Great line of the day

Here's another great post from Stirling Newberry over at The Blogging of the President. This time he is writing about what he calls The Trillion Dollar Men:

Lieberman and McCain are both in a very select club . . . Men whose bad judgement has cost more than a trillion dollars each - and on more than one occasion. McCain was personally involved in the S&L meltdown . . . Lieberman isn't just an Iraq booster, but the architect of the Department of Homeland Security . . . This puts them in the range of blunderers of epic proportions, and yet each is so unshakeably convinced of his own infallibility, that a pontiff would blush at it . . . Let us face the economic reality - the war in Iraq has squandered the last years of the baby boom. We are now going to face a period of hammering retirees and their expectations to pay for the trillion dollar trash heap that is Bush's version of Baghdad. The money that could have been spent dealing with real and pressing issues, was spent chasing phantasm and fantasy. We not only didn't find WMD in Iraq, but we didn't find cheap oil there either. The first was a foregone conclusion, the second is an act of incompetence so staggering that it requires a particular genius.
These two trillion dollar men both have delusions of presidency - and McCain, ensconced as he is in a bell jar of his own superiority - has a very good chance of getting there. He is perfect for being a Hoover of this age - a man who will drive the engine over the cliff. And Lieberman, should be be elected, would make the perfect Vice-President for him.

Emphasis mine.

Phone hell

There's a company called Gethuman.com which is developing a new database to help us speak to an actual human being when we phone a company which which we want to do business.
Give them a medal, somebody, please.
The phone answer system which is now at the top of my own shitlist is Aeroplan's new "voice response" system -- which they seem to be just sooooo pleased to announce.
But it can barely understand Canadian English clearly spoken on a good line -- God knows what someone with an accent or on a scratchy cell line encounters when they try to use this disaster. And after a decade spent learning how to punch numbers into phones, I am not allowed to use any number bypass -- it's speak or nothing!
I just hate calling Aeroplan.
Next on my personal list are all the phone systems which tell me in smooth, duclet tones "Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line...." to which I always snarl "If my call was so goddamn important to you, you'd ANSWER IT!"
Gethuman has some advice for navigating automated phone systems to reach a person:

-Interrupt: Press 0, 0#, #0, 0* or *0 repeatedly, sometimes quickly. Some systems connect to humans after invalid entries. Others will disconnect.
-Talk: Say 'get human,' 'agent' or 'representative.' You can also try mumbling incoherently. The computer might connect you out of confusion.
-Hold: Say nothing and pretend you have an old rotary phone.
-Jump queue: Ask for account collections or sales, which are usually answered quickly. Then ask to be transferred to the department you need. Sometimes this works, but occasionally a call is put at end of queue.

Friends forever

Speaking of Worse-Than-Hitler title holders, before Ahmadinejad and Hussein, there was Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Read this great post at Liberal Oasis, called The Qaddafi Card which describes how theWorse-Than-Hitler leader has been rehabilitated. Bill Sher concludes:

. . . Qaddafi is no longer officially sponsoring terror in the eyes of Bush's State Department. Never mind that he was accused a few years ago of trying to assassinate the Saudi Crown Prince. Or that he still runs the sort of oppressive dictatorship Bush himself says fosters terrorism.
As long as Bush can trot him out to justify the war, or to make himself seem pragmatic and flexible while continually snubbing Iran, and as long as Qaddafi keeps pumping oil and providing intel, he’s now our boy.

Certificate of Hitlertude

The other day I made a comment on a blog somewhere to the effect that the president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has now been declared the world's newest "Worse-than-Hitler" leader (the previous title-holder, Saddam Hussein, having retired. But I digress).
Now I am pleased to announce that, at last and not a moment too soon, a grateful world can take a Professional Approach to the Worse-Than-Hitler competition.
Commenter Alison on Canadian Cynic refers us to Creekside which takes us to Uncyclopedia's Certificate of Hitlertude -- the definitive solution for all those occasions when we want to compare some political or social leader to Hitler.
The World Institute of Hiterology will also provide the subject's Hitler Quotient:

