Two kinds of people

Emily Yoffe (Dear Prudence) on the difference between phoning and texting:

I think the world is beginning to divide into two groups of people. Those who love to shout into the cell phone that there was too much mayo on the turkey sandwich they had for lunch, and those who prefer to text this crucial information.

Mr. President, we cannot allow a mine-shaft gap!

Right-wing anti-Obama journalist John Perry says if Obama doesn't give the generals more troops for Afghanistan, he should be afraid of a military coup:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic. . . . Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

These people are nuts.

Great line of the day

Nancy Nall says Roman Polanski is guilty, guilty, guilty.

The older I get, the more com­fort­able I am with sit­u­a­tions that are muddy, com­pli­cated, filled with icky peo­ple on both sides but still have a clear right/wrong dis­tinc­tion, and this is one of them. . . . No real prac­ti­cal pur­pose will be served by lock­ing up Polan­ski at this point, but (shrug).

UPDATE: Sorry, I should have included more of Nall's text to explain her view more fully, which is that irregardless of Polanski's record of artistic accomplishments, he should still have to serve out whatever jail term he is given.

All of the above

Rabble is running a poll:

What was the most disturbing thing that came out of the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh last week?
--The heavy-handed police repression of protesters
--The news that Canada would co-host the G20 in 2010
--PM Harper's assertion that Canada 'has no history of colonialism'

Too bad they don't have a button for "all of the above".

What Juan Cole says

Whenever Iran or the Middle East are in the news, I go to Juan Cole to see what he is saying about it. In his piece about Iran's Qom Enrichment Facility he provides a useful summary of the problem:

Julian Borger and Patrick Wintour of the Guardian report that Iran was forced to acknowledge the site because Western intelligence had picked it up in satellite photographs and then gathered information on it by other means. Ahmadinejad is correct in saying that by the letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has not done anything illegal, insofar as the site has not gone operational and Iran is giving 6 months notice. However, the Iranian government had additionally pledged to the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2006 that it would alert the UN to any new new nuclear facility immediately. So Iran may not have broken the law but it has broken its word.
For Iran to break its word on this matter is, moreover, as serious as for it to break the law. (This self-destructive and overly cocky way of proceeding in Tehran was the subject of my column for Salon this week, asking if Ahmadinejad is intent on turning his country into an international pariah.) Iran's enemies, who want it put under severe economic sanctions of the sort that turned Iraq into a fourth-world country, and ideally would like to see the regime in Tehran overthrown-- if necessary by military means-- will point to the secret development of a new enrichment site as a sign of Tehran's essential deviousness.
. . .the law and the facts of the matter are less important than the determination of Europe and the US that Iran not develop even the Japan option. And this Qom facility and the delay in notification are powerful political arrows in the sanctions quiver.

And here's his conclusion:

I am personally opposed to further sanctions on Iran unless they are very carefully targeted so as not to harm ordinary people. Regimes running oil states are not very vulnerable to sanctions. Moreover, sanctions against Iran are deeply unfair if Israel, India and Pakistan are held harmless for ignoring the NPT altogether and for developing their bombs. In fact, the way the UNSC is proceeding against Iran is such as to destroy the NPT, because any country in its right mind would prefer to withdraw from it and just do as it pleases, a la Israel, than to submit to it and have that submission be a pretext for sanctions, even where the signatory country had done nothing contrary to the letter of the law.
Finally, I leave readers with a caveat. There may be less to the Qom plant than meets the eye. Beware the Hype.

