Northman's Fury

Listen, if Obama had actually warned the Canadian government that he wasn't serious about his NAFTA threats, I'm thinking our Conservative Finance Minister wouldn't have been out there all hot and bothered by those very threats.

It does offer a nice contrast of the blogs that leap to defend a Republican like McCain when the press says something bad about him, but will swallow any old story by that same "liberal media" if it paints a Democrat in a bad light.

Listen, no US president is going to back out of NAFTA, whatever their complaints about it. The clever little clauses they inserted to ensure things like Canada can't stop exporting oil or any other resource no matter what kind of domestic shortage it may face, are way too beneficial to US interests to give up, and both Obama and Clinton are more than intelligent enough to realize it.

On the other hand, they may be willing to renegotiate the pact with our current government, knowing our Bush-loving Conservatives would be likely to hand over to them even more sovereignty than they already have.

I swear to goodness that when I checked Memeorandum and saw the headline “McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out” I thought it meant something about his mother’s birth canal and a c-section birth and said to myself WTF.

The late Independent MP from British Columbia who kept the Liberals in power in the spring of 2005 was offered a $1 million life insurance policy by the Conservatives in an attempt to win his vote, according to an upcoming book.

. . .

Harper said his understanding of the offer to Cadman was that "it was only to replace financial considerations he might lose due to an election.

"I don't know the details," he's quoted as saying in the book. "I can tell you that I had told the individuals — I mean, they wanted to do it — but I told them they were wasting their time. I said Chuck had made up his mind he was going to vote with the Liberals."

Harper also confirmed the people who met with Cadman were "legitimately representing the party."

Ah what a wonderful set of people we have running this country. It's little wonder the Conservatives didn't want this former Reform and Alliance MP running for their party, he was a conservative with actual morals. Also gives some added detail to why his family supported the NDP candidate in the last election.

I'm sure glad the Liberals are on top of this stuff, else the Conservatives might actually have to face Canadians over it.

Just 12 months ago, Senator Barack Obama presented himself as an idealistic upstart taking on the Democratic fund-raising juggernaut behind Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

That was when Mr. Obama proposed a novel challenge aimed at limiting the corrupting influence of money on the race: If he won the nomination, he would limit himself to spending only the $85 million available in public financing between the convention and Election Day as long as his Republican opponent did the same.

Obama has already answered this, but the rocks keep from the McCain campaign. A really good answer to this would point out the glass house McCain is doing his throwing from. Something like:

"Once I have secured the Democratic nomination, I will go to my Republican opponent and try to work out a deal on public financing for the general election campaign. However, I feel it wise to point out that my Republican opponent, Senator McCain, has a very complicated history when it comes to such agreements. He has used the public financing system to guarantee a loan to his campaign, putting American taxpayers on the hook should his campaign falter. Then, once he had locked down the nomination and got what he needed from the public financing system, he has chosen to withdraw and overspend, regardless of the rules.

Now, when I talked about meeting with foreign leaders without preconditions, I was told that I was naive, and that I was giving away too much. Well, if I were to unilaterally sign myself up for public financing against an opponent to whom the rules of such are to be tossed away whenever it is convenient . . . Well, then I would be just as naive as my opponent likes to claim that I am."

I will meet with Senator McCain and his representatives, but I will not just throw away our advantages against someone who has proved himself less than capable of honouring his agreements. Not here, and not on the world stage.

Elaborate as necessary.

At last, somebody with a good explanation of the Liberal strategy.



Also works for the US Democratic Party.

Note to the writers of The Sarah Conner Chronicles, I've got some places you might want to look at for ideas on Skynet's development:

Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.

"They pose a threat to humanity," said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain's Royal United Services Institute.

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world -- from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones -- can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

. . .

But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.

It we are not careful, he said, that could change.

Military leaders "are quite clear that they want autonomous robots as soon as possible, because they are more cost-effective and give a risk-free war," he said.

. . .

The use of such devices by terrorists should be a serious concern, said Sharkey.

Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. "I don't know why that has not happened already," he said.

We do increasingly live in a science-fiction world. I did get a bit of a chuckle out of this, however:

For now, however, there remain several barriers to the creation and deployment of Terminator-like killing machines.

Some are technical. Teaching a computer-driven machine -- even an intelligent one -- how to distinguish between civilians and combatants, or how to gauge a proportional response as mandated by the Geneva Conventions, is simply beyond the reach of artificial intelligence today.

