Oil for Food Scandal - Kofi Skates?

Now that the UN's own internal Independent Inquiry Committee into the Oil-for-Food Programme has released it's second interim report. It is interesting to see the media spin starting that this report exonerates Kofi Annan. It reminds me of another internal independent inquiry at CBS that exonerated Dan Rather. At least at CBS there was not massive shredding of evidence like at the UN.

For better coverage visit Roger Simon who has been following this. Or this blog Friends of Saddam devoted exclusively to the Oil for Food scandal.

I'm willing to bet that, like Dan Rather, Kofi Annan will be eased out the door before his appointed term is up.

Well. It Could be Worse

Just imagine what will happen once Turkey joins the European Union!

Austrian Gerhard Haderer's story depicts Christ as a binge-drinking friend of Jimi Hendrix and a naked surfer high on cannabis. This attempt at satire has landed the writer in trouble in Greece.

"Haderer did not even know that his book, The Life of Jesus, had been published in Greece until he received a summons to appear in court in Athens in January charged with blasphemy.

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He was given a six-month suspended sentence in absentia, but if he loses his appeal next month his sentence could be increased to two years.

Haderer's book is the first to be banned in Greece for more than 20 years, and he is the first artist to fall prey of the European arrest warrant system since it was introduced in June 2002."

Ward Churchill Academic All Star

Great article in the on-line National Review by Victor Davis Hanson on Ward Churchill, the great academic fraud, currently a tenured professor at the University of Colorado. It explains how this fraud can exist at a supposed institute of higher learning.

The University has now released it's pre-liminary report on Ward Churchill and it looks like they are going to be investigating further whether this fraud really is a fraud. For a good overview of what lying SOS Churchill is, visit this blog or this one.

The Immigration and Refugee Board Get's One Right

Idiotarian deserter Jeremy Hinzma lost his application for refugee status here in Canada. Good.

Why I Like James Lileks

First he is a writer. Technically all who blog write, but then there are those that can write. You can see why he is able to make a living as a professional writer. Yet after the bills are paid he still writes the Bleat daily when possible. I enjoy reading bloggers that can write because they usually are Anti-Idiotarians and even when I don't agree with all they say I still read them.

Here's a excert on visiting Target that shows why I read the Bleat:

"Then we went to Target to get the chairs for the gazebo. I paged a Sales Associate, or whatever they’re called, and up wheeled Dale. He’s there every time I visit the store. I don’t know what his disability is. He’s the go-to guy at Target. Minor speech impairment; some muscular inabilities. But he has a walkie-talkie and a datapad tied into the Target mainframe and a gun that reads SKUs with a laser, so he can tell you whether the item’s in stock, order it up, and send a team of guys to drag it to your car. All with his one good hand. We are the Borg. Or will be, eventually; I can imagine a device that would fit on his head and let him do all these things with brainwaves and blinking. Thirty years ago he would have been in a Home making wallets, wheeled out into the sun once a day, kept from sight. Now he rules this store."

Read the Bleat and buy his books if they interest you.

Rent a Mobs

Found via Instapundit. An item on professional protesters in the US. While it is anecdotal, I don't doubt it's veracity. Here in Canada we have our own Rent a Mobs that are guaranteed to show up at most lefty protests at Queens Park. Or the groups that also show up with their pre-printed, bordered protest signs, with a nice blank middle to scrawl in the cause du jour. But I do not think we have reached the point, like the US, where they are on the payroll of some liberal interest group. Yet.

The London Free Press Comes Through

Trust a paper that gives space to Gwynne Dyer and Eric Margolis to put a picture of one of the peace protesters on the Sunday front page. Black beret a la Che Guevera? Check. Clenched fist in the air? Check. Mr. Fadi Hamadani has his cliche lefty schtick down pat. Unfortunately he is not quoted in the story so we don't know what idiocy he was saying.

