October 2006 Archives

Working over the media has long been a staple of the right wing playbook. In the United States, three decades of constant abuse at the hands of right wingers has reduced the press to role of Republican megaphone. This has been greatly aided by years of media deregulations, which concentrated media outlets in the hands of fewer and fewr large corporations, all of whom are sympathetic to the Republicans' corporatist agenda.

In Canada, the Conservatives have also declared war on the media. This has manifested itself for years in their noted antipathy toward the CBC, which bears the black mark of being publicly funded and therefore frustratingly difficult to corrupt with vast swaths of corporate cash or promises of further industry deregulation. But most recently, this battle has been represented by the ongoing scrap with the Prime Minister's Office and the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

Background on this little scrap can be found here, but the thumbnail sketch is that the PMO decided that the PPG had no right to decide who got to ask questions of the Prime Minister, and that he would determine who did the questioning. He also decided that holding press conferences was not worht the trouble, and that he would simply go directly to friendly media outlets to ensure he got out the message he wanted. The upshot was that the PPG has been effectively removed from the political reporting process.

Today in Pressthink, a U.S. media monitoring site run out of New York University, Canadian writer and radio producer Ira Basen dissects the result of PM Stephen Harper's battle with the PPG, and sees this as the first move in undermining the mainstream media in Canada, and effectively removing it from the forum of public debate. The PPG was simply the first to fall victim to Harper's long term media strategy.

Declaring that the Ottawa gallery was biased against him, he announced that in the future, he would speak primarily to local media and other journalists of his own choosing. Reporters who made their living covering the ins and outs of Ottawa would be out. He was not prepared to cede the power to determine how Canadians viewed his new government to people who effectively saw themselves as another opposition party.

One of the journalists that Harper talked to was Kevin Libin of The Western Standard, a right-wing Alberta-based newsmagazine that is arguably Harper’s biggest booster in the Canadian media. In an extraordinary interview with Libin in June, Harper spelled out his new media strategy.

The Ottawa press corps, the Prime Minister declared, was dominated by “left-wing ideologues” who were determined to stop him from getting his message out. The Gallery’s decision to boycott his press conferences clearly played right into his hand. “I’ve got more control now,” he boasted, “I’m free to pick my interviews when and where I want to have them.”

That would clearly bring short term benefits, but Harper had bigger ideas. “The real long-term effect of this may be to break up the gallery,” he declared. The public could now see the “filter” through which their news was being reported. The gallery had become “too institutionalized, and too convinced that it can control the news.” It was actually in the way of better government. “I think if we can break that up in any way, that is helpful for democracy.”

From today's Toronto Star:

Norman Spector, a former Canadian ambassador to Israel and chief of staff to ex-prime minister Brian Mulroney, created a stir over the weekend when he said on the radio Belinda Stronach was a "bitch."

"Bitch is a word that I would use to describe someone like Belinda Stronach," said Spector, now a political pundit.

"You know, I'm not in politics, I can say it, I think she's a bitch and I think that 90 per cent of men would probably say she's a bitch, for the way she's broken up (former Maple Leaf) Tie Domi's home and the way she dumped Peter MacKay. She is a bitch."

...

Spector also told CTV News he thinks the reason the Tory foreign affairs minister's reported reference to Stronach as a dog got major coverage was because of the number of female journalists in Ottawa.

Asked for her reaction, Stronach apparently took the high road; she says she is glad that Spector doesn't speak for Canada any more, and she suspects that he "has issues."

Me, I'm still counting the number of neuroses Spector just confessed to in that little chat. I mean, long before we get to the evil feminists, I thought everyone of Spector's vintage had at least read Ann Landers, eh? We all know that no third party ever busts up a marriage unless at least one of the partners is already ready to split, yes/no?

Now, most people might be tempted to think of Peter McKay, Tie Domi, and Norman Spector as men who have acquired marked amounts of power and/or wealth and/or public acclaim and ego-validation in this life, but Norman Spector has news for anyone who thinks so. He and those other guys, he wants us to know, are in fact pathetic victims of women who entice them away from the wives they treated so well and still long to be with, who oppress their ambitious male partners by refusing to suppress their own views for the sake of the guy's career, or who have to compete with -- gasp! -- a whole lot of lady writers and broadcasters who are making it really hard these days for some of the puir wee old male hacks to continue skating by on cheap and lazy misogynistic jokes.

A couple of months ago I pointed to a story that suggested the major internet service providers were positioning themselves to play Big Brother on law enforcement's behalf in compliance with legislation that hadn't been passed yet. The Liberal government's Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act died on the order paper when the last federal election was called but it was widely believed that Canada's New Law and Order Government™ would revive it.

Michael Geist has an article in the Toronto Star which suggests the government may be holding off on that precisely because they know it's a political hot potato. In fact, it appears the Liberals knew it too.

Internal government documents recently obtained under the Access to Information Act provide some insight into how officials view, and have managed, the initiative. They uncover a clear recognition of the negative public reaction to the proposals, a divide-and-conquer strategy for managing that reaction, and lingering internal doubts about the effectiveness of Canadian privacy legislation to address Internet privacy threats.

The negative public reaction is no secret to anyone who has followed the issue through the media. Indeed, a Department of Justice memorandum drafted just after the last federal election acknowledges that "although the public generally responds positively to the idea of `getting tough on crime,' proposals to introduce new investigative tools raise concerns about the surveillance powers of the state and the public's underlying anxiety is heightened by the media and statements of privacy and civil liberties advocates."

