Missile defense would have brought down the government

So now the Conservatives think they can have it both ways -- they want to get credit in pro-US circles for bashing the Liberals announcement on missile defense, and yet they would have happily brought down the Liberal minority government on this issue.
And wouldn't the Conservatives have loved to fight an election on this.
First of all, any motion on missile defense coming for debate in the House, concerning as it does a major aspect of Canadian military and foreign policy, would have to be considered as a confidence issue (unlike the gay marriage bill, which is not being considered this way)-- if a confidence motion doesn't pass, the government falls.
So if Martin had brought a missile defense motion to the House, he would have had great difficulty even getting his own caucus to support it. The NDP and the Bloc would have voted against it for sure, leaving Martin with a motion that could pass only with Conservative support. Then, after great blustering and blather, a sufficient number of Conservatives would have voted against it to bring down the government.
Leaving Harper in the delightful position of fighting an election on the missile defense issue, which something like 70 per cent of Canadians do not support, rather than, say, the gay marriage issue or the new budget, which a majority of Canadians do support.
Most disingenous was this MacKay quote from The Globe and Mail: Canada won't allow U.S. missiles to impugn sovereignty, PM vows: "Conservative MP Peter MacKay said the government should have consulted the House of Commons before informing the Americans that Canada was staying out of the missile defence project." Is there any chance whatsoever that the House would have supported missile defense? Just asking!
Now Martin finds himself attacked by editorial pages across the country, for making a decision that most of the country supports. Poor guy, he can't win, can he?
You know, there was a time when I supported Canada's participation in missile defense, because it was one way to keep the Americans happy and it would never work anyway. But the more the American media talk about weaponization of space, the more I realized that this was the ultimate aim of the program, and nothing would deter the Americans from weaponizing space if they wanted to, regardless of any Canadian protests. So all we could do was simply not join them, thereby denying them the "North American" cover they wanted. Its not much of a gesture, but there it is.

One good thing

CNN.com - Judge extends Schiavo stay until mid-March
If this horrible case does one good thing, it is to make families talk about what others should do if they find themselves in this situation -- in my own family, we have three "turn me off" and one "keep me alive as long as you can". OK. So now, we all know and, if worst comes to worst, we can make a terrible decision without second-guessing each other.
This case is such a tragedy for everyone -- the husband, who is convinced his wife is gone and wants to do for her what he thinks she would have wanted, and the parents, who are convinced their own lives will be worthless unless they can save their daughter. The parents will never stop searching for agreeable judges, and, in the unlikely event a year or two from now that the feeding tube is ever actually removed, the media will turn it into even more of a circus than it already is and start into their patented death countdown coverage -- this could be, after all, bigger than Michael Jackson! (which may, actually, be finished in a year or two, though I doubt it.)

Sorry

Well, I added My Blagh's great news aggregator feed to the Links side of this site yesterday -- but then this morning my page took forever to load. Blogger, or at least my free version of it, just doesn't have the juice, I guess. So I had to take the aggregator off, I'm sorry.
But I will be checking My Blagh often to keep up with the news.

Guilt by innuendo

POGGE points us to this column: Uncle Sam's steely glare
It tells the stories of several Canadians, in addition to Arar, who have been arrested and jailed without evidence or trial, as well as several stories about Canadians who have been put onto some kind of mysterious ghost flag airline list without any opportunity to defend themselves. This is what these people have in common "They were under investigation by CSIS and the RCMP; they are Muslim Canadians; they were arrested, jailed or tortured in countries that receive intelligence information from CSIS and the RCMP. And all have one thing in common with Shara Vigeant and Shahid Mamood: Somehow, their names got onto a list."
UPDATE: And if you want to read something REALLY scary . . . BOP points to this one.

Those who live by the sword. . .

Daily Kos :: Operation See No Evil
The CIA has been picking up and torturing ghost prisoners since 911, and they now find themselves working for people who will toss them all to the lions without a second thought. "If I were in the CIA right now, I'd be worried too. No direct access to the President. A boss who seeks to 'streamline' the intelligence process by removing from that stream opinions contrary to the President's stated wishes. Increasing press awareness of an off-books operation that directly resulted in the torture and death of detainees, and the secret detention of untold others, all in violation of international laws. And an administration cabinet that looks, for all intents and purposes, to have been hand-chosen to further solidify all those initiatives. Where's the off button? " And where, oh where, is America's gag reflex?