Forget for the moment that Terminators aren't generally known for their compassion to non-combatants. Do you really think the guys who cheered Israel's stated goal of "disproportionate" force in Lebanon and called the Geneva Convention "quaint", are going to be worried about their killer robots making such ethical considerations?

The reason we're always afraid of the machines taking over and wiping us out, is because we have the not entirely unreasonable fear that they may be imbued with the same flawed morals as their creators.

Arctic icebreaker, fishing port, tax break a start: northerners

People just aren't as easy to buy off as they used to be.

There is some good news in there, the fishing port being the biggest one, as it holds out at least the possibility of economic growth in Nunavut. Of course, the $8 million the feds are planning on spending there rather pales in comparison to the millions being allocated to refurbish the Nanisivik deep-water port for military use.

The upping of the Northern Resident's tax deduction is welcome, but it still needs to be indexed to the inflation rate. Somehow I don't think 10% covers the rise in the cost-of-living for the last twenty years, and it will be eaten up quite quickly in the years to come.

And, while promising to replace one of Canada's ice-breaker fleet 10 years from now sounds good, I'm waiting to hear about what they plan to do with all the other aging ships. And don't talk to me about those piss-ant patrol boats, we need real icebreakers up here.

All in all, about what I've come to expect from the feds over the years. Lots of promises, very little follow-through, and generally just ignoring the whole region outside what might help their near-term election prospects.

Not like that's a surprise or anything, but it is about the only useful thing to come out of last night's debate.

When it comes to the nation’s finances, Republicans in Washington have shown, shall we say, a certain lackadaisical attitude. Deficits, debts, expensive tax giveaways, lax regulations on the financial industry, Enron-omics — when it comes to looking after our money, GOP officials don’t exactly inspire confidence.

But what about when they’re tasked with looking after their own money? Well, it’s a funny story, actually.

Read the rest at the link. The gist is that lax oversight and poor internal controls led to abuse and possible fraud. Even with their own money, Republicans are incompetent managers.

The only real surprise after all of this, is how the hell do they still hold on to their reputation as prudent fiscal conservatives?

A pretty good article from the New Republic on Obama's advisors and the way his policy shop comes up with his plans and positions. One of the main points is this:

Despite Obama's reputation for grandiose rhetoric and utopian hope-mongering, the Obamanauts aren't radicals--far from it. They're pragmatists--people who, when an existing paradigm clashes with reality, opt to tweak that paradigm rather than replace it wholesale. As Thaler puts it, "Physics with friction is not as beautiful. But you need it to get rockets off the ground." It might as well be the motto for Obama's entire policy shop.

Pragmatism isn't often associated with Obama recently due to the overwhelming focus on his words and speaking ability. The lack of ideology that is the other point of the article gets some play, but more as a function of "reaching across the aisle" than as a measure of his policy proposals.

What I really like about the article is the view inside how Obama and his crew make decisions, both in economics and foreign policy; using the reams of available data to tweak the system to their benefit. It is a realistic approach that leads to better judgement about how to affect change.

And judgement trumps experience every time.

Okay, not really a do-over, but a reinterpretation. This I like.

Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion.

The country's powerful Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran.

. . .

The forensic examination of the Hadiths has taken place in Ankara University's School of Theology.

An adviser to the project, Felix Koerner, says some of the sayings - also known individually as "hadiths" - can be shown to have been invented hundreds of years after the Prophet Muhammad died, to serve the purposes of contemporary society.

"Unfortunately you can even justify through alleged hadiths, the Muslim - or pseudo-Muslim - practice of female genital mutilation," he says.

"You can find messages which say 'that is what the Prophet ordered us to do'. But you can show historically how they came into being, as influences from other cultures, that were then projected onto Islamic tradition."

The argument is that Islamic tradition has been gradually hijacked by various - often conservative - cultures, seeking to use the religion for various forms of social control.

Leaders of the Hadith project say successive generations have embellished the text, attributing their political aims to the Prophet Muhammad himself.

Using religion to further one's political aims is the biggest argument that most of us who believe in a secular society have against any and all forms of organized religion. And I'm quite happy with the next part as well.

Even some sayings accepted as being genuinely spoken by Muhammad have been altered and reinterpreted.

Prof Mehmet Gormez, a senior official in the Department of Religious Affairs and an expert on the Hadith, gives a telling example.

"There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband's permission and they are genuine.

"But this isn't a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet's time it simply wasn't safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons."

The project justifies such bold interference in the 1,400-year-old content of the Hadith by rigorous academic research.

