"Common securities regulator"?

Buried at the end of this story on ATM fees is this statement about what Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is going to be talking about this week at the Group of Seven talks in Washington:

Flaherty said he will also raise the issue of mutual recognition and free trade in securities, as well as 'getting our house in order nationally' in Canada by moving towards a common securities regulator.

Does anyone know what this means? Is it more Fortess America/Customs Union stuff perhaps?

Iraq as Performance Art

Are they serious? It makes no sense as a war anymore, but has become a bizarre attempt at Performance Art -- with real blood as the medium.
RangerAgainstWar alerts us to the newest American tactic, phoney war:

U.S. tax dollars are building Iraqi businesses and boosting their economy, but instead of reaping any publicity benefits from the endeavors, U.S. officials stress that the effort will only work if the U.S. contribution is totally "invisible," this "given the hostility toward the U.S." (These Raids in Iraq Look Real, But They Aren't.) So part of what the U.S. forces are tasked with in this phony war on terror is staging phony raids in order to help those Iraqis ostensibly on our side to be made to be seen as though they are really phony U.S. enemies. Got it?
This is a make-work program from the Americans, who are hoping it will also "keep otherwise idle men from joining the insurgency." As well, the Iraqi component of this project stressed the importance of keeping the U.S. role secret.

Robert Fisk in the Independent describes the newest US technique for stabilizing Baghdad -- ghettos:

The initial emphasis of the new American plan will be placed on securing Baghdad market places and predominantly Shia Muslim areas. Arrests of men of military age will be substantial . . . the new project will involve joint American and Iraqi "support bases" in nine of the 30 districts to be "gated" off. From these bases - in fortified buildings - US-Iraqi forces will supposedly clear militias from civilian streets which will then be walled off and the occupants issued with ID cards. Only the occupants will be allowed into these "gated communities" and there will be continuous patrolling by US-Iraqi forces. There are likely to be pass systems, "visitor" registration and restrictions on movement outside the "gated communities". Civilians may find themselves inside a "controlled population" prison . . .
. . . another former senior US officer has produced his own pessimistic conclusions about the "gated" neighbourhood project.
"Once the additional troops are in place the insurrectionists will cut the lines of communication from Kuwait to the greatest extent they are able," he told The Independent. "They will do the same inside Baghdad, forcing more use of helicopters. The helicopters will be vulnerable coming into the patrol bases, and the enemy will destroy as many as they can. The second part of their plan will be to attempt to destroy one of the patrol bases. They will begin that process by utilising their people inside the 'gated communities' to help them enter. They will choose bases where the Iraqi troops either will not fight or will actually support them.
"The American reaction will be to use massive firepower, which will destroy the neighbourhood that is being 'protected'."
The ex-officer's fears for American helicopter crews were re-emphasised yesterday when a military Apache was shot down over central Baghdad . . .

Here's a family walking past where a carbomb killed six people. This is the kind of thing children in Iraq see every day. No wonder they're leaving if they can:

We have "the world's fastest growing refugee crisis" in the countries surrounding Iraq as 2.2 million Iraqis flee. The website Refugees International reports:

“Iraqis who are unable to flee the country are now in a queue, waiting their turn to die,” is how one Iraqi journalist summarizes conditions in Iraq today. While the US debates whether a civil war is raging in Iraq, thousands of Iraqis face the possibility of death every day all over the country.

A short story in this week's New Yorker contains this little-known fact about suicide bombers:

“Where there are suicide bombings. Maybe you don’t want to hear this.”
“I don’t know.”
“In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get fixed in the body of anyone who’s in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a café. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into her skin. They call this organic shrapnel.”
He tweezered another splinter of glass out of Keith’s face.
“This is something I don’t think you have,” he said.

Meanwhile, Bush keeps giving the same speech over and over, even CNN can't stand it anymore and cuts away . . .
Yeats had it right, after all:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .

Those were the days?

