Mr. Bush? Saudi Arabia is calling on Line 2

And Kuwait is on Line 3.
And boy, are they pissed!
But don't worry, boys -- I know you think you understand what you think Bush said. But what you don't realize is that what he said is not what he meant.

Feeling hopeless?

Read this -- Homeless man given highest award for civilian bravery for helping save woman

"2,245 Dead — How Many More??"

Oooo -- how scary! Subversive, even! Arrest that woman! How dare that Cindy Sheehan wear a t-shirt to the State of the Union saying "2,245 Dead — How Many More??" -- such goings-on simply cannot be tolerated in a democracy!
The priceless thing about the whole story is this: in their eagerness to spare King Bush the slightest embarassment, his Brownshirt-Lite Royal Guard have just killed any positive momentum which Bush might have achieved with this speech.
Cindy Sheehan had virtually disappeared from the major news media over the last few months. If they had let her sit in the gallery, wearing her t-shirt during the Bush speech, chances are the network cameras would have panned over her once or twice during the speech and that's it. But now, this needless arrest has put Cindy front and centre again. She was all over the news tonight and will be again tomorrow -- apparently she is going to be on the morning TV shows now too.
Bush's speech is dull news now - stay the course in Iraq, switch to ethanol at home, ho-hum, same-old, same-old.
I'll bet the White House is simply furious.

The golden age

This Newsweek article about evangelical debaters - Cut, Thrust and Christ - made me think about the overall goals of the religious right.
When you look back over the last hundred years or so, the 20th Century, you see the larger picture, I think -- basically, how the rise of the progressive left in the western democracies helped both individuals and society make a lot of social and economic progress.
Progressives supported unions, to end sweatshops and help working people get paid what their labour was worth. And medicare and access to education and workplace safety regulations and old age pensions, to make people's lives safer, more secure and to protect people against economic catastrophe. With these advances also came so-called "liberal" courts which brought us things like the privacy rights, birth control, abortion rights, affirmative action, and equal rights, which ended anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and discrimination of all kinds.
These left-wing advances were not just theoretical constructs. People today may not remember, but men and women died fighting for these 'liberal' ideas -- union organizers were killed in the early 20th century; civil rights workers in the South were beaten and hung. And millions of people have benefited directly and personally from these changes -- they were paid decent wages for their work, they could save money and buy their own homes, their working conditions were made safer, their children got educated in decent schools, they got health care when they were sick, they had enough money to live on when they got old, and they had the right to pursue happiness without being held back by discrimination.
Now the right seems to think it is their turn -- the pendulum has swung their way, they think.
The problem I have is that I cannot discern what the right wing wants to do with all their new-found power, except to somehow turn back the clock and dismantle everything the liberals created.
This Newsweek article about how right-wingers are training their young to rule the world gives us some insight into right-wing goals:

. . . the religious right figure that if they can raise a generation that knows how to argue, they can stem the tide of sin in the country. Seventy-five percent of Liberty's debaters go on to be lawyers with an eye toward transforming society. "I think I can make an impact in the field of law on abortion and gay rights, to get back to Americans' godly heritage," says freshman debater Cole Bender.

Godly heritage? What is that, and how does it help a working person qualify for a mortgage? Well, its a mythical golden age, back to when America was founded, when men were men and women were women and "God's in his Heaven. All's right with the world."
So what would a society based on a "godly heritage" look like? Well, forget about using the Constitution to protect anybody's rights, forget about government entitlement programs, forget about those burdensome government regulations (except to outlaw abortion). Such a society starts to look like this one or this one.

I am liberal, hear me roar . . .

After the disappointment of seeing the Alito cloture vote approved, I was thinking how downhearted the progressive blogosphere would be tonight.
But they're not, not at all.
They're reciting Shakespeare, and channeling Churchill, and praising Kerry, and quoting Robert Kennedy.
Reminds me of a song:

I am liberal, hear me roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And I know too much to go back an' pretend
'cause I've heard it all before
And I've been down there on the floor
No one's ever gonna keep me down again

You can bend but never break me
'cause it only serves to make me
More determined to achieve my final goal
And I come back even stronger
Not a novice any longer
'cause you've deepened the conviction in my soul

I am liberal, watch me grow
See me standing toe to toe
As I spread my lovin' arms across the land
But I'm still an embryo
With a long long way to go
Until I make conservatives understand

Oh yes I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong
I am invincible
I am liberal

With apologies to Helen Reddy.

Doesn't CBC News use Google?

