Turning Iraq into the Ghetto

US troops in Iraq have found one technique that apparently reduces the number of hit-and-run attacks on US troops -- constructing guarded walls around towns so that insurgents cannot use them as bases.
Not surprisingly, the Iraqis don't like having to go through checkpoints whenever they leave or enter their home: "the imam at the village mosque compared the constant watch envisaged under the new plan to a concentration camp. "
You know, Bush always tries to draw the analogy that Iraq is like World War II (himself as Rooseveldt spreading democracy, ridding the world of evil, and all that). I always thought this was a dumb analogy, but now I wonder -- does anyone remember the Warsaw Ghetto?

Weekend update

So, to sum up the situation so far:
The Conservatives' loyal supporters are going to try to outlaw gay marriage, and make abortion illegal again (thanks to A BCer in Toronto for finding this one.) And in their first budget, they would raise our income taxes.
The Liberals support gay marriage, and they support letting a woman decide whether ot not to get an abortion. And they would maintain the income tax reduction.
Hmmm....for me, the choice is pretty clear. And its NOT Foreign minister Stockwell Day or Justice minister Vic Toews.
By the way, if Harper goes down in this election, here's the news story that will be marked as the beginning of the end: Harper plays his age card:

Stephen Harper says unlike his retirement-age chief rival, his relative youth means he can relate to the average Canadian and is in touch with the country's needs. Harper highlighted the age gap between himself [he is 46] and Prime Minister Paul Martin [67] yesterday while revisiting his day-care announcement . . . "Laureen and I, obviously we're from a middle-class background, and our experience with child care is fairly recent and it's in the modern era. Every leader brings different experiences to this job. I'm still considerably younger than any of the leaders competing in this campaign."

Great, Stephen -- you just insulted every Canadian over the age of 50 by implying that we are all old-fashioned, practically senile, while also reminding everybody about your own profound lack of experience running anything.

Airs above the ground

Beautiful.
Looking through Yahoo's photos this week, I found this one of a horse and trainer from the Spanish Alvaro Domecq Riding School (photo taken at Muscat, Oman, during their annual equestrian show for AFP by Mohammed Mahjoub). It reminded me that my sister and I went to see the the Lipizzaner stallions tour this summer and we enjoyed it very much. We had seats right at ringside so we got a sense of how powerful these horses are and how highly skilled their trainers must be to teach the horses the "airs above the ground". I was surprised at how much the horses seemed to appreciate the applause and cheers they got during their performances.

A word for our times -- truthiness

truthiness: the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.

The American Dialect Society has selected "truthiness" to be its Word of the Year. First said by that noted Daily Show linguist Steven Colbert, the word is one for our times -- the news story announcing the award quotes North Carolina State professor Michael Adams defining truthiness as "truthy, not facty." He continues "The national argument right now is, one, who's got the truth and, two, who's got the facts. Until we can manage to get the two of them back together again, we're not going make much progress."
Here are some of the other new words I liked:

brown-out: the poor handling of an emergency.
disaster industrial complex: the array of businesses which make profit from by providing emergency services, especially those that result from no-bid government contracts.
lifehack: to make one’s day-to-day behaviors or activities more efficient.
whale tail: the appearance of thong or g-string underwear above the waistband of pants, shorts, or a skirt. Also known as a longhorn.
muffin top: the bulge of flesh hanging over the top of low-rider jeans.
man date: when two heterosexual men engage in an activity together without romantic implications.
pope-squatting: registering a domain name that is the same of a new pope before the pope chooses his new name in order to profit from it.
Ex-Lax option: immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
holistic practitioner: a prostitute.
VBIED: a car bomb. An acronym for Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device. Sometimes pronounced vee-bid or vee-bidder.
jump the couch: to exhibit strange or frenetic behavior. Inspired by the couchbouncing antics of Tom Cruise on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show.
Cyber Monday: the Monday after Thanksgiving, purported to be the day that most online shopping takes place.
folksonomy: a taxonomy created by an ad hoc group of non-experts. From folk + ta(x)onomy.

