Tough love

Clinton says to Democratic politicians: "'If you don't want to fight for the future and you can't figure out how to beat these people, then find something else to do.' "

Aboriginal Spiritual Journey

I thought this was a wonderful idea -- as part of Canadian Rememberance Day tributes in The Year of The Veteran, Veterans Affairs arranged an eight-day tour for a delegation of 300 First Nations and Metis veterans and youth to travel to Ypres, Vimy, Juno Beach, and Courseulles-sur-Mer to pay tribute to Aboriginal veterans and to do a "calling home" ceremony.
Our new governor general, Michaëlle Jean, joined the group during the Juno Beach portion of their trip.

Canadian Press photo


First Nations and Metis ceremonial performers outside the Kemmel school in Belgium. Veterans Affairs photos.


Veterans and representatives from Veterans' organizations stand at attention during the Last Post, at the "calling home" ceremony at Hill 62.

Last week, the Globe and Mail gave us one warrior's story -- from Elmer Sinclair, now 84:

When Elmer Sinclair last trod on European soil, he did so as a warrior. Sixty years later, he is returning to pay tribute to comrades buried in ground he helped liberate. Mr. Sinclair, a Cree from Manitoba who lives in Nanaimo, spent much of his adult life in uniform. He served in the Canadian Army for all but the first nine months of the Second World War. Later, he re-enlisted to fight on the frozen hills of Korea before spending a year in the desert as a peacekeeper in the Gaza Strip. Those were assignments for a young man. He was not much more than a boy when he signed up as a regimental signaler with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. He then transferred to the Signal Corps as a radio operator.
Mr. Sinclair was born to a family living just outside Selkirk, in a home in the woods. His carpenter father belonged to the Peguis band, but his son would never live on the reserve. Young Elmer spoke English at home, and his parents saved their native tongue for their private conversations. The family moved to Pine Falls and seven-year-old Elmer was sent to Fort Alexander Residential School, operated by Oblate priests more interested in corporal punishment than celestial reward. "It wasn't heaven," Mr. Sinclair recalled in an interview. "They were mean to us and cruel. They prayed like hell in church, then beat the hell out of us afterward." After leaving school, he worked in a sawmill. Canada declared war on Germany two days after his 18th birthday. He enlisted in Winnipeg nine months later.
His expertise at transcribing and transmitting Morse code kept him out of the front lines, and he was assigned signal security. Mr. Sinclair landed at Gold Beach with the 50th British Infantry Division about a week after D-Day. He has never forgotten the scene. "All the pillboxes and the obstructions in the water. Pillars of cement. Barbed wire. All flattened out. It was an awful mess." After rejoining the Canadian Army, Mr. Sinclair tramped through France, Belgium and the Netherlands. He was in the port city of Bremen, flattened by years of Allied bombing, when Germany at last surrendered. Other soldiers' weapons went rat-a-tat-a-tat. His went dit-dah-dit dah-dit . . . Mr. Sinclair re-enlisted after the outbreak of the Korean War, rejoining the Princess Pats. At 29, he had a greater knowledge of the horrors of war than did younger recruits. "We were marching along a valley toward the hills to take over a position at the front," he said. "We saw a village ahead of us on fire. Burning. We got up close and started seeing bodies of American soldiers. They had been on a patrol the night before and gone to sleep there. "The Koreans or the Chinese came down off the hill, surrounded the village and burned it. The Americans started running back toward our lines and there must have been patrols of North Koreans or Chinese along the road. They killed them all. "Our men had been going forward laughing, having a good time. The sight sobered them up." Mr. Sinclair left the army in 1964 with the rank of Warrant Officer 2. During his trip to Belgium, Mr. Sinclair hopes to offer a final salute to a classmate from Selkirk, Sergeant O. D. Smith of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, who was killed on Oct. 12, 1944. To pay homage to his friend, Mr. Sinclair will need to visit the Adegem Canadian War Cemetery midway between Bruges and Ghent on Highway N9. In the southeast corner, in Plot No. 8, Row G, Grave No. 10, he will find the final resting place of Sgt. Smith, one of 1,144 war dead buried in the cemetery. If he finds the grave, Mr. Sinclair said, "I'll just stand there and have a look." He knew the sergeant as Orville. He was just 23 when he died.

