Apr. 18 - George Steinbrenner is not happy with the performance Yanks record. (Others, of course, are delighted.)

Orioles 8, Yankees 4: With Only 150 Games to Go, Steinbrenner Checks In:

The offense is batting .208 with runners in scoring position, including 4 for 21 over the weekend. The starters have not had a quality start (at least six innings and no more than three earned runs) in nine games. The bullpen has been abysmal, and the Yankees have given up at least seven runs in every loss.

The CNN poll on their home page asks if Steinbrenner over-reacted in criticizing "the highest-paid team in baseball." 85% had said "no last time I checked, which is the first time I can recall so many people siding with George S.

Manager Joe Torres must feel like hockey coach Harry Neale, who is reputed to have said "We can't win at home, we're terrible at home, and my failure as a coach is that I can't think of anywhere else we can play."

Since I'm on a sport topic, it is worth while to mention Lance Armstrong's decision to retire after the Tour de France in July.

I have to go to a meeting tonight and then to work. So long!

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1 George should chill out about the Yankees and revel in the fact that he owns the favorite, Bellamy Road, in the upcoming Kentucky Derby. And with the incredible success Bellamy Road's trainer Nick Zito has been having this spring (he has at least 3 or 4 Derby contenders), I wouldn't doubt that the thought has crossed Steinbrenner's mind to hire him as the Yankees manager.

Posted by: TimR at April 18, 2005 09:21 PM (rr+yX)

2 I'm no fan of the Yankees, but whatever bad karma they deserve is paid off by working for Steinbrenner. PS: It figures. I move from Baltimore back to DC and the Orioles sweep the Yankees.

Posted by: mikem at April 18, 2005 10:36 PM (EzNXf)

3 It couldn't happen to a nicer team (the Yankees) - after all what do you expect for about $200 million.

Posted by: John B at April 18, 2005 10:48 PM (ju7Wp)

4 $200 million? Yikes! Last I checked they were overpaid at $80 million. Sheesh. George has a pont that they're not earning their pay. But, I mean, he's the guy thta paid them... The Mets, on the other hand, seem to've finally found their groove...

Posted by: Tuning Spork at April 18, 2005 11:50 PM (Ns1Gb)

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Apr. 17 - Time Canada on Ann Coulter. Good read thus far (I'm only on page 3.)

(Via Neale News.)

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Apr. 17 - PM Howard of Australia told the soldiers departing for Iraq "You go with our support, our prayers and our good wishes for a safe mission and a return home for all of you."

Members of the Al Muthanna Task Group have already begun departing for southern Iraq, with the navy's heavy-lift ship HMAS Tobruk setting sail from Darwin with 200 crew and 20 Australian light armoured vehicles with little fanfare yesterday.

The troops, mainly from Darwin's 1st Brigade, will be deployed by sea and air during the month.

Mr Howard, joined by Defence Minister Robert Hill, and Defence chief General Peter Cosgrove, attended a barbecue to formally farewell the bulk of the troops at Darwin's Robertson Barracks.

Apr. 20 - 04:25: The DoD press release is here.

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Apr. 17 - Mount Karthala is definitely cranky, causing Hundreds to flee as volcano belches smoke from the crater.

"The ground has started trembling and we have seen cracks appearing," a local official on the island of Grande Comore, near the scene of the volcanic activity, said.
Residents near the affected villages described a strange smell wafting from the volcano, followed by a steady drizzle of black rain on the Indian Ocean island.

"Villagers are in total darkness, gritty rain is falling and visibility is zero," a resident, who gave his name as Charif, said.

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Apr. 17 - The Earnscliffe Strategy Group obtained federal contracts during PM Paul Martin's tenure as Finance Minister. Former Martin aide Terrie O'Leary has been subpoenaed by the Commons public accounts committee looking into the relationship of the group, federal research contracts and the Finance Department. Her lawyer says its for "political" purposes:

A parliamentary committee examining federal research contracts is trying to "embarrass and humiliate" a former aide to Paul Martin for political purposes, says the woman's lawyer.

Andrew Davis, the counsel for Terrie O'Leary, levelled the accusation in an e-mail to the Commons public accounts committee, which wants to question O'Leary about opinion polling contracts that went to a firm with political ties to Martin.

[...]

O'Leary is one of four witnesses subpoenaed to appear next Monday at hearings that will centre on Earnscliffe Strategy Group and its relations with the Finance Department when Martin was minister there.

