Right-wing Blog Commenter Threatens UN Building

While checking out the right-wing blogger reactions to the John Bolton resignation, I found this comment over at Hot Air which no one to this point has renounced:

Maybe after Bolton and his staff have vacated their offices, something could *happen* to the building.

RushBaby on December 4, 2006 at 10:32 AM

And maybe someone should report 'RushBaby' to the FBI...

Rabid right-wing bloggers seize on every news report involving what they perceive to be a possible threat by anyone who is Muslim (note the latest imams on a plane story which they have completely blown out of proportion), ignoring real domestic terrorism plots that don't meet their hysterical anti-Muslim criteria and when someone on one of their blogs writes a threat like this, they look the other way.

Here's a screen capture of the comment:

John Bolton Resigns

Knowing he wouldn't be confirmed by a Democratic congress, the US's UN ambassador John Bolton has resigned. The boy king had this to say:

President Bush, in a statement, said he was "deeply disappointed that a handful of United States senators prevented Ambassador Bolton from receiving the up or down vote he deserved in the Senate."

"They chose to obstruct his confirmation, even though he enjoys majority support in the Senate, and even though their tactics will disrupt our diplomatic work at a sensitive and important time," Bush said. "This stubborn obstructionism ill serves our country, and discourages men and women of talent from serving their nation."

The only obstructionism that happened was the White House's refusal to release classified documents to the committee when Bolton was up for confirmation last time causing his nomination to stall and leading Bush to sneak Bolton into the position during a recess appointment as an act of defiance. Bush, as usual, is just trying to rewrite history once again.

While Bush could not give Bolton another recess appointment, the White House was believed to be exploring other ways of keeping him in the job, perhaps by giving him a title other than ambassador.

How about 'asshole'? Or 'disaster'? Or 'bully for hire'?

Sanity - 1; Bloggers for Bolton - 0

Update: Santorum as the next UN ambassador? Are you on crack or what?

Bonus Update: Check out the FOX news screenshot over at Think Progress. 'Another defeat for the devil'. heh

Bushco: Worst.Police.Trainers.Ever

We've all read and seen the reports from Iraq where the so-called coalition of the willing still can't get a grip on training anything near an effective police force - that is if recruits ever actually make it into the recruiting centers which have been frequent suicide bomber targets because the facilities are not adequately protected. Now, a new report from Afghanistan shows that the US military has been just as ineffective there as well:

Via the NYT:

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department has found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.

In fact, most police units had less than 50 percent of their authorized equipment on hand as of June, says the report, which was issued two weeks ago but is only now circulating among members of relevant Congressional committees.

In its most significant finding, the report said that no effective field training program had been established in Afghanistan, at least in part because of a slow, ineffectual start and understaffing.

Police training experts who have studied or had first-hand experience with the American effort in Afghanistan said they agreed with the report’s findings, and some said they had warned for years that field training was the backbone of a strong program. But they said additional problems needed to be investigated, including the quality of private contractors and the cost and effectiveness of relying on them to train the police officers. In particular, the experts questioned why the report focused on United States government managers and only glancingly analyzed the performance of the principal contractor in Afghanistan, DynCorp International of Virginia.

They can blame the private contractors all they like but the fact is they hired and supposedly oversaw those companies. Yet now, 5 years later this ineptitude is only finally being noticed?

Once again, the Pentagon and the Bush administration are having to play catch up to the realities of their failures while they have the audacity to chastise NATO countries for not doing enough to fix the situation in Afghanistan.

Does it get any more ridiculous than this?

The report says that management of the DynCorp contract by United States government officials in Afghanistan has fallen into a state of disarray; conflicting military and civilian bureaucracies could not even find a copy of the contract to clarify for auditors exactly what it called for.

When will they get the fact that peoples lives are on the line over there? Are our Canadian soldiers dying because the US government doesn't even care enough to properly train the Afghan police force to handle major security issues? And just how long are we supposed to put up with that?

Write Your Own Caption

That darn red tape catches up to us every time.

Sunday Food for Thought

“Society must take every means at its disposal to defend itself against the emergence of a parallel power which defies the elected power.”

- Pierre Elliot Trudeau

And, with the issue of same sex marriage being brought up once again by the Conservative party next week, let's not forget these infamous words of Trudeau as well:

“The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.”

Don't like history? Just stuff it in the back room...

