Barrel Strength

This should be on page one of every newspaper in the country. I cannot add anything to what Ezra Levant has written but my disgust.

Kate informs us that the Messiah, aka Obama, has expanded his skill-set and it now includes raising the dead. It once again highlights what your correspondent has previously thought about his oratory skills.

As soon as the Teleprompter King™ deviates from a prepared text, he is in trouble. The fatal phrase that he uttered, “and I see many of them in the audience here today”, seems to be an idle ad lib on his part when one examines the corresponding video. When one hears him being interviewed, it is surprising to hear the umms and ahhs in his response. Your correspondent is old enough to recall that when Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign began to falter, the newspaper started including the verbal annoyances in the text as a signal that it was time to stick a fork in the pig. Will the Messiah’s campaign follow a similar path?

May 30, 2008
Update: The WSJ Opinion column agrees:

As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter.

When it comes to reporting on the PM’s new chief of staff, Keith Boag — like his apparent mentor — has “plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence.”

Click video to play.

The week before the BC Human Rights tribunal travesty, he sells out the Fraser Institute Conversation Series at $500 a ticket. Bjørn Lomborg on Global Warming, Karl Rove on U.S. Politics, Richard Dawkins on Evolution and, May 26, Mark Steyn on the War on Terror. They book ‘em big on the west coast. This is delightful.

Two great broadcasters and one great interview. Listen to the American correct Paikin about hockey lore. Best new gen: after the impromptu TVO debate, a couple of the fresh young lawyers said they were having trouble nailing full-time jobs because they were perceived as enemies to free speech. Sounds like Canada’s law firms get it: it’s not your skin colour or your faith, it’s your fundamental misinterpretation of the values of the society in which you hope to practise. ‘Kids, in a professional environment that assumes a free society, book-burners are unemployable. Sorry, can’t work with you. Next.’

A genome paper provides interesting results and conclusions thus corroborating old assertions.

Results: Among the 17 tissues, the highest similarity in gene expression patterns was between human brain and testis, based on DDD and clustering analysis. Genes contributing to the similarity include ribosomal protein (RP) genes as well as genes involved in transcription, translation and cell division.

Conclusions: Present results provide evidence to support the proposal that human testis and brain share the highest similarity of gene expression patterns. The implications of the similarity regarding that both brain and testis contributed to human speciation are discussed.

US Federal Judge Bernard M. Decker:

“It is better to allow those who preach racial hatred to expend their venom in rhetoric rather than to be panicked into embarking on the dangerous course of permitting the government to decide what its citizens may say and hear …. The ability of American society to tolerate the advocacy of even hateful doctrines … is perhaps the best protection we have against the establishment of any Nazi-type regime in this country.”

By June 24 1978, US Nazi leader Frank Collin had assembled his forces and was ready to parade his might before an astonished world. Apart from his drive to make a fool of himself, Collin himself was a character of minimal charisma and absolutely no consequence, while his Brownshirts were an ill-favoured bunch of mixed physical types, mostly unremarkable. In press conferences, Chicago reporters enjoyed asking Collin whether he was of Jewish descent so they could watch his face turn red. For months, the ACLU had been fighting for Collin’s right to lead his dozen confused young adolescent males on a march through Skokie, a mostly Jewish suburb of Chicago. For some reason, the US federal government was forced to host a Nazi demonstration and chose Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago as the venue. The Chicago police were drafted in to make this all happen. Their solution was to bring the Nazis in through the back of the federal building and on to the plaza. The wags on the force had decided to place the press inside a double line of saw-horses between the Nazis and the mob. (Jim Belushi was there with the world’s phoniest press pass, to gather material for Second City skits. The cops didn’t care. You want to be part of a human coil-spring between angry and stupid? Fill your boots.)

It was a beautiful day and everyone got there early for the warm-up. College kids came in for miles around to confront the demonstrators. It could have been a festival, with street vendors and music, except people were carrying signs mounted on two by fours and lengths of steel pipe. The police did their best to confiscate those, along with the rocks and bottles, but it was a big crowd.

The demonstration itself was quite brief, and Collin’s bull-horn was totally inadequate to the storm of noise and debris that instantly broke over him. While he exercised his right to free speech, the Chicago cops exercised their baton arms on the unfortunates who were jammed up against the barriers. The press got a story with lots of exciting ‘vis’, and the students got a lively outing. Everybody got something. This is how a free people conducts its business, in the open air, in full view of all. Hateful people have a right to say at least some hateful things, and government has at least some obligation to protect them. Whenever I look at the wasteful, inept and ultimately useless human rights cases in Canada, I think of the US government making sure Frank Collin had freedom of expression. He is long gone now, but the lesson remains. Give a free people free expression and free access to ideas - they know what to do.

That rarity, a prize moment in a new Simpsons episode. Even Christians have to laugh at this one:

Click video to play.

