After Vitor began revealing the unusual list of Liberal party donaters, obtained through their searchable database, Elections Canada has responded – by making it nearly impossible to use.
Update – Bound By Gravity is busy with a work around. If you’re techie inclined at all, pop by and see what you can help with.

Now I’m angry.
ABC News:

A senior U.S. military official tells ABC News he believes the investigation into the fatal shooting of an Italian intelligence officer by U.S. troops in Iraq will ultimately prove the officer’s car was traveling in excess of 100 mph.

After three major wars, Saddam Hussein’s negligence towards the country’s infrastructure, and two years of damage by roadside devices and carbombings, Iraq still has better highways than we do in Saskatchewan.

Rusty Shackleford has new images that Italian TV is stating are Giuliana Sgrena’s car. (Earlier photos turned out to be unrelated, so some caution is being exercised. Nonetheless – if it turns out to be genuine, the story becomes even more ridiculous than first thought.

If this is the car then it would contradict earlier reports that Sgrena’s rescuers had used a truck. If accurate, the condition of the car would also directly contradict the story told by Sgrena in which she claimed 300-400 bullets were fired, one of which hit Italian secret-service agent Nicola Calipari.

Several photos here.

Guardian;

Sgrena told colleagues the vehicle was not travelling fast and had already passed several checkpoints on its way to the airport. The Americans shone a flashlight at the car and then fired between 300 and 400 bullets at if from an armoured vehicle. Rather than calling immediately for assistance for the wounded Italians, the soldiers’ first move was to confiscate their weapons and mobile phones and they were prevented from resuming contact with Rome for more than an hour.

Full story here.
UPDATE – it turns out that the car pictured was only tangentially related to the original kidnapping. LGF unravels the whole mess, created by a misleading AP video.

If you watch the Associated Press video linked above, you’ll see a medium shot of this car, changing to a closeup, as the voice-over says, “Coalition forces fired on a vehicle that was approaching a checkpoint at a high rate of speed.”

A day or so after Paul Martin ended his dithering on missile defense to settle on “flop”, a pair of left-leaning local radio announcers were discussing the potential consequences to US – Canada relations. With the border opening to live cattle again in doubt, and other trade disputes still bogged down, one of them mused that the relationship had changed.

“I don’t think the US is our best friend anymore”

The other agreed. I waited for the discussion to procede to the next logical step.
Well…?
And…?
Yet nothing more was said. The sentence left hanging as a conclusion, the topic changed and soon they were on to sports or something. The question I was waiting for was never asked.
Who is Canada’s “next best friend”?

A Montana court has granted an injunction to R-CALF, keeping the US-Canadian border closed to Canadian cattle. It’s unlikely that any appeal will be heard prior to the scheduled March 7th opening.
Is the decision the result of Paul Martin’s botched BMD fiasco? No – but the oncoming freight train of Bush administration indifference to Canadian grievances will be.
Condoleezza Rice has deferred her visit and Paul Martin can’t get his calls returned. Martin’s flip flopping support for missile defense reminds me about something that David Frum wrote in his book “The Right Man”;

Then Arafat made what may someday be reckoned as the most fateful miscalculation of his career. On January 5, 2002, Israeli naval forces intercepted a Gaza-bound merchant ship loaded with fifty tonnes of arms from Iran. Arafat hastily sent Bush a letter denying any involvement in the shipment. Probably Arafat did not even intend his denial to be interpreted literally; he may have written it as a social form, like the phrase I regret in a letter declining an invitation to a wedding or a dinner party. If so, Arafat sorely misunderstood his man. Bush does not lie to you. You had better not lie to him.

I’m beginning to wonder if Paul Martin has just been confined to his compound on 24 Sussex.

This article won’t bring any surprises for anyone familiar with Islamic terrorism, but it’s not often you hear a Saudi admit it.

