Comments on politics, the culture, economics and religion by Paul Tuns -- in short, everything about the human endeavour from a non-hyphenated conservative perspective. I am Toronto-based writer and editor, whose articles, columns and reviews have appeared in more than 35 publications. I am editor-in-chief of The Interim, Canada's life and family newspaper, author of Jean Chretien: A Legacy of Scandal and a regular contributor to the book pages of the Halifax Herald.

 
OGIC a Harwell fan

Great post by Our Girl in Chicago about the state of baseball announcing today. Now, she isn't being quite fair when she compares the Chicago White Sox play-by-play duo to the incomparable radio voice of the Detroit Tigers, Ernie Harwell whom she described perfectly:
"I grew up on the comparatively dry style of the great Ernie Harwell, whose relative formality didn't preclude a definite down-home appeal. Harwell, of course, had that gently cadenced southern purr going for him, making it sound like politesse and respect but not stiffness when, say, he called opposing players 'Mr.' Like anyone in his line of work, he had the trademark phrases that never fully escape becoming a bit of a schtick: the most theatrical and probably my least favorite was the home run call, 'it's looooooong gone' — though, gosh, it was a pretty little tune — and the one I most delighted in was his standing strikeout call, 'He stood there like the house by the side of the road and let that one go by,' stresses in all the right places. But the best thing about Harwell's work was everything he didn't say, his modesty and his economy. You got from him crisp accounts of the action, frequent reminders of the score, and the occasional well-placed anecdote—but mostly you got what what you needed to know."
I grew up in southwest Ontario and when I couldn't get New York Yankee games on 770 AM, I enjoyed Harwell giving the play by play for a team I could not care less about.
If you have ever winced at the banality that passes as analysis during the coverage of a ball game on the radio or TV, you have to read the rest of OGIC's post.
posted by Paul Tuns at 6:23 PM

 
Summer vacation for politicos

NCC vice president Gerry Nicholls on how Canada's "leaders" are going to spend their summer. Nicholls says the Liberals:
"... will likely spend the summer months congratulating themselves for once again proving their political invincibility. Hey they may have broken a few rules, shattered whatever sense of ethics they had left and ignored centuries-old democratic traditions in the process, but the bottom line is they are still in power.
And for them that's all that matters. As long as they are in power, they can keep hanging out the goodies, and altering the rules that will allow them to remain in power."
As for Canada's de facto finance minister, NDP leader Jack Layton:
"... he will likely spend the summer riding his bike, vacationing in resorts powered by wind mills and figuring out what he will demand of the Liberals when the House resumes in the fall."
Nicholls advice for his old NCC colleague, CPC leader Stephen Harper: provide Canadians with a vision for the future, not photo ops at BBQs.
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:24 PM

 
Hayes on al Qaeda-Saddam links

The Left has been up in arms this week about President George W. Bush linking Iraq to 9/11. Stephen Hayes has two articles over at the Daily Standard on the links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The first article examines how at least one Democrat (Jay Rockefeller) did at one time acknowledge the link. The second article is about how CNN flat out lies about the lack of any connection between the terrorist organization and the former Iraqi dictator.
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:14 PM

 
Quotidian

"None of the Victorian mothers -- and most of the mothers were Victorian -- had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:51 PM

 
Chatters on the moral decline of Canada

From Conservative MP David Chatters' (Westlock—St. Paul) speech on June 28 on Bill C-38:
"No, this is not about equality. It is not even about starting down the slippery slope toward moral decay because we are already well down that slope. We started down that slope with Trudeau's 'just society' theory which was launched 40 years ago. As an aside, I would like to remind members in the House, particularly the Prime Minister, that his own father had the moral courage to resign from the Trudeau cabinet rather than support the 1968 bill liberalizing divorce, homosexuality and abortion."
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:18 AM

 
What's the point?

The New York Times editorializes about new Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It concludes its editorial thusly:
"Unless the long-stalled talks with Britain, France and Germany make some real progress in the very near future, these European powers should acknowledge that diplomacy has failed and refer the Iranian nuclear issue to the United Nations Security Council. That will not necessarily produce a solution either, particularly if Beijing uses its veto to shelter Iran, an important oil supplier. But there is no point prolonging negotiations if Iran intends only to use them to buy time to further advance its nuclear weapons ambitions."
So let me get this right: the negotiations seem stalled and probably won't amount to much so it is time for the United Nations to address Iran's nuclear weapons program even though it likely won't don't anything about it either. So why go to the UN exactly? The only two reasons the Times could have for advocating this position is because 1) it ideologically favours any alternative, even one that it knows cannot accomplish a favourable goal, to the United States possibly acting on its own or 2) it ideologically favours the United Nations as the conduit for all action (and inaction), no matter what the cost.
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:07 AM

 
You gotta love jazz musicians

AP reported yesterday that jazz trumpeter Chris Griffin died on June 18 at the age of 89. He was a member of the trumpet section in Benny Goodman's band and lead trumpeter in the orchestras of several television shows. And get this: when he died near the end of his ninth decade, he was engaged.
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:03 AM

 
An European agenda for Blair

Anatole Kaletsky writes in the London Times about Tony Blair assuming the presidency of the European Union for the next six months and suggests that the British prime minister highlight the diversity -- the economic diversity -- of the continent:
"Mr Blair could emphasise the diversity of Europe by rejecting the concept of a single economic model to be followed by every EU country. The EU’s official economic policy (known as the Lisbon Agenda) is to create 'the world’s most competitive economy by 2010.' This objective is not just embarrassingly unattainable, but deeply misguided. Europe is not a single economy. It is a single market; a community of democratic nations, whose citizens choose different economic and social priorities."
I like the distinction between single economy and single market.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:59 AM

 
Scrap CAP to relieve third world poverty

The Daily Telegraph reports, "Tony Blair and Gordon Brown turned up the moral pressure on European leaders to scrap the £33 billion-a-year Common Agricultural Policy yesterday by saying that over-generous subsidies paid to EU farmers were perpetuating mass poverty in Africa." I am doubtful that Blair and Brown are motivated by a desire to help the poor of the developing world as much as they are interested in eliminating a major EU budget item that they are forced to subsidize. Still, Brown's words give the moral case against agricultural subsidies:
"We cannot any longer ignore what people in the poorest countries will see as our hypocrisy of developed country protectionism. We should be opening our markets and removing trade-distorting subsidies and, in particular, doing more to urgently tackle the waste of the Common Agricultural Policy by now setting a date for the end of export subsidies."
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:53 AM

 
Gitmo a day at the beach compared to Vietnam

James H. Warner, a prisoner of war for five-and-a-half years in Vietnam, writes in the Washington Times and responds to Senator Dick Durbin's (D, IL) criticism of Guantanamo:
"Consider nutrition. I have severe peripheral neuropathy in both legs as a residual of beriberi. I am fortunate. Some of my comrades suffer partial blindness or ischemic heart disease as a result of beriberi, a degenerate disease of peripheral nerves caused by a lack of thiamin, vitamin B-1. It is easily treated but is extremely painful.
Did Mr. Durbin say that some of the Islamo-fascist prisoners are suffering from beriberi? Actually, the diet enjoyed by the prisoners seems to be healthy. I saw the menu that Rep. Duncan Hunter presented a few days ago. It looks as though the food given the detainees at Guantanamo is wholesome, nutritious and appealing. I would be curious to hear Mr. Durbin explain how orange glazed chicken and rice pilaf can be compared to moldy bread laced with rat droppings.
In May 1969, I was taken out for interrogation on suspicion of planning an escape. I was forced to remain awake for long periods of time -- three weeks on one occasion.
On the first of June, I was put in a cement box with a steel door, which sat out in the tropical summer sun. There, I was put in leg irons which were then wired to a small stool. In this position I could neither sit nor stand comfortably. Within 10 days, every muscle in my body was in pain (here began a shoulder injury which is now inoperable). The heat was almost beyond bearing. My feet had swollen, literally, to the size of footballs. I cannot describe the pain. When they took the leg irons off, they had to actually dig them out of the swollen flesh. It was five days before I could walk, because the weight of the leg irons on my Achilles tendons had paralyzed them and hamstrung me. I stayed in the box from June 1 until Nov. 10, 1969. While in the box, I lost at least 30 pounds. I would be curious to hear Mr. Durbin explain how this compares with having a female invade my private space, and whether a box in which the heat nearly killed me is the same as turning up the air conditioning.
The detainees at Guantanamo receive new Korans and prayer rugs, and the guards are instructed not to disturb the inmates' prayers. Compare this with my experience in February 1971, when I watched as armed men dragged from our cell, successively, four of my cell mates after having led us in the Lord's Prayer. Their prayers were in defiance of a January 1971 regulation in which the Communists forbade any religious observances in our cells. Does Mr. Durbin somehow argue that our behavior is the equivalent of the behavior of the Communists?
Actually, I was one of the lucky ones."
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:43 AM

 
Conservatives running the next campaign on SSM

After reading Brent Colbert's post I decided to add my two cents on this issue over at The Shotgun. Two notable posts and opposite views on this issue can be found by reading Kevin Libin, who says that Conservatives could use SSM to their advantage in the next election, and Bob Tarantino, who has his doubts about that proposition.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:35 AM

 
Steyn interviewed

Right Wing News interviews Mark Steyn. Steyn answers questions on topics as diverse as his thoughts on the National Post, the future of NATO, who he favours for the GOP in '08, what blogs he reads, and post 9/11 foreign policy. I especially found his views on illegal immigration interesting, perhaps because, as the interviewer noted, it is a topic he seldom writes about:
"Both parties have been weak on illegal immigration, even though the 9/11 attackers used the illegal-immigrant support network to facilitate their operation. You can’t even use the word 'illegal' in polite society – ie, Democrats and media. Illegal immigrants are now fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community, the country’s biggest minority.. Anything would be better than the present system, of allowing illegal immigrants to corrupt national databases, live tax-free, change the results of state and local elections, and ultimately undermine the integrity of American citizenship.
The problem starts with the sclerosis of the legal immigration system. Routine and essentially non-discretionary immigration cases – such as a US citizen who marries a foreign spouse - take ages to be processed by the bureaucracy. That's time and resources that could be devoted to the real problems. When the INS mailed Mohammed Atta his visa six months to the day after he died ploughing his plane into the World Trade Center, I wrote that in the sense his paperwork wasn't completed until he was dead he may be a more poignant symbol of US immigration than we realize. The principles aren’t difficult: legal immigration from friendly states should be swift and efficient; US citizenship should be a privilege and hard to acquire; and illegal immigration should be all but impossible, rather than a rational choice for which you will pay no penalty."
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:15 AM

 
Duh!

The Detroit News reports that patients who suffer heart attacks are at increased risk to die suddenly within 30 days -- even people with stronger hearts. Shocking. How could we get on with our lives without the health stories that appear in the daily papers?
(Hat tip to James Taranto)
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:08 AM

 
On why the war must be fought -- and won

Austin Bay has a good column on why it is necessary to see through the liberation of Iraq and fight World War IV (although he doesn't use that term). He concludes:
"Removing Saddam began the reconfiguration of the Middle East, an arduous process that lays the foundation for true states, where the consent of the governed creates legitimacy and where terrorists are prosecuted, not promoted.
A large order? So was World War II, when heavy history fell on The Greatest Generation. It's this generation's turn to accept the challenge or face the hell of destructive consequences."
Can this generation be the next great generation or will we lose our sense of mission, perhaps even our destiny?
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:59 PM

 
Quotidian

"So many young men got their likes and dislikes from Mencken."
-- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:50 PM

 
Good news from the OLO

Geoff Norquay, Stephen Harper's communications director, is calling it quits. Adam Daifallah is happy. Now Harper's only challenge is to find, as Daifallah says, the "pros who can outwit and outspin the Liberals." Right now I'd settle for competent and mildly effective, that being a giant step up from what Norquay et al have provided in the past year.
I have a thought about the idea of hiring a pro. Obviously they need to hire someone who knows the ropes but what about hiring someone who isn't a communications professional. Why not try a smart and talented blogger such as Stephen Taylor? I use Taylor as an example for several reasons. He's articulate, thinks outside of the box (his posts on who contributes to the CBC are incredible), and knows how to effectively use new media. There are now (at least) four job openings in the OLO, why not try something a little innovative?
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:37 PM

 
Unfree Canada

The Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of North America: 2005 Annual Report was released today and they found that Alberta is the only Canadian representative among the top five most economically free province and states in North America. Eight provinces -- all but Alberta and Ontario -- rank in the bottom ten (and Ontario ranks a horrible 47th out of 60). This should be a serious concern not only for free marketeers but the citizens of those provinces because as study co-author Fred McMahon says, there is a correlation between economic freedom on the one hand and prosperity and growth on the other: "Economic freedom is a powerful driver of growth and prosperity and those provinces and states that have low levels of economic freedom continue to leave their citizens poorer than they need or should be." In short, Canada's over-regulated economy is not only making Canadians uncompetitive but poorer. For those who don't have the time to look at the full report, a detailed press release is available here.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:26 PM

 
Bush's speech

New York Post columnist John Podhoretz said that President George W. Bush specifically addressed many of his critic's complaints about the continued US presence in Iraq, but more importantly the speech marked a new day in Bush's second term:
"Last night's speech marked the conclusion of the Social Security period of the Bush presidency, and a return to the war presidency.
Which is as it should be.
With 130,000 men at arms in Iraq, fighting for a cause that is belittled and misrepresented here at home by a full-throated political and ideological opposition, the troops need their commander in chief to keep making the argument that their efforts are vital. And the 290 million Americans here at home need to know that the president is as dedicated to winning the war as those who are fighting it."
Over in The Corner, Mark R. Levin makes a good point about some of Bush's critics:
"How soon some of our liberal friends forget. Among others, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer, Chris Dodd, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Jay Rockefeller voted for the October 11, 2002 congressional joint resolution authorizing the president, on his discretion, to go to war. Here, in part, is what the resolution said:
'Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq:
Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terroist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens;
Whereas the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations ...'
And not a single news person bothered to ask any critics of the president's speech last night how they can square their offense at the president's linking terrorism to the war against Iraq when they did the same exact thing."
The Guardian's coverage is typical of the left-liberal criticism (on both sides of the big lake) that Bush erroneously invoked 9/11 -- "In his prime-time speech at Fort Bragg military base, the president mentioned September 11 five times in 30 minutes as he argued that withdrawal from Iraq would leave the US open to more terrorist attacks," the paper sniffed. They approvingly quote Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi who claimed Bush tried to "exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq." The left continues to ignore evidence that is inconvenient to their criticism of the liberation of Iraq.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:05 PM

 
British Tory interview gleaned for advice for Canada's Conservatives

British Tory MP and likely leadership candidate David Cameron in his interview with the Daily Telegraph says two things that Canada's Conservatives should keep in mind:
"I don't even understand the debate about being a moderniser. It's perfectly obvious to me that if you don't reflect and love the country you're trying to lead, then you can't lead it."
And:
"People aren't the remotest bit interested in the future of the Conservative Party, they're interested in the future of the country and if we have interesting things to say about that then they'll look at us."
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:23 AM

 
Socially liberal British Tory wants tax fairness for families

Despite my headline I don't see the irony in David Cameron's call for taxes to support married couples as not to encourage the breakup of the family in the same way that London Telegraph seems to. (The paper's interview with Cameron is here.) I may find it odd that a socially liberal Conservative MP wants to support families but I think that many Tory MPs are motivated as much by a desire to see taxes reduced as they are by any semblance of social conservatism. What I find more troubling is that a conservative of any stripe would support lower taxes for married couples because individuals and the government have a shared responsibility to make families work. I think reducing taxes for opposite-sex married couples with children (Cameron uses families and explicitly states that families come in all shapes and sizes and thus could include homosexual couples and their children) is a good idea. I think that such families are the foundations of society and deserve support. But it is big leap from one institution (the state) supporting another (the family) to suggesting that the two are partners.
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:05 AM

 
Rosett on UN reform

Again this week Claudia Rosett is doing what she does best -- skewering the UN and its Secretary General Kofi Annan. She begins her Wall Street Journal column thusly:
"The threat of the U.S. withholding cash from the United Nations has sent Kofi Annan into overdrive recently, with the secretary-general putting his name to yet another round of articles proclaiming such stuff as a fresh start and much progress and grand plans for reforming the U.N.--which he is particularly practiced at, having done it twice already, in 1997 and 2002.
This is a moment at which there is much to be learned about the U.N., though less from Mr. Annan's epistles than from the realities that have engendered them."
Rosett then skips over a series of peripheral but still substantial issues including the fact that Annan's articles attacking the US position are written by his pricey staff which is subsidized by the ... you guessed it, the US or that Annan recently took credit for the progress in Iraq despite the fact that he opposed its liberation and the very act that led to the nation's progress, namely the removal of Saddam Hussein as its president. Rosett even suggests that we take seriously his calls for reform even though it is his "signature relief deal," the Oil for Food scandal that is the immediate cause of the UN's troubles and Annan's declining credibility. ("Oil for Food fortified Saddam, helped corrupt the U.N. Security Council, and has since provided such diversions as the evolving tale of how the U.N. Office of the Iraq Program happened to hire a company that for more than five years paid the secretary-general's own son for not working in West Africa.")
Rosett says the real problem is money, which at least at the UN is the root of its problems:
"On the 38th floor of today's U.N., whence top management holds forth, there is one thing that matters more than anything else. It is not grand diplomacy. It is not world peace. It is not global prosperity. And it is certainly not transparency or any big push for democracy. It is money.
That might at first sound odd for an institution that to a great extent still works on what was once known in the last century as the Marxist principle of reallocating resources from each according to his ability, to each according to his need--starting with U.N. dues, and proceeding posthaste to the needs not of the word's poor and downtrodden, but of the U.N.'s own largely secret and erratically audited multibillion-dollar menu of ever-expanding projects. As we learned at great cost in the last century, the result of allowing secretive and unaccountable authorities to do all sorts of deciding about who deserves what is not utopia."
So it is all the more worrying that Kofi Annan's UN reforms include the requirement that the developed world contribute 0.7% of its GDP to "official development assistance." The UN, presumably, would allocate these riches -- $82 billion from the US alone, Rosett calculates -- but considering the agency's skimming of the Oil for Food aid program, there are no guarantees that the money will go to the people it is intended to help. That would be scandalous.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:47 AM

 
Safire's back at the Times

Alas, for one column only but, as one would expect from William Safire, its a good one. He writes about the case of outing a CIA agent (by Robert Novak) and the prosecutorial over-reach in harassing Safire's former New York Times colleague Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper. Safire looks at the prosecution's failure to prosecute for real crimes and thus his intention to go after names. Safire says it is time to move forward and explains how:
"To every privilege there are exceptions; a lawyer, for example, cannot conspire with his client in committing a crime, and a reporter's testimony may be necessary in a capital case. But this investigation has shown no national security crime at all, as defined in the identities act. Maybe an official misled an agent, or even perjured himself to save his job; is that sufficient cause to incarcerate innocent journalists and impede the entire press's traditional means of exposing official corruption?
Here's what needs to be done now:
1. The judge should resist the prosecutor's pressure for coercive, lengthy and possibly dangerous confinement. Judy won't crack and should not be made to suffer.
2. The prosecutor should submit an information bewailing his witness difficulties in fingering sources in false denial, but showing why no major national-security crime had been committed.
3. Mr. Novak should finally write the column he owes readers and colleagues perhaps explaining how his two sources - who may have truthfully revealed themselves to investigators - managed to get the prosecutor off his back.
4. The Congress should urgently hold hearings on shield bills to conform federal practice to the states' laws based on Congress's 1975 directive to the Supreme Court to apply 'reason and experience' to extending privilege - which the court did in its 1996 Jaffee decision to psychotherapists."
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:41 AM

