Cab-driver Journalism

Some interesting posts today about the conceit of rich, white, old political journalists who think they are "men of the people".
Glenn Greenwald writes:

Claims that one's own views are what 'Americans think,' when unaccompanied by empirical data, are worthless. And patronizingly joining the 'real people' in a coffee shop a few times a year is meaningless. It certainly does not make one qualified to speak on behalf of anyone.

Digby follows up:

[These journalists have] a sort of pre-conceived notion of what defines "the people" that appears to have been formed by TV sit-coms in 1955 . . . invariably these middle-aged white men say the country is going to hell in a handbasket and they want the government to do more and they hate paying taxes . . . Meanwhile, someone like me, who lives in a big city on the west coast and who doesn't hang out in diners with middle aged white men are used as an example of the "fringe" even though I too am one of "the people" as are many others --- like hispanic youths or single urban mothers or dot-com millionaires or elderly southern black granddads or Korean entrepreneurs

What Greenwald and Digby are describing is what I call "cab-driver journalism" and it works like this:
a reporter from Washington or Toronto flies into Podunk, Nebraska or Riverwart, Alberta or even a city like Los Angeles or Halifax to cover something -- maybe a political convention or a space launch or a missing white woman or a big storm or a trial or whatever.
And the first thing he does is hop into a cab to get to his hotel from the airport.
And on the way into town, usually a half-hour trip or more, he invariably asks the cab driver what he thinks about the convention/space launch/missing woman/storm/trial/whatever. And so the cab driver tells him.
And chances are, this will be the ONLY actual citizen the reporter ever talks to -- unless he hops another cab to go somewhere else -- because everyone else he meets, from the desk clerk to the waitress to the doorman to the office secretary, is busy working and they don't have time.
So then the reporter writes a sidebar story, beginning something like "People in Podunk are getting tired of ______ already and ____ hasn't even started yet. They're wondering why the government would spend a dime on _____"
And then when the reporter goes home, he spends the next several months telling his co-workers things like "When I was in Podunk, people were saying.....", to the point that he eventually believes he really did talk to a lot of people there.
Personally, just about everything I know about Nashville, and Seattle, and Detroit, and Boulder, and Boston, and London, Ontario, and Fredrickton, and Toronto, I learned from cab drivers.
In retrospect, though some of the rides certainly were interesting, and the stories I heard certainly amusing, I doubt that I have a particularly broad or well- informed view of those cities or what their people think.
So next time some pundit starts writing about what the people of your town "really think", don't be surprised if it sounds just like the yap you heard during your last cab ride.

Great line of the day

Alison at Creekside gives the Globe and Mail a rap on the knuckles for daring to use the term "prisoners" to describe Afghan prisoners. She asks how long will Canada put up with this?

I thought we settled this already.
The Afghan people are "insurgents" until such time as they are killed or handed over to Afghan authorities to be tortured, at which point they become "scumbags", terrorists, and Taliban.
How many times do we have to go over this?

Chow down

Maybe we should all be putting in our own big gardens this spring. And finding a local farmer to sell us a beef quarter from an animal he raised himself.
Here's a chilling summary of the melamine contamination issue, titled FDA: the “Faith-based Dining Administration”:

. . . USDA/FDA say they believe the melamine level in meat would be very low, but they haven’t bothered to test it. They say they believe melamine is nontoxic to humans, but then, a few months ago we believed it was nontoxic to dogs and cats too. They say they believe that there have been no human health problems due to eating tainted pork and chicken, but admit that the Centers for Disease Control has “limited ability to detect subtle problems due to melamine and melamine-related compounds.”
And while USDA/FDA have focused their efforts almost entirely on inspecting imports of vegetable protein concentrates, and on tracking contaminated product through the animal and human food supply, the import of processed foods, meat and farmed seafood products from China has continued unchecked and unabated, despite the obvious potential of contamination within China’s own, largely unregulated, agriculture and food industries.

I don't think we've heard the last of this one.

Crazy line of the day

From a crazy pundit called Dick Morris:

. . . if we stay in Iraq, it gives them the opportunity to kill more Americans, which they really like.
One of the things, though, that I think the antiwar crowd has not considered is that, if we’re putting the Americans right within their arms’ reach, they don’t have to come to Wall Street to kill Americans. They don’t have to knock down the trade center. They can do it around the corner, and convenience is a big factor when you’re a terrorist.

So now we finally know why American soldiers are in Iraq -- to be targets.

