John Hagopian goes, for the Hamilton Spectator, where other mainstream outlets have feared to tread – the legal facts of Caledonia;

In short, the Six Nations have no legal rights to the lands in question, and have had none for over a century.
They have never had any rights to land in Ontario by virtue of aboriginal title or by treaty. For a tract of land along the Grand River, they obtained in 1784 merely an occupancy permit from British colonial Governor Frederick Haldimand that endured only at the pleasure of the Crown. After 1784, the Six Nations surrendered to the Crown various portions of the Grand River tract, and by the middle of the 19th century all that remained was the land contained in the current Six Nations reserve south of Brantford. That is a summary of their legal rights.

Then, he tackles the mythology.

Bill Ardolino interviews Iraqi soldiers.

INDC: I’ve also heard that some local Fallujans distrust the Iraqi Army because you guys are from different parts of Iraq and many of you are Shia. Does that hamper your ability to operate in the city?
Mohaned F: “If we don’t trust another we’ll lose battles …”
INDC: If you don’t mind me asking, are you guys Shia, Sunni, what?
[All are Shia]
Mohaned F: “But some of our guys are Sunni, but they are on leave right now.”
INDC: “Does that cause any tension with the local Sunni population in Fallujah? I’ve heard about the tension between the two …
Mohaned N: “Everybody here is Iraqi. We don’t like the state of affairs here (with terrorism and insecurity), so there is no difference between the Shia and Sunni.”
INDC: So once again, who do you think the terrorist insurgents are? Are they locals, are they from other countries?
Jabbar: “He has just one target, he wants to attack everyone. So he does not care whether you are Sunni or Shia.”

For violating international law before he was against it;

Al Gore supported rendition before al Qaeda had declared war on the United States and hung its battle flag on the Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, the African embassies, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Bali disco, the Madrid trains, and the United Nations. But after those defeats, Al Gore changed his mind. Has any reporter for any major news organization bothered to ask Gore to explain his reasoning?

Do they ever?
h/t

Belmont Club;

…apparently the Anbar tribes have quit “playing both sides” and come down on the side of the US. What does that suggest about who tribes think is going to win? And why do they think that? Another commenter at Small Wars Council shrewdly understands, from the apparent progress in Anbar, that the correct interpretation of “changing the rules of engagement” doesn’t mean “taking the gloves off” but increasing the degrees of freedom that the commanders in the field are allowed to exercise. Mandatory severity may be just as damaging as compulsory leniency. Perhaps the real lesson of Anbar is to let men on the ground do what they think is right. But the real gem is buried in a link to the blog Talisman Gate, which relates how a Jihadi satellite TV station has gone from broadcasting Islamic Internet attack video to criticizing al-Qaeda.

Christopher Hitchens on the changing positions of Hillary Clinton – along with a handy primer for those hiding deep in the Iraq memory hole.
Smash thinks a political backlash is in the wind as anti-Murtha forces begin to organize.
John Hinderaker – “Apparently it’s a matter of policy at the Associated Press that President Bush be blamed for everything, so the reporter made up for McCain’s omission.”
Sam Johnson of Texas “was a pilot who flew something like 90 combat missions in Korea and Vietnam. He was shot down over North Vietnam and spent seven years as a POW, most of that time in solitary confinement. He returned to the U.S. in 1973 and was elected to Congress in 1991.”

Add related links in the comments.

“Plamegate” – the case against Scooter Libby derails;

It is a common maxim that sometimes those who most loudly decry a sin are in fact the most guilty of it. The trial of Scooter Libby has become a troubling affirmation of that maxim, at least from my vantage point in the media room at the Prettyman Courthouse.
The Washington press has been giddy since the name Joe Wilson was first thrust into the limelight by the tag-team of the New York Times opinion page and NBC’s Meet the Press. This week’s court proceedings reminded us how invested Big Media has been in the prosecution of White House staff over Wilson’s now-debunked claims.
[…]
The contradictory logic evidenced in Russert’s testimony is, somewhat ironically, the keystone of the media’s case against Libby. The criticisms that his memory lapses are selective could easily be levied against both Russert and Mitchell as well. The media has attempted to convict Libby in the minds of its audience by detailing the absurdity of someone forgetting such obviously important facts and conversations. Yet the very people who have beat this drum for months are now exposed as either equally forgetful, or equally deceitful. The glaring omission of these parts of the testimony from NBC’s coverage of the trial makes deceit the increasingly more plausible of the two.

And that’s why a “Bush administration scandal” that once featured prominently in Canadian newscasts has been quietly shelved.

Redstate explains;

The article, by Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith, purported to summarize the conclusions of a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general, beginning with the news that..

Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included ‘reporting of dubious quality or reliability’ that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community . . .

