Merry Christmas, Katrina survivors!

These news photos and their cutlines show how the survivors of Hurricane Katrina are doing Christmas this year -- with courage and determination and good humour. Admirable people, all:


Gregory Scott stands on his porch amidst his tent and Christmas decorations in New Orleans . . . Other than three weeks he spent on a median on the Orleans Parish border, he says he never left New Orleans or his damaged home since Hurricane Katrina. At left is his friend Myron, no last name given. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)


Kim Newton walks with her dogs Boots and Rocket in front of her FEMA trailer which is decorated for Christmas in front of her home that was heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina in the St. Bernard Parish town of Chalmette, La. just outside New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)


Children homeless from Hurricane Katrina cheer as a man dressed as Santa Claus arrives on a fire engine for a toy giveaway at Camp Premier, a tent city for people displaced from the storm in Chalmette, La. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)


A weathered Santa wearing a toxic mask stands in front of a home destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in Chalmette, La. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Shut up, and watch your poll numbers increase

Here's the Politics Canada poll chart again:


And isn't it interesting -- the lates story is that the Tory campaign is failing to gain traction with voters:

Stephen Harper's policy-heavy election campaign is no better at capturing voters' imaginations than the Liberal effort, according to a new poll that also finds less gloom about the direction of the country than when the election was called . . . Allan Gregg, chairman of The Strategic Counsel, said a strategy of not focusing on criticism of the Liberals may be contributing to the Tories stall. "[The Conservatives] have to get that general protest sentiment back up there," Mr. Gregg said. "The cornerstone of any opposition party is unhappiness with the status quo. It's the oldest cliché in the book, but it's true. Governments defeat themselves."
Mr. Gregg said the Liberals may have found their game simply by fighting back every time the Tories lay out a policy proposal. "They're not doing much on the initiative front, but they're very effective in their counter-punching," he said.
The results appear to run against the grain of some commentators who have criticized the Liberals for running a relatively quiet campaign focused on their record rather than announcing new policy ideas. The Tory campaign has announced almost daily policy prescriptions, while the Liberals have criticized them for being too ideological.

This confirms my own thinking -- which I didn't blog about because I didn't think I could possibly be right -- that Martin was getting better traction NOT making policy announcements than Harper was getting by making them.
The problem for Martin with just about any policy announcement, of course, is that the response would be -- well, why didn't you do this already? Harper is not so constrained -- but, on the other hand, when a political party announces armfuls of goodies day after day after day, eventually people start to wonder whether anyone has added it up and whose money will be paying for it.
And Harper's latest one, the Arctic sovereignty thing, is just stupid -- he's trying to counter Martin's winning anti-Bush strategy with a little flag-waving of his own, but Canadians know we have better things to do with billions of dollars than harass a few US submarines.
Harper's deeper problem, however, is that he simply cannot describe how he could manage a minority government.
Canadians aren't stupid -- we know reality. We know that if the Bloc maintains their vote in Quebec, then they will prevent either the Conservatives or the Liberals from achieving a majority government. We know that to form a government, either Harper or Martin would have to ally with either the NDP or the Bloc. We don't want the Bloc to get any stronger than it already is, so we would prefer that they NOT be the deal-breaker party.
We know that Martin would ally with the NDP. And we're OK with that. But we don't know what Harper would do.
No wonder the poll numbers are dropping -- all those policy announcements, yet he hasn't announced the one thing that Canadians would want to know.

Happy Festivus

Hey, December 23 is Festivus, the holiday billed as "for the rest of us."
We had the traditional red Festivus comfort-food meal tonight -- spagetti and meatballs (though I must admit the menu was accidental because I had forgotten all about it.)
Anyway, the other Festivus events are the traditional Airing of Grievances, which begins with "I have a lot of problems with you people" and carries on with a listing of the ways in which your nearest and dearest have disappointed you this year. Then there are the Feats of Strength, and the gathering around the alumnium festivus pole.
This all started as a Seinfield episode -- and has evolved to the point that there are now a number of companies which actually sell Festivus poles.
Obviously, a holiday whose time has come.

Oh festivus, oh festivus, your day is for the rest of us
Oh festivus, oh festivus, we'll tell you all the worst of us.
We'll wrestle and we'll genuflect
Around your pole and then we'll ...
Oh festivus, oh festivus, your day is really best for us.

Well, great -- I have an "estate" now

Hey, folks, if this is true, then divy me up! "A body could be worth about $150,000, according to Art Caplan, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania."
So make sure my family doesn't bury me or cremate me. Instead, I want them to make a few bucks and break me down for parts.
Will I care? Not at all.

