Evidence that refutes the claims of the hysterical left that the Bush administration is threatening civil liberties and freedom of speech.
Exhibit A: Ted Rall* is still drawing breath.

Fringe cartoonist? Hardly. Rall is carried in the Washington Post and about 140 other newspapers.
Crossposted at the Shotgun

Listening to John Gormley Live this morning in the truck, to a discussion on Moore’s Moonbat Masterpiece, a caller phoned in who mentioned a website with an address I promptly forgot. He explained that it compiles in one place every half-baked, quarter-baked and unbaked conspiracy theory surrounding the events of Sept.11. We’ve heard them all by now. The caller, of course, thought the website was credible.
With the controversy swirling around Farenheit, I’ve been reminded a lot lately of Oliver Stone’s JFK. The parallels are striking – from the media hype to the public debate, to the eventual debunking and consensus that Stone’s movie was a pile of unsubstantiated crap. While conspiracy theorists still abound over the events in Dallas, not many of them cite Oliver Stone these days. When all the hoopla is over, and Iraq stumbles its way towards quasi-democracy and Bush has moved back to Texas, replaced by Kerry in 2004 or Rice in 2008…I predict Farenheit 9/11 will be sitting on a dusty shelf, next to JFK. Nobody will take Moore any more seriously than they do Mr. Stone.
But this morning, as the conspiracy seeker was being summarily dismissed as a lunatic, I began thinking about the extinction of the werewolves.

It’s hard to imagine a time long ago when werewolves were taken seriously, when simple-minded village people huddled together beside bright fires, with their doors barred against an unspeakable fate. Harder yet to imagine the irrational terror of an unbelievable, supernatural creature.

All in all though, werewolves were a resilient lot – incomprehensibly powerful, virtually immortal. They survived in the folklore and literature of civilization for centuries. How many silver bullets were spent in the dark, how many beasts felled, to return to their human forms?
In the end, the magnificent and malevolent creature were condemned to nothingness- their last gasps expended on celluloid. I think the last true werewolf movie was An American Werewolf In London – long after the real thing was gone.
They had to see it coming. When Edison created the light bulb, the werewolf retreated with the dark. A century later, Apollo on the moon and Armstrong walking its surface, the creature was struck a fatal blow. The moon was no longer magic.
Today, Mars rovers and Titan probes have pushed these quaint old monsters so deeply into the void that we nearly forget they ever existed. There, they joined the mermaids and the sea witches and the Windigo. Only the vampire survived, but at a price – the everlasting humiliation of being vanquished by girls named “Buffy”.
But with their demise, a vacuum arose.
Denied the objects of old superstitions, the human mind sought new ones. As science explored both outward and inward, demystifying and explaining the unknown, the superstitious had fewer places to go. With nowhere else to turn, they cast their lot with the known. Today, they fear the powerful mortal figures of our present, and find darkness in the giant shadows that they cast. Conspiracy folk fables arise from the mists just as surely as the howls of the werewolves did in centuries past.
Instead of supernatural, bloodthirsty creatures of lunar inspired madness, the monsters of the simple minds of our new age are mere human beings, transformed into scheming omnipotent creatures through the power of the political. One can’t help but think that it must be frustrating to settle for such pale and transient villians. Perhaps this is the reason for their shrillness – they’ve been cheated of the real thing. Real werewolves don’t have term limits.
So today, while a small metal object circles the planet of Saturn, and geneticists unravel the human genetic code, as physicists transform light into tools and molecules into robots – the superstitious still gather together in the dark, reassured by the flickering screen of the cinema, as their ancestors were reassured by the flicker of the cabin fire.
Perhaps we should just leave them be.

Jeff Goldstein is involved. With Peter Fonda. In a manner of speaking. Thus, the expected language warnings.

Christopher Hitchens reviews Farenheit 9/11.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.

It should be noted that Michael Moore has assembled an attack team of lawyers to sue anyone who insults him or his film. Hitchens goes on to deconstruct the contradictions and outright fictions at length in the so-called “documentary”.