The memorandum continues by noting that "almost all stakeholders indicated generally that the lawful access proposals seemed to be moving ahead without the government having provided a convincing justification for the new measures."

There is no shortage of enemies in right winger world. They are constantly on guard against whatever enemies their "leaders" have identified for them to level their hate at. They need that special someone as a focus for their otherwise inchoate rage. The problem is that sometimes the enemy-of-the-day is far, far away, and just too darn abstract to really serve the purpose of inspiring the right wingers at home.

Well, thanks to Christie Blatchford, we know there is a homegrown enemy, already threatening our heroic troops. And who else would that be but damn dirty leftist peaceniks? In her most recent column decrying the lack of hagiography for our soldiers and the existence of news coverage of anti-war protest marches, Blatchford takes a break from advocating for a return to Victorian-era crime laws to make malevolent accusations toward those who oppose the war.

Ottawa 'satisfied' with U.S. response to Arar case

Ottawa says it is "satisfied" with the American response to Canada's protests over the handling of torture victim Maher Arar, despite the absence of an apology.

A letter U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent to Canada last week contains no apology to Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

Dan Dugas, spokesman for Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, said yesterday the federal government is happy with the letter's substance.

"We are satisfied with the content of the reply," Dugas told the Globe and Mail.

The letter from Rice says the United States is committed to notifying Ottawa about any Canadian citizen who may be involuntarily sent to a third country.

Ok, then. Make your travel plans accordingly.

Ok, mahigan. Time to put up or ... else. (Drat: I can't be mean to mahigan. Who could?)

Remember your wild rice stuffing recipe? Which you were going to vouchsafe to us? We're none of us getting any younger, y'know.

While we're waiting, I thought I might prod mahigan along a little with my own favourite wild rice recipe. The cookery magazine I took this from sometime in the early 1980s meant it to be a stuffing, so that is how I used it -- the first time. But it is just so tasty that I have made it ever since as a dish on its own, and I wouldn't risk losing any of it in, y'know, some avian cavity. It tastes and smells of autumn and early winter, rich, smoky, nutty, crunchy.

Three weeks ago Stephen Harper got a lot of press for saying that he wanted to see the American government "come clean" on its role in the detention and imprisonment of Maher Arar.

Canada wants to hear that "these kinds of incidents will not be repeated in the future."

The U.S. government is not apologizing for its treatment of Maher Arar, CTV News reported Friday.

The network quoted a letter from American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, which makes no mention of an apology.

The letter also doesn't mention removing Arar from the U.S. watch list.
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Rice's letter to MacKay notes that the United States agrees fully with the consular understanding with Canada to notify and consult each other in such cases, but there is no apology for Arar's treatment.

To all those who thought that the efforts by Canada's New Government™ to "repair" our relationship with the Bush administration would have any real results: have you learned nothing from Tony Blair?

As skdadl hinted at last week in comments, there's been a theme to this month's posts: I've been purposely selecting female artists. (Would someone at YouTube please find some Sue Foley? And a Koko Taylor rendition of Wang Dang Doodle would be nice.) I'm going to close out the month with a couple of pieces that push the definition a little as well as crossing generations.

First we have Etta James having some fun with the R & B classic I'd Rather Go Blind (Blind Girl).

And then we have blues-rocker Ana Popovic with My Man.

If there's a religion in the world today I hate, it isn't Islam, it isn't Christianity, even the noxious right wing version in the US - it's free trade fundamentalism.

That Free Trade fundamentalism is on show in Canada with the Conservative government's attempt to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board. They certainly don't call it that - they talk about "choice" but if the lowest cost farmers (mostly large corporate farms) and those with the lowest transportation costs (ie. southern farmers near the US border) are able to bypass the Board, ending its "one desk" selling authority then the Wheat Board is effectively done.

The Wheat Board has been challenged in front of both NAFTA and the WTO - it is legal under international law. Agricultural economists have estimated that by controlling 20% of the global grain market, it brings in about 800 million to prairie communities which would not receive that money without it.

And if it dies, a part of the Prairies will die. It will destroy most of what is left of the smaller farms. They willl be bought up, one by one, until the vast majority are part of huge corporate operations, the majority of the benefits of which will not flow to local communities. Why? Because with all the low cost producers out of the pool, the wheat board's wheat will be uncompetitive - the only solution will be to join private large producers with low cost structures. As farm families leave, and as less and less workers are needed, many town will turn into ghost towns.

There's a simple answer to all this, Section 47.1 of the Canadian Wheat Board Act explicitly requires a referendum with the growers before the act can be modified. Chuck Strahl is set to just ignore that.

Arar lawyers exploring whether Boeing connection exists

Maria LaHood, a New York-based lawyer involved with Arar’s lawsuit against the U.S. government, said the legal team may hire a private investigator to find out whether Boeing’s Jeppesen International Trip Planning played a role in flying Arar to Syria. “We don’t expect them to come forward, but we’re looking into what role (Jeppesen) may have played,” LaHood said in an interview.

A report in The New Yorker this week alleged that San Jose-based Jeppesen helped handle flight plans, hotel reservations and other navigational details for the secret flights.
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The New Yorker quoted an unnamed former Jeppesen employee saying that Bob Overby, Jeppesen’s managing director, said at an internal meeting that “we do all of the extraordinary rendition flights — you know, the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way.”

A Jeppesen spokesperson declined to comment to The New Yorker.

