International Pickle Day

According to the radio this morning, today is International Pickle Day.
Have a crunchie one, everybody!
And I found this website to help us all keep track. May 16 is also:

Wear Purple For Peace Day
Biographers Day
National Bike to Work Day (Third Tuesday in May)
Root Beer Birthday
Spaghetti-Os Birthday
Spam Birthday
US Nickel Minted In 1866

How low can they go?

So Emerson says the softwook deal critics are just expecting too much. Well, I ask -- how low should our expectations be of the Harper government?

War with Mexico?

Atrios describes the Mexican-American War of 2006:

. . . I know what they're thinking at the White House. We can have a lovely little 'fake war' at the border, one with all the cool uniforms, hummers, helicopters, etc... A war which is entirely safe. A war where there isn't really an enemy. And the president can safely visit that war, prance around in his codpiece, yell things out a bullhorn while sitting astride a massive hummer. Ridiculous, but that's probably the plan.

My carnation is white

The white carnation is worn on Mothers Day when your mother has died.
My mother died 29 years ago, and I still find it hard to believe she is gone -- to this day, I find myself talking to her and asking her for advice.
Several years ago, the comic strip For Better or For Worse had a series about Ellie's mother dying. One strip showed Ellie and her mother talking in the hospital, and Ellie asked her mother to watch over her children from heaven.
That's what I would have wanted to ask my Mom to do.
But then, I didn't really need to ask, because I know she would do it anyway.
I know it's sort of sentimental, but here's a poem, author unknown, about mothers:
Your Love is like an island
In life's ocean, vast and wide,
A peaceful quiet shelter
From the wind and rain and tide.
Above it like a beacon light
Shone faith and truth and prayer;
And through the changing scenes of life,
I find a haven there.

With small men no great thing can be accomplished

In Comments, reader M@ refers us to John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, saying that "what Mill says about the "tyrrany of the majority" is pretty much all you need to know about the necessary limits of majority rule in a liberal democracy. Every high schooler in the western world should read it. There are very, very few other books I would say that about."
Also instructive are the sentences at the end of Mill's essay, which apply to what is going on now in Washington and maybe also in Ottawa:

The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it . . . a State, which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.

In other words, if the nay-sayers and freethinkers and shit-disturbers are discredited or silenced, the government will run smoother but the nation as a whole will fail.

Time for a career change

So MP Nathan Cullen said he can't help a constituent because he's afraid of the RCMP -- and now he regrets saying this but won't apologize.
This sounds like a man who needs to find a different career, one which doesn't require either courage or good judgement.

Rights and wrongs

Billmon provides one of the best summaries I have read about why polls are wrong about civil rights.
He is talking about Phone-gate, and some recent polls showing that half of Americans are so terrified of terror that they think the government needs to monitor their phone calls without warrants to keep them safe.
They won't be so cheery about it when their kids start getting arrested for drug possession after chatting on the phone about their dope stash. Or when police come breaking down their door because their son was talking to his friends about Grand Theft Auto. But that's all going to be happening later on, and people will be heard to say things like, Hey, didn't Americans used to have some sort of right to privacy or something? Does anyone remember that? No? Oh, well, maybe my memory is slipping....
But anyway, Billmon's argument now is true when it comes to any kind of civil rights, like anti-discrimination court rulings, gay marriage, and so forth:

The whole point of having civil liberties is that they are not supposed to be subject to a majority veto . . . some things are wrong just because they're wrong -- not because a temporary majority (or even a permanent one) thinks they're wrong. Real conservatives used to understand this. But the authoritarian right, for all of its talk about moral absolutes, understands and respects just one thing: power. In our system power flows from votes -- and having the money to demagogue those votes. It doesn't get more relativistic than that.
We can't do anything about how a corrupt, oligarchic system works (or rather, doesn't work) but we can at least stop accepting the other side's terms for the debate. What the government is doing is illegal and unamerican, and that would still be true if the polls showed 99% support -- in fact, it would be even more true.

