I read the news today, oh boy

Pressure mounts on RCMP chief -- as well it should. Mahar Arar's attorney says:

“. . . If [RCMP commissioner Zaccardelli] knew [that Mahar Arar was innocent], he remained silent and didn't do anything to protect an innocent man for over a year. But if he didn't know, which is what he's saying today, then this leads to a whole series of questions. Who's running the RCMP?”

Over at the Wheat Board, Measner's firing is a not-subtle message to every civil servant in Ottawa -- if you want to keep your job, you must back the Conservatives ideologues, especially when they are lying to the public. The Conservatives pretend to be the party of principles, but they can't defend their policies. Stahl can fire Measner in a fit of pique, but if he tries to abolish single-desk wheat marketing without a producer vote, he'll be tied up in court for the next five years.

Vancouver health clinic wonders how to pay bills without charging patients. Well, I'll just bet they're wondering now -- the tone of this piece implies we should all feel sorry for this medical clinic, but shouldn't the clinic owners have checked this out a little better before they bought all that state-of-the-art equipment?

Looking south, Swopa writes about Cheney's recent summons to Saudi Arabia and points out that the United States is between a rock and a hard place in Iraq --

So the Saudis (and the Sunnis they back in Iraq) say X is unacceptable, and the Shiites (backed by Iran) say that anything besides X is unacceptable. Good luck finding a solution to that problem, Dick.

And does anyone else agree that Bush Sr. seems to be cracking up?

"Strategizing" equal rights?

If Dion lets the Conservatives win any vote on same-sex marriage, no matter how harmless the motion appears to be, just because he is trying to pander to his caucus -- well, then, he might as well quit right now.
For the Liberals to throw gay rights under the first bus to pass them by would mean either that the Liberal caucus members are gutless when faced with any kind of organized lobby group, or that Dion himself is too gutless to lead the caucus in a controversial question. Either way, they're toast.
The Liberals are running the "free vote" idea up the flagpole as a "strategic" question. This is fine, I guess, as long as gay marriage itself doesn't lose in the process:

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion is poised to allow his MPs to vote freely on the question of reopening the same-sex marriage debate, musing that imposing party discipline would only hand the Conservative government more leverage on the issue . . . if the question was strictly on striking down the right of gays to marry [Dion]would in fact insist on voting the party line.
But Dion said for now it's important to think strategically.
"If we have a party vote, he'll say that I muzzled my MPs and that if I had let them vote freely the motion would have passed," Dion said of Harper.
"Maybe from a strategic point of view, it would be better to have a free vote."
Dion is doubtless also trying to avoid conflict on his first week on the job. A handful of Liberal MPs are in favour of revisiting the same-sex issue, and would have to be disciplined if they acted out of step with a whipped vote . . .
. . . there seems almost no chance the vote will pass in the Commons, with the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP both imposing party discipline, and the vast majority of Liberals against reopening the debate.
A number of Conservatives, including cabinet ministers John Baird, Jim Prentice, Loyola Hearn and David Emerson are also expected to vote against the motion, along with a number of other Tory MPs.

But how much "leverage" would Dion and the Liberals have if a majority in the Commons actually did vote to re-open the gay marriage issue -- just because everyone was too busy strategizing and pandering and triangulating and all that, and didn't get an accurate count?

Great line of the day

From Ken Levine:

I read where clown Emmet Kelly Jr. passed away, a sad event, and my heart goes out to his family and friends. But I just can’t help imaging the funeral procession – one hearse filled with two hundred mourners.

I read the news today, oh boy

Police identify woman, child in deadly plunge -- It is a tragedy when society cannot intervene in time to stop a person from committing suicide, but I sometimes wish we could start a group or a movement or a poster campaign or something called "Don't Take Your Children With You".
Tori Spelling To Pen Memoirs -- that will be a short book, won't it?
Bush: 'I'm not happy' about Bolton's resignation -- well, I am. The "quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy" and "serial abuser" of subordinates is toast. And some of the news stories aren't just mindlessly repeating the White House lie that the Democrats cost Poor John his job; they are actually reporting the truth, that his nomination was derailed by several key Senate Republicans. The Galloping Beaver has a good take on the whole thing, too.
3 members of missing family found alive -- so they drove off through mountains in the winter with a toddler and a baby, and no extra food or water or clothing, and apparently without telling anyone their route. But its hard to be too critical, I guess -- they were from San Fransisco, and may not have realized that winter weather kills unprepared people. Even here in Saskatchewan, it seems like somebody freezes to death every winter just because they took off driving somewhere without giving the weather a moment's thought.
Echidne of the snakes writes about the Fear of Insufficient Womanliness Test and the Fear of Excessive Womanliness Text applied to women in politics. "Just imagine if men like Tony Blair or George Bush would have to pass a similar Excessive Manliness Test where they'd have to prove that they won't suddenly go all red-faced and bulgy-eyed with anger, that they won't get carried away with penis-comparisons, that they won't fail to see social cues in the behavior of VIPs from other countries." Or, I suppose, start any illegal, unprovoked and unnecessary wars just to prove what Real Men they are...

