Laugh du jour

Cam Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

Great line of the day

Digby writes about reaping what you have sowed, and all that:

It's very hard for me to feel any sympathy for Grover Norquist who is being battered by the religious zealots for daring to speak at a Log Cabin Republican meeting . . . He built a vote machine of ignorant saps who really believe that economic conservatism has something to do with hating gays and traditional families. When you let the nutballs into the tent and give them real electoral power, this is what you get. Wait until Big Business understands that after they get their tax cuts and deregulation they'll have to contend with a generation of creationist witch burners to sustain a first world economy.

Emphasis mine. Yes, its going to be pretty difficult to drill for oil when the engineers on your crew don't believe in geology, or to build space weapons when the technicians didn't attend physics lectures, or to develop new crop varieties when your biologists never studied genetics.

Its criminal

James Wolcott sums it up: " . . . 'criminalizing politics' is exactly what should be done when political criminals deceive a nation into a war . . . "

Great line of the day

In regard to whether or not Fitzgerald is building a strong case against SOMEone, Billmon writes: "the reaction of every judge who has looked at the prosecutors's sealed evidence -- including the judges who ordered Judy Miller sent to the slammer -- has been the legal equivalent of a low whistle. Whatever Fitzgerald's got, it seems to pretty damning . . . "

Frog goes musical

Frogsdong writes a little ditty: "I've looked at George from both sides now
From highs and lows and still somehow
It's George's failures I recall
He really is a loser after all."

Still crazy after all these years

You know, as a confirmed progressive-leftist type, I should probably be opposed to this: 'Open skies' talks take wing: "The federal government is launching formal talks to open up the Canada-U.S. air industry to more cross-border competition and potentially lower air fares."
It will undoubtedly compromise Air Canada's attempts to become profitable, thereby risking Canada's national airline, etc. etc.
But, Lord help me, I just can't work up a sweat over this.
Air Canada doesn't deserve it.
The last time I flew across country, to an event in Fredericton NB with a pause in London Ontario, I had to take a total of six flights. Five of them were late. And I mean LATE -- like mostly by two or more hours.
And at good old Air Canada, no one seemed to care. Apologies are for wimps, I guess.
At one point during this odyssey, I remember, they switched a flight to a different gate. Without changing the sign. I only knew because I asked at the old gate. The rule is, never believe their signs -- always ask.
So while I was waiting at the new gate -- because, of course, the flight was late leaving -- a little old man came up and asked the crew why flight such-and-such hadn't left yet. Well, it had -- from a different gate, which they hadn't bothered to post signage for or to announce either.
Nobody seemed particularly concerned about this -- they just told him to sit down, they're get him onto another flight sometime or other.
There was one flight which left on time. It was the one which was supposed to be my last one. I, however, was not on it because I was late getting off my connector flight. The reason I was late getting off this flight was because the plane was late so the Air Canada gate crew had left the gate before we got there.
So when they finally showed up, I tore down to the final flight's gate, hoping it would be late too -- please, please be late, every other flight on this benighted trip has been late so why should THIS flight leave on time? But, of course, no such luck. THAT flight had left exactly on time, five minutes before. Five minutes! And they KNEW I was coming on the connector flight, me and a couple of other people too. So I asked why it couldn't have waited for us, considering that it was flying across the country and could have made up the five minutes pretty easily, and got told, patronizingly and haughtily, "Well, we have to leave on time, you know!"
Choke, gasp -- I was speechless!
Of course, they booked me onto the next flight, leaving four hours hence. It, however, was late. It couldn't leave because the flight crew wasn't there. They had been on a Chicago flight, which was late. The flight finally left an additional six hours later -- a new lateness record!
The next time my husband and I flew Air Canada, we were trying to get to Vancouver. The flight was -- you guessed it -- late. It was, in fact 20 hours late -- so we missed a full day of a four-day little vacation.

Great line of the day

In Pushing Our Buttons Redux Orcinus says some interesting stuff about US terror warnings. He begins

It's becoming evident that the terrorists with designs on destroying America don't need to actually carry out any attacks to undermine our national security. The Republicans now in power are doing it for them.

And he ends thusly:

If there's anything America needs right now, it is leaders, and thinkers, and media figures who will not play games with our national security -- who will forsake the temptation to parlay the real war on terror into a political marketing campaign. It's a temptation this administration has fully indulged, with the adamant support of its cheering section in the Republican Party. Indeed, it is now apparently even being refined by lesser Republican lights in their local races. And someday, we're all going to pay for it.

And did one of them have the first name "Quentin"?

