Globe Reports: Judges, Defense Lawyers Don’t Like Tories (ya think?)

The Globe and Mail really is a sad old hag of a newspaper. In 2,200 words filling 51 paragaphs of dense, unreadable tripe, “investigative journalist” Kirk Makin reveals what I could have told you in one sentence: Liberal-appointed judges, defense lawyers, and ivory-tower intellectuals don’t like the Conservative government and their tightening of the criminal justice system.

Outside of Liberal-appointed judges, defense lawyers, ivory-tower intellectuals (and their sycophants), and criminals themselves, who exactly opposes: closing the 2-for-1 loophole; making the system less arbitrary by enforcing mandatory sentences; and ending the “faint hope” clause that allows first-degree murderers a chance to earn the freedom that their innocent victims can never, ever regain? (I’d call it the “endless nightmare” clause if it was a member of my family that was murdered.)

Congratulations, Globe. You’ve once again led with “Dog Bites Man”. Now (despite David Frum), get me my Post…

Barack Obama: If you’re buying what they’re selling, here’s what you’re getting

I still find it hard to believe that America will lose its collective mind next Tuesday, and elect Barack Obama President. People still have no idea who this guy is! By far, the most complete account of his mysterious life – obfuscated daily by his supporters, his fawning media friends, and his very own statements – can be found here at The Obama Files – a site run by the mysterious “Beckwith”, who has spent the past two years obsessively gathering together facts, pictures, videos, and analysis that piece together a history of the man who would be #44. I highly recommend spending some time here – particularly if you’re in the denial school (“he’ll govern as a moderate, like Clinton”), or the bamboozled school (“he’ll bring the country together, fix the depression, end war, and make the world love America”).

The opening of Beckwith’s site introduction gives us an unmistakeable conclusion, reached by anyone who has entered a serious and open-minded study of the facts:

I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about this guy in the last 18 months and I know less about him now than I did at the beginning.

Is he a Muslim?  — I don’t think so.

But, I don’t think he’s a Christian, either.

He’s a Socialist — and worse he’s an Alinsky socialist.

McCain may be a weak campaigner, an intellectual mediocrity, and an ideological lost soul – but he clearly loves America the way it was founded, the way it has evolved, and the way it should proceed – as a bright (but imperfect) light, a city upon a hill.

Obama wants to “Change America, change the world.” He won’t tell us what he means, which leaves us to make our own best guess. I’m quite positive – it will be an ugly, ugly change for the worse.

God help us all.

Calm down! The American economy is not collapsing.

Everywhere I go, there’s someone saying: America’s economy is collapsing. As media hysteria continues to ride roughshod over any sense of perspective (and as wishful-thinking in some quarters drives otherwise sensible people into lip-smacking meltdown), some sensible analysts are still talking sense. The National Post’s Terrence Corcoran brings us back to earth with this front-page column, “The D Word Going Cheap” :

The Great Depression, massive in scale and scope, dug a deep trench through U. S. economic statistics of the 1930s, numbers so big that today’s comparisons have little meaning or relevance. Industrial production fell 50% between 1929 and 1932; prices fell 20%; real incomes of Americans fell 35%; the stock market plunged 75%.

Nothing remotely near this kind of meltdown is on the horizon. The United States, which actually grew 3.3% in the second quarter that ended two months ago, has yet to show meaningful signs of recession. None of the standard indicators of economic slowdown — unemployment, payroll employment, civilian employment, industrial production — point to serious recession, let alone something worse.

…

What recent events suggest, however, is that by the time the new president is sworn in next January, the worst should be over. Yesterday’s U. S. stock market drop, while the largest Dow correction since 9/11, was remarkably orderly. By letting Lehman Brothers slide into Chapter 11, the U. S. government appears to have put an end to its attempts to bail out failing institutions. This can only hasten restructuring along market lines and based on actual values.