Prof Gormez points out that in another speech, the Prophet said "he longed for the day when a woman might travel long distances alone".

So, he argues, it is clear what the Prophet's goal was.

In Muhammad's day, Islam was a big step up for woman's rights. That conservatives, traditionalists, and extremists have either locked it into place or forced it further backwards is one of the faiths major curses in the modern world. Making a few Wahabbi heads explode over this interpretation leaves me well-pleased.

Now we just need somebody to do the same thing for the Bible.

When all else fails, go negative with everything you've got,

After struggling for months to dent Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy, the campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now unleashing what one Clinton aide called a “kitchen sink” fusillade against Mr. Obama, pursuing five lines of attack since Saturday in hopes of stopping his political momentum.

. . .

After denouncing Mr. Obama over the weekend for an anti-Clinton flier about the Nafta trade treaty, and then sarcastically portraying his message of hope Sunday as naïve, Mrs. Clinton delivered a blistering speech on Monday that compared Mr. Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience to that of the candidate George W. Bush.

. . .

Clinton advisers said the attacks were partly an effort to knock Mr. Obama off balance before the debate on Tuesday.

They also said they were sending a signal to supporters that Mrs. Clinton was still resolutely fighting to win the presidential nomination, despite news reports in recent days about her dispirited campaign operation and her own somber outlook on the race.

Like many other tactics she has been using the past couple of weeks, this has the smell of desperation. She is still in the race, and we won't know for another week if this helps her or hurts her, but it doesn't look helpful to the Democratic Party as a whole.

And as for the major issue of importance for the Democrats, Obama has the edge.

In the past two months, Senator Barack Obama has built a commanding coalition among Democratic voters, with especially strong support among men, and is now viewed by most Democrats as the candidate best able to defeat Senator John McCain, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

And that is not an isolated poll. Obama does far better than Clinton in a head-to-head match-up with McCain. If the Democrats want to reclaim the White House this November, Obama is the better choice.

In what has become an annual tradition, the onset of winter, and the cold weather that accompanies it, leads to the inevitable opinion articles that this somehow proves that "Climate Change" is so much bunk. To be fair, the flipside is true as well, with talk of Global Warming/Climate Change heating up during the summer months of heat waves, hurricanes, and droughts. It is an unfortunate measure of how scientifically illiterate our society is that the discussion happens on such an annual cycle for a lot of people.

Anyway, as to the article itself; Yes, it has been a cold couple of months, and yes, the Arctic sea ice has been recovering from where it wound up last summer, though that is only part of the story:

"The ice is about 10 to 20 centimetres thicker than last year, so that's a significant increase," he said.

If temperatures remain cold this winter, Langis said winter sea ice coverage will continue to expand.

But he added that it's too soon to say what impact this winter will have on the Arctic summer sea ice, which reached its lowest coverage ever recorded in the summer of 2007.

That was because the thick multi-year ice pack that survives a summer melt has been decreasing in recent years, as well as moving further south. Langis said the ice pack is currently located about 130 kilometres from the Mackenzie Delta, about half the distance from where it was last year.

The hard, multi-year ice is the key here. One cold winter makes little difference to it, and the long-term pattern here is that it is shrinking, during the summers when, you know, it isn't so cold.

And on the other side of the world, where, yes, it is summertime, scientists are seeing some other worrying trends.

UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica.

. . .

Satellite measurements have shown that three huge glaciers here have been speeding up for more than a decade.

. . .

Throughout the 1990s, according to satellite measurements, the glacier was accelerating by around 1% a year. Julian Scott's sensational finding this season is that it now seems to have accelerated by 7% in a single season, sending more and more ice into the ocean.

Hell, even the oil companies are ready to acknowledge Climate Change as an issue of importance, why can't the wingnuts get their heads around it?

Sadly, No! has more

Anthony Cordesman has a short article in the Washington Post in which he tries to boost the chances for victory in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He is, at least, honest about what would be required, including a massive boost of troops for Afghanistan and more resources committed to both theatres. And most significantly, the amount of time that would be required.

What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war. Any American political debate that ignores or denies the fact that these are long wars is dishonest and will ensure defeat. There are good reasons that the briefing slides in U.S. military and aid presentations for both battlefields don't end in 2008 or with some aid compact that expires in 2009. They go well beyond 2012 and often to 2020.

