They think they have a say

Yes, you have the right to an opinion.
But you don't have a say in how I run my life.
My sister describes a phenomenon she calls "Jerry Springer Syndrome" -- when we start acting like we're a "studio audience" for other people's lives, and therefore we can pass judgment on other people's lifestyles. We act, she says, like we have a say. But we don't.
Every time she would dial past the Jerry Springer show and other shows of this ilk on TV, she would see the studio audience booing and cheering and yelling and jeering and howling at the poor smuck on stage, writhing in self-inflicted and vainglorious agony.
These shows, she says, promote the idea that everybody in the audience has a say -- the whole format of the show encourages people to think that their opinion about whatever is happening on stage must be continuously, enthusiastically and loudly expressed.
Now that we have pundits on TV all the time opining at the drop of a hat on everything political, social, moral, religious and cultural, we all seem to have adopted the attitude that everyone should be constantly judging everyone else all the time. When it comes to politicians, of course, they're asking for it. And they get it, from pundits and columnists and journalists and talk-show hosts all the time. But, too often these days, everyone else gets it too -- from Michael Shiavo to the runaway bride, from Tom Cruise to Elton John, from Michael Jackson to Queen Elizabeth -- everyone seems to think they have to have a say in how other people are living their lives.
Why not, my sister asks, just leave people alone?
You don't like what someone else is doing with their life? OK, fine -- but just shut up about it. Unless they asked for your opinion, or unless what they are doing directly affects you and yours, well, its none of your business.
Ann Landers used to tell people MYOB -- mind your own business. Maybe that's an acronym we should revive.
I thought of my sister when I read this LA Times story, about a US court ruling that yes, a school can tell a student not to wear a gay-bashing t-shirt. The right-wing student, of course, is all outraged that he cannot inflict his anti-gay opinions on all his fellow students, gay or straight. And he's using his religion as his excuse -- just because his religion supposedly condemns homosexuality, he says, this gives him the right to wear a shirt on Day of Silence which said on the front "Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned'' and on the back "Homosexuality Is Shameful''.
Well, no one is saying he cannot HAVE a negative opinion about gay people. But he doesn't have shove his opinion in everyone else's face.
While the issue may seem trivial, the principle is not. The majority opinion from the court noted that students have the right to

"be secure and to be let alone...being secure involves not only the freedom from physical assaults but from psychological attacks that cause young people to question their self-worth and their rightful place in society. The 'right to be let alone' has been recognized by the Supreme Court . . . as the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men"

The dissenting judge seemed to think that the shirt was OK because people didn't come to blows:

There was no evidence that gay students were harmed by derogatory messages of the type conveyed on Harper's T-shirt, Kozinski said. Moreover, Kozinski said there was no indication that a discussion Harper had with other students about the T-shirt "turned violent or disrupted school activities." In fact, Kozinski said, "while words were exchanged, the students managed the situation well and without intervention from the school authorities. No doubt, everyone learned an important civics lesson about dealing with others who hold sharply divergent views."

Obviously, this judge has been seriously afflicted by the Jerry Springer Syndrome -- ' no fight, no foul' was his attitude, and apparently he is either blind to the larger context of gay-bashing in the US, or personally biased against gays himself. The LA Times story describes the overall picture:

Today's ruling comes amid a growing campaign across the country to compel public schools, state universities and private companies to annul policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment. Plaintiffs in several lawsuits are seeking to knock out tolerance programs on the grounds that they violate religious beliefs that oppose homosexuality. Legal experts, such as UCLA constitutional law professor Eugene Volokh, said the issue eventually would reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

I must say, it disgusts me that they are parading around their supposedly-Christian religiousity as a justification for their prejudice. How many gays do they think Jesus would bash?

Did Harper actually INTEND to disrespect every Aboriginal person in Canada?

