“He could end all of this if he’d just show us his dog licence.”*

I’m going to quote the whole thing;

Afghanistan was politically oversold because it was not Iraq. It was useful in order to establish the narrative of a “good war” in contrast to the ‘bad wars’ of GWB. The price for doing this was to pervert its true value while while the centers of enemy gravity were simply defined out of policy existence. Eventually they would have to take back their shoddy goods. To weasel out from under their extravagant promises.
What we are watching is a changing of the narrative. The “good war” is about to become “a failure of bad intentions made worse by the blunders of George W. Bush”. Well it was never the former nor the latter; worst of all it was never what it was said to be: one battlefield in a global war whose existence is too inconvenient to be recognized.
The Wikileaks episode, considered in the context of the last 9 years, suggests that the media and the political elite are almost totally dishonest. Their economics is a lie; their global warming a lie; their military ’strategy’ another lie; and even their accounts of the lies are lies. Personally I think [Wikileaks founder Julian Assange], far from being a revolutionary outsider, is just another operative in the backroom. But that’s not news. The really significant thing is that things don’t work the same way any more. That apart from being total liars they are now total bankrupts. The global financial crisis, the discrediting of “global warming” and the crisis in the media are really reminders that the old magic is losing its power.
Your credit is good, but we need cash.
Maybe someone had the idea that mega-exposes like the Washington Post’s Secret America and the Wikileaks dump of classified would bring back the golden years of 1973. When everybody wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein. Maybe Assange thinks that Hollywood will soon get a top matinee idol to play him in the new version of ‘All the President’s Men’. Maybe. But I wouldn’t take out a big loan to attend J-school just yet. The sparkle isn’t there any more; and the movie that is really going to bill is ‘Sunset Boulevard’. There is a curious flatness in the public response to these earth-shaking revelations. It’s the dog that didn’t bark in the night.

h/t Maz2

Find an anti-Semite;

Today’s blockade of the Port of Oakland by anti-Israel forces, in collaboration with the Longshoremen’s Union (ILWU), is the opening of another front in the war on Israel — economic, politcal, propagandistic, and military — which escalates week by week. Will it ever end? Not according to the masterminds of the flotilla:

Meanwhile, Yasser Kashlak, a Syrian businessman of Palestinian descent who heads the “Free Palestine Organization” and is funding this boat, as well as another that is to carry journalists and parliamentarians, said over the weekend on Hizbullah’s al-Manar television station that he was more and more optimistic that one day these same boats would take “Europe’s refuse [the Jews] that came to my homeland back to their homelands.
“Gilad Schalit should go back to Paris and those murderers go back to Poland, and after that we will chase them until the ends of the earth to bring them to justice for their acts of slaughter from Deir Yassin until today.” Kashlak, a fervent Hizbullah supporter, called Israel a “rabid dog sent to the region to frighten the Arabs. He said he had a message for Israelis: ‘Get on the ships we are sending you and go back to your lands. Don’t let the moderate Arab leaders delude you, [you] cannot make peace with us. Our children will return to Palestine, you have no reason for coexistence. Even if our leaders will sign a peace agreement, we will not sign.’”

h/t

Reader Jim H. emails –

I was reading your site tonight and had a thought regarding the Islamic convention that just wrapped in Toronto.
All we’ve heard here for the last 2 days is about the chaos at Pearson Airport, something like 15% of flights to the US cancelled, incredible delays etc. I’m given to understand the problems are not as severe in other parts of the country or in the US. And then I began to wonder if the presence of 8000 politically active Muslims in the city might have more to do with the extensive searches and cancelled US flights than some guy whose underwear caught fire.
Not the sort of angle our local media is likely to suggest. But if you were an edgy head of Homeland Security and knew 8000 people who don’t like you very much were camped that close to the border, you might be putting some pressure on your opposite number here to tighten things up.

Yes, I suspect so.
Related.

“You right wing conservatives just can take a little truth and when a socialist fights back scream: “censorship him”. It already happens hear at SDA, trust me.”*

That one came this –> || close to making it to the masthead.

Reader Brian Mallard is looking for input;

I am going to be in Ottawa this coming week. I will attend a meeting where the prime minister will take questions in an open forum. There are no media in the room. What question would you ask if you had the chance?

Heh.