There they go again

Huffington Post has as its headline today "THE NUKES OF SEPTEMBER along with a photo of a bomb being launched.
Glenn Greenwald points out how trite and dangerous this kind of hysteria is:

here we have, yet again, inflammatory (and, in many eyes, war-justifying) accusations made against an American Enemy, and the American establishment media seems capable of nothing other than mindlessly repeating it, asking no real questions, and doing little other than fueling the fire. . . . everyone agrees that -- despite all the rhetoric about Iran getting caught red-handed -- it was Iran itself which notified the IAEA of this facility; the facility is far from operational; and there's no evidence that it contains or even can produce weapons-grade material. Until there's an IAEA inspection -- which Iran said it would permit -- it's impossible to know the true purpose and capabilities of this facility, which is the cause for the Chinese's skepticism and should cause skepticism among every thinking person, beginning with the American media. Can anyone point to any such skepticism anywhere? Listening to the media coverage, one would think that Iran just got caught sitting on a secret atomic bomb.

Torture prosecutions, at last

Well, we don't have to wait any longer to see someone from the Bush administration prosecuted for torture -- it was on tonight's Law and Order.
And my husband and I agreed this might well be the only prosecution we will ever see for these crimes.

Fashionably late

When I was a teenager, it was conventional wisdom that Canada was always several years behind the States in terms of things like fashions and hairstyles and movies.
But I didn't realize this was still going on -- now our Conservative government is imitating the anti-intellectualism of the Bush era.

New links

So I have some new links on the blogroll - to the right, under (you guessed it) New Links.
Here's why I like Nancy Nall -- she begins one recent post with this immortal line:

My search for the ideal stim­u­lant con­tin­ues.

Ah, a woman after my own heart!

Great line of the day

Digby describes what differentiates the American right wingers:

...the Religious Right operates out of fear of sex, while the Populist Right operates out of fear of race.

Calling Firedoglake out

Firedoglake is off my blogroll.
Sadly, I have reached my limit of tolerance with the Obama-trashing commenters on this site.
Want examples? Commenters to this Jan Hamsher post say:

“eletist asshole who is really put out by having to get in the weeds about the peasants health care problems” and a “dispicable, lying, deplorable human being and …a “fraud” from day one” and “Obama NEVER intended to do one thing about healthcare for the American People going in. He’s the one responsible for this charade that’s happening now”

Today Hamsher herself says:

We were trying to think of how health care would be different if Mitt Romney had been elected, and really couldn’t think of how it would be.

Really? REALLY? You actually see no difference between Mitt Romney and Barak Obama?
Finally, these comments at this post

"Nearly everything Obama says these days pisses me off but his repeated smackdowns of progressives is too much to take. Go to Hell, Mr. President." and "stop it, Obama. Just stop it. We get it, you don’t like us much. Surprise! It’s mutual."

Well, I guess I agree with Obama, then -- I don't like these people much either.
Buh-bye.

Dis-harmony

In British Columbia, they're marching in the streets against the HST, the so-called "harmonized sales tax". In Ontario, the federal Liberals have lost 15 points to the Conservatives, and I think we can assign at least some of the blame to McGinty's intention to bring in the HST.
A few weeks ago, I heard John Gormley trying to get Premier Brad Wall to talk about the HST. Gormley has long been in favour of the HST and he tried mightly to get Wall to say, or even hint, that he would reconsider the HST for Saskatchewan. Wall was extremely smart -- he just kept saying over and over that he had not campaigned on it and would not think of it. I was surprised that he would be so definite, but seeing how deeply unpopular the HST is in BC and Ontario, I can understand why Wall wouldn't move an inch on it.

Making a difference

So often we think, I'm only one person so what can I do?
Well, Christopher Reeve broke his neck in 1995 and died in 2004, but research partly sponsored by his foundation has now figured out a procedure which helps paralyzed rats to walk again.

There but for the grace of god

When I read this tragic story I realized again that just being a teenager can be a death-defying act. Our kids did some pretty dumb things when they were teens, which we didn't know about at the time, and some of their friends did worse, but they were all lucky enough to survive.
Come to think of it, I did some fairly stupid stuff too, when I was a teenager.