And here's another priceless piece of Canadiana -- in the Comments section to the Globe and Mail article on the Jean visit, was one remarkable contribution from David Hawyard of Nanoose Bay, BC, who sent in this moving piece of poetry

We, the Descendants...
We, the descendants of Canada's Aboriginal, French and English founders,
and of all others who later arrived to help build this nation,
stand in unity as witness to this pledge.
Remembering that Canada's provinces and territories have been settled
by peoples whose mother tongues, heritage and values differed,
we pledge in the name of Canada, and to one another:
To recognize, to respect, and to celebrate Canada's diversity,
lest a loss of identity suffers unto our descendants;
To embrace tolerance, equality, sharing and compassion
as the moral cornerstones of our great nation;
To bond together as one in the pursuit of dignity, health,
prosperity and happiness for all Canadians;
To forever preserve and promote this mission
that we so proudly share.

Great line of the day

The Smirking Chimp quotes Huffington Post's Trey Ellis column 'President Cheney's goose is cooked' about the Scooter Libby indictment:

. . . Republicans keep saying that Democrats looked at the same intelligence briefings they did when they overwhelmingly voted to go to war. That is true. They all saw the same books, but what this indictment should bring to light next, is that those books had been cooked.

More torture chronicles

Hmmm -- this is interesting: Reuters is reporting that "The United States on Friday invited three U.N. human rights investigators . . . to visit the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in a bid to show 'we have nothing to hide'." The investigators cannot, of course, actually speak to any of the Gitmo prisoners -- apparently only the International Committee of the Red Cross can do that -- but at least the UN will get a look at what is going on. (And boys, make sure you get them to open ALL the doors.)
Maybe this sudden smasm of conscience is in response to this story about the abuse of the prisoners who are involved with the Guantanamo prisoner hunger strike, or this story about how the US State Department is trying to convince the UN that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the US signed in 1992, actually doesn't apply to US military prisoners outside the US.
At which the UN is shaking its head and rolling its eyes . . .

One more Aboriginal woman gone every month

I've blogged about this issue before, and undoubtedly I will blog about it again. Amnesty International continues to try to raise awareness of a terrible issue -- the disapparance or murder of Aboriginal women, about 500 in the last 20 years -- one a month, every single month.
Amesty asks "How many more sisters and daughters will be lost before the government of Canada takes real action?"
Good question. Amber Redman's mother spoke out at the Amnesty press conference on Monday: "Yuzicappi's daughter, Amber Redman, vanished July 15 after a night out with friends in Fort Qu'Appelle, Sask., northeast of Regina. The shy, 19-year-old who dreamed of going to university and becoming a teacher hasn't been seen since. Family members, volunteers and police searchers have found no trace of Redman, a member of the Standing Buffalo First Nation. "My daughter had limited media coverage in Saskatchewan."
Limited? I'll say -- like, zero.
Here is her photo:

and here is the FSIN website with information about Ms. Redman and other missing Aboriginal people.

Great lines of the day

D r i f t g l a s s writes:

Bush is a bolt of convenient winding cloth to hide the moral leprosy of the Right. Bush is the Halloween Costume Rove dresses up in when he goes abroad in the land to slander and defame and destroy. The math is simple:
Bush+Rove = Swift Boat Liars, gay-bashing ballot initiatives in 2004, smearing Max Cleland, John McCain's Black Baby.
Bush-Rove = Katrina, 'Brownie', Harriet Miers, the First Debate, Cindy Sheehan.
As we on the Left of Crazy have always known, Rove is our Domestic President in charge of dividing and destroying the country from within, and Cheney runs the Foreign Plunder division, tasked with pissing away our reputation abroad, while lining the pockets of his shareholders. And as long as he sticks to the script, Bush -- the feeble-minded codpiece used to cover up their crimes and betrayals -- gets to play at being President.
But now, despite all of the insipid rhetoric on the Right about Bush the Wise, Bush the Sage, Bush the Brilliant, their own hysteria gives them away . . . . the Party of Morality and Personal Responsibility is compelled to admit to itself that treason and treachery in the Oval Office is, by their own lights, No Biggy. And by their shouting they own up the the fact that it's the Real President that's under the hammer.

Emphasis mine.

