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Two Steyn Corner posts and a post from Contentions bring you up to date on the chilling speech actions by the state in Canada.
“The tyranny of the administrative state”
…That’s how Powerline’s Scott Johnson characterizes Ezra Levant’s inquisition for the crime of publishing the Danish cartoons in Canada. Ezra has posted another sharp exchange with Alberta “human rights agent” Shirlene McGovern. He explains the wasted time and money (not to mention the broader “chilling effect”) these “human rights” pseudo-courts impose on editors and publishers. There’s then a short pause before Agent McGovern, licensed to chill, responds blandly, “You’re entitled to your opinions, that’s for sure.”
The accused replies that he wishes that were the case. But in Canada today you’re only entitled to your opinions if Agent McGovern says you are. That’s the issue – “for sure”. …
Charles Krauthammer’s glad the Obama drama is over.
… It is fitting that New Hampshire should have turned on a tear or an aside. The Democratic primary campaign has been breathtakingly empty. What passes for substance is an absurd contest of hopeful change (Obama) vs. experienced change (Clinton) vs. angry change (John Edwards playing Hugo Chavez in English).
One does not have to be sympathetic to the Clintons to understand their bewilderment at Obama’s pre-New Hampshire canonization. The man comes from nowhere with a track record as thin as Chauncey Gardiner’s. Yet, as Bill Clinton correctly, if clumsily, complained, Obama gets a free pass from the press. …
Similar observations from Mort Kondracke.
A door-to-door canvasser here for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) told me all during the weekend before Tuesday’s primary that his team was encountering independent voters torn between Clinton and Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).
Surely an anomaly, I thought. Then I ran into such a voter, a teacher taking her young daughter to campaign events. I asked her, “What about Barack Obama?”
“I’ve seen him five times,” she said. “What he says sounds great, but it’s all fluff. There’s no meat there.”
And that, I think, is one reason Clinton pulled out a campaign-saving victory over the Illinois Democrat here.
Welling tears may have helped “humanize” Clinton, especially with women voters, but I think she also made a dent with her updated version of Walter Mondale’s 1984 taunt of his “new ideas” challenger, Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.): “Where’s the beef?” …
The Captain says Bill’s campaigning is creating discord in South Carolina.
Bill Clinton has gotten a lot of mileage out of the notion that he was somehow the nation’s first black president, but that may be coming to an end. The tone he and Hillary have taken when criticizing Barack Obama has begun to generate a reaction among black politicians, and the New York Times reports that the first salvo in return may come soon. Rep. James Clyburn may reverse himself and endorse Obama before the South Carolina primaries after listening to the Clintons in New Hampshire: …
Mike Allen of Politico reports on Bill’s damage control.
On the GOP side, Mark Levin looks at the McCain record.
There’s a reason some of John McCain’s conservative supporters avoid discussing his record. They want to talk about his personal story, his position on the surge, his supposed electability. But whenever the rest of his career comes up, the knee-jerk reply is to characterize the inquiries as attacks.
The McCain domestic record is a disaster. To say he fought spending, most particularly earmarks, is to nibble around the edges and miss the heart of the matter. For starters, consider:
McCain-Feingold — the most brazen frontal assault on political speech since Buckley v. Valeo.
McCain-Kennedy — the most far-reaching amnesty program in American history.
McCain-Lieberman — the most onerous and intrusive attack on American industry — through reporting, regulating, and taxing authority of greenhouse gases — in American history.
McCain-Kennedy-Edwards — the biggest boon to the trial bar since the tobacco settlement, under the rubric of a patients’ bill of rights.
McCain-Reimportantion of Drugs — a significant blow to pharmaceutical research and development, not to mention consumer safety
Pickings of Jan. 6 had a BizzyBlog post on the fraud committed by The Lancet, a Brit medical journal. WSJ Editors weigh in too.
Three weeks before the 2006 elections, the British medical journal Lancet published a bombshell report estimating that casualties in Iraq had exceeded 650,000 since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. We know that number was wildly exaggerated. The news is that now we know why.
It turns out the Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers. It also turns out the timing was no accident. You can find the fascinating details in the current issue of National Journal magazine, thanks to reporters Neil Munro and Carl Cannon. And sadly, that may be the only place you’ll find them. While the media were quick to hype the original Lancet report — within a week of its release it had been featured on 25 news shows and in 188 newspaper and magazine articles — something tells us this debunking won’t get the same play. …
Paul Greenberg takes a grown-up look at the water-boarding debate.
It’s been eclipsed in the news for just a moment by all the hubbub over the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire presidential primary, but earlier you may have noticed the latest suggestion in Congress and Medialand over how to conduct the war on terror: Go after the good guys. Honest. Not the enemy. But the CIA. Not its chief but the lower-downs. Maybe even the grunts. The foot soldiers who do the real work, take the real risks, and who get their hands and maybe even their consciences dirty. Because they’ve got a real war for fight, not another Power Point presentation to prepare or computer projection to analyze. Besides, you can be sure the higher-ups long ago took every precaution to assure what used to be called Plausible Deniability. You see their names and pictures in the paper from time to time — the well-tailored bureaucrats with clean fingernails who sit in air-conditioned offices at Langley issuing memos designed to cover their precious backsides. Just in case, as they say, Questions Arise. …