doesn't mean that the issue is decided for all time; societies need the flexibility to re-visit matters. But are there really enough people that agree with the Tories that it makes sense for them to make this the primary issue in a campaign? Especially in the teeth of anti-conservative, pro-SSM media coverage?

One further danger: if the Tories are explicit in their determination to ensure that if/when they win a majority they will repeal same-sex marriage legislation (and they need to decide whether that will be the case whether they win this year, next year or five years from now), there may be a countervailing loss which makes up for attracting "conservative immigrants". In other words, how many people out there who would otherwise be willing to vote Tory will decline to do so because they have been assured that a CPC majority means repeal of the legislation? Are the numbers sufficiently small to outweigh potential gains from anti-SSM voters? When the numbers are as tight as they seem to be when determining majority/minority governments, it would seem that the CPC needs to be extremely sure that this gambit is a winning one.

Canadians who vigorously oppose gay marriage have nowhere to go except to the Conservatives, unless they waste their votes on the Christian Heritage Party. It's the fiscally-conservative-but-socially-liberal voter the Tories need to put them over the top, and who knows how many will be driven away by a campaign like this? I'll still vote for the Conservatives because of, well, pretty much every issue except same-sex marriage - but many, many more will stay home, spoil their ballots or hold their noses and vote Liberal.

More mainstream media fraud

An acclaimed columnist for the Sacramento Bee may have faked 43 sources over the past twelve years. Meanwhile, a Globe and Mail reporter made up details about a meeting between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, in order to make a dubious point about Palestinian "dispossession".

Update: AP writer Jennifer Loven travelled through time to report on President Bush's Iraq address - before it even happened! (As I write this, the speech is scheduled to begin in about ten minutes.)

(via LGF)

Cut off further

You need a permit to make an international telephone call from North Korea, but even that's not enough control for Kim Jong-Il's regime:

North Korea has cut most of its international phone lines since late March over concerns that sensitive information about its society will flow out of the isolated country, South Korea's spy agency reportedly said Tuesday.

Spy agency officials said the steps were taken to eliminate sources of instability ahead of the 60th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule, as well as the 60th anniversary of the founding of its Workers' Party.

Nothing surprises me about that government anymore.

Conversations with a would-be killer

Not to be missed: Manuela Dviri, an Israeli journalist involved with a charity providing medical treatment to Palestinian children, interviewed failed suicide bomber Wafa Samir al-Biss in prison.

When a soldier asked her to remove her long, dark cloak, she turned to face him. All her movements were taped by the military surveillance camera at the checkpoint: calmly, deliberately, she took off her clothing, item by item, until she looked like any normal young woman in T-shirt and jeans. It was then that she tried to set off the belt containing 20lb of explosives hidden beneath her trousers. To her horror, she did not succeed. Desperate, she clawed at her face, screaming. She was still alive, she realised. She had failed her martyrdom mission.

That afternoon, on June 21, the 21-year-old, Wafa Samir al-Biss, was brought before the press by Israeli intelligence. Her neck and hands were covered with scars caused by a kitchen gas explosion six months earlier. The ugly scars - which had been treated in a hospital in Israel - had probably helped turn her into the perfect would-be huriia (virgin), the ideal martyr, since they would make it difficult for her to find a suitable husband.
[...]
Wafa had been sent on her mission by the Abu Rish Brigade, the small militant faction with links to Fatah. She did not, she said later, regret it, though she stressed that her decision had had nothing to do with her scarring. "My dream was to be a martyr. I believe in death," she said. "Today I wanted to blow myself up in a hospital, maybe even in the one in which I was treated. But since lots of Arabs come to be treated there, I decided I would go to another, maybe the Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews …''

And what about babies? Would you have killed babies and children? she was asked. "Yes, even babies and children. You, too, kill our babies. Do you remember the Doura child?"

Another clumsy move

The Conservatives are trying to undermine pending same-sex marriage legislation by by saying the separatists' support makes it illegitimate:

Stephen Harper set off a political uproar Monday when he appeared to blame Quebec separatists for the pending legalization of gay marriage.

The comments were swiftly rebuked and ridiculed by rivals of all political stripes.

Personally, I have no problem with tweaking the Quebec separatists at every opportunity. But the last thing Stephen Harper needs right now is to be seen as anti-Quebec - not to mention hypocritical, considering that the Conservatives had no problem with the Bloc helping them try to bring down the government altogether just last month.

Just how politically tone-deaf can this party get?

9/10

The media is now officially back where it was before 9/11.

Don't even talk about it

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters he's "disappointed" to see the ACLU debating provisions of the PATRIOT Act at an upcoming meeting. "I would have expected the ACLU to be a little more circumspect," he said.

Once again, we see the spectre of fascism creeping over the so-called "land of the free", where politicians tell citizens and private organizations what they can and cannot talk about. It's absolutely disgusting, and...wait a minute, my mistake. It's actually federal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh telling the Canadian Medical Association they shouldn't even discuss the role of private health care at their annual convention. Never mind!

Federal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh says he's "disappointed" with Canada's doctors -- and especially the head of their influential national association -- for planning a debate at their annual meeting this summer on the role of private health care in this country.

"There are people who still remember the dark days of private health care, where people had to sell their farms and sell their homes to care for their loved ones."

In a perfect world, the CMA would pass a resolution telling Ujjal Dosanjh to fuck off. (via Angry in T.O. at The Shotgun)

(By the way, I'm sure some of you are thinking about Ari Fleischer's infamous "watch what they say" comments at a White House press briefing shortly after 9/11. In context, Fleischer's remarks weren't threatening at all - but for the true believers, it will always be proof of totalitarianism descending on America.)

Insufficiently grateful to his captors

I would say the Australian left has hit rock bottom, except that I'm sure they'll find some way to sink lower than this:

[Andrew] Jaspan is editor-in-chief of The Age, Australia's most Left-wing daily newspaper, and on ABC radio on Wednesday said how "boorish" and "coarse" Wood was at his press conference this week when he called his captors "a---holes".

I haven't heard much lately more perverse. If what Wood went through is Jaspan's idea of being "treated well", I finally understand why The Age seems so dismayed by the fall of nice Saddam Hussein, who similarly treated his victims so well that more than 300,000 have been found in mass graves. They must have been simply tickled to death to be there.

An editorial in The Australian contrasts the treatment of Wood with that of "Australian Taliban" David Hicks:

If Douglas Wood had emerged from captivity and blamed John Howard, Tony Blair and George W. Bush for his troubles, he would have become an instant hero in some circles. By now he would be have been offered a Chair in Middle Eastern Studies at one of our major universities, and ABC Radio National would have been renamed Radio Doug in his honour. Instead, Mr Wood had the temerity to disparage his captors, praise his liberators and declare our Iraq mission worthwhile. His name has been mud ever since.
[...]
Since Mr Wood was deprived of his livelihood by his abductors, and has done nothing wrong, it is hard to see why his decision to sell his story arouses such ire. After all, if there were no interest in that story, he would not receive $400,000 for it. That, coincidentally, is about how much taxpayers were forced to kick in to a fawning and unwatched SBS documentary about Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks. Instructively, Mr Wood's support for the US alliance disqualified him from the sympathy of some commentators, while Mr Hicks's avowed anti-Semitism, along with the fact he trained with al-Qa'ida, flowed off them like water off a duck. Ackland hints darkly that a man like Mr Wood must have had nefarious reasons for being in Iraq. His earlier judgement on Mr Hicks was that he is a "woebegone idealist". Sorry?

Placed in context, the vilification of Mr Wood is the latest in a series of bad calls made on the Left since September 11, 2001. While the leaders of the social-democratic parties in Australia, Britain and the US made the principled decision following 9/11 - to support democracy and civilised values against religious fascism - for many on the Left the idea the US could be the victim rather than the perpetrator of evil was a head-spin. At every step along the road since then, their strategy has been to appease the fascists and castigate the US and its allies. In this upside-down world picture, nobody is too discredited to be fashioned into a hero and nobody too blameless to be set up as a villain.

(via timblair.net)

Update: audio of Jaspan here. He starts talking about Wood around the 4:30 mark.

Among the privileges granted to Douglas Wood while he was in captivity: getting to hear his fellow hostages being murdered.

The flag can handle it

Steyn gets it exactly right, as usual, on that stupid anti-flag-desecration amendment recently passed in the House of Representatives:

Unlike Congressman Cunningham, I wouldn't presume to speak for those who died atop the World Trade Center. For one thing, citizens of more than 50 foreign countries, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, were killed on 9/11. Of the remainder, maybe some would be in favor of a flag-burning amendment; and maybe some would think that criminalizing disrespect for national symbols is unworthy of a free society. And maybe others would roll their eyes and say that, granted it's been clear since about October 2001 that the federal legislature has nothing useful to contribute to the war on terror, and its hacks and poseurs prefer to busy themselves with a lot of irrelevant grandstanding with a side order of fries, but they could at least quit dragging us into it.

That alone is a perfectly good reason to object to a law forbidding the "desecration" of the flag. For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat senators want to make speeches comparing the U.S. military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It's always useful to know what people really believe.

Do not miss Steyn's comments about the one time he saw the Canadian flag getting burned on television. (Personally, I wish more of the world's kooks, tyrants and fascists thought the Maple Leaf was worth burning.)

573 down, 259 to go

I think I'm going to print this story and stick it on my refrigerator.

No quick victory

Donald Rumsfeld admits the Iraq insurgency could last for many years to come, but he says it will ultimately be defeated by the Iraqis themselves:

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday warned that the insurgency in Iraq could go on for at least a decade and confirmed that the army had been in contact with some of its leaders in an attempt to quell the violence.

He added that Iraq had a sovereign government which could choose its own relationships with different groups of insurgents. "We facilitate those from time to time," Mr Rumsfeld said.

The Bush Administration has done itself no favors in making overly optimistic predictions like Cheney's, and here's hoping it will be much more realistic about Iraq from here on out. In the meantime, U.S. News and World Report notes that the "militants" are getting at least a little of their funding from "peace" activists in Europe:

Turns out that far-left groups in western Europe are carrying on a campaign dubbed Ten Euros for the Resistance, offering aid and comfort to the car bombers, kidnappers, and snipers trying to destabilize the fledgling Iraq government. In the words of one Italian website, Iraq Libero (Free Iraq), the funds are meant for those fighting the occupanti imperialisti. The groups are an odd collection, made up largely of Marxists and Maoists, sprinkled with an array of Arab emigres and aging, old-school fascists, according to Lorenzo Vidino, an analyst on European terrorism based at The Investigative Project in Washington, D.C. "It's the old anticapitalist, anti-U.S., anti-Israel crowd," says Vidino, who has been to their gatherings, where he saw activists from Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Italy. "The glue that binds them together is anti-Americanism." The groups are working on an October conference to further support "the Iraqi Resistance." A key goal is to expand backing for the insurgents from the fringe left to the broader antiwar and antiglobalization movements.

"Not antiwar but on the other side," indeed. (via Blithering Bunny)

Christians defended

Norm Geras and Blithering Bunny are avowed atheists, but that doesn't mean they have any time for casual put-downs of religious believers.

Why they hate psychiatry

The "Church" of Scientology's long-standing feud with psychiatry is explained here. To make a long story short, it stems from L. Ron Hubbard's book Dianetics - which premiered in a pulp sci-fi magazine, and serves as a kind of founding text for Scientology - being dismissed as blatant quackery by the mental health profession just after it was released in 1950. (via Let it Bleed)

That's not to say there aren't legitimate criticisms of the psychiatric profession. But the likes of Tom Cruise and Kelly Preston are just blindly mouthing Scientology propaganda, and it's good to see Cruise being called on it during interviews to promote War of the Worlds. (Matt Lauer is lucky Cruise didn't shoot lasers from his hands, like he did with the late Oprah Winfrey.)

Africa's blind eye

The African Union had a golden opportunity to show its commitment to democracy and political reform by condemning Robert Mugabe's destructive policies. Instead, it's letting Mugabe get away with it:

The African Union rallied to an African leader, saying it would not intervene in a Zimbabwean campaign of evictions and arrests that has been described as cruelly anti-poor because Robert Mugabe might be trying to help his people in the long term.

"But if it is in the interests to prevent crime, or improve sanitation or ensure the health of the people or ensure Harare does not turn into a slum, I do not see how the AU should take over the internal legislation for action the government says they have taken to improve the livelihoods of their people," Orjiako said.
[...]
The African Union has intervened elsewhere on the continent, earning praise at a time when rich nations in the West are looking for signs any overture on their part to increase aid to Africa would be met with political reforms.

