On the lighter side

With all the uproar over immigration, I thought everyone might take a break for the joke now circulating around my husband's company:

It is the first day of school and a new East Indian student named Surinder enters the fourth grade. The teacher says: Let's begin by reviewing some American history. Who said "Give me Liberty or give me Death"?
She sees a sea of blank faces, except for Surinder, who has his hand up: Patrick Henry, 1775.
The teacher says: Very good. Who said "Government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth?
Again, no response except from Surinder: Abraham Lincoln, 1863.
The teacher snaps at the rest of the class: Class, you should be ashamed. Surinder knows our history better than you do.
She heards a loud whisper: Fuck the Indians.
Who said that? she demands.
Surinder puts up his hand: General Custer, 1862.
At that point, a student in the back says: I'm gonna puke.
The teacher glares and says: All right! Now who said that?
Surinder immediately says: George H.W. Bush to the Japanese Prime Minister, 1991.
Now furious, another student yells: Oh yeah? Suck this!
Surinder jumps out of his chair waving his hand: Bill Clinton to Monica Lewinsky, 1997.
Now almost at mob hysteria, another student yells: You little shit. If you say anything else, I'll kill you.
Surinder frantically screams: Gary Condit to Chandra Levy, 2001.
The teacher faints. As the class gathers around her on the floor, someone says: Oh shit! We're fucked!
Surinder says quietly: George W. Bush, Iraq, 2006.

"I paid my money to see the high-diving act!"

Our government in action

Our Fearless Leader Stephen Harper is so afraid of exposing the incompetence of his cabinet ministers that he is now holding his Cabinet meetings in secret so reporters cannot buttonhole ministers in the hallway afterward and ask questions.
Well, I guess he knows these guys better than we do.
But as Yosemite Sam said, "I paid my money to see the high diving act! So I'm agonna SEE the high diving act!"

Maybe I thought of this Bugs Bunny Show comparison when I read Canadian Press quoting commenter Coyote at Small Dead Animals "I think that the government should announce to the media any topics of concern to Canadians when they come up."
Now THERE'S democracy in action, isn't it?
All us good little Canadians shouldn't have any topics of concern unless the government announces them first.
So we just won't worry about anything unless our Stevie tells us to.
To their credit, some of the other commenters on the SDA thread weren't taking Stevie's instructions to wear their Winston Smith hats just yet.
And as my son just reminded me -- wasn't this the guy that ran on the platform of accountability and transparency?

Great line of the day

In regard to this CP story Bush extends olive branch to Canada in runup to meeting with Harper , our very own Canadian Cynic riposts "We give them billions of dollars in illegal softwood lumber duties and, in return, we get ... a branch? I'm pretty sure that's not going to cover it."

Slushfund

So the Firearms Centre was already $500 million over budget, so what's another $75,000 anyway. And besides, doing things the right way by actually asking Parliament for the necessary funds "would have taken too much time."
Doing things right -- SUCH a bother, isn't it?

Chris Matthews edges closer to the truth

Bit by bit, the American media is realizing the moral quagmire that is entangling the US in Iraq.
Here is MSNBC's Chris Matthews last week:

. . . There's a difference between chasing terrorists around the world --which we all agree we should do; in fact, the world believes we should be doing -- and going into a country to bring down a government, and then . . . to try to build the government of our liking, a Democratic government where the majority rules. But in this case, the majority simply means one faction overrules the other faction. The faction that's being overruled is fighting the majority faction . . . How do you give the orders to a young American service person, "your job is to make sure that the Shia run the show over there and that the Sunnis buckle under and take their minority role, and that’s your job, to risk your life, maybe lose your life for that purpose" . . . That’s saying we think there should be a certain kind of country here where majority rules, minority takes orders and maybe gets a piece of the action. And if they don’t accept their little minority piece of the action and start to fight the majority, we take the side of the majority and start shooting to kill them. Is that a moral right of America to be doing that?

No, its not, not unless the UN asks you to.
He's getting closer and closer to endorsing Murtha's pullout plan, though he's not quite there yet.
And of course this is why Chretien spoke out against "regime change" before the war, and why he kept us out of Iraq. Thanks, Jean. Canada has had enough of its own moral quagmires over the years, we don't need this one too.

But they wouldn't have been kidnapped in the first place...

This is the cartoon from today's Star Phoenix -- it tries to make some kind of point about how the Christian Peacekeepers want the "bloocthirsty pig dogs of the illegal occupying force" to leave Iraq even though it was the military which rescued them from kidnappers. Ho, ho, ho-- those ungrateful lefties, they're learned their lesson now, blah, blah, blah.
The stupid thing about it is this:
the four Peacemakers would not have been in Iraq, and would not have been kidnapped, if the American military hadn't been there first.