 
Courageous MPs

All but three Conservative MPs voted to defeat C-38, the government's legislation legalizing homogamy. They were joined by two independents (Pat O’Brien and David Kilgour), 38 MPs who bucked their party's wishes on this legislation:

Liberal No Votes (32)
Bonin, Ray
Boshcoff, Ken
Cannis, John
Carr, Gary
Chamberlain, Brenda
Commuzzi, Joe
Cuzner, Rodger
Galloway, Roger
Hubbard, Charles
Karygiannis, Jim
Khan, Wajid
Lee, Derek
Lastewka, Walt
Longfield
Malhi, Gurbax
Maloney, John
Matthews, Bill
McCallum, John
McKay, John
McTeague, Dan
Pachetti, Massimo
Savoy, Andy
Scarpaleggia, Francis
Simard, Ray
Simms, Scott
Steckle, Paul
Szabo, Paul
Tonks, Alan
Ur, Rosemary
Wappel, Tom
Wilfert, Bryon
Zed, Paul

Bloc No Votes (5)
Bouchard, Robert
Cardin, Serge
Gaudet, Roger
Perron, Gilles
Thibault, Louis

NDP No Votes (1)
Desjarlais, Bev NDP
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:25 AM

 
Shelby Foote, RIP

Shelby Foote was an excellent historian of the civil war. His three part The Civil War: A Narrative, remains the best, most readable book on a topic that has more than its share of books. The trilogy may have been more readable because 1) Foote was also a novelist and therefore could write compelling stories and 2) as the New York Times noted, "Though a native Southerner, Foote did not favor [the]South in his history or novels and was not counted among those Southern historians who regard the Civil War as the great Lost Cause." He was one of the few historians who truly understood the south but was still critical of the Confederacy. There was a renewed interest in Foote's work in 1990 after he appeared in Ken Burns' PBS documentary The Civil War and his correspondence with novelist Walker Percy is possibly the best book of letters I've ever read. Foote passed away Monday at the age of 88. An obit can be read at the New York Times, news coverage of his passing at Reuters, and an appreciation at the Washington Post.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:03 AM

 
Stockwell Day on why C-38 passed

Yesterday, Conservative MP Stockwell Day (Okanagan—Coquihalla) said this about the same-sex marriage debate:
"This travesty has come upon us because of the pompous and alarming dictates of the Prime Minister and the leader of the NDP who have robbed this chamber of its most vital integrity by not allowing MPs to vote freely according to their own hearts and the hearts of their constituents.
What is the pretense for this action that is pure tyranny on the part of these leaders? It is the view of the leaders that this is a matter of rights and, therefore, no other position is of value. That is the debate, whether this is a sacrosanct right or not.
Do we have to remind ourselves that almost every question we debate here touches on rights of some kind. What right in this chamber is paramount? The right to represent those who send us here. The Prime Minister and the leader of the NDP are violating that most precious right.
What is really disturbing is that if the bill passes, as it appears it might, it will pass even though a majority of the MPs, if they were allowed to vote freely, would not be supporting it."
A majority of Parliament, like a majority of Canadians, oppose redefining marriage but, assuming the Senate also approves the bill, Canada will have same-sex marriage because too many parliamentarrians, like too many Canadians, were sheep following the advisory decision of the Supreme Court of Canada.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:21 PM

 
It is time to take freedom in Iran seriously

Michael Gove has an excellent column in the London Times on the fraudulent Iranian elections and what the West should do next. Here's the conclusion:
"The Iranian regime’s clear belief that the West is weak suggests that it is preparing to press ahead with its ambitions to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, a goal that may be just months away. If the West is not to confirm a potentially fatal reputation for infirmity, we need to strike back, using the strongest allies we have in the region: the Iranian people themselves.
We need to provide hope to the millions who boycotted elections they knew would be frauds, run by crooks, to favour fascists. Western leaders should be asking Iran’s new President what he will do to free his country’s dissidents, like the heroic journalist Akbar Ganji who has suffered horrendously for daring to expose the corruption and criminality of Iran’s elites. Why isn’t our Foreign Secretary standing up for him, and his colleagues, as western politicians once stood up for Sakharov and Solzenhitsyn?
The longer our leaders remain silent in the battle for democracy in Iran, the more likely we are to see a far more ominous conflict escalate — between Iran and the democracies."
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:13 PM

 
Quotidian

"Everyone is striving for what is not worth the having."
-- William Thackery, Vanity Fair
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:02 PM

 
'Don't be afraid. Don't be of little faith. I am with you.'

LifeSiteNews.com notes the coincidence that Bill C-38, the government's legislation legalizing homogamy, passed third reading on the same day that the readings in the Catholic Mass, scheduled years in advance, were about 1) Sodom and Gomorrah, cities punished for their immorality, notably homosexual sins, and 2) Christ's assurance that his disciples would endure the storm. LSN interviewed Toronto auxillary Bishop Pearce Lacey who reminded the faithful that they must not lose hope. Bishop Lacey said, "As in today's Gospel, the Lord is simply saying 'Don't be afraid. Don't be of little faith. I am with you'."
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:43 PM

 
Poilievre on Liberal hypocrites

Yesterday, Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre (Nepean-Carleton) had this to say about Liberals who "oppose" SSM but continue to prop up their government:
"We have on the other side of the floor a group of hypocrites, hypocrites who sit there right now and claim that they oppose this legislation. They claim that they want to protect the traditional definition of marriage. They do that because they know that the majority of Canadians in all polls that have come out on the matter support the traditional definition of marriage in all parts of the country. These members stand up in the House of Commons and claim that they are on side with the majority. Last week, when they could have put an end to it, they signed a written deal with the Bloc Québécois, the separatists, to see that go ahead, to see those votes occur, and to ensure that gay marriage will be on the agenda this week and will be passed into law.
I suggest that those 30-plus members who sit in the Liberal caucus and claim to support the majority view, which defends the traditional definition of marriage, but who last week voted with their government and with the separatists and the socialists are the real hypocrites in this debate."
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:46 PM

 
Questions re: SSM

Yesterday (June 27), Conservative MP Ken Epp (Edmonton—Sherwood Park) posed 43 questions about same-sex marriage and elements of the debate surrounding the issue.

Instead of restating the positions which I have already articulated in my previous speeches on this topic, I am going to ask a series of questions which I challenge others to answer honestly, to put aside prejudgments on these questions and to try desperately to think of these things on a deep level.

Here are the questions. They are not in any particular order. I just wrote them down as they came to mind.

Question 1: Am I ready to undo the traditions and teachings which have directed societies and nations over many millennia?

Question 2: Am I ready to contribute to a weakening of the family unit as it has come to be understood and sought after by generations of people in history?

Question 3: If I have a belief in God as taught by my religion, am I ready to go 180 degrees against the teaching of my religion?

Question 4: If I have no professed religious belief, am I ready to undo thousands of years of tradition and history?

Question 5: Why is it necessary to so profoundly offend the millions of Canadians who, from either a religious or non-religious basis, do not want to have the definition of marriage redefined?

Question 6: Have I read and studied with an open mind the hundreds of studies which show that children raised in families with their biological mother and father do best in all defined measurable categories?

Question 7: Do I really believe that it is in Canada's best interest to promote the increase of families which do not have a mother and father present for the development of the children?

Question 8: Am I ready to say to children brought into these homosexual unions that they may never know their biological roots, being denied forever the knowledge of either their biological father or mother?

Question 9: Am I ready to say to every person so raised that they do not have the right to determine their genetic heritage?

Question 10: Have I asked myself why in this debate the only questions of equality are for the equality of homosexuals, instead of the broader question of equality for all relationships, including non-sexual relationships?

Question 11: What are the actual benefits to society to have the traditional definition of marriage nullified?

Question 12: What benefit is there to the children involved in society as a whole if we transmit the message that fathers do not matter, or mothers do not matter?

Question 13: Is it really true that there are no consequences to a child being raised in a home where only one gender is represented in the parentage?

Question 14: Will this redefinition assist or hinder young people in gender identity issues?

Question 15: How will children in these relationships have any hope whatsoever of learning the roles of males and females when they are not being modelled for them?

Question 16: Why did members of the Liberal Party do a 180 degree reversal of their position of supporting the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of others, as demonstrated in their 1999 speeches and vote?

Question 17: Were the Liberals right then and wrong now, or were they wrong then and right now?

Question 18: Why would the Deputy Prime Minister, then minister of justice, speak so eloquently that the equality issues can be addressed without redefining marriage if she did not believe it?

Question 19: Is there some concern about the hidden agenda in the Liberal Party when it promised right before an election, “It is not the intention of this government to change the definition of marriage,” and then after the election do the precise opposite?

Question 20: Why will the Prime Minister not permit a free vote on this important issue for all members in his party, including cabinet ministers and parliamentary secretaries?

Question 21: Is it not important to hear the thousands of Canadians for whom this is a very important issue and to seek a compromise solution that avoids offending deeply so many good citizens of our country?

Question 22: Is it not a bit of a hollow promise on religious freedom if in the very vote on the issue Liberal members are not permitted to exercise their religious freedom and conviction?

Question 23: If their position on this bill is so right, then why can they not trust their members to vote correctly, without coercion?

Question 24: If this is truly a human rights issue and there are apparently some 30 or more members in cabinet or in parliamentary secretary positions in the government, why are these intolerant members permitted to continue in their positions?

Question 25: Why is the government giving false assurance of religious freedom when we already have a number of cases in which people with religious faith or leaders in religious organizations are being hauled before various tribunals and in some cases are being punished?

Question 26: Is there not a concern regarding the loss of individual religious freedom when this bill addresses only the apparent freedoms of religious organizations? I emphasize the words “individual religious freedom”.

Question 27: Is there not a concern with the fact that the Supreme Court, in its reference, ruled that religious freedom in the sense anticipated by the bill is not within the federal jurisdiction to grant?

Question 28: What about the marriage commissioners in British Columbia and Saskatchewan who have been given notice to solemnize same sex marriages or lose their credentials? What about their religious freedom?

Question 29: What about individuals like the teacher in B.C. who was suspended from his position solely on the charge of expressing his personal opinions in letters he wrote to newspapers?

Question 30: What about the individual in Saskatchewan who lost a case in which he was charged with quoting the scriptures?

Question 31: What about the Catholic school board that was forced to go against the teachings and beliefs of the church at a recent graduation ceremony?

Question 32: What about the mayor of a major Ontario city who was fined for not promoting a teaching that was against her religious beliefs?

Question 33: What about the religion based camp in Manitoba that was charged because it refused to go against the convictions and beliefs of its supporting members?

Question 34: Is it a concern that the democratic process is being trashed?

Question 35: Why are the million or so names on petitions presented in this House being ignored?

Question 36: Why are members of Parliament being bullied into voting opposite to the wishes of their constituents?

Question 37: Why was the justice committee of the last Parliament shut down before being permitted to report and the present special committee totally stacked with individuals on one side of the debate, having its work truncated in order to ram this legislation through?

Question 38: Why is this issue so urgent that it justifies an extended session of Parliament into the summer?

Question 39: Is part of the tactic to push it through quickly, using the excuse that members must get back to their commitments in their ridings and other parts of the country?

Question 40: Why is it so important to stifle the opposition to this bill?

Question 41: How come, in 1999 and previous votes, the traditional definition of marriage was clearly upheld and now, just a few years later, it is under attack?

Question 42: Why is the Prime Minister so determined to jam this bill through quickly? It is because he hopes the voters will forget by the time of the next election?

Question 43: If this approach in social policy is so defensible, why is there such fear that the voters of the country will react negatively against the Liberal government?

These are important questions and they demand honest answers. I fear that many members have been bullied or deceived into supporting this legislation. In my view, this legislation is wrong. We should do the country and its citizens a huge favour by defeating it and getting the solution to these problems right.
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:40 PM

 
Liberals beholden to special interests

Conservative MP Mark Warawa (Langley) asked the government last week (June 23) if they had made a deal with any special interest groups to hastily pass C-38.
"Mr. Speaker, the government has admitted now that Bill C-38 is its single issue. This is a single issue government. It wants to socially engineer Canada to bring it farther left than any other country in the world. We heard that in committee. I sat on that committee and it was a sham. The committee was structured in a way that Canadians would not have an opportunity to give input. The number of witnesses who could appear was limited. The committee was stacked with only members who supported the government and they brought closure on that by manipulation. We heard from witnesses that religious freedoms in Canada would not be protected. We had amendments from all parties that the government refused. It called them out of order.
Will the government House leader not admit that there were special promises made to special interest groups? The government funded these special interest groups to come and support same sex marriage. What promises were made to these special interest groups?"
I, for one, don't believe a special promise was made or that there were any deals. I just think that the Liberals are beholden to the gay lobby -- or is it that the gay lobby is beholden to the Liberals -- and thus their interests are one and the same.
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:12 AM

 
Nordlinger on Kofi

In his Impromptus column yesterday -- worth reading for the longish observations and recognitions of Cuban freedom fighters in the first third of the column -- Jay Nordlinger has this to say about UN Secretary General Kofi Annan:
"You know, when it suits him, Kofi Annan says he's just a humble secretary-general, servant of all the member-states of the United Nations. He is their mere employee, their instrument. Yet, when it suits him, he's "President of the World," and certainly president of the U.N., arguing with the United States about what its U.N. policy should be.
Isn't U.S. policy toward the U.N. a matter for the United States, and not for the U.N. secretary-general?"
Anyway, the Wall Street Journal column in which Kofi Annan lectures America about its relationship with the UN, the one that led Nordlinger to complain about Annan's self-aggrandizing posturing, can be found here.
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:06 AM

 
Saudi oil reserves

The American Enterprise Institute's William Tucker says there is reason to doubt that Saudi Arabia's oil will flow as easily in the future as it has the last half-century. In his review of Twilight in the Desert by Matthew R. Simmons in the Wall Street Journal, Tucker says:
"First, Mr. Simmons notes, all Saudi claims exist behind a veil of secrecy. In 1982, the Saudi government took complete control of Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Co.) after four decades of co-ownership with a consortium of major oil companies. Since then Aramco has never released field-by-field figures for its oil production. In fact, no OPEC member is very forthcoming. The cartel sets production quotas according to a country's reserves, so each member has reason to exaggerate. Meanwhile, OPEC nations are constantly cheating one another by overproducing, so none wants to publish official statistics."
That is, there is an incentive to lie about the reserves. And there are facts and not just suspicions of Saudi Arabia to justify doubt about their capacity and thus future importance:
"Almost 90% of Saudi production comes from six giant fields, all of them discovered before 1967. The "king" of this grouping--the 2000-square-mile Ghawar field near the Persian Gulf--is the largest oil field in the world. But if Saudi geology follows the pattern found elsewhere, it is unlikely that any new fields lie nearby. Indeed, Aramco has prospected extensively outside the Ghawar region but found nothing of significance. In particular, the Arab D stratum--the source rock of the Ghawar field--has long since eroded in other parts of the Arabian Peninsula. The six major fields, having all produced at or near capacity for almost 40 years, are showing signs of age. All require extensive water injection to maintain their current flow."
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:59 AM

 
Good news from Iraq

Arthur Chrenkoff has two weeks' worth of good news and here's my favourite (from the Los Angeles Times):
"Since President Saddam Hussein was ousted two years ago, the number of nuptials in Iraq has soared, say party planners, judges and clergy members.
Although there are no reliable countrywide statistics, those in the business estimate that the number of 'I do's' has doubled since the uneasy months before and after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Some say a better living standard is driving Iraqis to the altar. Others speculate that many weddings were postponed because of the war, and couples are catching up. And there are those with a more existential bent, who see wedding celebrations as a retort to death itself."
Certainly an increase in marriages is a vote of confidence in the future of the nation. And if it is merely an increase in celebrations of marriages rather than marriages itself, at least Iraqis feel like celebrating.
There are dozens and dozens of positive stories that the MSM is either ignoring or failing to highlight in the same way that terrorist killings of American soldiers or Iraqis lining up to apply for jobs make the front pages. But other good news include the capture of terrorist insurgents, greater transparency in post-secondary education, the holding of conferences for business women, using the internet to express political opinions and much, much more.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:46 AM

 
Monday morning quarterbacking

Senator Jean Kerry (People's Republic of Mass.) not-so-humbly offers some advice in the New York Times to President George W. Bush for his speech tonight:
"Our mission in Iraq is harder because the administration ignored the advice of others, went in largely alone, underestimated the likelihood and power of the insurgency, sent in too few troops to secure the country, destroyed the Iraqi army through de-Baathification, failed to secure ammunition dumps, refused to recognize the urgency of training Iraqi security forces and did no postwar planning. A little humility would go a long way - coupled with a strategy to succeed."
Now, a little humility from the man who lost last November's election would go a long way to restoring some credibility to the Democratic criticism of the president -- it is way to partisan. But Kerry hasn't said anything that The Economist hasn't said ten times in the past six months (including the past two weeks -- see, for example, this piece from the June 16th edition). Earlier in the column, Kerry suggests that Bush start to "tell the truth" because all the "happy talk" about Iraq is creating a gap between expectations and perception that is weakening support for the democratic project in Iraq among Americans. Of course, if Democrats told the truth, the whole truth including the good news from Iraq instead of focusing on the negative stuff to score points against the president, support for continuing effort to keep Iraq free would not be as fragile as it is.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:32 AM

 
LDCs support 0.5 version of free trade

The Financial Times reports that the 50 least-developed countries meeting in Zambia this weekend to strategize ahead of this December's WTO meeting in Hong Kong are said to be seeking a "binding commitment on duty-free and quota-free market access for all products from LDCs to be granted and implemented immediately" from the developed world and that such programs should be undertaken without any demand that the developing world reduce their own tariffs and trade barriers. The EU has already uniliterally reduced some trade restrictions for the world's poorest nations although powerful lobbies, usually in the agricultural sector have prevented this program from going into full effect.
Now I favour almost any reduction in trade restrictions, including unilateral reductions. One of the bright spots in any of Jean Chretien's cabinets was his first trade minister, Roy Maclaren, who favoured such an approach when necessary. But asking for unilateral concessions from others and not offering it yourself is opportunistic and unprincipled. At least Maclaren was suggesting that Canada reduce its own tariffs when other nations were not open to full free trade (even though he never actually pursued such a policy). All that said, opening western markets to tariff-free African and South American goods would benefit our consumers but it would be a politically difficult sell because most people think that economies exist to create jobs, not serve consumers. But such thinking is a mistake and politicians shouldn't pander to ignorance. Unilateral dismantling of trade restrictions advances the goal of offering domestic consumers a better market -- wider choice at the best possible price. It is just too bad that LDCs are asking for it because it would be the right thing for the West to do; better yet would be for the developing world to open their markets, too.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:09 AM

 
If musicians wanted to help instead of doing PR

The London Times reports on the extraordinary wealth of the artists performing int he Live 8 concerts: "If they can’t make poverty history by singing, they could sign a cheque. The final line-up for the Hyde Park Live 8 concert will put £2 billion worth of musical talent on stage." U2 and Paul McCartney alone are worth half that. But perhaps Bono has better things to spend his money on such as the $1,500 price tag of flying his favourite hat from London to a charity concert in Rome last month.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:48 PM

 
No to Gonzales

AT NRO Ramesh Ponnuru says that President George W. Bush would be making a horrible decision if he appointed Attorney General and former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to the Supreme Court in essence because Gonzalez would only be half a justice. Noting that the law prevents justices of federal courts, including the Supreme Court, from participating in any case in which he (or she) "has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, advisor or material witness concerning the proceeding or expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case in controversy." Ponnuru said that Gonzales "would have to recuse himself from cases dealing with a wide range of issues — from the Patriot Act to partial-birth abortion — because of his high-level service in the Bush administration." I know that Bush wants to appoint the SCOTUS's first Hispanic justice but he should look beyond the person who would have to step aside for what are expected to be some of the most important issues the Court will have to deal with in the next few years.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:36 PM

 
Quotidian

"And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood."
-- Philip Larkin, "Aubade"
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:31 PM

 
ID cards in England

The House vote is tomorrow. The Guardian has an interesting report on the politics of national identification cards -- the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will oppose the bill which Prime Minister Tony Blair says is merely enabling legislation. Blair wants the legislation to pass because ID cards are an "idea whose time has come," and, anyway, all the problems with the ID cards can be worked out eventually and maintains that the total cost of implementing them will be only 6 billion pounds although critics say the cost could be 10 billion. Meanwhile there is a report from a panel of 14 professors from the London School of Economics outlining the problems with the Labour government's legislation as it is. The Guardian summarizes the ten points of concern:
"It highlights 10 areas of concern: cost, renewing the biometric testing, replacing ID cards, enrolling difficulties, difficulties with card reader machines, non-cooperation from the public, civil liberty, privacy and legal implications, problems for disabled users, security concerns and the creation of a new offence of identity theft."
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:08 PM

 
Goldstein's figuring out Martin quiz

Toronto Sun columnist Laurie Goldstein has a very funny column in which he illustrates the capitulations and fuzzy thinking of Prime Minister Paul Martin through a series of quizzes. Here's a sample:

1) When Paul Martin said in response to a recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling, "We're not going to have a two tier-health care system in this country" did he mean that:

(a) We're not going to have a two-tier health care system?

