Ed Morrisey at Captain's Quarters may help bring down the Canadian Government.
Sitemeter Overheating
At the moment, SDA is recieving about 2,000 hits an hour - about 15 times
normal traffic for this time of day. But look at Captain Ed's stats:
smalldeadanimals.com
[Graph shows spike on hits from 20K per hour to 105K]
My logs show that the vast majority of my hits are from Canadian sources, including media and government servers (there are few on normal days). I suspect Ed's site is showing similar demographics. That means that a lot of Canadians are becoming aware of the information.
That raises difficult poltiical optics for a government considering prosecution of bloggers or news aggregators. How does one prosecute individual citizens for sending readers to the same information that politicians and media have been recieving via blackberry (elitist hypocrisy) - information that is deeply damaging to the governing party - without the appearance of abuse of power to protect your own political interests?
The traffic is causing some loading problems here and at Captain Quarters, who is anticipating more information - and another traffic surge - later today. Our host (this blog is also hosted in the US) is "clearing the decks" to smooth server problems. I'll second his recommendation of Hosting Matters as a blog host par excellence.
update - Welcome, MIchelle Malkin and Wizbang (as well as Instapundit readers who have been surfing in for the past couple of days).
As I wrote on Kevin's site - this is Canada's "Watergate", writ large - but in this case the blogosphere is playing the role of both "Deep Throat" and the Washington Post, and in the case of Canadian sites - doing so with the threat of legal action over our heads. Kudos too, to CTV News for naming Captain's Quarters on their broadcast last night. It is no small assist to have the nation's leading news broadcaster pushing the envelope along side us - especially NealeNews.com, who is going to need all the backup we can give him.
update 2 Colby weighs in and suggests now is the time for American bloggers to pour on the heat. I'll exerpt the juicy bit, but it's a good idea to read the whole thing for context.
Under the metaconstitutional Oakes test, any infringement of individual Charter liberties, such as a publication ban, must have a "rational connection" to the intended benefit and must be the most minimally restrictive measure that can bring about the benefit. The argument here is that if a ban doesn't work in practice--say, because American webloggers are all printing the mind-blowing stuff Canadian ones cannot--it can't meet Oakes. With due respect to the ban, which I consider myself to have observed herein, it would actively help free the hands of Canadian webloggers and reporters if our foreign cousins were to be aggressive about "publishing" the substance of the Brault testimony outside the reach of Canadian law. |