Or will this be merely a happy byproduct of making Maurice Vellacott chair of the Aboriginal Affairs Committee?
As my husband said, that's like putting Ernst Zundel in charge of a Holocaust survivors' tribute.
There is nothing Harper could do which would indicate more clearly to Canadian Aboriginals that the Kelowna accords are dead. Not only that, but the Conservative government considers Aboriginal people to be second-class citizens, whose history is not worthy of respect and whose concerns are not worthy of consideration.
Star Phoenix columnist Randy Burton's provides the background in his article -- Hard to imagine worse choice than Vellacott:

. . . Vellacott's latest contribution to racial harmony is to suggest that the reason two Native men were found frozen to death outside of Saskatoon is because they were in the habit of going to a shack on the outskirts of town to drink.
This is no doubt going to come as news to the police, to Darrell Night and to anyone else in the city with an interest in this topic.
What shack? Where is it? Can Vellacott provide a tour? Or is this merely another figment of the man's crowded imagination?
After all, the debate over whether the police had a habit of dropping Native people outside of town has dominated the discussion about policing in Saskatoon for years.
It was the core of the case against former Saskatoon police officers Dan Hatchen and Ken Munson, who were convicted of unlawful confinement for dumping Night out of their car on a freezing cold winter night back in 2000.
Vellacott has never accepted that verdict and last year even asked the provincial Justice Department to reopen the case, based on the claim that Night asked to be dropped off.
This line of defence was rejected in the original court case, but Vellacott later claimed to have "new evidence" in the form of a relative of Night's that Vellacott said was living in a Fairhaven apartment complex at the time.
Even if this was true, it does nothing to explain why Night would be left some 2 1/2 kilometres from where he asked to be dropped off.
In any event, the RCMP investigated Vellacott's claim and rejected it. After a review of the relative's rental receipts and the business records of the landlord, police found no evidence the relative had ever lived there. In response, Vellacott said the RCMP "weren't diligent" and "have not done their job."
Now more than a year later, Vellacott has another dead horse to flog. This time, he has a new theory of how Rodney Naistus and Lawrence Wegner died. In an interview with the Globe and Mail this week, Vellacott suggested they must have been drinking in a shack just outside of town and then froze to death when they tried to stumble back home.
For this to be true, Wegner had to have walked five kilometres out of town without shoes or a jacket in order to do some drinking in Vellacott's shack. Of course, he would also have had to be carrying a case of beer or a bottle of whisky. The same applies to Rodney Naistus, who was last seen on a downtown street in front of Winston's pub.
That had to be some nice shack to attract people to walk out to it in the dead of winter. Or if they drove, there would have been some sign of traffic left behind, tire tracks in the fields, cigarette butts, something.
However, throughout the subsequent police investigation and two coroner's inquests, not once did anyone ever report finding any sign of a party shack anywhere on the outskirts of town.
Where Vellacott gets his information I will have to leave for him to explain. His office informs me he is far too busy on his Easter break from Parliament to return phone calls. The reason this issue has arisen is because Vellacott took it upon himself to issue a press release earlier this week saying Prime Minister Stephen Harper is about to name him chair of the aboriginal affairs committee.
Why the prime minister would want to do that is a mystery almost as deep as Vellacott's shack . . .

The CBC reports on the reaction of Aboriginal leaders:

. . . Vellacott wasn't speaking with reporters Tuesday, but some aboriginal leaders were expressing their concerns. "We wonder what kind of message this government, this new government is sending to us having seen the history of the person that's been nominated," said Alphonse Bird, chief of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations. "Mr. Vellacott has been very outspoken but not necessarily in favour of aboriginal issues," said Métis National Council president Clem Chartier.
When questioned by reporters Tuesday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not specifically discuss the Vellacott nomination, but he defended his right to hand pick MPs to chair Commons committees. Harper said he doesn't want Conservatives fighting amongst themselves.

Yes, its just so much better that his Conservative MPs should fight with the Canadians whose interests they are supposed to be representing, I guess.

Great line of the day

From Taylor Marsh at Firedoglake:

There are two signs that a Republican is in trouble. One is they start talking about Bill Clinton. The other is they book an interview on Rush Limbaugh's radio show.

I guess Rumsfeld was on Limbaugh yesterday. Maybe he picked up a Gitmo Staff t-shirt?

I hate this man

Nothing personal, but this Idaho man eats 6,500 calories a day -- he has a little trouble gaining weight, you see.
I, on the other hand, do not.
There ain't no justice . . .

Son of Chretien

Amazing, isn't it?
Now that Harper is Prime Minister, he's finding that the rigid, controlling, autocratic way Chretien did things just makes so much more sense than the messy, controversial, democratic way Paul Martin did them -- like for the Prime Minister to appoint the committee chairs again.
Jean will be so proud . . .

