The Black Rod

If the Winnipeg Free Press was a real newspaper, this city would be buzzing with excitement today. The streets would be electrified with anticipation. There would be only one topic of conversation--- “Are you going?” It’s the biggest cultural event of the year in Winnipeg and the city’s biggest newspaper has hardly grunted an acknowledgement. The Toronto Globe and Mail has carried more stories on it than the Winnipeg Free Press. It. The Boys in the Photograph. The world premiere at MTC of the new musical by Ben Elton and Andrew Lloyd Webber. If you know next-to-nothing about it, you can thank the Winnipeg Free Press. Like all beleagured dailies in the Internet Age, the Winnipeg Free Press clings to its last tattered source of respite. We’re professionals , they bleat. We’re trained journalists, unlike those not-to-be-trusted bloggers. We know what is and is not news, and how it should be delivered. Don’t worry your pretty little heads, leave the decisions about news to the trained prof

Manitoba's NDP government wants to send a Winnipeg police officer to jail. It doesn't matter which one. Any one will do. "Justice" Minister Dave (Six Months) Chomiak has painted bullseyes on two policemen in particular to get the ball rolling --- Const. Darrel Selley and his partner Const. Kristopher Overwater, who have been charged with a raft of offenses guaranteed to send them to prison if convicted. The province has had great experience convicting police in the court of public opinion through Stalin-esque show trials called public inquiries (Sophonow, Driskell, Taman) at which the verdict is arrived at first (police are guilty) and evidence is then manipulated to, ahem, "prove" it. The Black Rod has developed a cottage industry doing what the mainstream media refuses to do---expose these show trials as the travesties of justice they are, modern-day Salem Witch Trials. The NDP has had a bad track record, though, in real courts with real judges who apply

You may as well cue the funeral dirge for Winnipeg. Sunday saw the first installment of "We Believe--In Winnipeg", a joint campaign by the Winnipeg Free Press and the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce "to get the city to feel good about itself." Well, if this is the best that the city's business community and biggest newspaper can come up with, then it's time for the medical examiner to call the time of death . We believe---Winnipeg has flatlined. We Believe/The Arts, Sunday's campaign kickoff, was the worst dreck in modern memory. The amount of time put into Part One can be measure in milliseconds. The so-called stories were nothing more than quick cut-and-paste jobs from city promo brochures. They looked under Art Galleries and Theatres in the phone book and reprinted the results. In hyping the campaign, the FP wrote "(Chamber president Dave Angus) and Silver said Winnipeg needs to get over its inferiority complex and do a better job of trumpeting its

The British in Afghanistan are using an artillery piece so accurate we may have to redefine the word sniper. A Taliban commander was hit in the chest with a 35 pound shell fired from the gun 1.8 miles away. The blast killed him instantly and blew apart two of his subordinates. Time from firing to detonation: 5 seconds. The 105mm Light Gun, installed last month by the defenders of the town of Musa Qala, has become the weapon most feared by the local insurgent fighters, who call it The Dragon because of the tongue of fire that blasts out of its muzzle whenever its fired. The two-ton gun was flown by helicopter to the foot of a cliff, dismantled because of concerns the pathway couldn't handle the weight, then carried in pieces up a 130 foot hill by the men of 8 (Alma) Commando Battery, 29 Cdo Royal Artillery. But it's not the only weapon the Taliban hates, and fears. The bombing campaign in Pakistan's lawless tribal regions by unmanned drones is starting to unnerve the Taliban