Spineless toadies

Well -- one down, dozens to go.
On Countdown tonight, John Dean said the Nixon White House actually considered whether they could use the secrecy of a grand jury proceeding to try to hide the Watergate crimes. Instead, Congress held public hearings and down came the Nixon administration.
Digby writes: "If the Republican leadership of congress weren't spineless Bush toadies and insane religious fanatics they would do their job and investigate this honestly for the good of the country. But they won't. They are nothing more than braindead fatcats gorging at the pork barrel with a fistfull of C-notes in one hand and a bible in the other . . . We are left with a timorous press and an honest prosecutor to get to the bottom of what these people have done to us."
Only if the democrats take the House or the Senate in 2006 will the Bush administration get the kind of public investigation it deserves.

DBK was right (updated)

Columbus, Ohio newspaper The Free Press reports that the Government Accounting Office "now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House. Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear that's exactly what happened." Hoo, boy. Forget Meirs -- THIS is a story. Frogsdong DBK always said that the 2004 election was stolen, and now the GAO shows how it was done.
UPDATE: Frogsdong is now DBK -- sorry, Frog, I missed the announcement until today.

Yes, we should be ashamed of ourselves

I have been waiting to blog on the Milgaard Inquiry until it was a little clearer what direction the inquiry was taking.
Was it going to pin down some responsibility for sending an innocent 17-year-old kid to jail for 23 years for the rape-murder of nurse Gail Miller. Or was it just going to whitewash all the good old boys (police and prosecutors) involved -- several of whom, it appears, cannot actually remember much if anything all now about one of Saskatoon's biggest murder cases ever -- oh, sure, guys!
There were some bad signs early on -- I don't have the details at my fingertips anymore, but last spring a couple of the lawyers started flinging around comments to the effect that, really, David Milgaard actually could have killed Miller after all. And I thought, what the heck is going on here? -- this is supposed to be an inquiry into a conviction which has already been proven to be wrongful, where another man has already been proven guilty. Its not supposed to become a forum for inventing new fantasies about imaginary evidence.
Finally Judge MacCallum put a stop to this kind of speculative and suggestive questionning and the inquiry got back on track. But it left me concerned that this inquiry risked letting the lawyers try to exonerate their clients by demonizing Milgaard.
Now, once again, I am starting to wonder.
Milgaard, quite justifiably, doesn't want to testify at the inquiry. He says the prospect of testifying makes him sick.
And I can understand it -- he was victimized by the Saskatchewan justice system once before. So now, does he really have to sit in that witness chair again? Once more at the mercy of bunch of lawyers, who will try once again to victimize him, to sneer at him and trip him up with trick questions and make him look like such a sneaky, unstable, unlikeable liar that of course anyone would have thought he was guilty -- they couldn't help themselves because you just looked so guilty and anyway you were just such an asshole , weren't you, MISTER Milgaard?
Well, the judge now is saying that Milgaard may have to testify if he wants his lawyer to continue to be able to question the other witnesses at the inquiry. Yet the evidence so far has been that it was not Milgaard's personality nor actions which contributed to his conviction -- rather, his so-called friends, dumb and dumber and dumberer, helped over-eager police put together a very loose, circumstantial case, and everyone happily rushed to judgement, so glad to get such a monster off the street that it took Joyce Milgaard two decades to make a dent in the public's perception of his guilt.
This story says that Milgaard's mother "told reporters she felt 'intimidated' by [Judge] MacCallum and thought 'Canadians would be ashamed' with the way her son is being forced to testify."
Well, here's one Canadian who is ashamed.

Think about it

Miers withdraws Supreme Court nomination -- so now Bush is going to nominate the person who was originally his SECOND choice, someone who he felt was LESS qualified than Miers. Jenna, perhaps? Or Barney?

Great lines of the day

Twas the night before Fitzmas, and in the White House
Every one was scared shitless, and Bush was quite soused
The indictments were hanging like Damoceles' sword
As verminous oxen prepared to be gored

The perps were all sleepless, curled fetal in bed
While visions of prison cells loomed in each head
And Dick in his jammies, and George in his lap
Were sweating and swearing and looking like crap

When out on the web there arose such a clatter
The blogs and the forums were buzzing with chatter
Away to the PC Rove ran like a flash
He booted his browser and cleared out his cache

The rumors that flew through the cold autumn air
Made Dubya shiver with angry despair
When what to his horror-filled eyes did he spy?
A bespectacled man with a brown suit and tie!

