OFF TO HEAR my youngest brother’s band, Copper, play at the “Sundown in the City” festival, which they’re headlining. Back later.

I CAN’T SEEM TO FIND the full text of Tom Ridge’s Flight 93 speech yesterday, but to my surprise what I heard on TV was quite good. Here is a soundbite:

Your loved ones did not expect to serve the cause of freedom on that Tuesday morning, but serve it they did. Faced with the most frightening circumstances one could possibly imagine, they met the challenge like citizen soldiers, like Americans.

Not as good as Dave Barry’s column, but not bad.

DAMIAN PENNY weighs in on the Chretien flap.

UPDATE: Armed Liberal embraces banality. Thanks, Salon!

TIM BLAIR REPORTS ON THESE “FORBIDDEN THOUGHTS” concerning a possible Salon bankruptcy. All I can say is that this is in dreadful taste, and I hope that TimBlair.Com loses every single one of its paying subscribers as a result. . . .

UPDATE: Er, this post was tongue in cheek, you know. I got several emails saying that I was too hard on Tim and, even more alarmingly, some congratulating me for putting him in his place. Though those were probably all Salon staffers using fake names. . . .

I guess Andrea was right about my sense of humor. Oh, well.

ASPARAGIRL, who’s not happy about this, offers a link to this Fox story with more information on the radioactive ship.

I’ve gotten some emails from people claiming to know about various nasty things being smuggled in cargo containers, but the sources were unknown and I couldn’t confirm anything. I wonder if there’s more going on along these lines than we know.

THE CANADIAN EMBASSY HAS RESPONDED to my email concerning Chretien’s remarks by sending, without comment, this extract from his interview:

Peter Mansbridge: By the end of the day, what were you thinking about in terms of how the world had changed?

Prime Minister Chrétien: But I’ve said that it is a division in the world that is building up. And I knew that it was the inspiration of it. For me, I think that the rest of the world is a bit too selfish, and that there is a lot of resentment. I felt it when I dealt with the African file for the Summit of the G8. You know, the poor, relatively, get poorer all the time. And the rich are getting richer all the time. You know, now we see the abuse of the system with problems in the United States at this moment with the corporate world, you know.

When you think that, you know, you have to let go somebody in the Cabinet because perhaps relatively very minor things…of guidelines. And there was billions of dollars that were basically stolen from the shareholders. And we have to you know solving the problems when you read history. Everybody don’t know when to stop. There is a moment, you know, when you have to stop. There is a moment when you have very powerful (inaudible).

I said that in New York one day. I said, you know talking, it was Wall Street, and it was a crowd of capitalists, of course, and they were complaining because we have a normal relation with Cuba, and this and that, and, you know, we cannot do everything we want.

And I said…if I recall, it was probably these words: ‘When you’re powerful like you are, you guys, is the time to be nice.’ And it is one of the problems. You know, you cannot exercise your powers to the point that of humiliation for the others. And that is what the Western world, not only the Americans, the Western world has to realize, because they are human beings too, and there are long﷓term consequences if you don’t look hard at the reality in 10 or 20, or 30 years from now. And I do think that the Western world is going to be too rich in relation to the poor world. And necessarily, you know, we look upon us being arrogant, self﷓satisfying, greedy and with no limits. And the 11th of September is an occasion for me to realize that it’s even more.”

Well, there is a mild effort to expand the claims of misbehavior beyond America alone, but this is — except for that one phrase – entirely about accusations of American wrongdoing when you get down to it. I’d be interested in seeing what impression the entire interview gives.

UPDATE: Lots of Canadians seem to dislike this guy:

I am a Canadian and I found Mr. Chretien’s remarks offensive. The clear message in the interview is that the US in particular and the west generally must bear responsibility for the actions of those in the third world who are angry and who are seeking revenge because of it. This line of reasoning is so empty headed and easy to refute that it is barely worth making the effort.

Americans only have to deal with Mr. Chretien’s foolish and witless conduct when he is addressing issues of mutual interest. In Canada, we live with the results of his buffoonery every day. His government is in complete disrepute-charges of corruption and cronyism are so frequent that they are rarely reported any more. He has been an embarrassment to this country on virtually every occasion. He says in the interview that he likes to keep his distance from US presidents in order to preserve Canada’s independence. I am inclined to think that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush have found it wise to keep their distance from him in order to preserve their sanity. They have enough wing nut leaders in the middle east to deal with.

Ouch. Meanwhile Porphyrogenitus blames the French.

“SIX PEOPLE ARRESTED IN BALTIMORE TERROR PROBE:” Hmm. Things appear to be heating up. Conceivably, this stuff is being timed to produce PR for the White House (and I’m sure you’ll hear some anti-war people claiming that), though I rather doubt it. More likely, it’s taken this long for Al Qaeda and its sympathizers to get some new operations underway — and it’s taken this long for the counterterrorism folks to get their act even partially together.

