Liberal party leadership race: it can't get any better than this

CTV reports:

David Orchard mulls run at Liberal leadership

Updated Mon. Mar. 27 2006 11:33 PM ET

Canadian Press

OTTAWA — Saskatchewan farmer and two-time Tory leadership hopeful David Orchard is thinking about leaping into the Liberal race.

"What I'm really doing right now is taking calls. I certainly had not been considering it, but calls kept coming so I kept answering them and listening to what people have to say,'' Orchard said in an interview.

"I'm not ruling anything in or anything out.''

In my table of ranks, this guy would be just a notch behind Belinda Stronach. In fact, I'm not even sure about that.
I guess that's what happens to the Natural Governing Party once it's put out of the business of governing.
On a more serious note, it's sad really - that the Liberals now have to deal with this guy. But it's not just about them - the very fact that Mr. Orchard can 'mull' his chances reveals one of the most glaring and disturbing deficiencies of the Westminister system - namely that established political parties are potentically vulnerable to hijacking by an outsider with a small, but dedicated, group of followers.

Elections results in Belarus: a poster

Double standard: Guantanamo vs. Darfur coverage in the Western media

via Daimnation
An excellent post from Atlantic Review that raises very good questions. Cartoons? Look at the Spiegel covers. "Stark" indeed.

Popular German magazines such as Der Spiegel frequently put US critical pictures on their cover. Critical reporting about the world's sole superpower is necessary, but statements like "Torture in the Name of Freedom" (as seen on a recent Spiegel cover) appear to be malicious distortions to sell more copies rather than critical, ethical journalism...

Although Darfur is much closer to Europe than the US, the mass murder, expulsions and rapes in Darfur (some call it "genocide") seem to be covered more extensively in the US than in the German media. American NGOs devoted to Darfur are more vocal than German NGOs. Do Germans care more about alleged torture, abuse, human rights violation and inhumane living conditions in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib than about much worse conditions in Darfur and many other war zones?..

Darfur is more outrageous in both magnitude and intensity than Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, but the US scandals are more in the news because the media is more interested in the perpetrators than in the victims. US perpetrators are more sexy than Sudanese perpetrators, it seems...

It would be easy, and yet true, to bemoan Europe's reflexive anti-Americanism yet another time but it's just one piece of the puzzle.
The bias of such reporting practices results from implicitly 'racist' attitudes which lead to the perpetuation of a double standard in media coverage of international news. (full disclosure - I hate this particular usage of the word, ‘civilizational condescension’ would be a much more appropriate term but I’d have to explain it first so I’ve got to settle for the former). It is an unspoken, patronizing assumption on the part of the media that ‘those savages’ cannot be held to the same standard as ‘civilized people’. 100,000 people ‘over there’ have been made to starve, thousands have been tortured and died - such reports could only produce a collective yawn. It’s the same story all over again. On the other hand, ‘US perpetrators’ of real or imagined digressions are not just ‘sexy’ – they are ‘just like us’ and thus their failings can be instantly translated into a feeling of our own moral superiority, which in turn make Germans/Canadians/French/NDP members etc. feel so good about themselves.

elections in Belarus

Having just watched a Russian TV report:
Lukashenko (answering the question 'for how long does he plan to stay in power):
As long as the people keep letting me to

I think it's applicable to any dictatorship - only through struggle one can win freedom.

Milosevic's death and the future of the ICTY

Today I attended a discussion on Milosevic. Nothing what I heard there was new although I did find out that Voislav Sesel Vojislav ?e?elj is being tried not primarely for his activities as a paramilitary commander rather than a radical Serbian politician.
Whatever can be said about Milosevic, one things seems to be clear in the short-term perspective. His death is a devastating blow to the credibility of the Hague Tribunal as it underscores its procedurial impotence (Milosevic had been in custody for four years and there was no end in sight when he died) and dubious legal standings.
I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps my analysis is rather naive but from what I have understood about his case it rested on the notion of 'command responsibility' which itself is based on 'customary international law' (read more about it here).

To me the whole notion of 'customary' law is itself dubious but even in the text it is stated that

By 1977 the doctrine of command responsibility was accepted as customary international law and was codified in the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, relating to the International Armed Conflicts [emphasis added].

So it seems that the concept would not be applicable to the civil war in former Yugoslavia. However below it states that

It should be noted that international law recognizes the principle of command responsibility both in international and in internal armed conflict.

So when did it happen exactly?

Pictures from Iran

Russan LJ user drugoi posts some pictures from Iran. Check them out - they're really interesting and seem to confirm my long-held suspicion that regime and its people are often not on the same page. While Iran is theocracy run by scary mullas, its people are much more Westernized and much less religious than one might think.

Camille Paglia on Summers

I have already written on the issue of Summers' resignation from Harvard presidency.
Today I came across a very interesting article by Camille Paglia in NYT. She acknowledes that it was the forces of 'professoriat' that brought him down in the first place. But as she points out a lot of Summers' troubles were of his own making due to his abrasive style of communication. But also there was a perception of a disturbing trend, the encroachment upon academic freedom by University administrators.
As Paglia puts it:

Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical expansion of administrative bureaucracies on American college campuses that has distorted the budget and turned education toward consumerism, a checkbook alliance with parents who are being bled dry by grotesquely exorbitant tuitions.

I don't dispute her assessment. It's pretty evident that the forces that brought Summers down were not monolithic and many people found themselves in a firm opposition to him due to a variety of reasons. But still, it doesn't dispell the gloom that comes from the realization that if even such a powerful man as Larry Summers had to crowl acquiescently, rather than stood by his remarks, and was still brought down, the persepctives of simple mortals are that bleak.
And finally my favorite part of the article:

While many issues are rumored to have played a role in Mr. Summers's resignation (including charges of favoritism in a messy legal case involving foreign investments), the controversy that will inevitably symbolize his presidency was the manufactured outcry early last year over his glancing reference at a conference to possible innate differences between the sexes in aptitude for science and math. The feminist pressure groups rose en masse from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last March.

Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity to introduce the forbidden subject of biology to academic gender studies (where a rigid dogma of social constructionism reigns), Mr. Summers collapsed like a rag doll. A few months later, after issuing one abject apology after another, he threw $50 million at a jerrybuilt program to expand the comfort zone of female scientists and others on campus. That one desperate act of profligate appeasement tells volumes about the climate of persecution and extortion around gender issues at too many American universities.