Clinton Book Phenomenon?

Media 3 Comments

Matt Drudge is so funny. From his current “headlines”;

Clinton’s Book Signings Draw Adoring Throngs in NYC…
CNN: ‘My Life’ sets records; 90,000 to 100,000 unit single-day expectation..
PUBLISHER CLAIMS: 400,000 copies bought in U.S. in one day!
BUT… Sales slow in Florida…
Stacks Left Untouched on Maryland Shore…
SAN FRAN YAWN…
Clinton book sales quiet in Arizona…
Memoirs not on Houston’s best seller list…
Tome slow out of gate in Cincinnati…
Not flying off shelves in Hudson Valley…
Mixed reaction in Manitowoc…
Mixed book sales in N.E. Georgia…
Creates little hoopla in San Antonio…
Not Selling in Shenandoah Valley…
Book not so magical in Wichita Falls…
Hoosiers react quietly to memoir…
Just hype? asks Gainesville…
Sales can’t measure up to Harry or Hillary in suburban Chicago…
Memoirs don’t stir Saginaw…
Memoir is no 1st-day best-seller in Ft. Wayne…
Not selling in VA Beach…
No best seller in Billings…
Slow in Sacramento…

A little mental exercise, now if you will.
If there had been no Monica Lewinsky in the White House, what would the buzz be around “My Life”? today…
think.
hard.
….
Can’t think of anything, eh?
So, why would anyone other than the usual suspects run out and buy a book, when they can get their curiosity satisfied for free on 60 minutes?

Anti-Alberta Bigotry

Political Animal 2 Comments

I’m not the only one who’s noticed this.

Cabinet ministers are going to fall. There is a new desperation in the Liberal campaign — a whole generation of Liberal MPs and organizers have never felt what it’s like to lose. They don’t like that feeling, and it shows.
They’re angry. And so they’re telling Martin to be angry — to do something, anything. And so Martin is getting angry at the easy scapegoat, the traditional Liberal whipping boy: Alberta. He really ought to be angry at Ontarians, who are rejecting him for the Conservatives, according to recent polls, by a 10- point margin, or at Quebecers, who are rejecting him by even more.
They used to vote Liberal, and aren’t. But Alberta makes a much more gratifying target.
So last week, Martin blasted Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, calling Klein’s health-care reform package un- Canadian. “Unlike Stephen Harper, I will look Ralph Klein in the eye and I will say ‘no.’,” ranted Martin. From Ontario, of course — not over the phone to Klein privately, not in a memo, but at an election event, using federal-provincial relations as a desperate partisan weapon. “Unlike Stephen Harper, I will defend medicare,” he said — defending it against Klein, the new Liberal demon.
Although nearly every province has private health-care facilities, Martin chose to attack only Alberta.
He did not criticize Ontario and Quebec, with their burgeoning private hospitals. Ontario and Quebec are run by Liberal governments.
The government of Alberta has kept Martin briefed about their proposed changes for months. Martin has never raised an objection, and Anne McLellan, the deputy prime minister, has repeatedly approved of such changes.
So there was no reason to criticize Klein’s plans at all — at least until they provided a scapegoat for the Liberals. And if Klein’s plans provide a scapegoat, so do all the other provinces.
This is not coincidence. This is what the left would call “systemic bias” — an anti-Alberta bigotry.

This hypocrisy needs to be targeted hard by the media. Instead, they’re lining up behind the Liberal canard, awaiting the Klein “bombshell” that Paul Martin is predicting.
Funny how he doesn’t apply the same standards to his own doctor.
hat tipDebbye

Martin: Clueless About The Military

Military No Comments

A Canadian soldier lets loose on Paul Martin’s military bashing campaign ads.

“I voluntarily became a soldier knowing that it might one day mean me losing my life for Canada. Can Martin say that? When did he ever serve? He’s a fat cat billionaire without a clue about what it means to be a soldier. What he said was an insult to every man and woman in this country in uniform. All of them better Canadians than him. But what’s he care? Our military size has been so shrunk he figures the Liberals don’t need their votes to win.”
The soldier was reacting to a front-page newspaper story he read on the weekend in which Martin, during an interview, attacked Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s plans for the Canadian military. Martin, according to the article, saying Harper would impose a warlike “ready aye ready” philosophy that is out of vogue in today’s Canadian society.