The subject has come up in passing at the federal sponsorship inquiry headed by Justice John Gomery, but the judge ruled the deals did not fall within his mandate.

That prompted Bloc Quebecois MP Benoit Sauvageau to propose that the public accounts committee take up the matter - a suggestion quickly adopted by other opposition MPs who command a 7-5 majority on the panel.

Herle, who co-chaired last year's Liberal election campaign, was a partner at Earnscliffe when the firm obtained contracts from the Finance Department during Martin's term there.

For much of the same period his longtime personal companion O'Leary was chief of staff to Martin. She has repeatedly said she was careful to avoid any involvement in contracts that went to Earnsclifffe.

The firm employed many political associates of Martin, and was often jokingly referred to at the time as the prime-minister's-office-in-waiting.

Two other witnesses will be Auditor-General Sheila Fraser and Public Works whistleblower Allan Cutler, a former Public Works official who was fired after he filed a complain in 1996 about the questionable handling of the Sponsorship Program.

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Apr. 17 - A report from the Conference of Defence Associations says that replacing the Hercules transport and other equipment is "years off" because the military lacks efficient procurement practices:

"At present, the department has inadequate numbers and expertise . . . to execute the existing capital acquisition plan," the association said in a report to the Commons defence committee.

"Existing approaches to military acquisitions and a dearth of project expertise lead to the troubling conclusion that transformation of the Canadian Forces . . . would not be possible before the year 2020."

The conclusions come as the all-party committee prepares to release a report on military procurement Monday. The panel is expected to say defence purchasing is weighed down in politics and inefficiency.

Similar to the revelations that followed the initial investigation into the Watergate break-in and the attempts to cover up the crime, many stories are now emerging which suggest other instances of wrong-doing. Some will prove out and others will not.

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Apr. 17 - Greg Weston reports that a "crack team of top forensic accountants" is Following the Adscam money trail to determine where the millions stolen from the Sponsorship Fund eventually landed:

... This is no ordinary group of number-crunchers.

Among its members are some of the key investigators who unraveled the massive and complex financial scandal at Enron Corporation, the giant American energy company that collapsed under billions of dollars of hidden debt and fraud. Sometime in the next few weeks, this squad of sleuthing bean-counters from the firm Kroll Lindquist & Avey will present the Gomery inquiry with the results of its Adscam investigation.

If successful, the accountants will answer the most contentious of all sponsorship questions: Who ended up with all the money?

So far, the Gomery commission has heard testimony that an elaborate web of kickbacks and fraudulent invoices siphoned millions of dollars from the federal sponsorship program into the coffers of Liberal Party operatives. What we don't know -- and the forensic super-snoops will likely tell us -- is what happened to all the loot after the Liberal bagmen got it.

The statute of limitations for some of the illegal acts is very slim:

While Brault and two others are facing criminal fraud charges, time has wiped out any chance of nailing others with violations of election and lobbying laws.

The Gomery inquiry has so far heard from a dozen witnesses who broke election laws -- passing political cash around in brown paper bags does not exactly conform to federal political financing rules.

But an official at Elections Canada indicates there is nothing the government can do to prosecute the Adscammers -- under the old election financing laws in place during the sponsorship program, violators had to be prosecuted within 18 months.

The same applies to the numerous Gomery witnesses who have admitted they broke federal lobbying laws while they were out twisting arms in government for sponsorship cash.

A joke at the best of times, the lobbying laws don't even apply to AdScam -- the statute of limitations is two years.

The federal lawsuit against the 19 Adscam players is open-ended, to allow the government to add more names as they are unearthed at the Gomery inquiry. (Emphasis added)

I'm not likely to buy a used car from either man, but Brault came across as someone who tried to take a shortcut to success and ended up paying for it, and his testimony despite his poor health compared to Corriveau's memory-loss-by-medication makes Brault the more sympathetic character.

Mindful of the dictim that one can't excape death or taxes,

... If all else fails, there is always the long arm of the tax man, no doubt already hot on the trail of all that pilfered Adscam money. Where it will end nobody knows except, we hope, the accountants of Kroll Lindquist & Avey.

Some articles recapping Jean Brault's and Luc Lemay's testimony in anticipation of Corriveau's testimony here (including testimony from Groupaction employee Bernard Michaud that seemed to confirm that Brault was being pressure to donate to the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party) and Lemay's testimony that he never looked at Corriveau's bills but just paid them and that he didn't know that Gault was being pressured to donate to the party (the last contradicts Gault's testimony.)

