the blog quebecois

Opposition wants Chretien aide's head over reports she called Bush "a moron".

Kenney said Canada-U.S. relations have deteriorated to their lowest level in decades because of the Liberals' "knee-jerk anti-Americanism."

Sigh. Time to wheel out the all-purpose apology form letter:

Indeed, the recent remarks by

[ ] Jean Chretien
[ ] a Chretien Cabinet Minister
[x] Some Liberal flunky

were

[ ] ill-timed
[ ] unfortunate
[ ] insensitive
[x] completely off the Whack-O-Meter

and

[ ] should not seriously affect our relations with our great friends, the Americans.
[ ] a stern reprimand has been placed in his/her personnel file
[ ] enclosed is a complimentary jar of maple syrup.
[x] we'll beat the bitch to death with hockey sticks.

Sincerely,

Canada

P.S. Please don't close the border.

On other fronts: An Edmonton newspaper released a poll last week showing that 40% of Albertans are in favor of at least using the threat of separation for leverage. That's about double the historical average. This again parallels the pattern in Quebec. By 1976, separatist leanings were at 45%, which was when the first Parti Quebecois government was elected.

Heh. That's over a 14-year period (starting from the "Quiet Revolution" of 1962). Albertans made the jump in two months, and it's starting to attract serious attention from some heavyweights in the ruling Conservatives.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Stay tuned.

Oh, wonderful. Jean Chretien was on ABC this morning, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos (or however he spells it).

It's not bad enough that this embarrassment has to torment his countrymen, now he's got to take it internationally.

Just kidding, George. You have a fine show; I'd rather watch FOX News Sunday, though.

Da widdle guy from Shawinigan (or however he spells it) was babbling on about how Hussein is boxed in and no threat -- surrounded by troops, tanks, airpower, he can't and daren't make a move.

Good enough, I suppose, but is Chretien proposing to keep those forces there forever, or at least until Hussein's squalid Tikriti (or however he spells it) regime topples of its own weight?

Surely he'd be willing to contribute, say, a brigade of Canadian armor or infantry to help stand watch?

Oh, right, there isn't any Canadian brigade to contribute.

Thanks for your wisdom, Jean. That gentle rustle that you hear across America was the sussuration of a million TV clickers clicking off as soon as your name was announced.

America doesn't know who you are, and why the hell should it?

I have a clearer resolution for the Security Council to ponder:

Pass this, or relocate this worthless organization to friendlier climes, say, Gstadd or Oslo, and let it dwindle into obscurity there.

Why the Americans persist in bankrolling this corrupt little club is of course their choice; I wonder why they consider themselves hamstrung by the likes of France and China. Or Canada.

If the fumbling embarrassment formerly known as Jean Chretien accedes to the role that he desperately wants -- Secretary-General -- then it is long past time that the Yanks tear the UN down brick by brick and toss it into the East River.

Taxation without representation is one way you could sell it.

Hmmm.

Aldo Moro (1978), Olaf Palme (1986), Pim Fortuyn (2002), Zoran Djindjic, et. al., (1914 and counting), and now Anna Lindh.

Those cowboy Europeans. When will they learn from their more sophisticated American cousins?

The crazed, gun-totin' Yanks, after all, haven't had any major political assassinations since 1968. (MLK and Bobby Kennedy, if I have to jog your memory.)

That even beats their nicenik neighbors, the Canadians, who last boasted a murdered politician -- Pierre Laporte -- in 1970.

Hmmm. Suddenly the world no longer makes sense.

Tony Blair told us the truth. There, said it. Shocking, isn’t it? Something you would never dream of reading in a family publication. Especially the Spectator, the paper which supports Andrew Gilligan.

Everyone knows, after all, that Mr Blair is a liar. We wouldn’t believe him, would we, if he told us the time. Everyone knows he made up the threat from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction because none has been found, and if something isn’t found then it proves that it never existed. Everyone knows that this is, well, just obvious.

As a précis of the Blair/Kelly/BBC affair (to which I really didn't pay much attention -- my patience with mainstream media these days is, uh, limited) I thought this was worth reading.

It's by Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, whom I hadn't previously read. My loss.

There's no permalink to the article, but you can get to it here, clicking on the first link, "The shocking truth about Tony Blair."

When I lived in Mali, West Africa in 1976-78 one of the great parlour games we played was: guess who the CIA agents attached to the American Embassy are.

I had a certain advantage here -- I'd once read that the CIA heavily recruited in Ivy League schools, employing bright young men, degreed in economics.

So I had him nailed: xxxx xxxxx, from Princeton, an economics major, with some vague title, like, "economics advisor to the Ambassador."

And it turned out that xxxx xxxxx was indeed with the CIA.

I teased that out of yyyyyy yyyy, after a very long evening of drinking.

What surprised me was the identity of the station chief. He didn't fit the profile at all.

And, no, I didn't run down to the Soviet Embassy and rat on them, or on my informant.

Fun's fun; but then someone gets their eye poked out, and mama's worst dreams come true.

Besides: the Americans are the GOOD guys; the Soviets were MASS MURDERING SCUM.

I suppose I should say something about Ah-nuld, but all I can think of is: Hooray!

The CBC's David Halton was on The National last night, wandering the corridors of Sacramento, making big frowny faces. These crazy Americans, this . . . democracy.

I happen to think that California's rights of referenda and recall are a critically important check on arrogant politicians, judges and bureaucrats. Would that Canadians had similar options.

We instead have an ossified -- if, for the moment, benign -- dictatorship, and nothing short of bullets and bayonets will remove it. No, I am no Paul Martiniac. (Yes, A Fearful Symmetry, you owe me a link for that one.)

But you didn't come here for my opinions on Canadian politics. All I've got to otherwise offer is this lame joke, which I heard yesterday:

"Did you hear about the new pirate movie?

"No! What about it?"

"It's rated Aaaahhrrrr!"

Bangkok

Mr. Chrétien and Mr. Bush were expected to bump into each other several
times during the summit of 21 world leaders, but U.S. officials shrugged
off a Canadian request for a formal bilateral meeting between the men,
who have never had a close personal relationship.

Let's put it this way: I've got a closer relationship with Bush than this contemptible jackass.

It's going to take a lot of time to repair the damage Chrétien's done to the Canada/U.S. relationship, and it wasn't just about Iraq. The Americans weren't begging for Canadian troops -- we don't have any to spare, anyway -- but some half-hearted display of political support would have gone a long way in Washington.

Believe me, I'm counting the days until this buffoon is gone. February at the latest and with luck much earlier.

People are always complaining, "Where do they get these polls? Why don't I ever get polled?"

Not a problem for me. I'm always getting polled. Which suits me fine, as I want to make sure the right-wing whacko view is accounted for. I don't mind the time, as I can usually do some work on my computer and keep half an eye on the football game simultaneously. (There are exceptions, like the excruciating half hour I once spent giving my opinions on agricultural water-management, but at least I got the right-wing whacko view out. I think.)

But yesterday was the standard political poll, on national politics, what I thought of the Liberals (ugh!) and the Alliance/Conservatives (yay!).

There was one curious thing, though. The first couple of questions concerned Mike Harris running for leader of the new Conservative Party.

I might have missed something, but about a week ago, Harris pretty well unequivocally ruled out a leadership bid, though he was widely considered one of the front-runners. What's going on here?

The way these polls are put together can include questions from any number of interested parties. You spend X thousands of dollars and you get your question or questions on the poll. So why would Harris or his people -- or for that matter, the polling company -- be interested in something that was supposedly off the table?

They could have sold that block of questions to someone else, but they didn't. Strange, strange.

My thanks to King of Fools, who has again come to my rescue. He set up my MT blog and all was fine until I discovered that I couldn't edit the templates. That is, I could change them but the changes wouldn't register on the blog.

He invoked powerful Geek Majik on it, and now I can edit to my heart's content.

Not that I know squat about CSS and HTML anyway, so I'll probably just end up stealing someone else's design.

Pardon the language, but when it comes from someone as urbane and cheery as James Lileks, it deserves to be printed as is:

"Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him."

Read the whole thing.

Vaughn Palmer in the National Post:

VICTORIA - It was billed as a "no-holds-barred" speech about a woman's lot in B.C. politics, and since Joy MacPhail was the one delivering the goods, they arrived pretty much as advertised, not sparing anyone, herself and her colleagues included.

So let's just say she accused the men of publicly brandishing their, ah, members (and I don't mean the honourable ones) as a form of one-upmanship.

Hmm-hmm.

So the tyrant is well and truly overthrown; and the oppressed people, sensing that a shadow is lifted off the land, flock to the blog quebecois, demanding to see the dictator stripped bare. Yes, they want nude pictures of . . . Sheila Copps.

I kid you not. I've had a dozen hits the last day or two searching for 'em.

I should explain here that Sheila Copps was formerly Canada's Minister of Heritage.

I should explain here to Americans, who invariably say "Minister of What?" that Canadians cannot be entrusted with celebrating their own heritage, inasmuch as it mainly involves those icky dead white males, so the Government instead funds authentic emenations of Canadian culture, such as (I'm not kidding) female East Indian hip-hop groups. No link available, but I've seen it, and trust me, it's awful.

Anyway, Ms. Copps lost the Liberal leadership race and was bounced from Cabinet. No word yet on whether she faces war crimes charges, though the abovementioned musical act would certainly be damning evidence against her.

I suppose I could do a Wendy Mesley and whip up some Photoshopped version of Sheila for the, um, enjoyment of the masses, but I mean, really, this

is what I've got to work with. Not very promising.

In other news:

Rumors abound that some high-ranking Iraqi mucky-muck has been captured.

I am tracking this story and will report as details become available.

It's hard-hitting, timely investigative journalism such as this that has propelled the blog quebecois to the lower middle rungs of the bottom third of the cheap-rent district of the blogosphere.

Either that or the nude Sheila Copps photos.

December marked a small but significant victory in the war on terror, as Jean Chretien stepped down from his post as Canadian prime minister after ten years of casual indifference regarding the terrorist threat permeating within Canada's borders. Chretien's ignorance on matters relating to the security of not only Canadians, but also all North Americans, was mind-boggling for a head of state in the post-9/11 world. It was Chretien who announced shortly after 9/11 that no terrorist cells existed in Canada, only to have Canadian-intelligence sources inform the media that, in fact, the country was host to 50 such cells. True to form, Chretien responded to this public humiliation by promptly slashing the budget of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

Erick Stakelbeck in National Review Online.

Ilan Berman and Paul Michael Wihbey
National Post

Thursday, January 22, 2004

WASHINGTON - Slowly but surely, a largely forgotten ally of the U.S is re-emerging in Washington's backyard. Last month, Jean Chretien stepped down as Canada's prime minister, bringing to a close a decade of tepid ties between Ottawa and Washington. The subsequent inauguration of Mr. Chretien's replacement, Paul Martin, provides a long-overdue opening for a revitalized North American alliance.

In fact, the pillars of such a partnership are already visible. Largely ignored during the tenure of Mr. Chretien, two issues have now crept to the top of the Canada-U.S. agenda.

The first is energy. Over the past two years, a widening quest for energy security has led officials in Washington to pay growing attention to West Africa and Russia as potential substitutes for volatile Gulf oil.

But an even more stable supply lies closer to home. At around 2.5 million barrels daily, Canada's current total oil output already puts it ahead of most OPEC nations in terms of production. And with some 180 billion barrels in proven recoverable reserves, Canada's oil wealth currently ranks second only to that of Saudi Arabia.

And as luck would have it, most of it's in Alberta, probably the only province that would have voted for George Bush. As the old joke goes, Albertans are a lot like Texans, but they tend to be more pro-American.

You can read the rest here. (I'm not sure how long this link will last, as The Post disappears tomorrow behind a pay-firewall. If it does vanish, I'll just upload the rest of the column.)

Update: Sure enough, the link now doesn't work. So here's the rest:

Yet in a way LaRouche is precisely the visionary he imagines himself to be, for it is obvious that, although he himself may never be elected to anything, his day has come in American politics. This is not just because it is possible to hear from many of the more sane and respectable Democratic opponents of the Bush administration language very similar to that of the LaRouchians’ warnings against, as they put it, “the Straussians’ commitment to transform the United States from a democratic republic into a tyranny, using the events of Sept. 11, 2001 as their ‘Reichstag fire,’ to justify the overthrow of our Constitutional system.” Conspiracy mania, though usually kept just off-stage, has long been a temptation for parties out of power in America, and it all tends to sound pretty much the same. But conspiracy mania is flourishing today as it has seldom done before in America, and not just at the fringes where the mainstream press would once have disdained to venture, because the standards of discourse have been cut free from their moorings in a common culture. As a result, anyone can say anything.

I haven't been to the New Criterion website for a while but one excellent reason to visit is the writing of James Bowman, here on the strident and fetid nature of politics these days.

It is not entirely incorrect to generalize that Quebec politicians will lean toward the interventionist, dirigiste, l’état c’est moi of its philosophy as is fashionable in France, and Albertans won’t. That wasn’t true in Laurier’s time, but it is in ours. And it is certainly true that bloated, interventionist governments attract charlatans, hucksters and crooks like moths to a flame. So if that’s the type of Quebec-bashing people want to engage in, I say bring it on. And if they aren’t always completely articulate about “how politics is done in Quebec” I think we might want to cut them a little slack. It is intellectually dishonest to simultaneously endorse Quebec’s “distinct society” as most progressive Anglos are inclined to do while making it taboo to discuss certain aspects of its distinctiveness.

Why isn't this guy writing for a major Canadian paper?

Also see Laurent at Polyscopique. If you want a crash course on contemporary Quebec politics, these are the guys to read.

A Bloc Québécois motion to cancel Canadian participation in the U.S. missile defence system was defeated 155-71 in the House of Commons, but attracts 30 Liberal votes.

From the National Post (no link):

Liberal MP John Caccia said he was pleasantly surprised by the show of support for the Bloc motion.

"It shows there is a growing awareness of several major points: one, there will be a militarization of space by the U.S. administration; two, we have no enemy and, therefore, we need not to enter this scheme; three, if we do enter it, we will attract retaliation perhaps."

From whom, Mr. Caccia? Our non-existent enemies? Do you refuse to lock your doors at night, for fear of enraging a prospective burglar?

Of course, the anti-missile shield will do nothing to protect Canada against its deadliest threat, until they can refine it enough to lock onto and vaporize individual politicians.

Maybe we could attach GPS beacons to briefcases stuffed with stolen taxpayers' money? Just a thought.

There are two absolutely killer lines in Mark Steyn's latest piece on John Kerry. This is one.

Then there was the senator's clumsy attempt to declare himself America's ''second black president.'' Bill Clinton was at least canny enough to get himself anointed as the first black president by an actual black person, the novelist Toni Morrison, who declared that he displayed ''every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.'' It's harder to pull that off when you're a Swiss finishing school boy from Massachusetts. Many's the night John and the other boys in his dorm would lie awake dreaming of their freedom as they murmured one of the traditional spirituals of their people: ''Swing by, sweet limousine, comin' for to carry me home.''

As much as it pains me to relate it:

The CBC tonight came off more fairly regarding Condi Rice's testimony before the Congress than CTV. Or Comedy Central.

Impressionistic because I don't feel like linking to transcripts that don't exist or are too much trouble to track down.

CBC: There were memos, but they were impossibly vague.

CTV: There were memos.

Comedy Central: Jon Stewart.

There's a story about a funeral in England where the cleric delivered a moving, if brief, eulogy:

"We are gathered here to celebrate the memory of Mr. X -- but if the truth be told, he was a rather unpleasant fellow, and he shan't be missed."

The papers will be brimming tomorrow with effusive praise of Svend Robinson, the socialist MP from Burnaby, B.C., who blubbered his way through a press conference this afternoon announcing his temporary -- possibly permanent -- departure from politics. Seems Svend swiped some jewelry from a show last Friday, citing severe personal stress. He's sought out medical care, and announced that he won't run for Parliament until after possible criminal charges are sorted out.

He'll be lauded as a "dedicated," "passionate, "courageous, "committed," "humanitarian," "fiery civil rights advocate," secular saint.

In a word: Bollocks.

Robinson, Canada's first openly-homosexual MP, is a nasty, vituperative man who routinely slanders opponents as "bigots" and "homophobes." When Opposition Leader Stephen Harper made a mild joke at his expense, Robinson called him a "scumbag."

And how can we forget his charming antics, from heckling Ronald Reagan during a speech to Parliament, to engaging in a shoving match with Israeli soldiers when they wouldn't let him through to visit his hero, Yassir Arafat, to egging on the Brownshirt anti-globalization thugs as they rioted in Quebec City a couple of years ago.

It's ironic that Robinson is departing the scene on the eve of his biggest legislative triumph, Bill C-250, which should pass the Senate and become law next week.

This is a Private Member's Bill (which hardly ever are successful, even when sponsored by a Government backbencher) that got whisked through the Commons and Senate with Robinson pulling every procedural lever he could find (and with the Government running full-tilt interference for him).

Briefly, C-250 adds to Canada's hate crime laws the category of "sexual orientation."

Which means . . . you fill in the blank.

Never mind, the courts will do it for you.

John Leo discusses some of the ramifications here.

It will be used to hammer social and religious conservatives, make no mistake.

Thanks for the parting gift, you creepy little fascist.

I doubt that we've seen the last of him, failing a wooden stake through his heart, but if we have, let me be the first to say:

Buh-bye, Svend. You will not be missed.

TORONTO -- The Ontario government is obliged to treat the family of Ahmed Khadr no differently than any other resident, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Tuesday as critics decried the widow and children of the alleged al-Qaida leader as threats to Canadian security.

You can check out this link, or I can give you the Coles Notes version:

The Khadr family are "Canadians" who've spent most of their time in salubrious climes like Pakistan and Afghanistan, returning now and then to raise money for the family "charity," which was a front for al-Qaida training camps. In fact they knew Osama bin Laden very well.

Papa Khadr was killed in a shootout with Pakistani troops; the youngest Khadr was shot in the spine and paralyzed in the same firefight.

Omar Khadr -- the middle son -- is in Guantanamo Bay, accused of killing a US Army medic in an ambush in Afghanistan. The oldest boy, Abdurahman, was also arrested in Afghanistan, but was apparently turned by the CIA and sent to Guantanamo as an informant and later shipped off to Bosnia, etc., to collect intelligence. (He was the proverbial "black sheep" of the family -- he liked to chase girls, drink, and otherwise goof off. Not your promising holy warrior material.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, Mama and the youngest have decided to investigate Canadian health care, which is apparently superior to what's available in Pakistan (though not by much, is my guess).

To everyone's surprise, the Canadian government for once took a principled position, which was: They are Canadian citizens, therefore we have to let them in.

True enough, if a wildly unpopular viewpoint.

Me, I'm just looking for laughs, so I seized on the point that "Khadr" is pronounced "Kotter," which summons up memories of "Welcome Back, Kotter," the cheesy 70's sitcom that starred comedian Gabe Kaplan and propelled John Travolta into teenage stardom, a setback it took him twenty years to recover from.

Of course, 3,569 other bloggers, radio commentators, bag ladies and politicians immediately hit upon the same punchline.

So then I had one of the brainflashes that you have come to know and love -- why not leave them in the dust with a hilarious parody of the theme song? My readers will be wiggling their toes (or other appendages of their choice) with delight!

Sure. I downloaded the lyrics, which I barely remembered, and here they are:

Welcome back,
Your dreams were your ticket out.

Welcome back,
To that same old place that you laughed about.

Well the names have all changed since you hung around,
But those dreams have remained and they're turned around.

Who'd have thought they'd lead ya (Who'd have thought they'd lead ya)
Here where we need ya (Here where we need ya)

Yeah we tease him a lot cause we've got him on the spot, welcome back,
Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.

Feh. It doesn't even have a rhyme for jihadi.

And worse yet, the insipid melody is back and haunting me.

Hey, that rhymes with jihadi.

More or less.

I think we can all get behind this:

Poop For Peace Day is not about protest or partisanship or politics. Poop For Peace Day is about acknowledging the fundamental basis of shared humanity: black or white, liberal or conservative, Christian or Muslim or Jew, we are all united in struggle against the tyranny of the bowel.

Via Memepool

you've got something to tell
i wanna get it all
before the lights go out

-- butchie boys

I just finished painting the basement (several spiders were harmed in the process) and I am bagged.

However I must comment on today's disgraceful Supreme Court ruling, which effectively muzzles free speech by ordinary citizens during elections.

I won't go into the details, but here's a brief rundown.

American readers will no doubt recognize it an an analogue of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill. (Canada is famous for importing lousy American legislation a few years after the fact, proving that history does indeed repeat itself as farce.)

However our rulers on the Supreme Court don't seem to have figured out that the media landscape is rapidly changing beneath their stuck-up noses.

Behold, gentle reader, the blogosphere. Third party groups cannot purchase advertising to get their message out?

Well they can get it for free here. No money need change hands. As a public service I'll publish gratis advertisements, links to webpages, small editorials, etc., for people who want to put their opinions forward during this upcoming election. I'd maintain editorial control -- I'm not going to print something from the KKK or Al-Qaeda -- but otherwise the offer is open to anyone in Canada or elsewhere who wants to put forward a viewpoint on the upcoming election.

Of course, this is somewhat risible in regards to this blog, which has only 50-60 regular readers. (And my Sitemeter's been stuck at a somewhat ominous 12 hits for most of today.) But if the idea spreads to some more popular bloggers, then maybe we can serve notice that attempting to suppress free speech in the age of the Internet is like trying to put out a grease fire by throwing water on it.

What is it about Jack Layton?

He's a fairly handsome man. He's probably a decent sort, not often getting into drunken fistfights in bars. I suspect he's quite sincere about his beliefs, and I think he thinks that his beliefs have value for Canada and the world

So why is it that every time I see him, I want to hit him with a shovel?

Elderly ND groovester Ed Broadbent shakes his cha-chas in bid to prove that he is the happenin' dude with today's hepcat guys 'n' gals.

Judge for yourself here. (I could only get the Quick Time version to work.)

OK, let's be charitable and assume the video was intended to provoke derisive, uncontrollable laughter.

In that case -- mission accomplished!

Watching CBC's Sunday Report last night. No transcript as usual, so you'll just have to trust me.

The last portion of it was devoted to the intensely troubling (to the CBC, anyway) question of why more young people don't vote.

Exhibit A: Young black woman named Natasha in Pickering, Ont. Why isn't Natasha voting?

None of the parties, it seems, are addressing what she considers to be essential issues. Iraq? Taxes? Integrity in government?

Nope, none of the above. She goes on with the usual litany of "youth-related" demands -- reducing education debt, AIDS, more funding for the arts. She thinks "creative cities" would be nice. And she also wants "funky, refreshing candidates."

Hey, who doesn't? But even allowing for a dearth of those, I would think that all the parties cover her concerns, if only with the standard boilerplate promises.

But what's at the head of the list; the #1 thing she's upset about?

Sidewalks. Freaking sidewalks.

Cut to a shot of a new suburb, which as commonly is the case nowadays, doesn't have sidewalks. They're expensive to put in and maintain, and almost no one uses them.

Natasha thinks that this is the responsibility of the Federal government. The horrifying truth is that probably a couple of the parties would agree.