Great line of the day

Over at Peace, Order and Good Government, Eh?, Kevin Brennan writes about Stephane Dion -- He Soft Rocks My World

Frankly, I've never understood why either Ignatieff or Rae were being presented--and viewed--as "pragmatic" choices for the Liberal leadership. Both were high-risk candidates . . .
[The Ignatieff campaign] was troubled and prone to serious gaffes . . . Candidates without real campaigning experience quite frequently make these kinds of mistakes. It's why they should never be put into leadership positions until they've survived a couple of campaigns and know how not to shoot themselves and their parties in the foot . . .
Rae has experience but was a failure as premier of Ontario. Most people I've asked about him consider Rae t be a decent enough guy but could never imagine voting for him again . . .
Given these choices, Dion seems like a safe enough bet to me. He's been in politics for over a decade. There's no evidence linking him to scandal. And most of all, he's a strongly federalist Quebecker. For the last forty years, the Liberals have won elections when led by a federalist Quebecker and lost elections when led by anyone else.

Exactly. Emphasis mine.

I read the news today, oh boy

Herewith, I'm starting what I hope will be a regular feature on my blog, some "short takes" on the news stories of the day -- as I troll through the daily news, I sometimes find I want to make just a couple of comments about individual news items and other people's blog posts -- in the tradition of Cursor and The Sideshow, though nowhere near as good.

Christmas Stories

Here's one from Whiskey Fire:

The first year after we moved up here to chilly upstate NY from sunny Florida we were pretty broke, so we put off buying a Christmas tree until the last possible minute. We picked one up from some Boy Scout sale in the parking lot of a Methodist Church, because it was cheap. Since it was so late in the year we didn't have a lot of choices; we ended up buying one that looked a lot like the Charlie Brown model, only it was about 20 feet tall and had these evil branches that stuck out like swords. The needles were dry and hard, and when we picked the damn thing up they showered down on us like tiny little razor blades. One needle got under my glasses and stabbed me in the eye, and I was bloodshot for the holidays.
Needless to say, getting the thing stood up in the living room was a pain in the ass and a half (thus a pain in three cheeks total). Now, let me warn any Whiskey Fire readers who do not already know this: no matter how much you love and respect your Soul Mate or your children, if there is any hitch in the process whatsoever, putting up a Christmas tree together will make you want to kill them. Christmas trees can cause deeper and darker and more savage Instant Hate than even Being Late and Lost and Arguing Over Directions.
So that first year, the Christmas tree buying was kind of a total disaster. We resolved to do much better the following year: we swore we'd get the tree earlier, we'd get a better Christmas tree stand, we'd hide the kitchen knives, and so on.
Of course, we screwed this up. We got to maybe December 21st. No tree. The financial picture had improved, but our semesters go right up close to the holidays, and we were buried in papers and so on. We were exhausted and wanted to rest: the 7-Year-Old was then just a 4-Month-Old, and we weren't getting a lot of sleep. On top of everything else, the whole Florida recount fiasco was in progress, and we were appalled at, uh, how absolutely freaking appalling that was.
So it was about 6PM. We were both grouchy and bleary-eyed, annoyed and irked. We climbed into our economy Saturn and went out to get a tree. NYMary said she'd seen or heard of a place selling good cheap trees out by our small regional airport, way out in the countryside. The night was dark and cloudy and wet; there was snow on the ground but it was a relatively warm day, which meant some melting, which meant a ton of fog. Driving the road out to the airport was like driving through some B horror movie scenery, only more sullen. And, of course, when we finally got there, the place we were driving to was missing: we just could not goddamn find it. The wind howled, the darkness crowded in, and then the Saturn started to make a strange noise under the hood, like a cat got its tail caught in the fan belt or something. It was really kind of a bleak moment.
I mean, it sucked ass. Emotionally, it was even worse than the previous year, when we'd wanted to kill each other. Now we just wanted to kill ourselves.
But this is a Christmas story, so it ends well. As we drove through the fog, suddenly we saw a hand-painted sign: "Christmas Trees," with an arrow leading up a long, curving driveway. I turned the car suddenly. There was this guy sitting outside his garage, with a really well-laid-out selection of trees in his yard, all nice and full-branched. He was friendly, talkative, very upstate, and twenty minutes later we had a perfect-sized tree bundled up on the car. And when we got home we discovered that the new Christmas tree stand we bought at Lowes was actually really easy to use. Even the horrible noise under the hood simply... went away.
It was a god-damned Christmas miracle
Maybe it's dumb, but I've never gone from feeling really, really bad to feeling wonderful and warm and happy quite so fast in all my life. Sometimes, life smiles. Sometimes, that Christmas tree farm shows up out of nowhere, and you get to remember that there are still good people alive in this world. Even if you can't always see them in the fog.

