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!