Using the L-word

The L-word is 'Liar'.
The New York Times is pissed - and rightfully so. Here are some excerpts from their Sunday editorial - Spies, Lies and Wiretaps - emphasis mine:

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.
The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant. [To say that] Sept. 11 could have been prevented . . . is breathtakingly cynical. The nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking . . . nothing prevented American intelligence from listening to a call from Al Qaeda to the United States, or a call from the United States to Al Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in doing so . . .

And the editorial continues on to demolish every Republican talking point which has been trotted out over the last month by servile Senators and ignorant talking heads:

. . . The biggest fish the administration has claimed so far has been a crackpot who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch — a case that F.B.I. officials said was not connected to the spying operation anyway . . .
The secret program violates the law as currently written. It's that simple . . . Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust.
The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance . . .
Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the authority to do anything he wanted when it authorized the invasion of Afghanistan. There is simply nothing in the record to support this ridiculous argument. The administration also says that the vote was the start of a war against terrorism and that the spying operation is what Mr. Cheney calls a "wartime measure." That just doesn't hold up . . .
Mr. Gonzales, who had the incredible bad taste to begin his defense of the spying operation by talking of those who plunged to their deaths from the flaming twin towers, claimed historic precedent for a president to authorize warrantless surveillance. He mentioned George Washington, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These precedents have no bearing on the current situation, and Mr. Gonzales's timeline conveniently ended with F.D.R., rather than including Richard Nixon, whose surveillance of antiwar groups and other political opponents inspired FISA in the first place. Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush is waging an unpopular war, and his administration has abused its powers against antiwar groups and even those that are just anti-Republican.

The editorial ends with as stern a statement as I have ever read in an American newspaper:

. . . Congress has failed, tragically, on several occasions in the last five years to rein in Mr. Bush and restore the checks and balances that are the genius of American constitutional democracy. It is critical that it not betray the public once again on this score.

If you've got the money, honey, I've got the time

So Jack Layton is declaring a honeymoon with the Conservatives:

"I am going to make a legitimate, determined effort to find things where there can be common action," [Layton]said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "I believe there are ideas in all of our platforms for the parties to get something done."
. . . with the reality of a Conservative minority government on Feb. 6, and with no appetite among Canadians for another election soon, pragmatism is setting in . . .

Another source of pragmatism, I would think, is that nobody has any money left now to fight another election right away.
But come next fall, how tempting will it be for the NDP, the Conservatives and the Bloc to think about a snap election before the Liberals can get their act together again . . .

Great line of the day

Cheryl at The Galloping Beaver quotes Judith Hayes: "If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction."
And wouldn't millions of teenagers just love to think that sex wasn't connected to pregnancy.

Who's on first?

In Comments, tcarson suggests I should try an Open Thread to find out what is on everyone's mind right now.
So here it is -- my very first Open Thread! Oh, isn't it just so thrilling? So who's gonna be on first?

Iraq deja vu

Well, let's check in on the war news why don't we -- we haven't done that in such a long time.
But I find that just about all the "news" is strangely familiar.
The grandiosity of the US department of defense continues to be revealed -- today, the news is that the Pentagon thinks it will need to "fight the net" someday and wants the ability to knock out every telephone, networked computer, and radar system on the planet.
In Iraq, the war crimes of the US Army continue to be revealed -- today, the news is that they took women as hostages to try to force their husbands to surrender.
The incompetence of the US administration continues to harm the Iraqi people -- today, the news is that close to 200 water, sanitation and electrical reconstruction projects in Iraq won't be completed -- as well as harming American taxpayers -- today, a US audit announced a "spectacular" waste of funds in Iraq.
Oh, and although five out of ten Americans now believe the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, almost six out of ten Americans would support military action in Iran if Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons.
Because after all, they sure wouldn't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Hey, seems to me I've heard that somewhere before...
Oh, here's one piece of actual new news -- King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is making his first official trip outside the Middle East since being crowned last year. And where he is going? To China, India, Malaysia and Pakistan.