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (…) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

“The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States “

And that’s just from Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it’s highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It’s also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

(By way of comparison, the approving pap from a clueless Roger Ebert.)
hat tip – QandO

CBC Watch:

With copy slogans like “He came inside me,” “I came inside him” and “He likes it Raw,” Health Canada and a handful of AIDS groups are running a new national HIV ad campaign targeting gay men under the catch phrase “Think Again”(a phrase already used by Health Canada for a campaign to target smokers).

CBC Watch has a followup on the reaction of the People’s Network to Jim Pattison’s refusal to run the images on Pattison Group billboards. Short version: “bad conservative billionaire!”.
I like Kathy Shaidle’s take.
A couple of years ago, a friend who works with Sask Health mentioned that they were worried that a new needle exchange program was going to anger diabetics, who had to pay for their own. I told her, “And rightfully so.”
“But,” she protested, “AIDS is a public health issue.”
“and diabetes isn’t?”
“A lot of people don’t know that you can catch HIV through intravenous drug usage. They don’t know….”
“What.. ? Did they miss the day in Grade 6 where we learned shooting drugs into your veins with a needle is bad for you???

As legislation expands here and across North America to ban smoking of tobacco products in public places, the anti-smoking crusaders (whose bandwagon I jumped off a couple of years ago) are claiming victory.

More recently, Nanny State has been treating us (at taxpayer expense) to brown eyed toddlers telling us how they “smoke a cigarette” on the way to school, on the way to grandma’s house. – through the noxious fumes they inhale in mommy’s car. I suspect the family sedan is next.

While the progressive forces of leftist “we know what’s good for you and if you don’t believe us, it’s jail for you!” clan marches forward with their zero tolerance agenda, their brothers-in-arms are busy campaigning – and succeeding – for the decriminilazation and normalization of marijuana Which, last I checked, one rolls into cigarettes and inhales into their lungs.

Despite any scientific evidence to support their claims, (Pfizer should have it so good), marijuana is now being grown and sanctioned for medicinal purposes, courtesy of Health Canada.
And everything old is new again.

Just about every time I drive into the US, I hear Toby Keith’s post 9/11 song “Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue”. And I quite like it.
I don’t imagine the song has ever been played here in the frozen north, [disclaimer – I don’t listen to country] – outside perhaps a furrowed-brow analysis of Canadian moral superiority over warmongering America cultural differences between our country and the US, on CBC Radio.

Hey Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list,
And the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist.
And the eagle will fly,
And there’s gonna be Hell,
When you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell!
It’s gonna feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you…
Brought to you courtesy of the Red, White and Blue!

Which got me to thinking. On occassion, local CBC radio has a phone-in song request show.
Heh.

I do believe that, at this very moment, the Democratic party is wrestling with an important script rewrite. From: “BUSH STOLE THE ELECTION !!!!!”

to: “Bullet, dodged.”

Now, for today’s bonus feature: an insight as to why Canadians are generally misinformed about US politics:
Today, the RNC responded :

“Al Gore served as Vice President of this country for eight years. During that time, Osama Bin Laden declared war on the United States five times and terrorists killed US citizens on at least four different occasions including the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the attacks on Khobar Towers, our embassies in East Africa, and the USS Cole.
“Al Gore’s attacks on the President today demonstrate that he either does not understand the threat of global terror, or he has amnesia.”

Now understanding that should be pretty easy. It’s short. To the point. Not a lot of big words. Devoid of nuance. A no-brainer.
Antonia Zerbisias simple.
But, failing that – in the unlikely event that there was a reporter on the planet with the intellectual incapacity to misread that news release, you’d think the fact that it’s quotable would save them. Surely, laziness accompanies stupidity in the way that gravy accompanies mashed potatoes? Laziness is a defense mechanism that has evolved to keep the stupid alive. Being lazy keeps the stupid out of dangerous situations. Being lazy means not getting noticed by predators. (Newborn fawns are stupid and lazy.)
So, it should follow that a person too stupid to understand the content, would be inclined to take the lazy way out and quote it directly. Shouldn’t it?
On local radio, just now….

…[begin audio of Gore] …”The unpleasant truth is that President Bush’s utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States.”

