Mulroney Playing for Time

Brian Mulroney is looking for a 2-week adjournment of the public inquiry into his dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber.

Mulroney's lawyer contends the extension would give counsel more time to examine documents (gee, what have they been doing all these months?) and allow inquiry head, Justice Jeffrey Oliphant, time to clarify just how Mulroney's conduct is to be assessed.

Pratte wants a line drawn to demarc "above reproach" from "ordinary dirtbag." That fictional line would be the day Mulroney left office. From the Toronto Star:

Oliphant has already rejected a contention by Mulroney that the only proper yardstick for assessing his actions is the 1985 cabinet ethics code he himself put in place.

The judge served notice, in a ruling last month, that he would cast a wider net and take account of ethical provisions contained in federal statutes such as the Financial Administration Act, the Income Tax Act and even the Criminal Code.

Oliphant hastened to add that he didn't intend to draw any conclusions about civil or criminal liability, something he's barred from doing under his mandate.

He concluded, however, that he couldn't be bound by the narrow confines of the 1985 ethics code. "This inquiry is ultimately concerned with the good government of Canada," said the judge.

It's hard to say but Pratte seems to be invoking the legal maxim, "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." Mulroney's team also want to know what smoking guns Schreiber will bring to the inquiry. In the wake of the Commons ethics committee hearings, Schreiber has already disclosed documents suggesting that Mulroney aide Fred Doucet wasn't truthful when he told the committee, under oath, that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the Airbus-Air Canada deal. Doucet's evidence served to corroborate Mulroney's unsworn statements. If, as the documents appear to suggest, Doucet was lying, then it raises no end of questions about Mulroney's evidence.

If you're interested in what started this all, Stevie Cameron has reproduced the anonymous letter she received at The Globe and Mail. She also has the transcript of notes taken during her interviews with the Mulroneys' chef, Francois Martin.

http://steviecameronblog.blogspot.com/

If you're looking for more, check out the items done by The Fifth Estate at http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/unauthorizedchapter/schreiber.html

Joe the Rat Says - Condoms Cause AIDS

Pope Benny, aka Joe Ratzinger, is at it again. This time the Pope is in Africa where he opined that condoms contribute to the spread of AIDS. From Reuters:

"It (AIDS) cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem," he said in response to a question about the Church's widely contested position against the use of condoms.


http://www.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUSLH936617._CH_.2400

A Fine, Tory Idea

The Conservative government has announced it will put up just over $21-million to assist in training Afghan police and corrections officers.

Maybe when we get those Afghans all trained up we can bring some of them over here to train the RCMP.

Canada's Dysfunctional Little War

Our American cousins are getting annoying again. With another 17,000 troops en route to Afghanistan they'll soon have nearly a quarter of the force that would have had a chance at securing the countryside back in, say, 2003 when that was still a viable option.

Having utterly screwed up the Afghan war for the past eight years, the reinforced Americans are suddenly full of bright ideas, gratuitous advice and a bucketful of that arrogance that we've all come to know and love. The Washington Post interviewed various American commanders in Afghanistan who were outspoken about Canada and the other NATO forces:

When NATO forces were deployed to the south in 2006, the Canadians were assigned the province of Kandahar, the British got Helmand, and the Dutch were sent to Uruzgan. The three nations developed their own battle plans and agendas for development. They established provincial reconstruction teams that report to their capitals, not the NATO regional command at the Kandahar airport.

People at the regional command now joke that the three provinces should be renamed Canadahar, Helmandshire and Uruzdam.

"It's a totally dysfunctional way of fighting a war," said a U.S. officer in the south. "You've got each of these guys doing their own thing in their provinces with very little coordination."

The fractured approach is a result of demands imposed by NATO members as a condition of sending troops to Afghanistan. Each nation wanted its own chunk of the action so it could show off what it had accomplished. That model has been less problematic in the far north and west, where there has been less violence, and in the east, where the U.S. military has established its own command.

"The big question for NATO now isn't whether members are going to send more troops or what caveats will be placed on those troops, but whether the nations who have decided to stand up and fight will actually fight together," a senior U.S. military official said.

The task of trying to get everyone to collaborate has fallen to Nicholson, who is pushing the British, Canadians and Dutch to embrace a more integrated approach to war-fighting and development. "We need a coherent regional plan for victory," he said, "not a bunch of national plans for victory."

Wait just one minute. There may be real merit in these criticisms but the time for criticism was 2005, four years ago. The Dutch are set to leave next year and we're supposed to be out the year after that. You don't leave it until 2009 to try to reform the mission.

The American commander is right in calling for a "coherent regional plan for victory." That would begin with about 200,000 troops flooding the southern provinces to establish security and America has already given that idea a pass. NATO forces have never been in this war to win but neither has the lead partner, the United States, and, after all, when it comes right down to it, this is America's war.

When America's military gets into wars that go badly, there's a point at which they switch from war-fighting mode to finger-pointing mode as they gear up to dodge responsibility for failure. Anyone who was around to notice in the aftermath of Vietnam will recall how this game is played. The first line is "we never lost a battle." Then you simply pin the loss of the war on any convenient mark. You can blame the feckless politicians or the ungrateful civilians at home.

The parallel between Vietnam and Afghanistan is that the bad guys are fighting a different war than the war we're fighting over there. They're waging a political war, an insurgency. We're fighting a military war. We're bound to win all the battles in our war because we're the only side with artillery, tanks, attack helicopters and strike fighters. But our war doesn't matter except for conjuring up excuses and pointing fingers. It's their war that matters because that's the one that'll remain when our war has run its course and we've pulled up stakes.

So our generals and America's generals will beat their chests and bleat "it's not our fault" which, by definition, means it must be someone else's fault, it must be your fault. But it's America's generals who have the most blame to spread around and they'll smear it wherever it might stick, including their NATO allies.

The tide has changed. Last year the NATO forces were invaluable allies, this year they're hapless Surrender Monkeys. The Pentagon is getting ready to run up the White Flag.

A Dandy Primer on Credit Default Swaps

The Republicans decriminalized them, bogus insurance policies called Credit Default Swaps. These scams now total more than the global GDP. These are the ticking time bomb behind the global meltdown.



These swaps should be ruled null and void, written off the books entirely. There was no way any reasonable person would have or could have expected the CDS issuer to be able to pay them off if called.

Frum Pokes Bristol

I'm no great fan of David Frum but some of his missives during the post-apocalyptic Repug era have been pretty good. Today Frum takes a poke at Bristol Palin, what she means to hardcore Republicans and why they need to get out of this rut. From the National Toast:

Many conservatives carry in their heads a mental image of American society that’s a generation out of date. They imagine the existence of a huge class of socially conservative downscale voters, ready to vote Republican because of abortion and gay marriage.

The story of Bristol Palin should help puncture this illusion.

...Of children born to white women with a college degree, only 8% were born out of wedlock. But of children born to white women who did not finish college, 28% were born outside of marriage. Of children born to white women who stopped their education after high school, 42.1% were out of wedlock. And of births to white women like Bristol Palin, who have not completed high school, almost 61% were out of wedlock.

It may still be true ...that there remain many socially conservative voters who are “white, working- and middle-class, Catholic, small-town, rural, unionized, middle-age and seniors, and surviving on less than $50,000 a year.” But the key fact about those voters is tucked into the middle of that sequence of descriptors: “middle-aged and seniors.” Younger white downscale voters are a very different story.

