Saturday digest

- As six Middle Eastern countries have announced that they're about to follow Iran into the nuclear club, more on the slogan-busting revelation that as late as 2002, experts agreed that Iraq was about to obtain nukes within a year. That doesn't change the fact that every neo-con is hopping off the bandwagon faster than you can say "yallah", but still, I think what Richard Perle says is fair:

"I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

On the other hand, we have David Frum, he of absolutely stunning naiveté and starry-eyed idealism, the likes of which we'd come to expect from a grade 12 world issues student rather than a White House employee:

"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

- Remaining with Bush, I could help but notice that in the lead story on last night's CTV News broadcast, Tom Clark seemed to insinuate that the hypocrisy of a Colorado bible-thumper, who has been exposed as more phony than a Chinese red-head for being a drug-snorting homosexual while preaching against same-sex marriage, should be laid at the feet of W's Republicans.

This should be a non-story outside of Colorado as it has very little to do with leadership or any of the substance of the issues that matter in this Tuesday's elections.

Contrast the coverage that story is getting to this, which reveals that leader of the notorious Canadian al-Qaeda family, the Khadrs, engaged in business dealings with Maher Arar's buddy Abdullah Almalki, purchasing two-way radios from Almalki (like Arar, later sent to Syria) for use in Afghanistan during the 1990s. However, according to Almalki,

"In Syria I was tortured six times, repeatedly for long periods of time and asked the question about the radios," Mr. Almalki recently told The Globe and Mail. The engineer has long said he knew the Khadr father only through charity work he briefly did in Afghanistan. His business dealings, he insists, were always legal and legitimate.

Why hasn't this come out before? Why has Arar never mentioned the fact that his buddy Almalki had dealings with al-Qaeda operatives as early as 1994? Charity work under the Taliban, hmmm? As the public record shows, it was Arar's friendship with Almalki that led to him being investigated in the first place. Oh, and let's not forget Ottawa resident, Algerian national and security certificate detainee Mohamed Harkat, who admitted to Peter Mansbridge on "The National" that he once took a ride between Ottawa and Toronto with Papa Khadr, but didn't know who he (Khadr) was.

I have two things to say: first, I have long maintained that if Arar wasn't a member of al-Qaeda, he probably knew people who were and said nothing about it; and two, a couple of sayings come to mind - something about birds of a feather and another about walking and talking like a duck.

Shouldn't the media be a little more skeptical now that this has been revealed? But hey, why bother covering this when you can just use some hypocrite social conservative as ammunition to pile on an already reeling W, right, CTV? Or could it be that you're too intimidated and/or politically correct to ask the hard questions of Arar?

- Once again, assimilationism - and sanity - reign in Oz.

- Driving by the PMO yesterday, there was a bedsheet spraypainted with the phrase "KYOTO NOW!" in big block letters hung between two trees on Wellington St. in Ottawa, while treaty-exempt China is well on track to become the world's biggest polluter within four years. Why should Canada commit itself to death by a thousand cuts when countries like China don't have to?

(H/T to Fred for those last two items.)

- Finally, Skeelo asks the following on the minimum wage debate taking place in Ontario:

Here's a very quick math lesson for those in favour of boosting the minimum wage. Let's say I own a small independent business and need to keep my prices low to remain competitive. I can afford to pay 5 employees $8/hr (which the minimum wage will jump to on Feb 1) for a total of $40/hr. If the wage rate jumps to $10/hr I can still only afford $40/hr. That means I will have to let go 1 employee to keep my wage structure constant. In other words I now only employ 4 of those 5 people and 1 is out of a job. Why is basic grade 3 math so damned hard to understand?

It strikes me that the same people who think forcing labour costs upward is going to increase the material wealth of the poor probably also think that printing more money is a solution to the issue of poverty.