To coalesce or not to coalesce

Reading the pundits and parsing the Delphic utterances of Michael Ignatieff, I find myself unable to make any firm predictions about the outcome of next week's budget debate. An election? A coalition? A seaworthy budget that the Liberals can support, if only by resorting to the discredited Dion strategy of permanent abstention?

It depends upon whom you read. And that's a glorious repeat of the old saga about the blind men and the elephant.

Don Martin asserts today that the Liberal-NDP coalition "must die," which is encouraging for those of us who thought it was already dead:

With the shrug of his shoulders Wednesday, Mr. Ignatieff seemed to acknowledge its passing-on as an inconvenient truth. He declared himself repulsed by the thought of foisting a needless and unpopular election on Canadians and is well aware the Liberal party's sudden recovery in the polls is contingent on officially divorcing from the coalition.

--

To force an election or fake a coalition are childish actions best set aside. Parliament's recession-fighting challenge cries out for adult supervision.

But Ignatieff himself isn't quite so clear as Martin surmises. Seen as the centre-right Liberal, as opposed to Bob Rae's relative progressivism, Ignatieff seems to have been positioning himself closer to the left over the past few days, supporting federal anti-scab legislation at least in principle (although, with his predecessor, he joined the Conservatives in torpedoing Bill C-257 two years ago), and demanding the repatriation of Omar Khadr. As for the coalition?

"A coalition if necessary, but not necessarily a coalition, meaning that I need to look at this budget carefully," says Ignatieff, channelling Mackenzie King.

The polls are looking pretty good right about now for both Ignatieff and--in a stunning turnaround--for the coalition, which, never mind Don Martin, now enjoys the support of 50% of the public. The only thing that Ignatieff has been completely clear on is that an election in the near future is not in the cards: Canadians, he says, need another election "like a hole in the head." That leaves only two alternatives.

At this point the budget is taking shape somewhat like a collective agreement, with two parties at the table (and be assured that the table in this case is not a metaphorical one), and timed public utterances. The resulting document will either be a "final offer" that the Liberals cannot abide, or a "win-win" compromise with considerable water in everybody's wine.

This kind of detailed engineering is politics at its best, and it would be interesting to be a fly on the wall during the on-going back-channel negotiations. The stakes are high for both Harper and Ignatieff, and with the new polling numbers brinkmanship is inevitable. Ignatieff could find himself a relatively popular new Prime Minister, but there are obvious risks involved in forcing the issue. Harper could retain power, but at considerable cost to fiscal conservative principles.

The "win-win" option, a compromise budget, might not in fact be the best solution for the Conservatives. For Harper, already wobbling a little on his base, giving in to Liberal pressure might be a worse long-term solution than being Opposition leader for a while and playing the "coup" card. But for Ignatieff, a political tyro, heading into the uncharted waters of coalition politics during an economic recession might prove to be more hazardous than playing it safe and supporting the Conservatives.

Quite the game of chess--or is it poker? I'll be in the budget lock-up on Tuesday, so I'll provide an early report on its contents. It promises to be a fascinating document. And what follows is anyone's guess.

Ragegasm: the tremors continue

Oh noes! The crowd at Obama's inauguration littered! Yes, they did! (And we just know who "they" are, don't we?)

And Obama's Chief of Staff made a childish gesture! It must have been intentional disrespect to George W. Bush! And the President's birth certificate...

And this.

Good grief,will someone kindly put out teh burning stupid before it uses up all the planet's oxygen?

[H/t CC]

UPDATE: A heads-up from commenter Geo: Obama has retaken the oath, "out of an abundance of caution." But where's the evidence?

UPPERDATE: (January 22) Geo points to the most likely reason for Chief Justice Roberts' double-flub.

"I'm a lefty. Get used to it."

OK, suspension of disbelief, at least for today. Time for the audacity of hope.

[H/t R.G. Billings]

The new Rickroll?

Misery loves company. Thought I'd share a mindworm with my readers--it's been three days now. Dammit.

