Find me some Canadians!

Just like the military refused to knuckle under to the PMO on the coffin coverage issue, so the Canadian foreign affairs staff are not going to be blamed for the chaos in Beruit. They're telling the Globe and Mail what happened.
Deny it all you want, PMO -- as this story makes clear, the main goal of the Harper trip to Cyprus was to generate good publicity for Harper. Who cares about all those screamers in Beruit -- the Prime Minister has an urgent photo opportunity emergency! He desperately needs some Canadians to fly home with him!
With the preemptive strike by the foreign affairs staff in today's Globe and Mail, however, the news stories now will focus on how the Prime Minister's Office insisted on trying to control everything from afar, not trusting embassy staff on the spot to make good decisions -- likely because they were all appointed by those dastardly Librulls! --

. . . Suddenly, last night, they were told the Prime Minister would be visiting and that Canadians — any Canadians — would have to be brought to the port of Larnaca, Cyprus. They made an urgent request to the British government, which had been taking Britons on large naval vessels with military escorts to the western city of Limassol, to allow 120 Canadians to board one of the ships so that there would be some available to greet the Prime Minister and ride home on his Airbus jet.
One government official in Ottawa, who asked to remain unidentified, expressed concern that Mr. Harper's decision to fly to Cyprus to offer up the services of the government jet might be perceived by Canadians as a publicity stunt. The government could have sent one of its Challenger jets to Paris to pick up the Prime Minister and his staff, the source said, freeing up more room on the Airbus.
But, even if they had qualms, the Canadian officials quickly booked suites of rooms and offices at the Palm Beach resort hotel in Larnaca, and made the half-hour journey to the port. Joined by newly arrived officials from the PMO, they set up a war room in the hotel's conference centre and were quickly struck by waves of bad news.
First, it turned out that 120 Canadians had not boarded the British vessel — at most, perhaps 20 were on board. The officials then scrambled to see whether the single Canadian-rented vessel that had reached Beirut, the Lebanese-licensed Blue Dawn, could sail more quickly to Larnaca to meet the Prime Minister.
It quickly became apparent this wasn't going to happen. While Israel had guaranteed Canadians passage, the captain wasn't ready to move without military escort — and Canada couldn't deliver that. Hours passed. The sun set. And it wasn't until 11 p.m. in Beirut that the ship finally left the dock with 261 Canadians aboard . . .

The story gets even worse from there.
It's pretty clear that, left on their own, our Canadian foreign affairs staff would have made some pretty good decisions, and made them more quickly, on how to get Canadians out of Lebanon. But with the PMO office horning their way into the situation, it will continue to be a balls-up.

The story behind the story

Here's the news - the Tories have been engaging in illegal fundraising for two years.
Now, you'd never know that from reading this CP story, which promotes the they-are-all-equally-guilty meme. The story says that Liberals, NDP and Conservatives all engaged in "cheque-swapping" until "recently".
What is not made clear by either the headline or the led is that the Liberals and NDP both stopped doing this in 2004, as soon as Elections Canada made it illegal.
The Tories did not. Apparently, they are doing it to this day.
And that's the real story here:

. . . Cheque-swapping, or cheque exchanges as the practice is sometimes called, had been going on for decades prior to 2004 . . . a delegate would make a donation to his or her local riding association, the full amount of which could be claimed by the delegate for a tax credit. The association would then use the donation to pay for the delegate's food, hotel and travel expenses at a convention, bills which would not be eligible for a tax receipt if paid for directly by the delegate.
Essentially, the arrangement amounted to a public subsidy for delegate expenses.
Political financing reforms in 2004 addressed he practice . . .
E-mails obtained by the Vancouver Sun have indicated that some Conservatives were using cheque-swapping to defray their expenses for the party's 2005 policy convention.
"I can tell you that all EDAs (electoral district associations) in Alberta are doing the cheque-swap," advised Red Deer Tory organizer Linda Toews in one e-mail . . .
Mike Donison, the Conservatives' executive director, has said the party had no knowledge that local organizers were using cheque-swapping and did not approve or condone the practice . . .
[Liberal national director Steven] MacKinnon said the Liberals went to considerable effort and expense to analyse the complex political financing reforms and to ensure no one in the party inadvertently breached the law.
Similarly, [NDP federal secretary Eric] Hebert said he spent six months on the phone with officials at Elections Canada, going over every detail of the changes in the law. He acknowledged that some of the complicated details might have been lost on local Tory organizers, but he said it's the responsibility of the central party to ensure all party members respect the law . . .