It’s unclear what legal exposure Boeing might face if it’s proven to have ties to Arar’s case.

A website called CorpWatch has picked up the original New Yorker article which reveals that Jeppesen may be tied in to another rendition and Boeing may yet face legal action on that front.

James Travers expands upon a point that I have made many times in the past: Stephen Harper is planning to run the U.S. Republican playbook when the next election rolls around. There is no attempt made to even alter the model, which usually runs like this:

- Give crappy legislation a positive name, then curse out your opponents for opposing it.
- Use fear to mobilize your base and intimidate the opposition.
- Use the military to boost your patriotic bona fides (at no risk to yourself), while simultaneously labelling your cirtics anti-military.
- Surround the prime minister (or president) in a bubble of sycophancy to prevent actual facts from seeping into a decision making process entirely ruled by ideology.

Here's Travers identifying this tendency, and he really is at the top of his form:

Week by week, evidence mounts that Stephen Harper is creating, packaging and marketing an alternative universe.

How else to explain a Clean Air Act that experts all but unanimously agree will only make this country a dirtier part of a dirtier world? Let's be perfectly clear: Talk of meaningful progress by 2050 is pure delusional fantasy for politicians with four-years-or-less lifecycles and gnat-like attention spans.

On the strength of this week's pronouncement, the only environmental change between now and never-never will be political. Armed with legislation that sounds socks-and-sandals green, a blue-suit party can now stump cross-country in an expected spring election accusing their opponents of being against clean air.

As a tactic, it owes plenty to U.S. presidential contests. Candidates there scavenge voting records to savage each other for not supporting legislation with feel-good titles hiding hideous flaws.

It's also not new for a government that relentlessly labels itself "new." Ideology and populism emerged as the prevailing currents early in this minority and are only gaining strength as the Conservative grip on power weakens.

Wilfully blind to bureaucratic policy options and isolated from all but a few cabinet ministers and advisers, Harper's guidance comes from his own unshakeable certainty. Causes are disconnected from effects and facts are no match for beliefs.

When Michael Ignatieff first entered Canadian politics and I first dared to criticize him, I was carefully but firmly cautioned that I needed to read him more carefully. When I based my criticisms on his actual words, I was further admonished because I hadn't read quite enough of him. For a while, I followed the links I was provided and read the material that was offered. And in the end I came to the conclusion that Ignatieff's greatest gift was an ability to endlessly repeat himself without ever saying exactly the same thing twice. If it were anyone else I would have called it obfuscation but apparently Ignatieff's academic credentials were enough to make it something quite different: an ability to deal in nuance and complexity that surpasses the rest of us mere mortals.

Lately Paul Wells has been spending a fair amount of time on Iggie and I have to admit I'm enjoying it. In yesterday's edition Wells dealt at length with Ignatieff's pronouncements on Quebec, nationhood and the various reactions to them but tucked at the bottom of the post is this:

Turning to the Globe, we see Raymonde Folco, an MP who wavered in her support for Ignatieff after he called Qana a war crime. "But after speaking to him at length, she said she believes that Mr. Ignatieff did not say what he really meant."

Precisely. A stout refusal to believe what Michael Ignatieff says has become the central condition for supporting his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. The opposition to Ignatieff now comes exclusively from people who fear his words have meaning.

When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.' .

Thomas Walkom follows up on yesterday's ruling that the definition of terrorism in our anti-terrorism legislation is unconstitutional (blogged here).

Under the 2001 law, a terrorist activity is defined as an act of violent intimidation that is motivated by religion, politics or ideology. Yet, as Rutherford noted, the government has never been able to satisfactorily explain why mass murder carried out in the name of religion or ideology is somehow worse than mass murder carried out for reasons of profit or personal pathology.

At the time the law was passed, the then-Liberal government's only defence for this motive provision was that, without it, terrorist crimes would be no different from ordinary crimes.

Which, as Rutherford said, is precisely the point.

"The average person would be hard-pressed, I daresay, to recount much about the motives of some if not all of these notorious crimes (such as the 9/11 attacks)," he wrote. "Just what political, religious or ideological objectives or causes the perpetrators felt they were supporting with their actions is largely lost on the populations affected. And for good reason. It doesn't really matter."

What's more, he wrote, the decision to focus on religious or ideological motive will inevitably lead to a chilling effect on the right of Canadians to think and believe what they wish.

Those who are not terrorists, he writes, will inevitably be tarred because they happen to have the same religion or beliefs as those who are.

Apparently, even Vic Toews may be pleased.

"Canada can take care of North Korea. They're not busy."

That, as truthdig tells us, is how the Republican National Committee hopes to win a senatorial race in Tennessee.

Well, they have some other tricks up their sleeves, too. The attack ad in question has outraged many Americans -- including not only the Democrat candidate who is its target but also the Republican candidate it is supposed to support -- for its subliminal racism:

L.A. Times:

WASHINGTON—A new Republican Party television ad featuring a scantily clad white woman winking and inviting a black candidate to “call me” is drawing charges of race-baiting, with critics saying it contradicts a landmark GOP statement last year that the party was wrong in past decades to use racial appeals to win support from white voters.

Critics said the ad, which is funded by the Republican National Committee and has aired since Friday, plays on fears of interracial relationships to scare some white voters in rural Tennessee to oppose Democratic Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. Ford is locked in a tight race, hoping to become the first African American senator since Reconstruction to represent a state in the former Confederacy.

