Yes, but can he parallel park?

I thought they just played poker:

. . . a woman in Hohhot, capital of north China's Inner Mongolia region, crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson. . . There were no injuries and both vehicles were only slightly damaged . . . The woman, identified only be her surname, Li, said her dog "was fond of crouching on the steering wheel and often watched her drive," the news agency report.
"She thought she would let the dog 'have a try' while she operated the accelerator and brake," the report said. "They did not make it far before crashing into an oncoming car."

Actually, if you Google "dog driving" images, you get more than 3,000 pictures...

Sometimes I feel this way too

But I usually manage to babble on about something...

"You've obviously mistaken me for someone who cares"

This is a great story -- Oops: Impostor scams Louisiana officials.
I saw the Yes men documentary on TV recently and it was terrific -- they are completely plausible, totally corporate. And they only bullshit the bullshitters:

A man who pulled a hoax on Louisiana officials and 1,000 contractors by presenting himself as a federal housing official said Monday he intended to focus attention on a lack of affordable housing. "We basically go around impersonating bad institutes or institutes doing very bad things," said the man, who identified himself as Andy Bichlbaum, a 42-year-old former college teacher of video and media arts who lives in New York and Paris. "That would be HUD. At this moment, they're doing some really bad things."
Masquerading as Rene Oswin, an official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Bichlbaum followed Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to the lectern Monday morning at the Pontchartrain Center in Kenner.
In a speech to attendees of the Gulf Coast Reconstruction and Hurricane Preparedness Summit, he laid out grandiose plans for HUD to reverse course.
. . . In his speech, Bichlbaum said the department's mission was to ensure affordable housing is available for those who need it. "This year, in New Orleans, I'm ashamed to say we have failed," he said. To change that, HUD would reverse its plans to demolish 5,000 units "of perfectly good public housing," with housing in the city in tight supply, he said. Former occupants have been "begging to move back in," he said. "We're going to help them to do that." . . . Bichlbaum said The Yes Men plan to release a movie about their exploits next year, but that commercial gain is not their goal. "The real reason we do it is what we're doing right now," he told a reporter. "You're paying attention to this issue of affordable housing and the absurd policies of HUD."

Now, do you think there is any chance that some local or national reporter will follow up on this story? Well, maybe -- now that the JonBenet Killer is no longer in the news...

Great line of the day

Avedon Carol reports on the latest supidities in fear and loathing. As Carol puts it:

This is the kind of crap right-wing bed-wetters are willing to give up their rights for. Well, sorry, but I'm not.

Say it ain't so

Surely not. Not even in Alberta.
I haven't been following the leadership race in Alberta, but please tell me that this homophobic, ignorant,
divisive, mean-spirited pulicity hound blowhard named Ted Morton doesn't actually have any chance to follow Ralphie as Conservative leader.

Great line of the day

Dave asks exactly what values are we promoting in Afghanistan?

Harper needs to explain how perpetuating and promoting a corrupt, inept government which sits by and allows the Taliban to expand and profit from opium poppy production is anything close to a Canadian value.

Yeah, I was starting to wonder about that myself.

Fantasy

Juan Cole has a few choice words for the republican congressional report on Iran.
The words are: "riddled with errors", "neoconservative propaganda", "wild fantasies", and "vastly exaggerates".
Ouch.
Cole also notes that the report was written by John Bolton's former assistant:

So this report is the long arm of Bolton popping up in Congress . . . John Bolton is just an ill-tempered lawyer who has no special expertise in nuclear issues or in Iran, and aside from an ability to scare the bejesus out of young gophers who bring him coffee and to thunderously denounce on cue any world leader on whom he is sicced, he has no particular qualifications for his job. Nor do the Republican congressmen know anything special about Iran's nuclear energy program. They certainly know much less than the CIA agents who work on it full time, some of whom know Persian and have actually done, like, you know . . . intelligence work. We are beset by instant experts on contemporary Iran, like the medievalist Bernard Lewis, who wrongly predicted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would attack Israel on August 22, based on Lewis's weird interpretation of his alleged millenarian beliefs . . . Pete Hoekstra, who is the chair of this committee, has a long history of saying things that are, well, disconnected to reality. Like when he made a big deal about some old shells with mustard gas found in Iraq left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, and claimed that these were the fabled and long-sought Iraqi WMD over which 2600 of our service people are six feet under and another 8000 in wheelchairs. Nope. Bolton at one point was exercised about an imaginary Cuban biological weapons program, which even his own staffers wouldn't support him on, and at one point he was alleging that Iranian mullahs were sneaking into Havana to help with it. This congressional report is full of the same sort of wild fantasies.

Ouch.
But I particularly liked his description of Bolton as an ill-tempered lawyer...

Who is listening to these people?

Glenn Reynolds, April 2003:

. . . maybe we shouldn't rub in just how wrong, and morally corrupt the antiwar case was. Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a "quagmire" were wrong . . . And I suppose we shouldn't stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It's probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again. Nah.