That Bank of America appears to have the financial clout to take up Merrill Lynch, creating a new global powerhouse in banking and finance, is a sign that the U. S. economy is doing what the U. S. economy has always done best, which is to overcome a succession of economic hurricanes and emerge as powerful and efficient as it has been in the past. The curse of other nations– Japan, Europe — has been their reluctance to make the adjustments and move on, letting failures fail.

That, in fact, is the greatest story in U. S. economic history. Since the Great Depression, it has never come close to having another great depression.

Now why would the left want to make things out to be worse than they actually are? Alright, I’ll spell it out: lefty politicians like Obama and Dion want to break you down so you lose faith in free-market capitalism, elected them, and give them the moral authority to enact widespread wealth redistribution and social engineering schemes – exactly the schemes that have stood in the way of further progress and success for a century now.

Outing the Sarah Haters: Ralph Peters on Palin, Faith, and Fear

The sneering condescension dripping off the lowered reading glasses of ABC’s Charlie Gibson during his series of interviews with John McCain’s VP running mate Sarah Palin this week was obvious, typical, and despicable. ABC should be embarassed – but, of course, they’re not.

What has made Governor Palin such an object of utter revulsion in the eyes of American liberal Democrats? And why has the Canadian reaction to her been even more vicious – not only by the usual suspects like the miserable, angry “feminist” Heather Mallick , but by normally-reasonable Margaret Wente, who trashes her as part of a bizarre column that proudly retreats into shallow anti-Americanism by glorifying the fact that our Canadian elections are vapid and meaningless?

Col. Ralph Peters, the excellent, biting columnist for the New York Post, identifies the source of the hatred: the secular urban elites’ contempt for, and fear of, people who actually, truly, deeply, spiritually, on a day-to-day basis, in theory AND in practice, believe in God. A great column, worth a full read: “Why Our Elites Fear Faith”, Ralph Peters, New York Post, September 12, 2008:

NOTHING in recent memory has driven home the divide between our self-appointed aristocracy and “commoners” as sharply as the intelligentsia’s rush to mock Gov. Sarah Palin’s religious faith.

While the attacks and insults are backfiring on the mortified elites, the double standard applied to “Sarah America” is a disgrace that can’t be excused as “just politics.”

Certainly, much of the left-wing fury over Palin stems from the Democratic Party’s assumption that it “owned” the exclusive right to nominate women to the executive branch (despite the crushing of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy). How dare the Republicans advance a woman? How dare they change this year’s election script?

But the root of the left’s dread of this happily married mother of five seems to be that she actually believes in God: How could anyone be that stupid?

…

Washington fears faith – even nominal believers inside the Beltway have been shaped by secular educations and secular caste values.

Humans fear what they can’t understand, and our comfortable ruling class just can’t comprehend the power and the glory, the beauty and the ecstasy, the awe and commitment experienced by those who believe in a divine power. To paraphrase the late Leona Helmsley, “Faith is for the little people.”

Believers are mocked (if not too publicly at election time). Sen. Barack Obama‘s behind-closed-doors remark in San Francisco to the effect that worried blue-collar chumps cling to God and guns perfectly captured the left’s worldview, equating faith and firearms as equal menaces to an enlightened society.

…

I don’t see extremism in Palin’s faith. I see the love of God that prevails beyond the Beltway. The media’s bigotry toward her tells us far more about the political biases and snobbery of journalists than it does about Sen. John McCain’s running mate.

In recent years, a succession of pundits has compared our country to ancient Rome. Most of the assertions are silly. But our governing elite certainly shares the Roman patricians’ disdain for the faith of the common citizen.

Saddam’s Nuclear Program, 1975-2008. RIP in Blind River, ON

So 550 tons of yellowcake uranium – which, if refined to weapons-grade, could have been used to produce as many as 140 nuclear bombs – was removed from Iraq over the past year, and and arrived last week in the Port of Montreal, on the way to its ultimate destination, the Cameco uranium processing plant in Blind River, Ontario (a small outpost town on the shores of the Lake Huron narrows, about a five-hour drive from either Detroit or Toronto), to be converted to fuel for the province’s nuclear power plants. The world’s press yawns. Any story that, in any way, supports President Bush’s decision to take out the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003, is certain to be buried far behind, say, the latest update on whether or not the Obamas are going to buy a dog.