"A man accused of growing marijuana . . . claimed he was hired to renovate the property . . . by a Mr. Black, a Mr. Pink and a Mr. Blue and had no idea there were 2,500 pot plants growing in the building. Lucin, 33, of Surrey also said the facility was registered to a Mr. Peach. The judge called Lucin's evidence totally unbelievable . . . "

Photos from Ohio

Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'. We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drummin' . . . This was running through my head as I searched for these photos from Saturday's events in Toledo. I also posted the commentary on the photos from the Yahoo slideshow. I found this commentary sort of interesting because it obviously was written from the viewpoint of the police rather than of the protestors.


Police are seen in a stand off with an unruly group of prosestors, Saturday, Oct. 15, 2005, in Toledo, Ohio, where violence erupted between police and local protestors. A crowd that gathered to protest a planned march Saturday by a white supremacist group turned violent, throwing baseball-sized rocks at police and vandalizing vehicles and stores, including setting a bar on fire. (AP Photo/J.D. Pooley)


Members of the National Socialist Movement gesture to protesters from the grounds of Woodward High School . . . REUTERS/The Blade/Allan Detrich


Residents protest on Stickney Avenue . . . Members of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement had been scheduled to march under police protection through north Toledo, with anti-Nazi groups set to counter-protest. But police canceled the event and told the neo-Nazi group to leave as tensions rose and violence erupted nearby, the Toledo Blade reported. REUTERS/The Blade/Allan Detrich


Police use tear gas against a group of protestors . . . A crowd that gathered to protest a planned march Saturday by a white supremacist group turned violent, throwing baseball-sized rocks at police and vandalizing vehicles and stores, including setting a bar on fire. At least two dozen members of the National Socialist Movement, which calls itself 'America's Nazi Party,' gathered at a city park just before noon and were to march under police protection. Organizers of the march said they were demonstrating against black gangs that they said were harassing white residents in the neighborhood. (AP Photo/J.D. Pooley)

The news story indicates the crowd was angry at what they perceived as implicit city support of the march. "When the rioting began, [Toledo Mayor] Ford tried to negotiate with those involved, but "they weren't interested in that." He said people in the crowd swore at him and wanted to know why he was protecting the Nazis. They were mostly "gang members who had real or imagined grievances and took it as an opportunity to speak in their own way," Ford said. "I was chagrined that there were obvious mothers and children in the crowd with them," he said."
In the stories coming out of New Orleans, it seemed that some of the black families waiting at the Convention Centre viewed the young men with guns as their protectors - and these young men saw themselves that way, too -- while the police and soldiers saw them as gangsters. Perhaps they were both protectors AND gangsters. I wonder if the same dynamic is at play here in Toledo as well. Are poor black Americans so alienated from police that they experience greater protection and fairer treatment from the black gangs in their midst rather than from the police who, as they perceive it, arrest them too easily, arbitrarily and for no reason?
If so, this is a serious problem and it is up to police forces to solve it. They can solve it only by recruiting many more black officers -- just as, in Canada, police forces and the RCMP had to learn a long and painful lesson about how they could not properly police their various communities if people from those communities had not been hired by the force. For us, this meant many more Aboriginal officers in Western Canada, more East Indian and Asian officers in Vancouver, and so forth. Still far from perfect here, but I think we are getting better.
UPDATE: Ah-ha -- as I suspected, this news story confirms that the Nazis deliberately chose to hold their protest in a black neighbourhood -- they wanted to provoke violence and get black people blamed for it, a longstanding fascist technique.

Why I like Halloween

Its the only kids celebration we have that actually belongs to kids.
Everything else, from Christmas to Valentines Day to Thanksgiving, even to Rememberance Day, has been taken over by adults and organized within an inch of its life.
But Halloween, around here at least, is done by the kids. For the most part, they figure out their own costumes -- though the mothers insist it be large enough that kids can wear their winter coats underneath if need be -- and they do their own decorating, carving pumpkins or pasting paper witches on the window or hanging up kleenex ghosts in the trees. And I think this is just great. When our kids were little, we deliberately did NOT get into the more elaborate house decorating that a few of the other neighbours did, just because we wanted to keep it simple.
And the kids loved it -- our two talked about their costumes from the day school started. Our kids and their friends would set up hugely complicated scenarios about who would meet who and when and where, to go trick-or-treating together. They got into fierce discussions about which houses gave the best stuff, and particularly whether they could get away with making a second stop at the rich houses, the ones of incredible prolificacy where they scorned the "halloween"-sized candies and gave out whole chocolate bars, or standard-sized bags of chips. I did do some basic costume-sewing -- the black cape got used for years, as did the pirate hat -- but basically my husband and I deliberately limited our role in Halloween to finding the candles for the pumpkins and saying typically grumpy parental things like "Now don't you kids eat too much candy before you go to bed, and make sure you brush your teeth!!!"
I was reminded of all this when I read this story about a Long Island private school principal who cancelled the spring prom because indulgent, social-climbing parents made their children's prom into an expensive nightmare: "It is not primarily the sex/booze/drugs that surround this event, as problematic as they might be; it is rather the flaunting of affluence, assuming exaggerated expenses, a pursuit of vanity for vanity's sake -- in a word, financial decadence. Each year it gets worse - becomes more exaggerated, more expensive, more emotionally traumatic. We are withdrawing from the battle and allowing the parents full responsibility. (Kellenberg) is willing to sponsor a prom, but not an orgy." Good for the principal.