Click here to see all the nominees(pdf).

This woman makes me gag

Elsie Wayne is back, and leading the fight against same-sex marriage. Here are a few choice quotes from this news story:

"Look at the future for our young people, for heaven's sake. What kind of message are we sending to them? It's no wonder George Bush doesn't want to do business with Canada anymore. I don't blame him. At least he has moral standards." . . . Wayne says she is convinced a national referendum on the marriage question would produce overwhelming support for the traditional definition. "We have a lot of people in this country who are for marriage being between a man and woman and nothing else," she says. "The fact of the matter is that Paul Martin just listened to a few loudmouths on this issue. He hasn't listened to Canadians."

What complete bullsh*t. Will anything other than a vote for the Liberals shut this woman up?

Harper: "Read my lips -- more new taxes!"

Martin knew if he waited long enough, Harper wouldn't be able to stop himself -- he just has to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:

Late last year, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper's staff told CBC Online the Conservatives would let the [Liberal] tax cuts stand if they win the election. But the Conservatives called CBC this week to say that while they would allow the Liberal tax cut to stand for last year . . . they intend to immediately raise personal income taxes if they are elected later this month. The Conservatives say a Stephen Harper government would raise the rate on the lowest tax bracket back from 15 per cent back to 16 per cent in their first budget, probably in April. As well, the basic exemption, income on which no tax is charged, would be dropped by $400 in the same budget. A Tory official acknowledged to CBC News that would likely mean taking back the money taxpayers are saving on their paycheques for the first four months of this year.

Oh, and here's the kicker:

The Tories refused to be interviewed on camera for the story.

Emphasis mine.

And if the Conservatives would backtrack on this promise, what about all the other Liberal/NDP spending programs of the last 18 months, for cities and infrastructure and Aboriginals and health care? Harper said at the time that he wouldn't pull the rug out from under these programs if he was elected (which, I must say, I did not believe at the time). But is he now going to change these promises retroactively?

So now Harper can play defense for a while.
And I note that even the press is now getting a little tired of seeing the RCMP apparently running against Martin -- the latest story is that the RCMP is now going around interviewing people on whether a portion of a $4 million grant given by Heritage Canada to a federalist group during the 1995 referundum campaign was properly accounted for, an issue which then-minister Sheila Copps told CBC had been looked at by the Auditor General ten years ago.
So, OK -- everybody into the pool!
Should we also see if we can't get the RCMP to re-open an investigation into Mulroney and Airbus or whatever that crock was all about? And why stop there? Lets rehash the NDP's Spudco scandal in Saskatchewan that cost us $34 million. . .

Think about it

Paul Wells writes:

. . . here's an ad I'd run this weekend, if I was a Grit and seriously worried I was about to lose big:
Blank black screen. Type appears across screen as deep, urgent voice reads text:
'Foreign Minister Stockwell Day'
Screen darkens: relights on Liberal logo; bright woman's voice reads:
'On January 23, Vote Liberal.'
I figure that would be good for about a five-point swing all by itself.

Ah, yes, what a concept.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Anyone who thinks "Darwinism" is "just a theory" can read this and weep.
This NYT article "DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution" uses that old "E" word - evolution -- without a blink or a demur.
And the story is such a fascinating one -- it would be a pretty dull story to attribute the cat to so-called "intelligent design", AKA "creationism", compared to what really happened:

About nine million years ago - two million years after the cat family first appeared in Asia - these successful predators invaded North America by crossing the Beringian land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska . . . Later, several American cat lineages returned to Asia. With each migration, evolutionary forces morphed the pantherlike patriarch of all cats into a rainbow of species, from ocelots and lynxes to leopards, lions and the lineage that led to the most successful cat of all, even though it has mostly forsaken its predatory heritage: the cat that has induced people to pay for its board and lodging in return for frugal displays of affection.
This new history of the family, known as Felidae, is based on DNA analyses of the 37 living species . . . Before DNA, taxonomists had considerable difficulty in classifying the cat family. The fossil record was sparse and many of the skulls lacked distinctiveness . . . [the research team]has been able to reconstruct a series of at least 10 intercontinental migrations by which cats colonized the world. The cheetah, for instance, now found in Africa, belongs to a lineage that originated in North America and some three million years ago migrated back across the Bering land bridge to Asia and then Africa. Dr. O'Brien said the cats were very successful predators, second only to humans, and quickly explored new territories as opportunity arose. Sea levels were low from 11 million to 6 million years ago, enabling the first modern cats, in paleontologists' perspective (saber-tooth tigers are ancient cats), to spread from Asia west into Africa, creating the caracal lineage, and east into North America, generating the ocelot, lynx and puma lineages.
The leopard lineage appeared around 6.5 million years ago in Asia. The youngest of the eight lineages, which led eventually to the domestic cat, emerged some 6.2 million years ago in Asia and Africa, either from ancestors that had never left Asia or more probably from North American cats that had trekked back across the Bering land bridge.
Sea levels then rose, confining each cat species to its own continent, but sank again some three million years ago, allowing a second round of cat migrations. It was at this time that the ancestors of the cheetah and the Eurasian lynxes colonized the Old World from the New . . .

Even the most deeply religious person should be able to see the hand of God in such a fascinating history.
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
(Thanks to Americablog for highlighting this story.)

Another great cat story

Meet "Miracle"

who clung under an SUV for 60 miles (100 KM) down the New Jersey Turnpike, until another driver spotted her and got the SUV stopped.

I would have supported this anyway

Even if my son were not running for the Greens, I would have endorsed this: CBC News: Greens launch formal complaint over debate exclusion But now, of course, I am even more supportive.

In a letter to the broadcasting regulator, lawyer Peter Rosenthal calls for a revision of the debates policy, charging it is not consistent with the Charter principles of free and democratic elections. "To deny the Green party participation, it perverts the democratic process," Rosenthal told CBC News Online . . . "By restricting participation in the debate to the leader of the four "major" parties does truly drown out the voices of Green party candidates and is thus unconstitutional," Rosenthal writes . . . the party is running candidates in all 308 ridings, and received 4.3 per cent of the vote in the last election . . . Although the Green party has little chance of forming a government, amendments to the Canada Elections Act makes every vote count. A party that now obtains two per cent of the vote, will receive $1.75 for each vote for each year until the next election. Rosenthal . . . suggests a drawing line be made at those parties who have obtained at least two per cent of the vote, the same threshold needed to receive per-vote financing.

I myself would be much more interested in listening to Jim Harris rather than Gilles Duceppe.

5-0

Our Golden Boys win it all:

And coach Brent Sutter "is 12-0 in his two years at the helm of the national team. He's now the winningest Canadian coach in the history of this tournament."

Great lines of the day

At Hullabaloo. Glenn Greenwald writes about cowardice and fear -- how the one-note Bush administration still wants Americans to be afraid, be very afraid:

There is no more important goal than exposing and undermining the cowardly and exaggerated fear which lies at the core of the Bush agenda . . . if it really were the case that Islamic terrorism constituted the sort of imminent, civilization-ending threat which the Administration has spent the last four years drumming into everyone’s head, then it would be extremely difficult to gin up much outrage over an eavesdropping program, warrants or not . . . one can protect against the threat of terrorism with courage, calm and resolve – the attributes which have always defined our nation as it has confronted other threats. Hysteria and fear-mongering are the opposite of strength. The strong remain rational and unafraid.

Emphasis mine. It has been my contention for three years that just about everyone in the government in Washington was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder -- and its time to get over it, folks.