So, Howard, when exactly was that golden age of yesteryear, those good ole days when it was perfectly OK for a talk-show host to call black female athletes "nappy-headed hos"?
Ha, ha, ha. Can't you girls take a joke?
Nope. Not any more.
Newsweek editor Howard Fineman expressed his own longing for those happy, innocent days of yore when he talked to Don Imus about what an intolerant world we live in today:

FINEMAN: You know, the form of humor that you do here is risky, and sometimes it runs off the rails . . . it's a different time, Imus. You know, it's different than it was even a few years ago, politically. I mean, we may, you know -- and the environment, politically, has changed. And some of the stuff that you used to do, you probably can't do anymore.
IMUS: No, you can't. I mean --
FINEMAN: You just can't. Because the times have changed . . . you know, things have changed. And the kind of -- some of the kind of humor that you used to do you can't do anymore. And that's just the way it is.

Over at First Draft, Athenae calls bullshit:

People like this really do feel put-upon that they can't give in to their basest instincts. They really feel like they've been somehow reduced because they're not allowed to reduce others. What Fineman is basically saying is that left to his own devices, he'd be happy to mock black women for being black and being women. Left to his own devices, he'd be happy to use snotty code language to put other human beings in their places. Left to his own devices, he'd be a total fucking ignorant jackoff. And it's outside pressure that is keeping him from being so . . . If only we lived back in the good old days. Had Fineman been around back then, no doubt, he'd be much more comfortable, freed of the burden to control himself so strictly.
Free to be the asshole he apparently wants to be.

I've been hearing this kind of "he's too old to change" crap for the last 40 years, and I'm tired of it.
There is not a man alive today who has any excuse whatsoever.
I used to go along with it in the 70s, and even into the 80s.
But guys -- and I'm speaking to guys like Fineman and Imus -- you've had 40 years to get with the program.
Men who were in kindergarden during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and in grade school when The Feminine Mystique was published are now getting Seniors Discounts.
So they've had ample time stop thinking about people as "nappy-headed hos".

UPDATE: Digby talks about why Imus still gets celebrity journalist guests -- because he helps sell their books:

. . . When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.
Don Imus has been behaving badly and apologizing for it for many, many years. I expect he will continue to do so once he's finished with his two week vacation. And all of these writers will once again make pilgrimages to his show and pledge fealty to him in order to sell books. Because, unlike those great basketball players he maligned so casually --- they really are whores.

Why Vimy Ridge matters

Wondering what Vimy Ridge was all about? Here is Dave's explanation at Galloping Beaver: How Hill 145 and Vimy changed everything. I've been hearing about Vimy Ridge all my life, but this is the first time I understood what was so important about it for Canada. Thanks, Dave.

Great rant of the day

Sometimes they're just too great for one line. I kept trying to find a way to make this excerpt shorter, but I just couldn't do it. So here is Hunter at DailyKos with one of the best rants ever - Tom DeLay is Just Like Six Million Jews:

It's true. Indicting Tom DeLay for money laundering is just like the Holocaust. You can just ask him:

I am so outraged by this whole criminalization of politics. It’s not good enough to defeat somebody politically. It’s not even good enough to vilify somebody publicly. They have to carpet bomb you with lies and made up scandals and false charges and indicting you on laws that don’t exist. … It’s the same thing as I say in my book, that the Nazis used. When you use the big lie in order to gain and maintain power, it is immoral and it is outrageous…
It’s the same process. It’s the same criminalization of politics. it’s the same oppression of people. It’s the same destroy people in order to gain power. It may be six million Jews. it may be indicting somebody on laws that don’t exist. But, it’s the same philosophy and it’s the same world view.