A recap of Corriveau's testimony this past week: Corriveau denies kickback claims and CTV's coverage on Thursday and Friday.

In another link, on Thursday Corriveau denied ever discussing the Sponsorship Program with Chretien while running the graphic design company Pluri Design, denied that he was close to Alain Renaud, and denied one of the most damning segments of Brault's testimony:

Corriveau said he never referred to the party as "the cause" in any conversations, contrary to Brault's claim that the phrase came up often while Corriveau and top Liberal officials browbeat him for cash.

On Friday, he denied receiving any kickbacks or playing any role in a scheme to funnel money back to the Liberal Party and suggested the inquiry focus on Alain Renaud. He explained the invoices which were for events in non-existent Olympic stadiums were due to a "significant printing error" -- so it wasn't due to a copy-paste operation but the use of an original invoice (for a 1997 event at Montreal's Olympic Stadium) as a template for later invoices (which went undetected in several Accounts Payable departments? If the invoices contained a significant error due to the template it's not a "printing" error but human error, and that still doesn't explain why nobody noticed it.)

He admitted being paid for lobbying the government for contracts for Lemay's Groupe Polygone even though he wasn't a registered lobbyist, and was caught contradicting testimony by Chretien's neice, Maria Lyne Chretien, when he admitted recommending her for a job at Groupaction upon her request (she had testified that she never solicited a recommendation from him.) Brault testified that of the five he hired (Serge Gosselin, Maria Lynn Chrétien, Gaby Chretien, Alain Renaud and Jacques Corriveau) she is the only one who did legitimate work for Groupaction.

[I've tried to cite numerous sources in part because some of the links have only a short life span and others will be subject to "subscribers only" retrieval.]

11:05: Lorrie Goldstein dispenses with the contention that Martin is the "wire brush" to clean up Canadian politics and brings the point home with the the reminder of the applause and praise in the Liberal caucus following Chretien's golfball testimony at the Gomery Inquiry -- an appearance that, to quote Goldstein, "made it perfectly clear he [Chretien] had nothing but contempt for the proceedings."

More chickens comes home to roost, as Linda Williamson reminds us of the "tainted blood scandal" and John Crosbie points out some bad bookkeeping and questionable business decisions at Canadian Steamship Lines, the company Paul Martin owned and ran before he became Prime Minister and wonders if the Canadian electorate will leave the government in the hands of wolves.

Edmonton Sun columnist Paul Stanway urges voters to "stop hiding behind the excuse of Battered voter syndrome" and outlines the flaws in the Liberal Party's pretensions as the "natural ruling party of Canada."

Salim Mansur asks Remember when honour was important?:

There was once an unspoken rule in public life that when trust is broken and a reputation sullied, the person in question should depart and save others from embarrassment.

We no longer live in such a world or, more properly, we now imagine that to demand honour in public life is romantic fiction.

It has become unreal to expect from public officials what Shakespeare made Mark Antony declare: "If I lose mine honour, I lose myself."

Instead, the unruffled contemporary norm is pass the buck, deny evidence and brazenly defy those whose trust has been broken due to poor judgment, ineptness or malfeasance.

Instead, the unruffled contemporary norm is pass the buck, deny evidence and brazenly defy those whose trust has been broken due to poor judgment, ineptness or malfeasance.

We've seen ample evidence of this in the AdScam debacle in Ottawa. So, too, we recently heard the pithy response of Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, when asked if he would resign following the release of the second interim report of the Volcker committee on the Oil-for-Food scandal: "Hell, no."

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Apr. 16 - I can't find a source other than the NY Times at this point: Swiss Investigates Possibility of Bribery in U.N. Contract:

A Swiss judge is investigating possible bribery charges involving a $50 million contract to renovate the headquarters of a Geneva-based United Nations agency, according to government documents and Swiss and American officials.

Jean-Bernard Schmid, the Geneva-based judge who has led the criminal inquiry, said in a telephone interview on Friday that his investigation was focusing on Michael Wilson, who was a consultant to the company that won the renovation contract at the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Mr. Wilson, a Ghanaian businessman, has been identified by investigators as a business associate of Kojo Annan, the son of Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general. The judge said Kojo Annan was not a target of the investigation.

Investigators said the judge was trying to determine if Mr. Wilson had bribed a senior official at the United Nations agency to win the renovation contract. Edward Kwakwa, the agency's legal counsel, said Khamis Suedi, a top official at the intellectual property agency, acknowledged having received 325,000 Swiss francs, about $270,000, from Mr. Wilson, but said the money was from a private business venture that had no connection to the agency's construction contract. In an interview, Mr. Suedi said he had had nothing to do with the awarding of the contract.