Outed

The world is moving too fast for the Anglican Church.
BOP reports on the Anglican Communion Primates’ Meeting Communiqué
The Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopilians in the US have been kicked out of class for the next three years - ie, they are being asked to withdraw from church administration until the next Anglican conference in 2008.
In the meantime, they are supposed to visit the principal's office - ie, appear at a church conference in June to justify their decisions to bless gay marriages (Canada) and elect a gay bishop (US).
And they are supposed to write on the blackboard one hundred times "We're sorry, we didn't really mean it, we take it all back" - ie, the Canadian bishops who have supported gay marriage are supposed to apologize and to refuse to allow any more gay ceremonies, while the Americans are also supposed to apologize for electing a gay bishop.
Now, I have only skimmed the recommendations of the Windsor Report but I did not get a sense that the report's authors grasped the momentum of this issue -- that such announcements would be tatamount to demonizing gay people and would send gay people the very clear message that they are not welcome in the Anglican church. Or maybe they actually just don't care -- maybe gay people are actually NOT welcome in the Anglican church.
The report mentions in a couple of places how important it is to be inclusive to gay people, but these are formulaic declarations. Overall, the report is much more concerned about the feelings of congregations upset by these bishops than about the feelings of congregations supporting them.
I'll be watching the news to find out how the New Westminster dioscese reacts.

Yes! Its NO!

Well according to the quotes in this story Martin tells U.S. about missile decision: CTV Canada has weakened its sovereignty "by not being there when the decisions are being made".
Yes, like if someone lobs a missile at Canada, it will now be up to the US alone to decide whether to shoot it down. That is, if the billions they want to spend on this boondoggle can ever develop a technology to intercept any missiles at all.
At the end of this story comes this little snippet "U.S. defence analyst Dwight Mason said it would be the first time since 1938 that Canada had refused to participate in continental defence." I don't know what treaty he is talking about, but maybe that explains why, when Canada went to war against Germany in 1939, the US didn't join us until two years later? They just weren't there when the decisions were being made, I guess.

Some trick

So we're watching Hardball tonight, and the guy who heads this USA Next organization was being interviewed about why his group was running this awful ad -- Daily Kos :: The anti-AARP campaign begins. And he said it was just a test to see how quickly the liberal blogs picked it up. Ha, ha.
So, they pissed off millions of senior citizens, just to "trick" the liberal blogs? And what, exactly was the trick? The smear that senior citizens don't support the troops? Or the accusation that they do support gay marriage? Some trick, guys. Boy, that'll really show those liberal bloggers.
What is actually going on here, I think, is that they are finally aware of the liberal blogosphere now, and they really are beginning to be afraid of its reach and influence.
Here's why -- look at The Truth Laid Bear site rankings

1) Daily Kos 454616 visits/day - progressive
2) Gizmodo 190803 visits/day - tech news
3) Gawker 175369 visits/day - another tech news site
4) Instapundit.com 169937 visits/day - rightwinger
5) Defamer 148761 visits/day - entertainment news
6) Eschaton 111109 visits/day - progressive
7) lgf: what's the ugliest part of your body? 93498 visits/day - rightwinger
8) Power Line 71059 visits/day - rightwinger
9) Wonkette 67229 visits/day - progressive
10) The Washington Monthly 44906 visits/day - progressive
11) The Smirking Chimp 39691 visits/day - progressive
12) Michelle Malkin 36861 visits/day - rightwinger
13) Blog for America 33746 visits/day - progressive
14) www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish 32716 visits/day - rightwinger
15) Wizbang 30237 visits/day - rightwinger
16) HughHewitt.com 29229 visits/day - rightwing
17) onegoodmove: I thought these things might be clues 24536 visits/day - progressive
18) Blogcritics.org 23515 visits/day - celebrity news
19) Blogcritics.org 23515 visits/day - celebrity news (maybe a typo here)
20) Go Fug Yourself 22467 visits/day - celebrity news

In the top 20 according to daily visits, seven are progressive blogs while seven are rightwing blogs. And yes, sure, the right-wing sites are getting lots of daily hits. But look at Kos -- 450,000 hits a day! Instapundit, the most-visited rightwing site, has less than half that number.
So almost half a million people every day are reading about how Kos interprets the daily news. And over 100,000 are checking out Eschaton, while 45,000 are reading Kevin Drum. Howard Dean's site, Blog for America, is attracting 35,000 visits daily. Pretty impressive, folks.

The right to bear charms?

Yahoo! News - Court Rejects Appeal on Sex Toy Sales Ban
No wonder the right wing thinks the ACLU is crazy -- arguing a constitutional right to sell sex toys? Give me a break.

Engage brain, THEN open mouth

The first rule for an ambassador is to NOT shoot off his mouth. Oops! Canada already in U.S. missile plan: McKenna
So now Martin either has to fire him, or admit that what McKenna says is true.
UPDATE Wednesday - so when Paul Martin announces tomorrow that Canada is NOT participating in missile defense, I think McKenna was supposed to be whispering to the Bush administration and the Pentagon that, really, Canada is participating through NORAD, don't worry boys. But McKenna got the script wrong, and announced the whisper in public. Double oops! Please, people, remember your lines!

Judge not

My Blagh points to this story The Globe and Mail: Famous Players drops same-sex advertisements which outlines some of the tactics now being used to oppose gay marriage:

"We were starting to get e-mails that were threatening to our staff," Nuria Bronfman, the Toronto-based vice-president of corporate affairs for Famous Players, said yesterday. The man who placed the ad, another Famous Players executive, said yesterday he'd received death threats. Also, "the phone calls were starting to get abusive," explained Ms. Bronfman, "so we thought it's not fair for our staff to have to go through that sort of thing."