Countering the assertion of many in American academia, a Saudi official said extremist teachings, not poverty or unemployment, are the root causes of terrorism in the kingdom, the homeland of billionaire Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers.
At a news conference in Riyadh, Labor Minister Ghazi Al-Gosaibi blamed the spread of terrorism on the “indoctrination that teaches young people they can kill justifiably” and training in Afghan camps, reported Arab News, an officially sanctioned Saudi newspaper. […] “I am not aware that somebody has been driven to terrorism simply because he could not find a job.”

Well, unless they’re in Quebec, and used to work for Wal-Mart. (Wal-Mart Store recieves bomb threats) Though, this may also be due to indoctrination of a leftist form of fantasy ideology known to some as Militant Unionism;

The union representing workers at Wal-Mart’s only unionized store in North America say they are going to continue trying to negotiate a first contract, even though the store is being shut down.
[…]
Henri Masse, the president of the Quebec Federation of Labour, said they still have a right to have a collective agreement imposed by an arbitrator.

Masse added that successful arbitration with a closed Wal-Mart store was likely to serve as a jumping off point for talks with Eatons, Woolco and Canadian Airlines.
See also: Colby’s perplexedness.

First rule of union negotiation in the “big leagues” – never forget that you’re just another pin in the map.

There’s a new sacred cow backing out of the government truck. With pre-Medicare generations slowly passing into history, and Canadians fully indoctrinated with the belief that the words “commodity” and “right” are interchangable, it’s time to ramp up the process. And so, we welcome a new generation to the concept that “free babysitting” is a societal responsiblity.
I can see how this could work… by the time these babies of 2005 graduate into the work force, the cost of government will have rendered taxation obsolete – Canadians will just go directly from government birthing room to daycare to school into the service of the state, with their basic needs provided and ….
You know… that sounds kinda familiar.

Alternate headline: “It Takes A Thief”.
How deliciously ironic to think that a chronic abuser of Canada’s ludicrously lax immigration and deportation policy has finally bitten the hand that unleashed it.
And Brent Colbert has some interesting finds on Citizenship and Immigration Committee chairman Andrew Telegdi’s past in student politics.

(The Chevron – University of Waterloo, circa 1974)

Version One –CNN, January 11:

Investigators said he may have been driven by a desire to avoid returning to Iraq.
Andres Raya was scheduled to report back to Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, on Sunday after a weekend leave.
Instead, police said, he went out with a semiautomatic rifle and drew officers into an ambush outside a liquor store in Ceres, a town of about 35,000 next door to his hometown of Modesto.
Raya’s mother told the Modesto Bee that her son “came back different” from his last assignment, which included service in western Iraq’s insurgent hotbed of Falluja.
“In speaking with family, they conveyed to us that their son did not desire to return to Iraq,” said Lt. Bill Heyne, a spokesman for the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department.
[…]
A statement from Camp Pendleton said Raya was on weekend liberty when he was killed. The Marine Corps is assisting police with the investigation, the statement said.
Raya was a driver in the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment — an element of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, much of which is serving in Iraq.
According to the Marines, he had been awarded the National Defense Service Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and the Navy and Marine Corps Sea Service Deployment Ribbon.

Version Two – Modesto Bee, Jan.15:

The 19-year-old Marine who gunned down two police officers was a Norte�o gang member who plotted a deadly attack on police, not a veteran suffering the stress of war, investigators said Friday.
A toxicology report shows that Andres Raya was high on cocaine Sunday night when he shot and killed 39-year-old Sgt. Howard Stevenson and severely injured officer Sam Ryno, 49, outside George’s Liquors on Caswell Avenue.
Information presented at a Friday news conference contrasted sharply with the image that police and Raya’s family initially portrayed of the young man, that of a traumatized soldier who snapped and committed “suicide by cop.”
“The easy answer to this would be to blame it on Iraq,” said the lead investigator, Lt. Bill Heyne of the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department.
But he said an investigation into Raya’s background showed that he harbored violent tendencies and an anti-government attitude long before he went to war.
Raya, a lance corporal who worked as a Humvee driver, did not engage in combat during seven months in Iraq, Heyne said. But Raya saw a fellow Marine suffer a leg injury when a bomb exploded under a vehicle in his convoy.
Raya bragged to Marine buddies that he had bought an SKS rifle in Modesto and left it with one of his “boys.” It was capable of carrying 30 rounds of high-powered ammunition. When they asked Raya why he needed the weapon, he replied that a 7.62-caliber round could penetrate a cop’s armor, Heyne said.

