Buckdog

This weeks release of Central Intelligence Agency records under Freedom Of Information Access has revealed that many Canadians were under ongoing scruitiny by the American spy network.

During the turbulent 1960's and '70's, Canadian anti-Vietnam war activitsts, academics and left thinkers were targeted as a threat to US security for their beliefs.

-CBC
-CIA releases documents detailing its misdeeds
-Central Intelligence Agency Freedom of Information Access

"As the Conrad Black trial has headed into its last days - the jury is expected to begin deliberations today - friends and supporters of Lord Black have gathered round. [...] But a surprise this week was the appearance of Western Report editor Ezra Levant. Word is, Mr. Levant returned from a 23-day vacation in China to his home in Calgary and then promptly hopped on a flight for Chicago. But apparently he is not there to cover the trial or write insightful commentary. No, he is there simply to show solidarity for Lord Black."
Patricia Best
Globe & Mail

Globe & Mail

Rahm Emanuel spoke on the floor of the House of Representatives today on cutting off the madman Cheney.

On June 28, 1987, a new Canadian $1 coin was shipped to financial institutions across the nation to be introduced into circulation on June 30th.

The original design for the $1 coin featured a voyageur canoe, much like the one that graced the old traditional silver dollar coin for years. However, the master dies were lost in transit. Somewhere between Ottawa (where the dies were engraved) and Winnipeg (the production facility) they disappeared and were never found.

The mint feared that counterfeiters, working with the master dies, might be able to flood the country with bogus bucks. Hence a new design was struck and ... we have the 'loonie'.

CTV

With Michael Moore's new documentary, 'Sicko' about to get huge exposure, the American right wing is getting prepared to launch a campaign to counter it. Fear-mongering on the supposed evils of "socialized medicine" will be repeated daily. It will be their rallying call.

Yet, when you look at the number of Americans who currently receive federal and state medical programs and benefits ('socialized' medicine), the number is massive.

The American Right will be joined by the usual suspects from north of the 49th - namely the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and the Fraser Institute - but more on that in an upcoming post.

Consortium News has a great article on what to expect from the American Right.

Jib Jab

It is becoming clear that Americans have to decide whether they still want to live in a Republic with inalienable rights or if they are so scared about terrorism that they would prefer a modern-style autocracy in which an all-powerful Executive decides who will have rights and who won't.

In this article, Stephen Crockett suggests the only way to save the Republic is for Americans across the board to reject the idea that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are above the law:
Consortium News

"The recent claim by Dick Cheney to have both executive privilege and not to be part of the executive branch of government seems to amount to a claim that Cheney is simply above the rule of law.

It appears that both Bush and Cheney think they rule by divine right like the absolute monarchs of medieval Europe or the dictators of the old Soviet Bloc. Both need to be impeached.

Until they are removed from office, the media, Congress and the courts should be aggressively investigating, exposing and opposing their abuses of power.

Bush has ignored the rule of law repeatedly. He has wiretapped American citizens without court orders in clear violation of the law by claiming nonexistent Presidential authority. Both Bush and Cheney lied to the American public and Congress to take America into an illegal war in Iraq.

Republican politicians helped Bush and Cheney pack our federal courts and the U.S. Department of Justice with partisan political hacks who do everything possible to make illegal actions benefiting Republicans appear legal. Elections have been essentially rigged by denying millions of Americans of their right to vote or to have their votes accurately counted.

Corporation channeling money to Republican organizations or candidates have been able to win billions of dollars worth of no-bid government contracts under highly questionable or obviously illegal conditions. Corporate givers were able to ignore government regulations and federal laws concerning oil and mineral leases, environmental considerations, worker safety, consumer rights, fair competition, price-gouging and anti-monopoly concerns.

Congress should immediately repeal the falsely-named Patriot Act because neither Bush or Cheney can be trusted with the powers that law hands to the White House and the Executive Branch. All funding for the White House should be strictly limited and closely monitored by Congress.