(b) We're not going to have a two-tier health care system, other than the one the Supreme Court says we already have?

(c) We're not going to have a two-tier health care system, other than the one I helped to create as finance minister by gutting transfer payments to the provinces for health care in the 1990s?

(d) We're not going to have a two-tier health care system, other than the one we Liberals helped to create by ignoring the proliferation of private clinics across Canada, including those run by my family doctor?

Sorry, no prize for answering correctly.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:19 PM

 
LAT on PBS

The Los Angeles Times is liberal, its reporting too artisanly so, but its editorials are usually fair and often demonstrate serious thought. That's what makes this editorial on PBS so disappointing. It rightly notes that Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson has gone out of his way to find liberal bias in PBS programming, but the editorial never acknowledges that he might have a legitimate concern that deserves further query. Instead the editorial tries to score political points against the GOP. What, do they think they are the New York Times?
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:07 PM

 
Quotidian

"Where were the crowds? Had they come to the wrong place? There seemed to be a handful of black people and about twenty white students, just standing about. A huge banner said GAY FIST. Gay Fist? He had dreaded the thought of the noise and the commotion, but now he was worried about the silence."
-- Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:59 PM

 
1+1=PC

Diane Ravitch has an excellent article on the politicizing of the teaching of mathematics in Opinion Journal. Here's what the education blob is doing to what would seem like the one discipline immune to political corruption:
"They advocate using mathematics as a tool to advance social justice. Social justice math relies on political and cultural relevance to guide math instruction. One of its precepts is "ethnomathematics," that is, the belief that different cultures have evolved different ways of using mathematics, and that students will learn best if taught in the ways that relate to their ancestral culture. From this perspective, traditional mathematics--the mathematics taught in universities around the world--is the property of Western civilization and is inexorably linked with the values of the oppressors and conquerors. The culturally attuned teacher will learn about the counting system of the ancient Mayans, ancient Africans, Papua New Guineans and other 'nonmainstream' cultures."
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:29 PM

 
This is just stupid

Noor Huda Ismail writes in the Washington Post about Abubakar Baasyir, a Muslim preacher that teaches a class on Islam four times a week attended by about 100 prisoners of Indonesia's Cipinang Prison. What is odd is that Baasyir himself is a prisoner, accused of being involved in "planning and/or encouraging other people to commit terrorism" including the 2002 Bali bombing (202 killed) and the 2003 bombing of the J. W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta (12 killed). He was cleared of any involvement in the Jakarta bombing but was found guilty of approving the Bali terrorist attack. Ismail's interest in this case stems from the fact Baasyir founded the Al Mukmin Ngruki board school -- the alma mater of "dozens" who graduated to terrorism. Ismail wonders why so many of his fellow alumni are linked to Jemaah Islamiyah (the column is a rather middling exploration), but for the question is why does a man convicted in association with one terrorist attack and linked to so many terrorists, get to preach and teach behind prison walls.
posted by Paul Tuns at 5:02 PM

 
Save the lake, eat a gull

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that sea gulls are the primary cause of E coli contamination in Lake Michigan and thus Chicago area beach closings. The paper reports that: "The birds weren't always a problem for Chicago area bathers. Their ranks were low in the early 1900s, thanks to our appetite for gull eggs and a penchant for plumage in women's hats. Now that we don't eat them or wear them, their numbers are up." That is not to say that human waste is not contributing to the contiminated water, just that fecal matter from gulls is the number one cause of E coli. But even then, it appears, humans must share the blame because their beach behaviour is attracting the poop hawks. The Sun-Times quotes Cameron Davis, director of the Alliance for the Great Lakes: "We found that 42 percent of what our volunteers are picking up from Chicago area beaches is either food or food packaging ... No wonder animals are heading to the beach. It's a smorgasbord."
posted by Paul Tuns at 4:43 PM

 
Dumping on Rumsfeld

New Republic editor Peter Beinart, a supporter of the liberation of Iraq, writes in his monthly Washington Post column that President George W. Bush should fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, asking "How can Bush offer a credible strategy for winning peace if he relies on an utterly discredited defense secretary to carry it out?" Beinart is right to criticize Rumsfeld for not using more troops initially but canning Rumsfeld would not be viewed as an admission of mistaken strategy by the critics of the liberation of Iraq and the War on Terror but as an admission that the whole project was a mistake. The administration cannot afford to do that because it would embolden domestic critics of the war and give the terrorist insurgents a moral victory. To answer Beinart's question -- "How can Bush offer a credible strategy for winning peace if he relies on an utterly discredited defense secretary to carry it out?" -- all the president needs to do it rely less on Rumsfeld. Rummy provides a much needed voice around the war room table but he cannot be, and I would guess is not the only voice the president listens to.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:34 AM

 
Felt's superior thinks he was motivated by revenge

F. Patrick Grey, the man appointed by Richard Nixon to become the FBI director,
thinks that the most famous source in history squealed on the president because he was upet at being overlooked for the top job and to get back at Grey.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:27 AM

 
My interview with Robert Cooper

In May I interviewed Robert Cooper, former foreign policy adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and currently director-general of external and politico-military affairs for the Council of the European Union, while he was in Toronto to deliver a Donner Foundation lecture and promote his book The Breaking of Nations. The story appears in today's Halifax Herald and is reproduced below.

Rethink use of force to solve world problems - ex-policy adviser
Countries urged to rely on regional or international organizations instead
By Paul Tuns
June 26, 2005
Halifax Herald

In recent years, there have been numerous books on how the international order is going to play out, the title of which became a catchphrase for an entire system of thought: Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and Donald Kagan's Paradise and Power.

Each of these books has animated the public discourse about either the post-Cold War world or, later, the post 9/11 world. They each began as articles in some journal, developed into a book and ended up becoming a misunderstood cliche about international affairs.

Everybody knows that Huntington wrote about the clash of civilizations but few could tell you what he said about it. Robert Cooper's The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century could soon join the company of such books.

Cooper is a former foreign policy adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and currently director-general of external and politico-military affairs for the Council of the European Union. He was recently in Canada to deliver the Donner Foundation lecture in Toronto and promote the Canadian release of The Breaking of Nations.

Cooper didn't set out to write a book but rather, gathered three previous works. They include a 1993 lecture on the failure of the nation-state that he gave while head of the planning staff in the Foreign Office, after witnessing what had just happened in Bosnia and Somalia. The others are an unsent memo to Blair on how to create peace, and a reply to Robert Kagan's essay on Paradise and Power, which examined the different approaches to international issues by the United States and Europe.

The three parts cohere surprisingly well and Cooper explains that they should: "They come from the same mind."

That mind, of course, is animated by an over-arching idea of the international order.

Asked to explain his thesis in a sentence, Cooper says it is "difficult to summarize," keenly aware of the fates of The End of History and other similar books that came to represent a single idea while the arguments presented in the books themselves have long been forgotten.

Nonetheless, he finds two main themes: that following the First World War, the "European nation-state system" was "demonstrably a complete failure," and, that with the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the late 20th century, the age of empire had ended.

More important than his theses are their foreign policy implications. He suggests there are two major implications: that we must rethink the use of force and that countries must organize themselves in international organizations to address international issues.

He spends most of his time talking about the first implication, considering the second point self-evidently good.

Cooper explains that a people can no longer be governed by force.

"The idea of a conquered people is no longer valid," he says, explaining why empire is no longer possible. So instead of invading another country to control it, which is the traditional role of the military, armies now have two purposes - to defend nations and to defend goals.

In The Case for Democracy, Natan Sharansky has argued that democracy is a necessary precondition of peace. Cooper believes he gets it backwards - that peace is a necessary condition for democracy.

He says that free societies can only take root in regions that have some semblance of stability.

"In an atmosphere of threat," he says, "it is easy for despotic regimes to survive" because they blame external forces for their society's problems.

With this in mind, Cooper says that the West should continue to engage Iran and convince Tehran that it is in neither its nor the region's interest to continue to pursue nuclear weapons. He explains that Iran's pursuit of such weapons could lead its neighbours to do the same, with the result being a nuclearized Middle East.

While Cooper suggested a "series of carrots and sticks" to move Iran to a less belligerent position, he was short on specifics.

Similarly, on the issue of genocide in Sudan, Cooper offers few specific policies. In short, Cooper has broad goals but few policies to get us there.

Asked whether he was a realist or an idealist, Cooper said that he would agree with the neo-conservative argument that the idealist agenda is now also the realist agenda.

He supports American efforts to democratize the Middle East and says that whatever errors have been made the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.

He said that he wished Europe "was more like the United States," citing America's willingness to act.

"When the United States wants to do something, it gets done," he says admiringly.

That said, he emphasized that "one United States was enough."

But while Cooper shares the neo-conservative enthusiasm for spreading democracy, he laments its rejection of international institutions.

"Idealism should be as much about international institutions as democracy."

He said that if neo-conservatives are going to accept the neo-Wilsonian world view, "they should accept the whole package," including former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson's vision of international co-operation through institutions.

Cooper says that only through institutions such as the UN or, more likely, regional institutions modelled on the European Union, will it be necessary to deal with the military and humanitarian challenges of the future.

But that's what you'd expect a senior bureaucrat from the EU to say, wouldn't you?

What you wouldn't expect is his willingness to reinforce the co-operative spirit of the EU with the military force the United States is prepared to employ.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:46 AM

 
Weekend List

Favourite James Bond villians & henchmen

10. Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), GoldenEye
9. Jaws (Richard Kiel), Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me
8. Tee Hee (Julius Harris), Live and Let Die
7. Brad Whittaker (Joe Don Baker), Living Daylights
6. Dr. Kananga/Mr. Big (Yaphet Kotto), Live and Let Die
5. Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi), Thunderball
4. Fransisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee), The Man With the Golden Gun
3. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasence*), You Only Live Twice
2. Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe), Goldfinger
1. Max Zorin (Christopher Walken), View to a Kill

* So much better than either Telly Savalas' Blofeld in Her Majesty's Secret Service or Charles Grey's in Diamonds Are Forever.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:12 PM

 
Will an elected Senate restore balance?

Link Byfield, senator-elect from Alberta, made the case yesterday in his Calgary Sun column for an elected Senate as one way to restore some balance in Ottawa by diluting the power of the PMO. In short, senators who are elected by the people would not be beholden the prime minister and less susceptible to undo influence from the PMO. I'm not entirely convinced because Byfield doesn't address the issue of party discipline and the PMO would still have some influence over elected senators of the same party. Byfield says that elected senators could ask toughter questions of the government than, for example, the Official Opposition, but it is difficult to see how elected senators would have much differently than elected MPs. Furthermore, such senators, less secure in their jobs might have eyes on other patronage appointments. While I think an elected Senate is a good thing, I'm not sure that such a body (alone) would do much to restore balance between the PMO governors and the governed or hold the government to greater account.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:02 PM

 
At the trough

The Economist has a good article on farm subsidies. The OECD countries handed out $279 billion in agricultural subsidies in 2004 alone. The Economist notes:
"There is, though, wide variation between OECD members. Producer support is worth less than 5% of farm receipts in New Zealand and Australia, but amounts to roughly 20% throughout North America, 34% in the European Union, and a whopping 60% in Japan. And while the overall value of support has fallen from 2.3% of GDP in 1986-88 to 1.2% now, the reductions have been uneven (see chart above). Canada and Mexico have made deep cuts in their farm supports, for instance, while Turkey has actually increased its supports."
Nice to see Canada doing the right thing because farm subsidies hurt the poor and distort domestic and global agricultural markets. While there was some decrease in subsidies in the 1990s, progress has stalled in recent years -- a testament to the political power of a small but influential farm lobby.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:55 PM

 
Quotidian

"Lippman cared about social justice, but it was not an emotional issue for him."
--Ronald Steel, Walter Lippman and the American Century
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:50 PM

 
Glacial progress a Rwandan genocide case

AP reported yesterday that the UN has asked France to take legal action agaisnt Callixte Mbarushimana, a Hutu employed by the UN to deliver suppplies and protect UN workers on their stand-by-and-watch "peacekeeping" mission during the genocidal slaughter of 1994. Mbarushimana is suspected in the murder of 33 or 32 people (depending whether you trust the AP or Wikipedia), and that among his alleged victims were the UN workers that he was supposed to protect. Mbarushimana maintains his innocence and in 2004 won compensation from the UN for its dismissal of him three years earlier; the UN says that France, where Mbarushimana now lives, should take legal action because it admits it bungled its own internal review of the case.
Here's some interesting history on the case that demonstrates how the UN works (or doesn't). The UN cannot be held responsible for the fact that Mbarushimana effectively took over the UN Development Program in Rwanda when most of its international workers left the country after the violence in 1994. Nor can it be held responsible for the fact that he "drew up a list of people to be killed, including fellow U.N. employees." But consider this: Mbarushimana was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal based largely on eye-witness testimony from 20 people who say they saw him shoot and kill two people and that he was involved in the deaths of 31 more. The indictments came in 2001 although the UN knew about his involvement in the deaths of Rwandans and UN workers as early as 1995. Yes, justice moves slowly but did the UN have to give Mbarushimana two more assignments -- in Angola in 1996 and Kosovo in 2000?
posted by Paul Tuns at 6:58 PM

 
It's a war, baby

The AP reports the shocking fact that female soldiers are casualties of war in Iraq:
"The lethal ambush of a convoy carrying female U.S. troops in Fallujah underscored the difficulties of keeping women away from the front lines in a war where such boundaries are far from clear-cut.
The suicide car bomb and ensuing small-arms fire killed at least two Marines and four others were missing and presumed dead. At least one woman was killed and 11 of 13 wounded were female."
If you are going to fight a war where 11,000 of the 138,000 troops are women, such casualties are to be expected. According to the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation -- that's the saddest organization I've ever heard of -- the attack this week was the largest involving female servicemen since 1945 when six nurses were killed when a kamikazee slammed into the USS Comfort.
posted by Paul Tuns at 8:29 AM

 
Time for the UN to note that it might, someday, have to say something about Zimbabwe

This is quite extraordinary -- the Financial Times reports:
"Anna Tibaijuka, head of UN-Habitat, is expected to meet Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president, tomorrow or Monday, to discuss an urban clean-up programme that critics say has left hundreds of thousands destitute, but which the government claims has slashed crime and improved hygiene.
Officials say her findings, backed by a team of political and humanitarian experts, will be crucial as Kofi Annan, UN secretary- general, decides whether to take a more proactive stance, or revert to its more traditional pattern of quiet long-term diplomacy."
Reverting to its more traditional pattern of quiet long-term diplomacy is a nice way of saying "silence" or "ineffectiveness." It is amazing that the UN had stood by and said nothing about Mugabe's "urban clean-up programme" that has left an estimated 200,000 homeless and 20,000 jailed. One could imagine how resolutions "strongly" condemning the country's actions in such a situation if instead of Mugabe it was Ariel Sharon doing the bull-dozing.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:54 PM

 
Quotidian

"But she slept lightly and impatiently, as someone for whom the next day there is something extraordinary in store."
-- Robert Musil, "The Temptation of Quiet Veronica."
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:39 PM

 
Huh?

The Financial Times reports on Seymour Hersh's presentation at the Brighton Festival:
"Someone raises their hand to wonder whether Hersh thinks Bush is a zealot or a pragmatist. For Hersh the answer is easy. He finds himself almost nostalgic for the days of Henry Kissinger, and American foreign policy as realpolitik. If Kissinger had gone to war, he says, everyone would have assumed that it was a deal tied into oil futures. Bush says what he believes - whereas Kissinger, Hersh spits, 'lies like other people breathe'."
Let's get this straight: Hersh would prefer foreign policy decisions in the Middle East being made by a schemer, dealer and liar? Interesting admission (recognizing that the paragraph is the Times' characterization of what Hersh said).
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:32 PM

 
From the continuing story of Anglican correctness

The Guardian reports that, "Anglicans yesterday voted to urge their member churches to consider disinvesting from companies involved in Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands." Actually, I am surprised that they are just getting around to this, although they have been busy having a civil debate over blessing same-sex marriages in recent years.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:25 PM

 
This is neat

The New York Times has a pretty decent meet-the-editorial-board page with short bios and photos. Get to know the Leftist clique that writes the drivel that appears on the editorial page of the paper of record.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:43 AM

 
Back to the future?