Stuff

Looking for some good stuff?
Don't miss Canadian Cynic's "kittens 'n guns" visuals -- baby kittens are so cute!
Ross blogs a great description of how Neil Young's newest protest song was recorded.

. . . when the lyrics we were supposed to sing flashed on the giant screen, a roar went up from the choir. . . . The session was like being at a 12-hour peace rally. . .

Digby refers us to Lance Mannion's take on the David Brooks' NYT column about rape and the Duke team. Mannion also quotes Amanda Marcott's "Shorter David Brooks", which has in a few brief days become a net classic:

"In exchange for shutting up and giving up this silly fight for sexual and racial equality, we white men promise that we won't rape. As much. Well, it won't get into the news, that's for damn sure."

Here's Tom Englehardt's History Ambushes the Bush Administration: In the Rubble, a companion to his earlier post The Hyperpower Hype and Where It Took Us: Exporting Ruins -- both are well worth your reading effort.
And here FYI is one of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mike Luckovich's cartoons (from October):

Rogue cop

Canada's own Ian Welsh writes great sense at Firedoglake.

. . . I have to tell you, that from a foreigner's point of view. . . you are a rogue nation. You invade people based on lies. You have no credibility on Iran. You are the boy who cried Wolf. You don't obey the Geneva conventions. You have secret prisons. You torture people, including the citizens of your allies. You have abolished habeas corpus for classes of people. You kidnap foreigners and secretly ship them off to be tortured. . . . There are only two nations in the world who constantly talk about how they're willing to nuke people without even being attacked first: The North Koreans - and the UNITED STATES.
You gave up the ability to stop countries like Iran from getting nukes when you invaded a country like Iraq which had no nukes and no real possibility of getting them. That was your wad, and you blew it. You chose to be weak. At this point, for you to stop Iran would involve you in a war you cannot win -- or at least no victory worth having. You can't occupy Iran, so are you going to really glass Tehran or the entire country? Do you know what the world reaction would be? Do you know what would happen to the dollar? Are you out of your minds?
Why is this even being discussed? And why is it that I can't simply dismiss it as diplomatic posturing? When did the US step through the looking glass? When did insanity become reasonable?

Exactly.
I keep hearing American talking head pundits discuss war with Iran as though it was some kind of obligation -- like, America is the global cop, the global superpower telling other countries what to do, its some kind of divine right or mandate or something.
I want to say this to these talking heads -- America used to have four things: a magnificent Constitution, the sympathy of the world following 9/11, a large economy, and a large military budget. All that is left is a large American economy -- as long as oil is still purchased in American dollars and China is still purchasing debt -- and all that military spending.
But America has no monopoly on morality. Not any more. And no more right to tell everyone else how to live than Brazil does -- in fact, at least Brazil still knows how to have fun.

Great line of the day

Digby:

I find it simply mind-boggling that after the unbelievable intelligence manipulation and incompetence that led us into the Iraq anyone in this country is willing to trust George W. Bush to launch another "pre-emptive" war. What exactly would he have to do to make the beltway courtiers question his good intentions? Get a blow job?

Signs of the apocalypse

It has struck me lately that components of our "western culture" here in North America are turning back in on themselves.
No wonder the rest of the world thinks we're nuts.
So, I've decided to document this in an occasional feature I intend to call "Signs of the apocalypse".
And I'm NOT even going to use any C&W lyrics to make my point -- that would be just too easy.
So here's the first one -- I realize that western civilization may be doomed when I see photos like this --

-- showing a diver in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary off Key Largo hiding eggs for an underwater Easter egg hunt.
I think its the bunny ears that did it for me . . .

OK

Sorry for the lack of posts -- everything is OK but my daughter is here visiting for the weekend so main minutes and spare minutes have been spent visiting -- also, for the first time yesterday since my accident, my knee was strong enough that I actually went shopping in three different stores! And I bought some clothes!
Amazing how your frame of reference changes after a period of being physically exhausted by walking a few steps.