Great line of the day

At Daily Kos, Hunter writes about what the Domenech affair says about the Washington Post:

. . . so long as your paper continues to report facts they don't like . . . those conservatives are still going to attack the paper itself as being hopelessly 'liberal.' Journalism is the liberal part. From Horowitz to Hewitt to Limbaugh, these people hate you. You can't appease them, because there's no such thing as an acceptable 'level' of partisan hackery that will offset actual journalism or inconvenient facts. They'll only be happy when you kill the journalism -- or at least stop reporting the facts surrounding the more inconvenient stories . . . By all means, stand by your decision to balance someone accused of being liberal with a professionally partisan conservative; to balance those with excellent credentials with someone with none; to balance facts with spin; to balance journalism with hackery. It sounds like you've got the glimmer of understanding on just how bad an idea that was, but it doesn't sound like, even now, you understand the basis of the conservative attacks against you. They're playing you for chumps. And you're taking it . . .

Emphasis mine.

Here's the news from Iraq

The US military on the ground is trying very hard to get with the program, but the truth keeps tripping them up. Here's today's AP story quoting Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch:

"There is not widespread violence across Iraq. There is not. Seventy-five percent of the attacks still take place in Baghdad, al-Anbar or Salaheddin (provinces). And in the other 15 provinces, they all averaged less than six attacks a day, and 12 of those provinces averaged less than two attacks a day." . . . The three provinces he cited, however, are home to about 9 million people . . . As Iraqi soldiers and police have begun patrolling more territory, U.S. forces have become less visible in many areas in the country and less easy to target. Also, the nature of the violence in the country has shifted from assaults on American troops to battles rooted in sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Well over 1,000 people have died violently in Iraq, mainly in and around Baghdad [in the last month] The sectarian-rooted deaths since then have been running at dozens a day. The bodies of hundreds of victims have been dumped after being shot execution-style, hands bound and bearing signs of torture.

Here is the reality. How would we like to be living and working and raising a family in neighbourhoods that looked like these?




A makeshift refugee camp in Baghdad for people displaced by the violence.


Another body found on the street in Baghdad:


A bomb attack at a coffee house:


A car bomb attack in Miqdadiya


A patrol in Basra:


A vegetable market in Hilla, south of Baghdad:


An oil tanker truck set on fire -- the driver blamed the American military, who are probably getting blamed for everything which goes wrong in Iraq these days.


The family allegedly slaughtered by American troops:


And finally, some actual good news: three of the Christian Peacemakers were rescued

The O'Reilly Tactic - "Just Shut Up"

Bush to the media: Just shut up.
With no new "turning points" coming up, the Bush administration is really in trouble with public opinion about Iraq now. The only tactic they have is to revive the Republican talking point from 2004 about how Iraq is just perception, not reality, and its all the media's fault. Its like promoting the idea that if people just don't TALK about poverty, then it doesn't really exist.
Let's be clear here -- the Bush administration doesn't care what is actually happening in Iraq, just what gets reported. They are trying to intimidate reporters and news editors into downplaying the awful daily news from Iraq. It's Bill O'Reilly's "just shut up" line as a White House tactic.
Crooks and Liars quotes CNN commentator Jack Cafferty:

. . . if somebody came into New York City and blew up St. Patrick's Cathedral and in the resulting days they were finding 50 and 60 dead bodies a day on the streets of New York, you suppose the news media would cover it? You're damn right they would. This is nonsense . . . The news isn't good in Iraq. There's violence in Iraq. People are found dead every day in the streets of Baghdad. This didn't turn out the way the politicians told us it would. And it's our fault? I beg to differ.

Saveabureaucrat.com

Another new blog: Saveabureaucrat.com
Another hilarious example of how blogs could change the world.
This story has gone worldwide in the blink of an eye -- an Ottawa bureaucrat has set up a website called "Save a Bureaucrat" to try to raise money so he can quit his job. He writes:

I'm desperate. Desperate to escape my 9 to 5 job I've been at for over 10 years now. It's not that I don't appreciate the steady hours and the decent pay, but it's just that after a while it starts to sap the energy and soul out of you and you realize that you have become a true bureaucrat. . . . But how can I justify quitting my job and giving up my security and pension? The only way I can do it is by obtaining enough money that I can afford to quit and then have enough spare time and energy to do something that makes a difference in my life and the lives of others. Please help me in any small way you can to realize my dreams . . .

So far, he has raised about $50.
The only other place I have seen this type of chutzpa was in the classified ads in Harper's magazine, where people would advertise for money so they could see the world, write poetry, etc -- I always wondered how that worked out for them.