Good, bad, ugly

Good - Trudeau, Tewksbury among first inductees into Queer Hall of Fame
Bad -- the latest from Afghanistan
Ugly - Brian Mulroney's long campaign of vindication

Mary's music

With the sad news that Mary Travers has died, her great music has been posted all over the internet. Here are two somewhat less well known pieces which I liked.

A Soalin', from 1981



Jane, Jane, from 1965

Great line of the day

Glenn Greenwald is in fine form writing about the group of former CIA Directors who think the President should tell the Attorney General not to investigate CIA murders:

In other breaking news, Erik Prince announces that he believes criminal prosecutions of Blackwater are unwarranted; Wall Street CEOs -- past and present -- conclude that an investigation of fraud and abuse among investment banks would serve no real purpose; Alberto Gonzales reveals his opposition to any proceedings against DOJ lawyers who acted in bad faith; police unions announce that the problem of brutality is overstated and there's no need for added oversight; medical doctors agree that malpractice lawsuits need to be limited; and a poll of felons currently in prison reveal that 99% of them believe that the country would have been better off if it had just let bygones be bygones and decided not to proceed with prosecutions in their particular case.

Emphasis mine.

Canada as sanctuary

I am one of the many thousands of Canadians who can trace their roots to the United Empire Loyalists who moved to Ontario after the American revolution. I support Gerard Kennedy's war resister sanctuary bill:

Gerard Kennedy's bill would allow foreign military deserters — or those who refuse mandatory military service — to stay in Canada if their action is based on “sincere moral, political or religious objection.”
MPs have already voted twice to support war resisters, but that was through motions that are not binding on the government.
Mr. Kennedy's bill would be binding because it would amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

Wikipedia quotes a 2004 BBC documentary, which described Canada's tradition as a refuge for Americans:

"Americans in trouble have been running to Canada for centuries... in the wake of the American Revolution ... [in the] Underground Railroad that spirited escaped American slaves to freedom... and in the 1960s, [when] as many as 60,000 young American men dodged the draft..."

The new sherrif is a n.....

I think this is just going to keep on happening every six months or so -- the US media will go through these periodic paroxysms of hysteria as they simultaneously try to call out racism toward Obama while also wanting to deny that racism is actually a factor in how Americans are feeling about him.
But I must say, I am impressed with some of the people who I had considered hopeless wingnuts, who have taken a brave stand against the racism they are seeing on their own side -- Little Green Footballs for one.

Word salad

Racist organizer of the teabagger march calls Obama:

Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief

WTF does that mean? They don't know, or care. The only thing that matters is that it;s vivid and catchy and suitably scary. They're all sounding like Sarah Palin -- string a bunch of adjectives together and keep babbling.

Oh, sure

Funniest headline so far this week:

'We're not cutting any deals,' Tories say

Revising Employment Insurance along the lines wanted by the NDP is just an extraordinarily well-timed coincidence.

On the side of King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham

Amanda Marcotte has an interesting post about some of the basic assumptions of the anti-Obama /teabag /wingnut movement and their little march on Saturday.
One of the highlights is her discussion about this photo:

. . . whoever made this sign seemed to think that using Robin Hood as a stand-in for the villain was a good idea. Most of us understand that Robin Hood is the hero of the stories about Robin Hood. But wingnuts tend to reflectively see Robin Hood as a villain. This isn’t the first time I’ve been puzzled by this. In Texas, opponents of laws that would create more equal spending between school districts have deemed such laws “Robin Hood Laws”. Again, they don’t see a problem with trotting out a traditional hero as a villain and expecting everyone else to play along.

