Crossing over

The decline of the SUV and minivan, the rise of the CUV:

The switch from sport utility vehicles to crossover utility vehicles in North America is helping to keep some Canadian auto plants humming, says a Bank of Nova Scotia report.

Crossovers, which combine the ride of a car with the space of an SUV, should become the largest segment in the North American market next year [emphasis added - MC], displacing mid-sized cars, Carlos Gomes, a senior Scotiabank economist, said in his monthly examination of the auto industry.

"CUVs have existed as a segment only since the 2000 model year and, like SUVs in the 1990s, the segment has witnessed phenomenal growth, climbing from only 7 per cent of overall Canadian and U.S. vehicle sales in 2002 to more than 17 per cent so far this year," Mr. Gomes said. "However, in contrast to the SUV craze, which peaked in 2003, demand for crossovers should continue to expand over the next decade."

[...]

High gas prices and a proliferation of new models in the CUV segment are helping to drive sales. Fuel economy of CUVs is better than that of SUVs in part because they are lighter in weight.

In addition to knocking mid-sized cars out of the leadership spot, CUVs have also helped to send minivan sales skidding [emphasis added].

Sales of minivans are down 18 per cent from 2006 and are on pace to slide to 1.1 million units in Canada and the United States this year, down from 2.1 million at the peak in 1999.

More here. The sales rise may in part be simply a question of definition. According to the second link the Toyota RAV4, which used to be considered an SUV, is now a CUV (Toyota says it's "Too intelligent to be categorized"). I guess the Honda CR-V is now a CUV too ("Total pleasure, "zero guilt"; "crossover-sized frame").

Mark C.

Damian adds: some of these "crossover" vehicles are quite nice, especially the Mazda CX-7 and Ford Edge. But if you want a family hauler, I still think you're better off with (gasp!) a minivan - or, even better, a Mazda 6 wagon (now discontinued, unfortunately, but there might be a few left).

How to get your house toilet-papered this evening

If raisins, toothbrushes or even Jack Chick tracts don't get the desired result, this ought to do the trick.

Damian P.

Halloween horror

Can your heart stand the terror of...Mr. B. Natural?

Part two here - if you dare.

Damian P.

And as for Mr Steyn...

The superspooks are going to get you--in the movies if not in the real world:

...In Hollywood, The Bourne Ultimatum is the standard template: Every plot has a government agency or well-connected corporation behind it. And anyone who doubts the influence of the medium should consider that a substantial proportion of the population now watches the news like a movie. The World Trade Center got taken out? Interesting. Who did it? Mohammed Atta and a gang of Saudi males? Yeah, yeah. But what’s the plot twist? Who really did it? Someone in the government, right? The planes were switched in mid-flight and the passengers were “disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean” (Professor A K Dewdney of the University of Western Ontario), and voice-modification technology was used to fake the phone calls to loved ones, and Flight 93 was “taken out by the North Dakota air guard” (retired Colonel Donn de Grand Pre), and anyway everyone knows fire can’t melt steel (Rosie O’Donnell), so Bush must have done it, and, if you don’t believe me, ask yourself why World Trade Center Tower 7 had to be destroyed.

And, if you point out that having a bunch of planes hijacked and replaced by Predator drones and the crew and passengers dumped over the Atlantic would seem to be a big enough conspiracy that somebody would have leaked something by now, if only to get a book deal, well, that just shows how cunning it is. Or that you’re in on it. There have always been conspiracies, of course, but today there’s only one, with the same relentless message: The bad guy is us, our government agents, our cabinet officials, our corporations. America is one unending director’s cut of The Usual Suspects, with Karl Rove as Keyser Sose. And yes, yes, I know Rove is supposed to have “left” the White House, but doesn’t that strike you as a bit convenient?

This sensibility is something worse than mere liberal bias. It corrodes reality itself...

Mark C.

Damian adds: Steyn on 9/11 conspiracy theories: "if 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it."

Andrew Coyne on the march

This should really give Maclean's a fighting chance (via Paul Wells, also of the magazine--along with Mark Steyn). Early National Post redux?

TORONTO, Oct. 30 /CNW/ - Ken Whyte, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Maclean's, today announced the appointment of renowned journalist and columnist Andrew Coyne as National Editor of the magazine. One of the most original and compelling voices in Canadian media, familiar to millions of newspaper readers and TV viewers, Coyne will join Maclean's in early November. "We are delighted to have Andrew at Maclean's," says Whyte. "He's a great addition to our enviable roster of correspondents. He's a brilliant journalist -- funny, insightful, profound. He'll write a column as well as longer pieces. We'll also benefit from his editorial guidance in our coverage of national affairs in print and online. Andrew knows Canada and its politics as very few others do but his interests are broader than just Ottawa and we intend to use the full scope of his talents at Maclean's."

AC's own post is here.

Adam Daifallah thinks Maclean's "...is fast becoming the best newsweekly anywhere." I think AC is the best journalist working primarily in the Canadian major media. He makes one think.

Mark C.

"The best-looking car of 1974"

"Though it wasn't really a great car, there's just something about the AMC Matador X that makes me want to buy one and drive around with the windows down, listening to Stevie Wonder."

Damian P.

The end of SNN?

"Tom Paine" of Shire Network News, a podcast to which I've been contributing audio commentaries for some time now, interviews the leader of Belgium's far-right Valaams Belang political party - and confronts him about the racist elements of the party platform.

Unfortunately, the interview has caused a schism between some of the people who put together SNN every week. But I think Tom did the right thing in calling out this neo-fascist, and that mainstream conservatives should have nothing to do with European ultra-right political movements like the VB, the Sweden Democrats, the Swiss People's Party or the British National Party.

A commenter at LGF put it best: "Anti-Islamofascism is not anti-Muslim or anti anything but anti-fascist. An alliance with fascists who are opposed to Islamofascism is still an alliance with fascists."

Damian P.

The killer soda machine

Just in time for Halloween, The A.V. Club compiles a list of the most ridiculous horror-movie monsters of all time.

I'm glad Maximum Overdrive made the cut (that gem also featured a killer drawbridge, a killer electric carving knife, and a bank machine calling Stephen King an "asshole") but the list if marred by the egregious omission of 1991's Body Parts and its villain - namely, the arm of a serial killer, transplated onto Jeff Fahey's body. No one remembers this movie except me, and the Simpsons writing staff.

Damian P.

Hate literature

That loaded phrase accurately describes material being sold in mosques all over Great Britain. No prizes for guessing which country is financing it:

Books calling for the beheading of lapsed Muslims, ordering women to remain indoors and forbidding interfaith marriage are being sold inside some of Britain’s leading mosques, according to research seen by The Times.

Some of the fundamentalist works were found at the bookshop in the London Central mosque in Regent’s Park, which is funded by the Saudi regime and is regularly visited by government ministers. Its director, Ahmad al-Dubayan, is also a Saudi diplomat and was among those greeting King Abdullah when he arrived in Britain last night for his official state visit.

[...]

A key theme of the books was a “strident sectarianism” which told Muslims that they should remain separate from other faiths and resist integration. The report stated: “Simply put, these notions demand that the individual Muslim must not merely feel deep affection for and identity with his fellow believers and with all that is authentically Islamic. The individual Muslim must also feel an abhorrence for nonbelievers, hypocrites, heretics, and all that is deemed ‘unIslamic’. The latter category encompasses those Muslims who are judged to practise an insufficiently rigorous form of Islam.” Most books stopped short of calling for violence. But they created a climate of intolerance and contempt for nonMuslims that could be exploited by violent jihadists, the researchers said.

The report called for a radical overhaul of Britain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, which it argued has a “powerful and malign” influence over British Islam and sponsored the export of fundamentalist Islamic doctrine.

Melanie Phillips, as you might expect, has more. The full report (warning: it's a 202-page PDF document) can be found here.

Damian P.

Hitler savages Brits for not fighting anti-semitism

That headline would make about as much sense as this:

U.K. Soft on Terrorism? Saudi King Says So in BBC Interview

[...]

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia accused Britain of not taking international terrorism seriously in an interview with the BBC.

The Saudi monarch said Britain failed to act on intelligence provided by Saudi Arabia that could have prevented the 2005 bombings on London's transit system.

But a May 2006 report by the British Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee on the attacks found that Saudi Arabia's intelligence was "materially different from what actually occurred on 7 July and clearly not relevant to these attacks."

Oh, I agree that the Saudis are taking international terrorism seriously. Very seriously indeed.

Damian P.

Hillary and Afghanistan

A letter of mine in the Globe and Mail:

The next President Clinton

MARK COLLINS

October 29, 2007 - page A22

Ottawa -- John Ibbitson, in his informative essay A Superpower Overstretched, But Surprisingly United (Globe Essay - Oct. 27), points out the likely continuities in U.S. foreign policy if a Democrat, especially Hillary Clinton, becomes the next president. It is odd, however, that he does not mention her policy on Afghanistan, the issue likely of most concern to Canadians. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Senator Clinton wrote that "our military effort must be reinforced."

I wonder how our opposition politicians, many of our pundits and the Canadian people will react to that position.

Also Norman Spector's LETTER OF THE DAY.

Mark C.

One small reason to be in Afghanistan

The people we are fighting did this:

People still speak of the Buddhas as if they were there. The Buddhas are visited and debated. A “Buddha road” just opened. It boasts the first paved surface in Afghanistan’s majestic central highlands and stretches all of a half-mile.

But the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan are gone, of course, replaced by two gashes in the reddish-brown cliff. They were destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban in their quest to rid the country of the “gods of the infidels.” The fanatical soldiers of Islam blasted the ancient treasures to fragments.

[...]

...The visitor is drawn into the void as if summoned, not by vacancy, but by the towering Buddhas themselves.

Yet they are in pieces. Nasir Mudabir, 29, a director of the site, ushered me into a makeshift shelter where boxes with sandstone and plaster fragments from the two Buddhas are kept. Metal remnants of the bombs that destroyed them are preserved separately: they are jagged where the stones are smooth to the touch.

Why keep evidence of the barbarians’ arsenal? “It’s part of the story,” Mudabir said. “It’s history, bad or good. Instead of going forward, we went backward.”

[...]

Hazara refugees, who have returned from Iran after Afghanistan’s decades of conflict, eke out an existence in Taliban-despoiled caves once covered with bright murals.

That this is a holy place, sought out by Buddhist pilgrims over the centuries, is written in light, form and stone.

The smaller, eastern Buddha, known locally as “Shamama,” stood 125 feet tall and has now been dated to the year 507. The larger, called “Salsal,” rose to 180 feet. It was constructed in 554. One theory holds that the builders were dissatisfied with the first and erected its neighbor in the pursuit of perfection.

[...]

...What began here in March 2001 has spread. The Taliban is back, sort of, seeping across the Pakistani border in a campaign fed by an Internet-borne jihadist message. The Web is a force multiplier for any guerrilla movement.

This was the Afghan burning of the books. The Nazis burned Brecht. The Taliban, then sheltering Osama bin Laden, bombarded the “un-Islamic” Buddhas. The burning presaged war. The destruction presaged 9/11: two Buddhas, two towers.

Heinrich Heine noted that “When they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings.” When Buddhas buckle, people will be crushed...

Before. And then...Now this. Such mindless hatred--including from some Canadians.

Mark C.

Like son, like father

Looks like Charlie won't be the only troofer at the Sheen/Estevez dinner table this Thanksgiving.

Damian P.

Car of ghosts

What would be bid for a Hitler Mercedes, also used by Mickey Rourke? A stretch limo, supposedly owned by Pol Pot, is up at ebay.co.uk for 35,000 pounds. This certainly must add to the vehicle's charm:

The car was also used by Matt Dillon in the making of his cult classic - City of Ghosts - starring Gerard Depardieu and James Caan...

More at Spiegel Online.

Mark C.

Flatrock

I've been in Newfoundland for a couple of days. Here's what the place (specifically, Flatrock, about 20 minutes outside of St. John's) looks like this time of year:

Damian P.

Lies, damn' lies--and The Beer Store

No truth in advertising there. In Ontario most beer is sold through this evocatively named outlet, jointly run by the major breweries in the province. I noticed a sign on a cart today:

Did you know that unlike the liquor store every brand of beer we carry is ice cold?

In fact The Beer Store makes a point of claiming its beer is "ice cold" But, er, all the beer at The Beer Store is, at its lowest temperature, around 15 degrees Celsius. How much ice does one see in those circumstances? Besides which, the beer which the liquor store does sell chilled is actually cold.

Must be an awful lot of frustrated Americans and Quebeckers when they actually open a bottle or can for the first time...

Mark C.

Why "Islamofascism" is a bad term

I agree with Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen about "Islamofascism" (though Damian may not), if fascism is to retain any shred of substantive meaning. However I think Mr Gardner underestimates the long-term existential (and demographic--see Mark Steyn) threat. Remember that a great Muslim oak from little Arabian acorns grew.

At least since the days of Oswald Mosley and the Spanish Civil War, "fascist" has been the preferred slur of campus revolutionaries and other leftists of limited vocabulary. But something curious has happened in the last few years.

Among conservatives, "Islamofascist" has become the standard label for those who butcher in the name of Allah. Practically unknown prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, the term was first embraced in the nether regions of the blogosphere before it seeped into the mainstream. President George W. Bush used it only once, in 2006, but Rudy Giuliani, the Republican with the best shot at succeeding Bush, has made it a crowd-pleasing fixture of his stump speech.

[...]

This is all quite appalling for liberals and leftists. The end of the political spectrum that once saw a fascist under every crew cut now finds the right's use of its favourite epithet offensive, even bigoted.

Nonsense, huffed Christopher Hitchens in Slate. Both fascism and violent Islamism, Hitchens wrote, "are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ... Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories." And on it goes, with Hitchens generating a long list of shared characteristics and concluding that if it goose-steps like a fascist, it is a fascist, and should be called what it is.

As usual with Hitchens, his case is clever, compelling and far more substantial than similar efforts of much lesser writers. It is also wrong.

"This is a very dubious term because all radical movements have things in common but they're not the same thing," says Stanley Payne, a leading scholar and author of Fascism: Comparison and Definition. "Fascism and communism have an awful lot in common but communists weren't fascists and it's not helpful to call communists fascist."

A list of the differences between fascism and violent Islamism is as easy to produce as a list of the similarities, Payne notes. Fascism was ultra-nationalistic but Islamism rejects nationalism. Fascism was secular, not religious. Fascism deployed state violence and warfare, not terrorism. And so on.

Payne also worries that "Islamofascism" could be counter-productive, even dangerous. "One of the most important things is to separate the great majority of Muslims who are peaceful from the terrorists, so you have to use terminology that defines and specifies the terrorists and doesn't sound like a broad-brush painting of Muslims in general," he says. Gluing "Islam" and "fascism" together "makes it sound as if Islam in general is fascist." That's no way to win hearts and minds.

More after the jump.

Mark C.

[...]

In this sense, the "Islamofascist" label is part of a larger trend. Ever since 9/11, many writers, commentators and politicians have cast the terrorist threat in ever-grander terms - culminating in the self-evidently absurd notion that small bands of lightly armed fanatics are, like the Red Army and the Wehrmacht before them, a threat to the every existence of civilization. This process is driven, in part, by psychology.

[...]

Inflate terrorism and it ceases to be a mere problem, threat or danger. It is an existential crisis - and the fight against it becomes an existential mission. "What I dread now," wrote George Packer in the New York Times, "is a return to the normality we are all supposed to seek."

Fascists do have their uses.

Iranian halftime show

Not bad, I guess, but they've still got a way to go before they can match the North Koreans.

Damian P.

Baby steps for NATO on Afghanistan

This week's meeting of defence ministers has produced indications of small, additional troop commitments to help the Dutch in Uruzgan:

NATO allies rallied yesterday with pledges to assist Dutch troops in war-torn southern Afghanistan in a move widely interpreted as a dose of political courage as the Netherlands approaches a crucial parliamentary debate on its role in the international mission.

Dutch media reports last night named France, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Czech republic as either confirmed, or in the process of confirming modest military deployments to Uruzgan, where 1,700 Dutch soldiers are locked in the thick of fighting one province away from the Canadians in Kandahar.

De Volkskrant newspaper said the French commitment, though initially not expected to exceed more than a few dozen military trainers, was especially important for the Netherlands as public pressure mounts for a withdrawal of troops.

The promises, discussed during a closed-door meeting of NATO defence ministers at the Dutch seaside resort of Noordvijk, included pledges from five other nations to send more military personnel to Afghanistan. But the cumulative numbers are expected to fall far short of the battalion-sized increases sought by U.S. officials.

[...]

Dutch military analysts told the Toronto Star that beneath the façade of high tension, the Netherlands is quietly cobbling a pragmatic solution, including symbolic support from other allies, which will enable a one-year extension of the Dutch mandate in Uruzgan.

Pretty small beer, but, I'm confident, enough for the Dutch to extend their mission. If Canada can also get help at Kandahar that will make it simpler for our government to extend our own mission (though doubtless with a reduced combat role--my analysis is here).

Sadly, as far as I can see, the story above was not carried in the NY Times, Washington Post or LA Times; two solitudes, or something. This is a story that I don't think you'll see in our media, more solitudes:

Dutch troops launch offensive against Taliban in southern Afghanistan

This story also gives some more detail about the NATO meeting:

On Wednesday diplomats said nine nations had pledged more troops to bolster the 41,000-strong NATO force. The offers ranged from 20 to 200 troops from countries including Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and non-NATO members Georgia and Croatia. Officials said it could add around 1,000 extra troops in total.

Germany offered about 100 instructors and France 50, but there was no sign those nations, along with Italy, Spain and Turkey, were dropping a refusal to send combat forces to the battlefields in the south and the east.