Ah, Tom DeLay, the Paris Hilton of political money laundering. In earlier times and among more intelligent folks, it might have been possible to explain that if you don't want the "criminalization of politics" to reach your doorstep, probably the most important thing you could do would be to, you know, not commit crimes for the sake of politics. DeLay, however, is dumber than a box of rocks -- and I'm talking ordinary gravel, here, not nice rocks -- and quite possibly the single most powerfully narcissistic Republican politician we have had in some time, which is truly saying something. Tom DeLay's career has been checkered with things that everyone else thinks is unethical or illegal, but which he's been willing to do anyway, and with gusto: he will go to his grave believing in the theory of the Unitary Exterminator -- that if he does something, it is by definition simply not a crime.
On the other hand, one of the better things about our recent crop of teeth-gnashingly conservative politicians is a direct result of this omnipresent narcissism: when they finally implode, they do it in style. Tom DeLay compares his plight to that of the Holocaust, thereby Godwining himself smartly over in the corner where nobody's even been watching. Hastert and the entire Republican Majority vanished not just because of their complete inaction on the steadily disintegrating Iraq War, but when they weren't willing to take even trivial steps to stop one of their own from attempted child buggery. Libby goes and gets himself indicted and then convicted simply because the White House hates critics with such a McCarthyite passion that they can't not attempt to punish them. Gonzales has the entire Justice Department melting around his ears, and appears to be in no position to do a damn thing about it. Conservative shock pundits like Savage or O'Reilly or Little Annie Coulter have taken to immolating themselves for any tiny shreds of self-absorbed publicity. Gingrich -- oh, sweet Heaven, Newt Gingrich himself! -- went supernova long ago, but now is back as conservative white dwarf star: insignificant in the national landscape, but still burning bright as legend in his own mind. And he even packed a sack lunch of old scandals for us to all share, as if in recognition that you can't be a nationally known conservative these days without a display of truly spectacular immorality and sordid personal baggage.
It's like everyone all of a sudden wants to be their own Nixon, or their own McCarthy -- to push the envelope until they finally find the exact moment when it all dissolves around them, and then look around with a dazed expression and pretend to be astonished at the inexplicable, monstrous cruelty of the world actually calling in their chips. Is this a new game show? A bit of performance art, and we're not in on it? A test of our national intelligence, to see just how far they can push things before finally, at long last, even the "pundits" who are buying them drinks finally say "you know what? No more. This all has finally all reached the point of being Quite Stupid Enough, thank you?"
I could mention here the extraordinary irony of Tom DeLay accusing folks of partisan-based indictments at the same time as the Bush administration's Department of Justice is being probed to determine whether was being restaffed with the explicit intent of procuring more partisan-based indictments, and I was certainly going to say something pithy here about how wildly inappropriate it was to compare your indictment for money laundering to genocide, but you know what? I don't have it in me. Knock yourself out, Tom. We've got all of conservativetown flinging their own poop, at the moment -- if that's what it takes to get you noticed in your fight for attention, then go for it. Show 'em what passes for wisdom in that conservative brain of yours: everyone who opposes you is like Hitler.

Emphasis mine.

New links

Look to the right and check out the new links.
When I read of this today, via Matthew Good's blog, I decided to link to this site - Ceasefire.ca.
Also, check out Bill Scher's new blog, Common Sense, plus some other anti-war and progressive sites: compilation sites Saskatchewan Progressive Bloggers and The Next Agenda; individual sites Skippy the bush kangaroo, RangerAgainstWar, and Wise Law Blog.
And just for fun, to keep up with TV and movie news, try Forget it Jake, its Chinatown (formerly the Round-Headed Boy), Lance Mannion and Sunset Gun.

John Williams conducts Handel's Messiah

Say what you will about Christianity -- and I could certainly agree with a lot of what you say -- it is a religion which has produced some beautiful music. Here is one of my favorites, which is usually a Christmas performance rather than an Easter one, for some reason.