I guess robbing the rich to give to the poor isn't OK if you're one of the rich -- or if you'd like to be. Or if you think that King John actually was better than the rest of us. Glenn Greenwald explores this theme some more, saying that the basic anger is about spending money on the "undeserving":

...the poor minorities and other undeserving deadbeats who, in right-wing lore, somehow (despite their sorry state) exert immensely powerful influence over the U.S. Government and are thus the beneficiaries of endless, undeserved largesse: people too lazy to work, illegal immigrants, those living below the poverty line. That's why Joe Wilson's outburst resonated so forcefully among the Right and why he became an immediate folk hero: he was voicing the core right-wing fear that their money was being stolen from them by Obama in order to lavish the Undeserving and the Others -- in this case illegal immigrants -- with ill-gotten gains

Matt Tabbi described this in April as a peasant mentality:

. . . when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. . . . actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. . . . A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger.

Yes, like believing Robin Hood had it wrong.

'Nuff said

From Crooks and Liars:

Seeing

I read this and I'll never take eyesight for granted again.

The new "Progressive Conservatives"

Maybe its just snark on my part, but I was amused that the participants in yesterday's rally in Washington apparently couldn't tell the difference between 70 thousand and 2 million -- no wonder these folks didn't notice the US deficit until Jan 21, 2009.
Anyway, Matthew Yglesias was there and posts some photos and reports on the overall incoherence of their message. Here are some of his comments:

. . . there was very little sense that anyone had any actual specific complaint with Obama’s health care proposals. That one woman loves the confederacy. This guy thinks guns are great and diversity is stupid. Many protesters feel that abortion is murder and/or that Barack Obama is in league with terrorists. But nobody had a sign urging the president to adopt more stringent cost control measures, or slamming the concept of regulations to require insurers to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.. . .
Echoing a problem familiar to any liberal who ever tried to go to a rally to protest the occupation of Iraq only to find a bunch of guys with Free Mumia signs or Trotskyite sandwich boards extolling the virtues of the DPRK, an awful lot of today’s tea parties seemed to want to talk about obscure fringe causes that have nothing to do with health care or 9/11 or anything. . .
Probably the weirdest thing about the Glenn Beck / Tea Party nexus to me is that it tends to rely so heavily on libertarian rhetoric and fear of incipient authoritarianism. These kind of sentiments would be a lot easier to take seriously if not for the fact that we didn’t see these people marching out in the streets when George W. Bush used the threat of terrorism to justify secret, illegal warrantless surveillance, detention without trial, torture, etc. . . . Jonah Goldberg, it seems to me, was the real pioneer in this brand of hypocrisy-driven hysteria—holding captives in secret where they’re hung by shackles from the ceiling and occasionally beaten to death is fine by him, but efforts to curb smoking are “liberal fascism.” And now this line of thinking seems to have completely taken over the right.

And don't read the next part if you're drinking anything -- over at Malkin's blog, the commenters are all excited and they were talking about how if the Republicans don't listen to them, then they're going to start a new party -- a "Progressive Conservative party".
Well, the name's available, isn't it?
Bhwa-ha-ha-ha-ha....

Proud to be a member of that 'left-wing fringe group' called 'women'

Alison has followed up brilliantly on Antonia Zerbisias' suggestion about a new t-shirt slogan: "Proud to be a member of that 'left-wing fringe group' called 'women'".
This follows from Harper's derisive smear against the Court Challenges program, which the Conservatives shut down because they didn't want their legislation to be challenged by what Harper is now calling "left-wing fringe groups." Yeah, like "women". After all, we wouldn't want any more cases like these:

. . . landmark cases, many fought by LEAF, the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund – a group clearly overrun by rabid fringe feminists.
They intervened in "left-wing fringe" court cases such as Torres v. Minto Management (2002), which prevented a landlord from increasing a single mother's rent by 41 per cent just because her husband had left the building.
Then there was the "left-wing fringe" case The Queen v. Keegstra (1990), which kept a Holocaust denier from teaching his anti- Semitic ideas to Alberta schoolchildren.
Or how about that "left-wing fringe" case Brooks v. Safeway (1989), which forced employers not to discriminate against pregnant staffers.

There is now a facebook page, too.