Except for the Tories, I guess.

Today's pop quiz

1. How many days will it take for the evacuation of Canadians stranded in Lebanon to dissolve into complete chaos?
2. I said "days", but should I have said "hours"?
Now, I know a lot of hard-working civil servants are working hard on this, but how can anyone actually take such Canada's mythical evaluation plan seriously? Here's the plan:

The Canadian government has chartered seven ships with a combined capacity of 2,000 passengers. Girtel said about 30,000 people now have registered with the Canadian Embassy, but it's not clear how many of them want to leave. Ships will ferry back and forth between Lebanon and Cyprus until everyone who wants to leave has been picked up, she said. "People are being contacted and told the evacuation will start (Wednesday). The Canadian government has been working around the clock on this." She said that all registered Canadians will be contacted one way or another and the effort would continue until every single Canadian had been reached.

Here's the reality, and its only just started:

The drive to the harbour used to take 15 minutes but now would likely take an hour or two because the bridges have been bombed, said Chaar . . . Chaar said she has heard nothing from the embassy, has had great difficulty getting through, and has been able to obtain little information when she does get through . . . the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp., Beirut's top-rated radio station, has reported a sit-in by desperate Canadians at a Beirut hotel.

And so each cruise ship would have to make 15 (that's right, fifteen) round trips before everyone is evacuated. Given a day at each trip end for things like refueling, cleaning, restocking - if there is any fuel or food to be had -- and it will be the end of August before all the Caandians are out.

And when they get to Cyprus, what will happen? More chaos, I think. Other countries including the United States are also sending their people to Cyprus, and the CBC reported last night that no plans were in place to accomodate the evacuees -- Cyprus is at the height of its own tourist season now, and there are no hotel rooms available.
We're going to be reading lots of stories like this one:

A pregnant Hamilton, Ont., woman waiting to be evacuated from Beirut expressed her "sheer disappointment in the Canadian government" Wednesday, after she arrived at the port only to be turned away.
Lara Tcholakian, who was on holiday in Lebanon with her husband and one-year-old son, said Canadian officials called her to say she'd be among the first group of Canadian evacuees to leave Beirut and to be at the port at 8 a.m. "When we arrived it was total chaos - thousands of Canadians just waiting inside the gate where the port is, and they were just baking in the sun," she said in a phone call with the Canadian Press from her sister-in-law's home in Beirut.
A Canadian official announced over a loudspeaker that the ship would begin to accept pregnant women, families with young children and the elderly. Tcholakian, six months pregnant with her infant son in tow, was told she was not on the list. Canadian officials told her to go back "in a very abrupt and very rude way."
After nearly six hours at the port, Tcholakian, 33, and her family returned to a relative's house. She said the security situation in downtown Beirut, where the port is located, is so precarious that she resented being told to drive there unnecessarily.
"If you're going to go, you want to make sure you're going to be evacuated instead of driving back and forth and being told to come back later," she said.

Chickenshit understatement of the year

In a blathering article about how Bush should do more dick-swinging at Iran and North Korea, the Washington Post reluctantly admits that perhaps -- just "perhaps", mind you -- the Iraq war is problematic:

It has not helped the neoconservative case, perhaps, that the occupation of Iraq has not gone as smoothly as some had predicted.

Ya think?

Live by the sword...

Cue another Steve temper-tantrum with the media.
This CP story leads with:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper . . . quipped that the enemy now carries news cameras, not guns . . . "These were sand, not cement," Harper said of the reconstructed sandbags [at Vimy Ridge]. "And the enemies carried guns, not (a) camera," he added, looking directly over the lip of the old trench at a small clutch of Canadian TV and still cameras.

