Sunday, January 01, 2006

Rob Anders Update

Well I must say I was disappointed it appears that Rob Anders Calgary West Reform/Alliance/Conservative MP has slipped down to eigth place in Warren Kinsella's list;

THE TOP TEN JERKS IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE, GIVE OR TAKE


Rob Anders – Conservative MP who, problematically, still exists. Called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Unfit to clean out the toilets in the cell Mandela occupied for decades.

Warren seems to have missed Anders recent foray into B.C. Politics for his update. He reminds us of Anders dissing Mandela, which remains Anders crowning moment of Parlimentary Infamy.

Though for me Anders more recent comments attacking Gay Marriage err 'homosexual sex marriage' as immoral leading to the destruction of civilization as we know it, runs a close second for parlimentary infamy.

He declared in the House of Commons his expertise in morality and Roman history by invoking Augustus Ceaser in his defense of heterosexual marriage and moral values.

Now Augustus was Caesar when Jesus was born and had appointed Herod as his tax collector in Charge of Bethlehem.

And Augustus was rumoured to have had an incestuous relationship with his sister.

He introduced the moral laws Anders likes so much;

Augustus also launched a morality crusade, promoting marriage, family, and childbirth while discouraging luxury, unrestrained sex (including prostitution and homosexuality), and adultery. It was largely unsuccessful (indeed, his own daughter was banished due to it.)

Despite his moral cursade, Augustus was the very antipathy of Christian Morality that Anders is defending. Go figure.

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Was the Grey Cup Win Rigged


Tired of political scandals? Here's a little bit of sports scandal from Redmonton.

The Edmonton Eskimos in the worst kept secret in the world had mid season traded their former star QB Jason Maas to the Hamilton Ti-Cats. But they got to keep him for the rest of the season because Hamilton didn't make the play-offs.

Everyone knew Maas was leaving, but the Edmonton sports media hushed it up. No analysis not before the Grey Cup. No siree. But now all is over, a month has past and now the real story can be told. Funny that.

Edmonton Sun sports writer Robert Tychkowski has a great take on this in today's Sun, which I thought was worth quoting in full.

Cause all this could have been said earlier, but it shows the corporate pull that a sports team can have in a city, politically over the media, whom it expects to be its biggest booster. Which does little justice for the fans,the players, the team or the league.

Free trade agreement

It's not easy looking bad in a year when you hoist the Grey Cup, but Eskimos management found a way. A team that pocketed about $6 million for selling the Trappers out from under Edmonton started the season by letting Sean Fleming pay $15,000 out of his own pocket to keep Ed Hervey in town. Classy. They did win a title, but only after a "trade'' that wouldn't have passed the BS test in a weekend pickup league. Unable to find a running back on their own, or protect their quarterback, the Esks got a 1,000-yard rusher and a starting Canadian O-lineman for free (since Hamilton wasn't making the playoffs, they let Edmonton keep Jason Maas and Edmonton's side of the package as insurance for the Cup run). It's like the Leafs trading Mats Sundin and Bryan McCabe to Calgary for Jarome Iginla, then letting Calgary keep Iginla until after the playoffs. CFL commissioner Tom Wright, reading from Green and Gold cue cards, approves the deal. The Esks, with Maas, bolstered pass protection and a new running back, win a Grey Cup. The league loses a little dignity.




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Amerika


Fascism comes quietly in the night, and knocks at your door, when you answer you are swept away never to be heard from again. Your neighbours murmur and shut their curtains, thanking their god that it was not them.

Others are heard to say, 'they must have done something wrong' or perhaps 'you have nothing to worry about if you are innocent'.

Is this the 1930's? Or 1948? Or even the dreaded 1984? Nope its 2006 and you should be afraid, very afraid if you live in Amerika today.

Fascism the police state, the security state is invoked because of a mythical enemy, in Germany it was the Jews in Amerika it is Terrorists.

Daschle: Congress Denied Bush War Powers in U.S.

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer

The Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making authority "in the United States" in negotiations over the joint resolution passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in today's Washington Post.

Daschle's disclosure challenges a central legal argument offered by the White House in defense of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. It suggests that Congress refused explicitly to grant authority that the Bush administration now asserts is implicit in the resolution.

The Justice Department acknowledged yesterday, in a letter to Congress, that the president's October 2001 eavesdropping order did not comply with "the 'procedures' of" the law that has regulated domestic espionage since 1978. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, established a secret intelligence court and made it a criminal offense to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant from that court, "except as authorized by statute."

EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants

In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.

Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest

Jurist Concerned Bush Order Tainted Work of Secret Pane

A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.


According to One Blog, The New York Times, quoting unnamed government sources: "The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged....As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications...."

Wiretaps said to sift all overseas contacts

Vast US effort seen on eavesdropping

''Long before 9/11, the NSA gathered from the ether mountains of [overseas] phone calls and e-mail messages on a daily basis," said Columbia Law School professor Deborah Livingston. ''If you have such an extensive foreign operation, you'll gather a large amount of phone traffic and e-mails involving Americans. That's something we've lived with for a long time."