Simon Heffer writes in The Spectator (free registration required) that the best leader for the British Tories would be the former leader William Hague. I agree that Hague has all the right attributes: smart, Thatcherite, charming and charismatic, articulate, etc..., but I think it generally a bad idea to go looking into the past for leaders. Policy, perhaps; principles, of course; but not leaders. And, anyway, he has already ruled it out for a number of reasons, none better than Mrs. Hague doesn't want him to.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:36 AM

 
Blix on Iran

The AP reports that former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix says that Iran is years away from acquiring nuclear bomb capabilities. Ah, that makes me feel better. Blix says, "I believe there is plenty of room for negotiations." A reminder to the UN and other avoid-war-at-all-costs types: the threat that the West will act militarily is the only way to get rogue nations to the negotiations table in the first place. And here's a question for Blix and pacificists: negotiate for how long? Can Blix be sure on the exact date for acquiring nuclear capabilities because once they have them it is definitely too late to do anything about it. One should view Iran developing nuclear weapons as urgent a problem as Iran having them.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:26 AM

 
CBC's humour-challenged comedian

Burkean Canuck on Rick Mercer:
"That Rick Mercer is a whining socialist with his trotters in the trough, er, on the CBC payroll, doesn't really bother me ... much.
I just wish the guy who is the on-air talent for a show billed as comedy was funny."
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:59 PM

 
Quotidian

"I reached the grave conclusion during the Mass that I am nothing but a pencilled marginal note in the Book of Life. I am not in the main text at all."
-- D'Arcy Osborne, British envoy to the Vatican, quoted in Owen Chadwick's Britain and the Vatican During the Second World War
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:56 PM

 
A moment of sanity in Berkeley

The school board in Berkeley, California voted down a measure to rename Jefferson Elementary School to Sequoia because the third president and author of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. The board considered the change after input from the school community: "In a referendum on the issue several weeks ago, students and staff at the school voted in favor of the name change by a wide margin. Students backed the change by a vote of 161-111. Staff members supported it 11-5. Parents and guardians also endorsed the move, but by a much narrower vote of 67-61." I'm sure that the students had no pressure applied to them by the teachers, nor were they the victims of their teachers' propaganda, especially when the New York Sun reported yesterday that students from kindergarten to Grade Five voted (that's kids as young as five).
In the same referendum that endorsed the name change, the name Sequoia was proposed for the new school name, coming out ahead of Sojourner Truth, Ralph Bunche (a black diplomat, Cesar Chavez, and Florence McDonald (a deceased Berkeley rent-board commissioner). Critics of renaming the school Sequoia point to the fact that the Cherokee nation under Chief Sequoia also owned slaves but proponents of the name claim that it would recognize the tree not the Indian leader. But perhaps the self-righteous citizens of Berkeley might want to focus on the name of their university town: Anglican bishop and philosopher George Berkeley who owned slaves that worked on his Rhode Island plantation.
One might also wonder about the community's priorities and whether or not the issue is honouring a man who owned slaves or just being politically correct. In the 1970s, the school board renamed Lincoln Elementary -- named after the president who emancipated the slaves -- to Malcolm X Elementary.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:26 AM

 
Brooks on the polls re: Iraq

Hit or miss New York Times columnist David Brooks hits a homer with a piece on the polls indicating most Americans want at least some U.S. troops to come home and growing dissatisfaction with President George W. Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. He begins the column:
"There's a reason George Washington didn't take a poll at Valley Forge. There are times in the course of war when the outcome is simply unknowable. Victory is clearly not imminent, yet people haven't really thought through the consequences of defeat. Everybody just wants the miserable present to go away."
Brooks explains:
"It's too soon to accept the defeatism that seems to have gripped so many. If governments surrendered to insurgencies after just a couple of years, then insurgents would win every time. But they don't because insurgencies have weaknesses, exposed over time, especially when they oppose the will of the majority.
It's just wrong to seek withdrawal now, when the outcome of the war is unknowable and when the consequences of defeat are so vast."
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:46 AM

 
Klein's Clinton book

The moment I heard that Ed Klein's book The Truth About Hillary claimed that the former first lady was raped by her husband I knew I would not read the book nor care for the political fallout from it. Remember how Bill Clinton came back from his non-sexual sexual relationship "with that woman"? The Clinton's thrive on beating such allegations (and realities). I think if American conservatives pay much attention to Klein's book they are going to suffer the same fate that Canadian Conservatives suffered after the publicity over the Grewal tapes, namely an enormous backlash. But unlike the Conservatives north of the border, the conservatives south of it will deserve the public's disgust.
I think I am something of a rarity in this view of Klein's book, at least among the conservatives I talk to so I was happy to discover that Peggy Noonan doesn't like the book either. She writes at OpinionJournal.com:
"The real problem with Hillary biographies is that the picture they paint, if it is true, is difficult for a normal person to believe. No one could be that bad. No one who has risen so high in American politics could possibly be that bad. To believe is to go to a dark place.
And the charges seem so at odds--so utterly at odds--with the nice, smiling woman who calls abortion a tragedy and enjoys speaking of how much she prays. This is the problem all Hillary biographers have: It's too grim to believe. To believe that her story as presented by the books so far is true is to believe that she has clung to a premeditated plan for 40 years, that she is ruthless in the pursuit both of her own ambitions and of a deep and intractable leftist political agenda. And that she found her equal in a partner sufficiently hardhearted to stick with the plan, and the secrecy, and the weirdness. It's too over the top. It seems hard to believe, not because it isn't true but because it isn't likely, usual, expected. It isn't the kind of biography we are used to in our leaders. That is her great advantage.
What is needed is a big and serious book by respected reporters who can dig, think and type, and whose sourcing standards are high and unimpeachable. Will that happen? It would be big if it did. This book is not that book."
Put aside that last paragraph (although it is a serious problem for the Klein book): why demonize Clinton in such a personal way -- in the same way the Left in general and the Clintons in particular demonize their political opponents? Such claims will have no electoral traction unless there is a smoking gun and Klein's sources certainly don't qualify. I agree with the New York Sun editorial (subscribers only) which exhorted Hillary critics to challenge the senator from New York on her policies; it is on those that 2008 will be won or lost.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:29 AM

 
Regulating gas prices

Bob Howse has a good piece in the Halifax Herald on how the Nova Scotian can help reduce gas prices without jeopardizing the profit margins (and thus existence) of retailers: reduce regulation. Definitely worth reading, it includes an existing commercial model for profitable gas distribution which will reduce costs for retailers and thus, donwn the line, consumers.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:23 AM

 
A numbers game

The AP reports on an Information Technology Association of America study that finds women and most minorities (and whites) under-represented in the U.S. technology industry. Women make up only 32% of the IT work force, Hispanics 6.4% (they are 13% of the U.S. population); blacks and whites, too, were "under-represented" while Asians were over-represented. This is all very interesting but quite irrelevant. The ITAA disagrees. The AP characterizes the association's concerns this way: "With such underrepresentation, fewer people are available overall to work in high-tech, putting the nation at a disadvantage compared with China and India, where universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of science and engineering students per year — in some cases with nearly equal numbers of women and men." Or in the words of ITAA president Harris N. Miller, "We can ill afford to miss out on anyone with the right aptitude, skills and motivation to succeed in technical fields." But there is no evidence of that. If Asians have the aptitude, skills and motivation to succeed in technical fields, then the IT industry is doing just fine. In fact, it is just as likely that Asians with such attributes are not in IT as it is that blacks, Hispanics and women who share them are not in the field. It is preposterous to believe that in this highly competitive field that there are people with tech skills being excluded because they are black, Hispanic or female. The AP's suggestion that such under-representation means that there are fewer people available to work in the IT industry is unfounded; it is highly probable that the make-up of this workforce reflects the reality of the choices people make in conjunction with their skill sets and nothing more (or less) than that.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:07 AM

 
Willets on helping the poor and lowering taxes

British Tory MP David Willets writes in the London Times that Lord Saatchi's suggestion that the party should advocate lower taxes to help the poor is wrong-headed. Willets says that something more imaginative is necessary to help the poor than mere tax cuts. Willets says that whatever broad-based tax reform that will actually assist the poor will also cost the treasury too much because the middle classes, too, would benefit from the lower tax (whether it be raising the exemption or lowering the VAT). Willets almost sounds as if he is arguing against tax cuts but in reality he is reminding conservatives (and Conservatives) that merely tinkering slightly with tax rates will not solve the problems of the very poor.
Willets is right to suggest that a substantial reduction in taxes (that will benefit everyone) will be pricey. What he doesn't say is that perhaps such tax cuts would be worth doing if they force the government to reduce its spending.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:44 PM

 
Quotidian

"The Bible tells us to forgive our enemies; not our friends."
-- Geoffrey Madan, Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks (collected by John Sparrow & J.A. Gere)
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:28 PM

 
Nazis a no-no, but Gulag comparison doesn't matter

Here's a reminder of what Democratic Senator Dick Durbin (Il) said on June 14:
"If I read this to you and did not tell you it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings."
The Washington Post's Mark Liebovic says:
"Someone should post a sign in the Senate cloakroom or wherever Important People Who Should Know Better will see it. The sign would warn politicians against comparing anything to the Nazis or Hitler or the Holocaust. These comparisons are not a good idea. Repeat : Not a good idea. It will only bring a massive headache, as Sen. Richard Durbin has learned.
... Durbin, the Democratic whip, became the latest politician who couldn't make his point without comparing the matter at hand -- the alleged mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- with the methods of the Nazis (and those of Pol Pot and the Soviet gulags, too)."
Several observations:
1) I don't think that Durbin is sorry because he really believes the nonsense he uttered.
2) He has learned that it was wrong to compare American behaviour to that of the Nazis or anyone else because he really believes the nonsense he uttered.
3) The fact that the Left is incessantly making comparisons to the Nazis is proof that their are intellectually vacuous.
4) Leibovic implies that while it is wrong to make comparisons to Nazis, it is not necessarily wrong to make comparisons to comparative communist monsters.
posted by Paul Tuns at 6:40 PM

 
Haven't the people of south Asia suffered enough?

200,000 people died in the tsunami last December, millions more lost their homes and in Bill Clinton's column in the New York Times examining the challenges ahead the former president seems to care as much about trees as he does restoring some normalcy to the lives of the tsunami's victims:
"The construction effort also carries significant environmental risks. Wholesale, unrestricted logging can cause deforestation in some regions, particularly in Indonesia, doing great damage to rainforests and setting the stage for more natural disasters. Timber needs to be obtained legally, and conservation measures, like replanting mangrove trees rather than developing the land from which they were uprooted, should be part of the reconstruction."
This seems so high schoolish. Yes, people died, the narrow-minded student would write, but what about the rain forests that are dying due to globalism? But the high schoolishness continues:
"... we must do all we can to assure that the voices of the most vulnerable are heard. Will women survivors be involved in the design and execution of the recovery process? Will their property rights be protected? Will the Dalits (also known as the "untouchables") of India be discriminated against? Will poor families get documentation for their assets and have access to lines of credit? Will national governments give localities greater flexibility to meet their particular needs? Will children who survived be able to get back to school? Will the disaster usher in a new chapter in the peace processes in Sri Lanka and Aceh, thereby making it easier for aid to be distributed and reconstruction to take place wherever it's needed?
Thanks to the generosity of millions of people, we will have the resources to meet these daunting challenges. The World Food Program of the United Nations is feeding more than 700,000 people daily. Unicef is making substantial commitments to meeting the area's large needs for water and sanitation. Other United Nations agencies are doing their part."
Clinton has been to south Asia numerous times and if anyone knew the answers, he would. I would have appreciated insight rather than rhetorical questions. C'mon, I thought this guy was supposed to be the smartest president there ever was.
He ends with a story that could be touching if it were told by someone capable of sincerity:
"On my most recent trip to the region, I visited the Jantho camp for displaced people in Aceh, where I met a woman who had lost nine of her 10 children. As one of the camp leaders, she introduced me to the youngest camp member: a 2-day-old boy. She said the child's mother wanted me to give him a name. I asked if there was an appropriate Indonesian word for 'new beginning' and was told that there was: 'dawn,' which in their language is a boy's name. I think a lot about that little boy, and our obligation to give him a new dawn. We can do it together."
I applaud his optimism although his unanswered rhetorical questions about allowing women a voice in the rebuilding efforts and other forms of discrimination don't really warrant such optimism. That said, I just don't believe him when he tells this anecdote of naming the boy Dawn. I hope that the region recovers from December's horrible natural disaster that indiscriminately killed and destroyed that which was in its path, but whatever recovery they have will be due to the hard work of those in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, India and elsewhere -- the citizens, the volunteer organizations, private business and professional NGOs -- and not because of the publicity seeking efforts of Bill Clinton.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:17 AM

 
Quote of the day

Actually it is a quote from yesterday. Writing about conservatism in America in the Wall Street Journal, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, authors of The Right Nation, say: "For Pat Buchanan 'the conservative movement has passed into history' --much as, some would say, Mr. Buchanan himself has done." I wish I had said that.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:00 AM

 
Wow

Behind 11-7 at the bottom of the eighth inning against the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Yankees score 13 runs and win 20-11. What a wild one although it was probably an ugly game to watch. Unfortunately, the Baltimore Orioles beat the Toronto Blue Jays and remain five games behind.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:56 PM

 
G to infinity

The Washington Times runs a column by Andres Mejia-Vergnaud that has this line about Brazil's ambition to play a larger role on the international stage: "Brazil, and other countries such as Germany, India and Japan, also known as the G4, has taken advantage of the current U.N. crisis of credibility and the growing calls for reform." Reading The Economist, I'm always seeing a G-something or other involved in some, usually economic, story: G7, G8, G20, the African gee-I-forget. How many G and pick-your-numbers are there? Just wondering.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:51 PM

 
Quotidian

"Funny ting, a man's life."
-- John Dos Passo, Manhattan Transfer
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:48 PM

 
UK's nukes

Last week I noted that former British Conservative Defense Minister Michael Portillo had called for the United Kingdom to scrap its nuclear weapons. Oliver Kamm responds in a column in the London Times. Portillo said that getting rid of their nuclear capabilities would 1) reflect the changing geopolitical reality -- there is no longer a Cold War, 2) increase the UK's credibility in the push for nuclear proliferation and 3) free up money for conventional forces which in Portillo's view are more practical. Kamm says, "This is a serious and seductive argument that suffers only from being the reverse of the truth." explains:
"An independent deterrent has become more important since the Cold War, not less, as the relatively stable bilateral relationship between the superpowers has been superseded by new potential challengers. Remarkably, the only potential adversaries that Mr Portillo cites are the undeterrable 'urban guerrilla detonating a dirty bomb in a suitcase in one of our cities' and the 'residual risk' of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. These scarcely exhaust the possibilities."
Kamm explains why an independent nuclear deterrent is more important in the multipolar, post-Cold War world:
"A nuclear deterrent allied to, but independent of, the US might in some circumstances cause an aggressor to reconsider, simply because it confers an additional and irreducible political counterweight not possessed by, say, Canada. That European capability cannot be left to France alone, for the reason it is doubtless impolitic to mention that gangster regimes in autocratic states have scant historical grounds for regarding France as an impediment to their ambitions."
Nicely put. Kamm also notes that the countries (Brazil) most likely to be impressed by the British gesture are not the countries the West is worried about (North Korea and Iran).
The two columns are worth reading because Portillo, although he comes to the wrong conclusions, has initiated an important debate. Britons and their government should maintain and even enchance their nuclear capabilities but it is good and wise that they fully understand why they do so. This debate could be a moment of sober-minded reflection which is all too rare in the exercise of foreign policy in Europe.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:34 PM

 
Vietnam and human rights

This Washington Post editorial calls for balance between America's strategic interests in Vietnam and holding them accountable for their abysmal human rights record but it doesn't go far enough. Vietnam is, after all, as the Post reminds us, "a place where a citizen can be sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment for the crime of denigrating Communist Party officials in e-mails."
In his Impromptus column, Jay Nordlinger has some good links about stepping up the pressure on Vietnam and says that more must be done to highlight the oppression of its own people by the Vietnamese communists:
"And why not 'a public reception by U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Michael Marine for the best-known in-country dissidents such as geophysicist Nguyen Thanh Giang, Dr. Nguyen Dan Que, oppositionist Nguyen Vu Binh, Father Nguyen Van Ly, oppositionist Nguyen Dinh Huy, Father Chan Tin, and more'? [Vietnam-democracy activist, Scott Pham] believes that such an event would have the effect of President Reagan's reception for Soviet dissidents in Moscow.
For the mainstream press, the story of the Vietnamese chief's visit is reconciliation, and, 'Will Vietnam forgive us?' Some others, fortunately, ask, 'What are we doing receiving the head of a vicious, Communist state? Isn't this supposed to be the age of the democrat and the dissident'?"
posted by Paul Tuns at 8:42 PM

 
LA Times wikitorials need to work out kinks

From Ros Taylor of the Guardian's blog:
"So when the LA Times tentatively said it would be inviting readers to comment on and edit an editorial about the Iraq war, as my colleague Sarah Left noted last week, a lot of media executives were watching - and as Claire Cozens reports, their worst fears were realised: 'Within hours one user had managed to change the headline on several pages to read "Fuck USA".' Despite the best efforts of moderators, and a requirement for posters to register, the 'wikitorial' eventually had to be taken off the site, thanks to what the paper describes as vandalism."
posted by Paul Tuns at 8:36 PM

 
Quotidian

"Mario Vargas Llosa, the very able Peruvian novelist who has written a lengthy critical sutdy of Garcia Marquez, said of this remarkable novel: 'One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those rare instances of a major contemporary work of literature which everyone can understand and enjoy.' That, too, seems to be largely true, except the first time I attempted to read One Hundred Years of Solitude I thought it quite brilliant and stopped reading it at page 98 (of 383 pages in the paperback edition). A number of intelligent people I know have gone through a similiar experience in reading the book. All thought it brilliant, but felt that anywhere between eighteen to fifty-one years of solitude was sufficient, thank you very much."
-- Joseph Epstein, "How Good is Gabriel Garcia Marquez," Commentary, May 1983
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:00 PM

 
Comments

Send 'em to paul_tuns [at] yahoo.com.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:23 PM

 
Weekend list

Ten favourite Canadian political books

1. The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities by Peter Brimelow (1986) -- He explains why the 20th century didn't belong to Canada but instead "it turned out to belong to the federal Liberals." Brimelow attacks our national institutions and our policies in describing the fragmentation and weakening of Canada. He illustrates that the problems Canada had before Trudeau were exasperated by PET.
2. The Trouble with Canada: A Citizen Speaks Out by William Gairdner (1990) -- Broader in scope than the Patriot Game in examining Canada's ills, it's extensive use of statistics makes this book more sociological at times makes some of it dated reading already.
3. No Surrender: Reflections of a Happy Warrior in the Tory Crusade by Hugh Segal (1996) -- I'm not a Segal fan but this is one of the best political memoirs ever and certainly the best by a public official in Canada. Less self-serving than other memoirs, it is engagingly written, full on interesting political history and tidbits, and the best inside account by anyone from the Mulroney years.
4. Canada's Founding Debates: A Conversation with the Founders edited by Janet Ajzenstat, Ian Gentles, William D Gairdner, Paul Romney (1999) -- Excellent history of an under-appreciated part of Canadian history. Americans have both the mythology of the founding fathers and the Federalist Papers to better understand the birth of their nation. Canada had little like that until Ajzenstat et al put this book together.
5 & 6. Viva Chairman Pierre (1977) and Trudeaucracy (1972) by Lubor Zink -- Collections of Zink's columns about the prime minister. Zink was warning Canadians of the dangers of Trudeaumania before he was prime minister and long after he was elected to the job.
7. The Tory Syndrome: Leadership Politics in the Progressive Conservative Party by George C. Perlin (1980) -- Perlin finds that the Tories have long been plagued by leadership races that both embody and symbolize the persistent internal (power-play and ideological) conflicts within the party.
8. Lament for a Notion: The Life and Death of Canada's Bilingual Dream by Scott Reid (1993) -- Great book that honestly looks at the effects of Canada's language laws and policy of official bilingualism. Reid concludes that they were an impediment to national unity.
9. Getting It Done: A Memoir by Derek Burney (2005) -- Burney, a long-time diplomat before becoming Mulroney's chief of staff and later his ambassador to the United States, gives an insider's view of how some of the jobs he has held actually function. Particular worthy of note is his account of negotiating the free trade agreement with the United States.
10. Mulroney: The Making of the Prime Minister by L. Ian MacDonald (1984) -- Less a biography than a highly readable and informative study in the rise to power by Canada's 18th prime minister.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:46 PM

 
Quotidian

"You had an attack of self-righteousness and you decided to try the impossible."
-- Father Egan to Sister Justin in Robert Stones' A Flag for Sunrise
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:23 PM

 
Happy Father's Day

I'm in Woodstock today celebrating Father's Day with my dad and a bunch of family birthdays at the annual Tuns family barbecue. My relationship with my dad is best summarized by Twain's comment about his own father ("When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years"). Happy Father's Day to all you who are privileged enough to bear this responsibility.

