The era of Saddam has ended

and the left couldn't be more mad or upset.

Apparently they think the people of Iraq have killed the wrong mass murderers. Thanks to their moral equivalency blinders they see absolutely no difference in blame between a dictator who directly ordered the killings of thousands (and by some reports millions) of his own people and someone who took action to remove him.

And even though the vast majority of deaths in Iraq since the invasion have been due to Iraqi on Iraqi and as often Saudi/Iranian/Syrian/etc.. on Iraqi violence and in most cast didn't even involve coalition troops all the blame is Bush's.

Of course, the fact the Iraqi economy is skyrocketing and the people are by and large much happier with their new found freedoms post Saddam, that's just a little glitch that their "Hate Bush" philosophy is working overtime to ignore.

And for those "progressives" who still want to argue over the cost of the war I ask this, what is the acceptable price for freedom? Don't even talk dollars since the only time liberals worry about federal finances is when their own pet projects may have to be trimmed. And while 3000 lives is a great price for any country to bear that was a price those individuals were willing to pay to offer those 25,000,000 Iraqis a chance at a better life.

That there are people willing to pay the ultimate price to help others they have never even met should be a very somber but heart lifting story. Knowing that people capable of such sacrifice are still around today in this "me first" society should be heralded from the rooftops. Instead their sacrifice is used as cannon fodder for the far left and their anti-West, anti-Capitalist movements.

Gateway Pundit's keeping on eye on the reactions to the news from the left (so the rest of us can avoid getting lost in the fever swamps).

Blogging from airport in Quebec

Surprisingly it's the only airport I've found where the "open" internet access is actually truly open, as in free; guess they've upgraded more than their seats.

Not much going on as I wait 2 hours for my next 50 minute flight before my hour and a half wait for my final 30 minute flight so I've decided to do a little light blogging.

First thing I've noticed is that over at LGF they have a link to Zombies response to, from all reputable accounts, is a laughable report from Human Rights Watch that still tries to cover up cover up what by all evidence appears to be just another attempt at fabricating an Israeli war crime. The gist of the HRW report, the Israeli's did in fact cause the damage using a mysterious unknown type of armament that can cause extreme fires which do not burn and explosions that do not destroy; oh yeah and rust, lots and lots of rust. Zombie has a link to his original debunking in his response.

Then there's this interesting bit of blog work from Michelle Malkin. It all concerns a simple little story out of Iraq about how John Kerry has been receiving the cold shoulder from soldiers on his latest visit to show how much he supports the troops. Not really an important story, just good for a laugh but questions have come up concerning the veracity of the claims of the timing of the primary photo. As a show of what makes the blogosphere so great when it comes to reporting events you can clearly follow the original story, it's counter claims and finally the investigation into whether or not the story is in fact accurate, all from one post with links to everyone involved. A stark contradiction to to the MSM's method of report first and damn the truth as exposed by the ambulance story above.

Well, just 45 more minutes before my boarding call. Time to do a little more light reading and possibly play a game or two over at CrazyMonkey.

Still not much done ...

... on the Blogging front. It's amazing how little gets done when you have all the time in the world.

The good news is that my parents new computer is up and running with everything ported over successfully. I am having IE7 issues though. It's not a major concern as I've switched them over to FireFox ages ago, but I felt I may as well install it.

First, who was the genius at Microsoft that decided to buck the trend over the last 20 years and
move the menu bar from the top to underneath the address bar. I'm also having issues with the refresh and stop commands being seperated from the forward and back by the address box itself. And apparently the home and print buttons no longer even deserve the privilege of being on the main toolbar. Now they are regulated to the tab bar, which looks seriously cramped if you use it to open up even a half dozen tabs at a decent resolution. Using 800x600, which so many people never change their systems from, would make the tab bar almost useless.

None of these would be major issues if they allowed any customization at all but the drag and drop functionality is next to non-existant even with the toolbars unlocked and don't even think about moving or removing commands from the various built in toolbars. For crying out loud you have to do a registry hack just to get your menu to appear in the same place it does in every other piece of Windows software.

Oh well, it's still a vast improvement over IE6.

Well back to Zelda. If I don't finish Twilight Princess before heading back to Ottawa I may never finish it.

Still here

Just not blogging a lot, either reading or writing.

Flew to Labrador City on the 15th (missed my original flight because of a runaway dog) and then made the 6 hour drive to Goose Bay on the 16th for an early Christmas with my brother and his family and made the return drive on the 18th. All in all an eventful first weekend of my Christmas vacation.

The change in flights did up costing me about $400 but meeting Megan in the Montreal airport kind of made up for it. Turns out her father was one of my chaperons on my school trip to Europe in grade 10.

My mother would kill me if she knew, and luckily she doesn't read blogs, but I almost stayed in Sept Isles overnight as my original rescheduled ticket called for, instead of spending the $350 for a ticket on another airline, just because me and Megan were having such a good time. Hey it's not everyday I strike up a 3 hour conversation with a beautiful girl I've never met before.

While the preliminaries are done, I still haven't made the final move to the Blogger 2.0 format. For now I'm using the excuse that I'm waiting to get my parents new computer up and running before investing too much time; in actuality, I'm just lazy.

So in the meantime, I'll drop a couple of interesting links to keep you busy:

• Found via LGF, PM Harper takes a stand against Hamas. It's taken most of my adult life, but we've finally gotten a federal government in that Canadians can be proud of. One that's willing to take a stand based on what's right and wrong not on what's popular.