Great line of the day

On this Easter Sunday, Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake writes a powerful piece about the US justice department and ex-employee Monica Goodling's perception that in remaking the department in Bush's image she was somehow doing God's work. Of State…And Church:

. . . Someone forgot to tell Goodling and her fellow Bushies that The Bible is not a text that was ever meant to be cherry-picked as a justification for being able to screw over whomever you please, or as an excuse to be able to do whatever you want, grasping for promotions and chits from the powerful along the way.
Perhaps a review of The Ten Commandments would have helped — the first commandment reads: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." That includes Presidents who say they talk to God, as well as their political power broker minions, too, and not just golden calves — and working hard to curry favor with any of the above is an act that worships power and what you can get from it. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who thinks securing earthly power, consolidating one's position and amassing a number of favors owed to you that you can call in when you need them is the point of existence is worshiping at the altar of Gordon Gekko.
Decency and ethics always has a place in public service. But simply slapping a "Christian" label on yourself is not an excuse for grasping, greedy behavior because you have some back-of-your-mind understanding that you can ask forgiveness for your piss poor behavior later. That's a post hoc ergo propter hoc justification, and it doesn't fly. God has not rewarded you with the promotion — you earned it all on your own by stabbing a whole lot of people in the back and, thereby, appealing to the crowd of malignant political minions who were looking for just such a self-serving, grasping person to stab a few more people in the back. Congratulations, Monica, you've lived up to the very low standard of Karl Rove.

Emphasis mine.

Baghdad, Indiana

Some idiot Republican congressman said that shopping in Baghdad was just like going to a market in Indiana. So the LA Times runs this description of an Indiana family shopping expedition by Brooklyn writer John Kenney:

My wife came into the living room wearing a Kevlar vest, helmet and night-vision goggles.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Have you completely forgotten, silly head? We're going to the market."
I placed my hand at my head. I'd been so caught up in stitching a minor wound I'd received earlier in the day after going to an outdoor fruit stand that I had completely forgotten.
"I'm a dope, aren't I?" I said, chuckling, slowly shaking my head back and forth. She chuckled too, also shaking her head. We both chuckled. Then I winced from where a stitch popped.
Carol helped the boys get ready, putting on their sneakers and body armor. I phoned the Indiana National Guard so that they could radio the 434th Special Air Wing at Grissom Air Force Base, which in turn scrambled two F-14 Tomcats. Then we hopped in the wagon.
Carol and I moved to Muncie from Detroit. Frankly, we were tired of the noise, the dirt and the crime. Here, you feel so safe, as long as you move very quickly through the market, keep your head down and have appropriate air cover.
Carol handed each of the boys — 8 and 5, and a handful, let me tell you — a juice box, a Xanax and personalized Navy SEAL-issue GPS systems.
"Dad?" said Kevin, our 8-year-old, from the back seat.
"Yes, Kev," I said.
"Can we go to that cotton candy stand again?"
The F-14s flew by low. Each of us activated our earpieces and hand-held mini walkie-talkies, agreed on a frequency, and I slowed the car to 15 mph as Carol and the boys opened the doors and rolled out, taking cover under shrubbery near the Bibb lettuce stand (the boys love salad!).
So far, so good.
I hit the gas and spun the car and parked in a ditch that had once been a Tasty Donut before a tactical nuclear weapon had decimated it. Great parking space, though.
I saw my neighbor, Larry, under his car, from the looks of it a spanking-new Bradley fighting vehicle. "Snipers today," Larry said with a smile.
"Nice ride, Larry," I said as I dove under the car, a sniper's bullet exploding inches away from my foot. "Looks solid."
"The hull is constructed of welded aluminum and spaced laminate armor," he said, burying his head in the dirt as another round came in. "The Israelis use them. I had an Explorer, but it was blown to bits last time I went out for garbage bags."
"Roomy?"
"Ton of room. Carries three crew, commander, gunner and driver, plus six fully equipped infantrymen. Mileage is awful, but with all the space in the back, it's great for the market."
I borrowed his high-power binoculars to check on the family's progress.
Kevin and his little brother had successfully bought lettuce, fruit and homemade jams before a particularly well-placed rocket-propelled grenade destroyed the stand (the owner managed to avoid the hit and began rebuilding immediately, as weekends are, obviously, his busiest time).
Carol, I noticed, had found cover behind the wall of a largely destroyed warehouse. A sniper had a bead on the glint from her eyeglasses, which the afternoon sunshine had caught (Indiana is known for its beautiful summers).
Larry asked me to cover him, and he rolled out from under the BFV and hopped in. I activated heavy smoke bombs, and his car tore out of the field. I made it back to my car as Larry's choppers came in low over the market, taking heavy fire and destroying the sniper's den (about time, thank you very much) as well as a Toys R Us that was closed for renovation.
I could see the smoke in the rear-view mirror when Carol dove onto the hood, managing to hold onto the bundles (that woman never ceases to amaze me). I hit the brakes and she got in quickly.
"You put on face paint," I said, giving her a quick kiss.
"You wouldn't believe how crowded it was," she said, panting. "I saw Margie Hynes. Boy, has she put on weight."
A CBU-52B cluster bomb exploded to our left, and I hit the gas. We could see the boys ahead, waving flares in the dense smoke. I didn't stop the car completely. Kevin threw Chip in first, then jumped in himself.
Both immediately vomited from the smoke.
"You kids have fun?" Carol asked.
"Yeah!" said Chip.
"He was holding a loaf of bread and it got blown out of his hand!"
"It was so awesome, Mum."
We all laughed. Really hard. That's how shopping is in Indiana in the summer. It's just fun. It's fun and safe and hopeful and full of warm and welcoming Indianans and insurgents and snipers and bombs.
"Oh darn," Carol said.
"What is it, honey?"
"We forgot milk."