Thank you, Natasha. Thank you for sitting this one out, and you might want to consider skipping the next two or three.

I don't know how much blogging I'm going to be accomplishing tomorrow.

I expect to be pretty well glued to the TV and Internet, but I'll try to post some thoughts here and there.

we're gonna be elected, elected, elected
respected, selected, call collected
i wanna be elected, elected

-- alice cooper

Canada goes to the polls on Monday, and I know everyone is waiting with bated breath for my predictions. This is, after all, a political blog -- or at least it was, until I realized I was lousy at writing about politics.

This was my brave call on April 7:

Steve Harper just might be the guy who tips undecided Ontario voters over the edge.

Er, that was my brave call on April 7 of 1996, in a FidoNet (ask your parents, kiddies) political echo. The talk at the time was of the prospective merger of the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party, and who should lead it.

That didn't take place until October of last year, but I seem to have been prescient in my call for Stephen Harper to lead the new Conservative Party.

Without going into all the details, this represents the best chance in a generation to kick the tired, corrupt Liberals to the curb.

Unfortunately I don't think they can quite finish them off this time, and I see at best a Conservative minority government.

But even that will give the Conservatives the opening to send in the auditors; and I think they'll be able to dig up enough dirt to bury the Liberals for a long, long time.

From the Ottawa Citizen:

Today's federal election may be a tight horse race right to the finish, but a vote among young people has already declared a clear winner.

The Conservative party attracted more votes from young people than any other major political party in two election polls that were part of a program aimed at raising awareness among youth about the election.

The Conservatives received 41.6 per cent of 1,992 votes cast online or via wireless phone text messaging in the Youth Vote 2004 program sponsored by the Dominion Institute, a Toronto-based charitable organization concerned with issues of Canadian history and public affairs, and CanWest Global.

Hey, that's not the way it's supposed to go . . .

Here we go . . .

The polls have just closed in Newfoundland. Four ridings reporting, the Liberals leading in each.

Good grief.

5-1 Liberals. Now it's a 3-3 tie with the Conservatives. One Liberal declared elected - Bill Matthews with about 55 per cent of the vote inn Random-Burin-St.-Georges.

Percentage of vote:

LIB 47.85%
CON 32.87%
NDP 17.69%
BQ .00%
OTH 1.60%

This is kind of early, of course, and Newfoundland and the Maritimes are going to be more or less split between the LIBS and CONS. One NDP declared elected, though I don't know who.

Hey, this is the Internet. Look it up yourself.

Results starting to come in from Nova Scotia.

CBC now has 6 Libs leading and elected. 5 for Cons. 1 NDP

-----
EXTENDED BODY:
13-6-2 Libs/Cons/NDP. Peter MacKay, Con deputy leader, declared elected.

Looks like the Cons might be picking up a Lib seat in Fundy.

18 Libs 7 Cons 3 NDP. You know, I'm not liking this trend. If the Liberals are mortally wounded -- and I'm not saying they aren't, not yet -- it would have been nice to see blood all over the floor by now.

Terrific. The Libs have gained 4 seats in the Maritimes.

Turncoat Scott "Weasel" Brison has been elected. He jumped to the Liberals shortly after Martin came to power.

20 Lib 7 Con 4 NDP.

LIB 44.24%
CON 31.11%
NDP 21.57%
BQ .00%
OTH 3.08%

Quebec polls now starting to report. BQ declared elected in Gaspé.

Oh, hurrah, here comes Rick Mercer to lift our spirits. Bah. (For non-Canuck readers, he's a state-funded "comedian," who's about as funny as you'd think.)

Is it too early to start drinking? It's never too early to start drinking.

7:30 pm: The polls from Quebec to Alberta should start reporting soon. This is it.

CBC's running an interview with Peter MacKay and Scott "Weasel" Brison. Brison for some inexplicable reason is yammering on about capital punishment and his opposition to it, which is rather odd, seeing as it was never a campaign issue.

First reports in from Ontario. Excuse me while I puke.

33 Lib 8 Con 6 NDP 1 BQ

LIB 43.59%
CON 30.13%
NDP 22.56%
BQ .20%
OTH 3.52%

7:45 pm:

54 Lib 19 Con 8 NDP 8 BQ 1 OTH

That 1 OTH is from the Marxist-Leninist candidate in some Ontario riding (with only one poll reporting).

8:00 pm:

114 Lib 64 Con 46 BQ 17 NDP 0 OTH

LIB 42.48%
CON 29.70%
BQ 2.41%
NDP 21.60%
OTH 3.82%

Bwahahaha. Martin's losing in his riding to the BQ. Mind you, that's with only 3 of 200 or so polls reporting.

Western ridings starting to kick in, Liberals stalling. I can live with a Liberal minority, especially if they have to depend on Obnoxious Jack Layton and the Dippers.

8:30 pm:

Bring me my pistol, Darlin', I feel like putting a bullet through the TV. Or Ontario.
What the hell is wrong with you people?

CBC declares a Lib minority govt.

9:00 pm:

Start erecting that firewall, Ralph. I forgot that one should never underestimate the stupidity of Ontarians. As a commenter on Andrew Coyne's blog put it: They are the new spain, coddled into being scared shitless by attack ads.

9:30 pm:

And now for our election-night wrapup!

What an utter fucking disaster. You'll note I said above that I could "live with" a Liberal minority govt. propped up by the NDP. That was before I added up the numbers and got 135 Lib + 23 NDP = 158 (these numbers are somewhat tentative because of some tight races, but the final totals shouldn't be very different) versus 94 Con + 55 BQ = 149.

So the two major opposition parties can't bring down the govt. if they want. Are there deal-breakers between the NDP and the Libs?

Sure, but Wacko Jacko's Windmill-In-Every-Pot (and free pot!) agenda can be postponed into budgets yet undreamt or thrown to the courts to decide.

Gay marriage? Nope. The Libs will be whipped into approving it, and the NDP and BQ are fully onside.

Kyoto? Firewall, Ralph, fireWALL.

The bright light at the end of the tunnel? As usual, it's the Americans who're providing it.

They have to know by the fall if Canada's in or not on Missile Defence. The Libs are desperate to rebuild relations with the U.S. (They might have thought about not reelecting Carolyn "American bastards" Parrish and Colleen "Baghdad" Beaumier, but never mind.) Missile Defence (with an 80% approval rating south of the border and 70% favorable north, in the only poll on it I've ever seen) is a low-cost (free) way to ingratiate themselves.

But the NDs have made it clear that they won't compromise on Ballistic MD. The BQ is the same. No.

So the Libs vote Yes, the NDs and the Bloc vote No, and the Cons vote . . .

Does Harper say Yay! with the Libs and keep the govt. afloat, or does he launch the torpedo and bring the govt. down? Interesting strategic decision.

Mind, I'm ignorant of the machinery of Parliament on this. I suppose Martin could declare the vote as not a "confidence" motion, bringing down the govt. on its failure.

The fact that I have to think so long and hard about optimistic outcomes of this election is proof enough of my pessimism. God help us.

Well, things changed for the better as I slept last night. Most of the close races went to the Conservatives, and the totals today are:

Lib: 135
Con: 99
BQ: 54
NDP: 19
Ind: 1

Which puts the Liberals 1 below the 155-seat majority with NDP cooperation. The Con/BQ total is 153 seats, with the Independent, a former Conservative (he was deposed when his riding association was hijacked by an ethnic bloc) expected to vote with his former party.

So things could get interesting -- not an adjective that usually describes Canadian politics.

The indefatigable Steven den Beste, in response to a foreign correspondent, posts a useful primer on U.S. politics, more specifically the legislative function.

Canadians and others who presume to comment on U.S. affairs should read it.

Gary Andres in National Review Online notes that John Kerry is not connecting very well with a critical demographic:

Among Democrats, however, not only are the overall affirmative percentages on both questions lower, but some significant sex differences emerge. While 70 percent of Democratic men want their kids to grow up like Kerry, only 46 percent of Democratic women do — a 24 percentage-point difference. And 62 percent of Democratic men want to spend an hour with Kerry, while only 49 percent of that party's women voters do.

I can't speak for women, and I'd be voting for Bush anyway, but maybe they're just a little bit spooked by all the grappling and manhandling between Kerry and his shiny new running mate. When people start putting together video clips like this (warning -- music) you might want to reconsider your strategy.

And of course, this is a deliberate strategy -- you know these guys are choreographed more closely than ballet dancers, with focus groups determining everything from their speeches to their shirt-colors, so this phony horseplay was approved from On High, as it were. The problem is that it looks as creepy as Al "Lurch" Gore did in its various incarnations.

Remember your heritage: White men don't hug.

Funny parody of Woody Guthrie.

Note: Server seems to be very busy, so you might have to try it later.

the girl's got family
she needs cash to buy aspirin for her pain
everybody's good enough for some change

-- live

It seems a certain Democratic nominee-wannabe has caught the evil eye of . . . The Bitter Waitress:

Tipper's Name: John Kerry

Restaurant: Chart House

Where it happened: Alexandria, VA

Total bill / Tip amount / Percentage: $262.60 / $0.00 / 0%

What happened:

June 5, 04 Kerry, his wife, 4 unknown suits - We were happy to seat them in a semi-private area and gave them the same excellent service as we would give anyone - then got stiffed!

I seem to recall Hillary Clinton doing the same thing while running for the Senate. Ah, yes, here it is.

What is it with these cheapskate Tribunes of the People?

Via Diversionz

By the way, after addressing the NAACP's 95th annual convention in Philadelphia, Kerry gave the audience the black power clenched-fist salute. I wonder whether his white audiences get the black power salute as well.

Walter Williams unloads his revolver in John Kerry's face. Not pretty, but well worth reading.

and when I touch you I feel happy inside.
it's such a feeling that my love
i can't hide, I can't hide, I can't hide.

-- the beatles

Addressing the crowd, Kerry's wife, Teresa, took a swipe at the Bush administration. "You cannot solve problems by throwing stones, and you cannot solve problems by telling lies, and you cannot solve problems by wishing ill to other people," she said. "The only way you solve problems is by holding hands and talking about it, and that's what we want to do in this campaign."

It's official, folks. This woman is seriously starting to Creep. Me. Out.

Via The Corner.

Dear Prime Minister,

I distinctly remember your promise in the past campaign; that if you were elected, the Government of Canada would make it a top priority to put Carolyn Parrish in a locked, weighted steamer trunk and send it over Niagara Falls. (The Canadian side is far more picturesque, of course.)

Alas, yet another Liberal promise broken. But who's counting? I see that Ms. Parrish is again in the news:

Canadian Member of Parliament Carolyn Parrish had said she hated "damned Americans" and called them bastards in the run-up to the Iraq war. She found a new moniker, idiots, on Wednesday in discussing the planned U.S. missile defense system.

"We are not joining the coalition of the idiots. We are joining the coalition of the wise," the Liberal legislator told a small group of demonstrators.

Parrish, who had to apologize for her "bastards" remarks last year, at first denied using the word idiots, and when reporters pointed out they had her remarks on tape, she said: "I don't mean Americans are idiots."

Parrish then begged reporters not to use the remarks: "Please guys don't put that on tape," she said. "I already got into trouble once.... Really, please, I've had enough trouble."

Four hours later, however, she hardened her line.

"The last one was a really stupid thing to say," she told Reuters. "Bastards is an inappropriate word. Idiots is a term people use in everyday conversation," she told Reuters.

Quite so, Prime Minister. I myself have used, and continue to use, the term "idiots" in everyday conversation, usually when discussing you and your government.

However, I've been trying to think of a more appropriate term for Ms. Parrish, and by Jove, I think I've got it. Addlepated douchebag.

Kind of rolls off the tongue. Addlepated douchebag.

You might object -- isn't this a "sexist" term? No, Sir, it most manifestly is not!

Although addlepated douchebag will first and foremost bring to mind the distinguished member from Mississauga-Erindale, it works extraordinarily well when describing other Liberal politicians. It's really quite flexible that way:

Bill Graham, addlepated douchebag. Erwin Cotler, addlepated douchebag. Pierre Pettigrew, addlepated douchebag.

I think I'm on to something.

With your assistance, Prime Minister, we can put addlepated douchebag where it belongs -- at the top of the Google rankings. Let Canada be known as the number-one location for discriminating consumers of addlepated douchebaggery.

I remain, your loyal servant, & etc.

gnotalex

and i think it's gonna be a long long time
till touch down brings me round again to find
i'm not the man they think i am at home

-- elton john

The Washington Post:

Former senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) took the defense a step further by comparing the Republicans' misleading statements to those of Nazi Germany. "You've just got to separate out fact from fiction. . . . Too often, too often, in this country, if you hear something repeated, it's the old Hitler business -- if you hear something repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated, you start to believe it," he said.

Hey, Mr. Helpless-plaything-of-V2-mastermind Wernher von Braun! Do I have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat this?

I'll let the editorializing -- "the Republicans' misleading statements" -- speak for itself. But do tell: What were the "misleading statements" of the Nazis?

front and forgery
pass on, pass on, move on ­­­ forget it !
get started, don't know where it begins

-- urban dance squad

I don't think he can be reelected if this is true.

Of course, it might possibly be a fake, but it's a darn good one if it is. Let's hold on to that hope.

The Drudge Report:

In last week's WASHINGTONPOSTWABCNEWS Poll, John F. Kerry was viewed favorably by 36 percent of registered voters, down 18 points over the past six months.

But just how low Kerry's standing has fallen cannot be appreciated fully without comparing his standing with that of other household names in GALLUP polls over the years, the POST's Dana Milbank reported on Tuesday.

Kerry finds himself in a dead heat with Martha Stewart and Joseph McCarthy, and behind Herbert Hoover -- although he narrowly beats O.J. Simpson.

"You hate me! You really, really hate me!"

Here's the list, with the year of the poll in parenthesis:

Michael Jordan: 83 (2000) Tony Blair: 76 (2003) Pope John Paul II: 73 (2003) Democratic Party: 54 (2004) John Ashcroft: 49 (2003) Michael Dukakis: 47 (1988) Prince Charles: 45 (2003) Herbert Hoover: 43 (1944) Jesse Jackson: 38 (2003) Vladimir Putin: 38 (2003) John Kerry: 36 (2004) Martha Stewart: 36 (2004) Joseph McCarthy: 35 (1954)

John Ashcroft? Kerry polls lower than the demon John AshKKKroft? This is not good news.

Yahoo/AP:

Humanitarian Teresa Heinz-Kerry, on the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan:

"Clothing is wonderful, but let them go naked for a while, at least the kids."

Via Ace of Spades

Media Research Center:

[CBS reporter Jim] Axelrod consulted a Democratic pollster who contended Bush delivers a simplistic "candidacy for the fast food age, whereas Kerry is more like a long dinner party."

Sort of like a looonnnngggg deadly dull dinner party where the host rambles on and on and on and on about his four months in Vietnam, punctuated now and then by screaming from the kitchen, where Terezzzah is flogging a maid who dropped a teacup.

Yeah, I can visualize that.

hey joe where are you going
with that gun in your hand
going down to shoot my old lady

-- cher

They must be rolling their eyes at the DNC when the phone rings and some Hollywood celebrity bonehead is on the line offering advice.

The Corner today linked to a story in which Cher called for Joe Lockhart to be fired or demoted. Aha, I thought. She must have been peeved at Lockhart's insulting remarks directed at Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi during his recent trip to Washington:

The ugliest treatment of all came from Mr. Lockhart, the former Clinton White House spokesman. After the Allawi-Bush press conference Thursday, Mr. Lockhart said that "The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips."

Er, no, that wasn't it. Apparently Lockhart's corporeal bulk is entirely too much for the fastidious diva:

During preparation for the debate, Bob Shrum, Kerry's top strategist, had a telephone conversation with singer Cher to thank her for holding a fund- raiser for Kerry. Cher took the opportunity to advise Shrum to pull Joe Lockhart, the campaign spokesman, off the air.

"He's too heavy," the sturdy Lockhart, with chagrin, quoted Cher as saying. "You need thinner people on TV."

I'd love to hear Cher and Babs Streisand discuss strategy as they attempt to get their synapses firing. It'd probably sound like a battle between defective lawn mowers.

My server hasn't crashed yet, so I thought I'd offer reflections on the VP debate in the States:

Cheney won, easily. He killed Edwards in the first thirty minutes, on foreign policy. He held his own in the second. By the third (thirty minutes) I was as drunk as Edwards was (punch) drunk, so I tuned out.

That said, I don't think it matters much. The Bush-Gore debates in 2000 were in many ways pivotal, but this time they(the debates)'re not going to bump the numbers.

Trying to turn the world around
Trying to turn the world around
I’ve come to turn your world around.

-- midnight oil

You might have heard of a British newspaper's attempt to influence the U.S. election, by handing out addresses of Clark County, Ohio voters and encouraging its readers to write to beg them not to vote for President Bush.

Grateful Americans have bombarded the Guardian with thank you notes, such as this:

My dear, beloved Brits, I understand the Guardian is sponsoring a service where British citizens write to Americans to advise them on how to vote. Thank heavens! I was adrift in a sea of confusion and you are my beacon of hope!

Feel free to respond to this email with your advice. Please keep in mind that I am something of an anglophile, so this is not confrontational. Please remember, too, that I am merely an American. That means I am not very bright. It means I have no culture or sense of history. It also means that I am barely literate, so please don't use big, fancy words.

Set me straight, folks!
Dayton, Ohio

Er, I think he was being a bit sarcastic. Well, there's plenty more here, though I should say that a lot of them are unprintable.

Then again, the Guardian did print them, so I guess they are printable after all..

Sort of a conundrum.

This whole effort was spearheaded by Aussie blogger Tim Blair, and you can get up to speed on it here.

Tim has gone on to other good works, such as mocking these fools:

Go and read. (Make sure beverages are not within spewing distance of computer.)

Via NealeNews.com

My fearless prediction: George Bush wins reelection comfortably, with around 300 Electoral College votes. Minor gains for the Republicans in the Senate and House.

This will lead to two positive results:

a) the saving (at least in the near term) of Western Civilization; and,
b) a drastic lowering in air pressure as the heads of most of Canada's media babblers implode.

I'll be live-blogging the election, so I've got to get caught up on a few things to clear the deck for Tuesday. See you then.

Great. The Internet would pick today to pitch a hissy-fit. I can't get through at all to Instapundit, Tim Blair, Vodkapundit, etc., etc. Someone fix this immediately.

Early exit polls showing Kerry leading by one in Florida. First exit poll in Ohio has Bush 49-41 over Kerry.

Good afternoon, ladies and germs!

Geddit? Ladies and germs! Ha ha! That's a little bit of humor, there, to "break the ice," as it were.

Turnout is very heavy, which spells good news for the Democrats, unless they're all Republicans, in which case it spells bad news for the Democrats.

Keep dropping by for incisive analysis such as that!

voices from nowhere
and voices from the larger towns
filled our head full of dreams
turned the world upside down

-- john mellencamp

So. The day arrives, and after some reflection I have decided to modify my prediction not one bit. Bush wins big.

I haven't based this on careful analysis of 20-year voting patterns or demographic shifts or anything like that. I don't pretend that I know what Ohioans or Michiganders (Michiganders? Michigoosians?) have in their hearts. I don't know what local issues will drive turnout .

No, this is from my gut. Some anecdotal observations:

1) Republicans traditionally underpoll by two or three points. I think the gap is going to be much larger this time.

2) Bush is picking up conservative black voters; and blacks in general don't seem too terribly enthused by Kerry.

3) Ditto for women. These are constituencies that he cannot afford to lose.

4) He lost me some time ago. I've never seen a more thoroughly unlikeable candidate for any office, anywhere.

But that's just me, and I don't get a vote anyway. Americans do, and I hope they use it well.

Exit polls trending heavily to Kerry, but it's early yet, folks.

QandO explains the essential unreliability of these.

Further on exit polls from the very informative Horserace Blog:

The raw numbers trickling out are just that...raw. Exit polling is heavily "scrubbed" at the end of the day to account for turnout in each precinct, to account for pre-existing demographic sensibilities (i.e. samples are re-jiggered for sex, race, income, etc). These raw numbers obviously cannot be scrubbed in this matter. This means that the MOE is so high for Bush and Kerry that they are basically useless. What's more...you don't know what kind of data out there is reliable or not -- it is all rumour and innuendo.

Via INDC Journal

And more from The Corner

There are media reports that we are behind in early exit polls. Here’s my sense of things. The early exit poll numbers are hard to make sense of right now, until we dissect and analyze them, which is being done even now. It’s of course still early, and it depends on where in the state the numbers are coming from. Much more importantly, our data also suggests what Drudge is reporting: the early samples are heavily weighted toward women (58 percent), which would of course give an artificial advantage to Senator Kerry. That imbalance will not hold up. Indeed, among men we are winning 53-45. To put it another way: if we’d one down in states with a sample that is heavily female, we’re in good shape with the overall population. To put it a third way: it looks like the first exit polls are a reflection of the composition of the electorate, not how the president is performing. Once those return to norm, the President should gain several points (2-3 pts) and Senator Kerry should lose several points (2-3 pts), giving the President the lead in a number of states.

Two hours until first polls close.

Instapundit, Power Line, Vodkapundit still down.

As a special treat, I will be keeping an eye on CBC's coverage. This is hazardous (for the TV, if I happen to start throwing things) duty, but someone has to do it.

I was going to add a bit of "color" to my posts by giving a bit of background on each of the states, something like:

Most people think that the state capitol of New York is New York City. Not so! You'll be surprised to learn that it's actually in scenic Upper Rutabaga, New Jersey. That's where Governor Jim Thorpe lives, in the magnificent Spindrell Castle. Actually most New Yorkers are surprised to learn this, too.

But then I discovered that there are something like eleventy jillion States, and that sounds like a lot of work. So screw it.

I'll just go with Dave Barry's observation on color commentary -- some guy who pops up randomly and says, "Boy, I'll say!"

Boy, I'll say!

John Fund calls it as

Popular vote: Bush 50.0%, Kerry 48.5%, Nader 1.0%, others 0.5%.

Electoral vote: Bush 296, Kerry 242.

Via Ace Of Spades

The dog that hasn't barked: 45 minutes until polls close in the East and Al Qaeda hasn't shown up to cause trouble. Keep fingers crossed.

Okay, let's check off my Blogger's Survival Kit.

Beer chilling -- check!

Guacamole corn chips with "authentic Mexican" dip -- check!

Go make Mr. Poopy -- check!

Sure, go ahead and laugh. But you'll be making Mr. Poopy in your pants when the Hildebeast leads the lesbian bayonet charge out of the Adirondack Mountains around midnight.

Here we go . . .

NBC has called Kentucky, Indiana and Georgia for Bush; Vermont for Kerry.

From Instapundit:

YOU ARE LUCKY TO BE READING THIS. And I’m lucky to post it. 601am says we’re under denial-of-service attack.

CBC scores it 34 Bush 3 Kerry.

Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina close at bottom of hour.

CNN calls West Virginia for Bush. 5 EC votes.