“It is a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African American men and white women,” said Hilary Shelton, head of the Washington office of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the country’s oldest civil rights organization.

A former Republican senator, William S. Cohen of Maine, was more blunt. Cohen, who was also Defense secretary under President Clinton, said on CNN that the ad was “a very serious appeal to a racist sentiment.”

It's always hard to tell from this distance what it would take to be able to say that Karl Rove just shot himself in the foot, but maybe he just winged one of the Bush administration's most sycophantic faithful allies?

While a parliamentary committee reviews the anti-terrorism measures that are due to sunset in a couple of months as I noted in the post below this one, an Ontario Superior Court judge just gave that committee something else to think about.

The first person charged under the federal Anti-terrorism Act in Canada won a legal victory on Tuesday when an Ontario judge struck down a provision because he says it violates charter rights.

Justice Douglas Rutherford of Ontario Superior Court ruled that a section of the Anti-terrorism Act that defines "terrorism" violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The defendant will still go to trial on seven charges but the article quotes a Liberal member of the appropriate commons committee admitting they have go back to the drawing board. And this follows closely on another judge striking down sections of the Security of Information Act.

So how silly does it have to get before we acknowledge that the post 9/11 anti-terrorism legislation was poorly thought out and passed in too much of a hurry and we need to back up and rethink this mess?

When the omnibus anti-terror legislation was passed by the Liberal government in December, 2001 the Libs bowed to public pressure and attached sunset provisions to some of the measures that were enacted. Two of those measures are due to expire in December of this year unless parliament votes to extend them. In a pair of articles, the Toronto Star reports that parliament appears likely to do just that.

Tonda MacCharles reports the news.

The lifespan of the most controversial anti-terrorism powers granted to police after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks should be extended to 2011 to safeguard national security, a parliamentary committee recommends.

The measures — preventive arrest and investigative hearings for material witnesses in terror cases — should be reviewed again once the country has had a decade of experience with them, the public safety committee said yesterday. Neither power has yet been used.

As the old song says, they've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil. They've also got lots of natural gas in Bolivia as well as a socialist president in Evo Morales, who has promised to nationalize the industry. They used to have rather too many old Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in Paraguay, and they still have enormous reserves of underground water in the north of that country, right where Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil meet.

A very curious story has been bubbling up in the Latin American press and a few blogs over the last couple of weeks. Today for the first time the Guardian is reporting it cautiously as a set of rumours first floated by the state-controlled Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. Is George W. Bush -- or his dad, or his daughter, depending on which source you read -- buying / already the owner of a hundred-thousand-acre ranch in northern Paraguay?

Some have speculated that he might be trying to wrestle control of the Guarani Aquifer, one of the largest underground water reserves, from the Paraguayans.

Rumours of Mr Bush's supposed forays into South American real estate surfaced during a recent 10-day visit to the country by his daughter Jenna Bush. Little is known about her trip to Paraguay, although officially she travelled with the UN children's agency Unicef to visit social projects. Photographers from the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color tracked her down to one restaurant in Paraguay's capital Asunción, where she was seen flanked by 10 security guards, and was also reported to have met Paraguay's president, Nicanor Duarte, and the US ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason. Reports in sections of the Paraguayan media suggested she was sent on a family "mission" to tie up the land purchase in the "chaco".

...

Last week the Paraguayan news group Neike suggested that Ms Bush was in Paraguay to "visit the land acquired by her father - relatively close to the Brazilian Pantanal [wetlands] and the Bolivian gas reserves".

Gosh, I hear you exclaim. I haven't thought twice about Paraguay since Alfredo Stroessner, host and protector of Josef Mengele and other notable fascists, enthusiastic participant in Operation Condor, was deposed in 1989.

A few days ago, Scott Tribe of progbloggers warned some of us that a certain group of bloggers who shall remain nameless were trying to start a blogburst by vilifying the Court Challenges program. Given that the Court Challenges program had already been pretty much killed dead by that group's favourite Vulcan prime minister, there seemed to some of us a touch of morbid obsession in that project.

So we thought of a more cheerful alternative: the progressive poetry blogburst tribute to the Court Challenges program. If you believe in democracy, clap hands and then write a pome in tribute to the Court Challenges program, for which I will provide a bit of history later. Well: I will provide a bit of the history of Stephen Harper's personal animus against the program.

But first, here are the rules:

1. Your pome does not have to be good, and it doesn't have to be long. Four lines minimum and heartfelt -- that is all we ask.

Update to rules: Haikus are welcome. Even couplets are welcome. Forget the four-line rule.

2. Your pome must mention the Court Challenges program. It may also mention the destruction by fiat of the mandate of Status of Women Canada and/or the Canadian Wheat Board, or any other recent outrage you can think of.

3. You don't have to be tagged or to tag anyone else. Just, y'know, compose and publish.

I have a modest example here. I am not m'self much of a poet, which is why I don't call my pome a poem. It is a bit of doggerel, a parody of a great sonnet (which I shall copy on the flip), but we also serve who only stand and applaud the real poets, eh? And I am suspecting that out there in progblog land there are in fact a few real poets who could help us to sing enlightened programs like the CCP back to life.

Ahem. *cough*

Ode to the Court Challenges Program

When I have fears that Stephen Harper’s crew
May slip and slide through their minority,
May hide their worst intentions too
In hopes of a majority;

When I behold the mandates cut and mocked
Of those who Challenge prejudice and fear,
Whose visions of women’s future really rocked
Or spoke to rural history we hold dear;

Then I remember still to turn my gaze,
To listen for the voices fighting back,
To citizens who bravely spend their days
Defending rights and freedoms we still lack.