The most confounding aspect of this story is the fact that knowledge of Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, and his massive stockpile of Uranium, has always been common knowledge to those who wanted to know! Randall Hoven writes a brilliant column on the topic at American Thinker: “The 500 Tons of Yellowcake”, discussing the great danger such a stockpile poses to its handlers, the potential for its weaponization, and the nonsensical attacks by the “Bush Lied, No WMDs” crowd that should know better. Hoven correctly states that little comfort should be taken in the fact that the Uranium was “monitored” by the UN from the conclusion of the 1991 Gulf War, until the inspectors were kicked out in 2003:

…even Charles Duelfer concluded that Saddam had every intention of getting back into the WMD business as soon as he could end the sanctions regime, which he was busy doing with oil-for-food bribes.

I think it neither illogical nor bizarre to think Saddam had WMD or WMD programs in 2003.  I still believe he did, in a “preponderance of the evidence” sense.  And I believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he would have been back in the WMD business by now, if not by 2004, had we not invaded.

That he sat on 550 metric tons of yellowcake under UN “safeguard” is about as comforting to me as knowing the convicted child rapist next door has a case of duct tape (dual use, by the way) that the police check up on every week.

As we Ontarians spend the next few years powering our televisions, refrigerators, computers, and tools with Saddam’s former stockpile, we should thank the lord for George W. Bush’s courage in standing up to Jacques Chirac and the “International Community”, who, in the name of money, oil, and old-fashioned anti-Americanism, would have been saying “let’s negotiate” today as the Iraqi tyrant held a 550-tonne sword above our heads.

And you Cameco people – handle with care, eh?

“One Dominion under the name of Canada” – Canada Day and Identity

It’s a question that has plagued the residents of North America north of America for more than a century and a quarter, since a tipsy lawyer named Macdonald cobbled together a coalition of provincial pols and created a political union proclaimed as “One Dominion under the name of Canada” – what is the Canadian identity?

Most countries have some elements of a unique culture – culinary, musical, artistic, linguistic, religious, etc. – but identity needs to be deeper than just culture. It also should be defined in the positive – most University-educated Canadians’ descriptions of our identity end up boiling down to some form of “not American”. Ideally, a national identity should be: a set of values, as shaped by history and culture, that brings unity to a people in times of distress, and strength to a nation as it progresses through time.

In the past century, wars between nations of extremely strong identities caused the world’s intellectual culture to react sharply, and promote a well-meant but ultimately destructive idea: that national identities are a cancer that, once excised, will put an end to wars, and harmony to mankind. Natan Sharansky’s latest book explores this concept in great depth. Consequently, young nations like Canada were discouraged from ever developing a proper identity. Religious identity? Forget about it, wars were fought over religion. British ancestry? Nah, the Brits are on the decline, and that would offend Quebec. New World optimism? No, we’re just as guilty of oppression as the old world, thanks to our treatment of the Natives. With deconstructionism, multiculturalism, internationalism, and other mushy “ism”s ruling the day, developing a Canadian identity has been nearly impossible.

There should be hope. We live border-to-border, sea-to-sea with the world’s strongest identity of the past hundred years – the United States of America. We could have adopted the best of America’s ideals that has granted its people the self-confidence to build the most powerful, most prosperous, most welcoming nation on earth, where people from every country in the world wish to migrate to more than anywhere else on earth. Yet, out of petty insecurity, loyalist resentment, jealousy, and ideological elitism, most Canadians reject anything “American” out-of-hand.

But where might we be if we opened ourselves to the best of America’s values? We could start by coming to terms with a few simple facts:

1) our very existence, and any material success we have achieved, comes almost exclusively from the British colonial/mercantilist system, which introduced the concept of government based on Judeo-Christian morality to the world, enshrining individual freedom into law, and proving that the elimination of slavery is the true road to riches.

