More Conservative Bashing of Arar

Well they were slow off the mark but here is yet more predictable right wing bashing of Maher Arar, from our favorite wingnuts at the Western Slander.

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Arar


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Bad Example

Opps, this was a bad example to use....

The running joke among many Afghanistan is not whether you'll be given a shakedown when passing through a checkpoint, but how much will be extorted from you. There have been reports, near the village of Senjaray, that the roadblocks are run by uniformed Afghan National Police officers - something that sullies the force's already blackened reputation. Irritated citizens also claim a powerful, former militia commander-turned local politician is behind the racket. "Like everything else, people will say the governor is corrupt; OK show me," said Lt.-Col. Simon Heatherington, whose assignment ended Monday. "It's like saying (in Canada) the prime minister is corrupt; OK show me.

Seems he forgot about the Gomery Commission....And its not like there isn't plenty of evidence of corruption....

Afghanistan Cover Up?

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Hanging Out With Warlords

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Afghanistan

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Free Unions

Here is an interesting post on the need for 'free democratic worker controlled unions' not state controlled workers associations.

How U.S. and other global corporations utilize government-controlled unions created by authoritarian nationalist regimes even as they claim to be liquidating the legacy of those regimes in the interest of economic freedom.





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Labour

Unions

Bureaucratic Collectivist Capitalism

The Need for Arab Anarchism

China Needs Free Unions

Independent Unions In China

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Income Trust Blowback

Begins today. I guess these folks won't be voting for Harpers Conservatives.

Meanwhile Financial Post (the Financial Post!!!) exposes the self interested business lobby that is pro Income Trusts; the Canadian Association of Income Trust Investors (CAITI) pointing out that they are not 'really' investors;

Whether CAITI actually represents trust investors is debatable. One witness appearing tomorrow, independent consultant Dianne Urquhart, says the association is in reality sponsored by trust vendors and the law firms and accountants supporting them. They are trust "investors" only to the extent they invest in their own product.

And the FP to its credit points out, as I have here the concerns that Income Trusts were always a ponzi scheme, benefiting fund managers and owners more than investors.

Contrary to what the spin masters would have us believe, not all pensioners are opposed to the government's decision to tax trusts. The National Pensioners & Senior Citizens Federation, which speaks on Thursday, supports Flaherty's decision. Its 450 chapters and clubs represent a million seniors and pensioners, including the 300,000 members of the United Senior Citizens of Ontario.Even before the Halloween decision came down, the NPSCF was concerned about "income trusts being sold to seniors on the basis of cash yields that are inaccurate, inflated and misleading."

What the Liberals should have done and didn't and what the Conservatives promised not to do, but did, affected investors, sure, but only a small number of well off seniors. Canadian seniors who have been screwed by Income Trusts should remember the financial term used for these kinds of investment; high risk.

This is not the same kind of rip off seniors in Alberta faced under the Tories in Alberta in the eighties (during the last big boom) when Dial Mortgage Abacus-Cities and Principal Trust collapsed. Those were avoidable and had been backed by the Alberta Treasury Branch as well as the Government. Yet when they collapsed seniors were left holding the bag.

What keeps getting lost in all this brouhaha is that Flaherty is promising business another tax cut to make up for taxing income trusts. That's the real meaning behind his euphimistic "Tax Fairness". Nothing fair about it. Just another government handout to those who already have the upper hand.

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Income Trusts

Tax Avoidance



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Whose Taliban Now

The right wingers at the Blogging Tories have labeled NDP Leader Jack Layton "Taliban Jack"

Ever since the NDP Convention passed a motion calling for the withdrawl of Canadian troops from the Southern Offensive in Kandahar. Layton and the NDP proposed putting them back in Kabul overseeing and protecting reconstruction projects andthat Canada promote peace talks in the region.

Peace talks giggled the right wing with glee, as the Liberals and BQ joined in the chorus denouncing the NDP.

Well guess whose Taliban now....Karzai proposes talks with Taliban leaders

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Jack Layton

NDP

Afghanistan






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Iraqi Ghost Dance

Maliki's Shiite Iraqi Government orchestrated a deliberate slaughter of Muslim heretics this weekend in Iraq.

Iraq and the region is home to many diverse atavistic cults, including Sufism which is a form of Shia'ism.

The Sufi's influenced the Gnostic Islamic heresy of the Ishmali's.

The idea of eliminating clerics and politicians who represent the estabilished powers is as old as the Shi'ite Cult of the Old Man of the Mountains, Hasan ibn Sabah and his Hassain (cult of the Asssassins). Who was one of the founders of the Ishmali sect.

Hasan ibn as-Sabah was thus the original “Old Man of the Mountain,” preceding his namesake Rashid ed-Din Sinan by a hundred years. He also founded a secret religious brotherhood of which he termed himself “grand master” and which aimed, in the words of the Arab historian Philip Hitti, “to emancipate the initiate from the trammels of doctrine and encouraged him to dare all. Below the grand master stood the grand priors.…the lower degree of the order comprised the fida’is, who stood ready to execute whatever orders the grand master issued.” If the word feda’i, or “self-sacrificer,” rings a bell, it should. It’s the singular of “fedayeen,” a term coined by Hasan ibn es-Sabah and widely used in Arabic to this day to describe irregulars fighting for an Arab cause. It’s a favorite of the Palestinians and also had wide currency during the recent fighting in Iraq.