Oil troubles in the northern waters

In the whole election campaign, I thought Harper's dumbest moment came when he started talking about spending billions on Arctic icebeakers and establishing bases in the middle of the great white nowhere to form a thin white line against those bullying American subs. I thought it was just the usual election posturing taken to the n-th degree to impress us rubes.
But now I realise there may be more to it -- like, Canadian oil reserves, and international oil transport.
Thomas Walkom's Toronto Star article -- Harper's Arctic stand makes for grand politics -- refers in passing to several important issues:

. . . Certainly, the Arctic issue is serious. The polar icecap is melting, making it easier to navigate the Northwest Passage. Scientists warn that if this route were to become a well-travelled waterway for, say, oil tankers, there could be unwelcome consequences for the fragile ecology of the Canadian North. Unfortunately, for Canada, the U.S. has the better legal argument here. Other key maritime routes that pass through sovereign territory, such as Indonesia's Strait of Sunda, are treated as international waterways. Why not the Northwest Passage?
Perhaps even more important, though, are the simmering issues of resource ownership in the Arctic, as Canada, Denmark, Russia and the U.S. vie with one another for the right to exploit undersea oil and gas deposits.

Now, it starts to make some sense, if oil and gas deposits are at risk, not to mention use of the Northwest Passage for oil tankers. I still don't know if Harper's solutions are the right ones, but taking some action in the far north seems to be more justified.
By the way, I did find amusing this writer's comments that the US has the better "legal argument" -- so is the Bush administration actually going to put forward a position that Canada shouldn't violate some existing treaties, even though they themselves have abandoned numerous treaties in the past five years? And would they be running off to the International Court -- which the US despises -- to get these enforced?

Very smart

I was glad to see this quick response to the Alberta move on health care -- Harper warns Alberta on health reform: "Alberta can go ahead with all the health reforms it likes - so long as it stays within the rules of the Canada Health Act, says a spokesman for the incoming Conservative government."
Any time there is a new government, there is always a certain amount of pent-up demand for change -- which can explode in the incoming government's face if they don't get a grip on it quickly. So its good that Harper took immediate steps to cool Alberta down.

Weekend!

Daaaawwg talks to G-Dubz

From OptimusCrime -- The Inaugural Phonecall. (And thanks to My Blagh via Galloping Beaver for finding this.)

Well, I'm trying

I'm really trying.
I really do want to give Harper the benefit of the doubt, to accentuate the positive and elminate the negative, all we are saying is give peace a chance, and all that touchy-feely 60s stuff about peace and love and stop with the negative vibes.
But it gets a lot harder when I read articles like this one (thanks to Cynic for finding it) -- Harper's grand plan:

On the one hand, he wants to radically decentralize power and taxing authority so that the federal government no longer plays a significant role in social areas, like medicare, that Canadians regard as national institutions.
On the other, he wants to focus and strengthen Ottawa's role in areas such as defence so that Canada can more effectively join the United States in what Harper has called the great moral battle against tyranny and terror.

Sorry, but I just can't help it -- when I read stuff like this my inner-Yosemite Sam starts to explode into the mother of all Snark attacks and I burst forth with "Oh, great, guys, just what we need, George Bush Lite -- all the incompetence without those bloated deficits -- yet! Does he think this is what Canadians elected him to do? Well, he's got another think coming . . . (yadda, yadda, yadda, you know the rest!)"

We can only choose our side

We don't get to choose the battle. We only get to choose our side.
I have been thinking lately about how to reply to the apparently-reasonable-sounding argument that I hear from Conservatives and religious people that a person can support gay rights without supporting gay marriage.
But you can't. Not anymore.
We don't get to choose the battle.
No one decided that the second world war would start in defense of Poland. But once Germany invaded, no one could just sit back any longer and say "Sorry, boys, can't fight now because we just aren't organized well enough quite yet. Let's put this off until something else outrageous happens."
No one decided that the right to have an abortion should define the women's movement. But this issue came to symbolize the most basic right, for women to control their own bodies, and therefore people who do not support a woman's right to choose are not feminists and cannot claim to be.
No one decided that the black civil rights movement would make its bones through a bus boycott in Montgomery. But once this boycott began, the black people of Montgomery had to keep on walking no matter how tired they were and how violent things became. The people couldn't say "Sorry, boys, this is really inconvenient for everybody, so can you please take your cause to some other city?" No, Montgomery became a battle that had to be won.
And so it is now with gay marriage. The battle is real and immediate and personal to many gay people, but its has also become symbolic. The Christian Right hysteria against gay marriage is one of the factors that has made this battle so important, because the core of their opposition to gay marriage is bigotry and hate against gay people, which cannot be allowed to win.
When someone says "I don't support gay marriage but this doesn't mean I am a bigot", this simply isn't true. Not anymore. The battle lines have been drawn.
The choice is which side you are on.
You ARE a bigot if you don't support gay marriage.

