The Black Rod

We're all Coulterians now apparently. In the wake of the Sept.11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the brilliant wit Ann Coulter made no bones of what she thought her country's reaction should be. In her column two days after the attacks she wrote: “Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.” The roots causes crowd was aghast. Invade their countries? Convert them to Christianity? Insanity. Whoops. Eight years later Taliban Jack Layton and the rest of th...

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...

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has come to the rescue of Gail Asper's vanity project, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. According to Toronto Star columnist Martin Knelman, McGuinty has committed the Ontario government to giving the Manitoba project $5 million, in installments of $500,000 a year for 10 years . "Premier Dalton McGuinty made the promise months ago to Gail Asper, chair of the fundraising campaign for the museum. But McGuinty asked for the deal to be kept quiet until he was ready to make an announcement." wrote Knelman in his column published Wedneday, March 25. Nothing about the museum contribution was in the Ontario '09 budget this week, so a formal announcement is probably waiting for Gail Asper to get back from a trip to Argentina. The money can't come soon enough. Private fundraising by Asper's organization, Friends of the Museum of Human Rights, has stalled millions short of the $105 million it pledged to raise for the project. The p...

"This war is lost." It was April, 2007, almost exactly two years ago. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, speaking for the Democratic Party, declared the Muslim terrorists had won the war in Iraq. "I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and - you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows - (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything...," said Reid. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby described the mindset of the time in a lookback this week (Bush's Folly is ending in victory, March 25, 2009): There was no military solution to the sectarian slaughter. The surge would only make the violence worse. Victory was not an option. The only choice was to partion Iraq and get out. That was then. This is now. ABC reporter Terry McCarthy filed this report on life in Iraq for World News Sunday: "Markets without bombs. Hummers without guns. Ice cream after dark. Busy streets without fear. Six years af...

Well, well, well....What a different message we get when people in the Inner City are allowed to speak for themselves free from the filters of strident native ideologues and Marxist university professors. It turns out that what they say is diametrically the opposite of what we've been told by these very intermediaries who, we can now clearly see, have been twisting the public's words to fit their own private agendas. The Winnipeg Police Advisory Board should be applauded for letting the voice of the people be heard at last. The board's first annual report was delivered to city council late last week. Within its pages we can hear what Inner City residents really think about the police. What an eyeopener. It turns out the residents of the most crime-ridden centres of town welcome the police. They want more police. They want to help the police to do their jobs better. Their biggest complaint is that intimidation by gangs and drug dealers keeps them from providing the police wi...

Slap Slap Slap Slap Slap If a written report could make a sound, that's the sound you would hear from the Winnipeg Police Advisory Board's first annual report. Everybody from the Premier, the Mayor, the Chief of Police on down to the members of the advisory board themselves get slapped in the report. The board failed to do what it's supposed to do, but in exchange it produced an amazing report that tips the apple cart of complacency about public safety and policing in the city . It's findings need to be trumpeted from the rooftops. Instead, the report, which was handed to city councillors last Friday, was met with near deafening silence by the news media in the city. Hey, it was Friday and what self-respecting news reporter wants to tie up a Friday night by reporting news. Only the Winnipeg Free Press reported the story, and even then it was buried deep in the Saturday newspaper instead of being highlighted on their cover page. At least reporters Bartley Kives and Gabr...

We confess. We've been knocked off our stride. Despite our best hopes, we haven't been able to put out a weekly Afghanistan report consistently this year. When we started our Afghanistan reports in 2006 we hoped to provide an overview of the fighting, primarily in Kandahar province where Canadian troops are stationed, and some analysis of the strategies involved. That gradually expanded to include military action throughout the country. Then into the lawless tribal regions of Pakistan. Last year as the Taliban tried to destabilize Pakistan and to spark a war with India, we began to get overwhelmed. We thought we could get a handle on it, but...obviously not yet. So this week we're using a time-honoured tactic---KISS---keep it simple, stupid. We'll focus on only a handful of topics while we regroup. ********* How time flies. Blink, and it’s already the season of the Feared Taliban Spring Offensive. As sure as geese fly north in the springtime, the mainstream media has b...