You can believe that mankind descended from aliens, like the Scientologists do, or that God literally did create Adam and Eve. You can also believe that the world is only 6000 years old. That's fine. But, that doesn't mean you get to expect that fossil evidence of man's origins be relegated to shelves in the back room of a museum just because it makes you feel uncomfortable.

"The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact," said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, the Christ is the Answer Ministries.

"Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory," the bishop said.

Bishop Adoyo said all the country's churches would unite to force the museum to change its focus when it reopens after eighteen months of renovations in June 2007. "We will write to them, we will call them, we will make sure our people know about this, and we will see what we can do to make our voice known," he said.

There's nothing stopping that Christian community from opening their own museum with their own artifacts that fit their theory. Oh wait...they don't have any such artifacts except their Bibles. They wouldn't need a very large museum of their own to display those at least.

Quote du Jour

From CTV's Question Period:

...and last nite the absolute appalling hypocrisy of an unelected Conservative senator, minister, hack, Michael Fortier saying that he thinks Mr Dion is going to have trouble winning votes in Quebec. Well, Mr...senator Fortier didn't even have the guts to face the voters in Repentigny so he's sitting in the cabinet as an unelected minister. So the hypocrisy is just appallling coming from Mr Harper.

- Dominic LeBlanc, Co-chair, Liberal Party Leadership Convention

Fortier's comments:

Conservative Senator Michael Fortier said Dion won't be able to deliver votes in Quebec, where the Tories have been working hard to gain support.

"It's telling that the people who know him best from Quebec actually shunned his campaign," Fortier told reporters. "I'm convinced he did not carry Quebec and this is very, very significant."

Yes, the Women Are Angry!

HALIFAX (CP) - Joanne Hussey says Prime Minister Stephen Harper owes her 29 cents - the amount of money, for every dollar, that Canadian women earn less than men.

It's the message behind a campaign she and four other Halifax women have started, setting up a website and distributing pins and postcards to argue funding cuts to Status of Women Canada will only maintain that disparity.

And what began as a local project to pique interest in the Nova Scotia capital has quickly grown, with thousands of hits on the site and e-mails of support from across the country.

"I think that it's really important the government knows that there isn't widespread support for these types of decisions," says Hussey.

"We don't want our government making decisions that reverse strides that have been made over the last 20 and 30 years."

Hussey's website - www.thewomenareangry.org - is one of at least two such efforts that have sprouted up since Heritage Minister Bev Oda announced $5 million in cuts to Status of Women Canada's annual budget, effective April 1.

link

The movement against Oda's cuts, which include removing the word 'equality' from the Status of Women agency's website and the recently announced closure of 12 regional offices, has prompted local women's groups to rally in protests around the country as well.

Oda and those who support her cuts insist that she is simply streamlining services in a more efficient manner but we have yet to see any hint of what she actually plans to do for the women of Canada besides slashing, burning and grasping at straws.

Oda insists her government will instead fund organizations and programs she says more directly affect women. Those could include the YWCA and the Salvation Army, or programs that encourage women to enter professions traditionally dominated by men.

Is she going to start a faith-based operation similar to Bush's which is now facing a US Supreme Court challenge? Is that what Canada's women have to look forward to? An outsourcing of government responsibility to address the needs of women in this country? Fracturing the distribution of sorely needed services is not a solution. We deserve better than that.

If Oda isn't up to the task of standing up for all Canadian women (not just her Conservative fans in special interest groups like the so-called REAL Women - who don't care about real equality at all) then she needs to resign.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

It's a good time to be a liberal. The US Democrats have taken over the house and the senate. Stephane Dion is the new leader of the Liberal party. Far-right Alberta PC leadership candidate Ted Morton was rejected, as was corporatist Jim Dinning and a more centrist Ed Stelmach is our new premier.

Harper's minority government Conservatives have bungled their way through their first year of governing while managing to anger families, seniors and businesspeople with policies like the measely $100/month for child care, the scandalous income trust decision in which companies and investors lost billions, the pathetic so-called Clean Air act championed by an Environment minister who won't even show up to testify at the environment committee, the vote on extending Canada's mission in Afghanistan without even presenting a plan to do so while the situation deteriorates rapidly...and so on and so on....

All in all, the majority has spoken loudly and has said that the era of neocon-like rule is no longer acceptable. Americans and Canadians are overwhelmingly moderate and the small pockets of extreme conservatives no longer have the power to sway mass numbers of people to accept their bidding. Successfully managing the public's two most urgent concerns: the environment and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, cannot be trusted in the hands of ruling conservatives in the US or Canada. Bush and the GOP have failed utterly on both of those fronts and Harper is simply following in his footsteps.

