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Posted by Scott Tribe on February 14, 2011, at 7:48 am |
SunMedia journalist David Akin responds to criticisms of media coverage in general that Ezra LeVant spouted off about:
Levant and (others) allege that Western reporters have missed the big story, that the Muslim Brotherhood is about to install radical Islamist rule in place of the secular autocracy that is now crumbling…. I, for one, found it difficult to report conclusions like this while I was in Cairo or since my return for I can find no evidence to back up these statements.. .Journalists reporting on the situation in Egypt would be fools to ignore the Muslim Brotherhood. But journalists on the ground in Egypt have no reason, at this [...]
Posted by Scott Tribe on January 27, 2011, at 7:59 am |
We are again witness to the fact that the West will support popular uprisings against repressive regimes – provided of course that they’re not our allies. We should be cheering what happened in Tunisia, and what is happening in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. If what is going on here was happening in North Korea, we’d see a swell of support from the West, encouraging them on.
I presume it’s because Western governments are afraid that Muslim fundamentalists will come to power – but as mentioned elsewhere, they’re not in the lead on this. Besides, when the West funded these governments with money to support them, rather [...]
Posted by Scott Tribe on December 1, 2010, at 8:19 am |
They apparently do it by calling for an assassination. See Tom Flanagan proclaim this on CBC about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Forget those wimpy courts and rule of law and due process and the innocent til presumed guilty part – just use a drone to get the job done!
I note a pattern amongst conservatives where a lot of these “law and order” conservatives quickly forget about the “law” part.. and the “order” part for that matter. (By the way, if I were this blogger, I’d re-title the caption from What Has My Country Come To? and change it to ‘What Has My Country’s Conservatives come to? They’ve [...]
Posted by Scott Tribe on November 29, 2010, at 8:05 am |
For years, the Harper government has claimed we can’t do anything on lowering Greenhouse Gas Emissions until the Americans do something on it, so we can “harmonize” the plan with theirs. That was seen by many as an excuse of Harper’s to do nothing, because he knew the Bush administration would do nothing, and he calculated Obama’s administration would not be able to pass anything with Republican obstructionism in the Congress. He was correct on the second part, but Obama had a back-up plan, which apparently our Canadian government knew nothing about (when it’s been repeated for a few months that this is what would be done – I’ve [...]
Posted by Scott Tribe on November 4, 2010, at 7:50 am |
Don Martin of the National Post takes Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon heavily to task in his column today. The dispute with the UAE over airspace rights, and then the closing of our military base there, the botched UN Security Council seat, and the fact he was being two-faced over the Omar Khadr plea bargain are all listed – all examples of someone who appears to be out of his depth.
There is a second phase of criticism however that appears down the column – apparently Minister Cannon has been rather neglectful with meeting any of the foreign ambassadors here: he’s much too busy apparently:
..the Embassy newspaper [...]
Posted by Scott Tribe on November 2, 2010, at 8:28 am |
So yesterday, we find out Canada was negotiating all along with the US in agreeing to a plea bargain, despite Foreign Minister Cannon’s claims to the contrary (which he ridiculously tried to continue using in Question Period yesterday). Today, Brian Lilley of the Sun writes there was a bitter Cabinet argument over the fact Canada had accepted the plea agreement, and now there are apparently “top Conservatives” blaming Canadian diplomats for exceeding their authority:
The deal appears to have been sealed while Prime Minister Stephen Harper was travelling in Europe and there is the suggestion that foreign affairs officials used this time to offer and accept more than Harper [...]
Posted by Scott Tribe on November 1, 2010, at 8:41 am |
Everyone is aware by now of the farce known as the Omar Khadr showtrial and it’s conclusions by the military jury deciding to not only accept the prosecutor’s recommendation of 25 years, but to go 15 years over that. A symbolic gesture, not only because it was meaningless with Khadr’s plea bargain (a move that appears now to have been correct; the Defence council obviously knew how this would end up), but of how everything was stacked against Khadr from the beginning in this carbon-copy of a Stalinist show-trial (minus the executions). I’ll only note that it’s very interesting to me that this military jury asked to hear the [...]
Posted by Scott Tribe on October 30, 2010, at 12:48 pm |
Question to the PMO and Dimitri Soudas – who decided to turn a potential terrorist incident yesterday into partisan politics by claiming Ignatieff’s Liberals wanted to defend Canada with kites, because of their questioning of the costs of the F-35 Stealth Fighter jet, as well as not putting it up for a competitive process bid:
How exactly do 18 billion$ (or more) of 65 F-35 stealth fighters defend Canada against a bomb hidden in a printer ink jet cartridge in the cargo hold of a passenger plane? Do the F-35′s have X-ray vision and can detect bombs in mid-flight? Can it escort a plane to a safe airport or [...]
Posted by Scott Tribe on October 26, 2010, at 8:55 am |
Given a choice between a stacked military tribunal/kangaroo court, presided over by a Military Judge who had been hand-picked by Bush (who replaced the former Military Judge who had actually given Khadr’s legal team some procedural victories, and was suddenly “re-assigned” in the middle of the trial without explanation) which was going to almost certainly give Khadr life imprisonment (this is the system after all that was set up so that there would be no acquittals, which a former Bush official infamously said), or to do a guilty plea bargain that allowed him to get out of Guantanamo after a year and able to serve the rest of his [...]
Posted by Scott Tribe on October 24, 2010, at 9:07 am |
Today is United Nations Day; a day that would normally receive disdain in this particular incarnation of the Conservative Party anyways, but probably is getting more antipathy then normal in those quarters after the resounding defeat in the vote at the UN over the rotating Security Council seat to Germany and Portugal.
UPDATE: I just got reminded World Statistics Day was last week – which is another day not circled on this current government’s calendar – seeing as they would rather do away with accurate data and statistics in their decision to cancel the mandatory long-form census.
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