You are a very sick man Jonathan Kay who finds comfort and pleasure in a sick cartoon in a foreign government’s web page and gleefully reproduce it in the NP. Like your mother you have no shame and thoroughly disgust me. You are simply put a traitor and indeed belong there and not in this great country of ours.

h/t Bourque
(Some people are having trouble viewing the cartoon, so here’s a copy).

Speaking of terns and er, unthreshed barley straw which of course you weren’t but: My brother, the farmer of the family, heard that barley straw put in small sloughs stopped the formation of blue-green algae so he raked up a quantity of said unthreshed barley straw and dumped it in a slough on his farm. That was in in the heat of the summer. A couple of days later he checked to see if it was working as he had been told. Instead he found hundred of terns make a horrendous sound of slurred piping, flapping about uncontrollably and seemingly unable to fly. It seems the unthreshed barley in the straw had fermented and he had left no tern unstoned for miles around.

It’s the same hypocritical language that blows through SDA every day “You losers take potshots at us perfectly centered grey area people, well we say your nothing but knuckle dragging, red neck Nazi’s that want to kill baby’s who don’t smoke pot and have the government pay your way. Just die and go away, so that big brother and John Lennon can tell us how to live because it’s a grey world out there”.

“Perfectly centered grey area people”. That reminds me of someone.

Me No Dhimmi;

… I had a chat with my daughter who went to Queens in the early 90s. She told me that one of the best essays she ever wrote came back with every single ‘he’ circled in red ink. Every single one. She was scolded by the marxist-feminist prof and told to use the gender-neutral, but ugly and unprounceable, s/he.
Fair enough, I supposes, except …. the essay was about Gulliver’s Travels.

First Liberal: “I got the impression that Canadians are split on the issue“.
Second Liberal: “Funny. That’s how I felt about Peter Mansbridge shagging Cynthia Dale when he was married to Wendy Mesley.”
*

“The fact that the decline in Harper’s fortunes seems to go lock step with a decline in the stock market indicates that the entitlement psychology has spread far beyond starving artists and cranky university students: apparently middle class Canadians now feel “entitled” to a rising stock portfolio and soaring real estate values, and feel that it is the job of the state to guarantee those things.”

Bingo.

John Neish writes;

I’m stuck here in the States for the time being, and my usual rounds of errands take me through several towns in the area. One to the north and another to the east are those kinds of towns where one would go to hunt lefties, were there ever a government enlightened enough to add them to the ‘varmint’ category. The towns are insanely wealthy — Doctors, lawyers, professionals of all stripes — and both towns have a very solidly-entrenched population of ‘country-club Liberals’. In the last Presidential election both towns fairly bristled with Kerry placards, but this time around. I’ve been looking for, but so far I have not seen a single Obama poster in either town. There are posters for other Democratic candidates — no shortage of those — but none for Obama: not a single one.
Prior to the Primaries, Hillary was considered by many to be one of the most-disliked woman in the US. Negative polls — those that ask you ‘who do you *dislike* the most’ (as opposed to ‘who do you *like* the most’) — had her in the upper numbers. Even so, Obama had to really work hard to beat her. Now, of course, she’s a figure of pity because of the shabby way that the little twerp has treated her. He even announced his choice of Biden in a text message sent out at three in the morning: anyone who doesn’t think that that was a dig at her for her ‘phone call at three a.m.’ advert deserves to be sold the Brooklyn Bridge (or maybe even the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’).
So, you heard it here first: being barely able to beat a person who at that time was not very regarded, and now being absent from the thickets of Democrat placards in these upscale towns with a well-establish Democrat presence, I predict that he’s going to get whomped in a big way come election day.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

QOTW:

“Watch for the motion picture version of his life: “Driving, Missed Daisy Cutter”.

