Passport Security Breach Linked To Obama Advisor’s Firm
Despite Reports To The Contrary
I did not gather with twenty-four of my closest friends in Calgary today. I was at the Saskatoon Co-op Home Centre, where I purchased electrical box cover plates, lime scale remover, and a new door knob, and I have the receipts to prove it.
Though admittedly, I and the tan work shirts exchanged knowing glances.
More – photographic evidence of my non-gathering.
Lucy, Look What Choo Started!
On the front page of today’s National Post;
Next Tuesday, at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in Ottawa, one of Canada’s most prominent white supremacist propagandists, backed by the legal team that defended Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel, will put the country’s entire human rights bureaucracy on the witness stand.
After months of closed-door wrangling, a constitutional challenge, an appeal to federal court and a blizzard of legal motions, Marc Lemire can now interrogate, under oath, two investigators of the Canadian Human Rights Commission about why they posted provocative comments on his and other ultra-conservative Web sites. Much credibility hangs on their answers.
The curious thing about the hearing, which will make it a crucial moment in the history of Canadian human rights law, is that Mr. Lemire, the last president of the now defunct neo-Nazi Heritage Front, enjoys the qualified support of a Liberal MP, PEN Canada, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association — even a leader of B’nai Brith Canada.
[…]
All of which points to next week’s hearing in Warman v. Lemire as a watershed moment in the history of Canadian domestic human rights law.
It is as if all the cases, legitimate or ridiculous, are to be represented by this one, a most unfrivolous complaint against a prominent distributor of white supremacist propaganda, which threatens to implode not only because of the alleged unconstitutionality of the law, but because of shady investigatory practices.
Read the whole thing.
(And when you’re finished, don’t miss this one – “Axis of Shove It”)
“Are you a woman in the military whose marriage has ended?”
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune would like to exploit your misfortune to further their anti-military agenda under the guise of “news” journalism.
If, on the other hand, you’re a media consumer who considers the Star-Tribune’s actions to be dishonest and intellectually insulting, you can contact reporter Pam Louwagie at 612-673-7102 or e-mail plouwagie@startribune.com.
Thnk Hard
Has anything you’ve seen reported by Canadian media on Afghanistan in the past couple of years even hinted at the possibility that a single Afghan citizen might enjoy the luxury of television?
The [Afghan Pop Idol] programme has become a sensation in Afghanistan where it is estimated that 11m viewers, or over one-third of the population, regularly tuned in.
Much less 11 million of them?
All that time wasted with Lisa Laflamme, when we could have tuned in to Simon Cowell.
The Case Of Brenda Martin: Flashback
At Blue Like You, commentor “Tony” drops this tidbit from The Edmonton Journal, dated February 2003;
“It looked like a friggin parking lot outside that house most days,” said Sandy Smith, who asked that her real name not be used. She still lives in Vallarta and fears the Mexican federal police. The Toronto native worked as Waage’s chef and lived in Castillo Cristina for 10 months beginning in July 2000.
[…]
“Our liquor bill was $2,000 a week — minimum,” she said.
Smith said she placed one order for 80 kilograms of crab and then sent a mozo (houseboy) out to buy two new freezers to hold it all.
“He wanted only the best and I got it for him,” she said.
“He was very generous and I had carte blanche with money. If I went to him and said I needed some money to get groceries or whatever provisions he would say to me, ‘How much do you need, this much?’ ” she said, miming Waage holding his index finger and thumb about two inches apart.
” ‘Or do you need this much?’ ” she said, and moved her fingers about four inches apart. “Then he would reach into the safe where he kept the cash and take a wad out of money out and just give it to me. Sometimes he never even counted it.
Emphasis mine.
Brenda Martin “worked for Waage for 10 months until he fired her in 2001”.
Reader Tips
Tips thread open.
A Picture Of Richard Warman All Decked Out In Nazi Duds Landed In My Mailbox Last Week
What Are The Odds?
This sounds less like a security breach than it does a case for the “smell test”…
Plans showing the layout of a new building for a Canadian Forces counter-terrorism unit based in Trenton, Ont., have been found in a pile of garbage on Bank Street.
The 26 blueprints, stamped with Department of National Defence markings, show everything from the location of the security fence to the floor plan of the new home of the Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit at CFB Trenton.
The unit is the military’s main responder to a terrorist attack using a weapon of mass destruction.
[…]
The blueprints were found March 13 by the spouse of Anthony Salloum, an analyst with the Rideau Institute, the left-leaning Ottawa think-tank. As the couple were on their way to dinner, Mr. Salloum’s spouse noticed a large pile of garbage bags on the sidewalk, on top of which sat seven large rolled tubes of paper stamped with Defence Department markings.
“I thought they looked interesting, but we were headed to dinner, so I figured I’d pick one up on the way back if they were still there,” said Mr. Salloum.
Reader Bob McLeod echoes the suspicions of a number of commentors;
This is just too coincidental to even sound legitimate.
Salloum just happens to work for a left leaning think tank opposed to the military. He and his companion check garbage along their route to dinner.Doesn’t everyone? There are seven(they counted, right?) rolls of documents on the bagged garbage. The documents just happen to appear along his route to dinner. He happens to a have a “partner” with him who can corroborate the find. He doesn’t go back for the other rolls of documents, even after seeing DND markings and “briefly” examining the documents. Neither he, nor the others in the “think tank” knew what they had…..kinda a dumb bunch of deep thinkers. On suddenly realizing what they had, instead of calling the authorities, they call the media. Good citizens, not! Having a very cynical mind, I suspect that the documents were obtained through less than legitimate means, and this is the chosen method of revealing them to the public. Want to bet that this “scandal” surfaces in the next question period? Makes you wonder who has orchestrated the whole thing.