But Bush's order cleared the way for the NSA computers to sift through Americans' phone calls and e-mails.

According to a New York Times report last week, Bush authorized the NSA's human analysts to look at the international messages of up to 500 Americans at a time, with a changing list of targets.

Hayden, now the deputy director of national intelligence, told reporters this week that under Bush's order, a ''shift supervisor" instead of a judge signs off on deciding whether or not to search for an American's messages.

The general conceded that without the burden of obtaining warrants, the NSA has used ''a quicker trigger" and ''a subtly softer trigger" when deciding to track someone.

Justice Dept. to probe leak of spy program

Bush had called disclosure a ‘shameful act’; N.Y. Times reported NSA story

Bush Presses Editors on Security

President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.

The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the administration's anti-terror tactics.



And the Right Wing is all indignant not over the authoritarian illegal actions of Bush but by their expose. So much for Freedom that these whingnutters proclaim they believe in.

FBI and Justice Department Finally Investigate a Real Leak

Jim Kouri, CPP

The US Department of Justice has directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct an in-depth investigation in order to determine who disclosed a secret National Security Agency intelligence operation to a reporter from the New York Times.

"We are opening an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified materials related to the NSA," said DOJ spokesperson Trent Duffy during a press conference earlier today.

When the New York Times suddenly broke the story about the NSA top secret operation Bush conceded that he indeed authorized the program. He called its disclosure to The New York Times "a shameful act." He said he expected a Justice Department leak investigation into who disclosed the National Security Agency eavesdropping operation would be conducted.

According to the Bush White House, the DOJ and FBI began the investigation without consulting with White House staff, but the President approved of their investigation to find the leaker whose actions are believed to have caused severe damage to national security and homeland security. Now with Republican and Democrat liberals poking their noses into the NSA program, some intelligence and law enforcement officials fear there will be even more leaks of classified information -- including information on methods and sources.

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Saturday, December 31, 2005

Happy New Year

I have been on the internet as a web activist with various web pages since 1997. I began this blog a year ago as a result of writing articles for local weeklies on the last Federal and Provincial elections.

And one of my first articles I published here was my expose on the gun registry scandal and its link to government policies of contracting out and privatization.

I now have over 500 articles here, so I guess I will have to break down and do an topical search archive for the new year, there that's my resolution.

2005 was a good one.
Happy New Year! Auld Lang Syne! to ya' all and hope you have the best in the new year which is mere hours and a leap second away.

Gordon Stamp in the News

Well besides being national news the Gordon Stamp resignation made it into both the Edmonton Sun and the Edmonton Journal as major news stories. So I guess that will be more evidence to Candace at Waking Up On Planet X of the media and bloggers flogging a dead horse. Though we don't know if the horse is dead he was unavailable for comment at press time.

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Albertas Birthday Whimpers to a Close

As the year comes to a close so does the Alberta Saskatchewan Centennials. In Alberta the occasion was one of bungling, banality and basically a non celebration. Cause Colleen Klein was in charge. Communities were not funded for centennial celebrations, instead a Tory bueracracy hunkered down with money and doled it out to its friends. Gary Mah was put in charge of the celebration and he didn't know what was going on.

If you can believe it King Ralph is claiming that we spent oddles on celebrations. Celebrations we have yet to see.

The province spent $500 million on so-called legacy projects and $16 million on the festivities. A final accounting of the costs and projects will be available in the spring.

$16 million on festivities. What the hell was it spent on? Heck we could have given everyone the day off on Sept. 1 for that kind of cash.

Now in Saskatchewan they had a year of celebrations worthy of speaking of. And I did all year I blogged about the embarassment that poor old Saskatchewan was able to out do its rich neighbour in creating a spirit of the provinces Birthday. Here was the spirit of the Centennial celebrated in Saskatchewan. While in true Scrooge fashion King Ralph penny pinched on our celebration. Even the Queens visit was more spectacular in Saskatchewan, rain and all. In Edmonton her visit was rained out.

Go figure.

The best thing King Ralph could have given Albertans this year was his resignation. Sigh, didn't happen. We will have to wait till 2008, a year before the annual five year provincial election in Alberta.

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After Iraq is Syria next?

While some are speculating over U.S. Iran relations and the potential for conflict over Irans nuclear power options, the reality is that the U.S. is eyeing Syria for its next expansionist occupation.

The set up is clear, the U.N. has condemned Syria for involvement in Lebanon, the U.S. is talking about porous borders allowing foreign terrorists to move into Iraq from Syria, and has already had border town skirmishes in the last month. The U.S. has moved active forces out of Baghdad onto the Syrian border.


As Le Monde Diplomatique poiunts out in a feature article this is a dangerous situation being percipitated in the Middle East not only by the U.S. but by the U.N. investigation into the death of leading Lebonanese politicians and journalists and the involvement of the Syrian Secret Service and factions of the military.