White House funding should be conditioned on Cheney revealing all details of his Energy Task Force and all details of Karl Rove’s role concerning the various election scandals seemingly connected to the White House.

All details concerning the outing of CIA agent Valerie Palme and the lies promoted by the White House leading up to the invasion of Iraq should be revealed to Congress. White House involvement in torture and secret prisons should be publicly exposed.

Our national security has been undermined. Our civil liberties threatened. Our traditional political freedoms badly trampled by an out of control Executive Branch actively abetted by Republicans in Congress and Republican federal judges.

Corruption and incompetence dominates the leadership of the Republican Party at the state and national level almost everywhere in America. Investigations are underway in state after state from California to Texas to Ohio of Republican political abuses. Many more are called for in places like Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Partisan political considerations should never trump the rule of law. It is up to Republicans to clean-up the corruption and contempt of American political traditions by their leadership. Republican leaders need to choose between their Party leadership and the future of the American nation!"

Stephen Crockett, co-host of Democratic Talk Radio http://www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com, can be reached by e-mail at midsouthcm@aol.com or by regular mail at P.O. Box 283, Earleville, Maryland 21919.

Scientists believe that they can now sequence the Neanderthal genome. Debate has raged for years about whether there is any relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans. Some researchers believe that Neanderthals were simply replaced by early modern humans, while others argue the two groups may have interbred.

Sequencing the genome of Neanderthals, who lived in Europe until about 30,000 years ago, could shed some light on that question.

Pravda

A semi-truck carrying a load of uranium oxide went into a ditch on a busy Saskatchewan highway on the weekend, following a two-vehicle accident that left two people injured.

Officials claim that there is no risk to public health from the incident as none of the uranium leaked from the truck.

CBC Saskatchewan

60 years ago today, the Diary of Anne Frank was published for the first time. Since then, it has been translated into a number of languages and has sold millions of copies world wide. It is a testament to the human spirit and the will to survive.

The entire Frank family except for Anne's father died in Nazi concentration camps. At the end of the war, he returned to the Netherlands and found that Anne's diary which documented their years in hiding, had been kept safe by friends.


-Haaretz
-Anne Frank Museum

Following Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that his office is not a part of the executive branch of the US government, Democratic Caucus Chairman Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) plans to introduce an amendment to the the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill to cut funding for Cheney's office.

Since Cheney believes that he is above the law, it is time that the representatives of the American people rein in this arrogant right wing renegade.

Rawstory


tag evil right wing scum

Gordon Brown has been crowned Labour leader, promising to give the party not just policies but "a soul".

Tony Blair said his longtime chancellor had "all the qualities to mark him out as a great prime minister" when he takes over as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on Wednesday.


BBC

-U.S.-led move to back Abbas gov't blocked in Security Council

-Mubarak calls Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip a 'coup'

-Hamas: We didn't plan to win Gaza

Individuals who use make-up on a daily basis are absorbing almost 5lb of chemicals a year into their bodies, it is claimed.

Among chemicals under scrutiny are parabens (para-hydroxybenzoic acids) which are preservatives used in products including soap, shampoo, deodorant and baby lotion. Traces of parabens have been found in breast tumour samples, although its link to the development of the cancer is disputed by cosmetic manufacturers. (Surprise, surprise!)

Telegraph

Right Wingers - Getting stupider by the hour!!!

Over the last week there have been lots of articles written about Gaza and the West Bank - Hammas and Fatah. Some pundits are placing their tongues in their cheeks with references to 'Hammastan' and 'Fatahstan'.

As cutesy as these little word plays are, it raises the serious question of which of the two sides will be the first to actually declare themselves as the State of Palestine with the accompanying flag and other trappings of statehood?

If you think that the Palestinian situation is complicated and volatile now, just wait and see what happens when one - or both of these camps unilaterally declares themselves as the legitimate State of Palestine.

tag hamas gaza fatah palestine

If you don't smoke and if you have 520 days to spare in isolation, then you have a chance!