The African Union also has peacekeepers in the volatile Darfur region of Sudan and is mediating truce talks between the Sudanese government and Darfur rebels.

Mugabe's status as an anti-colonialist hero, and his viciously anti-white rhetoric, have probably ensured his immunity from condemnation by Africa's other leaders - even though his victims are overwhelmingly black. Roman Catholic Archbishop , who has bravely spoken out against Mugabe's crimes against his nation, put it this way during an interview on British television:

[Jon Snow suggests that comparison with Pol Pot is 'pretty extreme'.] It's not extreme. I mean here is a man who is not giving any warning to people, pushing them out, something like one and a half million people. This is extremely cruel, very much like Pol Pot, and this will lead to people starving. People are already starving in the country because Mugabe didn't call for aid, at least not in time, and he's politicizing food in certain areas. So now these people are being forced to go to the country where there's nothing. The rain didn't come down... So, what will happen to these people? They're going to starve...

[Jon Snow asks why there isn't more protest from neighbouring states, from Africa.] You must understand there's an African club here. They will support one another come what may... They think that the Western world works to its own advantage... and they feel that we Africans, we must support one another, not embarrass one another by criticizing one another. It's an African club mentality here.

The Islamofascists' next target

According to the New York Observer, members of the radical "Islamic Thinkers Society" - like their militant bretheren in Europe - have begun harassing gays and lesbians:

The dispute between an irascible lesbian conservative from Queens and a militant new group well on the fringes of the city’s Muslim community might appear to be a marginal conflict. But to New York’s gays and to some of its Muslim leaders, the scene in Jackson Heights bears a worrying similarity to communal conflicts that are challenging the idea of tolerance across Europe, with particular flashpoints in Holland and Scandinavia. There, young immigrants and the children of immigrants have been drawn to a more radical Islamic ideology than that of their parents. On the extreme fringes, these young men have committed acts of violence against Jews and gays, and in a case that shocked Europe, one young Dutchman of Moroccan origin murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in an Amsterdam street.

In this conflict, gays have become canaries in the ideological coal mine. Western liberals have tended to cut Muslim groups slack on their ideological pronouncements, in part out of sympathy with some of their causes—the insurgencies in Chechnya and the Middle East, for example—and in part out of a sense that anti-Muslim sentiment in the West is a more pressing problem than anything Muslims themselves might do. [A telling example here - Ed.]

But the rise of gay bashing on European streets has pushed the question of tolerance a step further and led some to question their reflexive defense of a put-upon minority. It has also opened up a heated debate within the gay community, and among liberals in general, over whether the proliferation of intolerant strains of Islam requires liberals in the West to take a harder line on issues like immigration and assimilation.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

On a somewhat related note, the City of Jerusalem has cancelled a gay-pride parade scheduled for June 30, largely because of pressure from Jewish and Muslim religious authorities. What a disappointment for those of us who believe the mere presence of a gay-rights movement illustrates the fundamental difference between Israel and its neighbours.

Why Africa is poor

Amount of foreign aid recieved by Nigeria between 1960 and 1997: £220 billion.

Amount of money looted from the Nigerian treasury by politicians between 1960 and 1999: £220 billion.

The scale of the task facing Tony Blair in his drive to help Africa was laid bare yesterday when it emerged that Nigeria's past rulers stole or misused £220 billion.

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has spoken of a new Marshall Plan for Africa. But Nigeria's rulers have already pocketed the equivalent of six Marshall Plans. After that mass theft, two thirds of the country's 130 million people - one in seven of the total African population - live in abject poverty, a third is illiterate and 40 per cent have no safe water supply.

The biggest thief was the late military dictator Sani Abacha, who stole between £1 billion and £3 billion during his five-year rule. (His widow keeps sending me e-mails asking for help in hiding the money.) Nigeria is under a new government today - but the onus should be on the new rulers to prove it can govern competently and honestly before we give that blighted nation the help it needs.

Hardliner elected

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the mayor of Tehran, has been elected President of Iran:

Hard-line Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sweeping toward a stunning presidential election victory over veteran cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani with the backing of Iran's religious poor on Saturday, officials said.

The Associated Press reported that a top aide in the Rafsanjani campaign said their figures also pointed to a victory for his opponent.

The official turnout was 47% - much lower than in the first round of balloting, and a good indication that disgruntled younger voters just didn't bother. Or were prevented from doing so:

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all state matters, banned supporters from the two sides from holding victory celebrations after a fractious campaign marred by allegations of electoral irregularities.

Officials at the Interior Ministry, dominated by reformists who back the former president, also complained of illegal election-day campaigning.

Babysitter Broadcasting Corporation

The BBC is going to introduce a time delay in live coverage of "sensitive news events", so particularly "shocking" scenes can be removed. Don't want to make the viewer uncomfortable, you know.

Had these guidelines been in place on 9/11, I guess the BBC wouldn't have shown these planes slammering into the towers. Then again, most other news channels have deemed these images too disturbing and/or inflammatory to show us, so why should the Beeb be any different?

Torture admitted?

AFP says the Americans have admitted mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to the UN Committee Against Torture. (Which got me wondering, does anyone else ever admit anything before the UN Committee Against Torture?)

Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

UN sources said it was the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities.
[...]
"They haven't avoided anything in their answers, whether concerning prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan or Guantanamo, and other accusations of mistreatment and of torture," the Committee member said.

The US report said that those involved were low-ranking members of the military and that their acts were not approved by their superiors, the member added.

I can hear the cries of "whitewash!" already. As for me, if the "torture" consists of playing loud rap music and turning off the air conditioning, I'm not going to lose any sleep. But if prisoners have been physically beaten (and there have been confirmed deaths in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, though not at Guanatamo Bay), it's completely unacceptable, and the American government should come clean about it. Of course the worst conditions at Guantanamo don't even come close to what happens in the prisons of the Arab world (or the prisons elsewhere in Cuba, for that matter), but that's not really the point; the United States should be held to a higher standard than, say, Saddam's Iraq.

People say Guantanamo and the War on Terror have severely damaged America's image abroad, and that may be true. In some cases, the damage may be justified. But does the United States want to appease people who have more positive feelings toward China?

Another interesting celebrity fact

Tom Cruise is completely fucking insane. (But is that even a surprise anymore?)

An interesting celebrity fact

Jennifer Lopez, aka J.Lo, aka a lot of other names too vulgar to post here, has been in 18 movies. Not one has made over $100 million at the box office.

(via The Superficial)

That so-called "horseless carriage" will never make it, either

Gavin O’Reilly, incoming chair of the World Association of Newspapers:

I think participative journalism is a dangerous precedent for our industry. People forget that newspapers have always been an interactive medium, people have always been able to interact with us through the mailbag.

The corrupt continent

Once of these shake-your-head-in-disbelief articles, in The Spectator, reveals the absolutely staggering extent of corruption among Africa's rulers. While the people struggle and starve, their Presidents and Prime Ministers - known as the "WaBenzi" because of their particular fondness for the S-class Mercedes-Benz - spend lavishly on limosuines, airplanes and mansions. And much of it is paid for with foreign aid:

The legacy of colonialism is a continent carved up by arbitrary frontiers into 50-odd states. But the WaBenzi are a transcontinental tribe who have been committing grand theft auto on the dusty, potholed roads of Africa ever since they hijacked freedom in the 1960s. After joyriding their way through six Marshall Plans’ worth of aid Africa is poorer today than 25 years ago; and now the WaBenzi want more.

Take, for example, Malawi’s ‘Benz Aid’ scandal. In the year 2000 Bakili Muluzi was hailed as a paragon of African ‘good governance’ following the demise of Life President Hastings Kamuzu Banda. The Economist rated Blantyre as the best city to live in in the world. Britain promised to increase its aid from £30.8 million to £52.4 million in a single year specifically to help the 65 per cent of Malawians existing on less than 50 pence a day. Malawi’s government celebrated by purchasing 39 top-of-the-range S-class Mercedes at a cost of £1.7 million. In the furore that followed, Clare Short, then international development secretary, ruled out a ban on aid to Malawi, explaining that the money used for the car purchases had not been skimmed off British aid but some other donor’s.
[...]
Last year King Mswati III of Swaziland went against the grain. He passed over Mercedes and went for a £264,000 Maybach 62 for himself plus a fleet of BMWs for each of his 10 wives and three virginal fiancées selected annually at the football stadium ‘dance of the impalas’. Imagine if he continues buying BMW for his wives; his dad collected 50 spouses and 350 kids. In May southern Africa’s Mr Toad changed his mind about Mercedes and roared up to his rubber-stamp parliament in a new S600L limo. The total bill for his car purchases alone will be about £750,000, or three quarters of the annual figure for British assistance. Of the £14 million Swaziland gets in foreign aid, £9 million goes on the king’s balls, picnics and parties — and cars. Yet 70 per cent of Swazis languish in absolute poverty and four out of ten have HIV/Aids, the highest rate in the world. [emphasis added]

There is much, much more. And any regime callous and corrupt enough to waste money like this shouldn't get a nickel from Western governments. Not only is the money failing to make it to those who need it, it's legitimizing an African ruling class which has betrayed and cheated its people for decades. It has to stop.

(One historical quibble: the author, Aidan Hartley, says Mercedes-Benz was "was ticking along, doing nothing special" until the 1960s, when the leaders of newly free African countries started snapping up Pullman limosuines. "Nothing special"?)

Budget rammed through

After months of savaging the Conservatives for making a deal with the Bloc Quebecois to try bringing down the government, the Liberals made a deal with the Bloc Quebecois to ensure the federal budget would pass on Third Reading:

The federal Liberals scored a quick and decisive victory Thursday night, catching the Conservatives off guard by passing their controversial budget amendment and ensuring their minority government is safe until the fall.

"When push comes to shove the Liberals will make any deal with anybody," Harper said after the vote. "And it doesn't matter whether it's with the socialists or with the separatists or any bunch of crooks they can find."

Once again, the Liberals revealed their sheer ruthlessness - and once again, the Conservatives were caught napping.

Update: of course, given these poll results, we're probably lucky not to be heading into an election.

Classy

Where else but in The Guardian would you find subtle, thought-provoking political satire like this?

(via LGF)

Grimes' district goes blue

PC candidiate Clayton Forsey has been declared the winner of the provincial by-election in Exploits, the Central Newfoundland riding vacated by former Liberal leader (and premier) Roger Grimes.

Grimes held that seat since 1989, and the Williams government is at the point in its mandate when the opposition parties usually do well in by-elections. If there's a more thankless job in Newfoundland than leader of the Liberal Party right now, I don't know what it could be.

The Right has spoken

Now that Ed Klein's poison-pen biography of Hillary Clinton is out, the evil conservative RepubliKKKan fascist Nazi Karl-Rovian neoconservative Jew...er, Zionist hordes are speaking with one voice again. Captain Ed, Glenn Reynolds, John Podhertz, Michelle Malkin, Jim Geraghty, Decision '08, Peggy Noonan, Bill O'Reilly...all of them agree that the book is, um, sensationalist trash. (More here. Personally, I haven't read the book and have no plans to, but I'm not even going to dignify its most lurid allegations by posting them to this site.)

Wizbang has two absolutely priceless quotes from the demented Oliver Willis, who has a bit of a double standard about this kind of thing. (No, really?)

Exploiting the dead

This vile comment in favor of the anti-flag-burning amendment, from Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-California), is every bit as despicable as anything Sen. Durbin has said recently:

Ask the men and women who stood on top of the Trade Center. Ask them and they will tell you: pass this amendment.

As a Hit & Run commenter puts it, "if I was on top of one of the towers, a burning flag would be the least of my concerns." (Others say "Duke" was referring to the firemen who hoisted the flag at Ground Zero, but that's not much better.) It's one thing to say 9/11 established the need for strong anti-terror policies, and I have little patience for those who say the Bush Administration has "exploited" the attacks for that purpose. It's something else entirely to invoke 9/11 to pass this affront to all that America stands for, and if "Duke" has an ounce of shame he'll apologize.

That's a big "if", of course.

Update: now Democrats are crying foul about comments by Karl Rove:

Democrats are demanding that White House adviser Karl Rove immediately retract and apologize for comments that liberals responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes by wanting to "prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

Rove said the Democratic Party made the mistake of calling for "moderation and restraint" after the terrorist attacks.

Rove's comments are grossly unfair to Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Richard Gephardt, who take national security issues seriously - but quite accurately describe the MoveOn.org crowd. And these days, there's no doubt about which wing controls the Democratic party.

Sauber Sold

BMW is buying and rebranding the Sauber F1 team. The new team will begin boycotting F1 races racing next season.