If the next president, Congress and the American people cannot face this reality, we will lose. Years of false promises about the speed with which we can create effective army, police and criminal justice capabilities in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot disguise the fact that mature, effective local forces and structures will not be available until 2012 and probably well beyond. This does not mean that U.S. and allied force levels cannot be cut over time, but a serious military and advisory presence will probably be needed for at least that long, and rushed reductions in forces or providing inadequate forces will lead to a collapse at the military level.

. . .

Any American political leader who cannot face these realities, now or in the future, will ensure defeat in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Any Congress that insists on instant victory or success will do the same. We either need long-term commitments, effective long-term resources and strategic patience -- or we do not need enemies. We will defeat ourselves.

Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winnable? I don't know, and neither does Mr. Cordesman, really. There is no certainty to predicting what will happen over the next decade in both countries and in their neighbours, which will affect the outcome. And one of the things he misses when he talks about those governments, is their legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan and Iraqi people. So long as they are considered as little better than puppets of the Americans, their effectiveness really doesn't matter. Effective local forces like those being bragged up in Iraq have no loyalty to the central government and will just as soon overthrow them as not.

One thing I do know, is that the US and what's left of its allies do not have sufficient military resources to successfully prosecute both counterinsurgencies. Only the US maintains a large standing army anymore, and it is at the limit of what it can deploy. The same goes for most everyone else. Short of a draft, which will make the wars even more politically untenable than they are now, there is no way put enough boots on the ground in both theatres. To have even a chance at victory in one of the conflicts, the other has to be sacrificed. Anyone who can't face that reality, dooms the US to defeat in both conflicts due to insufficient resources applied to either.

The other thing I'm fairly certain of, though in this I can't really know, is that after better than five years of being strung along on a Freidman timeline, so popular that even al-Sadr is now using it, and given the relative unpopularity of the war, the American public doesn't want to be told that they should continue pouring money and blood into the Iraqi desert for another five to ten years for just the possibility that they can pull out something resembling a victory.

Dishonesty and false promises have already doomed these wars. It is only a question of when.

And announcing yet another run for the presidency.

There might be something to respect about this guy if it weren't for the fact that we only ever hear from him once every four years. Seriously, outside of popping up to attract Republican donors and Democratic votes in the 2004 election, what has Nader been doing for the last seven years? Does he really think grandstanding once every four years is the best way to effect change? Why not build a movement up during those off years if this stuff is so important?

This isn't about issues, this is about Nader's ego, and that's a pretty sad thing for a guy who once deserved some respect.

His column today mirrors what I said a while back, Hillary Clinton's campaign shares some troubling similarities to the Bush administration's war plan for Iraq.

WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.

It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

And from there, he goes on further to contrast the two campaigns and what it may tell us about how prepared Clinton really is to run the country.

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.

In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.

This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.

The rest of the column is worth the read as well, but it is this point that I keep coming back to when I compare the two Democratic contenders. Obama has ran his campaign with brilliant effect, solidifying his support while working to make inroads into other demographics and voting blocs, fighting for every vote in every state. Clinton simply relied on her base, name recognition, and establishment support to bury her rival with wins in the big, already solidly Democratic, states, ignoring and bypassing states they felt wouldn't count for much. What's worse, even though it became clear such a strategy was backfiring, they still don't know what to do or how to adapt.

It is a measure of just how much inertial mass her campaign has that despite losing 11 straight contests, she is still considered very much in the race, but I don't think the US as a whole is in such a condition that it can continue to glide along on its inertia of being the world's hyperpower. The US needs someone at the helm who can shift and adapt as the world does around it. Clinton does not appear to be that person.

This story, while good news for the individual involved, interests me more for what it says about what for-profit health-care really means.

Calling Woodland Hills-based Health Net's actions "egregious," Judge Sam Cianchetti, a retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, ruled that the company broke state laws and acted in bad faith.

"Health Net was primarily concerned with and considered its own financial interests and gave little, if any, consideration and concern for the interests of the insured," Cianchetti wrote in a 21-page ruling.

. . .

At the arbitration hearing, internal company documents were disclosed showing that Health Net had paid employee bonuses for meeting a cancellation quota and for the amount of money saved.

"It's difficult to imagine a policy more reprehensible than tying bonuses to encourage the rescission of health insurance that keeps the public well and alive," the judge wrote.

The policy may be reprehensible, but it is the inevitable result of a for-profit health insurance system. The less coverage you have to pay out, the more profit you make, and the happier your shareholders will be. The incentives in such a system have little to do with health, and everything to do with the money that can be made from selling people the hope of health. Hope that can be pulled away if it looks like it may interfere with the bottom line.