You have to see it to believe it

My favorite, from the Cavalcade of Bad Nativities at the Going Jesus website.

Great line of the day

Echidne gives us girls some Nifty Things To Do With Plastic Milk Jugs -- here's a particularly good one:

Save six plastic milk jugs and cut off the tops so that you end up with what looks like plastic tumblers. These are excellent wedding gifts. You can personalize them by painting pictures of foods on the sides. I always send these to those brides and grooms who only give me a very pricey wedding-gift list to shop from. That way they know I cared enough to give them something home-made and different. Or so I think, as I usually don't hear from them again.

Emphasis mine.
And for bridezilla stories, check out these greedy couples.

Guess who's coming to Regina?

Lorne Calvert announced today that Al Gore is coming to Regina. On the radio this morning, I heard talk show host John Gormley and some of his listeners apparently expressing some doubt about whether the tickets would sell.
Of course they will -- he sold out at the University of Toronto in minutes.
And don't I wish that I could go, too.
I also heard a lot of claptrap on the radio about whether people "believe" in global warming or not.
It's not a religion, people. It's not a political party.
It's just the truth, though an inconvenient one.
I don't get why some right-wingers insist on trying to turn global warming into a partisan issue. Reading the comments over at Small Dead Animals and listening to the phone calls on Gormley, some people act like global warming is just another political belief --like, say, marketing boards and single-payer health care and proportional representation -- rather than a scientific reality. Just because a Democrat, Al Gore, is trying to educate people about global warming, they seem to think only "lefties" could "believe" in global warming just like only "lefties" "believe" in taxing corporate profits, while the right-thinking right wing has to scorn and deride global warming just like it scorns and derides business tax increases.
Discuss the science, if you will -- as scientists have been doing for the last decade, finally concluding that the evidence is overwhelming and unmistakable -- but global warming is simply not a "left-right" issue. More a "life-death" issue, really
And don't get me started on the manufactured "controversy" about how much energy Al Gore uses personally.
How much do you use -- yes, you there with the SUV and the boat and the cabin? Or how about you over there, hiding behind the washer-dryer set you got after your vacation in Mexico?
Al Gore lives in a large house and wears a tuxedo and charges a speaking fee, so his political opponents seem to think they can accuse him of being some sort of hypocrite -- I guess he's supposed to be holier than thou and travel by horse and buggy (or at least fly coach) and wear some ratty old tweed jacket and live in a crummy house, just to conform to some archaic stereotype of what a "leftie" is -- how dare a "leftie" be wealthy?
Gore does set an example by paying more than $5,000 a year for energy offsets, a poorly-understood concept which is basically what Kyoto also promotes on a much larger scale, I think, with the goal of reducing overall world energy usage. And it's the whole world that Gore cares about -- he doesn't seem to be the least bit interested in wasting his personal energies on taking cheap shots at his political opponents.