January 20: a Black day

...for some.

OK, President Obama...

...it's time.

Cooler heads...

...don't always prevail.

Defamation

The long knives are out once again for Maher Arar. As the zone of exception known as Gitmo is about to be padlocked by the incoming President of the United States, desperate agents are bobbing, weaving and confabulating. Reading the news reports this morning is like turning over a dead rat and watching the maggots squirm.

In the blogosphere, the right side of the aisle is having a collective orgasm. As always, Small Dead Animals leads the way. Check out the combox, if you can stand the smell. And you can always count on that other foaming wingnut, our Best Canadian Blogger (at least according to a horde of US freepers), seizing yet another opportunity to defame an innocent man.

Yup, now we have the word of an FBI "interrogator" based upon a tale extracted from a 15-year-old under torture in Bagram. That'll stand up in court--not.

Investigator Kerry Pither puts the matter squarely:

Never mind that nothing that anyone has said to interrogators at the Bagram air force base, where so much prisoner abuse, torture and even prisoner deaths have been documented, can be considered remotely reliable. As Michelle Shephard, Toronto Star journalist and author of Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr notes, some of Bagram’s interrogators were later convicted of killing an innocent Afghan citizen during an interrogation there.

And never mind that Khadr has said that he repeatedly lied to interrogators in order to improve his detention conditions, especially when interrogators kept saying that if only he cooperated, he’d be sent home.

The fact is that Maher Arar has been exonerated.

First, by an exhaustive four-year long public inquiry in Canada which concluded that Canadian agencies had no evidence of wrongdoing by Arar, and that the U.S. “very likely” based their decision to send him to torture in Syria on erroneous Canadian information.

Then, by the Harper government itself, which, before settling Arar’s law suit, sent then-public safety minister Stockwell Day to the U.S to see the American file on Arar.

Day returned to say there was nothing there that would justify keeping Arar on a watchlist, and within weeks Prime Minister Harper was on live television issuing an official, and long-overdue, public apology on behalf of the government to Arar and his family.

Not much later, Arar and his family were deservedly financially compensated for Canada’s role in what happened to him.

Quite simply, the information put forth today, coming from an agency under fire for its legacy of complicity in torture, cannot be trusted.

Maher Arar and his family have endured enough.

It is the record of the FBI, CIA, RCMP, CSIS and other security agencies that must come under scrutiny now — not Maher Arar’s.

Given Maher Arar's complete exoneration, there's enough actionable commentary on the starboard side of the blogosphere today to get him another $10 million. And he's not going to need any PayPal button should he choose to pursue that course. Too bad he can't do a class action suit in reverse.

UPDATE: And the truth, always less startling than the lies it replaces, quickly comes out:

Khadr only "stated that (Arar) looked familiar" after he was shown a photograph of then [sic] Ottawa computer engineer."

Khadr, "in time . . . stated he felt he had seen" Arar, the hearing heard.... At that time, Mr. Khadr would have been six or seven years old.

The notes also stated that Khadr "felt" he had seen Arar in Afghanistan during a period in 2001 that he is known to have been in North America.

Um...Speech Warriors™?

*crickets*

UPDATE: Whoops, I should have given them a little time. Patience is a virtue. There is some speech that even our brave Speech Warriors™ apparently find too much to bear. Like a lecture on urban education. Speaking of education, read the comment thread at that link.

Ayers has visited Canada several times before, but someone has apparently been misinforming border security:

William Ayers, a distinguished education professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago, said he was perplexed and disappointed when the Canada Border Services Agency declared him inadmissible at the Toronto City Centre Airport on Sunday evening.

He said he has travelled to Canada more than a dozen times in the past.

“It seems very arbitrary,” he said. “The border agent said I had a conviction for a felony from 1969. I have several arrests for misdemeanours, but not for felonies.”

Enemies in high places, by the looks of it.

Tainted Meat Follies, Part XXX

It appears that my tongue-in-cheek blogpost about unions last week pushed a few hot buttons. Check out the hostility explosion in the combox.