Such a beautiful system.

From McClatchy:

Iraqi Kurdish officials on Friday ordered 6,000 Kurdish militiamen to take up new positions in Iraq's Dohuk province as hundreds of Turkish troops crossed the border in what Turkey said was an attack on Kurdish rebels who'd sought shelter there.

. . .

Friday's incursion came after a Turkish aerial and artillery bombardment on Kurdish targets that destroyed at least five bridges and one day after peshmerga forces confronted Turkish troops who'd moved to seize two highways in Dohuk in tanks and armed personnel carriers. The peshmerga forced the Turks to return to one of the five bases that Turkey has maintained in Iraq since 1997 and then surrounded the base. Peshmerga commanders told the Turks that they would open fire if the Turks attempted to move off the base.

This could get messy.

The Rev nailed this one:

. . . We will hear endlessly all about how William Ayers, a domestic terrorist and member of the sinister hippy-communist-veteran hating Weather Underground -- the largest domestic terrorist group EVER ! They bombed the Pentagon before Al-Quaida!-- who has become a sissified America-hating academic "intellectual" (just like Ward Churchill) is practically Obama's foster father. . . .

Today, via memorandum, is this story:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious – and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

. . .

Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home—part of a campaign courtship—reflects more extensive interaction than has previously reported.

For those wondering how Obama will be able to handle the attacks and smear campaigns sure to come his way should he succeed in besting Clinton in the primaries, the next few weeks should give you a taste.

Turkish ground forces have rolled across the border into northern Iraq to target Kurdish rebels said to be sheltering there.

Thousands of soldiers are thought to be involved in the operation which, the army says, began on Thursday evening after an air and artillery bombardment.

Turkey promised its force would "return home in the shortest time possible after its goals have been achieved".

The US military says it believes the operation is "of limited duration".

But a US official quoted by Reuters news agency appeared to express concern about the scale of the Turkish operation.

Reports put the number of Turkish ground troops in Iraq at about 10,000, with many thousands more waiting on the border, which makes this incursion a good deal larger than any previous Turkish operation. It is also a bit unexpected given the lack of recent PKK attacks, meaning there is a not small chance that they'll catch the PKK off guard.

Of course, much will depend on how limited the "limited duration" turns out to be. The longer the Turks stay, and the more damage they do, the more likely that the pesh merga of the two major Iraqi Kurdish parties join in the fighting. Something to watch over the weekend.

Update:

Regarding the timing. I'm wondering if people are looking at this wrong. It may not be the recent non-attacks by the PKK we should be looking at, but the recent declaration of independence by another quasi-state, Kosovo, that has the Turks nervous.

This story is a touch worrisome.

Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.

The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.

Well, I guess the crowd seemed friendly. What's to worry?

Keep this sort of thing up, and you'll make Doris Lessing a prophet.

I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one.

Several hundred protesters have attacked the US and other embassies in Serbia's capital in anger at Western support for Kosovo's independence.

From the Serb's perspective, this has been a pretty bad couple of decades, with the Kosovar declaration of independence, and the West's support of it, one more humiliation added to the list. They've watched while the West has supported every movement set on breaking up their nation, suffered under sanctions while their enemies prospered, and were bombed into submission when they tried to hold on to a part of their territory. Then they got to see the ethnic Serbs in that territory, under the "protection" of NATO and the EU, attacked, beaten and killed by mobs, houses and churches set on fire, and driven from their neighbourhoods and towns.

Of course, the Serbian government did a fair bit of nasty during the break-up of Yugoslavia, and not a small part of Serb suffering can be pinned upon those acts, but as with most wars, there are rarely any simple distinctions between the "good guys" and the "bad guys". Every side was committing atrocities, but for whatever reason, only the Serbs seem to get blamed. In that, they have gotten the short end of the stick.

The Kosovo bombing campaign is also a good place to look for the first stirrings of the Russian Bear awakening from hibernation thanks to the traditional ties between Russia and Serbia. I remember the Russians were quite pissed about the whole thing at the time, and you can bet this little declaration and American support of it, isn't going to leave Putin feeling terribly cooperative over other international issues like Iran or missile defence.

Whatever your feelings about Kosovo's independence, the repercussions from it are probably just getting started.

Denmark, land of the infamous Muhammad cartoons, is roiling from the unrest caused in part by their publishing.