PARIS — If you are a European or Canadian with planetary vision, want to be on space exploration's cutting edge and don't get bored easily, the European Space Agency may be looking for you.

The agency needs volunteers for a simulated mission to Mars, one of the most challenging space experiments ever.

Despite rigorous conditions — up to 520 days in “extreme isolation and confinement” — competition will be stiff, with more than 2,000 applications received in two days for only 12 spots, project manager Jennifer Ngo-Anh said Thursday.

“The reaction has been really overwhelming. My mailbox is full,” Ms. Ngo-Anh said in a telephone interview.

Elaine Ganley
Associated Press
June 21, 2007

Globe & Mail

There is an oped in the New York Times, written by Ahmed Yousef, political adviser to Ismail Haniya, who became the Palestinian prime minister last year. He lays out the Hamas rationale for their actions in Gaza last week. He lives in Gaza City.

"The events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the West as a coup. In essence, they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup."


New York Times

tag hamas gaza

"Hamas' capture of the Gaza Strip has created, along with Iran, a second radical Islamist state in the Middle East. The region, probably the Arab-Israeli conflict, and certainly the Palestinian movement, will never be the same."
Barry Rubin
Taipei Times


-Abbas rejects talks with Hamas 'terrorists'

-Hamas Leader Warns Israel Not to Attack

-To 'salvage something from the wreckage of Palestinian democracy'

-Hamas creating 'empire of darkness'

-Hamas Conquest of Gaza Disturbs Arab World

Things got hot and heavy at a Senate hearing today in Ottawa. Saskatchewan's Premier Lorne Calvert and Conservative Senator David Angus exchanged some heated words over Harper's unbalanced treatment of provinces in Canada.

Those who continue to say that Saskatchewan's law suit against the federal government is about a 'broken election promise' are not being honest. This is a Charter challenge concerning the inequities that exist in Canada over which provinces can and which provinces cannot retain their resource revenues.

-CBC Saskatchewan
-CBC.ca

Photo courtesy CP PHOTO/Tom Hanson)

(This article is definitely worth a read)

The conflict within Islam is the conflict of our time

JEFFREY SIMPSON
Globe and Mail
June 19, 2007

The most consequential international story, the one our media are failing to grasp, remains the conflict within Islam.

The news is everywhere apparent. Sunnis and Shiites bloody each other in Iraq. The Taliban and al-Qaeda strike other Muslims in Afghanistan. Lebanese leaders are assassinated. Bombs go off in Algeria. Pakistan remains deeply unstable. Authoritarian regimes squelch simmering conflicts in Egypt, Iran, Jordan and Syria.

Part of that conflict within Islam is how to deal with those of other faiths; the other part is how believers should deal with each other.

With a few exceptions (Indonesia and Turkey), Islamic countries have been unable to become pluralist democracies. They have also largely failed, again with a few exceptions, to make economic advances. Even the ones with huge oil revenues cannot create democracies or strong civil societies, or effectively spread their oil wealth around their citizens.

Within the Arab world, economic stagnation has been particularly evident, as a series of United Nations reports by Arab economists have showed. These reports on human development have been devastating, although they seem to have had no effect on their intended targets: Arab governments and civil society.

We in the news media focus on the external manifestations of the internal Islamic struggle: the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, al-Qaeda attacks, fiery speeches by Iranian leaders. But the internal struggle is about ideas, ideologies, interpretations of history and sacred text, ethnicities, power struggles.

These intellectual struggles are hard to understand, harder still to report. But these struggles are at the core of Islam's conflicts. The result is less a clash of civilizations than a clash within a civilization, the reverberations of which cause clashes with others.

Read Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer and Gelber Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, to understand better the power of ideas in shaping action. The ideas of terror, legitimized by certain readings of the Koran, grew in the minds of future terrorists before anything happened; the antipathy to existing regimes in Islamic countries fuelled the alienation that made zealots hate Islamic moderates.

The United States and other Western powers have certainly misunderstood this internal clash and made things worse. The conflict in Iraq since the disastrous U.S. invasion has become a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. The daily violence is horrifying - not just the bomb attacks but the bodies discovered each morning with signs of torture and bullets in the back of the head.

