Remember the intense interest around StopIggy.com? It was that ankle-biting website dedicated to explaining to everyone just why Michael Ignatieff would cause death and destruction if he won the nomination for the Liberal Party leadership.
First, StopIggy.com has disappeared.
Second, we know the person behind it — Marsha Akman, a Liberal Party activist and a member of the party’s women’s commission.
What we don’t know is if there was someone behind Akman, and why the site has gone down.
Stephane Dion in 2004 (paraphrased):
Keeping tracks of bad chemicals is important. Really it is. And you chemical producers have a great program for doing it. The key idea in your program is to be responsible over the whole life-cycle. A lot of other people are impressed with it, and it’s been making a real difference for over 10 years now. Congratulations to you.
Stephane Dion in 2006 (paraphrased):
Keeping tracks of bad chemicals is important. Really it is. Today I’m proposing a great program for doing it. The key idea my program is that chemical producers have to be responsible over the whole life-cycle. A lot of people are going to be impressed with my idea and I’m going to make a real difference starting when I’m prime minister. Congratulations to me.
No kidding. Not only is he touting a plan that sounds suspiciously like the same plan for which he heaped so much praised on to the Canadian Chemical Producers Association two years ago, he actually uses the same paragraph to kick off both speeches — then he veers off in two entirely different directions.
Check out the two speeches and see for yourself.
If he didn’t rip off his own speeches, I might never have spotted it.
Update: The CCPA is not entirely pleased.
In the US, people like actor Ron Silver have been called War Democrats — still liberal with regards to social issues, but four-square behind the conservatives when it comes on the War on Terror.
Well, Jack Layton’s recent lies — suggesting the Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants Canadian troops out of his country when the opposite is true — have driven one NDP blogger out of the NDP altogether.
A War Dipper?
Australia is cracking down on importers who insist on importing banned toys from China. One of those toys is the Yo-Yo Water Ball, a known asphyxiation hazard. That particular toy has been banned by Health Canada since October 2003.
Yet you can still buy it from an importer in Montreal.
Sounds like Health Canada has something to check into.
Angry in the Great White North has the details:
Water-ball Yo-Yo
One of the hottest sellers on the market!
This yo-yo is made of a water filled gel ball.Reference ID: 10104
Item Code: YO001
Price: US $8.49 (CA $9.99)
Qty/Pack: 12
Details: Cool item!Cool item? Illegal item! How are these things even getting into the country? Don’t we pay people to check for this stuff at the border? Is someone messing with the documentation? Or is this old stock, imported before 2003, still being sold by PartyStarter?
How many have been sold by PartyStarter since 2003, I wonder.
At Angry in the Great White, we get news of a mysterious disappearance at the University of Western Ontario. The officially sanctioned club, Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, has disappeared, at least from the web. And not just their own website, but the SPHR-UWO no longer appears on the official list of UWO clubs. At least one person thinks the Jews are behind it.
Mystery solved: the club was deratified and the website kicked off the university server. The post has been updated with some details.
The NDP website quotes Hamid Karzai in such a way as to suggest that Canadian troops are bombing civilian villages. Jack Layton has gone too far. If he thinks that Canadian troops are engaged in such acts, he should stand up and say it himself, instead of using Karzai as his proxy.
Especially after Karzai delivered a speech today, in Parliament, right in front of Layton, thanking Canada for its efforts, both in civilian reconstruction and militarily.
Jack Layton is not just shameless. He’s a shameless liar.
Update: The full text of Karzai’s comments only serves to emphasize the full depth of the NDP lie.
This guy threatens everything for both native and non-natives.
Is it possible for the John Mark Karr fiasco to get even more fiasco-ish?
Sonoma County authorities say they’ve lost the computer that belonged to one-time JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect John Mark Karr and allegedly held the child pornography images that he’s charged with possessing.
Edmonds said authorities looked for the computer for the past two weeks, but have had no luck. It likely was lost when the sheriff’s department moved into a new building in 2002.