BLOGOSPHERE FAVORITE ALEX BEAM joins the chorus of writers saying that right-wing pundits have more fun.

This is funny, but it’s a serious problem for the Left. Like Sweden, it’s cruised for a long time on a reputation for free-wheeling hedonism that no longer holds. The hair-shirt left is alienating to a lot of people — I mean, which would you rather have, wild sex and high living or Andrea Dworkin and a spare lifestyle relieved only by an affected moral superiority? To Beam, the answer is obvious:

Who would you rather be? Me, plodding through errands on my bicycle, sporting my pathetic ”One Less Car” T-shirt, or one of the many SUV drivers who blast exhaust in my face as they roar off to fill up on cheap gas? Who would you rather be?

Vrooom, vroom.

MEGAN MCARDLE WONDERS if this story is true. I’m inclined to doubt it, but I’d like to know more.

HERE’S A LINK to the White House document outlining the case against Saddam Hussein.

I seem to remember linking to a similar document setting out the case against Bin Laden. I also remember that (1) some people said it was made up, but since then he and Al Qaeda have admitted complicity in the 9/11 attacks; and (2) Bin Laden hasn’t been heard from in a long, long time.

MORE ON THE RADIOACTIVE SHIP QUARANTINED off New Jersey.

STEPHEN CARTER has resigned from the Kass bioethics commission. Tim Noah, who reports the story, doesn’t suggest a motive, but as I’ve said before, I think it’s because he realized it was a waste of time.

THE INS CAN’T CUT IT, according to this piece in NRO by Michelle Malkin.

BREAKING NEWS: Chretien (well, his Press Office) is “clarifying” his remarks. Seems he wasn’t actually criticizing America after all. Not everyone’s persuaded

UPDATE: More mail:

I’d like to add my voice to the (hopefully) large chorus of e-mails you’ve received from Canadians distancing themselves from the antics of our PM. The man is an embarrassment to our country.

I had stumbled across the article in the Post just before you linked to it. Up until then I had been planning on commenting on the Judd/High Noon post you had linked to in order to defend Canada (he had lumped us in with Germany and France). After I read this I just didn’t have the heart. How could a non-Canadian possibly think any other way when this is our public face?

Yesterday around town most businesses had their flags at half mast and a large number were flying American flags alongside our own. I like to think that this is far more representative of how the Canadian people feel. Despite occassional differences, America is our closest friend and ally and we are fortunate to have you as our neighbour. Chretien’s comments were disgraceful.

Sean Engemoen

Saskatoon, Canada

Thanks Sean. We know most Canadians don’t feel this way. We just have trouble understanding why so many Canadians who do feel this way wind up in high office. And yes, my inbox runneth over — and nearly all the email is from Canadians.

MARS NEEDS BUREAUCRATS! Governments must control Mars colonization, says British astronomer Sir Martin Rees, or it might turn out like America!

Once an infrastructure is established the costs of getting to Mars will go down, which could open up the possibility for different types of expeditions.

“If they were governmental or international (expeditions), Antarctic-style restraint might be feasible. On the other hand, if the explorers were privately funded adventurers of free-enterprise, even anarchic disposition, the Wild West model would be more likely to prevail,” he said.

Okay, the story’s a bit shy on context, so his remarks may be more reasonable than they sound. But some of us think the “Wild West” wasn’t so bad, and it’s, ahem, “insensitive” of non-Americans to treat it as a synonym for “bad.”

NOT MUCH ACTUAL NEWS in this L.A. Times story on weblogs, which I found on Bill Quick’s site, but it does mention, er, Bill Quick!

But jeez, this is basically the same story other people were running 6 months ago.

HOLLYWOOD HACKING BILL UPDATE: InArguendo has an interview with Alec French, the Minority Counsel on the House Judiciary Sub-Committee on Courts, Internet, and Intellectual Property, regarding Rep. Howard Berman’s “Hollywood Hacking” bill. Readers may recall that the InArguendo folks got the back of the hand from Berman’s office until they revealed that they had a weblog, after which cooperation was forthcoming.

The interview is pretty interesting. I think this is another sign that weblogs are doing more “real journalism.”

UNLIKE DAMIAN PENNY, I DON’T WANT SALON TO GO BANKRUPT. I’ve liked Salon, which does a lot of good reporting amidst the knee-jerk Joe Conason-style stuff.

But reading the comments to Scott Rosenberg’s reply to Penny, I think that Rosenberg comes off as unpersuasive. The 9/11 piece was intended to shock and get attention. It did. Now it’s being criticized — in a less vicious spirit, as commenters note, than the piece itself displayed — and Rosenberg’s unhappy. That’s breaks.