Washington's refusal to deal with Hamas after it won the Palestinian election has now boomeranged. The Palestinian Authority is split, ideologically and geographically.

All the administration's talk about spreading democracy has been shelved, because the regimes the Americans count on for stability, from Morocco to Jordan, don't want democracy. They fear it, since they might lose power in democratic elections. The refusal to talk to Iran undermined Iranian moderates and disheartened pro-American Iranians. And its obsessive focus on Iraq diverted attention from Afghanistan, where the Taliban had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda.

Across the Islamic world (again with certain exceptions), the conflict rages about the role of religion and the state, the relations of believers to non-believers, the failure to produce economic growth.

In Thailand's south, Muslim terrorists kill Buddhists every week, whereas Muslims in the rest of the country are well-integrated in society. Pakistan is still a cauldron of tribal conflicts, ruled by a president losing his grip. Afghanistan is unstable, Iraq chaotic, Syria thuggish, Saudi Arabia authoritarian and afraid, Iran assertive, Lebanon disintegrating (again), and Algeria returning to low-level violence. Libya is governed by an eccentric, Sudan by accomplices to murder, Somalia by gangs, the Persian Gulf states by autocrats.

It's easy for all of them to blame others for their misfortunes, and others deserve some portion of the blame. But the conflict within Islam, which is the conflict of our time, is for those of the faith.

jsimpson@globeandmail.com

test blog
working out the kinks

The headline announcing the retirement of Tory MP Myron Thompson blares out the words, "Longtime Edmonton MP Thompson leaving politics"

Only problem is that Myron Thompson represents the riding of Wild Rose in the southwestern part of Alberta - it contains Banff and borders with B.C.

File this under 'MSM Oops'

UPDATE: The headline has now been changed to say 'Calgary' - ahh the power of the blog!!!!

Those who are following events in Gaza and the West Bank have lots of developments to follow:

-Israeli tanks enter Gaza

-Egypt moving diplomats from Gaza to West Bank

-Jimmy Carter says U.S. aims to split Palestinians

-Israel plans funding clampdown on Hamas-ruled Gaza

-Hamas official wants dialogue with Fatah

Holy smoke! A Saskatchewan man has caught the world's largest rainbow trout in a Saskatchewan lake.

The trout was caught by Adam Konrad on June 5th, 2007. It weighed in at 43 lbs, 6 ounces and the girth on this fish was 34 inches setting a new world record! Konrad caught the fish on 6-pound line and a 4-inch orange spoon called a Mepps Syclops.

The previous World Record was also caught in Saskatchewan and was held by Duane Farden of Macrorie, Saskatchewan.

-Late Trout Heaven
-Opinion 250

tag fishing

"With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack which puts himself and Dick Cheney in charge of leading the Federal Government ~ a coup in waiting as Congressional investigations nip at their heels"
Allen L Roland
opednews.com

The end game is almost in sight ~ and the likely scenario will probably involve a contrived crisis with Iran - and that's when things will get really ugly back home.

-Bush Makes Power Grab
-The Bush Push To Militarize North America
-Criminal leaders make an additional power grab!

After the loss of a Calgary seat in last weeks byelection, Alberta Tories are showing some nervousness. Wading in with advice for Conservative Premier Ed Stelmach is my favourite Alberta right wing ideologue, Ezra Levant. Levant states that it is time for a new ideological vision for Alberta. Something like say, getting rid of Medicare! Or how about getting rid of the Candada Pension Plan for Albertans?

"How different it would be if Stelmach actually had a galvanizing vision for the province, something that would divide the provincial discussion along ideological lines of his choosing. The abolition of the provincial income tax would be such an idea; opting out of costly federal straitjackets like the Canada Pension Plan, Employment Insurance and even Medicare would be another or the so-called "Alberta Agenda" championed by Ted Morton."