Dion's first victory will be same-sex marriage

Showing that terrific grasp of timing that will undoubtedly serve him so well during the upcoming election, too, Stephen Harper is apparently still going to hold the same-sex marriage vote for the week after the Liberal convention.
Did he actually schedule it this way on purpose?
Harper has given his new rival, Stephane Dion, a success in the House for his very first high-profile vote.
Talk about great optics -- Dion wll be able to show his leadership on a Liberal core issue, equal rights, during his very first vote in the House, and it will be a vote he will win.
Told ya Harper would regret bringing up same sex marriage again.

The WYSIWYG leader

When Liberals voted for Dion, they were voting against the kind of political shenigans described in this story -- the trickery, triangulation, manouvers, optics, spin and all those other words that basically are just political synonyms for "lying":

Of all the sweaty palmed shakedowns, the not-so-secret pacts and the unseemly convention floor shoving matches, a whimsical decision late Friday by a half dozen or so of Gerard Kennedy's ex-officio delegates to throw their support to last-place contender Martha Hall Findlay on the first ballot turned out to be pivotal.
They felt confident Kennedy could spare a few votes and hoped they might be able to boost the lone female contender ahead of seventh-place Joe Volpe.
But those few votes made all the difference. Kennedy wound up slipping into fourth, just two votes behind Dion. The psychological impact of those paltry two votes on the 5,000 delegates turned out to be huge.
Dion was suddenly the guy with momentum, however slight, and Kennedy's campaign effectively stalled.

So basically, guys, ya shoulda voted for the person you actually wanted to win. And you didn't.
Dion is not, of course, an idiot, and he can probably spin with the best of them. But he doesn't come across as a trickster.
With Dion, what you see is what you get.
He is sincere, open, earnest, likeable, and a person who inspires great loyalty -- Canadians all across the country will see this as they get to know Stephane Dion. And in the end, without even seeming to try, Dion will contrast pretty well with the hectoring tone and imperial court approach of Steven Harper.

Laugh --

We just watched this great performance by Otis Lee Crenshaw (aka Rich Hall. Enjoy.

Great line of the day

Rick Mercer:

At the end of the day though, watching Dion on stage, I couldn’t help but be amazed at his physical presence. The Liberals went into this convention with a host of choices. They could have gone with a battle-tested politician, a former athlete, a world famous academic or a food bank founder from the West; at the end of the day they choose the nerd.
That's pretty Canadian.

Emphasis mine.

Dion momentum

The "politics-in-the-raw" of the Liberal Leadership Convention is pretty fascinating. Particularly ineresting this time around are the blogs, like
this one from CBC and this one from Jason Cherniak.
I'm rooting for Stephane Dion -- what a Liberal leader he would make! Cherniak is supporting Dion too. Dion is winning the CTV poll (though hasn't been freeped by anyone yet.)
If Dion wins, the key to his victory will prove to be Kennedy's move to him after the second ballot -- it came at just the right time, I think.

UPDATE: He did it! Won with 2500 of the final 4500 votes!

Great lines of the day

About New York Times war-mongering columnist Tom Friedman --
Jane at Firedoglake:

My first clue that the Baker Group was completely full of shit came when I learned that they had spent an hour listening to what Tom Friedman had to say.

Glenn at Unclaimed Territory:

. . . Tom Friedman is a morally bankrupt narcissist whose only devotion is to the self-love of his own genius . . .
But tragically, there is nothing unique about Tom Friedman. What drives him is the same mentality that enabled the administration's invasion of Iraq and, so much worse, it is the mentality that is keeping us there and will keep us there for the indefinite future. We stay in Iraq in pursuit of goals we know are fantasies, because to do otherwise requires the geniuses and serious establishment analysts to accept responsibility for what they have done -- and that is, by far, the most feared and despised outcome.
The invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake. But the behavior of our political and media leaders after that, and now, reveal that they are not just bereft of judgment but entirely bereft of character.

Emphasis mine.

So what's new?

Gee, you miss a couple of days blogging and the world turns inside out.
Or maybe not -- did you know that the US failure in Iraq is not the Bush administration's fault at all?
Nope. Apparently the conventional wisdom among the Washington pundits now is to blame it on:
a) the craven Iraqi people
b) the cowardly American people
c) Both

Fired by fax

for telling the truth:

. . . [In]a recent speech to the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce . . . [Wheat Board president] Measner warned of the dire economic consequences for the board, the City of Winnipeg and the province of Manitoba if the government allows competition.