What was the cut?

"Former [Malaysian] Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Monday that disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff was paid $1.2 million to organize his 2002 meeting with President Bush . . . " Yeah, and George Bush, Karl Rove and the Republican Party never saw a penny of that money? Hmmmm...

Great line of the day

Tim at POGGE writes about the short shrift given to the Arar lawsuit by US courts: "Remember when we used to live next door to America? I miss that country."

A damn good thrashing

"Right! That's it! You've tried it on just once too often! Right! Well, don't say I haven't warned you! I've laid it on the line to you time and time again! Right! Well...this is it! I'm going to give you a damn good thrashing!" -- Basil thrashing his car with a tree branch when it won't start.
Now comes the news that many of us talk to our cars. Reuters reports on a British survey:

Nearly half of motorists regularly talk to their cars, giving words of encouragement ahead of a long trip and lavishing praise for a job well done at journey's end, according to research on Monday. A survey of 2,000 owners also found 40 percent thought their car had a personality and was capable of being upset whilst 19 percent worried about how their car was feeling.
The poll, conducted by organisers of July's British International Motor Show found women rather than men tended to have a close relationship with their car. Giving a pet name to their car but not their human partners was admitted to by 20 percent of women...

What they didn't survey was how many of us talk to other drivers -- I'll bet its just about everybody, and thank heavens those idiots cannot hear us insult them.
There is one thing that we all share, and that is the inner conviction that each of us has -- "I am an above-average driver".
My kids learned to swear by listening to me behind the wheel, though of course I always blamed it on their friends.

Great line of the day

Digby writes:

I was just watching Bush give a speech and he said "it makes sense for the government to incent people."
I've never really subscribed to the great man theory, but I have to say that in my experience organizations do take their cues from the person at the top. When you have a president who says things this ridiculous every single day, for more than five years, I think it's safe to say that he is a boob. And his government is a perfect reflection of him: incompetent, arrogant, short-sighted, impulsive, secretive. A failure. That is the story of Bush's life. Let no one ever say again that it doesn't matter who the president is becuase he'll have great people around him. Bush's government is as bad as anyone could have predicted when we saw him flub that answer about foreigh leaders back in 1999 --- he was clearly unprepared and unqualified. And he's proven it.

Emphasis mine.

Olympics

Well, its turning out to be a pretty good Olympics so far for Canada. I've been watching a lot of the coverage and this year enjoying how CBC is doing it -- not as many of those annoying "Life in Turin" type of filler pieces, and more coverage of the sports themselves.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that we already have so many medals -- 5th in the medal standings so far -- that always makes an event like the Olympics better. Its going to be a good building process for Vancuver in 2010.
And am I wrong, or doesn't it seem as though we have as many black people on our team as the United States does on theirs? But we don't get to boast just yet -- because where are the Aboriginal athletes who should be on our team?

Deeply sorry

Harry Whittington apologized today for being shot by Dick Cheney. "My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice-President Cheney and his family have had to go through this week," Whittington said.
In other news, Liberal leader Paul Martin apologized today for David Emerson betraying the voters of Vancouver Kingsway to join the Conservative cabinet, and Buzz Hargrove said he was sorry for putting the Ontario NDP to all the trouble of suspending him. Ralph Klein expressed regret to Aboriginal Canadians that the Western Standard magazine printed a racial slur against Klein's wife.
On the international scene, Hamas took full responsibility for winning the recent elections in Palestine and thus causing such difficulties for both Israel and the United States, and the prisoners in Guantanamo apologized to the United States for overturning two centuries of international and constitutional law just to manufacture an excuse for jailing some Afghan and Iraqi teenagers.

Great lines of the day

At Daily Kos, SusanG notes that Rumsfeld is now trying to make the argument that the US military is woefully behind the guys living in caves in terms of being tech savvy.

All I can muster is ... huh? I feel like a movie reel has been switched and I'm watching the second half of a completely different movie than the one I walked into. Kinda like starting out in the Last of the Mohicans and ending up in The Matrix . . . So let me see if I have this straight. These same "dead-enders," "remnants of defeated regimes," "small number of terrorists, a small number of militias, coupled with some demonstrations and some lawlessness," these are the same losers who now are suddenly relegated to some category of Blackberry-wielding, VOIP-using, IM'ing wizzes, operating in a country with a few hours of electricity per day? Is that the scenario? Or am I missing an episode in a trilogy? You know, every time Rumsfeld speaks, I feel a little stupider. Here we are, arguably the most industrialized nation in the world, the home of Silicon Valley and Bill Gates and NASA, and our defense secretary is trying to sell us on the idea that we're getting our asses whupped by people he'd previously designated as unaffiliated, dying-gasp, disgruntled losers who are reluctant to enter the 21st century and partake of the fruits of democracy and capitalism with us. If I missed a transitional phase, forgive me.

