What's Wrong With This Picture?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top Marine Corps general flew to Iraq on Thursday to tell his troops they should kill "only when justified," as the U.S. military investigated whether Marines killed civilians in two incidents.
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Lou Dobbs' Head Just Exploded

The US senate has just passed its version of the immigration bill. Dobbs is blaming it on the Democrats, of course, despite the fact that Bush favours the senate bill and that Republicans own the senate.

Just prior to the explosion of Lou's head, he announced that the senate passed a provision that would see the US government consulting with Mexico about the border fence.

At that point, Dobbs' grey matter could be seen splashed all over teevee screens everywhere. It was not a pretty sight.

CNN has the details of the senate bill and Dobbs announced that the senator behind the provision for consultations with Mexico was Arlen Specter (R-PA). He will no longer be on Dobbs' Christmas card list.

Preparing For a Strike on Iran?

It's been a busy week for Bush in Washington. He hosted a visit from Israel's Prime Minister Olmert and will hold a joint press conference later today (~5pm ET) with Britain's Prime Minister (and sock-puppet) Tony Blair.

What's really going on?

Olmert spoke to congress not only about the Israel/Palestinian situation, but quite forcefully against Iran and Bush asserted that the US would protect Israel from an Iranian attack. Will Bush just fabricate an attack as he had planned prior to the Iraq war?

Blair and Bush are expected to talk about Iraq but, unless they have something new to add to the converstaion in the form of an announcement about troop withdrawals, one is left to wonder what Blair's visit is really all about.

Is this just the run up to a US attack on Iran? Is Bush meeting with these leaders to prepare for one? With the growing spread of anti-Iranian propaganda and conflicting reports of Iran's nuclear capabilities, no one seems to actually know the truth of the situation on the ground. In all of this confusion, will the US once again bypass the UN Security Council and unilaterally decide on preemptive strikes no matter what the intel presents?

And what is Canada's part in all of this?

The U.S. state department said Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns met with his Canadian counterpart as part of the London meetings, but a foreign affairs spokesperson in Ottawa would not name the Canadian representative.

Is there any logical reason for not naming our country's representative in these talks? What is our government trying to hide?

Many people believe that Bush would not make the same mistake twice - invading a country without adequate resources or preparation.

I'm not one of them.

Bush Orders Freeze of Rep Jefferson's Documents

Bush has ordered a freeze on the documents seized in an FBI raid on Democractic Rep William Jefferson's office on Saturday in order to determine whether the FBI's actions were legal and constitutional. The documents will now be under seal until that time.

The FBI received a tremendous amount of criticism for the unprecedented raid from critics who asserted it was a violation of the separation of powers.

Ralph to Ottawa: Keep Your Hands Off Our Oil Money

Ralph Klein just wouldn't be Ralph Klein if he didn't have something to complain about. This time, he says he's received a copy of a leaked report that would see Ottawa including provincial resource revenues included in the equalization formula. The problem is that, according to experts, no such proposal is under consideration.

Roger Gibbins, president of the Canada West Foundation, said he's "baffled" by the premier's comments because Alberta's provincial revenues wouldn't be affected by proposed changes to the program.

Indeed, Klein's musings are a bit confusing, considering equalization is a federal program paid for by federal taxation -- not through cash grabs on the provinces.

All Canadians pay for the program through the levies they pay to Ottawa on such things as income tax and the GST.

Increasing the equalization revenue pie would see all Canadians paying more, not just Albertans.

Paul Boothe, an economist at the University of Alberta who recently helped oversee the equalization program for Ottawa, said Klein's worries of a cash grab are unfounded.

"Certainly nobody is talking about a claim on Alberta's revenues or any other provincial revenues," Boothe said.

Regardless, political observers said Klein is delivering a symbolic message to the rest of Canada going into equalization negotiations.
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But academics and policy experts immediately denounced some of Klein's musings. Just last week, federal Finance Minster Jim Flaherty pledged in Calgary that Ottawa will keep its hands off Alberta's energy dollars if and when it revamps equalization.

Maybe Ralph has just been spending too much time in the sun.

The Hastert Hullabaloo

On Wednesday, ABC News reported that House Speaker Dennis Hastert was being investigated by the FBI in connection with the Abramoff scandal. Reuters then ran a story with DoJ denials but ABC restated that they were confident in their assertions. Now, Hastert's lawyers are accusing ABC of libel:

This statement is false, and your republication of it after actual knowledge of its falsity constitutes libel and defamation. ABC News’ continued publication of this false information, after having actual knowledge of its falsity, evidences a specific and malicious intent to injure and damage Speaker Hastert’s reputation by continued repetition of a known falsehood.

We will take any and all actions necessary to rectify the harm ABC has caused and to hold those at ABC responsible for their conduct.

And, it gets even curiouser:

WASHINGTON May 25, 2006 (AP)— House Speaker Dennis Hastert accused the Justice Department Thursday of trying to intimidate him in retaliation for criticizing the FBI's weekend raid on a congressman's office, escalating a searing battle between the executive and legislative branches of government.

"This is one of the leaks that come out to try to, you know, intimidate people," Hastert said on WGN radio Thursday morning. "We're just not going to be intimidated on it."

The Illinois Republican, in his interview with a Chicago radio station, was responding to an ABC News report that quoted an unnamed law enforcement source as saying that he was "in the mix" of the Justice Department's investigation into influence peddling by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

So who's really legally responsible for this mess?