Ace Of Spades points to this:

About a half hour back, I posted word that a senior Bush campaign official was saying, "Ohio is won, Florida is won, and Pennsylvania is tied." Then Shannon Coffin noted a White House source saying, "Confident that Bush will win OH and FL, that he will roll in WVa (ten points?) and that Mel Martinez will carry Florida."

Ooooh. Check out C-Span's electoral map.

Looks as though New Hampshire is trending Kerry 61%-38% but that's with just with 3% of precincts reporting.

Bush leading 60-40 in N. Carolina. 52-48 in Ohio. Bush picks up one vote in Maine.

Bush is opening up a lead in Ohio 55-44 with about 24,000 votes counted.

New Jersey goes to Kerry. Bummer.

CBC has an EC score of Bush 95 Kerry 78.

Bush ahead in Florida by 100k votes with 9 percent counted.

With a quarter of the vote counted in Florida, Bush is over 1 million; Kerry 860,000

Uh-oh. Ohio has flipped. 83000 votes for Kerry 66000 for Bush. I've no idea what counties that represents, though.

CNN calls Virginia, S. Carolina for Bush.

Odd. CNN has Bush ahead 87-77 in the EC

CBC has it 108-78 Bush. I'm not sure what the discrepancy is.

North Carolina goes for Bush.

5,957,625 popular vote for Bush; 4,655,026 for Kerry.

New York, R.I. for Kerry. No surprise. Texas for Bush, ditto.

CNN now has Bush up 155 to 112 in the EC.

A real nailbiter in Ohio. Bush now leads 244,487 to 228,233.

Megapundit shows Michigan with a 54-45 Bush lead (only 1% of precincts reporting).

Florida is looking good for Bush. Pennsylvania isn't. Wisconsin 60-39 for Bush (just 1% of precincts reporting.)

Gawd, it's tough trying to write this. The numbers are always right on top of you and it's a struggle just to keep up with them, let alone speculate about what they mean.

I'm nevertheless quietly optimistic right now. I get the sense that a corner's been turned.

CBC just ran a short piece on blogs, mentioning the rumors that Instapundit, etc., had been taken down by a DoS attack.

From The Corner:

This conservative anti-Kerry Dem is feeling a whole lot better than I did a few minutes ago. W is right where he needs to be in Ohio. The bulk of the early returns (9pm) were in two of the most pro-Kerry counties in the state Cuyahoga and Trumbull. In the few rural and Columbus suburban counties W is right where he needs to be.

Bush still holding up in Ohio. 25% of precincts reporting, and Bush has 802,960 votes for 53%; Kerry with 718,185 for 47%.

Bush takes Arkansas. That ol' Bill Clinton magic didn't seem to take.

Montana and Missouri for Bush.

CBC has 196 Bush 112 Kerry. Don't know where that extra 3 points is coming from, but bless your confidence in a Bush victory.

New Hampshire might be in play after all. From The Kerry Spot:

Spoke w/ his people in NH. They think they're going to win. Bush surprisingly won 2 wards in heavily Democratic Manchester, and one in Nashua. Their vote total was much higher than expected in traditionally Democratic places, and the late returns in NH usually come from heavily GOP areas.

The Corner:

"The mood just became sour. Everyone thinks Bush just swept Ohio, FL, and will be re-elected decisively based on readjusted exit polling."

What are you still doing here, loyal readers? Mark Steyn has a election page up and running.

Bush ahead in New Mexico and Colorado 53-46 in both states with 25% and 12% of the votes in respectively. Pennsylvania goes to Kerry, but I think it's too little, too late.

Looks like Kerry will take Iowa and Minnesota, but Bush grabs Michigan and Wisconsin.

CNN has Bush ahead 197-188, CBC 210-199 for Bush.

A bit late with the update. I think Bush has got it in the bag. Kerry would have to win pretty well everything from here, and I don't think that's going to happen.

James Zogby might want to update his prediction page.

Kerry's people have just about written off Florida, according to CNN's Judy Woodruff.

CBC has just given Florida to Bush. (11:41 pm) 237 Bush 199 Kerry.

Ohio still looking good. 1,833,998 votes to 1,705,873 for Bush. 64% of precincts reporting.

Carville and Begala on CNN presently. They know they're beaten.

Arizona for Bush. The gloom deepens in the Kerry camp.

Finally CNN calls Florida for Bush. It's all over but the shouting, folks.

Ohio tightens slightly. 51-48 Bush. 74% of precincts in.

It's the Witching Hour, and I think I'll wrap this up and have a good, stiff drink. Okay, another good, stiff drink.

Thanks for dropping by, and I hope you return some day.

My congratulations to the putative President-reelect George W. Bush and big thanks from north of the border.

God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. (I'd dig up an animated flag .gif, but I'm too tired to even start looking for one.)

Good night.

All times E.D.T.

Other bloggers covering election:

Please leave a link in the comments if you wish to be listed here.

Statistics from Wall Street Journal unless otherwise noted.

I confused pollster John Zogby with his Arab-activist brother James in this post below.

My apologies, and I understand they're changing their first names to "Jack" and "Jim," anyway.

I said I wasn't going to gloat. Well, maybe just a little.

Via Best of the Web:

"One day last May, I assigned the election to John Kerry. I said it early, and often. As I looked more, I saw that it shouldn't even be close. I said that in this space more than once. Now I am so sure that I am not even going to bother to watch the results tonight. I am going to bed early, for I must rise in the darkness and pursue immediately an exciting, overdue project. Besides, if I was up, so many people, upon seeing every word I said of this election coming true on television in front of them, would be kissing my hands and embarrassing me with outlandish praise."--Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, Nov. 2, 2004

Ahhhh, that felt good. How 'bout some of everybody's favorite moonbat, S. F. Chronicle "writer" Mark Morford:

You want to block it out. You want to rend your flesh and yank your hair and say no way in hell and lean out your window and scream into the Void and pray it will all be over soon, even though you know you're an atheist Buddhist Taoist Rosicrucian Zen Orgasmican and you don't normally pray to anything except maybe the gods of really exceptional sake and skin-tingling sex and maybe a few luminous transcendental deities that look remarkably like Jenna Jameson.

Ewww. That's just plain icky.

The Buick Terraza (yes, I know it's actually a minivan).

it's dark, I know you can't see at all
but try and take some notice
at least try and focus

-- jump little children

'The guys have been out there, building relationships with local people that brings in crucial intelligence and keeps us safe. If the same guys start kicking down doors and reporting on ordinary people who are just trying to earn a living in difficult circumstances, then they are not going to see us as friends anymore,' one soldier, recently returned from Afghanistan, told The Observer.”

Various drug-control types in the US and UN and UK want to use troops in Afghanistan to destroy poppy fields and thoroughly alienate the locals. Way to go, you heroic desk-warriors! You're going to get real warriors killed.

As Stuttaford points out, it'd make a lot more sense to buy up the crops and dispose of them however you like. The farmers don't care what the ultimate destination is. If money's a problem, you could probably cut a chunk out of the DEA's budget to take care of it.

Idiots.

The Times Online:

'The worst reports to come out of the tsunami disaster are surely the claims that many orphaned or lost children are being kidnapped by predators. But is this horror story just too bad to be true? There appears to be little evidence to support warnings of mass child abduction. To me, it looks more as if the West's own unhealthy obsession with seeing child abuse everywhere is now being projected on to the Asian disaster zone ....'

Mick Hume is an interesting fellow. Formerly the editor of the fiercely iconoclastic Living Marxism, he went on to found the equally heterodox spiked, which is always worth a read for its provocative and well-argued pieces.

He's come to the same conclusion that I have -- that this supposed epidemic of child-snatching in the wake of the tsunami (Is there no official name for it yet?) is largely in the imaginations of radical feminists like Carol Bellamy, the Executive Director of UNICEF, and other government and media busybodies who will exploit any and every tragedy to advance their agendas.

I was watching an interview on CBC of a Sri Lankan family that lost their 10-year-old daughter when the wave crashed into a passenger train, killing at least 800 people. They were convinced that she had been abducted, and you really can't blame them for holding on to that pitiful hope.

But it'd be unusual indeed for anyone to have lived through that chaos and horror and stagger out with the lust-crazed thought: Hey, this is the perfect time to grab me a child sex-slave.

As Hume points out, it's just not credible.

Not that any facts matter with a crowd that is at the same intellectual level with the moonbats who natter on about George Bush causing the thing by somehow insulting the Goddess of Gaia.

goin' places that I've never been
seein' things that I may never see again
and I can't wait to get on the road again

willie nelson

CBC screwed up royally on Sunday night, airing on Newsworld's The Passionate Eye the documentary Journeys With George, Alexandra Pelosi's low-budget videocam diary of being on the 2000 campaign trail with George W. Bush.

If that last name -- Pelosi -- rings a bell, it's because she is indeed the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, the Minority House Leader. She was at the time (and might still be for all I know) a reporter for NBC news, and as you would expect, a lifelong Democrat.

I suppose the producers of The Passionate Eye thought they were making some devastating point about the press coverage of the campaign; the herd mentality, etc. Truly, though, this is no great surprise to any thoughtful observer of politics and the media. They had a more sinister interpretation, too: (I paraphrase) That George Bush used his Machiavellian gift of charm to win over the press and thus the election.

Bollocks. The press was about 90% in the tank for Gore, and the overall coverage reflected that.

What you do come away from the film with is that George Bush is an immensely likeable, funny guy. As Matt Labash wrote in the Weekly Standard:

Hopelessly lowbrow, Bush is blessed with matchless comic timing. We see him posing as a chirpy male steward, welcoming reporters on the plane, then angrily snapping at them when they ask for peanuts. We see him reprising his male cheerleader days, pretzel-ing his body into letters to spell "Victory" after Super Tuesday. At one photo op, Pelosi accosts Karl Rove with her shaky hand-held camera. "Why are you lying?" she asks. "I'm not a journalist," Rove calmly replies. "I'm not a liar." Someone grabs the camera and turns the tables on Pelosi, prompting her to distance herself from other journalists by saying "I don't like these guys." "You don't like me?" Bush asks, incredulous, his head popping into the frame like a groundhog emerging from his hole, late to the party. "You call this objective journalism?"

Not that the moonbats of the Democratic Underground would appreciate (or understand) the point, but no normal person viewing this could doubt Bush's native canniness and people-skills. I've met many people who are intelligent who have the sense of humor of a turnip -- however, I've never met someone who is humorous who isn't also very bright.

The film has already aired on HBO in the States; if you haven't seen it yet and you're in Canada or on satellite or close enough to the border to pick it up, Newsworld will be rebroadcasting it on Saturday February 5 at 10pm ET.

Or you could buy it on Amazon here.

You might have heard of the fatuous piece that Lloyd Axworthy, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press last week. It's supposed to be an open letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. but it's a fair bet that she'll never see it; and if she did, she'd flick it into the nearest wastepaper basket with one of her exquisitely-manicured (one presumes) fingernails midway through the first paragraph, along with the head of the flunky who thought it was worth her time. Here's how it starts, and it's all downhill after that:

Dear Condi,

I'm glad you've decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It's a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.

I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.

I was going to fisk the piece, but I've been short on time the last while, and I realized that it was so excruciatingly bad that I'd have to jump on every single line. Anyway, Bob Tarantino had already performed one of his masterly demolition jobs on it at Let It Bleed.

But lo and behold, who pops up last night on CBC's The Hour but the old gasbag himself. As I might have mentioned before, CBC, unlike real journalistic organizations like Talon News, doesn't provide transcripts (rather, they want the taxpayer to fork out $45 here for an hour-long show) so I am unable to reproduce the parts where Axworthy expounds on his bizarre sexual fetishes. Suffice it to say that they're as unpalatable as you'd think.

I did manage to hit the record button on my VCR in time to capture this exchange, though:

Interviewer: Would you have written this kind of letter if you were still the Minister of Foreign Affairs?

Axworthy: No, no, but look, I'm a liberated person, it's almost like being canonized. You can speak a little ex cathedra.

If you had written it while in office, it probably would have been classed as an act of war.

Oh, and I was unaware that the Vatican was contemplating your sainthood. That must have been why the Pope got so ill recently. And in keeping with the Papal theme, you boob, an ex cathedra pronouncement does not, as you seem to think, mean that you are speaking unofficially. When the Pope speaks ex cathedra, he is promulgating official Catholic doctrine, by virtue of his Apostolic authority (the widely misunderstood notion of Papal Infallibility).

I don't know how long the Free Press link will last, so I've taken the liberty of reprinting the piece in full in the Extended Post section. Read it if you must and marvel at its smug, smarmy arrogance. If you need editorial comment, just imagine me making loud retching noises and throwing open windows to try to clear the smell.

The Congressional Record:

[Sen. Edward] Kennedy: What we are basically saying is that those people who have worked hard, have health insurance, and had a serious health challenge or need in their family--just enough to tip them over--is that we are not going to show them any mercy. Absolutely, no, put the wood to them. Veterans, put the wood to them. Single moms who are not getting their payments of child support and alimony, put the wood to them.

Somehow, I knew you would.

Update: Stupid Congressional Record link isn't working. The quote also appears in this transcript of CNN's The Capital Gang.

I consider Trevor Lautens, along with Mark Steyn and David Warren, one of the best political writers in this country. He published a column in the Winnipeg Free Press Thursday that Terry O'Neill featured in The Shotgun; I've taken the further liberty of reprinting it here, as Mr. Lautens speaks eloquently and precisely to my feelings of malaise these past months.

UNFORGETTABLY, though I've forgotten his name and can't find his exact words in 45 years of my notebook-diaries, a U.S. senator once said, in surveying his career: "I began by wanting to save the world. Then I wanted to save the United States. Now I want to save... (some local slough or woodland)."

Derivatively -- and what better time than Canada (nee Dominion) Day to quote or misquote an American? -- I once loved Canada. Then I loved my neighbourhood. Now I have some regard for the tree-clad slope behind my house.

It is partly my property, partly my neighbour's -- I met him after just 18 years of residence and he proved to be an agreeable fellow, though neither of us has felt an urgent need to communicate again in the intervening two years.

Possibly a metaphor lurks here. Or not. In what used to be regarded as old age (in my case, 70 is the new 90), Canada looks too big for intimacy, too big for the imagination. It has to be broken up into small pieces to be lived in and through. In its larger cities, even downtown is a place too far.

Politically, the country is uninhabitable. Pride in today's Canada is embarrassing, if not repelling. I won't be there for the fireworks tomorrow.

You can stay while I tilt my kitchen chair back and reminisce, or leave now.

There seemed to be a fresh new dawn in the 1950s, that decade scorned as boring and repressive by those who weren't there for it. The Canadian vocabulary unashamedly included kindness, thankfulness, manners, and such, and citizens quite often even put those words into practice. The actual and linguistic horrors of lifestyle, fulfillment, liberation, orgasm (good, better, best), closure (what of importance is ever closed, especially the death of the loved?) and that tool of the institutionalized New Bigotry, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, all gratefully lay far ahead.

Of course, there were unfairness and prejudice, but also -- still in the glow of triumph over evil in the last war, whose righteousness we may ever universally agree upon -- a strong sense of hopefulness, of better days ahead, real wrongs being really righted.

More than an aside on that war: In a Times Literary Supplement review of David Dilks's The Great Dominion: Winston Churchill in Canada, 1900-1954, Nathan M. Greenfield writes: "The Canada Churchill knew is almost unrecognizable, especially to those who have followed the country's reduction in military capacity. The Canadian army rushed to England in 1939 was the only army that could defend Britain in the months after Dunkirk."

Canada's wartime gifts to Britain "totalled one-quarter of those under the more famous American Lend-Lease Agreements -- and Canada's population was one-twelfth that of the United States." Furthermore, Canada supplied 44 squadrons in Britain by 1944, and had built 100 of the Royal Navy's ships and 1,223 of the 5,000 tanks the Allies shipped to Britain.

Since then, countless brains have been addled by an approved high-school textbook that ignored the soldiers and reduced the war to two consequential issues -- women's work (invaluable, certainly) and the expulsion of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast to virtual internment camps.

I've long admired what I call the Class of 1920, those born a few years on either side of that year who ground through a devastating depression, fought and won a war and, hardened into smartness, brilliantly provided Canada's leadership for decades.

Now Canada is uber-enlightened and people are afraid to go out at night. (One never knows, a crooked MP might be lurking in the shadows.)

Dismiss all this as an old man's grumbling if it makes you feel better -- or the mutterings of one who confuses happier times with his youthful self, an argument I grant has some merit. But, when not in danger of being overheard, people of my generation agree with me that it's not just rosy nostalgia for youth. Objectively, life in Canada really was better before the Hippies and the Me Generation and Generation X, and even, amazingly, human rights commissions and liberal judges secretly terrified of their ambitious and even-more-liberal young law clerks.

One finally learns that a single act of personal kindness and civility that lightens a heart and makes life more endurable is more virtuous than an act of Parliament. (To quote myself: All great crimes begin in committee.)

One also learns -- a subversive belief, unpopular and deserving of quick suffocation lest it gets around -- that the displacement of God and enthronement of Man has had only dimly understood but devastating social consequences. To think that we are the universe's highest beings should fill us with the greatest alarm and dread if we look around and, especially, inward. (This, as I always feel obliged to state, from a non-Christian, non-church-going, gin-swilling blasphemer. But that doesn't mean I'm stupid.)

So other hands will have to wave the flags tomorrow. The Canada I cherish -- still -- is a private and mystical one, somewhere up that backyard slope of wild greenery, where a chickadee announces his pert importance over a flower born to blush unseen.

The comments that this inspired at The Shotgun are well worth reading, too.

The security guard would like to have a few words with you.

The Western Standard commissioned a poll gauging the mood in the western provinces:

The poll sampled 1,448 adults in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Thirty-six per cent of respondents agreed with the statement, �Western Canadians should begin to explore the idea of forming their own country.� Forty-three per cent of Albertans agreed with the statement, with the greatest level of support coming from the youngest age group (18 to 29 year olds).

The cover story here (.html) or here (.pdf file).

Methodology here (WordPad document).

For some perspective on this, separatist sentiment in Alberta had historically percolated around 10-20% -- the same level as in Quebec at the start of the "Quiet Revolution" in 1960. By 1976 that had risen to about 45%, at which point the first PQ government was elected.

I don't think that this poll is an outlier. An Edmonton paper (I think it was the Sun) published a poll a few years ago with similar results, though it was dismissed as analomous and too small in size. It'll be interesting to see the reaction this one draws.

If that Alberta number is accurate then this country could be perilously close to breaking up. Alberta has a long tradition of cataclysmic political change. Only four parties have ruled her since she became a province, and once thrown out of office, none of them have returned to power:

Liberal Party (1905-1921), the United Farmers of Alberta (1921-1935), the Social Credit Party (1935-1971), and the Progressive Conservative Party (1971 to present).

The Progressive Conservatives are looking a bit long in the tooth, I'd say.

Another comparison between Alberta and Quebec is I think instructive, and maybe decisive. As I wrote in 2002 in the first entry in this blog:

Western separatism is a different creature than Quebec's. The Quebec variety is top-down: Intellectuals, media and politicians. In the West, it's grassroots: Farmers, small business owners, and the guy who sleeps in his truck outside Ft. McMurray while waiting to get a spot in Syncrude's barracks.

The trigger is going to be Kyoto. If the Feds bungle it (as they've shown every sign of doing) then all bets are off.

Via Nealenews

Austin Bay subbing for Glenn Reynolds at his MSNBC spot:

We know polls often (usually?) exaggerate. Still, if only one in five of oil-rich Alberta�s population �wants out,� that�s a hot social and economic flare. Coddling the Parti Quebecois is no longer in Canada�s political cards. The Liberal Party machine, based in Ontario, is corrupt, and with �Adscam� everyone knows it. The stage is set for a revitalizing Canadian political rebellion, led by Western Canada.

�coz i�m lonely and i�m blue
i need you and your love too
come on and rescue me

the supremes

One of the mixed blessings about the CBC strike is that the sneering CBC reports on the New Orleans rescue efforts have been replaced with sneering BBC reports on the New Orleans rescue efforts. I'm looking at you Matt Fry! Take a bow, Gavin Hewitt!

To any dispassionate observer of Leviathan, the wonder is that the State accomplishes anything, let alone on time and/or on budget. By that standard -- admittedly a low bar to hurdle -- the US federal response to New Orleans has been nimble and creative, considering all the roadblocks the incompetent Governor of Louisiana and her sidekick Mayor have left in their wake.

I attribute that agility not to George Bush nor his bureaucrats, but to the initiative and common sense of ordinary Americans; when faced with situations that the rulebook doesn't allow for -- they toss out the rulebook and find out what works instead.

We in Canada don't need initiative or common sense. We have studies (in both official languages!) that prove it.

Natural disasters do not strike Canada, because Canadians are universally loved, especially by Mommy Earth. But should she (or more likely the Portland Hills Fault) slip up and accidentally level Vancouver with a 9+ Richter quake, our worries will be few, because our Government has been extensively preparing for this for years.

Unbeknownst to most Canadians, the authorities have been busy building an exact copy of Vancouver, complete with cars, house furnishings and heroin addicts, deep in the interior of B.C. And here's the genius part: the whole thing is mounted on millions of caster wheels, like on a dessert-cart.

Naturally, this has all been very expensive. Where did the money come from?

You remember all that AdScam stuff and alleged Liberal "corruption"? Silly children! That money was being diverted by selfless civil servants and politicians for the construction of "New Vancouver." That $2-billion "gun registry"? Every penny of it spent instead on tarps to conceal the project. (The locals don't suspect a thing.)

Within minutes of the tremors ceasing, a vast armada of helicopters (now do you see why the military couldn't have new ones?) equipped with powerful suction tubes will be vacuuming dazed Vancouverites out of the wreckage. Simultaneously the world's largest fleet of bulldozers will begin towing New Vancouver to its new home, detouring only to crush a few Conservative-voting towns.

Once the bulldozers arrive, they'll push what's left of Old Vancouver into the sea and install New Vancouver in its place. The helicopters will reverse suction and begin spitting dazed Vancouverites out to carry on with their lives. From there it's just a matter of turning the power back on, and then "It's Miller Time!"

We of course have a fallback strategy: we'll lie around in the rubble and whine until the Americans come and save us.

Yeah, that's doable. Let's hope they bring some Miller.

National Post:

OTTAWA - Federal and provincial justice ministers will consider a proposal next month to sue U.S. gun manufacturers as part of a plan to stem the flow of illegal handguns across the border, federal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler said yesterday.

Oh, great. This is the same braintrust that hit upon the idea of suing Canadian tobacco manufacturers in US courts, a tactic so novel that it was laughed out of every court they tried it in. Not before it cost us millions of dollars, of course.

Earlier, Prime Minister Paul Martin indicated it was among the issues he intended to raise with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Word that Canadian governments could sue gun makers came as a spate of weekend violence in Toronto continued, with at least two more daylight shootings in Canada's largest city.

Mr. Martin said at a news conference up to half of all gun crimes in Canada are committed by individuals using firearms that have been smuggled into the country.

He added that the U.S. has an "obligation" to get tough on gun smuggling by working more actively with Canada.

