Great line of the day

Scott links to this Greg Weston column about the latest extravagant idiocy of the Harper government -- spending a million dollars on posters of Canadian scenes to put around the Summit meeting halls:

If the insatiable Foreign Affairs decorators wanted to capture the true essence of the summits, they would have backdrops depicting a billion-dollar sinkhole.

Yeah, well...whatever

Non Sequitur Comic Strip, June 09, 2010 on GoComics.com

Kentucky Vice

Does everybody else like the new show Justified as much as we do?
It reminds me of The Sopranos in its unexpectedness -- its filled with stock characters that we've all seen in police procedurals a thousand times before, but just when you think its going to get all trite and homespun and cliched, it turns around on you -- our hero lead character mouths off in a bar and gets beaten up. The stone killer who has maybe reformed, or has he, blows someone up by accident, or was it? The jerk prosecutor maybe had a heart of gold, or does he? The slut girlfriend might be moving on, or is she?
The Globe article about this show says it could be called "Kentucky Vice" It's all based on an Elmore Leonard short story, and the series maintains a true Leonard voice -- Canadian producer Graham Yost (grandson of Elwy Yost) handed out bracelets to the scripwriters marked WWED, or What Would Elmore Do? And its great theme has got everyone interested in a whole different kind of music, too -- bluegrass rap.

Jump

It's great news for women ski-jumpers

Gag reflex

Is there a point at which the cruelty and immorality of the Bush-Cheney regime is finally going to trigger Obama's gag reflex?
Maybe this will finally do it -- Digby reports

The PHR report indicates that there is evidence that health professionals engaged in research on detainees that violates the Geneva Conventions, The Common Rule, the Nuremberg Code and other international and domestic prohibitions against illegal human subject research and experimentation. Declassified government documents indicate that:
• Research and medical experimentation on detainees was used to measure the effects of large- volume waterboarding and adjust the procedure according to the results. After medical monitoring and advice, the CIA experimentally added saline, in an attempt to prevent putting detainees in a coma or killing them through over-ingestion of large amounts of plain water. The report observes: “‘Waterboarding 2.0’ was the product of the CIA’s developing and field-testing an intentionally harmful practice, using systematic medical monitoring and the application of subsequent generalizable knowledge.”
• Health professionals monitored sleep deprivation on more than a dozen detainees in 48-, 96- and 180-hour increments. This research was apparently used to monitor and assess the effects of varying levels of sleep deprivation to support legal definitions of torture and to plan future sleep deprivation techniques.
• Health professionals appear to have analyzed data, based on their observations of 25 detainees who were subjected to individual and combined applications of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, to determine whether one type of application over another would increase the subject’s “susceptibility to severe pain.” The alleged research appears to have been undertaken only to assess the legality of the “enhanced” interrogation tactics and to guide future application of the techniques.

Maybe its less disgusting in the original German.

Great post of the day

Bitch Ph.D. begins a post about Rand Paul with this great piece of writing -- which you could use to begin just about any post about Republicans, Conservatives, what have you:

Each time you think the GOP has finally perfected its stupidity, that it has reached the uppermost Everest of stupidity, that there is no summit of stupidity to overtop the height of stupidity it has currently attained, that it has ascended the last ridge of stupidity and now overlooks the broad plain of human ignorance and stupefaction, observing, with a certain smugness, the exhausted forms of the ideological sherpas and porters littering the wake of its traverse, it flings a grapple over a rocky spire rising up from the tower of stupidity above which you thought nothing could tower and begins, anew, to hoist itself to higher heights of cognitive austerity from which it may fling itself into the void of its own drooling dumb-ass-ness.

Good guys

The Rev Paperboy notes this Andrew Bacevich article about why America is fighting another pointless and immoral war in Afghanistan. The Rev asks:

Why are we so sure we are the good guys?