The Chief of the Defence Staff is asking for rather more (where's the minister?):

...General Rick Hillier was asked about this week's NATO decision to rent helicopters flown by civilians [maybe from a Canadian company?] for use in southern Afghanistan, and why no military aircraft could be found to do the job.

Gen. Hillier said there were helicopters available in European countries, and called on his European counterparts to provide more equipment and troops on the ground.

[...]

Gen. Hillier specifically listed three things on his European wish-list: helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles and ground troops. He said he has spoken regularly to his European counterparts about the issue, and pointed to some positive steps taken by countries such as Portugal, which recently sent a company of troops to the dangerous Panjwai district west of Kandahar city emphasis added]...

Here's a view that will find little acceptance in Germany (or most of quasi-pacifist Western Europe):

Time for the Bundesmacht

See the table at the bottom of this link for a list of country troop contributions to ISAF (the Canadian total is considerably less than the standard 2,500 figure because quite a few of our personnel committed to the mission are not included, e.g. "National Support elements").

The Danes, for their part, have had a bright idea.

Mark C.

Update: More good stuff from the Danes:

Denmark is in the process of ramping up its own force in Helmand to almost 700 from just under 400 and is adding four Leopard 2 tanks, inspired in part by Canada's successful use of tanks in neighbouring Kandahar...

Congratulations to Airbus

The A380 makes its first commercial flight (with video at second link). Notice the curved rise from the wingroot to the main wingspan--just struck me, unique I think but would welcome correction.

I don't think the six-month delay to the Boeing 787 will hurt significantly.

Mark C.

Leaving Islam

Johann Hari explains what ex-Muslims are going through - not in Saudi Arabia or Iran, but in tolerant, secular Europe:

Ehsan Jami is an intelligent, softly-spoken 22 year-old council member for the Dutch Labour Party. He believes there should be no compromise, ever, on the rights of women and gay people and novelists and cartoonists. He became sick of hearing self-appointed Islamist organisations claiming to speak for him when they called for the banning of books and the “right” to abuse women. So he set up the Dutch Council of Ex-Muslims. Their manifesto called for secularism – and the end to the polite toleration of Islamist intolerance. As he put it: “We want people to be free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in.”

Ehsan was immediately threatened with death. He was kicked to the ground outside the supermarket. He was grabbed in a street with a knife put to his throat. He can’t afford to be glib about the risk: he remembers the daylight decapitation of Theo Van Gough on the streets of Amsterdam. Yet instead of rallying to Ehsan, his party condemned him. The Dutch Vice-Prime Minister Wouter Bos said they disapproved of an organisation that “offends Muslims and their faith”.

In Britain, my friend Maryam Namazie recently set up the British Council of Ex-Muslims. She was immediately flooded with calls from frightened people who wanted to join but were too intimidated. Endless phone threats inform her she will soon be beheaded – but she has learned that the police just aren’t interested. “They have never been very helpful,” she says. “They act as if it’s your fault for ‘provoking’ these people, when in fact the Islamist movement uses threats and intimidation as a tool to silence their critics.”

[...]

If Christian fundamentalists were doing this – as they used to, and would like to again – none of us would hesitate in erupting in rage. But because Islamic fundamentalists are doing it, we feel awkward, and fall silent. The only difference is the colour of their skin. There is a word for this: racism.

Women like Mina expose a hole in the stale logic of multiculturalism. She shows that secularism is not a ‘Western’ value: she thought of it all by herself, in a rural village in Iran. Yet the attitudes that lead to the persecution of apostates are widespread even within British Islam, because we patronisingly assume it is ‘their culture’ and do not challenge it. Some 36 percent of British Muslims between the ages of 18 and 24 think apostates should be murdered. The younger British Muslims are, the more they believe it – a bad sign for the future, unless we start arguing back. This isn’t just kids sounding off. Some act on it: a Despatches documentary earlier this year, ‘Unholy War’, found dozens of cases of apostates having their cars blown up, their kids threatened and even being beaten and left for dead, on British streets.

More thoughts from Oliver Kamm and Harry's Place.

Damian P.

X1/9 + 510

It wasn't very fast, and it made Ladas look reliable by comparison, but I've always had a soft spot for this old Fiat.

I was taken to my first day of Kindergarten in one of these. Too bad it disintegrated so quickly (ah, the seventies), because I'd love to have one now.

Damian P.

Bubba bashes blackshirts

Bill Clinton smacks down a gaggle of 9/11 conspiracy idiots. (Which proves that he was in on it, of course!)

Damian P.

They're welcome where, exactly?

Andrew Sullivan responds to the banning of Ron Paul supporters from RedState.com:

...here's a simple message to Ron Paul supporters. You're welcome here. The Dish believes in expanding the range of debate among conservatives, not crushing it.

That's nice, but wouldn't it help if Sullivan had a comment section?

Damian P.

Yawn

Ted Rall is still desperate for attention. So why are we giving it to him?

Damian P.

Why the right rules talk radio

Lots of interesting speculation here, in response to Air America getting bounced off the dial in Austin, Texas (a very liberal city in a very conservative state).

In Austin, at least, I wonder how many potential Air America listeners instead tune into this Austonian.

Damian P.

The big government party

It's now the GOP, and not just because of defense and homeland security spending:

Take almost any yardstick and Bush generally exceeds the spending of his predecessors.

When adjusted for inflation, discretionary spending — or budget items that Congress and the president can control, including defense and domestic programs, but not entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare — shot up at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent during Bush’s first six years, Slivinski calculates.

That tops the 4.6 percent annual rate Johnson logged during his 1963-69 presidency. By these standards, Ronald Reagan was a tightwad; discretionary spending grew by only 1.9 percent a year on his watch.

Discretionary spending went up in Bush's first term by 48.5 percent, not adjusted for inflation, more than twice as much as Bill Clinton did (21.6 percent) in two full terms, Slivinski reports.

Defense spending is the big driver — but hardly the only one.

[...]

Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, points to education spending. Adjusted for inflation, it's up 18 percent annually since 2001, thanks largely to Bush’s No Child Left Behind act.

The 2002 farm bill, he said, caused agriculture spending to double its 1990s levels.

Then there was the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit — the biggest single expansion in the program’s history — whose 10-year costs are estimated at more than $700 billion.

And the 2005 highway bill, which included thousands of “earmarks,” or special local projects stuck into the legislation by individual lawmakers without review, cost $295 billion.

“He has presided over massive increases in almost every category … a dramatic change of pace from most previous presidents,” said Slivinski.

Could a Democratic President and Congress spend even more money than this? Yeah, actually, they might. But the Republicans can't be given the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Damian P.

Conservatives the new, improved Liberals Wimps?

The current government certainly is an improvement. But at what point does putting power before principle start overly corrupting?

The fact is we don’t really have a conservative party in this country. Of course, we have a party which calls itself “Conservative.” But it doesn’t actually believe in conservatism.

Rather, it believes in a new philosophy or ideology, which former Conservative Party campaign manager Tom Flanagan outlines in his recent book, Harper’s Team. This new ideology is seemingly based on four points: Winability, Incrementalism, Moderation and Persistence. I prefer to summarize it by the acronym W.I.M.P.

What do WIMP Conservatives believe in?

Well they actually don’t believe in anything. They don’t believe in conservative principles or values or ideals. And they certainly don’t believe in any kind of conservative vision for Canada. WIMP Conservatives, in fact, regard ideals and principles as nothing but obstacles to winning elections. And that’s all that really matters to them — winning elections. If they have to act like Liberals or Greens or New Democrats to win elections, well that’s what they will do.

Or to put it another way, the Conservative Party wants to hang onto power simply for the sake of hanging onto power. Without a vision or an ideological compass, WIMP Conservatives are like a rudderless ship, floating along with the current of public opinion...

I admit to considerable frustration too. But there is a real, political, Canadian world. Let's just see what they do if they win a majority government--though even writing that is probably "scary".

Mark C.

Blackberry rules

Doesn't look like another Nortel...

Research in Motion becomes Canada's most valuable company

And it's taking over the world:

RIM reaches key deal to sell in China

But is the Blackberry a Good Thing, all things considered?

Mark C.

Damian adds: Molson, meanwhile, is banking on the iPhone coming to Canada. Sometime. Eventually.

Happy UN Day!

Meryl Yourish has some suggestions for how bloggers can celebrate the big day.

Damian P.

Rudy and the Sox

True, Yankees fans don't hate the Red Sox the way Red Sox fans hate the Yankees. (Until the Sox won the World Series a few years ago, people said the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry was like the Princeton-Cornell rivalry, of which only people at Cornell were aware.) Still, this is an eye-popping bit of political opportunism:

In baseball-crazed Boston, Mr. Giuliani, a die-hard Yankees fan who often wears a Navy Yankees jacket to games, said he was backing the Boston Red Sox to win the World Series. "I'm rooting for the Red Sox in the World Series. I'm not saying that just because I'm in Massachusetts," Mr. Giuliani said in comments likely to reverberate over the airwaves in New Hampshire, a center of fanatical Red Sox support. "I'm an American League fan. I go with the American League team maybe with the exception of the Mets because of my loyalty to New York." Mr. Giuliani's comments were in contrast to a slogan often seen on t-shirts throughout New England, "my favorite team is the Red Sox … and whoever is playing the Yankees."

In that spirit, Mr. Fehrnstrom said, "if Colorado wants Mayor Giuliani to root for the Rockies, they're going to have to move their primary up."

If Giuliani and Hillary Clinton win their respective primaries, we'll have a fight between the fake Red Sox fan and the fake Yankees fan. My opinion of Ron Paul would improve dramatically if he came out in support of a team that didn't use public money to build its stadium, if such a team exists.

Let me assure you, in the unlikely event that I become a serious contender for Prime Minister of Canada, that I will never under any circumstances say I'm rooting for the Montreal Canadiens.

Question for baseball fans: do any of you really cheer for the American League or National League, depending on where your team plays? When Super Bowl time comes around, I don't cheer for the NFC just because the Bears are an NFC team.

Damian P.

Into Kurdistan

The Turks are almost certain to send in at least some troops:

Desperate to avoid war on yet another front, the Iraqi government vowed yesterday to crack down on Kurdish rebels using the north of the country as a base to attack into neighbouring Turkey.

The offer didn't seem to mollify Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who repeated that his country was ready to invade northern Iraq "at any time" in order to hunt down fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party, better known as the PKK. Two days after a daring PKK ambush that left 12 soldiers dead, Turkish troops continued to mass along the country's 300-kilometre border with Iraq.

Debate in this country yesterday was not about whether to invade northern Iraq, but over how big and how deep such an incursion should be. Funerals held yesterday for the dozen dead soldiers turned into emotional political rallies, as tens of thousands of mourners waved the national flag and chanted for action against not only the PKK, but the Kurdistan Regional Government that administers the north of Iraq, and its President, Massoud Barzani.

As the mood in Turkey grew angrier, the government banned television channels from discussing Sunday's deadly ambush, saying such broadcasting was having a "negative impact on public order" and creating the impression of weakness in the Turkish military.

[...]

Mehmet Ali Kislali, veteran military correspondent at the Radikal newspaper, said that while a full-scale invasion isn't likely in the cards, the military is contemplating establishing bases on the Iraqi side of the border - akin to the "security zone" Israel once maintained in south Lebanon - in order to cut off the PKK's routes through the mountains into Turkey.

Mr. Kislali said that while the mildly Islamist government of Mr. Erdogan and the staunchly secular military have had strong differences in the past, there is no quarrel between them over the need to deal with the PKK. "There is full understanding on this between the military and the government," he said. "The government has left all the decisions to the military."

Some commentators cautioned that an operation launched to deal with the estimated 3,000 PKK fighters in Turkey could end with the country mired in the already multisided fighting raging across Iraq. The country's parliament last week authorized the army to pursue the PKK into Iraq if the general staff deemed it necessary.

"This is not about a cross-border operation any more. If Turkey gets into northern Iraq, it is total war," wrote Yalcin Dogan, a columnist with the Hurriyet daily newspaper. "You might get into northern Iraq, claiming it is about the PKK, but it may turn into a war between Turkey and northern Iraq or even Iraq."

Mr. Barzani has said that he hopes Turkey will not chase the PKK into Iraq, but has promised Iraqi Kurds will defend their territory if Turkish troops invade.

Damian P.

Afghanistan and NDP economy with the truth

This document is generally more accurate that what one has become accustomed to from the buggers-out:

Dissenting opinion of the New Democratic Party To the Standing Committee on National Defence

Respectfully submitted by:
Dawn Black, MP

Yet Ms Black cannot forgo mendacity:

In spite of the establishment of ISAF under UN mandate, the US has maintained its anti-terrorism coalition forces of approximately 8000 soldiers, which have no official UN mandate...

This is from the most recent, Sept. 2007, UNSC resolution--similar to annual preceding ones:

“The Security Council...

“Recognizing that the responsibility for providing security and law and order throughout the country resides with the Afghan Authorities and welcoming the cooperation of the Afghan Government with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)...

“Reiterating its support for the continuing endeavours by the Afghan Government, with the assistance of the international community, including ISAF and the Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) coalition, to improve the security situation and to continue to address the threat posed by the Taliban, Al-Qaida and other extremist groups, and stressing in this context the need for sustained international efforts, including those of ISAF and the OEF coalition...

“Welcoming the completion of ISAF’s expansion throughout Afghanistan, the continued coordination between ISAF and the OEF coalition, and the cooperation established between ISAF and the European Union presence in Afghanistan, in particular its police mission (EUPOL Afghanistan)...

“5. Calls upon ISAF to continue to work in close consultation with the Afghan Government and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General as well as with the OEF coalition in the implementation of the force mandate...

Does that not rather sound like an "official UN mandate"? Why do these fools continue to try to mislead people with untruths? Are they no longer capable of recognizing truth, so deep is their hatred and petty mindendness? And are our government and media so dim, or careless, as not to be able to refute them?

Mark C.

Mass murder by Tito

Another reason Yugoslavia broke up; people did not, in private, forget:

After digging for two hours in a chilly forest clearing, the workers had their evidence: bones and the soil-covered, blackened remnant of a shoe confirmed that this was a secret mass grave from World War II.

In the trees a short distance from where the diggers worked, an elderly man looked on. He would not give his name, but said he was at the same spot when he was 16, one morning in 1945, after he heard shouting in the night.

The Lancovo grave is one target of a Slovenian government program to help people come to terms with a hidden legacy of unprecedented slaughter during the war.

So far, 540 such sites have been registered across Slovenia. They are believed to hold up to 100,000 bodies.

"The killings that took place here have no comparison in Europe. In two months after the war, more people were killed here than in the four years of war," said Joze Dezman, a historian who heads the committee for registering hidden graves.

"Srebrenica is like an innocent case compared to that," he said, referring to the Bosnia Serb Army's killing in 1995 of about 8,000 displaced Muslim civilians in Bosnia, their corpses bulldozed into the earth.

Those killed in Slovenia were mostly soldiers who collaborated with the Nazis. Most were slain in the woods without trial. They were victims of a vengeful killing spree by partisans of the Yugoslav leader after British-led Allied troops turned them back from Austria and handed them over [emphasis added].

Slovenia, now a European Union country of two million people, declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, but the graves remained a public secret until excavations in recent years.

"These killings took place in Slovenia because this is where the war was ending: this is where the Iron Curtain was anticipated, this is where refugees found themselves at the end of the war," Dezman said.

[...]

In August, Slovenian researchers confirmed there were at least 15,000 victims in a secret mass grave in Tezno, about 120 kilometers northeast of Ljubljana, where mostly Croat and Montenegrin soldiers were slain and buried.

[...]

Slovenians account for about a fifth of all victims but, so far none of the killers have been brought to trial.

Mark C.

So that's why she won

9/11 was no big deal, according to Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing:

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning British author, has called the attacks on New York on Sept 11, 2001, "not that terrible", compared to the campaign of terror waged by the IRA in the UK.

Lessing, 88, who won the Nobel Prize for literature earlier this month and was praised by the judges for her "scepticism, fire and visionary power", said the attacks were not as "extraordinary" as some Americans thought they were.

"September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible,” she told Spanish newspaper El Pais.

"Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be," she said of the Americans.

"Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our Government.”

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept 11 attacks of 2001. More than 3,500 died and thousands more were injured in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland. (via Tim Blair)

Yeah, the stoic Brits never, ever get hysterical in the wake of a tragedy. If, God forbid, a remnant of the IRA kills 3,000 people in one shot, then we can compare apples to apples.

Damian P.

Budding McVeighs

They were once inspired by The Turner Diaries. Now, they're more likely to be inspired by Loose Change.

Some of them are already seeking out targets.

Damian P.

People's car?

The European Court of Justice opens the way for Porsche to buy VW. (Now, how about more free trade within Canada?):

The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg overturned Germany's so-called "Volkswagen Law" on Tuesday morning, saying it was protectionist. The decision clears the way for a potential takeover of Europe's largest carmaker by the much smaller automobile manufacturer Porsche.

The VW law dates from 1960 and was intended to save the company from foreign takeover. The European Commission has been waging a war of attrition on such laws because they block free trade within the European Union. Tuesday's court ruling should help the Commission -- the EU's executive branch, which brought its case against Volkswagen in 2005 -- challenge the convention of "golden shares," or special stakes held in publicly-traded companies by governments to reserve certain rights and shield the firms from unwanted takeovers.

[...]

An analyst with Merrill Lynch in London wrote to shareholders on Monday, ahead of the ruling: "We have believed for some time that there is a 60 percent chance that Porsche will move to an above-50-percent ownership of Volkswagen. We believe the starting gun for any move by Porsche could well be a favorable ruling from the Court of Justice."