Regular blogging will continue on Tuesday (one of our sons is turning eight). Quotidians will go up today and tomorrow and a weekend list sometime tonight.
posted by Paul Tuns at 4:16 PM

 
Comrade Rowan Williams

Rod Liddle says that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is behaving like a Marxist:
"The church’s habit of flailing and whining at institutions — the government, the World Bank, the press — and leaving individuals alone is surely an abrogation of ecumenical responsibility. The nasty bits of the worldwide web are not the fault of insufficient regulation and a lack of censorship: they are the fault of individual human beings. The church should be addressing its message of repentance to the individual, not the profession, as its founder did."
When will churches -- and it is not just the Anglicans -- and their priests, ministers and bishops start worrying about saving souls instead of this world?
Here's the money line from Liddle's London Times column: "There is something naive and hopeless about Williams, qualities which you may or may not feel are also exemplified by the Church of England." Perhaps they are hopeless because their eyes are fixed horizontally instead of vertically. Just a thought.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:13 PM

 
Political correctness or fighting crime: tough choice

Well, apparently not. In England, police will chose the former. The Daily Telegraph reports: "Scotland Yard failed to investigate fully an allegation by a white woman of a rape involving an officer from an ethnic minority because of concerns that it would be accused of racism." The reason for this was the chilling effect of the Macpherson Report (see the BBC and Daily Telegraph for some background on this report).
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:55 PM

 
Portillo on UK's nukes

Writing in the London Times, Michael Portillo makes the case for the United Kingdom scrapping its nuclear missiles. Portillo never acknowledges that there is any case -- any case at all -- for maintaining them. Instead he tears down arguments no one makes (Britain needs them so France isn't the only European nuclear power) and offers facts that irrelevant to the issue (England's greatest threats now come from terrorists not the Soviet Union). The problem with the column is that is thus fundamentally dishonest. I am willing to be persuaded that a key country in the Western alliance should abandon its nuclear weapons but Portillo comes nowhere near convincing me.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:48 PM

 
British Tories

The Independent reports that MP and two-time losing leadership candidate Kenneth Clarke, a pro-EU, social liberal, has not ruled out another run. According to one oddsmaker, he is 11-1 to win, ranking him fourth among the potential candidates. Those who have supported him in the past are either backing others (as in the case of Ian Taylor now supporting the front-runner David Davis who has 4-6 odds) or expressing doubt that Clarke can win having demonstrated his bona fides as a loser.
The article also reports that right-leaning David Willetts is likely to announce his intentions to run sometime in the next week.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:42 PM

 
Lancing Lancet

Andrew Stuttaford says that, "The Lancet is a disgrace to medicine and a disgrace to journalism." Read the London Times for a non-disgraceful journalistic explanation why. In short, 30 fellows of the Royal Society, including two Nobel Prize winners, charge the medical journal with scaremongering. The Times reports: "Poor editorial judgment at The Lancet has fuelled panic over issues such as the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, hormone replacement therapy and genetically modified (GM) crops, the eminent medical researchers charge in a letter that the journal has refused to publish."
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:36 PM

 
Quotidian

"News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he reads it. After that it's dead."
-- Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:32 PM

 
Gitmo no Gulag

Pavel Litvinov, a former Soviet dissident who was banished to the Gulag (for his role in disseminating information about the Yuri Galanskov and Alexander Ginzburg trials) where he was "adopted by Amnesty International," writes in the Washington Post about Amnesty International's publicity-seeking comparison of Guantanamo to the Gulag. He notes a seldom made observation:
"For example, incidents of desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo by U.S. personnel have been widely reported. But those Korans were surely not brought to Guantanamo by the prisoners themselves from Afghanistan. They were supplied by the U.S. administration -- in spite of the obvious fact that most of the prisoners misguidedly found in the Koran the inspiration for their violent hatred of the United States."
Litvinov says, "There is ample reason for Amnesty to be critical of certain U.S. actions," but finds that, "by using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty's spokesmen put its authority at risk. U.S. human rights violations seem almost trifling in comparison with those committed by Cuba, South Korea, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia." Very nicely put from a man who knows.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:00 PM

 
Bilingual in 1937

One of the Trudeaupian myths people believe is that Canada was not truly (and officially) bilingual country until Pierre Trudeau came to power. As but one example of how this thinking is incorrect I offer something I saw earlier tonight on the Home Shopping Channel. It was selling excellent condition 1937 bank notes ($1, $2, $5, $10, $20 bills) all with fully bilingual text.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:57 PM

 
Why can't the government encourage the philosophy of 'the more, the merrier'?

Mark Krikorian reviews two books on America's demographic trends -- fertility rates better than Canada's, Europe's and Japan's, but still just under replacement levels, and population growth spurred mostly by immigration -- and it is full of interesting and important facts and interpretations of their meanings. Krikorian, for examples, says that "Within the context of falling birthrates worldwide caused by urbanization, education, and the rest, Americans, as both a more religious and more optimistic people, simply choose to have more children." While I think there are advantages to pro-natal policies, I agree with Krikorian that "the social engineering that both authors call for is incompatible with republicanism, and in any case, unnecessary." But a debate about the policy implications of slow population growth and eventually depopulation must begin. Americans may decide that despite breaking with the republican tradition of the nation, pro-natal policies, many of which could also provide some taxation policy equity to families, may be wise.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:40 PM

 
Uzbekistan and the War on Terror

Writing in the Boston Globe, Mark Brzezinski, director for Russia/Eurasia on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton administration, examines the challenges for America in its relationship with Uzbekistan -- an important ally in fighting terror but one which does not live up to President George W. Bush's rhetoric about respecting human rights (not even close, actually).
"To send a clear signal to Uzbek authorities that the United States is serious about human rights, the CIA's rendition program with Uzbekistan must end. To be sure, Uzbekistan is in a position to offer some help in tackling critical security threats, especially in remote parts of Afghanistan. But seeking Karimov's support on these issues -- and it is in Uzbekistan's own interest to do so -- does not mean the Bush administration should remain quiet about negative trends in human rights."
This seems to strike the right balance. It may cost the United States a close military ally but President Bush himself has alluded to how misguided Yalta was. It is not enough that the US's allies are strategically important.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:29 PM

 
Gelernter on teaching history

David Gelernter explains in his Los Angeles Times column how, "Our schools teach history ideologically. They teach the message, not the truth." It is an excellent column in which he concludes, "There is an ongoing culture war between Americans who are ashamed of this nation's history and those who acknowledge with sorrow its many sins and are fiercely proud of it anyway." He urges parents to teach it properly at home because the schools are a lost cause.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:22 PM

 
Student debt and Starbucks

Over at Oxblog, Daved Adesnik fisks this Washington Post story on students accumulating debt to pay for their high-priced lattes. Here's a bit of the WaPo story:
"At a Starbucks across the street from Seattle University School of Law, Kirsten Daniels crams for the bar exam. She's armed with color-coded pens, a don't-mess-with-me crease in her brow and what she calls 'my comfort latte.'
She just graduated summa cum laude, after three years of legal training that left her $115,000 in debt. Part of that debt, which she will take a decade to repay with interest, was run up at Starbucks, where she buys her lattes.
Part of the $115,000 debt Kirsten Daniels of Seattle incurred to finance law school went toward her regular caffeine fix. The habit costs her nearly $3 a day, and it's one that her law school says she and legions like her cannot afford.
... It borders on apostasy in this caffeine-driven town (home to more coffee shops per capita than any major U.S. city, as well as Starbucks corporate headquarters), but the law school is aggressively challenging the drinking habits of students such as Daniels."
But why is the university getting involved?
"At Seattle University School of Law, Lim [Erika Lim, director of career services at the law school] concedes the futility of persuading students to stop spending borrowed money on high-priced coffee. Still, she refuses to give up. The consequences of latte-larded law school debts are worrisome for the legal profession, she said, insidiously tilting career paths toward jobs that pay more but satisfy less.
... 'The amount of money you owe directly affects the professional choices you have,' she said.
Debt-panicked law school graduates, she said, tend to run away from low-paying jobs such as public defender (about $45,000 a year) and into the more remunerative arms of corporate law."
So the concern is not the financial burden Starbucks causes people but that burden leads law students to higher paying corporate law gigs. (Never mind how Lim knows that better paying jobs are less satisfying, although it makes sense that less satisfying jobs would pay more because employers would be compensating for the misery their employment is apparently causing employees.)
But there is no need for me to tear apart this socialistic, scare-mongering story. Adesnik does a fantastic job.
posted by Paul Tuns at 8:50 PM

 
Five

The New York Yankees just beat the Chicago Cubs 8-1 to win their fifth game in a row. Derek Jeter had five ribbies. (Yesterday Hideki Matsui had five.) The Yankees are now less than five games behind the Baltimore Orioles who play later tonight.
posted by Paul Tuns at 5:58 PM

 
On Amnesty International

Jay Nordlinger wrote in his Impromptus column about Amnesty International and their comparisons of Gitmo to the Gulag, and liberal reaction to American conservatives who criticize that comparison but cite AI on Iran, China or Sudan (for examples). As Nordlinger relates, Rush Limbaugh answered this criticism by asking a caller why liberals cite approvingly the Gitmo-Gulag comparison but ignore AI's criticism of Iran, China and Sudan. (Actually, Rush used the example of pre-liberation Iraq.) Nordlinger comments:
"I’m still a little uneasy about citing Amnesty, ever, simply because of its political nonsense. It seems to want credit for 'evenhandedness,' and this means grouping the United States with genuine human-rights violators. It’s far wiser to rely on Freedom House, which actually knows the difference between Guantanamo Bay and the Gulag."
I agree, but with one caveat: quoting AI goes farther with both liberals and those are not self-conciously political. I think one of the great things that AI and Human Rights Watch both do is provide facts for conservatives that liberals have difficulty ignoring or debunking. While there is great, usually better studies at Freedom House and, often, the U.S. State Department, the Left and mushy middle will not acknowledge them as authorities. I hate giving credence to organizations such as AI and HRW, but I'd rather use them to win an argument over human rights with some Red China-defending Lefty or average Joe skeptical of the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

(Cross-posted at The Shotgun)
posted by Paul Tuns at 5:55 PM

 
Europe is dead

Writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Paul Johnson says that Europe is dead because it has turned its back on its past and is now soul-less:
"... the EU is not a living body, with a mind and spirit and animating soul. And unless it finds such nonmaterial but essential dimensions, it will soon be a dead body, the symbolic corpse of a dying continent."
But here are the money 'graphs:
"It is natural that high and chronic unemployment generates a depressive anger which finds many expressions. One, in Europe today, is anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. Another is exceptionally low birthrates, lower in Europe than anywhere else in the world except Japan. If present trends continue, the population of Europe (excluding the British Isles) will be less than the United States by midcentury--under 400 million, with the over-65s constituting one-third of that.
The rise of anti-Americanism, a form of irrationalism deliberately whipped up by Messrs. Schröder and Chirac, who believe it wins votes, is particularly tragic, for the early stages of the EU had their roots in admiration of the American way of doing things and gratitude for the manner in which the U.S. had saved Europe first from Nazism, then (under President Harry Truman) from the Soviet Empire--by the Marshall Plan in 1947 and the creation of NATO in 1949."
So instead of being a vibrant centre for culture, philosophy and science, Europe has embraced hatred and envy. And when that hatred and envy is directed at Americans, it is pure ingratitude.
posted by Paul Tuns at 8:50 AM

 
A bad idea

My guess is that conservatives -- both of the small-c and proper noun variety -- would like the private members bill from Tory MPs Joe Preston and Helen Guergis
which would require party-switching MPs to sit as independents and face an election within 35 days of bolting their former party. Guergis said C-408 is "about democracy, it's about integrity (and) restoring voter confidence." I disagree on each count. People like Pat O'Brien and David Kilgour, two Liberal MPs who have left their party this year to sit as independents, are viewed by constituents (and conservatives, too) as men of integrity for leaving a corrupt party. I would guess that both have restored a measure of voter confidence, at least in their ridings in London and Edmonton, by standing on principle, opposing their party and putting their own careers on the line. As for democracy, I think that Guergis fundamentally misunderstands how the Canadian electoral system works (at least in theory) in that oters elect MPs not parties; indeed, there are no parties listed alongside candidates' names on the ballot for provincial elections in Ontario. Of course, many people decide who to vote for based on party affiliation but formally we vote for the individual candidate not the party. Edmund Burke told constituents he owed them their best judgement and so would represent them, not their views, in Parliament. (He also won only once in the riding he said that in.) That judgement may require MPs to leave their party. Guergis also said her bill is about accountability, but she ignores that MPs will be held accountable come the next election which will always be just a few years away.
The last word on this should go to "Matthew" who in commenting to a post on this topic by Kevin Libin on The Shotgun said:
"I see the rationale behind this, but are do we really want to undermine the traditional rationale for Parliament? Parliament ought to be a place for debate- and if we close off the possibility of Parliamentarians being convinced, we undermine that.
This would also reinforce the already malignant view that MPs should be merely ciphers, proxies for their constituents. If we want a proxy Parliament, there are better ways to do it than the British system, which is designed to promote the kind of representation Burke spoke of.
Finally, it sounds as if this proposal would increase the power of the parties over their members, as the parties could essentially kick a member out of the party AND out of Parliament."
posted by Paul Tuns at 8:33 AM

 
The War on Terror and polls

Daniel Henninger has a column in the Wall Street Journal examining the polls that indicate a majority of Americans do not support the President's "handling" of the liberation of Iraq. Henninger notes the signficance of such polls to America's enemies:
"June 11, AP: 'Only 41% said they support Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, also a low-water mark.' The 'war,' of course extends no further than these bombing reports.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the maestro of the Iraqi civilian slaughterhouse, has produced a steady shower of human blood, and as often happens, blood has been a public-opinion downer. Perhaps in his next life al-Zarqawi can come back as an American marketing consultant. Having established there is a U.S. market for American-associated death in Iraq, such as the front page of the Yahoo! news portal, al-Zarqawi is supplying it with daily product. The up-or-down polls he reads are his profit-and- loss statement."
One important question to be asked then, is what would the effect be of President George W. Bush paying attention to such polls and withdrawing from Iraq? Henninger says that "If we removed our troops from Iraq, the terror would not stop. But the U.S. news of innocent civilians blown up in Iraq would move to the unread round-up columns." That is innocent Iraqis and Philippinos and Indians will die but not American soldiers, so that in the eyes of the American Left, all would be fine in the world.
At home, the polls have significance, too. The Economist has a good article on the polls and the war in Iraq and what contributes to their flucuations. This paragraph captures the subtleties of the polling data that most news stories do not:
"So it is notable that while a clear majority is worried about the war, Americans are more evenly split on whether it was the right thing to do in the first place. Even now, slightly more people think the decision was right than wrong (though the majority is dwindling). That suggests there are reservoirs of support."
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:02 PM

 
Terri's autopsy

NRO has a good editorial explaining that the autopsy on Terri Schindler-Schiavo was not a vindication for the proponents of dehydrating her to death:
"About the main arguments against killing Terri Schiavo, the autopsy had nothing to say. Many people believed that it is wrong deliberately to bring about the death of innocent human beings, whatever their condition; that it is especially wrong when there is doubt about what that person wanted, and when her family members are willing to provide care for her; that Mr. Schiavo was too compromised to make this decision; that a law enabling the killing of people in a 'persistent vegetative state' should not be stretched to cover people who might be “minimally conscious”; and that the Supreme Court should not have established the current lax standards for denying incapacitated people food and water. Nobody who believed these things has any reason to change his mind based on this week’s evidence."
So what did the autopsy contribute to the debate? Little other than it indicated that Terri's injury was not the result of abuse, that Terri's brain damage was irreversible (and to reiterate the point the editorial makes, that fact doesn't matter) and that Terri had become blind.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:56 PM

 
Quotidian

"We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that."
-- Bernard Malamud, The Natural
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:52 PM

 
On Morgentaler

Over at The Shotgun, I comment on something he said at UWO today.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:14 PM

 
This is neat

The Spectator has a random article generator. Here's how it works:
"With articles and columns going back to September 2000, spectator.co.uk has a fascinating archive of unique voices.
Until now the only way to access previously published articles on spectator.co.uk has been to take out an online subscription.
Click on the button below and a piece, at random, will be called from the depths of the archive. The joy of this is that it is entirely unpredictable – you might get a column from Jeremy Clarke, Taki or Frank Johnson, some typically robust comments from Mark Steyn, insights from Peter Oborne – there is simply no way of knowing what you will turn up.
And you also have what our writers did not – hindsight. Just how well have their comments and thoughts stood the test of time?
Try it for yourself. Click away!"
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:53 PM

 
Quotidian

"Probably we don't get to the point of apprehending anything good until we're about forty. Then, in the light of what is going, and of what, God help us?, is coming, we arrive at understanding."
-- Willa Carther, The Song of the Lark
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:37 PM

 
Yanks sweep Pirates

Bronx Bombers exact a measure of revenge for '60 by sweeping the Pittsburg Pirates, winning the third game 6-1. To those who emailed noting there is nothing special in beating the Pirates, but the pleasure comes, in part, for avenging the Maz homer 45 years ago.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:00 PM

 
Chretien's reputation

CBC reported: "Chrétien's lawyers pleaded with Justice John Gomery to restore Chrétien's 'extraordinary reputation' which has been badly battered in the media even though he had nothing to do with the problems that surfaced related to the federal sponsorship program, his lawyer, David Scott, said." That must be the reputation that survived the HRDC scandal, Shawinigate, obstructing the work of commissions of inquiry into Somaliagate and Peppergate, and numerous other abuses of power. Read all about them in my modest effort to batter Chretien's extraordinary reputation by purchasing Jean Chretien: A Legacy of Scandal.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:52 PM

 
Them are fighting words

Because of this post by John Derbyshire leads John Podhoretz to suggest that his fellow Cornerite should have voted for John Kerry last year.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:57 PM

 
Gratzer essay online

The Macleans piece by Dr. David Gratzer I wrote about on Monday, is now online.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:26 PM

 
Yankees win

For the first time this season, the New York Yankees came back and won a game after trailing in the eighth inning. They won in the 10th, 7-5, on Jason Giambi's game-ending homer. The win breaks a streak of five losing series as the team climbs back to 500 ball.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:15 PM

 
Terri's autopsy

No surprises. Let the conspiracy theories begin.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:10 PM

 
France and the future of EU

I'm not sure whether this is Dominique de Villepin 1) pulling a hissy fit over losing the referendum last month, 2) belatedly addressing a concern that some French voters may have with the EU, 3) causing trouble for Tony Blair or 4) expressing a genuine sentiment, but nonetheless he suggested that France has "grave reservations" (the Times' characterization) about the speed of enlargening the EU. This was seen as a thinly vieled reference to talks that are to begin in October on Turkey's admission to the EU. Previously, French president Jacques Chirac was an enthusiastic supporter of the large Muslim nation joining Europe so de Villepin's comments were not expected.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:57 PM

 
EU elite scare-mongering

The Financial Times reports that the EU will focus on its budget for now and "indefinitely delay" the constitution ratifying process. European officials are not admitting there is little chance of meeting the proposed November 2006 deadline because both French and Dutch voters would have to vote to undo their no votes from the past month. As a result, Britain, Denmark, Ireland and Poland are likely to indefinitely postpone their own referenda. This seems wise; indeed, it is the only choice the EU and its members states could make if their previous announcements -- that all members had to ratify and the promises made by national leaders to respect the referenda results -- meant anything. But that doesn't mean that they're happy about it. FT reports that "José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, claimed the summit would decide whether Europe would recover from its constitutional debacle, or 'sink into a permanent crisis and paralysis'." Quite a choice, there. I assume that by recover, Barroso means find a way to implement the constitution through the backdoor. But even if the EU can't do that, is it truly permanent crisis and paralysis (which sounds like a pretty good description of the European welfare state) or is this an opportunity to not recover in the EU-sense of the misusing such words but to do things differently, such as practicing greater respect for national sovereignty?
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:41 PM

 
'Hell no' again

Kofi Annan reiterates he is not going to resign. Thus, the most significant obstacle to substantial reform of the UN remains.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:36 PM

 
Quotidian

"There are surely bad races and good races, just as there are good people and bad people, and the Irish belong to the category of the impossible."
-- Henry James, Henry James Letters (edited by Leon Edel)
posted by Paul Tuns at 4:25 PM

 
Comments

Send them to paul_tuns [at] yahoo.com
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:16 PM