Strangely the web editors have chosen not to put the article on the local protest online. They do however have an AP wire service item in the news section. Titled "Quit Iraq, Europe tells US" which is pretty funny when you read the article and find out about the low numbers of protesters. For more on the drop in protest numbers go to Harrys Place and scroll down. (Hat Tip to Damianation)

In the dead tree version the article quotes one Ms. Lorraine McNeil from People for Peace who informs us that.

"U.S. soldiers are 'defending multinational oil interests and sacrificing their lives and the lives of Iraqis for no good reason.'"

Nice. I will cut our local "peace" activists some slack and just call them misguided. Unlike the two groups that organize the big protests. In the US, ANSWER, and Stop the War in England. Both are not anti-war per se but extermist leftists that are actually on the other side.

Update
The London Fog has posts here and here on the demo and who was part of it. I take back my earlier thoughts on cutting them some slack. Anyone who parades around with a hammer and sickle flag at a peace rally is beyond the pale. I wonder if the Tariq in the second post is the same guy on the Free Press front page. If so, that's probably why the Free Press didn't quote him.

Why Can't I See Our Peace Protesters?

From the bloggers at The London Fog I learned that there was to be an anti-war protest today in London. So I just watched my local tv station, the New PL, and what do I see? No London coverage but lots of time on the Windsor Protest. The Windsor protest looked to be more a Lebanese rally that co-opted the anti-war moonbat protest. Nothing new from the moonbats. Bush lied about WMD and its all about oil ....yadda yadda yadda.

So what happened in London? No one showed up? Or was it that whoever did show up were so lame that the New PL didn't broadcast anything out of pity? I guess I will wait to see what the Free Press has tomorrow or hopefully one of the London Fog crew was there and will post a report.

Update: The 11 pm New PL News had expanded the anti-war coverage by including video from London England but still nothing from London Canada. They had an inteveiw with an Iraqi who susposundly attended the London rally after coming back from visiting Iraq for the first time in 23 years. I have no transcript of what she said but it seems like she said Baghdad is burnt to ground and the streets are filled with amputees. Nice woman.

Canada's Criminal's Justice System

For a long time I have had the notion that what was our Canadian Criminal Justice System is now a Criminal's Justice System. This was just reinforced watching W5 on the crime of mortage fraud. Check it out and see how the criminals don't have a thing to worry about when they steal your home or your identity.

I Can Now See Why Eventually You Leave Blogger

I have experienced server problems with Blogger. For two days I tried posting and got the page could not be displayed message. Couldn't even save as a draft. This is why, even though it is free and servicable for my wants now, I will eventually switch to a program like Moveable Type and buy space on a server somewhere.

What I do know is that server will not be in Canada. We have some odious election gag laws, overeaching human rights commisions and free speech denying hate laws. I don't like the speech of the extremists on all sides of the political spectrum but I don't think they should be censored. It never stops them but only sends them underground. I always like free speech because then you can identify the idiots.

I think as bloggers get more attention up here in Canada they will fall under government scrutiny and may have laws passed like the McCain Fiengold law in the US.

Update on March 15th

Well I didn't cook a steak but tried some ground lean Angus beef that was on sale at my local grocery store. If you are my age you know where that is because I still find "It's mainly about the meat". So I made a Salisbury Steak with fried onions with french fries on the side. While I'd like to say I enjoyed my eat meat for PETA meal. I again found why I don't like lean ground meat. It lacks the fat content of regular ground and it is the fat in the meat that adds to the flavor. If I had picked up a steak I would always go with the one with the best looking marbling.

The Red Ensign Standard

Via Instapundit I have found a group of Canadian Bloggers whose sites make interesting reading for a conservative. They do a round up of their sites under the name The Red Ensign Standard which is now in it's 17th edition.

I can see their reasoning behind using the Red Ensign flag. It was our flag until the Red Maple Leaf flag was adopted in 1965. I must admit I like the flag, even though the Liberal Party of Canada was responsible for it. What I don't like is the way the Liberals have treated the flag as if it is their personal property.

I remember the outcry that occurred when it was found out that the original flag was kept by the Liberal Party and displayed in the Prime Ministers Office whenever a Liberal was Prime Minister. In 2000 the Liberals finally did the right thing and gave it to Heritage Canada. Only it turns out that one was a fake. Lost or still in some Liberal's den?

