Loud-Mouth Klein Stabbing Conservatives in the Back – Again!

Alberta’s Premier Klein is at it again. While touring Canada in a silly attempt to build a legacy with Canadians, Premier Klein has once again opened his mouth and let flow more negative talk about Stephen Harper and the federal Conservatives. Most Albertans are used to Klein’s inability to keep his mouth shut, but I imagine their are plenty of Conservatives in other parts of the country who would love to silence this “so-called” conservative.

Days before an expected election call, Premier Ralph Klein said the country will probably be left with another Liberal minority, largely because Stephen Harper won’t be able to muster enough support in Ontario.

The outspoken Tory premier conceded his federal colleagues probably won’t make significant inroads in vote-rich Ontario, where the party desperately needs to gain ground if it hopes to oust the governing Liberals.

For those of you who are unaware, over the years Premier Klein has over stayed his welcome as Premier of Alberta. It appears he’s on the same track at Chrétien – so busy to create a lasting legacy for themselves, they fail to see they’ve become incompetent in their leadership and largely irrelevant to the public.

Lazy Aldermen Look to the Police to Solve Budgetary Problems

Embarrassing. Apparently some aldermen in the city of Calgary feel that they can add a few million to their budget by simply asking police officers to increase the amounts of tickets they give out to the offending public.

Aldermen approved the change in a 9-6 vote as they tried to find ways to cut millions from its 2006-08 budget, which calls for a 5.4 per cent tax increase next year.

Beaton was disappointed with council’s expectation of the police service as a revenue generator.

Sorry Beaton, but the policy service is already a revenue generator – it’s called photo radar and I’m surprised it wasn’t suggested as a possible solution to the cities problems. Double the amount photo radar machines snapping photos of speedy drivers and you can likely double your revenues. Unfortunately this does little to improve safety and only increases a municipality’s dependency on profit marking crimes.

Alberta Alliance Elects New Leader

It took three ballots at the Alberta Alliance leadership Convention for party members to settle on Paul Hinman as their new leader. Hinman was the front runner, and he is the only elected Alliance MLA. Marilyn Burns was the runer up.

Hinman
said he’ll continue to hammer for reduced taxes, eliminating health premiums, smaller government and voter recall of MLAs.

Liberals Don’t Want to Offend Religious Groups: Only Now

Paul Martin ridiculously claims a campaign during Christmas would insult religious groups in Canada. Since when did the prospect of offending Canada’s religious groups ever stop the Liberals from offending them?

Moreover, the Libs can’t even use the excuse that it’s a holiday. Jean Chretien once ridiculed Stockwell Day’s practice of resting on Sunday as an example of not working hard enough.

I’m sure there are lots of religious groups who’d this time love to be offended by the Liberals.

White Phosphorus in Iraq: Further Debunking

Via Instapundit (with lots of links), Flit debunks the conspiracy theories surrounding the US military’s use of white phosphorus, and provides historical context (i.e., did you know Canada has used it frequently in wars?).

More here.

Bin Laden’s Vision

The Telegraph reports on a newly published collection of Osama bin Laden’s writings:

Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.

The first complete collection of the Saudi’s statements published today portrays a world in which Islam’s enemies will take the first steps towards salvation by embracing the “religion of all the Prophets”.
…
His terms for America’s surrender appeared after the September 2001 suicide attacks and include demands that amount to the abandonment of much of western life.

Alcohol and gambling would be barred and there would be an end to women’s photos in newspapers or advertising.

Any woman serving “passengers, visitors and strangers”, presumably anyone from air stewardesses to waitresses, would also be out of a job.

The West must “stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you” and has become the “worst civilisation witnessed in the history of mankind”.

So there you have. Like previous Islamists including Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden identifies the West with the dar al-Harb (realm of war) that must be stopped and destroyed if it does not convert to Islam. Moreover, the freedoms, including women’s freedoms, that we enjoy, he regards as contributing to the West’s warlike nature.

So when the left calls for the US to withdraw from Iraq, and to perform general penance for all of the sins it’s commited against non-Western peoples, don’t forget that included among those sins are freedom for women and lots of other things the left also prizes.