No votes for Chalabi

Well, first of all, Chalabi's defeat couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy: "Preliminary results in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad indicate that Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress scored a minuscule 0.36 percent of the votes. Out of almost 2.5 million voters in Baghdad, only 8,645 voted for Chalabi. In the Shiite city of Basra, the results indicate he had an equally dismal showing of 0.34 percent of the vote. In the violent Sunni province of Anbar, 113 people voted for him."
But second, I wonder if, in the end, the iraq election will stand? US pundits seem shocked - shocked!- that Iraq has elected a Shiite fundamentalist government with ties to Iran. And I was shocked that they knew so little about Iraq that they would be surprised at this -- who did they THINK the Iraqi electorate would vote for? Anyway, now that Chalabi has hired a PR firm, we'll see whether the "vote fraud" story will be inflated to try to hamper, delay and ultimately invalidate the election result.

Thanks, Bazz

In Comments, Bazz from the Oi! Thump! blog, points us to this hysterically funny Onion story: U.S. Troops Draw Up Own Exit Strategy

BAGHDAD—Citing the Bush Administration's ongoing refusal to provide a timetable for withdrawal, the U.S. troops stationed in Iraq have devised their own exit strategy. "My marines are the best-trained, best-equipped, most homesick fighting force in the world," said Staff Sgt. Cornelius Woods. "Just give us the order, and we will commandeer every available vehicle to execute a flanking maneuver on the airstrips of Mosul. By this time tomorrow, we will have retaken our positions at our families' dinner tables in full force." In a striking rebuke of the assertions of the Pentagon and the White House that a swift exit is neither practical nor possible, soldiers of varying rank have outlined a straightforward plan of immediate disengagement, dubbed "Operation Screw This.". . .

Ah, was there every anything like the Onion? Even the Daily Show doesn't get quite as sharp as the Onion. Thanks, Bazz.

Great line of the day

In 'Cheney's cheerleading falls flat' on The Smirking Chimp, author John Nichols from The Nation describes the reaction of US soldiers to Cheney's visit to Iraq:

. . . the administration's talk about how the U.S. will stand down as the Iraqis stand up remains an empty promise. How empty? Consider a line buied deep in the AP report of the vice president's visit to Taji Air Base in Iraq: "U.S. forces guarded Cheney with weapons at the ready while Iraqi soldiers, who had no weapons, held their arms out as if they were carrying imaginary guns." For all of Cheney's cheerleading about how well things are going, those carrying the real guns recognize that they will not soon be coming home from a country where their 'replacements' are carrying imaginary guns.

Emphasis mine.

Beware of paralegals

Lawyers always have had a reputation, mostly undeserved, for being con artists. But it appears from this list of the year's best scams and cons from Insurance Bureau of Canada that paralegals are the people to watch now:

1) A Halifax man made 11 claims in which he pretended to be struck by cars backing out of parking lots.
2) A man exported his new vehicle to Europe and claimed it was stolen three months later.
3) A Toronto-area man who took his car to a body shop for repair of a minor scrape was surprised to see the enormous bill and list of unnecessary parts - including a front grille and cooling system - the shop sent to his insurance company.
4) A Quebec man earned the title Chop Shop King for running two bustling garages where police found 40 stolen vehicles being carved up for parts. The king was jailed six years and ordered to pay a $774,000 fine.
5) An Alberta man reported his high-end pickup truck stolen, collecting $68,000 from his insurer. Months later, investigators learned he had stripped the vehicle and sold the parts. He was charged with public mischief and fraud.
6) A Toronto-area paralegal recruited people to file more than $200,000 in claims for phantom injuries from supposed car crashes. The scheme was supported by a clinic that claimed to have assessed and treated the injuries.
7) Salespeople at a few Toronto-area car dealerships charged $500 to arrange insurance with a broker they said would save car owners lots of money on premiums. The scammers put bogus information on the applications so that customers would be put into a cheaper rate group, but that made the policies invalid.
8) A woman in the Toronto area persuaded friends and family to join her in staging car accidents and filing false claims. One annoyed neighbour was pestered once too often and secretly recorded her pitch.
9) The owner of a company that had several workers filing injury claims denied knowing any of them. It turned out that a paralegal had forged employment forms to boost the compensation claims of staged "victims."
10) A car crash victim seeking cheap legal advice from a paralegal was duped into signing a pile of legal forms that had the paralegal negotiate on the man's behalf with the insurance company. The paralegal then forged the man's signature on the resulting cheque and cashed it.

