The Weekly World News is shutting the doors. (Note that the original Ed Anger is apparently died at age 56, though the My America column  by Ed Anger continued.)

Must NBC Stop Running Law & Order If Fred Thompson Announces His Candidacy or else face the obligation to give rival candidates equal time?

Apparently the answer is yes... or maybe... or who knows?

Does it also mean that the networks cannot show any of his movies including Hunt for the Red October, Cape Fear and Die Hard II unless they also show an equal amount of footage of Hillary Clinton sitting through Bill's impeachment hearings? Thompson was also on some episodes of Matlock, which seems to run on cable 24 hours a day, and he did an episode of Sex and the City.

Apparently the New York Times stringer covering the Conrad Black Trial maynot actually be covering the Conrad Black Trial. ... he may not even be in Chicago...he may not even be animate:

Theree is much speculation about the whereabouts of the New York Times stringer who has been filing dispatches on the trial. His report the other day seemed (to some) to suggest he was in the courtroom, and yet nobody seems to have laid an eye on him. Nobody is suggesting anything untoward of course. Certainly not. This is the finest newspaper in the world we’re talking about. And, to be fair, nobody among the assembled scribes knows exactly what this fellow looks like, so it’s possible he was among us at some point over the past few days, disguised as a lawyer perhaps. Or an empty chair.

UPDATE: NYT guy is in the building:

This is the way the CBC remebers Adscam ... not as a corrupt Liberal Party but as a Liberal Party painted corrupt by the opposition:

The sponsorship program, now defunct, was designed to raise the federal government's profile in the wake of the 1995 sovereignty referendum in Quebec. Over its life, Liberal-friendly ad firms in that province took in millions of taxpayers' dollars.

Some of the money ended up in the pockets of high-ranking Liberal organizers in Quebec, allowing the opposition to paint the government of former prime minister Jean Chrétien as corrupt.

Poor Jean Chretien... he was treated so unfairly... why everyone knows that he and his buddies never got a dime. And Paul Martn knew nothing about it .... nor did Dion or Tobin or Copps....

With so much accepted truth out there in the media and in the legislatures of Canada, we need to look south of the border to find a debate that would be worth watching:

The Editors’ Challenge This should be an offer that the Wall Street Journal can’t refuse — debate the editors of National Review on the immigration bill. ...

It shouldn’t be a problem for the Journal’s editors to take up this challenge, since opponents of the bill aren’t “rational” on the question, have no arguments, and are “foaming at the mouth,” as they explained in a videotaped session of one of their editorial meetings last week. Click here to watch — you have to see it to believe it. We urge them to come out of the shadows, and hope defending the bill in this forum is not another one of those jobs that no American will do. (We would challenge President Bush himself to a debate on behalf of the conservatives he has maligned, but we fear he hasn’t read the bill.)

Where can I tune in?

First the United Nations brought human rights to Libya.... now they are teaching Zimbabwe about sustainable development... this is the most ridiculous letter to the editor I have seen in a long time:

UN posting may give Zimbabwe real incentive to improve

National Post

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Re: The UN's latest, editorial, May 14.

One remarkable effect of the rotating chairing of UN committees is that it gives compelling reasons for errant regimes to imagine themselves becoming responsible custodians of world standards. The developmental worth of this system can be seen when these states learn to adopt maturity and stewardship.

Libya was forced to think about the meaning of human rights when it became chair of UN Human Rights Commission. This resulted in some profound policy epiphanies that would been unimaginable before Libya's turn at chairing that committee. Could anyone have envisioned Libya admitting responsibility for the Pan Am disaster at Lockerbie, Scotland, or backing away from lethal WMDs, if she had not been given the responsibility of heading a human rights institution?

I hope that Zimbabwe, as the new head the UN's commission on Sustainable Development, will transform similarly. Prescriptive behavioural management does not have nearly the effectiveness of developmental techniques.

Alan Blanes, facilitator, World Movement for the Culture of Peace Initiative 2000-2010, Edmonton Committee, Edmonton.

By the way, the World Movement for the Culture of Peace appears to have some affiliation with the UN. Now, if we could only get Sudan as the head of UNICEF, the children of Darfur will have much better lives.

(also at The London Fog)

The Ontario Liberals have been dodging questions about a sponsorship slush fund for at least a month. Premier McGuinty took the early position of avoiding Question period all together; so too his impugned Minister, Mike Colle. Now that they have shown up, the answer is to call the Tories racists or to avoid the question. The Star opines:

The daily ritual in the Ontario Legislature is called "question period" for a reason: for 60 minutes MPPs may ask questions of the government, but they can't count on getting answers.

However, last week's performance by the Liberal government was even worse than usual in this respect and ought not to be allowed to pass without comment.