Tech support cheat sheet

What actually happens when you call tech support, as found at Bouquets of Gray:

Turning myths upside down

The Toronto Star punctures four election myths which the Conservatives are promoting.
But I'd like to see Ignatieff and the Liberals do more -- they should be turning these myths on their head. Here are the responses I would make --
Myth one:

An election would imperil economic recovery.

The response I'd like to see:

Bay Street is laughing at that one. An election would improve economic recovery by putting in charge a government which knows what to do with the economy, rather than the fumbling Jim Flaherty and the ideological Harper cabinet.

Myth two:

The Liberals will wrest power from the Conservatives by joining in a coalition with the NDP and the Bloc Québécois.

The response I'd like to see:

Canadians never did elect a Harper majority because they did NOT want Harper to be given free reign. And thank heavens for that -- when every other government in the world was helping its industries to survive the recession, Harper wouldn't do it until Parliament forced him to. Without the Coalition threat last winter, the Harper government would never have done the right thing for the Canadian economy; they would have sat on their hands and watched our auto industry just disappear, along with millions of jobs in other industries all across the country. Canadians deserve a better government that that.

Myth three:

A Liberal proposal to make it easier for laid-off workers to obtain Employment Insurance would be irresponsibly costly.

The response I'd like to see:

EI reform would pump a billion dollars into the Canadian economy, getting this money out of government bank accounts and putting it directly into the pockets of millions of people -- people who have already paid it into the EI system in the first place.

Myth four:

An election will cheat Canadians out of their home renovation tax credit.

The response I'd like to see:

So what kind of incompetent bumblers would announce a program but never get around to making it legal? Was it some kind of bait-and-switch where they were going to change it at the last minute? Or is this just another one of the blizzard of Harper press releases which announce laws they never get around to implementing? Of course the Liberals would implement this tax credit immediately, unlike the untrustworthy Conservatives.

There, that oughta do it!

Great line of the day

Glenn Greenwald:

I have very mixed feelings about the protests of conservatives such as David Frum or Andrew Sullivan that the conservative movement has been supposedly "hijacked" by extremists and crazies. On the one hand, this is true. But when was it different? Rush Limbaugh didn't just magically appear in the last twelve months. He -- along with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol and Jesse Helms -- have been leaders of that party for decades. Republicans spent the 1990s wallowing in Ken Starr's sex report, "Angry White Male" militias, black U.N. helicopters, Vince Foster's murder, Clinton's Mena drug runway, Monica's semen-stained dress, Hillary's lesbianism, "wag the dog" theories, and all sorts of efforts to personally humiliate Clinton and destroy the legitimacy of his presidency using the most paranoid, reality-detached, and scurrilous attacks . . . Nothing that the GOP is doing to Obama should be the slightest bit surprising because this is the true face of the American Right -- and that's been true for a very long time now. It didn't just become true in the last few months or in the last two years. Recent months is just the time period when the media began noticing and acknowledging what they are: a pack of crazed, primitive radicals who don't really believe in the country's core founding values and don't merely disagree with, but contest the legitimacy of, any elected political officials who aren't part of their movement. Before the last year or so, the media pretended that this was a serious, adult, substantive political movement, but it wasn't any truer then than it is now.

Emphasis mine.
The difference between the Clinton Presidency and the Obama Presidency is Keith Olbermann and Daily Kos, Rahm Emmanuel and Rachel Maddow, Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald.
I hope it will be enough.

Watching the speech

From the Charlotte Observer, some photos of people watching Obama's health care speech:











I also include this photo of Hillary and Obama together, because I've been wondering what she thinks about Obama's handling of health care reform this summer.



Myself, I don't know whether Hillary could have done a better job in getting health care reform through without such divisiveness or not, but I do know that Republican congressmen would also have yelled at her and walked out -- they wouldn't have accepted or respected a woman as president any more than they accept or respect an African-American.

