Who in the eurozone can do what Alistair Darling has just done in extremis to save Britain’s banks, as this $10 trillion house of cards falls down? There is no EU treasury or debt union to back up the single currency. The ECB is not allowed to launch bail-outs by EU law. Each country must save its own skin, yet none has full control of the policy instruments.

Germany has vetoed French and Italian ideas for an EU lifeboat fund. The former knows exactly where that leads. It is a Trojan horse that will be used one day to co-opt German taxpayers into rescues for less Teutonic EMU kin. One can sympathise with Berlin. But sharing debts with Italy and Spain was implicit when they agreed to launch the euro. A shared currency entails obligations. We have reached the watershed moment when Germany has to decide whether to put its full sovereign weight behind the EMU project or reveal that it is not prepared to do so in a crisis. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the telegraph

Like many collectivist ideas, the Euro was a solution in search of a problem. Worse, by linking the weaker economies of Southern Europe to the stronger (relatively speaking) of Northern Europe, it actually made matters worse in many cases. With currency, monetary policy and credit, one size does not fit all. The right interest rate for Spain is unlikely to be the same as it is for Germany. But the very premise of the Euro was that it should be.

I have been amazed at how well the US dollar has been doing. Frankly, on fundamentals and projected growth in money supply the USD should be falling. It isn’t, yet. Largely, I suspect, that there is nowhere for funds to go. (Other than the Canadian dollar of course - but we really do not want a $1.50 Canadian dollar.)

There is no serious economic reason for mass immigration to Canada and, as Bissett points out, even if there was “only about 18 to 20 per cent of our immigrants are selected for economic factors. By far the bulk of the immigrants we receive come here because they are sponsored by relatives or because of so-called humanitarian reasons and none of these have to meet the “points system” of selection.”

This has to stop. We are flooding Canada with people who have very little to contribute and we are doing it because the instant a politician suggests we stop doing it he or she is called a racist.

A word which should, frankly, be dropped from the immigration debate altogether.

30-50,000 economically well qualified immigrants would be a net gain to Canada, more than that will not. Time to roll it back.

There is a sort of bell curve of responses ranging from one benighted soul who seems to think Hezbollah is Hamas, a whole heap pointing to the Green Party’s denial that Hezbollah was even at the “peace rally” in TO and then into some rather sound thinking on the nature of terrorism and the proper response to it.

If you have a few minutes go read the whole thing. It is illuminating to read 45 responses to Jago’s question.

Many official sources are claiming to have warned the American intelligence community, which spends $30 billion a year gathering information, about the attacks on the twin towers on that heartbreaking day.

German Intelligence (BND) claims to have warned the U.S. last June, the Israeli Mossad and Russian Intelligence in August. Israeli businesses, which had offices in the Towers, vacated the premises a week before the attacks, breaking their lease to do it. About 3000 Americans working there were not so lucky. Lesley Hughes - Get the Truth

h/t Dawg/ Black Rod

(I have been trying to reach Ms. Hughes campaign office for confirmation…line’s busy.)

UpDate: Reached the Campaign Office and spoke to the very pleasant campaign manager, Selina Bieber. They are aware of the story…the Globe and Mail had called. they are trying to verify it. I left my number and said I’d be happy to talk to the candidate.)

Update II Smoking Gun! At the lovely “Canada Wants the Truth Blog” from 2007 “Barrie Zwicker and Lesley Hughes to speak Thursday September 6th, Winnipeg MB Canada

Thursday on the 3rd floor of Mondragon (91 Albert street.) for 7:30 PM, featuring Author, Media Critic Barrie Zwicker & Fromer CBC jounalist, Editor of Canadian Dimension (www.canadiandimension.com) Leslie Hughes will be discussing 9/11.”

Hey, isn’t Barry Zwicker Smilin Jack’s Troother pal??

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Update III And here is a report of Ms. Hughes as a panelist at a Troother event.

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Update IV: Here we go. Thank you Kate, Blazing, Daimnation and Jonathan Kay at the National Post for linking into this story. With Jonathan we now have MSM ignition….The Post breaks stories, let’s see who follows.

On a side note - I wrote Jonathan to ask him to credit Dr. Dawg and The Black Rod from whom I got the details. So far no call back from Ms. Hughes or her campaign office.

Selina Bieber, Ms. Hughes’ campaign manger who I had a nice chat with this afternoon told me she had already heard from the Globe and Mail - question of the day - will the G&M go with the story or will they sit on it? I am not optimistic. And what of poor Jason? Crickets? Or a head explosion of Biblical proportions?

Update V: The Globe and Mail weighs in - by basically burying the story (they hope) blending it with assorted other candidate outrages.

Winnipeg-area Liberal candidate Lesley Hughes was forced to explain an article she had written about conspiracy theories alleging that the U.S. government was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and that Israeli businesses had advance warning to vacate the premises. The remarks surfaced a day after she joined Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion in a major public outreach to Canada’s Jewish community.

“I find any interpretation of my journalism as anti-Semitic personally offensive and I heartily apologize for that perception,” she said in a statement released late yesterday. globe and mail

Non-apology, apology not accepted: yes, the underlying narrative of the Troothers is implicitly ante-Semitic; but, more importantly, it is batshit crazy. You cannot apologize for being insane - you just have to live with it. But the Liberals are surely not so desperate that they have to nominate crazy people.

But what were the Liberals thinking having Dion sign her nomination papers? More on that tomorrow.

Apparently, John Bennett, who styles himself Communications Director of the Green Party, threatened a blogger, a lefty bloger as it happens, with a suit for slander unless that blogger took down the video above.

Yo, John, there really is nothing dumber than threatening a blogger with legal action…It can give you a nasty virus.