Great line of the day

Tim over at POGGE describes the ridiculous spectacle of our Prime Minister manufacturing needless disputes with the Ottawa Press Gallery.
Doesn't he have better things to do, like running the country maybe?
Anyway, Tim writes:

However his supporters try to spin this, the public is seeing the image of a prime minister trying to control the press, or trying to pick friendly reporters instead of those who might ask uncomfortable questions. It's absurd, and Harper appears a little bit smaller every time he tries to assert his 'executive privilege' or whatever the hell it is he's asserting . . . why is it no one that he trusts is explaining to him that he is engaging in a popularity contest he simply cannot win? Journalists may not be held in as high public regard as, say, teachers, but they certainly rank much higher on the credibility scale than politicians.

Emphasis mine.

16 days?

Yeah, sure, Iran can produce enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb in 16 days -- provided those days are February 1 to February 17, 2016.
Maybe.
IF they can somehow get 54,000 centrifuges. Right now, they have 180.
Oh, and they also have to figure out how to do it.
So as Steve Gilliard notes, the scare headlines about Iran having the nuclear bomb are utter bullshit.

Fear and loathing

The blogosphere is unleashing its best fear and loathing on the prospect of the US starting an unprovoked, aggressive nuclear war against Iran.
First, for some perspective on Iran's actual political situation and actual uranium enrichment capabilities, see these two short articles:
Ian Welsh's The Three Principles of Iranian Foreign Affairs

[1]Iran wants its neighbours to not be a threat . . . [2] Iran needs a deterrent against the US and other great powers . . . [and 3] The Mullahs intend to stay in charge . . . Really, almost everything else is a corollary of these three rules . . .

And Juan Cole's "Iran can now make glowing Mickey Mouse watches" :

. . . all President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday was that it had enriched uranium to a measely 3.5 percent, using a bank of 180 centrifuges hooked up so that they "cascade." The ability to slightly enrich uranium is not the same as the ability to build a bomb. For the latter, you need at least 80% enrichment, which in turn would require about 16,000 small centrifuges hooked up to cascade. Iran does not have 16,000 centrifuges. It seems to have 180. Iran is a good ten years away from having a bomb, and since its leaders, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, say they do not want an atomic bomb because it is Islamically immoral, you have to wonder if they will ever have a bomb . . . The Iranian hard liners are down to a popularity rating in Iran of about 15%. They are using their challenge to the Bush administration over their perfectly legal civilian nuclear energy research program as a way of enhancing their nationalist credentials in Iran. Likewise, Bush is trying to shore up his base . . . If this international game of chicken goes wrong, then the whole Middle East and much of Western Europe could go up in flames.

Now for some perspectives on the impact such a war would have on the world and on the United States itself:
Billmon worries about the muted media reaction to a US nuclear first strike:

. . . to the extent there is a rational excuse for treating a nuclear strike on Iran as the journalistic equivalent of a seasonal story about people washing their cars, it must be the cynical conviction that the Cheneyites aren’t serious . . . the rest of us have learned that when Dick Cheney starts muttering about precious bodily fluids, you'd better pay attention. . . . Maybe the idea of the United States would launch a nuclear first strike – albeit a "surgical" one – is too hard for most Americans, including most American journalists, to process . . . the current nuclear war gaming strikes me as much more likely to end in the real thing – partly because the neocons appear to have convinced themselves a "tactical" strike doesn't really count, partly because of what Hersh politely refers to as Bush's "messianic vision" (Cheney may have his finger on the bureaucracy, but Shrub is still the one with his finger on the button) but mostly because I think these guys really think they can get away with it . . .

Tristero at Hullabaloo punctures the myth of the so-called "tactical" nuke:

It really doesn't take much effort to make a tactical nuclear device.
1. Take one nuclear weapon with the destructive power of as many Hiroshima bombs as you like.
2. Add the word "tactical" to the description.
Voila! You now have a tactical nuclear weapon that magically always hits its target and only kills evil people, leaving all the good people alive and perfectly healthy.

Josh Marshall :

President Bush's dimwit megalomania seems to have survived the disaster of his Iraq adventure wholly intact . . . They appear to have learned almost nothing from the last three years in Iraq. The only sensible expenditure of energy is to find ways to hem these guys in or constrain them before they do even more damage to this country.