Where have I heard this huffy argument before? After 9/11, when it was thought that some of the terrorists had crossed through the Canadian border (none had). But yes, ultimate responsibility rested with US Customs. Just as it is Canada Customs' obligation to control what comes into this country.

It's bad enough you've abdicated our military responsibilities to the Americans; now you want them to perform basic border duties? (The government had to be embarrassed into providing bulletproof vests for [unarmed] Customs officers when US law enforcement agencies started donating used ones to us.)

Tell you what: how about we outsource your jobs to the Yanks? They couldn't possibly be as inept at governance as you clowns.

Cotler wanders off-message:

Mr. Cotler cautioned that the federal government cannot sue gun makers and provincial governments may have difficulty in the U.S., where President George W. Bush has sided with firearms producers when asked to comment on similar domestic court battles.

Well, duh. If your high-priced legal talent had been following the news instead of ordering up new Beemers and Savile Row suits, they might have noticed this item from just last week:

CNN:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congress gave the gun lobby its top legislative priority Thursday, passing a bill that would protect the firearms industry from massive lawsuits brought by crime victims. The White House says President Bush will sign it into law.

The House voted 283-144 to send the bill to the president after supporters, led by the National Rifle Association, proclaimed it vital to protect the industry from being bankrupted by huge jury awards.

Kinda blows a hole in your little rowboat, doesn't it? You want to combat gun violence in Toronto? Harassing farmers in Saskatchewan and duck hunters in Alberta isn't going to do it.

Waving your hands in the air and blaming the Americans isn't going to do it either; but that's exactly what you'll do. It's the Liberal Way.™

The Oracle of High River speaks:

WINNIPEG -- Former Tory prime minister Joe Clark says there is no credible future prime minister among the leaders of the three Opposition parties -- Conservative Stephen Harper, the NDP's Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Quebecois.

Two of those aren't in the running, genius. Don't Maureen's boots need polishing or something?

Via Nealenews

I heard Paul Martin in a speech today -- I assume it was to the Liberal caucus, but I'm not sure, and it hasn't turned up on Google yet -- denounce the Tories as "neo-conservatives."

Expect to hear much more of this Liberal talking-point in the days ahead. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's never stopped them before.

The term "neo-conservative" originally described American liberals and socialists, such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol who became disillusioned with the Left and gravitated towards conservatism under Nixon and especially Reagan.

I don't suppose Martin knows any of this; so I will go with the second, less charitable interpretation: "neo-conservative" has become, in the lexicon of the Left, synonymous
with the word "Jew."

Paul Martin: anti-Semite. Run, run with the meme. It's less dishonest than what he's doing.

The BBC:

The United Nations has launched an appeal for a record $4.7bn (�2.7bn) to help more than 30 million victims of war, famine and natural disaster.

The amount is equal to global military spending in 48 hours, UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland says.

"We can afford to clothe, to feed, to care for all of the children of this world," he told the BBC's World Today.

Would that be before or after your cut?

..."We are asking exactly the amount of 48 hours of military spending in this world, or we're asking for the equivalent of two cups of coffee per rich person."

Here ya go. Hold still, I'll pour another one.

"U.N. Man" rides to the rescue! (Via The London Fog, who appropriately calls the video "ghastly." Warning: music and extremely bad voice acting.)

PoliticsWatch:

OTTAWA � Canadian bloggers can breathe a little easier Friday after Canada's chief electoral officer confirmed that he doesn't plan to have a crackdown on political blogs during the election campaign.

Jean-Pierre Kingsley [pictured] said at a press conference in Ottawa that as far as he is concerned political blogs are a form of free expression, not political advertising.

"I don't think that there's going to be a major problem with respect to blogs," Kingsley said in response to a question from PoliticsWatch.

"This is a means where by a lot of people have decided they are going to express themselves

"If a political party or a candidate were to have a blog then that would fall under the financing regime. But if it's the supporters, there are going to be supporters all over for various parties and it's a form of self expression."

I wouldn't trust Kingsley as far as I could throw him; but even he, it seems, understands that a crackdown on political blogs would be an p.r. disaster. However, the piece goes on to note:

One conservative blogger said this week he was warned by someone he knew in government that there could be a problem with blogs that endorse candidates.

The three major political parties all have supporters who are members of a community of bloggers, who share links to other members in the community on what are known as blogrolls. The blogging networks are not directly affiliated with the parties. The Liberals have Liblogs, the Conservatives have The Blogging Tories and the NDP has The Blogging Dippers.

These blogs are made up largely of individual bloggers' analysis and opinions of the latest political developments [and also nude volleyball, don't forget the nude volleyball -- ed.] but some include areas where you can volunteer or donate to the party or help candidates.

Several of the Conservative bloggers even have a slick graphic proclaiming their support for Conservative Leader Stephen Harper.

Brent Colbert, who ran for the Conservative nomination in Halton earlier this year, operates one of the better known Blogging Tory sites, Colbert's Comments - with the catchy slogan "I know I'm right, what about you?"

After Colbert posted about the Liberals' plan not to put much emphasis on blogs in this campaign, Colbert said "an old friend" who works in "official Ottawa" told him "he hoped that I'm not endorsing any candidate in the election campaign on my blog."

When Colbert told him about the Harper graphic the friend suggested he "re-think that."

"I tried to press him for more details but all he could say was for me to be careful," Colbert wrote.

In the same post he later raised concern that the Liberals could try to "use Elections Canada in an attempt to level the playing field" in the blogging community, which is dominated by conservatives, even in Canada.

You wouldn't think that the Liberals could be that stupid; but hey -- there's always hope.

CBC has just announced (Mansbridge in a brief aside -- no mention of it yet on the CBC's site or anywhere else that I can find) that Paul Martin in Toronto tomorrow will call for "a sweeping ban" on handguns. This in practice will amount to confiscation of law-abiding citizens' property, with utterly no effect on crime. It will be wildly applauded by the usual suspects.

If handguns are so dangerous, Prime Minister, then lead the way and instruct your RCMP and JTF2 bodyguards to ditch theirs.

Or is only your plutocratic ass worthy of protection?

CBC:

Liberal Leader Paul Martin said on Wednesday he's not concerned by what officials in Washington think about his remarks on the campaign trail.

"I am not going to be dictated to as to the subjects I should raise," Martin said at a lumber mill in B.C.

He was responding to comments made by U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins in Ottawa on Tuesday.

Wilkins implicitly rebuked Martin for attacking U.S. policies to score political points, suggesting it could have an effect on the future of the cross-border relationship.

Martin was unapologetic following Wilkins's speech, and came out swinging again on Wednesday. "When it comes to defending Canadian values, when it comes to standing up for Canadian interests, I'm going to call it as I see it," Martin said.

No, you're not defending Canadian "values," unless you count being a moron as among them.

There's a name in business for employees that publically, gratuitously and cynically insult one's biggest customer -- they're called "former employees." Here's hoping we can shortly hang that tag on you.

You're speaking to a bigger audience than you know, Prime Minister. It used to be that Canada-U.S. trade disputes mattered only to Canadians, policy wonks in D.C. and maybe a few U.S. media players close to the border and in the dusty back pages of the Wall Street Journal.

No more. There's this thing called the Internet, and it's spreading your words far and wide. The Drudge Report linked to today's story, and yesterday's; you're not just speaking to your rabidly anti-American base. Hello, Kansas? Toto. Out.

Incidentally, the subject that you seem to be so exercised about -- the softwood lumber dispute -- I doubt you could outline the situation beyond: America bad; Canada good.

Unless you can hack your way through (as of 2001, defunct) verbiage such as (warning: PDF file) this:

in which case you are a far better woodsman than me. Now as I recall, we've had a couple of NAFTA rulings for us; a couple of WTO rulings against us. Don't tell me what to believe, Prime Minister. Tell me what you believe.

While we're discussing dumb plant material, here's Jack Layton:

Vancouver � Canada should threaten tariffs on oil and gas exports to the United States as a way of dealing with the ongoing softwood lumber battle, NDP leader Jack Layton said Saturday.

I don't think so, Jacko. Let's spread the pain around for a change, shall we? How about a nice stiff export duty -- say, $10,000 per vehicle -- on those cars you like to build in Ontariarario.

Just think how pissed the average American is going to be when he finds out that his new Ford Crapmobile is going to cost a wee bit more to drive off the lot. He'll probably bitch and grumble all the way home, then write a stinging letter to his Congressman.

Yeah, that'll get things moving.

Toronto Star:

A high-ranking official within the Liberal Party of Canada resigned today after he made disparaging comments on his blog about NDP Leader Jack Layton and his wife, NDP candidate Olivia Chow.

Mike Klander, executive vice-president of the federal Liberal party's Ontario wing, stepped down after photographs of Chow, the NDP candidate for the Toronto riding of Trinity-Spadina, and a chow chow dog were posted on his blog dated Dec. 9 under the heading ``Separated at Birth."

Klander . . . Khadr? Only a DNA test can tell for sure, but the ol' unibrow never falls far from the tree, if you get my drift.

CTV:

Martin hammered again and again at the broad theme of values, claiming he and Harper have different visions of government.

"I think he has a very different perspective on the role of government than I do. It hasn't been hidden," said Martin.

"His role of government is very much to fend for yourself."

What he said next unfortunately didn't seem to make any of the stories I've seen, or the TV news, but I heard it on the radio this morning. It was something to the effect that Liberals, in contrast to Harper, believed in "bringing people together."

Good grief. Let's get out the calculator and figure out how many people this bumbler has alienated: Albertans, Quebecers, Newfoundlanders, gun-owners, veterans, income-trust investors. Not to mention our most important ally and trading-partner. I guess "bringing people together" is some kind of Liberal secret code for "raping the taxpayer" or something.

Martin believes institutionalized state child care is "the best example" of these value differences.

"I believe that government has a very strong role to play in child care. That's a fundamental difference and that applies across the wide range of issues in which you deal with family."

You clowns couldn't run a lemonade stand. Keep your hands off the kids, creep.

Or if you like: PM PM's PM.

What the hell was that all about? Not the debate -- I concur with Andrew Coyne and Chantal Hebert, who both gave a clear victory to Harper.

I'm talking about Martin's bizarre (I'm tempted to think that he made it up off the cuff, but nothing the man does is spontaneous) boast that he'd eliminate the Notwithstanding Clause altogether.

Ted Morton:

Eight provinces (all but Ontario and New Brunswick) opposed Trudeau's proposed Charter of Rights because it transferred so much power to judges, especially the Supreme Court. They thought that this empowerment of the judiciary conflicted with Canada's longstanding tradition of parliamentary democracy and that it would undermine the capacity of the provinces to be self-governing. They feared that federally-appointed superior court judges would use the Charter to unfairly strike down provincial policies. Their acceptance of the Charter in November, 1981 was conditional upon Trudeau's acceptance of the legislative override power.

In particular, Premiers Lougheed (Alta.), Blakeney (Sask.) and Lyon (Man.) were adamant that the Notwithstanding Clause was integral to passage of the Constitution. Without its inclusion the Constitution Act, 1982 and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would never have come into force. Any attempt to eliminate it -- by subterfuge, amendment or fiat -- will be seen especially by the West as a dealbreaker.

You might not like a leash on untrammelled judical activism, Prime Minister; that only leaves the alternative of judges' heads stuck on pikes before Parliament, or whatever institution succeeds it.

Exclusive, must credit blog quebecois!

I, too, have my sources in the Liberal war room. This is from the second wave of Liberal ads, expected in the next week:

Mother Nature at her most lyrical -- it is as if the woodsy sprite is in thrall to the music of the celestial spheres. Dance, little ballerina, dance!

Will Stephen Harper send soldiers to kill this tree if he is elected? He won't say.

Soldiers. In Canada. With bullets.

We're not making this up.

Choose your Canada.

Vote Liberal.

oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, doctor (oh, doctor)
won't you kindly hear my plea? (oh, doctor)
i know, you know, doctor (oh, doctor)
exactly what is best for me (oh, doctor)

irving berlin

Edmonton Journal:

Rahim Jaffer (Edmonton-Strathcona) is also a contender because he is from a visible minority. Edmonton-Leduc MP James Rajotte, the party's longtime industry critic and a staunch supporter of Harper's leadership bid, could also be in line for a position at the cabinet table.

Energy is the least likely cabinet position to go to an Albertan precisely because most of the country's resources are here, and it wouldn't be acceptable to the rest of the country, said [B.C. political scientist Allan] Tupper, now at the University of British Columbia. It would be like naming a physician to the health portfolio.

Yeah, sort of like Dr. Carolyn Bennett, Minister of State for Public Health in Martin's cabinet. She's a big believer in command and control:

Despite the fact that a huge demographic, the boomers, is moving into late middle age, we must somehow reduce the demands on Canada's health-care system. To find ways to do so, it's instructive for Canadians to look south: not the south of George W. Bush, but farther south, to Cuba, which long ago decided that it wouldn't be able to afford to have its citizens get sick and so would focus on keeping them well.

I don't know what sort of Potemkin village they were squiring you around, Dr. Bennett, but chances are that it wasn't a Cuban hospital -- you know, the kind that real Cubans have to use. The pictures were taken at "El Hospital Clinico Quirurgico de la Habana."

Oh, and those black crunchy things are called "cucarachas" in Spanish. Isn't that just adorable? More at Val Prieto's Babalublog.

I guess Allan Tupper is right. You'd hate to have doctors in charge of stuff like that.

Nealenews:

QUEBEC � Elections Canada has been asked to investigate the Conservatives after allegations the party is overseeing a group that operates partisan on-line Web logs.Canada�s election watchdog received a complaint yesterday from a disaffected party member who claims the Tories tried to sway political opinion in cyberspace in the leadup to, and during, the election by setting up the popular �Blogging Tories� website.

The site appears to be a coalition of like-minded individuals who have met in cyberspace to share their political opinions and express their frustrations with Paul Martin�s Liberals.

But a Victoria man, Eugene Parks, and Toronto Tory dissident Carole Jamieson allege the venture may be in contravention of the Elections Act and thirdparty financing laws. They say it may have �unduly influenced the election coverage and potentially the outcome of this campaign.�

Oh, laudy, no. Now we are doomed. I expect Joe Clark will soon rise from his grave and endorse Paul Martin, thus putting Harper over the top.

Doomed, I tell you.

CBC:

McDonough and MacKay were sparring about constituency races in Nova Scotia. When he said she was using her reputation to drag NDP candidates across the finish line, she defended the NDP candidate running in his riding.

"We'll just see what happens," MacKay replied. "I think you better stick to your knitting and win your own riding."

McDonough immediately asked him if that was a sexist reference, and he said it wasn't. Then she said she would be delighted to have time to knit after the election because she has five grandchildren.

But after the radio program, McDonough told reporters she was surprised by his "sexist slur."

I can't find a link for it, but in the 2000 (I think) federal election, the oh-so-finicky Ms. McDonough had this to say about Premiers Ralph Klein and Mike Harris:

Is it the testosterone that makes them so stupid?

Maybe you should stick to your knitting, dear.

Update: Commenter blueright verifies my recollection and provides a link to a similar quote. So it looks like it was one of her standard [insert stupid male here] talking points.

let's tell the future
let's see how it's been done
by numbers by mirrors by water
by dots made at random on paper

suzanne vega

My heart says Conservative majority; my head says Conservative minority. Liquified deep within my bowels is the consideration that Martin will parlay his disgraceful campaign of fear and smear into a Liberal minority.

How's that for covering all the bases and/or organs? For what it's worth, I predicted a Conservative minority last time. That didn't turn out too well. On the other hand, I correctly foretold George Bush's reelection.

So this is the rubber match. I'll step out on a limb and call a slim Conservative majority (155-160 seats), and you can take that to the bank. What your banker will make of it is anybody's guess, but that'll be his problem, won't it?

Can you pick the dangerous criminals out of this collection of mug shots? (The other ones are harmless drug addicts.)

Via grow-a-brain

Not an auspicious start for CBC Newsworld, as it's been knocked off the air. No, wait -- it's back on. Unfortunately it's showing Rick Mercer.

Captain's Quarters is unreachable. I blame the CRTC.

Newsworld is still having troubles. Mansbridge sounds like Darth Vader.

I'm not liking what I'm seeing.

Here we go . . .

Incredible. Maritimes drank the Liberal Kool-Ade.

Libs: 70 Con: 81 NDP: 16 BQ: 24

Cons making up some territory, but too little, too late?

CTV projecting Con minority.

99-82 now. Wow. Cons up 22.8% in Quebec.

CBC declares Con minority.

OK, so my prediction was a bit off. I really thought the Tories would do better in the Maritimes.

Still, congratulations to Stephen Harper and his people. If he's as smart a politician as I think he is, he should be able to parley it into a majority in a couple of years.

And so I take my leave for the evening, knowing that the future of this country is looking a good deal brighter tonight.

Blogs:

Please leave a link in the comments if you wish to be listed here.

TV:

I'm abiding by the news blackout; if you are of a deviant, un-Canadian nature, you might want to take a look at the un-Canadian blogs above: Captain's Quarters, The Surly Beaver and Michelle Malkin.

wee-ooh wim-o-weh wee-ooh wim-o-weh
wim-o-weh o-wim-o-weh o-wim-o-weh o-wim-o-weh
o-wim-o-weh o-wim-o-weh o-wim-weh

the tokens

Having done my small part for freedom and democracy, I now retreat to my natural habitat, there to slumber undisturbed. Unless Brian Tobin sticks his head up.

In which case, wake me by tossing small pebbles at my window.

Cartoon by Wiley Post

Apologies to George Orwell for the theft of the title.

I don't usually pay a lot of attention to US Presidents' State Of the Union addresses, being filled as they usually are with empty political blather: We will restore dignity for, um, whatever.

The Democrat response: Gov. Keien? Keeen? Keine? Of Kentucky. If that's the best you can put up: some hack politician nattering on about veterans' benefits that he has no interest or capability of delivering: welcome to the 2006 GOP majority.

Why do we fight?

I hope it's because we elect flawed people who keep their eye on the big picture: GWB on the War On Terror and the Supreme Court; Stephen Harper in the dream that he can somehow turn this shipwreck of a nation around.

Update: I stand corrected. Though I have no real choice, considering the righteous spanking administered by commenter and blogstress marybeth -- a winsome, yet stern daughter of Kentucky, who points out that the forementioned doofus of a Governor hails in fact from Virginia.

Geez. I hope I got the Orwell quote right.

Goodness. Judging by the hoohah, you would think that Stephen Harper slaughtered the Governor General and celebrated Black Mass at his Swearing-in ceremony yesterday.

I refer, of course, to his two infamous Cabinet appointees, Liberal defector David Emerson and Montreal businessman Michael Fortier, via the Senate.

I think the Opposition and their attack dogs in the media should contain their glee just a bit. Harper has acted in consonance with the Constitution and this issue isn't going to resonate with Canadians.

I suspect that they're making the same mistake as their American equivalents did about a certain politician -- what was his name again? Chimpy McHaliburton? -- who time after time somehow comes through the smoke with yet another win, leaving his opponents to unleash even more hysterical attacks against him, with even less effect.

C'mon down, Barbara Boxer!

The Chronicle Herald:

VANCOUVER (CP) � Like many Liberals, B.C. MPs Hedy Fry and Don Bell were angry that David Emerson decided to become a Tory after being elected as a Liberal in the Jan. 23 federal election.

Both worked hard, along with the former Liberal industry minister, to boost Liberal support in B.C.

Now, Bell and Fry have been given duties that will allow them to politically harass their former associate, now international trade minister in Prime Minister Stephen Harper�s cabinet.

Hmmm. Why does the expression "like being savaged by a dead sheep" come to mind?

CBC:

The federal ethics commissioner says he is opening a preliminary inquiry into conflict-of-interest allegations against Prime Minister Stephen Harper concerning his formerly Liberal cabinet minister David Emerson.

Emerson ran as a Liberal in the campaign leading up to the Jan. 23 general election, but was a surprise appointment to Harper's Conservative cabinet on Feb. 6. Prime Minister Stephen Harper's conduct in the Emerson affair will be reviewed.

Ethics commissioner Bernard Shapiro says he will look into what influence Harper wielded to convince Emerson to cross the House of Commons floor.

Oh, this is rich. Mister See-No-Liberal-Evil emerges from his coma to investigate the Conservatives. Sort of like how he ran Belinda Stronach through the wringer. Andrew Coyne, writing after Shapiro's release in January of the report on Gurmant Grewal:

We know that Belinda Stronach's defection took several days of negotiations to arrange. And sure enough, the day she crossed the floor, she was given a cabinet post. Are we to believe there was no connection between the two? What were they negotiating, if not the precise "reward" she would receive? What did she bring to the table, but her vote on the confidence motion? Why was that not also the subject of an inquiry?

Harper can't fire this stiff; only Parliament can do that. Here's hoping it becomes the first order of business when the Tories obtain a majority.

Canadian Press:

TORONTO -- Fewer Canadian women will be able to contribute to the national economy if the federal Conservative government scraps a national child-care program set up by their Liberal predecessors, women's advocates said Monday.

A report prepared for YWCA Canada says more women will have to stay home without the increased day care spots made available under the five-year Liberal program introduced last year, which the Conservatives have promised to cancel after this year.

"We can't afford not to make this investment,'' study co-author Debra Mayer told a symposium on the issue at Toronto's city hall.

Government warehousing and indoctrination of children isn't an "investment." It's a totalitarian's wet dream.

A difficult struggle to find day care spaces gets harder when parents try to accommodate tight work schedules, Mayer said. Plus, finding sufficient care for children with special needs can complicate the problem, she added.

"Barrier after barrier is what our parents in Canada are faced with,'' Mayer said.

Yeah. Like having a federal government that confiscates half their income to squander on stupid social programs.

The $5-billion, five-year program introduced by the former Liberal government is slated to be replaced next year with direct $1,200 payments to parents for each child under age six.

Even with those payments, however, parents would still have day care expenses to cover, eliminating the incentives for many mothers to return to work or school, Mayer said.

YWCA Canada CEO Paulette Senior acknowledged the $1,200 payments are beneficial to parents as a family allowance, but don't address broader day care needs.

"We believe that Canada can actually do both,'' Senior said.

Sure we can. We just shake the magic money tree and why not buy everyone a bunny rabbit too, while we're at it.

More than two-thirds of Canadian women with a child under the age of six are in the workforce, Senior estimated. Forcing them to return home because they can't afford child care costs is an issue of equal rights, she said.

"While all family members are affected, women pay a disproportionate price when quality child care is not available.''

Federal Social Development Minister Diane Finley has not wavered from the Conservative commitment to cancel the Liberal program by March 31, 2007.

Finley declined the opportunity to speak at Monday's event, but she later told CBC Newsworld that many parents are eager to see the $1,200 payment because it gives them the freedom to choose the child care they need.

"There are a lot of parents out there who don't have access to full-time institutionalized day care, mainly because it doesn't meet their needs,'' Finley said.

"Now institutionalized day care is a good thing for some, but let's remember the parents who have to work night shift, the ones in rural areas, the ones that are stay-at-home parents who still need some help time to time. Our plan will help them.''

Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba all signed five-year funding deals with the former Liberal government, but they allow either side to opt out with 12 months notice. Other provinces had one-year agreements in principle as they negotiated longer terms.