A long time reader and observer of American politics writes;

Yesterday and this morning I watched the ZDF-TV coverage of Obama’s speech. ZDF, a self-described NBC partner, showed a clip of Brian William’s interview with the messiah. In it, Brian asked Obama to react to John McCain’s comment that he would rather lose a campaign than a war, unlike Obama.
On the whole, the ZDF was comparatively restrained. Their White House correspondent from the White House lawn actually described Obama’s trust-gap that polls show. They had commentary from former-ambassador Kornblum, a Clinton appointee now living in Berlin. CNN’s Amanpour made an appearance but confined her comments to the event, the Obamafest, being like an Oktoberfest. The ZDF “anchors” made various guesses of the crowd size and age, from 20,000-100,000 of 25-year olds.
ZDF were gracious in not mentioning just how substance-free the speech was. They did mention that the purpose of the speech, planned pictures, and images were intended for the American audience. One anchor even mused that Obama had his sights set not only on the US’s but also the world’s presidency.
The Germans in recent history have been notoriously deficient in judging the character and intent of leaders, beginning with their own in the 1930s. Somehow the Camelot myth has overtaken and obliterated Kennedy’s disastrous meeting in Vienna with Khrushchev, and that the building of the Wall could very well have been stopped.
Few Germans still remember how GIs in some parts of West Germany, immediately after the end of the War, “lost” trains filled with food to supply a starving population. A Berliner I met at the B-School and who became a friend, told me that the school I had attended had become a hot-bed for Communism, undeterred by the murders at and on the other side of the Wall.
The messiah seems to have forgotten, or not understood at all, that Truman and Reagan faced long odds and determined opposition, at home and abroad, to organize and maintain the Airlift, to bring down the Wall and Communism—if only for a time.

Thanks, Joe.

See, when you put it this way…

Muslim woman are not shake hand with men.There are so many people have the same culture and they do not shake hand such as Buddhism Chinese only show respect by shake head or Hindu Indian only put hand together and put head down the similar mentality and culture. If you do not shake hand it keep you more healthy not to touch hand who may has germs, culturally is not correct to continue wrong idea of only show respect by touch other person hand, why men should touch woman’s hand still hand is part of woman body is not permitted and not morally right to continue wrong west culture to touch hand or even men in West kiss face of woman in French culture mostly, Muslim does not like shake hand with woman as west do not like so many Muslim culture if you think about it is not correct or not necessary to shake hand this is my simple answer. Period. That is reason woman in Islam do not shake hand with men.

What’s not to like?

Spurwing Plover;

,,,we birds did,nt come from no reptile were not a dinosoars reletive AND IM GOING TO GET VIOLENT WITH THE EVOLUTION WACKOS IM GOING TO PICK THEIR EYES OUT SQUAWK SQUAWK

Ric Locke;

Greg/Hugger,
No doubt you consider yourself reasonable. From here you sound like a hysterical panicked Luddite.

So, let’s say it went down half the time, which isn’t going to happen but just say.

If any wind turbine farm was “up” — producing power — half the time anywhere in the world, I can guarantee the owners would be holding news conferences. The availability fraction for a wind turbine is generally held to be thirty percent… in areas where the wind is particularly strong. When somebody in one of those 24,000 homes switches on a light, the control system at the power plant makes an infinitesimal adjustment to the fuel feed. The chance that a corresponding increase in wind will occur at just the right time is so tiny that you’d be far better off betting your whole salary on a single spin of a slot machine.
We have a lot of wind turbines here in Texas, and hardly a day goes by that a truck doesn’t pass my store carrying another one. And you know what? — those turbines turn all the time, making just enough power to stabilize them, and that power is thrown away (in heat!) in big resistors because it’s never available when it’s needed, only when the wind blows. You know why they’re there? Because there’s a subsidy, a big one. When money falls from the sky, Texans find their big hats useful. Power generation? It is to laugh. Add up the oil to make the fiberglass blades, the coal to make the steel for the tower and shafts, the natural gas to smelt the copper in the generators, the power to make the silicon in the electronics and the glass and carbon fibers, and and and, the chance that any wind turbine will produce enough net power to pay back the Diesel fuel to truck it to its site and erect it is zero.
As for batteries, your Wright Brothers analogy is crap. The Wright Brothers knew what their problems were: getting enough power from the primitive engines of the time, and control. They worked on those things, and solved them, at least partially — but none of the solutions they arrived at are still in use in aviation! Now, Google “electromotive series”. You will get a list. Pick two substances off it, and you have a battery. The farther apart the two substances are on the list, the better the battery as a power source. BUT (by a curious coincidence) the best candidates for battery electrodes are also highly reactive — for which read, explosive, corrosive, poisonous, or otherwise highly dangerous. Every scientist in the world knows that list exists and how to get access to it. And that’s all there is. Every possible battery in the world is on that list. “New elements” aren’t even credible comic-book material any more. Do you really suppose things haven’t been tried?
And even if you found the wonder battery, you’ve still got to make it, so what you need to do is go back to research: how much is available? The only battery material in the Universe that’s available in quantities large enough to make enough batteries to make a difference is lead. For everything else, you’re looking at anything from triple to a thousand times the current level of mining and refinement, mostly using chemicals that would make any sane EPA bureaucrat’s ears curl. Do you know why there aren’t any Tesla Roadsters on the road? Because the makers bought the entire production of the factory that made the batteries — and didn’t even get enough for all the prototypes!
Solar power is the next best thing to useless in Canada; your sun angle isn’t high enough. Wind power is a toy anywhere; it isn’t dependable, and it’s even more diffuse than solar. Both of them are boondoggles designed to separate you from your tax money and give power to the bureaucrats who “manage” the projects. People who tell you otherwise are lying, and the only thing the numbers they give you establish is that liars can figure.