The women, farmers, activists, progbloggers --
And with this pome I now tag all the poggers.

So why did Stephen Harper really hate the Court Challenges program so much?

Bonnie Raitt covers Pride and Joy at a tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan.

It's funny how progressive bloggers can work for several weeks in support of feminism in general and the Status of Women in Canada in particular and there isn't a peep out of the top-down media. But let a few Blogging Tories leap to the defence of Peter MacKay after he makes insulting comments in the House of Commons and it gets immediate attention.

It must be more of that liberal bias I've heard so much about.

I've seen it suggested more than once that Peter MacKay is playing Gordon Brown to Stephen Harper's Tony Blair, waiting patiently while Steve has his time on the throne in the sun and assuming that when Harper's time is up, his will begin. If that's really the case, Peter ought to work on that looking prime ministerial thing.

It's bad enough that he's clinging to obsolete talking points on Afghanistan. At least he can comfort himself with the fact that the boss is too. But when he also manages to call a female MP a dog in the House of Commons, thereby giving credibility to the accusations that the Cons really don't respect women, and then gets caught napping in Question Period with hysterical results, I don't think it helps any leadership aspirations he may have.

Thing is, given the kind of week the Conservatives have had the next leadership contest may come around sooner than anyone thought -- as I've said before on this blog, we live in hope -- and at the moment, bench strength doesn't appear to be something the CPC has in abundance.

I haven't bothered with all the stories of Republican scandals in months. I know they're a bunch of crooks and hypocrites and if you read this blog, chances are you do too. But this one is just so... perfect. As reported at TPMmuckraker, the House Appropriations committee has had so much to investigate in recent months that they'd hired 60 extra investigators as contract staff. Committee chairman Jerry Lewis, himself under investigation (and having spent eight hundred grand on his own legal fees so far) just fired them all.

The TPMm post quotes from the Congressional Quarterly (which requires a subscription).

Lewis’ decision “has in fact stalled all of the investigations on the staff,” said one of the contractors, a former FBI agent, who asked not to be identified. “This eviscerates the investigatory function. There is little if any ability to do any oversight now.”
...
“This staff has saved billions and billions of dollars, we’ve turned up malfeasance and misfeasance,” the contractor said. “It’s results justify the expense of the staff. I have no idea why the chairman would do this.”

Secrets law ruled unconstitutional; judge quashes warrants

An Ontario court has struck down sections of Canada's secrecy law in throwing out RCMP warrants used to search a reporter's home.

David Paciocco, a lawyer for Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill, says Thursday's ruling by the Ontario Superior Court is a tremendous affirmation of press freedom.

Squads of Mounties combed through O'Neill's home and office on a cold January morning in 2004 in an attempt to find the source of information about the Maher Arar affair.

The complete works of Charles Darwin are now online.

From the Reuters report:

Among the unique collection is the notebook used during the Beagle voyage which would later forge his scientific arguments. It was stolen in the 1980s, but Darwin's great-great-grandson hopes the publication online, thanks to a transcription from a microfilm copy made two decades earlier, will persuade whoever has it to return it.

"It has huge importance for the history of science," Randal Keynes told the BBC.

"We very much hope that now that it is known to have been stolen and the pictures of it are on the Web site and can be seen by everyone and read, when it next surfaces someone will get in touch with English Heritage, the owners, and enable them to recover it and bring it back to Darwin's home, where it should be."

Other items in the free collection of 50,000 pages and 40,000 images are the first editions of the Journal of Researchers, written in 1839, The Descent of Man, The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, which includes his observations during his five-year trip to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific, and the first five editions of the Origin of Species.

John van Wyhe, director of the project run by Cambridge University, said the collection is so comprehensive it will help dispel the "many misconceptions and myths" about the naturalist.

Think of all the people who are going to be bouncing up and down at this news over breakfast this morning. George W. Bush. Pat Buchanan. Lorna Dueck. Charles McVety, if he isn't still too busy scheming with the PMO about how to sink Garth Turner.

And then there are all those lovely people over at the Discovery Institute, who brought you the theory of Intelligent Design.

And me too, of course. I love reading other people's diaries.

MPs back bill to revive Kelowna deal

Former prime minister Paul Martin won approval in principle Wednesday for a private member's bill aimed at resurrecting his cherished Kelowna accord.

Martin's bill, which would compel the Harper government to implement the $5.1- billion aboriginal pact, passed 159-123 with the support of Liberal, New Democrat and Bloc Quebecois MPs.
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Martin's bill will now be referred to the all-party aboriginal affairs committee for study before returning to the Commons for a final vote.

Although the Tories could try to delay the bill, they don't have the numbers to stall it indefinitely or defeat it in the face of unanimous opposition support. Nor could they stop it in the Senate, where Liberals hold the majority of seats.

The combined majority opposition in the House of Commons is demanding emergency hearings on the future of the Canadian Wheat Board.

Agriculture critics from the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois say the minority Conservative government is moving to cripple the wheat board with actions that are "unprecedented, unethical and undemocratic."

They want the Commons agriculture committee to hold emergency hearings next week to hear from wheat board advocates who they say are being muzzled by the government.

Hat tip to Scott Tribe at ProgBloggers for the first story.

Yesterday President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law. If you're contemplating visiting the U.S.A. please be advised that while on American soil you remain free at the pleasure of the President.