Both Volkswagen and Porsche shares rallied on the news Tuesday morning, with Porsche's share price jumping 6 percent.

Mark C.

Quote of the Day

Kate McMillan: "There's a reason that the Saskatchewan Roughriders have never won a Grey Cup with the NDP in office."

Damian P.

Just wondering...

How would Andrew Sullivan react if Giuliani, Romney or Clinton supporters were advertising on white-supremacist websites?

I know Ron Paul is not a neo-Nazi, and I don't think his official campaign had anything to do with this. I'll even give him the benefit of the doubt about being a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. (He is a NAFTA conspiracy theorist, though.) But as illustrated by his regular appearances on the Alex Jones radio show, he obviously has no problem associating with questionable characters who will support him.

Which, come to think of it, makes Ron Paul pretty much exactly like every other politician in the world.

Damian P.

Update: don't ban the Paulestinians from your blog, says Captain Ed. (The Cap'n hopes to interview Paul for his internet radio show. That's one I'd really like to hear.)

Update II: Sullivan gets huffy about my use of the term "Paulestinians." I have to admit, it isn't nearly as classy as "Christianist" or "Weimar watch."

When they're good, they're very, very good...

...and seldom, I think, horrid. Excellent Canadian journalists [perhaps better described as "commentators" - DP]--because, like most of those Brits, they can write:

Colby Cosh:

It was early in the morning when I got Jonathan Kay's e-mail telling me about the paper's new series on the theme "If you had the power to change a single thing about Canada, what would it be?"... I found myself thinking, "Well, for starters, I'd make the damn place a little bit warmer."

[...]

Canada has set out on the right direction under recent governments, and the gravitational force of the brain drain probably seems less severe to a young person now than it did in 1990. But weather remains an intractable inherent factor in the quality-of-life differential between Canada and, say, Silicon Valley or Texas. Many of my friends and acquaintances would never have left for warmer climes if they had foreseen Alberta's economic boom, and for some, departing was an objective error. But when they imagine coming home now, they think of minus-30 February days and natural-gas bills and shovelling snow.

[...]

It is difficult to enumerate all the ways in which our cruel winters affect us. We normally consider them a given. But it's hard to avoid the suspicion that a few extra degrees of mean temperature might provide enormous net benefits to an icebound state such as ours. On cold days, when we're not concerned with looking like good internationalists who care deeply about Vanuatu and the Maldives, we all joke about being in favour of global warming. And heaven forbid we should act on our own interests when it comes to climate; but is it at least fair to ask what those interests really are?

The thing is that from Oshawa (just east of T.O. for the geographically challenged) west to Windsor, the centre of the Canadian universe, winters are hardly harsh. So people there--such as the "national" media in the ultimate centre of the universe--don't quite get the pan-Canadian picture.

As for attracting (other than to Vancouver and the GTA) the best and the brightest from India or almost all China...

Mark Steyn:

...The notion of a national interest, or strategic goals, or even (for Pearsonian nostalgics) a moral foreign policy, all are absent. That brave Canadian warriors (to use a word M. Chrétien never would) are performing heroically in Afghanistan is an entirely accidental by-product of the Liberals' shrivelled political calculus. For all his talk about "values," the great survivor of Canadian politics is closer to Oscar Wilde's man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. On, say, gay marriage, what does M. Chrétien actually believe? He might be for it, but reckoned the Canadian public weren't ready to be sold it. He might be against it, but figures he's got no choice but to string along with the court decision. He might have no view either way, but discerned an opportunity to tar the opposition as intolerant and bigoted. Who knows? And, given (as he says) "how few gay couples actually bothered to tie the knot," who cares? "While homosexuality, multiple divorces, and babies born before the honeymoon may be upsetting for many traditional people, they are the modern realities we have to recognize." And M. Chrétien's great skill is in recognizing modern realities without being encumbered by principle.

[...]

...The case for pre-emptive war [Iraq], pronounces Chrétien, would not have convinced "a judge of the municipal court in Shawinigan." This is the logical reductio of Trudeaupian foreign policy: a second-rank power that has attitudes rather than policies.

And, while Jean Chrétien may not have cut an impressive figure on the world stage, no doubt he still commands respect at that Shawinigan courthouse. "Even after I began to do quite well," he muses, "I preferred to build a house near my blue-collar friends in an area that became known as La Place Rouge, rather than in a bourgeois part of Shawinigan" -- never mind Westmount, or (as he snipes of "Mr. Black" during the Conrad peerage episode) Palm Beach, New York and London. As that tinnily paternalistic flourish of "my blue-collar friends" suggests, M. Chrétien was content to be the big shark in a small pond, working the room, dispensing favours, calling them in. It's hardly worth rerunning Shawinigate one more time except to note that, when I stayed at the Auberge Grand-Mère, Chrétien's blue-collar buddy Yvon Duhaime was an amiable mein host but his new publicly funded ensuite bathrooms didn't appear to be built to code: anyone over five-foot-three who sat on the toilet would have had to poke his or her knees out the door into the bedroom. Can't see what the Canadian taxpayer got out of that. But it accords with the Chrétien way of doing business: in a "diverse" nation, the state is the best arbiter of who deserves what slice of the cake.

[...]

...M. Chrétien also, as he says, "did well." He was in "public service" for 40 years, except for 20 minutes in the mid-eighties when he went into private life and amazingly became a multi-gazillionaire overnight. Mulroney's smooth when-Irish-pores-are-oozing gladhanding was aesthetically revolting to his fellow Canadians. Chrétien's liddle-guy shtick was both less oleaginous and far more lethally effective...

Mark C.

Shame on the Ottawa Sun

Outrageous headlines, Oct. 22:

Front page:

BATTLE FATIGUE

Troops overseas divided on future of Afghan mission

P.3 for the story itself:

Troops split on staying

The Canadian Press story itself quotes a total of two--that's right, two--soldiers who express doubts about whether the mission is worthwhile. Some split, some division. In the face of such completely mis-representative headlines like this, no wonder many Canadians have do not support the mission.

And from the Toronto Sun:

Canadian combatants divided

But the Calgary Sun gets it right:

Mission deadline called unrealistic

I guess in Calgary, the headline writer actually read the story closely.

Here's the original CP headline:

Soldiers agree Afghanistan needs Canada past 2009, debate what mission can do

The second part of the report, not included in the Sun stories, also provides considerable useful detail from which to assess the situation.

Meanwhile, on the broader war front:

Afstan: The Toronto Star notices the other fighting allies

Congratulations on their recent reporting.

Scott Taylor savages the Liberal governments' handling of Afghanistan. And an American civilian, who has worked in Afghanistan, gives a primer (provoked by comments at the CBC website) on the country's recent history:

Who Are The Taliban?

Mark C.

"The new culture wars"

They're between "phoney and real progressives," according to Sarah Baxter in The Times:

My own test for spotting a phoney liberal is as follows. If you think Bush is a fascist and Castro is a progressive, you are not a democrat. If you think cultural traditions can trump women’s rights, you are not a feminist. And if you think antisemitic rants are simply an expression of frustration with American and Israeli policy, you have learnt nothing from history.

[...]

Nick Cohen, whose book What’s Left? has just been published in paperback, identifies progressives as antitotalitarian internationalists who subscribe to “some kind of universal values”, as he puts it.

“The left are like old-style Tory imperialists, who believe rights are all very well for western Europe but not for Johnny Foreigner, and that the liberation of women is essentially for white-skinned women, not brown-skinned women,” Cohen says.

A case in point is the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalia-born author of Infidel, who has received an astounding lack of support from liberals and the left. An article in Newsweek described her as a “bomb-thrower”, when it is Hirsi Ali who faces death threats from real bomb-throwers merely for speaking her mind and has had to rush back to the Netherlands because its government will no longer pay for her bodyguards while she is abroad.

Natasha Walter, reviewing her book in The Guardian, wrote blithely: “What sticks in the throats of many of her readers is not her feminism, but her antiIslamism” - as if the two could be separated. It was Hirsi Ali’s culture that led her to be genitally mutilated as a girl, and it was her Muslim former co-religionists who murdered her friend Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker. Why should she remain quiet?

There's also a story about Che Guevara's children visiting Iran, which shows what can happen when radical leftists and Islamic fundamentalists find out they don't have as much in common as they thought. (via Harry's Place)

Damian P.

It might work...

A new protest campaign against the Burmese government. You got a better idea?

Damian P.

The $2,500 car?

Tata, an Indian company probably best known for making the ill-fated CityRover, is promising to build it. The Car Connection's Jerry Flint is skeptical.

Damian P.

Switzerland turns right

More evidence that Europeans are turning to far-right, unabashedly xenophobic political parties in response to mass immigration ("Islamization," some say):

The right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP) is set to consolidate its position as the alpine nation's most popular grouping in a parliamentary election on Sunday, outstripping its rivals after a provocative campaign.

Polling booths in Switzerland are due to close around midday (11 a.m. British time). A large proportion of Swiss ballots are cast by mail in advance of election day. The first estimated national result is due at around 1900 local time (6 p.m. British time).

According to the last opinion poll conducted before the election, the People's Party are expected to win 27.3 percent of the vote, a slight increase over 2003 when they raced to the top of the polls amid accusations of xenophobia.

The SVP has again run a controversial campaign calling for the extradition of foreigners who commit serious crimes. It has been criticised by opponents and has ruffled the usually smooth waters of Switzerland's consensus-based politics.

Opposition to the SVP's campaign, which used posters calling for the "black sheep" of Swiss society to be booted out, spilled over into a rare outburst of violence on the streets of Berne earlier this month when police and left-wing activists clashed.

Drudge has a photo of the "black sheep" election poster, which makes "race-baiting" American campaign ads look very timid indeed.

Last month, Reason's Michael Moynihan wrote about the rise of the SVP and other anti-immigration parties:

That Europe is "trending racist" is surely an overstatement, though many of the continent's traditional paragons of racial and social tolerance, like the Netherlands, have travelled a bumpy road towards a multiethnic society and religious pluralism. After the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and the persistent death threats against anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders and Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, many native Dutch have become noticeably less "tolerant" of Muslim immigrants. According to the New York Times, a 2005 opinion poll found that 35 percent of "the native Dutch questioned had negative views about Islam," while Dutch polling firm Motivaction found that "63 percent of respondents think Islam is incompatible with modern European life." But this, of course, is a two-way street. A study by Frank Buijs of the University of Amsterdam's Institute of Migration and Ethnic Studies showed that Moroccan youth in the Netherlands are deeply skeptical of Dutch liberalism, with 40 percent of respondents saying they "reject western values and democracy."

In Denmark, a country long associated with socialism and sexual liberation, anti-immigrant sentiment has markedly increased, causing a left-wing columnist for Sweden's biggest daily to brand his fellow Scandinavians an unreservedly racist lot: "Our little neighbor is Western Europe's most prejudiced, bigoted and narrow-minded nation." A deeply unfair characterization to be sure, but the far right Danish People's Party, the country's third-largest, with approximately 13 percent voter support, is a vital bit player in the ruling Venstre Party coalition.

The depth of European skepticism towards immigration is difficult to gauge by merely charting the progress of far right parties. Across the continent, fringe parties have watched as establishment politicians appropriate portions of their message. When British political candidates collate the latest opinion poll data—suggesting deep skepticism to increased legal immigration; demonstrating a startling preponderance of illiberal attitudes amongst British Muslims—they respond with alacrity. Yesterday, the Sunday Telegraph reported that "Tens of thousands of immigrant workers will be forced to learn English before they are allowed into Britain under a plan [Labour] Prime Minister Gordon Brown is expected to announce tomorrow in a speech to the Trades Union Congress in Brighton..." Not exactly Enoch Powell, but Prime Minister Brown is clearly not courting the Neil Kinnock-wing of his party either.

Damian P.

The US and Turkey: Armenia and Iraq

Charles Krauthammer takes on the Speaker of the House:

There are three relevant questions concerning the Armenian genocide.

(a) Did it happen?

(b) Should the U.S. House of Representatives be expressing itself on this now?

(c) Was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's determination to bring this to a vote, knowing that it risked provoking Turkey into withdrawing crucial assistance to American soldiers in Iraq, a conscious (columnist Thomas Sowell) or unconscious (blogger Mickey Kaus) attempt to sabotage the U.S. war effort?

The answers are:

(a) Yes, unequivocally.

(b) No, unequivocally.

(c) God only knows.

[..]

Turkey is already massing troops near its border with Iraq, threatening a campaign against Kurdish rebels that could destabilize the one stable front in Iraq. The same House of Representatives that has been complaining loudly about the lack of armored vehicles for our troops is blithely jeopardizing relations with the country through which 95 percent of the new heavily armored vehicles are now transiting on the way to saving American lives in Iraq.

And for what? To feel morally clean?

[...]

...the Ottomans were not friends. They were an enemy power in World War I [actually not--the US and Turkey were never at war with each other - MC], allied with Germany. Now the Turks are indeed friends, giving us indispensable logistical help in our war against today's premier perpetrators of crimes against humanity -- al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan. Friends don't gratuitously antagonize friends who are helping to fight the world's foremost war criminals.

[...]

Is the Armenian resolution her [Nancy Pelosi's] way of unconsciously sabotaging the U.S. war effort, after she had failed to stop it by more direct means? I leave that question to psychiatry. Instead, I fall back on Krauthammer's razor (with apologies to Occam): In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.

Sometimes Realpolitik is in order.

Mark C.

Words I never thought I'd write

Thank you, Bill Maher.

Damian P.

Paul/Fawkes '08

I have a strange kind of respect for their candidate, a man so principled he voted against sending emergency federal aid to Katrina victims, on the grounds that they chose to live in hurricane-prone New Orleans. But the Paulestinians creep me out more and more each day.

Why isn't Paul facing serious media scrutiny for this kind of thing, as Allahpundit asks? It seems to be a case where his maverick candidacy, and relatively low poll numbers, are actually working in his favor. If Ron Paul becomes a serious contender for the GOP Presidential nomination, then I think you'll see the mainstream media start asking some tough questions.

When I first read the LGF post about this video, in which Charles says it used imagery from V, I was hoping he meant this.

Damian P.

Who's afraid of a Harper majority?

Not Canadians, by and large:

Most Canadians say the best outcome of the next federal election would be a majority government, according to a new national Ipsos-Reid poll.

Moreover, the poll conducted exclusively this week for CanWest News Service and Global National reveals that of those Canadians who prefer a majority most think it ought to be led by Stephen Harper.

Fifty-eight per cent of those in favour of a majority would rather have Harper as the prime minister in such a circumstance, compared to 28% who preferred Liberal Leader Stephane Dion.

The vast majority of those surveyed, however, also said there should be no election until the spring at the earliest because there is still "important work" to be done by the government.

[...]

The survey, conducted since Tuesday's throne speech, said the Conservatives hit the magic majority number of 40% for the second consecutive week.

The Liberals trailed by 13 points at 27%, a spread that pollsters attribute to weeks of unrest with Dion's leadership, party infighting and ruptures within the Quebec wing of the party. The NDP garnered 14% support and the Green party had eight.

The Conservatives' lead over the Liberals in seat-rich Ontario widened to eight points from three points last week, virtually guaranteeing they would score a "solid majority" victory if an election were held today, Mr. Bricker said.

Tory support was 42%, up two points from the previous survey, while the Liberals dropped three points to 34%. The NDP had 13%, and the Green party 10.

In Quebec, the sovereigntist Bloc Quebecois led at 36%, but the Conservatives outpaced the Liberals by 26% to 19% as Quebecers preferred federalist option. The NDP registered 12% support and the Green party six per cent.

Full results here, in PDF format. I'm pleasantly surprised to see the Tories at 39% in Atlantic Canada, just four points behind the Liberals, but note the tiny sample size. (That probably explains why the Liberals lead 48-8 among Atlantic Canadians who want a minority government, but the Conservatives are up 52-37 among those who want a majority.)

I'd like to see that broken down between the four Atlantic provinces. My home province of Dannyland, I suspect, is pretty barren territory for the Harper Conservatives. I don't think he's doing much better in Nova Scotia, largely because of the Bill Casey mess, and PEI has given all four of its seats to the Liberals in the last few elections.

That leaves New Brunswick, whose provincial government is not involved in any contentious resource/equalization disputes with Ottawa, and where the Reform Party and Canadian Alliance did considerably better than in the other Atlantic provinces. Might Harper gain a few seats there?

Damian P.

Worth reading

If only any Canadian newspaper (whatever one's prejudices) could produce an op-ed page like this. Or this. Thomas Walkom and James Travers (Toronto Star)--just to choose two easy targets--would never get such prominence in the UK. People without wit, little knowledge, and of infuriating mediocrity.

Canada has three major newspapers, given the two solitudes: The Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post; the UK has four (decreasingly) "quality" dailies, The Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent, and the Times. Now the UK may have around two and a half times the RoC's population, but that doesn't explain why their papers are so much more well-written in their op-ed sections. And about five times as stimulating--one way or the other.

Which is why I love reading the British papers, in print, when I go there. One the other hand their news reporting, at least foreign, for at least twenty years has been far behind that of the main US dailies. On June 3 this year the Telegraph's "Thomas Harding...[was] the only journalist with the troops..." in Afghanistan. Shocking.

Mark C.

I don't ordinarily condone vandalism

...but for once, I'm willing to make an exception.

Now, if only we could do something about these bloody T-shirts...

Damian P.

LIberals and the Canadian Forces

A post at The Torch:

Expectedly partisan

Mark C.

