Bill Graham

When the competent David Pratt was removed from his brief tenure as Defense Minister when he lost his seat, the pickings for a worthy replacement were slim. Really slim.
Jaeger on the UN-idolizing, Foreign Affairs embarrassment, Bill Graham;

So rather than restoring the Canadian Forces to something resembling a fighting force capable of defending the nation’s interests we will see the Liberal transformation accelerate. Soon we’ll have an army completely disarmed, staffed exclusively with women and homosexuals engaging in social outreach programs in third world countries, if they go abroad at all. I can’t think of a worse time to be a Canadian soldier.

Watch for the Canadian Armed Forces float entry in next year’s Toronto Gay Pride parade.

Car Bomb In Nashville

What looks to be an amateur car bomb has detonated near Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville. Fortunately, the only fatality was the driver. Via James Joyner, who observes:

But, had this been a sophisticated terrorist operation, a lot of the people in those 2881 rooms and the adjacent shopping mall could have been killed. If we can’t stop amateur suicidal nuts–and we can’t–then we can’t stop committed professionals.
The day is coming.

Leaving On A Jet Plane

All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go,
I’m standing here outside your door,
I hate to wake you up to say goodbye.
(Not that you could with that much narcotic in your system)
But the dawn is breakin’,
It’s early morn,
Deportation order’s waitin’
Tube’s outa my arm,
Already, I’m so lonesome I could die.
Kiss me and smile for me,
Take this little pill for me,
Pass out so you’ll never, ever know.
‘Cause I’m leaving on a jet plane,
Don’t know when I’ll be back again,
Oh, babe, I hate to go

Pantsgate, Con’t

James Joyner: “So, he accidentally took documents more than once, and only after a pattern emerged did the staffers report him.”
Sandy Berger was National Security Advisor. What the hell was going on?
Update – Glenn Reynolds has extensive followup this morning., and on the further collapse of Joe Wilson’s credibility.
This email he recieved is enlightening:

Just to back up some of your other correspondents. I spent 27 years total in the AF – with a Top Secret clearance. I had at times, specific appended code word clearances, which are controlled on a strict need-to-know basis – because they often involve sensitive sources (say, you are getting data from a mole in the Itanian Gov. – that particular data would be graded TS and then given a code word to further identify it as very sensitive and to restrict access from those with just general TS clearances). In a nutshell, the security system from least classified to most classified was: Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, Top Secret codeword). When we worked on Top Secret codeword (it might read something like Top Secret Fishhook), it was in a vault and our notes were put in burn bags. We were not allowed to take any notes out -period. We clearly understood that you didn’t screw around with Secret, much less TS or TS codeword. For us a slip-up meant the slammer. What Berger did is so far removed from accepted security procedure, that I can only see two possible explanations: dishonesty with an ulterior motive (political CYA, I would guess) Or he’s crazy. There is no way a veteran in the security business doesn’t understand the gravity of walking out with TS codeword data.
Doug Rivers
USAF Ret.

A Blog About Nothing

I’ve added A Blog About Nothing to the sidebar, proving my boundless generosity, as it appears the selfish bastard doesn’t do reciprocals.
Nonetheless, here’s why.

“I think the course of a marriage runs much like the course of The Shining. It starts out great, sure, but boy does the author have a surprise in store! You may be lost on my comparison of a wedding to a hanging, but considering 50% of all marriages end in divorce, that leaves the rest to end in death. Given the long course of a marriage that ends thusly, and all the torture that comes with it, and given the relative lack of BS during a hanging, I guess I would rather be hung.”