Williams can still have factory BMW engines until 2009, but don't bet on it. (My money says the Williams-Honda will return in 2006.)

Blogs censored in China

And in other news, the sun rose in the east this morning. Chris Myrick says TypePad-hosted weblogs are being blocked by Chinese internet service providers, almost certainly at the behest of Beijing - and with the assistance of companies like Cisco Systems and Alcatel.

I'm an amendment to be, yes, an amendment to be...

I thought this issue had already been decided in the late 1980s, but the House of Representatives has voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban the burning of the U.S. flag.

Eugene Volokh explained why this is such a bad idea in the Los Angeles Times last year:

Right now, when people -- mostly blacks -- are deeply offended by what they see as a symbol of racism and slavery [the Confederate flag], the legal system can powerfully tell them: "Yes, you must endure this speech that you find so offensive, but others must endure offensive speech, too. Many Americans hate flagburning as much as you hate the Confederate flag, but the Constitution says we all have to live with being offended: We must fight the speech we hate through argument, not through suppression."

If you were black and saw the Confederate flag as a symbol of slavery and racism -- and millions of blacks do, whether you agree with them or not -- would you be persuaded by these arguments? Would you feel better about America because of them?
[...]
The [First] Amendment is a truce: "I won't try to suppress your ideas, if you don't try to suppress mine." And the flagburning amendment risks shattering this truce.

(both links via InstaPundit)

Grewal cleared

The federal "ethics commissioner" (no matter how hard I try, I still can't write that phrase without scare quotes) has cleared Gurmant Grewal of any wrongdoing with regard to immigration visas:

Gurmant Grewal, the embattled Conservative MP facing allegations on several fronts, can breathe easy on one of them today.

He adds that Grewal made an error in judgment which placed him in an apparent conflict of interest. But he says the B.C. MP simply made an honest mistake.

Grewal was also cleared with regard to that weird airport incident a few weeks ago. It's starting to look like the man deserves an apology from those of us who called him an embarassment to the party - if he can make up for that tape-editing fiasco.

The real story now is, did Immigration Minister Joe Volpe abuse his authority?

The investigation began when Immigration Minister Joe Volpe asked the Federal Ethics Commissioner and the RCMP in May to look into two Conservative MPs who were allegedly helping immigrants in return for money.

"I had some information that came to my hands and I handed it off to the same authorities," Volpe said at the time.

Slouching Toward Genocide

Didymus Mutasa, head of Zimbabwe's secret police, quoted in the Weekly Standard: "We would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle."

Zimbabwe has ten million people (down from 13 million a few years ago). And they mey get to six million sooner than expected: in addition to bulldozing homes and businesses in the major cities, the Zimbabwean government is also preventing those left homeless from growing food.

I'm not sure what's worse: that a government is behaving like this, or that the world is standing by and letting it happen. Right now I'm thinking there's only one way Zimbabwe is not going to end up like Rwanda, Darfur or the Congo, and it involves Robert Mugabe's body hanging from a telephone pole.

Some things are just too damn easy to make fun of

Tom Laughlin, off curing cancer since The Man kept Billy Jack Goes to Washington from getting a wide release, is producing a fourth Billy Jack movie, tentatively titled Billy Jack’s Crusade to End the War and Restore America to its Moral Purpose.

I think they're going to have a little trouble fitting that on a poster (not to mention angry protests from CAIR for using the "C" word), so Protein Wisdom readers have come up with some alternate titles. (In the meantime, if you get the chance to see the E! True Hollywood Story about Laughlin, check it out. Hollywood has never seen a mind like his, and you can take that statement however you want.)

The sophisticated German diplomat

Bret Stephens must have the patience of a saint, considering that he didn't pound the tar out of this guy:

But the diplomat had no patience for my small talk. Apropos of nothing, he said he had recently made a study of U.S. tax laws and concluded that practices here were inferior to those in Germany. Given recent rates of German economic growth, I found this comment odd. But I offered no rejoinder. I was, after all, a guest in his home.

By then we had sat down at the formal dining table, with our backs to Ground Zero a half-mile away and our eyes on the boats on the river below us. My wife and I made abortive attempts at ordinary conversation. We were met with non sequiturs: "The only people who appreciate American foreign policy are poodles." After further bizarre pronouncements, including a lecture on the illegality of the Holocaust under Nazi law, my wife said that she felt unwell. We gathered our things and left.

(via Davids Medienkritik)

Bombers from Britain

British police have traced an Iraqi suicide bomber to...Manchester:

The first suspected suicide bomber to travel from Britain to attack coalition troops in Iraq lived in Manchester, police said yesterday, as they raided a red-brick terrace house where he once stayed.

The man, a 41-year-old French national of north African background, had spoken to friends at a mosque in Manchester of his desire to fight jihad, or holy war, in Iraq. He is thought to have blown himself up in an attack four months ago.
[...]
The bomber was unknown to MI5 but fits the profile of the jihadists who went to fight for the greater Muslim cause in Bosnia, Chechnya or Afghanistan.

Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif left Britain to become suicide bombers in Israel. Hanif blew himself up, but Sharif's bomb failed. He fled but his body was found in the sea off Tel Aviv.

Where else but Berkeley?

If the majority of parents, teachers, and students of Jefferson Elementary School in Berkeley, Calif., has its way, the school will soon shed its name and its association with the nation's third president, who they say is not worthy of being honored because of the hundreds of slaves he owned at his Monticello plantation.

A spokesman for the Berkeley Unified School District, Mark Coplan, acknowledged that Chief Sequoia "presumably owned slaves and was rather barbaric," but he emphasized that the proposed new name would honor the sequoia tree, not the Cherokee leader.
[...]
In an ironic twist, Mr. Larrick noted that the City of Berkeley is named after George Berkeley, an Irish-born philosopher and Anglican bishop who brought several slaves to his Rhode Island plantation in the late 1720s. "In a way, it's worse than Jefferson, because the bishop was an apologist for slavery," Mr. Larrick said.

Update: Jay Nordlinger has a great quote from David Gelertner:

There is an ongoing culture war between Americans who are ashamed of this nation’s history and those who acknowledge with sorrow its many sins and are fiercely proud of it anyway. Proud of the 17th-century settlers who threw their entire lives overboard and set sail for religious freedom in their rickety little ships. Proud of the new nation that taught democracy to the world. Proud of its ferocious fight to free the slaves, save the Union, and drag (lug, shove, sweat, bleed) America a few inches closer to its own sublime ideals. Proud of its victories in two world wars and the Cold War, proud of the fight it is waging this very day for freedom in Iraq and the whole Middle East.

If you are proud of this country and don’t want its identity to vanish, you must teach U.S. history to your children. They won’t learn it in school. This nation’s memory will go blank unless you act.

Keeping Africa Down

There is one way in which the West can be plausibly blamed for keeping Africa poor: wealthy nations pour billions of dollars in subsidies and price supports into their farming industries, while slapping tarriffs and taxes on imports from Africa. The EU's sugar policy is one of the most egregious examples.

Freer trade in agriculture would do more for Africa than all the charity in the world. (Bob Geldof, to his credit, has made it one of the aims of Live 8.)

"Red on Red"

I like the sound of this:

Marines patrolling this desert region near the Syrian border have for months been seeing a strange new trend in the already complex Iraqi insurgency. Insurgents, they say, have been fighting each other in towns along the Euphrates from Husayba, on the border, to Qaim, farther west. The observations offer a new clue in the hidden world of the insurgency and suggest that there may have been, as American commanders suggest, a split between Islamic militants and local rebels.

"The thought was, "They're coming for us. But then we saw they were fighting each other," he recalled during a break in Monday's operation. "We were kind of wondering what happened. We were getting mortared twice a day, and then all of a sudden it stopped."

(Hat tip: Paul Canniff)

Help Alberta

Details here. (via The Shotgun)

Not antiwar, but on the other side

Some of Douglas Wood's countrymen will never forgive him for being grateful to his rescuers. (Tex has even more, but his permalinks are screwed up.)

Is there anything they won't try?

Needless to say,this except to note that it will not stop "human rights activists" from whining when the Israelis search Palestinians entering the country for medical treatment. (More here.)

Where's Osama?

CIA Director Porter Goss, in an interview with Time, says he has an "excellent idea" where he is, but implies that it isn't practical to just rush in and nab him. (Which probably means he's in Pakistan, large areas of which are effectively outside the control of the Pakistani government.)

Eric Olsen has a superb overview of bin Laden's life and terrorist career.

Words we can't hear often enough

Condi Rice, on an official visit to American "ally" Egypt, made a strong pro-democracy speech at the American University in Cairo:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice challenged leaders in the Middle East yesterday to "abandon the excuses" for depriving their citizens of democracy, saying the rulers' "fear of free choices" no longer justifies "the denial of liberty."

In a forceful speech billed as the keynote address of her four-nation tour of the region, Miss Rice was more specific than any U.S. official has ever been about what Arab regimes must do in order to respond to the "inevitability" of a "fully free and democratic world."

"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region -- here in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither," she told an audience of more than 600 students, academics, journalists and intellectuals at the American University in Cairo.

"Now, we are taking a different course: We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people," she said.

Even though Miss Rice's speech sounded themes familiar from President Bush's second inaugural address in January, it was the most daring oration that any senior Western official has given while in the region.

"Throughout the Middle East, the fear of free choices can no longer justify the denial of liberty," she said. "It is time to abandon the excuses that are made to avoid the hard work of democracy."

As she urged Egypt to be "at the forefront" of democratic changes, Miss Rice denounced some of the practices of President Hosni Mubarak'sregime, such as its emergency law imposed with his rise to power in 1981 after the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat.

It's not nearly enough to push for democratic reforms during private meetings with Arab leaders, if the Americans - not to mention other Western politicians, including Canadians - are too bashful to speak out in public. We need to see a lot more of this (and while we're at it, we need to see the Americans actually following up this lofty rhetoric in places in Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan).

In the meantime, there are still people in Lebanon doing all they can to make sure democracy doesn't take root there.

Update: Harry's Place, which has been keeping a close eye on the Bush Administration's commitment to democracy, has more. (If Condi insists on driving herself around during official visits to Saudi Arabia, I'll endorse her for 2008 right then and there.)

Holidays in Chernobyl

The Ukranian government is taking tour groups through the Chernobyl "exclusion zone". (Interestingly, this New York Times story, which includes a must-see slideshow, says the famous "Kid of Speed" site is a hoax - though it doesn't say whether the photos were faked or whether someone else took them.)

Michael Totten wants to go. So do I - but only in a radiation suit.

The most disgusting man in America

Say what you like about Ted Rall, at least he doesn't picket soldiers' funerals with signs reading "Thank God for 9/11".

Aside from the "God Hates Fags" stuff, there really isn't that much separating Fred Phelps from the CounterPunch/IndyMedia left, is there?

(via Pejman)

Still second

The latest Ipsos-Reid poll has the Liberals five points ahead of the Tories, 34-29. That's hardly insurmountable (the survey that put the Conservatives eleven points down is starting to look like a statistical anomaly), but the Liberals still have a huge advantage: a commanding thirteen-point lead (44-31) in Ontario.

Stephen Harper could do worse than to read and ponder Warren Kinsella's advice. (Hey, say what you like about the man, he knows how to win - and he definitely wants Paul Martin to lose.)

Top formula, low farce

I missed the United States Grand Prix yesterday. Thank God.

All I can say is, this kind of thing never seems to happen in NASCAR. (Yeah, they don't race when it rains, but everything goes ahead as planned once the weather clears.)

Gone again

I have a day off on Monday, so I'm heading up to Halifax for the weekend. Posting likely won't resume until Monday night, at the earliest.

What's with all my trips to Halifax all of a sudden? Well, it's time to reveal a big secret: for the past few months, I've been seeing a lovely young woman in Dartmouth, just across the harbour. The distance is a nuisance, but Aeroplan points and (relatively) cheap flights on CanJet are a big help. And when I take my summer vacation in early July, I'll drive up. (Perhaps a Halifax blogger bash could be organized, Mike?)

See you in a few days.

Hitch in Iran

Essential reading, especially for the account of his meeting with a pro-American dissident: the son of Ayatollah Khomeni.

If you wanted to be a candidate in today's Iranian election, the rules are here. (via Harry's Place) If you support anything other than some kind of Shi'ite theocracy, forget it.

