(bumped for John Gormley Live listeners)
CBC;

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities has asked Canadian cities and towns to phase out the sale and purchase of bottled water on municipal property. […] It takes a lot of energy to produce the bottles themselves, Perrault said, and despite being recyclable about half of the bottles sold end up in landfills — at a direct cost to local governments.

Because bottled water is so much different from bottled diet Pepsi.
Time for the Federation of Fed Up Citizens to phase out the election and employment of under-worked political busybodies, I think.
Boil Water Advisory Map

(BTW – the water shortage map is an eye-opener, too. Don’t tell Maude Barlow.)
More about this nonsense at The Economist. h/t KevinB
Update – Aha – it’s all a conspiracy by Big Soft Drink! What would we do without the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives?

Which should make the Europeans stand up and take notice.
h/t Orlin.

Meltdown.

The long arm of the lawless;

The spillover of violence from Mexico began some time ago in border towns like Laredo and El Paso in Texas, where merchants and wealthy families face extortion and kidnapping threats from Mexican gangs, and where drug dealers who refuse to pay “taxes” to Mexican cartel bosses are gunned down. But now, the threat posed by Mexican criminals is beginning to spread north from the U.S.-Mexican border. One location that has felt this expanding threat most acutely is Phoenix, some 185 miles north of the border. Some sensational cases have highlighted the increased threat in Phoenix, such as a June 2008 armed assault in which a group of heavily armed cartel gunmen dressed like a Phoenix Police Department tactical team fired more than 100 rounds into a residence during the targeted killing of a Jamaican drug dealer who had double-crossed a Mexican cartel. We have also observed cartel-related violence in places like Dallas and Austin, Texas. But Phoenix has been the hardest hit. […]
The kidnapping gangs in Phoenix that target illegal immigrants have found their chosen crime to be lucrative and relatively risk-free. If the flow of illegal immigrants had continued at high levels, there is very little doubt the kidnappers’ operations would have continued as they have for the past few years. The current economic downturn, however, means the flow of illegal immigrants has begun to slow — and by some accounts has even begun to reverse. (Reports suggest many Mexicans are returning home after being unable to find jobs in the United States.)
This reduction in the pool of targets means that we might be fast approaching a point where these groups, which have become accustomed to kidnapping as a source of easy money — and their primary source of income — might be forced to change their method of operating to make a living. While some might pursue other types of criminal activity, some might well decide to diversify their pool of victims. Watching for this shift in targeting is of critical importance. Were some of these gangs to begin targeting U.S. citizens rather than just criminals or illegal immigrants, a tremendous panic would ensue, along with demands to catch the perpetrators.

Related;

Nearly 2,000 Mexican soldiers and armed federal police poured into the border town of Ciudad Juarez last weekend. The city – just across from El Paso in Texas – has been ravaged by drug gangs. Just this month 250 people were killed there by hitmen fighting for lucrative smuggling routes.

Mexico is on the brink of becoming a failed state. (link fixed) But never mind that, we have our trusty betters in media alternating national news coverage between developments in the relationship of a hip-hop artist and his punching bag de jour, and envy of the First Lady’s toned arms.

Pretty soon, you’re talking real money.
h/t Simeon

“This not a story for people who need to think that _____ always had it together, because it looks like we’ve caught him being mean to a lady because of her ethnicity. At first, he ignores her cries. Then he refuses to help her and compares her people to dogs.”

Pop quiz!
Post your guess in the comments before clicking this link to find the answer.
h/t James P.

h/t Bart

“… and there were no Africans in the room, except for me.”

While your national networks have been breaking the latest developments on Octomom and Joaquin Phoenix, transportation and profitability problems are beginning to create commodity shortages in the pharmaceutical industry;

Last week a Wegmans pharmacy in upstate New York ran out of OxyContin® and several other prescription medicines. Customers were told that Wegmans’ supplier did not have the ingredients to make several medicines and did not know when they would have them. Wegmans isn’t a mom-and-pop corner store with no buying power. It’s a 71-store chain on the east coast, is one of the largest private companies in the US and had sales of $4.8 billion in 2008.
Tasmania and India are the largest producers of thebaine, the active ingredient of OxyContin®, which is one of 20 alkaloid compounds derived from the opium poppy. Alkaloids cannot be stored by law, so each year’s crop size is limited by the expected sales. However, it’s only February so the shortage in the US is not due to exporters’ supplies having run out.
There is a worldwide shortage of acetonitrile, a critical chemical ingredient used in the purification of pharmaceutical compounds. Acetonitrile is a by-product of the automotive industry and is in short supply due to the worldwide slowdown in that industry, which, in turn, has caused chemical production facilities to close.
Another drug in critical short supply is leucovorin, a generic used in the treatment of colon cancer. Its shortage, too, is due to “manufacturing” delays, according to the suppliers. In an interview with Forbes, Michael Katz, chair of a committee of patients that advises the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group, said, “I’ve never heard of anything like it.” The ECOG group of doctors, who have played a key role in testing new cancer medicines, recently started hearing from hospitals that they were almost out of leucovorin. There is a fear that shortages will occur more frequently with generic drugs because the margins are so thin. Even worse, many of the most important cancer drugs have gone off patent, according to Katz. Further, he wonders why there is no system to catch these shortages before they harm patients or halt clinical trials. The shortage is so acute in Florida that many cancer patients are receiving lower-than-prescribed dosages or none at all.

h/t Shaken.

Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, on C-Span in late January. (Partial transcript, beginning at about the 2:20 minute mark)

“It was about September 15th. Here’s the facts, and we don’t even talk about these things. On Thursday at about 11 o’clock in the morning, the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion dollars – being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two.
The Treasury opened up its window to help, they pumped $105 billion into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account, so there wouldn’t be further panic out there. That’s what actually happened.
If they had not done that, their estimation was that by 2 o’clock that afternoon, $5 trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours, the world economy would have collapsed.”
It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.

Some out there seem to believe this is newly disclosed information. It’s not. Nor is the rapid movement of money necessarily evidence of a plot.
More here from a UK perspective.

Fox News;

The Executive Council of the American Association for Public Opinion Research said Dr. Gilbert Burnham, a Johns Hopkins University professor, had repeatedly refused to cooperate with an eight-month investigation into his research on the Iraqi death toll that made headlines in October 2006 when it was published by The Lancet, a British medical journal.
The widely publicized study headed by Burnham contended that nearly 655,000 Iraqis had died because of the U.S.-led invasion and war in Iraq.
“When asked to provide several basic facts about this research, Burnham refused,” the council said in a statement. It noted that the group’s Code of Professional Ethics and Practices calls for researchers to disclose their methodology when survey findings are made public so they can be independently evaluated and verified.

More at Hot Air.
Maz2

Oh, wait…

BBC:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has hailed a largely peaceful vote for new provincial councils across the country as a victory for all Iraqis.
Voting was extended by one hour due to a strong turnout, including among Sunni Muslims who boycotted the last polls.
The first nationwide vote in four years is being seen as a test of Iraq’s stability ahead of a general election due later this year.

At the new and improved muslim-reachy-outy-dialoguey White House website… crickets….

Largely unnoticed during end of civilization as we know it.

Secondary finding: Americans still take George W. Bush’s word over that of Al Gore’s.
h/t Ed S.

November 20, 2007;

A new United Nations report on the plight of children confirms what many Canadians already know – the Conservative government of Stephen Harper is content to let children fend for themselves, Liberal Social Development Critic Ruby Dhalla said today.

January 21st 2009;

A high-ranking human rights worker with ties to the United Nations was nabbed at Kennedy Airport Tuesday with kiddie porn in his suitcase, officials said.

Andy McCarthy;

The New York Times reports that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review — the specialized federal appeals court created by the 1978 FISA statute to rule on questions involving national security surveillance — has reaffirmed that the President of the United States has inherent constitutional authority to monitor international communications without court permission.
The power exists, the court is expected to reaffirm, even when the communications of American citizens are involved.
The ruling, which was classified when made back in December, may be disclosed publicly as early as today. As the Times says (or, shall I say, concedes through gritted teeth?): “In validating the government’s wide authority to collect foreign intelligence, it may offer legal credence to the Bush administration’s repeated assertions that the president has constitutional authority to act without specific court approval in ordering national security eavesdropping.”
Yeah, it may.
It understates the case to say the Bush administration has been slandered for asserting this power — accused of shredding the Constitution and violating the principle that no one is above the law (even as Congress put itself above the law — the Constitution — by enacting and trying to enforce a statute, FISA, that sought to diminish the president’s constitutional authority). It was never true.

Not that it matters. When Obama wants to eavesdrop on foreign terrorists, God simply whispers the transcripts into his ear.

Takes me back to that day in 1993, when President Bill Clinton sent six warships to blockade Haiti.

(Reading the comments, it’s apparent nobody’s figured this one out yet… think, people, think!)

Well, I should hope so.

Canada stood alone before a United Nations human rights council yesterday, the only one among 47 nations to oppose a motion condemning the Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

The body would be better named the United Nations Council for the Destruction of Israel;

In addition to its recent adoption of an Islamic-sponsored agenda item that singles out Israel for permanent scrutiny, the [Human Rights Council], since being established in June 2006, has directed all of its country censures, now numbering eleven, against the Jewish state. The only other country addressed has been Sudan, though instead of issuing condemnations, the council has praised Khartoum’s “cooperation” and repeatedly called for further reports.

The Star continues…

The United States, regarded as Israel’s greatest ally, is not a member of the council

They’re not a member because they voted against formation of the farce to begin with and refuse to legitimize institutionalized Jew hatred with their participation.
Update: I meant to link to this earlier – “Go Canada!

Oh, wait….
h/t