Good Better Best

Good

Larry Wright, The Detroit News

Better


Non-Sequitur

Best

Brian Gable, The Globe and Mail

Compare and contrast

Read these two versions of the same news story. Lots of similarities, but some subtle and not-so-subtle differences.
First, the Canadian story -- Martin and Bush hit stalemate in chat over softwood lumber dispute

Prime Minister Paul Martin has warned U.S. President George W. Bush that Canada will wage its battle over softwood lumber in American courts - and in the court of public opinion. Martin spoke with Bush by phone Friday but they failed to make any progress on the softwood issue. Neither leader budged from his original position during the 20-minute chat, officials said. Bush maintained that he would prefer a negotiated settlement, said a spokeswoman for Martin. The prime minister insisted there's no reason for Canada to negotiate because it has already won all NAFTA challenges to U.S. tariffs and duties that have cost Canadian lumber firms $5 billion. "Canada has won panel decision after panel decision," Martin said while attending the inauguration of a new Quebec border crossing with the U.S. "Fundamentally, what one might call the final court of appeal under NAFTA has also confirmed the Canadian position. And that should be respected." A NAFTA extraordinary challenge committee ruled in August that Canadian exports posed no threat of injury to American producers. But the U.S. government signalled it would not comply with the ruling, saying it was already complying with a World Trade Organization decision on the matter. Martin told Bush that Canada will continue fighting in the U.S. courts and by appealing to Americans who would benefit from cheaper Canadian lumber - something Martin suggested would be an embarrassment to Bush. "(Martin) told the president that we view it as a shame that we should have to take the U.S. to court in its own country to make that point," said a Martin spokesman. "But we're more than prepared to do so and we will do so." Canadian lumber exporters have paid more than $5 billion in duties since May 2002, when American lumber producers filed their fourth trade complaint in 20 years. Canada estimates that, based on past NAFTA rulings, the U.S. should pay back at least $3.5 billion of the duties collected so far. For the fifth time, a dispute resolution panel under the North American Free Trade Agreement has ordered U.S. trade officials to review the way they determine Canadian lumber exports are subsidized. The NAFTA panel, made up of three American and two Canadian trade experts, gave the United States until Oct. 28 to comply. If the panel's ruling is implemented, the countervailing duty rate would fall below one per cent, which under trade rules would result in its cancellation, according to the B.C. Lumber Trade Council. During Friday's phone conversation, the two leaders also discussed the U.S. plan to drill for oil in an Alaska Arctic wildlife refugee - something Canada opposes. Bush insisted he must move forward because his country needs the oil.

