Relevant to Canada too:

Politicians who demand inquiries should be taken out and shot

As it were–the Mickster on la belle province:

…
Ignatieff says he’s saddened to see how Canada and Quebec have become isolated, with the optimism of decades past having given way to disillusionment.
“The problem here is we don’t have anything to say to each other anymore,” he said. “There’s a kind of contract of mutual indifference, which is very striking for someone of my generation.”..

Video, plus reaction. In fact what he said is not exactly hot news despite all the Sturm und Drang—from 2010:

…
Among Quebecers, however, a mere 30.1% reported they were very attached to Canada compared to 71.6% in the rest of the country. The poll found 45.9% of Quebecers were very attached to their province – in line with the findings across the country…

The root cause of student riots is not telling them to voulez vous coucher avec themselves.

First we had Tom Ricks at his “Best Defense” blog:

Denmark and Canada avoid war!

…

But Publius is not assured by this outbreak of northern détente:

…It would not be unusual if they [the Danes] were to resume their traditional pattern of conquest and plunder. The coasts of Labrador and Norfolk are especially vulnerable…
Denmark has a remarkable large military force of 27,000 for a population of only 5.5 million. Yet Canada with a population of 34 million has a military of 68,250. In per capita terms the Danes are armed to the teeth…
The Danes will occasionally posture as a well established liberal democracy. Yet it is one of the few countries in the world with an official religion! It’s entrenched in their constitution! Just like Saudi Arabia! As for their so called established democracy, the current constitutional monarchy dates back only to 1849. A whole year after responsible government was established in Canada!..

…for Canadian federal politics. Stop this:
Opposition:

How many babies has the government killed today?

Government:

How many babies have died today because the opposition voted against our bills?

Earlier.

Dalwhinnie sets his hook at Barrel Strength:

…
None of that for Stanley Fish.
This is the conclusion of what he wrote…

…It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that…

Example:

…
Captain Jean-Marc Bélanger, chairman of the 3,000-member union, said in an internal newsletter to pilots that he conducted a self-assessment and deemed himself unfit to fly, based on his personal workload and sleep deprivation…

And not just for the NDP as Publius elucidates:

As The Dipper Panders
…
In the ROC Medicare is not a social program, it’s a totem of national identity. What it means to be Canadian in modern Canada is the divine right to die on a publicly funded waiting list. Unless you die in a hospital bed, at which point the hospital will nickel and dime your family and estate…
The Quebecois are not so emotionally attached to Tommy Douglas’ brain child. It’s a nice freebie and all, one of many financed through the largess of the less kleptocratic jurisdictions in the country, but it ain’t anything special. Quebec is Quebec and the Quebecois are pretty sure of who and what they are. That whole neurotic obsession with national identity is very much a WASP thing. No self respecting Francophone nationalist is going to stay awake at nights wondering how he is different from the Americans…

“The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance.”

Plus ça…

Franco-British Tensions Stress Relationship
Britain and Europe, divided by more than a channel
Britain started war of words over credit ratings, insists French foreign minister

Remember St. Crispin’s Day!
Also remember:

France Surrenders, We’re in the Finals
Fog in Channel, Continent Isolated

Meanwhile, Little England?

Sir Gus O’Donnell: The UK faces break-up
Britain’s most senior civil servant Sir Gus O’Donnell has publicly questioned whether the United Kingdom will still exist in a few years’ time.

That’s the problem (haven’t seen this analysis in our media’s coverage of the debacle):

A Boggle of BlackBerrys
…the current line is a jumble of models. There are BlackBerrys that flip, BlackBerrys that slide, BlackBerrys with touch screens, BlackBerrys with touch screens and keyboards, BlackBerrys with full keyboards, BlackBerrys with compact keyboards, high-end BlackBerrys and low-priced models.
Features have proliferated on BlackBerrys as part of RIM’s move to the broader consumer market, and so have the number of models. Since 2007, RIM has introduced 37 models. The company, in a statement, said it did not know how many models were on the market.
Adding to the shopping confusion are RIM’s product names, which generally rely on four-digit model numbers and sometimes have different products sharing a name. The BlackBerry Torch 9850 and 9860 are touch-screen phones that are on some shelves next to the BlackBerry Torch 9800 and 9810, touch-screen phones with slide-out keyboards. (The model number differences reflect models adapted for different cellphone systems.)
By contrast, Apple has introduced only four iPhones since 2008 and all were basically the same phone with differences in the amount of storage, or upgrades from older models…

Earlier:

The End Is Nigh

Image such a “white collar” sentence up here:

Blagojevich gets 14 years in prison for corruption

Not:

Everyone hates… Canada?

