It started so innocently. A sunny morning in January made brighter by a little good news from Transport Canada. Canadian highways are much safer than they once were, with another decline in collisions, injuries and fatalities;

Fatalities continued to decrease in 2004, even though there were more drivers and vehicles on the road than ever before. Injuries also decreased by four-and-a-half per cent over 2003.

The report never knew what hit it. In a moment the good news lay dead on the street – cut down by a headline from the Globe & Mail;

Roadway carnage kills thousands, study finds

And in a tragic case of “wrong place, wrong time”, a passing election campaign was seized hostage.

Once politicians finish grappling with gangs and guns, they may want to take a closer look at a much more deadly problem: Car crash deaths outnumber homicides by almost 5 to 1.

With the situation grim, CTV News arrived on the scene to negotiate…

Statistics show that 2,730 Canadians died in traffic accidents in 2004, compared to 622 who were the victims of homicides…

Homicide rates and gun violence aren’t bad… just misunderstood.

[N]umbers reported by the Toronto Star indicate that motorized vehicles killed more people in 2005 than guns in the Greater Toronto Area, despite the attention that gun violence has garnered in recent weeks. According to the Star, 229 people died in traffic accidents in the GTA in 2005, including 59 in Toronto; while 58 people died of gunshot wounds, with 52 in Toronto.

Meanwhile, at Health Canada, cancer and heart disease plotted their next move…

Wretchard;

The Washington Post recently wrote a somewhat disparaging article of bloggers on the battlefield, mentioning Bill Roggio in particular. I hadn’t realized that a blogger [Steven Vincent]– and not a regular Western professional correspondent — was the only foreign journalist to die in Iraq in 2005.

A lonely gatekeeper pines for the good old days, when ordinary citizens knew their place in the political debate;

This can’t be a good thing for lovers of the traditional game of politics. We know how the traditional game works: Politicians make statements, media report statements and solicit reaction from other politicians. Politicians and media are the players. Those who are not players have several ways of making their views known: They can write letters to the editor, they can answer the phone when the pollster rings and they can be the person-in- the-street when news media are conducting person-in-the-street interviews.
[…]
This structure has not always been viewed as fair by all members of the public and some have attempted to make their views known by other means. These include heckling loudly at political gatherings and also standing on street corners and shouting. The blog is an electronic version of the latter.
[…]
“People we will never hear of again, some of them anonymous or pseudonymous, got their vicious little ideas into the paper. If they had written letters to the editor and tried to use a pen name, the letters would not have been printed.”

There used to be a name for those people Charles Gordon refers to in the Ottawa Citizen.
“Subscribers”.
Via Lost Budgie who chirps, “Wait until he discovers that ordinary people in their pyjamas are now putting out “TV Talk Shows” and delivering them via the web…”

An alert reader at Angry’s scores this one;

Yowza.
Go to Angry’s for the whole thing.

Someone is being stonewalled over questions about why there was a one year delay in the New York Times publication of the National Security Agency eavesdropping story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau.

I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future.
[…]
The impact of a new book about intelligence by Mr. Risen on the timing of the article is difficult to gauge. The book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” was not mentioned in the Dec. 16 article. Mr. Keller asserted in the shorter of his two statements that the article wasn’t timed to the forthcoming book, and that “its origins and publication are completely independent of Jim’s book.”

That “someone” is none other than the NYT Public Editor, Byron Calame.
h/t

Another day, another new stunning revelation. Still reeling from “Cookiegate”, reports have now surfaced that the White House website has a traffic counter.
h/t

Weird goings on at CBC Regina;

CBC National News with Peter Mansbridge gets introduced on the broadcast originating in Regina tonight at 10 pm. Mansbridge begins his intro of the lead story – the Ralph Goodale RCMP Investigation.
No sooner has Mansbridge begun, but commercials start running instead. This goes on for several minutes, returning to the feed only when reporter Caroline Dunn is wrapping up her report.
Mansbridge moves to an interview with Goodale. Less than a minute into the interview, commercials start running again, returning to the feed only at the very end of the interview.
After this, there are no other broadcast problems.

Commentor “Mentok”* caught it, too.
Update Blogging Blue put a call in to the CBC… and is still waiting for an explanation.

At the Ottawa Citizen/Vancouver Sun, they have trouble ciphering.

What exactly do they mean by this sentence?

But Harper stopped short Friday of vowing his party would avoid negative campaigning in its bid to mislead the public in his bid to form a Conservative government.

Update – SDA readers get results! The passage has been edited.