Overreaction

Joe Friesen at the Globe is becoming one of my "go-to" writers -- everything he covers is interesting, well-written and well-researched. Lately he has been covering the Saskatchewan high school student suspended because he told his classmates alcohol is worse than marijuana -- which, of course, it is.
The more I read about this story, the more obvious it is that this was an hysterical overreaction on the part of school officials -- drama queens who would rather lock down their school and call in the RCMP instead of just talking to an intimidatingly-brilliant 15-year-old boy. I guess he's just too scary!

Great line of the day

From Some Guy with a Website (August J. Pollak):

It seems almost insane how right-wingers are in some advanced state of denial that there might be a president in the near future who isn't George W. Bush, let alone isn't a Republican. It continues to fuel my partial interest in seeing Clinton become president just for the entertainment value.
It might be useful to get a lot of Senators on record right now about their feelings on signing statements, because if Hillary Clinton becomes president next year I'm pretty sure a lot of them are going to have a massive epiphany about Executive powers.

Emphasis mine.

Ohhh, hot!

It is, of course, completely trivial and ridiculous to focus on what political candidates look like.
But all this pundit swooning over how sexy the Republicans are is ridiculous too.
Compare this group:



to this one:


The only way these three could be considered sexy is if "hotness" is now an index of balding, jowly, squinty-eyed, pudgy, double-chinned, wispy-haired and bulbous-nosed.
Oh, yeah, mama, bring it on!

Infuriating phrases

The Cursor refers us to this Telegraph contest for infuriating phrases -- like this:

. . . Stakeholders will be fully engaged in a consultation exercise breaking down barriers, pushing the envelope towards a seamless, one-stop shop service. Safety and value for money will be paramount so we are investing a funding stream to put in place a supportive multidisciplinary team to head up this exciting upcoming project, provide local ownership and robust clinical governance. Doing nothing is not an option...

But I think the Telegraph missed one. The world's most infuriating phrase is this one -- Homeland Security spokesperson Fran Townsend's statement about the US failure to capture Osama Bin Laden:

"It's a success that hasn't occured yet."

Great post of the day

I was just going to quote a line or two from this, but the whole thing expresses so clearly what I feel. From Ian Welsh, Hanging Is Too Good For Them:

. . . Let's be real clear - people were raped and tortured at the behest of America's government, with the knowledge and approval of the highest members of government. This rot didn't start at the bottom, it spread from the very very top.
And it was known in 2004, and the US re-elected George Bush anyway.
I'll never forget that, and until George Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and a number of generals are behind bars, I'll never entirely forgive it either. There is no greater crime against humanity than torturing someone. There is nothing more despicable than rape. And there is nothing more pathetic than senior officers refusing to accept responsibility for what their soldiers do, especially when there is every evidence they knew.
Abu Ghraib was the grave of America's soft power; of its reputation as, for all its complicity in other countries unfortunate policies, a basically decent nation that didn't step over the line. It is when bin Laden's rants about the US were given weight, and for many Muslims, made true.
It's when the US became no better than those it fights. Oh, "pre-emptive war", for which the US hung Nazis, had pushed the US close - war based on lies, on classic big lie propaganda scare mongering no different in nature than anything any fascist or totalitarian dictatorship would use, for all that "reporters" bent over backwards to help the administration spread their lies, had pushed the US close to evil.
But Abu Ghraib sealed the deal in the eyes of the world.
America the Good, the city on the Hill, had become a country that tortured. And then, in 2004, in full knowledge of that torture, the US's citizens re-elected George Bush.
There's no fall so far that there can't be redemption. But redemption in this case means facing up to what happened. And that means, in part, that George Bush and his enablers have to go to jail. Really, they should probably be hung, and hanging is too good for them, but since their crimes were those against all human kindness and decency; against all standards of civilized behaviour, the death penalty is not appropriate. Let them rot in jail.
Until the US does this, until the US cleans house, many in the rest of the world will always believe that it could happen again - that George Bush was not; is not, just an aberration, but he is what America is becoming, that your system of "checks and balances" is so broken, so non-functional, that the country is ripe for demagoguery and totalitarian impulses of the worst and darkest kind.
I hope, as someone who believed in America as a bastion of freedom, for all its flaws; that you do clean house. Failure to do so will not just have moral consequences, it will have realpolitik ones as well.