Thus I'm pleased to follow up with an encouragement to go read Just Another Willy Loman for his timely blogpost about the recent confrontation between Stevie and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency workers.

The CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) will be voting on a new contract today. The union for the agency whose purpose it is to protect our sources of food, has played a leading role as whistle blower about the Harper government’s secretive deregulation of Canadian safety standards.

Predictably, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz is nowhere to be seen - or heard.

Dr.Dawg adds:

Meanwhile, on the subject of unions, David Reevely of the Ottawa Citizen points to a good summary of the complexity of the bus scheduling issue and the central importance of that issue to striking OC Transpo bus drivers.

"Arabs need to die"

They're still digging dead family members out of the rubble--when the Israeli Defence Forces permit it--and the death toll in Gaza has now reached around 1,300, one-third of them children, half of them civilians. Another 5,000 Gazans were wounded. Tens of thousands of Gazans are now homeless. Parts of Gaza City after the attack "looked like Grozny on a bad day."

Newsweek reports:

The relatively new, $7 million campus of the American School was completely demolished in air strikes. The Al Quds Hospital in downtown Gaza City, run by the Red Crescent Society, was hit by a bomb and set afire. Part of the massive shell that purportedly did it now sits on hospital director general Khalid Judah's bookshelf. Although the hospital building survived major structural damage, the fire forced the evacuation of 500 patients to other hospitals in the middle of the night, many of them leaving hooked up to medical machinery; a baby was even rolled out in an incubator. "I can guarantee you, no one used this building to fire at the Israelis," Judah said.

Elsewhere, five United Nations facilities were, according to [UNRWA spokesperson John] Ging, deliberately targeted, not counting many others that suffered collateral damage from air strikes nearby. In none of those cases, he said, was there any evidence that the U.N. facilities were being used to attack the Israelis, as Israel Defense Forces spokesmen claimed. Ging said he had direct liaison contacts with ranking IDF officers, who disputed their own spokesmen, acknowledging to him that no U.N. facilities had been used to attack the army.

The press continues to be tightly controlled: the few foreign reporters who have been allowed in are being shepherded around by the military. Small wonder. Israel doesn't want too much more of this sort of thing leaking out:



[H/t stageleft]

The "human shields" meme is wearing a bit thin. This was at least in part a war against civilians from the beginning, to punish them for their choice of government. Meanwhile Hamas is talking tough about more rockets and so on. They remind me of the slimy fight promoter telling his poor old punchdrunk guy, "Get in there. The bum can't hurt us."

And what do the surviving civilians think? There's a good cross-section of comment here.

Freedom House

...lies:

Canada faced threats to freedom of expression as government agencies brought charges against journalists who wrote commentaries that were critical of Islam.

Er...no. Government agencies brought no charges at all. Not one. Ordinary citizens did--and not a single complaint has been upheld to date by the aforesaid "government agencies."

The false statement quoted is due neither to accident nor ignorance. Freedom House has shamelessly shilled for the Right for nearly seven decades. The above, from its most recent world survey, is yet another example of why this ideologically-driven outfit should never, ever, be trusted.

[H/t]

NB: Commenter Eliezer made a similar point at the Maclean's site where this rubbish was approvingly reported.

Less 'décolleté', more 'collé à la réalité'.

As a distant observer of the Julie Couillard and Maxime Bernier debacle in 2008, I observed that media attempted to press every last drop of pulp and juice from the bare bones of the story. As well, a number of Québec variety show caricatured Couillard and her circumstances in the most crude and clichéd terms.

News outlet – even purportedly high-minded – were eager to stick epitaphs onto Couillard, like used bits of gum that rude chewers discard without any concern for the mess they make. How many media websites boosted their internet hits by posting an attractive Couillard photo?

Biker chick, Mata Hari, courtesan. Surely that couldn’t be all there was to her life?

When I purchased My Story, the young woman working at the sales desk asked as she handed me the receipt and my change, “What’s the book about?” I mumbled something about confidential NATO documents and a cabinet minister, and she announced loudly, “Good for her! She deserves to tell her story.”