"Equally bad"

Rusty Shackleford responds to Kos' mind-boggling assertion that "torture" under U.S. command is "equally bad" as what happened under Saddam. (warning: extremely graphic photos)

No smoking

The increasingly infamous "Downing Street Memos" are being called the "smoking gun" that proves George W. Bush lied about the reasons for invading Iraq. Some Democrats even held an ersatz "hearing" on them yesterday in the basement of the Capitol. But Slate's Fred Kaplan, a consistent critic of the war, says the memos actually show the Bush Administration sincerely believed its claims about WMD in Iraq:

The memos do not show, for instance, that Bush simply invented the notion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam posed a threat to the region. In fact, the memos reveal quite clearly that the top leaders in the U.S. and British governments genuinely believed their claims.

The implicit point of these passages is this: These top officials genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—and that they constituted a threat. They believed that the international community had to be sold on the matter. But not all sales pitches are consciously deceptive. The salesmen in this case turned out to be wrong; their goods were bunk. But they seemed to believe in their product at the time.

Being wrong is not the same as being dishonest, and most Americans - even many of those who've turned against the war in recent months - likely believe the presence of a terror-supporting, genocidal maniac in the Middle East simply could not be tolerated after September 11. That's the main reason I supported the war, and that's why I still think it was the right thing to do. If anything in the DSM deserves further investigation and debate, it's the assertion that the Americans did not adequately plan for the post-war occupation:

Manning's memo recounts raising some issues about political support, international law, postwar stability, and so forth at a recent dinner with Rice. "Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed," he reports, adding, "From what she said, Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions." Two months later, the July 21 Cabinet Office report cited the same worry: "A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. … U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point."

At least the Brits clearly saw the difficulties ahead and tried to engage Bush on their implications. Had he listened, our biggest problems in Iraq today might be a great deal smaller. This is another lesson to be gleaned from the Downing Street memos.

I don't think this should be a debate about honesty. This should be a debate about competence.

About friggin' time

A mere four years after XM first became available south of the border, satellite radio has finally been approved for Canada:

The CRTC on Thursday approved applications for three subscription-based radio services, but imposed strong Canadian content rules.
[...]
Canadian Satellite Radio has partnered with Washington-based XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., while the CBC and Standard Broadcasting have partnered with New York-based Sirius.

The third pay service, to be run by CHUM and Montreal-based Astral Media, will use land broadcast towers to broadcast their digital service.

The Can-Con regulations seem pretty reasonable to me - really! - but not surprisingly, they aren't strict enough for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting:

"The CRTC got it wrong today. This decision does not reflect the legal requirement that Canadian broadcasters must offer homegrown programs. Today's decision creates a pipeline for U.S. radio programs direct to Canada, with little in return for our country" says Friends spokesperson Ian Morrison.
[...]
The CBC, a 40% owner of Sirius Radio Canada, is abdicating its special mandate to present Canadian programs. Sirius was approved for licencing today to deliver 72 pay radio channels, only 8 of which are required to be Canadian.

"If Mr. Rabinovitch had been CBC President when TV technology was first developed, CBC would be broadcasting ABC and CBS with a little more than 1 hour of Canadian programs each day," Morrison said.

And if Ian Morrison was running the CRTC, we'd only be able to get 6 channels up here. (That said, I have to wonder how a joint venture with Sirius falls within the CBC's mandate.)

Sirius Canada is promising NFL coverage, so if I the price is right I'll give it a try. If we get Howard Stern up here, that's a bonus.

There are no words

A Three-year-old Canadian boy was killed Thursday when four masked gunmen seized dozens of children at an international school in Cambodia.

Gunfire broke out inside the school, and hostage takers later told police they killed the Canadian boy because he was crying too much. Police moved in after they "threatened to kill the other children one by one," Information Minister Khieu Kanharith said. [emphasis added]

More details here. No one really knows who was responsible for this atrocity, but the reports I've seen suggest it was an attempted robbery or extortion plot.

Kill them. Kill them painfully and slowly. There is simply no other way to mete out justice to someone who would do something like this.

It's getting better all the time

A Power Line reader compares 1975 with 2005 here. And he doesn't even get into the clothes and cars...

Desecration

Most anti-semites believe the only Jew is a dead Jew. But in Britain in 2005, even being a dead Jew isn't enough:

The graves of the two children - Rachel, aged 13, and Abraham, aged four and a half - had stood undisturbed side by side for almost 150 years. But yesterday their headstones lay smashed, the Hebrew inscriptions, etched on fine Portland stone, crumbling in the dust.

The desecration is part of a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Britain, including violent attacks on children and orthodox Jews. There were 532 anti-Semitic incidents last year, the highest since records began 20 years ago.

Can Iraq be saved?

Yes, says Tom Friedman - but only if the number of American troops on the ground is greatly increased:

This is no time to give up - this is still winnable - but it is time to ask: What is our strategy? This question is urgent because Iraq is inching toward a dangerous tipping point - the point where the key communities begin to invest more energy in preparing their own militias for a scramble for power - when everything falls apart, rather than investing their energies in making the hard compromises within and between their communities to build a unified, democratizing Iraq.

Yes, yes, I know we are training Iraqi soldiers by the battalions, but I don't think this is the key. Who is training the insurgent-fascists? Nobody. And yet they are doing daily damage to U.S. and Iraqi forces. Training is overrated, in my book. Where you have motivated officers and soldiers, you have an army punching above its weight. Where you don't have motivated officers and soldiers, you have an army punching a clock.

Read it all. Unfortunately, with polls showing Americans turning against the war, it may no longer be politically feasible to do the job right.

This, of course, proves that Texas A&M was in on it, too

The university has issued a statement on the Morgan Reynolds nonsense:

Dr. Morgan Reynolds is retired from Texas A&M University, but holds the title of Professor Emeritus-an honorary title bestowed upon select tenured faculty, who have retired with ten or more years of service. Additionally, contrary to some written reports, while some faculty emeriti are allocated office space at Texas A&M, Dr. Reynolds does not have an office on the Texas A&M campus. Any statements made by Dr. Reynolds are in his capacity as a private citizen and do not represent the views of Texas A&M University. Below is a statement released yesterday by Dr. Robert M. Gates, President of Texas A&M University:

"The American people know what they saw with their own eyes on September 11, 2001. To suggest any kind of government conspiracy in the events of that day goes beyond the pale.”

I really shouldn't dignify this idiocy by spending more time on it, but a quick perusal of Reynolds' writings on LewRockwell.com shows lots of reliance on conspirozoid and radical-right websites - but Reynolds never once claims to have come across anything firsthand about the Bush Administration's ambitious plans while he was a chief economist at the Department of Labor.

In other words, we're talking about a conspiracy on an almost unimaginable scale, involving President Bush and his cabinet, the State and Defence Departments, the CIA, FBI, FEMA, INS and FAA, the Israelis, the owners, managers and tenants at the World Trade Center, United and American Airlines, the City of New York, the NYPD and FDNY, all the major TV networks and newspapers, the stock markets and thousands upon thousands of eyewitnesses - but one of the Bush Administration's top bureaucrats, who presumably dealt with dozens if not hundreds of other top government officials and employees before 9/11, was kept completely in the dark.

Damn, these guys are good.

Update: ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod!!! The library at Texas A&M is named after George H.W. Bush!

Connect the dots, people!

Kofi's in trouble again

Supposedly "cleared" by oil-for-food investigators in March, newly discovered memos (CIA/Mossad/Stonecutter forgeries, I'm sure) suggest Kofi Annan was aware that Cotecna, a company which employed his son, was lobbying for a lucrative UN contract:

The committee probing the UN oil-for-food program announced Tuesday it will again investigate Secretary-General Kofi Annan after two e-mails suggested he may have known more than he claimed about a multimillion-dollar UN contract awarded to the company that employed his son.

Through his spokesman, Annan said he didn't remember the late 1998 meeting. He repeatedly has insisted that he didn't know Cotecna was pursuing a contract with the oil-for-food program.

Roger L. Simon, as you might expect, has much more.

Realpolitik wins, democratization loses

At a recent NATO meeting, the Americans sided with Russia to oppose a call for an independent investigation into the Uzbek massacre:

Defense officials from Russia and the United States last week helped block a new demand for an international probe into the Uzbekistan government's shooting of hundreds of protesters last month, according to U.S. and diplomatic officials.

The communique's wording was worked out after what several knowledgeable sources called a vigorous debate in Brussels between U.S. defense officials, who emphasized the importance of the base, and others, including State Department representatives at NATO headquarters, who favored language calling for a transparent, independent and international probe into the killings of Uzbekistan civilians by police and soldiers.

I've always had the impression the State Department usually pushes for old-fashioned realpolitik, while the Defence Department has been more strongly in favor of democratization. But in this case, the roles are reversed:

Other officials said the disagreements between Defense and State officials reflect a continuing rift in the administration over how to handle a breach of human rights that has come under sharp criticism by the State Department, the European Union and some U.S. lawmakers.

Rice has said publicly that international involvement in an inquiry into the killings in Andijan is essential, and she has declined an Uzbek invitation for Washington to send observers to a commission of inquiry controlled by the parliament. Three U.S. officials said Uzbek President Islam Karimov has retaliated against her criticism by recently curtailing certain U.S. military flights into the air base at Karshi-Khanabad, in the country's southeast. The U.S. military considers the base a vital logistics hub in its anti-terrorism efforts.
[...]
The Defense Department position, articulated before the meeting began by Mira Ricardel, the acting assistant secretary for international security policy, was that "the NATO-Russia communique may not be the most appropriate place" to demand an international inquiry into the massacre, she confirmed in a telephone interview. "It was not a question of the policy, which was clear, but whether the venue for that was best" because of what she described as a routine focus at NATO-Russian meetings on strictly military issues. Another official privy to the deliberations described her opposition to mentioning the word "investigation" as unequivocal.

The British view was that the communique was an ideal venue for making the demand, since Uzbekistan prizes its existing military links to NATO and a call by defense ministers would carry substantial weight. One U.S. official said Britain was prepared for a time to hold up the communique if the language was not included.

The Bush Administration has now given every Middle Eastern tyrant, Third World dictator and Chomskyite leftist something to point to and say, "see? We told you the Americans weren't serious about promoting democracy after all." Sadly, they would have a point.

(via Hit & Run)

The risks of blogging

USA Today notes that several people have been fired or disciplined by their employers because of what they wrote on their weblogs. I'd love to be able to come out wholeheartedly against this kind of thing, but certainly there are situations - say, revealing company secrets or actively warning people against using your employer's services - where firing would likely be justified. Each case must be decided on its merits.

At the very least, if you're blogging under your real name, it's wise to post a blurb noting that your views do not represent those of your company. (On a completely unrelated note, my employer is the best darned law firm in Newfoundland, if not the country.)

(via Relapsed Catholic)

Buick deathwatch

Forbes' Jerry Flint says Buick, the brand on which the world's biggest car company (for now) was built, is doomed.

I hate seeing any make of car unceremoniously killed off, but Buick should have been axed instead of Oldsmobile, a brand that was actually trying to attract buyers under 70 years of age. I'm sure the new LaCrosse/Allure is a very nice car, but how many non-retired people have bought one?

If GM wants to save the brand, they should bring back something like this. Quickly.

Thank God for people with way too much time on their hands

Behold the Rocklopedia Fakebandica, an obsessive listing of fictional singers and rock bands from television and movies. Yes, The Zit Remedy is included (though listed as "The Zits").

Zerb does it again

Not long after I started up this blog, I came across an Antonia Zerbisias column which approvingly cited the ne plus ultra of conspirozoid websites, whatreallyhappened.com. I e-mailed Zerb to point out that WRH was a blatantly anti-semitic hate site, and to her credit she owned up to the mistake in her next column. It must be embarassing for a "media critic" to miss something like that, so I figured she wouldn't make the same mistake again.

Needless to say, she made the same mistake again. On her Toronto Star-hosted weblog, Zerb links to an article by former Bush Administration official Morgan Reynolds, who's evidently a structural engineer on the side. Reynolds now believes the World Trade Center towers were likely destroyed by "controlled demolitions", and one of his sources - also linked by Zerb - is this article, from a website called "americanfreepress.net".

"American Free Press", it turns out, is the successor to the infamous Spotlight, a hatemongering tabloid run by venerable neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Willis Carto. A quick perusal of the site shows that it hasn't changed much.

I don't believe Zerb is at all anti-semitic, and I'm sure she linked to "American Free Press" without realizing its real agenda. But when you really, really want to believe Dubya n' the neocons carried out the 9/11 attacks, it tends to get in the way of your critical judgment.