They want us there

A new poll shows that the people of Afghanistan - you know, the ones supposedly being killed, displaced and humiliated by Canadian and NATO forces - overwhelmingly support our presence in their country:

In a poll of Afghans conducted by Environics Research on behalf of The Globe and Mail, the CBC and La Presse, respondents expressed optimism about the future, strong support for the government of President Hamid Karzai and appreciation for the work being done by NATO countries in improving security.

In Kandahar, where the Taliban is stronger and violence more pervasive, support for the foreign troops was weaker, but respondents still want the soldiers to stay.

According to the survey, conducted between Sept. 17 and 24 with a sample of 1,578 men and women, 60 per cent said the presence of foreigners in the country was a good thing. Only 16 per cent said it was a bad thing, while 22 per cent said it was equally good and bad.

In Kandahar, where the Canadians are centred, Environics added to the number of respondents and asked a series of special questions. There, 61 per cent said the foreign presence was good while 23 per cent responded that it was a "bad thing."

[...]

When it comes to Canada's presence in the country, it has a relatively high profile, ranking fourth in public awareness after the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Asked which foreign countries are present in Afghanistan with soldiers, aid workers and businessmen, 95 per cent named the United States, 63 per cent named Germany, 52 per cent Britain and 46 per cent Canada.

But virtually no Afghans are apparently aware that Canadian soldiers are involved in fighting the Taliban. Asked which foreign counties are involved in battling the Taliban, 89 per cent of Afghans mentioned the United States and none mentioned Canada.

Even in Kandahar, 90 per cent said the United States was fighting the Taliban while only 2 per cent identified Canada. On the other hand, 25 per cent of respondents in Kandahar said that Canada was providing reconstruction assistance, compared with 27 per cent who said Britain and 28 per cent who said Germany.

Yet when the question was asked differently, awareness of the Canadian role was higher. When respondents in Kandahar were asked what the main purpose of the Canadian presence was in the province, 47 per cent responded that the main goal was to fight the Taliban, while 16 per cent mentioned reconstruction and 10 per cent answered that Canada was there to support the Karzai government.

Mr. Neuman said that because the United States has by far the most troops in the country, respondents immediately identified U.S. forces as the major fighters against the Taliban, but in Kandahar, awareness of the Canadian presence was high and their role was well-regarded, particularly when it comes to reconstruction work.

Support for the Taliban was surprisingly low, with only 14 per cent of respondents nationally saying they had very positive or somewhat positive views of the Taliban. In Kandahar, those positives rose to 20 per cent.

Damian P.

Mark adds: "Support for the Taliban was surprisingly low"...that's one way to look at the poll results (which, as I can see, the Globe has reported quite fairly). Damian Brooks does his own breakdown at The Torch:

Why would we abandon them?

CBC video of reaction to the poll, starting with troops at Kanadahar, is here. So far about the only non-Canadian media to notice the poll are Allahpundit and PakTribune.com. Pity.

Damian adds: The Prof noticed the results as well.

Welcome home, Ms. Bhutto

The death toll from a horrifying terror attack in Pakistan, directed at Benazir Bhutto amd her thousands of supporters, is 115 and climbing. Bhutto, who returned to the country after years in exile, survived:

Two bombs went off in a procession welcoming her back to the country after eight years in exile.

Her bullet-proof bus had just passed when the blasts happened.

She was unhurt and has been taken to her house in the city but at least 115 people were killed and around 150 others wounded.

An initial small explosion was followed by a huge blast just feet from the vehicle. At least one of them was thought to be a suicide bombing.

[...]

Militants linked to al Qaeda, angered by her support for the US war on terrorism, had threatened to assassinate her.

Regular updates at Hot Air, where Allahpundit makes a seemingly obvious point:

One of the weapons in the Taliban’s arsenal is an appeal to patriotism among Pakistanis: they’re all technically countrymen so Musharraf’s offensive in the tribal areas is, in theory, an attack on his own people. Bombing civilians who came out to see Bhutto very foolishly undermines that argument.

Damian P.

Living in a bubble

"A Reporter's Ottawa" sure is a tiny town. Rinaldo (dig the music) Hair Designers & Spa (21) has a certain cachet; Hy's (5) is (and I approve) old school red meat--22 oz. porterhouse $44.95. Some day I'll go.

I went to high school near 20.

Mark C.

Kos-acting

A dramatic reading by Charles Johnson. The resemblance to Alex Jones is startling.

Damian P.

Are there any good guys in Darfur?

What is to be done? An international, colonial, takeover of the area (which will not happen)?

...increasingly, the rebels are at risk of becoming the key stumbling block to peace, say analysts. In recent months, the rebels have:

• Split into more than a dozen quarreling factions.

• Accused one another of seeking personal fame, being bought off by Sudan's government, and representing the interests of specific tribes instead of all of Darfur's people.

• Killed 10 African Union (AU) peacekeepers, according to AU commanders, in the worst attack since the troops were deployed in 2004...

Still some Canadians think that by magical "leadership" we can do something substantive to help. I ask: what? And who would follow us?

Senator Dallaire joined opposition MPs and activists who used Parliament's reopening yesterday to showcase their call for Canada to provide more aggressive leadership in the long-frustrated search for peace in western Sudan...

Meanwhile, the peace agreement covering southern Sudan (in which perhaps two million people died over two decades of war) may be unravelling:

...U.N. and African diplomats step up peace efforts in Sudan's other crisis, the conflict in the western Darfur region.

Signers of the 2005 truce ending Africa's longest civil war have missed every major deadline, and tensions in the south have increased amid reports of a military buildup by both sides. Last week, former southern rebels took the dramatic step of withdrawing from a national unity government, accusing northern officials of blocking the peace agreement and failing to remove thousands of its troops from southern oil fields.

As Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir met Tuesday with leaders of the southern-based Sudan People's Liberation Movement to discuss the crisis, both sides insisted that they didn't want to go back to war.

Analysts fear that renewed hostilities could trigger a humanitarian disaster even worse than in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people are believed to have died over the past four years.

"I don't think this means an immediate return to war. But it is a serious call for more attention and more robust political support for the process because war is certainly a possibility," said Sara Pantuliano, a Sudan expert with the Overseas Development Institute, a London-based think tank.

During the two-decade civil war, which pitted the Arab-dominated northern government against rebels from the mostly Christian and animist south, about 2 million people died, mostly from hunger and illness. The southerners' plight won support from American activists, particularly evangelical Christians...

What is indeed to be done? More Canadian leadership I guess--if M. Dion is up to speed:

We cannot turn our back on Africa ... and what does the government intend to do in Darfur?” Mr. Dion said...

Fantasyland.

Mark C.

Jack and Gilles went up to the Hill...

...but Stéphane won't go tumbling after them. To the polls, that is--his chances for an electoral crown being broken at the moment.

What is all this nonsense about how "Canadians don't want an election"? From what many pundits and politicians say, one gets the idea that actually causing people to vote in a free election is an outrageously punitive action against the populace. If that's the case, what's the point of democracy anyway?

Prediction: there will never be an election in Canada again!

Pity those poor, oppressed Americans who have to vote for the House of Representatives every two years--those groaning masses, yearning to be free of ballot boxes (oops! electronic voting machines).

Or those French who, in most districts in parliamentary elections, and in most presidential elections, must vote twice in two weeks (gasp!) so one of the candidates achieves a majority. I suppose if they were voting-averse Canadians they'd start another revolution to restore the ancien régime.

But I guess an ancien régime is what the Liberals want...

Mark C.

NCTO (Neil Clark Treaty Organization)

The last of the unrepentant British communists wants Iran, Russia, Syria and Venezuela to form a mutual defence pact against the evil Yanks. He doesn't say Zimbabwe should be included, the racist.

Clark says the Nazis could have been stopped, "had Britain, France, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia signed such a mutual defence pact in the 1930s." Funny, but I've heard about Clark's beloved USSR entering into such an alliance just before Hitler really got going...

Damian P.

It's the (Chinese) economy, stupid

Why Kyoto is deader than Stéphane Dion's Prime Ministerial aspirations:

China’s drive for wealth means end of our low-carbon dreams

Hu Jintao wants to make every Chinese twice as rich by 2020. He has done it once – in just five years, income per capita doubled to $2,000 (£983) - and the only obstacle in the Chinese President’s path is the fuel needed to stoke the boiler in China’s locomotive.

The president needs more copper, iron ore, zinc and natural gas. Above all, he needs more coal to keep the power stations humming nicely and more oil for Chinese cars and lorries. China accounts for more than a third of world demand for coal and the price in Australia soared this year as the People’s Republic switched from being an exporter to being an importer. If Mr Hu had a message for the world in his address to the Communist Party National Congress, it was this: we will burn our coal and, if we have to, we will burn yours, too.

What does this mean? Put bluntly, it means that the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions is dead and so is any prospect of persuading Beijing to bind itself to other curbs on carbon emissions. We can stop kidding ourselves that China will sign up to any green thingy that hinders his party’s ten-year plan to get rich quick. Instead, the ravenous demand for minerals and metals will continue and the desperate land grab by Chinese state companies in their pursuit of resources in Central Asia, Africa and Canada will become more politically embarrassing...

Mark C.

Might a pustulent boil be lanced?

In light of these sillinesses, should one care?

BBC faces strike over thousands of job cuts

...
The plan is to "transform" the way news is gathered by the BBC by ending the system of journalists from radio, television, News 24 and online all covering the same story backed by their own producers, technical and planning staff.

They will be required, where possible, to work across all three media to reduce duplication. The unions jealously guard the existing system.

A senior BBC source said: "Typically when a newspaper or commercial broadcaster contacts an organisation about a story one or two calls are made. When it's the BBC it is more like 26 because of the duplication. Sometimes three separate producers can be involved handling a report coming from a court case which could be handled by one person...

Mark C.

Update: 1,800 staff cuts announced.

Election unlikely

He'll make up his mind later today, but the Toronto Star says Stephane Dion probably won't bring down the government over the Throne Speech:

Hamstrung by a divided and restive party, Liberal leader Stéphane Dion appears to be leaning against using his 96 MPs to defeat the Conservative throne speech and force an election.

"We know that Canadians want as a priority that this Parliament work," Dion said in his initial response to the Conservatives' agenda-setting address last night.

"They don't want a third election in three years and a half."

However, he hammered the speech for its abandonment of the Kyoto protocol on climate change, its lack of clarity on the future of the military mission in Afghanistan and what Dion said was Prime Minister Stephen Harper's weak economic strategy. He also slammed the Tories' game plan for its "complete and shocking indifference to poverty in this country."

[...]

"I don't see poison pills here," Liberal deputy leader Michael Ignatieff told CBC-TV in a reference to the kind of throne speech policies that would have been completely unacceptable to the Liberals and forced them to topple the government.

"People don't want an election now. They're electioned out," Ignatieff added.

The Liberals' strategic response to the Tory throne speech was obscured in a widening uproar within the party over Dion's leadership.

Facing a revolt within the Liberal organization in Quebec, a frustrated Dion has been tempted to dump the Harper government and clear up questions about his leadership by winning or losing at the polls right away, sources disclosed.

But to do so, he would have to defy his closest advisers and most of the Liberal caucus, insiders said. In yesterday's closed-door Liberal meeting, those who argued in favour of an election were decisively outnumbered by MPs who said the party is nowhere near ready for an election, MPs reported.

With the Quebec wing of the party in total chaos, it's understandable if Dion doesn't want an election. But as Don Martin notes, he risks looking weak and scared, and losing whatever credibility he had left as an environmentalist:

It's only one paragraph in a 16-page Speech from the Throne full of the usual rah-rah rhetoric and resurrected tax cut and crime-fighting promises, but one key point forces Liberal leader Stephane Dion into a policy box shaped like a credibility coffin.

Kyoto -- the international greenhouse gas reduction treaty, not Mr. Dion's gas-generating pet dog -- is dead in Canada. Finally.

"Canada's emissions cannot be brought to the level required under the Kyoto Protocol within the compliance period, which begins on January 1, 2008, just 77 days from now," Mr. Harper wrote.

That acknowledgment makes us the first country in the world to engage a de facto retreat from ratified treaty obligations to reduce greenhouse gases below 1990 levels.

To spare his ailing party from a campaign disaster that would be marked by leadership disarray and party disorganization, the former environment minister now has to support the effective dismantling of a signature Liberal government accomplishment.

Yes, yes, there's the plan to float a symbolic opposition, giving just enough Liberal MPs a voting day off to ensure they don't push the government into an election.

But with the New Democrats testosteroned into the deluded belief they would be the big winner of any fall election, and the Bloc Quebecois believing they have to fight now or face annihilation in Quebec, the dirty job of propping up the government belongs exclusively to the Liberals.

The inconvenient truth behind his Throne Speech predicament is that Mr. Dion must either vote to save the planet or save his political ass. Half measures, desperate hair-splitting and voting shenanigans by the Liberals only justify public cynicism about his party as a band of quivering opportunists interested in keeping their MP paycheques.

Lest we forget, Kyoto still enjoys sacred cow status in public opinion and it was the Liberals whose MP successfully sponsored a bill last spring forcing the government to draft a plan to meet the Kyoto targets.

To accept the Speech from the Throne as an approved government agenda is to agree one of the party's few policy successes is an unattainable farce. It would deliver a hard, if not fatal, hit on the credibility of a leader whose claim to political integrity and personal honesty are his greatest, if not only, strengths.

Bring on the Ignatieff (or Rae? Maybe Kennedy?) era.

Damian P.

Stephen Harper isn't "Bush-lite"

He is, rather, Bill Clinton's younger brother (and note that JFK hairstyle). Here's the Speech from the Throne: talk about triangulation. Flanagan rules.

If there are "poisoned pills", try these:

1) Kyoto: can't be done
2) Afghanistan: the mission, with a (diminishing) combat role should continue until 2011--the Manley panel taken into consideration.

And one sentence:

[Our government] will again ask Parliament to repeal the wasteful long-gun registry...

Mark C.

Quote of the Day

Mike Duffy: "I think for the first time in Canadian history, we have a government which wouldn't mind being defeated, but it can't seem to get the opposition to come out against it."

Damian P.

Don't print these campaign signs yet

The Throne Speech likely won't trigger an immediate election, according to The Globe and Mail:

The Stephen Harper government is expected to unveil a new plan for governing today that sources say will not unnecessarily provoke the opposition to bring it down and force an immediate election.

Sources have told The Globe and Mail that a so-called "poison pill" that would force the opposition to kill the government is not expected to be included in the Speech from the Throne to be delivered by Governor-General Michaëlle Jean.

However, the Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois could still defeat the government if the bills that flow from the speech later in the legislative sitting don't meet with their approval.

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has already said that he is expecting a speech that is conservative in nature and that he will consider supporting it, providing it is not too strongly ideological. However, sources said that Mr. Dion may keep Canadians in suspense until tomorrow before responding.

The speech will include broad themes that include tax cuts, new crime legislation and a further assertion of Canada's role on the world stage, including an increased presence in the Arctic. The environment is also expected to be addressed, as is Mr. Harper's plan to restrict the federal government's role in creating programs in areas of provincial jurisdiction.

[...]

Speculation has focused on whether the speech will include measures unpalatable to the opposition. However, several Conservative insiders speaking on condition of anonymity yesterday insisted there will be no such effort. "People have been talking frantically about a poison pill, but I just don't see it," one Conservative told The Globe. "The whole concept of there being a poison pill just to poke Dion in the eye, I think that's just pure speculation."

The Conservatives are ahead in the polls, but not enough to win a majority government - and don't forget how much of that support is concentrated in certain parts of the country, especially Alberta. The Tories are now the clear federalist choice in Quebec, but they still trail the Liberals in Ontario.

Barring something major happening on the campaign trail, an election called today would likely bring us right back where we started, with a Conservative minority government. A Liberal collapse in Quebec would end Stephane Dion's leadership for good, but Harper has done okay with the ineffective Dion across the floor, don't you think?

Damian P.

Update: The Canadian Press has obtained a copy of the speech:

The government's throne speech will promise a one percentage point cut in the GST and legislation aimed at cracking down on violent crime, according to a leaked copy obtained by The Canadian Press.

The speech is scheduled to be delivered by Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean at 7 p.m. ET.

It will also include a promise to hold a Parliamentary vote on the Afghan mission, and will say that Canada is unable to meet its Kyoto commitments.

According to CP, the speech will outline plans for a new "Tackling Violent Crime" bill, that aims to crack down on impaired driving and set mandatory prison terms for gun crimes.

[...]

The following additional measures are expected to be included in the speech:

* Tax cuts for individuals and businesses;
* The government will limit its ability to spend tax dollars in the provinces;
* Increased funding for cities and infrastructure;
* More measures to help senior citizens; and,
* No new national programs without provincial approval -- a direct appeal to Quebec.
* The speech is also expected to appeal to urban and female voters, where his support has traditionally been weakest.

The incredible shrinking blue oval

There goes the Premier Automotive Group (Aston having already been vanquished in a Gulf sale).

And Tata (from India) is kicking Volvo's tires. Boy, is the world getting flat. What would 007 think?

Mark C.

The blackshirts' stalker site

Former University of Wisconsin professor Kevin Barrett - arguably the most deluded of the prominent 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and that's saying something - has launched www.wheretheylive.org, a website that will feature the home addresses of "power-abusers" and "suspects in the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on 9/11 and during the 9/11 wars."

No, they don't mean Osama bin Laden, though I'd certainly appreciate knowing his home address.

Barrett insists the site is meant for "nonviolent" protest - wink, wink - but there aren't any names or addresses up yet. I presume a special section featuring photos of their targets' children, and the names of their schools, will follow before too long.