This is the same Paul Martin currently flogging the canard that Stephen Harper wants to buy aircraft carriers. Considering our media is listening with ears perked for any gaffe, real or imagined, to pounce on the Conservatives, you’d think they’d be all over this big, fat lie like white on rice…
You’d think wrong, of course.

No More

What He Said 3 Comments

Prior to [9/11], Conservatives, however distasteful, were inchoate; they had tacitly acknowledged the intellectual leadership of the Liberal project. No more. Now Liberals were confronted with people who didn’t want to read the New York Times, were unimpressed by celebrity and didn’t want to go to Harvard. Many liberals didn’t recognize “their” familiar country any more. James Lileks described the intensity of the revulsion at the barbarians at the gates; not Osama Bin Laden, but rather someone else.

I ask my Democrat friends what they’d rather see happen — Bush reelected and bin Laden caught, or Bush defeated and bin Laden still in the wind. They’re all honest: they’d rather see Bush defeated.

[…]
Through the long summer of 1990s, the wounds festered as the infection deepened. It was masked by the ineffectual cologne of NGO projects, corrupt aid delivery, United Nations peacekeeping public relations projects, by selective media coverage and by the jangling of fund raising concerts at which a Secretary General appeared, like some secular pope, to give his blessing, until the boil burst over Manhattan on that bright autumn day. As the debris showered on New York it obscured the fact that a new post-post-colonial ideology was ready to push the Liberal edifice aside and take up the challenge of Islamic terrorism; underneath the War for Terror there was now a War for the West.
James Lilek’s friends must know that electing John Kerry to the White House will not restore the antebellum world. Things have gone too far for that. The Third World in general and the Islamic World in particular have burst their bounds; they can no longer be herded into the decrepit and threadbare tent of the United Nations; the Kyoto climate agreement; the International Criminal Court or any of Potemkin treaties woven by the European Union. Islamic fundamentalists are openly attacking Russia; besetting India; seizing British naval vessels; threatening to interdict the Straits of Malacca; menacing the House of Saud; renewing hostilities in Kosovo; bombing trains in Spain; raging through the Sudan and building nuclear enrichment plants. No Clintonian ceremony in the Rose Garden can replace the planets in their old orbits. All John Kerry can do if he must pay the price of restoring the Liberal dream is to withdraw, like Prince Prospero, into the artificial gaieties of last Bal Masque while the Red Death stalks without.

Go read it all.

He Speaks The Language

Radioactive 1 Comment

Typically, the Iranian kidnapping of British servicemen and patrol boats is being given less coverage than the Olsen twin anorexia story.
Wretchard, at the Belmont Club has useful insights, as usual.

If there’s any doubt that the enemy full-court press has begun, the seizure of three RN smallcraft by Iran and the attack on 4 US Marines in Ramadi, probably by Ba’athist special forces, should erase any doubt. Fighting with the Ba’athists began again after the US killed two dozen foreign terrorists in Fallujah. It was only a matter of time before they struck back, as they do in Lebanon, where many of the Syrian-backed fighters train with Hezbollah. That was expected. But the seizure of the Royal Navy patrol vessels is surprising because it represents a public and unilateral escalation by Iran. As a political statement, it must rank with Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, which was calculatingly delivered against a weak Jimmy Carter. It is an indication of how politically emasculated the Mullahs think the Coalition is, that they should have attempted this at all. Shortly after the conclusion of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Mullahs were practically trembling on their thrones. But now they smile; the BBC has done its work well.