Iraq's poster child

Here's one of the saddest stories you will ever read:

The tiny photo shop is an open shutter onto Iraq's woes, and Farouq has reluctantly plunged into a somber new specialty. "Almost all my work now is focused on martyrs," he said . . .
He used to dote over each picture, sharpening contrast, adjusting light and finding the perfect tint for green grasses and blue skies. Now he's fixing the reds in a pool of blood. . . the only steady business that doesn't involve death and destruction is the booming demand for passport photos.

Some Republican was talking tonight on MSNBC about how, if things aren't better by September, then Bush will just have to develop a new policy.
What a joke! He won't do that -- Cheney won't let him.
And even if Bush wanted to, he can't do it--he doesn't know how. He'll just continue to sit there, reading My Pet Goat while children die.
The little girl pictured above was killed by a car bomb with her parents.

Great line of the day

From Tristero at Hullabaloo:

It blows my mind to think 28 percent of this country still thinks God's Joke From Texas is doing a fine job. Ok, ok, I know it's not entirely scientifically kosher, but that sort of means you go walking down a street - or go to a mall - and more than 1 out of every 4 people you pass is completely insane.

The Queen

Annie Leibovitz's new portrait of the queen.

The "R" Word

Anyone who remembers Paul Henderson's goal would once have been surprised by this photo.
In the Canada of the 1970s, and before, nobody ever saw turbaned Sikhs in Canadian police uniforms.
You didn't see very many women, either, of course.
But it is the Sikh officers I noticed in this photo -- because in reading the latest news from the Air India inquiry, I'm wondering if anyone is mentioning the "R" word there.
Can I mention it here? The "R" word is Racism.
Now, I haven't undertaken any kind of detailed research into the ins and outs of the trials or the recent news from the inquiry now going on. But I lived through those times. I remember. And I believe to this day that racism in BC and in Canada against Sikhs, and Asians generally, was a factor, perhaps a significant factor, in the failure of the Air India investigation.
Over the years, many things have been blamed for the chaotic, unfocused nature of this whole investigation, from the initial failure to take the warnings seriously, to the antiquated personnel policies of RCMP and Vancouver police which limited recruitment of non-white officers, to inter-service rivalries between the RCMP and CSIS which apparently led to mishanding of evidence and the inability of prosecutors to bring anyone to justice.
But underneath it all is a racist taint. The lives of the victims were devalued because they were of East Indian heritage. As a result, irrelevancies and distractions like inter-service rivalries and office politics were allowed to dominate and ultimately derail the investigation.
Here's one example of this devaluation which I still remember vividly:
The explosion happened June 23, 1985, one of the worst disasters in Canadian history. Macleans magazine didn't even stop the presses and pull their cover story. They just put a banner across the top right corner. I have never forgotten my shock when I saw that cover -- a major Canadian disaster, and our major news magazine doesn't even make it their cover story? It was as though it was just another disaster in a foreign country, rather than a disaster for citizens of Canada.
Here is testimony from Toronto engineer Bal Gupta to the inquiry in September, describing what the Air India disaster did to Canadian families:

... 329 persons were murdered, most of them Canadians. Twenty-nine families were completely wiped out, 32 families had one spouse left alone. Eight couples lost all their children, and two children lost both parents...

Yet Prime Minister Mulroney did not call the families. Gupta testified:

"The Government of Canada did not set up any information line and did not offer any other administrative or emotional help immediately or any time thereafter. Instead we heard that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent condolences to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi."

Here are some of the historic events from that time in Sikh-Canadian history -- and all of them happened in the decade AFTER the Air India disaster:

1986
Metro Toronto Police permitted Sikhs to wear their turbans while on duty with the force.
1986
First Sikh elected to any provincial legislature in Canada was Manmohan (Moe) Sahota from Esquimalt, British Colombia.
1988
March 10, the Canadian Parliament devoted a whole day to debate the issue of the Sikh's rights and the issue of Khalistan.
1988
Dr. Gulzar Singh Cheema was elected as an M.L.A. to the Manitoba legislature.
1990
A plaque commemorating the Komagala Maru Incident was placed at Portal Park in Vancouver on May 23 jointly by the municipal, provincial, and federal Governments.
1990
March 15, the solicitor General of Canada announced that the RCMP dress code would be amended to have a turbaned Sikh join the force. Constable Baltej Singh Dhillon had the honour of becoming the first baptized Sikh to join the RCMP.
1991
Three Sikhs were elected to the British Columbia legislature. Manmohan (Moe) Sihota, and Ujjal Dosanjh have held various cabinet posts, and the other M.L.A. is Harbhajan (Harry) Lalli.
1993
Gurbax Singh Mahli and Harbans (Herb) Dhaliwal were the first Sikhs elected to the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa.
1993
In July, Vancouver Punjabi Market at Main and 49th Street was officially recognized with bilingual signs in English and Punjabi.
1993
Five Sikh veterans were invited to participate in a Remembrance Day parade on November 11, but were denied entry to the Royal Canadian Legion in Newton, B.C.
1995
The B.C. Government officially recognized the Vaisakhi Parade and published a brochure.
1996
February 15, the Supreme Court of Canada reaffirmed a Sikh officers right to wear a turban.