The news announcer continues;

“Today the Republican party responded, saying that Gore should watch what he says, since the 911 attacks happened while he was vice-president.“

I despair.

In the Morgan Spurlock schlockumentary Supersize Me, Spurlocks schtick is to live for a month on nothing but McDonalds food – with the preordained expected consequences.

Spurlock starts out the picture of health, a strapping 6-foot-2 and 185 pounds. Three doctors and a nutritionist, who reappear throughout, examine him and attest to his well being. But within a few days he’s vomiting out of the window of his car. And it’s downhill from there. Spurlock’s body goes through a general deterioration that surprises even his doctors in its rapidity. (His girlfriend, a vegan chef, is beside herself.) Gaining weight is just the outward sign: His liver becomes toxic, his cholesterol skyrockets, his libido sags, he gets headaches and becomes depressed

Something already doesn’t ring true about this. I hate McDonalds food, but I can think of ways in which to eat sanely at McDonalds for a month without puking out the window or putting on 50 pounds. Not to mention the obvious – there are too many college students alive and well today to buy this.
The Filthy Critic has issues with his methodology;

Like I said, Morgan Spurlock is a fucking pussy. First, he only took on one vice, when it’s common knowledge that you need to counter one with another. Like drinking is healthiest when you smoke. Or a crack addiction is optimized with a delusional paranoia. As a heavy drinker with a hell of a lot more than thirty days under my belt, I’ve got a little advice: push through the pain, you baby. Get past the depression, the illness, the shakes and diarrhea. Sure, that first month is full of ups and downs, but after that you reach equilibrium. You don’t feel so sick or queasy, and you learn to love your captors. It’s like the Stockholm Syndrome, except with cheeseburgers for you or $1.50 drafts for me. When you have your bad days, you learn to self-medicate; hit the fries or hooch until the sadness goes away. On a really shitty day, hit the trifecta: Supersize Fries, a fifth of Old Mariner vodka and a soft bed of dirt under the junipers behind the ice skating rink.

I think I’ll go see this – right after I sit through Bowling for Columbine.

Over at the Shotgun, Laura is frightened.

“This is scary shit. The prison abuses are scary shit. All of the lies are scary shit.”

Well, Laura, you found us out. I confess… there is a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy[tm] and nobody noticed until now. I know this is true, because, well… I’m in it. And now that you’ve found us out, I’ve been given permission to tell you the rest.
Please, sit down.
There never were any weapons of mass destruction. None. Anywhere. We knew that all along – there never was a Halabja. It was filmed in a remote part of Texas hill country.�Mexican illegals, playing dead for the camera. Rumsfeld directed – he shook Saddam’s hand, didn’t he? It was all fake, Laura. Didn’t you notice the flags were waving? Waving, Laura. There’s no atmosphere in northern Iraq.
It’s Vietnam all over again. Tet. My Lai (did you know it’s pronounced “me lie”?) Soldiers raping babies. Quagmire quagmire quagmire. Bush lied. Bush is stupid. Bush is a chimp. An evil mastermind Nazi puppet chimp who engineered the takeover of America by stealing the election. And he’s ours. We hold the strings.
We murdered Vince Foster, just to watch him die. And so we could blame Hillary.
Udday was gunned down by the capitalist forces of globalization. His hands were in the air, his fingers pleading – “Peace”. He knew the cure for cancer, so they couldn’t let him live. There were panties on his head.
Nick Berg is on a secret tropical island, with his Helliburton pension, golfing with Jack Kennedy and sharing peanut butter and bacon sandwiches with Elvis. Yucking it up with Danny Pearl. There’s a greenish glass jar in the entertainment center, beside the big screen TV. Inside, a Roswell alien floats gently, gently, upside down. A pallid little creature bobbing in a lava lamp. Some sick bastard has slapped a decal on it; “Don’t Mess With Texas”.
“Don’t Mess With Texas”, Laura.
It was all about the oil. It’s always about the oil. Japan was about the oil. Vietnam was about the oil. Panama? Oil.
There are alligators in the sewers of New York. I once had a friend who knew someone who had a Doberman who choked on the finger of a burglar. In the fifties there was a engine that got 200 miles to the gallon but Big Oil stole the plans and murdered the inventor. The drug companies created AIDS through genetic engineering to kill the gays. Ronald Reagan told them to. The WTC towers were taken out by Israeli missiles, there never was a Holocaust and the JEWS RULE THE WORLD!!!
So, Laura, there you have it. You’re free to go. You’ve got the truth now – spread the word. Proclaim it far and wide. Write your newspaper. Nobody will believe you, because…
We’re a vast right wing conspiracy.
And we own the media.

