If you go to the Drudge Report right now, you'll see the teaser:

PAPER: Soros 'at center of hedge funds plot to cash in on demise of the euro'...

If you click on the link, you'll see the Mail Online headline:

Man who broke the Bank of England, George Soros, 'at centre of hedge funds plot to cash in on fall of the euro'

If you read the lead paragraph, you'll see:

A secretive group of Wall Street hedge fund bosses are said to be behind a plot to cash in on the decline of the euro.

And if you read the entire story, you'll see it is spun entirely around a private dinner meeting that Soros himself did not attend: [Read more]

I'm not one of those who see the glass as seven-eighths empty. I see it, rather, as one-eighth full. So I'm not crying in my crisp, refreshing Canadian beer over last night's 5-3 loss to the United States in Olympic hockey.

No, there is an upside: Canada won't have to face Russia or Sweden in the gold-medal game next weekend. The downside is that we will have to beat both those powerhouse teams one-on-one to get within even sniffing distance of the podium. Assuming we can first dispatch Germany tomorrow night. [Read more]

The Vancouver Olympic organizing committee has gotten a lot of unfair criticism, so I hate to pile on.
But I've watched quite a few medal presentation ceremonies over the past few days, and I'm now fairly positive: that is not Canada's flag on display.
Ours is a red maple leaf on a white central square, with two red bands half as wide on either side. Its proportions are therefore 1:2.
All the flags I see raised at the medal ceremonies appear to be 2:3. And I'm making allowances for camera angles.
That's fine for some countries -- like France, Italy or even Russia -- whose flags really have those proportions.
Not, I would argue, for Canada. [Read more]

OK, there's this nagging problem I have. Sort of an obsession. I push it to the back of my mind, where it stays quiescent for months, causing me no grief. Then it re-emerges, always re-emerges. Help me, dagblog community. HELP ME!

I blame Genghis for this latest relapse. In a comment to a post by Orlando (below), he wrote:

"A lying Mrs. Tebow would have no significance on the abortion debate. But nor would an honest Mrs. Tebow." [Read more]

I get it. You're angry with the incompetent, self-serving, tone-deaf leadership of the Democratic Party. Just don't try to tell me you're surprised.

The good news is: the solution is at your fingertips. Channel that anger! It's a midterm election year -- traditional time for throwing out incumbents. Just beat the Republicans to the punch by primarying the asses off all these pseudo-Democratic dickheads. Not all of them, of course. There are at least a handful who stand with and for the common man. But there's a long list of corporatist anti-progressives who can go. [Read more]

I'm totally unqualified to predict who'll win tomorrow's Senate election, which puts me right up there with every other pundit or expert. I suspect Obama's last-minute intervention and a desperate get-out-the-vote effort just might eke out a narrow win for Coakley. But I wouldn't bet on it; she's a bad candidate with an aura of entitlement and zero resonance with the national mood Obama tapped into just over a year ago.

I also suspect some in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party wouldn't mind losing their supposed super-majority. All it ever did was raise public expectations that they'd bring in effective legislation. As the health-care fiasco showed, that kind of pressure is the last thing congresscritters want. [Read more]

Considering what's just happened to the poor, sick, malnourished and misgoverned Haitian people, it may seem an irrelevant distraction to focus on the words of one arrogant Christian bigot. But it needs to be done. It's time for Pat Robertson to just go away.

Conjuring up bogus causality after the fact is his recurring shtick. Feminists and gays caused 9/11. Abortion caused Katrina. Evacuating Gaza caused Sharon's stroke. Health care reform probably caused swine flu. Teaching evolution no doubt led to Fort Hood and the underpants bomber. Enough.

It wasn't sufficient that Haiti lost 100,000 people or more, they had to endure this dreck: [Read more]

Don't mean to step on anyone's franchise (no need to lawyer up, Deadman) but I simply have to share this armchair fan's elation at tonight's orgy of televised hockey fare: four games to choose from, spread over the next seven hours -- and much of it top-notch.

It starts with Sweden and Finland facing off in the bronze-medal game of the World Junior Hockey Championship. Sweden is always a contender, but I'm pulling for the upstart Swiss, who pulled off a last-minute overtime win to eliminate mighty Russia from the medal round. It was the first time Switzerland had ever beaten Russia. (The game for the bronze is actually under way; Sweden leads 5-0 after one period.) [Read more]

Reading material! I'm talking reading material. Jeez!