[...]

Mr. Wilson's relationship with Kojo Annan was cited in a recent report issued by the United Nations commission investigating its oil-for-food program in Iraq. According to the commission, Mr. Wilson was a vice president at Cotecna Inspection S.A., a company that worked for the oil-for-food program, and Mr. Wilson helped get Mr. Annan a job at the company.

After both men left Cotecna, they became partners in a consulting business in Africa, according to investigators in the United States and Europe. Kojo Annan's lawyer, Clarissa Amato, declined comment for publication.

The Swiss investigation concerns Mr. Wilson's activities in Geneva. Mr. Kwakwa said Mr. Wilson had been an intern at the intellectual property agency "decades ago" when his father was posted in Geneva as an ambassador from Ghana. Mr. Kwakwa said that more recently Mr. Suedi told officials there that he and Mr. Wilson had been doing work that involved "benevolent, nongovernmental organizations." Mr. Kwakwa said the outside work had been approved by the agency.

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Apr. 16 - From yesterday's New York Times, more pieces of a nightmare from which we can never awaken and a mistake for which we can only try to atone: Iraqis Find Graves Thought to Hold Hussein's Victims:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 14 - Investigators have discovered several mass graves in southern Iraq that are believed to contain the bodies of people killed by Saddam Hussein's government, including one estimated to hold 5,000 bodies, Iraqi officials say.

[...]

At least 290 grave sites containing the remains of some 300,000 people have been found since the American invasion two years ago, Iraqi officials say.

[...]

One of the [newly discovered] graves, near Basra, in the south, appears to contain about 5,000 bodies of Iraqi soldiers who joined a failed uprising against Mr. Hussein's government after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Another, near Samawa, is believed to contain the bodies of 2,000 members of the Kurdish clad led by Massoud Barzani.

As many as 8,000 men and boys from the clan disappeared in 1983 after being rounded up in northern Iraq by security forces at the command of Ali Hassan al-Majid, widely known as Chemical Ali. It remains unclear, however, how the victims ended up in the south.

Investigators have also discovered the remains of 58 Kuwaitis spread across several sites, including what appears to be a family of two adults and five children who were crushed by a tank, Mr. Amin said. At least 605 Kuwaitis disappeared at the time of the first gulf war, and before the latest graves were discovered, fewer than 200 had been accounted for, he added.

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Apr. 16 - Great Granny Guns Would-Be Thief

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Apr. 15 - I have to rush off to work, but this is troubling: Website gagged as Calgary police chief wins court order.

Neale News has a link to this page of the website.

We'd better keep an eye on this.

(Links via Neale News.)

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Neale News

Apr. 15 - I just have to note this moment in history. We have a good friend who is still a diehard Senators fan (he even wrote and published a book about them) and Mark has long bewailed the lack of support for the Expos, who consistently played better than their payroll warranted, so now there a cosmic merging of The Underappreciated and The Arcane as the legacy of the Expos and Senators combine to create the Nationals.

Great article in the Washington Times about the President's intense preparation before throwing the initial pitch including the fact that he warmed up before taking the mound. Guess only women who love baseball lovers would understand, but I just know he constantly peppered Laura with the all-important question: slider or a fastball?

The Times says "It was a fastball. A ball. High and inside to a phantom right-handed batter." Mark said the catcher called it a strike, and I made the error of observing that, sans batter and umpire, it can't be anything because without the latter, It ain't nothing until he calls it.

Mark replied smugly, "The catcher knows" which in itself is a bit of a switch as Mark rarely admits to pitcher error on a wild pitch because it's the catcher's job to catch whatever is thrown. So now a catcher is all-wise and all-knowing? (Of course, Mark was not only a pitcher but a southpaw to boot which are two strikes against his sanity.)

I'm a baseball fan, but I'm not as fanatic as certain people like someone sitting 10 feet away who reads baseball blogs but doesn't read mine ...

Charles Krathammer tries to figure out why he cares about 25 guys he doesn't even know:

It is one thing to root for your son's Little League team. After all, he is your kid, and you paid for his glove -- and uniform, helmet, bat, and, when he turns 9, cup. You have a stake in him, and by extension his team.

But what possible stake do grown men have in the fortunes of 25 perfect strangers, vagabond mercenaries paid obscene sums to play a game for half the year?