The Keystone Kops of Sonoma figure it won’t matter:
But the missing computer, seized from Karr’s home in 2001, was not expected to jeopardize the case against him because authorities had copied the entire hard drive contents and printed out the five illicit images, Sheriff’s Department Lt. Dave Edmonds told The Press-Democrat of Santa Rosa on Tuesday.
Right. Because we all know just how permanent digital information is. How diificult it is to make something look like something it is not.
The defense will have a field day with this.
This farce has to end. The authorities are going to have to just give up and cut him loose. And live with the consequences of their incompetence.
I predicted this was going to happen.
At Angry in the Great White North, there is an analysis of Canadian Public Accountability Board (CPAB), the entitiy that sets standards for audit firms. Sounds dry, I know. But it is actually a story of how a group of quasi-governmental bodies with only the minimal oversight of the provincial governments can act with near impunity. The bodies, the provincial securities commissions, have created a cartel of sorts, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), to set these national rules. There are no legislative acts to give these new bodies, the CSA and the CPAB, the specific statutory power to do these things. All there is in Ontario, for example, is the Securities Act, which says that the Ontario Securities Commission can set the rules, and submit them to be be signed off on by the minister in charge (normally the finance minister, but because of Greg Sorbara’s legal troubles with the OSC, the OSC reports to the Minister of Government Services, Gerry Phillips). The minister has 75 days to sign off on it or reject it. The rule is not presented to the legislature, not evaulated by a legislative committee, or even debated in cabinet. But it does have the force of law. If the Minister doesn’t sign off, the rule becomes permanent by default.
Nice eh? Nothing like a state within a state.
Does it matter? The CPAB has ruled that Certified General Accountants cannot audit publicly traded firms. CGA-Canada is not pleased. But because this is the case of a private entity, the CPAB, setting public rules instead of a legislature body making law, CGA-Canada has to go take the CPAB court instead of working for amendments with elected parliamentarians.
Is there a better way to do this? In the US, in the aftermath of Enron and other auditing failures, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was created to set standards for audit firms. The PCAOB was the model for the CPAB, which was created a year later. The huge difference is that the PCAOB was created by an act of Congress, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
The CPAB, on the other hand, was created by rule 52-108, drafted behind closed doors by the CSA, and signed off by a minister in the privacy of his office. Instant law without all that messy debate to slow things down.
NDP leader Jack Layton is ripped apart from one of the former members of the New Politics Initiative, the faction of the NDP that once considered Jack Layton to be its great success.
From FOX News, reporting from Santa Rosa, California, news on John Mark Karr‘s impending release:
One-time JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect John Mark Karr was offered a plea deal Tuesday on child pornography charges that would free him on probation.
Assistant District Attorney Joann Risse said prosecutors would waive three of the five child pornography possession charges against him if he pleaded guilty on two remaining charges.
Karr, 41, would get credit for time served and would be placed on probation for three years. He also would be required to register as a sex offender.
As I’ve said before, Karr could choose to fight this. He could demand his jury trial and then argue an impartial jury can’t be impanelled because of all the media attention. Or he could just take the plea and walk away.
Either way, this whole thing has been a circus, and the American justice system has come out looking like a bunch of fools. Defense lawyers did not come out looking much better either.
The question is whether this is the last we’ll hear of John Mark Karr.
Is Pope Benedict XVI going too far with the apologies? I think a moral argument could be made for that, at least as far as Thomas Aquinas is concerned:
St. Thomas teaches (Summa theol., II-II, Q. x, a. 11): “Ritus infidelium tolerari possunt vel propter aliquod bonum, quod ex eis provenit, vel propter aliquod maum, quod vitatur” (Heathen worships can be tolerated either because of some good that results from them or because of some evil that is avoided).
He was talking about whether a Catholic state should tolerate other religions within its borders (he says they should be tolerated, and other Catholic philosophers have expanded on this), but the principle applies more widely. Tolerance is a good thing because it generates a good result.