 
Schiavo-Schindler autopsy to be released Wednesday

I'm not expecting that Terri's family will be happy with the findings. If there was anything suspicious I would hope that the coroner would have said something before the body was cremated, ending any chance to pursue legal action against Terri's husband-in-name-only, Michael Schiavo.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:31 PM

 
The difference between a $205 million payroll and a $37 million one

The New York Yankees, in their first game against the Pittsburgh Pirates since the 1960 World Series (you know the one that featured Bill Mazeroski's 9th inning homer in game seven), look like a $200 million team tonight, winning 9-0.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:16 PM

 
Quebec's rural parts

I hate disagreeing with Adam Daifallah but I think his characterization of "rural, socially conservative, francophone Quebec, where the PQ wins a lot of seats," in an otherwise great post about likely future PQ leader André Boisclair (who is gay) is incorrect. My understanding is that most of Quebec -- both urban and rural -- is socially and economically liberal. Two figures (off the top of my head) that I recall reading in the past few months. 1) The number of Quebec Catholics who attend Mass weekly is in the single digits. 2) All but six of the provinces' MPs voted for the government's legislation redefining marriage to include same-sex couples. (Put another way, if Quebec were not part of Canada, C-38, instead of winning by 30 votes, would lose by 30 votes.)
posted by Paul Tuns at 8:35 PM

 
Quotidian

"And now, if I may take for granted that the true and adequate end of intellectual training and of a university is not learning or acquirement, but rather is thought or reason exercised upon knowledge, or what may be called philosophy..."
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of the University
posted by Paul Tuns at 8:20 PM

 
How to turn around a 34-48 season

The Los Angeles Lakers bring back supercoach Phil Jackson. He'll bring them back to the playoffs and probably even contention for the division title. Jackson's departure meant much more than Shaquille O'Neal.
posted by Paul Tuns at 8:05 PM

 
Adrienne Clarkson tagged

Paul Wells book tagged the Governor General and she agreed to play. I'm sure that many conservatives will find her reply a little much (asked which five books mean the most to her she says: "I presume you mean books that I read and re-read and which I would find necessary for the continuance of my sanity and ethical well-being. Maybe I should not have included that last part, but I did anyway"), but I like them.
posted by Paul Tuns at 8:00 PM

 
Microsoft does Red China's dirty work

Perry de Havilland rightly says that Microsoft is complicit in Beijing's repression (he says the company is a "direct collaborator") when it agrees to adjust "its blog tools to help block online speech" that promotes democracy and liberty. Voice of America reports the company is "not allowing the Chinese version of its new Web portal to use words deemed politically sensitive by China's Communist Party such as "democracy" and "human rights". If a blogger in the oppressive communist country types in such words, VOA reports, "an automatic message pops up warning the person not to use prohibited language." PdH concludes:
"Next time you hear of all the philanthropic work done by MS and Bill Gates, just keep in mind that there is a very nasty flip side to the Giant from Redmond. It would appear that even Gates has a price at which his principles are clearly 'negotiable'."
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:51 PM

 
Bye, bye VHS

I heard on the radio that Wal-Mart will stop stocking VHS tapes after Christmas.
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:35 PM

 
Canadian military first

LifeSiteNews.com reports that on May 3, two men became the first military gay couple to get married. The base's chaplain, Lt.-Cmdr. David Greenwood, an Anglican minister, could not perform the ceremony himself but he did make the arrangements for an United Church minister to officiate. I thought it was the job of the military to kill people and break things not bring people together.
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:05 PM

 
Michael Jackson

Over at As I Please, Lorne Gunter has a good post on the Michael Jackson verdict. I liked Gunter's introduction about MJ: "Michael Jackson is undoubtedly a troubled individual. You don't do that much cosmetic surgery unless somewhere down deep you hate yourself." Troubled, yes, but a child molester? Gunter says the system worked unlike, oh, say, the O.J. trial, about which Gunter also has things to say. Sure, Michael might have molested boys, as one juror suspected, but the prosecution failed to prove its case. Gunter also compares the alleged victim's mother to the Wendy's finger lady, suggesting that the criminal justice system is sometimes exploited by individuals out to make a quick buck. Most importantly, the system worked, in part because, as Gunter points out, "There were fewer political overtones (so less race-based pressure to decide one way or the other)." That said, I wonder if a black defendant would have been acquitted.
posted by Paul Tuns at 6:12 PM

 
The EU Constitution will change in its current form

I have had this discussion with many people and most of them say that the constitution is dead because it would be impossible to get it past the countries where voters rejected it. Sure the constitution is dead. And long live the constitution, which it will -- the elites said so. It is typically North American to think that an issue is settled just because the people have spoken. We like to think that once a difficult question is settled, its settled for good. In Europe, however, issues aren't settled until They say it is settled. The Daily Telegraph editorializes about the attitudes of the EU and other political elite and their reaction to the French and Dutch voters' decision to reject their charter:
"They plainly need to be better informed, re-educated, brought to see their true interests. To our masters in Brussels, the goal of a united Europe is not simply desirable but inevitable. Public opposition to that goal is thus an obstacle to be overcome, not a reason for changing direction. We may find their attitude laughable. But, when the laughing stops, they will still have their constitution."
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:33 PM

 
Quotidian

"The indignities of stupidity, and the disappointments of selfish passion, can excite little pity."
-- Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:16 PM

 
Gratzer on the Chaoulli decision

Writing in Macleans (I don't see it online), physician and author Dr. David Gratzer, applauds the Chaoulli decision from last week, saying that "Canadian health care will never be the same." Gratzer outlines the Quebec doctor's long fight against socialized medicine before getting to the actual case and the state of the nation's health care. Most importantly, Gratzer, author of the Donner Prize-winning Code Blue: Reviving Canada's Health Care Sytem (1999), finds that the SCOC majority "dismissed the present political debate" because the justices "didn't buy" the "party line" that "a private option would destroy the public system." Indeed, it seems that the system is already near destroyed as, in the words of Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Justice John Major, "The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health-care system are widespread, and that, in some cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care." Gratzer emphasizes the "patients die" part and so he should. As he notes and the SCOC implicitly recognized, "Canada's medicare system can kill you." That, the Court found, violates Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (life, liberty and security).
The most important observation Gratzer makes is that private care is now available to all Canadians: "In an age of jet travel, private health care anywhere in Canada effectively means that private health care is everywhere." Apparently I was overly pessimistic in my post on the Chaoulli decision last week when I described it as a baby step in the right direction. But not all is won. As Gratzer concludes his essay, the "paternalistic system" of government-knows best, one-size fits all health care, is on its death-bed as Chaoulli "ushered in a new era in Canadian health care ... Now its up to the rest of us to push forward." As Gratzer demonstrates, we're closer to a saner, more responsible and healthier health care system because of last week. But we have lots more work to do.
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:14 PM

 
Carrots are not enough

Yesterday I noted that the Washington Post editorialized against a Congressional bill that would withhold US contributions to the UN if it did not reform itself or reform quick enough. I thought it was silly for the WaPo to urge engaging the UN in discussion if the US did not have the stick of withholding half of its contribution to the international organization. Peter Brookes makes the case for the "stick" approach to UN reform in the New York Post. He says: "As it stands now, without serious congressional pressure, reforms are likely to languish until the new secretary-general is in place — at best. At worst, reform will be frustrated ad infinitum by the U.N.'s entrenched bureaucracy." In short, as Brookes says, the US must save the UN from itself.
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:05 PM

 
To Saskatchewan NDPers, every problem is an excuse to expand government

Over at the CTF blog, David Maclean notes that the Saskatchewan government is going to subsidize the development of the meat processing industry to the tune of $37.3 million. Agriculture and Food Minister Mark Wartman said. "Our livestock production levels exceeded the province's processing capacity." Maclean responds: "... so the province finds it startling that we raise 29 per cent of the cows in Canada, and have only 6 per cent of the processing capacity. Maybe it's because we have a punishing tax on capital, the highest corporate income tax in Canada, a sales tax on all business inputs, and the most restrictive labour laws outside of Quebec."
posted by Paul Tuns at 6:36 PM

 
Important documents on North Korea

The Woodrow Wilson Center has documents from North Korea that illustrate "the regime's near-obsession with its own survival colors its political decision-making." They are noteworthy, say Robert S. Litwak and Kathryn Weathersby in the Washington Post yesterday, because the country "has been ruled by only two men, Kim I and Kim II, and the archival records reveal a striking continuity on security issues and the pursuit of nuclear weapons." On the security front, it is clearly demonstrated in the conversations of the two Kim's that the American presence in South Korea has prevented another Korean War. (Two cheers for deterrence!) On the nuclear weapons front, North Korea has been working on acquiring such weapons since the early 1960s.
The documents can be viewed at the Woodrow Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project here.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:47 AM

 
LA Times editorial page shake-up

The New York Times has an article on Michael Kinsley shaking up the Los Angeles Times editorial page. It is worth reading for those interested in how editorial pages will be changing in the future. One significant and welcome change it that (online, at least)it'll be more "interactive" with "wikitorials" where readers will "engage in an online dialogue with the paper." But amore significant move is to farm out editorials to freelancers. Kinsley justifies the decision for two reasons -- there are many people who are not professional journalists who have something to say and that editorial pages are stodgy and predictable. I actually think this a bad development. They can enliven their op-ed pages with non-professional journalists (when the Times says there are plenty of Nobel prize winners who have something to add to the debate, I wonder "exactly how many columns can they run advocating more funding for embryonic stem cell research) by doing what newspapers have always done: accept and assign freelance columns. I still think that there it is a good thing for newspapers to have an institutional voice and that voice being the editorial page. Certainly this is partly a conservative instinct against change but it is also a pragmatic concern that if the paper were to lose the opportunity to make its case on the editorial page (recognizing that the Times says that guest editorials will toe the paper's line) there is a greater risk of it migrating into its news coverage.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:05 AM

 
Weekend list

Best seven drinks for a hot afternoon

1) Heineken
2) Apricot Orange Snapple
3) Mountain Dew
4) 7-11 Dr. Pepper Slurpee
5) Nestea Ice Tea
6) Mango Madness Snapple
7) An ice cold bottled water
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:02 AM

 
Tories not much better than the Liberals

John Williamson, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, writing in the Halifax Herald, says that the Tories are following the Liberal lead on saying whatever it feels it needs to get elected. From Kyoto to child care, the Tories have reversed themselves to make themselves more palatable to the voters (or, depending on your perspective, indistinguishable from the Liberals). Williamson concludes his commentary:
"To date, the Conservative party has tabulated Liberal pre-election spending at over $26 billion.
Yet the Opposition has matched Liberal spending promises and, in some areas, the government-in-waiting is willing to push the spending envelope further still.
Mr. Harper, it is time for a time-out and some clarity. A party willing to do anything and say anything will not have much success: Look at Mr. Martin's performance as prime minister."
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:50 AM

 
Quotidian

"If mankind had not been organized into families, it would have never have had the organic power to be organized into commonwealths."
-- G.K. Chesterton, "Marriage and the Modern Mind," Sidelights on New London and Newer York
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:45 AM

 
How is Howard Dean not like Russell Crowe?

According to a Los Angeles Times editorial, Crowe apologizes when he offends (and is therefore a better salesman). The Times says:
"Dean presents a conundrum for embattled Democrats, who have lost control of the White House and Congress. There are two ways for them to think about him. One is that he's a reckless, emotional politician whose fiery remarks will stir up debate and help the Democratic Party. The other is that he's a reckless, emotional politician whose name-calling cheapens the national debate on issues and hurts his own party."
They come to the conclusion that because Dean offends potential customers -- some people who voted Republican that the Democrats must convince to vote for them if they ever want to win elections -- he is a horrible salesman. Why can everyone except the Democratic Party see this? I would wager that they do see this, so the better question might be why do they tolerate it? I think that they are glad that he says what they are (almost) all thinking anyway but count on the public dismissing it because they think "there's that outrageous Howard Dean again." I'm not sure this is a great strategy but it is no doubt cathartic for the Dems.
For the record, the Times editorial says the strategy might be that it makes the rest of the Democrats look moderate by comparison but that misses the point that at least for now it is Dean who is defining the party. Come the 2006 mid-term elections, the Democrats will be sorry for (take your pick) 1) pursuing this strategy, 2) picking Dean as DNC head or 3) tolerating his mouth for so long.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:24 AM

 
Steyn on Gitmo: center of Koran abuse

From Mark Steyn's Chicago Sun-Times column:
"... since Gitmo became the global center of U.S. Quran Desecration operations, there have been five verifiable instances of official minor 'disrespect' for the holy book, three of which may have been intentional, which averages out at one incident per year. The same report also turned up 15 documented instances of 'disrespect' by Muslim detainees. 'These included using a Quran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Quran, attempting to flush a Quran down the toilet and urinating on the Quran.'
When three times as many detainees 'desecrate' the Koran as U.S. guards do, it seems clear that the whole Operation Desecration ballyhoo is yet another media crock and the Organization of the Islamic Conference and all the rest are complaining about nothing. Or is Quran desecration one of those things like Jews telling Jewish jokes or gangsta rappers recording numbers like 'Strictly 4 My Niggaz'? Are only devout Muslims allowed to desecrate the Quran? No doubt that's why the Egyptian foreign minister and company had no comment on the recent suicide bombing at a mosque in Kandahar, which killed 20, wounded more than 50 and presumably desecrated every Quran in the building."
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:21 AM

 
UN reform needs a big stick

The Washington Post editorializes against Rep. Henry Hyde's "extreme bill" that would link US payments to the United Nations upon the UN's enactment of reforms outlined in Hyde's bill. The Post praises some parts of the bill but finds the threat of withholding US contributions to be unwise, comparing it to "using a sledgehammer to drive a nail into an antique table." The Post asks:
"Hyde and his congressional colleagues must ponder a basic question: Is the U.S. national interest best served by disengaging from the United Nations and allowing it to atrophy for lack of resources? Or is the national interest served by supporting the institution, even while pushing it to reform?"
Fair questions and, indeed, a debate worth having. But without the withholding of US contributions what else does the United States have to push the UN to reform? Fortunately or unfortunately, without the stick of cutting the UN off of the full American contribution, no set of carrots is likely to get the attention of the international organization. As a former US president once said (and I'm paraphrasing), talk all you want, you gotta have a large piece of lumber to get their attention.
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:49 PM

 
Brooks on AIDS in Africa

Great column in the New York Times by David Brooks. (Hit and miss columnist, his week he hits a triple.) Brooks says that to win the war (yes, I hate that expression -- I apologize for using it) against AIDS in Africa people, especially those with the disease, must change their behaviour. These paragraphs should be tacked onto every bulletin board on every pro-condom NGO and UN committee that deals with the subject:
"We have tried to change behavior, but we have mostly tried technical means to prevent the spread of AIDS, and these techniques have proved necessary but insufficient.
We have tried awareness, but awareness alone is insufficient. Surveys show that vast majorities understand, at least intellectually, the dangers of H.I.V. They behave in risky ways anyway.
We have issued condoms, but condoms alone are insufficient. Surveys also show that a vast majority know where they can get condoms. But that doesn't mean they actually use them, as rising or stable infection rates demonstrate.
We have tried economic development, but that too is necessary but insufficient. The most aggressive spreaders of the disease are relatively well off. They are miners who have sex with prostitutes and bring the disease home to their wives. They are teachers who trade grades for sex. They are sugar daddies who have sex with 14-year-old girls in exchange for cellphone time.
If this were about offering people the right incentives, we would have solved this problem. But the AIDS crisis has another element, which can be addressed only by some other language - the language those people in church slipped into.
The AIDS crisis is about evil. It's about the small gangs of predatory men who knowingly infect women by the score without a second thought in the world.
The AIDS crisis is about the sanctity of life. It's about people who have come to so undervalue their own life that ruinous behavior seems unimportant and death is accepted fatalistically.
It's about disproportionate suffering. It's about people who commit minor transgressions, or even no transgressions, and suffer consequences too horrible to contemplate. In America we read in the Book of Job; in sub-Saharan Africa they have 10 Jobs per acre.
It's about these and a dozen other things - trust, fear, weakness, traditions, temptation - none of which can be fully addressed by externals. They can be addressed only by the language of ought, by fixing behavior into some relevant set of transcendent ideals and faiths.
That's a language governments and N.G.O.'s rarely speak. It's a language that has to be spoken by people who connect words like 'faithful' and 'abstinent' to some larger creed."
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:43 PM

 
Cox nomination

George F. Will has an excellent column on the media critics of "business-friendly" Christopher Cox, President George W. Bush's nominee to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Will concludes by noting the hypocrisy of the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post, the latter of which said that the retiring SEC chairman, William Donaldson, a 74-year-old wealthy investment banker, is "immune to pressure to earn a living after he left government." Will observes:
"That the rich, because they are supposedly above material temptations, are especially suited to public service has long been used to justify aristocracies. That idea, however, usually embraced by liberals gloomily convinced that if someone 'pro-business' chairs the SEC, corruption will be rampant in America's business system -- the system that produced Donaldson's supposedly ennobling wealth."
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:35 PM

 
Uncommon common sense

This story from Friday's Reuters wire service has news that I was hoping but not expecting to see. Denmark has hinted the September 27 referendum on the European constitution might be delayed until after France and the Netherlands come up with some "solution" to the problem of implementing a constitution that the EU said would not take effect until all 25 members ratify it; in May and on June 1, voters in France and the Netherlands voted against the constitution. Since then, European leaders have said that other countries should get on with the business of ratifying the constitution but Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen questioned whether that made any sense: "It must be up to the French and Dutch governments to present a solution." Reuters reports that others, too, are questioning the wisdom of continuing with the ratification process. Among them are EU Vice-President, Margot Wallstrom, a Swede, said that with the Dutch and French votes and Tony Blair's decision to suspend its planned referendum, "the process has de facto been put on hold ... One can no longer ask for a Danish referendum to take place."
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:18 PM

 
Rifkind in trouble?