When charges surfaced last month that the names of those filing Access to Information requests were being illegally leaked to politicians, a parliamentary committee voted to investigate the matter. In testimony before that committee yesterday Ken Rubin, whose name frequently turns up with regard to this subject, charged that the government has been "profiling" people like him.

Federal government departments are profiling some access requesters, a veteran Ottawa researcher charged Monday.

Testifying before a parliamentary committee, Ken Rubin revealed that he learned recently he has been the subject of just such a profile.

Documents Rubin obtained from the Canadian Border Services Agency revealed a memo prepared in January 2004 for then-public safety minister Anne McLellan outlining an access request that Rubin had filed for information concerning the department's Advance Passenger Information project. In the memo, which the department told Rubin was never transmitted all the way to the minister, the department outlines details of telephone calls officials had with Rubin, other access requests he had filed and the fact that he had volunteered to help Maher Arar and his wife get information about their case.

Literary awards don't often bring tears to my eyes. The publishing biz is a business first of all, and if anything it has become more narrowly that in the almost forty years that I have watched it and worked in it. Literary prizes are as much the creatures of trends and fads and commerce and politics as are any other awards. Of course the winners are always at least "good" writers, by one or another standard of the times, but then so are all the losers, not to mention many of the unnominated and even some of the unpublished. Sometimes but not always, the prize of prizes, the Nobel, finally catches up to a writer who changed the course of literature some years before, as it did last year (Harold Pinter) or in 2003, when a still-great master, J.M. Coetzee, joined the Nobel laureates.

But every once in a while literary accomplishment feels momentous because it is recognized at a moment when it just might matter. In her appreciation of this year's laureate, Turkish novelist and essayist Orhan Pamuk, Margaret Atwood writes:

It would be difficult to conceive of a more perfect winner for our catastrophic times. Just as Turkey stands at the crossroads of the Muslim East/Middle East and the European and North American west, so Pamuk's work inhabits the shifting ground of an increasingly dangerous cultural and religious overlap, where ideologies as well as personalities collide.

Like Atwood, both the members of the Swedish Academy and the writer who knows Pamuk's writing most intimately, his translator Maureen Freely, have challenged the reductive view that the Academy's choice this year was a mere political gesture:

The Nobel has gone not to the man and not to his politics but to his words, his characters, and his ideas. Born into a culture that had (recently) clipped its eastern roots, and that was struggling to define itself as western, he has (like all of us who grew up in Istanbul) grappled with double identities all his life. What might have seemed a curse to a young man is the source from which his imagination feeds. He has taken both sides of his clashing heritage and made them whole. Though he is often praised in the west for making Turkey "visible", his greater achievement is to make the west see what it looks like from the outside. This is why he has such devoted readerships on both sides of the divide.

Inevitably, however, the narrowly interested on many sides remain determined to reduce Pamuk's luminous works to the merely political.

Over at DailyKos, there is a post by OrangeClouds115 announcing a new web site called Recipe for America. This is the stated focus of the site :

Focus of This Project
We brainstormed a list of problems with the food system that our project might wish to address:
Problems with the Food System
1. Overproduction of commodities
2. Inefficient system of agricultural subsidies
3. Financial hardships for family farmers
4. Consolidation in agricultural industries
5. Obesity epidemic (& related health problems)
6. Energy inefficiency within the American food system
7. Lack of food safety
8. Lack of food labeling requirements (COOL, National Uniformity for Food Act, GMOs)
9. Over permissiveness of food labeling (structure/function statements)
10. Lack of nutrition in school lunches
11. Lack of food sovereignty
12. Food insecurity
13. Pesticide & synthetic fertilizer usage
14. Lack of regulation of GMOs
15. Inefficient water usage
16. Immigration & its affect on farm labor needs
17. Poor labor practices in slaughterhouses
18. Mistreatment of animals
19. Pollution by CAFOs
20. Regulation of Industrial Organics
21. rBGH
22. Soil erosion

Is Yeti in the house? I know he and I are both in (very different aspects of) the agriculture business. Any other Ag producers want to weigh in? I would expect no end of interest from the consumer side.

It looks like some time tomorrow the Site Meter down in the bottom right corner is going to kick over to show 250,000 visitors. This will come two days short of the third anniversary of the founding of Peace, order and good government, eh?. Since I'm usually caught napping by these things I thought I'd get out ahead of the game this time.

I started blogging spontaneously one night. I'd discovered where Blogger was, wondered how difficult it would be to set up and within an hour or so I was blogging. The name came just as spontaneously -- it just popped into my head while I was looking at the Blogger setup screen. Sometimes my best ideas come that way. On the other hand, not all the ideas I get that way are good ones.

My initial post concerned the leadership race that was then taking shape for the new Conservative Party of Canada. Regular readers won't be surprised to find out that I look forward to writing about a new leadership race for the same party real soon now. But I digress.

The ensuing three years have seen one platform change, several server moves and the addition of six additional authors to the bullpen (And now we are seven. I finally got to say it!), not to mention two federal election campaigns and assorted other wonders. I still vividly recall the day Paul Wells linked to a post I wrote -- I had stagefright for two days. It's been interesting, entertaining, occasionally frustrating and often educational (and a good part of all of that comes from the readers' comments). I think I'll stick around for a while and see if we can hit half a million visitors.