The whole thing is completely irrational. For me, this is no mere abstract question. I have been a baseball fan most of my life. I could excuse the early years, the Mantle-Maris era, as mere childish hero worship. But what excuse do I have now? Why should I care about these tobacco-spitting, crotch-adjusting multimillionaires who have never heard of me and would not care if I was dispatched to my maker by an exploding scoreboard?

[...]

Presto. It is 1975 all over again. I begin to care. I want them to win. Why? I have no idea. I begin following day games on the Internet. I've punched not one but two preset Nationals stations onto my car radio. I'm aghast. I'm actually invested in the day-to-day fortunes of 25 lugheads I never heard of until two weeks ago.

Apr. 16 - 08:34: Sorry, forgot link to Krauthammer's column. Fixed now.

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Apr. 15 - David Bay Chalmers Jr. of Bayoil U.S.A. was charged yesterday in Iraq Oil Sales by Hussein Aides.:

In an indictment, federal authorities in New York said David Bay Chalmers Jr., a Houston oil businessman, and his company, Bayoil U.S.A., made millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks to the Iraqi government while trading oil under the $65 billion aid program.

Separate charges were brought against Tongsun Park, a millionaire South Korean businessman, for acting as an unregistered lobbyist for Iraq in behind-the-scenes negotiations in the United States to set up and shape the United Nations program. The criminal complaint said Mr. Park received at least $2 million in secret payments from Mr. Hussein's government for serving as a liaison between Iraqi and United Nations officials.

Mr. Park was at the center of a lobbying scandal in the 1970's, when he was accused of paying bribes to lawmakers in Washington to secure support for loans to South Korea.

[...]

The authorities not only charged that Bayoil made illegal payments to secure Iraqi oil, but also that it conspired to artificially lower the price Iraq received, depriving the Iraqi people of money for sorely needed items. The charges also disclosed new information about an alleged plan to pay senior United Nations officials to influence the course of the program.

Catherine M. Recker, a lawyer for Mr. Chalmers, said the Bayoil defendants and the company would plead not guilty and "vigorously dispute" the criminal charges.

According to federal authorities and the complaint against Mr. Park, he was a partner in the lobbying effort with Samir Vincent, an Iraqi-American businessman who pleaded guilty in January to illegal lobbying for Iraq.

Mr. Vincent, who is cooperating with federal investigators, said Iraqi officials signed agreements in 1996 to pay him and Mr. Park $15 million for their lobbying, the complaint says.

One of their tasks was "to take care of" a high-ranking United Nations official, which Mr. Vincent understood to mean to pay bribes, the complaint says. The authorities did not identify or bring charges against the United Nations official. (Emphasis added)

[...]

David N. Kelley, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, in Manhattan, said the complaint alleges that Mr. Park intended to bribe the official, but does not show that the official received any bribe.

The complaint also charges that Mr. Park met with a second unnamed senior United Nations official, once in a restaurant in Manhattan. After that, Mr. Park said he invested $1 million he had been paid by Iraq in a Canadian company belonging to the son of the second United Nations official, the complaint says.

Mr. Kelley declined to say whether the officials were still actively serving at the world organization. He said, however, that the investigation was "broad and large" and that his office would "wring the towel dry" in pursuing United Nations officials. (Emphasis added.)

A federal grand jury in Manhattan charged that David B. Chalmers Jr., founder of Houston-based Bayoil USA Inc. and Bayoil Supply & Trading Limited; Ludmil Dionissiev, a Bulgarian citizen who lives in Houston; and John Irving, a British oil trader, funneled millions of dollars in kickbacks through a foreign front company to an Iraqi-controlled bank account in the United Arab Emirates. If convicted, the three men could each be sentenced to as long as 62 years in prison, $1 million in fines, and the seizure of at least $100 million in personal and corporate assets.

The federal complaint against Park charges that he received a total of $2 million in cash from Iraq, including a fee to "take care" of an unnamed U.N. official. It also states that Park invested $1 million in Iraqi money in a Canadian company owned by the son of another unknown, "high-ranking" U.N. official. Park could face as long as five years in prison and a fine of as much as $250,000 or twice the value of profits he earned as a result of his alleged activities. (Emphasis added.)

The Telegraph (UK) has a fairly terse article on the arrests.

Thus far I've only found coverage of the arrests in The Globe and Mail which covers the arrest but as of 5:41 a.m. didn't report the allegations of a Canadian connection but does report that U.N. officials may be connected to these arrests:

The reference in the complaint against Mr. Park to two mystery high-ranking UN officials sparked widespread speculation in UN corridors of possible names.