Darcey considers his own pile of trash bound blueprints;
In my garage I have a number of rolls that are heading out to the garbage and I couldn’t imagine anyone rooting through them other then maybe some curious kids.
My gut feeling is that the story by the program director of the Rideau Institute stinks. Do Anthony Salloum and his wife routinely look thru garbage they find on the street and pick it up?
More on what appears to be a non-story. Neither the blueprints nor the construction site were considered sensitive;
But he downplayed the significance of the what the abandoned blueprints reveal and noted that anyone is free to enter the base and many areas are unrestricted.
“There’s nothing in the building that I know of that is security-related. It’s a steel building, its got concrete floors and some cooling and heating system and some electrical system. There’s nothing (else) in there. Now, what fit-up the army may do with it, well that’s a different story.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
NOAA Class “A” station at Hay Springs, NE.
More
Reader Tips
A note to those of you who take the time to send me your links and your private comments – and who don’t get a response, or wonder why I don’t use them. It’s usually just a matter of available time, space, and energy. Sometimes the story has been covered in abundance elsewhere, (and sometimes I’ve already used it and you didn’t notice). But, I do want you all to know that your efforts are appreciated. I wish I had time to acknowledge everything sent my way, but I’d never get any work done – much less blogging!
Tips thread open.
Five years In
“This war has now lasted longer than World War I, World War II or the Civil War,” – Barack Obama*
R. Warman v. Marc Lemire
The ruling to close the CHRC hearing to the public has been rescinded.
Read more, from Mike Brock;
Rogers Communications, on behalf of Macleans Magazine, has been fighting the tribunal to allow journalists to be present when Commission employees Hannya Rizk and Dean Steacy, will be forced to testify, under oath, of allegations that members of the commission (and Dean Steacy himself) indeed planted racist messages on websites, which were subsequently investigated by the commission.
There are also allegations, that Richard Warman, as a non-commission employee gave inappropriate direction to members of the Commission on how to proceed on cases in which he was a complainant.
Warman and Steacy have long fought to prevent giving such testimony, and recently have fought to prevent having such testimony published, citing concern for their safety.
How Many Deaths Is Walt Disney Responsible For Worldwide?
Learn a martial art form from India called “runforyerlife”
Previous.
The Case Of Brenda Martin
…had my qualified sympathy up until the precise moment in time at which her supporters denounced Jason Kenney’s trip to Mexico as a “photo op” that would do “more harm than good”.
So, let’s get this straight.
You screamed bloody murder that Stephen Harper wasn’t doing enough to help, you splattered every Conservative minister within spitting distance of your tantrums, you bawled and threatened and cajoled, and now that someone is making a personal effort to help – you transform Brenda Martin’s cause into a political stink bomb. At about the same time as details begin to emerge that cast a little suspicion on the purity of her victimhood status.
Nice work, people.
However, I suspect the Harper government will keep doing what they can to help her – in spite of her ingratitude, and despite your complicity in tossing her to a media who views her as little more than a bit of political red meat to drag through the streets.
So, keep your petitions and spare me your guilt trip. I’m not calling my member of parliament. If Brenda Martin wanted a guarantee that the Canadian government would intervene to protect her human rights as a Canadian citizen, she should have chosen to live and work in Canada.
Update – Exhibiting the level of judgment that likely landed her in prison in the first place, Ms. Martin is now calling efforts to help her a “dog and pony show”. Decide for yourself who’s chosen to play the part of horse’s ass.
The Sound Of Settled Science
They write these headlines without so much as a nod to their own absurdity – “The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat” (link fixed)
Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.
This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.
Now, watch the struggle to make the facts fit the narrative;
One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.
But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?
Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it’s probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.
That can’t be directly measured at the moment, however.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they’ve been playing during this period,”
Trenberth says.It’s also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it’s possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don’t know about. It’s an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.
“I suspect that we’ll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis,” Trenberth says. “But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board.”
Kevin Trenberth has been mentioned here before – in this 2005 quote from a resigning Chris Landsea, citing IPPC misrepresentation of hurricane research;
It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity.
Two years later, Trenberth was still using hurricane Katrina as evidence of global warming.
Osama Bin Laden, Call Your Office
How do you say “irony” in Farsi?
The Al-Qaeda media braintrust’s latest production incorporates images of Spartan spears drenched in the blood of Persians.
(h/t to the sharp-eyed Knight.)
Reader Tips
Leaked! The CHRC response to motion on secret hearing.
More lawyery insight from “Canada’s leading legal expert on what David Dingwall takes in his coffee”.
“When human rights commissions are mocked on the CBC’s leading prime time show, you know the political environment has changed.”
Go east, young Lucy! Use your cream and tin foil as a springboard to greater anonymity!
Tips thread open.
Hitchens, Five Years In
I recall a CBC Sunday Edition interview with Michael Enright in which Enright opined that in the wake of 9/11, American paranoia had become so deep and irrational that he had relatives in Montana who feared terrorist attacks.
Hitchens countered that he should ask the people of Beslan about that.
Answering the question How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? Christopher Hitchens is a rare bird – a lefty with historical memory;
We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, “lied into war.” We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam Hussein or a decision to have done with him. The president’s speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most misunderstood.
Read it all.
He’s Not Really Dead
“He has retired to 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’.”
And near the beach, under the shade of the palms, a bearded figure in a red Adidas track suit practices his morning yoga and sings songs of la Revolución.