Thank you so, so much

Women will be so thankful.
The Associated Press story about the South Dakota abortion ban quotes a woman named Leslee Unruh, president of a Sioux Falls pregnancy counseling agency, who said that most of the 800 abortions which are presently being performed annually in South Dakota were simply "conveniences", that most South Dakota women wanted the state to ban abortion, and many who have had abortions "wish someone would have stopped them."
You see, we women just don't know what's best for us -- it will be so wonderful when women in the United States show the way to the rest of us by losing the right to make their own decision on abortion. And we'll be ever so grateful -- yes, we will -- when we are stopped from making our own decisions and instead we have to go crawling into some hospital committee for permission to have an abortion if we can convince them that continuing the pregnancy will kill us -- before it actually does. And we'll all be so thankful that someone will control our bodies for us since obviously we cannot control ourselves and we have sex and all that evil stuff...

Great line of the day

From Hullabaloo, Tristero writes a letter:

Dear God,
Please deliver us from the hideous locust plague of conservative pseudo-intellectuals. Sinners we may be in Thine eyes, and unworthy of thy Divine Love, but Jesus Kee-rist! Cut us some friggin' slack, already! Fire and brimstone, eternal damnation, I ain't gonna argue with you. But, seriously, God, we really don't deserve any more Fukuyamas, y'know? So ease up.
Please.
Love,
Tristero

And that's what its all about

So I'm flipping through websites thinking about blogging about something, but its all just so damned depressing - civil war in Iraq and the Bush administration screwing up and the hockey team melting down and on and on, when I find this posted by susanhu at Booman:

. . . Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote 'The Hokey Pokey,' died peacefully at the age of 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.
They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started . . .

Men just don't understand

Of course the BC finance minister spent $600 on a pair of shoes. If you want an economy, you have to pay for it.

What Canada is all about

This is what Canada is all about:

Canadian soldiers sent an Afghan boy with a massive tumour on his face to a cancer hospital in Pakistan early Thursday morning, where he will likely live out his final days in a little less pain . . Touched by the boy's cries of pain and knowing a modern cancer hospital exists in Pakistan, Cpl. Brian Sanders, an ambulance driver at the camp, contacted his church in Edmonton to see if it could help. The North Edmonton Christian Fellowship church raised $10,000 Sunday morning, with money still flowing in after news reports publicized Namatullah's case . . .

We can't save them all, but we still do what we can to save some.

Great line of the day

Here is Dibgy on The Trifecta: "If there are three hallmarks of this failed Bush administration, it is hubris, incompetence and cronyism. This port deal features all three."

"When solder #3,000 dies, I get a free juicer!"

Seeing this story about people getting arrested for selling guerrilla t-shirts reminded me that my son said I should check out this website -- T-Shirt Hell, which sells shirts with slogans like "When solder #3,000 dies, I get a free juicer!" and "Dumbledore dies on page 596. I just saved you 4 hours and $30" and "I'm not getting jiggy, I have Parkinson's" and "You'll regret reading this shirt when the sketch artist asks you to describe my face", and a baby's t-shirt that reads "Now that I'm safe, I'm pro-choice" .

Grotesque Guantanamo nonsense

Here are some nonsesical quotes from a New York Times article describing the grotesque force-feeding at Guantnamo of hunger strikers:

Military spokesmen have generally discounted the complaints, saying the prisoners are for the most part terrorists, trained by Al Qaeda to use false stories as propaganda . . . Capt. John S. Edmondson of the Navy, wrote that his staff was not force-feeding any detainees but "providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral nourishment." . . . General Craddock suggested that the medical staff had indulged the hunger strikers to the point that they had been allowed to choose the color of their feeding tubes . . . Two other Defense Department officials said a decision had been made to try to break the hunger strikes because they were having a disruptive effect and causing stress for the medical staff.

So its just a little bit stressful for the poor staff, is it, who have to strap prisoners into restraint chairs and repeatedly force those colour-coordinated feeding tubes down their throats while the prisoners are bleeding and vomiting and urinating and defecating all over the place? But of course, all those terrorists prisoners are just lying about how awful it all is, except for the hundreds who are innocent, I guess. But they don't think they're really force-feeding anyone, just "providing nutritional supplementation" and its all so "voluntary" that people are choosing the colour of their feeding tube -- which sort of begs the question of why the staff are finding it all so stressful.
Just how stupid does the American military think people are, that they would believe all this tripe?
Or how delusional are these military people themselves?

"Anti-gay adoption" will get out the Republican vote

Well, here it is -- USA Today is reporting that banning gay adoption will be voted on in 16 states in November, 2006.
I've been watching for this -- I knew there would be SOMETHING that would be used to get the Republican vote out.
In 2004, the ballot initiatives against gay marriage gave Karl Rove enough of the Christian wingnut vote that Bush was reelected. Now, while the Democrats are howling after the UAE port deal and Abramoff and illegal wiretaps and Kartina and Iraq and all the other Bush administration foul-ups, the Republicans are terrified about trying to save enough Senate and the House seats to maintain control of the US government committees.
They must prevent committee investigations of the Bush administration at all costs. The word they DO NOT want to hear is "subpoena". And state votes against gay adoption will be their ticket.
Republicans are trying to keep this under the radar. The USA Today article says:

Republican pollster Whit Ayres [says] adoption . . . "doesn't have the emotional power of the gay marriage issue because there is no such thing as the phrase 'the sanctity of adoption.'

That's just BS -- gay adoption has even more power than the gay marriage argument to bring out the wingnut vote.
If there is anything Karl Rove loves, it is whisper campaigns. We all saw how easy it was to create public hysteria about the day-care-centre-as-Satanic-cult prosecutions of the 1990s. With gay adoption, its going to be really easy to develop an under-the-radar whisper campaign about a gay-recruitment and pedophila-agenda subtext.
Gay adoption doesn't have a prayer. And neither do the Democrats if they don't get cracking.

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.