Calgary Sun

The Conservative Party today announced a partnership with Whitlock Motor Sports unveiled at the Mosport Race Track in Bowmanville, Ontario.

The partnership will include the Conservative Party of Canada logo being placed on the hood and front side panels of car number 29* in the Canadian Tire NASCAR Series.

As well, National Newswatch is reporting that car number 29 is listed as being driven by Pierre Bourque. Inside Track News blogsite has details.

National Newswatch




Photo courtesy Inside Track News

In September 2002, American Vice President Dick Cheney said, "We now have irrefutable evidence that Saddam has once again set up and reconstituted his program to take uranium, to enrich it to sufficiently high grade, so that it will function as the base material as a nuclear weapon." That was a lie. Everyone knows it. But as a result of that lie, Iraq is what it is today thanks to the corrupt and misguided strategy of Bush, Cheney and the Republicans.

Flash forward to 2007. American Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns declared in Paris this week that there was "irrefutable evidence" that Iran was arming the Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Another lie!

Even Afghan government officials are disputing this most recent White House lie.

The Taliban are Sunni fundamentalist extremists. The government of Iran is made up of Shia fundamentalists. They hate each other.

So what do we make of this recent American government false statement? Once again we have the White House playing to the lowest intellect level of their supporters in the American public. But why? I guess time will tell.

Huffington Post


tag iran afghanistan

"An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind." -
-- Mahatma Gandhi

By allowing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people to languish in refugee camps since 1948 until the present day without a resolution to their plight is unforgivable. There is enough wrong here for blame to be thrown at everyone including the western world (especially the United States), the Arab League, the former Soviet bloc, Israel and on and on and on.

By allowing this unresolved problem to fester for 60 years, we now find ourselves with a situation where the possibility of one Palestinian state is likely not even possible.

With Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip and Fatah taking control of the West Bank, this horrible situation has now become worse.

Human beings truly are a primitive creature. There is too much hatred based on religion - too much ignorance - too much blood - too little will to find resolution.

-In the West Bank
-In the Gaza Strip

Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II has her own email address but no one seems to be able to find out what it is so that we can add her to our address book.

The UK Telegraph is on the story and gives you the opportunity of sending her a email which they will forward to her once her actual address is determined!!

Telegraph.co

The following is an excerpt from an article written by Campbell Clark in the Globe and Mail - June 15, 2007:

OTTAWA — Former RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli was an “autocratic” leader who punished whistleblowers, and the force's entire management structure is “horribly broken,” a government-appointed investigator in the Mounties' pension-fund scandal has concluded.

Lawyer David Brown called for a task force to conduct an “urgent review” of the force's management and recommend sweeping changes by Dec. 14 of this year.

In a report released in Ottawa on Friday afternoon, Mr. Brown not only vindicated RCMP whistleblowers but blasted senior Mounties and especially Mr. Zaccardelli.

The Globe & Mail


tag rcmp

I was surprised by a story I read today that reported on a school outreach program in Newfoundland by the Canadian Armed Forces where a tank was brought into a school yard for kids to touch and romp around.

I am sure that many of the kids found this quite exciting but a number of local parents are not impressed with this type of 'outreach'.

I hope this is an isolated episode and is NOT something that we will be seeing more of in schools across Canada.

CBC

Okay. Just when you thought that Bush's strategy in Iraq was completely flawed, we now learn that it is completely insane.

The New York Times reports that the U.S. military has undertaken a risky plan to arm Sunni factions with ammunition and cash to exploit a growing wedge between homegrown ex-Baathists and foreign Islamists. In exchange, the Sunnis have agreed to furnish U.S. officers with intelligence (i.e. the locations of roadside bombs).

Oh good. Let's arm one of the factions in the unofficial Iraqi civil war.

Can American foreign policy get any more bizarre? I hate to ask!

-New York Times
-The Chronicle
-Fort Wayne.com

And with his tongue placed firmly in his cheek, here is Jon Stewart's take on the new stratgy - from Comedy Central (you have to endure a 10 second commercial before the segment plays).
Jon Stewart feature on 'Our Enemy's Enemy Is Our Friend'

I hope the people of Saskatchewan successfully sue the ass off our lying Conservative Prime Minister and his 12 lying Saskatchewan Members of Parliament.