First, Jason Kenney and Gary Lunn indicate that government members of a certain visibility understand the issue. Then, the Justice department releases a legal brief that appears to back the status quo. So where are we? Even? Somewhere behind? I think the legal brief will be very positive. If it represents the very peak of current thinking within the bureaucracy, all to the good. Let good ideas drive out bad. With one hand, the government has signaled sympathy, and with the other, it is steadying a target to be aimed at. As Mr. Levant suggests, let the exegesis begin.

Indulge me as I walk through this from the point of view of a communications person. The CHRT announced a decision that it would no longer transcribe and release tribunal testimony, beginning with the March 25 Lemire hearing. All right, fine, a little research revealed that this had been in contemplation for some months but only wanted some good reason to take effect. (The needle on the Sinister meter is only flickering a little.) The hearings were to be available in audio format. However, when I called to obtain a CD (with the purpose of organizing an online transcription bee) I learned that it could only be obtained by an Access to Information request.

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

At that point, I desisted and sat back to await events, because John Pacheco was doing a great job slicing the testimony to ribbons and it was clear that exceptionally stupid people were in charge at the commission.

From the perspective of a communications professional, this is a carnival of ineptitude. First of all, does anyone who has ever worked in a bureaucracy believe there would not be an official written transcript for internal use? And there would not be half a dozen ways for the outside world to discover that? And that not releasing it - like all the others - would make you look petty and fearful and bitter and hateful and obstructive and small?

In the transcript, the fellow who has presided over the travesty said, “Have you had the opportunity to use the audio system; Mr. Fromm, that we have in place now, because it’s quite user friendly? I’m relying on it quite extensively.” Why? Why would he ‘rely on it’? He already had written transcripts for all previous hearings. Which brings us to the sudden banning of written transcripts just in time for the one that promised to continue to bring CHRC wrongdoing to the surface. I do not think it is a coincidence, I think it is a calculated measure to drive up defendants’ costs at a critical time.

Then, apparently, someone at the Commission leaked the official transcript - which should not but does exist - to a presumably ‘friendly’ journalist. To vindicate the commission. In 60’s advertising jargon, “Fuzzy thinking.” To reporters, the call for ‘balance’ means walking all the evidence in hand around to every possible adversary, in search of a good, balancing quote. That part is working great so far, for the reporter and Ezra and the cause of free speech. I wonder how it’s working at the Commission?

Two interesting points came up in today’s edition of PrimeTime Politics on CPAC:

1. Pollster Nik Nanos reports that Canadians rate Stephen Harper as the most competent leader over Stéphane Dion by a factor of more than three to one.
2. In an interview with Environment Minister John Baird, Peter van Dusen notes that his previous guest, Elmer Fudd sound-alike John McCallum, warned that his party’s carbon tax proposal was not a tax on gasoline.

Now, let’s see: a leader who is not perceived by most voters as a competent manager entertains an election plank that would vastly increase oil and coal-based energy prices for Canadians, all while Ontario’s economy is reeling from high energy costs for its industries. So his greatest concern is that his minions do not suggest a hike in gas taxes is coming. Instead, he sticks with his master plan of swinging the death blow to the economy of the most vote-rich province in Canada.

Wow.

A postmodernist academic at Dartmouth College is threatening to sue her students on grounds that their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights:

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.

Such loopy resorts to legalism by the unreasonable are, of course, nothing new to us in Canada. But finding students who resist these PoMo clowns rather than acquiescing to them for the sake of grades is astounding. Hope remains in the quest to reclaim sanity in academia.

NEXT GEN HUMAN RIGHTS
The Future of Canada’s Human Rights Commissions
Crowne Plaza Hotel
Ottawa, Ontario
June 3, 2008
A Public Policy Forum Symposium

The agenda.

11:30 am Pundit’s Pit
This session will feature intellectual debate about the role of HRCs in
particular, and the state in general in addressing discrimination, hate
speech, and human rights violations in Canadian society.
Participants:
Warren Kinsella (confirmed)
Dr. Keith Martin, MP (invited)

Because it would the equally tasteless gesture in response to the “get-well” brickbat tossed by the lovely and intelligent Elizabeth Thompson of the Montreal Gazette at the ailing Sandra Buckler, hospitalized for thyroid cancer surgery.

Kudos to Right From Alberta for catching this Great Canadian™ in flagrante redacto, sloppily covering her tracks.

Update:

And full laurels to Dr. Roy Eappen for taking the Gazette to task with both fervour and expert knowledge of the situation. Well done, Dr. Roy!

… when Jason Kenney stands in front of a hostile audience and says, “I think it’s very important for those of us engaged in anti-racism efforts to ensure the tactics we use, the approaches that we take, are consistent with respect for the liberal values of the Charter of Rights, of the Canadian constitutional framework, of our democratic parliamentary institutions.”

Does anyone think he scratched the following sentiment on the back of an envelope on the flight west, and that it came as a surprise and shock to the Prime Minister’s Office? “I would also hope that we think long and hard about the central role, the foundational role, of such values as freedom of expression in our constitutional framework, and that we do not lightly undermine those constitutional values in our efforts to combat racism or hatred.”

That is not a maverick MP breaking ranks, that is the Conservative party reaching out to its supporters. It is time to have a little faith and patience, and continue working for a majority government.