It is marriage that creates culturally conservative voters – and young downscale Americans are not getting married. When they do marry, they do not stay married: While divorce rates among the college educated have declined sharply since the 1970s, divorce rates among high school graduates remain ominously high.

The socially conservative downscale voter is increasingly becoming a mirage – and a Republican politics based on that mirage will only lead us deeper into the desert.



One thing that Frum overlooks is those states which have the highest rates of education and marital stability and the lowest rates of unwed teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease - are Blue States. They vote solidly Democrat, they always have.

Frum's Republicans would have a better chance if they could get the people of the Slave States to begin acting more like the people of the Blue States but that isn't going to happen. They're going to remain America's cesspit of poverty, ignorance and bigotry.



http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/13/david-frum-bristol-palin-and-the-conservative-mirage.aspx

Harper Drops a Whopper

According to Stephen Harper, understanding the global meltdown is simple - it's all the fault of American consumers and American investors. They didn't act like conservatives, you see.

It wasn't the doing of his American idols, Bush-Cheney. Remember Dick was the guy who proclaimed that "deficits don't matter." It wasn't their late-term lackey Alan Greenspan or voodoo economist, senate banking chairman Phil Gramm, or all their big Republican backers on Wall Street. It really had nothing to do with toxic derivative securities and equally lethal credit default swaps. The decriminalization of inherently corrupt Wall Street practices was irrelevant.

How does Harper find the strength to shovel that much horse shit behind the curtain?

Steve says the problem was that the Americans weren't conservative. He conveniently overlooks the Zero-Forty (zero money down, 40-year term) mortgages he and Flaherty unleashed on the market and later very quietly withdrew. Our Furious Leader is a total hypocrite. If he'd had his way we'd have been in the same mess that both Washington and London brewed up for their countries. He just didn't have enough time to undo the sound regulatory, banking and insurance regime bequeathed to him by Paul Martin along with balanced budgets and healthy "rainy day" surpluses.

Of course, Steve was peddling this crap at the "Manning Institute of Democracy" a conservative think-tank that seems to do so little thinking as to be able to swallow this nonsense.

Madoff - The Same Old Story Only Bigger

It's the same old story. A person holding the money of others in trust. A difficult moment arrives. The guy with the money decides to borrow a bit of it, just enough to weather the storm, just for a short time. He takes some of the money. He breaks the taboo just that once. He takes the money telling himself that he'll put it back before anyone even knows it's gone.

And from there on in the theft takes on a life of its own and grows bigger and bigger with each passing day. In very short order the void created from the theft becomes too big to fill, too big to cover up and then the original theft simply begets a continuum of ever larger thefts necessary to disguise the truth.

For Bernie Madoff this wasn't about the money he misappropriated. It was about what would happen to him, to his exalted reputation, if and when it was discovered. He didn't break the taboo because he wanted a few bucks, he broke it to protect Bernie Madoff and everything he'd built.

It's hard to say how often these scams work. They're very difficult to conceal in the long run and that's probably what sets Madoff apart from his garden variety confreres, the lawyers who bilk their clients of a few million. He got away with it for at least two decades while regulators somehow looked the other way, even ignoring specific warnings.

Madoff probably realized shortly after this began that there was no good way out for him, that the only thing undecided is when his day of reckoning would arrive. Unfortunately for his victims, Bernie Madoff didn't have the decency to turn himself in years ago.

A Most Curious Coup

Pakistan is on the verge of yet another coup, one that seems a lot different than Islamabad's normal fare. For one thing, it's being done almost openly. For another, it's being pushed by Washington and London. Another difference is that it's being presented as an ultimatum - change or we'll change you. A real big difference is that, although it appears the coup would be effected by Pakistan's military, the generals themselves wouldn't take over (as in Zia or Musharraf) but would install a civilian right off the bat.

The Hindu reports that Zardari has been put on a very short "or else" timeline by the West:

A volatile situation existed in Pakistan where authorities on Friday continued their crackdown on agitating lawyers staging a 'long march' amidst reports that President Asif Ali Zardari had been set an internationally-backed, 24-hour deadline by the army to end the stir.

Pakistan Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was reported to have got into the act on Friday, meeting Mr. Zardari for the first time since the president returned home Wednesday from a regional meeting in Tehran.

The 24-hour deadline was set under a new deal "backed by Washington, London and the army establishment", A Pakistan News, an independent website run by media professionals, said. There was no official confirmation of the report.

As part of the deal, the website quoted sources as saying, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani has been asked to "immediately convince" Mr. Zardari to "demonstrate the flexibility required" to break the deadlock before the thousands-strong lawyers' march reaches Islamabad.

According to the news website, Zardari was also "asked to go" by the army and Gilani "if he does not accept a new deal hatched by them in consultation with foreign powers".

Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that the Pakistan military doesn't want a military coup.

Stern Talk on Climate Change

Nick Stern, the economist commissioned by the British government to evaluate the impact of global warming, has returned to castigate politicians for failing to accept and act upon the climate threats facing mankind.

His stark warning about the potentially "devastating" consequences of global warming came as scientists issued a desperate plea last night for world leaders to curb greenhouse gas emissions or face an ecological and social disaster.

More than 2,500 climate experts from 80 countries at an emergency summit in Copenhagen said there is now "no excuse" for failing to act on global warming. A failure to agree strong carbon reduction targets at political negotiations this year could bring "abrupt or irreversible" shifts in climate that "will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with".

In a significant break from the scientific tradition not to comment directly on policy, the experts insisted politicians must stand up to "vested interests that increase emissions" and "build on a growing public desire for governments to act". They called for a "shift from ineffective governance and weak institutions to innovative leadership in government, the private sector and civil society".

Now I realize this is only 2,500 legitimate scientists and not the 300 or so tobacco lobby nutjobs corralled by the Heritage Institute who believe that warming is caused by sunspots, aliens and voles and merely mask a looming Ice Age

Read more here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/13/stern-attacks-politicians-climate-change

Yeah Steve, Canada's in the G-Bottom 7

Britain's foreign ministry has decided the G-20 maybe should be reduced to the G-13 and other hangers-on like Canada. After Stephen Harper has worked so hard to put Canada front and centre on the world stage, the Brits think we would be better placed toward the curtains on side stage. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Ahead of a G20 summit in London next month, Britain's foreign ministry has divided the grouping of leading economies into two distinct tiers, one of which has been targeted as "high-priority" for lobbying, the Financial Times said Friday.
The report will likely embarrass the British government just days ahead of a meeting of G20 finance ministers near London on Saturday, before the April 2 summit.
According to the document, which was a tender for public relations services issued in December by the government, the 11 countries are the United States, China, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and South Africa.

The remaining seven -- the G20 includes the European Union's rotating presidency -- are Russia, Australia, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey.

A spokesman for the ministry told the newspaper that the two-tier list was "absolutely not a firm hierarchy of the most important states for our political relations."

He said the 11 countries had been targeted for various reasons, such as having strong non-governmental organisations, media, academia, trade unions and civil society and "non-traditional actors like sovereign wealth funds".

We may not have a sovereign wealth fund but since when has Canada been a slacker on "strong, non-governmental organizations, media, academia, trade unions and civil society?" Christ, to get that from a Brit!

Monbiot - Mankind's Three Perils

Guardian correspondent George Monbiot is at the cutting edge of global warming reportage. Below is his latest article, reproduced in its entirety:

The more we know, the grimmer it gets.

