Fighting alongside their Canadian brethren in the greater war on terrorism.
Fox News Hand Wringing
James Adams exhibits “fair and balanced” reporting at the Globe and Mail.
Fox News, the Canada-baiting house organ of the U.S. right, will come to Canadian digital television next year, the federal broadcast regulator is expected to rule today.
[…]
News Corp. is controlled by the right-wing Australian media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch.
It claims to have more than 80 million subscribers in the United States alone, subscribers who have made it that country’s top- rated all-news channel and its commentators Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren and Bill O’Reilly full-fledged media personalities.
The abrasive Mr. O’Reilly, in particular, has developed an intense, albeit negative, interest in things Canadian in the past two years.
He used his much-watched The O’Reilly Factor program as a launching pad for feuds with The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle and Heather Mallick, and attacked, variously, Canadian teens (for being “ignorant”), the CRTC (for “banning” Fox), former prime minister Jean Chr�tien (for being “a bum”), The Globe and Mail (“a far-left newspaper”), Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell (for being soft on heroin users) and Canadian health care (“socialist”).
Woohooo! With endorsements like that, I think Fox can look forward to a healthy relationship with the unserved Canadian conservative news audience.
The Libranos – A New Wrinkle
Alfonso Gagliano has held titles in Canada that include labor minister, deputy House leader, ambassador to Denmark and minister of public works.
In New York he held a different kind of title, according to secret FBI documents obtained by the Daily News: “made” member of the Bonanno crime family.
Gagliano was identified as a longtime soldier in the Bonanno crime family by Frank Lino, a former Mafia capo-turned-informer.
Lino is now cooperating with the FBI and federal prosecutors as they slowly take apart the mob family to which he once swore allegiance.
Gagliano’s name surfaced as Lino described the Bonanno family’s operations in Montreal, which has served as an outpost for the Brooklyn-based group for decades.
He said he and a group of top Bonanno gangsters traveled to Montreal in the 1990s to let the northern branch office know the family had a new boss, Joseph Massino.
The group met at a catering hall, and during the meeting, a Bonanno gangster, Joseph Lopresti, introduced Gagliano to Lino as a made man in the family, FBI documents state.
Lino made a point of telling the FBI that only actual members of the Bonanno family were allowed to attend the meeting at the catering hall. Associates were banned.
Gagliano attorney Pierre Fournier did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.
For years, Gagliano was a fixture in Canada’s national politics, rising through the ranks of the Liberal Party.
But his most powerful position was undoubtedly Canada’s minister of public works and government services, the office that oversees the Canadian mint and awards most of Canada’s government contracts.
In that capacity, Gagliano found himself embroiled in a growing scandal over potential corruption in the awarding of contracts for government advertising.
In February, he was dismissed as ambassador.
There is an ongoing investigation into allegations that government funds were funneled to large contributors to the Liberal Party for no-work contracts.
Lino was shown an array of photographs and identified Gagliano, the FBI documents state.
When he began cooperating with the FBI, Lino admitted he was involved in six murders, several attempted murders, loansharking, extortion and gambling.
Libranos flashback….
update Western Standard staff writer, Kevin Steel has written to the Daily News asking if any Canadian news agency has asked for copies of the FBI documents. Heh.
Carolyn Parrish, Comedian
At least one Liberal MP will find it difficult to hide her distaste for the recently re- elected U.S. president. Carolyn Parrish didn’t even try on Monday, playing along with CBC-TV’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes by stomping on a George Bush action figure.
Parrish has been outspoken in the past, calling Americans “bastards” and mocking Bush’s efforts to gather allies in the war on Iraq by calling countries that follow the U.S. a “coalition of idiots.” 
“Come on guys, this is humour … I am not a monster lady. I’m not an angry wet hen. I am actually a pretty funny person and humour is one of those tonics in life.”
Carolyn has a point.
1 pm. update – Prime Minister Paul Martin has announced Parrish has been expelled from caucus.
Deja Graihb, All Over Again
A young Marine and his cover man cautiously enter a room just recently filled with insurgents armed with Ak-47’s and RPG’s. There are three dead, another wailing in pain. The insurgent can be heard saying, “Mister, mister! Diktoor, diktoor(doctor)!” He is badly wounded, lying in a pool of his own blood. The Marine and his cover man slowly walk toward the injured man, scanning to make sure no enemies come from behind. In a split second, the pressure in the room greatly exceeds that of the outside, and the concussion seems to be felt before the blast is heard. Marines outside rush to the room, and look in horror as the dust gradually settles. The result is a room filled with the barely recognizable remains of the deceased, caused by an insurgent setting off several pounds of explosives.
The Marines’ remains are gathered by teary eyed comrades, brothers in arms, and shipped home in a box. The families can only mourn over a casket and a picture of their loved one, a life cut short by someone who hid behind a white flag.
