Still crazy after all these years

In Salon.com | Bush's night of the long knives Sydney Blumenthal concludes ". . . vindictiveness against the institutions of government based on expertise, evidence and experience is clearing the way for the intellectual standards and cooked conclusions of right-wing think tanks and those appointees who emerge from them. In this strange Soviet Washington, a system of bureaucratic fear and one-party allegiance has been created in which only loyalists are rewarded. Rice stands as the model. One can never be too loyal. And the loyalists compete to outdo each other. Dissonant information is seen as motivated to injure the president -- disloyalty bordering on treason. Success is defined as support for the political line, failure as departure from the line. An atmosphere of personal vendetta and an incentive system for suppressing realities prevail. This is not an administration; it does not administer -- it is a regime. On one of Powell's recent futile diplomatic trips, his informal conversation with reporters turned to a new book, 'The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency' (where) Powell is quoted as describing the neoconservatives to British Foreign Minister Jack Straw as 'fucking crazies.' That, the reporters suggested, might be an apt title for his next volume of memoirs. Powell laughed uncontrollably."
Sad, isn't it.

Next year country

It's always so gratifying when the US media notice something about Canada -- USATODAY.com - Home of CFL player vandalized after loss
This is so embarassing - apparently CNN used it too.
Actually, the egging incident wasn't a typical reaction from Saskatchewanians -- if you were listening closely from, say, Montana or Alberta on Sunday, you would have heard a whole province scream "Oh, shit" as the field goal kick sailed wide, and then, in chorus, "Well, we'll do it next year."
We often describe ourselves as "next year country" here in Saskatchewan -- we should have used this slogan on our license plates, instead of the insipid and creepy "Land of Living Skies" which was chosen after a contest and which always, for me, brings to mind some sort of mist-shrouded monster striding over the landscape a la Stephen King.
Anyway, go Riders go -- we're with you, boys, and you gave us a great season even though it was prematurely cut off. I guess if I can't root for the Riders in the Grey Cup, I'll root for the Lions instead.

The shallow meaning

Chris Matthews talks about Powell's resignation in Power shifting in the president's cabinet?.
I continue to be amused by media pundit thinking in the US -- they actually think the Bush administration is just like all of the other administrations in US history, where the president was a person who actually had a plan, a purpose and a policy. And they keep trying to find deeply meaningful interpretations of Bush administration actions. Matthews says "The real power in this administration lies between the president and the vice president. . . . Will George W. Bush relieve Dick Cheney of some of his enormous power and give it to a secretary of state? . . . I think there's going to be some power shifting and not just name changing. And the one to watch here is the vice president. Will George W. Bush continue to allow the public perception that he has almost a co-president in Dick Cheney? Or will he say that it's time (to) govern without a chief counsel?"
Now, isn't that just silly? Matthews has been listening too much to Pat Buchanan-- who actually thought that Bush was going to get rid of all the neocons right after the election - ha!
Does George Bush worry that Dick Cheney is running US foreign policy? Not in the least. Does Bush even care about what that policy is? Not at all. Bush only wants someone to tell him that that "freedom is on the march" and he's happy as a clam. He once described Condi Rice as "a fabulous lady", which is the kind of terminology parents use to describe their child's kindergarden teacher, not the way presidents usually describe their National Security Advisor.
With Rice as Secretary of State, Cheney is happy as a clam, too. Unlike that spoilsport Powell, Rice will never tell Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld that they are wrong about anything, ever. And acquiesence is the only thing which makes anyone fabulous in this administration.

Feeling a blog chill?

On last Friday's Hardball, I caught the end of this exchange between Joe Trippi and Susan Molinari, described as a Republican strategist, talking about the blogger assertions that Kerry had actually won the election. I have been waiting for the transcript I've so I could check on whether I heard what I thought I heard.
Here is the key exchange:
SUSAN MOLINARI: Well, obviously, blogging has to be taken for what it is, with all due respect to Joe Trippi. It is an opportunity for people to carry on without any consequence to their actions and what they allege. . . this is just, I think, a distraction. And every vote should be counted. But, clearly, there are places all over the United States where the Republican votes are not counted . . .
TRIPPI: Susan, I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is that . . . when a conspiracy theory takes hold and starts rolling, there is a responsibility, then, for the press and for the officials to prove it wrong. And that's what I think is healthy about this process. .
MOLINARI: Absolutely. And I don‘t disagree with you on that point. I guess, just somewhere in the future, we have to find in this brave new world of ours, who holds the bloggers accountable? Or are we allowed to, at any moment‘s notice, go off on this venture and say, right, not right? Or, to Chris‘s point, when do you say, oh, I guess I was wrong, I‘m sorry, a la Election Day exit polling. That was sort of thrown all over the universe on blogs. . . .
TRIPPI: . . I think the blogs did a good thing here. And I think it‘s good that we‘re having this recount. I don‘t think it should go on. I don‘t think there should be recriminations and divisions after it is over. But I think it was healthy that the blogs began this. I actually think this speaks more towards what is the press‘ responsibility and the two parties‘ responsibility to ensure that these issues get carried out, because it wouldn‘t have been done. This would not have been followed up on if the blogs hadn‘t brought it out.
End of the transcript.
Now, this was not an unreasonable exchange of views, and all that.
But here are the lines that bothered me, both from the Republican:
"It is an opportunity for people to carry on without any consequence to their actions and what they allege" and "who holds the bloggers accountable? Or are we allowed to, at any moment‘s notice, go off on this venture . . ."
So I wonder, are the republicans actually beginning to think about ways they can "hold bloggers accountable?"
Or is this just another conspiracy theory?