Mark Steyn, May 2003:

. . . It takes two to quagmire. In Vietnam, America had an enemy that enjoyed significant popular support and effective supply lines. Neither is true in Iraq. Isolated atrocities will continue to happen in the days ahead, as dwindling numbers of the more depraved Ba'athists confront the totality of their irrelevance. But these are the death throes: the regime was decapitated two weeks ago, and what we've witnessed is the last random thrashing of the snake's body . . .

Glenn Greenwald, today:

. . . The same people who were wrong about everything -- literally -- and who viciously mocked those who were right, now want to use the same mindset and assumptions to guide us into our next war . . . Democrats should make this election about this question because it is, in large part, what the election is about -- whether the country wants the same people who dragged us into Iraq to do the same in Iran, Syria and beyond.

Priceless!

This is hilarious.
A Fox News interviewer cuts off Ann Coulter's ridiculous and ignorant blathering. And then, while she bleats and flaps and pleads for Sean Hannity to interrupt, both the interviewer and the other guest, a Democratic party strategist, calmly proceed to discuss Afghanistan and Bin Laden and terrorism and security. And they both completely ignore Coulter for the rest of the segment.
Priceless.

Green party convention

The Green Party convention is on this weekend in Ottawa, being broadcast on CPAC. Look close and you'll see a tall young man with longish blond hair, likely wearing a hoodie -- that's our boy!
I was watching the speeches tonight and I did catch a glimpse of him in the audience.

Base Ball

Noted in passing that a group of former ball players are trying to start up a vintage base ball league. Here are some of the "vintage" rules:

six balls for a walk, and a foul ball won't count as a strike — unless it's caught, in which case the batter will be out. A foul ball caught on a bounce counts for an out, and a hit batter is only a ball, with no base awarded.
Gloves will be tiny, bat handles will be thick and the ball — that's right, one ball will be used per game unless it falls apart or is lost — will be dead. There aren't any pitcher's mounds, and there's no such thing as a balk on pickoff attempts . . . umpires must be addressed as "sir." Fans — called "cranks" — will be encouraged to wear period costumes . . . .
The ball will have seams in the lemon-peel style, which was replaced by the current seam pattern designed by Albert Spalding, adopted by the major leagues in 1877. Pitching will be overhand, and games will average about 2 hours, 15 minutes.
Before each plate appearance, a batter will declare his "desired strike zone preference" — belt to knee or belt to armpits. If the umpire misses a call because his view is blocked, a team captain can ask for a "gentleman's ruling," in which players involved in the play are to truthfully say what occurred. If a dispute remains, the umpire may ask the cranks for their opinion.

Sounds like fun, but I just hope you can still yell from the stands.

Great line of the day

Well, August 22 came and went and nothing happened (or, at least, nothing blew up.)
The Poor Man alerts us to the next day of infamy:

I believe the calandar is free of apocolypses for the next six weeks, right until the Chinese Confucio-Nazis begin their long-planned Columbus Day weekend invasion of Missouri.

Requiem?

We have spent the last two nights watching Spike Lee's `Requiem for New Orleans'. It is more than just the tale of slow recovery from a natural disaster. There is deep anger and resignation and betrayal, but also the people Lee interviewed were spirited and independent and committed to their city, and they were shaking their fists at engineers and insurance companies and FEMA and government at all levels.

Winning hearts and minds

Juan Cole reports on the results of a recent opinion poll in Egypt:

a poll of the Egyptian public. . . found that Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, is the most popular politician in Egypt. In second place comes Khalid Mashal, the radical Hamas leader who operates from Damascus and has been implicated in terror attacks inside Israel. In third place? Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Funniest. Comments. Ever

The Poorman post is funny enough:

Title:God Damn I Hate Working For Living
Text: If anyone has figured out a way around this particular problem, please email me. I promise I won’t tell.

There's something about The Poorman that inspires the funniest comments and this post has some great ones -- like these:

~I realize you were young and inexperienced at the time, but in hindsight you should have chosen your parents more wisely.
~Be chronically ill . . . and beg for donations, which grow fewer and fewer as time goes on. I don’t really recommend this one.
~If you send me 5 dollars, I’ll send YOU the secret to making money… the EASY WAY!!!!!
~Work - the curse of the drinking class.
~Work is a fucking scam. What kind of world is this that some people spend 60 hours a week pulling fries out of hot grease? What does a $300,000 car say to the cosmos? “Please, fucking wipe us out with a giant asteroid already”, is what.
~Don’t you get regular payoffs from kos in exchange for not mentining the scandal with his kittens? The rest of us do.
~Ooh, I know! Nobody ever went broke soliciting contracts from Republicans for pie-in-the-sky, never-gonna-reach-even-the-r&d-phase defense technology.
~I heard that if your roomate commits suicide, the government will give you money every year for the rest of your life.
~There is this guy in Nigeria who is looking for a business partner. I’ll forward you his e-mail.
~Get a dog or cat that can sing opera. It’s always worked for me.
~Hostages can be real money makers.

And finally, this one:

~Apparently, if you drink a lot, do a lot of coke, and crash your dad’s businesses into the ground, you can become President.