Opposition critics at the symposium pledged to battle the Conservatives over their child-care strategy when Parliament resumes April 3.

Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, who is said to be mulling a run at party's upcoming federal leadership contest, said the Liberals may not have articulated the issue adequately during the last election campaign.

"It's a shame that in some ways, we didn't do a good enough job, I think, for the people of Canada, to understand really the importance ... of this extraordinarily important social infrastructure,'' she said.

Oh, you explained it well enough that more people voted for the Conservatives than for you. Jolly good work!

Scrapping the Liberal program is "not a choice to the young mom who really thought that she was going back to school this September, or really thought she was going back to work,'' Bennett added.

New Democrat MP Olivia Chow is also spoiling for a fight.

"I can't wait until April 3 to deliver a message that . . . we need to protect these agreements,'' Chow said.

"We need multi-year funding, not just this coming year . . . .You can't just open a child care centre and then close them. Kids continue to be born.''

No thanks to the NDP, which worships at the altar of abortion.

Ontario Child and Youth Services Minister Mary Anne Chambers held out some hope that discussions with Finley might offer some more help for parents.

"This is not a partisan issue,'' Chambers said. "We actually signed an agreement as the government of Ontario with the government of Canada on behalf of parents and children in Ontario.''

And then the people of Canada unsigned it. Elections have consequences.

Carrie Lukas in National Review Online:

For years, the only way that a university could inoculate itself from Title IX litigation was to have athletic participation mirror enrollment. In other words, if 58 percent of students were women, then 58 percent of athletes had to be women. Universities trying to meet this criterion struggled to attract female athletes. But, all too often, they resorted to the surefire method of balancing the equation: eliminating men's teams. More than 90 universities cut men's track and field, and more than 20 cancelled wrestling.

If similar standards were applied to academic departments, university biology and accounting programs would be forced to try desperately to attract young men to the major. But if they fell short, they could opt to expel women to make the numbers balance. Engineering programs would face the inverse problem: attracting women and cutting men.

Gender warriors may be willing to take this deal. Feminists hardly celebrate that women gravitate toward majors like education that lead to lower-paying jobs after graduation. They may embrace a policy that pushes women toward more prestigious careers. But if academic departments are fair game, then why shouldn't similar standards be applied to enrollment?

If Title IX were applied to enrollment, schools would face the uncomfortable proposition of trying to attract more men or artificially reduce women's enrollment to reach the magic proportional balance. To achieve enrollment parity today, more than one million women would have to be expelled from colleges and universities around the country.

Harry at Chase Me, Ladies notes that relief is galloping across the horizon: (Warning: "Man-in-street" interviews)

Given that most Social Studies curricula these days is an unrelieved bitchfest of how The Man done po' po' Womyn wrong, you'd think that the term would have been slightly familiar. Or maybe they're just tuned it out entirely.

You won't be surprised to learn that the cameraman and interviewer are the ones who got in trouble for their little experiment. Story here.

Toronto Star:

Rail authority apologizes after mischievous rider hacks into electronic message board

Gerry Nicholls thought he was hallucinating as he kicked back in his seat to take the 35-minute GO train ride to his Oakville home.

About every three seconds, the scrolling electronic sign that usually carries transit updates and advertisements had a very different message that he just could not keep his eyes off.

"Stephen Harper Eats Babies. Stephen Harper Eats Babies. Stephen Harper Eats Babies," the message kept repeating.

Really? I've heard that Opposition placeholder Bill Graham likes to eat teenage boys.

Belinda, your party and your country needs you. You have already shown your commitment to your principles once, by joining the Liberal Party. You have shown you can handle criticism, and weather a storm. Please, Belinda, take the leap!

Off the cliff, and follow her lead!

Momentum is growing:

The Liberal leadership is truely full of nothing but a list of poor candidates. I agree with you Jon, Belinda would put this country back on the right track! A good leader like he should be at the head of this nation! I sending my letter to endorse her now.

Me rite 2!

Via Nealenews

as the snow flies
on a cold and gray chicago morn'
a poor little baby child is born

elvis presley

The Corner:

I don't think you are going to go very far in reforming the country until we have a better educated, healthier, wealthier population. . . .

You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I'm not advocating some sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies.

There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true, but we only whisper it, because as liberals who believe in individual rights, we view any program which might treat the disadvantaged differently as discriminatory, mean-spirited and...well...so Republican. . . .

I am not proposing that you send federal agents armed with Depo-Provera dart guns to the ghetto. You should use persuasion rather than coercion. You and Hillary are a perfect example. Could either of you have gone to law school and achieved anything close to what you have if you had three or four or more children before you were 20? No! You waited until you were established and in your 30's to have one child. That is what sensible people do. . . .

Imagine the uproar if this had appeared in a Freedom of Information request from the Bush Administration. It was in fact a letter (pages 61-64 here -- note: PDF document) written to then-incoming-President Clinton in early 1992 by lawyer Ron Weddington, urging FDA approval of the abortifacient drug RU-486.

As America's first black president, I imagine that Clinton was pretty steamed about that, especially since proven methods of contraception like blue dresses and cigars were readily available.

Mr. Weddington concludes with this postscript:

I was co-counsel in Roe V. Wade, have sired zero children and one fetus, the abortion of which was recently recounted by my ex-wife in her book, A Question Of Choice (Grossett/Putnam, 1992) I had a vasectomy in 1969 and have never had one moment of regret.

You sound like a lovely ex-couple. By the way, you neglected to mention your invaluable contribution to the Wannsee Conference, but I'm sure that it was just a youthful indiscretion.

Or a statute-of-limitations thing.

The StarPhoenix:

Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay got a rough ride in his first appearance before the Senate national security and defence committee, but the proceedings turned particularly ugly when Liberal Senator Peter Stollery hurled an insult at Karzai, Afghanistan's interim [sic -- in Oct. 2004, Karzai was elected in a U.N.-supervised vote to a full five-year term] president, who MacKay said would soon be visiting Canada.

"You know Karzai, he's a stooge. He was put there by Americans. Everybody knows that," Stollery said.

By golly, he's got a point. Let's see what else we know.

Karzai:

Karzai fled to India during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and remained until the fall of the Taliban. He took a postgraduate course in political science at Himachal University in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India from 1979 to 1983, then returned to work as a fund-raiser supporting anti-Soviet uprisings in Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention for the rest of the 1980s. After the withdrawal of Soviet forces, he served as a deputy minister in the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani.

Stollery:

His family owns Stollery's clothing store at the corner of Yonge Street and Bloor Street in Toronto, hence his designation in the Canadian Senate as Senator for "Bloor and Yonge".

Karzai:

When the Taliban emerged onto the political scene in the 1990s, Karzai was initially among their supporters. However, he later broke with the Taliban, citing distrust of their links to Pakistan. After the Taliban drove Rabbani out of Kabul in 1996, Karzai refused to serve as their U.N. ambassador. In 1997, Karzai joined many of his family members in [the] United States, from where he worked to reinstate Zahir Shah. His father was assassinated, presumably by Taliban agents, July 14, 1999, and Karzai swore revenge against the Taliban by working to help overthrow it.

Stollery:

Stollery has worked as a teacher and travel writer, as well as working for the family business. In addition, he worked as a cab driver in Toronto for many years.

Karzai:

Karzai was a candidate in the October 9, 2004 Presidential Elections. Despite a perceived lack of national support he won 21 of the 34 provinces, defeating his 22 opponents and became the first democratically elected leader of Afghanistan.

Stollery:

He was first elected to the Canadian House of Commons as a Liberal candidate in the 1972 election for Spadina riding in Toronto. He was re-elected in 1974, 1979 and 1980 elections. He served for a time as Chairman of the Parliamentary Caucus. . . . Stollery is currently Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Karzai:

From a base in Pakistan, Karzai began to organize anti-Taliban opposition. When his father was murdered in Pakistan, presumably by agents of the Taliban, Hamid Karzai, was selected to succeed his father as Khan of the half-million Popalzai. He immediately defied both the Pakistan and Taliban governments by leading a convoy of tribal mourners to carry his father's body home for burial in Kandahar, a stronghold of the Taliban. The Taliban did not dare intervene. This act of defiance made Hamid Karzai the most visible leader of resistance to the Taliban among the Pashtun people.

Stollery:

In 1981, Stollery was appointed to the Canadian Senate on the recommendation of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau wanted to open Stollery's Spadina riding so that Trudeau's aide James Coutts, could be elected to Parliament in a by-election. Coutts was defeated in what had been a safe Liberal seat by Dan Heap of the New Democratic Party in the subsequent by-election.

Karzai:

In October 2001, Karzai and three friends re-entered Afghanistan to raise a revolt. He had a single satellite phone, no sleeping bags or other supplies, little ammunition, few weapons, and no certainty of outside support, but day by day he attracted more followers. He narrowly escaped capture by the Taliban, and was even wounded by a stray American bomb, but by December, the Taliban had fled from Kandahar.

Stollery:

<crickets>

. . .

</crickets>

I seem to have run out of things to quote.

It's not all fun-and-games being an U.S. stooge, y'know.

Karzai:

On September 5, 2002, an assassination attempt was made on Hamid Karzai in Kandahar. A gunman wearing the uniform of the new Afghan National Army opened fire, wounding the Governor of Kandahar and an American Special Operations officer. The gunman, one of the President's bodyguards, and a bystander who knocked down the gunman were killed when Karzai's bodyguards returned fire. A second attempt on Karzai's life took place on September 16, 2004 when a rocket missed the helicopter he was riding to Gardez, where Karzai planned to open a school.

Of course, Stollery is a man of no small courage himself; the Senate still buzzes with the memory of his April 20, 1986 hand-to-hand battle with Sharon Carstairs for the last crabcake at the Parliamentary All-U-Can-Eat buffet. God, that was ugly.

So here we have a tale of two men. Hamid Karzai gave up a comfortable and prosperous life in America to fight for a country and people he loved and won a dubious (and dangerous) prize: the presidency of Afghanistan.

Peter Stollery gave up . . . well, nothing that I can see, with the possible exception of his eternal soul to serve as a hack for a morally-bankrupt political party.

Do us all a favor when Karzai makes his first state visit here and lock yourself in your office, Stollery. You're not fit to be in the same room as the man.

Via Nealenews

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce .

Karl Marx

An interesting piece on Stephen Harper in National Review.

Also, the good Capt'n meets with Karl Rove:

This was an interesting chat. We had met once before, on our trip to Washington DC almost exactly a year ago, and he still recalled our conversation. The conversation remained mostly fixed on elections and campaigning -- obviously his fort� -- but he remembered teasing me about all of the blogging I had done on Canadian politics. Rove told me that he had the chance to spend some time with Stephen Harper and was pleasantly surprised about how geniune the Canadian PM was. He and I agreed that Harper's transparency played against him for too long; Liberals tried for years to make his openness into some sort of false front that masked a "hidden agenda". Canadians now have found out how wrong that assessment was.

Let the moonbattery commence!

The Ottawa Citizen:

But even the mayor couldn't help Public Works Minister Michael Fortier, Harper's Quebec lieutenant and stand-in for the event. Fortier's remarks were swallowed up in a rising tide of boos, which then grew more deafening as much of the crowd began slamming their folding seats up and down. Harper has promised to revisit the issue of same-sex marriage in Parliament.

"Shame! Shame! Shame!" spectators cried, wagging their upraised fingers in unison.

Does anybody think that had Stephen Harper shown up for this wankfest that he wouldn't have been treated to the exact same infantile tantrum? Or that the CBC wouldn't have run with it as their top story?

Maybe he should have gone, and shown them for the oafs they are.

Via Nealenews

The sinistrosphere was ablaze last night with this tale of Stephen Harper's arrogance:

By way of illustration, on a recent trip, the Prime Minister was asked by a flight attendant to turn off his cellphone and BlackBerry. Mr. Harper declined. The pilot then made a request, saying it was for safety purposes. The PM relented. But, at the end of the journey, one of his staffers gave the pilot some news: His services would no longer be required on prime ministerial trips.

The aviator should have known that this is the new Ottawa. In Harpertown, you fall in line or fall from favour.

See here, here, and here.

I was just looking at opening paragraphs at the Canadian Blog Exchange; I didn't bother to click through on any of them. The story stuck with me, though. I looked for it today in the two daily newspapers I read. Nothing there. Nothing online about it.

Surely the press would be jumping all over this example of Tory high-handedness? I went back to the Exchange and found out that all the excitement was because of this column by Laurence Martin.

Oh. Chretien's hagiographer. I've got tile grout fungus with more credibility than him.

He of course provides no names, no sources. Is it believable?

First, I doubt that the Prime Minister bothers to fiddle around with a Blackberry or a cell phone. One of the perks of being the PM is that you get to have other people wreck their thumbs on your behalf.

Second, the alleged interference with airplane navigation and control from personal electronic devices (PEDs) is just that, alleged:

what the industry doesn't tell passengers is that there is no scientific proof to support these claims.

What also isn't widely known is that pilots have blamed portable voice recorders, heart pacemakers, electric shavers and hearing aids for interfering with their cockpit controls, yet there are no restrictions on their use during flights.

The industry's evidence of cell phone-caused interference is purely anecdotal -- instances engineers have tried but failed to duplicate under "controlled conditions."

[...]

Although there is no clear evidence that PEDs interfere with onboard instruments, the RTCA recommends against the use of PEDs during the "critical phases of flight" -- taking off and landing -- when the plane is most likely to be bombarded by signals from other sources, like industrial heaters, cable TV networks and FM broadcast stations.

"I guess we should all feel a little nervous during takeoff and landing," Sheehan said.

In fact, the FCC has lately been holding hearings on allowing cell phone calls from airplanes. Most of the remaining objections concern the annoyance factor of having the usual yakkers discussing their recent hemorrhoid surgery throughout a long flight:

While the FAA and DOJ raised safety concerns, most of the subcommittee's members raised objections to mobile phone calls during flights based on the potential nuisance to other passengers.

Third, Harper travels on a military jet, fully in contact with his office, Cabinet officials, and civil and military authorities at all times. Are we to imagine that he'd break off a call from, say, George Bush or Vladimir Putin because some bossy stewardess told him to?

Over, gnatroots. Do you copy?

Pierre Bourque grabbed a screencap of the Liberal party webpage, showing sock-puppet leader Bill Graham receiving marching-orders from his American boss.

It's a long-held adage in American politics that "politics stop at the water's edge," meaning that partisan bickering about foreign policy should cease once the President decides on a particular direction.

It's actually a rewording of this part of a speech in 1948 by Senator Arthur Vandenburg:

To me, 'bipartisan foreign policy' means a mutual effort, under our indispensable, two-party system, to unite our official voice at the water's edge so that America speaks with one voice to those who would divide and conquer us and the free world.

Vandenburg, a Republican from Michigan, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A former isolationist, he was instrumental in throwing his weight behind Democrat President Harry Truman in favor of his policies creating the Marshall Plan and NATO.

Alas, it's a convention more honored in the breach than the observance these days; gone, too, is the quaint notion that ex-Presidents avoid criticising their successors, offering at worst non-committal support.

At least when it comes to the Democrats. Bill Clinton, as usual, is all over the map. Here he slams Bush. Here he supports him. Must be his fabled "triangulation" in action.

You can't beat, however, Jimmy Carter. As much as you'd like to. With a stick. Here he is a couple of days ago in the German magazine Der Spiegel:

Unfortunately, after Sept.[11], there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous. For three years, I'd say, the major news media in our country were complicit in this subservience to the Bush administration out of fear that they would be accused of being disloyal. I think in the last six months or so some of the media have now begun to be critical. But it's a long time coming.

It's a thankless enough job without a miserable little ankle-biter like Carter making misery for your ankles.

Sorry, ran out of metaphors there. I must have been distracted by his comic assertion: I think in the last six months or so some of the media have now begun to be critical.

Good one, Jimmah! No wonder Ronald Reagan bounced you out on your ass after your pathetic one-term Presidency. What an embarrassment you are.

CNN:

OTTAWA, Canada (Reuters) -- A candidate to head Canada's opposition Liberal Party vowed Monday to stay in the leadership race despite reports that his campaign team had signed up dead people as members.

Joe Volpe, who also hit the headlines for the wrong reasons in May after it emerged he had accepted large donations from children, acknowledged errors could have been made in "the hurly burly of recruitment" of members.

A couple of "ghosts" were stalking Volpe as he left a news conference in Ottawa. There was much speculation in the press as to the identity of the ectoplasmic visitors, and which opponent's campaign -- or even if the Conservatives -- had sent them.

But . . . what if they were . . . real? oooooOOOooooOOOOooooOOOOo

I was flipping through some old magazines prior to throwing them out putting them into a neat pile for the recyclers when I ran across a small article (it was on one of those gossipy-what's-happening pages with four or five items) in the June 2005 issue in the now-defunct Saturday Night.

It was about the worst foreign affairs minister Canada's ever had, at least in my memory: Lloyd (Soft Power) Axworthy, and some of his favorite internet bookmarks.

Let's see. The BBC; the UN; the New York Times. No shockers, those.

Oh, and what's this?

I've just discovered the blog site Daily Kos, having become one of their subjects. It certainly seems to touch a lot of nerves in a lot of different places. Maybe we should rethink our foreign policy and get on the blog system. [What for the love of God this means is anybody's guess. -- ed.] It's a whole new network, a very potent and surprising kind of experience.

If you were wondering what inspired the mighty Kos himself to write about Axworthy, it was the incredibly juvenile, taunting "open letter" that he had penned in the Winnipeg Free Press to US Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice. My considerably less flattering take on it is here.

Did anybody else notice (Officially Screwed did) that when Stephen Harper a few days ago accused the majority of the Liberal leadership candidates of being anti-Israel, the immediate, furious denials were as if he had accused them of anti-semitism?

Bob Rae, for one, was quick to note that his wife and children were Jewish.

That's all well and good; but Harper wasn't denouncing you for not having a Jewish wife and children. He was pointing out that your party has consistently demonstrated an anti-Israel bias. (To be fair to Rae, he did break with his former party in 2002 over its virulently anti-Israel positions.)

Whatever could have caused Harper to reach that conclusion? Aaron Goldstein has a nice roundup of statements by Liberals that might have misled him.

Here's our boy, Lloyd:

[Scott Brison] doesn’t really understand what Liberal foreign policy is about. He’s almost at the forefront of a very small group of nations [Brison is a nation? -- ed.] who say whatever Israel does is right . . . We’re becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It's long been a truism of the left that being anti-Israel does not mean being anti-Jewish. That's certainly the pose that the Daily Kos tries to maintain.

The hysterical reaction of Liberals pinned with the first of those labels might indicate otherwise.

I leave it for the reader to judge. Here's a pastoral essay by one of Kos's diarists, "Imagine A World Without Israel":

We could bring down the Wall, send prisoners home, and families could be reunited.

We could dismantle checkpoints, open crossings, and pull down barbed wire fences.

There would be no more settlements or armed settlers because the people would be united.

We could replant trees and olive groves and rebuild battered cities.

No more suicide bombers or sniper fire, and no more dead civilians.

Give or take a few million Jews, I'd wager.

Sometimes it's a bit more explicit, as in this entry, hurriedly rewritten, but not before Little Green Footballs got a screencap:

Israel is showing the entire world why the Iranian President was absolutely right to suggest that Israel cease being a sovereign state as is.

So does Lloyd Axworthy embrace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's proposal to extirpate Israel from the face of the earth? Dunno. But his preferred choice of reading material raises a few questions. It also casts a bit more illumination on this curious little story.

Speaking of whom, I found this at Bourque last night:

Note the top headline. I think we are owed an explanation. Especially from Mark.

Globe and Mail:

OTTAWA -- Opposition Liberals have demanded an apology from Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay for apparently referring to his former romantic partner, Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, as a dog during a nasty Question Period in the House of Commons yesterday.

The incident occurred as Environment Minister Rona Ambrose was defending her new clean-air program from Liberal accusations that it does nothing concrete for the environment.

Liberal MP David McGuinty taunted Mr. MacKay, suggesting that if the Conservatives do not care about the health of people, they should care about the health of animals. Mr. McGuinty demanded to know: "Don't you care about your dog?"

Mr. MacKay, who dated Ms. Stronach when she was a Conservative, heckled back: "You already have her."

Tsk. I can think of many more-descriptive ways to describe Miss Stronach: "vapid clotheshorse"; "the dilettante debutante"; "high-functioning moron" immediately come to mind. Or my favorite: "Tie Domi's blowup doll."

Nevertheless, brevity is the soul of wit, so "dog" takes the day.

I watched in astonishment this afternoon as Mike Duffy Live devoted its entire hour to this ginned-up "scandal." Particularly amusing were the outraged women, like Craig Oliver, Scott Reid, and the odious David McGuinty. Between them all I don't think they could grow a pair. And we ain't talkin' tits.

I once heard or read somewhere that Sheila Copps, if she hadn't entered politics, would have gone on to become a star journalist (she worked briefly for the Hamilton Spectator and Ottawa Citizen), earning "in the six figures."

Really? In Canada? In print journalism?

I can think of maybe a few who make that much, but they'd all be opinion columnists, not journalists. Copps, who does now write a column for the Sun chain brings to it extensive knowledge of government, but her insights into it are nothing that a dozen others couldn't offer; and she has at best a rather pedestrian writing touch.

She does have, though, the one indispensable requirement for a budding journalist: A blithe disregard for facts.

Here she is on Garth Turner:

He blogged away daily on what was going on in caucus. His e-mail list was huge. He used the web to openly criticize his leader, calling Harper a clone of U.S. President George Bush [. . .]

To which Turner posted this rebuttal:

This description of Stephen Harper was offered on this web site in a comment by a visitor. In the melee of the last few days it has been attributed to me. In fact, Craig Oliver did so today during CTV’s “Question Period” and Sheila Copps did it again in her Sun Media column of this date.

Be aware that I never wrote those words, nor would I. I do not view Stephen Harper that way, and if I did then I would have had no place whatsoever in the Conservative caucus. Harper is his own man, and is doing his best for Canada.

. . . of the Liberal party. ♪♪

Sorry this page takes so long to load -- that's what happens when you're using cutting-edge Flash technology.

And yes, I am aware that (Black)Jack! Layton and Belinda Stronach are not running for the Liberal Party leadership, but it was brought to my attention that I was behind on my MDLRR (Minimum Daily Layton Ridicule Requirement). And I needed a woman for the "Alice the maid" slot, and I didn't think anyone would recognize Martha Hall Findlay.

It would have been easier to work with bigger pictures, but I have a limited amount of screen real-estate available. You can add the wandering eyes to any picture on your computer or at a specific URL. Go here.

that started the whole world crying.

I wrote this late Monday night but held off posting it until now:

I judge it time to enter my fearless prediction on the mid-term US elections next week. If I am right, I shall modestly point to it at every opportunity to demonstrate my masterly comprehension of American politics (predicted Bush win in 2000; Republican gains in 2002; Bush's reelection and continued Republican victories in 2004).

On the other hand, if I am wrong, then this post will have safely scrolled off the front page by then, and I can arrange another "accident" with the archives to be sure that it never again sees the light of day.