Zerb concludes that poor Mr. Reynolds is going to have his career savaged and destroyed by the right-wing media machine, especially the omnipotent Fox News Channel. Personally, I think Morgan Reynolds is doing a pretty good job of destroying his own credibility, considering he doesn't believe any planes actually hit the World Trade Center:

About a dozen of the fragmented ends of exterior columns in the North Tower hole were bent but the bends faced the "wrong way" because they pointed toward the outside of the Tower. This fact is troublesome for the official theory that a plane crash created the hole and subsequent explosion between floors 94 and 98. The laws of physics imply that a high-speed airplane with fuel-filled wings breaking through thin perimeter columns would deflect the shattered ends of the columns inward, if deflected in any direction, certainly not bend them outward toward the exterior.
[...]
The small size of the holes in both towers casts doubt on the airliner-impact hypothesis and favors professional demolition again. There were no reports of plane parts, especially wings, shorn off in the collision and bounced to the ground on the northeast side of the tower, to my knowledge, though FEMA reported a few small pieces to the south at Church street (pp. 68–9) and atop WTC-5 to the east of WTC-1.

Adding to the problems of the official theory is the fact that photos of the North Tower hole show no evidence of a plane either. There is no recognizable wreckage or plane parts at the immediate crash site. While the issue probably takes us too far afield, the landing wheel assembly that allegedly flew out of the North Tower and was found several streets away could easily have been planted by FEMA or other government agents. I’ve never seen any objective analysis of this wheel assembly though it would be welcome. In fact, the government has failed to produce significant wreckage from any of the four alleged airliners that fateful day. [emphasis added]

9/11 conspirozoids have a lot in common with Holocaust deniers - but as far as I know, even the Holocaust deniers don't claim the Nazis never existed.

Freedom's just another word banned in China

Microsoft has caved in to the Chinese government and banned subversive words like "freedom" from the Chinese-language version of MSN Spaces:

Chinese bloggers, even on foreign-sponsored sites, had better choose their words carefully -- the censors are watching.

Microsoft's Chinese staff could not be reached immediately for comment. However, a spokesman at the tech giant's headquarters in Seattle acknowledged that the company is cooperating with the Chinese government to censor its Chinese-language Web portal.
[...]
The Chinese government encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to ban access to material deemed subversive.

Recently, the government demanded that Web site owners register with authorities by June 30 or face fines.

I've always believed increased trade and commerce will inevitably liberalize Chinese society and politics - but if this happens, it will be despite the best efforts of companies like Microsoft.

A revolution betrayed

Iran's student revolutionaries of 1979 are the dissidents and political prisoners of 2005:

Few would recognise Abbas Abdi, 49, as the leader of the students who stormed the American Embassy in Tehran in October 1979. High on the hope of a new Iran after the Shah’s deposition, the students from the capital’s Amir Kabir university caused an international crisis by holding US staff at the embassy hostage for 444 days.

The former hostage taker was incarcerated for an ironic crime. As a latter-day architect of reform and critic of the regime, his polling company published results suggesting that 74 per cent of Tehranis favoured dialogue with the US.
[...]
Reform is unlikely to have any significant leeway in Iran just yet. Foreign observers and Iranians suggest that the combination of disillusionment, fear, war-weariness and a lack of viable political alternative has eroded the chance of a new revolution. Meanwhile, veterans do not even enjoy their revolution nostalgia.

“We say, ‘Hey, you remember when you started fighting with the police or did such and such in this street or that? Yeah, you idiot, look where it got us’.”

(via Mick Hartley, who's on a roll these days)

Castro + Mugabe = Chavez

Actually, the Venezuelan President hasn't yet sunk to the depths of either Castro or Mugabe, but signs are not encouraging.

Heroic resistance fighters strike again

Another horrific bombing in Iraq:

A bomb exploded outside a bank in Kirkuk today and killed 18 people, including pensioners and child street vendors selling groceries, police said.

The roadside bomb exploded at 9am (0600 BST) near a queue of people waiting outside the Rafidiyan Bank in downtown Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, police colonel Shiraz Mohammed said.
[...]
Kirkuk is an ethnically mixed city where insurgents have repeatedly launched deadly attacks seeking to foment ethnic tension.

Update: and who knows how many more of these bombings will be financed by ransom money?

Hear them roar

This site has extraordinary photos of a feminist demonstration. In Tehran. (via Harry's Place)

The youth of Iran aren't going to put up with the mullahs much longer, either. Before you know it, Iran will be free. (Related reading: the story of French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose hatred of Western democracy was so pathological that he sided with Iran's "Islamic revolutionaries" in 1979.)

Somebody needs a hug

Novelist Lucy Ellman in - where else? - The Guardian:

American sentimentality may once have seemed endearing, but now we know it’s just another instrument of evil. Every aspect of American culture has begun to stink of the grave. The pizzas and hamburgers: this is how world tyrants fuel themselves. The cars, the drugs, the music, the TV: this is how they distract themselves from their crimes. But how can they still think they’re right about anything? Their children are deep-fried, drug-soaked numbskulls, the adults hapless lemmings in their SUVs, heading straight into the back-end of the American dream. Where is the guilt - and where the apology?

Long national nightmare soon to end

The Michael Jackson verdict will be revealed at approximately 4:30PM Eastern.

Instant analysis from north of the border: if he wins it's because the rich can buy justice in America, and if he loses it's because black people can't get a fair trial in America. (Whether Jacko can still be considered rich or black is a subject deserving of its own post.)

Update: not guilty on all charges. I can't say I'm surprised - all Jacko had to do was show a reasonable doubt as to whether he committed the offences, and there were enough serious questions about the complainants' credibility to overcome that hurdle.

I still think you'd have to be insane, greedy, star-struck or hopelessly naive to let your kids stay overnight at Neverland Ranch, though.

Homicide in Newfoundland

Over the past few days, Newfoundland has seen a man charged with first-degree murder in Irishtown (just across the bay from Corner Brook) and the suspicious deaths of a husband and wife in Port aux Basques. Today, in the most shocking case of all, a resident of Gander has been charged with the murder of his twin daughters, who drowned under mysterious circumstances in 2002.

Newfoundland and Labrador is a very safe place to live, rarely hosting more than one or two homicides per year out of a population of 530,000. But I don't think we've ever seen anything like this in such a short period of time - certainly not since I was born. To call it "unnerving" would be an understatement.

More Chaoulli-related thoughts

1. I caught most of Cross-Country Checkup on CBC Radio yesterday evening, and once again I was struck by the number of NDP voters calling in to rant, rave and bawl about unelected judges "imposing American-style two-tier healthcare" upon Canadians against our will. Here in Canada we like to pretend political considerations have nothing to do with appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada, and therefore we don't need "American-style" grilling of judicial nominees by Parliament. But now that the court has made a decision the left really, really doesn't like, I have a feeling reform of the judicial-appointments process is suddenly going to become a national priority.

2. As you can see, you can end all argument on any issue in Canada by saying a proposal is "American-style". I'm waiting for someone to seriously argue for abolishing elections, since they lead to "American-style argument, disunity and wasteful spending on political campaigns".

3. Michael Moore is working on a documentary called Sicko, an indictment of the American health-care system which, like Bowling for Columbine, will almost certainly have a section describing how much more enlightened we are in Canada. How's he going to deal with Chaoulli?

It never went away

A classic example of misleading reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: several reports today, such as this one from CBC.ca, say the Palestinians have "reinstated" the death penalty:

The Palestinian Authority has carried out the first executions since 2002, killing four men convicted of murder.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is facing heavy pressure from Israel and other countries to rein in the militants, signed the execution orders on Saturday.
[...]
The organization said the Palestinian Authority has carried out nine executions since it was established in 1994.

The issue is particularly controversial because about half of the 50 or so Palestinians on death row are convicted of collaborating with Israel.

Note that the story credits the sainted Arafat for supposedly "abolishing" the procedure, and implies that Mahmoud Abbas brought it back because of pressure from Israel. Here's what CBC, er, forgot to tell you: since the start of the second intifadah in 2000, the Palestinian Authority has carried out or turned a blind eye to the execution of over 100 suspected "collaborators" with Israel.

For Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, spying for the Israeli security services is considered the most heinous of crimes. Suspicion of collaboration is often enough to warrant summary execution.

“I’m sure that behind each Israeli assassination of a Palestinian, there is a colla borator,” says Eid. “But I think most of the collaborators killed during the second Intifada were probably innocent.”

If the "powerful Zionist lobby" controls the media, as we're often told, they're doing a staggeringly incompetent job of it.

Wasn't Gwynneth Paltrow supposed to be part of this?

Two more esteemed commentators at The Huffington Post: Israel-obsessed conspirozoid Justin Raimondo, and Israel-obsessed former Congressman Paul Findley, who uses a fake Condi Rice quote to "prove" that the Joooooooos control American foreign policy.

David Duke wasn't available?

Supreme Irony

The Chaoulli decision was based largely on the Supreme Court's vaunted Morgantaler decision from 1988, which lifted federal government restrictions on abortion. I always wondered how leftist medicare "activists" could justify supporting private abortion clinics but not private clinics for anything else, and I guess the Supreme Court of Canada felt the same way:

Last week's landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision on medicare drew heavily from an unlikely source: Dr. Henry Morgentaler.

"In Morgentaler, as here, people in urgent need of care face the same prospect: unless they fall within the wealthy few who can pay for private care, typically outside the country, they have no choice but to accept the delays imposed by the legislative scheme and the adverse physical and psychological consequences this entails," Justice Marie Dechamps wrote in the decision.

Lorrie Goldstein also notes the irony - but sounds a cautionary note for conservatives who've suddenly discovered enthusiasm for an "activist" Supreme Court:

Well, now the high court has said -- in a decision with clear implications across Canada despite the predictable b.s. coming from Martin and Premier Dalton McGuinty, that this ruling only affects Quebec -- that the single-tier health care system you so adore is taking away the right of Canadians to timely medical care, causing unnecessary suffering and death.

You will have forever defined yourselves as fans of judicial activism because this 4-3 judgment defines what judicial activism is.

Quote of the Day

"All this time we were led to believe the downfall of public health care in Canada would be a) Alberta, b) Klein and Harper, and c) the secret agenda of the Conservatives. Turns out the biggest blow might be a) Quebec, b) the Supreme Court, and c) the Charter of Rights and Freedoms."

- letter writer Cal Garder, of Edmonton, in The Globe and Mail

Live by judicial activism, die by judicial activism

Not surprisingly, Tom Walkom and the Toronto Star editorialists are upset about the Supreme Court of Canada having the gall to rule that one of their most cherished principles - ensuring private health insurance remains illegal in Canada - violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Lawyer Warren Kinsella, meanwhile, sputters and rages against "judicial activism":

Looking at the coverage this morning, it occurred to me that the judicial activists on the Supreme Court of Canada have given the rest of us their own public policy Vietnam: in their cloistered arrogance, they wish us to believe that destroying Medicare will save it.

(My God, at times like this, I wish we still had real leaders, like Chretien and Trudeau.)

Anyone want to go through Warren Kinsella's archives to see what he wrote when Canadian courts changed the traditional definition of marriage "without you, the voter, being asked first whether you approve"? (And while we're at it, what would a "real leader" like Trudeau do in a case like this? Send in the tanks again?)

Meanwhile, the head of the Canadian Medical Association - which obviously didn't get the memo from the federal Liberals, who insist that "no one" in Canada wants private health care - says it's time to end this fearmongering nonsense and have a real debate on the issue:

The head of the Canadian Medical Association wants Ottawa to carefully examine the prospect of expanding private health care in this country.

"We need a real debate on the role it has played, the role it continues to play and will play in our system to advance the health of all Canadians."

Canadians, by and large, are much more open to private health care than their leaders; one survey, cited by Rondi Adamson in today's Star, says 51% of Canadians want it to be available. Once again, we see a potential opportunity for the Conservatives to stand up for something most Canadian politicians won't touch - and once again, they won't do it, instead banging the "Liberal mismanagement" drum again. Don't want to get the people at the CBC and Globe and Mail angry at us, I guess.

What more can I say?

Three weeks after implicating Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin's chief of staff and a senior member of his cabinet in an alleged vote-buying scandal, an opposition lawmaker is now facing possible deportation.

Since releasing secret recordings of his conversations with Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh and senior Martin advisor Tim Murphy about crossing the floor of the House of Commons to bolster the Liberal government's chances of winning a crucial confidence vote last month, Grewal has suddenly become a pariah in his largely immigrant westcoast electoral district and the target of numerous wrongdoing accusations.

More bad news

A new CTV/Globe and Mail survey not only puts the Liberals well ahead of the Conservatives, but actually has them further ahead than they were a year ago:

The Conservative Party has lost more support, a new poll has found -- and that can be tied to a popularity drop for its leader Stephen Harper.