The article makes no mention of al-Qaeda’s 7 point plan, though bin Laden’s call for the transformation of the West would be consistent with that.

Quebec as a Bachelor’s Pad

Father de Souza has an insightful article on why Andre Bosclair is a good representative of contemporary Quebec in today’s National Post (sub. req.):

For some 200 years after the French defeat at the Plains of Abraham, a distinct culture survived, and even flourished, under the protection of the Church. Post-1960, that task would be given to the state. Repudiating their religious heritage, Quebec’s quiet revolutionaries channelled their energy into building a social democratic state.
…
Having sold their cultural birthright for a mess of politics, Quebecers handed over the future of their nation to the state. With the national project now entrusted to the government, Quebecers simply stopped producing Quebecers. It was no longer necessary to hang on to the cultural patrimony of Quebec generation to generation, father to son, mother to daughter. The state would do that now, passing laws against English signs and providing cheap electricity and cheap education and generous social assistance and favourable labour laws. What need was there for children?

Quebecers were apparently unfazed by Boisclair’s admission that he used cocaine while serving in Bouchard’s Cabinet. It was shrugged off as the kind of thing that marked Boisclair’s raucous past. But it speaks to a hedonism and frivolity characteristic of someone unburdened by responsibility. That has been the Quebec story since 1960 — the organs of culture have gone on holiday.

Though the Bouchard manifesto returns over and over to the issue of Quebec’s “demographic decline,” a more accurate phrase would be the death of a nation. Quebecers may be masters in their own house, but rather than the head of a bustling household, the future looks more like a party boy living it up in his cool party pad. That is Andre Boisclair’s Quebec.

Blair Falls Short, According to Sir Christopher Meyer

I’m not a big fan of Tony Blair. Many conservatives are, be it for his steadfast loyalty to President Bush or his determination on Iraq. But for much of his time as PM, Blair has shown himself to be a progressive “modernizing” idealist; too willing to give short shrift to the British constitution and, as Sir Christopher Meyer, former British Ambassador to the US, points out, too impatient to lend his voice, with much significance, to the American dominated war plan for Iraq.

The interesting thing about this interview is that it is decidedly NOT anti-American. Sir Christopher speaks very highly of Bush as a man and as a leader, remaining critical of his own government under Blair’s watch; Blair’s seeming inability to speak forcefully for British expertise in drawing up a war plan. Having served both Conservative and New Labour Prime Ministers, Sir Christopher’s arrows fly not from any throwback British arrogance vis a vis America, but rather from his practical experience in British government and his unique locus between Bush and Blair in the run up to war—a war he still endorses today.

Here are excerpts:

His status:

… Sir Christopher is not just another former ambassador but a man close to the heart of Republican America.

As British ambassador to Washington from 1997 to February 2003, he was the man who introduced a wary Tony Blair to Mr Bush. He led the way towards the unexpected mating of New Labour with the American right, a relationship that eventually took Britain to war in Iraq.

He did not just arrange meetings between the two leaders but spoke up at them. He was a confidant of both sides, with regular private meetings with everyone in the White House from vice-president Dick Cheney and his aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, now being prosecuted in Washington, to the president himself.

He reinvented what it meant to be Britain’s ambassador to Washington, a dominant figure in the capital’s social life as well as in politics.

The situation in Iraq:

He supported the war but is far from happy about the handling of the aftermath. “I don’t believe the enterprise is doomed necessarily, though, God, it does not look good,” he says in an interview with the Guardian marking the publication of his memoirs, DC Confidential. “A lot of people think what we are going to end up with is precisely what we didn’t want.”

Blair as a meek leader but staunch idealist:

He looks at the breakdown of Iraq now with the detachment of an outsider – but one with a unique insight into how the war came about and what could have been done differently.

He contrasts Mr Blair’s meek approach with Lady Thatcher’s dealings with the White House. Mr Blair behaved very differently from what Sir Christopher calls “the Thatcher style”. He saw it first-hand on many of her trips abroad.

