Canadians moving inland, says first news dispatch from beach head
By Ross Munro

WITH CANADIAN FORCES LANDING IN FRANCE, June 6, 1944 (CP Cable) – In two hours and 45 minutes of fighting on the beaches here, the Canadian invasion force won its beach-head and shoved on inland.
At 10:45 this morning the Canadian commander (Gen. Keller) sent this message to Gen. Crerar, G.O.C. 1st Canadian Army: “Beach head taken. Well on way to intermediate objective.”
The strip of coast won by the Canadians in this initial assault was quite narrow, but it gave them the beaches and provided a base for further penetration.
There was some stiff street fighting in the little coast towns and the Canadians also met considerable enemy fire on the beaches and as they worked their way into the defences. They had to overcome numerous steel and wooden obstacles which were placed out on the tidal part of the beach and which were covered at high tide to trap landing craft. However, the assault went in at 7:15 a.m. just as the tide began to rise and many of these obstacles were cleared away by engineers before the water covered them, thus enabling followup craft to beach and unload.
Some casualties were suffered in the assault by the Canadians from enemy machine-guns, mortars and artillery fire.
By 10:00 a.m. the Canadians were about 1,000 yards inland and going strong, meeting only small pockets of Germans. The first prisoners were taken and identified as belonging to a coastal unit.
On other parts of the front near us the operation is moving along. Canadian and British airborne troops did a good job when they dropped and came in by gliders at 3:30 this morning. They captured several bridges and held them.
Cruisers provided very effective support to the Canadians and one cruiser knocked out a troublesome battery about a mile and a half from the coast with six direct hits.
Enemy tanks are reported about 10 to 15 miles south of the beach-head and some enemy transport is also moving.
Up to noon the German air force has not shown up. It is estimated to have 2,350 aircraft in western Europe but it looks as if the air attack will come tonight.
The French coast is still wreathed in smoke driving far down the Channel. In some of the bombarded towns, fires are burning ….

So far the operation seems to have gone as well as could be expected. Destroyers and gunboats are cruising up and down the coastline banging away at last coastal points of resistance on our beach. Now the rest of the assault troops are going in. I am going ashore with them.

The rest is here.
(Ross Munro, war correspondent for The Canadian Press, died in Toronto in 1990 at the age of 76. Why can’t our war reporting of today be as clear and unobstructed by bias as this?)
Hat tip – Rick Hiebert

The media and pundits are leaning hot and hard on Harper in the past 24 hours, now that there seems to be more than a “good scare” looming for the preferred Liberals. The word “extremist” is getting thrown around, and breathless discussion of abortion law is swirling.
We should be working hard to point out what is happening. Fiamma Nirenstein, former Communist, human rights activist and Italian journalist;

“when you call a person a right-winger, this is the first step toward his or her delegitimization.”

The abortion debate is a classic example of the unresistable force of one person’s right to choose coming against the immovable object of the other person’s right to exist. There will never be an acceptable common ground for those on either side of the debate, so compromise is not possible.
Law has to choose one side or the other. In Canada, abortion is legal. But legality does not render a position “moderate”. There is no halfway position between life and death. Those who oppose abortion, and want to change abortion law through democratic channels are no less moderate or legitimate than those who want to retain the status quo. Yet, this is how they are characterized in the press and by the pro-choice advocates.
So, while I’m personally pro-choice, I cringe when I hear the pro-life position being described as “right wing” or “extremist”.
Jailing or stoning homosexuals is extremist. Executing people for having extra marital affairs is extremist. Flogging women because they do not cover their hair is extremist.
Being opposed to the taking of life for reasons of convenience is not extremist, nor is it right-wing. It is simply an opposing view, on an issue that has no middle ground.
When we hear the “extremist” meme in our media and from our politicians, we should be aware of what they are doing – it is an attempt to delegitimize that opposing view, so that they do not have to address the issue on its merits, or face the possibility that it is a majority viewpoint that may just prevail if subjected to the democratic process.

Via Instapundit this article in the Statesman about the suppression of stories by the BBC;

Just before the war against Iraq I began to receive strange calls from BBC journalists. Would I like information on how the leadership of the anti-war movement had been taken over by the Socialist Workers Party? Maybe, I replied. It was depressing that a totalitarian party was in the saddle, but that’s where the SWP always tries to get. Why get excited?
Oh there are lots of reasons, said the BBC hacks. The anti-war movement wasn’t a simple repetition of the old story of the politically naive being led by the nose by sly operators. The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba’athist fascism as it dared and had formed a working alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain, which, along with the usual misogyny and homophobia of such organisations, also believed that Muslims who decided that there was no God deserved to die for the crime of free thought. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, would allow themselves to be organised by the opponents of democracy and modernity and would march through the streets of London without a flicker of self-doubt. Wasn’t this a story?
It’s a great story, I cried. But why don’t you broadcast it?
We can’t, said the bitter hacks. Our editors won’t let us.