I phoned John Bennett on his cell. He stated this is a doctored interview (though not who doctored it) and then hung up on me before I could confirm his quote. He also stated that the interview was obtained illegally.

Listen and judge for yourself.

Meanwhile, Steve Taylor, who I have to say I trust a lot more than “John Bennett” confirms the authenticity of the tape.

Here’s the deal John, don’t threaten bloggers with legal action if you want to bury an embarrassing quote. Don’t try to tell people that “The Agenda with Steve Paikin” is in the habit of doctoring tapes. You look dumb and you embarrass your leader and your party. It is pretty clear May said that Canadians were stupid. Deal with it.

(Huge hattip to SDA)

Update: Last night as I tried to post this 4000 people had watched the video, as of (9:00 Pacific this morning 10,400 people had seen it. Way to go John.

Update II: TVO confirms the tape is intact.

Update III: 14,956 views at 9:24 PM Pacific and the Communications genius for the Green Party, John Bennett, has apologized but managed to refer to Leftdog as a Conservative blogger twice on Mike Duffy. Dolt.

The meeting was prompted by a series of ominous developments: continuing political turmoil in Pakistan, increasingly deadly attacks against Afghan and Western targets in Afghanistan and American complaints that the Pakistani military has been ineffective in stemming the flow of militants who launch attacks in Afghanistan from Pakistani havens. washington post via The Torch

I have long thought that if Pakistan is unwilling or unable to police the “Tribal Areas” on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border it is, effectively, no longer sovereign over those areas. And if that is the case there is no reason at all for the NATO and American forces not to adopt a radically more aggressive approach to attacks from those areas. Not to mention a very serious attempt to put paid to bin Laden and his henchmen who seem to be, to a degree, operating in the Tribal areas.

It looks as if the Americans may be swinging around to this view. It is, apparently, Obama’s take when he wants to sound bellicose.

Even senior officials at the agency, who have gone out of their way to accommodate the Iranians’ concerns, have little confidence that the Iranians have any intention of reaching a compromise. “All they seem interested in is extending the talks as long as possible while all the time they continue with their uranium enrichment programme,” said an official close to the talks. “Their entire strategy appears to be based on playing for time.” telegraph

Not even the UN is able to kid itself much longer that Iran is going for a bomb, Or at least the materials to make a bomb.

George Bush has five months, more or less, in office. At the moment his place in the history books, fairly or unfairly, stinks.Which means that he has very little to lose pushing over the rotten edifice which calls itself the government of Iran. Nor do the Israelis have much to lose trying to take out a capacity which could eliminate Israel.

Yes, the Euros will whine and, no doubt, Lloyd Axworthy will let out a howl. But there is no reason at all for Bush to leave the Iranian problem his successor.

But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. “I felt it emotionally,” she told The New York Times, “before I understood it factually.” Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was–guess what?–part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly. the new republic

What has always struck me about Ms. Klein is that her world view admits no possibility of doubt, much less error. She knows the truth and sets out to find the facts that back her up. Chait, a rather more nuanced thinker, finds more than a few facts which shoot her down. Not that it matters: to the sort of people who read Klein, “truthiness” is more important than actual fact. And much more interesting.

Italians had decades of Center-Right and Center-Left governments. None were very effectual but, then again, there were no existential issues facing Italy. Business got along just fine in a culture of officially winked at corruption and tax evasion. Politics, to a large degree, consisted of doling out public jobs and funds. That began to change in the 1990s when illegal immigrants and rather phony “refugees” began to arrive in Italy to supplement growing communities of other, documented, immigrants. Dawg cites the issues surrounding the Roma in a number of Italian cities, but Muslim migrants have also piled in.

Like most European countries Italy took a relatively liberal line with these new migrants extending welfare, social services, education and medical services. So long as the immigrant communities were relatively small Italians seemed able to adjust. However, as the immigration continued and as Italian birthrates declined, the non-elite mass of Italians began to seriously question the value of that immigration.

What Dawg sees as fascism - and there are certainly more than a few reasons to describe it that way - is also what I would describe as a cultural nationalism. And it is a cultural nationalism which I suspect will become increasingly prevalent in European countries with relatively large Muslim communities.

One of the great conceits of the left and center-left post-war politicians is that culture does not matter and that we are moving towards a multi-cultural, post national, world. The implication of this belief is that the very idea of “Italianness” is little more than a historical relic which will, with in the embrace of the EU, gradually become a quaint folk custom. Which might well have happened had the EU kept its borders shut to non-European immigration. But, of course, the EU positively encouraged Muslim immigration and the bien-pensant are now reaping the whirlwind.

Now, for the political elites, the essential differences between Western/Christian culture and Eastern/Islamic culture were matters to be ignored or studied or accommodated. Those elites rarely had much to do with the day to day reality of the cultural conflicts which arose. However those conflicts were and are real despite the arm waving and denial of the political elites.

Democratic politics has a generally conservative tendency - most politics takes place without there being much chance for actual change because the elite practitioners of such politics generally agree on all but the most trivial points. To a degree, this elite agreement is one of the main reasons why voter turnout has precipitously declined throughout the West in the last few decades.

However, at a certain point, the politics of elite accommodation effectively collapse in the face of focussed public anger. This can happen very quickly - as it has in Italy - and reflects a sea change in an electorate. Elite politicians ride along happy in the belief that their position, secured by effective media collusion, is secure. After all, when was the last time the voters in a democratic nation voted for real change?

The answer to that question is another question: When was the last time that voters in a democratic nation were confronted with an existential challenge to their culture? Mass, non-assimilated, immigration is just such a challenge and the voters of Italy met it by tossing the old coalition politicians out of office and replacing them with politicians who promised to address the real concerns of ordinary Italians.

I would not be at all surprised to see more of this happen in Europe. And in Canada too if dimwits like Dion really think they can do Green Rape with impunity.