A pizza succeeds where strippers failed…Toronto Star:

Sgro’s decision to step aside came only hours after the Toronto Star obtained a copy of an affidavit in which pizza shop owner Harjit Singh claims Sgro pressed him to supply food and workers for her campaign last spring. Singh, a father of three facing deportation from Canada, alleges in the sworn affidavit filed in the Federal Court of Canada in Toronto yesterday that when word of his arrangement with Sgro started to leak out, Sgro suddenly reneged on the deal and last month ordered his arrest and removal from Canada “to save her job.”
[…]
It was recently revealed Alina Balaican, a 25-year-old stripper from Romania, was granted a ministerial permit to stay in Canada after she volunteered on Sgro’s election campaign. Balaican’s husband has told the Star that people with immigration problems flocked to Sgro’s campaign office during the election. Sgro’s problems are the focus of an investigation by federal ethics commissioner Bernard Shapiro, who is probing claims that she dispensed favours to Singh and Balaican and allegations that she had senior advisers doing campaign work while on the government payroll.

Kevin Libin’s take.
Not much fear that this development will affect the special trips of Canadian immigration officials to recruit Librano supporters in northern Sri Lanka.

[deputy foreign minister] Mr. Warnapala suggested that Tamils have already disproportionately taken “full advantage” of Canada’s immigration system.
Protocol demands that he bite his tongue when Prime Minister Paul Martin visits Sri Lanka next week, he said. But, if asked, he will express his government’s point of view that Tamils have been extended special preference because of “pressure groups associated with the LTTE operating in Canada, particularly in Toronto and Scarborough.”
[…]
Militant expatriate Tamils are aggressively lobbying Canadian officials, he said, and Ottawa should be careful not to interlope into divisive political issues at a delicate time.
Jim Karygiannis, a Liberal MP from Scarborough, is in the northern part of Sri Lanka on a self-directed mission to ensure that aid is being distributed there.
While not taking anyone to task in particular, Mr. Warnapala said it would be wrong for outsiders to become embroiled in the internal politics of his country. The two have made attempts to put aside their differences during the tsunami crisis.
“We don’t want people to interfere and upset the balance we have created in the last 13 days. We don’t want anybody to make political capital out of that,” he said.
Most of Canada’s 200,000-plus Tamil population fled the war between the Sinhalese-dominated government forces and the LTTE.

The Liberals have sent more visa officers to the country deal with an anticipated surge in applications.

The UN’s Margareta Wahlstrom, aka “United Nations Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator and the Secretary-General’s Special Coordinator for Humanitarian Assistance in Tsunami-afected countries” – (yes, this is her title) is calling all psychiatrists;

“Counselling is the key thing as people have lost everything — children, family, shelter… which is why the UN will launch these appeals,” she said after visiting Sri Lanka’s southern region of Galle.

And after the psychiatrists arrive, then what? Why – family planning, that’s what. Lifesite;

“The United Nations Population Fund, the UNFPA, is calling for US $28 million in donations to re- establish ‘reproductive health services,’ in the Tsunami-stricken regions of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, according to a UNFPA press release published Thursday.”

As expected, the Diplomad is inside-reporting on the job.