2) the American revolution, while a rejection of the particular British regime of the era, was not a rejection of British ways. In fact, it had far more in common with a church schism, in which the breakaway group saw itself as perfecting the original idealism of the system. America’s concepts of free expression, individual liberty, free enterprise, local community autonomy, and proud worldwide proselytism, all come from Enlightenment England, and are simply hardened with a more rigid religious and ideological edge.

3) French culture is not incompatible with this British-inspired Judeo-Christian English idealism. One need look only at the Bayou, where expelled Acadians have survived and thrived for centuries now, deep in the American south.

4) Evil always tries to fill a vacuum, and disaster usually follows. Europe, most affected by the post-war trend towards one-world-identity idealism, is deep in the throes of a demographic nightmare that, if analysts like Mark Steyn, Bat Ye’or, and the late Oriana Fallaci are right, will have Christian and Enlightenment Europe relegated to the history books within a generation. Canada can follow Europe, or it can develop a sustaining identity like America.

How to define Canada’s identity? First, the country needs to be convinced that “not America” is childish and destructive. Then, an opportunity opens wide: the best of American values can be enshrined here, with the advantage of not having the baggage of slavery and Jim Crow as a significant blight on our history.

In the meantime, as we celebrate the holiday formerly known as Dominion Day, don’t forget where the founders got the word “Dominion” from:

Genesis 1:28-29: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

Anti-War Desperation: NYT Smears Troops, Ralph Peters calls them out

As the conventional wisdom of the New York Times and the rest of the US media elite tends to filter its way down into the minds of nearly every Torontonian, so that most everyone in these parts sounds like a cliche-spouting zombie on just about every major issue, I thought I’d blog about the Times’ front-page-above-the-fold story on Sunday, January 13, 2008, in which they propagate the “post-traumatic psycho” myth of the murderous returning American soldier.

Citing the figure of 121 murders committed by returning Iraq War veterans, the Times sends a clear message: now that it looks like the surge is working, and that Abu Ghraib was a one-off crime, and that no one cared that Saddam’s hanging made it to YouTube, we have to find some way to discredit the effort, and this is it – the army of decommissioned loose cannons roaming our streets, ready to unload an AK-47 on your arse next time you step into the 7-11.

And yet, they’ve once again stuck their collective foot in their mouth. As Ralph Peters of the New York Post points out in his column today, the 121 murders actually represents, statistically, just ONE-FIFTH THE MURDER RATE OF 18-34 YEAR OLDS IN AMERICA! Not only that, but check out this statistical wonder:

Know what else you’ll learn? In 2005 alone, 8,718 young Americans from the same age group were murdered in this country. That’s well over twice as many as the number of troops killed in all our foreign missions since 2001. Maybe military service not only prevents you from committing crimes, but also keeps you alive?

If you believe that returning troops are ticking time-bombs ready to go off, part of a generation destroyed by an unjust war…you’re simply believing what you want to believe to feed your anti-American bias. The numbers don’t lie.

 Yet more evidence that today’s American military is the most moral, upstanding – and powerful – fighting force in the history of man.

UPDATE 01/16/2008 – Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto dissects the Times’ smear from a similar angle in this OpinionJournal video.

Must-Watch 60 Minutes Video: Omar Khadr Terrorism on Film

 Omar Khadr at Gitmo.

If you didn’t watch 60 Minutes on November 18, 2007, you must head over to CBS and watch their 12-minute expose on the poor little misguided immigrant boy (as the left would have you believe), Omar Khadr, and see what this little dirtbag and his Liberal Party of Canada- and Al Qaeda-connected family were up to in the months following 9/11.

Click here to watch Bob Simon’s 60 Minutes report, “The Youngest Terrorist?”, on Omar Khadr and the Khadr family.