Emphasis mine.

Hearts and minds

Bush and company keep trying to compare Iraq to World War II. And indeed they may have a point -- if you think of the Americans as playing the German role this time.
A few months ago, when we first started watching the TV series "Over There", I commented on this blog that it was like watching a TV show about the occupation of France as told from the German side.
Now the war movies are being made -- like this one now showing in Turkey:

The crowd cheered, clapped and whistled as the Turkish agent plunged the knife into the chest of the enemy commander. "Valley of the Wolves - Iraq," which opened last week in movie theaters in Turkey, Austria and Germany, is a Rambo-like action story involving Turkish gunmen who seek revenge against a tyrannical occupying army.
In this version, however, at $10 million the most expensive movie ever made in Turkey, the enemy is no oppressive Third World dictatorship. The commander's name is Sam - as in uncle - and the opposing forces are the Americans, who are being punished for offenses against Turkish as well as Iraqi pride and honor. The commander, Sam William Marshall, played by an American actor, Billy Zane, is a sociopath, killing people without a second's thought and claiming that he is doing God's will . . .
The opening sequence portrays an incident that made headlines here in 2003, when a group of Turkish special forces soldiers in Iraq were taken into custody by U.S. Marines. The Turks, mistaken for insurgents, were handcuffed and held with hoods over their heads, which rankled many Turks. Other scenes show ruthless marines killing Iraqis, and soldiers mistreating inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, as well as an American Jewish surgeon, played by Gary Busey, who takes what look like kidneys from inmates during surgery to New York, London and Israel - all, according to the screenwriter, Bahadir Ozdener, inspired by real events . . .
The plot focuses on the hooding incident and its aftermath. The commander of the Turkish soldiers returns home in humiliation, believing that his honor has been so compromised that he has no choice but to commit suicide. But he leaves a note to the hero, a Turkish intelligence agent named Polat Alemdar, pleading with him to defend the country's honor that he had so disserved. So Alemdar leads a small team of special operations soldiers into northern Iraq, where they are astonished and outraged at what they find. "They were after the man who insulted the Turkish soldiers, but they couldn't believe their eyes when they saw the situation there," reads the movie's Web site. "The people of Iraq's values, personalities and history were completely being disregarded. The desired new order was forcing an unacceptable change on the people. The one who is responsible for these unendurable crimes against humanity is a Special Forces commander called Sam William Marshall." Marshall then orders a raid on a wedding, where trigger-happy marines get spooked and kill scores of civilians. It is all in pursuit of his plan to pacify the people through intimidation and violence, all according to God's will and for their own good. Until, ultimately, Alemdar catches up with him.

And here, from this Knight-Ridder story about Samarra is another scene from a movie yet to be made:

. . . Five days after the grenade attack, Lt. Call and his men from the 2nd platoon were planning an afternoon "hearts and minds" foot patrol to hand out soccer balls to local kids.
As Call sat in the schoolhouse, preparing to go out, he heard two loud bursts from the .50-caliber machine gun on the roof . . . Call and his men dashed out the front door. Pena had shot an unarmed Iraqi man on the street. The man had walked past the signs that mark the 200-yard "disable zone" that surrounds the Alamo and into the 100-yard "kill zone" around the base. The Army had forced the residents of the block to leave the houses last year to create the security perimeter. . . . Looking at the man splayed on the ground, Call turned to his medic, Specialist Patrick McCreery, and asked, "What the f--- was he doing?"
McCreery didn't answer. The man's internal organs were hanging out of his side, and his blood was pouring across the ground. He was conscious and groaning. His eyelids hung halfway closed.
"What ... did they shoot him with?" McCreery asked, sweat beginning to show on his brow. "Did someone call a ... ambulance?"
The call to prayer was starting at a mosque down the street. The words "Allahu Akbar" - God is great - wafted down from a minaret's speakers.
The man looked up at the sky as he heard the words. He repeated the phrase "Ya Allah. Ya Allah. Ya Allah." Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.
He looked at McCreery and raised his finger toward the house in front of him.
"This my house," he said in broken English.
McCreery reached down. With his hands cupped, he shoved the man's organs back into his body and held them in place as Call unwrapped a bandage to put around the hole.
"He's fading, he's fading," McCreery shouted.
Looking into the dying man's eyes, the medic said, "Haji, haji, look at me," using the honorific title reserved for older Muslim men who presumably have gone on Hajj - pilgrimage - to Mecca.
"Why? Why?" asked the man, his eyes beginning to close.
"Haji, I don't know," said McCreery, sweat pouring down his face.
An Iraqi ambulance pulled up and the Humvees followed. They followed the man to the hospital they'd raided a few days earlier. The soldiers filed in and watched as the man died.
Call said nothing. McCreery, a 35-year-old former foundry worker from Levering, Mich., walked toward a wall, alone. He looked at the dead man for a moment and wiped tears from his eyes.
A few days later, Call's commander asked him to take pictures of the entrails left by the man Pena had shot, identified as Wissam Abbas, age 31, to document that Abbas was inside the sign warning of deadly force.
McHenry, who was driving, told him, "There's not going to be much left, sir. The dogs will have eaten all of it."
Pena was up on the schoolhouse roof manning the same .50-caliber machine gun. He didn't say a word about the man he'd killed. As he stared at a patch of earth in front of him, at Samarra and its wreckage, he couldn't contain his frustration.
"No one told me why I'm putting my life on the line in Samarra, and you know why they didn't?" Pena asked. "Because there is no f------ reason."