Horse with no name

Come on, Liberals, get on with it!
According to this article, some of the least-likely leadership candidates in the country -- people whose horses are so dark they are effectively invisible -- want to give Harper all sorts of time in power by delaying the leadership convention until late 2007, so they can sell a few more memberships.
Along with likely candidates Frank McKenna, Brian Tobin, John Manley and Alan Rock -- as if this weren't enough -- the article also mentions dark-horse candidates Martin Cauchon, Stephane Dion, Maurizio Bevilacqua, Belinda Stronach, Scott Brison, Ken Dryden, Anne McLellan, Joe Volpe, Michael Ignatieff, and Denis Coderre. Coderre is quoted in the article as saying that Liberals should delay their leadership convention until they "conduct a thorough post-mortem on the losing election campaign, reunite the warring factions and allow plenty of time for new ideas and new leadership contenders to emerge."
But Canada doesn't have "plenty of time".
On this agenda, the Liberals wouldn't really be ready to fight another election until 2008. And by then, the Canada that the Liberals built will be on the way to being dismantled. We may well be in Iran with Bush. Customs and immigration integration may be implemented. The CRTC and the CBC will be unrecognizabble. Kyoto and the Kelowna accord will be toast. We may well be allowing two-tier health care.
So a crew of no-name Liberals want to give a Harper government the time to do all this, just so that they can try to promote themselves into a spoiler role in a leadership race?
Thanks a bunch.

First, we gut the CRTC!

Wow -- less than 24 hours and the CSA (Conservative secret agenda) is already up and running!
Kate McMillan's final CBC election blog post -Morning in Canada- says that as well as doing the things Harper actually told Canadians he would do -- like the accountability act, tax cuts, etc -- he should also immediately start doing things he DIDN'T tell anyone about, like gutting the CRTC and the CBC so that Canada can have its very own rightwingnut Rush Limbaugh-types dominating our radios.

. . . the single most important change he [Harper] can make to restore balance to Canadian democracy is to begin breaking down the stranglehold of government and the Liberal apparatchik on the communications industry by eliminating or radically restricting the authority of the CRTC, restoring political balance on the board of the CBC and moving the network to a model of market self-sufficiency, and closing the generous pasture land of government funded "think tanks" where deposed and unemployed Liberals retire to lobby the government at government expense - and inform Canadians of our "Canadian values."
For until and unless conservatives can look forward to hearing their voice, their issues, their world view expressed as part of - as opposed to subject matter for - mainstream Canadian media, the prospects for the election of Stephen Harper to bring "Morning to Canada" will be remembered only as a brief time out for Canada's unnaturally governing party.

Its going to be a fun year, isn't it?

Great line of the day

From Keith in the comments to Steve Gilliard's Canadian election post:

If one looks over the totals, one almost got the impression that the Canadian public stood the four leaders up against the wall and read them all the riot act. "Harper, we'll let you try things out but we don't trust you and if you get out of line, you're toast. Martin, go stand in the corner and get your shit in order. Duceppe, don't be getting any ideas about trying for independence because we're not in the mood. And Layton, you still don't have enough votes to be a power broker so shut the hell up and reign in your ego."

Emphasis mine. Hey, I think he's got it!

Update on my son

And just a quick update on my son -- he got 1284 votes with 182 out of 184 polls reporting -- a couple of hundred more votes than the Greens got last time in the Blackstrap riding, so we were pretty pleased about it. Thanks, everyone, for your good wishes.