At 91-100%, the thing you said is indeed deemed to be Just What Hitler Would Have Said. You lose your argument. Try again. Examples: 'I think that invading Poland would be just tops!', 'Let's slaughter as many Jews as possible!'
At 71-90%, you have said something similar to what Hitler would have said, but not quite as bad. You will probably lose your argument, but you are entitled to do so in bad grace. Example: 'Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein careful series of governmental checks and balances!'
At 51-70%, you have said something that Hitler might have said, but so would most other people. Examples: 'Is it just me, or could the French do with a solid kicking?', 'My moustache really itches!'
At 26-50% is the smartass band; things that Hitler would have said, but which are so banal as to make the comparison worthless. Examples: 'Good morning,' 'I don't think much of Communism,' or 'Where did I leave the keys to my Mercedes?'
At 25% or less are remarks that the experts agree that Hitler almost certainly never would have made. Examples: 'Give peace a chance,' 'All you need is love,' or 'Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai elohaynu Adonai echad!'

You can also get a Certificate of Communism at this site, but as the institute itself notes, "since the collapse of the Soviet Union, only Cubans, Koreans and Americans actually still give a rat's arse about Communism..."

Iraq update

So how are things going in Iraq these days?
Well, let's check Juan Cole.
Oh, good, a new government at last!
Oh, bad, look who it is:

The ironies here are manifold. Iraq has had to wait over 5 months after the December 15 elections for a government finally to be formed. The US intervened with local Iraqi parties to overturn the democratic vote of the United Iraqi Alliance for Ibrahim Jaafari.
It got instead [Nuri al-Maliki] a long-time member of the Damascus politburo of the then-radical Islamic Dawa Party, which helped form Hizbullah in Lebanon.

Double bad, that's not all:

. . . under US viceroy Paul Bremer, the US tried to establish "red lines" stipulating that no "Islamist" should fill posts like minister of education or minister of culture. This, Bremer says, was to protect the rights of the "secular" Iraqi "majority." . . . now the Bush administration extolls the turn-over of Higher Education to a Sunni fundamentalist from the equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the turn-over of Culture and of Education (i.e. K-12) to Shiite fundamentalists. Iraq now has a coalition government dominated by parties with names such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Islamic Dawa Party, the Bloc of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, and the Iraqi Islamic Party (begun as a branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood). Bremer's "red lines" are long gone, pushed over the cliff by US policies along with the phantom "secular" majority. No wonder neighbors like Egypt are alarmed and fit to be tied.

Triple bad:

Nuri al-Maliki . . . has not presented ministers for any of the key three cabinet posts having to do with national security. Wouldn't you think that addressing national security might be the first priority? He has given us a minister of Tourism but not a Minister of Defense or a Minister of the Interior?

Finally, some good news:

. . . the incomplete character of the new government probably doesn't matter that much. The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement will only redouble its efforts to overthrow this new government. And, there is no evidence that the troops and security forces of the new government can effectively curb the guerrillas, even if they had new leadership.

So it doesn't matter that the new Iraq government is incompetent, because they're irrelevant anyway.
Great.
Cole also describes the current state of the Iraq civil wars -- two civil wars and two guerrilla wars:

There are now four distinct wars going on in Iraq simultaneously
1) The Sunni Arab guerrilla war to expel US troops from the Sunni heartland
2) The militant Shiite guerrilla war to expel the British from the south
3) The Sunni-Shiite civil war
4) The Kurdish war against Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk province, and the Arab and Turkmen guerrilla struggle against the encroaching Peshmerga (the Kurdish militia).
Moreover, all of these wars involve strongly entrenched militias, which both keep some order and also substantially disrupt it.

These wars are not going to be over for a long, long time.

Road to Iran

"We're off on the road to Tehran
Hang on till the end of the line . . .
We may run into villains but we're not afraid to roam
Because we read the story and we end up safe at home"
(with apologies to Hope and Crosby)

Dave at The Galloping Beaver writes an excellent, thought-provoking post about Harper's incompetence in foreign affairs.
And now I'm convinced Harper will gleefully, casually, and thoughtlessly commit us to fighting with the Americans in Iran, if George calls and asks.
Here's Dave's analysis of Harper's latest gaffe, his media reaction to National Post's now discredited "yellow armband" story:

Harper, with no substantive evidence of the report's accuracy made a combative comment about the regime of a country he knows little about and then compared them to Nazi Germany. And then he kept it up by providing a statement that was in lock-step with the position of George W. Bush.
It was the performance of a rank amateur. A man who was unable to hold back when given the opportunity to present his "tough guy" theatrics in the presence of a visiting Australian prime minister John Howard. This is not new. This is the real Stephen Harper.