(Via Screw Loose Change, of course)

Damian P.

Pointing to the 'Con' in 'Climate Consensus'

Courtesy of Lavoisier.co.au is this paper by William M. Gray, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science, Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University.

Dr. Gray's cloud has few silver linings for anthropogenic global warming hysterics:

2. WHO AM I TO COMMENT? I am a Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University where I have been employed since 1961. I have been performing meteorological research, teaching, and forecasting for the last 53 years. I have participated in many tropical field experiments over the last 50 years. These experiments were directed to the study of cumulus convection, condensation heating, evaporation cooling, sea-air energy-moisture exchange, hurricane formation, etc. These are topics of crucial importance to the physics of global temperature change. But they are not well understood by the human-induced global warming proponents. The incorrect handling of these moist processes is responsible for the major flaws in the human-induced global warming scenarios.

[Ouch.] I'd love to see him in a debate mano-a-mano with Al Gore.

Another scholar pouring cold water on the Left's greatest modern pet "theory" is one Roy Spencer... and the moonbats just love him!

Look at it this way: It's a badge of credibility when the Left's attack dogs go after one ad-hominem. That's their 'Plan B' when defeated.

Joseph Hayyim

Why Doris Lessing deserves a Nobel

I think these thoughts are part of what blogging is all about:

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever...

Earlier in the article:

A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is...

And these are the first two sentence of the 1992 article:

WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness...

The prize biography is here.

Mark C.

Commons committee clowns

Once in a while I agree with Susan Riley, the Ottawa Citizen's true left columnist:

...Harper's critics have largely written off the Manley panel as more manipulation from a shrewd tactician who leaves nothing to chance. New Democrats portray the exercise as an insult to Parliament.

Any hearings, they argue, should occur before a committee of MPs. In theory, yes. But in this minority Parliament, committees have become a hyper-partisan waste of time, as MPs berate witnesses, shout furious accusations at one another and budge not an inch from their pre-ordained positions...

Mark C.

Stuff you can't make up

More of your tax dollars hard at work:

For $147,000 or so, have the taxpayers furthered the career of a brilliant scholar? Well, he's already achieved some international recognition.In 2004, at the Slayage International Conference in Nashville, he won the prize for Best Essay on Buffy Studies.

Mark C.

Historically good

Only Peyton Manning and the Colts - who host the Pats on November 4 - stand between the New England Patriots and a level of greatness not seen since the '85 Bears (and even more gloating from Bill Simmons). Help us, Peyton. You're our only hope.

Speaking of the Bears, this season looks like a write-off, but at least we still have this guy, and also, um...er... [Note: Damian P. began crying too hard to finish this post]

The Perry phenomenon

One of Hollywood's most bankable actor-directors is a guy you've probably never heard of, unless you're African-American. Note how the heavily hyped new George Clooney movie performed by comparison.

Damian P.

Update: FilmDrunk.com suggests an SAT question: "Tyler Perry Movies: White People, NASCAR: Black People"

Standing by Casey

The Conservative riding association in Bill Casey's riding is standing by the expelled MP, contrary to Stephen Harper's orders:

Bill Casey was worn out last night after spending a tense evening waiting while his Conservative riding association spent two hours in a meeting to determine his fate.

They decided to keep him.

"I wasn't in the room, I was out of the room because I didn't want my presence to hold anyone back from saying what they wanted to say," said the renegade Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit MP.

With this move, the riding association is defying Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

[...]

Harper has the final say on candidate nominations, but Casey's riding association president Scott Armstrong remained hopeful the prime minister would change his mind.

"We're hoping that cooler heads will prevail and Bill will be able to stand," Armstrong said. "We feel the best chance for us to win a seat and deliver it to Ottawa is with Bill Casey."

Harper's press secretary said in an interview last night that the prime minister was "crystal clear" about his position.

"As the prime minister said last week when he was asked that question, there will be a Conservative candidate in the riding, and it will not be Mr. Casey," Dimitri Soudas said.

As someone pointed out in the comment section for this post, the Tories never promised that free votes would be allowed on the budget. Casey voted against it, and that's the ultimate no-no for a government MP. That said, Harper's refusal to let Casey return to the fold is costing him so dearly down here, it makes you wonder why he bothered reaching a new offshore deal in the first place.

Can the Prime Minister afford to write off Nova Scotia? Odds are it will be another minority government after the next election, so I'd say he needs every seat he can get.

Damian P.

The sacred cow that kills

Florence Nightingale would weep. At least in the UK, there are private insurance options (not cash from one's pocket, as is the case in Ottawa should one choose to get an MRI across the river in Gatineau).

Yet this is the situation in Ontario. No logical explanation as to why private clinics are able to do government-funded X-rays, blood tests, PSA tests, etc.--but nothing more, including MRIs, is to be permitted.

One really wonders why the Liberals and NDP do not demand that all medical equipment (such as MRI machines) and instruments (scalpels) and other materials for the system (toilet paper in hospitals, whatever) be bought from non-profit making entities (logically owned by the Government of Ontario). After all, the profit motive is such an evil thing.

There is no rational consistency in their positions. And why did the Progressive (aaarrgh!) Conservatives insist that all "medically necessary" treatments be paid for by the government even if privately provided?

And do remember that the Liberal government in its last term eliminated physiotherapy and eye examinations from the category of "medically necessary" things that the government would pay for. Plus dental care (ever had a really bad toothache?) has never been covered by the government. Nor drugs, if one is not a "senior". Nor much of the quite substantial (we're talking in the low thousands) cost of artificial limbs.

The current system in my province is truly mad. Yet ideology prevents politicians from facing reality and ignorance rules the populace. Moreover, unlike in the UK, intelligent (if polemical) public discourse on the subject is virtually absent. part in non-existent "one-tier" health care will be the death of far too many people.

Good grief.

Mark C.

Update: Good griefer:

Wait times for surgery in Canada at all-time high: study

Then there's this:

The time that paramedics spend waiting to hand over patients at Ottawa hospitals continues to get longer, mirroring trends across Canada, despite recent efforts to unplug the bottlenecks that keep ambulances off the road.

Emergency crews in the first half of 2007 waited an average of 57 minutes and 38 seconds to return to service after arriving at a hospital, according to a report being tabled this week at the community and protective services.

[...]

...the Ontario government began funding a pilot project earlier this year at The Ottawa Hospital's Civic and General campuses to alleviate paramedic bottlenecks. Emergency room space is reserved for ambulance patients and extra nurses are on staff to look after those patients.

However, the report states the program "is not proving effective as hospitals still struggle with capacity within their own organization. ... Although solutions to the current hospital wait time is the sole responsibility of the hospital administration, it remains a contributory factor in paramedic availability and therefore negatively impacts service response time."..

Our politicians have no effective policies. Perhaps prayer has a place.

Three theories

1. The CIA blew up Pan Am Flight 103 and blamed the Libyans.

2. The Iranians blew up Pan Am Flight 103, but the Americans covered it up and blamed the Libyans.

3. Robert Fisk has lost his mind. (via LGF)

Fisk is calling upon people who know the truth about Flight 103 to send him the details (by snail mail). Time will tell if this gets more results than his appeal to Osama bin Laden to secure Daniel Pearl's release.

Damian P.

Demonstrate or else

The Burmese military junta, stung by international criticism over its handling of the monks' protests, is allegedly ordering its citizens to voluntarily march in support of the government:

Hundreds of villagers living on the outskirts of Myanmar's biggest city, Yangon, marched in support of the country's military junta Saturday after being threatened with steep fines if they did not, a political activist leader hiding in Yangon told CNN by phone.

Nilar Thein -- a key leader in the Myanmar-based group '88 Generation -- said residents of Shwe Pyi Thar village carried pro-regime placards after junta officials on Friday demanded at least one person from each household march in the government's rally. Junta officials also approached local factories and demanded they provide 50 workers.

According to the report, which CNN cannot independently verify, those who refused to march would be forced to pay steep fines.

The march comes on the heels of a massive government crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy marches led by widely respected Buddhist monks, which ballooned into mass demonstrations in late September. The monks took to the streets in August to protest the increase in fuel prices. Members of the '88 Generation group were involved in the marches.

The Burmese leaders should think back a few years, and remember that these orchestrated pro-government demonstrations don't always work out too well...

Damian P.

"The evidence of a drop in violence in Iraq is becoming hard to dispute"

That's the sub-head of an editorial in--gasp!--the Washington Post, Oct. 14:

NEWS COVERAGE and debate about Iraq during the past couple of weeks have centered on the alleged abuses of private security firms like Blackwater USA. Getting such firms into a legal regime is vital, as we've said. But meanwhile, some seemingly important facts about the main subject of discussion last month -- whether there has been a decrease in violence in Iraq -- have gotten relatively little attention. A congressional study and several news stories in September questioned reports by the U.S. military that casualties were down. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), challenging the testimony of Gen. David H. Petraeus, asserted that "civilian deaths have risen" during this year's surge of American forces.

A month later, there isn't much room for such debate, at least about the latest figures. In September, Iraqi civilian deaths were down 52 percent from August and 77 percent from September 2006, according to the Web site icasualties.org. The Iraqi Health Ministry and the Associated Press reported similar results. U.S. soldiers killed in action numbered 43 -- down 43 percent from August and 64 percent from May, which had the highest monthly figure so far this year. The American combat death total was the lowest since July 2006 and was one of the five lowest monthly counts since the insurgency in Iraq took off in April 2004.

During the first 12 days of October the death rates of Iraqis and Americans fell still further. So far during the Muslim month of Ramadan, which began Sept. 13 and ends this weekend, 36 U.S. soldiers have been reported as killed in hostile actions. That is remarkable given that the surge has deployed more American troops in more dangerous places and that in the past al-Qaeda has staged major offensives during Ramadan. Last year, at least 97 American troops died in combat during Ramadan. Al-Qaeda tried to step up attacks this year, U.S. commanders say -- so far, with stunningly little success.

The trend could change quickly and tragically, of course. Casualties have dropped in the past for a few weeks only to spike again. There are, however, plausible reasons for a decrease in violence. Sunni tribes in Anbar province that once fueled the insurgency have switched sides and declared war on al-Qaeda. The radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr ordered a cease-fire last month by his Mahdi Army. Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top day-to-day commander in Iraq, says al-Qaeda's sanctuaries have been reduced 60 to 70 percent by the surge.

This doesn't necessarily mean the war is being won. U.S. military commanders have said that no reduction in violence will be sustainable unless Iraqis reach political solutions -- and there has been little progress on that front. Nevertheless, it's looking more and more as though those in and outside of Congress who last month were assailing Gen. Petraeus's credibility and insisting that there was no letup in Iraq's bloodshed were -- to put it simply -- wrong.

Mark C. A report of progress:

Al-Qaeda In Iraq Reported Crippled

Many Officials, However, Warn Of Its Resilience

Update:

The Casey Conundrum

Opinions about the new offshore deal in are mixed, but Stephen Harper could have at least gotten some Nova Scotians back on side - if not for his hardline stance against former Tory MP Bill Casey:

Even with a new deal on disputed offshore revenue, the member of parliament booted from government caucus over the Atlantic Accord will not be welcomed back.

At a press conference in Ottawa, Prime Minister Stephen Harper spelled out in no uncertain terms that Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley MP Bill Casey is not a member of the party.

“Mr. Casey is not welcome into our caucus,” Harper said.

“Just so I can be as clear as I can be on it, when there is a next federal election, there will be a Conservative candidate in Mr. Casey’s riding and it will not be Mr. Casey.”

Williams, never one to miss an opportunity, will campaign for Casey when the elction is called. Some Nova Scotia Tories are sticking with him, too. As for Harper, didn't the old Reform Party have this big idea about MPs not being punished for voting their conscience?

Damian P.

Kandahar mission review panel

Here are the options proposed by the government:

Chaired by former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs John Manley, the panel will examine four main options, while not excluding others:

1. Continue training the Afghan army and police so Canada can begin withdrawing its forces in February 2009;

2. Focus on reconstruction and have forces from another country take over security in Kandahar;

3. Shift Canadian security and reconstruction effort to another region in Afghanistan;

4. Withdraw all Canadian military except a minimal force to protect aid workers and diplomats...

Quick comments:

1. Weasely, tries to downplay the combat side of the mission and implies that role will virtually cease by 2009. It says nothing about a serious military commitment to training or development (PRT) after then, much less combat.

2. Weasely straw man--how can that option be effected?

3. Aims at Liberals and Bloc.

4. Aims at NDP.

Here's the rest of the panel:

In addition to Mr. Manley, the panel includes former federal Cabinet Minister Jake Epp, former Clerk of the Privy Council Paul Tellier, former Canadian Ambassador to the United States Derek Burney, and Pamela Wallin, former Canadian Consul General in New York City...

Manley is good on his merits. This is what he said in March, 2004:

As I’ve said before, we can’t sit at the G8 table and when the waiter arrives with the bill, excuse ourselves to go to the washroom. We’ve been doing just that, and trading in our Pearsonian reputation rather than fulfilling the Pearsonian vision.

Tellier and Burney both know what government and foreign/defence policy are all about.

Excerpts from an article Mr Manley just published following a visit to Afghanistan in May this year as a director of CARE Canada:

What became very plain to me, however, was that there is no possible way to separate [emphasis added] the development or humanitarian mission from the military one. There can be no meaningful progress on development without an improved security environment. This can only exist if the institutions of rule of law can be established and the government of Afghanistan can succeed in establishing a welcome presence in more regions of the country.

Whenever we asked Afghans what they thought ISAF or Canada should do, they did not hesitate to say that we must stay [emphasis added]. Without the presence of the international forces, chaos would surely ensue.

But in looking to the future, expectations must be reasonable. Afghanistan is a deeply divided tribal society, with divisions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims [actually between the Shia Hazaras and all the other ethnic groups which are Sunni - MC]] further complicating the mix. It has been racked by decades of war, and it remains the third-poorest country on earth. There should be no belief that after five or even ten years of Western military presence and aid, Afghanistan will resemble Kansas. With patience, commitment and some luck, it will resemble Afghanistan. But an Afghanistan in which people can live together in relative security. Democracy has very shallow roots and has yet to prove itself to Afghans as a viable system of government.

Institutions that are respected will not be built overnight. Police and judges will need time to be trained, and the means to pay them must be established, but a functioning economy needs security in which to grow...

For me, Afghanistan is an enormous opportunity for Canada. For the first time in many years, we have brought a level of commitment to an international problem that gives us real weight and credibility. For once, our 3Ds (defence, diplomacy and development assistance) are all pointed at the same problem, and officials from three departments are working together.

Canadians hear mainly about our military role and are hardpressed to put it into a broader context of either peacekeeping, development or humanitarianism. They should hear more about the important and meaningful contribution our development assistance is making...

We often seek to define Canada’s role in the world. Well, for whatever reason, we have one in Afghanistan. Let’s not abandon it too easily. But let’s use our hard-earned influence to make sure the job is done right [emphasis added].

Amen.

Meanwhile, Steve Janke smells a big political move.

As for other fronts, a post at The Torch:

Afstan: Partially good news from Germany/Romania noticed

Mark C.

Update: Another Torch post:

Dutch putting Canada in a pickle

Upperdate: Plus a generally unnoticed combatant:

Afstan: NATO, Media, Poles Canadians

What free speech means

It means people with odious opinions, like David Irving or Nick Griffin, should be allowed to express these opinions without fear of prosecution by the state. It also means the Oxford Union should be allowed to invite them to speak.

But it does not mean that the Oxford Union is obligated to give these people a platform. Unfortunately, Oxford isn't the only institution which has trouble understanding this:

The Oxford Union debating society raised ire among student groups and activists on Thursday after its president announced that he had invited Holocaust denier David Irving to come speak at the university, The Guardian reported Friday.

The society's president, Luke Tryl, told The Guardian he had also invited British National party chairman Nick Griffin and Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukoshenko to speak. He added that the group has not yet formalized its invitation list.

"The Oxford Union is famous for is commitment to free speech and although I do think these people have awful and abhorrent views I do think Oxford students are intelligent enough to challenge and ridicule them," Tryl said.

[...]

"It will be a disgrace if these discredited speakers are allowed a platform at a forum on free speech. They have an embarrassing history of disregard for legal restrictions on it. It will certainly go down as a black mark on the reputation of the Oxford Union," Oxford Jewish Society co-presidents Daniel Bloch and Steven Altmann-Richer said in a joint statement.

According to the report, Irving denied having been formally approached by anyone from the Oxford Union but said he would accept such an invitation if offered.

Much more at Harry's Place.

Damian P.

It's Gore

As expected, Al Gore is a joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Canadian activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier was appearently snubbed.)

I would have preferred to see the Prize go to some of the people putting their lives on the line to fight tyranny in Zimbabwe, Burma or the Middle East, but we knew this was coming. So will it catapult him into the Presidential race? Time's star-struck Eric Pooley doesn't think so:

...[Gore] put himself in position to win the Nobel by committing to an issue bigger than himself — the fight to save the planet. If he runs for president now, he'll be hauling himself back up onto that dusty old pedestal, signaling that he is, after all, the most important thing in his world. Sure, he'd say he was doing it because he feels a moral obligation to intervene in a time of unparalleled crisis. But running for president is by definition an act of hubris, and Gore has spent the past couple of years defying his ego and sublimating himself to a larger goal. Running for president would mean returning to a role he'd already transcended. He'd turn into — again — just another politician, when a lot of people thought he might be something better than that.