Clearly, it is racism and it is systemic

Buzzflash pointed me to Greg Palast's article on the large number of "spoiled" ballots and provisional ballots from black precincts in Ohio -- Kerry won Ohio - just count the ballots at the back of the bus -- as well as the high numbers of such ballots in hispanic and Native precincts in New Mexico. Clearly, this is racism, and it is systemic -- the term "systemic" means that an apparently "neutral" procedure is actually racist in its result. Women have identified and fought systemic discrimination for years in areas like "minimum height" requirements for police and fire departments. Now, blacks are seeing this kind of discrimination in US voting regulations and procedures.
Palast notes the Republican "caging" strategy whereby they developed lists of hundreds of people in black precincts to challenge, thereby forcing them to cast "provisional" ballots which then would not be counted due to technicalities.
Ohio also refused to purchase card reading machines in black precincts, so voters could not check to make sure their punch card ballot would count. The result was almost 100,000 "spoiled" ballots -- this is clearly also systemic racism.
No wonder the exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio -- black people emerged from their polling stations and said yes, they had voted for Kerry -- little did they know that their vote would not be counted.
By the way, I have scrutineered and poll captained a number of elections in Canada, and the number of "spoiled" ballots in our polls you could count on one hand -- we have this little thing called national standards, you see.

Making a list; checking it twice

In a recent post on the culture wars, Digbywrote: "This is the same old shit over and over and over again. We backed off on the death penalty, gun control, welfare, affirmative action and here we are with a new slate of issues about gays. Tomorrow it will be creationism."
I have been thinking about this post and realized that Digby's list is sadly incomplete.
As well as instituting the death penalty throughout the US, overturning all gun control legislation, ending welfare, criminalizing homosexuality and mandating the teaching of creation science, there are lots of other actions which Bush voters should now be demanding to save the godless heathens in the US from certain hellfire and create a properly Christian, god-fearing, moral society:
criminalizing abortion including the morning after pill, outlawing sex education, preventing teenagers from getting birth control, permitting (nay, requiring!) prayer in schools, supporting Christian private schools, establishing a religious litmus test for adoption and for child endangerment apprehensions, preventing the removal of medical life support, outawing stem cell research, ending habeus corpus for anyone accused of terrorism, allowing evidence to be used in court regardless of whether it was legally obtained, preventing courts from overturning legislation, outlawing pornography, censoring TV and movies and music, building monuments to the Ten Commandments in all courthouses . . .

Remembering a war nurse

Read A colourful chronicle of nurses' heroism .
My aunt was a war nurse in Italy -- she died when I was 16 or 17, and I don't remember ever asking her about her war experiences. She was one of the thousands of women who never married after World War II -- the family legend was that the soldier she would have married died in Italy.
Reading this story, I have no idea whether my aunt may have been one of the brave nurses on that transport ship. But maybe she was. I admire the Globe for tracking down these stories and for bringing credit to all of the Canadians in the Italian campaign -- lest we forget.