I think that the GOP holds on to both the Senate and House. The latter might be by the proverbial skin of the teeth, but a victory nonetheless. The polls are tightening up (and Republicans traditionally underpoll) and the Democrats are as usual getting too complacent.

In the meantime, of course, the walking dog-doo magnet John Kerry stepped into another pile of it:

In his Monday appearance at Pasadena City College for Democrat gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, Kerry delivered several lines, such as Bush had lived in Texas but now "lives in a state of denial."

Then he said: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." There were a few polite titters from the audience.

I've met officers, NCOs, and enlisted men from the Canadian, American, British, and German armed forces, and they stack up very favorably against your average Massachusetts senator.

They don't need me to defend them. But I'll take Kerry at his word, that it was merely a botched joke (and a lame one at that).

Inexcusable. Comedy is much too serious a business to be left to amateurs. Politicians especially should be wary about engaging in it. Ronald Reagan and JFK could carry it off (the present occupant of the Oval Office is pretty good, too); John Kerry should outsource any future attempts to India, or Andrew Dice Clay, whichever is funnier.

Ned Rice in NRO:

As Pelosi told Newsweek recently, “I’m not saying I’m great, I’m just saying I don’t think everybody else is that great, either.” A ringing endorsement, indeed — if one is running, unopposed, for president of a sixth grade class. Presumably as Speaker Pelosi could afford to hire better speechwriters than the hacks who fed her this bon mot: “Mr. President,’ stay the course’ isn’t a strategy, it’s a slogan”— a statement which (apart from its inanity) is, of course, also a slogan. Then there was this inadvertently revealing Pelosi offering: “The gavel of the Speaker of the House is in the hands of special interests, and now [after Democrats take over] it will be in the hands of America’s children.” True in the sense that the gavel would be in the hands of someone with Pelosi’s childishly simplistic view of the world. Politics aside, making someone as inarticulate as Nancy Pelosi the “Speaker” would send a bad message to anyone who cared about speech even in the abstract.

Oh dear. Missouri is up for grabs and I can't bear watching Larry King, David Gergen and Adrianna Huffington picking over the corpse. I will sleep now, with uneasy dreams.

---

Whoops. Virginia just flipped to Webb. Montana isn't reporting in any great depth yet. Even if the Demos take both of those, though, I'm predicting that Missouri and Tennessee hold. Which would leave the Senate as a tie, with Dick Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote. I am guessing that that wouldn't be the favorite part of his duties. I don't think he suffers fools gladly.

---

So. A defeat for the Republicans, but at best a minor victory for the Democrats. Jeff Greenfield just pointed out on CNN that this was the first time since the Senate was elected by popular vote (1924?) that the party which lost one house of Congress didn't also lose the other.

Not what I'd like to have seen, but not an unthinkable result. If Pelosi, et. al. take it as a mandate to go wild with impeachment motions, ultimatums on Iraq, etc., so much the better. They'll pay for it in 2008.

---

All over for the Senate. Allen looks like he'll take Kentucky Virginia (I'm always getting those mixed up for some reason); Corker wins in Tennessee. Missouri heavily leaning to Talent.

House: 124 Rep. 144 Dem. Certainly the MSM prediction of a Democratic wave sweeping aside the Republicans isn't going to happen; but it looks like they'll win the House, with a small majority, I'm guessing.

---

One of the difficulties for a foreign observer in this type of election is that, as Tip O'Neill famously observed, "all politics is local." It's possible to generalize the mood of the nation in a Presidential race; much more difficult to analyze how it will play out in 435 Congressional districts and 30-odd Senate races.

Speaking of which: House Rep. 56 Dem. 63. Senate Rep. 44 Dem. 41. Gov. -- didn't quite catch the number, but the Democrats seem comfortably ahead.

---

Mind you, there's a couple of hockey games tonight, so my attention might be divided. Priorities, people, priorities.

---

I hadn't planned to liveblog the elections, and I probably won't have a lot to say about them, but I thought I'd keep a page open in case I have any thoughts. Hey, it's been known to happen.

I remain steadfast to my optimistic prediction of a few days ago. Right now CNN shows Republicans 22 Democrats 32 for the House; Rep 42 Dem 30 in the Senate. Governators -- Rep. 7 Dem. 12.

National Review Online:

More secrets about [Senator Edward] Kennedy’s collaboration with Moscow became known after the famous defector Vasiliy Mitrokhin smuggled his invaluable archive of secret KGB documents to the West. In 2002, he publicized some of them in The KGB in Afghanistan working paper, published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In 1980 Kennedy attacked President Carter over the latter’s tough opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. As Mitrokhin reveals, the senator had evidently coordinated that with Moscow several weeks before - through Tunney and Egon Bahr, West Germany’s top Social Democrat who often had secret contacts with the KGB.

Then in 1983, according to the notorious KGB document quoted by Sebastian and now by Kengor, Tunney conveyed another secret message from Kennedy to the Soviet leader, communicating to Andropov the senator’s willingness, “in the interest of world peace,” to take some joint measures against “the militaristic policies of Ronald Reagan.” When the KGB received this information, they classified it at the highest possible level - not only as “top secret,” but also as “of special importance” and a “special file.” [...]

I know it's too late to get him for manslaughter and drunk driving; but as I understand it, there's no statute of limitations on treason.

Google News:

Well, something's glowing there. Or maybe he's just one of those guys who likes to walk around with a flashlight under his chin, to make him look more "dangerous."

God knows where they scraped up that picture. The original link shows nothing of the sort.

Mark Steyn, interviewed on Hugh Hewitt's show last week:

MS...you remember Pat Buchanan's famous thing about ten years ago, that it would be easier for America to assimilate 100,000 Englishmen than 100,000 Zulus?

HH: Oh, I did not hear that, but I'm not surprised Pat said it, yeah.

MS: Pat said it, and I didn't particularly agree with him at the time, because in fact, you know, if you got 100,000 Englishmen on a Saturday night after the pubs closed, you realize that at least the Zulu warriors stopped chanting and go home at 10:00 at night, where as the baying English yabos don't.

I'm guessing that the transcriber didn't know the word "yobbo" and/or misheard it due to Steyn's accent.

Ottawa Sun:

Scouts Canada took a blast from some senators yesterday over allegations the organization has taken a dictatorial turn in managing its operations.

The long-running battle over the soul of Scouts Canada moved to Senate committee chambers as members of a 700-strong renegade group within Scouts made their pitch to stop a bill they say will slam the door on the grassroots.

Bill S-1001 is a controversial piece of legislation that dissident group Scouts eh! claims will be the end to Scouts Canada because it would entrench a top-down corporate structure.

What corporation isn't top-down? And why, exactly, is it any of the Senate's business how an independent company conducts its affairs?

Some senators around the committee table criticized Scouts Canada for lacking democracy.

"I would like to see democracy from the bottom up. I don't see here how an ordinary Scout can break into the circle," said Ontario Liberal Sen. Lorna Milne.

This is rich. A bunch of unelected political hacks stirring from their torpor to lecture people about democracy. Next they'll be preaching about the value of showing up for work.

National Post:

Mr. Dion also challenged reporters to give him a reason to renounce his French citizenship.

During the Liberal leadership campaign, Mr. Dion told CanWest News Service he would deal with his citizenship if it became an issue.

"I think it is part of who I am -- my loyalty for Canada is 100%. I have proven it, I don't need to prove it even more. People know how much I am committed for my country," Mr. Dion said at the time.

The issue appears to be an emotional one for Mr. Dion, who cut off further questions about the matter by repeating the phrase "end of the story" several times. During the media scrum yesterday, he told reporters to "move on" to other questions when it was repeatedly raised.

You wanted a reason? There you have it.

To be sure, the media will lose interest in a few days, like a hyperactive kid wandering away from his new toys on Christmas Day, spotting a shiny new example of Conservative perfidy. Our elites and the opinionators are assuring us that this is a trivial matter, unworthy of further comment.

Which is precisely why it will linger on.

Unlike the things that they think we should be exercised about -- the spat between the PM and the Parliamentary Press Gallery, for example -- this will have a resonance with voters, especially in the West. If it truly is such a non-issue, a trifle, then why won't Dion make the whole thing disappear? What is so precious about his French citizenship that he's not prepared to cast it aside for his bid to run this country?

A more pragmatic politician would have realized this and dealt with it from the start; certainly after the Governor-General's similar problems.

As it is, Dion seems to be burdened with a mulish stubbornness, and a tin ear to boot. If the MSM is inclined to overlook it, and the Tories are too polite (or scared) to bring it up; why, that's where we uncouth bloggers step in to hang it around his neck like the Croix de Guerre.

And contrary to the usual Liberal talking points: "Harper is scary! Bush Bush Bush!" -- this will carry the indisputable sting of truth.

CTV:

The Conservatives reacted angrily upon being compared to Nazis by a prominent Liberal on Thursday.

Bill Graham, a former cabinet minister who was the interim Grit leader for most of this year, made the remarks in the House of Commons.

He accused the Tories of repeatedly uttering false statements in the Commons about the Liberals' record in government and drew parallels with the infamous Nazi propaganda machine run by Joseph Goebbels.

"The government members in this House behave as if they were reading from a textbook written by Mr. Goebbels when he was preparing for power in Germany,'' Graham said.

"Mr. Goebbels," eh? Puts me in mind of another Mr. Goebbels. Or was that . . . Mr. Gobbles???

Via ThePolitic.com

A few days ago I wrote this about Scouts Canada appearing before a Senate committee. I was working from an Ottawa Sun story that didn't go into great detail about why the Scouts were there. Rather than further research it (are you kidding?) I rushed to print, extrapolating wildly to take a cheap shot at the Senate. I regret this. The first part of it, that is. I live to take cheap shots at the Senate.

Anyway, Senator Joan Fraser left a comment on the post, which I reprint here:

The senators were just doing their job. That is, they were doing a committee study of a bill presented, at the request of Scouts Canada, by Senator Con Di Nino. Committee study is standard practice between 2nd and 3rd reading of any bill. This was the bill to enable the reorganization which the controversy you mention concerned. It has now received third reading and been sent on to the House of Commons for consideration there.

This has left me terribly conflicted. Should I be flattered that Senators take time from their busy schedules to read this fine blog? Or should I be angry that they have enough free time to read this fine blog?

I am torn.

Dual citizenship? Piffle! Are we not men of the world? As Civitatensis discovers, the Liberal Party only scorns and shuns those who hold an alien political philosophy:

To be eligible for membership in the Party, a person must -

(a) be at least 14 years of age;
(b) support the purposes of the Party; [Power, baby, POWER -- ed.]
(c) ordinarily live in Canada;
(d) not be a member of any other federal political party in Canada [emphasis added]

None of that filthy "diversity" here, thank you very much.

I'm not registered as a Conservative, so I decided to find out what the criteria for joining is:

To become a member of the Conservative Party of Canada you must:

Be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada
Actively support the founding principles of the Conservative Party of Canada
Be at least 14 years of age

In fact, the Conservatives generically seem quite open to outsiders. The Alberta Tories, in the vote to replace Ralph Klein, sold $5 memberships to anyone who wanted one. A good many were reportedly bought by Liberals and NDs in an Anybody-But-Ted-Morton drive.

I didn't bother researching the NDP's membership requirements; as far as I know, there's only one inviolable rule: That you are certifiably insane.

Long-track speed skater Cindy Klassen, who set a Canadian record with five medals at the Torino Olympics, was named the winner of the Lou Marsh Award on Monday.

[...]

The 27-year-old from Winnipeg is the country's most decorated Olympian, with six career medals.

She set a Canadian record at the Games in Italy in February, when she won gold in the 1,500 metres, silver in the 1,000 and team pursuit and bronze in the 3,000 and 5,000.

Her five-medal haul marked the highest total by a female speed skater, surpassing the four gold medals won by Lidiya Skoblikova of Russia at the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Games.

Klassen, who lives in Calgary, previously won bronze in the 3,000 at the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City.

At the risk of sounding like the proverbial turd in the punch bowl (whatever that sounds like), I've got to call "turd in the punch bowl!" on this one.

Klassen was a good but not great player in a fringe sport; noticed, if at all, once every four years. By Olympic standards, Skoblikova's achievement of four golds trumps Klassen's full house, ace high. If I may mangle a metaphor or two.

Basketball's second-year-running MVP Steve Nash and baseball's American League MVP Justin Morneau were far more worthy of consideration.

Simple numbers. Klassen was the best (or second-or-third best) among a relatively-tiny (20,000? 30,000?) group of competitors; Nash and Morneau rose to the top of their respective professions, which boast millions of participants. It's a mug's game to compare one sport to another, but I think there's a difference between footie and football.

My vote would have gone to Nash, a tiny white man who projects his will through forests of big black men.

At least he's finally got a decent haircut. That's gotta count for something.

Nobody is going to mistake Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day for a major satirist, or even a minor humorist. He does, however, affect a breezy, chatty style when writing guest columns for his local newspaper; on this occasion poking a bit of fun at the brutally-cold last couple of weeks in Western Canada. (Full text here.)

Too much levity for media scolds like Greg Weston:

. . . a few days ago, Stock was back in print, this time in his hometown newspaper, making jokes about global warming, a subject about which his government might wish to at least appear serious.

Day began his guest column in the Penticton Western News with this catchy lead: "Hey, who knows? Maybe Al Gore is right." (The former U.S. vice-president, of course, has become the horseman of the global warming apocalypse of melting icecaps and glaciers flooding the Earth.) "Maybe all my constituents living high up ... (in the hills) will soon be sitting on lakeside property as one of the many benefits of global warming," wrote Day, one of Stephen Harper's most senior ministers.

Cue the wailing Greek chorus:

"It reminds me of an episode of the Flintstones,'' said David McGuinty, Liberal MP for Ottawa South. ''Mr. Day clearly does not understand the science of climate change.

[. . .]

Environmentalists said Day's latest views show the government is obsessed with conspiracy theories about Al Gore, the former U.S. vice-president who is touring the world to promote action against global warming. John Bennett, executive director of Climate Action Network, said the government should instead be educating people about climate change to encourage action.

''A federal minister should be taking the threat of climate change far more seriously than this,'' said Bennett, who is also a climate-change policy analyst for the Sierra Club of Canada.

On second thought, Day comes off as a veritable fountain of wit compared to these petty Savonarolas. My personal version of hell involves Weston and McGuinty and Bennett and a supply of booze too paltry to render me insensate.

Globe and Mail:

The current distribution does penalize certain provinces, particularly western provinces, Alberta and B.C., that only have six senators at this time but they have four to five times of the population of New Brunswick or Nova Scotia where they have 10 senators.

Many will share my view that it's not good for the province[s] to have an elected Senate as long as we don't have a change of the number of senators per province.

Such touching solicitude from Citoyen Dion, on why Senate reform is needed; unless someone tries to reform it, in which case it's impossible without opening up the Constitution. (Makes frowny face, shakes head sadly, turns away.)

The blogospheric Line Of The Day appeared in a slightly different context, but it fits: Here's a sack of flour, dirty tragic dying person. Someone will be around to study your plight shortly. (Via SDA.)

Update: Newsworld's top-of-the-hour broadcast: Something to the effect that Harper was determined to push through his changes, even if they would leave the Senate "less accountable and more dysfunctional." (I got that last part verbatim.) So sayeth the CBC.

Sheer, gratuitous editorializing. You must have missed that class at J-school.

Or maybe you learned all too well.

CBC:

Sperm stocks in Canada are significantly down since the federal government made it illegal to pay men for the donations, and the supply of sperm imported from the U.S. will eventually be cut off, Health Canada says.

It has been illegal to buy sperm or eggs since 2004. The change was part of Canada's new reproductive technology law, which also forbids payment for surrogacy and regulates stem cell research.

There used to be 40 sperm banks in Canada, but that has dwindled to two. It seems without a $75 payment, most Canadian men are not interested in donating to heterosexual couples, single women looking to get pregnant or lesbian couples seeking sperm.

Gee, what a shocker. Who else didn't see this coming? Certainly not the geniuses of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, responsible for these new rules.

Assembled in 1989 by the Mulroney Government, the Commission was stacked for the most part with doctrinaire feminists. (Also Maureen McTeer, whose main qualification was that she was apparently tired of bossing Joe around.)

This struck me as odd, since the most interest feminists ever show in children is when they can feed them into government-approved indoctrination centres or abortion-clinic garburators.

Silly me. When they weren't at each others' throats and filing lawsuits hither and yon, the Commissioners came up with the brilliant solution of abolishing children altogether. Too bad for the lesbians, but that's the way the coochie crumbles.

Britain also faces a shortage of sperm donors, but the issue there is not compensation.

Rather, British men are reluctant to donate because of a legislative change that allows children conceived with donated sperm or eggs to learn the name of the donor when they turn 18.

"I think what people worry about is somebody going to come to see me in 10 years and start demanding money," said Mark Jackson of Moss, England, who donates to infertile couples.

"Any donor doesn't need to worry because it is stated in law that you are not the guardian of this child, and you don't owe any money to this child."

Silly you. The law is whatever a judge decides it is on any particular day. And one day -- count on it -- a judge will decide that you owe 18+ years of child support, with interest; plus damages for "emotional abandonment"; and probably a bit of alimony too.

I think it's time for men to discover a new hobby. I'd recommend urban warfare.

CP:

Some Tories found it pretty cheesy when Liberal Leader Stephane Dion named his dog Kyoto.

Now we learn that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has adopted a kitten - an orange tabby called Cheddar. Harper's last cat was killed by a car outside Stornoway three years ago, when the Harper clan was still ensconced in the opposition leader's residence.

Since moving into the prime minister's official digs at 24 Sussex, Harper's wife, Laureen, has been fostering stray cats until permanent homes can be found for them.

Dion, a former environment minister, got himself a Siberian Husky shortly after the Liberals were defeated in last winter's election. He named the dog after the international climate change accord and jokes that the pet's family name is "protocol."

This can mean only one thing. Stephen Harper has some nefarious, secret plan to destroy the Quebec and Ontario dairy marketing boards.

MADD Canada has been in the news of late:

Mothers Against Drunk Driving has stopped fundraising efforts at a time when holiday merrymaking means more intoxicated drivers are on the roads.

The organization's efforts have been put on hold following an investigative report by the Toronto Star that claimed just 19 cents from every dollar raised actually goes to victim services and fighting drunk driving.

The report alleges that the majority of donations go to professional telemarketers and people who go door-to-door raising money for the charitable organization.

But Andrew Murie, MADD Canada's CEO, has called the article misleading and said 83.6 per cent of donor money is used on MADD Canada programs.

I don't know if there's any significance to it, but organizations formed to combat drug and alcohol abuse tend to perform poorly in the eyes of charity oversight groups. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives its "A" status to none of them. The Charity Navigator awards MADD's US parent foundation an overall rating of 47.60 (out of 100]; HOPE International and The American Jewish Committee, to choose two others at random, scored 60.68 and 62.54 respectively.

As Steve Janke pointed out a few days ago, single-issue pressure groups inevitably succumb to a sort of drift, in which the original focus gives way to institutional survival.

There's another potential hazard ahead for MADD; namely, its future as a registered charity. I doubt that politicians have any appetite for reviewing it, but bureaucrats are another matter. In 1989 they stripped Greenpeace Canada of its tax-free status on the grounds that it was engaging in too much political lobbying. The rules are somewhat vague and subject to interpretation -- just the way they like it:

The Income Tax Act allows a registered charitable organization or foundation to devote no more than 10% of its resources to political activities so long as the activities are "ancillary and incidental" to the organization’s charitable purposes or activities.

Certainly MADD does seem to devote a lot of time and money pushing for political and legal changes, from installing ignition interlock devices on offenders' cars (and eventually on all cars); to lowering the current 0.08 blood-alcohol limit to 0.05 (the efficacy of which is strongly disputed by the Canada Safety Council ); to increasing taxes on alcohol. It was a major lobbyist behind the government's recent legislation concerning drugs and driving.

MADD would argue that its expensive and slick advertising campaign, which rolls out like clockwork at this time each year, is intended to "educate" the public; yet it is intended to "educate" politicians as well. Does all this cross the line into political activity? I suppose Revenue Canada will be the ultimate judge of that.

You know, for people who insist that they're not wild-eyed neo-prohibitionist zealots, as MADD frequently does . . . ya coulda fooled me:

Egged on by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority is thinking about banning alcohol from commuter trains on the Metro-North and Long Island railroads. "Times have changed and drunk driving is a major concern," says MTA board member Mitch Pally. "People get off the railroad and they get into cars," says Deena Cohen, president of MADD's Long Island chapter. "Somebody is going to get killed."

People also get off airplanes and get into cars, attend sporting events and get into cars, go to rock concerts and get into cars, eat at restaurants and get into cars, and leave bars and get into cars. As a result, somebody is going to get killed. Does that mean alcohol should be banned from all of these places as well?

To further follow the logic, people drink at home and then get into cars. So obviously that's got to stop, too.

I'm sure the WCTU would approve.

An amusing juxtaposition of stories on National Newswatch earlier today.

The Texas Scribbler:

Minnesota Muslim congressman Keith Ellison's use of Thomas Jefferson's two-volume copy of the Koran to take his oath of office was a pretty slick idea, until you consider that Mr. E. probably didn't take the time to turn a few of its pages and read what was written there. If he had, according to the Austin-based community Web site Altmuslim.com, he would have discovered that the translator, George Sale, "calls the Prophet Muhammad a 'criminal... imposing a false religion.'" Oops.

Via Simply Jews

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Al Gore's shock troops are on the march:

Those selected to gather at the Hilton Nashville Downtown last week included teachers, doctors, a meteorologist, ministers, Wal-Mart employees, actress Cameron Diaz, architects, retirees, veterans and financiers.

This is Gore's Climate Project, training 1,000 "presenters," who shall disperse among the population to spread the gospel. So expect a couple of Wal-Mart employees on your doorstep any day now.

Less likely to appear is Cameron Diaz. This is just one of her many interests. Here's some of what she had to say to Oprah Winfrey before the 2004 presidential election:

We have a voice now, and we’re not using it, and women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies if you think that rape should be legal, then don’t vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body, and you have a right to say what happens to you and fight off that danger of losing that, then you should vote . . .

I had no idea that Bill Clinton was running, but there you go.

So you see that she's not one of those one-dimensional Hollywood bimbos. There are at least two dimensions there. Who knows how many other wondrous thoughts bubble through the mind of Ms. Diaz?

CBC:

Jury selection began Tuesday in the case against I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, a former Bush adviser and chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Libby is accused of lying to investigators about his conversations with reporters about CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Like the readers of the Soviet-era Pravda, CBC-watchers have learned to evaluate the news by what isn't reported.

Watching Newsworld today at noon, after the near-rapturous coverage of Barack Obama's taking the initial steps to run in 2008, Henry Champ weighed in on the upcoming trial of Libby.

If you'd just dropped by from another planet, you would have thought that the trial was about the (as it turns out, apparently not-so-illegal) leaking of Valerie Plame's status at the CIA. Champ went through his entire spiel without mentioning the fact that the leaker has been well-known to the Special Prosecutor, from the beginning of the case. And to the public for months:

On September 7th [former Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage admitted to being the source in the CIA leak. [15] Armitage claims that [prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald had originally asked him not to discuss publicly his role in the matter, but that on September 5 Armitage asked Fitzgerald if he could reveal his role to the public, and Fitzgerald consented.