Presentations by climate scientists at this week's conference in Copenhagen show that we might have underplayed the impacts of global warming in three important respects:

• Partly because the estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) took no account of meltwater from Greenland's glaciers, the rise in sea levels this century could be twice or three times as great as it forecast, with grave implications for coastal cities, farmland and freshwater reserves.

• Two degrees of warming in the Arctic (which is heating up much more quickly than the rest of the planet) could trigger a massive bacterial response in the soils there. As the permafrost melts, bacteria are able to start breaking down organic material that was previously locked up in ice, producing billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane. This could catalyse one of the world's most powerful positive feedback loops: warming causing more warming.

• Four degrees of warming could almost eliminate the Amazon rainforests, with appalling implications for biodiversity and regional weather patterns, and with the result that a massive new pulse of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. Trees are basically sticks of wet carbon. As they rot or burn, the carbon oxidises. This is another way in which climate feedbacks appear to have been underestimated in the last IPCC report.

Apart from the sheer animal panic I felt on reading these reports, two things jumped out at me. The first is that governments are relying on IPCC assessments that are years out of date even before they are published, as a result of the IPCC's extremely careful and laborious review and consensus process. This lends its reports great scientific weight, but it also means that the politicians using them as a guide to the cuts in greenhouse gases required are always well behind the curve. There is surely a strong case for the IPCC to publish interim reports every year, consisting of a summary of the latest science and its implications for global policy.

The second is that we have to stop calling it climate change. Using "climate change" to describe events like this, with their devastating implications for global food security, water supplies and human settlements, is like describing a foreign invasion as an unexpected visit, or bombs as unwanted deliveries. It's a ridiculously neutral term for the biggest potential catastrophe humankind has ever encountered.

I think we should call it "climate breakdown". Does anyone out there have a better idea?

Are we going to wake up in time? I know a couple of people working in this field. They both think the chances that we, mankind, will do anything really effective are very slim. One told me that, to keep showing up for work each day required a really strong sense of humour.

Arbour to International Crisis Group

Louise Arbour will be heading the International Crisis Group. From ICG's press release:

The Co-Chairs of the Board of the International Crisis Group, Lord Patten of Barnes and Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, are very pleased to announce that the Honourable Louise Arbour has been selected to be the organisation’s next President and CEO.

She will be formally confirmed by Crisis Group’s Board of Trustees at its meeting in Washington DC in April 2009 and take up the position in July.
Ms Arbour brings with her decades of practical experience in international affairs, having held many high-profile posts in her distinguished career.

From 2004 to 2008, she served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the highest office mandated by the international community to promote and protect human rights. Before this, she was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.

From 1996 to 1999, she served as the Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In these roles, she drove a significant expansion of trial activity, bringing tens of accused war criminals into custody and leading the Tribunal to issue the first war crimes indictment by an international court of a serving head of state, President Slobodan Milosevic.

“I am thrilled to be taking up this new position”, Louise Arbour said. “Understanding very well the influence Crisis Group has among top policymakers, I look forward to leading the organisation in finding ways to confront conflicts and potential conflicts around the world.”

What's the Holdup in Afghanistan?

This doesn't make any sense. NATO officials announced today that registration for the Afghan national elections is complete. According to the Associated Press report, 15.6-million people have been registered to vote, up from the 12.6 registered for the 2005 vote.

If voter registration is finished in mid-March, it's hard to understand why the general elections had to be postponed from May (the date under the Afghan constitution) to August (the date picked by the electoral commission).

It does sound like the fix is in. There has been speculation that the three-month delay is intended to allow potential rivals to Hamid Karzai to come forward and campaign.

Peter Puck Punked

This is the guy who "owned" Wayne Gretzky. How the mighty Pocklington has fallen.

Peter Pocklington was arrested on bankruptcy fraud charges in California. He's to be charged today with false bankruptcy filings and declarations.

According to The Globe: "He filed for personal bankruptcy in California last August, just two days after a raid on his previous residence, initiated by a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit. His net worth is listed in his bankruptcy filing at $2,900 and personal liabilities at $19.7-million."

The gist of the charges appears to be claims that Pete didn't quite disclose all his assets. Oopsie!

Our Global Ecological Ponzi Scheme

Physicist Joe Romm, of climateprogress.org, argues that, when it comes to the earth's climate and future generations, we're all Bernie Madoffs:

In our case, investors (i.e. current generations) are paying themselves (i.e. you and me) by taking the nonrenewable resources and livable climate from future generations. To perpetuate the high returns the rich countries in particular have been achieving in recent decades, we have been taking an ever greater fraction of nonrenewable energy resources (especially hydrocarbons) and natural capital (fresh water, arable land, forests, fisheries), and, the most important nonrenewable natural capital of all — a livable climate.

We aren’t all Madoffs in the sense of people who have knowingly created a fraudulent Ponzi scheme for humanity. But given all of the warnings from scientists and international governments over the past quarter-century (most recently two years ago with “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly“) — it has gotten harder and harder for any of us to pretend that we are innocent victims, that we aren’t just hoping we can maintain our own personal wealth and well-being for a few more decades before the day of reckoning.


Read more here:

http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/08/ponzi-scheme-madoff-friedman-natural-capital-renewable-resources/

(photo - Charles Ponzi, father of all pyramid schemes)

Lincoln's Watch Mystery

The National Museum of American History confirmed a rumour today when it popped the back off Abraham Lincoln's watch to find a message engraved there on April 13, 1861 by watchmaker Jonathon Dillon.

Part of the inscription reads, "Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels" and "thank God we have a government." Sumpter was attacked the previous day by Confederate forces the day previous.

Also plainly visible is the engraving of "Jeff Davis" which must have referred to Jefferson Davis who served as president of the Confederate States of America throughout their existence from 1861 to 1865.

California - Running on Empty

The southwest has run dry. Years of drought and over-dependence on dwindling groundwater stocks has brought the Day of Reckoning to California and other states in that region.

Mother Nature played a dirty trick on us. When we came to settle the West (including our own Alberta and Saskatchewan), we thought that the rainfall patterns were normal. We grew our cities, states and provinces on that core assumption. We didn't know that the white man's arrival sort of coincided with what would be a century of unusually wet conditions. We didn't know that drought is normal in the West with mega-droughts of up to 60-years being the history of the region.

Then along comes global warming and the disruption of normal precipitation patterns. It's now become feast or famine - either too much rainfall causing floods and mudslides, or too little. California, America's market garden, has been especially hard hit. From Reuters:

Water raised leafy green Los Angeles from the desert and filled arid valleys with the nation's largest fruit and vegetable crop. Each time more water was needed, another megaproject was built, from dams of the major rivers to a canal stretching much of the length of the state.

But those methods are near their end. There is very little water left untapped and global warming, the gradual increase of temperature as carbon dioxide and other gases retain more of the sun's heat, has created new uncertainties.

Global warming pushes extremes. It prolongs drought while sometimes bringing deluges the parched earth cannot absorb. California Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow says two things keep him up at night: drought and flood.

University of Arkansas Ecological Engineeering professor Marty Matlock warns the essence of climate change is greater swings in precipitation -- and thus food production. At times of peak demand, prices can skyrocket, he said, as happened to food prices last year.

"There's no slack any more. The rope is tight, and if you give it a tug, it yanks on something," he said.

While farmers suffer, cities continue to grow. The sunny, warm American West remains a magnet.

"Add water and you have the instant good life," said James Powell, author of "Dead Pool," a book about global warming and water in the U.S. West.
"For the last few years, the driest states, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, have been the fastest growing. And you know that can't be sustained," he said.