My Name Is Joe


(clears throat)
Hey.
I’m not a lumberjack,
or a fur trader…
and I don’t live in an igloo
or eat blubber, or own a dogsled…
and I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada,
although I’m certain they’re really, really nice.
I have a Prime Minister,
not a President.
I speak English and French,
NOT American.
and I pronouce it ABOUT,
NOT A BOOT.
I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack.
I believe in peace keeping, NOT policing.
DIVERSITY, NOT assimilation,
AND THAT THE BEAVER IS A TRULY PROUD AND NOBLE ANIMAL.
A TOQUE IS A HAT,
A CHESTERFIELD IS A COUCH,
AND IT IS PRONOUCED ‘ZED’ NOT ‘ZEE’, ‘ZED’!
CANADA IS THE SECOND LARGEST LANDMASS!
THE FIRST NATION OF HOCKEY!
AND THE BEST PART OF NORTH AMERICA!
MY NAME IS JOE!
AND I AM CANADIAN!
Molson, Coors talk union
Molson Canadian may soon become a dual citizen. Molson Inc. and Denver-based Adolph Coors Co. have confirmed they are in “advanced” talks to combine the two firms. Prompted by swirling rumours, the two beer makers announced yesterday they are working on a “merger of equals.”
Though nothing has been finalized or approved, the terms of the deal include retaining Eric Molson as chairman and Coors’ Leo Kiely as chief executive. Yesterday’s announcement wasn’t much of a surprise, noted Keith Howlett, an analyst with Desjardins Securities. “Molson has been pretty open that it is reviewing strategic alliances and alternatives,” he said. “Coors is the first one that comes to people’s minds because they have so many business relationships already.”
[…]
In addition to being roughly the same size, Molson and Coors share a similar history and share structure. John Molson started his company in 1786, and his family still controls the voting stock. Adolph Coors started making beer 87 years later. His relatives own about a third of the voting stock. Peter H. Coors, the fourth generation chairman, had decided to run for the U.S. senate, raising doubts about his succession plans. At Molson, Eric stepped down as chairman last year. However, he prevented his cousin Ian from taking over, hence the feud.

Professional Attribution

The Associated Press has already pulled this item, but not before it was saved for posterity…

Police are asking for help to solve the mystery of Powell’s death.
“The public is very important, especially if they know her from a different name or may have seen her sometime before Saturday,” Ryan McFarland of the Adams County sheriff’s office said.
Investigators are not sure if Powell died where her body was found or if she was killed elsewhere, WLWT Eyewitness News 5’s most- overrated, obnoxious, annoying, stick-like, ho-bag, sperm- receptacle staff member Raegan Butler reported.

Via Outside The Beltway and Wizbang.

Job Vacancy

Sean has found his dream job. Sort of.

There are only three things standing between myself and a job like this. First, it’s only open to those living in the Ottawa and Quebec regions – not good-for-nothing Westerners like myself. Second, French is a requirement and I’ve let mine atrophy to the point where I struggle with reading my old French language Asterix cartoon books. Lastly, I’m pretty sure that my sponsor in a certain 12 step program that I may or may not belong to would kick my ass into low orbit if he even thought I was serious about applying for the position.

Salary: $61,312 to $66,287. It’s a 3 – 6 month position.
Sean, don’t give up hope. We lowly Western wine connoisseurs�may yet be able to apply for the job of cleaning the spiffy new granite curbs in Ottawa.
“Excusez moi, monsieur! Permit moi to polishez les gutter pour vous!”

Pantsgate

President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, is the focus of a Justice Department investigation after removing highly classified terrorism documents and handwritten notes from a secure reading room during preparations for the Sept. 11 commission hearings, The Associated Press has learned.
Berger’s home and office were searched earlier this year by FBI agents armed with warrants after he voluntarily returned documents to the National Archives. However, still missing are some drafts of a sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration’s handling of al-Qaida terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration.
Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed handwritten notes he had made while reading classified anti-terror documents at the archives by sticking them in his jacket and pants. He also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio, they said.

That’s a lot of inadvertant.
Update – Notes inadvertantly found their way into his socks, too.
And, Hugh Hewitt reminds us to apply the “Rice test”.

Even if the Commission was a genuine non-partisan effort instead of a show trial designed to keep the eye off of Clinton’s indifference to al Qaeda throughout the ’90s, it would still have needed all the records, and in an untampered form. How can anyone think it was a good idea to let a potentially responsible party review the evidence against him and his colleagues?�
[…]
Had Rice been the one caught tampering with the records of the Bush Administration relating to terrorism, Rice would already have been forced by a baying press to resign, and Bush would be threatened with a Watergate-style meltdown.� But it is a pro-Kerry media, so watch for Berger’s attempted cover-up to get its own cover-up.

Another update – Berger has stepped down from the Kerry team.
Well, duh.

SIDS Gene Uncovered

A form of SIDS (crib death) has been linked to a recessive gene in Amish populations.

BBC – They looked at 21 infants who had died suddenly and came from two generations of an American Amish community. All died before 12 months of age from sudden cardiac and respiratory arrest.
Dr Stephan’s team looked at the genes of four of these infants and found a defect common to all them. All four infants had two abnormal copies of a gene called TSPYL which is located on chromosome 6.
It opens up the possibility that mutations in other genes may also contribute to some sudden infant deaths.
The researchers looked at DNA from the parents of each of the children and found the parents carried only one abnormal copy of the gene. The researchers believe having two abnormal copies of TSPYL affects the nervous system and causes sudden death by interfering with the brain’s control of the heart and lungs.