Breaking: Lay & Skilling Guilty, Guilty Guilty

It's been a long time coming but, finally, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron have been found guilty on numerous charges.

May 25 (Bloomberg) -- A U.S. jury convicted Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling of orchestrating the fraud that destroyed Enron Corp., giving prosecutors a victory a case that came to symbolize corporate crime sparked by the stock market bust in 2000.
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Lay, 64, and Skilling, 52, face at least 25 years each in prison after being convicted of using off-the-books partnerships to manipulate Enron's finances. Skilling faces additional jail time over his conviction for using inside information to sell Enron stock. Lay was also convicted on bank fraud charges after a trial that U.S. District Judge Sim Lake held without a jury while the panel in the main case deliberated.
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The eight-woman, four-man jury convicted Skilling on 19 of the 28 charges against him while finding Lay guilty of all of the six counts against him. The government presented a total of 25 witnesses against the men, including a parade of former Enron executives.
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Sentencing will be announced on September 11, 2006.

Helen Thomas Grades Tony Snow

In a rather genteel article, much less confrontational than she usually is in the White House Press briefing room, Helen Thomas hands Tony Snow his first report card:

Tony Snow, former Fox Television commentator and talk-show host, is slicker, smoother and more articulate than his two recent predecessors, but the content is the same old spin.

Snow describes himself as the "new kid on the block" trying to get up to speed on the array of touchy issues that he gets asked about. But he is also a quick student and a showman, intense and glib.

She praises Snow a bit for the fact that he's willing to admit mistakes (which is almost a cardinal sin in the Bush administration) but doesn't leave Snow totally unscathed:

I asked Snow how he was going to make this administration more credible.

His reply: "I'm not going to answer questions about credibility, other than to say that I'm eager to be here and I'm happy to be working with you."

I persisted: "Are you always going to tell the truth?"

"Yes," he replied.

Where have I heard that before?

Snow consulted with many reporters about what he needs to do to succeed in the White House. He already knows the answer: Just follow the party line.

No doubt Helen will do everything she can to make him stray from that line as long as she retains her seat in the briefing room.

Random News & Views Roundup

- Ray McGovern on Eavesdropping, Gagging, and the Constitution. A must read.

- Gauging the statistical probabilities that the NSA's spying program might actually find any terrorists. (Heavy on the math). Conclusion: it's impossible.

- The number of people killed during the Haditha Massacre is higher than initially reported:

A key member of Congress said he 'wouldn't be surprised' if a dozen Marines faced courts-martial for allegedly killing Iraqi civilians Nov. 19. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., told Marine Corps Times that the number of dead Iraqis, first reported to be 15, was actually 24. He based that number on a briefing from Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Mike Hagee on Wednesday.

Hagee visited Capitol Hill in anticipation of the release of two investigation reports, which are expected to show that among the 24 dead civilians, five of the alleged victims, all unarmed, were shot in a car with no warning, Murtha said. The killings took place in Hadithah, 125 miles northwest of Baghdad.

At least seven of the victims were women and three were children.

- Erin Aubry Kaplan asks 'Is black-brown unity even possible?'

The unity is seductive on the surface, but how deep does it go? Blacks and Latinos have different experiences and ideas - not only about what America is but about what it means. And these differences have been suppressed, not examined or celebrated, by the cult of multiculturalism that dominates race relations and fuels the renewed call for black-brown unity.

- More on the issue via the Christian Science Monitor, Rising black-Latino clash on jobs.

While Los Angeles is ground zero for black-Hispanic friction these days, echoes of Vaughn's words are rising throughout urban black America as Congress labors over immigration reform. In cities where almost half of the young black men are unemployed, a debate is raging over whether Latinos - undocumented and not - are elbowing aside blacks for jobs in stores, restaurants, hotels, manufacturing plants, and elsewhere.
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"In this era of mass immigration, no group has benefited less or been harmed more than the African-American population," says Vernon Briggs, a Cornell University professor who researches immigration policy and the American labor force.

Yet a precise relationship between the presence of immigrants and the loss of black jobs has not been clearly proven in research. Rather, the influx of legal and illegal immigrants has been so massive that it has affected the internal migration of native-born Americans to the point where "economists have given up trying to prove a one-to-one-displacement," says Dr. Briggs.

Alas, a country that is increasingly divided over the immigration issues its congress is attempting to resolve. But these schisms may well take decades to heal.

Stephen Harper Flashback (circa 1997)

Stephen Harper's speech 'to a June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing U.S. think tank':

First, facts about Canada. Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.
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In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance.
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Of our two legislative houses, the Senate, our upper house, is appointed, also by the Prime Minister, where he puts buddies, fundraisers and the like. So the Senate also is not very important in our political system.
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What the House of Commons is really like is the United States electoral college.
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The NDP could be described as basically a party of liberal Democrats, but it's actually worse than that, I have to say. And forgive me jesting again, but the NDP is kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.
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Some people point out that there is a small element of clergy in the NDP. Yes, this is true. But these are clergy who, while very committed to the church, believe that it made a historic error in adopting Christian theology.
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If you look at the surviving PC support, it's very much concentrated in Atlantic Canada, in the provinces to the east of Quebec. These are very much equivalent to the United States border states. They're weak economically. They have very grim prospects if Quebec separates. These people want a solution at almost any cost. And some of the solutions they propose would be exactly that.
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Its [the NDP's] main concern, of course, is simply the left-wing agenda to basically disintegrate our society in all kinds of spectrums.