UPDATE: Rosenberg has a new post responding to the critics of his response to Damian Penny’s response to the piece featuring reader responses to. . . . well, this is the Blogosphere, isn’t it?

THIS ARTICLE SAYS that the Germans are still covering up important aspects of the Munich Olympics massacre.

UPDATE: Reader Ralf Goergens copies me on a letter he’s sent taking issue with the Spectator article referenced above:

Letter to the Spectator:

Sir,

Simon Reeve neglects to mention some important aspects in his article “The German way with terror”.

At the time no European government, nor the American one would have been prepared or been able to deal effectively with this kind of terrorism. Some serious mistakes were also made, but to suggest that anti-Semitism, latent or otherwise, was involved on the part of the German police is absurd, if not downright malicious.

This experience led to the founding of the GSG-9 who in 1977 stormed a Lufthansa jet abducted to Somalia. The GSG-9 killed three terrorists and captured the fourth, without any casualties among themselves or the passengers. The Munich debacle also strenghtened the general German resolve in dealing with terrorists. Our domestic terrorists were defeated, their demands for negotiation were turned down, at the expense of the lives of some hostages.

In the 1980s some Germans were abducted by Lebanese terrorists to prevent the incarceration of an accomplice of theirs, who had tortured and murdered an American navy diver and later was arrested by German police. He received a life-sentence despite the threat to murder the hostages. Here is the URL of a Congressional Record on that matter: Link

Around the same time, the head of the CIA station in Beirut was abducted and then tortured to death by the same terrorist organization. The USA never took any revenge for that, nor for the suicide-bombing of the US Marine barracks which led to the death of 241 Marines (lobbing some large shells in the general direction of suspected terrorists does hardly count). [I heartily agree — GR]

I mention this only to show that it is impossible to properly deal with an implacable foe if one is unprepared for his savagery.

The current German government may refuse to participate in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but German military and police are nevertheless involved in fighting terrorism. German commandos are in Afghanistan, fighting remnant Al Queda and Taleban forces and German ships patrol around the horn of Africa. I wouldn’t call this yielding to terror.

When fighting terror Germany is walking on thin ice, though. If German authorities had dealt with the terrorists in Munich as harshly as it seems appropriate now, with the benefit of hind-sight, your paper might very well have published an article called “The German way with massacre”. alluding to some altogether different historic parallels. Today’s world opinion would be happy to draw the same parallels if Germany did not act with the restraint it shows right now. Imagine the reaction to a German version of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

Kind regards,

Ralf Goergens

Munich

These seem to be excellent points — though, frankly, it’s hard to imagine any more hysteria over Guantanamo Bay than actually took place. I imagine, in fact, that Mary Robinson would have been keenly respectful of German “sensitivities” on the subject.

CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER JEAN CHRETIEN is a blowhard. Instead of criticizing the United States and saying that the 9/11 attacks were America’s fault for trying to “impose its values” around the world (as opposed to those of people who stone women to death for baring their ankles) perhaps Chretien should do something about the mobs imperiling free speech in Montreal.

Chretien is a poster boy for what’s wrong with the world’s governing classes. It’s disgusting, and Canadians should be ashamed to have him as their spokesman. I suspect that some of them are.

And why is it that the people who lecture the United States on its “arrogance” are always so arrogant themselves?

UPDATE: Canadian reader M. McInnis writes:

I likely speak for many Canadians when I say that I agree with your sentiments about the our Prime Minister. They say that in a democracy you get the political leaders you deserve; what does that say about us when Chretien has been elected to three consecutive majority governments? (Though with the political right in Canada split between two parties, Chretien’s Liberal government “mandates” have been with less than 50% of the popular vote (e.g. 41% in 2000).

The link below takes you to a brief piece the Globe and Mail prepared on Chretien during the last federal election. Appropriately, it is called “Ambition or arrogance?”

Uh, I’ll take #2. Then there’s this:

I am a Canadian, born and raised. Am I ashamed to have Chretien as my “spokesman”?

Hell YES !!!

Rick in Toronto

Thanks, Rick.

UPDATE: Here’s more Canadian mail:

Our esteemed Prime Minister states that “You cannot exercise your power to the point of humiliation of others” in the National Post article you linked. It’s funny that exercising power to the point of humiliating others seems to be a guiding principle of Chretien’s long political career. The sacking of his chief rival Paul Martin, our former finance minister (link), is the most recent example of this.