Dr Dawg thinks that Couillard is a defiantly ‘ballsy’ name for a woman. I disagree with the title he gave his post about her. Although Bernier expressed scorn and contempt towards her, and resorted to typically HarperCon tactics when blaming and shaming her, Couillard's measured response is relatively dignified. Her book does not resonate with fury and her account is far more credible than most of the speculation and gossip published.

Julie Couillard was born in the late sixties in a cultural and social milieu that valued beauty (for girls) and brawn (for boys) over brains. She had ample opportunity, as her parents' modest fortunes rose and crashed, to carefully observe who held power, how they secured it and how they maintained it.

A woman – or a man, for that matter – doesn’t wake up one morning with the notion that she will seek a career in organized crime. One doesn’t go knocking at the door of a biker club with one’s curriculum vitae in hand.

Though it may be possible to chart an upwardly mobile path in that business, with a little brain power. Those with ambition but no organizational acumen will soon find themselves in the St-Lawrence river, wearing concrete galoshes.

How does a woman penetrate the bikers’ world of organized crime? As most of the men do, first by working at the bottom level of their multi-tentacled service industry: sex, drugs and money-laundering. In Julie’s case it was her happenstance attraction to over-confident, preening braggarts – con men really – for whom she provided the required accessory to their alpha male posturing that opened a door. It’s all there in her autobiography, predictable really when you understand why Julie looked for and found these archetypical male figures.

The element that radiates from Couillard's inadvertently pathetic and slightly banal account of her life is poverty; not only material though certainly there is that, especially in her early years. The adults present show appalling parenting incompetence with regard to their ability to nurture the young Julie, and to provide inspiration, hope, joy and continuity.

As I waded through chapter after chapter describing grim events in a matter-of-fact style that was totally devoid of drama, something tugged at my memory. It seemed as though I had read similar accounts before, but where?

In the long pauses I took from reading the book – a page-turner, though not in a good way as I tried to put distance between Couillard's bleak reality and my imagination – I recalled where I had encountered such narrative.

Joyce Carol Oates. Every single female protagonist in every one of her literary creations embodies many facets of the harsh complexity of Julie Couillard’s life.

During the 1970s, as Oates became a more transgressive writer, her female characters began to define themselves, not as characters in a male author's plot but as authors of their own lives.

Intriguing, disturbing, struggling, withdrawn, disenfranchised, cunning, hardy survivors. Those are some of the traits found in Oates’ female characters. And a fairly accurate portrayal of Julie Couillard, in her own unadorned and blunt words.

eta: political cartoon credit - Chapleau, of course.

The sick, putrid RCMP

...and the Crown attorneys who facilitate them.

First, they Taser an old man in a hospital bed. Then they kill an immigrant. Now they Taser a woman with her kids on her lap.

Disband them now.

Canada deserves better.

[H/t stageleft]

If your life was saved today, thank a union member.

As news about this would-be tragedy trickled out yesterday, several of us marveled at the skills and knowledge that empowered the flight crew and made it possible for everyone to be rescued after the engines on Airbus A320 failed.

In the US, where some elected officials seem hell-bent upon breaking the back of unions, this blogger made an eloquent point:

They're calling it a miracle -the successful landing of a US Airways jet in the Hudson and subsequent rescue of all 155 passengers. They're detailing the heroism of all involved, starting with the pilot and including cabin crew, ferry crews, and first responders. What they're not telling you is that just about every single one of these heros (sic) is a union member.

Indeed.

How soon we forget our own heroes.

Prison riot

It was just a few days ago that the pen erupted.

Millington Max had been under lockdown for months. The warden was clear from the beginning. "We take no crap from these bastards," he said to his correctional officers. "None. If we let them get away with any infraction at all, they'll see it as licence." He went off, muttering something about a broken window.