California is looking at a basket of measures including conservation, groundwater rehabilitation, storm sewer water reclamation, new dams to catch torrential runoffs and desalination. California is actually luckier than many inland states but one thing is clear - its days of cheap water are just about over.

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE52900820090310?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

What's With Kinsella?

I'm always leery of people who seem to like litigation a little too much. Especially when it comes to serial defamation lawsuits it usually turns out that the aggrieved plaintiff comes across as taking their reputation a lot more seriously than others might.

Warren Kinsella is back at it again, suing over his hurt feelings. This time he's targeting the Conservative party and Public Works Minister Christian Paradis.

Mr. Kinsella figures he deserves a million dollars because of a press release that called him "unsavoury, dishonest and that Michael Ignatieff and the Liberal party of Canada" should sever ties with him.

Oh well.

France Is Back

40-years ago Charles de Gaulle created a furor when he pulled France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Well today the French military is back, returned to NATO command by Nick Sarkozy.

Gaullists ...fear France risks losing its independence and ability to act as a counterweight to the US.

Critics say the move means Paris would no longer be able to pursue its own diplomatic alliances and stand apart from Washington, particularly in the Arab world.

France is the fourth-largest troop contributor within NATO and its generals have commanded missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The French "one foot in the door" position of the past four decades has actually worked fairly well - for France anyway.

The French parliament will vote on the issue next week.

Pakistan - Here We Go Again

House arrests are back in fashion as the favourite tool to stifle dissent in Pakistan. The government has placed opposition leaders including Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif under house arrest and has rounded up "hundreds of lawyers and opposition activists" according to The Guardian.

Many opposition leaders are said to have gone into hiding. Pakistani lawyers, supported by opposition leaders, are due to begin a protest tomorrow dubbed the long march to demand the restoration of judges removed from office by the former president Pervez Musharraf.

President Asif Ali Zardari, husband of the assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, has failed to fulfil a pledge to restore the justices since being elected last year.

But the ban on public asssemblies is all for a good cause, namely, "to prevent a bad law-and-order situation." Indeed.

Makes you wonder how much longer the Pakistan Army will wait before it puts Zardari's wobbly government out of its misery?

UN Drug Policy - a Total Failure

A European commission report finds that the United Nations drug policy of the past decade has been an utter failure. From The Guardian:

Representatives from governments are split in their efforts to formulate an international drugs policy for the next decade. The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs is due to formulate a strategy over the next two days, but there is widespread disagreement among delegates and a general feeling that an opportunity for a united approach has been lost.
In an article for the Guardian, Mike Trace, chairman of the International Drug Policy Consortium, says: "We're about to see the international community walk up the political and diplomatic path of least resistance. It will do nothing to help the millions of people around the world whose lives are destroyed by drug markets and drug use. And the depressing thing about it is that we can all book our seats for 2019, to go through this charade again."

The director of the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime, hardliner Antonio Maria Costa, describes the rise in organized crime as "one of the unintended consequences of drug control". Unintended as in undesired surely but hardly as in unforeseeable. Costa's position on drugs has been about as meaningful as the Bush administration's position on sexual abstinence training in high schools.

Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the global drug policy programme at the Open Society Institute, Warsaw, said: "It is now clear that after months of negotiations, millions of people around the world will continue to suffer needlessly. Thanks to the global 'war on drugs' over the past decade, close to 2 million people living in the former Soviet Union are infected with HIV, half a million US citizens languish in prison for non-violent, drug-related crimes, and billions of dollars are spent on destructive military actions in Colombia while the production of cocaine continues to rise."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/11/un-drug-strategy

Do You Feel Afraid?

Obama Veep Joe Biden says the situation in Afghanistan threatens the security of every NATO nation. That said, Biden then asked for suggestions from the Alliance nation's 26-ambassadors.

Biden's appearance was notable for the change in approach from the Bush/Cheney era of unilateralism.

A terror attack in Europe would be seen as an attack on the US, he said. "That is not hyperbole ... We view it as a gateway to further attacks on the United States. So please understand that this is not a US-centrist view that only if America is attacked is there a terrorist threat."

The vice president's visit comes less than a week after the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, also met Nato and EU foreign ministers in Brussels to discuss the volatile state, indicating that reaching out to allies to help in Afghanistan is now Washington's priority.

Obama is looking at how Nato's mission in Afghanistan can turn the tide in the volatile south of the country, which has seen a steady rise in fighting and losses. The top US military officer in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, said on Sunday that coalition forces were not winning the war in the south, which remains the centre of the Taliban-led insurgency.

Biden's approach of asking for suggestions doesn't reflect American weakness but rather a confluence of realities.

- This war is getting into its eighth year.

- The enemy, initially in disarray, has regrouped and returned, resurgent. The Taliban and al-Qaeda now threaten both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

- America's military has been worn down on the gristmill of Iraq leaving it unable to flood Afghanistan with the 2-300,000 troops that would be needed to secure that country.

- The Kabul government has degenerated into an ineffectual clubhouse for crooks, thugs and warlords while both corrupt government officials and the insurgency are fueled by the country's narco-economy.

- The insurgency, once the preserve of the Pashtun Taliban, has expanded to become a broadbased uprising embracing a variety of ethnic and nationalist supporters.

- The Islamabad government is also horribly wobbly, under attack by the Islamists while being closely scrutinized by Pakistan's generals. The Islamist influence is spreading through Pakistan's tribal lands.

- And, above all else, there is the Afghan people and the failing campaign for their "hearts and minds." We've pretty much worn out our welcome and support for these wars at home is flagging, the Achilles' Heel of counterinsurgency warfare.

Suggestions? It's going to take a lot more than suggestions to turn around this disaster. Bush not only slashed all four tires, he keyed the paint and poured sugar in the gas tank.

It's 2009 and, no matter what we say, we're on the defensive. Yes, we're staging Vietnam style "search and destroy" missions but they're turning out to be a lot more searching than destroying. Meanwhile the insurgents are consolidating their presence and control of the border regions and are encircling major cities including Kabul and Kandahar.

Perhaps it's not a question of whether our countries are under threat of attack from the Islamists but, instead, whether anything we're capable of doing in Afghanistan can possibly eliminate those threats?

Pakistan and the United States virtually created the mujahadeen. They funded them and armed them well enough for them to be able to drive out the Soviet army and topple the central government. What happened afterward? Did bin Laden's al-Qaeda soldiers carry on their war into the Soviet Union? No, of course not, they had nothing to gain from it. The Islamists did fight in Chechnya but that independence movement wasn't directly tied to Afghanistan.

So, is it safe to assume that leaving Afghanistan, no longer fighting them "over there," will mean we'll have to fight them at home, "over here?" That's been drummed into us for nearly eight years now, often enough that it's pretty widely accepted as gospel.

Osama bin Laden was on the scene 20-years ago when the Soviets pulled out. He didn't rally his forces to attack Moscow, did he? Washington used to argue that America couldn't leave Iraq relying on the "fight them there, not here" argument. It's curious how that mantra fell by the wayside.

With the exception of foreign terrorists drawn to Iraq by the American presence there, the homegrown gaggle of Iraqi insurgents were focused on internal power struggles. They weren't about to attack America because it would serve no purpose.

What if the Taliban did return as a political entity in Afghanistan? How bad would it be? Would Afghanistan return to civil war? Possibly although it can be argued that the insurgency has already morphed into a civil war.

