Anti-immigrant claptrap

When we lived in BC 20 years ago, we used to hear a certain amount of anti-immigrant claptrap -- from people whose great-grandparents were, of course, immigrants but who now considered themselves "Canadians" and who now deeply resented all those new people, usually brown-skinned of course, who had the effrontery to use Canadian social services from time to time.
With all the marches going on in the United States now, I'm hearing more anti-immigrant claptrap again in the blogosphere.
So here is an interesting post -- More Stupidity in my In-box -- which rebuts very effectively some of the most ridiculous clap-trap stuff -- worth reading because it applies to Canadian attitudes too.

We'll meet again...

I was going to title this quote a Great Line of the Day, but its a little more serious than that. AMERICAblog writes: "We cannot afford having George Bush think that America is in the business of launching pre-emptive nuclear wars."
This is in relation to Seymour Hersh's article The Iran Plans. AMERICAblog's line reminded me of George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove -- Gentlemen, we cannot afford a mine-shaft gap! But the Hersch article reminds me even more of the last scene in Dr. Strangelove -- Slim Pickin's Texan pilot Major T.J. "King" Kong, riding his bomb down to oblivion, yahooing all the way:

Followed by Vera Lynn singing the war torch song:
We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when,
But I know we'll meet again, some sunny day.
Keep smiling through, just like you always do,
'Til the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away.

Its a chilling article, describing how the Bush administration is talking itself into going to war, then talking itself into using nuclear weapons -- all with the purpose of preventing Iran from building its own nuclear weapons, which the US cannot even prove Iran is trying to do anyway.
The US intention, apparently, is to bomb the shit out of Iran so that local rebels will be able to take over the government thereby changing Iran's leadership to one that will listen to the United States and won't want to build nuclear weapons anymore.
Yeah, that's what I thought, too.
Here's what Hersh says about how the US is justifying nukes:

. . . at least four hundred targets would have to be hit . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons . . . One of the militaryÂ’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites . . . the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete . . . The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. "Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap," the former senior intelligence official said. " 'Decisive' is the key word of the Air Force's planning. It's a tough decision. But we made it in Japan." He went on, "Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout -- we're talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don't have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out -- remove the nuclear option -- they're shouted down." The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran --without success, the former intelligence official said. "The White House said, 'Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.' " . . . “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.” The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said. The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

How pathetic yet how frightening -- "It's a tough decision but we made it in Japan"?
Yeah, Truman used nuclear bombs to stop an unprovoked war of agression against the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, China, and Malaysia, that had already gone on for four years, had killed hundreds of thousands of people and promised to kill hundreds of thousands more -- and even then, the justification for using nuclear weapons has barely passed the world's muster.
So now Bush thinks he wants to go down in history as the first president to authorize using nuclear bombs again -- this time not to end a war but to start one, against a country which hasn't attacked any of its neighbours and doesn't offer any imminent or proveable threat to the United States?
People, that is simply crazy -- the leadership of the United States is suffering from a pathological disorder, grandiose narcissism?

Found at last

I love stories like this one, about Sam who was finally rescued after two years living by his wits. In his case, he had been neglected as a pup, and had only been with his new owners three weeks when he got loose. Luckily, he stayed in the area so his owners kept hearing about him. But he was spooked, so they had a hard time recapturing him.
Lost dogs spook easily and it doesn't take long for even a dog raised in a loving home to "go wild" -- I think it is some kind of primitive survival instinct.
Our dog, Mars, got away from a vet's office once and wandered the streets near the riverbank for several hours before we could find her. As we were driving back and forth, I spotted her just lying down on the grassy section of a boulevard. Driving up, I got out and opened the passenger door and called her to come -- she got up and just looked at me for a few seconds, sort of confused, like "do I know you?" before she finally responded to the "going for a ride" cues and jumped into the car. Then suddenly she DID know me and was wiggling all over with excitement and joy. We were a very relieved family that day, let me tell youl.
One of the greatest stories I ever heard was a friend of my sister, whose little Sheltie dog got away in Waskisiu provincial park. She spent weeks driving back and forth every weekend, putting up posters and looking for the dog. Finally, five weeks later and some 30 miles away from where the dog had been lost, she got a phone call from a cafe in a lakeside resort area where they had seen the dog scounging their garbage.
With her other two dogs, she drove up and started walking around the wood trails near the cafe, calling for her dog. At last she spotted her lost one in the bushes. Careful not to shout or leap or startle the dog, she just called the dog softly. He didn't run but he wouldn't come to her. So -- and I don't know how she managed to do this so calmly -- she just kept on walking. Finally, she turned around to find all three dogs walking with her, and she got all of them back to the car. Her lost sheltie was malnourished and took several weeks to fully recover but, amazingly, had nothing wlse wrong with him. She was convinced it was the other two dogs, as much as herself, who helped bring her dog home again. But I credit her devotion and persistence -- she wouldn't give up and she blanketed the area with her fliers -- the person who called her about the dog was the teenage son of the cafe owner, who had happened to see a flier with the dog's photo on it and finally convinced his parents that their stray was that particular dog.

So who will be voting for this?