"But frankly, as Canadians get to know Harper, they (think) he might be a little lacking in leadership," he said.

Even more depressing, the poll shows that Canadians simply aren't that upset about Adscam anymore:

The sponsorship scandal has been replaced by concerns about government stability as the top issue facing the country.

While people might not like the Liberals' tactics for holding onto power, "they don't see any alternative," he said.

Once again, we see that it's not enough for the Conservatives to run on a "we aren't as corrupt as the other guys" platform. The Tories have to actually show what they stand for, and party leaders should read and think about this post from Kate McMillan.

Liverpool's in

Thanks to a last-minute rule change by UEFA, the Reds have been allowed to defend their Champions League title after all. (To Liverpool fans complaining because the team has been placed in the first qualifying round: get a friggin' life.)

Amother trip

I'm heading off to Eastport to hang out with some friends for a few days, so posting - if any - may be light until Monday morning. Have a great weekend.

Dump Karimov

Uzbekistan hasn't been in the news much lately, but dictator Islam Karimov presumably hasn't gotten any better since his government massacred hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators. Michael Totten says America's relationship with Karimov - just like its support for the likes of Hosni Mubarak and the House of Saud - will just further inflame anti-American sentiment in that part of the world, and that it's time to cut the man loose:

The short-term response, at absolute minimum, is a public condemnation of the atrocity and, by extension, the regime. Most likely the Bush Administration had a few words with Karimov in private. But that does no good at all if he refuses to take our advice about moderating his rule and behaving by civilized norms. After Andijon, he clearly does not.

Quietly twisting Karimov's arm while lauding him in public gives the Uzbekistan "street" legitimate reasons to hate the United States. We are allied with a man who stomps on their face and kicks them in the stomach. That's no way to make friends. But it's a terrific way to make enemies.
[...]
If Karimov's rule were slowly improving it would be worthwhile to accomplish whatever we can. Being labeled hypocrites is a price worth paying if it yields tangible results in the real world. But Karimov's rule is not improving. It's getting worse. And it's getting worse at a time when we need him a lot less than we recently did. Over the long run, and perhaps over the medium run as well, we do need the people of Uzbekistan to have at least neutral -- if not positive -- views of the United States.

Something different needs to happen. If it doesn't, a second realpolitik alliance very well may be added to the first. Uzbekistan's liberals and other various secular oppositionists could side with the Islamists against the regime. That's exactly what happened in Iran during the 1970s when the U.S. supported the tyrannical Shah Reza Pahlavi. Since that time the Ayatollah Khomeini's dark Guardian Council has been deeply entrenched in power for more than a quarter century.

"Revenge on the poor"

The Independent has more on Robert Mugabe's latest campaign of destruction:

Human rights activists, churches, unions and opposition groups have unanimously condemned the "clean-up" as a brutal crackdown on the urban poor to punish them for voting against the government in the 31 March elections. In a matter of days, the campaign has seen the destruction of street markets and the mass arrest of traders; the demolition of shanty towns and the collapse of the informal economy upon which millions of the country's poor rely.

Today sees the second day of a nationwide two-day strike called by the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in response to the crisis. But it is virtually impossible for the "stay away" action to work in a country where only 800,000 from a population of 12 million have formal employment. There has been concerted intimidation with police saying they would be "ruthless" with strikers and going from door to door to warn employers that they face arrest if their businesses shut.

Why on earth is Mugabe doing this? Simple: the urban poor overwhelmingly support the opposition, so he's trying to force them back to the countryside, where they'll be too hungry to rise up against his government.

The more I read about Zimbabwe, the more I'm inclined to agree with Perry de Havilland:

Clearly the only chance for the people of Zimbabwe is for someone, anyone, to help them to rise up and meet violence with violence. They do not need aid, they need guns and ammunition so that supporters of the MDC can start shooting at anyone associated with ZANU-PF or the 'security' services. Time for Mugabe's swaggering police thugs to be met with a hail of gunfire rather than terrified sobbing. But of course the South African ANC government, far from being a possible solution to the rapidly deteriorating situation across the border, is aiding and abetting in the Cambodia-ization of Zimbabwe. I look forward to Saint Nelson Mandela taking a loud, public and sustained stand against Mugabe's madness. Yeah, right.

If Tony Blair was serious about doing something about poverty in Africa, he would be sending guns to the MDC and to anyone else who is willing to resist and threatening to have some gentlemen from Hereford put a .338 hole between Mugabe's eyes unless things change radically. What a pity Zimbabwe does not have oil or maybe more people would give a damn what is happening there.

Is this even newsworthy anymore?

Ho hum, more insane ranting (with healthy dollops of projection) on Saudi television...

Abd Al-Aziz: "Yes. The decisions of the 1965 Vatican Council included, first of all, absolving the Jews of the blood of Christ. This decision is well known and was the basis for the recognition of the occupying Zionist entity - Israel. The second decision was to eradicate the left in the eighties. I believe we've all witnessed this. The third decision was to eradicate Islam, so that the world would be Christianized by the third millennium."

"When in January 2001, the World Council of Churches delegated this mission to the US - what did the US do? It fabricated the show of… is it September 9 or 11?"

Same old Jesse

I'd forgotten all about Jesse Helms, thank God, until I found out he was publishing an autobiography in which he still maintains that integration was imposed upon the South by "outside agitators". Captain Ed delivers a righteous savaging upon a man who still thinks that way in 2005:

[Helms:] “We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance,” according to the uncorrected proof. “We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust.”

Did the civil-rights movements have their excesses? Of course. Did the government go too far in establishing preferences to compensate for centuries of shameful oppression? Arguably, yes. But to write in 2005 that equality and brotherhood would have dropped from the sky like manna to the Israelis if the blacks in America only had a little more patience doesn't just amount to historical revisionism, it sounds like a fantasy world concocted by David Duke.

Appeal accepted

A Supreme Court of Canada press release says Chaoulli's appeal has been allowed, but reasons for judgment have not been released yet.

Update: full text of the judgment here. McLachlin, Major and Bastarache all ruled that the prohibition on purchasing private health care was not rationally connected to the goal of maintaining a public system, while Deschamps ruled that there was such a connection but that the ban was a disproprtionate means of attaining that goal. Justices Fish, Binnie and LeBel would have upheld the ban.

I'll need a lot more time to review the whole text, but here's the money quote from the headnote for McLachlin and Major's decision:

The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care. The evidence also demonstrates that the prohibition against private health insurance and its consequence of denying people vital health care result in physical and psychological suffering that meets a threshold test of seriousness.

Where lack of timely health care can result in death, the s. 7 protection of life is engaged; where it can result in serious psychological and physical suffering, the s. 7 protection of security of the person is triggered. In this case, the government has prohibited private health insurance that would permit ordinary Quebeckers to access private health care while failing to deliver health care in a reasonable manner, thereby increasing the risk of complications and death. In so doing, it has interfered with the interests protected by s. 7 of the Canadian Charter.
[...]
...Here, the evidence on the experience of other western democracies with public health care systems that permit access to private health care refutes the government’s theory that a prohibition on private health insurance is connected to maintaining quality public health care. It does not appear that private participation leads to the eventual demise of public health care.

The breach of s. 7 is not justified under s. 1 of the Canadian Charter. The government undeniably has an interest in protecting the public health regime but, given that the evidence falls short of demonstrating that the prohibition on private health insurance protects the public health care system, a rational connection between the prohibition on private health insurance and the legislative objective is not made out. In addition, on the evidence, the prohibition goes further than would be necessary to protect the public system and is thus not minimally impairing. Finally, the benefits of the prohibition do not outweigh its deleterious effects. The physical and psychological suffering and risk of death that may result from the prohibition on private health insurance outweigh whatever benefit – and none has been demonstrated here – there may be to the system as a whole.

Sit back and watch the political earthquake, folks. This time, for once, it will be the Canadian left complaining about "judicial activism". (Needless to say, I'm eating my words from earlier this morning.)

Update II: the other big difference between the ruling of Mr. Justice Deschamps, and the concurring opinion of McLachlin, Major and Bastarache, is that Deschamps based her ruling on Quebec's Charter of human rights and freedoms, while the others went further and said the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was violated. But three judges did not agree with the latter finding, which means a similar outcome for other provinces is not a slam dunk.

Medicare on trial

The Supreme Court of Canada rules today on whether it's unconstitutional to prevent Canadians from paying for medical services:

The Supreme Court of Canada is set to issue a ruling Thursday that could have significant implications for the country's medicare system.

They say that patients should have a right to pay for services from private doctors and that doing so would pose no threat to the public health-care system.

I think this reasoning makes perfect sense, which I guess is why I'll never get elected in this country. But Quebec's lower courts have ruled that "collective rights to a universal, publicly funded system" (CTV's words) are more important than individual rights, and I'm just jaded enough to believe the Supreme Court of Canada will find some way to justify a similar ruling. We'll see.

We've done the impossible

A new poll puts the Conservatives 14 points behind the Liberals, just barely ahead of the NDP, and lower then we were before Adscam erupted:

The Liberals vaulted to a 14-point lead over the Conservatives in popular support, suggests a new poll released to The Canadian Press.

Decima said the Tories had fallen 26 points behind the Liberals and were in third place behind the NDP. The Liberals had 48 per cent in that province, the NDP was at 24 and the Conservatives held 22 per cent.

Once I get my head out of the oven, I'll say the worst possible thing we can do right now is to start lashing out at the Canadian electorate. A lot of voters already believe we have a hidden agenda to destroy Canada, and the last thing we need to do is give them more ammunition. The simple fact is, Canadians have grown numb to the Adscam revelations, and while the Tories have concentrated 100% on bringing down the this corrupt government, they have not shown what they would actually do if they won an election. And when we Conservatives aren't openly talking about our policies, people assume the worst about us. It might not be fair, but that's just the way politics works in this country.

It's also obvious by now that the Grewal mess has done untold damage to the Conservative Party of Canada. The Tories now look paranoid, incompetent and dishonest - and that's the worst thing that could possibly happen if we're savaging the Liberals for their corruption and arrogance. As soon as it became clear that Grewal's tapes had been clumsily edited, he should have been fired - regardless of whether the Liberals really were offering him government positions in exchange for his vote. (Admittedly, the Globe and Mail headline would probably read, "Minority MP fired from Conservative caucus".)

I've been a Harper supporter ever since he won the leadership in 2004. But as the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, he must be held accountable for the complete, utter mess the party has made out of what should have been a tremendous opportunity. I'm not calling for his head yet - but I'm a lot closer to doing so than I ever expected I would be.

Live from Hell

Some brave soul is blogging from Zimbabwe, and things are looking pretty bleak. He (or she) deserves our attention and support - and our prayers.

Among the "insurgents"

A story in today's Guardian provides a fascinating, insightful look at the Islamofascists streaming into Iraq to fight the Americans. Yes, they're being encouraged by the Syrians, and most of their funding comes from - you guessed it! - Saudi Arabia.

There's simply too much to excerpt. Read it all.

(via Harry's Place)

The dark side of the story

Darth Vader (formerly Leonard Skywalker, not "Anakin") is pissed off with biased media coverage of his life and career, and now he's fighting back.

(via Galley Slaves)

Post abandons Newfoundland

CanWest is going to stop printing the National Post in Newfoundland, and will sell only a small number of print copies down here:

National Post subscribers in Newfoundland will be getting the newspaper in a different mailbox starting next month — their email inbox.

He expects the printed Post won't arrive in the city until 10 a.m. or so. Current subscribers will get the electronic version free for one year.
[...]
Willows said the Post, owned by CanWest Global Communications Inc., has in recent days been printing fewer than 2,400 copies in St. John's.

They sold the Post here in Corner Brook for a while, and then they upped the price to $2.00. When sales inevitably plummeted, they gave up on Western Newfoundland altogether.

The Post still has Andrew Coyne, Robert Fulford and Colby Cosh, and it's not as elitist and infuriating as the Globe and Mail. But the paper's continuing decline since the Aspers took it over has been absolutely painful to watch. When the Post is inevitably folded a few years (months?) from now, people will say it's "proof" that a conservative newspaper just can't make it in Canada - even though its sales were considerably better when Conrad Black still owned it.

Tories lose again

A new poll on the Grewal mess says Canadians are more likely to believe the Liberals' explanation than the Conservatives:

The Conservatives strategy of releasing secretly taped conversations to embarrass the Liberals fell flat, according to a new survey obtained by The Canadian Press.