Though, speaking of underreported stories on Iran…. perhaps the little guy from Shawinigan can make use of his new Iranian oil connections can negotiate a quiet little deal. You know, dictator to dictator…..
crossposted at the Shotgun

Media Sanitizing

Media No Comments

The Aboriginal justice commission was formed in response to the freezing deaths of Indian men on the outskirts of Saskatoon – in locations that coincided with an incident in which Saskatoon police dropped an intoxicated Darrell Night to walk back to the city, in the dead of winter. Yesterday the commission released its final report.
The Federation Of Saskatchewan Indian Nations did not attend the news conference, but responded today. Early broadcasts of comments of Vice-chief Lawrence Joseph had some particularly descriptive criticism of chair Willie Littlechild’s report (which included emphasis on the need for Indian and Metis communities to take responsibility for their own future)… now, lets see who wants to include it in their print coverage.
Looking for the money quote: Globe and Mail ? not here.… the CBC …nope. … FSIN news release ? eh… no.
So far, I can’t find the statement in any coverage at all.
Ok, so this is from memory, from a local 650 CKOM radio clip this morning (it’s been dropped from later reports). FSIN Vice-chief Lawrence Joseph;

” they want to train Indian leadership to be good little white leaders.”

That may not be the exact wording, but it’s damned close. If anyone has the actual transcript, please send it along.
(update, June 24 – revised to actual quote.)

Paydirt

Gopher News 5 Comments

From today’s Star Diamond Project news release;

A total of 3,355 commercial sized diamonds (greater than 1.18 millimetre square mesh screen), collectively weighing 338 carats, has been recovered from the treatment of 4,913 dry tonnes of kimberlite. Thirty-three diamonds greater than one carat have been recovered and the three largest stones are: 3.50, 3.31 and 3.19 carats, respectively. In addition, 352 diamonds (6 carats) were recovered down to 0.85 millimetre square mesh. The colour of over 80 percent of these diamonds has been classified as white, with a further 12 percent classified as off-white.

Like I said a couple of months ago, anticipate diamond prices to drop to $3 a bushel.

Ripping Moore A New One

Moonbats 2 Comments

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

Well, It’s About Time

Insufferable Twits 2 Comments
Former NDP member of parliament Svend Robinson has finally been charged with theft of a diamond ring to impress his boyfriend with.
That was two months ago.

NDP leader Jack Layton was sympathetic at the time.

“Now Svend’s inner strength must be applied to a very personal inner challenge,” Layton said. “I have every confidence that my friend Svend will overcome.”

It took a special prosecutor to figure out that grabbing 50K of someone else’s stuff and leaving the premises is like, illegal. Robinson’s snap impulse had been preceeded by casing the joint a shopping trip to the store two days earlier.
NDP Lorne Nystrom, who incidentally, also had a personal shoplifting crisis a few years ago;

“It is a personal tragedy,” … “All of us, under certain circumstances, crack and do something that’s really strange and weird.”

Strange how that happens. They always “crack” in the presence of something expensive. You don’t hear of people succumbing to stress and say…. making off with the neighbor’s garbage.
Equally forgiving, was Prime Minister Paul Martin, ” who called Robinson a dedicated parliamentarian who’s clearly under a lot of stress.”
Well, you can’t say he’s inconsistent on the issue of being holding thieves accountable. Though, at least Svend gave back the ring.

More Media Incompetence

Media No Comments

William Safire’s NYT column on the fiasco last week in which the world press uniformly reported:

“Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie” went the Times headline. “Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed” front-paged The Washington Post. The A.P. led with the thrilling words “Bluntly contradicting the Bush Administration, the commission. . . .” This understandably caused my editorial- page colleagues to draw the conclusion that “there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. . . .”
All wrong. The basis for the hoo-ha was not a judgment of the panel of commissioners appointed to investigate the 9/11 attacks. As reporters noted below the headlines, it was an interim report of the commission’s runaway staff, headed by the ex-N.S.C. aide Philip Zelikow. After Vice President Dick Cheney’s outraged objection, the staff’s sweeping conclusion was soon disavowed by both commission chairman Tom Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton.
“Were there contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq?” Kean asked himself. “Yes . . . no question.” Hamilton joined in: “The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections . . . we don’t disagree with that” – just “no credible evidence” of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attack.