To the simple-minded useful idiot leftists who hate America more than they love Canada: what kind of country do you want to live in? A country where people like the Khadrs are protected and supported by taxpayer dollars? Or a country where freedom fighters like Chris Speer and Layne Morris are honoured for paying the ultimate price while doing the heavy lifting that, for the most part, we’re simply too small and weak to do?

When you leave Canada to fight for a foreign terrorist army, your citizenship should be considered null and void. Thank you, Harper government, for letting the Americans deal with this citizen of Taliban Nation as they see fit. America, get it together already, and convict this atrocity of his atrocities.

Justice for Christopher Speer: Trial of Omar Khadr to Begin

 The baby-face that’s launched a thousand misguided “human rights” crusades…Omar Khadr at age 15… 

I AM SICK OF THIS PICTURE!

As part of the world-renowned “First Family of Terrorism”, I feel no pity for Omar as he finally heads to trial starting November 8, 2007 in Guantanamo Bay. For the sake of the victim of a lethal dose of grenade shrapnell to the head, Special Forces Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, 1974-2002 (RIP), justice must be served. Try the suspect, and let him face the consequences, or acquittal. Here’s the pictures that should replace the poor-kiddie portrait above:

Omar Khadr in court, Age 21.

 Chris Speer, at Age 15.

Tabitha Speer, widow, single mother of two young children, at her husband’s funeral.

And, for those of you who feel Omar Khadr was just a poor little misguided teenager? Watch this fantastic dressing-down given to the hapless George Stromablopolous of CBC’s “The Hour” from 2005 by Sgt. Layne Morris, survivor of the battle that saw Speer killed and Khadr captured:

Sergeant Layne Morris tells the story of Omar Khadr and the battle that killed Christopher Speer (6 mins.)

DISASTER ZONE! The Naomi Klein Onslaught Begins

Oh lord. Here it comes. “Mansbridge One-on-One”? A sure bet. Front-page feature coverage at the Globe & Mail? Coming this weekend, I’ll guess. Launch-party coverage live on CP24? No doubt. The left half (believe-it-or-not) of Canada’s most nauseating socialist power couple, Naomi Klein, is back in business once again with a new 576-page anti-capitalist doorstopper, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”.

This time around, the No Logo authoress spends more than 500 pages trying to convince you that free-market economists (with a particular hateful obsession with Milton Friedman, who due to his recent death is no longer able to defend himself) have allowed the evil corporate world to have their way with the world’s disaster zones at their most vulnerable moments, forcing these former utopias (Baghdad, New Orleans, 1970s Chile) into becoming part of some sort of Chicago-school-inspired world conspiracy. Skeptical, are you? Don’t be…she’s got…FOOTNOTES! From today’s Toronto Star:

The 560-page argument, which also deals with the privatization of post-communist economies in Poland, Russia and China, the reliance of the Israeli private sector on security-related entrepreneurship and other subjects, is bolstered by nearly 70 pages of footnotes, citing more than 1,000 sources.

“I expect the release of the book to be a battle. And the endnotes are my body armour,” says Klein, who will further defend her thesis during a public interview Thursday at the UofT’s MacMillan Theatre.

“When you are introducing ideas that are new and in some cases quite radical, you need major backup if you want to reach beyond a small section of the population. Hopefully, the people who don’t need as much convincing will bear with me because if the book were more anecdotal and less carefully sourced it would make it that much easier for the people who want to get me.”

Defensive much, Naomi? What, references to sources are supposed to bolster your self-hating hypocritical non-arguments against the very system that enriches you and your family? Bombarding your readers with footnotes is supposed to impress all your limousine liberal friends and anarchist acolytes – all of whom will waste their money on your book and never get past the acknowledgements?

Only an aging, intellectually-bankrupt paranoid leftist would start a major speaking appearance by unleashing vitriol at…right-wing think tanks!

The question that remains: will husband Avi Lewis give her a full half-hour when his notorious CBC Newsworld show, “On the Map”, returns in November (allegedly…)