Howard, on the other hand, peppered his response to the story with "if that is true" and "I hadn't previously heard of that" -- after several years of American disinformation campaigns, it appears that Howard now is at least a little suspicious of "wipe Israel off the map" psyops stories like this.
Harper, evidently, is not.
Dave then recalls how Harper embarassed Canada with his 2003 Wall Street Journal letter criticizing Chretien for not joining Bush's "coalition" in Iraq:

Harper's letter to the WSJ underscored a point. Harper was a shallow thinker, was possessed of an extremely short temper and held Parliament, of which he was a member, in contempt while openly admiring the administration of the US president. It demonstrated another point: a letter published in a US newspaper for a US audience, literally condemning the people of Canada was utterly petulant - a temper tantrum from a spoiled brat who didn't get his way.

Finally, Dave explains what both incidents illustrate about Harper:

So, Harper's recent display of short-thought, long-mouth over Iran, where he would undoubtedly have suffered at least a small amount of embarrassment for inappropriate language is nothing new. Harper is no statesman. He is a diplomatic dilettante . . . What Harper has proven is that he's no leader. Anyone gullible enough to swallow raw BS, whether from a Conrad Black journal or George Bush's falsified intelligence doesn't have what it takes to run a dog pound, much less a country. And the 'tough guy' act won't go as far as he thinks.

When Bush is trying to assemble his new "coalition of the gullible" to declare unprovoked, unjustified, illegal war against Iran, I have no doubt now that Stephen will be first in line. And Canadian soldiers will not "end up safe at home" as a result.

Who-Likes-Who

When we said in the 60s that the personal is political, we had it backwards. American reporters now think that everything is actually just personal, and it all comes down to who-likes-who.
Easier, really, to consider politics as just a soap opera, where who-likes-who is the only thing that is important -- saves all that effort and engagement and eye-strain reading that boring policy and research stuff.
The American media are commenting on Stephen Harper's inclination not to attend the annual Press Gallery dinner. NewsBusters commentator Matthew Sheffield says maybe its OK to blow off the dinner because Bush's experience proves that "making nice with journalists who despise you, your party, and your policies, doesn't do much good." And CBS's Public Eye Brian Montopoli says "If Harper . . . wants to skip serious engagement with the press – and that starts to be seen as a successful model here – that's another story entirely."
Hmmpff!
"Doesn't do much good"? "Starts to be seen as a successful model"?
Whaa?
For five years, we have witnessed a Bambi-eyed Make/ Announce/ Type lovefest between the cowardly White House Press corps and good-ole-boy brush-whacker George.
And as a result we've seen reporters give the Bush White House a free pass on everything from having a male prostitute lobbing softball questions in their very own press room, to assembling a fradulent case for a war which has killed and injured more than 20,000 Americans, to allowing a Religious Right takeover of social and healty policies, to bribery and corruption at all levels of the Pentagon, Congress and the White House staff, to illegal monitoring of millions of phone calls -- and they still talk about how Bush hasn't had good press coverage?
Gag me with a spoon!
American reporters like George Bush -- he's a very charming fellow, apparently; as Chris Matthews memorably put it, "everybody sort of likes the president except for the real whack-jobs on the left" -- and so they gave him a free pass over his policies.
Of course, in the end, likeability has nothing to do with either policy or competence. The American people always knew this. Now that more than seven out of ten Americans have realized what a lousy job Bush and his boys are actually doing, the reporters are thinking its mean to poor George to mention it.
So Stephen, stay away from the dinner if you want -- who cares? Not the Canadian public, certainly, and I hope not the Canadian media either. They can bill it as An Evening Without Stephen and sell lots of tickets.
Or maybe they can get Stephen Cobert to come instead.

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.