Words for tonight’s CBC/CTV National News Singalong;
(sung to Folsom Prison Blues)

Well, t’was just a little sarin…
Why, nothing here to see
George Bush exaggerated..
Not much WMD…
Hans Blix, he says ’tis nuthin,
And so, believe you me..
Now, back to Rumsfeld’s prison:
“A man who sprained his knee…”

Update

“Survey of Canadians Views of RCMP Policing Services 2004

1 = Strongly disagree …..2…….3…….4…… Strongly Agree = 5

hmmm…. ok. couple of basic questions about satisfaction levels. Check. Check.

The RCMP’s services are important for Canada

….vague enough to get a 4.

The RCMP is a professional organization

Technical question. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are paid for what you do.”
Obligatory 5

The RCMP is an organization with integrity and honesty.

Adscam and pension fund misuse for 2, Alex!

The RCMP places an emphasis on providing good service to the public

eh… three calls to drag away the creep who was masturbating in his car outside my house?
2.

The RCMP is sensitive to the needs of different cultures and groups

….ike a survey memo in 20 languages? 18 bonus points!

The RCMP is sensitive to Aboriginal issues

“Stay the hell off our reserve. We have a constitutional right to smuggle firearms and cigarettes self government.”
5.

The RCMP is sensitive to the needs of women

That would be me. And I don’t have special needs.
So, no numeral for you!

The RCMP is sensitive to issues pertaining to youth.

That’s “young offender” to you, Officer. Cut ’em loose….

…

Lucky them. A postage paid envelope.

Jon Henke spanks Kevin Drum

It’s official.

Via Drudge

What does the Council Of Canadians know about genetically modified crops?
Nothing, of course.
But why let little things like the facts get in the way of left-wing stupidity?

Canadians upset that genetically modified wheat might one day find itself on their shelves now have a new way to vent their anger – – mail a slice of bread to Prime Minister Paul Martin.

I have a better idea.
As a few of the environmental benefits provided by GMO crops include reduced soil erosion and pesticide use, wrap up your empty herbicide container, or simply fill an envelope with dirt, and mail to:

The Council of Canadians 502-151 Slater Street Ottawa, ON, K1P 5H3 Canada

Activists planning to shoplift ‘en masse’
Sean at Pol:Spy:

If there’s any good news to be found here, it’s that these “activists” are taking the initiative and stealing for themselves, rather than relying on the government to do it for them. I suppose that’s something.

From The Future of Life (2002), by Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, a “leading voice for the preservation of biodiversity and the founder of a field of study relating social behavior to genetic advantage.”

Consider that with the global population past six billion and on its way to eight billion or more by midcentury, per capita freshwater and arable land are descending to levels resource experts agree are risky. The ecological footprint-the average amount of productive land and shallow sea appropriated by each person in bits and pieces from around the world for food, water, housing, energy, transportation, commerce, and waste absorption – is about one hectare (2.5 acres) in developing nations but about 9.6 hectares (24 acres) in the U.S. The footprint for the total human population is 2.1 hectares (5.2 acres)

There are about 291 million people in the US, according to the census bureau.
291 milllion people @ 24 acres each is 6,984,000,000 acres
640 acres in a square mile = 10.9 million square miles. That is more than the total area of the US, Canada and Brazil combined, including bodies of water, deserts, mountains, rain forests, tundra, high arctic….
Now, taking Dr.Wilson’s estimate that the rest of the world’s population of averages a “footprint” of 5.2 acres each…
and there are over 5.7 billion of them…
That’s an additional 29.6 billion acres, or 46.3 million square miles.
Total dry land on the planet? 57.5 million miles. 4.5 million of that is in Antarctica.
His bio does offer this disclaimer;

[Dr. Wilson] has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science awarded by President Jimmy Carter and the Craaford Prize issued by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His confidence with words and his love of nature enabled two Pulitzer Prizes, one for On Human Nature and the other for The Ants. Writing comes easy to him, far easier than mathematics.