“Thatcher had no hesitation on the phone, or surging into the Oval office to blaze away if she thought Reagan was doing something stupid. And she did on a number of occasions and sometimes it was extremely effective and certainly did not damage the relationship at all. I think Tony Blair and Downing Street were reluctant to perform in that way,” he says.

And for all his rhetorical strengths, Mr Blair was surprisingly weak on detail. He faced a president who was sharper than Europeans generally assume. There were “moments of great power and strength exerted by Blair, usually in the rhetorical framing of issues. But we see, how can I put it, less attention to detail than some of these issues demanded.”

Lady Thatcher took pride in knowing more detail than her officials. “That is why it was terrifying to be summoned into her presence because if you did not know your stuff, she would expose you. There was never that danger with Tony Blair.”

The jury is still out on Iraq:

But he accepts that the task of rebuilding may now be impossible. “There is no doubt that the presence of American and British troops to a degree motivates the insurgency. So this is agonising for Bush and I think it is agonising for Blair, all of us really.” He also dismisses the prime minister’s claim that the war has not exposed Britain to terrorist attacks. “There is plenty of evidence around at the moment that home-grown terrorism was partly radicalised and fuelled by what is going on in Iraq,” he says. “There is no way we can credibly get up and say it has nothing to do with it. Don’t tell me that being in Iraq has got nothing to do with it. Of course, it does. The issue is it is part of the price we have to pay and should be paying for the removal of Saddam Hussein and at the moment the jury is out.”

He never expected to have such doubts at this stage. “I was a war supporter. I still think it was the right thing to do to bring Saddam to heel.”

On WMD and why Iraq is a political war:

The US Iraq survey team, sent in after the war, failed to find any WMD after one of the most intensive hunts in history. Sir Christopher suggests they could have been “spirited out of the country into Syria or maybe even Iran. That is a possibility”. To the Americans, though, Sir Christopher says, the war was always about regime change, not WMD. “One of the things that came to me when writing was how political the war was. This wasn’t just a war, it was a political war.” The US, he says, wanted to “replace a bad government with a good government”. It was, he says, the “neo-con vision”.

None of this is news to those in the know but maybe, rather, interesting confirmation.

I have often wondered, given the relative success of the Brit’s at managing colonies, why, then, has there not been more success on the ground in Iraq. Now this experience may not have offered much of a relief given the endless raging factionalism of the Middle East. But given British history running Palestine, one would expect that the British Foreign Office could, with the right political leadership, be a helpful voice on getting Iraq right. (There’s also the mantra of Victor Davis Hanson to consider, that the successes on the ground in Iraq are under reported by a largely defeatest media.)

Anyone else interested in talking about the difference British input could have made on Iraq? Or what difference it has made? Or maybe, more generally, the differences in British and American administration in Iraq, successes and failures? I don’t know much about this, so hopefully some of you do.

Phosphorus in Fallujah: Pentagon Responds

In response to an Italian TV channel’s documentary alleging phosphorus use by the US military against civilians in Fallujah, the Pentagon has admitted its use but denied using it against civilians:

Lt.-Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said while white phosphorous is most frequently used to mark targets or obscure a position, it was used at times in Fallujah as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants.

“It was not used against civilians,” Venable said.
…
WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition,” the authors wrote.

“We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE (high explosive)” munitions.

“We fired ‘shake and bake’ missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.”

The authors added, in citing lessons for future urban battles, fire-support teams should have used another type of smoke bomb for screening missions in Fallujah “and saved our WP for lethal missions.”
…
Venable said white phosphorous shells are a standard weapon used by field artillery units and are not banned by any international weapons convention to which the United States is a signatory.

Jean Lapierre: Shameless

In a speech promising that the federal government will deliver “the merchandise” to Quebec in the form of an extra $500 million in transfer payments, the federal Minister of Transport and Liberal Quebec lieutenant Jean

Lapierre told delegates there is no shame in being a Liberal in Quebec and predicted a party majority in the next election.

Lapierre claimed that the announcement has nothing to do with electioneering, but he was quick to talk about the majority government that he expects his party to win. There is no shame in being Liberal. There is no shame among Liberals. Is that not the problem? No shame at all.

h/t: CANCC

Crossposted from Civitatensis

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