Now, what Our Leader probably meant was just that the people looking into the trench 90 years ago were soldiers rather than Canadian news photographers. But the way it came out, of course, implied that the news photographers are now the enemy.
Predictably, he and his media people will throw a fit about how he is being so unfairly treated by the media.
But with the way he treats the media, this is the kind of coverage he is going to get from now on.
CP's Bruce Cheadle writes about how Harper handled himself during his first appearance on the world stage at the G8 -- and it wasn't pretty. The reporter describes Harper's "cold calculus", his "awkard" comments, and how he was "clinically dismissive" of questions about support for Israel:

Harper's seeming lack of nuance, empathy and people skills are making his week-long diplomatic foray . . . an excruciating exercise. Throughout the trip, Harper has distanced himself from reporters. Since leaving Ottawa last Wednesday, he has spoken to media travelling with him only three times, including a brief encounter on the plane.
It appears that his handlers consider every media encounter an element of their larger political "strategy," not as a way of keeping Canadians informed about the government's actions.
That may be one reason behind the perception in some quarters that Harper's government hadn't done enough to plan for the Lebanon evacuation. He simply declined to talk about it.

Luckily, Harper's clumsiness has been completely overshadowed at this summit by repeated Bush buffonery. Great how these things work out, isn't it.

Great lines of the day

From Wolcott, describing Bush's idiotic responses to the Israel-Lebanon war:

In the meantime, as civilians are being slaughtered on both sides, perhaps the president might make an effort not to see quite so blase, detached, and in-character. I understand his exercise regimen is sacred and not to be tampered with, but it looks a trifle cavalier to see him shooting by on his bicycle in St. Petersburg waving at the camera . . . between the news ootage of Beirut going up in flames . . . No doubt exercise helps clear his brain, but if it were any clearer, it'd be a patch of blue sky. He needs to unclear his brain, and let a little reality intrude, and wipe that barbecue grin off his face.

Emphasis mine.

I'm back!

"I''m here! I'm here! Let the bells ring out and the banners fly. Feast your eyes upon me. I know it's too good to be true, but I'm here! I'm here!"
I'm back and we had a great time. Thanks for all your good wishes - more tomorrow...

On holidays

We're off tomorrow morning to Nova Scota and PEI -- we've never been there before so we're looking forward to it.
Posting for the next two weeks will depend on whether I can find an internet cafe. I'll try to check in every day or two, and I plan to post photos when we are back.

Today's Nelson Moment

Ha ha!

On this weekend's Meet the Press, Bill Bennett ominously warned the panel of journalists that Americans were growing extremely angry over the disclosures of classified information by The New York Times and other newspapers. Riding this wave of massive public rage towards the NYT, a protest was organized for yesterday by Cliff Kinkaid of Accuracy in Media along with FreeRepublic.com. The protest was heavily promoted by Michelle Malkin (who announced that she would personally attend) and other pro-Bush bloggers, who urged all patriotic Americans to attend and make their anger at the NYT heard loudly and clearly
. . . 16 protestors actually showed up.

Ooohhh, feel the anger!

Great line of the day

NYT's Nicholas Kristof:

When I was covering the war in Iraq, we reporters would sometimes tune to Fox News and watch, mystified, as it purported to describe how Iraqis loved Americans. Such coverage (backed by delusional Journal editorials baffling to anyone who was actually in Iraq) misled conservatives about Iraq from the beginning. In retrospect, the real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it.

Emphasis mine.

I always knew it!

Today, some unsurprising news.
I am a descendent of royalty!
Of course, I share my royal ancestors with just about everyone else on the planet. But I'm not selfish, not a bit - noblesse oblige, you know, and all that. Royal is as royal does, as those of us born to the thone always say:

Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another. 'Millions of people have provable descents from medieval monarchs,' said Mark Humphrys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. 'The number of people with unprovable descents must be massive.'

Makes you realize that democracy came along just in time. Why, without it, we'd be having wars of succession all over the place.

Forest fire situation

I think this is one of the worst fire years we have had in northern Saskatchewan -- here's the latest news:

At least 1,800 people have fled heavy smoke and encroaching flames from a growing number of out-of-control fires in northern Saskatchewan.
It's "a serious fire situation pretty much across the province at this time," Steve Roberts, executive director of Saskatchewan Environment's fire management branch, said Monday.
He said 14 of the 109 fires burning across the province are more than 100 square kilometres in size, and three of those are over 1,000 square kilometres in size . . . The 1,800 people have registered at the government checkpoint in La Ronge, Sask., about 330 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon. They've fled at least five communities north of La Ronge - Stanley Mission, Grandmother's Bay, Waddin Bay, Englishman's Bay and Sucker River - and abandoned campgrounds and cottages. . .