Seeing these UNocrats perched at the table, whispering to each other, back-slapping, shaking hands, they seemed like a periodic reunion of old cynical Mafia chieftains or mercenaries who run into each other in different hot spots, as they move from one slaughter to another, “How are you? Haven’t seen you since Bosnia . . ..” As the hours wore on, however, and I nervously doodled in my note pad, shifted in my chair, looked at my watch, and thought about all the real work I had to do that evening, I decided that, no, labeling them mafiosos or mercenaries was much too kind. They seemed more to be the progeny resulting from a mating between a mad oracle and a giant carrion-eater. They were akin to some sort of ancient mythical Greco-Roman-Aztec-Wes Craven-Egyptian-bird-god that demands constant sacrifice and feeding, and speaks in riddles which only it can solve. Yes, I decided, the UNocrats are great hideous vultures, roused from their caves in the European Alps and in the cement canyons and peaks of Manhattan by the stench of death in the Turd World. They leisurely take flight toward the smell of death; circle, and then swoop down, screeching UNintelligble nonsense. They arrive and immediately force others, e.g., the American tax payer, to build them new exclusive nests in the midst of poverty, and make themselves fat on the flesh of the dead. My friends, allow The Diplomad to present to you The High Priest Vulture Elite (HPVE).
These genuinely repulsive, arrogant creatures survive only because the world’s rich countries, the non-Turd World, allow them, too. We in the First World find it politically impossible to reveal their pronouncements as the cant they are. For many in Europe and among the New York Times crowd, helping maintain these mad vultures substitutes for genuine action, “The UN is on the job!” In addition, for many senior bureaucrats and minor politicians, there is always the hope that if they play the game right, they, too, can join the High Priest Vulture Elite: We see the ranks of the HPVE full of Scandinavians and leftist Americans, and the occasional pompous Euro-Brazilian, all of whom parlayed mediocre domestic careers of lip-biting humanitarian symbolism into well-paying tax-free sinecures in the HPVE.

Well, with oil-for-food finally buried, we knew they’d be on the prowl for new bodies.

The Diplomad has several good entries on the tsunami disaster relief, there’s no point linking to a single one. Just read all the way down. This bit though, cuts to the chase – in response to criticism of the US by former British International Development Secretary Clare Short that “Only really the UN can do that job, It is the only body that has the moral authority.”;

Do I really need to say anything more? “Only really the UN can do the job?” We have US C-130s flying in and out here dropping off heaps of supplies; US choppers arrive today; USAID is doing a knock-out job of marshalling and coordinating US and local resources to deliver real assistance to real people. The Aussies have planes and troops delivering stuff; even the Indians have goods on the way. The UN? Nowhere to be seen. OK, I’m not being fair. Last night they played host to a big “coordination” meeting of donors to announce that the UNDP has another large “assessment and coordination team” team arriving. Our USAID guys, who’ve been working 18-20 hrs/ day, came back furious from this meeting saying everybody would be dead if the delivery of aid waited for the UN to set up shop and begin “coordinating.” The UN types are upset with the US, Ms. Short, dear, not because we’re undermining them but because we’re showing them up as totally inept.

Which reminds me – any word yet from our Canadian 12-member “reconnaissance team” ?

(hat tip – Protein Wisdom)

He knows when you’ve been sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
So be good or else he’ll sell your presents on Ebay.
(hat tip)

Christopher Caldwell on the growing Islamic crisis in Holland (in tomorrow’s Weekly Standard), “Holland Daze – The Dutch Rethink Multiculturalism”;