Getting worse

The thing about the Bush administration is this: its ALWAYS worse than it first appears.
With Clinton, it often turned out that nothing had happened -- the first news stories about all his scandals started out pretty awful, but then it just dribbled away and turned to dust as it gradually came out that nothing much had actually happened -- like Whitewater and Travelgate and impeachment for a blowjob.
But with Bush, its the other way around -- the first news stories start out pretty awful, and then it just keeps on getting worse and worse -- the Office of Special Plans, stovepiping, Abu Ghraib, rendition, CIA prisons, Fallujah, Guantanamo, torture, sabatoging the UN, firing civil servants, pouring government money into Christian Right organizations, Halliburton, losing billions in Iraq, politicizing scientific and technical policies, and now Big Brother-gate.
And then it also turns out that it isn't just accidental or coincidental or bad apples or someone misinterpreting the orders -- nope, it always turns out to be the newest US policy, ordered right from "the top" -- Rumsfeld, Cheney or Bush, happily implementing the Imperial Presidency as fast as they can.
When you think of all this stuff together, it seems pretty clear to me that there is a rough beast being born here. In this post on My Left Wing called :: Slouching Toward Kristallnacht Maryscott O'Connor quotes from Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 - 1945. It is a chilling description of a civilized society sliding toward fascism, and its attributes are more familiar in America today than anyone could have believed just five years ago:

". . . one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none . . . in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're an alarmist."
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in, your nation, your people is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing) . . . You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or "adjust" your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."
I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say . . . "Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was "defeatism." You assumed that there were lists of those who would be "dealt with" later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a "victory orgy" to "take care of" those who thought that their "treasonable attitude" had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
"Once the war began, the government could do anything "necessary" to win it; so it was with the "final solution" of the Jewish problem, which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its "necessities" gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

In America, the targets are liberals (anyone who disagrees with the Bush administration) and Muslims (who want to establish the caliphate, didn't you know?)

"It's a cookbook!"

There is a Twilight Zone episode called "To Serve Man" based on a science fiction short story by, I think, Larry Niven. It was one of those stories with a twist ending. The aliens arrive on Earth and they're all very nice and friendly and they invite everyone to visit their planet. Well, our hero is suspicious, but the aliens win him over. Then his girlfriend finds an alien book titled "To Serve Man" and sets to work translating it. At the end of the episode, just as the hero is getting onto the spaceship to travel to the alien planet, the girl comes running into the spaceport and screams up at him "It's a cookbook!"
This is what I am starting to feel like with this NSA story -- that its not a question anymore about which individual people are being targetted and whose enemies they are. Rather, the question is whether there is anyone, anywhere, whose phone calls and email are NOT under surveillance?
Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall have assembled indications that NSA is spider-botting whole groups of people at once. Marshall says

. . . Perhaps they're doing searches for certain patterns of words or numbers, perhaps something as simple as a phone number. But unlike 'traditional' wiretapping, in which you're catching the conversations of a relatively small and defined group of people, this may involve listening in on a big slice of the email or phone communications in the country looking for a particular phone number or code or perhaps a reference to a particular name . . . you can see how this would just be a non-starter for getting a warrant. It is the definition of a fishing expedition.

And its also more than a little reminiscent of the "Big Brother is Watching", where everyone is guilty until proven innocent.
And suddenly we are back at the Supreme Court nominations, too. Everyone thought the questions about how Roberts and Alito would rule on Right to Privacy issues were related to birth control and abortion rights -- but that's pretty small potatoes, really, compared to the question of whether people all over the world have a right NOT to have their communications monitored without cause or warrant.

O.J. Two

Call it O.J. Simpson Two: G.W. Bush wants everyone to focus on the REAL criminal, that person who leaked the story to the New York Times!
Well, Bush and Gonzales and Rice and Rumsfeld and Cheney and the right wing bloggers can spin all they want, but the public knows what the real crime is.
In Bush's Snoopgate, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter writes:

. . . on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story . . . The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security . . . Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story . . . because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker.

They just can't explain why they didn't apply for warrants. There is no explanation, except for the obvious one that the people they felt to be such a threat to security were political targets like journalists and Democrats, and they knew no judge would ever give them a warrant to eavesdrop on these people.

Christmas skirmishes

Non-Sequitur

Harper - Canada's Dubya

Watch out for this guy Stephen Harper. He wants it his way, ALL his way. And that's all there is to it. The Imperial Prime Minister has spoken.
Just like Dubya, if Harper wants reality to twist in his direction, well, then...it will. HE doesn't have to work with actuall reality. Oh, no. If he wants a different reality, a Harper reality, why then -- magically -- that's the way it will BE!
It is a profound belief in creationism, to think that he can personally create a universe which is more to his liking. Its just the way your average four-year-old thinks.
Harper continues to insist that if he passes a law against same-sex marriage then it just won't be overturned by the Supreme Court.
Even though lower courts have ALREADY declared laws against gay marriage unconstitutional.
Even though the only way the Charter allows overriding of constitutional rights is use of the notwithstanding clause.
Nope. That's not the way Harper wants it to be. So that's not the way it will be. So he's going to deny reality, forcing everyone to go through years and years of expense and trouble and legal cases and court challenges, just to end up exactly where we are now, with same-sex marriage legal unless the notwithstanding clause is used.