ET;

Jim Travers of the Star writes:

Conservatives were as skilfully swift in positioning Dion as an impotent environmentalist as they were framing him as a weak leader.”

No, Mr. Pro-Liberal MSM pundit, Dion’s position as an impotent environmentalist and weak leader isn’t due to the Conservatives. It’s due to himself.
I went to an all candidates meeting in Toronto Centre last night. The St. Lawrence Theatre takes over 500, and it was packed. At first I thought I’d wandered into a British SitCom.
There was a troop of medallion bedecked grannies singing Songs of Peace.
Various impoverished and earnest activists, looking like Bertie Worster Without Jeeves – handing out flyers insisting that a basic income and house are a Human Right (particularly if both are provided by the Working Taxpayer. A deeply committed 9/11 Denier (It was Bush Who Did It). Others Against The Imperialist USA. Unreal.
Rae, on stage, is smug, smooth and polished. He deals with his Years of Deficit by removing it from criticism..by beginning his comments by a joking reference to it. That acknowledgment, which turns it into a joke, removes it from the table. How does he deal with Dion?
He deftly turns the tables. He accused both the NDP and CPC of having brochures that depict Dion in unflattering images, as weak, as.. The NDP countered that the images weren’t altered. Rae then acknowledged Dion as a ‘nerd’ but continued that it wasn’t ‘nice’ to focus on such personal things.
This ignores that he defines the CPC as The American Republican Party.
I got the impression – but I’m possibly biased as it is actually my opinion – that the Liberal Party is acknowledging Dion as a nerd and leaving him outside to play on his own in the sandbox. They can’t do anything about him. They dare not have an election now (to get rid of him) because their loss in seats would be far more disastrous to the Party.
So, they’ll let Dion make a fool of himself, with his claims that ‘we can’t have an election now because it’s snowing’. Or, ‘because it’s Easter’. But they won’t let him have an election (which he wants) because of that disastrous seat loss.
Therefore, they’ll put up with him, and even, isolate themselves more and more from him. Token acknowledgments as Our Leader. But, I’m saying the Real Leader is going to be Rae. And the image he’s going to present will be Experienced, Wise, Smooth and above all, Genial, Friendly, Open. Above all- open. In contrast to Harper’s shyness and ‘coldness’. Rae is going to be The People’s Man.
Their other strategy is to define the CPC and Harper as Corrupt. Their tactic is endless accusations. All unfounded. But they don’t care; the Public Image promoted by their faithful MSM friends is all that matters.

h/t

Breaking!!
Liberal sources are disclosing that there were additional elements to the Cadman bribe!
In addition to offering a patient in the final stages of terminal cancer a one million dollar insurance policy, Harper is reported to have offered Cadman a unicorn, and a magical forest in which to ride his new beast.
Although experts unanimously agree that unicorns, magical forests, and million dollar insurance policies for terminal cancer patients, don’t actually exist, Liberal insiders are firm with their allegations.
Said one source close to Dion:
“Look, if Harper can manage to hold onto power for over two years, pass three budgets, a crime bill and maintain his Afghan position, with three left leaning parties holding more seats than the CPC, he can certainly produce unicorns, and insurance policies for dying patients.”
Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail is sending its crack team to investigate the obviously legitimate concerns of Conservative unicorn production. Stay tuned.