“… the public has been told for two decades now that they ain’t seen nothing yet, that this is only the first wave of a long era of immigration, which they’d better learn to love. The immigrants the country now hosts have been difficult to manage. Part of the problem is the interaction of high immigration and what was for years a generous, no-questions-asked welfare state: As many as 60 percent of Moroccans and Turks above the age of 40–obviously first-generation immigrants–are unemployed, in the only major economy in Europe that has consistently had unemployment at or below American rates.
Most of these immigrants are Muslims. Muslim immigrants had begun to scare people long before Pim Fortuyn, the charismatic populist, turned himself into the country’s most popular politician in the space of a few weeks in 2002, by arguing that the country was already overloaded with newcomers. (Fortuyn was assassinated by an animal-rights activist in May of that year.) Already in the 1990s, there were reports of American-style shootouts in schools, one involving two Turkish students in the town of Veghel. This past October, newspaper readers were riveted by the running saga of a quiet married couple who had been hounded out of the previously livable Amsterdam neighborhood of Diamantbuurt by gangs of Muslim youths. There were incidents of wild rejoicing across Holland in the wake of the September 11 attacks, notably in the eastern city of Ede. The weekly magazine Contrast took a poll showing that just under half the Muslims in the Netherlands were in “complete sympathy” with the September 11 attacks. At least some wish to turn to terrorism. In the wake of the van Gogh murder, Pakistani, Kurdish, and Moroccan terrorist cells were discovered. The Hague-based “Capital Network,” out of which van Gogh’s killer Mohammed Bouyeri came, had contact with terrorists who carried out bombings in Casablanca in 2003. Perhaps the most alarming revelation was that an Islamist mole was working as a translator in the AIVD, the national investigative service, and tipping off local radicals to impending operations.
The question naturally arises: If immigrants behave this way now, what will happen when they are far more numerous, as all authorities have long promised they will be? It has been estimated that the country’s two largest cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, will be “majority minority” very soon (Rotterdam is today at 47 percent), and already 65 percent of primary and secondary students in both cities are of non-Dutch parentage. London’s Daily Telegraph, citing immigration experts and government statistics, reported a net outflow of 13,000 people from Holland in the first six months of 2004, the first such deficit in half a century. One must treat this statistic carefully–it could be an artifact of an aging population in which many are retiring to warmer places. But it could also be the beginning of something resembling the American suburban phenomenon of “white flight,” occurring at the level of an entire country.

Read the rest.

A Lileks offering for today, for those of us waiting and uneasily wondering if we shouldn’t thaw a lasagna for emergency backup.

I don�t think people in the Evil Coastal Godless Baal-Loving Media hate Christianity. I�m sure some hold it in disinterested contempt, the way they view NASCAR and Simplicity dress patterns and those giant salad forks some people inexplicably used as kitchen-wall decorations.

“Never in the history of Canadian Liberal asshattery has so much been owed by so many, to so few”

update: a petition has been launched.

It’s not just “exotic dancers” getting the fast track.
CTV news;

The RCMP has charged five people, among them an Immigration Canada official, with corruption and fraud after several morning raids in Ottawa Thursday morning.
The RCMP are alleging the group received up to $25,000 in fees from at least a dozen Arab immigrants seeking permanent resident status.
The arrests are the culmination of an investigation that began in January. There will likely be more arrests, the RCMP said.
RCMP Cpl. Nathalie Deschenes told CJOH’s Anna-Karina Tabunar that the suspects were allegedly approaching immigrants and promising that their applications would be fast-tracked for fees ranging from $4,000 to $25,000.
One of the five suspects is the 34-year-old operations manager at the Ottawa branch of Citizenship and Immigration.
[…]
These arrests will likely sharpen the focus on Immigration Minister Judy Sgro, whose resignation opposition critics have been demanding in recent weeks.
She is currently the subject of an investigation by the federal ethics commissioner, prompted by allegations she received an improper election donation.
Critics have also lambasted Sgro for her office’s decision to extend a residence permit to a Romanian stripper who worked on her re-election campaign; and over Ottawa’s controversial program to allow foreign strippers to get special work visas.

When the stripper story broke, my first reaction was that Sgro’s department has been infiltrated by someone with associations to organized crime. The connections to the sex trade are too well known and too obvious for even the dimmest beaurocrat to feign ignorance. In this case, it appears the corruption was well established and well supported. That tells us it’s been in place for a long time.