I remember that stupid turban battle which went on and on and on, embittering so many people and setting Canadians against each other. And I remember that ridiculous flap about wearing a turban into a Royal Canadian Legion, as if East Indian veterans weren't quite "good enough" to associate with the "real" Canadians.
I hope we are living in a better Canada today. In 2005, then-prime minister Paul Martin declared June 23, 2005, as a national day of mourning and said June 23 would be Canada's National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism.
Ujjal Dosanjh was quoted in Macleans just yesterday:

Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh says he's shocked but not surprised that police did not take seriously warnings that Sikh extremists planned to blow up an Air India jetliner two decades ago.
In the months preceding the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, Dosanjh said it was clear that police didn't understand or care about tensions within British Columbia's Indo-Canadian community.
"There was at that time a basic perception (that) here are some brown guys with turbans fighting each other, maybe hurting each other," Dosanjh said Thursday.
"The rest of the society really didn't know the culture, didn't know the language, didn't really know the issues, didn't in fact care very much. And that permeated throughout the (police) forces . . . I'm not blaming them but that was the environment at that time." . . .
"Maybe it's harsh coming from me at this day and age but I genuinely believe if you had 329 white Anglo-Saxons killed in an Air India disaster, you would have had an inquiry in no time."
Dosanjh had been relatively circumspect in his comments about Air India until now. But evidence coming out of the Air India inquiry about ignored warnings and investigative foul-ups prompted him to bluntly suggest that racism was part of the problem.
"I've never spoken so harshly before but that's the truth and Canadians have to, we have to confront that truth," he said.
"The fact is racism lurks in various nooks and crannies of this society. All of us have dark corners in our hearts. We have biases and prejudices that we live with. We have to all kind of come clean and deal with these issues."

Great line of the day

Timothy Gatto on The Smirking Chimp writes about a McCain comment during the Republican Debate:

John McCain had to qualify that vote for evolution by saying that when he walks through the Grand Canyon, he see’s God’s hand over the horizon. He doesn’t know it, but that’s God waving goodbye to any chance of him becoming the Republican candidate.

Embryo "farming"?

I'm listening to the Republican debate on TV in the background and somebody just said they don't support embryo farming.
Whew! That's a relief. We won't need a new marketing board, I guess.

Nobody does it better

No neocon is ever, ever going to complain again about Steven Colbert saying something inaccurate -- just watch this piece at Crooks and Liars, where Colbert uses his "apology" to twist the knife a little deeper into Doug Feith -- couldn't happen to a more deserving guy! -- and then in passing nails William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz too. That'll teach 'em!

Don't believe everything you read

Oh wow, this sure does look like a really big story from Canadian Press: New report suggests Vancouver's safe-injection site a failure. But folks, it's tripe. Overblown, inaccurate, poorly researched, ideological tripe. Canadian Press should be ashamed of themselves.
Here's the story:

A new study suggests a safe-drug-injection site in Vancouver that has been hailed by scientists as a success is really a failure.
The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice, says there are serious problems in the interpretation of findings about Insite - the first such facility in North America - which opened as a pilot project over three years ago.
. . . report author Colin Mangham, director of research with the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, refutes such claims, saying positive findings about Insite have been overstated while negative ones have been ignored.
"(The findings) give an impression the facility is successful, when in fact the research clearly shows a lack of program impact and success."