Mr. Kelley, pressed repeatedly by reporters at a news conference to say whether U.N. officials had actually received money tied to Mr. Park, would say only that that issue was not part of the indictment.

The U.N. is claiming that the Americans and British were perfectly aware of the violations of the sanctions but refused to order their ships in the Persian Gulf to stop oil tankers heading for Turkish and Jordanian ports with illicit Iraqi oil. I have read reports that trucks loaded with illegally purchased oil from Iraq went to Turkey and Jordan (that became common knowledge after Operation Iraqi Freedom and the public learned just how corrupt OFF - or Oil for Palaces - really was) but I don't understand why oil headed for Jordan or Turkey would use rather lengthy sea lanes when they border Iraq and could drive it in.

Maybe Annan was thinking of Syria, a member of the U.N. Security Council, but, again, the oil was not transported by sea but by pipeline, two of which were turned off when U.S. troops got to them. Maybe he just forgot.

11:30 - Glenn Reynolds has lots of links on the arrests.

Apr. 16 - 10:05: FoxNews has no additional information on U.N. Official No. 1 and Official No. 2.

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Apr. 14 - Some quick updates before I go to work. Corriveau says he can't remember Chretien calls but confirmed about 21 over the years, citing surgery and medication as reasons for some memory problems, and that he only saw Chretien once or twice a year on average. He also denied he was an "unofficial consultant" to Chretien

The story in the Globe reports that Corriveau defended the phone calls logged in the former prime minister's office as being due to his employment of Chretien's son, Michel, at Corriveau's graphic-design firm from 1989 to 1991, which was before Chretien came to power, as pointed out by inquiry counsel Bernard Roy.

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Apr. 14 - Paul Martin denies ever having lunch with Claude Boulay of Groupe Everest, one of the agencies implicated in Adscam (Paul Martin: I have never had lunch with Boulay.)

Greg Weston wasn't impressed with Martin's "moral authority" speech yesterday and even less impressed with Martin's refusal to answer Opposition Leader Stephen Harper's direct question yesterday about Boulay.

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1 now, if we can only find the soiled napkin.

Posted by: keith at April 14, 2005 07:23 PM (HRjgG)

2 Yay! That's the kind of punchline I was looking for, Keith.

Posted by: Debbye at April 14, 2005 08:04 PM (okk+Q)

3 Sounds like Clinton and Lewinsky "I never had sex with that woman" Oh wait, what was that? Hmm maybe if you define it that way, perhaps, maybe... uh huh

Posted by: Dwayne at April 15, 2005 10:36 AM (aPkwd)

4 It all depends on what the meaning of the word "lunch" is.

Posted by: Tuning Spork at April 16, 2005 05:32 PM (lAI6Q)

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Apr. 14 - Yes, it's Update on Adscam time, but I'm not sure I'm up to it. I caught some of Lemay's testimony on CPAC this morning, but I couldn't believe my ears. Did he really assert that he has neither read nor heard anything as to the content of Jean Brault's testimony last week? That is so unbelievable that I'm certain I must have dozed off there for a bit.

Another curious note: I turned on CPAC a few minutes ago and there is debate going on over a Bloc motion for the Liberals to put their alleged ill-gotten gains into a trust account so as to level the playing field in the event of an election ... thus far, speakers from the Bloc, Conservative Party and NDP have supported the motion.

Back to Lemay's testimony, he seemingly has no understanding of what constitutes 'Influence peddling':

HUSTLING by a pal of Jean Chretien to land a Quebec publishing empire lucrative sponsorships for a hefty commission is blatant "influence peddling," Justice John Gomery charged yesterday. Gomery launched the allegation in heated testimony from Groupe Polygone owner Luc Lemay, who said he helped mask Jacques Corriveau's hefty commissions with fake invoices to avoid the federal lobbyist registry.

"You have never heard of what we call influence peddling, as being a forbidden practice in the government?" Gomery pointedly asked Lemay during his second day of grilling.

"No," Lemay answered.

Corriveau, a Liberal bagman and the former PM's confidant, made $6.7 million in commissions on the $37 million in sponsorships the feds pumped directly into Lemay's conglomerate of companies between 1996 and 2002.

Laughter erupted when inquiry counsel Bernard Roy noted Corriveau billed thousands of dollars for working at the Olympic Stadium in Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivieres, Rimouski, Chicoutimi and Ste-Foy, a suburb of Quebec City.