Next, the American view - Bush urges Canada to settle lumber tariffs

President Bush pressed Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin for a negotiated settlement of the bitter U.S.-Canadian dispute over lumber tariffs on Friday. Martin rebuffed the overture and warned that Canada would seek relief in U.S. courts if necessary, according to their respective press secretaries. "The president said we should get back to the negotiating table and work to find a lasting solution," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan in describing the 20-minute phone call. In Ottawa, Martin spokeswoman Melanie Gruer said the two leaders made no headway. Martin insisted there's no reason for Canada to negotiate, as it has already won all challenges to U.S. tariffs on Canadian lumber in cases brought before North American Free Trade Agreement panels, Gruer said. "The prime minister emphasized that it makes little sense to negotiate a victory that we've already won." She said Martin told Bush that Canada would take its fight to U.S. courts and appeal to Americans who benefit from cheaper Canadian lumber - something Martin suggested would be an embarrassment to Bush. McClellan did not mention that threat in his version of the conversation. "The prime minister expressed Canada's concerns about the issue of softwood lumber," McClellan said. "The president expressed our strong commitment to NAFTA," he added. At issue is a dispute over steep U.S. tariffs imposed in 2002 on imports of Canadian softwood lumber used in home construction. The tariffs, which now average about 21 percent, were put in place at the urging of the U.S. lumber industry, which contended it was losing thousands of jobs because of unfair subsidies provided to Canadian producers. Martin has accused the United States of ignoring a string of NAFTA rulings against the U.S. duties. Some industry analysts estimate that it costs Americans up to $1,000 more to build new homes since the construction lumber dispute began in 2002. In the most recent ruling, a NAFTA panel of three judges - two Canadians and one American - in August unanimously dismissed U.S. claims that an earlier ruling in favor of Canada in the lumber dispute violated trade rules. Most U.S. timber is harvested from private land at market prices, while in Canada, the government owns 90 percent of timberlands and charges fees for logging. The fee is based on the cost of maintaining and restoring the forest. Canada claims it has lost some $4.1 billion in punitive tariffs. At issue are shipments of such softwoods as pine, spruce and fir. McClellan said that during the call, Bush also thanked Martin for Canada's help in relief efforts for victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. They also talked about the upcoming election in Haiti, the continuing strife in Sudan's Darfur, next month's Summit of the Americas in Argentina, and oil, McClellan said. The Canadian spokeswoman said the two leaders discussed the U.S. plan to drill for oil in an Alaska Arctic wildlife refugee - something Canada opposes. Bush, Gruer said, insisted he must move forward because his country needs the oil.

Two solitudes, eh?

Lying Judy and lying New York Times

So here is the New York Times's big article explaining Judy Miller and all -- The Miller Case: From a Name on a Pad to Jail, and Back.
Lies, damned lies -- no statistics, just lies.
The lying all starts right here, at the very beginning of that story -- "In a notebook belonging to Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, amid notations about Iraq and nuclear weapons, appear two small words: "Valerie Flame." Ms. Miller should have written Valerie Plame. That name is at the core of a federal grand jury investigation that has reached deep into the White House. At issue is whether Bush administration officials leaked the identity of Ms. Plame, an undercover C.I.A. operative, to reporters as part of an effort to blunt criticism of the president's justification for the war in Iraq. Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify and reveal her confidential source, then relented. On Sept. 30, she told the grand jury that her source was I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff. But she said he did not reveal Ms. Plame's name. And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she "didn't think" she heard it from him. "I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall," she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today."
Emphasis mine.
So now the New York Times actually reports lies to its readers. Lies they KNOW are lies.
They expect readers to believe that some mysterious stranger told Judy about Plame -- someone whose name she cannot recall? A one-armed man, perhaps? Or maybe it was someone wearing a mask and driving a batmobile? Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
Well, I'm sure she apologized very sincerely to Fitzgerald and the grand jury -- twisting her sash, with a fetching smile, she put her finger to the dimple in her chin and simpered "sorry, Mr. Prosecutor and all you nice jurors, but really, I jest caint remember WHO it was ...."
And they said, OK, fine, thanks, you can go.
And though the New York Times reports blandly on her statement that apparently Libby was NOT her source for Plame's name, what they don't explain in the whole rest of the article is just why she would then have to spend three months in jail -- if it wasn't Libby who told her Plame's name, why was she protecting him so vigorously?
Of course, she is lying -- I don't know if she actually lied to the grand jury, but in this newspaper article she is lying without shame, to her editor, to her own colleagues and to her readers -- and the reporters writing this story know she is lying but they report it anyway. And the editors let it stand. And the publisher printed it.
Oh, how far has this newspaper fallen.
UPDATE: A Kos diary also notes that later the article says "Mr. Bennett [one of Miller's lawyers], who by now had carefully reviewed Ms. Miller's extensive notes taken from two interviews with Mr. Libby, assured Mr. Fitzgerald that Ms. Miller had only one meaningful source. He agreed to limit his questions to Mr. Libby and the Wilson matter." So in effect the article actually says that Miller is lying about her mysterious one-armed source, but the readers have to parse its sentences for these clues. Pathetic!