First, the study's author Colin Mangham has been publishing reports for years against "harm reduction" drug policies -- which, briefly, are policies which tolerate drug use rather than try to prevent it. The safe injection site is a prime example of just such a policy in action -- and therefore, in this man's opinion, it must be stopped. What's the harm? Well, the problem seems to be that the harm reduction "ideology" makes us "vulnerable to the drug legalization movement". Can't have that, I guess.
Second, the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice is an on-line journal which has published only two issues, with articles like "The Lure and the Loss of Harm Reduction in UK Drug Policy and Practice" and "Is it Harm Reduction Or Harm Continuation?"
Third, the Drug Prevention Network of Canada is a pretty small organization which takes a fairly conservative approach to social problems. On their website, they post articles with titles like "In defense of the drug war" and "Cannabis - A General Survey of it's (sic) harmful effects" .
Fourth, though Canadian Press acts like Mangham's article is a research study itself, it's not. It is actually a personal critique of ten research studies which Mangham says are biased, weak, overstated, misleading. Here's the list:

Wood E, Kerr T, Montaner JS, Strathdee SA, Wodak A, Hankins CA, et al. Rationale for evaluating North America’s first medically supervised safer injecting facility. Lancet 2004;4:301-6.
Wood E, Kerr T, Lloyd-Smith E, Buchner C, Marsh D, Montaner J, Tyndall M. Methodology for evaluating Insite: Canada’s first medically supervised safer injection facility for injection drug users. Harm Reduction Journal 2004; 1-5.
Wood E, Tyndall M, Li K, Lloyd-Smith E, Small W, Montaner J, Kerr T. Do supervised injecting facilities attract higher-risk injection drug users? American Journal of Preventative Medicine. 2005; 29: 126-130.
Wood, E., Tyndall, M., Qui Z., Zhang, R., Montaner J., & Kerr T, Service Uptake and Characteristics of Injection Drug Users Utilizing North America’s First Medically Supervised Safer Injecting Facility. American Journal of Public Health, 2005, 5, 770-73.
Kerr T, Stoltz J, Tyndall M, Li K, Zhang R, Montaner J, Wood E. Impact of a medically supervised safer injection facility on community drug use patterns: a before and after study. BMJ 2006; 332:220-222.
Wood E, Kerr T, Stoltz J, Quia Z, Zhanga R, Montanera SG, & Tyndall MW. Prevalence and correlates of hepatitis C infection among users of North America’s first medically supervised safer injection facility. Public Health (2005) 119, 1111–1115
Wood E, Tyndall M, Stoltz J, Small W, Lloyd-Smith E, Zhang R, Montaner J, Kerr T. Factors associated with syringe sharing among users of a medically supervised safer injecting facility. American Journal of Infectious Diseases 2005, 50-54.
Wood E, Tyndall MW, Lai C, Montaner JG, & Kerr T. Impact of a medically supervised safer injecting facility on drug dealing and other drug-related crime. Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy 2006, 1:13.
Wood E, Tyndall M, Stoltz J, Small W, Zhang R, O’Connell J, Montaner J, Kerr T. Safer injecting education for HIV prevention within a medically supervised safer injecting facility. International Journal of Drug Policy 2005; 281-284.
Kerr T, Tyndall M, Li K, Montaner J, Wood E. Safer injection facility use and syringe sharing in injection drug users. Lancet 2005; 366:316-8.
Wood E, Kerr T, Small W, Li K, Marsh D, Montaner J, et al. Changes in public order after the opening of a medically supervised safer injecting facility for illicit injection drug users. Canadian Medical Association Journal 2004; 171:731-4
Tyndall MW, Kerr T, Zhang R, King E, Montaner JG, Wood E. Attendance, drug use patterns, and referrals made from North America’s first supervised injection facility. Drug and Alcohol Dependence 83 (2006) 193–198.
Wood E et al. Attendance at Supervised Injecting Facilities and Use of Detoxification Services. New England Journal of Medicine, June 8, 2006.

Evan Wood, Mark Tyndall, Julio Montaner, and Thomas Kerr are all at UBC; Ruth Zhang, Jo-Anne Stoltz and Calvin Lai are at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal? These are the top medical journals in the world.
And all these established senior researchers and highly reputable journals are just so blinded by their ideological allegiance to harm reduction that they are publishing misleading, weak research?
And Colin Mangham has found them out? Oh, sure.
If you want to read these articles for yourself, go here -- it is the "Insite For Community Safety" website which has direct links to the articles themselves.
I'm sure Canadian Press has read none of them. Nor did they call anyone from Insite or any of the researchers involved in these articles to get any response before publishing their smear article.
Now, I really don't care what people like Mangham believe or what point of view he may be trying to promote.
What bothers me is the udeserved credibility now given to this point of view by Canadian Press. This story allows people opposed to the safe injection site to proclaim righteously "it's a failure; I read it in the news".