Flabby fist

So I heard a bit of Scott Taylor'sinterview on John Gormley Live yesterday -- Taylor, who edits Esprit de Corps magazine, survived five days as a hostage in Iraq in September.
He described Fallujah as "the Alamo" for Iraqis -- regardless of whether the US wins its offensive there, the city will remain a symbol of Iraq resistance, and the more destruction the greater its symbolic value.
Then today I read James Wolcott's piece
On Borrowed Time about the hollow core of the so-called American empire: "the US can no longer back up the big mouths of its leaders. If America chooses to go it alone in future conflicts, it'll be because it has no choice."
He goes on to quote from Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire:
"Todd, a French demographer and author of a book correctly foreseeing the fall of the Soviet Union, says the US has become a "big little bully" incapable of picking on anyone its own size. It makes a show of force attacking the weak--dirtpoor countries with no air defences, such as Iraq and Afghanistan--because a "show" is precisely what it is. "These conflicts that represent little or no military risk allow the United States to be 'present' throughout the world. The United States works to maintain the illusory fiction of the world as a dangerous place in need of America's protection." Problem is, the fiction is only fooling Americans. The rest of the world has wised up. Todd points out that Germany, Russia, France, and even Turkey declined to join our great adventure in Iraq, and guess what?--nothing happened! Apart from sappy boycotts and juvenile gestures ("freedom fries"), they went unpunished. . . "We should not follow America's military leaders for whom the term 'theater of operations' has ceased being a metaphor. Fighting alongside the Americans in Iraq would only amount to playing a small role in a bloody vaudeville show." . . . The US assault on Fallujah is a prime example of what Todd calls "theatrical micromilitarism.". . . For months the US has been touting this incursion and publicly built up forces outside the city for weeks, giving the enemy plenty of time to rig explosives and/or skip town. Billing it as a "decisive battle"--another fraud. Guerrilla warfare operates on an entirely different set of rules; as has been oft pointed out, America won every major battle during Vietnam and still lost. What's unfolding is not a decisive moment but a ghastly production that trains hellfire on a symbolic target and "plays well" to American citizens as a flex of muscle . . . Civilian casualties, the destruction of homes and livelihoods, the absence of any significant capture of insurgent ringleaders, these are secondary to getting good action footage over which benedictions can be said. Under a second Bush term, the neocons are more entrenched and missile-rattling than ever, eyeing Iran, Syria, even China. But the fist they shake at the world is a flabby one, as the world has somberly, resentfully come to recognize. "As for George W. Bush and his neoconservative helpers, they will go down in history as the grave diggers of the American empire."

The gay drain is Canada's gain

This is great - bring it on.

Voting fraud? But so what?

Olbermann remains commited to covering the voting fraud story, I hope.
Because what I cannot figure out yet in reading the internet stories on the voting problems is this: did the overvotes give Bush Ohio and Florida? Or not?
This is the "so what?" part of the story that we haven't reached yet.
There are two mutually-exclusive story lines here.
The right-wing blogs seem convinced that the voting fraud stories prove their belief that those low-down dirty Democrats tried to steal the election by signing up fraudulent voters who would vote illegally for Kerry. It was this belief that they used to justify the harrasment and intimidation and attempted disqualifications before and during the election; now they think it explains the overvote counties in Ohio. It also, for them, confirms their inner conviction that patriotic Americans simply couldn't have voted for Kerry.
The progressive blogs, on the other hand, are convinced that the fraud stories prove their assertion that electronic voting machines, particularly the optical scan vote counters, were rigged so republicans could steal the election for Bush. This also supports the long-standing fears about Diebold, whose CEO famously promised to deliver Ohio for Bush. And again, it confirms the inner conviction that sensible Americans simply couldn't have voted for Bush.
Of course, I tend to believe the progressive blogs are correct, while the right-wingers are wrong.
But what is missing so far in both storylines is actual human testimony -- someone coming forward to say, yes I registered a bunch of phoney democrats, or yes, I programmed a vote-counting computer to triple-count the Bush votes. And I cannot find yet a summary or analysis of who actually got the votes -- were the 93,000 Ohio overvotes credited to Bush? Or to Kerry? Did the disproportionate Bush votes in heavily Democratic Florida counties actually make the difference in turning Florida, or was there a sufficient margin in the rest of the state to render these votes meaningless anyway?
I disagree with Digby, who says the overall 3-million vote margin likely provides sufficient legitimacy to Bush's presidency -- it DOES matter who actually won the electoral college.

See what I meant about anger?

Fuck the South "Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leaching, confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass. And no, you can't have your convention in New York next time. Fuck off."