The story says that among the groups angry about the ads is the Canadian Family Action Coalition, which tried to take credit last fall for convincing the Royal Bank to drop its Rainbow Sticker promotion and which tried last spring to stop the addition of sexual orientation to Canada's hate crime legislation.
CFAC states on its website that it's vision is to see "Judeo-Christian moral principles restored in Canada". Well, here are some principles that I suggest could be applied:
"judge not, that you shall not be judged" (Luke 6:37)
"do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (Matthew 7:12)
"inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these My brethern, you have done it unto Me" (Matthew 25:40)

Fear? Never mind.

Smirking Chimp highlights this Miami Herald column: Robert Steinback: 'Is it safe to order French fries again?'
Steinbeck comments about Condi Rice's recent luv-fest with France and says "Politicians are prone to changing with shifting political winds. But it's downright scary when the American people -- highly educated, democracy-trained and First Amendment-protected -- robotically accept what we are told seemingly without question or deliberation. But this has become a pattern in America since 9/11. Fear clouds rational, critical thought, and this administration and its conservative supporters have fed America a steady diet of fear since that dark day."
But at a significant level, its just not real anymore. The actors are all still saying their lines but the audience is now just talking amongst themselves.
On Thursday, CNN ran what should have been a big story Goss warns of terror threat to U.S.
Public reaction? Nada. No editorials that I could see, no follow-up stories about new preparations. The Conservative CPAC conference was going on at the time down the street, the largest collection of conservative talent in the US -- and none of the bloggers there said anything I can find about this big new threat. Neither did the progressive blogs note any expressions of concern -- Kos had a post about port security spending which only proves that Homeland Security and the Bush administration aren's taking terrorism threats very seriously either, treating it just like a big money pot for red state pork.
Increasingly, it strikes me as just cover-your-ass -- if there ever is another attach, everyone can say, well, we warned you. As Rozanne Rozannadanna would say, never mind.

Behind the 8-ball

With the news this morning of blasts in Baghdad aimed at Shiite mosques, I wonder whether Iraq's insurgency, which protrayed itself as a nationalist battle against the American military occupation, is now transforming itself into an insurgency portraying itself as a nationalist battle against Iranian influence in Iraq.
Robert Kagen's column in today's Washington Post -- Shiites and Stereotypes attempts to assure Washington that Shiite government in Iraq shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as an Iranian plot to control Iraq. But I wonder how it looks to the people on the ground in Iraq itself -- Iran, at the very least, is a long-standing ally of the Iraqi Shiites and a model for the kind of religious government they want to create. And the Iraqi military leadership, now running the insurgency, are the same people who fought for a decade against Iran and hate Iran passionately.
Where does this leave the United States? Behind the 8-ball -- in the bizarre situation of using 150,000 of its best and brightest American troops to prop up what might be an Iranian puppet government against a nationalist insurgency that will say it is battling Iranian control of Iraq. And how in the world do they get themselves out of this mess, when they would need to stay in Iraq if they want to use their Iraqi bases to launch a war against Iran or Syria?
Somebody told me there'd be days like these, strange days indeed.

Its like a cop handing a suspect to the Mafia

I've been laid low this week due to a cold and/or flu, but I could not miss noting this Bob Herbert column about the Mahar Arar case and so-called "extraordinary rendition" -- Our Friends, the Torturers: "The entire point of this atrocious exercise is to transfer the suspect to a regime skilled in the art of torture. It's as if a cop picked up a suspect on the street and handed him over to the Mafia to extract a confession. One's guilt or innocence is not relevant. No legal defense is permitted. If a mistake is made, too bad."
Particularly apt, I thought, was Herbert's analogy to police handing a suspect over to the Mafia for questioning. Yes, that's exactly what it is.
Also notable, I notice, is the development of a whole new language to hide what is going on. George Orwell would find terminology like "extraordinary rendition" and "enemy combatant" falls into his definition of "political language" which is "the defence of the indefensible" and "has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."

Pathetic

The Globe and Mail: Bitter attacks open debate on same-sex

"Let us not forget, it is the Liberal Party that said 'none is too many,' when it came to Jews fleeing from Hitler," Mr. Harper said yesterday. "It is the Liberal Party that interned Japanese Canadians in camps on Canada's West Coast, an act which [former prime minister] Pierre Trudeau refused to apologize or make restitution for." Mr. Harper dredged up the 60-year-old events just after the Prime Minister questioned the sincerity of those who would ban gay marriage, saying opponents refuse to admit that it would take the invocation of the Constitution's notwithstanding clause to do it.

I don't get it -- is it Harper's argument now that because the Liberal party once discriminated against Jews and Japanese, that it should be OK today for the Liberals to discriminate against gay people?
Typically incoherent Conservative argument!
I have a test -- for every comment you hear against gay marriage, substitute the words "interracial marriage". And if the comment then sounds like ignorant bigotry, well, it is.