• Via Campus Watch, again by way of LGF, this story of ABC news analyst, Fawaz Gerges, trying to equate the Palestinian troubles with the Holocaust. Yeah you know, I'm sure European Jews were also reaching population growth rates of just over 3% (West Bank) and almost 4% (Gaza) during the Holocaust (statistics via Wikipedia). Of course there's also the small point that many if not most of the deaths he uses to prove his point were caused by other Palestinians and in the case of Iraq, Muslim fundamentalists, but why let facts get in the way of a good moral relativism argument.

• Finally, Michelle and an army of interested bloggers continue with search for the elusive Jamil Hussein. I have a feeling Big Foot will be sitting down for an interview on The Tonight Show before the AP can produce their oft quoted source.
  

That's all for now.

Blogger updates

I've made the first moves to switch to the new Blogger format.

Everything seems to have been converted with no problems but I haven't begun to start playing around with the overall template yet. That's what Christmas vacation is for.

So hopefully, over the next 2 weeks I'll be able to get my base template brought up to the new Blogger format without losing too many of my minor add-ons.

I'll also be playing around with the Label feature to try and organize things a little better.

Pssst, can I interest you in a PS3?

What to do, what to do. Thanks to a fortunate(?) turn of events I ended up with a 60GB PS3 the other day. I'm still trying to decide if I really want it or not.

At $275 the decision to get a Wii was pretty simple to make. Especially since I could sell my GameCube with some old games and make half of that back.

At almost 3 times the price, my decision with the PS3 is a little harder. First of all it's a much larger piece of hardware. Where the Wii has a tiny footprint next to my TV the PS3 would look like the monolith from 2001. Secondly I've never had a Playstation so no old system or games to sell off to try and recoup some of the costs. The biggest drawback is that at present, I'm the only person I know who has one so online gaming with friends will be pretty much non-existant until they start showing up to stores on a regular basis.

So I'm on the fence right now as to whether or not to even open the PS3 box. Do I sell or do I play? On the plus side, it seems to be a pretty amazing machine and a half decent blu-ray player to boot. It also has built in wireless which is the major problem preventing me from picking up a 360. The 360 was my first choice after the Wii, but since I'd have to get a $50 Live account and a $150 wireless adapter (and a $199 HD-DVD drive if I wanted HD movies) the cost of owning a 360 vs the PS3 actually work out in the PS3's favor.

Guess I'll wait till after Christmas to make the final decision. For now the Playstation is on the market for anyone willing to make me a good offer, but if it's still sitting by my desk when I get back from vacation I don't think I could stop myself from cutting that sticker and ripping it open.

Sorry

Not a lot of posting this week. Been busy at work and have spent most of my blog time arguing the facts of the "Imams on Board" case over at The Vanguard.

As was bound to happen at some point the entire discussion has expanded from the highly suspicious actions of the 6 imams to a more general discussion of Islam's role in the Western world. Currently the hot topic is Sharia law, with two of the imams defenders talking about how great everything would be if we all just adopted this archaic misogynistic set of codes. Personally, I think when you pull out Saudi Arabia as the best example of what life under Sharia is like your argument is already lost, but you can head over there and judge for yourself.

The comment system is moderated but so far all that seems to mean is a delay in your comment showing up. There hasn't been any complaints of deletions or unprovoked edits so it seems like they are letting the discussion continue as long as it stays civil.

Cardscam

Once again, Captain Ed is right on the leading edge of what's going on in Canadian politics, an odd hobby for someone from Minnesota.

His latest, an Ontario government scandal that, while apparently non-political, has cost taxpayers untold millions, with little or nothing to show for it.

Just goes to show, aways make sure someone is keeping track of the company credit card.

On a related note, it appears the lines have been clearly drawn in terms of naming conventions; anything bad happening south of the 49th parallel must be suffixed with the infamous "-gate" while everything north gets the now all too familiar "-scam". We did go through our "boondoggle" phase, but I guess it was decided, and rightfully so, to switch to "-scam" as our suffix of choice in describing governmental scandals. Boondoggle just made everything sound a little to funny and hard to take serious.

Playing Catch-up

4 Days, no blogging =(

I don't really have an excuse except that I was feeling a bit under the weather (I wonder what the origin of that phrase is), so this ones a two-for.

First and not quite foremost, the Liberals elected a new national leader on Saturday evening. For those not keeping track of Canadian Liberal leadership races, the main contestants were:

1)An expat who for the last 27 years has lived in either in the UK or the US, only returning to Canada a year ago when the chance to head a federal party came up.

2) A former NDPer (the Canadian far left) who when elected Premier of Ontario managed to nearly bankrupt the economic engine of the country.

3)And an old school Liberal who held positions of power in both the Martin and Chretien governments during all the good scandals (Adscam, HRDC, the Gun registry). As environment minister he worked so hard that CO2 actually rose after the Liberals signed on for Kyoto and as of the Conservative take over were 41% higher than the were promised under the accord. A man whose mastery of the English language makes Jean Chretien appear to be an accomplished orator.

So out of this field of star candidates who did they elect? Why number 3 of course. So welcome to centre stage Mr. Dion.

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The other big news over the past few day has been the AP 'burning men' story. I guess the Associated Press was feeling left out with Dan Rather managing to disgrace prime time news and Reuters managing to disgrace photo journalists the world over, so they decided to just loosen then journalistic standards to include fictitious Iraqi police officers and anonymous reporters and unnamed witnesses just hoping that something would blow up and they'd finally get noticed.

The funniest part is watching the AP defenders, like the bunch over at the NYT's Blog, just try and make excuses for journalistic standards that wouldn't be acceptable at a junior high school paper. Their degree of tunnel vision knows no bounds when anything harmful to the US of more particularly the Bush administration is involved. As long as they agree with the idea of the story, the fact are irrelevant.

Just because it's Friday

and I need a good laugh with the weather outside.