With an impartial manner that gave Bush the shits
He knew in a moment it must be St. Fitz!
With unwavering voice, his indictments they came
He cleared out his throat and he called them by name:

Now Scooter, Now Libby,
Now Blossoming Turd,
Now Cheney, dear Cheney,
Yes, you are the third
To the bench of the court
Up the steps, down the hall
Now come along, come along,
Come along, all!

He then became silent, and went right to work
He filed the indictments and turned with a jerk
And pointing his finger at justice's scale
Said, "The people be served, and let fairness prevail."

He then left the room, to his team gave a nod
And the sound could be heard of a crumbling facade
And we all did exclaim, as he faded from sight
"Merry Fitzmas to all, and to all a good night!"

- © 2005 by Daryl W at no confidence.org, via Daedalus at Washingtonrox

2000 Americans dead

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Play The Last Post and think of them.
What a pointless, stupid waste.
One of the things about Vietnam was, in the end, how meaningless it was -- they killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese to stop China from taking over Southeast Asia and when they left, China did nothing. North Vietnam took over the whole country, which is exactly what would have happened in 1965 if matters had been allowed to run their course without US interference.
The war in Iraq has also already been proven to be useless in protecting America, because the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction which Hussein was supposedly using to threaten the America and his Middle Eastern neighbours did not actually exist. This war has also already killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, but has not transformed middle-eastern politics, hasn't improved Israel's security, and hasn't stabilized oil production capability. What overall effect it will have on stablizing the Middle-East is still pretty questionnable.
War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Chickens roosting on an open fire . . .

"...and so its been said, many times, many ways, merry Fitzmas to you."
Several posts today about chickens homing to roost, comeuppances arriving, "so's" being told, wake ups being called, yada yada and all that jazz. . .
From Pre$$titutes comes this piece about "The Great Vindication Of The Anti-War Movement ":

In case the world hasn't noticed, the events of the past few months have vindicated the millions of people in the U.S. and around the world who protested the Iraq invasion on the basis that it was being justified by lies and that it would lead to a long, bloody struggle . . . the fact that the outcome of this grand misadventure was predicted by anti-war demonstrators goes unmentioned. It didn't take foreign policy experience or national security expertise or top-secret Intel briefings for the anti-war movement to know, unequivocally, that the Iraq invasion was a hyped-up, over-sold war. It was crystal clear from day one what Bush, Cheney, Condi, Rummy, Colin, et al were up to . . . It's awful for the anti-war movement to be so right about something so catastrophic as a war based on lies and deceptions, but it behooves America to give credit to those who predicted every step of this sorry journey. Maybe next time they'll listen more closely. And then again...

And Driftglass writes about the tragic fate of the Moderate Republican in "You bought it. "

Now live in it . . .in five short years, the Moderates have lived to become everything they detest. Every word of clucking reproach they yelped in snickering glee during the Clinton Age has gotten caught up in the Bush Treason Cyclotron, sped up to light-speed, and is now coming screaming back at them like a sack of radioactive axe-heads. Their worst nightmare is in the process of coming true, big as a mountain in stilettos, carrying a sledgehammer in one hand and a 40-foot-long straight razor in the other, and there is not shit all they can do about it. Because everything they believed or touted or crowed about or tried to rub in our faces is in the process of coming down around their ears. Every. Single. Thing. Every justification that they were fed about their Great Ay-rab Safari is now spilling out into the sunlight and can clearly be seen -- even from High Earth Orbit -- to have been a willful lie. . . . now it’s not one thing that’s melting down; it’s everything. The serial cons that have kept the grubby Mods goggle-eyed and heroin-loyal are all falling apart simultaneously and there’s nothing but decibels left in the Shiny Object Bag to keep them from noticing the awful truth. That their Leaders are traitors. Their heroes are liars. Their dogma is a joke. Their President is a feeble-minded creep who has fucked up everything he has ever touched . . . How terrifying that must be. I mean, I’m wrong about a lot of stuff...but everything? Every God Damned Thing? And worse – so very much worse – not only were they utterly wrong about everyfuckingthing, but the Evil Liberals were right all along. The big picture. The fussy details. The arithmetic. The real, racist heart of the GOP. The various myriad, casual betrayals by the Bush White House. All of it. . . . I can’t even imagine how it must feel to know at some level that your whole world is a farce, and your whole belief system is a Ponsi Scheme run on you by thugs who never gave a shit about you, or your family or your dearest peon dreams.