There's really only one way to find out what would happen and that's to leave Afghanistan. If Karzai gets re-elected in August, it's hard to see what would be the point of staying. A legitimate, viable and popular state entity is the cornerstone of everything we could ever hope for in that country. What's the point of building an army if it is to serve an ineffectual and hopelessly corrupt government? Neither would last very long.

Eight years on, we're left with an awful lot of questions and very few answers, most of which are pretty grim. If the reason for NATO remaining in Afghanistan is fear of attack on the member states, somebody better show something that we've done in Afghanistan that's actually deterred such attacks over the past eight years. I've not heard that we've foiled any grand plots against our homelands in Afghanistan, have you?

British Columbia's "Trusted" Reporters

The Tyee takes a grizzly paw-size swipe at British Columbia's right-wing newspapers this week. It concerns the scam pulled by the Campbell faux-Liberals in 2002 to prepare the public for the transfer of B.C. Ferries to a private company.

A government memo marked "confidential" lays out the government's intricate plan to pitch the scheme to what they knew would be very wary voters.

An appendix to the strategy details the things the public might dislike about the change. There would be "public concern about steep increases in fares and cuts in service," it said.

"British Columbians are proud of and feel a sense of ownership in the ferry service," it added. And there would be "Public concerns about foreign ownership, especially by a U.S. company," a concern for which the spinners were yet to come up with a planned response.

And then there was the question of accountability: "Concerns that an independent BCFS will no longer be accountable to ferry users and the voting public at large." At least in the old days the public knew who to blame when something went wrong.

And who was the chief Judas goat? Why noneother than Mr. Integrity himself, then BC Ferries board chairman David Emerson. Cough, sputter, gag.

Even before the announcement, the communicators would be preparing the public for what was coming. "Leading up to announcement, arrange for David Emerson and other Board members to 'publicly muse' through briefings with trusted reporters about the Wright Report findings and the challenges facing BC Ferries."

Emerson and B.C. Ferries board members were to "place calls to key media" in the two weeks ahead of the announcement.

And who were the "trusted reporters" mentioned in the report? Well, they weren't named but the Tyee story noted which media ran inside stories prior to the public announcement - outfits like CanWest's Victoria Times Colonist, Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Province and Nanaimo Daily News.

Now there's nothing wrong with a reporter getting a leaked story or writing up a scoop but to be labelled, by the government, a "trusted reporter" who could be relied upon makes you wonder what else these scribes and their papers had done to establish their reliability credentials.

And yes, the public concerns the report identified were right on the money - and they've all come true.

http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/03/05/FerrySpin/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=090309

NATO's Last Secretary General a Canadian?

DefMin Peter MacKay is said to be in the running to replace the ineffectual Jaap de Hoop Scheffer as Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Given all he did for the Progressive Conservative Party, MacKay should have no trouble presiding over the demise of NATO too.

The New War on Terror - Narco-Terror

By now we're all too aware of the war underway in Mexico between drug cartels and the country's army and federal police force. It's bad enough that, in December, the Pentagon listed Mexico along with Pakistan as the two nations most in danger of sudden and total collapse.

To put it in some perspective, Canada has a force of 2,700 at war with the Taliban in Kandahar province. Mexico has a force of 60,000 at war with the drug cartels inside its own country.

The Guardian has just released an expose of the Latin American drug trade and how it has beset both the United States and Europe.

A new trafficking route between South America and west Africa has grown so quickly that the 10th latitude corridor connecting the continents has been dubbed Interstate 10.
Almost all those interviewed agreed that insatiable demand for cocaine in Europe and north America had thwarted US-led efforts to choke supply and inflicted enormous damage on Latin America.

"We consider the war on drugs a failure because the objectives have never been achieved," said César Gaviria, Colombia's former president and co-chair of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy.
"Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalisation have not yielded the expected results. We are today farther than ever from the goal of eradicating drugs."

The commission is urging a "paradigm shift" from repression to a public health approach, including decriminalisation of marijuana. Dismal statistics about coca cultivation, cocaine exports and murder rates have amplified calls to replace a policy which dates back to Nixon with one which focuses on curbing demand.

On Wednesday, ministers from around the world meet in Vienna to hammer out a new, UN drug policy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/09/cocaine-production-united-nations-summit

No More Growth - Even the NYT Gets It (Sort Of)

You have spent your entire time living in a society that worships on bended knee at the altar of Divine Growth. Like all good deities, the Lord Growth has evolved to meet the times.

In the wake of WWII there arrived the brief era of blind growth, catch up growth, go-for-it growth. We even grew babies by the tens of millions. Then came the Cold War and the era of patriotic growth. Big cars got bigger yet, so did houses and all the extra stuff we could jam into them. That really got into overdrive in the Greed is Good growth era. GiG was so grand that we created schemes of notional wealth, bubbles, and splurged with all the money we never really made. There were growth giants like the Dot.Com bubble and the Enron and WorldCom scams and, finally, a bubble for every American, the housing bubble.

Finally people began to notice the first wafts of smoke, the odd flicker of flame, and knew that something wasn't quite right with the world and with mankind. That's when we reached for the feel good solution - sustainable growth, sort of like light cream cheese. Eat all you want because it's sustainable. Free lunch for everybody.

Now we're finally, slowly beginning to realize that, as there is no free lunch, there's no such thing as sustainable growth either.

Now there might be room for sustainable growth in some areas but that's like saying we can all have shoes but just not food. Pretty soon you wind up having to eat your shoes and then the whole sustainable business falls apart.

I've written about our self-destructive, delusional addiction to growth for at least two decades which is why I was delighted this morning to discover that the New York Times' own Tom Friedman has finally found the light:

What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can’t do this anymore.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.
“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year — more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world’s fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit.

At this point, Friedman and I part company. Ever the cheerleader, he advocates tweaking "the system" to "...to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks."

Friedman advances the "magic wand" approach. Slap some solar cells atop the taxi and a bit of nanotechnology in the Hugo Boss suit and all will be well. It won't.

Like most of these dissertations Friedman weighs one problem in isolation of all others. Mankind's consumption of renewable resources has exceeded the planet's ability to replenish them since the mid-80's. We've become dependent on our dwindling aquifers, our emptying oceans and our vanishing forests. Even if well off Americans could break their addiction to overconsumption, less advantaged peoples aren't going to be much better off for it.

Friedman also ignores the chaos that's beginning to arrive as climate change effects settle in. It's very difficult to introduce what would truly be multi-generational reform compressed into a decadal effort just as ecological instability is besetting mankind.

It takes a long time to bring new "sustainable" technologies on line and, even if they were truly sustainable, we haven't got that kind of time. In many parts of the world these new technologies wouldn't be affordable in any case.

And then there's good old human nature. When we give up things it's usually because the artillery has gotten close enough that we can hear the guns firing. Do you sense among your circle of family and friends and co-workers the willingness to voluntarily embrace transformational change and the upheaval that goes with it? I don't see any sign of that.

My guess is that America and China aren't done with their fling yet; that powerful individuals and corporations are looking to the end of the recession/depression in hope they can get back to business as usual, for a little while anyway.

It's taken me some time to accept it but I now firmly believe Lovelock's call for "sustainable retreat." We have to get back into balance with our planet's renewable resources because we have no other choice. The path to that point means fewer and smaller instead of bigger and more. But, above all else, it also means a consensus, a willingness to go back and that's a level of consciousness that I see nowhere on the horizon.

Obama's Wishful Thinking on Afghanistan

President Obama is toying with the idea of reaching out to moderate Taliban factions within the Afghan insurgency, hoping for something akin to the Awakening movement that turned Iraq's Sunni insurgency against al-Qaeda fighters.