[…] take a look at the whopper of a correction the Post has posted, essentially recanting the entire thing.

A Feb. 9 front-page article about the Pentagon inspector general’s report regarding the office of former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith incorrectly attributed quotations to that report. References to Feith’s office producing “reporting of dubious quality or reliability” and that the office “was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda” were from a report issued by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in Oct. 2004. Similarly, the quotes stating that Feith’s office drew on “both reliable and unreliable reporting” to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq “that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC [Intelligence Community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration” were also from Levin’s report. The article also stated that the intelligence provided by Feith’s office supported the political views of senior administration officials, a conclusion that the inspector general’s report did not draw.

Oops.
Ed Morrissey looks at what the report does say; “They Were For Dissent And Alternative Analysis Before They Were Against It”
Feb 12 Update– Less an error than an agenda. The inside story on what happened doesn’t look good on Walter Pincus, or the Post.

You know Mo – Maurice Strong, Member of the Privy Council, mentor to Paul Martin Jr,m “architect of Kyoto”, former UN special envoy to North Korea, and the best friend a thievin’ UN Secretary General ever had…
(Beijing, some say, making “megatonnes of money” helping the Chinese sustain their economy.)
But, one thing we do know is where he’s not supposed to be;

UNITED NATIONS, January 28 — Ten officials of the Kim Jong Il regime in North Korea were flown to the University of Lund in Sweden in August 2006, according to UNDP spokesman David Morrison, by the UN-affiliated University for Peace, on whose governing Council still sits Maurice F. Strong, who ostensibly left the UN system following being linked, through a South Korean lobbyist, to the Oil for Food scandal in April 2005.
In continued reporting on the North Korea and audit controversy which led to a deferral of UNDP’s North Korea program by its Executive Board last week, Inner City Press asked UNDP to describe its role in the travel of 10 North Korean officials to University of Lund six months ago. Having received no response to its written questions, on January 25 Inner City Press asked the head of UNDP’s Office of Communications David Morrison the same question, after a press conference on the upcoming audit of UNDP. Mr. Morrison replied that the travel was paid by the University of Peace, “which is part of the UN system,” with UNDP only arranging the travel, through UNDP’s Beijing office.
Further inquiry reveals that while serving as both President of the University of Peace and as Kofi Annan’s envoy to North Korea, Maurice Strong, “convened a working group on energy” in the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” According to the University for Peace’s web site, Strong’s group presented its findings, to the nations in the Six Party Talks just prior to their meeting in Beijing in late 2005.
Despite statements that Maurice Strong has left the UN system following corruption scandal involving hiring relatives, as of January 28, 2007, Mr. Strong is still on the Council of the UN-affiliated University for Peace. (Click here and scroll down, noting that the web site has already been updated to include the photo of Ban Ki-moon.) And the energy work with the Kim Jong Il regime has continued.

More here.

James Joyner;

Fifteen years ago, when then-Yugoslavia was falling apart in a series of ethic civil wars, those of us who opposed American military intervention argued that no significant threat was posed to U.S. vital interests. The caveat was always that, if things got out of hand in Kosovo, we’d have little choice but the jump in to prevent it becoming a regional crisis.
When that did indeed come to pass, the idea that Kosovo’s independence would eventually followed would have seemed incredible. Now it’s buried on A10 of the Post.

Michelle Malkin’s video series from Baghdad is up at Hot Air. A commentor;

I’ve learned more from Michelle in the past few days than I have from the Mainstream Media in all of the years of this war.

In the lab, many gasoline alternatives look good. Out on the road, automotive engineers have a lot of work to do, and energy companies have new infrastructure to build, before very many people can drive off into a petroleum-free future. And, there’s the issue of money. Too often, discussions of alternative energy take place in an alternative universe where prices do not matter.
For this special report, PM crunched the numbers on the actual costs and performance of each major alternative fuel. Before we can debate national energy policy–or even decide which petroleum substitutes might make sense for our personal vehicles–we need to know how these things stack up in the real world.
The Great Alt-Fuel Debate: It takes five barrels of crude oil to produce enough gasoline (nearly 97 gal.) to power a Honda Civic from New York to California. So how do the alternative fuels that may gradually reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil stack up against the mileage and convenience of the filling-station stalwart? Download our comparison chart and find out.

A Popular Mechanics article that’s well worth your time.
h/t
More here – Car&Driver “Let’s examine the various promises for ethanol one by one, to see if it can deliver.”

A map for the “they need us worse than we need them” people.


(Click for full size)
The population of Texas is just over 20 million.

Last week Charles Adler interviewed Michael Marzolini from Pollara. What caught my ear was the pollster’s editorializing that Canadians were concerned about our economic prospects – due to sluggishness of the US economy and what we “saw for themselves” (or words to that effect) of the gloomy employment situation south of the border.