And on Huffington, Katrina Vanden Heuvel ends her piece on the "Five stages of political grief":

. . . In the meantime, we get to enjoy the hypocrisy of listening to Republicans run through the Clinton playbook. They are currently referring to the investigation as the "criminalization of politics," dismissing perjury as a "technicality," and smearing the Special Prosecutor. It is a veritable nostalgia-fest.

Personally, I'm waiting for the new phase to be identified, in the tradition of "I am not a crook", "What did he know and when did he stop knowing it?" and "Its not the sex, its the lying." I wonder what the Plame sentence will be?

Great line of the day

From Background noise and fried Rice'
at Smirking Chimp:

You know we're in trouble when the best we can say about our President is that, in a macabre way, he provides comic relief to our reeling nation.

Another "Ah-ha!" moment

You know, given all the time and energy going into the leak investigation, I had been starting to wonder whether Plame's work on WDM was purely the coincidental, ironic, "hey, who wouldda guessed it" meme that is always portrayed as being. Here Justin Raimondo lays down the scenario:

Until now, I have never understood why, in the name of all that's holy, Scooter and his cabal went after Valerie Plame, the wife of the man they supposedly sought revenge on. It seems remarkably petty and small-minded, even for a neocon. . . A hissy fit on Scooter's part doesn't quite qualify. There is, on the other hand, another possible explanation, less emotional and more cold-blooded, one that – in the context of recent developments – makes a certain amount of sense… Remember, the [Niger] forgeries were exposed in early March 2003. The New York Times published Wilson's now famous "What I Didn't Find in Africa" op-ed on July 6, 2003 – and we now know that Scooter and the gang were homing in on Wilson even before his piece appeared. We also know that Ms. Plame wasn't the only deep-cover CIA agent outed by Scooter and the Cheney-ites: she worked through a CIA front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, engaged in anti-proliferation work, whose activities were aborted by Plame's exposure. In one fell swoop, an entire group of undercover CIA experts on nuclear weapons proliferation was neutralized . . . Everyone assumes Libby and his co-conspirators were really after Wilson, but this now seems unwarranted, especially in light of Fitzgerald's reported focus on the Niger uranium forgeries. If this question of the forgeries is now within Fitzgerald's purview, it opens up the possibility that the conspirators really were after Plame on her own account. If Plame and her associates were hot on the trail of whoever forged the Niger uranium documents, by neutralizing Brewster Jennings & Associates the Libby cabal closed one possible route to uncovering their schemes . . .

Well, and I suppose they were just so pleased with themselves at the time -- thinking they were neutralizing both Wilson AND Plame in one blow.
But there's more. Ramimondo also connects the leak investigation to the recent flap over Syria:

The U.S. is ratcheting up its campaign against Syria, even as the principal proponents of confronting Damascus – Libby, Hadley, Hannah, Wurmser, et al. – find themselves in Fitzgerald's sights. In effect, the prosecutor is running a race with the War Party: can they provoke a war with Syria before he brings charges? . . . The War Party has its own prosecutor, UN "investigator" Detlev Mehlis, currently trumping up charges against the next candidate for "regime change" in the Middle East: Syria. Mehlis operates under none of the constraints of the U.S. legal system . . . His report is full of uncorroborated testimony from unknown witnesses of unknowable veracity, and in places reads more like a political polemic than a legal document. I defy anyone to read it and come to any definite conclusion other than that Lebanon is one vast snakepit we would do well to stay out of. Yet drawing American troops into the Levant is precisely what the neocons are counting on to distract the American people from their treason, in a "wag the dog" scenario so bold it leaves one breathless. According to Joshua Landis, the respected scholar of Syrian politics and culture who resides in Damascus, the very people who fear indictments the most are behind this new push for war: "I have it on good authority that Steven Hadley, the director of the US National Security Council, called the President of the Italian senate to asked [sic] if he had a candidate to replace Bashar al-Assad as President of Syria. The Italians were horrified. Italy is one of Syria's biggest trading partners so it seemed a reasonable place to ask! This is what Washington has been up to." . . . We're on the Middle Eastern escalator, as I've said before: there is no way to contain the conflict we've unleashed in Iraq . . . The neocons know they're running a marathon, desperately trying to outrun the consequences of their own trail of deception. Will the truth catch up with Hadley, Ledeen, et al., before they can do any more damage to American interests in the Middle East – and spill more blood?

See the Raimondo article for the links to the background documents.