In an interview with New York Times reporters, Obama said, "Part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of al-Qaida in Iraq. There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and the Pakistani region."

I think Obama is missing a few points. One is that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was hardly a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists. They were Iraqi nationalists, Saddam's people.

Another problem is one pointed out by Afghans themselves. From The Guardian

Ashraf Ghani, a former Afghanistan finance minister, who is to stand as presidential candiate in the elections in August, said: "I don't know of a single peace process that has been successfully negotiated from a position of weakness or stalemate."

Ghani is probably right. America's chance to drive a wedge between the Taliban and al Qaeda came and went around 2002-3. Ever since then, Western forces have been driving the two into each others' arms, reinforcing the bond between the Afghan insurgents and their foreign comrades by treating them as one and the same.

Haroun Mir, a political analyst and former adviser to the mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, said that even small-time insurgents would not be persuaded to lay down arms at a time when the Taliban was scenting victory over the Afghan government and its foreign backers. "Reconciliation was a great idea in 2003 or 2004, when the government had the upper hand, but now things are all going the Taliban's way. They are at the edge of Kabul and they have no incentive to join the government's side."

Sorry Barack but you're stuck with the mess created by the astonishing incompetence of the Bush/Cheney regime. At this late stage, America's best option could be to sharply ramp up recruiting, equipping and training of a new Afghan army. Find a location safely removed from the reach of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, establish a major training base for infantry, artillery and armour forces and start churning out trained soldiers four, even five times faster than the experience to date. Begin running classes through officer school and flight schools in the United States.

Somehow the balance of power has to be shifted back to the Afghans. Not the Western forces, the Afghans themselves. If need be, America should even consider subsidizing the Afghan military payroll. Isn't it better to pay a few bucks a month to an Afghan soldier than keep running up the tab in lives and treasure keeping Western forces tied down there?

Hey Iggy, Pull Your Thumb Out!

Dear Mr. Ignatieff. This has nothing to do with Israel Apartheid Week so lower the indignant eyebrow. It does, however, involve Israel and what's left of the Occupied Territories. It also involves your loudly proclaimed zeal for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It involves basic human decency and your chance to show you understand what that is.

From your years in England, you'll be familiar with The Guardian. Get a copy and take a read. You'll find a story about a leaked, confidential EU report that finds Israel is using covert means to effect the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem. In other words, your Igness, they're stealing the homeland of the Palestinian people (the worst kept secret of the last ten years).

In case you can't get your hands on a copy of the paper, here are a few excerpts:

A confidential EU report accuses the Israeli government of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank barrier as a way of "actively pursuing the illegal annexation" of East Jerusalem.

The document says Israel has accelerated its plans for East Jerusalem, and is undermining the Palestinian Authority's credibility and weakening support for peace talks. "Israel's actions in and around Jerusalem constitute one of the most acute challenges to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making," says the document, EU Heads of Mission Report on East Jerusalem.

"Israeli 'facts on the ground' - including new settlements, construction of the barrier, discriminatory housing policies, house demolitions, restrictive permit regime and continued closure of Palestinian institutions - increase Jewish Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, weaken the Palestinian community in the city, impede Palestinian urban development and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank," the report says.

Israel issues fewer than 200 permits a year for Palestinian homes and leaves only 12% of East Jerusalem available for Palestinian residential use. As a result many homes are built without Israeli permits. About 400 houses have been demolished since 2004 and a further 1,000 demolition orders have yet to be carried out, it said.

The EU is particularly concerned about settlements inside the Old City, where there were plans to build a Jewish settlement of 35 housing units in the Muslim quarter, as well as expansion plans for Silwan, just outside the Old City walls.

The goal, it says, is to "create territorial contiguity" between East Jerusalem settlements and the Old City and to "sever" East Jerusalem and its settlement blocks from the West Bank.

Now, esteemed Leader, have you taken a look at the West Bank itself? I mean looking beyond the show ouster of a few dozen illegal settlers. Are you aware that there are 430,000 illegal settlers now taking over the West Bank of the Occupied Territories and that their numbers are increasing by 5% a year (which is why the total shot up 40% during the Bush Era of Darkness)?

Here's a question. Do you think Israel is allowing these nearly half-million Israelis to illegally settle the West Bank if they had any, repeat, any intention of ever handing that land back to the Palestinians? Have you bothered to learn what the occupying force is doing to the West Bank Palestinians in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions?

And here's my final question. Are you a Liberal or are you just a charlatan, a poseur pandering for votes?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/07/israel-palestine-eu-report-jerusalem

MacKay Swings Wildly, Misses Own Shadow

Peter MacKay has joined the "do as I say, not as I do" brigade, telling NATO partners to get more combat troops to Afghanistan on the double as Canada tries to figure out just how we're going to cut and run in 2011.

Pete, when you've announced you're leaving and your boss has told the world we're not going to defeat the enemy in any case, you must come across like more than a bit of a goof when you start talking about victory.

Said Pete: "It's security first. It's combat troops that are needed right now in Afghanistan if we are to succeed." Maybe if Pete's talking about succeeding as in getting our forces the hell out of Afghanistan, he's making some sense. But if he's talking success as in meeting our pledge in our Status of Forces agreement with Kabul to "eliminate" the Taliban and al-Qaeda, he's sounding like a bit of a buffoon.

Pistol Pete took the opportunity to get a swipe in at feckless "coalition" governments. "The future of the alliance is predicated on the notion of all for one. While countries have certain (military) capabilities, some choose to put caveats in place in Afghanistan, some are under constitutional (restrictions) or fall prey to coalition governments which lead to internal unrest. . . . But it still comes down to political will."

So let's get this right. Harper says we're not going to succeed in Afghanistan, that the failed state is in a perpetual insurgency and that the Taliban aren't going to be "eliminated" as we promised. DefMin Pete says we will succeed - if we just get a few more troops.

What a pair of idiots.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/More+NATO+troops+needed+Afghanistan+McKay/1362230/story.html

Hillier Said What?

What does a Canadian victory in Afghanistan look like? Well, according to a Status of Forces agreement between Canada and the Kabul government under the signature of General Rick Hillier, we promised that "Canadian troops will "eliminate" Al Qaeda, the Taliban, "anti-coalition armed groups, and any other insurgents threatening the security and stability of Afghanistan or international peace and security."

So, there we have it. That's where we agreed to set the bar. This is how we will measure victory or defeat for our mission to Afghanistan.

Hillier signed us on to this deal in 2005 during the federal election that brought the shining light of Harperism to power. From the Toronto Star:

A newly elected Harper quickly stamped his support on the mission when he reacted to an upswing in violence in Afghanistan by declaring Canada would not "cut and run" from the country.

"We will not be in any way backtracking from an obligation which has been undertaken," Harper said in a March 2006 news conference.

Less than three years later, Boss Harp had a change of heart - sort of like how he's flopped on everything else such as transparency and accountability for starters - and says we're not so crazy about eliminating the bad guys any more.

But, there it is. That's what our Great Canadian Hero, General "Hubris" Hillier, got us into. That's how you can judge our victory or defeat in Hillier's war.

Sure Hillier got the approval for this from the prime minister but, when you're taking your troops out on the ice, it's the general's responsibility to ensure that ice is thick enough to get his troops safely and successfully to the other side. The guy said it was doable. He told the PM that, he told the same thing to the Canadian people. He was wrong and I don't see any excuse for him not knowing that.