Syria: a concerted offensive

All eyes are on Syria as it stands accused of being behind the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Even before the UN commission of inquiry was completed, the US was planning - with France - a concerted offensive against the Syrian regime. But destabilising President Bashar al-Assad could lead to regional chaos, given the fragility of Lebanon and near civil war in Iraq.

By Alain Gresh

“IN ORDER to facilitate the action of the liberation forces, to reduce the capabilities of the Syrian regime to organise and direct its military actions, to keep losses and destruction to a minimum, and to bring about the desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals. Their removal should be accomplished early in the course of the uprising and intervention.” For that, Damascus must be “made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments”.

The CIA and its British counterpart would “use their capabilities in both the psychological and the action fields to increase tension”. The overthrow of the regime would also mean the financing of a committee for a free Syria and the arming of different political factions to give them paramilitary capabilities.

All this comes from a document dating from autumn 1957 that was recently discovered by a researcher. The document was approved by the United States president, Dwight Eisenhower, and the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan.

At that time the Middle East was already regarded, simplistically, as a place for East-West confrontation. The US and British governments saw the Syrian regime - which was then genuinely liberal and democratic, if nationalist - as no more than a Soviet pawn. That meant it needed to be got rid of and its leaders killed. However, a few months later, in January 1958, the Syrians went to Gamal Abdel Nasser to ask for Syria’s unification with Egypt. From the moment the new United Arab Republic was established, its relations with Moscow grew strained, and so the West’s subversive plans were dropped.

The world has since changed. The war against terrorism has replaced the war against communism. But the US vision remains as simplistic as it was then: whoever is not with us is against us, says George Bush. At the time of a “third world war”, of US efforts to crush the Iraqi resistance and beat the Arab world into submission, the reluctance of the Syrian regime to bend to Washington’s will can no longer be tolerated.

Are we none the less heading for a racheting up of tension? A sanctions regime against Syria would penalise its population first, as it did in Iraq. Closing Syria’s borders would create problems with its neighbours, starting with Lebanon. And the fall of the Syrian regime would only extend the regional chaos created by the US military intervention in Iraq and the ensuing occupation.

The Washington Post had this to say: “The planning process, according to the internal documents, includes courses of action for cross-border operations to seal the Syria-Iraq border and destroy safe havens supporting the Iraqi insurgency, attacks on Syrian weapons of mass destruction infrastructure supporting the development of biological and chemical weapons, and attacks on the regime of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad”. The paper’s military commentator, who revealed these American plans, did not say whether, as in 1957, the assassination of Syrian leaders was part of the plans.





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Real Junk Science


"Call me Ishmael."

I will continue to be critical of the Junk Science Inc.(c) (tm) cult of the Rightwhing.

They specialize in attempting to debunk critics of capitalism usually by rolling out one scientific apologist for capitalism against hundreds if not thousands of nobel prize winning scientists.

Of course this makes sense since they are
ideologues of the American Individualist school of thought. The lone Rorak against the System just like Ayn Rands hero of the Fountainhead.

However here is a real case of authentic Junk Science.

The Japanese whaling industry
that is hunting these sentient relatives of ours for food hiding behind the Orwellian phrase; whaling for scientific research.

Dead Whales Tell No Tales as any sailor will tell ya.

JAPANESE whalers operating in the Antarctic are fog-bound and unable to hunt whales for the fourth day running, Greenpeace activists tailing the fleet said today. The Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), which carries out Japan's research whaling in the Antarctic, today sought to debunk criticism of the project by New Zealand's Conservation Minister Chris Carter.

Japan's JARPA II whaling program contained numerous flaws and was based on speculative and unsound science. It found that most of the data proposed to be collected in Japan's program was not required for the conservation of whale stocks, and that many of the identified objectives could be addressed through analysis of data from Japan's previous 18-year scientific program.


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The Sanctity of Marriage



But it was a straight marriage at least. Even if the male dolphin is named Cindy.

That should keep Conservatives and Conservative Jews happy.

Now had it been a gay dolphin marriage well that would have violated the sanctity of this fine institution.


Brit Jew marries dolphin

Unusual wedding: British woman marries her beloved dolphin in Eilat ceremony
Joe Kot

Till death do us part? An unusual wedding ceremony was held in the southern resort town of Eilat on Wednesday, as Sharon Tendler, a 41-years-old Jewish millionaire from London married her beloved Cindy, a 35-years-old dolphin, Israel's leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Tendler said she and her newly wed husband will probably spend their wedding night bowling. reported ThursdayAfter the ceremony was sealed with some mackerels, Tendler was tossed into the water by her friends so that she could swim with her new husband. "I'm the happiest girl on earth," the bride said as she chocked back tears of emotion. "I made a dream come true, and I am not a pervert," she stressed.

I Am Canada

With these two hands I Built Canada....Me....No One Else...It's In My Genes