Here, for reference, is a summer view of Stanley Mission:


Here is Grandmother's Bay:


And here is Sucker River:


And here is a map showing all three communities, which are north of LaRonge:

If I can find some fire photos I will post them.

Today's pop quiz

Time Magazine's article on How to Fix Gitmo suggests five steps that Bush can take: work with Congress, release the small fry, process the habeas cases, live by the Geneva rules, and lift the veil of secrecy.
1.Can you list the things which the Bush administration will actually do to fix Gitmo?
2. And is Gitmo capable of being fixed anyway?

Krazy Konservatives

As we were watching Olbermann the other night, my husband said, Am I wrong or have more conservatives gone crazy lately?
I was reminded that a couple of months ago Digby wrote a post exactly about this -- that as the Bush poll numbers kept falling and as more and more Americans turned away from conservative political ideas, they would get shriller and wilder and more out-of-control -- ie, crazy.
So I'm thinking I'll start a bit of a series, just to help keep track of the nuttiness.
Here is today's contribution:
Culminating a week of yelling at the New York Times for treason, when the Wall Street Journal AND the LA Times also published the financial surveillance story, the wingnuts have now decided the Times should not have published a travel item about some island retreat where Cheney and Rumsfeld and hundreds of other wealthy people have summer homes, as summarized by Glenn Greenwald:

. . . America is currently at war and its enemies are domestic liberals and The New York Times. This war was started by Al Gore and Jimmy Carter when they opposed the invasion of Iraq. The New York Times is allied with Al Qaeda and their latest plot against America is to provide their terrorist friends with a roadmap to the vacation homes of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld so that they can be assassinated. That is what is being reported today by three of the largest 'conservative' blogs on the Internet, along with Horowitz. . .

Rogue State

Reading Sy Hersch's new article about the coming war with Iran, one thought struck me -- how wrong we were to think that the risk of war decreased when the Soviet Union fell.
As it has turned out, the risk of a hot war actually increased -- because there was no one to hold the United States in check anymore, except for the civilized restraint of its political leader.
Then they go and elect cowardly, unprincipled leaders like Bush and Cheney. So all bets are off.
If Russia was still a world power, there is no way, today, that the United States would be planning a war with Iran -- the old Russia would just have announced that it would not tolerate any such attack, and that would be it. No attack.
Today, don't expect such rational and reasonable behaviour -- Bush and Cheney are mad, and Rumsfeld too.
In a paragraph dripping with incredulity, Hersh reports they think of themselves as great historical figures:

The President and others in the Administration often invoke Winston Churchill, both privately and in public, as an example of a politician who, in his own time, was punished in the polls but was rewarded by history for rejecting appeasement. In one speech, Bush said, Churchill “seemed like a Texan to me. He wasn’t afraid of public-opinion polls. . . . He charged ahead, and the world is better for it.”

Gad, they take themselves soooo seriously, don't they.
I am a great admirer of Churchill who, in my opinion, singlehandedly saved the western world from the Third Reich. He was a courageous man, but he was often wrong on his political judgments, from Gandhi and Indian home rule to Edward VIII, primarily because he saw the world in black and white. (Besides, it wasn't Churchill who declared war on Germany, it was that appeaser, Chamberlain.)
Actually, the more we read of American atrocities in Iraq, the more the WWII analogy is starting to fit better the other way round, isn't it, as the occupation of Iraq starts to resemble the German occupation of France.
Arthur Silber writes the plain truth about the upcoming war:

Any military attack by the United States on Iran within the foreseeable future -- even an attack using only conventional weapons -- would be profoundly immoral, and eternally unforgivable.
Remember the critical facts: all experts agree that Iran is approximately five to ten years away from having a nuclear weapon. Moreover, Iran is fully entitled to take the actions it does at present, including the enrichment of uranium . . . under the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory . . . The position of the United States is an entirely unprincipled one, and one which devolves into incoherence. These central facts lead to only one conclusion: an attack on Iran would represent a blatant, naked act of aggression against a country that does not threaten us. It would not be an act of self-defense, if that term has any meaning at all: there is nothing at present or in the immediate future to defend ourselves against.

And thus, too, the recent attacks on the New York Times and on the Democratic party as "traitors" starts to make more sense now, too -- so that their likely opposition to war with Iran can be brushed aside as just more cowardly treason.