The poll of 1,000 respondents was conducted from June 2 to June 5 - before Grewal took a stress leave this week because of an incident at Vancouver airport. The Surrey MP is taking an undetermined stress leave from his parliamentary duties.

A slideshow with an updated transcript, illustrating the sections conveniently cut from what Grewal originally released, can be found here. The Tories' incompetence here has been absolutely breathtaking, and Bob Tarantino chides the Conservatives for screwing it up so badly:

Yes, when weighing the wrongs here, the Liberals are the bad guys. And yes, Grewal's shenanigans with the tapes appear to be just dopey third-rate machinations. So, in the perfect world, if we're assigning guilt, Tim Murphy, Ujjal Dosanjh and Paul Martin are a bunch liars and scam artists. But c'mon: why does the CPC keep doing this? The Liberal-friendly media is going to crucify the CPC every chance they get; do we need to make it easier for them?

Is there a way in which the CPC could stage-manage the media more effectively? Possibly. Possibly not, given the general loathing the CBC/Globe/Star axis has for them. But, again, why muddle around in penny-ante crap like this whole sordid affair? Do Grewal's actions excuse the Liberals? Of course not. But amateurism is, to put it mildly, not helpful in breaking through the media bias. Should the media play up the actions of Grewal, while burying the possibly unethical, possibly illegal actions of the Liberals? Nope. But why give them even the chance?

Anne Bancroft, R.I.P.

She passed away from cancer, at age 73, on Monday. My condolences to Mel Brooks, to whom she was married since 1956.

Bancroft, sadly, is the latest Simpsons guest star we've lost over the past few years. (She played the psychiatrist who cured Marge's fear of flying.)

Amnesty hits bottom

Using Khmer Rouge apologist Noam Chomsky to promote "human rights" is like using David Duke to promote "racial harmony".

I was never a member of Amnesty International, but I always had at least some respect for the organization. But if Irene Khan's "gulag of our time" comment didn't make it clear that the group had moved from squishy-left to hard-left, this should end all argument. More here.

Sounds fair to me

A letter in the Montreal Gazette:

So Bernard Landry is not satisfied with his approval rating of 76.2 per cent.

I'm sure the Parti Quebecois will now realize that it's only fair that the Yes side should have to attract at least 76.2 per cent of the votes in the next referendum to break up the country.

Year Zero in Zimbabwe

Just when you think it can't possibly get any worse, you read something like this (via Samizdata):

President Robert Mugabe's onslaught against Zimbabwe's cities has escalated to claim new targets, with white-owned factories and family homes being demolished in a campaign that has left 200,000 people homeless.

The aim of this brutal campaign is, says the official media, to depopulate urban areas and force people back to the "rural home".
[...]
Across Zimbabwe, the United Nations estimates that 200,000 people have lost their homes, with the poorest townships bearing the brunt of Mr Mugabe's onslaught. "The vast majority are homeless in the streets," said Miloon Kothari, the UN's housing representative. He added that "mass evictions" were creating a "new kind of apartheid where the rich and the poor are being segregated".

The Herald, the official daily newspaper, urged "urbanites" to go "back to the rural home, to reconnect with one's roots and earn an honest living from the soil our government repossessed under the land reform programme".

In an interview airing on ABC's PrimeTime Live tonight, Brad Pitt complains about the lack of media attention given to the perennial humanitarian crisis in Africa. He's got a point. But has Brad Pitt, or any of his celebrity activist bretheren, ever complained about the thugs, tyrants and maniacs ruling most African nations? All the aid and charity in the world won't save Africa, as long as people like Robert Mugabe are running the show.

Good questions

Johann Hari has posted 15 questions for supporters of George Galloway on his website. The Galloway groupies in Hari's comment section respond with personal insults and conspiracy theories, and I've no doubt his new American fans would do the same.

Update: Galloway on Al-Jazeera:

"Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolph Hitler. It has killed far more people than George Bush. The economic system which these people support, which leaves most of the people in the world hungry, and without clean water to drink. So we're going to put them on trial, the leaders, when they come. They think they're coming for a holiday in a beautiful country called Scotland; in fact, they're coming to their trial.

"We want to make reparation to the Palestinian people for the crimes of Balfour which were committed in the building behind me, when one person, on behalf of one country, promised a second people the lands of a third people - the Palestinians.

And on Abu Dhabi TV:

"The people who invaded and destroyed Iraq and have murdered more than a million Iraqi people by sanctions and war will burn in Hell in the hell-fires, and their name in history will be branded as killers and war criminals for all time. Fallujah is a Guernica, Falluaja is a Stalingrad, and Iraq is in flames as a result of the actions of these criminals. Not the resistance, not anybody else but these criminals who invaded and fell like wolves upon the people of Iraq. And by the way, those Arab regimes which helped them to do it will burn in the same hell-fires."

Stress leave

More evidence, as if any were needed, that Gurmant Grewal is an embarassment the Conservatives just don't need right now:

Besieged by controversy over tapes of his conversations with senior Liberals and facing fresh allegations he violated Canada's airline security laws, Tory MP Gurmant Grewal has taken a stress leave.

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper announced that Grewal will be taking a break from his committee and caucus duties shortly after Air Canada confirmed it is investigating a complaint that the B.C. MP tried to get another passenger to carry a package for him on a flight from Vancouver to Ottawa.
[...]
A union official at the airport said Grewal went to an Air Canada ticket agent to ask if he could arrange for someone to carry a package to Ottawa on Saturday. He was told that was impossible because of security practices.

"I'm going to deny the allegations with Air Canada and they have, unfortunately, wrong information in their hands," he told Global News yesterday.

Today Germany, tomorrow the world

We already knew Germany was fertile ground for 9/11 conspiracy theories, but it appears a line has been crossed:

On the evening of June 5th 2005 the state-funded network ARD broadcast a 90-minute episode of Tatort. The word means “scene of the crime” and it is a long-running murder mystery series watched by millions. The episode ("Scheherazade") concerned a woman who claimed that a man was murdered in her apartment. Not just any man, however.

Throughout the mystery the woman was chased by groups of unidentified villains who were out to kill her because she had a CD with photographic evidence of the Boston hijacker who got away. The subtext of the plot was her explicitly stated allegation that 9-11 was instigated by the Bush family for oil and power. The hit men were CIA/FBI types and the TV audience is led to believe they were the ones who killed the pilot and were now after the woman to insure her story would never be known. The conclusion of the mystery has the detectives believing her story as she escapes the CIA by fleeing to an unnamed Arab country.

9/11 conspiracy theorizing could go the way of Holocuast denial (believed by only a hateful fringe) or Kennedy assassination theories (a staple of pop culture believed by almost everybody, even though nearly all of them fall apart upon close examination). Unfortunately, it looks like the latter is coming true. Many people are so consumed with anti-American, anti-Bush and/or anti-Semitic hate (often with a healthy dose of dhimmitude) that a "neocon cabal" theory makes perfect sense. And just as people have a hard time believing an insignificant loser like Lee Harvey Oswald could have murdered a beloved President, many just can't bring themselves to believe that 19 people could have pulled off something as horrific as 9/11.

Right now, "alternate histories" of September 11 are showing up on German television, and I fear it won't be long before something similar comes from Hollywood. (JFK was released 28 years after Kennedy was shot, so I guess Oliver Stone's 9/11 should be coming out around 2029.) Unfortunately, for the true believers in this kind of thing, the truth is no defence.

Religious Right infiltrates political party

I didn't see this on the front page of today's Globe and Mail, however...

Christian groups look to influence Liberals, not just Tories

"People of faith are engaging in the democratic process in the Liberal party as well as the Conservative party," Charles McVety, head of Canada Christian College and a founder of the Defend Marriage Coalition, said in an interview.
[...]
McVety said his group, which opposes same-sex marriage, helped a number of like-minded Liberals secure nominations prior to last year's election.

"And those are just some of the Liberals we've helped."

You have to wonder how many Torontonians voted for these guys because of that Conservative "hidden agenda" we keep hearing about. Meanwhile, MP Pat O'Brien has left the Liberal caucus because of his opposition to same-sex marriage - but that doesn't mean he'll vote to topple the government:

Liberal MP Pat O'Brien announced Monday he would be leaving the Liberal caucus to sit as an independent, saying Prime Minister Paul Martin had gone back on his promise to give adequate public consultation on same-sex marriage legislation.
[...]
Mr. O'Brien stopped short of saying he would vote against the government in a confidence motion. He said he and the other 34 Liberal MPs who voted against the legislation are in discussions about how they could stop the bill without toppling the government. But O'Brien said he would use any democratic means possible to stop the same-sex legislation from passing.

Gone again

I have to go out of town for a business trip, so regular posting won't resume until Tuesday morning. See you then.

Mao's not dead enough

Sixteen years ago today, the Chinese government turned the "People's Army" on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

Today, only the ultra-left fringe makes excuses for what the Chinese Communists did in 1989. But many of those who denounced that repressive regime in 1989 were silent when Mao was committing even more horrifying atrocities in the fifties and sixties - assuming they weren't openly supporting him. (I'd like to think many of them had become less naive about Marxism, but some lefties have never forgiven those who followed Mao for embracing capitalism.) A new book, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, says the Great Helmsman's crimes were even worse than originally thought:

Other biographers have stated that the victims of Mao’s land reforms, purges, political campaigns and famines (such as those triggered by the Great Leap Forward) were exceeded only by all the dead of the second world war; and greatly outnumbered the killings of Stalin or Hitler. Mao: The Unknown Story now puts the total of those who perished in peacetime as a consequence of Mao’s misrule at over 70 million — a figure significantly larger than that normally attributed to the second world war.

Famine apart, the authors calculate that deaths in prisons and labour camps over Mao’s years from 1949 totalled some 27 million. In the ten years of the Great Purge (1966–76) that came with the Cultural Revolution, at least three million people died violent deaths outside prison. Post-Mao leaders have stated that 100 million people (one-ninth of the entire population) suffered in one way or another during that period.

The present Chinese leadership isn't as brutal as Mao, they've abandoned his insane economic philosophies, and some of them were even purged and punished during the Cultural Revolution for their alleged heresies. But they haven't taken his picture down from Tiananmen Square.

Mass media dhimmitude

I haven't written much about the revelations of horrifying mistreatment of printed material at Guantanamo Bay, because I find the whole thing too ridiculous and depressing to merit further comment on this blog.

If it wasn't already obvious that the mainstream media is at best neutral about the conflict between the West and Islamofascist totalitarianism - and, at worst, openly siding with the enemy - it should be now. By making this a major story, the media has legitimized the "grievances" of Middle Eastern radicals who used a small, anonymously sourced magazine article as an excuse to riot and kill, and I cannot imagine any other context in which something like this would be front-page news. If the media made this big a deal about the ethnic cleansing in Darfur or the concentration camps in North Korea - or, for that matter, the Communist repression in Castro's part of Cuba - thousands of lives would probably have been saved by now. But who cares about a little thing like genocide, when you can make the arrogant Yanks look bad?

Captain's Quarters has an absolutely spot-on post about this today:

Ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, dear readers, and friends, I submit to you that this week represents the nadir of responsible thought about the war on terror. We face Islamofascist lunatics who wish to establish Taliban-like tyrannies throughout the Middle East -- and eventually the world -- and who commit real atrocities in their efforts to bring those twisted dreams to fruition. We have seen their videos showing the beheadings of helpless hostages with dull knives, literally sawing off the heads of these victims while alive. They slaughter women and children as indiscriminately as possible. They even blow up Islamic mosques to kill Muslims at prayer.

No. It's whether or not we abused a book.

No beer for you, Private

You know I'm pretty pro-American, but I have to admit, there are some things I just don't get about our powerful neighbour to the south. First on the list is the fact that Americans can vote and potentially die in service of their nation at 18 years of age, but they can't have a friggin' beer until they're 21. (via Lance in Iraq)

Here in Canada, the situation is less ridiculous, but just slightly - the voting and military-service age is 18, but the drinking age in most provinces is 19. (The Quebecois, bless them, not only allow drinking at 18 but even allow the sale of alcohol in supermarkets. In Newfoundland you can buy beer in corner stores, but in every other province it can only be sold in licenced or government-run liquor stores. When I first saw one of these liquor mega-stores just inside the New Hampshire border, I almost wept tears of joy.)

Personally, I believe that once the state has decided you're old enough to help select your political leaders and serve your country in battle, you should be deemed responsible enough to handle your liquor - and, God forbid, even smoke cigarettes. Anything less is just puritanical, nanny-state moralizing, widely ignored and almost impossible to police.