What Libby will be on trial for are flimsy perjury and obstruction of justice charges, in what is increasingly looking like a vindictive prosecution; if convicted he will be a prime candidate for a pardon from President Bush before he leaves office.

The notion that Libby, a lawyer by profession, would lie to the FBI and subsequently a grand jury over trivial, half-remembered conversations about a non-criminal act is laughable. (True, it didn't stop Clinton, but . . . that's our Bill!)

Champ neglects to mention any of this, but darkly hinted that "it is like Watergate where the coverup becomes more important than the original story." (Paraphrase mine. If you don't like it, CBC, release a transcript.)

About the only place this case is going is into the toilet. If there were true Justice, the careers of Fitzgerald and Champ would shortly follow it.

The Globe and Mail:

To come up with ideas and encourage caucus participation, [Liberal platform co-chairman Bob] Rae had MPs and senators break up into small groups of about five that were asked to develop themes, in bite-size phrases, for the platform.

One MP said that marrying the economy with environmental action was a dominant theme -- "some form of 'It's the environmental economy, stupid.' " Some came up with slogans such as, "The environment is wealth" or "The environment is health," MPs said.

But there were other slogans -- from "Hope and opportunity" to "Leading edge" -- designed to portray the party as more innovative and progressive than the Conservatives.

Let's put our differences aside for the moment and help the Liberals out. They're welcome to any of these:

The Mo is Strong

Now With 30% Less Corruption

We Have Our Convictions

Pay No Attention To The Men Behind The Curtain

There was a leader who had a dog
And Kyoto was his name-o
K-Y-O-T-O
K-Y-O-T-O
K-Y-O-T-O
And Kyoto was his name-o

No charge!

'as anyBODy 'ere sEEn mY ol' friEN' JEaN?
CAn oO tELL me WHEre 'Ee's gOnE
E' LeAd a loT of PEoPle
bUT deY t'rOw 'IM ovERboARD
dA wIDdle gUy fROm ShAWiniGAN

It's little known today, but in the early years of rock and roll, Stéphane Dion attempted to parlay his boyish good looks into a career in music. Criticized for seemingly riding the celebrity coattails of the American singer/songwriter Dion DiMucci, citoyen Dion indignantly denied it.

"iT IS nOT tHE SAme tHINg At aLL," he snapped at a press conference. "'E 'AS tHE nAMe 'DIon aND tHE BELmonts.' mE, i aM 'diON aND tHE belMONTS.' aND mY mOTHer, sHE LiKEs iT."

A couple of singles, featuring strangely-familiar melodies were released:

WeLL, I'M tHE TYPE OF guY WHO wiLL nevER setTLE dowN
wHeRE quOTA GiRLs aRE, weLL yOU kNOw thAT i'M ARouND
i cOAX 'eM, thEY're a TOKen, 'cAUSe tO mE thEY'rE aLL tHE sAME
i wOO 'em and i 'cHUte 'eM, i DOn't EVen kNOw tHEir NAMes
ThEY cAll ME tHE pANDerER - yEAh - the pANDerER
I roAm AroUND ArOUnD ArOUnd AROund

And who can forget this poignant ballad:

EAcH nIGHt I aSk the stARs sO cOLd aNd sO duLL
WHy mUst i BE a greENagER iN HuLL?
WHy mUst i BE a greENagER iN HuLL?

Reviews were mixed. Such as:

"This guy couldn't carry a tune in a bucket."; and,

"What the hell is he singing? I can't make out a word of it."; and,

"Good God, is that the crappiest Photoshop ever, or what? No, wait. Photoshop hasn't been invented yet. So it must be legit."

Reduced to playing ratty nightclubs, Dion soon tired of show business and went back to school. Music's gain is politics' loss.

CTV:

U.S. scientists have been pressured to make their writings on global warming fit with the Bush administration's skepticism on the topic, a U.S. Congressional committee has been told.

A survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists found 150 climate scientists had personally experienced political interference in their work over the past five years. The survey had 279 respondents.

At least 435 incidents were recorded, representatives of the watchdog group told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

"Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change,' 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," said Francesca Grifo.

We're going to hear a lot about the new Union of Concerned Scientists' report on the so-called Republican War on Science that was unveiled at today's hearing chaired by Henry Waxman. What you won't hear is that the UCS report is undeniably Junk Science, a term I try to avoid but completely apposite in this case. The UCS mailed out over 1600 survey forms to climate scientists and based their assertions of political interference on the 297 that got returned. That's a response rate of just 19 percent. OMB guidelines clearly state that a response rate of less than 80 percent requires an investigation of potential biases and an even closer investigation for a response rate lower than 70 percent. A response rate of lower than twenty percent is clearly vulnerable to the charge of a self-selecting sample, perhaps those with an axe to grind against their bosses, the politically motivated, and so on. In short, it proivides all sorts of legitimate reasons to dismiss the survey as utterly unrepresentative. The fact that these so-called scientists went ahead regardless exposes them for the partisan media manipulators they are.

And who were the dissenters crushed under the iron heel of the Bush Administration? Most of the press that I've seen featured two in particular: Drew Shindell and Rick Piltz, with little-to-no coverage of their claims. Marlo Lewis comments in National Review Online:

Another witness, Drew Shindell of NASA, recounted what happened when he published a paper forecasting a warming trend in Antarctica. The Bush White House did not try to stop him from publishing the paper, nor did it try to stop NASA from putting out a press release on it. So what dastardly deed did Bush operatives commit? White House officials twice rejected the titles he and the NASA press corps proposed for the press release, and eventually told them what title to use. This was, in the apt words of another witness, Roger Pielke Jr., ham-handed communications management, but it hardly qualifies as censorship or persecution.

and further goes on to eviscerate Piltz, whose complaints seem equally trivial. Not that you'd know it from lazy, lazy journalists.

I was reading up on the now-finalized purchase of Boeing C-17 heavy airlift by the government. I see that the USAF is allowing us to cut in on its current order. That's most gracious on its part. Or maybe it's getting a bit fed up with schlepping our tanks 'n' stuff around.

Not everyone was thrilled by the news. One man took time from his busy schedule of marching for Hezbollah to denounce it:

"We believe you can lease the aircraft you need for this role," said Denis Coderre, the Liberal Party’s defense critic. "It doesn’t make financial sense to purchase these planes."

Aside from the fact that Coderre is a blithering idiot, there are plenty of good reasons to buy the planes, as enumerated in this Globe and Mail comment thread on the same story (to my surprise, it was about 70% in favor).

I'd completely forgotten about it, but this commenter reminded me of one of the perils of depending on outside assistance:

in one example in the late 1990s we used a foreign owned and registered cargo ship to return sensitive communications and other military equipment to canada from a mission abroad. a contract dispute arose between the canadian government and the owner of the ship while the ship was at sea. the owner ordered the captain to stay at sea and to not sail into montreal harbour and to not deliver his cargo until the dispute was resolved. needless to say, a navy ship went out and had to escort the freighter back into canadian waters (after we boarded it and took control of it). i worked in the ops centre and witnessed this whole fiasco unfold.

It actually happened in August of 2000; as I recall, commandos (either JTF-2 or a specialized Navy team) had to rappel down from helicopters to seize the ship. Most likely the prospect of having our decrepit Sea King choppers hovering overhead so terrified the crew that they offered no resistance.

More on the incident here.

I've grown accustomed to her hate.
She almost makes the stomach spin.
I've grown accustomed to her posts
too nuts for Daily Kos.

That's about the only thing I can quote from Iowahawk's hilarious take on the John Edwards/Amanda Marcotte imbroglio. If you know nothing about the story, Edwards hired the foul-mouthed Marcotte, who runs the Pandagon blog, as one of his official bloggers for his presidential run. If you'd like a taste of her style, Michelle Malkin collected some nice samples of it from Pandagon before they were deleted.

Warning: Language, though if you did read Pandagon, you certainly won't be surprised by it.

of the February 11 Climate Change Celebrity Smackdown Prize is Tom Brodbeck of the Winnipeg Sun: [emphasis mine]

I’m not a scientist. I have no idea if humans are responsible for some, most or all of global warming -- or none at all.

But I do know there’s a pretty healthy debate on it by scientists who actually study this stuff.

And I’m not talking about unqualified frog counters like David Suzuki, either.

I've republished these quotes from the Globe and Mail out of sequence, mainly for my convenience:

[University of Ottawa Professor Amir] Attaran said his interest in the detainee issue began about a year ago when he was asked by the Law Society of Upper Canada to speak at a symposium on torture.

"I asked myself, 'What steps is Canada taking to make sure there will not be torture during our military intervention in Afghanistan?' " He said he ran into a brick wall when he tried to get a copy of the detainee-transfer agreement and that it would have remained secret if he had not persisted in asking questions.

"When I saw it I was very alarmed," he said. "What scandalizes me and what should scandalize this nation . . . [is that] today we are signatories to a treaty under which we do transfer prisoners to the Afghan National Police, self-confessed torturers."

Now what, I wonder, would Prof. Attaran have us do with these prisoners? I doubt he has in mind shooting them on the spot, as we are fully entitled to do, given their status as non-uniformed combatants.

Since handing them over to the Afghan authorities is not an option in Attaran's opinion, are we then to keep them in our custody indefinitely; our soldiers increasingly tied up as glorified jailers? Or should we transfer them to Canada, whence a veritable feast of litigation will ensue by Attaran and his cronies (all underwritten by the government, mind you), trying to gain freedom (and refugee status) for these barbarians.

If Attaran gets his way, expect a quiet message to be propagated through the ranks: Taliban and al-Qaeda die where we find them.

It wouldn't be anything new. Following the massacre of Canadian prisoners by the SS in Normandy, we proved rather difficult to surrender to.

Attaran said his interest in human rights and the accountability of institutions grew out of his immigrant experience and a seminal trip through Africa before working on his doctorate at Oxford.

"There in Africa, in the middle of Angola, it was astonishing to me that young men and women of my age who were just fantastically mentally gifted . . . would never have the opportunity to go to Berkeley, to go to Oxford, UBC, be a faculty member at Harvard, Ottawa.

"They were opportunities I got and they didn't -- just by accident of birth. . . . So it is clear to me that there is something that I have to pay back. That is the foundation of my morality."

Yeah, whatever, you preening jackass. If the Taliban get back in power, too bad that Afghan children won't get those opportunities. Sucks to be them, huh?

I certainly hope that Stephen Harper follows through on the idiotic Kyoto bill, which I have renamed in the above title in honor of its sponsor; as well as the fact that his head will decorate a pike on Parliament once it becomes clear what it would entail.

Harper should put out a plan in 60 days as specified by the bill plainly detailing the Kyoto targets and the costs and consequences of achieving them. Then call an election and point out that this is the Liberal-NDP-Bloc plan to possibly fix a problem that may or may not exist.

Harper can personally supervise the installation of Rodriguez's noggin on top of the Peace Tower.

I've long maintained that the signing of the Kyoto Accord was nothing less than an act of treason. I've seen nothing in the interim to change my mind.

Chicago Tribune:

Al Gore, the former vice president and now hit documentary-maker, on Thursday added rock promoter to his resume, announcing plans for a 24-hour concert series around the world to highlight the dangers of global warming.

The concerts, set for July 7, are part of a campaign, Save Our Selves--The Campaign for a Climate in Crisis, that promoters hope will trigger a broad movement to address what Gore calls a climate crisis.

Ban rock concerts, that is. Do you know how much juice those Marshall stacks suck up? Me either, but I'll bet it's a lot. And all that Bic-flicking is sending an entirely wrong message. Let's not even get into the pyrotechnic displays. Or trucking gear around and choppering in the talent.

It's time to share the pain, kiddies.

From the CBC's report on the East Coast Music Awards:

It is the second year the foul-mouthed TV and film stars, played by Robb Wells, John Paul Tremblay and Mike Smith, have played host.

The boys kept their language clean and performed a heart-warming rendition of Kitties are So Nice, with Bubbles on guitar.

However, Newfoundland and Labrador comedian Mary Walsh referred to the federal Conservatives as 'the arse-lickers of Satan' before introducing a performer.

Walsh, a state-sponsored "comedienne" who combines the physical charm of Rosie O'Donnell with the comic range of Margaret Cho, has an interesting approach to telling a joke. If nobody laughs, she repeats it word for word, but LOUDER. I've never had the misfortune of finding out, but I would imagine that her shows are a rather deafening affair by their conclusion.

Alicia Colon in the New York Sun:

The total military dead in the Iraq war between 2003 and this month stands at about 3,133. This is tragic, as are all deaths due to war, and we are facing a cowardly enemy unlike any other in our past that hides behind innocent citizens. Each death is blazoned in the headlines of newspapers and Internet sites. What is never compared is the number of military deaths during the Clinton administration: 1,245 in 1993; 1,109 in 1994; 1,055 in 1995; 1,008 in 1996. That's 4,417 deaths in peacetime but, of course, who's counting?

Jonah Goldberg in The Corner asked for confirmation of these numbers, and a reader obliged:

Note that there were far more military deaths in 1980, the last year of Carter's presidency, than any year of the current administration. The death rate was, also, higher. This was because of lower standards and less care in training.

The bottom line is that we're fighting this war with lower casualties than that expected from normal training accidents in a peacetime army. You should be embarassed that you didn't know this. It's a testiment to the near universal innumeracy and incompetence of the journalism profession that most journalists haven't even seriously considered looking at basic statistics and putting things in context 5 1/2 years after 9/11.

and also included a Department of Defense link (warning: PDF file) that lists deaths by all causes from 1980 to 2004. In fact, the Clinton quagmire years total out at 8,793 casualties.

BBC:

Iraq's cabinet has approved a draft of a national oil law that would share revenues from the country's vast oil reserves among its ethnic groups.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki described the agreement as a "gift to all the Iraqi people".

Iraq's Shia majority and Sunni and Kurdish minority groups have squabbled over how to distribute oil revenues since the US-led invasion in 2003.

The draft bill must now be submitted to Iraq's parliament for a vote.

The cabinet decision to back the oil law came two months after the government's own deadline for legislation to come into force.

This is huge news from Iraq; critical for its future stability. You would think it would merit just the slightest mention on the CBC's national newscast.

You would be wrong. I guess it doesn't fit into the standard Americans-are-there-just-to-steal-the-oil template.

CBC:

Liberals are demanding that a Conservative member of Parliament apologize for saying that there are "extremist elements" within the Liberal party.

"We know there is an extremist element in the Liberal party generally that has been very vocal in opposing measures that are designed to combat terrorism," Ottawa Tory MP Pierre Poilievre told a radio interviewer last week.

"And it would seem that Mr. Dion has collapsed under the pressure from those groups."

Poilievre remarks come in the wake of Tuesday's vote over extending anti-terrorism measures that provide authorities with special arrest and investigative powers. The measures, which are set to expire Thursday, were introduced by the Liberals following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. But Liberal Leader Stephané Dion opposes extending some of the provisions.

"All of us are looking to understand why the Liberals have had this sudden flip-flop. We're looking for an explanation of their motives," Poilievre said. "Now we know that a lot of extremist groups and people with some very hard left-wing views have advocated for along time that these provisions should be scrapped."

Cue the extremists. Oh, you thought he meant you?

Liberal MP Omar Alghabra called Poilievre's comments "outrageous, slanderous" and demanded an apology.

"This is the pattern that this government, this Conservative party, is following in choosing to go to the lowest level of politics that they can find to smear people just to make a political point," he said.

"Instead of focusing on the substance of the debate, they're trying to distract Canadians and smear honourable members of the House."

Liberal MP Navdeep Bains said the Liberal party is seeking legal advice about possibly suing Poilievre.

In the radio interview, Poilievre was asked whether he thought Bains was an extremist. Poilievre would only say that he doesn't comment on individuals.

I think we might be on to something here. Every week we accuse the Libs of harboring other miscreants -- pornographers, arsonists, double parkers -- and see who shows up to hold an indignant press conference.

Michael Ignatieff considered before settling on 'just a sideshow' to describe the relatives of Canadian 9/11 victims:

1. fame addicts

2. a freak show

3. Islamophobes

4. pity whores

5. Canadian Idol wanna-bees

6. a travelling carnival of grief

7. Israeli war criminals

8. climate change deniers

9. sleepy-eepy gwumblebunnies, sss oo are, sss oo are!

and <drum roll> this one, which he plans to use frequently in the future: </drum roll>

10. a bunch of people who probably aren't voting Liberal, anyway.

Well, this would explain my pathetic traffic. The Chinese government, fearful of my growing reputation for providing utterly unproductive and bourgeois Flash games, has blocked this fine blog. At least that's my interpretation.

The test isn't definitive -- it routes the URL through one server in China and sees if it can load the page, so it's a limited sampling.

Needless to say, I would wear it as a badge of pride that a totalitarian, evil regime would find me subversive enough to censor. In case I haven't been blocked already, I'll just say this: Tiananmen Square -- yay! Falun Gong -- yay! 2008 Olympics -- boo! Mao Tse-tung -- boo!

And speaking of that last example, stop changing the way you spell stuff every couple of years. Why the hell should we care if it's closer to the way you pronounce things?

That should do it.

You can check the status of other sites here.

Via The Presurfer

...phones up the Globe to share every single element of an internal strategic debate over the Liberal ad strategy designed to blunt the effect of a highly successful Conservative ad campaign?

If I were Stéphane Dion or his principal secretary, I'd view this article as my cue to start looking around the Office of the Leader of the Opposition for people to fire. No matter how senior.

-- Paul Wells

Ring! Ring!

"'AlLO? CaMPbEll cLARk? iT Is ME, --"

"Citoyen! I'd recognize that voice anytime. Whatcha' got?"

"yOU reMEmBer wHat We tAlK aBoUt laS' TiME?"

"Sure do. Got a byline out of it and everything."

"wELl, lET mE teLL yoU ThE boSS 'e vERy mAD beCAuSe oF 'dAt."

"Um, Citoyen --"

"t'E bOsS, 'E rEAdy tO fiRE mE, 'e A sTRonG LEadeR 'oo sEt pRiORitY."

"Oh, great. Paranoia and dissociation. Sté -- I mean Citoyen, you didn't--"

" 'dAT's AnoTHEr thINg. WE mEEt aT 'Da uSuAL PLacE?"

"Jeez, you still owe me $200. Give Wells a call, maybe he's got something."

Click!

National Post:

Canada's use of the term "visible minorities" to identify people it considers susceptible to racial discrimination came under fire at the United Nations yesterday - for being racist.

In a report on Ottawa's efforts to eliminate racial discrimination in Canada, the world body's anti-racism watchdog said the words might contravene an international treaty aimed at combatting racism.

Members of the Geneva-based Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also questioned other terms used by the federal government, among them "ethnocultural communities."

It won't happen until Stephen Harper wins a majority government; but I'll bet when he does he'll tear a page out of Aussie PM Howard's book, who told this klatch of international busybodies to bugger off.

I googled up the Committee and found it stacked with the usual (and with only two women among the sixteen members. Tsk!) crowd from human-rights titans like Algeria, China, Pakistan and Egypt. The US delegate resigned in October of last year, and the Americans haven't bothered to send a replacement.

I would recommend John Bolton. Heh.

Yet again I am in possession of a hot story which has eluded the attention of the blogosphere. It reminds me all too well of the critical flaw in Chrétien's "Me too, Bill!" Kosovo War: The failure to appreciate that these people were truly, deeply nuts.

Mind you, the Serbs come off as kind of weird, too:

THE BODY of Slobodan Milosevic, the late president of Serbia and butcher of the Balkans, has suffered the indignity of having a wooden stake driven through the heart in a ritual "vampire exorcist" attack.

Days before the first anniversary of Milosevic's burial in his home town of Pozarevac, a young self-confessed "vampire hunter" and paid-up member of the local chapter of The Resistance, presumably to the Undead, dealt with the mortal remains of the late dictator in the time-honoured Balkan fashion.

The first anniversary of a man's death is a significant date in the Vampire Hunters' Almanac, apparently a well thumbed handbook in Serbia and other, even darker corners of the Balkans. Milosevic's significant anniversary date fell yesterday.

Concerned relatives are anxious to avoid a repeat performance:

Slobodan Milosevic's daughter Marija Milosevic has hired security guards to protect her father's body from vampire hunters.

The self-styled vampire hunters have already made one attempt at driving a wooden stake through the former dictator's heart to 'stop him returning from the dead'.

Oh, sure. Now she thinks of it.

CBC:

The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a legal ban on reporting early vote results on federal election nights in regions of the country where the polls are still open.

In a 5-4 decision, the top court ruled the section of the Canada Elections Act that bans the publication of voting results until all federal polls close on election night does not violate the Charter of Rights.

British Columbia software designer Paul Bryan had challenged the 1938 ban, saying modern communications technology, such as the internet, rendered it obsolete.

He argued it violates the Charter of Rights' guarantee of freedom of expression and another section of the Charter that protects freedom of political association.

Federal lawyers argued the law should be maintained to ensure electoral fairness for all Canadians.

The court wrote that the ban is a "reasonable limit" on the Charter because it maintains "informational equality" among voters and contributes to "the fairness and reputation of the electoral system as a whole."

In another case, the Court voted 7-2 to restrict automotive traffic to 8 kph to "avoid scaring the horses."

Hey, don't take my word for it.

Via grow-a-brain

Humor by Simon Rich in The New Yorker, about how children perceive the adult world:

Mr. President! Did you hear about Woodstock?

Woo -- Woodstock? What in God’s name is that?

Apparently, young people hate the war so much they’re willing to participate in a musical sex festival as a protest against it.

Oh, my God. They must really be serious about this whole thing.

That’s not all. Some of them are threatening to join communes: places where they make their own clothing . . . and beat on drums.

Stop the war.

But, Mr. President!

Stop all American wars!

(sighs) Very well, sir. I’ll go tell the generals.

Wow. It’s a good thing those kids decided to go hear music.

Sounds like they all became socialists when they (allegedly) grew up.

French artists paste giant posters of, from left, a Palestinian Muslim cleric, an Arab Christian priest and an Israeli Jewish rabbi on a separation barrier in the West Bank. The artists are part of the organization "Face2Face," and they hang giant images of Israelis and Palestinians who do similar jobs alongside each other on both sides of the separation barrier. Their aim is to contribute to a better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Because as we all know, if there's one group of people who wouldn't possibly take offence to having a spiritual leader portrayed like he's being molested by a pickle, it's the Palestinians. How they will chuckle at this goofy good-humor!

You can see the Face2Face site here. Hurry, before something unfortunate happens.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Also Madam Speaker, you bitch:

The State of the Blog is Strong.

<applause> . . . </applause>

My apologies for the paucity of posts lately. Last week I came down with what I believe was a mild case of food poisoning. Apart from feeling like I'd been hit by a truck and immediately puking up whatever nourishment I could choke down, it wasn't so bad.

The next morning, I woke up feeling great. The knot in my stomach and the chills were gone. I lay there for some minutes, wiggling my toes to confirm my now-restored health. Then I sprang out of bed and fell flat on my face.