The opposition asked a series of questions about the decision-making process that lay behind some $30 million in government grants to various and sundry ethnic groups, some with Liberal ties.

The government responded by either changing the subject or impugning the motives of the questioners.

Not once was a question on the so-called slush fund directly answered by a government minister.

The whole article is well worth the read and concludes:

By the end of last week, the Liberals were looking pretty chuffed with themselves.

They ought not to be. Their handling of this file has been the nadir of their four years in office.

The sad part is that there is an election coming up in the fall, and for all of the condemnation by The Star of the handling of this clear use of tax dollars for political purposes including lining the pockets of the government's buddies, I'm willing to bet that The Star will be endorsing McGuinty and the Liberals in October.

Where Are the Anti-Communist Movies?

(via Instapundit)

Via Dust My Broom:

A Muslim journalist beaten with a cricket bat outside a Toronto-area home fears for his life after facing repeated death threats apparently because someone has deemed his writing to be anti-Islam.

A cricket bat? In North America the preferred club is the baseball bat... wait a second:

 The CP article doesn’t mention that the attackers were fellow Muslims.

via Daimnation

The Ottawa Citizen reports that the CBC are jumping into the censorship wagon:

A Booker Prize-winning Canadian writer was forbidden from reading from one of the world's most controversial anti-Semitic books on CBC Radio during Canada's Freedom to Read Week.

Life of Pi author Yann Martel said staff at CBC Radio Saskatchewan told him half an hour before a scheduled interview last Thursday that he wasn't allowed read excerpts of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf on the air.

Why, may you ask, was this Booker Prize winner reading Mein Kampf? Well, he was kind of asked to do so:

The CBC had asked Martel to do an interview on The Afternoon Edition because the author was planning to read from the book that evening at a Saskatoon Public Library event for Freedom to Read Week, an annual campaign raising public awareness about intellectual freedom in Canada.

The library asked Mr. Martel to read from any banned or challenged book, and Mr. Martel chose Mein Kampf.

"It's a horrible book, but a horribly important book, because you get in the brain of one of the monsters of the 20th century," Mr. Martel said.

As Daimnation states in support of the reading:

Know your enemy--and I mean it.

Though when you follow the link ityou find that it takes at least 2-5 months before you get the chance to start.

(also posted at The London Fog)

David Janes is again on to the misrepresentations held out as scientific truth by global warming / climate change alarmists.

Here is a link to a whole bunch of David's posts on the subjects. (if I recall correctly, Dave cut his programing teeth in the weather mapping trade)

This is not a victory for free speech, which was already protected; it is a victory for the perpetrators of libel and slander.

Borat Sagdiyev may have taken the United States by storm, but he won't repeat his box-office success in Russia.

Less than three weeks before a feature film about Borat, a character created by English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, was to open in Russian movie theaters, the Federal Culture and Cinematography Agency refused to license it out of concern that the film could offend audiences in this country.

The movie, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," about a misogynistic, wife-beating Kazakh journalist with a penchant for mustaches, thus becomes one of the first non-pornographic films to be banned since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

From the Washington Times a study of the mainstream media coverage of the midterm elections. It's all bad for the Republicans and all good for the Democrats.

The Big Three television networks have used unprecedented midterm election coverage to bash the Republican Party with negative stories, and plenty of them, a study says.     Only 12 percent of election stories that aired on NBC, ABC or CBS were favorable toward Republican candidates, according to a study released yesterday by the District-based Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA).     In contrast, Democrats basked in glory. The study found that 77 percent of the news accounts between Sept. 5 and Oct. 22 offered favorable evaluations of Democratic candidates and lawmakers.     "These numbers are pretty striking," said Robert Lichter, director of CMPA, a nonpartisan researcher of news and entertainment media. "The coverage has become a referendum on Republican leadership. The big question for all three networks is this: Why are the Republicans in trouble and how bad is it going to get?"  

The economy is booming and it is getting zero coverage.

  Other issues of potential importance to voters -- the economy or redistricting, for example -- got short shrift, such topics earning mention in six or fewer stories.

With that said, I am certainly not shocked by this report and the incumbent always gets a rougher ride. However, the telling statistic i think is found in this paragraph:

While midterms typically garner only tepid interest from broadcasters, the networks have dramatically ramped up their coverage this time around, providing 167 stories during the study period. Only 35 stories had been aired during a comparable time in 2002.