Here is why:

Excerpt from Stephen Harper’s Letter to Premier Calvert, June 10, 2004

“The Conservative Party of Canada will alter the equalization program to remove all non-renewable resources from the formula, as well as move the program to a ten-province standard.”

Conservative Party Platform 2004 ('Demanding Better')

“A Conservative government will also revisit the equalization formula. We will move towards a ten-province standard that excludes non-renewable resource revenues from the equalization formula, and do so in a manner that ensures no provinces receiving equalization will receive less money during the transition to the new formula than the current formula provides.”

Conservative Party Platform 2006 ('Standing Up For Canada')

“Work to achieve with the provinces permanent changes to the equalization formula which would ensure that non-renewable natural resource revenue is removed from the equalization formula to encourage economic growth. We will ensure that no province is adversely affected from changes to the equalization formula.”

Question by Stephen Harper to Prime Minister Paul Martin in the House of Commons, November 16, 2005

“The prime minister is also failing Saskatchewan on equalization. The government promised to reform the equalization program in 2004 for Saskatchewan. The government now says it will not get to that until at least 2006, costing Saskatchewan over 750-million dollars in lost revenue. When will the prime minister overrule his finance minister and make the changes necessary, so that Saskatchewan does not lose this money?”

In the recent Federal Budget, Harper 'said' that he was removing non-renewable resources from the equalization formula. He then set a cap on the amount Saskatchewan could qualify for!! At no point, in ANY of Stephen Harper's statements, did the concept of a 'cap' get mentioned.

Where I come from, we call this, 'lying through your teeth!'

Government of Saskatchewan News Release

More Americans accept the theory of creationism than evolution

Conrad Black's defence paid an accountant who is an expert at fraud matters to review over 400,000 documents at the price of $450 per hour. Alan Funk is a certified accountant and fraud examiner who previously worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a special agent on white-collar investigations.

The defence has now rested.



National Post

The Real McKenzies - Farewell To Nova Scotia (and a big H/T to Where'd that Bug Go Blog for intellectual property)!

RATKO MLADIC and RADOVAN KARADZIC are charged with GENOCIDE, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY and VIOLATIONS OF THE LAWS OR CUSTOMS OF WAR.




-The Official Indictment
-Mladic Amended Indictment
-Karadzic Amended Indictment

Regina City Police raided the home of a former university professor accused of spreading hate online and seized computer equipment.

Terry Tremaine, 58, who was let go from his job as a University of Saskatchewan mathematics professor in 2005, is the subject of a criminal complaint by Ottawa-based human rights lawyer Richard Warman and the Canadian Jewish Congress.

They accuse him of willful promotion of hatred in online postings that target Jewish, black and First Nations people in Saskatchewan.

Tremaine calls himself the leader of the National Socialist Party of Canada and a member of "white nationalists."

CBC Saskatchewan

Newfoundland & Labrador Premier, Danny Williams said Saskatchewan is being isolated by the federal government's assertion that its dispute with some Atlantic provinces is not about the issue of excluding oil and gas revenues from the equalization formula, but rather about the Atlantic Accord — an agreement on offshore oil and gas revenues.

"What that does, it completely isolates Saskatchewan … so then there's one problem solved," said Williams, who added he stands "shoulder to shoulder" with Saskatchewan Premier Lorne Calvert on the issue.

CBC Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan Premier, Lorne Calvert is as frustrated with Harper's promise breaking as his counterparts are in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland & Labrador.

Calvert is one of three premiers demanding Prime Minister Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government honour an election pledge to exclude all non-renewable resource revenues from the equalization formula used to redistribute wealth in Canada.

Regina Leader Post

On this weeks episode of 'Meet the Press', former United States Secretary of State, Colin Powell said he favours immediately closing the notorious Guantanamo Bay military prison and moving its detainees to facilities in the United States.