The Observer reports that the name of Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a candidate for the Tory leadership in the UK, "was discovered on confidential Iraqi diplomatic communiques found in the country's ransacked Foreign Ministry in Baghdad shortly after the fall of Saddam in 2003." Furthermore, "The contents of the papers have been confirmed as genuine and reveal that an Australian oil company which Rifkind was working for tried to open a business relationship with Saddam's government." Rifkind, for the record, was one of the more vocal Tory critics of the liberation of Iraq. We are beginning to see a pattern here, aren't we? For one side of this debate in the West, the issue really was oil.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:04 PM

 
Step right up and pick your poll

Political Staples likes the latest Strategic Council poll better than last week's decimating the Tories poll. The point right now is not which poll is correct (although it is a concern that genuine public opinion will begin to reflect the polling numbers by some process that is the political psychology equivalent of peer pressure and succumbing to what everybody else thinks). The immediate concern is that all the polls show the Liberals comfortably ahead of the Conservatives indicating the need for a new game plan from Team Harper.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:52 PM

 
Quotidian

Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being the most conventional way to rise above the conventional."
-- Vladimir Nabokov, "Madame Bovary," Lectures on Literature
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:46 PM

 
Quotidian

"Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged."
-- Hilaire Belloc, Epitath on the Politician Himself
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:50 PM

 
Best line on American judicial activism

Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post: " We have added 17 amendments since the Bill of Rights. Amending is not a job for judges."
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:05 AM

 
The lessons of e-bay

From a leader in The Economist:
"To succeed, firms need agility, an open mind and the ability to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Most of all, they need to listen carefully to their customers, paying close attention to what they do and don't want.
... The relatively low barriers to entry remain one of the most alluring features of the internet—and the greatest threat to any incumbent firm. Millions of people have already set up small web businesses, and millions more will do so, many of them using services provided by eBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo!. A few, it seems safe to predict, will become the giant-killers of tomorrow. For managers of any business, the lessons of eBay are both exhilarating and daunting: the prizes offered by the internet are dazzling by any measure, but only those who can satisfy the demanding and changing tastes of consumers, the internet's true sovereigns, will survive to enjoy them." (emphasis added)
So, the lessons of e-bay is exactly what any observation of the free market over the last century would have taught, just more so.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:00 AM

 
Another reason to register with The Speccie

Mark Steyn's column. Here are the money 'graphs on the "Gitmo as gulag" story:
"Well, then, these are diminished times for gulags. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, some 15 to 30 million prisoners passed through the Soviet gulags; at any one time there were around two million held; some two to three million died in the gulags because of malnutrition, typhus, overwork, or simply the whims of the camp commandant. By comparison, Guantanamo at its peak held 750 prisoners; currently there are 520; none has died in captivity, and, as I wrote here three-and-a-half years ago, it has the distinction of being ‘a camp where the medical staff outnumber the prisoners. Atrocious, eh? I bet Rose Addis is glad she didn’t get shipped there rather than the Whittington.’ Indeed, it’s the only gulag in history where the detainees leave in better health and weighing more than when they arrive. This means they’re in much better shape when they get back to killing infidels: of the more than 200 who have been released, about 5 per cent — that’s to say, 12 — have since been recaptured on the battlefield.
Calling Guantanamo a 'gulag is the sort of thing you’d expect from some nutter in the comments section of a kook website. Why would an organisation in the human rights business want to trivialise the murder of millions in totalitarian death camps by comparing them with a non-death camp where you’re at risk of having the frontispiece of your book moistened by a drop of urine if the wind’s blowing in the right direction? If Gitmo’s a gulag, what words does that leave for the systemic rape being practised by the butchers of Darfur? Or is it because they’ve so exhausted the extremes of their vocabulary on Guantanamo that the world’s progressives have so little to say about real horrors like Sudan? Warming to his theme, Amnesty International USA’s executive director William Schulz then declared Donald Rumsfeld the 'high-level architect of torture'. Asked what evidence he had for his assertion that the defence secretary had approved the use of torture at the camp, Mr Schulz said, 'It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea'."
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:55 AM

 
Direction of British Tories

A panel of Conservatives is interviewed by The Spectator including David Willets, Charles Moore and Nick Herbert as well as CINO's Michael Heseltine and Gary Streeter about what the party should do to get back on the right track. Not an auspicious beginning when Streeter, an MP "with a social conscience," says that there is no appetite for smaller government. But I love Charles Moore's response:
"But there should be a small state because a big state is a bad thing from a Conservative point of view. A big state arrogates power from the local to the central and it takes power away from people and gives it to bureaucrats. And that is a demoralising thing. It’s not just an economically bad thing, it is morally a bad thing."
Not surprisingly, Heseltine finds problems with what Moore said, explaining that when you talk about the size and waste of government you will alienate government workers. Later Heseltine says "Thatcherism was a disaster."
Nick Herbert has advice for his party that Canada's Tories would be wise to follow,too:
"But we can’t just say we are going to offer you more of the same but run it better. That would be a lethal thing to offer to the British public, because they might look at us and say, well, actually you aren’t going to run it better. What the government has learnt, and Blair has certainly learnt, is that he has only been able to improve the health service significantly in those areas where he has introduced a mixed economy. And where he has done that he has improved things very fast, and waiting lists have come down very fast. But I think he’ll be constrained on further reform and he won’t be able to do it. I think we should occupy that ground and let Brown and the Labour party be opponents of it."
Anyway, this is well-worth reading although you must first register with The Speccie.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:42 AM

 
Great quote

Terry Teachout: "There's something about New York that is positively inimical to recovery from any ailment other than boredom."
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:57 PM

 
Quotidian

"Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."
-- Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:50 PM

 
SCOC health decision

Three excellent posts in the blogosphere about it. One is Political Staples reaction to Paul Martin's reaction to the decision: "Apparently the PM can pick and choose which charter rights he will honour." This Globe and Mail story will explain what PS means, the gist of which is that Martin is committed to a single-tier of shitty healthcare.
Lorne Gunter at As I Please says the decision, in which the majority wrote, "many western democracies that do not impose a monopoly on the delivery of health care have successfully delivered to their citizens medical services that are superior to and more affordable than the services that are presently available in Canada," and "that a monopoly is not necessary or even related to the provision of quality public health care," is, in Gunter's words, "a pretty fundamental challenge to the Canadian orthodoxy that holds a) ours is the best health care system in the world and b) it is the best only because all private care is effectively illegal."
That said, Let It Bleed says that although conservatives may be happy with the decision because it is a baby step toward some (more) private health care provision, the fact is that the judges who found that denying private provision of health care in Quebec is a violation of that province's Charter rights are nothing less than judicial activists: "Canadian conservatives should be wary: we may have achieved what we perceive to be a desirable goal, but at the expense of the entrenchment of a line of judicial reasoning which is perhaps anathema to what we consider a proper interaction between the courts and the legislature."
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:21 PM

 
African mag serves as Mugabe PR flack

African Business magazine has a 40-page Special Report on Zimbabwe's Silver Jubilee and to read it you would think that all is golden in Robert Mugabe's paradise. The sub-head on the report is "25 years of Independence, Democracy and Development." The lead story, "It was the bullet that brought the ballot," is Mugabe's April speech marking 25 years in power and it is introduced by New African editor Baffour Ankomah. (African Business and New African are both IC Publications magazines.) Ankomah says that despite 5 years of Western economic sanctions, Mugabe can "blow a bit of his own horn for turning the land formerly ruled by discrimination into a lovely place for all its citizens." In another feature, Ankomah interviews Mugabe and asks such probing questions as "Your roads are wonderful, I have travelled around the country and your roads are superb." Mugabe handles the question by saying the roads are insufficient because there are so many cars. Ankomah suggests to the Zimbabwean president that perhaps one reason not every person in that country appreciates his leadership is because they've had it so good "in every sphere of national life since independence," that after a quarter-century the citizens have had it too good. Mugabe answers that hardball by saying that perhaps what his country needs is an educational process such as Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution to remind his countrymen of how far they've come.

Mugabe says he won't meet with the opposition parties, most notably the MDC, because they 1) are influenced by foreign agents, 2) they don't think nationally and 3) they don't believe they are as intelligent as the government. ("They act as if they don't have the same mental abilities as ourselves" and therefore allow themselves to be controlled by the West, says Mugabe.) But there were no questions about intimidation in the recent elections in Zimbabwe or any query about the country's human rights record; indeed, Ankomah says it is ironic that the Commonwealth has suspended Zimbabwe when "countries with worse human rights and democratic records are still members," although he doesn't name which ones he has in mind. Ankomah asked if Mugabe expects a Christmas card from US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Mugabe responds: "I wouldn't have her even for a girlfriend, would I?" The toughest questions he was asked were 1) were sanctions responsible for the "massive implosion of your economy in 2002 and 2003" and 2) whether the analysis of "critics at home and abroad [who] say you have put a soft female vice president in a strategic position" to watch the president's back is true. Sounds like a CBC interview of Paul Martin.

Other stories include a report on Mugabe honouring "African heroes" such as former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, former Angolan president Samora Machel and former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda. (Judge a man by those he esteems.) There's an interview with Dr. Gideon Gono of the Zimbabwe Central Bank in which Dr. Gono explains that the country's economic woes are all the result of the economic sanctions and all the shortages of goods are temporary; an interview with Patrick Chinamasa, the justice and legal affairs minister, who says that Mugabe is neither the problem nor a dictator. Chinasama says that the March 31 election was the "freest, fairest and most transparent election you can find anywhere in the world." He was never challenged on this. In another interview, Agriculture Minister Joseph Made claims that there are food shortages because white farmers contaminated the land. Zimbabwe's new Information Minister, Dr. Tichaona Benjamin Jokonya, a former diplomat, said that newspapers such as The Daily News were never banned but rather that they banned themselves. Dr. Jokonya says that only extremists in the West and the opposition say newspapers are being in any way censored before seemingly contradicting himself by defending the government's banning certain newspapers because they report Western lies (to "protect Zimbabwe from its detractors," as the (Dis)Information Minister explains). In another softball interview, that soft lady Ankomah asked Mugabe about, Vice President Joice Mujuru, describes her education: "Mao Zedong's thoughts, and other materials from North Korea, Romania, Yugoslavia and those Eastern European countries..." (remember, this was during the Cold War).

After reading the 40-page report one can only come to the conclusion that Mugabe and his administration are not only thugs but liars. They are also proof of Natan Sharansky's argument that dictatorships must have foreign bogeymen to blame for the problems that they themselves have caused. One can expect such lies from the Zimbabwean administration. What I don't get is any magazine, no matter how biased, presenting such lies as reporting. Not once is a member of the Zimbabwean opposition quoted or even named (although the MDC is but only within the context of being foreign-controlled stooges). Is it any wonder Mugabe and his ilk are not held to account when a magazine that purports to serve African business interests peddle his administration's lies?

(Cross-posted at The Shotgun)
posted by Paul Tuns at 5:45 PM

 
Just wondering

According to the minutes of the meeting of the ad hoc committee examining C-38, the government's bill redefining marriage, there were five MPs in attendence for the evening's proceedings who were not members of that committee: Garry Breitkreuz, Art Hanger, Pat O'Brien, Paul Szabo and Jeff Watson. Why is it that all five are pro-traditional marriage? Is it that the other side is made up of mostly closed-minded bigots who do not care to hear the arguments on both sides?
Burkean Canuck has Calgary Bishop Fred Henry's presentation, which BC calls "a very strong example of careful reasoning on public policy which is no doubt informed by faith but does not employ either confessional language or Scripture."
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:11 AM

 
GOP as the party of white Christians

Howard Dean says the Republican Party is "a white, Christian party," and
GOP Party Chairman Ken Mehlman responds that"a lot of folks who attended my Bar Mitzvah would be surprised." Very nice. LifeSite has some figures that disprove Dean's assertion: "... in the 2004 election Bush received 44% of the Hispanic vote, 44% of the Asian vote and 25% of the Jewish vote." Also, suggest LifeSite, look at the racially diverse Bush cabinet. Or do Liberals believe the only genuine blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Jews are the ones that vote Democrat?
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:05 AM

 
Bloggers on crack

Greg Staples says that recent politics is like crack: "I need more of it or stronger doses to get me worked up." No tapes, MPs switching sides, confidence vote. What to do?
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:03 AM

 
New NR blog

An as-yet un-named media blog. What is that, NR's 700th blog?
posted by Paul Tuns at 2:03 AM

 
Alleviating poverty

Financial Times reports that it appears that Prime Minister Tony Blair has convinced President George W. Bush to pony up some dough for Africa as he vows more "resources" for the World Bank: "We agree that highly indebted developing countries that are on the path to reform should not be burdened by mountains of debt." The New York Times finds Bush's $674 million pledge insufficient and complains that it pales in comparison to corporate tax cuts Bush has fought for. David Frum said that what would be really effective to alleviate poverty on America's door-step is passing CAFTA. Frum says: "CAFTA is premised on the unglamorous idea that poverty will be defeated by work and trade, not guilt-induced donations." Very nice. Rich Lowry has more on CAFTA here. Lowry says what has happened in Chile could happen in Central America:
"Chile is a model. The U.S. trade agreement with Chile that went into effect in 2004 expanded exports between both countries by 30 percent its first year. As State Department official Robert Zoellick pointed out in a recent speech, 'The country in Latin America that has dramatically reduced inequality, unemployment and poverty in recent decades while also increasing real wages and pensions for working families is Chile — the country that has most opened its economy to free trade'."
Yet, unions and the Democrats in their pocket oppose expanding opportunity (aka as free trade).
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:43 AM

 
On Taiwan

In a post about Taiwan inching towards "full-fledged independence," Lorne Gunter makes an excellent point about how the West has mistreated the island nation and yet Taiwan has become more democratic:
"What's truly amazing, though, is that Taiwan is still west-friendly. And what's ironic is that before its abandonment, Taiwan wasn't much more democratic than the mainland -- less brutal and repressive, but just about as undemocratic. But since the west jilted her for the mainland, Taiwan has become considerably more western in its political culture."
Still, the West should be ashamed of its China policy.
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:38 AM

 
Double standards?

From Lorne Gunter's As I Please:
"Just wondering. How come Belinda's defection was a sign Stephen Harper is a lousy leader, yet Pat O'Brien's resignation from the Liberal caucus is no reflection whatever on Paul Martin's ability?
Not that I'm saying there was any uneven coverage or anything."
No, never.
posted by Paul Tuns at 1:35 AM

 
Upward mobility

Thomas Sowell has a column focusing on one-third of the liberal trinity of race, gender and class. He says:
"The oldest, and perhaps still the most compelling, of these concerns is class. In the vision of the left, we are born, live, and die in a particular class -- unless, of course, we give power to the left to change all that.
The latest statistics seized upon to support this class-ridden view of America and other Western societies show that most people in a given part of the income distribution are the children of other people born into that same part of the income distribution.
Among men born in families in the bottom 25 percent of income earners only 32 percent end up in the top half of the income distribution. And among men born to families in the top 25 percent in income earners, only 34 percent end up down in the bottom half.
How startling is that?
More to the point, does this show that people are trapped in poverty or can coast through life on their parents' wealth? Does it show that 'society' denies 'access' to the poor?"
To liberals, the fact that just one-third of those from the bottom quartile jump to the top half is a sign of a dysfunctional society that requires massive welfare programs. But as Sowell notes, "Realistically, if nearly a third of people born to families in the bottom quarter of income earners rise into the top half, that is not a bad record."
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:00 AM

 
Quotidian

"For some time past, there has been much talk of the necessity of limiting history to the narration of facts: nothing can be more just; but we must always bear in mind that there are far more facts to narrate, and that the facts themselves are much more various in their nature than people are at first disposed to believe; there are material, visible facts, such as wars, battles, the official acts of governments; there are moral facts, none the less real that they do not appear on the surface; there are individual facts which have denominations of their own; there are general facts, without any particular designation, to which it is impossible to assign any precise date, which it is impossible to bring within strict limits, but which are yet no less facts than the rest, historical facts, facts which we cannot exclude from history without mutilating history."
-- Francois Guziot, History of Civilization in Europe
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:40 PM

 
Canada's best-known export links War on Terror-torture

Naomi Klein, the globalized wonder of the anti-globalization movement, writes in the Los Angeles Times about American torture in Iraq and concludes that if you still (can you hear her whine) support the liberation of Iraq, you must accept the torture, too. She comes to this nifty conclusion by way of a 1965 film, the Battle of Algiers in which Col. Mathieu does not deny French torture of Algerian rebels but rather says: "The problem is the FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria and we want to stay ... It's my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences." Klein says, "His point, as relevant in Iraq today as it was in Algeria in 1957, is that there is no nice, humanitarian way to occupy a nation against the will of its people. Those who support such an occupation don't have the right to morally separate themselves from the brutality it requires."
Klein concludes: "When the next batch of photographs from Abu Ghraib appear, many Americans will be morally outraged, and rightly so. But perhaps some brave official will take a lesson from Col. Mathieu and dare to turn the tables: Should the United States stay in Iraq? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences."
I don't buy that. One can support the liberation of Iraq and still be outraged by true torture. The problem with the likes of Klein is that she is unable to distinguish between real torture and aggressive interrogation. Klein even gives lip service to the torture committed by Saddam Hussein but this is only to equate the American presence in Iraq and the Bush administration with Hussein's regime.
And another thing: torture is not actually a consequence of the liberation, unlike the end of the torture at the hands of Hussein's regime.
And here's another thought. If those who support the liberation of Iraq must accept all of its consequences, including the non-consequence of torture, then don't the opponents of the liberation have to oppose the good things that have resulted from the deposing of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime?
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:03 PM

 
Good news for NYC

AP reports that New York City's 2012 Olympic bid is faultering. Good for New York City -- at least that portion of it that pays taxes. Gwenn Knapp of the San Francisco Chronicle says it is good for both New York City and San Fran that NYC was the American entry into the Olympic sweepstakes even though it is unlikely it will get to hold them on its first bid. (Paris, the front-runner, bid on the 2004 and 2008 Summer Olympics.) The point being, it's better that someone else's, anyone else's taxpayers and commuters should have to pay for such foolishness. Smart New Yorkers will by praying that Parisians host the 2012 Games.
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:32 PM

 
Bush smarter than Kerry

Adam Daifallah calls attention to this story about George W. Bush's Yale grades being better than John F. Kerry's. Of special note is that one of Kerry's better subjects was French. Surprise, surprise. I disagree with Adam, however, that this news (of Bush having better grades than Kerry) is a little astonishing -- Kerry never seemed all that bright to me. BTW, click on the Boston Globe story for one heckuva funny picture of Kerry.
posted by Paul Tuns at 6:50 PM

 
Harris is in

Rep. Katherine Harris (R), the Florida secretary of state who oversaw the 2000 presidential recounts in the Sunshine State, has announced that she will run for the GOP Senate nomination next year. If she wins, she will face first-term senator Bill Nelson (D). While she might galvanize Democrats in this race she 1) has the best name recognition of anyone likely to run, 2) is a fairly solid conservative and 3) because she will galvanize Democrats, even if she loses, she will divert the party's resources to Florida, helping GOP candidates elsewhere.
posted by Paul Tuns at 5:37 PM

 
Rifkind's in

The Daily Telegraph reports that Sir Malcolm Rifkind has thrown his hat into the centre of the Tory ring. Talking to the Conservative Mainstream group of self-described moderates, the former foreign secretary said the only chance the party has to win next time 'round is by recapturing the "centre ground." Why do conservative politicians lend credence to the argument that theirs are extremist parties by always talking about the need to moderate themselves?
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:24 AM

 
Great idea

The first part of this post by Stephen Taylor argues that CPC leader Stephen Harper should move to Quebec (not the great idea) before getting to the meat of his argument, specifically that Harper campaign as the unity candidate (that's the great idea). Taylor concludes:
"To win an election, one must define it. The Conservative Party should commission a poll in Quebec that simply asks if the Liberal party has done more to help or to hurt national unity. The answer will likely surprise people from Ontario. Stephen Harper should then run the Tory campaign, and indeed define the election, on national unity (everyone will understand Adcam as the subtext). This may win enough seats in Ontario to win at least a minority Conservative government. Its time to pull out all the stops and this idea might be radical enough to make the difference."
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:47 PM

 
More on Africa

Along the point I made in an earlier post, the (London) Times editorializes that Africans must become more responsible for themselves -- their economic basketcaseness is more home grown than most want to admit. But among the tsk-tsking of the editorial is the paper's criticism of Zimbabwe's neighbours and the African Union, both which are silent on Robert Mugabe's Operation Murambatsivna (Drive out trash) house-razing campaign:
"Little wonder that the United Nations condemned Zimbabwe’s actions or that the country’s braver religious leaders said they were shocked by the havoc. It is a greater wonder that the demolitions have, so far, evinced no word of protest or condemnation from South Africa, the African Union or from any of Zimbabwe’s neighbours. For misplaced African solidarity with a fellow 'liberationist' regime hurts all Africa, particularly when the developed world is again attempting another bail-out of a continent with too many crises."
So how about this? Tie the forgiving of debt to a serious condemnation of Harare.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:36 PM

 
Quotidian

"'Why should you object to being cremated, Mr. Puddlebrane,' said I, 'whether like a big pig or otherwise? It has not been suggeted that any one shall cremate you while alive'."
-- Anthony Trollope, The Fixed Period
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:27 PM

 
First, fix African governments

The Washington Times reprints a Daily Telegraph story on Britons' opposition to African aid: "The survey found that 83 percent of Britons are 'not very confident' or 'not at all confident' that new money given to Africa would not disappear into the pockets of criminals or corrupt governments." Still, a majority of Britons say the West should do something to help the Dark Continent. Gordon Brown responded to such concerns by giving lip service to accountability and transparency, saying the aid package combines "action on debt, aid and trade with good governance, transparency, an attack on corruption and the encouragement of private investment." As the Free Africa Foundation has noted -- as does its president George B.N. Ayittey in Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa's Future -- what Africa needs is not more aid but more freedom. Brown, Blair, Bush et al must tie any debt relief or development aid to greater guarantees for what the FAF calls the "four cornerstones of freedom": intellectual freedom, political freedom, economic freedom and religious freedom.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:09 PM

 
Post-referendum fallout for French socialists

The Independent reports that Laurent Fabius, the 59-year-old former prime minister, was booted out of the leadership of the Socialist Party's, along with eight others, for opposing the European constitution. In fact, he helped lead the fight against it while his party, the largest opposition party in France, supported the consitution. The national council made this decision in a 167-122 vote and was about much more than the referendum vote. The Independent reports: "Although officially a punishment for having defied party policy, the vote is the first shot in a struggle for the leadership and ideological direction of the Socialists and the wider French left before the presidential election in 2007." Fabius is probably the front-runner to be the mainstream Left's presidential candidate and I would guess that getting kicked out of the leadership of an unpopular party will only help his candidacy. You would think that the Socialists after being on the wrong (and government) side of the European constitution vote might want to be seen as slightly more sympathetic to the concerns of those who voted non instead of snubbing them.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:55 PM

 
Other notable Guardian stories

1) Paris is considered the front-runner for the 2012 Summer Olympics. For the sake of London and New York, I hope they get them.