The current round of unrest started in part with the arrest of three men who, it was claimed, were plotting to kill one of the cartoonists who drew the offensive cartoons. That story got a lot of coverage by the usual suspects. The follow-up much less so.

This was after Danish intelligence said they had uncovered a plot by three Muslims in Denmark to kill one of the cartoonists.

"We were all punished by the printing of those pictures," says the imam in his sermon.

He is angry that none of the men accused of masterminding the plot are being put on trial - the Danish intelligence services say revealing their evidence would compromise their intelligence network.

Instead, they are expelling two of the suspects who do not have Danish citizenship and freeing the third who does.

"How does it make sense that a person who is trying to kill somebody is being arrested, charged, interrogated and then released and yet still we should feel that he's a terrorist?" asks Imran Hussein, who runs Network an advisory body for Muslim organisations in Denmark.

Like many Muslims here he was appalled by the discovery of the plot to kill the cartoonist but now he is more sceptical.

The rioting may have taken a turn for the worse with a bombing in Copenhagen, though there is nothing to indicate Muslims are responsible. It does say something that they are automatic suspects.

And Denmark is hardly alone in this issue. One doesn’t have to think back too hard to remember the burning cars in immigrant suburbs around France, or the fate of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, not to mention acts like the 7/7 bombings in London.

Clearly there is an issue here that needs to be dealt with, and as with most issues, the problems aren’t all from one side. Like the LA riots that erupted in the wake of the first Rodney King trial verdict, the unrest in Denmark and other European countries aren't directly caused by their proximate triggers. Danish Muslims aren't rioting over cartoons, they're rioting over what the cartoons represent, which to them is a coordinated attack on them and their beliefs.

And if you want to find evidence to support that belief, you can start with folks like this.

A TV addict with bleached hair who adores Maggie Thatcher and prefers kebabs to hamburgers, Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam. Or so he says. 'Islam is not a religion, it's an ideology,' says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, 'the ideology of a retarded culture.'

The Dutch politician, who sees himself as heir to a recent string of assassinated or hounded mavericks who have turned Holland upside down, has been doing a crash course in Koranic study. Likening the Islamic sacred text to Hitler's Mein Kampf, he wants the 'fascist Koran' outlawed in Holland, the constitution rewritten to make that possible, all immigration from Muslim countries halted, Muslim immigrants paid to leave and all Muslim 'criminals' stripped of Dutch citizenship and deported 'back where they came from'. But he has nothing against Muslims. 'I have a problem with Islamic tradition, culture, ideology. Not with Muslim people.'

Clearly not the most tolerant of individuals, and it is important to note that he is far from some isolated nutjob. His support in The Netherlands is growing, and similar movements exist throughout Europe.

A few months ago the Swiss People's Party of the pugnacious billionaire Christoph Blocher won a general election while simultaneously running a campaign to change the Swiss constitution to ban the building of minarets on mosques. Last month in Antwerp, far-right leaders from 15 European cities and from political parties in Belgium, Germany and Austria got together to launch a charter 'against the Islamisation of western European cities', reiterating the call for a mosque-building moratorium.

'We already have more than 6,000 mosques in Europe, which are not only a place to worship but also a symbol of radicalisation, some financed by extreme groups in Saudi Arabia or Iran,' argued Filip Dewinter, leader of Belgium's Flemish separatist party, the Vlaams Belang, who organised the Antwerp get-together. 'Its minarets are six floors high, higher than the floodlights of the Feyenoord soccer stadium,' he said of a new mosque being built in Rotterdam. 'These kinds of symbols have to stop.'

Add to this kind of rhetoric the fear of a “demographic winter”, where the “real” Europeans are being swamped and out-breeded by immigrants set on destroying European power. An invasion by stealth to make Europe part of the Islamic Caliphate of neo-con nightmares and al Qaeda wet dreams.

It is a dangerous mix of bigotry and hatred for the “other” that Europeans particularly should be wary of. As the old saw says, forget your history, and you are doomed to repeat it. Which brings me to Germany and some other recent events.

Nine Turks, including five children, were killed in a blaze in an apartment building in the western German city of Ludwigshafen in what authorities said was the biggest fire in the post-World War II history of the city.

The fire on Sunday evening raised suspicions of an arson attack on Germany's Turkish community, although initial comments from officials said there was no evidence to prove that.

And

German police said Friday they suspect arson caused an overnight fire at a house inhabited by three Turkish families in southern Germany.

. . .

Germany has a large population of ethnic Turks who have on occasion been subject to attacks.