I don't know if it was related to my original illness or if it was mere coincidence, but I seemed to have developed an inner-ear infection, with the bonus side-effect of destroying my sense of equilibrium.

It's not that you're dizzy (though there is some of that) but that you seem to have forgotten where to put your feet. You take a step and your foot lands where it shouldn't; you try to catch your balance with your other foot and under or over-compensate; repeat the process; the next thing you know, you're sprinting sideways at 25 mph, heading for an encounter with the wall. This is a journey which invariably ends in tears.

I couldn't even make it across the room without clutching at the furniture to steady myself. If I must look like a stumbling drunk at 10 a.m., I'd prefer getting that way the traditional route; it hurts a lot less when you bang your shins into the coffee table.

Mercifully, most of the infection seems to have gone. I'm still a bit shaky on my feet, and there's some residual dizziness, which makes blogging or doing anything on the computer a chore. I'm slowly getting back to my schedule, the rigors of which would shock and appall the sturdiest men amongst you.

<applause> . . . </applause>

In other news, I've signed up with Kontera Technologies to run their ContentLinks ads. Like Google ads, they detect keywords in the text and tailor the ads to suit; the main difference is that Kontera highlights the words with a double-underline and displays a popup balloon when you roll your cursor over one, as in the picture. (I haven't installed the code yet, but will probably do so later tonight.)

Ordinarily, I wouldn't meet Kontera's criteria -- 500K page views per month -- but Vancouver money-blogger John Chow is offering to sign up low-traffic sites that are a) content-driven and b) in English (though they will consider other languages). I would think that nearly all the Blogging Tories sites would qualify, if anyone's interested. The offer is here.

I apologize in advance to any who find this change unaesthetic or unseemly. I too don't like popup links; but you must admit, these are superior to the type that obscure the page until you close them. These you can avoid by not hovering your mouse over them.

And it would be nice to have an additional revenue stream (or more likely, trickle) for this fine blog.

Hey, I'm not going to get rich (or even close to the $8,545 in ad revenue that John Chow reported last month) doing this, but it would be nice to cover my hosting costs and maybe a chunk of the broadband.

Or my medical bills. Click a link or two and make the cripple dance again.

In which Almer Gortry's acolytes address skeptics of the Gorspel:

Some people must believe the Mason-Dixon Line runs between our office and Gore’s mansion, Johnson says. No one would call Gore a redneck, but when we uncovered his hypocritical energy use, it somehow made me a sister-dating hillbilly. That’s quite amusing, since Gore and I live in Nashville, less than five miles apart.

I wondered how long it would take. For someone to blame the Virginia Tech shootings on George Bush, that is.

CBC to the rescue. On The National tonight, Elliott Layton, a former (and formerly-respected) anthropologist who studies mass-murders, attributed it to the Iraq War, and its desensitizing nature as compared to the halycon Clinton years (paraphrase mine -- the cheap-ass CBC still cannot find the money in its $900-million taxpayer-funded budget to provide transcripts).

Just a minute, there, Professor. Let's run the numbers, shall we? Leaving aside the outliers of the Clinton-era Columbine shootings (12 killed ) and Bush's Virginia Tech (32 dead at this writing), which totals were exacerbated by timorous and bungled police responses, we can add up the body counts, thanks to this handy-dandy list of school shootings at Wikipedia:

Bush (and Iraq War!) era (2001-present)

Santana: 2 K(illed)
Rocon: 2 K
Red Lake: 7K
Amish: 5 K
Platte: 1 K

For a total of 17 killed.

Clinton era (1993-2000)

Richland: 2 K
Frontier: 3 K
Pearl: 2 K
Heath: 3 K
Jonesboro: 5 K

For a total of 15 killed. But wait. The list doesn't include Kip Kinkel's 1998 rampage in Oregon, with 2 dead (not counting his parents, whom he murdered shortly before killing two of his classmates).

For a total of 17 killed.

Yeah, hell of a correlation there, Professor. You've flunked Elementary Statistics, but you'll always have a place of honor with the CBC. You have spoken the magic words.

Just to reinforce our moral superiority, and/or for giggles, let's compare Canada's record over the same period. Again I'll leave out the similarly-anomalous École Polytechnique Massacre (14 dead, attributable also to inept and confused policework).

Concordia: 4 K
Dawson: 1 K

Wikipedia also doesn't list the Taber, Alberta shooting, a few days after Columbine (1 killed).

For a total of 6 dead. Applying the usual 10:1 ratio of population difference, we would expect the Americans to have 60 fatalities instead of 34. Sweet pacifist Canada is almost twice as violent as the crazed gun-totin' Yanks. Oh, my.

Update: Via SDA, the clip:

when they decide those compact fluorescent bulbs are also too damned inefficient.

Via b3ta

Inspector Clouseau is on the case:

Federal Liberal Leader Stephane Dion is suggesting the government consider bringing Taliban fighters captured by Canadian soldiers to this country.

He says, "We should find another solution. We may bring them in [sic] Canada. We may keep them under our control in Afghanistan."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has already rejected the idea of holding Taliban prisoners in Canada.

Bring them here, and let them live among their people. With any luck maybe one of them would do us the favor of sawing Jack Layton's head off. I only worry that that wouldn't stop it from continually yakking.

Leave it to the moonbats at Daily Kos to come up with this weepy eulogy for the Virginia Tech shooter:

Cho lived in shadows, deep and dark. He attended classes at a prestigious University. He was a scholar, a writer.

Not much of one, if this example is any indication. Maybe the diarist was comparing it to her own wretched prose:

I beseech us all; I ask Americans, émigrés, and individuals in every corner of the globe, do not hold your children tighter, lock them up in buildings where there is little genuine affection.

What the hell that means is anyone's guess. To be fair, a lot of the comments were very critical.

Still.

Via Ace of Spades

Times Online:

Now, in addition to their often murky powers of illumination, low-energy bulbs have been shown to bring another inconvenience in their wake - they disrupt television remote controls.

Scientists have found that the infrared waves given out by some models of the bulbs are almost exactly the same frequency as those from the hand-sets. Sometimes this means the controls fail altogether. On other occasions the channels may be spontaneously switched by the “impostor” rays of the bulbs.

[ . . . ]

Nick Flynn, 46, who runs a project management consul-tancy in Exmouth, Devon, replaced his light bulbs with CFLs two months ago.

Then he discovered the remote control for his 27in Sony flatscreen television had packed up. Flynn sent it to a repair shop, which found nothing wrong but charged him £100 for the check.

He phoned again to tell them the remote control was still not working. It was only then that the guy on the phone said, "Have you recently changed your light bulb?" said Flynn. "Now every time I need to change the channel I pull the plug on the lamp."

This photograph by Jason Reed of Reuters appeared in Saturday's National Post, and it made me laugh out loud. (Unfortunately this picture is of somewhat-lower resolution, and I was unable to find a better version.) It shows US Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (centre) of Scooter Libby and now Conrad Black fame, and what I presume are four members of his office, striding (briskly, one imagines) to a meeting. I think that the intent was to show the hard-charging, incorruptible Officer of the Court and his team on Official Business, and woe betide any pedestrians that get in the way.

What it reminded me of, though, were the late-night ads you see for law firms, where the lawyers (backlit and in soft-focus) snap their heads around in unison to stare into the camera, interspersed with slow-mo shots of them marching manfully (even the women!) through the corridors of power to do battle on your behalf.

Folks, this barely works for me when it's the Pussycat Dolls; and even then it's vaguely risible.

But on the off chance that you're pitching this to the networks, I think it could use some fine-tuning.

So let me put on my Casting Director's hat, which has my name on it and everything.

First, ditch the two frumps on the left. As anyone can tell you, female Department of Justice employees are invariably stunningly-attractive, impeccably-attired, and expert kick-boxers. Those two look like judges at a cat show.

Ditto with the guy immediately to the right of Fitzgerald, the one who looks like David Caruso on a three-day bender. We can hire the real thing if we have to. And what's with the angry-looking man at the far right? Is he trying to use a TV remote?

I could understand that -- if I saw this crew coming down the street at me, I'd be flipping channels, too.

Toronto Sun:

The Conservatives' new environmental platform is a "complete and total fraud" that is "designed to mislead the Canadian people," former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said yesterday.

You'll pay for that, Almer Gortry. * But before we get started, let me insert this meta tag to block the Secret Service robots:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

Stupid robots. Bwahahaha.

Now, where does the bastard live when he's not up here annoying me?

It's easy enough to find out -- just go to Google Maps and type in "Al Gore's house." (Though it does help if you're looking at Nashville or at least Tennessee at the time.)

Hmmm hmmm. Street address and directions. Let's switch to satellite view so we can get a view of the environs:

I'll be damned. He does use 20 times more electricity than the average American.

* I was so proud of this, really I was. It was a play on Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis' 1927 novel about a corrupt preacher. Then a few days ago I googled it. Naturally, one other person had thought of it earlier.

Curse you, Mark Steyn.

At The Torch, Damian Brooks takes a look at gadfly UBC professor (and heretofore undisclosed by our ever-so-conscientious media: NDP advisor; NDP financial contributor; and NDP convention delegate) Michael Byers, who has been running around of late, trying to get Canadian soldiers and (Conservative) politicians indicted as war criminals. (But of course, they "support the troops.")

One paragraph I found especially interesting. I've highlighted a particular phrase that leapt out at me:

Byers closed the night with an anecdote. His friend, Dawn Black, an NDP Member of Parliament, was recently named by NDP leader, Jack Layton, as the party’s defense critic. Apparently, Dawn knows nothing about defense but was named just because she is the smartest cookie in the NDP caucus. So Dawn phones up her pal, Professor Michael Byers, to ask him what she needs to know. "All I know is that peace is good and war is bad," says Dawn. Byers fawningly replies: "Dawn, you’ll be just fine."

Dawn Black? Dawn "Big Guns! HUGE GUNS!!!" Black is the intellectual motor behind the NDP?

It would explain so much.

Via SDA

are being noted south of the border, too.

Investor's Business Daily:

Gore flew over to Canada last week and loudly blasted the Canadian government for its rejection of the Kyoto Treaty as "a complete and total fraud."

Speaking at a Toronto screening of his movie "An Inconvenient Truth," he announced that the Canadian government's new, more realistic plan to reduce greenhouse gases "is designed to mislead the Canadian people."

Not only did he offer an opinion of global warming, he offered an opinion about the Canadian government, too - as if his Oscar for his error-filled documentary had gone to his head and he suddenly confused himself with the ruler of the world.

[. . .]

An outsider like Gore has no idea why Canadians elected the government he attacked. But in the Internet age that hasn't stopped him from helping himself to all the privileges of political participation - without the responsibility.

Canada's environment minister, John Baird, in fact said Gore didn't seem to have read Canada's climate plan at all.

If the media are any indication, Canadians were not impressed: Canadian editorials had titles like: "Time to Muffle Al Gore's Exhaust Pipe."

Shane Doan has three goals (so far -- the third period has just started) at the IIHF World Championship game against Belarus today. Maybe that's why he's the captain?

George Orwell, in December of 1944:

We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are ‘objectively’ aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the ‘objectively’ line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore ‘Trotskyism is Fascism’. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.

This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. For there are occasions when even the most misguided person can see the results of what he is doing. Here is a crude but quite possible illustration. A pacifist is working in some job which gives him access to important military information, and is approached by a German secret agent. In those circumstances his subjective feelings do make a difference. If he is subjectively pro-Nazi he will sell his country, and if he isn’t, he won’t. And situations essentially similar though less dramatic are constantly arising.

National Post:

Canadian activists were out in force at a recent conference in Cairo that sought to forge closer links between the international anti-war movement and Islamic resistance groups, including several on Canada's terrorism list.

About 20 Canadians attended the March 29 to April 1 Cairo Conference, the largest delegation from Canada in the event's five-year history. According to one report, it was also one of the largest delegations from outside the Middle East.

In total, as many as 1,500 delegates from the Middle East, Europe, South Korea and the Americas attended. Many of the Canadian delegates were from the Canadian Peace Alliance, the country's largest umbrella peace organization, and some of its 150 affiliated groups, said peace alliance coordinator Sid Lacombe, who attended the conference.

Groups that sent delegates include the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, the Canadian Arab Federation, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, Artists Against War, the Venezuela We Are With You Coalition, the Toronto-Haiti Action Committee, the Toronto- Egypt Solidarity Campaign and Not In Our Name -- Jews Against Israel's Wars. The conference attracted representatives of at least four organizations that appear on Canada's list of terrorist organizations -- Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Jamaat al-Islamiya.

I hate to intrude on Mr. Lacombe's fantasies of revolution; but we are in a war, and he and his co-rebels have clearly chosen their side.

Wars have consequences, and they extend to people who play footsie with the enemy. Let's imagine that Sid Lacombe's dreams come to fruition; the West's armies quit the field, and the Jihadi have time and space to refocus their attacks. Emboldened in no small part by the likes of Lacombe and his smelly friends, the battles will continue in the Toronto subway and any and every other target where defenceless people gather.

For someone who makes a fetish of civil liberties and your heroic (and imaginary) struggle for them, you don't seem to have thought the problem through.

What do you imagine the state of human rights in this society will be following a Beslan-style massacre? Two or three of them? Or if your technically-challenged buddies actually manage to touch off a nuke in D.C. or Boston?

You expect that the basic decency of your fellow citizens and the rule of law that you fight against will protect you then? You'd better hope that the police find you first -- they might have some residual attachment to procedure and process, and you might even get a fair trial out of it. I don't think that the people you've betrayed will be quite so sentimental. Whether you know it or not, you're on The List.

And when the balloon goes up, payback's going to be a bitch.

Joel at Proud To Be Canadian has dug up a lot of information on Jeff Monaghan, the self-styled "anarchist" (I'll put it in quotes, as he denied the description tonight on the CBC) and Environment Canada flunky who is under investigation by the RCMP on the leaking of the government's "Green Plan."

Go here to see what he found. I'll content myself with scalping the link to Monaghan's lame-o punk band. Warning: Embedded music. And it ain't exactly The Clash.

The Mounties' preliminary interest seems to be concerning "Breach of Trust," the description of which and penalties for are specified in the Criminal Code as:

PART IV: OFFENCES AGAINST THE ADMINISTRATION OF LAW AND JUSTICE Corruption and Disobedience

Breach of trust by public officer

122. Every official who, in connection with the duties of his office, commits fraud or a breach of trust is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years, whether or not the fraud or breach of trust would be an offence if it were committed in relation to a private person.

R.S., c. C-34, s. 111.

So it's a pretty serious charge he's potentially facing. I found some additional commentary on it here:

Of all the sections addressing frauds on the government, perhaps the most general is the one aimed at preventing breaches of trust by public officers. Section 122 of the Criminal Code targets every official who, in connection with the duties of his or her office, commits fraud or a breach of trust. Section 122 does not require intent to commit fraud or a breach of trust. As a result, public officials have broader liability than private citizens who are charged under the general fraud provision, section 336 of the Criminal Code, which requires a specific intent to defraud[69]. Correspondingly, public office holders can be sentenced only to a maximum of five years in prison, whereas private citizens who engage in similar activities can face up to 14 years in jail[70].

For a public office holder to be convicted of breach of trust, it is sufficient that the accused be an official, that the act in question was committed in the general context of the execution of his or her duties, and that the act constitute fraud or breach of trust[71]. For a breach of trust to have occurred, the public official must have committed the act contrary to a duty imposed on him or her by law, and the act must have produced a personal benefit[72]. It is not necessary that the public official have dishonest or corrupt intentions.

Did the act produce a "personal benefit"? I don't know. Presumably he had in mind scoring with anarchist chicks. Not much of a prize, if you ask me, but to each his own. Certainly being in the band wasn't going to do it.

Unless it means going to jail. In which case he will be the one auditioning for the role of "anarchist chick."

In the early 70s, the two entered Cardozo High School in Bayside, NY. Tenet and Jeremy (who's real last name is Hyatt) played on the soccer team together.

Now we can begin to understand the unlikely career of porn star Ron Jeremy: A furious overcompensation for his miserable time in high school. Unless looking like a drowned ferret was all the rage back then, I'm thinking he didn't see a lot of hot girly action.

Not so with future Director of the CIA George Tenet, whose swave, studly unibrow must have driven the ladies into a frenzy. You can just imagine them combing through it with their fingers.

Via grow-a-brain

Brutal torture at Guantanamo Bay:

An accused enemy combatant held at Guantanamo Bay told a military hearing he was physically as well as mentally tortured there by having to read a newsletter full of 'crap,' being forced to use unscented deodorant and shampoo and having to play sports with a ball that would not bounce.

Majid Khan of Pakistan denied any connection to Al Qaeda and said he was tortured and his family hounded by U.S. authorities, according to a redacted transcript released Tuesday by the Pentagon.

Khan told an April 15 hearing called to determine whether he was rightly classified as an "enemy combatant" that he also had his baby pictures taken from him, that cleaners left marks on his cell walls and that detainees have no DVD players or other entertainment.

At one point, Kan said he wrote on his walls, "stop torturing me, I need my mails, newspaper and my lawyer."

Khan was captured in Pakistan in 2003. The military says he has provided support to Al Qaeda and has expressed a desire to assassinate Pakistan's President Pervez Musharaff. U.S. government authorities have said that Khan was also involved in plots to blow up American gas stations and poison U.S. reservoirs. The April 15 hearing is the first step in possible war crimes charges against him.

[. . .]

He said he has been unable to see his daughter, was denied communal recreation for 11 weeks, went four weeks without sunlight and fresh air, was deprived of basic or comfort items for three weeks, had his beard shaved twice and was forced to wear a protective suicide prevention smock.

And he complained that he was only given cheap unscented soap and shampoo, and that in the recreation room there is "no weight lifting machine, no toilet, no sink, ho hoops, and even balls them self have little air in them; they hardly bounce."

"They know my weaknesses - what drive me crazy and what doesn't," he said.

Apparently it doesn't take much. No doubt they decided that waterboarding this one wasn't worth the effort.

In an apparently more-civilized age, the Kentucky congressman and senator Henry Clay was once asked if the death of a political foe pleased him. He replied (this might be a paraphrase, as I was unable to find the quote):

No. When God puts His hand on a man's shoulder, I take mine off.

What triggered this memory was the recent death of Jerry Falwell. The nutroots responded with their usual unbounded glee:

Jerry Falwell collapsed in his office this morning, and he’s in the hospital, and he’s "gravely unresponsive."

At a time like this, people deserve sympathy and good wishes ... except for Falwell, who is an evil sonofabitch.

I didn't have much time for Falwell; but I had even less for one of his main antagonists, Larry Flynt, publisher of the repulsive Hustler. So it was a bit of a surprise to read this statement from Flynt today:

The Reverend Jerry Falwell and I were arch enemies for fifteen years. We became involved in a lawsuit concerning First Amendment rights and Hustler magazine. Without question, this was my most important battle -- the l988 Hustler Magazine, Inc., v. Jerry Falwell case, where after millions of dollars and much deliberation, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in my favor.

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

A graceful and -- dare I say it? -- almost Christian rememberance.

Salon: (You need a "site pass" -- by clicking on the featured ad -- to read the article in full.)

Free from handcuffs, but under the watchful eye of guards, the two brides wore street clothes during the ceremony, which was performed by a minister. The Mrs. and Mrs. inmates' names were not released, but one is serving a 34-month sentence for breaking and entering, assault with a weapon and aggravated assault, while the other has been doing six years hard time for manslaughter, assault and assaulting a peace officer. The wedding night was reportedly chaste, since the prisoners must continue to sleep in separate cells. But both brides are scheduled to be released by the end of this year, on Nov. 18 and Dec. 6, respectively.

Not everyone involved in the wedding shed tears of joy. The Canadian prison guards' union opposed the match. "It's the value and ethics of getting married in jail while they're serving time together in the same institution," said Kevin Grabowsky, president of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers. "It's not Club Fed, where you go and meet your spouse." He raised the concern that the union might cause security problems; for instance, if the couple had a "marital spat," or if one spouse had a dispute with a guard, the other might try to exact revenge. Talk about a killjoy. C'mon, Grabowsky, lighten up, it's a wedding! Also, haven't you ever heard the one about how love will find a way? [emphasis mine]

Edmonton Sun:

Two female inmates, who married in a quiet ceremony in January at the Edmonton prison - the first time a same-sex marriage was held inside a women's prison - have endured a stormy relationship right from the very beginning, said Grabowsky.

And when the pair get into squabbles, like the one that left one of them suffering a swollen eye, the other takes out her frustrations on the guards, he said.

Guards have had a door slammed in their face and have had profanities hurled at them, he said. The inmates have also smashed up appliances and broken windows.

CSC offered the women counselling to get through their rough patches and the warden even played Yagtzee [sic] with the pair to ease their tensions, Grabowsky said.

But nothing has seemed to work.

Not even Yahtzee? That never fails to tranquilize me. It's like Thorazine in a dice cup.

"These two feed off each other," Grabowsky said. "If one does something to piss off the other, we're the ones who take the heat."

Separating the pair by sending one to another institution would put an end to the situation, Grabowsky said.

It was when all else failed that guards at the jail hoped one of the pair would be transferred.

But when the Correctional Service of Canada balked, 14 of 15 guards at the jail asked for transfers out of the maximum security cell block where the female inmates live in different cells.

The Star:

As Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepared to arrive in war-torn Afghanistan, the orders from his security detail to reporters were clear - don't get between the Prime Minister and his team of bodyguards.

In other words, don't get inside the bubble.

When Harper goes on the road these days, that's never a problem - reporters are rarely allowed inside the bubble.

Harper, who has steered clear of holding Ottawa news conferences, has taken that style on the road, preferring carefully staged photo ops and speeches over real interactions with reporters who fork out thousands of dollars to accompany him. [emphasis mine]

Oh, man, am I delighted to pass this along to you, Bruce. You can charge all the costs back to The Star!

No, really. Check with your office. You were probably driving the accountants nuts trying to figure out why you weren't expensing out your trips.

Who knows? You might even start to make a profit doing it this way!

On Sunday I had the TV on CNN's Late Edition. I wasn't paying a lot of attention but my ears perked up during an exchange between moderator Wolf Blitzer and Democrat Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. They were discussing a fence on the Mexican border. I thought I heard Rangel say something preposterous. And so he did:

BLITZER: Well, let me ask Congressman Rangel, he's the chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. Is this American taxpayer money well-spent to go ahead and spend hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, on a new fence, a border fence, between the United States and Mexico?

RANGEL: The problem that Duncan Hunter has when he's president is whether or not he's going to use illegal immigrants to build the fence because there is a shortage of labor. No, they say that the American Ladder, since he's built the fence, has really had 100 percent in profits. They got these 50-foot fences and 55-foot ladders.

It's absolutely ridiculous in a great democracy like the United States of America should be known like Germany was when the Russians put up a fence to keep people out.

I have no idea what he was trying to say in that first paragraph. In the second, the portly gasbag apparently believes the Soviet claim that the Berlin Wall was built to stop greedy Westerners from streaming into the workers paradise of East Germany. I guess that explains all those people shot in the back in the attempt.

Even the East Germans weren't that gullible.