2) British PM Tony Blair is talking up Africa debt relief with US President George W. Bush and the paper reports that "progress" is being made. It is worth noting that while this story says the Bush administration supports 100% debt cancellation, John O'Sullivan reported in an Evening Standard column today, "The U.S. administration shares the view of many development economists that debt cancellation is a damaging and counterproductive form of aid." Did JO'S make a rare mistake?

3) The ICC is proceeding against several Sudanese officials for war crimes in Darfur in west Sudan. Note, this does not mean that a prosecution is imminent, but rather that the ICC admits that it has gathered evidence against members of the Sudanese governments and that now it will proceed with a formal investigation of war crimes and possibly genocide in Darfur. Question: how is gathering evidence and a formal investigation that different. Oh, never mind -- I'll never get international institutions-speak. Still, worth noting is this explanation about the killing of refugees in Darfur from Musa Hilal, a Sudanese tribal leader identified by the US State Department as a Janjaweed coordinator and a suspect in the genocide: "Most of the [rebel] garrisons were near the villages, near civilians ... They stayed near civilians and war has its consequences. Bullets fly."
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:21 PM

 
UK EU referndum

The Guardian reports that Tony Blair's government has shelved (for now) any referendum on the European constitution. Good news, sort of, for now. You don't have to read far into the story to realize that the French and Dutch voters and whoever is next notwithstanding, the European Constitution will be foisted upon the European Union one way or another. Here's the Guardian's report:
"Although the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, insisted it was not for "one country alone" to determine the future of the constitution, he announced the government was shelving to hold a nationwide vote and incorporate the treaty into UK law.
The decision on a way forward for the treaty - rejected by the French and Dutch in national referendums - will now lie with this month's EU council of ministers summit, Mr Straw said."
The decision on the way forward. Hmmmm ... that sounds like the EuroElite have made up their mind that the constitution will be implemented. It might take a little longer than they expected because they have to figure out how to pull a fast one over the Dutch and French and whoever else may vote no in upcoming charter referenda.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:15 PM

 
Missing the point

From Ezra Levant's Calgary Sun column:
"Ujjal Dosanjh, a cabinet minister in whom the country's and the Queen's highest trust is placed, is caught on tape hawking government offices as if they were trinkets at a garage sale. This breach of trust and absence of ethics is balanced out, it seems, if headlines are any indication, by the fact his attempted purchase -- Conservative MP Gurmant Grewal -- secretly taped the conversation.
Both are examples of 'sleazy politics,' we are told."
But there is no equivalence. A minister of the crown and members of the PMO ought not to have attempted to make a deal, even if Grewal was setting them up. (Big if, that is, too.) It is one thing for an MP to pull up such an amateur trick, if indeed that is what it was, to try to catch the Liberals in some sleazy wheeling and dealing. But Dosanjh and Tim Murphy shouldn't not have played along. Even assuming the worst about Grewal -- that he set them up -- the fact that they engaged in any discussion is a serious moral shortcoming (to be charitable) on the part of some of the most important politicos on Parliament Hill. Levant makes an important point in noting that with but a few exceptions, the media are not doing their job by pretending that both sides are equally sleazy. As Levant concludes his column: "Unethical, illegal things are being done in government. To ignore that by focusing on errors by the opposition is an abdication of true reporting and a collaboration in the undoing of our country's moral fibre."
posted by Paul Tuns at 5:03 PM

 
I guess it doesn't fit the media story line

Political Staples went to Mass yesterday and then celebrated his parish's 100th anniversary in a packed KofC hall, "All without a single CBC camera to prove how no one goes to Church any more."
posted by Paul Tuns at 4:58 PM

 
The price of freedom

Ben Stein pays tribute to the children of American military men and women who have died in the line of duty defending not only the freedom of Americans but the freedom of others (Iraqis, Afghanis, etc...). Last week Stein attended an event in Virginia where:
"There were about 250 of them. Children of men and women who had been killed in the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and in training. They were maybe from age five to fifteen. They were handsome. They were pretty. They were cute. They had haunted eyes, some of them, and some of them cried. One family had five kids, and the oldest, a beautiful 15-year-old girl, could not stop crying.
... I told the kids their parents had died to save this country, to give kids in Iraq and Afghanistan the chance to choose their lives and to have the freedoms we take for granted. I told them there were not enough words in the English language to thank them enough for what they had done. For the sacrifice they had made. I told them their fathers and mothers had died doing God's work."
It is almost as hard to express our thanks and offer our condolences as it is to imagine what many must be feeling -- a five-year-old cannot understand the sacrifice his or her parent has made. But thanks indeed go to these children and they remain in our prayers.
posted by Paul Tuns at 4:48 PM

 
Kristof goes overboard

First, let's praise this column on Darfur by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. (It is not for the squeamish -- it notes several unpleasant rapes in a matter of fact way.) The column concludes:
"I'm still chilled by the matter-of-fact explanation I received as to why it is women who collect firewood, even though they're the ones who are raped. The reason is an indication of how utterly we are failing the people of Darfur, two years into the first genocide of the 21st century.
'It's simple,' one woman here explained. 'When the men go out, they're killed. The women are only raped'."
This quote illustrates the tragedy of Darfur and why the West needs to do more. But Kristof is wrong to say, as he did:
"Those women who spoke to me risked arrest and lifelong shame by telling their stories. Their courage should be an inspiration to us - and above all, to President Bush - to speak out. Mr. Bush finally let the word Darfur pass his lips on Wednesday, after 142 days of silence, but only during a photo op. Such silence amounts to acquiescence, for this policy of rape flourishes only because it is ignored."
C'mon. Bush should do more. He could lead. He might commit troops to help establish some sort of peace. He might even ask the United Nations to do more than to merely ask Khartoum to crack down on those committing genocide. But to say he has acquiesced in widespread rape is too much.
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:00 PM

 
Relapsed Catholic v. Rabble

Knockout Kathy. (Scroll down to "The Babble continues," on June 5)
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:57 PM

 
Quotidian

"Good order is the foundation of all things."
-- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:49 PM

 
Conservatives and libertarians

My view of is that the sometimes friends should be workable allies more often. (Where's Frank Meyer when you need him?) Burkean Canuck has some thoughts of his own in these two posts here and here. BC captures my sentiments in one of his posts when he says: "Although I may disagree with libertarians on certain matters, I have appreciated the courage of their convictions and their willingness to engage in debate. And, more than once, I've found myself on the same side of an issue, albeit for different reasons." Of course, it would be easier to work with libertarians if they were more like Gods of the Copybook Headings, the libertarian blog critical of "vulgar libertarians" as opposed to scholarly ones. You can read the GCH reply to BC here to see what I mean.
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:28 PM

 
Quotidian

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."
-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:14 PM

 
Breindel & Rosett

I noted earlier today that Claudia Rosett won the Eric Breindel Award and said that she was a most worthy recepient. Martin Peretz wrote in The New Republic of Breindel, to whom he was a friend and mentor, that he "had an allergy to the pieties of public life because they forced our politics to pretend that the world was a better place than it is." That nicely captures Rosett, too, the pieties being about the United Nations. The New York Sun editorialized today:
"The Breindel award is named for the late editor of the editorial page of the New York Post. Last night, Ms. Rosett recalled that, in February 1998, a month before Breindel died, he wrote an article about the return of Secretary-General Kofi Annan from a parley in Baghdad with Saddam Hussein. She reminded us that the trip was 'hailed by many in the press, and by Annan himself, as a triumph, in which he announced he could "do business" with Saddam.' Yet it paved the way for what she called 'the U.N.'s stampede of corruption and deception.'
At the time, Ms. Rosett said, Breindel had observed that the final chapter of the appeasement of which the United Nations had become a part 'has yet to be written.' No doubt one of the reasons that the givers of the Breindel prize chose Ms. Rosett is that she has been, in a sense, working to finish the chapter Breindel was writing when he died at such a young age."
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:14 PM

 
Quotidian

"Belinda took up her knitting. She remembered Dr. Parnell saying that he thought Catullus rather too indelicate for a young girl to read. If this were so, for Belinda's scanty knowledge of Latin would not enable her to find out for herself, how much more indelicate must the great Roman poet be for a young curate!"
-- Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle
posted by Paul Tuns at 11:05 PM

 
Luzers protest spelling B

Yes, in 2005 even spelling bees get politicized. In The Corner, Mark Krikorian noted:
"Apparently, the National Spelling Bee is being picketed by the Simplified Spelling Society, because words like 'knee' or 'laugh' should be spelled differently. Who gets out of bed in the morning to picket irregular spelling? If a new, simpler spelling of a word catches on, like jail instead of gaol, fine, but people don’t seem to want that (as a conservative in temperament as well as politics, I sure don’t). The Washington Post 20-plus years ago changed its spelling of 'employee' to eliminate the final 'e' ('employe'), but it didn’t stick and they went back to the right spelling. I just hope the government doesn’t decide to get involved."
The story that Krikorian links to mentions the protestors are part of Spell4Literacy, the New Zealand division of the international Simplified Spelling Society. Spell4Literacy? Are they serious? Yes, indeed they are. They changed their name in January 2004 to help society better understand that "literacy surveys showed that the complexity of English spelling was a major cause of the large gap between children who mastered reading and writing and those who did not," and that "Updating spelling would help in raising literacy levels." Krikorian reacted to their protest by concluding, "I just hope the government doesn’t decide to get involved." Indeed Spell4Literacy has asked New Zealand's Parliament's Select Committee on Education and Science "to look at the connection between the English spelling system and literacy standards, with a view to initiating international action to update spelling in order to improve literacy standards." Sounds like a job for the United Nations.

(Cross-posted at The Shotgun)
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:28 PM

 
Good news from the art world

No, I didn't inadvertently type "Good" instead of "More bad". As the Guardian reports today, 34-year-old Gillian Carnegie, "an artist known for painting the most conventional of subject matters -- vases of flowers" was shortlisted" for the Turner prize today. Carnegie, the Guardian tells us, "is the first artist who exclusively uses paint as a medium to be nominated for the prize in five years." Some of Carnegie's art can be seen here. It is not that great but it certainly looks more like art than that which has passed for it in recent years. It is sad that it is news that the painting of flowers in vases in newsworthy but after years of cut up farm animals, unmade beds, dung-splattered Virgin Marys and, one could imagine, paintings of flowers in anuses -- what is politely called conceptual art -- the shortlisting of Carnegie is indeed welcome news.
posted by Paul Tuns at 6:30 PM

 
The man and the organization meet?

I have never believed that former US President Bill Clinton could be selected as the UN Secretary General; as much as Clinton is a man of the Left, the UN will never, never, never pick an American, especially a former president, to its top job. I tend to think of such talk by conservatives as part of rather silly attempts to solicit donations. Silly talk, though, can still be fun if for no other reason than it leads to comments such as this one by John Podhoretz (in The Corner) on why Clinton and the UN are compatible:
"Oh, what the hey, let our Bill be secretary general. After all, there's a lot of beautiful and exotic women at the U.N., he would have diplomatic immunity, and we know the organization doesn't care much about sexual niceties anyway."
posted by Paul Tuns at 6:01 PM

 
30th anniversary for Jaws

The Wall Street Journal's Joanne Kaufman has a column on the Jaws phenom, including the Jawsfest at Martha's Vineyard and this fascinating tidbit from Jaws author Peter Benchley (as told by Kaufman):
"'I had spent days with my editor thinking of the title,' recalls Mr. Benchley, who's scheduled to be signing books this weekend on Martha's Vineyard. He'd considered and discarded the rather Francoise Sagan-ish 'A Stillness in the Water,' as well as the apocalyptic 'Leviathan Rising' and 'Jaws of Death.' 'Finally I said 'well, we can't agree on a title, but we can agree on a word: "Jaws"'."
posted by Paul Tuns at 5:54 PM

 
Politically motivated prosecution

No, this is not a post about new allegations from the Gomery Commission of Inquiry (although who would be surprised if it were?) No, its about the persecution of Yukos' Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The Washington Post has an excellent editorial on the "lawless dismantlement of Mr. Khodorkovsky's giant company ... in a free-for-all of graft and extortion." It is quite possible that Khodorkovsky committed crimes but the fact is that it was never possible for him to receive a a fair trial in Vladimir Putin's Russia. The editorial concludes:
"Mr. Putin launched his attack on Mr. Khodorkovsky two years ago because he felt threatened by his growing economic clout and political ambition. He has destroyed the power and checked the ambition; Mr. Khodorkovsky may be in jail for the next two Russian presidential elections. Yet Mr. Putin has grown weaker. He has eliminated his rivals -- but also the chance that he will lead a country capable of thriving in the global economy, or a government worthy of the world's respect."
What this case demonstrates is that, in Russia, the law is arbitrary which means there is no law at all.
posted by Paul Tuns at 4:19 PM

 
Rosett gets prize worth more than a Pulitzer

The Eric Breindel Prize went to Claudia Rosett. No one could be worthier. New York Sun coverage here.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:19 AM

 
CJR to move further left

New York Sun reports today that Victor Navasky, publisher and editorial director of Nation magazine, will take the reins at the Columbia Journalism Review in some yet un-named role.
posted by Paul Tuns at 9:17 AM

 
Quotidian

"Observe, also, that a writer appears to more advantage in the pages of another book than in his own. In his own, he waits as a candidate for your approbation; in author's, he is a lawgiver."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quotation and Originality," in Emerson: Essays & Poems
posted by Paul Tuns at 10:46 PM

 
Book tag

The point of this game is to answer the following questions and then ask five people on the blogsphere to do the same. The Gods of the Copybook Headings tagged me, sort of. CPH said I had already done it but I think they are referring to my list of the 10 books that influenced the 20th century for the better. Not quite the book tag game, something I've been waiting for. Here it goes.

Number of Books That You Own:

Between 2000-3000, much to the chagrin of my wife.

Last Book Bought:

On Friday I bought three books at a used bookstore: Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred by John Lukacs, The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism by Hernando de Soto and The Crooked Timber of Humanity by Isaiah Berlin (I can't believe that I didn't own this until just this past week).

Last Book I Read:

As the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "What kind of wimp reads only one book at a time?" Among the books I am currently reading are Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study by Thomas Sowell, Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern, Federalism and the French Canadians by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, an advance copy of of Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada by William Johnson and One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty, among others. The last book I finished was The Breaking of Nations by Robert Cooper, but that doesn't really count because that was for a story I did for the Halifax Herald.

Five Books that mean a lot to me:

Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and At Home, 1986-1990 by George F. Will. It was reading this collection of columns that I decided that I wanted to be a journalist. (Now you all know who to blame.)

Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball by George F. Will. Yes, Will is my favourite author. And here he is writing about my favourite topic: baseball. This book greatly influenced (heightened) my appreciation of the game of baseball and the moral underpinnings of sport in general.

The Witch, the Lion and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. It is the first book I read in a day. This book, along with The Sporting News and Rory Leishman's London Free Press columns, led me to want to read more.

The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. This book led me to dozens of other authors and many dozens of other books that I might not have gotten to as early as I have.

Parliament of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke. He demonstrated that one could write about politics with both wit and insight; I'll never forget his description of Democrats as Santa Claus and Republicans as God.

Following the lead of the Gods of the Copybook Headings let me add Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and also her Virtue of Selfishness. The former is an incredible critique of Leviathan and defense of capitalism and the capitalist (not just free markets) and the latter provided two great insights -- that selfishlessness can be selfish (if it leads to self-righteousness) and that racism is little more than a form of collectivism.

I'm tagging five people:

Adam Daifallah

Right Ho!

Kathy Shaidle

Greg Staples

Bob Tarantino
posted by Paul Tuns at 7:53 PM

 
Questions for Woodward

Over at Slate, Timothy Noah has a question for Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward: why have you repeatedly lied about the man who was Deep Throat? Noah assumes Woodward would say it is it was "necessary misdirection" but Noah says it is "conscious fabrication."

(Hat tip: Conservative Ship)
posted by Paul Tuns at 4:56 PM

 
European charter suffers second defeat in three days

Dutch government admits that voters in that country nixed the European constitution; exit polls indicate that the margin is 63%-37%. Times coverage here. AP story here.
The Times continues the story-line that Dutch voters, like French voters, "feared" change -- economics, the inclusion of Turkey, bureaucracy: "Dutch opponents of the treaty fear that the Netherlands, with a population of just 16 million, risks being swamped in a European superstate run by Brussels and dominated by the major European powers." But perhaps Dutch and French voters didn't fear whatever they are said to be afraid of as much as they had a sincerely held disagreement with the governing elite that their lives should be controlled from Brussels. Just a thought, but have you, too, noticed that whenever liberals lose an election or referendum it is because the electorate was afraid?
posted by Paul Tuns at 4:48 PM

 
There is an 'I' word to describe Nader and Zeese

Writing in the Boston Globe, Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese, argue that it is time that the "I" word -- impeachment -- enter political discourse when talking about President Bush and Vice President Cheney. They say, in essence, Bush and Cheney lied about the pretenses for liberating Iraq although in one case (imminent threat) they seem to confuse Bush with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Anyway, Nader and Zeese say:
"The president and vice president have artfully dodged the central question: 'Did the administration mislead us into war by manipulating and misstating intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to Al Qaeda, suppressing contrary intelligence, and deliberately exaggerating the danger a contained, weakened Iraq posed to the United States and its neighbors?'
If this is answered affirmatively Bush and Cheney have committed 'high crimes and misdemeanors.' It is time for Congress to investigate the illegal Iraq war as we move toward the third year of the endless quagmire that many security experts believe jeopardizes US safety by recruiting and training more terrorists. A Resolution of Impeachment would be a first step. Based on the mountains of fabrications, deceptions, and lies, it is time to debate the 'I' word."
Nader and Zeese are idiots.
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:45 AM

 
How to say nothing in an editorial

New York Times on Deep Throat. The editorial ends with a whimper not a bang:
"The 91-year-old Mr. Felt and his family clearly felt it was now or never and talked to Vanity Fair magazine. Younger people who weren't around when Richard Nixon was president may at least relate to the family's hopes of using their long-held secret to pay for the next generation's tuition. Watergate aficionados will mourn the end to a 30-year cottage industry of Deep Throat speculation. It's a little like discovering that Superman's secret identity was, well - Clark Kent."
posted by Paul Tuns at 12:40 AM

 
Comments

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posted by Paul Tuns at 12:35 AM