Playing the Global Warming Game - Canadian Rules

When it comes to pointing fingers over carbon emissions, everyone uses the rules that suit them best. America points its finger at China and says that China, now that it has finally exceeded US CO2 emissions, must match America's cuts.

China points its finger back noting, quite fairly, that its population is more than three times larger than America's which makes its per capita emissions just a fraction of America's. Coupled with the fact that most of the current problem is the result of Western industrialization before China's economic miracle, then the US should bring its per capita numbers into line with China's before it lectures anyone else.

They've both got arguable points but what about Canada? Per capita, we're only slightly less carbon dirty than our American neighbours. But maybe there's another way, a Canadian way, of twisting the math.

What if we factor in population density? After all, a nation's landmass represents a major carbon sink. We've got plenty of land and relatively few people. So isn't our landmass soaking up pretty much all the CO2 we few Canadians are emitting?

It suits the Euros to focus on per capita emissions and they're to be commended for it. But Canada isn't Europe. We don't get the environmental economies of scale they achieve by having a lot of people occupying a relatively small territory. It's why mass transit is so much more viable for them than for us. There is sufficient population base to warrant the cost of such expensive infrastructure. On the other hand, Europe's land mass has a limited capacity to soak up their CO2 emissions which means they're inflicting far more greenhouse gas emissions on Mother Earth than their territory is absorbing.

What would the global warming guilt index look like if we played by Canadian Rules which compares greenhouse gas emissions on a square kilometre basis?

Here are some population density numbers, population per square kilometres:

Global average (including Arctic & Antarctica) 45.21

Monaco - 16,754
China - 636
S. Korea - 498
Netherlands - 395
Japan - 339
Belgium - 341
UK - 246
Germany - 232
Italy - 193
France - 106

United States - 31

And Canada? How 'bout just 3? We have three people per square kilometre of our territory. Only three. Less than a tenth of the density of the United States which is, in turn, less than a tenth of the density of Belgium. Our density is just 1/220th of China's.

Now, with just three grubby souls per square kilometre, we also have an enormous Boreal forest that the Euros can't match. We should get credit for that carbon sink too.

So maybe there's the answer. Just ask every other first and second world country to get down to Canada's population density. Three per sq. km., that's it. Oh my, what a different planet that would be.

That said, I remain convinced that Canadians have to pull their full weight in the fight against global warming. The name gives it away, it's "global." Convenient arguments aren't going to get us to a solution. We're all going to take it in the neck although Canada and Siberia will be better off than just about every other place.

I think I'm just a little less interested in self-righteous finger pointing from our Euro friends. There are just too many of them for our own good.

Are Israeli Arabs an Endangered Species?

Benny Netanyahu has described them as a "ticking time bomb" and even moderate forces within the Israeli Knesset don't see a place for Israeli Arabs in the future of their country. In a report from AlterNet, even moderate Kadima leader Tzipi Livni says Israel's Arabs have to go:

Livni told a group of Tel Aviv high school students last December, "and among other things, I will be able to approach the Palestinian residents of Israel, those whom we call Israeli Arabs, and tell them, ' your national solution lies elsewhere.'"

Such talk has consequences.

According to the Israeli Association for Civil Rights, anti-Arab incidents have risen sharply. "Israeli society is reaching new heights of racism that damages freedom of expression and privacy," says Sami Michael, the organization's president.

Among the Association's findings:

* Some 55 percent of Jewish Israelis say that the state should encourage Arab emigration;

* 78 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose including Arab parties in the government;

* 56 percent agree with the statement that "Arabs cannot attain the Jewish level of cultural development";

* 75 percent agree that Arabs are inclined to be violent. Among Arab-Israelis, 54 percent feel the same way about Jews.

* 75 percent of Israeli Jews say they would not live in the same building as Arabs.

The tension between Israeli democracy and the country's Jewish character was the centerpiece of Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu Party's campaign in the recent election. His party increased its Knesset membership from 11 to 15, and is now the third largest party in the parliament.

Lieberman, who lives in a West Bank settlement near Bethlehem, calls for a "loyalty oath" from Arab-Israelis, and for either expelling those who refuse or denying them citizenship rights. During a Knesset debate last March, Lieberman told Arab deputies, "You are only temporarily here. One day we will take care of you."

And this would be the same Israel so unquestioningly and unequivocally supported by Michael Ignatieff and Stephen Harper.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/129853/

The Employment Plunge Continues

The United States lost 697,000 jobs in February, well above the 630,000 forecast by analysts. Of those, 219,000 were manufacturing jobs. Service sector job losses accounted for 359,000 of the new jobless.

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/us-private-sector-shed-697000-jobs-adp-20090305-8on5.html

The Comeback of Karl Marx

Apparently Das Kapital has a new gaggle of admirers - in Britain anyway. According to The Independent, Karl Marx is all the rage in the business sections of British papers, even The Times.

[Marx] might also dispute the idea attributed to him, that slumps make the collapse of capitalism inevitable. Because while he said SLUMPS were inevitable, he also said the outcome wasn't inevitable at all, but depended on whether the poor allow the rich to make them pay for it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mark-steel/mark-steel-so-karl-marx-was-right-after-all-1636864.html

Asper, Pack Up & Leave. Your National Post is Toast!

Shouldn't Lenny Asper be busy trying to salvage something out of the ugly disaster he made of Daddy's CanWest media cabal? Instead he's busy smearing any Canadian with enough conscience and courage to oppose Israeli excesses. Here's Lenny's fetid delerium from the lead editorial in today's National Toast:

...the Tories don't mind smacking down radical groups that spout hate even as they demand multiculti handouts from Ottawa.

Perhaps the best example of this involves the Tamil Tigers (and their Canadian supporters), whom the Liberals never had the courage to brand as terrorists -- that job was left to Stephen Harper. But other examples present themselves as well, such as Mr. Harper's clear support for Israel during the Lebanon and Gaza campaigns, at the United Nations and elsewhere -- even in the face of strident opposition from the Canadian Islamic Congress and other terror apologists.

So, if your view of the Israeli-Palestinian problem doesn't tightly conform to Lenny Asper's, you're a "terror apologist." Once again Loudmouth Lenny proves why Canada will be so much better off without media tyrants of his ilk.

Canadians - We're a Curious Bunch When It Comes to Athabasca

We may be a nation of bobble-heads. Ask us just the right question, the right way, and watch us go.

Last week Ipsos-Reid released a poll that found 64% of Canadians, including 47% of Albertans surveyed, believed that development of the Athabasca Tar Sands should be halted until a clean method of production could be found.

Today there's a Harris-Decima poll claiming that 57% of Canadians, including 70% of Albertans, back the Tar Sands and believe there are more benefits than drawbacks to the venture.

Not everybody was impressed by the Harris-Decima polling. From the Toronto Star:

Mike Hudema, of the environmental watchdog group Greenpeace Canada, said the poll doesn't reflect environmental concerns expressed by Canadians in other surveys.

He said the Harris-Decima questions tend to focus on the oilsands or nothing, and on carbon capture and storage as the sole means to reduce pollution. That, he said, leads to skewed results and empowers political leaders pushing poor ideas.

"It's time our leaders stop deceiving people with false solutions like carbon capture and storage and instead put forward and invest in a green-jobs strategy that will put Canadians back to work building the green economy," he said.

"Unfortunately, both the provincial and the federal governments seem to have their heads too far buried in the tarsands to listen to anything."

Rethinking Afghanistan

An excellent mini-documentary on the quagmire of our own making, the Mission to Afghanistan.



courtesy Brave New Foundation

Okay, Just How Are They Going to Smear Iggy?

