Stephen Taylor

It’s been a while since my last post (4 days!) but it has felt longer since I’ve been busy doing a lot of blog stuff unrelated to this blog.

During the weekend and over this week, Craig Smith and I have been working extended hours (Craig tells me that he has a day job… a reality outside of this grad student’s life) moving Blogging Tories to its own server to give it some more space to roam.

We’ve also been upgrading the site’s software and its plugins. Due to a new caching program that we wrote, the aggregator no longer is the bottleneck for load times. Upon launching this new feature, we noticed an increase in hits. The small percentage of you who gave up on the page after 10 seconds of load time, welcome back!

Perhaps the most exciting change to Blogging Tories is the launch of our new group blog: The Brookstreet Group. The blog is named after the Ottawa-area hotel where some conservatives (fresh off of a federal election victory) got together this year and talked about [censored]. It has also been reported that the Bilderberg group met there soon after. Secret meetings and hidden agendas… what better name than “The Brookstreet Group” to generate some conspiracy theories among some of our nuttier left-leaning friends?

The Brookstreet Group Blog will be written by “conservative notables” (as Steve Janke puts it) and will hopefully generate a lot of discussion and perhaps some news.

The Blogging Tories Television plugin has also been upgraded to add the capability of hosting YouTube videos along with the Google Video standard that we used in the first version. The plugin is still being upgraded (as I find the time) and will soon feature a video archives feature, a full screen feature and video submission capability. For now though, if you have an interesting video that you’d like featured on BT-TV, send me the Google Video or YouTube link.

Blogging Tories Television will also be host to some exciting new BT-produced content soon, so what better reason do you need to install the plugin on your own blog! Please help us launch Blogging Tories version 4.0 and install the BT-TV plugin today. (what a pitch!)

We’ve also included more gimmicky features such as the Stephen Harper “days in office” mini-skyscraper graphic. This was mostly a diversion to figure out how to get PHP to dynamically generate an image, but it will inspire Conservative bloggers to help that number grow… or it will inspire Liberals to minimize its final total (NDPers don’t know where they want that number to go these days). Blogging Tories, show your pride by showing your visitors how long our friend “Steve” has been in office!

We’ll be launching a few more features that I haven’t mentioned yet (I may update this post as they become available), so keep watching the site. If you’re a long time conservative reader of this blog and/or of any Blogging Tories blog, why not join our ranks as a member?

In an article on the CBC website yesterday, the state-run broadcaster tries to label the Conservative government’s evacuation of Lebanese-Canadians from Lebanon as slow.

The article even gives a subtitle to a section of the article which we anticipate will be critical of the evacuation effort. The subtitle reads “Criticize evacuation work“.

The CBC reports,

Protesters also criticized Harper’s support of the Israeli mission and the slowness of the Canadian evacuation from Lebanon.

and the supporting quote that it offers has nothing to do with Harper’s evacuation efforts at all:

“Mr. Harper doesn’t represent the opinions of the Canadian people by unconditionally supporting Israel,” said Jerome Charaoui. “Canada should not support Israel, a country that is perpetuating war crimes.”

The CBC asserts that there are protestors that decry the “slow” response by the government on the evacuation efforts. The CBC even writes up a paragraph leading into what one might assume to be evidence supporting the network’s claim. Instead we just get some twit ranting about war crimes. The rest of the subsection is also weak on evidence on protesters complaining about the “slow” response.

Granted, it’s likely that there was somebody at the protests that thought the government’s response was “slow” but the CBC does not provide a supporting quote. The leading paragraph and the quotation are disjoint. This represents wishful reporting by the CBC coupled with weak follow-through.

Regarding the evacuation of foreign and resident nationals from Lebanon, the following has been said about the (what should have been) obvious difficulty in the wide-scale evacuation of citizens (50,000 Canada, 25,000 US) from Lebanon:

CNN (Jack Cafferty): Remember Katrina? France has gotten more than 700 of their people out!

MSNBC (Chris Jansing): Sort of brought back, you know, the whole Katrina thing.

Democrats (Nancy Pelosi): Just another manifestation of the Katrina mentality.

Democrats (Harry Reid): It is too bad that this is being treated as a mini Katrina.

CNN (Miles O’Brien): “You know, what we’re hearing from everybody, just about everybody, that comes off that ship, is not a very pretty picture. And one of the people we talked to earlier today equated it to a Katrina-type scenario. Is there some endemic problem in the U.S. government that it can’t handle a decent, a large-scale evacuation?”

CNN (letters picked by Jack Cafferty): >“Katrina, immigration, evacuating Americans, gasoline prices, prescription prices, health care, minimum wage, border security, almost anything that affects the average middle class American is the last priority for this administration and this Congress.” “Yes! It’s shades of Katrina again.” “Compared to other countries’ evacuations, the U.S. acts like it was unprepared to deal with the situation. Lack of planning seems to be a recurrent theme for the government in recent years, i.e. Iraq and Katrina.”

Democrats (Steny Hoyer): “This administration is not good on evacuations, as people in Katrina found out.”

CAIR (Dawud Walid): “The current administration’s minimal effort in rescuing Arab Americans and American Muslims leaves the impression to many that their lives are not as valued as other Americans. This slow response seems like a flashback to the miserable evacuation logistics of Hurricane Katrina where thousands of Americans, primarily African Americans, were left in perilous conditions.”

Toronto Star (Sean Gordon): “Searing editorials in the province’s major papers suggested the evacuation could end up being Harper’s equivalent of Hurricane Katrina”

Arab American News: “Until early Wednesday, the U.S. still had not begun evacuating its citizens. Evacuees were then supposed to come up with the money to cover their emergency-transportation costs. In the face of criticism that the plan smacked of a post-Katrina-like response, the administration backed down from its financial demand on Tuesday”

Now that you’ve got a sample of the hysterical media and political comparisons of the slower than desired exodus from Lebanon to the Katrina disaster, is the use of Katrina as a sensationalist reference point for failed government planning and execution even that valid in the real world? According to Popular Mechanics’ read of the recently released Congressional Report on the US government’s response to the hurricane of that name:

“In reality, despite organizational shortcomings, the rescue spearheaded by the National Guard and the Coast Guard turned out to be the largest and fastest in U.S. history, mobilizing nearly 100,000 responders within three days of the hurricane’s landfall. While each of the 1072 deaths in Louisiana was a tragedy, the worst-case scenario death toll would have been 60,000.”

Oh.