But no one hears these stories, except those who have lived to carry remains of a friend, and the families who loved the dead. No one hears this, so no one cares.
It’s Deja Graihb, all over again.
This time the “shocking” pictures are of a Marine shooting a “wounded Iraqi”, replaying on every channel, stills on every front page – while Margaret Hussan plays the part of Arni Berg, the bullets to her head too “disturbing” to view, the details of her weeks of torture too graphic to describe. The technicolor evidence of the scene of the crime is nowhere to be found.
Blackhawk pilot “2Slick”;
Call this an official warning to the MSM- keep it fair, or the blogosphere will activate the Bat Signal.
It already has.
Where Are The Slaughterhouse Photos?
Attention Freedom Of Religion: Lubricate Liberally
… and prepare for the slide.
Ont. minister urges Muslims to stay in gay-ed classes
Controversy erupted after students at Market Lane Public School were shown videos that depicted the feelings of children who get taunted at school because their own parents are homosexuals.
Angry Muslim parents complained that their religious beliefs were getting less respect from the board than gay rights and demanded that their children be excluded on religious grounds from similar presentations in the future.
The board rejected their request Tuesday night on the grounds that allowing some students to be excluded from discussions about gay families would violate the rights of those children with same-sex parents.
Still clinging to the lie assurance that churches won’t be forced to perform same-sex marriages?
Ontario’s New Democrats echoed the government’s position.
“I believe that human rights come above religious rights,” said NDP critic Michael Prue.
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms lists freedom of religion as a “fundamental right”. Further down, under “equality rights” we have this:
15. (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
Contrary to popular belief, the word “orientation” does not actually appear in the document.
Breaking News!
Louise Arbour, Insufferable Twit
Via The Command Post:
Top United Nations human rights official Louise Arbour has called for investigation of alleged abuses in Fallujah, Iraq, including disproportionate use of force and the targeting of civilians.
Those responsible for any violations – US and multinational forces, Iraqi government troops or insurgents – should be brought to justice, the former UN war crimes prosecutor said in a statement.
Well, what are you waiting for, Louise? Grab an M16 and you go, girl.
“There have been a number of reports during the current confrontation alleging violations of the rules of war designed to protect civilians and combatants,” the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights said.
[…]
All violations of international humanitarian and human rights law must be investigated, including “the deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the killing of injured persons and the use of human shields”, Ms Arbour said.
In related news:
Mutilated bodies dumped on Fallujah’s bombed out streets today painted a harrowing picture of eight months of rebel rule.
As US and Iraqi troops mopped up the last vestiges of resistance in the city after a week of bombardment and fighting, residents who stayed on through last week’s offensive were emerging and telling harrowing tales of the brutality they endured.
Flyposters still litter the walls bearing all manner of decrees from insurgent commanders, to be heeded on pain of death. Amid the rubble of the main shopping street, one decree bearing the insurgents’ insignia – two Kalashnikovs propped together – and dated November 1 gives vendors three days to remove nine market stalls from outside the city’s library or face execution.
The pretext given is that the rebels wanted to convert the building into a headquarters for the “Mujahidin Advisory Council” through which they ran the city.
Another poster in the ruins of the souk bears testament to the strict brand of Sunni Islam imposed by the council, fronted by hardline cleric Abdullah Junabi. The decree warns all women that they must cover up from head to toe outdoors, or face execution by the armed militants who controlled the streets.
Two female bodies found yesterday suggest such threats were far from idle. An Arab woman, in a violet nightdress, lay in a post-mortem embrace with a male corpse in the middle of the street. Both bodies had died from bullets to the�head.
Just six metres away on the same street lay the decomposing corpse of a blonde-haired white woman, too disfigured for swift identification but presumed to be the body of one of the many foreign hostages kidnapped by the rebels.
Such is the fear that the heavily armed militants held over Fallujah that many of the residents who emerged from the ruins welcomed the US marines, despite the massive destruction their firepower had inflicted on their city.
A man in his sixties, half-naked and his underwear stained with blood from shrapnel wounds from a US munition, cursed the insurgents as he greeted the advancing marines on Saturday night.
“I wish the Americans had come here the very first day and not waited eight months,” he said, trembling.
A former member of Canada’s Supreme Court, it’s a relief that Arbour has been removed from that position and into the UN, where her assinine statements lack any significant legal or moral authority.
Clinton Presidential Library
Artists rendition of the new Clinton Library opening in Little Rock tomorrow.
(Not shown: presidential limousine up on blocks in the driveway.)
I’m So Ronrey… So Ronery And Sadry Arone…
What is happening to the great masterpieces of North Korea?
hat tip – Captain Ed
Quote Of The Day
Yay Condi Rice. I want her to go to Saudi Arabia, and I want her first words upon getting off the plane to be “I’ll drive.”