And he'd be risking a hard-won happiness. Gore is happier these days because he is living the kind of life he always wanted to lead. He's happier these days because he is free from the excruciating requirements of electoral politics, the glad-handing and the money-grubbing that drove him deeper into himself the more he was forced to reach out. And, finally, he's happier now because he has been vindicated. The Nobel is an acknowledgment that Gore was right about the greatest global threat we face (and that this is the year when most everyone else finally figured out he was right). Winning the Peace Prize may not place Gore among the global saints, the Nelson Mandelas of the world; but it does place him among the laureates who are beloved in some quarters and loathed in others — those highly charged Prizewinners like Jimmy Carter.

Damian P.

Mark adds: Gore gets gored in the Daily Telegraph:

What has Al Gore done for world peace?

I nominate Mr Suzuki as the most sanctimonious Canadian pork belly.

Merde alors!

A headline in the Journal de Montréal (perhaps the BQ leader should focus his ire on his local media):

Maxime Bernier et la bullshit

Well, maybe a bit of a cow pat. Now if one reads to the end of the story one finds (my translation):

Haji Fazal also expressed his sadness at seeing so many Canadian lives lost in his country. "The work you are doing on our behalf is appreciated. I personally will always remember the smile of Capt. Nichola Goddard."

[...]

"Afghans are exhausted by the years of war, explained the elder. The Taliban, they are not real Islam. Islam is a religion of peace and love."..

Meanwhile, Terry Glavin gets religion and compares Canadian media coverage in general with that of Michael Den Tadt of the mighty Sun Times of Owen Sound, Ontario.

Mark C.

The Burmese crackdown

The situation in "Myanmar" has faded from view, as far as the rest of the world is continued. According to The Independent, however, things have only gotten worse:

Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month's pro-democracy uprising.

The first-hand accounts describe a campaign hidden from view, but even more sinister and terrifying than the open crackdown in which the regime's soldiers turned their bullets and batons on unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Rangoon, killing at least 13. At least then, the world was watching.

The hidden crackdown is as methodical as it is brutal. First the monks were targeted, then the thousands of ordinary Burmese who joined the demonstrations, those who even applauded or watched, or those merely suspected of anti-government sympathies.

[...]

Most of the detained monks, the low-level clergy, were eventually freed without charge as were the children among them. But suspected ringleaders of the protests can expect much harsher treatment, secret trials and long prison sentences. One detained opposition leader has been tortured to death, activist groups said yesterday. Win Shwe, 42, a member of the National League for Democracy, the party of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has died under interrogation, the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said, adding that the information came from authorities in Kyaukpandawn township. "However, his body was not sent to his family and the interrogators indicated that they had cremated it instead." Win Shwe was arrested on the first day of the crackdown.

It was the russet-robed Buddhist clergy, not political groups, who had formed the backbone of demonstrations during days of euphoric defiance and previously undreamed-of hope that Burma's military regime could be brought down by peaceful revolution. That hope has been crushed under the boots of government soldiers and intelligence agents and replaced by fear and dread.

A young woman, a domestic worker in Rangoon, described how one woman bystander who applauded the monks was rounded up. "My friend was taken away for clapping during the demonstrations. She had not marched. She came out of her house as the marchers went by and, for perhaps 30 seconds, smiled and clapped as the monks chanted. Her face was recorded on a military intelligence camera. She was taken and beaten. Now she is so scared she won't even leave her room to come and talk to me, to anyone."

Another Rangoon resident told the aid worker: "We all hear screams at night as they [the police] arrive to drag off a neighbour. We are torn between going to help them and hiding behind our doors. We hide behind our doors. We are ashamed. We are frightened."

Burmese intelligence agents are scrutinising photographs and video footage to identify demonstrators and bystanders. They have also arrested the owners of computers which they suspect were used to transmit images and testimonies out of the country. For each story smuggled out to The Independent, someone has risked arrest and imprisonment. [via Andrew Sullivan]

Much of this is anecdotal, of course, but nothing in recent Burmese history leads me to believe it isn't true. And as we direct our attention elsewhere, it's only going to get worse.

Damian P.

Warren the K reveals his secrets

Kinsella curiously didn't see the contradiction in these two paragraphs from a piece of his today (National Post):

6. Tory's (non-)Message: The Conservative's religious-schools mistake attained, pun intended, Biblical proportions. His religious mistake effectively turned this campaign into a referendum on a single issue -- polarizing the electorate, and crowding out the NDP. The schools controversy became big enough to suck up the oxygen for anything else Tory hoped to say.

[...]

In short, this campaign was about more than a single issue. It was about millions of voters considering two men, two teams, and two visions for the future. Our man, our team and our vision prevailed because -- as in the Ontario Liberal campaign slogan--Ontarians saw "change that is working."

[...]

Warren Kinsella was a volunteer on the Ontario Liberal campaign.

Maybe this explains the contradiction:

The morning after and what a morning. My head hurts...

Mark C.

A new deal for Nova Scotia

This comes out just a day after Danny Williams wins a landslide election victory. Coincidence?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Premier Rodney MacDonald ended their offshore revenue dispute yesterday with an agreement that lets Nova Scotia choose a special equalization formula.

It does not keep all the terms of the Atlantic Accord former premier John Hamm negotiated in 2005, but provincial officials say it could pay out more money, eventually.

The two leaders also promised to settle a separate revenue-sharing dispute between Nova Scotia and Ottawa that dates back to the 1980s.

"I've always told Nova Scotians that we would not lose one red cent from the accord," MacDonald told reporters in Ottawa. "Our two governments are reaffirming that here today."

The agreement to settle the long-standing Crown share dispute allowed Harper to argue he's now being fairer to Nova Scotia than previous prime ministers.

"We always said we would respect signed agreements, signed accords," he said in French.

Harper offered the same equalization deal to Newfoundland and Labrador, but there is no Crown share dispute to arbitrate with that province. He said it's up to Premier Danny Williams whether he "accepts that reconciliation."

Williams quickly rejected the offer. "The bottom line here is that Nova Scotians have said yes to less," he said.

[...]

The province will initially get less than it demanded, but finance officials said the agreement reached yesterday will pay Nova Scotia more money than it hoped to pocket over the lifetime of the accord. The reason is the old program grows at 3.5 per cent, which is expected to eventually outpace growth in the new formula.

The new deal is projected to catch up to Nova Scotia's demands nine years from now. By 2019-20, it could be worth a total of $229 million more. That's almost one per cent of the $25.6 billion in equalization Nova Scotia expects to collect over the period.

Danny, not surprisingly, is crying foul. Ed Hollett, no fan or Williams or Harper, thinks Nova Scotia is getting a pretty good deal - but Newfoundland and Nova Scotia are not in exactly the same position.

Williams's bluster gained him 43 seats in an election he would have easily won anyway. But what has it done for anyone else?

Damian P.

More on the unbearable lightness of Denis Coderre

From Norman's Spectator:

What can I say?

"Kabul executions spark fresh concern over fate of detainees"(Globe)

Liberal defence critic Denis Coderre, in Kandahar on a fact-finding [my link - MC] mission, said he wondered whether the Afghan legal system was independent enough to allow such harsh treatment, recalling that the Taliban held public executions in soccer stadiums. "I'm against capital punishment so I'm very, very concerned," he said. "The Taliban were doing that. It's the same thing."

Mark C.

Update: I could not agree more with this post of Damian Brooks at The Torch:

Three wars and the truth

This piece by Michael Den Tandt encapsulates just about everything about the Afghan mission we've been trying to say at The Torch recently. But he says it much better than I've been able to, at least.

If you only read one link, today, make it this one.

Coulter and the Jews

More evidence, as if any were needed, of Ann Coulter's sheer vileness. And unlike Libmaugh or O'Reilly, I don't see how she can claim her remarks were taken out of context.

Damian P.

Update: James Joyner, no Coulter fan, says her critics are blowing her comments out of proportion. "Don’t all religious people believe their faith is the One True Faith," asks Joyner, "and that it would be preferable if others shared in it?"

Fair enough. But history gives the Jews good reason to start getting worried when Christians suggest they convert...

Update II: Roger Simon: "If there weren't an Ann Coulter, the Democrats would have to invent her."

Old quarterbacks never die

The Carolina Panthers' new backup QB: 43-year-old Vinny Testaverde. Wonder if anyone who saw Testaverde throw 35 interceptions in 1988 thought he'd still be playing 19 years later?

Jeff George, a mere lad at 39 years of age, is still waiting for the phone to ring.

Damian P.

And they seemed so reasonable until now...

The Communist Party of Australia joins the "9/11 Truth" movement. (Via Tex)

It's interesting how often they're on the same side as the Nazis, isn't it?

Damian P.

Jim's still lucky

Taking on a man like him. Lord love the Brits--and the media that, one way or the other, reflect them:

The family of the late Sir Kingsley Amis has rallied to his defence after he was accused of being "a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals", by Marxist intellectual Terry Eagleton. Colin Howard, the homosexual brother-in-law of Sir Kingsley, has called Prof Eagleton "a little squirt" and said that the novelist, far from being homophobic, had extended an affectionate friendship to him and helped him come to terms with his sexuality...

It would be wonderful if "amis" were a Latin conjugation.

Mark C.

Three Liberals left

The party of Joey Smallwood and Clyde Wells (and, um, Roger Grimes) has been reduced to a pitiful three seats in the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly:

The party entered the three-week campaign having held 11 seats, although the majority of the caucus had decided to retire.

Eddie Joyce, the incumbent in Bay of Islands district, was also defeated, losing by 372 votes to Tory Terry Loder.

Reid had been in a tight race with Tory Derrick Dalley in the Isles of Notre Dame.

Yvonne Jones, an 11-year veteran of the southern Labrador district of Cartwright-L'Anse au Clair, was among the first candidates to be declared elected by the CBC decision desk.

Kelvin Parsons, who has represented Burgeo-La Poile since 1996, was re-elected by a comfortable margin.

Roland Butler was the last of the Liberals to be declared elected, narrowly winning in the Grit stronghold of Port de Grave.

The Liberals have never had so small a caucus. In 1982, when Brian Peckford led the Tories to a landslide, the party was cut down to a caucus of eight seats.

The last time an Opposition caucus was limited to three members was in 1966, when three PCs squared off against a Joey Smallwood majority of 39 members.

Leader Gerry Reid lost his own riding by seven votes. As for the three who hung on, I wonder what it would take for these ridings to vote anything but Liberal.

If John Efford doesn't make his long-rumoured comeback, look for Parsons to take over as party leader. (Reid says he hasn't decided for sure whether he'll resign. Uh-huh.)

Damian P.

Update: Efford is interested.

"Why just Columbia?"

More evidence suggesting that Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University hasn't worked out as he had planned. Good.

Damian P.

Marketing advice for Daimler-Benz

Pay Britney Spears lots of money to not use your products

(Oh, sure you aren't following the news about Britney. I suppose you never paid any attention to the O.J. trial, either.)

Damian P.

Danny wins a squeaker

Well, not really. But I'm surprised to see five ridings (as of this writing) resisting the Tory tide - I honestly thought the PCs would win all but one or two.

Danny Williams and his Progressive Conservatives will form a second majority government in Newfoundland and Labrador, CBC News projects.

Early results in Tuesday's election were solidly in the PC column, giving the CBC's decision desk confidence in projecting a second mandate.

The PCs were polling about 70 per cent of the vote, with about 10 per cent of polls reporting.

For all my reservations about Williams and his obsessive campaign against the Harper government, I almost certainly would have voted for his party once again. The province is in much better shape than it was when Williams took power. But I'm relieved to see there will at least be some opposition.

The provincial House of Assembly hasn't been this politically lopsided since the Joey Smallwood era. Hopefully, Williams won't spend all out oil money on rubber boot factories and stuff.

Damian P.

Canada's moral obligation to Afghans

Matthew Fisher makes explicit in this National Post article thoughts that underlay this post of mine:

What Mr. Coderre -- and to an extent Mr. Bernier --failed to provide in Kandahar was a realistic appraisal of the current security situation, which is not particularly good, and how it would get much worse if Canada were to retreat. Also missing was an appreciation of how Canada's combat role in southern Afghanistan, which was championed by Paul Martin's Liberal government and then mightily embraced by Stephen Harper's Tories, has created an expectation among Afghans that Canada was actually serious about helping this country.

Those who would demand a change in the Canadian mission are ignoring a broad international consensus that little social or economic development can take place here unless there is security and that establishing such security requires years of commitment, not months.

It is also laughable that some Canadian politicians think that after only 19 months of combat their country has already earned a dividend from NATO for fighting the Taliban in Kandahar's Panjwaii and Zhari districts and that somehow Canada now has the right to condemn countries such as Germany that have refused to fight in Afghanistan.

Canadian troops have done very well here, but their courage and their successes do not make up for the fact that for decades Canada neglected its military so badly that it became the laughing stock of NATO. And several generations of Canadian politicians were quite happy to have it that way.

It is only because of what Canada has been doing in Kandahar that it has begun to re-establish its position as a respected member of NATO. Canada's top general, Rick Hillier, has commanded the International Security Assistance Force here. Maj.-Gen. Marc Lessard of the Van Doos is to assume command for all combat operations in southern Afghanistan from next February.

The antics of Messrs. Coderre and Bernier over the Thanksgiving weekend were a lively pre-election sideshow. The crux of the matter is whether Canada can, in good conscience, so quickly abandon the 90% of Afghans who believe in what they are doing, throwing into question whether the 71 Canadians who have died here did so for any good reason.

More on NATO:

Afghanistan 'putting Nato's future in peril'

And on reality around Kandahar, especially our Provincial Reconstruction Team's work. Good on the Owen Sound Sun Times

Mark C.

Update: For balance:

A pessimistic German piece on Afstan

Thank goodness the Israelis don't play much hockey

More multiculturalism in action:

An Iranian-German soccer player who plays for the German national under-21 side has asked not to play against Israel in a friendly on Oct. 12. The team has accepted his request, angering Germany's Jewish lobby.

[...]

...the player had previously been quoted in Bild newspaper as saying: "There are political reasons. Everyone knows I'm a German Iranian." Berlin newspaper BZ quoted him as saying: "I have more Iranian than German blood in my veins. Besides, I'm doing this out of respect. After all, my parents are Iranian."

[...]

Dejagah, who has dual citizenship, was born in Tehran and has lived in Germany since he was two. The striker plays for football club VFL Wolfsburg and is regarded as one of Germany's most talented young players. He has family in Iran, which refuses to recognize Israel and forbids its citizens from visiting the Jewish state or engaging in sporting competitions with Israel.

Dejagah fears not being allowed to visit relatives in Iran if he has an Israeli stamp in his passport. "I have nothing against Israel. But I'm worried about having problems later when traveling to Iran," he told the BZ...

I would have thought this angered German Jews beyond the "lobby".

Mark C.

But don't question their (Aussie) patriotism

An Australian soldier falls while fighting the Taliban. Tim Blair lifts a rock and finds some of his countrymen feigning indifference - or celebrating.

Damian P.

Children suck

No wonder French intellectuals so often get a bad name (for assisting the decline of the West, for one thing):

A few months ago, Corinne Maier had one of those days. It was a pedestrian moment of domestic torture, a slice of unvarnished tedium and banality, the sort that all parents experience on a daily basis. The difference being that when Corinne Maier has a bad day, it has a way of transforming a nation.

[...]

...After 13 years of maternal humiliations, she wrote a quick, funny, angry book.

Everywhere you look in France these days, you seem to see its cover: The words NO KID in English, followed by "40 Reasons for Not Having Children" in French. It is a huge bestseller. Her 40 reasons are often funny and personal ("Don't become a travelling feeding bottle," "don't adopt the idiot-language of children") sometimes bitter ("you will inevitably be disappointed with your child") and often designed to puncture the idealized notion of motherhood that poisons Western societies...

Hah, hah. "The death march of narcissism", as Michael Harris of CFRA, Ottawa, puts it; he's right for once. Is this a case of The Death of the Grown-Up (via David Frum)?.

Mark C.

Original sin

An unappreciative review of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy:

For all its attention to American foreign policy and domestic lawmaking, The Israel Lobby operates more deeply as a theology, a belief system. The original sin, in the Mearsheimer-Walt cosmology, is the United States' support for Israel, which they view as the root cause of global instability, Islamist terrorism and American insecurity. To enter into this part is to accept the premise that a shifting, stealthy, protoplasmic group of Zionists, most of them Jews but some evangelical Christians, have for decades manipulated the puppet strings of Congress and the White House.

[...]

...In their original-sin perspective, there has been no tangled spiral of causes and effects; only Israel's actions and policies have destabilized the Middle East. Palestinian terrorism is the response of an occupied, outgunned people; from the Munich Olympics massacre to the suicide bombing in 2002 at a seder in Netanya, the attacks that traumatized Israel's populace and many moderate-to-liberal American Jews and drove their politics to the right are barely mentioned. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's vow to "wipe Israel off the map" was mistranslated, according to Mearsheimer and Walt. The Israeli offer of land for peace at Camp David was only "purportedly generous."

The logical outgrowth of such dismissiveness appears in this rather chilling section toward the book's end: "Although we believe that America should support Israel's existence, Israel's security is ultimately not of critical strategic importance to the United States. In the event that Israel was conquered [emphasis added] . . . neither America's territorial integrity, its military power, its economic prestige, nor its core political values would be jeopardized. By contrast, if oil exports from the Persian Gulf were significantly reduced, the effects on America's well-being would be profound."..

Then there's this:

...the United States has adopted its confrontational policies toward Syria, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq primarily to serve Israeli interests.

But it has since been reported that...

Israeli officials warned the George W Bush administration that an invasion of Iraq would be destabilizing to the region and urged the United States instead to target Iran as the primary enemy, according to former Bush administration official Lawrence Wilkerson...

Hmmm...

Mark C.