Dave Peterson

Vancouver

Reader Eric Tam (who unlike the folks I quote above is an American, not a Canadian) thinks I’m too hard on Chretien, and sends this link to a report in the Toronto Star that gives Chretien’s remarks less of an anti-American spin. Personally, I think it was pretty clear who Chretien was talking about (note his self-report of bravely standing up to “Wall Street.”) But if Chretien didn’t mean to call America names, he can certainly clarify his remarks on the subject. I’ve emailed the Canadian Embassy for a reaction, and will report any response. UPDATE: Tam emails that he’s a Canadia living in America. Sorry. Actually, I think that means that everyone who’s emailed so far is Canadian!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Canadian blogger Mark Wickens says “Sorry, America.” And Jason Bauer has posted the letter that he sent to the Canadian embassy.

CHARLES JOHNSON has an eyewitness report from the Pro-Palestinian riot at Concordia University in Montreal. Hanan Ashrawi will speak today at Colorado College, and though there will probably be demonstrations, it’s highly unlikely that she’ll be silenced by an angry mob.

Yet we keep hearing that it’s America where unpopular views are being suppressed.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish emails:

This letter is totally for publication.

I normally never question how another writer writes his weblog, nor do I usually ask people to stick a certain label onto a certain action. But the events of the horrible anti-Jewish protest at Concordia University, where Holocaust survivors were surrounded, spat upon, and kicked, can hardly be said to be called a “pro-Palestinian” riot. Throwing pennies at Jews is an age-old anti-Semitic tactic; it has nothing to do with protesting the situation in the Middle East. This was done by the so-called “protesters.” The riot didn’t seem to have as much to do with

protesting the Palestinian situation as it did taunting and tormenting the Jews who came to hear Netanyahu. So let’s call it what it was: An anti-Jewish riot.

You don’t have to, of course, agree with or follow my suggestion. But I will refer to it only as an anti-Jewish riot in the future, and even went back and changed my entry from 9/10 to reflect that.

I wonder why they managed to prevent such an outburst in Toronto, but couldn’t seem to do so in Montreal?

LIFE AMONG THE KURDS:

I watched the Iraqi troops from the roof of a house belonging to the forty-year-old Stia Ahmed. In her bedroom she has a large photograph of her husband, Qassem Mohammed, who died in Saddam’s army fighting the Iranians during the war. In the picture he has long hair because he was, like many in Iraqi Kurdistan, a Dervish, a believer in the Sufi-influenced interpretation of Islam. In view of the proximity of the Iraqis I asked Mrs. Ahmed what she would do if the Americans attacked. She said that if the rest of the village fled then she would go too, but if they stayed she would stay. Then, expressing a view I was to hear from many in Iraqi Kurdistan, she said that despite the risks to her village, and even her life, she still wanted America to attack. “We would prefer Saddam to be destroyed,” she said. “He did nothing for us.”

At a nearby shop I met a group of some twenty-five men and boys of all ages. In these conservative and rural parts, girls and women do not venture out of their houses without permission or unless they have good reason to. The men complained that none of them had anything to do because many of their fields lay in Iraqi-controlled territory and unless you paid a large bribe you could not work them. Men of military age hardly dared to cross the lines anyway for fear of being drafted into Saddam’s forces, while on their own side mines infested the fields. Ibrahim Kheder Mikhail, a sixty-eight-year-old, said that because of this, “it is like a prison here.” I conducted a straw poll. Bearing in mind the risk to Shoresh if the US attacked, I asked who was in favor of a US-led offensive and who was against. Not a single man was against. It was certainly not a scientific poll but still, judging from many other talks I had with Kurds, I suspect that even if it had been, the result would not have been much different. These men, however, were not part of any armed force. . . .

According to Dilshad, over in Mosul “things in the market are very slow, because people are afraid of American attacks.” What frightens people most, Kurds and Arabs alike, is the prospect of civilian casualties. Still, according to Haider, “people want America to attack because they are hungry and suffering a lot from Saddam.”

Reader Jakub Rehor sent this link, and said he was impressed that the New York Review of Books is running this kind of stuff. Me too.

COSMIC CONVERGENCES? SKBubba has not one, but two. I don’t see God as a short-seller, though.

YES, I’M UP: Blogging will continue today at, ahem, a somewhat slacker pace than yesterday’s near-all-out effort. I have classes today, and, well, even I can’t spend that much time in front of a computer on a steady basis. Though I managed to go out to dinner with my wife and daughter, read a couple of chapters of the latest book we’re reading at bedtime, and even soak my computer-savaged muscles in the Jacuzzi, so it wasn’t all toil in the salt mines.

I don’t plan to link to any more 9/11 remembrances. Let’s look forward now. Read Lileks (and check out the graphic at the top of his page) for more thoughts along that line.

Back later.

DALE AMON DISCOVERS the benefits of a lifetime of physical fitness. Er, not his lifetime, you understand.