Jeff Jarvis weighs in.
update- This isn’t incompetence. It’s outright deliberate misrepresentation by the LA Times.

View From The Eye Of The Storm

Terrorism No Comments

Via Stephen Den Beste, this piece that effectively capsulizes the problems in the Middle East and the nature of the threat the west faces. The source can’t be confirmed. Exerpts;

Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is.
– The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel.
– The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel.
– The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel.
– Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel.
– Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60’s because of Israel.
– Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel.
– The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel.
– The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel

…

– The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total population of 300 millions, larger than the US and almost as large as the EU before its expansion.
– They have a land area larger than either the US or all of Europe.
– These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgiumand equal to half of the GDP of California alone.

…

There is a new game in town: The actual murderer is called “the military wing”, the one who pays him, equips him and sends him is now called “the political wing” and the head of the operation is called the “spiritual leader”. There are numerous other examples of such Orwellian nomenclature, used every day not only by terror chiefs but also by Western media. These words are much more dangerous than many people realize. They provide an emotional infrastructure for atrocities. It was Joseph Goebels who said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. He is now being outperformed by his successors.

Required reading.

FAB: Endorsing Paul Martin

Political Animal 1 Comment

Fab Magazine’s Editor-In-Chief Mitchel Raphael:

“Paul Martin is your only hope if you do not want to see Stephen Harper become prime minister. Under the Liberals, we have seen gay rights move forward a touch beyond what most Canadians are comfortable with. The Conservatives will roll back our rights. I say, bring it on: boost the NDP, infiltrate the Conservative Party and make them change. But if you want to avoid a big battle, vote red.”

From his interview of the chosen candidate:

How do you think your personal views on homosexuality have changed over time? And why?
No comment supplied.
In the last session of Parliament your government introduced Bill C-12, which would remove the artistic merit defence in current child-porn laws. How can gay youth be protected from prosecution for expressing their sexuality through art?
No comment supplied.
The new Assisted Human Reproduction Act makes home insemination illegal. This is a big hurdle for gay men and lesbians trying to conceive. Does the state have the right to be in the bedrooms of the nation if a gay man decides to inseminate a lesbian with a turkey-baster?
No comment supplied.
Will you be attending Pride Day in Toronto on June 27, the day before the election?
No comment supplied.

I smell a Pulitzer.

Roads To Nowhere

Roadkill 9 Comments

It’s a poorly kept secret that the left-wing, labour oriented New Democrats governing Saskatchewan are hostile to the United States.
They parrot the “friends and most important trading partner” line, but they really don’t believe it. The NDP are socialists to the core – suspicious and antagonistic towards the US. Nor are they afraid to sacrifice the economic interests of residents of border constituencies to make their point. After all, it’s not like the southern rural areas are NDP strongholds.
What evidence is there for this? As I do nearly every year, over the past few weeks I’ve made road trips to North Dakota and Montana. Despite the fact that these border states are as sparsely populated as our own province, particularly near the Canada-US border, the American roads are well maintained – this is typical.
monthiway.JPG
It must come as a shock to American residents when they cross into Canada.
saskhiway1.JPG
This is what the last 50 miles looks like on those highways on the Saskatchewan side of the border leading to the ports of Northgate, Monchy and Climax. With broken pavement, huge potholes (never ignore a red hiway surface warning marker in this province) and eroding shoulders, these highways are in dangerous condition. According to border agents, there are American tourists who turn around after a few miles. Who can blame them?
saskhiway2.JPG
What they don’t know is that all of these highways improve dramatically, for no identifiable reason, around 50 miles into the province.

Bent Over Billboards

Moonbats 1 Comment

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???

Life Is A Highway

Blogging 1 Comment

Posting from beautiful Billings, Montana…
Things are going to be light here for a few days. I have the laptop with me, but precious little energy for blogging after a day in the sun and wind.
Check out the Shotgun (on the sidebar) for their take on the federal election leaders debate. Doesn’t sound like I missed much.

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