Canadians’ concerns that the U.S. economy will worsen in 2007 has body-checked Canada’ four-year trend of ever-increasing economic optimism, according to a new national poll released this morning by Michael Marzolini, Chairman of POLLARA Inc., at a breakfast meeting of the Economic Club of Toronto.

I waited for the followup – qualification by Marzolini that those perceptions are largely inaccurate and that the US economy continues to outperform our own. That didn’t happen. Instead, what followed was more evidence that we in Canada are routinely fed “findings” by pollsters who are negligently uninformed, analysed by media too lazy to confirm whether the premises – much less the conclusions – are valid.
Of course, he’s not alone;

The Canadian Chamber says Canada’s average annual real GDP growth will be 2.8 per cent in 2006 when all the numbers are counted, but that GDP growth will slow to 2.4 per cent in 2007. There are several factors for the projected slowdown, but key is lower U.S. demand for Canadian exports as a result of continuing economic weakness south of the border.
The Chamber projects that the Canadian economy will limp home as 2006 concludes, struggling to reach 2 per cent growth in the final quarter.

I cite that source not for the Chamber’s take on expectations or opinion on American prospects, but for the figure of 2.8% growth rate in the Canadian economy for 2006. Now, let’s look at that struggling American economy.

Economists are hastily upgrading their forecasts for the US economy after a series of surprisingly strong reports suggesting the so-called “soft landing” may be over and growth is accelerating.
Over the past week, surprises have come in stronger-than-expected reports on US job creation, the trade balance and retail sales — all key contributors to economic activity.
Lehman Brothers chief US economist Ethan Harris on Friday boosted his forecast for fourth quarter 2006 growth to an annualized rate of 3.3 percent, a leap from the firm’s prior call for just 2.0 percent growth.

And all those jobless workers?

The latest data showed US employers added a healthy 167,000 new jobs in December, with unemployment holding at a low 4.5 percent. Average wages were up 4.2 percent annually.

That’s right – the national rate in the US is still 1.5% below that of Canada’s 30 year lows.
What most are aware of however, is that our economic growth isn’t evenly distributed. Unemployment rates in Calgary are around 2% at the moment, while Quebec’s contribution to those “lowest jobless numbers in 30 years” is 7.5%.
Now, over to Joan Tintor, who interrupts the 24 hour coverage of global warming to provide this little-reported bookend.

Ontario slips into negative growth in third quarter; GDP minus 0.1 per cent
[…]
This is Ontario’s first quarter of negative GDP growth since the SARS-induced recession of 2003. Before that, the last negative-growth quarters were in 1992. It’s certainly the first negative growth on McGuinty’s watch.

News which is sure to send media outlets back to the pollsters to ramp up the message that the “sagging” US growth and employment rates are dragging our “more bouyant” Canadian economy down.
(More data)
Update – Michael Marzolini responds in the comments.
Related – “You gotta love Decima, if they didn’t exist the Liberals would have to create them.”

Strategy Page

Medicines and medical practices (particularly improved water and sanitation) led to a similar baby boom in the developing world in the latter half of the 20th century. Heinsohn demonstrated that when 30 percent or more of a population is aged 15-29, you have too many young men with bad attitudes, and the result is a jump in crime, terrorism and civil unrest. Heinsohn showed that in 90 percent of the 67 of the countries that have the 30 percent “Youth Bulge” (as demographers put it) you have massive unrest. Moreover, 13 of the 27 nations with the largest Youth Bulge are Moslem. In fact, most of the Youth Bulge is found in Africa and in Moslem nations.
Heinsohn also points that many historical upheavals were attributable, at least in part, to the Youth Bulge. These would include the American and French Revolutions and many other uprisings in places like Ireland and Latin America. The current growth of Youth Bulge can largely be blamed on Western efforts to improve the lives and health of people in the developing world. No good deed goes unpunished.

The creation of lesser offences for would-be shooters is unlikely to have much effect on the body count bottom line. But, why let common sense be your guide, when there are so many willing to study such matters!

The panelists considered 51 published studies examining seven different kinds of laws, including bans on specific firearms, restrictions on who may own a firearm, and waiting periods for gun purchases. They “found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws.”
In other words, after more than half a century of local, state, and federal gun control legislation, we still don’t know whether these laws do what they’re supposed to do. The report’s most consistent finding was inconsistent findings: Sometimes gun control is associated with reduced violence, and sometimes it’s associated with increased violence.
The world is messy, and it can be difficult to control for all the relevant variables when you’re trying to determine the impact of a particular law. Not surprisingly, the CDC panel calls for more and better research, and it cautions that “insufficient evidence to determine effectiveness should not be interpreted as evidence of ineffectiveness.”
But it’s scandalous that politicians have been legislating in the dark all these years, promising that the gun control solution du jour would save lives when there was no evidence to back up such claims. If gun control laws have any positive effect at all, it must be pretty modest to have escaped documentation so far.