I read today that sales have soared for British science popularizer John Gribbin's Get a Grip on Physics. The reason? Photos of Tiger Woods's crashed SUV showed a copy of that 2003 book on the floorboards. So Tiger wasn't distracted by the drugs or alcohol he'd imbibed, or wife Elin tossing golf clubs at his speeding vehicle. He was simply so engrossed in the book that he failed to successfully exit his driveway. That's some riveting reading! [Read more]

Something just happened in Dallas that hit me in the gut. Forty-six years ago, it was (as Noam Chomsky is quoted as dismissively saying) "a man in a building shooting a man in a car." For most people, however, the JFK assassination significantly changed how they viewed the world. This week, hardly anybody noticed when management of the Dallas Morning News sent out an internal memo announcing a structural reorganization. Huffington Post ran an article about it, as did Editor & Publisher, but for most of the public it was all "inside baseball." [Read more]

Laura showed up at my door today. Well actually, a UPS guy. But he handed over a copy of The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov's final, unfinished, fragmentary novel.

I had never ordered a book pre-publication before, without waiting for the reviews or (more likely) for it to go into paperback. This was different. This was Nabokov -- his first "new" work in more than 30 years. And, obviously, his last. I had to have it. [Read more]

One of Drudge Report's headlines today is "Sarkozy first to admit: Iran working on nukes." (The original was, of course, all-caps; I'll spare you.) It links to a Jerusalem Post article that reads in part:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy maintained that the Islamic republic was still working on a nuclear weapons program.  [Read more]

Compare and contrast.

Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter (whose job it is to enact legislation): "I have a fundamental problem with any 1,000-page bills."

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart (whose job it is to make us laugh): "I've read the bill." [Read more]

We finally have liftoff. Congratulations, NASA, sixth time's the charm.

Now we wait for the shuttle to catch up and dock with the International Space Station, which should happen around midday Friday. Here'a site that lets you follow the choreographed dance between the two vehicles in more-or-less real time:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/

Once the two spacecraft are docked together for their 16-day rendezvous, they should make a spectacular sight from Earth. [Read more]

I don't actually know how the folks who manage Eve Online plan to deal with this, except that they've booted the virtual fraudster out of the game.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/07/03/science-online-bank-heist.html

The scary part is that he successfully traded the "interstellar kredits" he stole for real-life money. Only $5,000 or so -- but still! If what you stole doesn't really exist, can you be accused of committing a crime in the real world? Especially when the virtual world permits and even encourages illegal activities? Suppose you libel a fellow player in an interactive game. Does he or she have recourse in a real-world court? [Read more]

Happy Canada Day, everyone. Snap quiz, if you're up to it:
1. Exactly what are we celebrating the anniversary of?
2. Who gets top billing as "Father of Confederation?"
3. Name one other.
4. Where exactly is the Canada-U.S. border (I mean the long straight part)?
5. Why did Canadians decide they wanted a country anyway?
6. What's the national anthem? Fairly easy one.
7. What's the flag? Ditto.
8. What's the national sport? What, another gimme?
9. How many provinces are there? Territories?
10. Aside from free-trade squabbles, what's our biggest looming dispute with the U.S.?

I thought I'd share one of those channel-surfing moments that make you wish all TVs came with a screen-grab function. I happened to switch to TSN as they were doing an item on the end of Manny Ramirez's 50-game suspension. What immediately caught my eye was the chyron at the bottom of the screen: "suspended due to darkness."

"Holy crap, TSN," I immediately thought. "You can't say that. They caught the guy fair and square." A second or so later, I realized I was seeing the second half of a line that probably referred to the game he'd been expected to play in.

Is there a moral to this little anecdote? Nope. None at all. Have a good night, folks.

For those of us who, like Mir Hosein Mousavi, are wondering what happened to our projected landslide green revolution, Josh Marshall links to an interesting Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/iranian-election

The cab driver picking up the reporter at the airport has the takeaway line: "Iran is not Tehran." In announcing the results, the election official confirmed that Mousavi had indeed beaten Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the capital. (If he gave the specific percentage, I didn't see it reported.) [Read more]

The torch design for next year's Winter Olympics was apparently unveiled months ago. Only now have some sharp-eyed reporters started asking each other, "Hey, what does that look a bit like to you?"

Personally, I love it. It sums up in one image the best British Columbia has to offer: winter sports and B.C. Bud. Now if only the organizers can sign up gold medalist Ross Rebagliati to kick off the torch relay.

Orlando posed a puzzler yesterday: if you shut the Camp Delta prison, what do you do with inmates who have committed no known war crimes or acts of terrorism, but who still pose a security threat? How do you keep them from taking up arms or otherwise waging jihad against the U.S. and its allies?

It's triflingly simple: Ask them to promise not to.

"Huh?" I can hear you all saying. "That's crazy talk, acanuck. What's to stop them from breaking their word?" Well, first of all, the concept of "parole" has an honored place in Arab and Muslim history. It resonates. [Read more]