There are currently 380 individuals being held in the the 'Gitmo' secret military detention facility.

Cnews.ca

I realize that there is a bit of tongue in cheek intended by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation apparatchik, David McLean, in his post entitled, "Equal opportunity offenders" on the CTF blog site.

"In the history of the CTF we've managed to offend pretty much everyone...or so I had thought." says McLean. Is the ability to offend people worn like a badge of honour by staffers at the CTF?

You have to wonder if those businesses and individuals who give money to the right wing CTF are fully aware that their donations are used to retain individuals who see it as their 'job' to offend everyone.

I personally am sick to death of the phony sham that the CTF uses in their attempt to portray themselves as a grassroots uprising of concerned individuals. Scrape the surface just a tad, understand the extremist right wing agenda this group advances and you WILL be offended!

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled today that the collective bargaining process is protected by the Charter of Rights -- a decision that will have a major impact on negotiations between governments and their unions.

This decision should piss off right wingers everywhere! So here is a big raspberry to the likes of the Fraser Institute, The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, etc, etc, etc.

-CTV News
-Canadian Labour Congress

Incumbent Member of Parliament, Rob Anders, will once again be the Conservative party's candidate in the next federal election for Calgary West. After interference from party leader, Stephen Harper, and the party establishment, Anders was declared the winner by acclamation Tuesday night amid huge controversy.

Mr. Anders has sat as a Reform MP, an Alliance MP and a Conservative MP. He was previously a paid heckler for Republicans in the USA.

CBC

Buckdog has been following the Rob Anders case for sometime.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 22 per cent of the global workforce are still working more than 48 hours a week, “merely to make ends meet.”

The study, Working Time Around the World: Trends in Working Hours, laws and policies in a global comparative perspective, spotlights working time in over 50 countries, and for the first time explores the implications for working time policies in developing and transition countries.


www/un.org

tag labor labour

Last September, Republicans in Congress took away Habeas Corpus, the traditional safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta by passing The Military Commissions Act into law.

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, which will reinstate this crucial right into the Constitution.





-capwiz.com
-fas.org

Documents released to Sun Media under the Access to Information Act show that there were 114 cases of misconduct dealt with by the force since 2005. Of those cases, no demotions in rank resulted from a variety of offenses which included violence, sexual assault, harassment, impaired driving, abuse of authority, fraud or interfering with administration of justice.


Ottawa Sun

The following is an excerpt of an article by Edward Wong that was published in the New York Times on June 3, 2007. His research into Iraqi history and culture explains why things have gone so bad for Bush in Iraq and why there will be no peace for a long time to come:

"PERHAPS no fact is more revealing about Iraq’s history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.

The word is “sahel,” and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.

It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraq’s history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.

Most famously it happened to a former prime minister, Nuri al-Said, who tried to flee after a military coup in 1958 by scurrying through eastern Baghdad dressed as a woman. He was shot dead. His body was disinterred and hacked apart, the bits dragged through the streets. In later years, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party crushed their enemies with the same brand of brutality.

“Other Arabs say, ‘You are the country of sahel,’ ” Razzaq said. “It has always been that way in Iraq.”

Iraq’s Curse: A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory

Members of Parliament on a Commons committee heard testimony of shady dealings between some RCMP staff and a computer firm that received lucrative contracts in the pension fund scandal.

The accounting firm, KPMG, found that a company known as Casey Computer Solutions, had been designated to get several contracts even before the requests had gone out for bids. Kim Casey disclosed she gave Ottawa Senators hockey tickets to the director of the RCMP branch that managed the pension fund's insurance plan on at least five or six occasions as she won contracts with the office for several years. Ms. Casey insisted "to the best of my knowledge, there were no irregularities" and proper procurement rules had been followed.

Ms.Casey's husband, Pat Casey, worked within the very RCMP branch from which his wife's company obtained the contracts -- totalling $3.27 million in one year alone.

Ottawa Citizen