Signs that the apocalypse is upon us

Sometimes ya just gotta shake your head:



Two spotted-billed pelicans participate in a wedding ceremony in a "bridal house" at a zoo in Fuzhou, southeast China's Fujian province April 25, 2007. The female pelican was found in south China's Hainan province, and brought to Fuzhou to mate with the male pelican, who lost his spouse three years ago, local media reported. REUTERS/CHINA DAILY



screen grab of CheddarVision.tv. A large English cheddar cheese has become a star of the Internet, attracting more than 1 million viewers to sit and stare at it as it slowly ripens. (www.cheddarvision.tv) Reuters



A horse stands next to a man sleeping on the floor of an all-night cash machine area in the foyer of a bank in Wiesenburg.

Selling water

Alison at Creekside continues to be my go-to person for all things related to the Grand Scheme For Truth, Justice And The American Way, AKA integration with the United States.
Now they're coming after our water -- see the Creekside posts here and here.
The last time I posted on this, Kate sent her winged monkeys over to insult me. They just didn't get it. They thought it was some kind of lefty anti-business anti-Americanism. So just let me explain it again as simply as I possibly can:

We cannot start selling our water. Because once we start, we can never stop.

For anyone of limited imagination, here's the scenario: Imagine if Arizona, say, or Nevada, or California built a pipeline to import millions of tonnes of water. They're not going to use this water just to irrigate a few acres to grow broccoli, not considering how much the pipeline would cost. No, to make their investment back they would have to use it to build new cities, with new homes and schools and factories as well as farms.
So now we have whole communities built because of Canadian water.
Now imagine if, 50 years later, Canada tried to say "sorry, we have to turn off that pipeline because we need the water for ourselves now"?
What would happen next? The US would simply not allow itself to be threatened in this way.
Remember in the 70s when people in Alberta started threatening to "let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark"? It was a cruel and immoral and unreasonable taunt; Trudeau wouldn't permit the welfare and the economies of Quebec and Ontario to be endangered by Alberta, so he brought in the National Energy Program.
So what the US would do if Canada tried to say "let the American bastards die of thirst"? Would the United States allow hundreds of thousands or even millions of its citizens to lose their homes and their jobs, to be forced to relocate to other cities which, in turn, would not have enough water for them?
No, not likely. I think we all can envisage what would happen. Our own needs would be secondary to a voracious American demand.
Deciding to sell our water would, in the end, destroy Canada as an independent nation.

It is to laugh

There are a number of "laugh 'til you cry" moments in this Globe and Mail story about the Harper cabinet meltdown in handling the Afghan prisoner of war story.
(And by the way, why are they called "detainees" all the time by the media, when they are actually "prisoners of war"?)
Anyway, here's the first funny:

. . . A senior defence official, seeking to present Mr. O'Connor's views as he fights for his political life, said the Defence Minister feels he has been shouldering the blame for Canada's policies toward Afghan detainees for more than a year.

Well, that would likely be because he IS to blame for Canada's policies toward Afghan prisoners of war.
Here's another funny:

National Defence feels it has been carrying a disproportionate share of the load in Afghanistan — and the public-relations war.

And here I thought the Canadian military was fighting a real war in Afghanistan, not a "public relations war".
The "source" continues:

It believes other departments and agencies should be responsible for issues such as detainee policy, including the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Canadian International Development Agency.
“The bureaucrats at Foreign Affairs resisted getting stuck with this issue this week,” the defence source said. “They don't want this hornet's nest. They are happy going to their cocktail parties and eating little shrimps.”
In particular, there have been complaints that Canada's foreign aid is slow to arrive in the dangerous southern province where the Canadian Forces are active.
“When CIDA discovers the road to Kandahar, they will be able to send in their funds,” the defence source said.

"little shrimps"? Can't find the road? Ouch. The insults show just how much the Canadian military actually disrespects both Foreign Affairs and CIDA. So how willing would they be to follow their orders about treatment of prisoners of war?
As usual, toward the end of the article, we get around to blaming the Liberals:

. . . federal sources said the previous Liberal government made a mistake in 2005 when it tasked the military — and not Foreign Affairs, which has more expertise in human rights — to sign a deal with the Afghans to ensure that prisoners of war were not abused after their transfer into local jails.

And finishing with a flourish, here's the final "laugh til you cry" moment -- attacking Conservative policy on prisoners of war is "maligning our troops". So I guess in effect, they really think that the troops are to blame for this whole mess:

Mr. Day said yesterday that the opposition attacks had to stop because they were affecting Canadian officials in Afghanistan. “Stop maligning our corrections officers and stop maligning our troops,” Mr. Day said.

Oh, OK, I guess I'll have to shut up -- I wouldn't want to be considered unpatriotic.