Some of the prisoners were just about the worst the country had to offer, if anyone were buying. There were serial killers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members. The place simply seethed with violence. It was in the air, in the cells and ranges, in the pathetic little bit of dirt they called a yard, in the way people on both sides of the bars looked at each other.

Contraband kept getting smuggled in, and some guards were assaulted in the gym by a posse of inmates run by some wheel over in seg, so the warden just shut the place down back in the summer. No visitors. No privileges. The hole for the slightest violation of the rules.

The prison shop, or "industries" as it was called, was where the inmates made licence plates--and an endless variety of shivs, which they managed to get to their cells by suitcasing them, somehow avoiding internal injury when they did so. The warden insisted on keeping the place going anyhow. From time to time an inmate would shank a suspected rat; and some, out of sheer lunacy, would have a go at the screws. Those guys would end up in the hole for weeks--or simply disappear.

The riot started when the warden decided to have an outdoor meeting in the yard--unprecedented, but he fancied himself a good speaker, and he had a message to deliver. "OK, listen up," he said. "I can keep this place locked down forever if I feel like it. I can s**t in your food and I can piss in your coffee, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. You want things to get back to normal, whatever the hell that is, you gotta get rid of that prisoners' committee of yours. I won't meet with them, that's that, and if you don't like it, too f**king bad."

There had been some dumb idea from a bunch of liberal pointy-heads that it was a good thing to have such a committee--they said it would diffuse tension, and they talked a lot of rot about safety-valves. Against the warden's better judgement he had the inmates pick their committee, and they promptly went ahead and chose the worst bunch of bastards in the joint. End of experiment, and just to drive his point home, he locked the whole place down for a week and put the inmates on K-rations.

He finished his speech, and there wasn't a whole lot of reaction--for a few seconds. Then there was a peculiar rumble, a growling sound slowly getting louder, like an avalanche bearing down on weekend skiers. The warden wasn't worried--he was surrounded by a small army of guards, who fanned out to herd the inmates back into their cells.

But something went wrong. They wouldn't go quietly. Some of them spat or struck out at the guards and were beaten and dragged off. Others began to throw volley after volley of shivs, at the guards and at the warden as he retreated. Most of them fell on the ground, but a few, whether due to luck or skill, reached their targets. And one guard, his neck gushing blood, died right there on the spot.

The warden wasted no time. "The only thing these bastards understand is force," he said. He ordered a total lockdown, no exercise, no food. "Never mind searching the cells for weapons and giving the prisoners their short-armed salutes," he said. "They still have as many shivs the next day as they did yesterday. These f**kheads need a lesson they'll never forget."

Guards began to throw sticks of dynamite into the crowded cells at random. The media weren't allowed in--"for their own protection," said the warden--but the word was getting out, in distorted fashion. Folks in the town could hear the explosions. Ambulances rushed to the scene, although they were kept from entering the walls for hours.

The paramedics' reports, when they emerged from the prison, were dire. The prison infirmary was packed to overflowing, and didn't even have aspirin at this point. Wounded prisoners were being taken out in the ambulances, but in a trickle--apparently the prison was strewn with corpses and bloodied, screaming survivors.

The local press, and then the national press, flocked around the outside of the pen. The warden came out to give an impromptu press conference. "The situation is well in hand," he said. "We need a little more time, but we're on the point of restoring order." He refused to take questions, and went back inside.

The next morning, editorials praised the warden for his handling of the situation. Wrote one editor:

Some of the dregs of society imagined that they could take over their own prison. At perhaps tragic cost, some have learned, and others are in the process of learning, their lesson.

Our correctional officers have the right to work without being in constant fear for their lives. Our correctional institutions are not democracies: people are not sent there for acts of good citizenship.

The warden acted with the utmost prudence in stopping a riot that could have spread like wildfire. His sheer professionalism in dealing with increasingly dangerous provocations that claimed the life of one correctional officer and injured several others was exemplary.

It is always sad when innocent people die. But we need to remember that in Millington Max there are no innocent people, other than the brave correctional officers who protect us all, the rest of the prison staff, and of course the warden. Thanks to their decisive action, we can expect that our penal institutions will be safer for all concerned from now on--and for the inmate population as well.