Of course, that should work both ways. I also believe you shouldn't be able to drive a car until you're eighteen, at least without adult supervision. I'm much more worried about some pimply-faced teen driving Dad's Chevy Suburban than I am about said pimply-faced teen getting hammered in his friend's parents' basement.

Religious nuts

Not long ago, in an event held at a taxpayer-funded university in New York, speakers at a conference of primarily Christian religious activists called their political opponents "evil", said they weren't really Christian and compared them to the Nazis; promoted outrageous and paranoid conspiracy theories; openly rejected finding any kind of common ground or compromise with people who disagreed with their politics; and even called for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

I wonder why publications which normally warn us of an impending American theocracy - like, say, the Village Voice - have been so quiet about this?

(via Kathy Shaidle)

Scientology media blitz

Perhaps because The Kabbalah Centre is challenging its position as Hollywood's dominant celebrity cult, the Church of Scientology's best-known devotees have been unusually vocal lately. Tom Cruise has made a complete ass of himself by attacking Brooke Shields' antidepressant use, and now Mrs. John Travolta has posted an interminable spiel about "mind-altering psychiatric drugs" on the Huffington Post. (I'm sure it was really written by Preston and not someone from the Church of Scientology - er, "Citizens Committee on Human Rights", yessir.)

I've been taking Paxil for a few years now, and I think it's helped me tremendously. So I take great interest in the debate over antidepressant use, especially when cult kooks are hijacking the debate to get people to spend tens of thousands of dollars on "Dianetics" courses instead. I actually agree with Preston that many children are being prescribed psychiatric medication when they may not need it - but I'd rather see children on Prozac, Ritalin, Methadone and Ex-Lax combined than have them model their lives on the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard.

I must see this

The original Star Wars trilogy in 58 minutes. Performed by one guy.

I must read this

I have too many unread books already, but I had to add Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot (not a biography of Diego Maradona, as the title would suggest) to my Amazon wish list.

(via Blithering Bunny)

If you can't trust a communist dictator, who can you trust?

Businesses who rushed into "joint ventures" with the Cuban government are - big surprised - getting totally screwed by Castro. Didn't see that coming. (via Jay Nordlinger)

To paraphrase Tex, if Castro ran the desert there'd be a shortage of sand.

Death in Beirut

A well-known anti-Syrian journalist was murdered by a bomb attached to his car:

A leading Lebanese journalist and anti-Syrian campaigner was killed yesterday when his car was blown up on a busy street in Beirut.

Malek Mrowe, a prominent businessman who had dined with Mr Kassir the previous evening, said: “Samir was very optimistic. He said, ‘Now the Syrians have gone we can say whatever we want. Lebanon will be the democratic model for the region.’”

The occupation of Lebanon may have officially ended, but I guess we shouldn't have thought the Syrians would leave without doing something like this.

Update: when he got the news, progressive hero George Galloway must have been doing cartwheels.

It's dead

David Carr's "obituary" for the European constitution is looking more prescient:

Plans for a referendum on the EU Constitution will be shelved by Jack Straw next week in a move aimed at persuading fellow European leaders to recognise that their ambitions for deeper integration are dead.

Although the Bill could be reintroduced at a later date, Whitehall officials said that there was no prospect or intention of doing so.

Now, an Italian cabinet minister is musing about his country abandoning the Euro, too.

The tapes were faked. Yeah, that's it

That's what Ujjal Dosanjh is saying, anyway:

Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh hinted Thursday that he believes Conservative Leader Stephen Harper's office was involved in tampering with tapes made by a B.C. member of Parliament during discussions about switching sides in the House of Commons.

He said two "independent experts" had confirmed that such interference had occurred, but gave no other details.

That's good enough for Paul Martin:

The prime minister is refusing calls to have his chief of staff and health minister step aside while the Mounties investigate the Gurmant Grewal secret taping affair.

Paul Martin says allegations that the tapes were doctored are disturbing, and raise questions that need to be answered by Mr. Grewal and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper.

The Tories have promised to give the tapes to the RCMP for further investigation - so if they did tamper with them, they're either incredibly brazen or incredibly stupid. The federal "ethics commissioner" (sorry, but I can't help using scare quotes when I write that phrase) is also allegedly interested in probing the tapes, but I think I know how that investigation would turn out...

Update: two producers at Ottawa's CFRA radio (a right-leaning talk station, I'm told) believe the tapes were amateurishly edited, though some alternative explanations are also put forth.

Personally, even if parts of the tapes were tampered with, I don't think that explains away everything Murphy and Dosanjh were caught saying. But just like with the "sexist" remarks about Belinda Stronach, the Conservatives' alleged sins would once again become the "real" story as far as the media is concerned - probably, this time, with good reason.

Update II: more evidence that the tapes have indeed been altered:

One of Canada's top forensic-sound analysts says a conversation secretly taped by Tory MP Gurmant Grewal appear to have been altered.

"This brief segment at the beginning shows that it's not continuous, and it should be."
[...]
Pausak says there's a discontinuity in the audio file, what he calls a "zero-signal gap" -- commonly known as dead air -- of about 0.3 seconds. The signal goes abruptly to zero in that interval, and afterward it continues.

"When you are using the word tampering, that means intent, right? Most of the time there is no way to show intent through the examination of the recording. You just see that it's altered."

If Grewal has indeed been fooling around with the tapes, he's turned what should be a political disaster for the Liberals into a total embarassment for the Conservatives. Even if Dosanjh and Murphy were trying to bribe him across the floor - and I still firmly believe they were, given what's on the presumably un-edited parts of the tapes - this will now be portrayed as a story about the Tories' alleged deceit and incompetence instead of Liberal corruption. Unless Grewal (or whoever did it) has a really good explanation for this, he should be expelled from the party.

I'm a Hitler, you're a Hitler, everyone's a Hitler

Lots of stupid "x equals Hitler" comparisons - from the left and the right - are compiled here. (My favorite involves board members of the Hawaii ACLU, who compared Clarence Thomas to Hitler and - oh, sweet irony - banned him from debating affirmative action at one of its civil-liberties conferences. Runner-up: Robert Mugabe compared himself to Hitler.)

The lesson here? "In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes."

Update: everyone seems to love the "15 minutes" comment, so I feel compelled to emphasize that it came from the 'Beautiful Atrocities' blog linked above, not me. I wish I could write a line like that.

Tagged

This seems to be the new game/survey/distraction sweeping the blogosphere, and now it's my turn.

Number of books I own: about 500, with at least 150 I haven't read yet, but just picked up in the Chapters bargain-books section, found at rummage sales, or recieved from publishers for review. Maybe I need a support group or something.

Last book I bought: The World's Worst Aircraft by Jim Winchester. Not as good as its companion volume, The World's Worst Automobiles, but still amusing.

Last book I read: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

Five books that mean a lot to me: Hold Fast by Kevin Major; Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers by Tom Wolfe; Holidays in Hell by P.J. O'Rourke; Radical Son by David Horowitz; Stasiland by Anna Funder.

Tag Five More: Tim Blair, Colby Cosh, Pejman Yousefzadah, Scott Burgess, "Tom Paine".

The new age of SUVs

At long last, Americans are turning away from traditional truck-based SUVs - Chevy TrailBlazer, Ford Expedition, Toyota 4Runner - in favor of "crossover" vehicles built on car platforms, like the Honda Pilot, Toyota Highlander and Ford Freestyle:

The data suggesting a big slowdown in big traditional SUV sales continues to mount with the release of a new report from J.D. Power's Power Information Network (PIN). The PIN says that in April, truck-based SUVs captured 12.1 percent of theU.S. market, the lowest market share since May of 1996. In contrast, the market share of car-based crossover utes hit a peak of 49 percent in April, the PIN adds. When it comes to "days to turn," or the time it takes a vehicle to be sold from the dealer lot, truck-based utes took an average of 79 days to sell, while crossovers averaged 48 days.

A truck-based vehicle is great if you need to tow a big trailer or do some serious off-roading. But if you're just using your SUV to get groceries and take the kids to school, and you can't bear to be seen in a (shudder) minivan, something like the Pilot will give you the off-road look and all-wheel-drive but with better fuel economy, less risk of rollover and, most importantly, a better driving experience.

That's not to say there isn't at least one truck-based SUV I'd love to own, of course...

The island of misfit cars

Yes, the CityRover is probably as bad as they say (BBC's Top Gear couldn't get a test car from the company, so they sent James May to go undercover as a potential buyer to try it out. The verdict: rubbish), but I still find this kind of sad:

A shipment of CityRover budget cars has been left stranded at Bristol docks following the collapse of MG Rover. The 1,200 cars are still on the ship which brought them from India, where they were built by Tata, but the storage firm which usually handles car imports at Bristol has refused to accept them as they will not get paid for dealing with them. There is also little chance of their being sold as few of MG Rover's dealerships are still open. The CityRover is a version of Tata's Indica, but besides the MG Rover badges, has a different specification for European sale; as Tata's supply agreement with MG Rover has now been cancelled anyway, the Indian firm is unlikely to want the cars back. It is now expected that MG Rover's administrators will take responsibility for the cars and their disposal, just as PWC is determining responsibility for the CityRover recall announced last week; the unfortunate vehicle has potential defects with its hubcaps and wheels which need to be checked.

(Via Autoblog, which also notes that TVR may be interested in buying MG - and relaunching the brand in North America. Keep your fingers crossed...)

Nee

According to exit polling, the Dutch have rejected the EU constitution by an even bigger margin than the French - 63-37.

Anne Appelbaum, in a column written after the French referendum but before the Dutch one, wonders whether the Euro-elite will get the message:

...one of the most remarkable characteristics of the European Union is the ability of its leaders to keep building their institutions and expanding their power, not only ignoring but self-righteously ignoring European voters. In the months before its adoption, when opinion polls showed that most Germans were also opposed to a single European currency, I asked a German politician whether this bothered him. No, he said: The job of a politician is to explain to the people what is good for them, not the other way around.

So far, the popular response to this erosion of democracy -- which has coincided with an economic slowdown in much of Europe, as well as a wave of North African and Eastern European immigration -- has been an anguished and inchoate series of "anti-establishment" protest votes.
[...]
...if European leaders, and the French above all, do not recognize that Europe needs to be run more democratically, expect the backlash to be broader, more powerful and possibly nastier the next time around.

The Stonecutters did it!

The Liberals say the Gurmant Grewal tapes have been altered and/or mistranslated:

Secretly taped conversations between senior Liberals and Conservative MP Gurmant Grewal suggest Prime Minister Paul Martin was prepared to reward the B.C. Tory -- perhaps even with a cabinet post -- within "two or four weeks" of a crucial budget vote if he defected to the government.

"There is a credibility issue, and it is not with the members of my staff or my government," said Mr. Martin. "From what I've been told about today's tapes ... there is doubt about the adequacy and veracity of the translation."
[...]
Mr. Dosanjh issued a statement late yesterday saying "the recordings have been altered."

"There are significant omissions in the transcripts and recordings," he said. "The translation from Punjabi to English is often inaccurate. Even the English to English transcription is deficient. Parts of the recordings themselves have been edited.

Maybe they're right. After all, as Belinda Stronach proved, the Liberals don't make you wait to get your reward for crossing the floor...

Good question

What's the average birth year of people who really don't give a damn about "Deep Throat" and his secret identity? I'd say 1977, the year after All the President's Men came out.

At least this story reminds us that Americans were so outraged anout illegal, underhanded activity by their President that they forced him to resign in disgrace. The contrast with we Canadians - who like to sneer at our Yankee neighbours for being patriotic zombies, while we're supposedly more worldly and sophisticated - is telling.

Holy site desecrated

I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think this is going to trigger mass riots and demonstrations across the Muslim world:

A suicide bomb tore through a mosque in southern Afghanistan Wednesday at the funeral of a Muslim cleric who spoke out against the Taliban, killing at least 20 people, including Kabul's police chief, and wounding dozens, officials said.

Nazir Ahmadzai, a doctor at Kandahar Hospital, said 20 people had been killed and 45 wounded many of them Khakrezwal's bodyguards.

Another day, another insane anti-Semitic TV series on Arab television

The latest: "Stories from Before the Verses Came Down", a Jordanian-produced series airing on Saudi Arabia's Iqra TV network, about eeeeeevil Jews gabbing about how much they hate Muhammad (and later using some kind of Jewish voodoo doll to hurt him).

Ka'b: By God, Rachel, I can't say I'm surprised by this Muhammad. I'm surprised by us.

Ka'b: Our war with Muhammad and his following is a long one. A very long war, Rachel. It will outlive both us and them. We will have no peace with them until Judgment Day.