"Harper appears to be living in a kind of legal Disneyland, as if you can wave a magic wand and thereby override" the Constitution, the courts and an act of Parliament, said Justice Minister Irwin Cotler. "The only way that Harper could possibly override all that is to use the notwithstanding clause and to suggest otherwise is either to be ignorant of the law or to be dissembling." He said lower-court decisions on the issue are constitutionally binding and the Supreme Court itself said the right to same-sex marriage "flows from" the Charter.

Remind you of someone? That guy down south, maybe? The one who keeps talking about how well things are going in Iraq, and how US authorities don't torture anyone, and how the economy is great and there is no such thing as climate change and Delay is innocent and . . .

Chatter

Anyone who gives this two seconds thought knows that the National Security Agency hasn't spent the last four years monitoring the phone calls and email of homesick Arab students.
This is a White House where every single thing is political, where the election of a Democrat was seen as a threat to national security. So they have, of course, been spying on all of those 10,000 people on the White House enemies list, plus Democrats and peace activitists and protestors and columnists and journalists and embassies and investment bankers and bank presidents and industrialists and Colin Powell and the State Department and, well, who knows . . . just about anyone or everyone. Remember those stories about John Bolton's abuse of NSA intercepts, when the White House refused to tell the Senate whose phone calls had been recorded, just accidently-like of course? Tip of the iceberg.
How many phone conversations have Bush's opponents or potential opponents had in the last four years with their mistresses or their lawyers or their bookies or their AA sponsors? Just about everybody has something they don't want to see spread all over the local newspaper.
And are we wondering which 'sensitive' security operations would have been endangered if this operation had been revealed a year ago? Likely the ones targetting the Democratic National Committee and the Kerry campaign.
People are wondering why the New York Times held this story for a year before publishing. Two reasons, I think. If the New York Times had published this before the election, it simply would not have been believed -- does anyone remember that a month before the election, when the New York Times revealed that Iraqi arms depots had been stripped of their weapons and the whole thing was brushed aside as partisan politics? And then after the election, the Bush administration had the media bamboozled that everybody just loved them, so again, the Times would have backed off the story again thinking that no one would believe it.
But now that the Bush administration is down, well, the media can finally kick them. The National Security Agency secret spying story has hit with even more impact than the secret prisons story.
Steve Gilliard writes:

Bush's war on terror has been a failure on most levels.
But why break the law?
Because Bush and Cheney think that there would be the magic bullet, that they could torture or violate their way to Osama, and didn't want the law in the way. And enablers like John Yoo were all too eager to help to subvert the law, human decency and common sense.
The short term solution was what Bush wanted. The whole idea behind Gitmo was to round up the truly dangerous, then the secret prisons, then holding Padilla. All short cuts to Osama, they thought. But it wasn't.
The short term solution war on terror will lead to the long term legal fights by its innocent victims.
Now, we're pushing into genuine impeachment territory. NO presidential finding can break the law. Bush seems to think the Constitution is an a la carte menu, when it isn't.

Emphasis mine.
Bush's Divine Right of Kings doctrine is finally turning around and biting him in the ass. I just hope it isn't too late.

Have you heard the good news?

The freeway blogger has a list of the good news from Iraq these days. Here's some of the best:

Vast majority of Iraqi population still alive. Many unwounded, untortured . . . Scrap metal business literally booming. Lots of extra car parts . . . Many U.S. Soldiers not killed at all . . . Lots of surgical training opportunities . . . World opinion of United States gradually changing from hatred and fear to laughter and pity.

If there is one thing which the American electorate will be unable to forgive, it will be Bush making the US look ridiculous around the world. Even after Vietnam, the world saw the US as mistaken, but not silly or misguided.
But here is Canada -- little ole Canada, with the world reputation as everybody's dweeb cousin -- dressing down the American delegation at last week's climate conference and telling the American ambassador to STFU. And meanwhile John Bolton continues to open his mouth just to change feet at the UN. And Rice tours Europe pleading with them to stop their CIA investigations. And Bush has to hold a press conference today with John McCain to announce an "agreement" on the torture amendment -- the agreement being Bush's total capitulation to what McCain wanted.