The politics of grievance

When you look at the history of the last fifty years, the politics of grievance has been one of the most destructive forces in the world -- from Northern Ireland to Zimbabwe, from the Basques to the Palestinians, from Chechnya to Venezuela, tribal grievances motivate apparently endless cycles of outrage and retaliation.
Now Digby describes the 200-year-old sense of grievance held by the Southern US, which he says can only be dealt with by changing their own culture, not the so-called northern one: "maybe it's time for the heartland to take a good hard look at itself and ask when they are going to adopt the culture of responsibility they profess with such fervor. It sure looks to me as if they've been nursing a case of historical pique for more than 200 years and that resentment no longer has any more meaning than a somewhat self-destructive insistence on maintaining a cultural identity that's really defined by it's anger toward the rest of the country. They are talking themselves into a theocratic police state in order to "crack the whip over the heads of the northern men" and it's not likely to work out for them any better this time than it did the first time."
I was reading this to my husband and we both said "what does this remind us of" and the answer was "Quebec, and The West".
Quebec has an historical sense of grievance with "English" Canada, and Western Canada has a long-standing grievance with "the East"; both are mutally incompatible, and basically irrational; both have plagued Canadian politics for two centuries.
Two things have saved Canada from being split apart (at least so far) by the politics of grievance:
In Quebec, its educational system (the Jesuit Catholic tradition) has produced generations of brilliant politicians who have served Canada and Quebec well. I regret that some, like Rene Levesque and Lucien Bouchard and now Jean Charest, were "lost" to Canada because they turned away from Canadian politics and devoted their brilliance and considerable energies to Quebec itself. Levesque and Bouchard were separatists, but such principled men that they would not lie or cheat or steal in order to take their province out of confederation. Others like Pierre Trudeau and Marc Lalonde and Jean Chretien ran the federal government for decades and made it their goal to promote the federalist cause in Quebec. But both groups were deep thinkers and good strategists and have served Canada well.
In the West, we have had a number of anti-eastern/pro-western political parties over the years, and lots of alientation talk, but never enough to unite the four western provinces sufficiently to achieve separation -- an accident of geography, perhaps, because the Rocky Mountains will always separate BC from the Prairies psychologically as well as physically. Only occasionally in the last 50 years have the western-oriented Conservatives been able to get enough federal votes in Quebec and Ontario to form the government, but it happens often enough that they have not given up hope.
I have confidence that Canada's regional differences are becoming less divisive -- the separatist cause appears to be less attractive in Quebec as Canadian society increasingly accepts Quebec's distinct status, and "western alienation" doesn't seem to be grabbing headlines the way it once did either. Perhaps each region in our country is maturing politically -- accepting responsibility, as Digby recommends, for our own situations rather than playing self-indulgent and self-destructive blame games. Now, if we could only get Danny Williams and Ralph Klein to stop walking out of meetings in a huff . . .

Oh, great!

Atrios points to this article in the Financial Times Dollar expected to fall amid China's rumoured selling -- and wouldn't this be just ducky for us all. The Canadian dollar rose again against the US dollar last week; looks like it will go up further. While this is good news for Canadian snow birds, its not so great for our exporters. And if American interest rates go up, so will ours.
I wonder if this relates to the intense and unexpected criticism of the war in Iraq from former vice-premier and former longtime Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen. In an article from China Daily published just before the election, Qichen wrote that America's anti-terror campaign "has already gone beyond the scope of self-defence. And these latest moves, when seen with the background of the Gulf War and the Kosovo War, have made it obvious that the United States has not changed its Cold War mentality and that the country is still accustomed to applying military means to deal with various threats, visible or invisible. The philosophy of the "Bush Doctrine" is in essence force. It advocates the United States should rule over the whole world with overwhelming force, military force in particular." With the war in Iraq "Washington has opened a Pandora's box, intensifying various intermingled conflicts, such as ethnic and religious ones . . the current US predicament in Iraq serves as another example that when a country's superiority psychology inflates beyond its real capability, a lot of trouble can be caused. But the troubles and disasters the United States has met do not stem from threats by others, but from its own cocksureness and arrogance. The 21st century is not the "American Century." That does not mean that the United States does not want the dream. Rather, it is incapable of realizing the goal. In this century, all big powers should compete in a peaceful way, instead of military means."
Though the Chinese government distanced itself somewhat from these remarks, things got a little tense with China and with Taiwan during Powell's late October visit.
And, of course, once again there seemd to be complicated relationships between the Bush family and various Asian businespeople, as shown in this article from last year.

Hillary vs Jeb

Wouldn't that just be a spectacle?
There's all sorts of stuff on the blogosphere about how Hillary shouldn't run in 2008 and how Jeb has said he wouldn't run, and Josh Marshall has a post about how such a matchup would be too much.
But after thinking about the 2004 results and the reasons for them, I think this would be terrific -- the ultimate political version of Dynasty!
Commentators on this election are already saying that too many people in the US now think of presidential elections as just another reality TV show, where the main issue becomes whether they "like" or "trust" a candidate, with no relation to what that candidate actually says or stands for, that most Bush voters had mixed up Kerry's policies. Well, so what -- if so many people are ignorant, maybe ignorance is the new paradigm. Hillary could use "Stand by your man" as a campaign song -- she could blandly ignore all of the Whitewater attack stuff, and all of the right wing talk show hosts blathering on and on about it throughout the entire campaign would just mystify their listeners. As for Jeb, well, he would be burdened with every single bad decision ever made by the senior bushes.
And we'll have fun, fun, fun . . .

Counter-Inaugural on Jan 20

A counter-inaugural protest is being organized by ANSWER and Dont Amend and likely a number of other groups. I wonder if Michael Moore will once again be the only media there?