Apparently.
It gets worse…�the FAO estimates that 5.6 million square miles of this is arable land.
If the rest of the world’s human “footprint” already uses 900% of the world’s arable land – where the hell are the Americans getting theirs?
hat tip – Dad
Added to the Beltway Traffic Jam

Her Ketchupdom for a dictionary.

“I think the American people are beginning to see the dichotomy between terrorism on the one hand and Iraq on the other. There’re not the same. The only thing that is the same is that Iraq has made terrorism worse, not better. … It’s exasperated terrorism worldwide,” Teresa Heinz Kerry said during a brief news conference at Franklin Canyon Park.

An exasperated terrorist is a dangerous terrorist. John F. Kerry would, with her help, work towards a world in which terrorists are happy and content.

She told them she was born and raised in Africa and learned to avoid water sources at sunrise and sunset, times when animals came to drink.

Raised by African Wild Dogs, she was… the mind’s eye pictures the little girl stooping at a watering hole to drink… one eye on the hyenas, the other on the crocodiles. How ironic that she would survive to return to America, only to succumb to a leech.
Via Deinonychus antirrhopus

Via the Shotgun:

The Mossad and the CIA infiltrated “Islamic combatant groups” in Afghanistan and were the forces behind the attack on Sept. 11 in New York and Washington, D.C., Imam Mohamed al-Asi said at York University last week.
Al-Asi was part of an event titled “From Ground Zero to Islamophobia: Who Are the Victims?” that was hosted by seven different campus organizations, including the Muslim Action Network, the Muslim Student Association, the Middle Eastern Student Association, the Pakistani Student Association and the Pakistani Student Federation.

Some of the juicy bits:

“The Israeli Zionist [sic] are the true and legitimate object of liquidation. A new generation of death-defying youth are motivated by Islam, and Islam alone, to challenge and destroy the racism and nationalism of Tel Aviv’s politicians. Israel is running out of time and all the politicians know it.”

Last night headstones at a Jewish cemetary in Kitchener were vandalized. That made national news. Yet, this hasn’t. But wait – there’s more!

The other main speaker of the evening, Zafar Bangash, director of the Toronto-based Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, also spoke about 9/11. The institute is described on its website as “an intellectual centre of the global Islamic movement.”
…
Bangash spoke about several conspiracy theories, including allegations that Canadian corporations defrauded Canadian taxpayers out of $2.5 billion in order to make banks Y2K compliant.
“Now this happened in Canada. You can imagine what goes on in the United States,” he said.
Bangash also complained about the lack of leadership in the Muslim community in Toronto.
“Any screwball can get up … [and] give their two-bit opinion about Islam.”

Apparently.

And go back to your veal tortellini. They’re parasite infested 350 lb water rats. They taste like rancid codfish. Yes, they do. You’ve never eaten seal meat. I have.

They are also hugely responsible for massive declines in fish stocks. What the hell did you think they ate? Seaweed? Fish, which – in case you haven’t noted – is high on the menu at your favorite sushi bar.
In fact, if seal didn’t taste like rancid codfish, it would be on the menu at your favorite sushi bar.
In 2000 there were an estimated 4.0 to 6.4 million harp seals in Canada – more than double that of 20 years ago. About a million pups are born each year. They are not endangered.

Yes, it sucks to be clubbed over the head. It sucks for a cow, it sucks for a sheep. It also sucks to be crushed alive in the jaws of an Orca or to die from infection or injury from wounds incurred during the rutting season. Life and death for wild animals is not bloodless or painless. They all die, and it’s sooner, rather than later.

If we cannot stop pretending otherwise, then please – some balance. Let’s see the PETA folks swim out to place their bodies between a baby seal and a polar bear for a goddamn change.