"To your knowledge, is there an Olympic stadium in Rimouski?" asked Roy, adding: "These details escaped you because you did not examine the bills."

Lemay replied: "Essentially."

Brian Daly also writes on Lemay's testimony here:

The fake bills complete with non-existent stadiums were turned in by Liberal organizer Jacques Corriveau for a series of regional hunting and fishing shows that did in fact take place, promoter Luc Lemay testified at the inquiry into the sponsorship scandal.

Many of the bills were duplicates of a legitimate invoice that Corriveau submitted for one of Lemay's hunting and fishing shows at Montreal's Olympic Stadium in 1999.

Lemay said Corriveau did little work or no work on the regional events and simply substituted the names of the smaller communities but left the rest of the document unchanged.

Corriveau, also a graphic designer, had cut himself in on the lucrative deals at 17.5 per cent but did little more than eyeball mockups for most of the contracts, said Lemay.

"I never verified these bills," he said.

A $2.7 million People's Almanac contract and the Montreal outdoors show were the only two of 19 federally sponsored events for which Corriveau played a major role, said Lemay.

As for the other 17 events worth nearly $28 million, Lemay said he had a "good faith" agreement to pay commissions to Corriveau, but didn't ask for details about Corriveau's work.

Lemay wouldn't corroborate Brault's claims but didn't deny Corriveau's bills were inflated.

[...]

Brault has implicated Corriveau and Lemay in the wide-ranging scheme that allegedly used Brault's Groupaction firm to secretly funnel at least $1.1 million to the party's debt-ridden Quebec wing.

Brault said he paid Corriveau nearly $500,000 under a bogus contract, and alleged Corriveau sent the cash to the Quebec wing.

Brault, who's semi-retired, also testified Corriveau pressed him to make huge financial contributions, while one of Lemay's firms allegedly paid Brault $2.3 million in bogus commissions to offset the party's financial demands.

Lemay has admitted that $1.9 million in bills from Groupaction were "perhaps a bit inflated" but insisted Brault told him the money was to help manage sponsorship contracts.

He said he he had no idea Brault was being pressured for Liberal contributions and said no Liberals ever strongarmed him into sending cash.

Gomery was incredulous when Lemay claimed he still didn't know about Brault's allegations, which have made international headlines.

"I've never seen media coverage like that of Mr. Brault's testimony," said the judge, adding: "You've read nothing about it?"

Lemay replied: "I don't have the time to read it."

Gomery then said, "Maybe it's time for a break," before ordering a pause in the proceedings.

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Apr. 14 - Andre Coyne absolutely rocks. I am floored that the existence of dark matter is proven because scientists weighed the universe and found something was missing ... I know there isn't some cosmic scale that they used, but being a Lowly Humnities Major I get close to these kinds of theories and then they slip right past me.

So what does dark matter have to do with the Defining the "fiscal imbalance"?

One of the delights of federal-provincial relations is the ingenuity with which the premiers find new ways to rationalize the same unchanging demand for more money. ..

Remember the 18% ratio? That was the percentage of all provincial health spending that Ottawa was obliged to pony up, some years back, or risk violating one or another of the laws of thermodynamics. The accounting was dubious enough -- the provinces conveniently forgot about federal transfers in the form of tax points, and in any event the money all goes into provincial general revenues, not some sequestered bank account marked “health” -- but no more so than the underlying principle. Which was … what, exactly? Well, 18% was what Ottawa used to kick in “for health,” circa 1995, before the “unilateral” (ie federal) reductions in federal transfers to the provinces imposed in that year’s budget. And why should that be any sort of benchmark? ...

Lately the premiers have discovered a new formula. .. The fiscal imbalance is one of those things like dark matter or quantum uncertainty that defy comprehension by the ordinary layman. Its precise magnitude has been the subject of countless arcane calculations -- the government of Quebec devoted a whole white paper to the subject -- but its basic mathematical expression may be reduced, by a combination of Lagrange polynomial interpolation and dead reckoning, to two lines: 1. Ottawa has money. 2. We want it.

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Apr. 14 - Sometimes Nick at Quotulatiousness drives me nuts. He writes very well, but too often contents himself with just quoting other people leaving his readers thirsty for more.

Now I've got him! He's got a post in which he does much of the driving himself here and scores:

The author also waves that wonderful "self esteem" flag, but that's a rant for another time.

