Open mouth

Change foot. Again.

What a show it was

Well, we finally did it -- we saw the Rolling Stones live and in person.
What a great, great show, from the greatest rock band in the world.
And you know, instead of acting like we should be happy they showed up, they acted like they were happy WE showed up.

Yay, Barney!

Great lines of the day

Pelosi spokesperson Jannifer Crider describes the problem with the GOP attempt to blame Nancy Pelosi:

Every mother in America is asking how Republicans could choose partisan politics over protecting kids, and the Republicans are asking who could have blown their cover-up.

The Culture of Victimization

Republicans are professional victims.
They are in charge of the whole US government. But whenever they do anything wrong -- which is frequently -- they blame:
1. The Librulls
2. The Democrats
3. The Librull Democrats
4. And Nancy Pelosi
Never have so many blamed so much on so few.

I don't understand it

Canadian Press reports that the Harper government is going to stomp on the outstanding legal cases of the lumber companies who reject the softwood lumber deal.
And here's what I need somebody to explain.
The story reports:

The court earlier struck down the U.S. lumber industry's claim Canadian imports posed a threat of injury and was set to rule on whether the roughly US$5.3 billion in duties collected since May 2002 should be returned.

Why is the Harper government so damned eager to abandon the court cases which may well declare that ALL of the US duties are illegal? Wouldn't our bargaining position be stronger if we won this case?

Say No To Torture!

Digby is asking everyone to post this today.

Ahead of his time

Jack Layton:

Sept. 1, 2006 - Layton suggests talks with Taliban
Sept 2 to Sept 30 - pile-on here, and here, and here, and here, and . . .
Oct. 1, 2006 - British troops in secret truce with the Taliban
Oct. 2, 2006 - Frist: Taliban Should Be in Afghan Gov't

Line of the day

Its not "Great" but it is the line America will remember:

...don't forget to measure.

Moral idiots

This week Republican supporters have endorsed torture, military tribunals, and the suspension of habeus corpus.
So why wouldn't they also ignore Republican pedophilia?
By the way, whatever happened to the Cunningham/Wilkes prostitues-in-the-limousine scandal? And who kept giving Jeff Gannon those White House press passes anyway?

Afghanistan update

The Asia Times has an interesting article about Afghanistan -- interesting as in the old Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times". It covers a lot of ground in describing what has gone wrong there and why and is worth reading in full. Here is its section about future problems:

What lies ahead is, therefore, becoming extremely difficult to predict. Even with 2,500 additional troops [there are about 20,000 US troops there already plus about 20,000 from NATO including 5,400 troops from Britain, 2,500 from Canada and 2,300 from the Netherlands] it is highly doubtful whether NATO can succeed in defeating the Taliban.
For one thing, the Taliban enjoy grassroots support within Afghanistan. There is no denying this ground reality.
Second, the Taliban are becoming synonymous with Afghan resistance. The mindless violations of the Afghan code of honor by the coalition forces during their search-and-destroy missions and the excessive use of force during military operations leading to loss of innocent lives have provoked widespread revulsion among Afghan people. . . .
Third, . . . the non-Pashtun groups in the eastern, northern and western regions also [are beginning] to organize themselves. . . .
Fourth, at a certain point it becomes unavoidable that regional powers will get drawn into the strife . . .

I hope Canada is planning a real exit strategy, even if they won't announce one. By "real" exit strategy, I don't mean just the idiotic "whenever we win" approach, but rather a strategic plan showing both what we as an individual nation can realistically achieve over there and the fail-safe points after which we would reevaluate our military purpose.
I think we're going to need it.

Canadian Bacon

Harper was so anxious to get the softwood lumber deal in place by this weekend that he was going to use $1 billion of Canadian taxpayers' money to pay off the Americans.
It was part of this money that was going to create the $450 million slush fund for the White House.
The Globe reports that the deal is going to be delayed because about 20 per cent of the businesses covered by the deal - 86 out of 400 - refused to sign over their duty refunds to the government, and refused to drop their lawsuits.
Apparently, the government had thought they could "finesse" the holdouts by using federal tax revenues to pay off the Americans. However, they couldn't unilaterally nullify the lawsuits:

The agreement required Canadian firms to sign over their right to duty refunds to the federal Export Development Corp. so some of the roughly $5-billion (U.S.) could be retained by the U.S. government and American producers. The EDC would, in turn, give exporters 80 per cent of the duties they had paid.
A number of companies have refused to sign over their rights but Ottawa was expected to use taxpayer money to ensure the Americans received the guaranteed $1-billion.
However, the U.S. stipulation that all lumber-related trade cases be withdrawn was impossible to finesse, said Mr. Gray. "The last I heard, it was 86 companies out of the 400 or so had not signed," he said. "I think that's their single most important issue. Our rights are our rights in American courts and I don't know how they can take that away from us."

Emphasis mine
Personally, I'm glad the White House isn't getting their hot little hands on my income taxes just yet. I know its a pittance in the great scheme of things, but I earned it and I do care about how it is spent . . .

Who would be proud of what happened today?

MSNBC describes it as the "bill on terror detainee trials" while AP calls it the "detainee interrogation bill" and CNN says it is a bill "to prosecute and interrogate terror suspects."
They've drunk the Koolaid -- they begin by assuming that everyone presently in Guantanamo is guilty, and they don't seem to realize what this bill actually does.
The blogs tell it like it is. They call it the pro-torture bill, the torture bill, the Bush/McCain pro-torture bill, the Republican Torture Ratification bill, and the USA Mengele Act, while the New York Times describes it as "a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy".
Here is the New York Times' summary of what Bush and the Republicans in Congress have done:

.. . held [accused terrorists] in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them . . .[then wrote a law which gives to the President] the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

So I got thinking about some of the other presidents we have known. What would THEY think about Bush's torture bill and the frightened, pell-mell rush of the Republicans in Congress to endorse Krystalnacht.

Would these two be proud of what Bush and the Republican Congress did today?


I don't think so.
And I'm sure he wouldn't be:


And not him:


Nor even him:


Definitely not him:


And not even him:

who once said "No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience."

Why Conservatives Can't Govern

Via Suburban Guerilla, we find political scientist Alan Wolfe's summary of "Why Conservatives Can't Govern". Here's the gist of it:

Contemporary conservatism is first and foremost about shrinking the size and reach of the federal government. This mission, let us be clear, is an ideological one. It does not emerge out of an attempt to solve real-world problems, such as managing increasing deficits or finding revenue to pay for entitlements built into the structure of federal legislation.
. . . like all politicians, conservatives, once in office, find themselves under constant pressure from constituents to use government to improve their lives. This puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing government agencies whose missions--indeed, whose very existence--they believe to be illegitimate. Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.
. . . As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster. And the disasters will continue, year after year, as long as conservatives, whose political tactics are frequently as brilliant as their policy-making is inept, find ways to perpetuate their power.

I'm very much afraid that Canadians will find that this applies just as well to Harper's Conservatives as it does to Bush's Republicans.

Great line of the day

From Tristero at Hullabaloo:

David Ignatius asks, in a genuinely stupid column, "How do we prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state? "
Step One: Bush and his entire cabinet leave office.
Step Two: Wait for Step One.
Until then, it is inevitable that Iraq will stay firmly on the path towards becoming a failed state . . . . And, no, it's not that Bush et al were incompetent that [the war in Iraq] failed. That's backward. The Bush administration demonstrated its total incompetence because it took a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq seriously and thought it could succeed.