Three more years

Billmon's post - Hogtied- summarizes the foreign policy bind into which Bush has tied the United States:

. . . one of the great ironies of Shrub's presidency: an administration that came to power determined to win maximum freedom of action in foreign policy by going it alone (or recruiting ad hoc coalitions that would submissively follow Washington's lead) has ended up virtually paralyzed by the consequences of its own hubris. Consider:
With the bulk of the U.S. active duty army marooned in the Iraq quagmire, pre-emptive (much less preventative) war is off the table. Syria, Iran and Hugo Chavez can all thumb their noses at the hegemon with relative impunity, secure in the knowledge that the 82nd Airborne won't come knocking on their doors any time soon.
Bush's inbred arrogance, Field Marshal Von Rumsfeld's moral cluelessness and the neocons' casual contempt for "soft power" have made the United States radioactive not just in the Islamic world but to public opinion in much of the rest of the world as well. Governments that might once have considered enlisting in Uncle Sam's army won't risk it now. . . .
Without a sensible energy policy. . . the U.S. is in no position to threaten Iran with meaningful economic sanctions . . .
Likewise, the U.S. can't risk alienating or destabilizing the House of Saud, lest the kingdom fall into the wrong hands (or none at all) sending oil to $150 a barrel. This makes any talk of "democratizing" the Middle East into a cynical joke . . .
We're not even trying to squeeze Chavez . . .
The failure of the neocons' go-it-alone attempt to isolate North Korea has left Kim Jong Il with a half dozen more nukes, and forced the administration to make a humilating U turn towards appeasement.
The Republican regime's out-of-control fiscal policies have given the People's Republic of China a senior unsubordinated claim on the U.S. Treasury and unprecedented potential influence over the U.S. financial markets. This rules out any attempt to "contain" Beijing or counter its reach into traditional U.S. fiefdoms like Latin America, and could become particularly problematic if the Chinese ever move militarily against Taiwan.
The GOP's drive to steamroll opposition to free trade -- instead of looking for practical compromises on labor and environmental standards -- could soon make it just about impossible to pass any more trade deals, unless the Republican House leadership intends to start using stress positions on party dissidents and holding votes open for three days instead of three hours . . .
the administration has marginalized the United States in the shaping of an International Criminal Court it someday will feel compelled to join . . .
[the Bush administration] virtually destroyed NATO without creating a replacement vehicle for managing relations with either the "new" or the "old" Europe. . . [and]handed out a string of security IOUs in Central Asia that it will be hard pressed to honor without Russian cooperation . . .
The unilateralist fantasy . . . has collided with global reality -- one part economic integration, one part political disintegration, shaken and stirred. And reality has won, tying the colossus down almost as tightly as the Lilliputians did Gulliver. Now the question is: What can Gulliver do about it? Or, even more importantly, what will Gulliver try to do about it?

Not to mention Guantanamo, which will be a national shame for the United States for the next several generations.
And the world has three more years of having to try to deal with these jerks and trying to keep them from causing any more trouble. We really do need to figure out some occupational therapy kind of thing, something harmless to keep the Bush administration busy and occupied and out of the way.
Maybe an expedition to build a bridge between the two peaks of the Mount Kilimanjaros . . .

Great line of the day

The Poorman refers to this post at Bottle of Blog - You Don't Need To Be A Weatherman To Know How Badly Bush Blows:

Republicans! Pick a thing and believe in it. Stop believing in people--especially these people. George W. Bush is not a political philosophy. Stop humiliating yourselves for a guy who couldn't care less how stupid he makes you look! Nobody voted for Clinton because they thought he had a great marriage. But the rubes all voted for Bush for a bunch of crap that, after five years, we all know he couldn't care less about. Cut your losses. Let's wrap this national turkey up. Eighty percent of Republican jokers keep sticking to this clown and they're going to walk away from this administration like the investors of Arbusto and Bush Exploration, and everything else Bush ever ran--broke, embarrassed, and out of business.

Emphasis mine.
I liked this piece because it spoke to the danger we all face of "believing" in a politician, and how vulnerable that makes both us and our political processes.
Of course, we won't vote for someone we don't like, no matter how much we agree with the policies he is promoting -- that's just human. But we have to be aware of the risk we are taking if we start believing that the person IS the party. This crosses the line between leadership and the cult of personality, and takes us into the territory of tyrants and fascists.
I don't get it myself, but apparently George Bush is a likeable guy, a gee-whiz charmer, someone who inspires great loyalty among otherwise intelligent people. Most of the time, the charming people you meet are also very nice people -- but every now and then, they aren't. I have known a couple of very charming people who were, at heart, not very nice. Being charming, they didn't suffer from their mistakes and tantrums and finger-pointing and selfishness -- they sincerely believed that everything that went wrong in their lives was always someone else's fault. They were great fun to spend a few hours with, but they were stunted personalities, really, because they never had to grow up.