For It Was A Tuesday

Where some of the Thanksgiving leftovers will go.

Indeed.


If Omar Khadr, unrepentant terrorist and murder, can be allowed back into the country, granted day parole and not face charges of treason, then you can let this man into the country:

Invited to speak in London, England, last year, Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who gained notoriety for his “International Burn a Koran Day,” never made it because the British government barred him from entering the country for “the public good.”

But with Mr. Jones scheduled to speak in Toronto on Thursday to argue that “Islam is not compatible with Western society,” Canadian immigration officials are saying there is little they can do since they lack similar powers.

A bill currently before Parliament would change that, giving the immigration minister the authority to keep out foreign visitors on the grounds of “public policy considerations.”

But opposition parties have come out against it.

“It’s so vague and all-encompassing, any government for political reasons could almost keep anybody out under ‘public policy considerations,’” Jinny Sims, the NDP immigration critic, said in an interview Tuesday.

“If we’re going to have a criteria for keeping people out, to not allow people access to our country, that criteria needs to be clear, it needs to be specific and we need to see it. It should not be left to the judgment of any minister or any politician.”

(Sidebar: that's no opposition insofar as it is opposition on the NDP's terms, further cementing that party's status as bottom-feeders of the worst sort.)

Liberal MP Irwin Cotler has opposed the bill for the same reason, among others. He said it does not spell out what factors the minister would consider or what checks and balances would ensure the provision wasn’t abused.

Mr. Jones is scheduled to appear on the lawn of the Ontario legislature at 6 p.m. Thursday to take part in a debate about the anti-Islamic video “Innocence of Muslims,” which sparked demonstrations throughout the Muslim world last month.

It is still uncertain he will be there. Canada Border Services Agency officers could turn him back if they deem him inadmissible under the existing immigration law, which allows them to exclude visitors considered security threats.

Burning the Koran loses its power once people stop minding.


Make no mistake about it. The Canadian government not only doesn't care about its people; it hates them.


Keep Huawei out:

A House of Representatives Intelligence Committee released a report Monday that warned U.S. telecommunications companies not to do business with Huawei Technologies or ZTE Corp, two Chinese equipment makers.

After an 11-month investigation, committee chair Mike Rogers said Huawei gave the Chinese government a way of gathering intelligence on U.S. networks, and even had the potential to close down those networks in the event of conflict. Rogers cited occasions where routers sent data back to China, a process known as beaconing.

Given that Huawei also supplies Canadian telcos such as Telus, the public airing of these long-held suspicions raises questions about the safety of information transported along networks in this country.

The only negotiation to be done with the Taliban should involve carpet-bombing:

Fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai was admired across a battle-scarred region of Pakistan for exposing the Taliban’s atrocities and advocating for girls’ education in the face of religious extremists. On Tuesday, the Taliban nearly killed her to quiet her message.

A gunman walked up to a bus taking children home from school in the volatile northern Swat Valley and shot Malala in the head and neck. Another girl on the bus was also wounded.

The young activist was airlifted by helicopter to a military hospital in the frontier city of Peshawar. A doctor in the city of Mingora, Tariq Mohammad, said her wounds weren’t life-threatening, but a provincial information minister said after a medical board examined the girl that the next few days would be crucial.

Malala began writing a blog when she was just 11 under the pseudonym Gul Makai for the BBC about life under the Taliban, and began speaking out publicly in 2009 about the need for girls’ education — which the Taliban strongly opposes. The extremist movement was quick to claim responsibility for shooting her.

“This was a new chapter of obscenity, and we have to finish this chapter,” Taliban spokesman Ahsanullah Ahsan by telephone.

I think carpet-bombing where the Taliban live is a very exciting and definitive way of finishing this chapter.



Where was the UN when Camp 22 was killing people and cremating the bodies?

The federal government’s tough-on-crime agenda is “excessively punitive” for youth and is a step backwards for Canada’s child rights record, says a United Nations group.

The UN committee on the rights of the child has finished a 10-year review of how Canada treats its children and how well governments are implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In particular, the committee says Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act complied with international standards until changes were introduced earlier this year.

The Harper government’s Bill C-10 — an omnibus crime bill that includes stiffer penalties for youth and makes it easier to try them as adults — no longer conforms to the child rights convention or other international standards.

Bill C-10 “is excessively punitive for children and not sufficiently restorative in nature,” the committee wrote in a report published over the weekend.

“The committee also regrets there was no child rights assessment or mechanism to ensure that Bill C-10 complied with the provisions of the convention.”

The committee also repeatedly expressed its concern that aboriginal and black children are dramatically overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Aboriginal youth are more likely to be jailed than graduate from high school, the report said.

In order to meet the standards of the UN convention, Ottawa should raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility and ensure that no one under 18 is ever tried as an adult, the report said.

Authorities should also be developing alternatives to detention, writing rules to restrain the use of force against children in detention and to separate girls from boys in jail, the committee added.

Do you know what else is a step backward for children's rights? Having a one-world organisation stand by and do nothing while children starve to death, are used as sex slaves or are killed wholesale.


We should withdraw from the UN today.


Well, this will prove to be very awkward for Obama come the foreign policy debates:

A U.S. security officer formerly stationed in Libya has told lawmakers he sent two cables to the State Department requesting more security agents for the American mission in Benghazi but received no response.

The officer, Eric Nordstrom, also said that a State Department official, Charlene Lamb, wanted to keep the number of U.S. security personnel in Benghazi “artificially low,” according to a memo summarizing his comments that was obtained by Reuters.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Nordstrom’s statements.

Nordstrom was interviewed by a congressional committee investigating the attack last month on the U.S. mission in Benghazi in which the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed.

It actually gets worse:

"This is significantly different than what we were being told at the time. At the time, as you recall, we were told it was a protest that went bad and became an attack. Now, we are told there was no protest going on outside that embassy. The first indication that they heard anything outside the walls of the embassy -- of the consulate compound, was an explosion and gunfire. They looked through a camera to see what was going on and we are told they saw a large number of armed men coming and approaching that compound. We're told it was a very complex attack without precedent in U.S. diplomatic history. We've never seen an attack like this in Libya or anywhere else, we were told by this senior State Department official," Karl reported.

There was some video profusely apologised for. Surely that will be trotted out again.


Or what could be said without hesitation is that Obama has the intestinal fortitude of a worm and is not fit to lead. Yes, he has pandered to the Middle East but can one honestly believe he had a plan if things went sideways? He wasn't even prepared for the last debate and even believed he won. Can one imagine more embassies ending up like the one in Benghazi?


Much worse:

One of the men who was in charge of security for U.S. diplomats in Libya says he feared for their safety long before the attack last month on the consulate in Benghazi. Four Americans were killed in the attacks on the Libyan consulate, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.

The concerned military security officer and Army green beret, Lt. Colonel Andrew Wood, will tell his story to Congress on Wednesday.

Wood first set foot in Libya last February to lead an elite, 16-man counterterrorism team. From the moment he arrived, he says he saw chaos…

Woods said he and his team became aware that they would not be allowed to stay through cables and draft cables coming back and forth. The State Department was telling the people in Libya not to continue to ask for help.

“The requests were being modified to say, ‘Don’t even ask for DoD support,’” he said.

Watch Paul Ryan defend himself against a hack.


This will be an interesting four years.



And now, poetry by cats. Enjoy.



(With lots of thanks)