Now is the time for renewal. The Democrats have a huge responsibility when it comes to making wise decisions about the future of Iraq, Afghanistan and the broader middle east. They must also fight back against the science-snubbing Bush machine to take charge of the environmental issues (along with so many other challenges of importance to Americans). Canada's Stephane Dion's strong environmental plans will trump the Harper government's nonsense hands down - despite the Liberals' past failures to deal with the situation.

In Alberta, a new era begins with a little known, quiet spoken premier who will most likely chart a very cautious course over the next while. Last election, Alberta's liberals finally made some small but notable gains and with the ever-changing boom population, it's not unthinkable to consider that more are on the way.

Overall, the stagnation of the past has finally been overcome and there's an energy in the air that has been absent for quite some time. Liberals (small 'l' like me and big 'L' supporters of the Liberal party, along with those who cheered on the Democrats) have been reinvigorated. Change is here, more is on the way and all I can say is that it's about damn time.

Alberta PC Leadership Race Results (Updated as they come in...)

****Say hello to Premier Ed Stelmach****

The second ballot voting for the leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservative party took place on Saturday.

Here are last weekend's first ballot results for the top three contenders who are now on the second ballot:

Jim Dinning 29470
Ted Morton 25648
Ed Stelmach 14967

According to local press reports, there was a huge turnout on Saturday so, even though polls closed at 7pm MST, the results may take a number of hours to tabulate.

CFCN TV has these very early numbers:

Here are the results as of 8:45 pm (mountain time) Saturday night:

Jim Dinning - 4224 (42.2%)
Ted Morton - 3011 (30.1%)
Ed Stelmach - 2773 (27.7%)

(7/83 polls reporting)

The hope for lefties in this province (besides being victorious in the next election) is that Ted 'Firewall' Morton loses, so there have been more than a few liberals (excluding me) who have bought temporary PC memberships in an effort to vote for the other two candidates to keep Morton out. Alberta has been a conservative stronghold for 30 years, but Morton threatens to take us back to the 1950s. If he wins, the future will certainly look quite dim and isolationist.

I'll post more updates as they come in...

This is interesting:

Results as of 9:50 p.m. in Saturday's final ballot in the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership election:

Ed Stelmach 18, 667
Jim Dinning 17, 435
Ted Morton 14, 294

Tank, Morton, tank:

Results as of 10:05 p.m. in Saturday's final ballot in the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership election 43/83 polls reporting:

23, 523 Jim Dinning
22, 139 Ed Stelmach
17, 993 Ted Morton

Morton still lags behind:

Results so far in tonight's final ballot in the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race with 60/83 polls reporting:

35, 325 Jim Dinning
28, 886 Ed Stelmach
24, 380 Ted Morton

11:18 pm:

44, 562 Jim Dinning
36, 688 Ed Stelmach
31, 763 Ted Morton

Since this is preferential voting, practically all of the Global TV pundits (and some MLAs) are already calling it for Stelmach.

11:35 pm Ted Morton conceded saying 'Steady Eddy has pulled it off'.
Cya later, Ted!

11:58 pm 75/83 polls reporting
48, 543 Jim Dinning
44, 046 Ed Stelmach
36, 071 Ted Morton

Final numbers (I think!) 82/83 polls reporting...

12:20 pm
49, 440 Jim Dinning
45, 890 Ed Stelmach
38, 167 Ted Morton

Okay...these are the final numbers for the second ballot:

Results from the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race with 83/83 polls reporting:

50, 937 Ed Stelmach
49, 753 Jim Dinning
38, 706 Ted Morton

via QR77

Well, crap! QR77 changed their numbers!

Results from the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race with 83/83 polls reporting:

Ed Stelmach 51, 764
Jim Dinning 51, 282
Ted Morton 41, 243

Wankers.

I was just about to head off to bed when Global TV broke in live and announced that Ed Stelmach has won with 77,000+ votes to Dinning's 51,282. The crowd started screaming so I couldn't hear the exact total for Stelmach.

Kate at the roadkill blog will be eating crow for breakfast (hopefully, raw). (Update: Kate has informed me that she said she would eat crow if her last-minute prediction of Stelmach being the victor fell through. Lucky for her (and some random crow which is still alive as a result) she was saved from eating raw foul for breakfast.

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