Crouzon Syndrome
A photo essay– by the Seattle Times on Brenna Johnston, who was born with a rare genetic condition called Crouzon Syndrome . I’m not sure what purpose the article serves, but this is one brave little kid.
al-Zarqawi TOSsed
Rusty Shackleford is reporting that Hosting Anime has shut down all terrorist related sites on their servers, including several linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The website had been previously hacked on several occasions by a group calling itself Teamz USA. The story was first reported here (and then ripped off by MSNBC) and a second hacking was reported by Chad Evans (also ripped by MSM). Might I just add that a certain Star Wars themed website gave out the URL for Zarqawi to well over a hundred people promising to take down the site again….Perhaps the new owners just got sick of all the hackers?
Now, if someone would only take care of Al Jazeera.
Life Imitates Scrappleface
Mental health officials in South Florida blasted Rush Limbaugh on Monday, saying the conservative talk show host’s offer of “free therapy” for traumatized John Kerry voters has made a mockery of a valid psychological problem.
“Rush Limbaugh has a way of back-handedly slamming people,” said Sheila Cooperman, a licensed clinician with the American Health Association (AHA) who listened Friday as Limbaugh offered to personally treat her patients. “He’s trying to ridicule the emotional state this presidential election produced in many of us here in Palm Beach County. Who is he to offer therapy?”
“us”?
Physician, heal thyself.
Cooperman, whose professional practice is based in Delray Beach, said the election-related symptoms she sees in the Kerry supporters more than quality PEST as “a legitimate syndrome or disorder within the trauma spectrum,” according to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
“Rush Limbaugh has no clinical qualifications to counsel anyone,” Cooperman said. “He’s not only minimizing PEST, but he’s bastardizing the entire psychological field and our clinical expertise.”
You don’t say.
(crossposted to Outside The Beltway where I’m doing a little guest blogging these days.)
Poodles
Greg Staples thinks the British press is incredibly bold.
Q Mr. President, first. The Prime Minister is sometimes, perhaps unfairly, characterized in Britain as your “poodle.” I was wondering if that’s the way you may see your relationship? And perhaps, more seriously, do you feel for the –“.
Here is a questioner calling the Prime Minister of the UK a poodle to his face.
Indeed. I wonder where they get it? Bush’s answer;
“PRESIDENT BUSH: The Prime Minister made the decision he did because he wanted to do his duty to secure the people of Great Britain. That’s why he made the decision. Plenty capable of making his own mind. He’s a strong, capable man. I admire him a lot. You know why? When he tells you something, he means it. You spend much time with politics, you’ll know there’s some people around this part of the — this kind of line of work where they tell you something, they don’t mean it…”
A Bushian slip, that. Whoever could he be thinking of?
Times Online
JACQUES CHIRAC dealt a blow to Tony Blair’s attempt to heal the wounds between the US and Europe last night by saying that the Prime Minister had won nothing for supporting the war against Iraq.
[…]
M Chirac, speaking to British journalists, including The Times, soon after General Powell’s announcement, revealed that he had urged Mr Blair to demand the relaunch of the Middle East peace process in return for backing the war.
“Well, Britain gave its support but I did not see anything in return. I’m not sure it is in the nature of our American friends at the moment to return favours systematically.”
[…]
M Chirac, whose visit to Britain concludes the Entente Cordiale anniversary celebrations, said: “I am not sure, with America as it is these days, that it would be easy for someone, even the British, to be an honest broker.”
Go, Norm Coleman, go. Time to return the favour.
Fairuz Yamulky
Fairuz Yamulky, a 38 year old Iraqi-Canadian, was taken hostage in Iraq on Sept. 7 and held for 16 days. She was tortured, beaten and threatened with death. She escaped with the assistance of one of her captors.
U.S. forces diverted a Blackhawk helicopter to pick up her and her protector in the desert, they provided medical tests and trauma counselling and gave her a place to stay in a general’s apartment.
Her treatment by Canadian government officials?
Once in Amman, Yamulky said Canadian officials never offered any followup medical help. She eventually saw her own doctor in Dubai, where her family lived while she worked in Iraq.
�
Yamulky said she could afford to pay what Canadian officials required and despite feeling traumatized was able to make some decisions.
�
But others in similar situations might not have her financial resources nor be able mentally to cope with such demands, she said.
�
“Some people come out of these traumas and they’re totally distorted,” said Yamulky.
�
“I do thank the Canadian government for keeping in contact with my family. But I do at the same time want them to have something in place when things like this go wrong.”
�
Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Marie-Christine Kilkoff said officials followed Yamulky’s plight very closely and worked with local Iraqi authorities and “other countries with a presence in Baghdad.”
