The Black Rod

March is a miserable month for millionaires. It's gotten so bad you can't go downtown without seeing some fat cat or other with his hand out, begging for money. Spare change? Give us your twenties, your fifties, any denomination you can spare, they plead pitiously. Some hire public relations firms to sell their cause. Some fly from their homes in Toronto to their Winnipeg pied-a-terres to appeal to the hoi polloi in person. Some suck up to newspaper owners. Who says the rich don't know sacrifice? Winnipeg's richest families, jointly worth in the vicinity of $3 billion, need to raise $30 million by March 31st, or else. Or else what? Or else they can't collect tens of millions of your money for their pet projects. That's what, buster. Millionaire moocher #1 is Gail Asper, whose family is jointly worth $833 million give or take ten million depending on this minute's stock prices. She's begging for $20 million. If she doesn't get it by March 31, her pers...

Canada's top general this past week flushed out the biggest threats to this country's mission to Afghanistan. In a speech last Friday Gen. Rick Hillier said MP's are endangering the lives of Canada's soldiers by delaying a decision on our role in Afghanistan. The Taliban see the debate as a weakness to be exploited by increasing attacks and casualties to frighten Canada out of Kandahar. And, he said, "the least our soldiers could expect" is a unanimous vote of support for the troops once a decision is made in Parliament. The counterattack from the Taliban's best allies in the country was immediate. Huh uh, said the citizen of France who leads the Liberal Party of Canada. Wat duz zee gen-ee-rall know? The Tal-ee-ban will killing be the Canadians soldiers, debate or non. Shut the f___ up, said the NDP's defence critic. The general is stupid and a liar, she said in slightly different words, yet eloquently summarizing her party's cut-and-run surrender ...

The NDP government's manipulation of the justice system for political purposes has reached disturbing levels. The latest example is the belated revelation of the results of a police investigation into high-level allegations of perjury by key prosecution witness Ray Zanidean at the trial of James Driskell for the murder of Perry Dean Harder. When the federal justice minister ordered a new trial for Driskell in 2005 he said it was, in part, because " For 11 years after Mr. Driskell's trial, the Crown failed to disclose information that Mr. Zanidean likely committed perjury at the trial ." The same day, Manitoba's then-Attorney General Gord Mackintosh announced the government would stay charges, instead of holding a new trial, in part because, as a letter from his office stated: " There is a basis to believe that Zanidean may have committed perjury at the first trial in at least two areas. For that reason the issue of possible perjury will be referred to an outs...

We were just about to put Week Six to bed when we got word of the fate of Mansoor Dadullah. If the name sounds familiar, it should, as you'll see. The last time we wrote about him we wondered what would become of him. Now we know and it would be tragic if it wasn't so funny. Mansoor Dadullah's life this past year has been a microcosm of the fortunes of the Taliban in Afghanistan and so we're forced to re-top Week Six with his story. A year ago, last March, his big brother Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban's chief military commander, was shot to pieces by British (or Australian) special forces, sucking the life out of the Feared Taliban Spring Offensive he was supposed to lead. He didn't even have time to strap his artificial leg on before he gasped his final farewell. Taliban leader Mullah Omar appointed Mansoor Dadullah to take over his bro's leadership of insurgent forces in the southern and western provinces---just in time to see his fighters decimated by an a...

The House of Commons ethics committee reconvened Tuesday and the mainstream media acted as if it was business as usual. In their eyes it's Sept. 10 again and all is well with the world. But the CBC collusion scandal has left two corpses in its wake, and nothing will be the same again. Fatality #2 --- The myth that professional journalists are more trustworthy than bloggers because they have standards, ethics and training that ensures their personal biases do not influence the fairness of their stories. Oh, and they have editors. Well, ding dong, the witch is dead. The CBC collusion scandal has been like an infusion of truth serum into mainstream reporters. And their confessions are eye-opening. It started with pundits like CTV's Mike Duffy and Maclean's columnist Paul Wells who tut-tutted that 'it's no big deal, everybody does it.' None other than CBC Publisher John Cruickshank pointed out that practice, by anybody, was unethical and unprofessional. "When,...

The House of Commons ethics committee reconvened Tuesday and the mainstream media acted as if it was business as usual. In their eyes it's Sept. 10 again and all is well with the world. But the CBC collusion scandal has left two corpses in its wake, and nothing will be the same again. Fatality #1-- The myth that the CBC is unbiased, or in the words of the CBC Publisher, "detached from partisan interest", and "professional and dispassionate in all aspects" of its reporting. The CBC confessed last month that one of its Parliamentary reporters, Krista Erickson, colluded with the Liberal Party in putting questions to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney before the ethics committee. She provided them with the questions; they would ask the questions and embarass the Conservative government; the CBC would get a story. In other words, business as usual. Publisher John Cruickshank really had no choice but to admit Krista's sin. She got caught red-handed. A reporter r...

The coalition forces in Afghanistan hit another home run this past week and once again, it went virtually unreported in the mainstream Canadian press. A Hellfire missile fired from an American Predator UAV killed a baker's dozen of Taliban commanders meeting last Monday in Mir Ali, a town in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area near the border with Afghanistan. When they got through putting the pieces together, they confirmed that one of the bodies belonged to none other than Abu Laith al-Libi, the No.3 man in al-Qaeda, behind only Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. And that's not even the good news. Syed Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan Bureau Chief for Asia Times Online spelled it out in no uncertain terms in his story on al-Libi's death: KARACHI - With the killing of Abu Laith al-Libi this week, the Taliban have suffered their biggest loss since being ousted from power in 2001, and they are left without their finest military brain just two months before the...

The CBC is about to learn the fundamental lesson of political scandals---it ain't the crime that kills ya, it's the cover-up. CBC Publisher John Cruickshank confessed the crime a week ago. One of the corporation's Parliamentary reporters, Krista Erickson, collaborated with the Liberal Party on questions for former P.M. Brian Mulroney at a meeting of the Commons Ethics Committee. Cruickshank fiercely rejected any allegations of partisanship by the CBC. HOW DARE YOU, he snarled at anyone suggesting such a thing. The poor girl was just trying to get a scoop and went about it the wrong way. She needs more training, and the CBC, gosh darn it, will give it to her. In Toronto. For almost a week Cruickshank tried to cram the genie back into the bottle, but then lawyers for Mulroney popped the cork with a letter http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2008/01/25/3231743.htm to the chairman of the ethics committee, Liberal MP Paul Szabo, containing this sentiment: "...given the way the p...

While Canada's news agencies this week fixated on the Manley Report on Canada's mission to Afghanistan, they completely missed the big news---the Taliban insurgency is splintering into pieces right under our noses. Asia Times Online reported Thursday that highly placed contacts in the Taliban told them that "Mullah Omar has sacked his own appointed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, the main architect of the fight against Pakistani security forces, and urged all Taliban commanders to turn their venom against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces." Then Omar's choice to replace Mehsud, Pakistan Taliban leader Moulvi Faqir Mohammed, turned him down. Last month Mullah Omar fired Mansoor Dadullah as the chief commander of insurgents in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, the birthplace of the Taliban. And that announcement came a week or two after a key Taliban commander in the Helmand town of Musa Qala, which had been held by the Taliban for 10...