Unsurprisingly, the John Howard Society, the Elizabeth Fry Society and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association did not agree. "Always on the side of the inmates," said one supporter of the action. "They're anti-guard, always have been." Another pointed out a small contingent from NAMBLA at a street protest against the killing of what was reported to be more than two hundred inmates, including four child molesters. "Not only anti-guard--pro-pedophile," wrote a blogger. "They don't give a s**t for the prisoners," wrote another. "Their agenda is clear--they support crime, period."

The federal government announced that no inquest would be held. "We are not about to question the actions of those who stopped a dangerous riot in its tracks," said a spokesperson for the Department of Corrections. Meanwhile, many of the families of the dead held a candlelight vigil on Parliament Hill, dismissed by most observers as "a cheap photo-op."

One commentator asked, "Is this a long-term solution for our overcrowded prisons? Will this end the violence? Surely brute force alone will not make our prisons, or indeed our society, a safer place to be." But the author of an op-ed piece summed up the majority feeling when she wrote:

The bottom line is this:

There can be no change in our admittedly antiquated prison system unless the prisoners agree to stop the violence. Obviously changes are needed, and the voices of responsible prisoners must be heard. But given the violence that the inmates just unleashed at Millington Max, calls for prison reform at this point are completely unjustified and indeed irresponsible.

With reform goes responsibility. Perhaps, with this prompt and measured action by the warden involved, we have turned the corner. Perhaps we have not. Either way, the inmates have learned, to their cost, who is boss. And in itself that's hardly a bad thing.

As for the future, only time will tell.

UN Gaza headquarters shelled by Israel

First UN schools, now UN headquarters in Gaza, housing hundreds of Palestinian civilians.

The U.N. compound struck Thursday houses the U.N. Works and Relief Agency, which distributes food aid to hundreds of thousands of destitute Gazans in the tiny seaside territory of 1.4 million people.

"I conveyed my strong protest and outrage to the defense minister and foreign minister and demanded a full explanation," said [U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon], who arrived in Israel on Thursday morning from Egypt.

It had only that morning become a makeshift shelter for 700 Gaza City residents seeking sanctuary from relentless Israeli shelling, U.N. officials in Gaza said.

White phosphorus shells, made in the US, were used.

The Prime Minister of Israel claims that Hamas was firing from the compound. Déjà vu, anyone?

Sometimes apologists for war crimes...

...present themselves as civilized.

By now, no one seriously believes that the Israeli Defence Forces are not engaged in a war against a captive civilian population in Gaza. Here's the pro-Israel Thomas Friedman in today's New York Times on the Israel-Lebanon war and today's assault on Gaza:

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future. [emphases added]

Inflicting civilian casualties for military objectives is a war crime by definition. But saying so carries a risk. The "anti-Semite" canard is by now old, tired and discredited, but that won't stop certain commentators on the Right from pulling it out of the dumpster and waving it in the air when it suits them. At this point, it's all they've got to defend the indefensible.

Of course, they are getting a little cleverer about it these days. They won't come right out and call you an anti-Semite: that's actionable, after all. Instead, folks like Jay Currie begin with this kind of thing:

Meanwhile, poor Dr. Dawg, in order to keep socialist street cred, is featuring dead Gaza babies wrapped in Hezbollah flags. Can we say “photo op”, of course we can.

(And who is creating the photo-op? Can we say "Israel?" Of course we can. The suggestion appears to be that the Gazans should just shut up and not tell anyone what's happening to them, but join instead the enforced media blackout that Israel has imposed upon foreign journalists.)

And then Jay goes dumpster-diving:

Hamas, the Aryan Nation and Dr. Dawg have spotted the problem: the problem is the Jews.

For Hamas, its supporters and the Aryan Nation, the Jewish Problem has a solution. A final solution as it were. Dr. Dawg is more nuanced but, by his own logic, tends to support the enemies of the Jews despite imagining himself a resolute enemy of anti-Semitism.