Damian adds: Jeffrey Goldberg's savaging of The Israel Lobby is well worth a read as well.

Behind the mask

Not all 9/11 conspiracy theorists are Holocaust deniers, but nearly all Holocaust deniers are 9/11 conspiracy theorists - and much of the "9/11 truth" movement has no problem with that.

Damian P.

Dawkins's dark side

What's more unnerving: that ultra-rationalist Richard Dawkins can blithely state that Jews "more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see" (uh-huh) or that many Times readers don't understand what the fuss is all about?

Damian P.

Further diminishing diversity

Ahmadiyya Muslims set up a "part-based suburb" in the GTA:

Welcome to Peace Village, Canada's first Islamic subdivision, where all 260 homes belong to members the Ahmadiyya sect, who flooded to Canada in the 1980s after persecution in Pakistan. It looks ordinary, with basketball nets and minivans in the driveways, until you notice the street signs: Mahmood Crescent, Ahmadiyya Avenue and Noor-Ud-Din Court.

"There is nothing like this in North America," boasts Naseer Ahmad, a real estate agent from Pakistan who dreamed up this community of Islamic dream homes (including oak stairs and central air conditioning) on the edge of Toronto. "You have a mosque, and people are walking to enjoy their part."

The houses, with some modifications, such as increased ventilation (for spicy food) and separate living rooms for women and men, are so successful that, six years after Peace Village opened, Mr. Ahmad plans to double the mosque's size and is now selling 55 townhomes, 1,700 square feet each, for around $350,000 with a garage and a yard, as "Peace Village Phase II."

[...]

The Ahmadiyya say they don't mean to isolate themselves, and they send their children to public school. Still, the nation's "cultural mosaic" is fairly monochrome in this spot: Teston Road Public School, which opened last month next to the mosque, is about 80% Muslim, and the school provides its gym on Fridays at lunchtime so the kids can kick off their running shoes, bow low toward Mecca and pray.

"Even though they are born in Canada," says Teston Road's principal, David Nimmo, "their first language is Urdu."

[...]

The appeal of part-based suburbs is simple: People feel more comfortable among their own kind...

Another "downside of diversity"? Any "we" around here?

Mark C.

Go west, young man

But not all the way to the coast. Colorado and Arizona will play in the National League Championship Series. Sure looks like Boston will keep the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim out of the ALCS. Good luck to the damn' Yankees.

Mark C.

Update: The World Series is going to be the New West against the Old East (or maybe the Old Northwest Territory). Just in case anyone missed it, I was being sarcastic about the Yankees.

A nattering nabob of negativism

Doubting Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star will do anything to undermine support for Canada's combat mission in Afghanistan:

Canada's purpose in Afghanistan is changing subtly but significantly. When then-prime minister Paul Martin agreed to send combat troops to Kandahar, his aim was to defeat the Taliban. Now, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai actively lobbies to bring his Taliban adversaries into a coalition government, the role of Canadian and other NATO-led troops is not to destroy the insurgents but to pressure them into talks.

In the real world of power politics, this is classic carrot and stick strategy. The carrot Karzai is offering his adversaries, including Taliban leader Mullah Omar, is a major role in the country's government. Canada and other NATO countries willing to have their soldiers die for the Afghan regime constitute the stick.

"If a group of Taliban or a number of Taliban come to me and say, `President, we want a department in this or in that ministry, or we want a position as deputy minister ... and we don't want to fight any more' ... If there will be a demand and a request like that to me, I will accept it," Karzai said last week.

What he left unsaid was the threat that if Taliban leaders don't compromise, they will continue to come under attack from NATO.

For Karzai, this makes perfect sense. As long as the insurgents have support in Afghanistan and hideouts in neighbouring Pakistan, they cannot be defeated.

In effect, he is saying to Mullah Omar: I can't win but neither can you. So let's make a deal and divvy up the spoils.

Yet it is a strategy that can work only if NATO keeps fighting. Otherwise, faced with a carrot and no stick, the Taliban would be tempted to battle on until they win.

Which explains why, even as Karzai makes overtures to Omar, he continues to plead with Canada to stay the course.

His problem, however, is that Canadians – even those who now support the war – may not be willing to have their soldiers used as pawns in this new great game.

[...]

...when the rationale for war is simply to buttress the negotiating position of an obscure foreign leader, will Canadians be as amenable?

It's one thing to fight a war to kill "scumbags." It's another to fight a war in order to persuade these same "scumbags" to accept six cabinet seats in a coalition government rather than seven.

I applaud Karzai for his attempts to end Afghanistan's nightmare through negotiation. Ultimately, a political solution is the only way out.

But at the same time, I wonder how the parents and husbands and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan will feel if he succeeds – if Mullah Omar becomes Karzai's prime minister; if, as part of a coalition deal, more severe forms of sharia law are imposed on women; if the very few gains Afghanistan has made in the field of human rights are reversed.

Won't they wonder if the whole thing was a waste of time? Won't they suspect their lovers and sons and daughters died for nothing?

Mr Walkom certainly has a talent for twisting things. The Martin government did not send the Canadian Forces to Kandahar "to defeat the Taliban". Rather, a Provincial Reconstruction Team was sent to do what its name implies; it was followed by a task force with the mission of providing security. That certainly entailed combat with the Taliban but I do not believe outright military victory was claimed as the mission.

Note Mr Walkom's negative and emotive language: our soldiers "as pawns in this new great game"; President Karzai as "an obscure foreign leader" (who just happened to address the Parliament of Canada just over a year ago).

Of course Mr Walkom is a reasonable man: "I applaud Karzai for his attempts to end Afghanistan's nightmare through negotiation." It's just that his heart bleeds fake blood for "the parents and husbands and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan...Won't they wonder if the whole thing was a waste of time? Won't they suspect their lovers and sons and daughters died for nothing?".

That would be if negotiations eventually produce a Taliban-heavy and repressive Afghan government with Mullah Omar back almost in the saddle as prime minister.

What a straw man argument. President Karzai has clearly said that any former Taliban types would have sincerely to renounce violence before being accepted in government. I can't see the good Mullah doing that and I can't see his ever being accepted back in any case.

The whole point of any negotiations is gradually to split the Taliban apart if that can be done, not to accept the old gang back holus-bolus. In the meantime security must be provided, with combat as necessary, whilst the effort continues to build up the Afghan security forces so that they can be ever-more capable of defending the government and people themselves--and so that reconstruction and development can gather pace.

That plan may not work. But so far there is no proof that it has failed or is failing. It is a plan worth supporting with Canadian troops--who are not dying simply to permit a Taliban return as Mr Walkom so deceitfully suggests. And how would those lovers and sons and daughters feel about those deaths if, after a Canadian withdrawal, undefeated, from combat the Taliban some time later regained complete power by force?

Mr Walkom has in fact been advocating peace for some time; he simply does not care if it's peace with honour.

In the end there may be no NATO, just the UK and US, along with the Australians. Even the Australian Leader of the Opposition, from the Labour Party, has said he will increase the Diggers' military presence in Afghanistan.

Have you seen that in the Canadian media? And why doesn't our government even mention it?

Mark C.

Update: IED again:

Australia suffers first combat death in Afghanistan

Why Israel struck Syria

The IDF's mysterious attack in September was against a nuclear facility, according to ABC News. The United States, burned by the Iraqi WMD fiasco, opposed the strike and got Israel to hold off for a couple of months:

The September Israeli airstrike on a suspected nuclear site in Syria had been in the works for months, ABC News has learned, and was delayed only at the strong urging of the United States.

In early July the Israelis presented the United States with satellite imagery that they said showed a nuclear facility in Syria. They had additional evidence that they said showed that some of the technology was supplied by North Korea.

One U.S. official told ABC's Martha Raddatz the material was "jaw dropping" because it raised questions as to why U.S. intelligence had not previously picked up on the facility.

[...]

Some in the administration supported the Israeli action, but others, notably Sect. of State Condoleeza Rice did not. One senior official said the U.S. convinced the Israelis to "confront Syria before attacking."

Officials said they were concerned about the impact an attack on Syria would have on the region. And given the profound consequences of the flawed intelligence in Iraq, the U.S. wanted to be absolutely certain the intelligence was accurate.

Initially, administration officials convinced the Israelis to call off the July strike. But in September the Israelis feared that news of the site was about to leak and went ahead with the strike despite U.S. concerns.

Syria's silence speaks volumes, notes Meryl Yourish.

Damian P.

Details, details...

A new documentary about the great cartoon jihad of 2006 reveals that many of its instigators never actually saw the offending drawings:

In a new documentary film, the violent protests in the Middle East over the infamous Mohammed cartoons in 2005 are proven to have been instigated by Islamic leaders who never actually saw the drawings themselves.

Danish director Karsten Kjær travelled throughout the Middle East to investigate who and what was responsible for the wave of violence released from the cartoons for his documentary ‘Those Damned Drawings’ (‘De Forbandede Tegninger’). He said the primary theme of the film is freedom of expression and its boundaries.

‘I’ve sought to be objective about the crisis’ factual events,’ Kjær told public broadcaster DR. ‘But it is also a very personal film that portrays my travels around the Middle East and my own impression of both the causes and consequences of the conflict brought about by the 12 drawings.

The film suggests the crisis began full-force when the man many consider to be Islam’s most powerful figure, Sheik Yussuf Al-Qaradawi, declared 3 February 2006 as ‘Anger Day’ on his TV programme. [Why bother with "Two Minutes' Hate" when you can have a full day? - DP] A wave of violent protests across the globe unleashing followed in the wake of that transmission.

In the documentary, Kjær shows the Mohammed drawings to Al-Qaradawi, who views them for the first time.

Kjær also shows the cartoons to Ali Bakhsi, the Iranian who spearheaded demonstrations in Tehran that led to the burning of the Danish embassy there. Bakhsi laughingly says the drawings look nothing like Mohammed but rather like an Indian Sikh. [via LGF]

The film airs on Danish television tomorrow. Hopefully a subtitled version will show up online before too long.

Damian P.

Diminishing diversity

The Western Standard ends as a print publication.

Mark C.

What a game!

You shoulda seen it. Indians beat Yankees in the bottom of the eleventh.

Mark C.

InstaBetty.com

Blogging advice for one of America's most beloved comic-book characters.

Damian P.

Under-reported in Afghanistan

A post by Damian Brooks at The Torch:

Say it with me...DE-VEL-OP-MENT

If only our media had regularly been doing this sort of reporting over the last year and a half, the public's view of Afghan realities might be rather different.

Mark C.

Update: A story on the work of our Provincial Reconstruction Team by Lindsey Wiebe (Winnipeg Free Press--she is also blogging from Afghanistan).

And a post by Terry Glavin:

Canada's Imperialist Aggression Against Muslims

"A hero's death" in Iraq

That's Terry Glavin's description of the death of an American soldier who expressed "...principled idealism and internationalism." Yet Mr Glavin writes that "...I was and more or less remain in the "anti-war" camp on the Iraq question...". Do read his thoughtful post.

Mark C.

CBS Cares

Only Cold Case, one of approximately 800 interchangeable police procedurals on the Tiffany network, has the guts to take on the growing problem of, um, high-school "abstinence clubs" stoning their members to death. (Via Kathy Shaidle)

Which show will be the first to portray 19 radical Christians hijacking airliners and crashing them into skyscrapers?

Damian P.

"He folds up like a deck of cheap playing cards"

That's David Frum's description of a Nobel Prize-winning economist's response to a certain Canadian capitalism-slayer wannabe:

The point is not one about Naomi Klein. As has been said, we have seen her kind before. The point is about Joe Stiglitz. The liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s was discredited and destroyed by its inability to resist anti-democratic radicalism at home and abroad. His generation of Democrats worked through the 1990s to try to overcome that deadly legacy. And yet now again, they are succumbing to their old weakness. I suspect that in the privacy of his room, Stiglitz reacted to Klein's work with intellectual disdain and moral revulsion. And yet in the publicity of his column, he could summon up only gurgles of reservation.

This is not a spirit that a democracy can count upon in an hour of trial. It is as if there is something in the very makeup of modern liberalism that lacks antibodies to resist those who would destroy everything modern liberals in fact hold dear...

Mark C.

Learning from the best

The most telling paragraph in yesterday's much-talked-about New York Times piece about "severe interrogations" carried out by the CIA:

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

Even if you accept that valuable intelligence was gained this way (and that's a big if) isn't it by now obvious that the damage to America's reputation simply hasn't been worth it?

Damian P.

Soviet chic

This doesn't offend me, but this does. Celebrating a groundbreaking technological achievement is one thing, but that doesn't make the system that produced it any better.

(Another example: the Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union Silver Arrows are worthy of admiration, but the government that sponsored them certainly isn't.)

Damian P.

Obama's economist

George Will, of all people, is quite impressed.

I think Obama's taking a needless risk with this, though. It's one thing to make the (perfectly valid) argument that politicians shouldn't wrap themselves in the stars-and-stripes, but using one's refusal to wear a flag pin as a sign of virtue seems no better.

Damian P.

Good for Fred

Thompson might be flopping on the campaign trail, but I'm always glad to see a GOP candidate politely tell James Dobson where to go.

Damian P.

Hitting a bullet with a bullet

Progress on US ballistic missile defence of North America (but without Canada, pity):

After a successful test last week, the tracking radars and interceptor rockets of a new U.S. missile defense system can be turned on at any time to respond to an emerging crisis in Asia, senior military officers said.

General Victor Renuart Jr., the senior commander for defense of U.S. territory, said Tuesday that the anti-missile system could guard against the risk of ballistic missile attack from North Korea even while development continues on a series of radars in California and in the Pacific Ocean and on interceptor missiles in Alaska and in California.

While the new system is limited, it is the most extensive anti-ballistic missile system the Pentagon has fielded since the Safeguard ABM system near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota was briefly operated, starting in 1975. Congress immediately voted to shut Safeguard ABM down, and it operated for only a few months.

"We can bring missiles up or take them down as need be so that they can continue doing the testing," said Renuart, commander of the military's Northern Command, based in Colorado Springs [right next to NORAD, no less - MC]. But, he added, "I'm fully confident that we have all of the pieces in place that, if the nation needed to, we could respond."..

But what about decoys?

Obering [director of the Missile Defense Agency] acknowledged that no decoys were flown in the path of the interceptor Friday as might be expected in a real missile attack. Skeptics have challenged the Missile Defense Agency to conduct more realistic tests that would include even primitive technologies designed to fool the interceptor. These include balloons and chunks of metal that separate from the missile along with the warhead...

More on BMD here.

Mark C.

CBC on Afghanistan

A major section of "The National" on Oct. 3 was devoted to the country. The first part (starts at 22:15, URL will change) is a good overall summary of the situation. The second, by two Radio-Canada journalists, covers the operation by the Van Doos this August in which two soldiers were killed, along with their Afghan interpreter, and in which one of the journalists lost a leg. Well worth watching (looks like this piece will continue to be available here).

Mark C.

Update: Controversy in the Netherlands over TV showing Dutch troops in combat.

What price freedom?

A Dutchman is ashamed of his government:

'We Are Making Fools of Ourselves in the Eyes of the World'

By Leon de Winter in Amsterdam

Fear of fanatical Islamists prompted Ayaan Hirsi Ali to leave the Netherlands, her adopted home, and now she has been forced to return. Paying for her bodyguards in the United States is too expensive for the Dutch government -- what a disgrace...

More on the controversy here.

Mark C.

The Burmese crackdown

The news from that country just gets worse and worse.

Damian P.

Minipax?

Softy Lloyd Axworthy ironically seems to have forgotten where this name comes from. He's also a hell of a lot more naive than Eric Blair:

Canada needs a ministry of peace to offset the militaristic direction the country's foreign policy has taken since 9/11, says former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy...

Lloyd, of course, has always seen himself as rather more equal when expressing his views.

Mark C.

Update: Very Minipax--what Lloyd wrote on Sept. 17, 2001:

What is also in the offing is the opportunity for a number of nations to work together to apprehend the guilty parties. While it may not serve the same visceral urges for revenge that a military action provides, the coalition would better serve the battle against terrorism by using due process under international law to bring the culprits to justice. We have the mechanisms, we need only the will to use them, as we have in Rwanda and the Balkans.

[...]

Canada can play an active role in shaping this agenda. I suggest we promote the idea that the Statute of Rome establishing the International Criminal Court be amended to include terrorist attacks against civilians to be a crime against humanity. We have been a leading advocate of human security and can impart some valuable lessons. Most germane is the need to make this an inclusive process, to widen the participation beyond NATO and a few other big players...

I'm still waiting for the Mounties, the NYPD, the Met, the BKA, or Spanish police (amongst many others) to find and arrest a certain Osama.

Pushing out Hillier?

CTV says Gen. Rick Hillier's term as head of the Canadian Forces will not be renewed - mainly for political reasons:

Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier is expected to be replaced as top military commander when his three-year term expires in February, Conservative insiders have told CTV.

Observers say Hillier, who is popular with rank and file soldiers, had hoped to stay on to oversee the war in Afghanistan.

"Most certainly I think Hiller would welcome a second or a renewal of his appointment and the troops would welcome that also," said Col. (ret'd) Michel Drapeau, a military analyst.

Hillier has been described as a larger-than-life soldier's soldier, spending Christmas with his troops and fighting to rebuild the Armed Forces.

But observers say the government seems determined to get rid of the charismatic general, blaming him for outshining his political masters and undermining former defence minister Gordon O'Connor.

[...]

One senior official told CTV: "Hillier has started to believe his own press clippings."

Another said, "O'Connor is a good guy but he got his feet taken right out from under him by Hillier."