It also raises questions about the cases in which multiple SIDS deaths in a family have led to murder charges. From a Slate article on the Noe case in which 8 children allegedly died of SIDS…

…experts now believe that losing one baby to SIDS does not increase the likelihood that a family will lose another. However, Wecht points out, there have been cases of two and three unexplained infant deaths in a family in which homicide was ruled highly unlikely. Parents of SIDS babies have been wrongly accused in the past. And most troubling, as I said before, we don’t know what SIDS is in the first place. We may have lumped several different diseases together in describing the syndrome. Perhaps multiple natural deaths in a family are possible.

Indeed. A simple recessive defect carried by both parents would produce statistical odds of one in four children being affected. And as probabilities are extremely unreliable in small samplings, the chances of two or three SIDS cases from two carrier parents would be pretty good.
And those are the odds for simple autosomal recessive mutations. If there are other gene defects that predispose children to crib death that are incompletely dominant (meaning that a single copy of the mutation can cause death, but a minority of carriers are spared and survive to reproduce), half of their children would inherit the defect. If a simple recessive, such as the TSPYL gene is survivable through fetal management and monitoring, 100% of the children of survivors would inherit it.
Prediction: In recent years, the recommended practice of laying infants on their backs to sleep has reduced SIDS deaths dramatically. This may mean that some SIDS deaths are purely mechanical – or it may be that the position compensates for respiratory problems in children with a mild underlying gene defect..If the latter is true, expect a sharp increase in SIDS deaths in a decade or two, when the survivors move into adulthood to have children of their own.

Canola

Today was a little busy for blogging. But I got out the camera on the way home from town as a thunderstorm was rolling towards Saskatoon behind me. The yellow flowers are canola, and the bloom is actually beginning to wane – the colour on the fields was a little more intense last week. Driving through the countryside, canola perfume hangs in the air – subtle and pleasant. About 40% of the farmland in this region is planted with the oilseed this year. The aerial view must be spectacular.
canola_shed.jpg
I had almost forgotten what it was like. Three years of dust storms, unrelenting heat, grasshoppers, high wind, barren pastures and withered crops. This region of the province had a drought that surpassed that of the 1930’s – the land saved only by modern no-till cropping methods.

(Dust storm, late May 2002. The street looking west from my house.)
But this year, the rainfall has been normal, the dust storms are gone. Summer heat was slow to arrive and crops are late, but they’re healthy and catching up fast. And the cold and wet meant trillions of grasshoppers perished, unhatched.
If anyone is considering a road trip into this province, this is the year, this is the time.

UN Oil-For-Terrorism Program

NY Post

American officials believe that millions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed from the scandal-plagued U.N. oil-for-food program are now being used to help fund the bloody rebel campaign against U.S. forces and the new Iraqi government, The Post has learned.
U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators said last night that the “oil-for-insurgency link” has been recently unearthed in the numerous probes now under way into the giant U.N. humanitarian program, in which Saddam is believed to have pocketed $10.1 billion through oil smuggling and kickbacks from suppliers.
[…]
Investigators have traced some of these accounts to banks in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Belarus, where money was either laundered or converted into gold and routed back to Iraq or into other accounts.
The network of bankers, front companies, couriers and money-launderers involved in handling Saddam’s oil-for-food kickback schemes still appears to be active, investigators say.
U.S. intelligence officials believe a portion of the funds in these hidden accounts � possibly millions� is now being used to fund the Ba’athist guerrillas responsible for much of the postwar violence against coalition troops, sources said.

Yet another justification to charge Kofi Annan with war crimes.
hat tip – James Joyner

Of Botox And Girly Men

As I’ve noted in the past, Matt Drudge is so funny.
And so is the Governator.

“If they don’t have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, ‘I don’t want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers … if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men,” Schwarzenegger said to the cheering crowd at a mall food court in Ontario.
The governor lifted the term from a long-running “Saturday Night Live” skit in which two pompous, Schwarzenegger-worshipping weightlifters repeatedly use it to mock those who don’t meet their standards of physical perfection.
Democrats said Schwarzenegger’s remarks were insulting to women and gays and distracted from budget negotiations. State Sen. Sheila Kuehl said the governor had resorted to “blatant homophobia.”
“It uses an image that is associated with gay men in an insulting way, and it was supposed to be an insult. That’s very troubling that he would use such a homophobic way of trying to put down legislative leadership,” said Kuehl, one of five members of the Legislature’s five-member Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus.

Oh, boo hoo, ya whiney bunch of pansies.

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