Just recently on the Canadian Antiques Roadshow they had a show from the Canadian Museum of Civilization. There a man came in and he had the original Maple Leaf flag that flew from the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill. How did he get it? His relative worked there back in 1965 and someone in the Liberal party gave it to him. No sense that the flag was historic and belonged to Canada and was not the property of Liberal Party to give away.

Bias in the US Main Stream Media

The Boston Globe is carrying a story today that states.

"The annual report by a press watchdog that is affiliated with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said that 36 percent of stories about Bush were negative compared to 12 percent about Kerry, a Massachusetts senator.
Only 20 percent were positive toward Bush compared to 30 percent of stories about Kerry that were positive, according to the report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The study looked at 16 newspapers of varying size across the country, four nightly newscasts, three network morning news shows, nine cable programs and nine Web sites through the course of 2004."

Now I know of no comparable Canadian Project. I checked my local university but nothing was listed there. I am willing to bet though that the number of negative stories about Bush in the Canadian media would be a lot higher.

Started My Blog Roll

I have started to populate my Blog Roll with links. I decided to split the links based on one of the Proverbs of Hell in Blake's poem.

"The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

What I Like About My Local Paper

I have the treat of having both Eric Margolis and Gwynne Dyer being carried by my local newspaper. I can enjoy Barking Moonbats in Stereo.

Gwynne's latest column informs us of the real reason behind the US Ballistic Missile Defense System. Gwynne sees a continual process starting under Ronald Reagan.

"Such a BMD system is not yet a technological reality even now, twenty years later, but that's what it was always about: giving the United States the ability to launch a first strike against the Soviet Union and to survive the inevitable retaliation with "acceptable" losses."

And now it is the neo-conservatives who are in charge in Washington and

"they still dream of gaining the ability to carry out nuclear first strikes against other countries with impunity."

Now preceding this revelation is a a factual quote from a document from the Project for a New American Century published in 2000 on their contention that America needs a strong layered missile defense and need for the US to maintain unrestricted access to space. Now I searched around the Project's website for any references to their dream of nuclear first strikes but I couldn't find any. I guess I don't have the same secret decoder ring Gwynne uses to find out the true nature of those evil neo-cons.

And after such as feast of Idiotarian views the dessert I get to enjoy are the letters to the editor such as this.

"U.S. missile plan bid to control globe
Regarding Gwynne Dyer's column, Anti-missile plan nothing to do with defense (March 5).
The Bush anti-missile plan is an attempt to impose American dominance on the world and is not about rogue states that may want to attack the U.S. The objective is to give the United States the ability to launch nuclear strikes against another country and to neutralize any potential retaliation.
This policy is madness and advocates mass murder and destroys the premise behind mutually assured destruction (MAD), that has maintained peace between the major powers for more than 40 years. It also fits into a strategy of pre-emptive strikes, that serves as a pretext for attacks against countries that pose no threat to the U.S., but only want to be independent and not exploited for their resources. The Project for a New American Century has brazenly published these goals.
The problem is that the neo-con advocates for this madness now hold many positions of power in the Bush administration. Bush wanted Canada's diplomatic support for political, not strategic reasons.
As Dyer notes, Canada wisely has stayed out of this mad venture.
Edward C. Corrigan
London"

I have a hunch that the author is none other than Ed Corrigan who used to be part of our local city council. Now why do you suppose I also think Ed is a member of the Liberal Party?

Something I Can Get Behind

The Third Annual International Eat an Animal for PETA Day on March 15th is an idea I like. PETA is an organization that I lost all respect for years ago and things like this day or this have my support. I plan to fire up my Big Green Egg and cook a nice steak with a salad on the side. I love being an omnivore. Found via Instapundit.

First Test Post

First test drive of Blogger to get the feel of the program. So there is nothing to see here yet. In the future I hope to "Blog like the wind" as Shiloh Bucher once said.