Pachacutec at Firedoglake:

Nuking Iran will not just incite the Middle East against us for the rest of our lifetimes. The whole world will turn against us. China. Everyone. World War III. Terrorism will continue its post 2001 increase. Oil will go to $200 per barrel, destroying our economy. Many of us will starve as food grows scarce. Most of us - the educated and the unskilled alike - will lose our jobs. Foreign nations will sell U. S. dollars and invest in Euros. We will lose international trade, and our national debt holders will band together to neutralize us. Nuking Iran would quite simply be the end of America . . . the current Bush policy is not contemplated in self defense. Iran is ten years away from the ability to develop weapons grade uranium. It possesses no nukes today. This is a situation fundamentally unlike any we faced during the cold war with the USSR. All Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, should stand shoulder to shoulder to demand that plans for preemptive nuclear strikes against Iran be scrapped . . . Iran is willing to engage in direct negotiations with the U. S. Our allies lack the leverage to induce concessions without our participation in direct talks. And yet, we refuse to talk to Iran. What is the point of threatening use of force when we offer Iran no alternative course of action, other than confrontation? Bush and Cheney are playing suicide pact politics in a gutless, insane attempt to save their plummeting poll numbers among some members of the Republican base going into the November elections. They want to look strong because they are weak: that makes them dangerous. They love their power more than they love America. . . . There is no reason to believe Bush is bluffing, since he has offered no negotiated way back from confrontation to Iran’s leaders (who frankly also face weakness at home and are at least in part colluding in this suicide pact for internal political gain). Bush is too filled with grandiose messianic delusion to engage in sane "strategery."

Arthur Silber :

If we can repeatedly engage in aggressive, non-defensive war -- and if we can use nuclear weapons offensively -- other countries will make the same arguments. Self-justification is not our exclusive domain. We may want to believe that we can control events across the world: the last few years have demonstrated conclusively that we cannot control events even within Iraq. But if we continue to seek to control events on a worldwide scale in the manner we do today, we will achieve one end at some point: destruction of a kind that will make the twentieth century pale in comparison . . . The possible end of civilization as all of us have known it, either in slow motion or on a faster schedule, is almost impossible to comprehend. It is the material of science fiction, not of real life. But whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, this is the nature of where we are today, and this is the critical historic juncture at which we stand . . . The world as we have known it may well be swept away in time, just as all the great civilizations of the past have been

We should also remember this:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

and this:

I think the Bush administration approved the Plame leak

The new official story doesn't make any sense.
The story is now that the Bush administration wanted to refute Joe Wilson by leaking to Judy Miller that the National Intelligence Estimate supported the uranium-from-Niger claim
But this claim had already been discredited before the "leak" occurred.
Here is the timeline:

July 6, 2003 - The New York Times publishes Joe Wilson's Op-Ed "What I Didn't Find in Africa"
July 7 - The White House retracts the Niger allegation, which was its first admission of a flaw in the case for war
July 8 - Scooter Libby meets with New York Times reporter Judith Miller over a two-hour breakfast and supposedly leaks the NIE story
July 11 - George Tenet issues a statement taking the heat for the 16 words, that they should not have been included in the SOTU.
July 13 - Novak's column "Mission to Niger" published: Plame outed to public.
July 18 - A declassified version of the NIE is released. (Newsweek)

So the seeking-uranium-in-Niger story was already toast by the time Libby and Miller met.
Now, perhaps Cheney is so far around the bend that he thought the NIE could still be waved around like a magic wand to convince a doubting nation that war was justified after all.
But for stone-age white guys like Bush and Cheney and Rove and Libby -- and for Novak and Woodward too -- its much more likely that they would think the Plame revelation was a great, juicy smear.
A long-haired, limp-wristed liberal, whose brassy-blond spy wife gets rid of him by sending him on junkets -- wow, they would think, what a wimp...
So I think THIS is the leak Libby was told to spill.
It must have surprised them that Miller didn't care what Valerie Plame did for a living-- nor did Walter Pincus or Matthew Cooper. They were actually more concerned about the war, amazingly, and so none of them wrote a story about Plame.
But good ole boy Bob Novak went along with the pussywhipped spin, and so did Woodward.

Oh, for crying out loud

For crying out loud, will we ever stop with the tests and the trials and the reviews and the hearings? Here's the latest-- Ontario coroner has no luck with DNA tests on exhumed body of Lynne Harper
Enough, already.
Steven Truscott was found guilty of murder 47 years ago. For 40 years, ever since The Trial of Steven Truscott was published in 1966, Canada has known that he is innocent.
It is time to exonerate him.