Thanks to all of the readers who stop by and participate in the conversation (even if you just yell at us in the privacy of your own minds instead of in public). And I'd also like to thank the other writers who have come on board here. I kept up a pretty torrid pace for the first year and a half or so but I found, as so many others have, that it's difficult to keep up a regular posting schedule unless you're being paid for it. Real life has a way of getting in the way of blogging and I'm grateful that so many quality people wanted to join in and help keep the content coming.

And one last thing: if I have a blogfather it's probably Steve Gilliard, though I don't imagine he's aware of it. It was his work at the now defunct NetSlaves that really got me thinking about the possibilities and made me wonder if there was a place for me in what some are calling the "new media". We're all still exploring the possibilities and I expect we will be for some time to come. (Which gives me an excuse to link to DemFromCt's post at Daily Kos about the latest Flu Wiki development. There's another project I got involved in that caught me by surprise.)

I'm A Woman - Koko Taylor

The conservative impulse is to keep what is old and to only change cautiously. When the reformer says, "we can do better", the conservative replies, "why would you think that?" A conservative (and by temperment I am a conservative) supports change only when it is execruciatingly clear both that the status quo isn't working, and that the proposed change has a good chance of being better than the status quo.

Or, to put it another way, when a reformer rushes up and says, "there's a fence down the middle of the road, that maskes no sense! We need to tear it down!" a real conservative's reply is "tell me why the fence was put up in the first place and I might let you take it down."

I'm reminded of this when considering Harper's plan to start getting elected Senators. The idea is that Senators would serve for eight years. Since actually electing them would require a constitutional change (and Ontario, for example, has said no way unless it gets more Senators) what Harper wants to do is have provinces run elections and then he'll appoint the people who were elected. The argument is, essentially, that democracy is good, elections are good and more elections are better. And that the Senate is a corrupt cesspool of retired pols, most of whom do nothing to earn their keep. With elections they'll have a mandate, with the possibility of not being re-elected they'll show up, and voters will enforce discipline on the upper chamber.

And, of course, who wants to run against "elections"? Harper is down on his knees begging the Liberal dominated Senate to get all uppity and block this, so he can run on "I believe in Democracy and Accountability and the Liberals don't."

Report Says Nonprofits Sold Influence to Abramoff

Five conservative nonprofit organizations, including one run by prominent Republican Grover Norquist, "appear to have perpetrated a fraud" on taxpayers by selling their clout to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Senate investigators said in a report issued yesterday.

The report includes previously unreleased e-mails between the now-disgraced lobbyist and officers of the nonprofit groups, showing that Abramoff funneled money from his clients to the groups. In exchange, the groups, among other things, produced ostensibly independent newspaper op-ed columns or news releases that favored the clients' positions.
...
The Senate report released yesterday states that the nonprofit groups probably violated their tax-exempt status "by laundering payments and then disbursing funds at Mr. Abramoff's direction; taking payments in exchange for writing newspaper columns or press releases that put Mr. Abramoff's clients in a favorable light; introducing Mr. Abramoff's clients to government officials in exchange for payment; and agreeing to act as a front organization for congressional trips paid for by Mr. Abramoff's clients."
...
The groups named in the report are Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform; the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, which was co-founded by Norquist and Gale Norton before she became secretary of the interior; Citizens Against Government Waste; the National Center for Public Policy Research, a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation; and Toward Tradition, a Seattle-based religious group founded by Rabbi Daniel Lapin.
...
The e-mails show that Abramoff and Norquist explicitly discussed client donations to Norquist's group in exchange for Norquist's support. The group's advocacy "appears indistinguishable from lobbying undertaken by for-profit, taxable firms," the report said.

Hat-tip to DemFromCt at Daily Kos.

When someone is saying something you don't like and may not have an answer for, tell him to shut up and turn off his mic.

Wheat Board ordered not to sow discontent

The Conservative government has banned the Canadian Wheat Board from advocating its continued existence as the monopoly seller of Western Canadian wheat and barley, adding fuel to a growing political fire.

In a cabinet directive issued late last week, the government ordered the board not to directly or indirectly spend money on advertising, publishing or market research that would enable them to argue for the retention of the monopoly.
...
The ban is the latest development in the battle over the Wheat Board's future. The Conservative government has promised to end the board's monopoly, but it's far from clear whether a majority of farmers supports that position and the government has refused to commit to a plebiscite on the issue.

General David Richards, commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, has just put a best-before date on the alliance's military mission in Afghanistan: six months.

Gen Richards said the country was at a tipping point, and warned that Afghans would likely switch their allegiance to resurgent Taliban militants if there were no visible improvements in people's lives in the next six months. "They will say, 'We do not want the Taliban, but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant life that that might involve than another five years of fighting'," he said.

General Richards, among others, has been sending up these warnings for some months now, as have more senior NATO military leaders. From the more recent Guardian report:

Although western diplomats remain squeamish about publicly criticising Pakistan, military commanders, facing mounting casualties, are increasingly outspoken. At a hearing of the US Senate last month, Nato's supreme commander, General James Jones, said that Quetta in Baluchistan was the Taliban "headquarters". According to one report, Nato has traced the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, to an address in Quetta.

So today General Richards will be paying a visit to President Musharraf of Pakistan, a man of many allegiances, and they will talk politely about NATO intelligence that continues to detect Taliban troop movements and evacuations across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. And for public consumption, at least, President Musharraf and many Western diplomats and politicians -- like Gordon O'Connor and Lewis MacKenzie -- will continue to pretend either that that is news to them or that they are doing all they can about it or that it isn't the issue anyway. Gordon O'Connor still can't think of a thing to do about Afghanistan except throw more bullets at it:

The Harvest Moon - the full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal equinox - is the best known of our named moons. But the one that follows in October, the Hunter's Moon is probably the more significant event. While the pressure was there to get the crop off, there was still an residual feeling of the easy going days of summer in the Harvest Moon.