I think we may be going too far to attempt to protect our kids from the real world by making even their most competitive environments less challenging (the "Nerf"-ing of kids' lives). How much of a shock is the real world going to be to someone who's never been exposed to the good and the bad of real personal conflicts outside the home?

Read the whole thing.

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Aprl. 14 - David Brooks has a straight-forward style that I really love. He uses words like "squishier" and phrases like "arcane fudges" that cut across the blather of nuance - which is basically the art of saying nothing but to say it well - and makes his points squarely and unequivocally.

Today's column is a gem (Loudly, With a Big Stick.) In the course of explaining why John Bolton will make a terrific Ambassador to the U.N., (he's there to represent the U.S.A., remember?) he explains why Americans will never accept some lofty world government and, at the risk of breaking a great many trans-nationalist hearts, exposes the primary reasons why people who love liberty and self-rule would never accept it either.

We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes and the losers accepting majority decisions.

Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.

Second, we will never accept global governance because it inevitably devolves into corruption. The panoply of U.N. scandals flows from a single source: the lack of democratic accountability. These supranational organizations exist in their own insular, self-indulgent aerie.

We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.

Fourth, we understand that these mushy international organizations liberate the barbaric and handcuff the civilized. Bodies like the U.N. can toss hapless resolutions at the Milosevics, the Saddams or the butchers of Darfur, but they can do nothing to restrain them. Meanwhile, the forces of decency can be paralyzed as they wait for "the international community."

Fifth, we know that when push comes to shove, all the grand talk about international norms is often just a cover for opposing the global elite's bêtes noires of the moment - usually the U.S. or Israel. We will never grant legitimacy to forums that are so often manipulated for partisan ends.

Sometimes it takes sharp elbows to assert independence. But this is certain: We will never be so seduced by vapid pieties about global cooperation that we'll join a system that is both unworkable and undemocratic.

With a terrific sense of contrast, Wrethard examines the French disenchantment with the EU Constitution taking a Guardian article as his base line and expands it into a post that parallels the Brooks column which, although they pursue different paths, come to similar conclusions about the sense of what it is to be a "nationality."

He calls passage of the EU Constitution a "Faustian bargain"

{French] People are beginning to understand the document before them but the political salesmen are determined to offer any combination of rebates, coupons, special offers and financing to get the final signature on the contract of sale. Stephen Benet's "The Devil and Daniel Webster" speaks of the belated remorse that so often follows Faustian bargains, though like as not there will be no reprieve from the consequences of this deal.

Although Wretchard explains a great many economic and political reasons why the French might reject the EU Constitution, I believe the answer may be far more basic: they don't want to stop being that indefinable thing that makes them unique which would happen were they to relinquish self-rule.

I think the French (as are the British, Dutch, and most especially the Eastern European countries who are unwilling to trade Soviet dominance for French dominance) are actually expressing a yearning they dare not admit to because it would make them just like us Yanks: love of country, love of those intrinsic matters that define them as unique, and love of being (don't laugh) French.

[Note the final paragraph in the Guardian article! They feel they need to cheat to win, which is most definitely not a sign of confidence.]

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Apr. 14 - Neo-Nazi Wolfgang Droege was shot and killed last night in east Toronto.

My only comment is that this guy only got 3 years for trying to overthrow the government of Dominica, but got 13 years for cocaine possession and weapons possession in Alabama. Something is wrong with that! Dominica sounds rather interesting; the website I googled says

Dominica was the last of the Caribbean islands to be colonized by Europeans, due chiefly to the fierce resistance of the native Caribs. France ceded possession to Great Britain in 1763, which made the island a colony in 1805. In 1980, two years after independence, Dominica's fortunes improved when a corrupt and tyrannical administration was replaced by that of Mary Eugenia CHARLES, the first female prime minister in the Caribbean, who remained in office for 15 years. Some 3,000 Carib Indians still living on Dominica are the only pre-Columbian population remaining in the eastern Caribbean.

I know the KuKluxKlan has tried to project a new image and that there are always fools who will be taken in by their b.s., but to me they are always the Democratic Rifle Club that was formed shortly after the Civil War and used murderous means to intimidate and deny enfranchised African-Americans their legally constituted civil rights. (Only one google reference. What do they teach in schools these days?)

I've filed this under the "Canada" category because I don't have one for "Sick Bastards Who Finally Died and Went to Hell" and under USA because I don't have one for "I don't believe in hate speech laws but I do affirm my right to get in your face and call you out when you preach that kind of crap."

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