Good question. Is it because our hearts are pure? Because God is on our side?
There's a throw-away scene in the movie, The Longest Day, where an Allied commander is trying to deal with some battlefield problem and says to his aide "Sometimes I wonder whose side God is on." and a little later, a German commander is trying to figure out some battlefield problem and says to his aide "Sometimes I wonder whose side God is on."
So how do we decide whose side God is on?
Oh, I don't know if there's a perfect answer, really. But I think all we've got is the United Nations -- far from perfect, but at least it is something we can use to help us to determine which "side" is right.
One critical difference between Afghanistan and Iraq is that the UN sanctioned waging war in Afghanistan, and they wouldn't sanction Iraq. I know, I know, the UN is awful in many ways, but there is a kind of collective wisdom that is meaningful.
I think we can at least argue that if the UN will not sanction a war, it should not be fought. When Bush couldn't get even a substantial minority of the Security Council to agree to support the invasion of Iraq, I felt that decided it. When people talked about how difficult it was to decide whether the Iraq invasion was right or wrong, I always found it simple -- if the UN won't support it, then its wrong. And Chretien nailed that one, too.
In a case where the UN DOES support a war, like it did with Afghanistan,then we still have to look at the arguments pro and con, and make our own judgment.
Initially I could support the war in Afghanistan because it was supposed to capture Bin Laden. But like everything else Bush and Cheney did, it was basically a corrupt and incompetent enterprise that rapidly turned to shit and came back to bite us on the ass: three of the world's great democracies, the United States, Canada and Britain, used the so-called War on Terror as an excuse to abandon the constitutional protections and civil rights that we had fought for and cherished for hundreds of years. In almost half the world, we will never be the good guys again, and for what? So that we could torture some farmers and teenagers and cab drivers.
Jesus wept.

Yes

Rivalies in sports are great fun, but here's what its really all about:

With two runners on base and a strike against her, Sara Tucholsky of Western Oregon University uncorked her best swing and did something she had never done, in high school or college. Her first home run cleared the center-field fence.
But it appeared to be the shortest of dreams come true when she missed first base, started back to tag it and collapsed with a knee injury . . .
members of the Central Washington University softball team stunned spectators by carrying Tucholsky around the bases Saturday so the three-run homer would count — an act that contributed to their own elimination from the playoffs

And here's another example of how we should be playing the game

This was the first softball game in Marshall history. A middle school trying to move up to include grades 6 through 12, Marshall showed up to the game with five balls, two bats, no helmets, no sliding pads, no cleats, 16 players who'd never played before, and a coach who'd never even seen a game.
One Marshall player asked, "Which one is first base?" Another: "How do I hold this bat?" They didn't know where to stand in the batter's box. Their coaches had to be shown where the first- and third-base coaching boxes were.
That's when Roncalli did something crazy. It offered to forfeit.
Yes, a team that hadn't lost a game in 2½ years, a team that was going to win in a landslide purposely offered to declare defeat. Why? Because Roncalli wanted to spend the two hours teaching the Marshall girls how to get better

Louisiana gulf requiem

Firedoglake posted this amazing piece:



People are desperately looking for someone to blame for the gulf oil leak -- British Petroleum? Obama? Bush? Is it a right-wing failure or a left-wing disaster?
I think maybe we could assign some blame to ideology itself.
Ideology helps us believe that everything can be simple -- if we just believe in "free enterprise" then we can let private companies like British Petroleum do what's best because after all they wouldn't do anything that would hurt their bottom line. Or if we believe in "government regulation" then we would have highly-trained government experts -- people who don't work for oil companies but somehow know all about oil drilling -- to anticipate every potential problem and force companies to fix them in advance. Or if we just believe in "environmental protection" then we shouldn't drill for oil off the coasts at all but instead continue to buy oil from the Middle East -- and let THEIR ecology take the hit!
Actually, these decisions are not simple at all, to find a way to balance economic development with environmental protection, to establish safety procedures under which an industry can operate without imposing so much regulation that the industry can't function. When we adopt an ideological "right-wing/left-wing" approach, it makes our decision-making easier and we think we've got it cased. But we cannot resolve complex issues with shibboleths and slogans.
This description of the chaos when the platform caught on fire demonstrates the brittleness of a bureaucratic and cover-your-ass approach to safety regulations, while this article about complex systems teaches that simplistic approaches to technological systems won't work.
As the article states, "Complex systems can not be reverse engineered." Sometimes you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, nor can you put Humpty together again. No matter what you believe.
UPDATE: John Cole writes:

I’m all for constructive criticism, but flailing around over things that no one can control is just driving me nuts. Why hasn’t Obama done more to stop the leak? I dunno. Why didn’t Obama do more to save John Murtha and Dennis Hopper! Why won’t he wave his magic fucking wand and bring world peace! Why is unemployment at 10%? Why are we all going to die one day!
Because sometimes things don’t have solutions or answers, you losers. Try acting like you are a little older than five for a change.

UPDATE DEUX: Americans are deeply concerned -- the latest news story about the disaster was posted by AP five hours ago, and there are more than 80,000 comments already on the Yahoo News website, more comments than I have ever seen.

What's the matter with these guys?

When we watch the Harper Conservatives, it's always wise to remember Roseanne Roseannadanna -- it's always something! if its not one thing its another!
Once again, the Harper Conservatives are getting cute and trying to have it both ways on the Afghan prisoner documents -- they want to be able to talk about how open and cooperative they are being, but they still don't want to actually be so open and cooperative that Parliament gets see the damned documents:

“It’s part of a pattern of the government on this issue: stonewall and delay and rag the puck,” NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar said.

Can't dance, too fat to fly

Remember how much fun it was to ridicule Conservapedia? Well, here's another ridiculous Republican website idea.
Conservatives taking themselves seriously is the gift that just keeps on giving.

Sestak, son of Lamont

Its always fun to see a politician shoot himself in the foot, isn't it.
I could understand why neither Pennsylvania Democratic senate nominee Joe Sestak nor the White House were saying anything about the supposed job-offer bribe story -- I suspected all along that both sides just hoped the story would die because they didn't want to embarass a Democratic candidate who had puffed up his own importance by lying about what he was offered. But the truth is starting to emerge now, exposing Sestak as a thoughtless braggart.
And what started as an off-hand comment in February has resulted in burned bridges with the Democratic heavyweights who Sestak will desperately need come November if he has any hope of winning a Senate seat held by the Republicans for the last 30 years.
Sort of a "Ned Lamont Part Deux" scenario that's developing here.

What a drag it is getting old

Lance Mannion wonders what's the point in getting old.
I must admit, I've been wondering that myself lately -- especially when I see an article with a headline about an "elderly woman" and click on it and discover she's my age!
Elderly? Balderdash! Late middle age, if that...oh, and you kids get off my lawn.
Sometimes I console myself with what Peg Bracken once said about getting old -- you either get old or you get dead and it's not much of a choice but there it is.
It puts my complaints into perspective, really.

Seems to me this is where I came in

As Randy Quaid said in Independence Day -- hello boys, I'm BAAACK!
And why are we still talking about MP expenses?
I notice our PM is demonstrating his usual mad leadership skillz on the issue, while Iggy is feeling the heat. Steve V compares how the media has jumped all over the MP expenses story with how they arily dismissed the prorogation story:

Is it really about transparency, or is it really about juicy details, maybe a scandal or two?

Because stories about MPs joining golf clubs or buying tuxedos on expenses practically write themselves, don't they?

In Saint John

We're in Saint John New Brunswick for a few days at a conference, and what a beautiful city this is. We always enjoy getting back to the soft air and sea breezes of a coast (East or West).
So far, we have found that Saint John had beautiful old buildings...

and a sense of humour...

This appears to be a tribute to Moosehead Beer!