There are a lot of people on both sides who are downright eager for conflict and convinced of their own righteousness. They hide behind freedom of speech to spew hate at the other side, hopefully provoke a reaction, and use those reactions, stripped of as much context as possible so as not to implicate their own role, to drum up further support for their cause.

Howling minorities feeding off each other to drag everybody else down to hell in the name of whatever ideology they profess, be it nationalist, racist, faith-based, or a combination of all of the above.

Hate and prejudice once unleashed are hard to put back into their bottle. It is a big problem and seems to be growing all the time. I can only hope Europe finds a way to integrate and accept its Muslim and immigrant populations, because the alternative is horror.

I'm a little late to this story in the NY Times, but it isn't too much of a surprise. The salacious rumour-mongering about a possible affair is stupid and irrelevant, and, as a result, will likely become everyone's focus. US politics just seems to work that way.

The real meat of the story, though, is the connections McCain has to lobbyists and his actions on their behalf, however slight he may try to make them. It does remind me of something I heard about during the last presidential election.

The US hasn't elected anyone from the legislative branch to the presidency for quite some time. Part of the reason for that is because of the way Congress works, with all of the earmarks and lobbyists and so forth, there is, usually, a long and detailed history for opponents to dissect and use as ammunition for attacks. Any vote can be twisted to seem to be voting against or for some hot button issue, even if the issue in question was a tiny rider on a huge and unpopular omnibus bill. It is a large part of what helped to paint Kerry as a flip-flopper.

This time round, both party's will be running Senators, and in this, Obama's inexperience is a bonus, as is Hillary's when compared to the long service of McCain. Lots of years, means lots of bills, means lots of votes, means lots of potential ammunition for his opponents.

Of course, the Democrats still need to prove they know how to use such an abundance of material, but McCain could be in for a much tougher ride than some might expect come the general.

So he’s finally gone. I’m sure a lot of people are breathing a sigh of relief. The man’s record on human rights and the intrusive use of state power to spy on his country’s own citizens in the name of protecting them from a foreign threat should be used as a cautionary tale for others.

Still, to be fair, he did what he thought was the right thing, regardless how unpopular it made him, or how hated he became in many parts of the world. We will have to wait and see, 50 years down the road or so, what history’s judgment will be.

What’s that? Castro you say?

Damn, all the election talk, I thought for a minute it was Bush who resigned.

Ah well, let me join Jon Swift in congratulating America on it's great victory over the forces of evil.

Let this be a lesson to other dictators around the world, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran to Kim Jong-il in North Korea, that the United States is a very patient country and if it takes us 50 years to get them out of power, we will not waver. In fact, as John McCain as made it clear to the insurgents in Iraq, we don't mind sticking around there for a 100 years if it takes that long.

All of those liberals who complained that sanctions were not working and said Castro was thumbing his nose at the United States should apologize to the ten Presidents who have methodically plotted Castro's downfall since 1959 now that Castro has finally said, "Tio." While it may have appeared to some that Castro emerged unscathed from the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 638 attempts by the CIA to assassinate him using poison cigars and exploding, mollusks, the embargo, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Mariel Boat Lift, which deprived the country of some of its finest criminals and mental patients, we can now see that each of these incidents chipped away at Castro's power little by little until he had no choice but to surrender.

Now that Castro is finally out of power, the US can finally start treating Cuba like it does other communist countries like China and Vietnam.

Or not.

Well, who would want to change such a effective policy now that it's finally showing some effect? Keep it up for another 50 years or so until Cuba finally changes into a free, democratic society like it was in the days before Castro took over.

The polls in Wisconsin haven't closed yet, and I'm beginning to wonder if it wouldn't be best for Hillary to win this one so we can hold off seeing more of this in the near future.

But maybe it's not so simple. Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.

. . .

Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama's mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let's recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally explosive matter at arm's distance.

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

Lovely.

The possible kerfuffle over the "super" delegates, the sudden flip-flop in deciding to push for Michigan's and Florida's delegates to be seated, and now this less than honest scheme:

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign intends to go after delegates whom Barack Obama has already won in the caucuses and primaries if she needs them to win the nomination.

This strategy was confirmed to me by a high-ranking Clinton official on Monday. And I am not talking about superdelegates, those 795 party big shots who are not pledged to anybody. I am talking about getting pledged delegates to switch sides.

What? Isn’t that impossible? A pledged delegate is pledged to a particular candidate and cannot switch, right?

Wrong.