�
Once Yamulky was free, they obtained an emergency passport for her and arranged travel to Jordan, though the flight was paid for by relatives and friends, said Kilkoff.
�
“While in Amman, Canadian officials advised Mrs. Yamulky that we could assist her with hotel and flight arrangements, which she declined,” she said.
�
The department has been warning Canadians since 1995 not to travel to Iraq, said Kilkoff, and its travel advisory states it has no consular services in that country.
�
Canada has one foreign service officer as a liaison with the Iraqi interim government and an RCMP officer looking into ways of aiding the country’s police forces.
�
Dining with Canadian embassy officials in Amman, Yamulky said one left the table to take a telephone call from Ottawa. She returned to ask if Yamulky would make a statement that the Canadian government had helped her.
�
“I refused,” she said. “I said I do not know how much you guys have done in my case.”
One might argue that when policies are established, and warnings given to travellers, that those who ignore them do so at their own risk and expense. Fair enough – but let us not forget that this is the same Canadian government that issued emergency passports and paid the airfare for the Khadr terrorism clan to return to Canada from Pakistan.
Travesty International
A reader at Powerline passes along this flyer being passed around at Penn State and ponders,
“�You always wonder why groups like Amnesty International always seem to hold War Criminal Tribunals for Bush, but somehow missed holding one for Kim Jong Il or Hussein.”
Amnesty International has become a caricature of its former self. Today, the organization just another donation pit for the anti-American, anti-semitic left.
Spaghetti Logic
Reminiscent of enviro-leftist warnings about the “devastating flooding created by not enough water to fill the dam” Rafferty-Alameda project here in Saskatchewan in the 1980’s, Kevin Libin wonders if the Missile Defense Shield Antis might refine their message.
” [T]hey, on one hand, argue that the technology will lead to a new global arms race as nations build increasingly sophisticated weapons to evade the missile shield, and on the other, that the missile shield will never work anyway.”
Meanwhile, on the medical front, Michelle Malkin watches the NYT editorial board squirm through a plate of spaghetti logic to remind readers that race is a concept with no basis in scientific fact, while encouraging the FDA to approve a heart medication developed specifically for African-American patients.
No wonder the left clings so tightly to relativism and its associated realms. You need to set aside that objective truth bullshit to like, cut through the crap that comes with thinking really, really hard about stuff you wish wasn’t true and everything.
UNScam Updates
The figures for the UN Oil-For-Food rip-off scheme have been revised from the previous 10 – 11 billion estimates. Doubled, actually.
William Safire at the NYT (registration may be necessary).
Annan’s obstruction of outside investigations has strong support within the U.N. members whose citizens are most likely to be embarrassed by revelations of payoffs: Russia, France and China lead all the rest. He has dutifully continued to align himself with their interests by declaring the overthrow of Saddam “illegal” and recently denouncing our attack on the insurgents in Falluja. Perhaps he thinks that this confluence of national interest in cover-up – along with the unwillingness of most media to dig into a complicated story – will let his stonewalling succeed. He reckons not with an insulted Congress.
Via Powerline, this Chicago Sun-Times column by Robert Novak on the upcoming showdown:
Coleman said this week’s hearings will show that ”the scope of the ripoff” at the U.N. is substantially more than the widely reported $10 billion to $11 billion in graft. But more than money is involved. These hearings also should expose the arrogance of the secretary-general and his bureaucracy. At the same time that he has refused to honor the Senate committee’s request for documents, Annan has inveighed against the Fallujah offensive sanctioned by the new Iraqi government while ignoring the terrorism of insurgents. This is an unprecedented showdown between a branch of the U.S. government and the U.N.
The scandal is not complicated. Money from Iraqi oil sales permitted by the Saddam Hussein regime under U.N. auspices, supposedly to provide food for Iraqis, was siphoned off to middlemen. Billions intended to purchase food wound up in Saddam’s hands for the purpose of buying conventional weapons. The complicity of U.N. member states France and Russia is pointed to by the Senate investigation. The web of corruption deepened when it was revealed that Annan’s son, Kojo, was on the payroll of a contractor in the oil- for-food program.
[…]
The reaction by the U.N. bureaucracy has been an intransigent defense of its stone wall. Edward Mortimer, Annan’s director of communications, publicly sneered at the Coleman-Levin letter as ”very awkward and troubling.” Privately, Annan’s aides told reporters that they were not about to hand over confidential documents to the Russian Duma and every other parliamentary body in the world.
But the U.S. Senate is not the Russian Duma. These are not just a few right- wing voices in the wilderness who are confronting Kofi Annan. ”In seeing what is happening at the U.N.,” Coleman told me, ”I am more troubled today than ever. I see a sinkhole of corruption.” The United Nations and its secretary-general are in a world of trouble.
Stay tuned.