They blame Hillier for embarrassing the former defence minister over his department's failure to reimburse soldiers' families for the full cost of their loved ones' funeral.

Some military observers say removing the popular commander is risky, especially during the war. [emphasis added]

David Akin names some possible replacements. The other Damian is decidedly unhappy.

Damian P.

Where the oil money goes

More good reasons to curb our dependence on Saudi oil. (Unfortunately, if we did stop buying the black stuff from Saudi Arabia, that would be considered an evil Zionist conspiracy to keep the Muslim world poor, too.)

Damian P.

Things are really tough in Afghanistan...

...but sure are looking up in Chechnya, according to a NY Times reporter.

One does wonder about the media--the old half full/half empty thing I guess. But why accentuate the positive in the case of Chechnya but not in that of Afghanistan? Enquiring minds and all that...

Mark C.

Damian adds: PJM's Kim Zigfeld compares the story to Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize-winning Times coverage of the Stalin era. (That's not a compliment.)

Spector vs. The Toronto Star

From THE COLUMN I’M GLAD I DIDN’T WRITE, Oct. 2:

Why a columnist writing about foreign policy should read the Washington Post

Playing politics with foreign policy (Travers)

A CONVERSATION WITH MAHMOUD ABBAS (Lallly Weymouth)

Is the U.S. policy of squeezing and isolating Hamas a mistake, or do you think it's the right policy?

In the beginning, I believed that they were mistaken, but now we are in the same position. I am against Hamas.

Plus the NYT, which reported a detail that the T Star omitted on Sunday

Bomber Attacks Bus of Afghan Soldiers; 30 Dead

Amid the Taliban’s stepped-up campaign of violence, Mr. Karzai has been under increasing pressure from NATO countries to try to forge a political peace process that would resolve the insurgency, which many Western and Afghan officials in Afghanistan say cannot be beaten militarily.

Mark C.

Canada in American columns

We're noted in the Washington Post and the LA Times on the same day. Neither piece is particulary positive; each has a very different point of view about the US itself:

Anne Applebaum:

"Why do they hate us?" Much ink has been spilled over the past six years in attempts to answer that question. By contrast, not enough attention has been paid to what is, in some ways, a more perplexing conundrum: Why don't they like us as much as they used to?

"They" in this latter question are our very, very closest allies. By this I don't mean France, or even Canada, democracies that are part of the Western alliance but that have never particularly warmed to the idea of American leadership, whether political or cultural. The French have always been huffy about NATO, and downright nasty about Hollywood; the Canadians have actually formed their national identity around being "not-Americans." No, the more interesting question is why support for American leadership has declined among our traditional friends: Britain, Poland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands.

[...]

...what our closest friends really dislike is not our traditional pushiness, our violent movies or even our current president (though they don't like him much) but our incompetence. A full third blame the perceived decline of the transatlantic alliance on the "mismanagement of Iraq." Not the invasion of Iraq, the "mismanagement" of Iraq. Which makes sense: If you're really worried about Iran, do you want to put your part in the United States, the country that bungled Iraq? If you really care about Islamic fundamentalism, do you want to be led by the country that, distracted by Iraq, failed to predict the return of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan?..

Jonah Golberg:

In Europe and Canada, the cure for every malady seems to be multiculturalism [I'd say the Europeans are re-evaluating their views on this a whole lot more than Canadians - MC]. This is the odd notion that all cultures are equal -- except for that of your own nation, which should be made to constantly bend to the aggrieved sensibilities of minority cultures. In Vancouver, Canada, smoking has been banned pretty much everywhere, except in Muslim-run hookah parlors. British schools were advised to ban crosses and crucifixes but not Muslim symbols. Honor killings among Muslims have gone ignored by police in progressive European countries out of some twisted sense of respect for Muslim culture.

The dirty, embarrassing secret is that this sort of multiculturalism has made Europe a wellspring of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, but America's Muslim community has remained overwhelmingly peaceful. Why? Well, if the answer doesn't lay in President Bush's "outreach" -- and few think it does -- or in Euro-style multicultural condescension, maybe it has something to do with the American "we" that Couric and so many others seem so embarrassed by.

Mark C.

Update: Jonathan Kay rips secular St. Rick on cultural equivalence:

The Western world is the only civilization in history whose intellectual class has embraced societal self-loathing as a mainstream ideology -- even as we have single-handedly launched a global human-rights revolution that, to our everlasting glory, has liberated gays, women and a dozen other formerly persecuted groups from discrimination. In the Cold War, our ivory-tower "guerillas with tenure" (to cite Irving Howe's phrase) didn't sink our ship because the enemy was itself a hollow shell spouting an ideology nobody believed. But militant Islam is different: Men like Ahmadinejad truly do ardently believe their loathsome world-view is ascendant, and that the green tide they champion will one day conquer the decadent West.

Salutin seems quite pleased that, in this globalized age, specimens such as this Holocaust denier are now able to "laugh" at us: It shows, he says, that "the civilizational playing field is finally being levelled"...

Darfur realities

This what the hybrid UN/African Union force will be up against:

The deadly attack on an African Union peacekeeping base by rebels in Darfur over the weekend brought the credibility of the rebel forces to a low point. It also demonstrated the extent to which the force, struggling with minimal manpower and matériel to keep a nonexistent peace, has come to be seen by many non-Arabs in Darfur as at best ineffective and irrelevant, and at worst, a tool manipulated by the Sudanese government, in the view of some rebel groups.

The assault by 30 truckloads of congo rebels late Saturday and early Sunday on a small base in Haskanita, killing 10 peacekeepers from three African countries, threatened to undermine fragile efforts by the United Nations and the African Union to forge a peace agreement at talks in Libya later this month to end the conflict in Darfur, the region of western Sudan where at least 200,000 people have died [note the change in death estimates of late - MC] and more than two million have been chased from their homes.

It will doubtless also make it more difficult to find enough troops for the 26,000-member United Nations-led peacekeeping force that is supposed to begin deploying at the same time...

Well, it may hard even to keep some AU soldiers:

Senegal threatened Monday to withdraw its more than 500 troops from congo, moving the African Union's beleaguered peacekeeping mission closer to collapse after a spectacular militia attack over the weekend left 10 A.U. soldiers dead and dozens more missing or wounded.

[...]

It also injected a new and unsettling element into efforts to gradually replace the A.U. force with a much larger one to be led by the United Nations but staffed largely by troops from African nations. That transition is scheduled to begin soon and take many months.

Senegal, with the third-largest number of troops in Darfur now, was expected to be a key player in any future force. But Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said all of his nation's military personnel will come home if an investigation reveals that the African Union lacked appropriate firepower to repel the attack...

As for UN troops, it's pretty clear that Khartoum wants a very small number of westerners (if any), a point that the Canadian media do not report and which seems to escape the notice of those here clamouring ("Where Jack wants to send our soldiers", as Norman Spector puts it) for greater Canadian military participation:

Norwegian and Swedish army engineers could be in Sudan's Darfur region as early as November as part of the U.N.-AU Darfur peacekeeping mission, their commander says, but so far their offer has yet to be accepted.

If the African Union approves the 400 Nordic troops, they will be the largest and best-equipped contingent from the developed world in the 26,000-strong hybrid AU and United Nations force, the bulk of which will be African infantry.

Norway's Lieutenant-Colonel Anstein Aasen said the contingent's main role would be building bases for the rest of the force along with heavy engineering projects such as roads.

But despite being on four months' deployment notice since September 2006, they still had no firm word on if they were wanted.

[...]

Observers say it is unclear if the delay in accepting the offer of the joint Swedish-Norwegian engineer battalion is due to opposition from Sudan's government, which wanted an all-African force, or from the African Union...

Mark C.

Dr. Turner's Pyongyang Weight-Loss Program

The founder of CNN extols the nutritional benefits of an all-grass diet. As one Reason reader puts it, this guy is just one step away from locking himself in his room and wearing tissue boxes on his feet.

Damian P.

Artists for censorship

Sean Penn shills for Hugo Chavez and the closure of RCTV on Late Night With David Letterman.

It seems like the more you rely on freedom of expression in America, the more enthusiastic you are about the stifling of freedom of expression elsewhere, doesn't it?

Damian P.

Update: Chavez sings! (Hey, if Paris Hilton can get a record deal...)

"Myanmar's" missing monks

More disturbing details about the Burmese crackdown, where the military junta has pretty much declared victory:

A new estimate by a well-connected dissident group has concluded that 138 people were killed and about 6,000 detained, including about 2,400 Buddhist monks, when the regime smashed the anti-government protests last week.

Those numbers were issued by the Democratic Voice of Burma, a dissident news group based in Norway with close ties to pro-democracy activists.

Another report said many of the arrested monks are being held at a former race course, where they were forced to give up their robes and change into civilian clothes.

Several monasteries, brutally raided by police and soldiers last week, are nearly empty now.

[...]

Monks in northern Burma who spoke to the Associated Press confirmed that many of their colleagues were killed or beaten and taken away by the military. But they predicted the monks would not give up

“I want our demands to be fulfilled. I want peace,” said one. “The best thing is to have balance and equality and peace.”

The monks' strategy seems to be based on a faith that the world will take action against the regime that showed its brutality in the crackdown last week. But early signs suggest that the junta will escape any serious consequences from key neighbouring states.

Myanmar's top generals appear confident that they can dodge the international pressure. Monday they snubbed a United Nations envoy, forcing him to cool his heels for a third consecutive day as he waited for a meeting with regime leader Senior General Than Shwe.

The envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, arrived in Myanmar on Saturday to express the UN's outrage at the violent military crackdown that killed at least 10 people and perhaps many more. Monday he made his second trip to the country's remote new capital, Naypyidaw, in a failed effort to obtain a meeting with Gen. Shwe. The government, bizarrely, took the envoy instead to another remote town to attend a workshop on relations between Asia and the European Union.

The envoy was finally promised a meeting today with the junta leader. But the delays suggest that the regime is quite willing to defy the international community.

"SeeDubya" at Junkyard Blog is more pessimistic about chances for democratic change in Iran, after seeing what happened in Burma. (Via Hot Air)

Damian P.

Cox & Forkum... bye for now!

Cox and Forkum have closed shop.

Gents, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your fine work. Your Earth Day cartoons still have me chuckling, as I suppose they will for many more years!

Joseph Hayyim

Burma's brave bloggers

The Times explains how they brought the "Saffron Revolution" to the attention of the world - and how they've been forced underground.

In Canada, we bloggers often don't appreciate how easy we have it, especially when we read stories like this (unsubstantiated, but all too plausible) about the sheer ferocity of the Burmese crackdown.

Damian P.

President Karzai, negotiations and the UN

I think the Afghan president's offer is meant to express a simple desire for a reasonable peace--which I have no doubt he wants. Moreover, the offer should help gain internal and international support. But note the conditions in the offer which the president clearly would not have expected the Taliban to acccept:

President Hamid Karzai yesterday [Sept. 29] offered to meet the Taliban leader and give militants a government position only hours after a suicide bomber in army disguise attacked a military bus, killing 30 people – nearly all of them Afghan soldiers.

Strengthening a call for negotiations he has made with increasing frequency in recent weeks, Karzai said he was willing to meet with the reclusive leader Mullah Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister and factional warlord leader.

"If I find their address, there is no need for them to come to me, I'll personally go there and get in touch with them," Karzai said. "Esteemed Mullah, sir, and esteemed Hekmatyar, sir, why are you destroying the country?"

Karzai said he has contacts with Taliban militants through tribal elders but there are no direct and open government communication channels with the fighters. Omar's whereabouts are unknown, although Karzai has claimed he is in Quetta, Pakistan, a militant hotbed across the border from Afghanistan's Kandahar province.

"If a group of Taliban or a number of Taliban come to me and say, `President, we want a department in this or in that ministry or we want a position as deputy minister ... and we don't want to fight any more [emphasis added]' ... If there will be a demand and a request like that to me, I will accept it because I want conflicts and fighting to end in Afghanistan," Karzai said...

The conditions were clearly unacceptable to the Taliban who have promptly rejected the president's suggestions:

Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents rejected President Hamid Karzai's offer of peace talks on Sunday, citing the presence of foreign troops, a Taliban spokesman said.

[...]

...[President Karzai has] excluded any preconditions such as the withdrawal of nearly 50,000 troops under the command of NATO and the U.S. military, as demanded by the insurgents.

Karzai said U.S. President George W. Bush and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had both supported the idea of peace talks when he met them in the U.S. this month.

[...]

Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf told Reuters from an undisclosed location that talks with Kabul were out of the question.

"Karzai government is a dummy government. It has no authority so why should we waste our time and effort," Yousuf said.

"Until American and NATO troops are out of Afghanistan, talks with Karzai government are not possible."..

The Canadian government, sensibly, is singing from the same songbook (I wonder if the Canadian Forces wrote President Karzai's appeal?):

Defence Minister Peter MacKay said the Taliban will have to renounce violence and accept the NATO mission in Afghanistan if it wants to work with the Afghan government.

MacKay was speaking at an enrolment ceremony for new military personnel in Halifax as Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday [Sept. 29] renewed his call for talks with the Taliban after a deadly suicide bombing in Kabul.

But MacKay said any co-operation must include the Taliban's acceptance that NATO forces aren't leaving the country any time soon...

No good can come from this:

In Ottawa, Liberal defence critic Denis Coderre said he will make an unauthorized fact-finding trip to Afghanistan after his request to visit the troops has been consistently ignored by the Harper government.

"(Afghanistan) is a major issue for the Canadian people," Coderre
said yesterday. "I think that for the sake of the debate it's important that I go. Since I couldn't get an answer I decided to go on my own."..

But this seems good to me:

Canada will call on the United Nations to dramatically raise the profile of the global effort in Afghanistan, saying the world body should name an envoy of major stature to the country -- in the same way the global Middle East peace process has named former British prime minister Tony Blair.

Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier will make the case for stepping up the UN's Afghan role when he delivers Canada's address at the annual General Assembly summit on Tuesday. Other countries, principally France, Norway, Spain and the United States, also seek enhanced UN leadership in Afghanistan, believing there is room to better co-ordinate reconstruction and other help currently arriving from around the world.

[...]

"The UN mission [one of its largest] is already there, and Canada is there under UN mandate, but we believe that the UN itself has to be more active in the co-ordination process."..

Maybe Paddy Ashdown is the person for the job.

I wonder if the NDP will support President Karzai's efforts and the suggestion the UN take a broader role in Afghanistan. Just kidding. Especially if the NDP are aware of this:

UN head in Afghanistan wants more NATO troops

Mark C.

Damian adds: today's Globe and Mail reports that the Taliban are divided over Karzai's offer:

"It's a joke," Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi told Reuters early yesterday. But the insurgents' spokesman sounded less confident about dismissing the idea of negotiations hours later, when contacted by The Globe and Mail.

"My bosses have not decided on a policy about this," Mr. Ahmadi said by telephone from an undisclosed location. "They will think about it, and when the Taliban has a decision, I will call you right away."

The fact that the Taliban's main spokesman could shift his position on such a crucial matter so quickly is an indicator of a larger conflict within the insurgent ranks about the idea of negotiations.

A member of the Taliban's ruling council recently told one of his guests in Quetta, Pakistan, that the council is divided about how to respond to Mr. Karzai's increasingly urgent calls for talks.

A majority of senior Taliban oppose negotiations, the council member said, but they're having difficulty persuading the minority.

If this story is accurate, Karzai is a much more shrewd politician than anyone - especially Canadian critics of the Afghan mission - give him credit for.

Update: Audio of an interview with the Afghan ambassador to Canada by Rob Breakenridge of CHQR, Calgary, is here.

Burma ominously quiet

The Australian describes the scene in Rangoon after anti-government protests were forcefully put down:

Rangoon is a city gripped by fear and uncertainty. The dilapidated former Burmese capital is in lockdown, with a curfew in force from 9pm to 5am.

Limited phone connections have been restored but mobile and internet services remain closed.

Small groups of monks were back on the streets yesterday seeking alms, not protest. I counted about 50 monks in groups of two, three and four yesterday afternoon.

Scores of heavily armed police and soldiers controlled the central area of Rangoon around Sule Pagoda, scene of the worst violence last week.

Troops were also out in force in the second city of Mandalay. Shopping malls, grocery stores and parks were closed and few people dared to venture out of their homes.

Soldiers with distinctive red scarves stood behind barricades at key intersections and strategic locations, including around Inya Lake, the suburb where opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is confined to house arrest. They appeared nervous and tense. Taxis do not like to venture near the home of the 1991 Nobel peace laureate, who has come to symbolise Burma's pro-democracy movement.

[...]

Earlier yesterday, diehard protesters waving the peacock flag of the crushed pro-democracy movement held a solitary march through the eerily quiet streets of Burma's largest city, where many dissidents said they were resigned to defeat without international intervention.

Rangoon housewives and shopkeepers taunted troops but quickly disappeared into alleyways. According to diplomats briefed by witnesses, residents of three neighbourhoods blocked soldiers from entering the monasteries in a crackdown on Buddhist monks, who led the largest rallies in a month of demonstrations.

The soldiers left, threatening to return with reinforcements.

Despite the presence of Mr Gambari, many protesters said they were nonetheless seeing a repeat of the global reaction to a 1988 pro-democracy uprising, when the world stood by as protesters were gunned down in the streets.

"Gambari is coming, but I don't think it will make much of a difference," said one hotel worker, who like other residents asked not to be named, fearing retaliation. "We have to find a solution ourselves."

If the situation in Burma fades once again from blogs, newspapers and television, the generals win.

Damian P.

The amazing Devin Hester

This might be the only reason Bears fans haven't committed mass suicide yet.

Damian P.