Great line of the day

In The Worm Turns, Digby writes about how the American people and the press are tired of Bush's rhetoric and are more willing to listen to the Dems again:

Listening to George W. Bush's speeches for the last five years, particularly after 9/11, is like having someone sing 'It's a small world after all' over and over and over again. It was bad the first time. Now it makes you want to stab your ears with a letter opener. The press, forced to listen more often than anyone else, seems to have reached its limit as well.

Emphasis mine.

75, 30, 28, 23, 23, 22, 6, 5, 5, 3, 3.

This made me feel sick.
These are the ages of the family members executed last week by American soldiers, according to the Iraqi police report. The report reads

At 230 of 15/3/2006, according to the telegram (report) of the Ishaqi police directorate, American forces used helicopters to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf situated in the Abu Sifa village of the Ishaqi district. The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people, including 5 children, 4 women and 2 men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles, and killed their animals...

Here is the AP story describing this massacre. Not quite as bad as MyLai, I guess, but the attitude is the same -- American military so paranoid and out of control that pre-schoolers are the enemy.
James Wolcott describes some of the chaos going on now in Iraq, quoting from Patrick Cockburn on the Iraq death squads and Robert Dreyfuss on the civil war. Then Wolcott has a suggestion for next year's invasion anniversary:

Perhaps next year on the anniversary of this glorious mission, the US could fly a transport plane crammed with the creme de la creme of warbloggers, hawkish pundits, neoconservative thinkers, and cable news and talk radio hosts, and deposit them on the site of Saddam Hussein's fallen statue--the newly christened Krauthammer Square--and let them behold the joy and splendor they have bestowed upon a grateful Iraqi people. Who, in turn, will brave the heat, dust, and danger and leave their homes to demonstrate their gratitude to their noble guests by attempting to shoot their lying asses to pieces.
No, that probably won't make for an appropriate holiday. Scratch that idea.
To earn its rightful date on the calendar, the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq should be a day of remembrance on which conscientious Americans wear mourning colors and beg the world's forgiveness, and Iraqis' forgiveness most of all.

Scary, isn't it?

What kind of dream world is George Bush living in?
During Bush's press conference today he said in response to Helen Thomas's question about why he started the Iraq war:

. . . the world said, 'Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.' And therefore, we worked with the world. We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world.
And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did. And the world is safer for it.

Emphasis mine. Could it be that this is really the way Bush remembers it? Saddam did let the inspectors back in, to inspect. It was BUSH who told them to leave, in March 2003, so that the war could start. And Saddam sent the UN a report, a thousand pages, describing what had happened to the weapons. It was BUSH who said this report wasn't good enough. And it was BUSH who ignored millions of anti-war protestors around the world, and who couldn't get a Security Council vote to support the war.
Does he really think it was Saddam who was ignoring the "message of the world"?

Why Canadian soldiers may have problems in Afghanistan

Dave at the The Galloping Beaver provides a useful summary of recent events in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which may affect the Canadian mission there:

Frustrated at the failure of Pakistan to neutralize or capture al Qaeda and the Taliban in Waziristan, Rumsfeld has resorted to a tactic which has served to do nothing if not antagonize an otherwise benign population. He's bombing them. Never one to use the right number of troops on the ground, Rumsfeld defaults to techno-war and air strikes. Results have been less than spectacular. While few al Qaeda terrorists have been killed, tribesmen, angered by US strikes and Pakistani army disregard for their safety, have started to accept Taliban rule and an alliance with al Qaeda.
NATO troops, including Canadian, British, Dutch, Danes, Estonians and an attached Australian force, in Helmand and Kandahar provinces are now under increased risk of attack. The four Provincial Reconstruction Team bases are on a direct line out of Tora Bora. Instead of being able to expand Afghan government control, which is their role, to areas outside Kabul, they will end up having to defend against the rebuilt forces of both the Taliban and al Qaeda. All thanks to Rumsfeld's interference resulting in a botched initial attack on al Qaeda and a subsequent reliance on a wholly untrustworthy ally in Pakistan.

This doesn't bode well for ultimate success in the Afghanistan campaign, does it? Maybe NATO should just ask the Americans to leave, so that the remaining troops can implement a strategy to win the peace in Afghanistan which will actually be successful.
And this is why I think the Canadian mission in Afghanistan does need frequent reassessment, to ensure that we are not being sabatoged by American bluster and blundering,

The apocalypse turkey

Two sidenotes to the Bush speech in Cleveland today.
The AP story says "The White House made no attempt to screen either the audience or the questions, said spokesman Scott McClellan." Yeah, I'll bet -- just another plastic turkey. The very first question was about whether Bush thinks that terrorism is a sign of the biblical Apocalypse -- a question which would naturally occur to just about anybody, I guess...
And check out Olbermann's take on Bush denying he promoted the Iraq war by making a connection between Saddam and 9-ll -- "Who does the President think he's effing kidding?"