Why America is doomed

Hallelujah brother!
John Cole provides the latest from that Phoenix pastor who prays for Obama to die -- he's talking about why real men of God need to take a stance, so to speak:

That’s where we’re headed in this country, my friend. We’ve got a bunch of pastors who pee sitting down.

I blame homeschooling for all this craziness, I really do....

Camelot update

I'm seeing more and more comments like this one on the progressive side of the blogosphere.
I divide these into three types:
The drama queens expected Obama to ride into Washington like some kind of cross between Yul Brynner in the Magnificent Seven and Clint Eastwood in Hang 'Em High, kicking ass and taking names and shooting up the joint.
The snide bitter ones never really got over Hillary, and they're faster than Fox News in seeing betrayal and incompetence in every phrase and nuance.
The sincere but naive purists can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that Obama isn't going to try to return to Camelot, that he would be happy enough just to get back to the way things were under Clinton.
Mistakes, sure, Obama has made them and he'll make more. But Bush and Cheney had run the country over a cliff, and ror the last eight months, Barak Obama has been putting the country together again. He's been putting good people in the right places throughout government, he's been writing some OK legislation, then shaking hands and talking to people and persuading them to see it his way.
That's what Barak Obama does. He's good at it.

No more Okey-Dokey

Here is Iggy's new ad:

Steve thinks this has hit the perfect tone.
I agree.
Though apparently some Convservative bloggers wanted a batch of attack ads. As BigCityLib notes:

....the problem with Conservatives generally, is that for them, if you're not accusing someone of being a pedophile or a commie, its just not campaigning.

But speaking of the campaign, I have come to the conclusion that Ignatieff isn't so much wanting to force an election as he's wanting to just stop saying "Okey-dokey" to Harper. As Steve also points out:

The same columnists that are simply AGHAST at the prospects of another election, are the same people who would be writing that Ignatieff's a wimp and the Liberals are rudderless and weak, Harper bested us again, if he announced he would "prop up" the government to avoid an election this fall.

Iggy's basically saying, no more wimping out, its time to let the NDP and the Bloc do the Okey-Dokey with Harper for a change!
Sure, Iggy's ready to go this fall -- and I'm still not sure that this is the right time -- but basically I think the Liberal calculation is that if the NDP and the Bloc ruin their own public credibility by continuing to find reasons to vote with Harper, then fine -- the Liberals just keep on raising more money and running more ads.

Great line of the day

Matt Yglesias about the Afghanistan quagmire:

Afghanistan is often called the “Graveyard of Empires,” but I think the phrase is pretty misleading. It seems to imply that empires that venture in Afghanistan get defeated and die. But the fact of the matter is that empires tend to venture into Afghanistan, get defeated, and then walk away and be just fine. . . . A better analogy might be that it’s the ESPN Zone of empires, someplace where from time to time a lot of people feel tempted to go, but when you get there it turns out to be not so great. But it’s surprisingly expensive to stay! Having gone out of your way to get there in the first place, you’re perhaps initially reluctant to just admit that it’s not worthwhile. But you can’t stay forever.

Emphasis mine.

Another great idea from the American financial industry

Maybe the Death Panels will be set up by Wall Street if grandma lives too long.

Once more

Great one, POGGE -- here's another.

Throwdown!

I'll see your Chet Atkins, POGGE, and raise you Men With Banjos Who Know How To Use Them:

Stupidest idea ever

Canada has 2,000 troops in Afghanistan, and the United States has more than ten times that many. So I can't believe that Americans are going to be suitably impressed by Canada staging explosions at its Washington embassy to wow America about what Canada is doing in Afghanistan.
Actually, I think this will just scare and annoy a lot of people:

Whether they will send jumpy tourists and Washingtonians on Pennsylvania Avenue fleeing in fear remains unknown, but embassy officials say they have a green light from the Secret Service, the State Department and the D.C. fire marshal.

Yeah, I'm sure.