Read it all. Via Glenn Reynolds who observes; “If a drug company were as cavalier about science as these people are, its executives would all be in jail.”.
To which I’ll add – if the news industry that reports these studies were as cavalier about … oh, nevermind.

I did not know this;

Don Cherry is a Canadian icon but remarkably Don Cherry is not a member of the Order of Canada.
How could that be? Who is more Canadian? I was surprised about this. Well sort of. He is as loud a patriot as there has ever been but he’s also been a thorn in the side of the Liberals who have ruled this land for much of its 140 years.
But with Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper in office now there are some hoping the tide will change and a few right-wingers will get a shot — with Don Cherry at the top of the list.
While they are at it maybe they can include a few well deserving Sun columnists, too. How the Toronto Star’s Michele Landsberg and the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson are members of the order and Sun legends Peter Worthington and Doug Fisher are not, says everything you need to know about how unfair the process is.
Worthington and Fisher are Canadian veterans who served in World War II and legendary journalists who have 120 years of newspaper experience between them. I haven’t found any military service records for Landsberg or Simpson. They must have had other connections.
Cherry’s connection is his fans, regular Canadians, and an underground campaign to see that he gets his due has popped up. “Don Cherry epitomizes and is representative of the freedoms we as Canadians enjoy, the freedom of speech,” said Toronto Police video services manager John Sandeman. “He does what government’s strive to do, unite Canada.”
Sandeman sent over an e-mail yesterday hoping to get people to fill in the form and send it to Ottawa. Let me know what you think or call the Governor General’s office at 1-800-465-6890, e-mail info@gg.ca or write to Rideau Hall, 1 Sussex Dr., Ottawa, Ont. K1A 0A1.

Via National Newswatch (which is getting better by the day).
UPDATE – Maybe we should just pool our pennies and buy him one.

The man Ike Turner might have been, had he only gotten better press.

There’s a lot to know;

Frederic Rouvillois’ definitive study of manners through the ages in France weighs in at a crushing 550 pages.
It joins Nadine de Rothschild’s best-selling bible of politeness in offering advice to those in need of guidance on how to behave in that oxymoron, “polite French society”.
[…]
It teaches the “arts de vivre”, that uniquely French concept which encompasses everything from how to appreciate your wine and food, whether to eat your sorbet or ice-cream with a spoon or a fork, and if you should run past your grandmother on the right or the left side when fleeing from Germans.

OK, so I added that last part.

This quote from Newsweek, via Greg Tinti.

Civil war or not, Iraq has an economy, and—mother of all surprises—it’s doing remarkably well. Real estate is booming. Construction, retail and wholesale trade sectors are healthy, too, according to a report by Global Insight in London. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports 34,000 registered companies in Iraq, up from 8,000 three years ago. Sales of secondhand cars, televisions and mobile phones have all risen sharply. Estimates vary, but one from Global Insight puts GDP growth at 17 percent last year and projects 13 percent for 2006. The World Bank has it lower: at 4 percent this year. But, given all the attention paid to deteriorating security, the startling fact is that Iraq is growing at all.

Via True North, a comment that originally appeared at Free Dominion on Nov.19th;

I was in the city of Toronto today. Around 2:00pm I was at Spadina and Dundas. On the south west corner hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chinese were standing there holding fabric banners that measured approx. 36″ x 30′. One read “Thank you Mr. Harper”. Another supported the government in general. I won’t assume the press will draw people’s attention to it, so I thought I would.

Can anyone confirm this? Kathy Shaidle can’t find anything on Google news, nor can I. Of course, absence of media coverage means nothing – this rally supported the PM. Now, had the event drawn numbers in the double digits, been organized by Friends of Hezbollah or the World Worker’s Party… well, you get the drift.
Update – from the comments, Bob Tarantino;

Well, I was there, I walked through the crowd, I picked up the pamphlets, even got a DVD which I haven’t watched yet. I would put the numbers at around four or five dozen (with the caveat that I’m terrible at guesstimating crowd sizes). As someone else pointed out, it’s pretty much logistically impossible to corral hundreds or thousands of people at the corner in question, regardless of the time of day. All that being said, the lack of media attention, compared to, say, protests being attended by even smaller numbers of people but espousing double-plus-goodthink, is… well, I was going to say “a sad comment on the state of our media”, but that would imply that I had any expectations of them whatsoever to begin with.

“Who do you think the top five GHG [greenhouse gas] culprits are in Canada?”