Great line of the day

Digby contrasts Bush and Clinton:

. . . Bush . . . roared into office with his one vote majority and treated the Democrats like lackeys, behaving as if he had a mandate to enact the most extreme items on the GOP agenda. He used patriotism as a bludgeon to intimidate all dissent against his inexplicable war with Iraq. At every turn he behaved with insolence and hubris and his failure has been manifest. Now he lives in a bubble, wandering around dazed and confused about what is happening to him --- which is not the result of Democratic partisanship, I might add, but rather the assessment of the American people. . . . Perhaps that's why his fall has been so steady --- the slow realization among the people that being a leader takes more than a manly swagger and a down home accent.
Bill Clinton may have been an imperfect human being but he was a president. This guy is, and always was, just a brand name in a suit.

Emphasis mine.

Phone-gate

Atrios is following the phone records story as it breaks -- will it be called "Phone-gate"?
When I heard about Bush speaking today, it reminded me of You Know Who -- remember "I am not a crook!"?

Bitch

Mary Cheney proves that just because a woman is gay doesn't mean she cannot be pathetic.
And talk about projection -- she won't call her father out for his suppoft of a State of the Union address where Bush promoted his anti-gay marriage amendment. Instead, she calls John Kerry and John Edwards names because they had the temerity to defend her against Republican anti-gay hate.

Home, chickens, roosting, etc.

Well,well...so Vellacott resigns from the aboriginal affairs committee -- and he says its all the Liberal's fault. I guess they're still running everything behind the scenes, don't ya know...

Nuremberg reborn

Steve Gilliard talks about the new Nuremberg:

. . .after 9/11, Bush asked for nothing. Not to save gas, not to enlist, nothing. So the burden fell on the willing and they are tired. Tired of war, tired of begging for food, tired of seeing their friends horrifically wounded . . . Bush has demanded nothing, and he gets nothing.
The US after WWII understood not only the burdens but the rewards of shared sacrifice . . . This administration does not. It's as if Herbert Hoover was asked to fight the Nazis without rallying the public. . . And how do we do it? By tossing away every lesson we've learned from Nuremberg. We build gulags, we sent people into a modern version of night and fog, where people are beaten to death, we coerse our allies into accepting kidnapping flights and dump the passengers in places where they will be tortured . . .
The excuse for violating what we once rejected was more than hubris. Every society has sadists. Most keep them under check, few allow them real power. Rumsfeld unleashed them, their worst instincts justified and it went from CENTCOM down to their field . . . Rumsfeld unleashed these people because he thought they had an easy solution to a difficult problem. But instead, they allow children to be raped and the innocent murdered for no gain. None.
We had embraced what we had fought so hard to end, not because we were inherently evil, but because it was one more easy thing to do for a man who always chosen the easy, wrong path.
I would like to think we will redeem ourselves one day, that the sadists and their bosses will face justice, real justice, in a large court for the world to see, to redeem the promise of what was begun at Nuremberg. . .

Read the whole post.

Great line of the day

Roy at alicublog asks why conservative commenters at The Corner and the Weekly Standard are always complaining:

Can't these people just enjoy the many economic, social, and governmental advantages whiteness unfairly confers? I know I do!

This is ridiculous

Now, I haven't researched this because I don't want to ruin my amateur standing, but can anyone tell me what is the matter with the British Columbia justice system these days?
They just finished the unsuccessful Air India mess, and now the Globe is reporting about how the Pickton trial is expected to last two years.
This is apparently being seen just as a problem for picking a jury -- because what sane person wants to put their life on hold for two years and spend their Christmas and birthdays and anniversaries for 2007 and 2008 in a courtroom.
But is anyone asking why the BC justice system is even contemplating such a monster trial at all?
Get a grip on it, folks -- even the Nuremberg trial lasted only 11 months.
Life without parole is life without parole, whether he is found guilty of six or 26 murders.

Great line of the day

From Eric Alterman, via The Sideshow:

Note that the same Beltway crowd that last year was telling us the Downing Street Memo was not news, is the same crowd insisting Colbert was not funny.