Springtime for Buchanan

Former US Presidential candidate and MSNBC commentator Pat Buchanan is arguing that Hitler was just misunderstood. The summer of Sotomayer and the teabaggers have pushed him over the edge, I guess. But if Glenn Beck and the Fox noise commentators now think Obama is Hitler, does this mean that Buchanan is now an Obama supporter?

Issues? You want issues?

Come get yer red-hot issues right here!
In Comments to my election hand-wringing post, Alison provides a brilliant and lengthy list of all of the Conservative outrages of the last several years.
So print off this list, Liberals, and take your pick -- maybe Iggy will have a few issues to run on after all:

. . . the war on Afghanistan, the Cadman tapes, the in and out scheme, attacks on Canadian wheat board, Naftagate, dirty tricks manual, dissing Kyoto accord, gutting public service, cancelling Court Challenges Act, Omar Khadr, Toronto 18/Paintball 11, nuclear watchdog fired, listeriosis mismanagement, C-484, AIDs conference snub, arts and culture funding cuts, Status of Women gutted, war resistors deported, war branding for Olympics, softwood lumber deal, attack on Insite, cuts to mad cow testing, NorthComm pact, deregulating Canada Post, two-tier healthcare push, Abdelrazik, tar sands, ethanol grants to agribiz, extraordinary rendition, Afghan prisoners tortured, refusal to protect lakes, Lougheed Martin census, obstructing HoC committees, conditions on FN reserves, mail-outs from defeated Con candidates, rewriting/deleting research on government websites, Colombia free trade deal, Canada First - not, copycat crime bill, militarization of arctic, Bill C-537, Bill C-10, NACC, Server in the Sky, Canada-Israel homeland security pact, government scientists muzzled/fired, support for Guantanamo, RCMP whitewash, TILMA, Chalk River, no-fly list, biometric passports, CIA access to banking records, Benamar Benatta, North American Forum, red fridays, Bali conference, Commonwealth climate change talks, undermining nuclear disarmament, Question Period a shambles, Independent Panel on Canada's Mission in Afghanistan, war on drugs, lowering pesticide standards, Montebello, deep integration meeting in Banff, "staying the course" in Haiti, DND funding in universities, 600 Canadian companies gone to foreign ownership, support for Wolfowitz at World Bank, Smart Borders, dissing Louise Arbor, P-3 security forces in Afghanistan, attacks on Dion for having a French mother, faking up law and order hysteria, nukes in the tarsands, Accountability Act, UN vote against Palestinian women, Suaad Mohamud, stacking the Senate, dead wrong on economy, Adult Learning and Literacy Program - eliminated, Health Canada- $28M reduction, Medical Marijuana Research Program- eliminated, Law Commission of Canada - eliminated, Museum Assistance Program - funding cut, One Tonne Challenge - 40% budget cut, Stats Can- budget reduced, Status of Women policy research and lobbying - banned, CMHC - funding reduction, Canadian Heritage Centre - eliminated, Canadian Volunteerism Initiative - eliminated, Canadian Labour Business Centre - eliminated, Canadian Policy Research Network - eliminated, Community Access Program - eliminated, privatization of airline safety, sale of federal buildings, isotope "crisis", GHG "intensity targets", Clean Air Act, reversals on aid to Africa, blocking access to public documents, revolving door between Con polis and industry front groups, tacit support for coup in Honduras, prominence of Mike Harris MPs in Harper cabinet, muzzling Con MPs and candidates, and enthusiastic and unstinting support for deep integration with the US.
Plus with 4 senators about to retire, Steve is within a handful of patronage votes in controlling the Senate which, corrupt as it is, has caught more than one crappy piece of legislation these last few years.

And Alison tells me to give my head a shake and get with the tour:

I realize you're talking strategy alone here, Cath, but boiling frog syndrome not looking to improve any time soon.

OK, makes sense to me.

Shorter

Shorter Andrew Sullivan

One could argue that the Bush/Cheney CIA was worse than the Gestapo. And one would be correct.