The article concludes:

  Like negative campaign ads, negative news reports may have a destructive rebound effect on a fickle viewing public.     "For the past week, the mainstream media has run story after story about the nastiness of this year's campaign ads -- perhaps as a way to distract our attention from their own dirty tricks," observed Stephen Spruiell of National Review Online yesterday.     "Viewers can get sick of negative TV coverage. They consistently rate the news coverage as one of the worst parts of a campaign, specifically citing negative content," Mr. Lichter said. And its going to get worse in the shrill run-up to Nov. 7.     "The GOP is the story, and they're caught in an echo chamber," he added.

These are the standard complaints. The Media will claim that nothing is wrong, the story really is about "why the republicans are in rouble and how bad is it going to get?" and the press may be right about that. However, defining the election question is the key to victory. Will it be about the economy, the war or just dissatisfaction? That the press has been instrumental in defining the question no one can deny.

TORONTO -- The man who ran Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign and gave political advice to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former South African president Nelson Mandela is lending his expertise to Ontario's Liberals.

James Carville, the man known as the Ragin' Cajun, spoke to 1,200 Ontario Liberals at their annual general meeting in Toronto Saturday, the last such gathering before the party tries for re-election next October.

How do you think the Canadian media would have reacted if Karl Rove came to Toronto to address the Conservative Party? I suspect there would have been a lot of pontificating about American interference and influence in Canadian poitics and the plans of Rove/bush to take over the world.

 Cross posted at The London Fog

Dear Belinda,

Grow up.

Yours truly,

Little Tobacco

Indeed there is a bias at the BBC as this leaked report indicates, ( I assume it is this report) . An excerpt:

The full account of the meeting shows how senior BBC figures queued up to lambast their employer.

Political pundit Andrew Marr said: 'The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.'

Washington correspondent Justin Webb said that the BBC is so biased against America that deputy director general Mark Byford had secretly agreed to help him to 'correct', it in his reports. Webb added that the BBC treated America with scorn and derision and gave it 'no moral weight'.

Former BBC business editor Jeff Randall said he complained to a 'very senior news executive', about the BBC's pro-multicultural stance but was given the reply: 'The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it.'

Randall also told how he once wore Union Jack cufflinks to work but was rebuked with: 'You can't do that, that's like the National Front!'

Quoting a George Orwell observation, Randall said that the BBC was full of intellectuals who 'would rather steal from a poor box than stand to attention during God Save The King'.

The BBC is in court to block the release of an internal report that is thought to be quite critical of the BBC's Middle East coverage:

The BBC has spent thousands of pounds of licence payers' money trying to block the release of a report which is believed to be highly critical of its Middle East coverage.
The corporation is mounting a landmark High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the Act to pursue their journalism.
The action will increase suspicions that the report, which is believed to run to 20,000 words, includes evidence of anti-Israeli bias in news programming.

Read the article. I am sure there will be plenty of commentary on the same. I simply point out that the BBC is government funded and that freedom of the press is an included part of the freedom of expression. I would love to see a similar report on the CBC.

My loyal reader will know that I am no fan of the police, the state, etc. That I believe in the rule of law and individual rights. If you are one of those who believe, as the current Harper Government does, that the police are benevolent or that Crown Prosecutors are not in it for themselves, take a look at the Duke lacrosse case (via Instapundit)This is a US example but I have posted on similar examples. Note in this excellent analysis the reaction of the Duke University faculty and administration. It is appalling at best. For you Arts students out there, the lesson is: do not believe any of your professors' social commentary. Communism, racialism, multiculturalism, and just about every other "ism" work only in the make believe worlds of the academic, the trade unionist and the civil servant. In the real world you get only artificial results enforced by a gun. When the government is involved or has control, the first decision will always be political.

I read this in the print version and intended to post on it. Then I see Tim Blair in Australia has beaten me to the punch. The circular logic of this letter is the stuff of the dark ages:

The fact that someone could call the Koran a "book of inherent violence" tells us how ignorant and uninformed that person is about our religion. Secondly, what I found interesting was Prof. Redeker's comment, "We must distinguish between Islamists and those responsible Muslims out there who should without a doubt support me." I find it hard to understand what he is looking for. Does he want moderate Muslims to support him when he is insulting the basis of our religion without putting in the time and effort to understand it completely? Even though he will not face a violent backlash from moderate Muslims, Prof. Redeker will not gain any kind of support or encouragement either.
Muslim "reactions" and "retaliations" against supposed "free speech" are not coming out of thin air. In fact, authors such as Prof. Redeker are adding fuel to the fire and expecting it to extinguish itself. There is a simple solution to these "violent" retaliations. Let's keep practising free speech, but eliminate the ignorant insulting of Muslim beliefs. The retaliations will stop. It is pretty hard to clap with just one hand.
Hamid Rizvi, Toronto.

What the???? We are vicious and violent only when you point out that we are vicious and viloent? It really isn't ours to wonder why.