Are apologies, which implicitly signal tolerance of the violence shown by Muslim mobs, leading to a good result? So far, it has only led to further violence. Moreover, it signals to the mob that future violence on other issues will be rewarded. I think there is an argument to be made that the Church must take an intolerant stand. She must make it clear that no further apologies or explanations are forthcoming, that the violence shown over the spoken word is intolerable, and that the Church will demand tolerance of Muslims in the future. That too, will lead to violence, but then it’s likely unavoidable. But taking such a stand will mean that the Church will have drawn a line in the moral sand, and in doing so taken sides with such others as Salman Rushdie and Naguib Mahfouz who themselves were victims of those who tolerated extremism, and who themselves represent the marriage of Islam and reason which was the point of the Pope’s speech in the first place.
[See the expanded post at Angry in the Great White North. Hopefully this expanded precis addresses some of the criticism from Kate’s readers. I’ll try to get the balance right in the future.]
That new all-woman media enterprise, GreenStone Media, backed by Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, has a splashy website to promote the all-talk radio network. The website also lists some of Gloria’s favourite blogs. But based on the traffic patterns on the first blog listed, it seems like getting the nod from GreenStone Media makes no difference to a blog’s traffic.
Which makes me wonder just how many people are going to the GreenStone Media website…and then how many people are listening to the radio shows.
Not too many, apparently. But judge for yourself.
You know Kevin Chalmers, the former campaign coordinator for David Emerson, and not the leader of the effort to “de-elect” Emerson for having the temerity to join cabinet.
Well, he doesn’t even in live in David Emerson’s riding. That’s right, apparently he has decided that those other constituents need to have a by-election in their riding. I wonder if he has decided that any of us need to have by-elections as well.
The details are at Angry in the Great White North.
Update: Apparently this was revealed by Norman Spector on CKNW radio today. Darn.
If a conservative figure likened Bill Clinton to a venereal disease and said homosexuals invariably cause pain to their families, he’d be run up the nearest lamppost by a rabid media horde.
So why does darling of the left, Kurt Vonnegut, get away with it?
Well, I guess we’re all taking turns at evaluating the circumstances of the sad death of Tom Fox in Iraq (see here and here).
So here’s my take on it. My beef is with the Christian Peacemaker Teams. Not in that they sent people into a dangerous area resulting in a death. But in that for their insistence on using the label of “Christian”, they seem to be behaving in a distinctly un-Christian manner.
They seem to have confused “turn the other cheeck” with “turning a blind eye”. They can call themselves teams, or even peacemaking teams. But Christian? That’s a tough sell for me.
Best forgotten. That seems to be the policy at the Liberal Party website. Check out his official biography. It never mentions anything after the leadership race of November 2003. In fact, it doesn’t even mention that he won the race in November 2003.
Remember how they said Paul Martin’s tenure as prime minister would be relegated to a footnote? Looks like if the Liberal Party has its way, he’d be lucky to have footnote.
All the details are at Angry in the Great White North.
Cargojet is leasing the gas-guzzling 727 Paul Martin is using to fly around the country, a plane he is sticking with despite the bad press it has generated.
Cargojet’s founder and CEO, Ajay Virmani, is a big Liberal Party supporter. Thousands and thousands in donations, both personally and by Cargojet.
So does it come as any surprise that just before Ralph Goodale announced favourable tax treatment for income trusts, that there was a spike in trading in units in Cargojet’s income trust fund?
Depressingly, no.
Check out the original post at MK Braaten, and the expanded version at Angry in the Great White North, to see how someone knew to buy two hundred thousand shares of the income trust Medisys just prior to Finance Minister Ralph Goodale’s announcement not to tax income trusts.
Medisys? Sound familiar? It should. It’s the medical services provider owned and run by Prime Minister Paul Martin’s personal physician Dr Sheldon Elman.
Yup, 30 years. Trudeau-time. PET leases a piece of land from a First Nations tribe in Vancouver for 71 years. Why? To build the Pacific Environment Centre, a place where people can learn and study and research environmental issues.
Ever heard of it? Of course not. It has never been built.
Why? Because it is the 4th most contaminated plot of land that the government owns or leases.
Ironic, isn’t it?
And guess what? Thirty years have gone by, and the Liberals are still paying millions every year to lease it, have yet to clean it up, and have no serious plans to do anything with it.
Read the whole story.