Now we hear that one of the aspects of the Conservatives trumpted "accountability" act is to impose a whole new set of accounting requirements on Aboriginal reserves -- thus pandering to the right-wing mantra cum Conservative wedge issue which claims that poor people, particularly darker-coloured poor people, are always trying to rip us all off.
Are the Conservatives also demanding similar levels of accounting detail for all of the municipal highway projects they fund each year? How about all of the business development grants they make? And the job-creation funding for companies? And the health-care transfers to provinces? Is the Auditor-General planning to expand her staff to hundreds of people, to look into all those federal transfers? Or are Aboriginal reserves going to be singled out?
I just hope the NDP, Liberals and Bloc will be asking questions like this before they give a knee-jerk vote in favour of "accountability" -- because who would want to be against it? -- without realizing they are actually voting for a divisive - maybe even racist - policy.
I say racist because so many reserves are already struggling to stretch their very limited, non-indexed federal dollars for education and housing. Now they'll have to spend even more on hiring more accountants, just to prove that they aren't spending anything wrong.
And don't tell me that these additional federal audits are needed to catch illegal embezzlement -- police and RCMP are already catching these offenders. Some cases of fraud don't justify implicitly tarring every reserve with the "fraud and mismanagement" brush, any more than every city mayor should be blamed whenever one or two mayors put their relatives on the payroll.

I searched the web for some photos of Aboriginal reserves, just to demonstrate that these are not people living in the lap of luxury. Here's a CTV photo of the Kashechewan reserve, which was under a boil-water advisory for two years -- TWO YEARS -- because their sewage treatment plant wasn't working and they couldn't get the money to fix it.

How about a nice little recession this spring?

In Comments, Scott notes that what many of us have had so far from the Conservatives is actually a tax increase. No GST cut yet -- apparently its not happening until the April or May budget or even later, into July.
Personally, of course, I'm going to try like hell to avoid buying anything major until the GST is reduced -- no new car, no new flooring if we can possibly delay.
I'm no economist, but it occurs to me that if everyone else in the country does likewise -- and apparently I'm not alone -- then in no time at all Canada will have a nice little recession underway plus maybe a few business bankruptcies.
Great stuff, Stevie.

Harper has opened the first envelope

A new manager takes over and finds on his desk three sealed envelopes marked One, Two and Three, with a note from the previous manager advising him to open them in order when he doesn't know what else to do.
So he settles in OK but finally the honeymoon is over and he starts having some problems, so he opens the first envelope.
"Blame your predecessor" it says.
So he does that and this works for a while. But then things start to go downhill again, so he opens the second envelope.
This one advises "Reorganize".
Ok, that works just great and everyone seems happier for a while, but then he starts having problems again and he's at his wits end how to solve them. So finally, he opens the third envelope.
It says "Prepare three envelopes."

Today Harper spend Question Period blaming the Liberals for every problem he was asked about -- obviously he has already had to open the first envelope.

Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out

Tom Delay's last words, referring to Hillary Clinton:

Nothing worse than a woman know-it-all.

Takes one to know one, you jerk.
Let's just remember, too, that neither Hillary nor Cynthia McKinney nor any of those other know-it-all women have had to resign in disgrace.
Memories of Charlotte Whitton, first woman mayor of Ottawa:

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Yes, it happens just about every day

From Digby (of course, who just won a Koufax for his writing):

...I guess that whole 'Delay Rule' thing was secret Democratic plot to take over the minds of Republicans and make them act like asses. (A common leftist tactic.)

There but for the grace of God

As a parent, when I read a story like this one, I just cannot help but finger my own metaphorical rosary beads of the times when my own children could have been grievously hurt, but by grace or fate or chance, were not.
Here are some of the beads I count every now and then:

I tripped over her walker when I was carrying my baby girl into the kitchen and somehow I twisted in mid-air as I fell so that when I hit the floor she was on top of me instead of underneath.

I poured a cup of coffee, then left it to answer the phone and turned back just in time to see my toddler daughter had grabbed the coffee cup and was holding it over her head and I leaped and pushed the cup forward and spilled the steaming coffee over the floor.

Our children were playing in the next yard and somehow the dog got out of the front door and the neighbour who saw it all said that the car that hit our dog came this close to hitting our 5-year-old son instead.

I hope little Brandon continues to recover.

Learning to shut up

The Ahenakew hate-crime conviction appeal was heard today. Ahenakew's lawyer argued that he shouldn't have been convicted because he hadn't intended to promote hate. But as the Crown pointed out "No one forced him to argue in support of his views, he did that by himself. You're not excused because you are answering questions by a reporter or anyone else." The news story also goes on to note that that "Ahenakew ... would not speak to reporters." Well, that's a relief. The world has heard quite enough from him already.

Ring around the rosie

Pocket full of posie
Husha
Husha
Delay fall down
He must be guilty as sin. By next week, all the Republicans in Washington will be saying "Tom who? Nope, sorry -- never met the fellow." Thus joining Jack Abramhoff as the Republicans Nobody Knew.

The bestest photo ever

Havril at [insert something clever] titles this post of Bush with Harper We'll always have Cancun.
I found it referenced at Canadian Cynic:

God of War

Great line of the day

From Michael Berube, International Professor of Danger:

If you want to make wingnuts' heads explode this week, just propose an illegal immigrant amnesty program in which immigrants become naturalized citizens if they agree to take jobs away from liberal professors.

Emphasis his!

I'll drink to that

So I guess the original researchers were three sheets to the wind when they concluded that drinking prevents heart disease.
Darn.