The rest is here.

Hundreds of women are murdered every year in the USA by their spouses. A significant percentage of those will be pregnant.
So, please, someone explain to me – why does the Scott Peterson trial merit any attention whatsoever outside of the Modesto, CA area? What can possibly be in the minds of the editors and news directors who choose this schlock to feed us day in and day out, at the expense of real news items?
You’ll notice, I have provided no link to any of the reports on the trial. It does not deserve one.

I listened to Rush Limbaugh on the drive home Monday, and he received an lengthy call from a US soldier back in the states after nearly a year in Iraq. He had put about 200 prisoners in Abu Graihb, and recounted some of the crimes that they had committed. He confirmed that the vast majority of Iraq is at peace and reconstruction efforts are going well.
There’s a brief transcript of part of the call up on his site. I don’t have audio capabilities, but I suspect at least part of the call is available for download there.

“You could sit here and you say you support the soldiers, but if you’re sitting here and saying you don’t support the president, you don’t support the administration, then I got news for you: you’re not supporting us.”

The caller echoed concerns about the media both in Iraq and at home – there are reporters on “every corner”, which interferes with the ability of the military to conduct operations without interference or second guessing. And despite surviving two roadside bombs, scores of missions and firefights in Baghdad, the first time he was truly “scared” was upon returning home to discover that the Iraq being reported was totally unlike the one he served in – and was afraid that the mission there would be lost in the media.

Martin A. Grove at the Hollywood Reporter chronicles the manipulation of events that led to Michael Moore’s film making it onto the pages of the New York Times, and from there through the world press, and to Cannes.

The “Fahrenheit” fracas first broke on the front page of The New York Times in a story with a Washington, D.C. dateline. Typically, stories about movies are covered from Los Angeles or New York, so the fact that this one was being reported on from Washington immediately suggested its origin was atypical. Its headline packed a powerful take-no-prisoners punch: “Disney Is Blocking Distribution of Film That Criticizes Bush.” Whoever planted the story with the Times’ Washington bureau had a political agenda in mind beyond wanting to secure a movie distribution deal.

You think they might have checked their facts before running with a story supplied by the agent of a well known political flacktivist. But some stories are too juicy to pass up, and fact checking might deflate the balloon of enthusiasm. Instead, the Times followed this up with an editorial titled Disney’s Craven Behavior”.

Moore’s reference to the Times’ article on his Web site wound up being cited later on by AFP (and, presumably, by other media outlets around the world) without mentioning that Moore’s own agent was the person the Times had quoted about those claimed Florida tax breaks for Disney that would be supposedly be endangered if Disney dared to let Miramax release “Fahrenheit.”
After the Times’ article appeared, Florida officials denied that Disney was receiving any tax breaks from the state. In an Associated Press story May 5 Gov. Bush was quoted as saying, “What tax break? We don’t give tax breaks that I’m aware of to Disney. I appreciate the fact that Disney creates thousands and thousands of jobs in our state.” In another AP story the same day Eisner was quoted as stating, “None of that (Florida tax breaks) was ever discussed. It is totally not true.”
Nonetheless, in stories written over the course of the past few weeks journalists have continued to refer to those so-called Florida tax breaks as if there’s no question at all about them being reality. Indeed, without the tax breaks issue the whole argument falls apart as to why Disney didn’t, in Moore’s view, want to let Miramax release his movie. The importance of this issue was hammered home in a Times’ May 6 editorial attacking Disney. Under the headline “Disney’s Craven Behavior,” the Times said the company deserved “a gold medal for cowardice for blocking” the film’s distribution by Miramax. It then went on to say: “Mr. Moore’s agent said that Michael Eisner, Disney’s chief executive, had expressed concern that the film might jeopardize tax breaks granted to Disney for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Jeb Bush is governor. If that is the reason for Disney’s move, it would underscore the dangers of allowing huge conglomerates to gobble up diverse media companies.”

Perhaps the NYT should just start a “Mea Culpa” page to compliment their corrections column. “Correction” isn’t really the right word for what they’ve been up to lately – the word implies an honest error, and these aren’t honest errors.
“Agenda-mongering” seems more appropriate.