Shiite Cult Aimed to Kill Clerics in Iraqi City Abdul Hussein Abtan, the deputy governor of Najaf province, gave an interview to Iraqi television from the battlefield, saying he was standing next to the dead body of the group’s leader. Mr. Abtan said the dead man had claimed to be the Imam Mahdi — the missing spiritual leader whom many Shiites believe will return someday to restore justice. Mr. Abtan described the movement as “an ideological and military organization with long experience,” and said that its leaders came from outside Iraq. He said it was relatively small, but had rallied a large group of “naïve people” over the past two days by proclaiming the return of the Imam Mahdi.
They said the group, calling itself the Mahdawiya, was loyal to Ahmad bin al-Hassan al-Basri, an Iraqi cleric who had a falling out with Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr — father-in-law of the Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr — in Hawza, a revered Shiite seminary in Najaf.

The fighting around Najaf centered on a date palm orchard near the village of Zarqaa, about 120 miles south of Baghdad. The village is alongside a river and a large grain silo that is surrounded by orchards, the officials said.

The clash appeared to be one of the deadliest battles in Iraq since the American-led invasion four years ago, and it was the first major fight for Iraqi forces in Najaf Province since they took over control of security there from the Americans in December.

Cult leader and 200 others killed: Iraqi officials

Nearly 400 people were in Iraqi army custody and 250 were killed, an Iraqi military source said. Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh put the number of dead at 150 to 200.

There had been women and children in the camp but it was not clear how many were among the casualties, National Security Minister Shirwan al-Waeli told Reuters.

"One of the signs of the coming of the Mahdi was to be the killing of the Ulema (clerical hierarchy) in Najaf," "He claimed to be the Mahdi," Waeli said of the cult's leader, adding that he had used the full name Mahdi bin Ali bin Ali bin Abi Taleb, claiming descent from the Prophet Mohammad.

Among previous violent instances of people saying they are the Mahdi were an opposition movement to British imperial forces in Sudan in the 1880s and a group of several hundred, including women, that took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979.

This incident reminded me of the slaughter of the indigenous native resistance movement in North America known as the Ghost Dance.

The parallels are striking, for the occupation of Indian country had been accomplished and this was the final resistance movement.

The Sioux began performing the ghost dance in 1890 after large herds of buffalo had been killed off.

They believed this magical dance would bring back the buffalo and eliminate their white enemies.

But white Americans became frightened of the ghost dance and demanded protection, leading to the Wounded Knee.

In early October of 1890, Kicking Bear, a Minneconjou, visited Sitting Bull at Standing Rock. He told him of the visit he and his brother-in-law, Short Bull, had made to Nevada to visit Wovoka. They told him of the great number of other Indians who were there as well. They referred to Wovoka as the Christ and told of the Ghost Dance that they had learned and the way that the Christ had flown over them on their horseback ride back to the railroad tracks, teaching them Ghost Dance songs. And they told him of the phophecy that, next spring, when the grass was high, the earth would be covered with new soil, burying all the white men.The new soil would be covered with sweet grass, running water and trees; the great herds of buffalo and wild horses would return. All Indians who danced the Ghost Dance would be taken up into the air and suspended there while the new earth was being laid down. Then they would be replaced there, with the ghosts of their ancestors, on the new earth. Only Indians would live there then.

This new religion was being taught at all of the Sioux reservations now. Big Foot's band, which consisted mostly of women who had lost their husbands and/or other male relatives in battles with Custer, Miles and Crook, would dance until they collapsed, hoping to guarantee the return of their dead warriors. Sitting Bull greatly doubted that the dead would be be brought back to life. He had no personal objections to people dancing the Ghost Dance; however he had heard that the agents were getting nervous about all of the dancing and were calling in the soldiers on some reservations. He did not want the soldiers to return to kill more of his people. Kicking BearGhost Dance shirts, painted with magic symbols, the soldiers bullets would not strike them. Sitting Bull consented to Kicking Bear remaining at Standing Rock and teaching the Ghost Dance.

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The Yezedi

My Favorite Muslim

The Need for Arab Anarchism

Can you be a Muslim Anarchist?

Antinominalist Anarchism

Bulgarian Women Abused

Shi'a

Heresy


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Measured Response

Remember His Highness Stephen Harper saying that Israel's war with Lebanon last summer was a measured response.

And after that he was silent on any Israeli war crimes. Insisting even at the Franco-phone summit that a motion critizing Israel be muted and include criticism of Hizbollah, by inference blaming them for starting the war.

And then Peter Mackay was in Israel last week saying the New Government of Canada stands by its new found ally.

Which is why they have been silent about this less than measured response in the last days of that war.....

Israel may have violated agreements with Washington on the use of US-made cluster bombs in its war with Hizbullah in Lebanon last summer, the state department said today.

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Israel

Palestine

Lebanon

Peter MacKay


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Tories Fit Right In

this year's Super Bowl commercials add a new twist --One of the biggest new themes of this year's game is getting amateurs into the act.

And so that is why these ads will fit right in.....

Liberals Will Be Attacked By Conservatives During Superbowl

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Worried

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No Brainer

Minimum Wage Increase Is Good for Business









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Minimum wage


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Big Brother Microsoft

Beware of Vista, Bill Gates new ultimate spyware.....

While those reviews have focused chiefly on Vista's new functionality, for the past few months the legal and technical communities have dug into Vista's "fine print." Those communities have raised red flags about Vista's legal terms and conditions as well as the technical limitations that have been incorporated into the software at the insistence of the motion picture industry.

The net effect of these concerns may constitute the real Vista revolution as they point to an unprecedented loss of consumer control over their own personal computers. In the name of shielding consumers from computer viruses and protecting copyright owners from potential infringement, Vista seemingly wrestles control of the "user experience" from the user.

Vista's legal fine print includes extensive provisions granting Microsoft the right to regularly check the legitimacy of the software and holds the prospect of deleting certain programs without the user's knowledge. During the installation process, users "activate" Vista by associating it with a particular computer or device and transmitting certain hardware information directly to Microsoft

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Microsoft

Internet

Software

Web

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