The Washington Post opines:

California’s high-speed rail system is going nowhere fast

Perhaps the Gray Lady indeed has a sense of humour. Swineism alert:

Midwest Farmers Are on Alert Against Pig Thieves

…
“They all look alike,” said Curt Younker, the sheriff…

In fact the Force, as it now exists, should be abolished. It is stretched far too thin, trying to be almost all things to almost everyone (the Auditor General’s latest report is here)–and the Conservative government refuses properly to fund it.
If today’s RCMP is not what it should be, what to do? I can think of no other developed country (and probably no other of any size) that has a national police force responsible for the following types of law enforcement:
-municipal policing (Ontario and Quebec and many cities in other provinces excepted)
-rural policing (all provinces except Ontario and Quebec)
-All policing in the territories
-highway patrol (all provinces except Ontario and Quebec, and the RCMP also does this on federal roads in Ottawa)
-Organized crime (drugs etc.)
-National security (terrorism, espionage)
-Border policing
-White collar crime (sometimes, e.g. Karlheinz Schreiber).
I’m sure I missed a few things.
It seems to me that all provinces should provide their own municipal, rural, and highway policing, by the means of their own choice. There then should be separate federal law enforcement agencies to deal with, in cooperation with the forces in provinces and municipalities as required:
1) Serious organized crime and national security matters (there are many common techniques involved, and both rely greatly on intelligence)
2) Border, airport, and port policing (this function should be part of the Canada Border Services Agency–think Vancouver Airport; one service might have done better)
3) The territories
4) White collar crime (small and mainly civilian, that is to say lawyers leading, indeed conducting, much of the investigation as is done in the US [think Patrick Fitzgerald, more here]; the Mounties just do not have the skills to do this sort of work properly)
5) VIP protection.

Can you imagine Steve speaking thus?

Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard: ‘There is a reason the world always looks to America’
…
She blew them away.
Speaking with a heartfelt tone and, near the end some voice-wavering emotion (full text below), Gillard’s 30-minute speech won 16 outbursts of applause, six of them standing. According to those in the House chamber, there were too some moist eyes at the end.
…few foreign leaders realize that deep down in their collective continental heart, Americans secretly yearn to be liked. Gillard gets that. Or her speechwriter does. But the Australian’s emotion recalling her childhood awe at being let off school to watch Americans walk on the moon could not be faked…
Gillard hit all the right bases, touched all the right notes, recalling joint sacrifices and expressing a level of official appreciation that Congress has not heard at home for a very long time, even though Gillard stressed she was speaking for Australians to Americans.
Probably back home her critics will say Australia’s national leader sounded a bit obsequious toward the Yanks. But for this audience on this day in this place of Washington, the lady from Down Under ruled supremely…

Now that’s serving your real national interests. And note:

Australia’s prime minister told a joint session of Congress on Wednesday [March 9] that Australian troops in Afghanistan would remain with the U.S.-led coalition for years to come, knocking down recent reports that the country was contemplating an early exit from the war-torn country…
Australia is far and away the largest non-NATO contributor to the coalition in Afghanistan, with some 1,550 troops on the ground — a 40 percent increase since 2009…

Some sharp views:

…
David Jones is a retired career diplomat. He served as minister-counselor for political affairs at the U.S. embassy at Ottawa during the mid-1990s and has kept a close interest in Canadian politics. He coauthored Uneasy Neighbo(u)rs–a study of U.S.-Canada relations.
…The decade-long Canadian combat commitment to Afghanistan is ending in July. It was never popular; Afghanistan is far away, and there was no 9/11 imperative to galvanize popular support. The commitment was a good neighbor substitute for not having been one of the “willing” during the Iraq/Saddam Hussein war. Nevertheless, Canadians are leaving with honor; their mission is morphing into a training contingent with much reduced troop levels. This gives Canadians more of what they prefer: “peacekeeping” rather than “peacemaking,” with much lower casualty counts…
Conservative Principles. While hardly a “conservative” in U.S. terms, Harper…
…because he doesn’t throw horse manure in the U.S. direction every time he picks up a pitchfork, he is unforgiven by those that remain convinced the North American Free Trade Agreement is a USG plot to beggar our neighbor while sucking their natural resources (oil/water) into our insatiable maw…
…there is a further sense that the Canadian public remains suspicious of anything with a conservative label and is willing to bolt away from the party given the least excuse…
With our foreign policy cup overflowing, it has been pleasant to have a northern neighbor that is looking after its interests but not convinced that it must tell us how Ottawa could better run U.S. foreign affairs…
A Liberal government would be… different…Liberals express a traditional attitude against the United States. While Tories want the best relationship with the United States that will not cost them the next election, Liberals have always sought the worst bilateral relationship that would not prompt U.S. retaliation [very nice apposition, that]…
Over 30 years ago, the Iranian revolutionaries seized U.S. diplomats and our Tehran embassy. Then Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor sheltered six U.S. diplomats in his residence, arranged for their escape using Canadian passports, and acted as de facto CIA station chief by providing Washington with detailed intelligence for months. The action was fully supported by a short-lived Tory government; then Liberal opposition leader, Pierre Trudeau, was unhelpful (even when the situation was explained to him). One can wonder whether a “prime minister” Trudeau would have directed Taylor to say “no room at the inn” and wonder equally just what a Liberal government would do in a comparable situation today [nice bit of knife putting-in].

But one of us has been…

Speaking truth to power
An honest man talking to the real thing:

…
The cable also reveals how CSIS feels about Canadian attitudes. Former CSIS director Jim Judd went so far as to complain that judicial rulings and public naiveté were paralyzing his spies – specifically lamenting that Canadians were prone to “knee-jerk anti-Americanism” and “paroxysms of moral outrage.”..

BBC exonerates Israel.