Pledged delegates are not really pledged at all, not even on the first ballot. This has been an open secret in the party for years, but it has never really mattered because there has almost always been a clear victor by the time the convention convened.

I've went from thinking that Hillary would be a bad choice for the Democrats simply because of the hatred she inspires in Republicans, to deciding she would be a pretty decent candidate early in the primary season, to now realizing why the Republicans hate her and her husband so much.

The whole win whatever the cost, whatever the rules that have to be broken, whatever the bridges that must be burned, or who has to be thrown under the bus.

I can only hope that the Democratic Party itself doesn't allow such tactics to prevail, that the leadership decides to honour the will of the voters and not to enable the Clinton's personal crusade for power. Because if Obama walks into the convention with a considerable lead in pledged delegates and walks out having lost because of backroom dealings, it will tear the party to pieces and hand McCain the presidency.

It is no way to pick a candidate, which I've been saying since I first learned somewhat how the primary system works. And I'm not too fond of the electoral college thing either. The US electoral system needs some serious reforming, but that's unlikely to happen so long as the system so heavily favours the people who can get elected in it.

Some of the commenters are donating 5 bucks every time the Clinton camp does something sleazy. Here is where to donate.

I'd be careful about such promises myself. At the rate the Clinton campaign is going, they'll hit the contribution cap before month's end.

I am really beginning to long for the days when I didn't pay such close attention to politics. It is just sad watching the whole ruckus being kicked up over Obama's supposed "plagiarism", and listen to the Clinton campaign do their best at outreach,

"Superdelegates are not second-class delegates," says Joel Ferguson, who will be a superdelegate if Michigan is seated. "The real second-class delegates are the delegates that are picked in red-state caucuses that are never going to vote Democratic."

But the real thing that bugs me, is that I can go over to the comment sections of No Quarter or TalkLeft, and see the same kind of mindless water-carrying that I'm far more used to seeing from the "We Love Bush" crowd over the last several years. I'm sure I could find the same for Obama, though at this point it's a bit hard to separate the Obama worship from the Clinton hatred. (Hello, Mr. Sullivan).

In any case, I'm curious to see just how far this goes, how insufferable these people will get after the election, and whether or not I'll succumb to the partisan sickness myself at some point.

The news that Obama met with John Edwards over the weekend has led to some wild speculation about whether or not Edwards is ready to endorse somebody in the Democratic race. (Side note - What's with the espionage-like stories? "sneaked down", "helicopter footage". It sounds like paparazzi trailing a celebrity into rehab or something.)

Anyway, it did make me think back to something I mused back before the South Carolina primary.

For the Dems, unless John Edwards pulls out an increasingly unlikely victory in South Carolina, it is now a two-person race, and it is getting to be an pretty ugly one, with allegations of voter suppression flying back and forth, plus the identity politics of race and gender. (Divisive primary-wise, though when considered on policy positions, Clinton and Obama aren't very far apart on any issue dealing with blacks or women, and will have the support of both going into the national race.) Hillary remains, as always, the front-runner, and thanks to establishment support and a long built-up national campaign machine, has the best chance going into Super Tuesday. I think the only real chance Obama has to pull off the upset now, is to take South Carolina to get back some momentum, and then hope Edwards drops out and joins his former running mate in endorsing Obama. Combined they could hold off the Clinton machine; separately, they're likely to get squished.

Edwards hasn't gotten around to endorsing Obama yet, and I don't suppose he will anytime soon, but he was good enough to drop out and get out of Obama's way before Super Tuesday, and it seems that much of his support has since gravitated to Obama of it's own accord.

The Clinton machine, while clearly unprepared for the fight this campaign has turned out to be, (ready on day one, my ass), is still capable of flaming their opponent over irrelevancies. It remains to be seen if these kinds of tactics will work, but it reminds me of one of the other reasons I like Obama. Clinton's tactics are too reminiscent of the Bush campaigns.

Blu-Ray defeats HD-DVD to become the dominant format in a market about to be swept aside by downloading.

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

You gotta love this, in the sick, twisted, ironic sense. Anyone who pays attention knows that the Saudis are the source of most of the Islamic world's terror funding, and the pushers of an extremist version of Islam. And here they as much as admitted they would take the pressure off the terrorists and point them the West's way if they didn't get their way.

And the response of the UK is to give them what they want, and the US threw in billions more in military aid and equipment.

Terrorism as blackmail really does work, at least on the appeasers in the Blair and Bush administrations.