Harper was happy to smear Paul Martin, even giddy beyond belief to smear Stephane Dion, but I still don't see how he can possibly risk the blowback of trying to smear Michael Ignatieff.

Harper was able to snipe at Martin and poke sticks into Dion's side from a position where he was pretty much safe from retaliation. There's no longer any safe place where Harper can hide.

Want to look into Ignatieff's past? Good luck with that. It's L'il Stevie who's got the problem with his past now and that he's got in spades.

Harper came into politics literally cloaked in self-righteousness and smug, uber-conservatism. Canada was a northern European welfare state. Kyoto was a socialist plot to steal from the rich. Afghanistan was where we drew the line to defeat Islamist terrorism.

Harper has literally abandoned just about every position he once stood for and promised to uphold. Accountability? Transparency? You name it, he's ditched it. Stephen Harper has turned himself inside out in his quest to cling to power.

Poor old Boss Harp. He's messed himself up so badly that he can't take a swing at Iggy without clobbering himself in the process. Let the games begin.

California Legislators Trash Proposition 8

The Mormons and other homophobes behind California's Proposition 8 intended to ban same sex marriage have run into a legislative wall.

California legislators say the proposition is invalid because it attempts to rewrite the state constitutionl, something within the power only of the legislature itself.

Just days before a historic state Supreme Court hearing on Proposition 8, the Legislature approved a resolution Monday declaring that voters alone did not have the right to adopt the gay-marriage ban.

The nonbinding resolution contends that Proposition 8 – which defines marriage as between only a man and a woman – was an improper revision of the state constitution. Sweeping revisions can only be adopted, the resolution says, if they originate in the Legislature, gain two-thirds approval in that body and then win approval by voters.

The resolution also states that Proposition 8, which voters approved in November, oversteps the authority of the courts to enforce equal protection and prevent government discrimination.

"We're talking about a radical revision to our constitution," said Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, an openly gay member of the Legislature who sponsored the resolution.

"Do we have a constitutional democracy in California," Leno asked, "or do we have mob rule, where a majority of Californians can change the constitution at any time?"

It seems logical enough. Why should a bare majority of a minority of eligible voters be allowed to do what takes a 2/3rds majority in the legislature followed by voter endorsement?

When the question comes before the courts, California's attorney-general will argue that Proposition 8 violates an "inalienable right of liberty" in the state constitution

Wally, It's Time to Charge Those Mounties

Maybe there isn't a winnable case against them for actually killing Robert Dziekanski. It is possible that even manslaughter charges wouldn't stick - possible. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that, in the immediate aftermath of this horribly wrongful homicide, these officers went into full blown coverup mode.

Before the passerby video came out the four mounties gave wildly false statements, claiming that their victim charged them, threatened them with a stapler, even fought them. But for that video they might have gotten away with it.

Surely there's ample basis for charging these guys with obstruction for trying to mislead investigators. Does anyone believe a lay person wouldn't be charged if they tried something like this?

These cops - four of them - highly trained to be skilled observers - either couldn't remember what happened or fabricated an exculpatory deception. They haven't done themselves any favours either by sticking with their excuses at the Braidwood inquiry until confronted with the video and forced to back down.

That these four should be sacked is far beyond question. We don't need cops this honest. But the very idea that they might be handed a severance cheque and allowed to simply walk out the door is unbelievably galling.

Wally Oppal - if you're not prepared to charge any of them for what they did up to the point of Robert Dziekanski's death, you have no excuse for not charging them for everything they did afterward. When it comes to holding mounties accountable, British Columbia doesn't have a great reputation. It's time that changed.

The Coven Gathers Again

The usual mixed bag of warlocks and Druids is gathering again as the Heartland Institute sponsors yet another International Conference on Climate Change. The conference, of course, is not about climate change or the endless flow of scientific research confirming it. It's about folks like Fred Singer getting together to convince each other that there's no such thing as anthropogenic global warming.

The conference is being held in New York for three days beginning this Sunday. Featured speakers include the president of the Czech Republic (assuming he's not needed for begging duties at the EU); the in some circles notorious Richard Lindzen; deep space astrophysicist Willie Soon; Harrison Schmitt; and Nir Shaviv who believes that passages through the Milky Way's spiral arms were the culprits behind Earth's ice ages.

So get ready for it. Assuming the National Toast survives that long, we'll soon be greeted by Lorne Grunter emerging from his cave to pronounce on the scientific consensus that global warming is a myth. Yippee.

No More Acid Trips for RCMP

I hope the Braidwood inquiry recommends that on-duty RCMP officers be strictly forbidden from using LSD. They can't handle it. The hallucinations are simply too dangerous to the public.

That much is clear from the evidence given today by constable Kwesi Millington, the officer who administered five Taser blasts to Robert Dziekanski at an arrivals lounge at Vancouver airport.

In a rare example of quality journalism, the Globe & Mail's Ian Baily captured all the mirth and hilarity that accompanied Kwesi Millington's testimony today:

A bulletproof vest, handgun, baton and pepper spray were not enough to quell the fear RCMP Constable Kwesi Millington says he felt when confronted by Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski during a fatal October 2007 incident at Vancouver airport.

"He had the stapler open, his other fist raised. He was in a combative stance, as we call it, and was approaching the officers, I believe, with the intent to attack so I deployed the taser at that point," he told the Braidwood inquiry into Mr. Dziekanski's death on Monday.

..."Can you tell us how four healthy men from the RCMP could not gain control of him when he's in that position?" commission counsel Art Vertlieb asked.

"I don't know why he was not under control. He was fighting so that's why we had to use [the taser]."

Mr. Vertlieb later asked the officer whether he was "scared."

"Yes," said Constable Millington, who earlier noted that the fact the stapler was open would make it "more" of a threat.

Within moments, Mr. Vertlieb had the constable take the actual stapler in question and hold it to show the inquiry how Mr. Dziekanski brandished it. Constable Millington, 32, stood in the witness box and complied.

The resulting scoffing sounds, snorts of derision and other noises from the spectators' gallery grew so obvious that inquiry head Thomas Braidwood, a former B.C. supreme court justice, had to counsel spectators to cut it out.

Jeebus, this hearing is turning into high comedy. Dziekanski had the stapler opened. Why, surely, he must've chambered a round, eh? Well, eh? What could be more combative than a guy holding a stapler? Who's to say it wasn't a weapon of mass destruction stapler? Maybe it was loaded with curare-tipped staples or maybe anthrax. You can't be too careful, 'specially when you've only got four officers, eh?

Christmas! Even the gallery can't keep a straight face as these mounties, Canada's finest, tiptoe down the path of absolution.

Here's my take. I've had dealings with Tommy Braidwood going back 30-years. I've known the commission counsel Art Vertlieb and the government of Poland's counsel Don Rosenbloom. These cowboys in yellow striped pants don't have a snowball's chance in hell of blowing smoke up any of their backsides. One by one they're just getting themselves in deeper and deeper.

If Harper's boy Elliott has any hope of rehabilitating the RCMP, he'll have to find better officers than these four.

A Picture is Worth - Not Very Much

This is the 12-month stock chart for CanWest Global Communications Corp.




And here's CanWest's 2-year stock chart:

What's that old saying about "buy low, sell high?"

Life Imitates Art, the Real Joe the Plumber

It took me a while to figure out Joe the Plumber and where I'd seen his shtick before:



And Here's Joe's Inspiration