Advertising

Well, this could be fun.
When I was going through the template page on Blogger the other day, I noticed that they now have a button where you can click to have Google advertising on the site. So I thought about it and did some reading about it, too.
The downside, I guess, is if I start "editing" myself just to get ads -- like, running stories about Garden Equipment I Really Really Like just to attract an ad from the XYZ Fertilizer Company.
So let me know if you think I am doing that.
Or maybe you really do want to know about Restaurants I Really Really Like?
But on the upside, I have sometimes wondered what this is actually "worth" as far as this blogging thing goes. I keep seeing other bloggers who ask for donations and have these PayPal clicker buttons on their site -- I think its sort of like buying a newspaper subscription, I guess. Going with ads on a blog is more like radio or TV, where they make their money based on the ads they sell rather than on subscriptions. The way these Google ads work is that every time someone clicks on an ad on my site, I would get some percentage of that ad's revenue (with some protections in place to catch me if I do all the clicking myself!)
But if there really are readers who like what I am saying -- and who therefore start clicking on the ads for the Craft Supplies I Really Really Like -- well, its one way of establishing value, I think.
So we'll see how it goes. The first ad on the site was for a Katrina relief fund, so that's something I can support, actually.
Let me know what you think, folks.

Rove of the North

He's around here somewhere, I just know it.
Karl Rove is famous for turning the tables, accusing his opponent of what his own candidate is actually guilty of. Thus, for example, we had Gore accused of stretching the truth, when it was Bush who actually told the whoppers about his presidential plans. And we had war-hero Kerry portrayed as a coward, while draft-dodger Bush escaped criticism. And then the opponent's responses to such bizarre lies end up sounding like sour grapes - "I know you are but what am I?"
You have to remember one thing -- Rove lies. All the time. About just about everything, because he thinks people are too stupid to handle the truth -- and its bullshit, isn't it?
Well, I don't know who is advising the Harper campaign, but it seems to me that Rove of the North is around somewhere.
On Monday, Harper announces to great fanfare that the Liberals are going to "go negative" and the news media dutifully report it.
But while Martin takes the high road with a new speech talking about his vision for Canada, it is Harper who actually goes negative -- yesterday releasing a vile ad campaign and today accusing Martin of dodging taxes on his shipping company.
I guess he hopes that by attacking first, he will prevent the media from pointing out that Harper cannot defend his own management record because he doesn't have one -- according to his biography, he hasn't founded a company or even worked for one. He hasn't ever worked at anything outside of politics, as far as I can tell. In a sane world, you know, voters might think this is a negative, but here is Harper trying to turn Martin's actual business experience into something suspicious.
And the Conservative ad campaign? Well, again, it strikes me that they are trying to keep everyone focused on Martin, and hoping no one notices their own complete lack of governing experience -- except, that is, for the Conservative candidates who used to be members of the discredited Harris government in Ontario.
Winnipeg Free Press columnist Frances Russell sums up exactly what is wrong with the Conservative campaign -- the hollow core at its centre -- in her column today - Canadians terrified of Harper's real plans:

With the wind at their backs from NDP leader Jack Layton's calls for a change in government and a cheerleading national media, Stephen Harper's Conservatives are cruising at 54 per cent in the polls, just as Brian Mulroney was in April 1984.
Well, no.
After almost two years of all-scandal, all-the-time, the Free Press headline Monday summed it up best: "It's Tories by a nose in new poll." All other surveys still show the Liberals tied or with a slim lead.
How can this be? How can the Liberals even be close after the gaffes, the insensitivity, the dithering, the lack of focus, the culture of entitlement, the arrogance and yes, the scandals? Not to mention the 22 months of the most relentlessly negative campaign in Canadian history, staged by Harper's Conservatives.
Part of it may be public turnoff from the daily battering of words like "corrupt," "corruption," "organized crime," "criminal conspiracy" and worse, spilling daily from the Conservatives, amplified by most of the media. Like battery acid, it's corroded the civility of our political culture and is driving voters away from the ballot box in droves. But mostly it's because, furious as all Canadians are at Liberal sins, they remain terrified of Stephen Harper and the direction he would take the country.
Like the Bush Republicans, the Harper Conservatives set groups in society against each other. Like Bush Republicans, they govern for the secure and affluent, for the "have mores," as President George W. Bush once memorably described them. And like Margaret Thatcher, they don't believe in society, only in individuals.
Their idea of public policy, as a prominent New Democrat once put it, is to give everybody a bucket of gravel and tell them to go out and build a highway.
It sounds so democratic to give individuals money to "choose." But Conservative promises of taxable allowances and credits, for day care, for public transit passes, for private but not public pensions and for children's amateur sports, don't create public services available to all. They just help individuals with above average incomes. Taxable allowances and credits do nothing for people who don't pay taxes and little for people who earn a modest living.
The single mother working at Wal-Mart on minimum wage can't benefit from a taxable allowance for child care. She needs a subsidized child- care space, a space that won't be available. A tax credit for a bus or subway pass isn't any use to her either if she can't afford all that money at once or if there is no public transit to use. As for the tax credit for sports equipment, she needs it for food and rent.
Harper's $400 million for individual transit tax credits would be better used assisting municipalities to improve their public transit systems. His $1,200 per child taxable allowance is of no use if there is no quality child care to be bought at any price. And his $250 million for new child care spaces is conditional on those spaces being provided by business through tax credits, hardly comparable to the Liberals' universal national childcare program, modelled after universal public education.
The senior relying on the Canada Pension, Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement is by definition worse off than the senior with a private pension. But the worse-off senior gets nothing from the Harper Conservative plan for tax credits for private pensions only. . . .
As the gun violence currently plaguing Toronto illustrates, there is blowback from government policies designed to punish certain groups in society simply because they are disadvantaged. Toronto today is reaping the whirlwind that the former Conservative government of Mike Harris sowed when it slashed welfare rates by 22 per cent and terminated social housing. And Torontonians should take note that several former Harris cabinet ministers are running on the Harper ticket . . . Vancouver entrepreneur Jayson Kaplan . . . says Harper is using Bush's 2000 election strategy, allaying voter fears by promising to be a "compassionate" conservative, not to intrude the state into matters like abortion and only to spend "projected surpluses." Once in office, Bush did the exact opposite.
"Voting for Stephen Harper is like voting for George Bush," Kaplan writes. "The two are just too similar in their campaigns and their beliefs for it to be a coincidence."

A chilling scenario

The Poor Man sets up a "how to look like you could be a terrorist" scenario:

One day, you’re sitting at your desk eating Cheetos when the phone rings.
It’s your old college buddy, calling to check in from his exciting new job overseas! He’s working for an important multinational corporation . . . he gives the number of the phone he’s calling you from. By a funny coincidence, that phone number, three years ago, was connected to a cell phone that was stolen by a . . . Pakistani kid who rang up a lot of calls to rural Kashmir. You don’t know that, of course.
A few months later, you take a trip to lovely Mexico. While there, you buy a calling card, so you can check in on the homefront without running up huge roaming charges on your cell phone. You also take some pictures of picturesque Mexican buildings, and post them . . . on the internet for friends and family to see.
When you get home, catching up on your news, you are shocked and horrified to learn that the islamofascists have decapitated another hostage. Intrigued in spite of yourself, and eager to stay informed about the depths to which those murderous bastards will sink, you find the video of the killing on the internet, and watch it on your computer.
Soon, in a festive all-black building in surbuban Maryland, a pock-faced jr. espionagateer gets a message from the big computers with the all the wires and antennas. The message has your name!

I wonder about is this -- that while the alphabet soup agencies are spending tens of millions tracking people like our token Mr. Cheetos here, wouldn't any actual terrorists manage to keep such a low profile that they would get lost in this crowd.
And one other point -- instead of calling this everyman Mr. Cheetos, perhaps we should call him Mr. Arar. The 'evidence' which raised all the suspicion against Maher Arar seems just about as flimsy as what the Poorman posted.