By the time of the Hunter's Moon, the easy going feeling has been replaced with a sense of urgency. Geese are taking their feeding flights stocking up for the southward migration. The bucks are sparring in preparation for the real event soon to begin. And the chipmunks leave the bird feeders with cheeks swollen with seeds for their winter stockpile. For the humans, too, there was a sense of urgency in years gone by to lay in both a winter's supply of firewood and food in preparation for the bone chilling cold of a prairie winter.

I'm a few days late to this party. Nominations are now open for Robert McClelland's Canadian Blog Awards. I'll say what I always say this time of year: the biggest value of these awards is that it may lead you to discover some good blogging you didn't know about. And thanks to Robert for all the work he puts into this.

(Of course it goes without saying that I'm not drawing attention to this just because we're nominated in several categories. That has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Nothing at all. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Via Accidental Deliberations, Linwood Barclay in the Toronto Star reminds us that the blogosphere doesn't have a monopoly on effective snark. Given the subject matter it's rather ironic for me to point to this as an example of good writing since irony is no longer being supported. You'll have to go read to understand.

You Gotta Gimmie Some - Bessie Smith

No, this time I'm not talking about L'il Stevie, Doris or the rest of the usual suspects. I have been up to my ears for the last two weeks in local rural politics - the only thing dumber than federal politics (or at least that's my position until the next provincial election). I'm politicked out for the moment so I'm going to post about food. At least that's something I still enjoy.

Really quick, you guys.

What is it? The New Government of Canada? The New Canadian Government? Canada's New Government? (Look to the blue box on the right. Or snap to attention at this story.)

I'm an editor. I gotta know soon what the correct form of address for our elders and betters elected representatives is.

And I'm thinking letterhead, business cards, all that sort of stuff. Etiquette, y'know? We've got to get this right.

Even more serious: the Chicago Manual of Style and the Editors Association of Canada are waiting to hear from Ottawa -- or maybe just from Canadians. In other words: you. We can't get our footnotes and bibliographies right without a general decision.

So. What is it? This new ... thing ... we've got: what do we call it?

Updated update: see press release from women's groups after meeting with the minister, in comments below.

More evidence, if evidence were needed, that your New Government of Canada has learned its lessons at the knees (and likely on its knees) of some American masters, this lesson in particular:

"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." -- Grover Norquist

Hard on the heels of last week's news that Status of Women Canada (SWC) has lost 40 per cent of its operational budget comes word of a new diktat from the department run by one of cabinet's biggest losers, the sad and ineffectual and utterly pathetic Bev Oda.

Two days ago, via the notice of the "five things" meme supported by progressive bloggers, a warning was sent up by pamused that changes to SWC's mandate had also been made:

The worst of it is that they have now banned ALL domestic advocacy and lobbying of governments with any funding received from SWC. What this means is that even though they've preserved the program funding available through the Women's Program, they've chopped at the knees those orgs who utilize that funding for anything other than service or program delivery. Case in point: without funding for advocacy from SWC, groups like the Canadian Council of Muslim Women et al could not have successfully mobilized and advocated against Sharia law in Canada (religious arbitration). So today's changes signify a brutal blow.

That redefinition of the department's mandate has now been confirmed on SWC's updated website.

Potentially embarrassing information requests "amber-lighted" by bureaucrats

The federal government is singling out the access to information requests of some Canadians for closer scrutiny and special treatment, despite Prime Minister Stephen Harper's sharp criticism of the practice when he was in opposition.

According to an e-mail dated June 12, by Citizenship and Immigration Canada access co-ordinator Heather Primeau, the government is ''amber lighting'' access requests that are considered to be more politically sensitive.

''The amber light process is a heads up process to advise senior management of upcoming access to information releases that may attract media or political attention,'' says a note at the bottom of Primeau's e-mail in which she alerts a series of departmental officials to the upcoming release of an ''amber lighted'' access request.

The e-mail, which outlines five things being released that could result in questions to the government, was sent to 19 officials in the Citizenship and Immigration department. Among them was Brooke Pigott, a policy advisor in Citizenship and Immigration Minister Monte Solberg's office.

Primeau's e-mail was received by researcher Ken Rubin as part of an access request to Citizenship and Immigration Canada on another subject.

Hat-tip to Eugene Plawiuk.

Day: MPs can watch RCMP, CSIS

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day says greater oversight of national security operations by elected politicians can help restore public confidence in the wake of the Maher Arar debacle.

In an interview Sunday on CTV’s Question Period, Day noted that the United States, Britain and Australia all have legislative committees that monitor their security forces.

He suggested a similar all-party committee of Parliament could keep tabs on both the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Day was more ambiguous on whether there should also be a stronger civilian review agency to monitor the RCMP — along the lines of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which already oversees CSIS.

By all means borrow ideas that will help improve accountability but let's not pretend that the American example has worked perfectly. Clearly it hasn't. With a majority government in power intelligence can still be politicized and misused and abuses can still happen. Without a great deal of care in setting this up, minority MPs can easily be muzzled by secrecy oaths.

I hope there's a great deal more to come than we've been given here.