And does anybody think a few soccer balls are going to make up for this?

Play ball!

The crowd is getting a little restless as the batter keeps stepping out of the box and taking a few more practice swings.
So we've already heard about what the Conservatives are NOT going to be doing right away -- they're not going to fix the so-called fiscal imbalance until 2007; and they don't support trading of emissions credits to help the world meet its Kyoto emissions targets.
But its been a month since the election, and we're still waiting to hear about all the other things they promised to do.
Are they going to implement their new family allowance plan, and pull the rug out from under the provinces on the day care space funding which the Liberals promised?
What about the infrastructure funding for the municipalities -- you said you would implement what the Liberals had promised but why haven't the municipalities heard anything yet?
Where's that GST reduction -- or are you going to have to raise our income taxes again first?
It's time to step up to the plate and start swinging, boys.

An idea whose time has come

An Ontario New Democrat has introduced a private members bill which would allow doctors to harvest organs for transplants unless told not to do so. In my opinion, this is an excellent idea, and I don't understand why anyone would vote against it.
The proposed bill says that anyone who, for religious or other reasons, does not want to donate organs can refuse to do so.
But everyone else shares, without having to remember to sign an organ donor card. And why not? Of what possible use are my organs to me after I am dead? Yet for someone else, they can be lifesaving. Sure, I have my organ donation card signed and in my wallet, but maybe the hospital doesn't find it in time, or maybe my next-of-kin get squeamish and say no.
The bizarre aspect of this news story is the comparison that the anti-abortion group Campaign Life Coalition makes to the Rogers Cable negative option billing proposal of several years ago, postulating that because people didn't like that proposal they won't like this one either. Its not really the same, guys -- one is about needless TV stations, and the other is about saving people's lives. I think Canadians will understand the difference.

Who does Ezra Levant think he is?

So he endangers Canadians overseas by gratuitously printing the Mohammed cartoons, and now he slimes Colleen Klein, wife of Ralph Klein, by gratuitously printing a racist slur against her. Congratulations to Air Canada for stopping its distribution of this magazine. And I hope other bookstores follow McNally Robinson's lead and refuse to sell the Western Standard.
Hate speech is not a standard of western Canada.

Disappearing act

Just when I am wondering whether I had missed something, comes this Globe story -- Why has Stephen Harper stayed out of sight? I was starting to think there had been some news stories about the doings of Harper and the federal government which I hadn't seen for some reason, but here is the Globe confirming that after leaving Emerson and Fortier hanging out to dry last week, Harper just disappeared.
So its not me, its him.
Seems to me that he has done this in the past, too -- pulled disappearing acts when nobody knew for weeks at a time what he was doing. Maybe its his style -- the Prime Minister who jumps down the rabbit hole.

Oooh, smart move, guys!

So after hemming and hawing all day yesterday, the White House finally decides that it should try to make a joke of the Cheney shooting incident -- "White House Finds Humor in Hunting Mishap"
And then what happens? "Hunter shot by Cheney has heart attack"
Great timing, guys.
And meanwhile the rumours start to swirl -- that Cheney was drunk, that he was weekending with another woman, Oh, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy...

Publicity hounds

As I read this column -- Gretzky undaunted -- I remembered the one thing about American jurisprudence which should never be forgotten: never underestimate the desire of US prosecutors for publicity.
Their dinky little gambling case against a state trooper and an assistant coach hit the big time just because they were able to drag Janet and Wayne Gretzky into it.

Al Gore takes one for the team

So, Al Gore has apologized to Muslims for how the US has treated them since 9/11. And the wingnuts are raking him over the coals for it.
But what they don't realize is that this isn't Al Gore's apology -- it is Condi Rice's apology. It may even be George Bush's apology.
There is no way that Al Gore would have ever gone to Saudi Arabia to say these things unless Rice had approved the trip, and maybe even instigated it. Condi herself could never have apologized for the racist brutality of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense -- but Al Gore is the one US politician who might be listened to by Muslim leaders. Now the Muslim leadership has the apology they needed, to help them cool down their own hotheads.