In Comments, pale (aka fuddleduck) notes this CBC News article - a poorly-researched story about American Free Congress Foundation founder Paul Weyrich and his latest love song to what he sees as a sneakily clever Stephen Harper strategy.
With friends like these , etc etc.
Anyway, this Weyrich fellow -- who is described in the article only as a "U.S. right-wing strategist" rather than the fascist wing-nut he actually is -- calls same sex marriage and abortion "cultural Marxism". The CBC naively goes on to say "He does not say how these things are linked in his mind to Marxism."
Why doesn't CBC know how to google? Just google "cultural marxism" and you get this page which takes you to this Southern Poverty Law Centre website on their Intelligence Project which gives a detailed and very scary description of a well-established, vile, anti-Semitic, fascist philosophy -- its far beyond just a crazy idea in Weyrich's mind:

"Cultural Marxism," described as a conspiratorial attempt to wreck American culture and morality, is the newest intellectual bugaboo on the radical right. Surprisingly, there are signs that this bizarre theory is catching on in the mainstream.
The phrase refers to a kind of "political correctness" on steroids -- a covert assault on the American way of life that allegedly has been developed by the left over the course of the last 70 years. Those who are pushing the "cultural Marxism" scenario aren't merely poking fun at the PC excesses of the "People's Republic of Berkeley," or the couple of American cities whose leaders renamed manholes "person-holes" in a bid to root out sexist thought.
Right-wing ideologues, racists and other extremists have jazzed up political correctness and repackaged it -- in its most virulent form, as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers. These supposed originators of "cultural Marxism" are seen as conspiratorial plotters intent on making Americans feel guilty and thus subverting their Christian culture.
In a nutshell, the theory posits that a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City devised an unorthodox form of "Marxism" that took aim at American society's culture, rather than its economic system.
The theory holds that these self-interested Jews -- the so-called "Frankfurt School" of philosophers -- planned to try to convince mainstream Americans that white ethnic pride is bad, that sexual liberation is good, and that supposedly traditional American values -- Christianity, "family values," and so on -- are reactionary and bigoted. With their core values thus subverted, the theory goes, Americans would be quick to sign on to the ideas of the far left.
The very term, "cultural Marxism," is clearly intended to conjure up xenophobic anxieties. But can a theory like this, built on the words of long-dead intellectuals who have little discernible relevance to normal Americans' lives, really fly? As bizarre as it might sound, there is some evidence that it may. Certainly, those who are pushing the theory seem to believe that it is an important one.
"Political correctness looms over American society like a colossus," William Lind, a principal of far-right political strategist Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation . . . and a key popularizer of the idea of cultural Marxism, warned in a 1998 speech. "It has taken over both political parties and is enforced by many laws and government regulations. It almost totally controls the most powerful element in our culture, the entertainment industry. It dominates both public and higher education. ... It has even captured the clergy in many Christian churches."
The idea of political correctness -- the predecessor of the more highly charged concept of cultural Marxism -- was popularized by the mass media in the early 1990s, highlighted by a 1991 speech by the first President Bush in which he warned that "free speech [is] under assault throughout the United States." By the end of 1992, feature stories on the phenomenon had appeared in Newsweek, New York magazine, The New Republic, Atlantic Monthly and the New York Review of Books.
The Wall Street Journal. . . said it posed a "far worse ... threat to intellectual freedom" than McCarthyism. In the pages of The Washington Times . . . Heritage Foundation scholar Laurence Jarvik wrote angrily that "storm troopers" were attacking "Western culture."
Of course, the phrase was basically a politically charged construct that was used to mock the left and even liberals. Challenges to gender bias, efforts to diversify the nation's universities, and similar policies were dismissed as attempts to turn the universities into "gulags" under the thumbs of left-wing thought police. The term was used to attack ideas while avoiding any discussion of their merits.

And it is the promoter of this theory -- Paul Weyrich -- who is now enamoured of Stephen Harper and the Canadian conservatives.
He was the one who emailed American conservatives just before our election to tell them not to speak to Canadian reporters for fear they would say something nutty and thereby jeporadize Harper's election chances. Now he has written a laudatory article about Harper's victory -- the CBC said his story was on the Free Congress Foundation website but they provided no link and I couldn't find it. Anyway, CBC quotes him as writing this about Harper:

"Harper is pleased that the media and many in his own party are nay-saying," he writes. "Harper thinks that such pessimism would lower expectations and give him additional latitude to accomplish his agenda.
"Harper's game plan apparently is to pit the federalist Liberals against the Bloc Québécois and the decentralizing Bloc against big-government Liberals.
"Canadian media understands that Stephen Harper greatly would expand defence spending. He does not like the Kyoto Treaty . . . More importantly, Harper favours participating in the United States missile defence program . . .
"It is not widely known in this country that a Canadian prime minister has more power than a United States president. Harper could appoint 5,000 new officials. (No confirmation is required by the Canadian Parliament.) The prime minister also could appoint every judge from the trial courts, to the courts of appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court, as vacancies occur.
"Harper's partisans believe he could maintain power for four years, during which time Conservatives hopefully would witness many vacancies created by Liberals leaving the courts. The Supreme Court of Canada currently is dominated by Liberals.
"As has been the case in the United States, cultural Marxism largely has been foisted upon Canada by the courts. If judges who respect the Constitution were to be appointed they would confirm that such rights are not to be found in that document. Sound familiar?"

Why, yes, as a matter of fact, it does. But it sounded better in the original German.

Voting against Alito

One more reference to recent American news -- I think the Alito filibuster is another battle where the only choice is to decide which side to be on.
The side to be on in this battle is the filibuster side, whether it wins or loses.
America will hate Samuel Alito as a Supreme Court justice -- he is a toady and a syncopant, as well as a right-wing pro-lifer. Americans will remember who tried to put him on the court and who tried to stop it.

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!