Great line of the day

The Editors agree with me about the true purpose of the NSA phonegate program:

. . . the question becomes: why was none of this done? . . . why wouldn’t you be interested, just on general principles, in trying to protect the privacy of Americans who you have absolutely no reason to suspect are involved in terrorism? Even if you didn’t have to, why wouldn’t you try to work with the Congress and the courts, just to ensure that everything could be carried out smoothly? In order to make some legal/philosophical point about the Unitary Executive? Because you forgot? Because you didn’t have the time?
Bullshit. The lack of oversight and the lack of privacy protection is not a bug; it’s a feature. This program was not intended to catch terrorists - it was intended to give the White House access, invisibly, to information about private citizens which it wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to have. (We’ve seen the tip of this iceberg already.) The goals of this program are political. There’s just no other plausible reason to conduct the program this way.

Emphasis mine.

"Never get involved in a land war in Asia"

I was googling the phrase "Never get involved in a land war in Asia", which I heard for the first time tonight watching The Princess Bride . . . a better movie than I had thought it would be, but I digress.
So anyway, I was looking up this phrase . . . which maybe originated in this movie because I couldn't find an older reference, but I digress . . . and I came across this funny commencement address at a blog called The Morning News. Some excerpts:

Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll spare me a minute, I’d like to offer a few pieces of advice for today’s graduates.
Ask not, ever. Some people will say your college years are the best of your life—ignore them.
I find that, sometimes, when your miss your bus, you can run really fast and catch up to it at the next stop!
Also: Write more letters, especially if you’re in jail. Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive, an amplification, or an illustrative quotation.
And for God’s sake don’t stomp on flaming paper bags.
If you’re bi-curious, experiment now; that window is about to close.
Spit only in the bathroom sink . . .
Don’t make generalizations—they will be wrong more often than not . . .
Fear God. And never get involved in a land war in Asia . . .
It’s important to hope, but vodka does not remove bloodstains from white linen . . .
And not everyone needs a blog—I’m just saying . . .
If you’re going to binge drink, wear practical shoes.
It’s better to throw up when you’re still drunk than to wait until the following afternoon.
And never let your passport expire . . .
And if you don’t know the difference between Philips head and flat head screwdrivers, learn; it will impress the plumbers . . .
And never eat at any restaurant that offers free balloons. Seriously.

Sniper

I don't know very much about how the Canadian military or armies or snipers work (except, of course, for enjoying Bob the Nailer tales), so I found this to be a fascinating post by Dave over at Galloping Beaver: Failure of command. Prosecute the corporal. I guess just as companies sometimes don't deserve their own best employees, militaries sometimes don't deserve their own best soldiers.

Great lines of the day

Republican Senator Pat Roberts made an amazing statement yesterday "I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties. But you have no civil liberties if you are dead."
John at Americablog summarizes the basic cowardice in such a statement:

. . . Patrick Henry once said: 'Give me liberty or give me death.' Pat Roberts said yesterday: Take my liberty and spare me death. You see, among the far-right wingers now running the Republican party, the concept of actually fighting FOR your freedoms, of actually DYING in the DEFENSE of those freedoms, is nuts . . . They don't understand our freedoms, let alone appreciate what it means to be willing to give your life to protect and preserve them. They have no concept that some things really ARE worth dying for. And that's a very scary thing indeed. . .

Emphasis mine.
And Matthew Yglesias at Talking Points Memo writes about how insulting Robert's statement is to Americans:

First off is the sheer cowardice of it. Sure, liberal democracy is nice, but not if someone might get hurt....Second is just this dogmatic post-9/ll insistence on acting as if human history began suddenly in 1997 or something. The United States was able to face down such threats as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany without indefinite detentions, widespread use of torture as an interrogative technique, or an all-pervasive surveillance. But a smallish group of terrorists who can't even surface publicaly abroad for fear they'll be swiftly killed by the mightiest military on earth? Time to break out the document shredder and do away with that pesky constitution. Last, there's the unargued assumption that civil rights and the rule of law are some kind of near-intolerable impediment to national security . . .

Emphasis mine, again.
What is wrong with these people? Don't they realize what they're giving up? They have forgotten these words supposedly said by Benjamin Franklin two centuries ago"Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither".

Doug Flutie

TBogg writes a great post about the retirement of Doug Flutie -- who he actually met, sort of.
I guess Flutie did some great things playing college football in the states, of course, but Canadians revere him as one of the greatest quarterbacks we ever had -- three Grey Cups.

1996 Grey Cup game against Hamilton

"We breathe it out"

In reply to Al Gore's new film, some oil-funded outfit calling itself the Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced two of the stupidest commercials ever made.
Just go take a look -- you'll think they are SNL parody ads, but they're not. Their message is that carbon dioxide just can't be bad for us because "we breathe it out."
Oh, yes..."out" is, of course, the operative word here.
They just don't get it, do they?
Media Matters writes :

It’s comforting to know that this is the best global warming rejectionists can come up with. There are plenty of things that are healthy and essential in reasonable quantities but harmful in extremely large quantities. (For example, drinking a few glasses of water is beneficial. Drinking 10 gallons of water can kill you.)

Media Matters also points out that the p. r. flacks who wrote the second commercial don't even understand the meaning of the glacier research they are quoting.

Yeah, sure

There's this naive assumption, even in Left Blogistan, that the NSA's phone monitoring program is hunting terrorists.
If the truth ever comes out, I think we will find that the program actually is tracking all the Enemies of the Bush State -- journalists, talk show hosts, media executives, Quakers, peace activists, progressives, liberals, Hollywood movie stars, members of NARAL, gay rights organizations, environmentalists, Democratic politicians and Al Gore.
Today Josh Marshall and Digby both reference a Baltimore Sun story about how NSA had a computer program which would have gathered communications data legally. It would have encrypted the phone numbers and ensured that only those records which demonstrated a potential terrorist threat were ever decrypted.
This program was junked, the article says, due to "bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's survelliance powers."
Oh, sure -- not because such a program would also have stopped the Bush administration from tracking phone calls to the New York Times and John Murtha . . .

The Canadian Way

Harper put on a huff about losing the vote to nominate one of his Alberta cronies as patronage appointments czar.
I think this is just an excuse to dump the czar idea and keep the patronage power in the Prime Minister's office where it belongs.
What's the good of having a bunch of patronage positions to hand out if you cannot reward your friends and fundraisers? These are the people who agree with your point of view. They like you. They will do things your way. And they will donate money to your next campaign if they are made to feel like part of the team.
And if you go too far and get too blatant about it and appoint too many cronies and incompetents, then Canadians will know who to blame and they'll throw you out of office (cough, Liberals, cough).
That's the Canadian way.
And really, I think its just as well that government appointments are not being given over to Gwyn Morgan in particular, a man with a great resume but with some pretty racist and moralistic attitudes. Harper may have the same attitudes, I guess, but at least if Harper's office makes the patronage appointments then everyone will know who is responsible.
That's why we call it Responsible Government.

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.