Trust them? I don't think so

ABC News says we should trust their hysterical story about Iran enriching uranium just because they say so. But it turns out this story was authored by the same ABC reporters, Brian Ross and Chris Isham, who claimed in October 2001 that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the anthrax attacks. In fact, Ross was also one of the primary promoters of Cheney's much-beloved "Mohammed Atta and the Iraqi spy in Prague" myth.
Glenn Greenwald tracked it down. The senior VP of ABC News said the unsourced assertion that Iran is enriching uranium at a furious pace was a credible story because the reporters were "very reliable":

In response to my central point -- that a story of this magnitude and potential impact should not be passed on without at least some information enabling an assessment of the credibility of the sources (or, at the very least, should include an explanation as to why such information was being concealed) -- Schneider's response was that there is a way for the reader to assess the credibility of the story. Namely, because ABC News and the reporters in question have "proven over a long period of time" that they are "very reliable" ...

Yeah. Reliably wrong!

Kinky

Remember this?
Glenn Greenwald calls neocon foreign policy the Abu Grahib Theory of Foreign Affairs. And yes, that is a useful construct in analyzing whether a foreign policy initiative actually makes sense or is just indulging a fantasy of power or submission.
But I think its actually more accurate to describe this with an S & M analogy.
When it comes to foreign "relations", the neocons appear to enjoy both the S and the M, the grovelling and the whipping -- wallowing in a mythology of American weakness, while indulging in Ilsa the She-Wolf fantasies of whipping the world into shape and bending all nations to her will.
Just look at the language we're always using to describe the Iraq war -- there's the "surge" in Iraq (which should, I think, be titled "Operation Big Swinging Dick" because that's whose idea it was and that's the idea of it.) Then there is the Bush administration's horror of Democratic attempts to "withdraw", which the Republicans describe as a a "slow bleed strategy".
Hmmm, sounds kinda kinky, doesn't it?
And here (via Greenwald) are Newt Gingrich and Hugh Hewitt talking about how the United States should whip the Iranians if any American sailors are ever arrested:

HH: So how long would you give them, to give them that ultimatum, the Iranians?
NG: I would literally do that. I would say to them, I would right now say to them privately, within the next week, your refinery will no longer work. And within the following week, there will be no tankers arriving. Now if you would like to avoid being humiliated publicly, we recommend you calmly and quietly give them back now. But frankly, if you'd prefer to show the planet that you're tiny and we're not, we're prepared to simply cut off your economy, and allow you to go back to walking and using oxen to pull carts, because you will have no gasoline left.
HH: I agree with that 100%.

Emphasis mine. So Newt Gingrich, who thinks he should be president, would "humiliate" Iran "to show the planet that you're tiny and we're not".
Hmmm, sounds kinda kinky to me.
Greenwald says:

. . . what it's all about -- everything -- is, as Newt put it: we must "show the planet that you're tiny and we're not."
Showing the planet that they're "tiny and we're not" really does sum up, almost completely, the entire neoconservative compulsion, which is the same thing as neoconservatism itself. As I've noted before, they talk about every foreign policy issue with themes of dominance, submission and humiliation as the centerpiece. It's the Abu Grahib Theory of Foreign Affairs, and it actually is quite uncomfortable even to read.

Hmmm, dominance and submission, sounds kinda kinky.
Safe word banana.

Throwing things at Karl Rove

Karl Rove may be a wow with the Beltway journalists but with university students, not so much:

Rove was on the campus to talk to the College Republicans, but when he got outside more than a dozen students began throwing things at him and at his car, an American University spokesperson said.
The students then got on the ground and laid down in front of his car as a protest.
The students said security officials picked them up and carried them away so Rove could leave.
Police said they have dealt with a lot of protests on campus and this one was handled peacefully.
No one was arrested.

I'll bet the university faculty vote to give them each a medal.