My anti-anti-Semitic street cred is intact: years of taking on Holocaust-deniers on Usenet, organizing against the Heritage Front in Ottawa, numerous posts on my own blog, an outright ban on anti-Semitic comments. Jay knows all this. But he can't resist a rhetorical re-statement of the "my enemy's enemy is my friend" line. If I oppose Israel's attack on Gaza, with its monstrous civilian death toll, then (in his binary thinking) I'm palling around with terrorists. And Aryan Nations for good measure.

The crux of all this, of course, is that for Jay, "Israel" = "the Jews," its one-fifth Arab population and banned Arab parties, and all non-Israeli Jews in the rest of the world, presumably included.

One can't accuse him of subtlety in this respect. He dispenses with the usual rhetorical disclaimer, "Israel is not immune from criticism, and one can and should be able to engage in such criticism without being branded anti-Semitic," employed by more skilled propagandists before they proceed to accuse critics of Israel of being anti-Semitic. If Jay's ludicrous implied equation held water, even Jewish critics of Israel, including Israeli citizens, are right up there with Hamas, Aryan Nations--and, of course, moi.

This from the fellow who has been none-too-shy for some time now about hopping into bed with assorted Canadian neo-nazi punks and misfits in a united front against Human Rights Commissions. The irony and hypocrisy here are thick enough, dare I say it, to cut with a scimitar.

[H/t commenter beluga2]

More than 1,000 Gazan deaths later...

I decided to have a look at that United Nations Human Rights Council resolution on Gaza--the one that only "Canada"* opposed--to see what the resolution actually said, who voted for it, and who abstained.

Somehow the news reports haven't conveyed very much solid information, so we have been forced to fall back on images and stereotypes. The big bad UNHRC, full of human-rights-loving nations like China. Poor, struggling Israel. Canada's principled stand.

So here is the unedited text of the resolution. It's "unbalanced," all right, a bit like the current respective death counts--13 Israeli fatalities so far, four of them self-inflicted, vs. more than 1,000 Gazans. It calls, in essence, for the immediate cessation of the on-going carnage.

Who voted for it? We all know that countries like China and Saudi Arabia did. That's been well reported. But India did, too. And Chile. And Brazil. And Mexico.

And who abstained? Countries like France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK. Not very brave of them, certainly, but at least they didn't vote for the slaughter option.

Only Canada, it seems, stood up for Israel, which continues to rain bombs, shells and bullets upon the captive population of Gaza. Nearly a third of the dead so far are children. Gaza is running out of space for graves. Kind of makes you feel proud to be a Canadian, eh?

___________
*I'll forego the shudder-quotes for the rest of this post, but the UN representative of the Harper government did not speak for me, nor, I suspect, for many, let alone most, Canadians. Harper's "Canada" is not my Canada.

Name that contest!

I love contests, and it's time to have one. The winner will, no doubt, expect some suitable emolument, but I'm not willing to give you anything except appreciation.

Readers are invited to suggest names for a competition in which Ezra Levant wins first place, with Kathy Shaidle as runner-up. "Best Canadian Blog" has apparently been taken.

Keep it clean, but let your imaginations roam.

PS: Contest closes midnight Thurday (January 15). Wittiness and succinctness will pay dividends, metaphorically speaking, with our distinguished panel of judge.

AND THE WINNAHS! There were many clever entries. One acronymic one had immediate appeal, but suggested an act that one sex is incapable of performing, and was hence disqualified. Others were rather too intense. As in a chili cook-off, smoothness and a balance of flavours were judged, as well as heat.

First place: So you think you can hate (Dr.Frink)
Second place: Anything s/he can do, I can do bitter (Dr. Frink)
Third Place: Best Canadian Flog (Forgot to buy tinfoil)

To other entrants: please, don't be discouraged. There will be other contests. Complaints, if there are any, should be directed to my co-blogger, who had nothing to do with any of this and is therefore strictly neutral.