Emphasis mine.
I agree. Unless there is truth and reconciliation, it will take a long, long time -- 50 years? 75? a century? -- certainly the rest of my lifetime, and perhaps my children's as well -- before the world might trust the United States again, or believe then when they say they stand for justice.

Summing up Harper

Two recent Globe and Mail columns about Harper and the Conservatives provide a lot of food for thought.
Macleans magazine Megapundit site summarizes the columns of Rex Murphy and Lawrence Martin summarizing our recent session of parliament:

In The Globe and Mail, Rex Murphy says it’s not so much “the arcane principles of equalization, or the particular dispute on the Atlantic Accord that has hurt the Harper government,” but rather its attitude in dealing with it. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s dismissal of the complaint - "Our government is not in the process of making any side deals for a few extra votes” - is evidence, he suggests, of “a chilly haughtiness that has become all too readily the signature key of the Harper administration.
“This is not an attitude that will widen his quite closeted appeal. And it is surely not an attitude that will have the multitudes strewing palms on the road when he seeks a re-lease on the comforts of 24 Sussex Dr.”
The Globe’s Lawrence Martin is of like mind. Referring to published accounts of Stephen Harper’s early life by William Johnson and Preston Manning, he attempts to psychoanalyze the Prime Minister’s “angry-man syndrome,” which he says dominated this nearly-ended session of Parliament. “The Harper idea of consensus-building was through consultations - with his own mind,” Martin writes. “His life in the cauldron of politics has seemingly taken away soft edges, making him even more partisan and more contemptuous than other practitioners of the sport.”

"Real" Questions

So Chris Matthews is at a Washington conference asking Hilary questions about Scooter Libby and finally the audience starts yelling at him to "ask a real question". Then Hilary chimes in with "A question about the people in this audience and not what goes on inside of Washington." Matthews was visibly upset at first but finally he went along with it and switched to a question about the labour movement.
I wonder if Tweety will think about this at all.

Hooray for winter!

Galloping Beaver notes that the 2007 Failed States Index has now been published.
Here's the map:

You may not be able to read the legend, but the darker green, the better.
Seems like many of the most successful nations are the ones that have the worst winters. I'm not sure if this means anything, but maybe we can thank our winter for keeping us focused -- because if we screw up our country, then everyone freezes to death right quick, like in about one Friedman Unit ...

Just for fun

Some recent dog photos from Yahoo


At a Japanese swimming pool for dogs.


French poodle Smash wins Best in Show at the 2007 World Dog Show Mexico 2007.


Boy and his dog in Geneva.


A West Highland Terrier named Skye waits as his owner looks at a Christie's auction of painting and sculptures of dogs.


Rusty Lu at a Spring Fashion Show for dogs in California. Hope he won.


Littleton, Colorado broke the Guinness record for largest mass dog "wedding", with 50 "couples", surpassing the previous record of 26 set in the Netherlands. Oh, good!

Making the right decision on Iran

I read here and there in the blogosphere about how very difficult it was in 2003 to decide whether the Iraq War was right or not.
Actually, I don't think it was a hard decision at all.
The war on Iraq was based on a unjustified doctrine of preemptive war. It was a war of choice on a nation which had not attacked either the United States or Britain or their allies. And it was a war which was not authorized or supported by any recognized group of nations, like the UN or NATO.
Therefore, of course it was wrong.
Now we're reading the same hysterical arguments promoting war with Iran. This would be just as illegal, immoral and wrong as the Iraq War was. And given the record so far of the Bush administration -- which consistently screws up because it hires incompetent Republican hacks -- a war with Iran would likely be just as incompetently executed.

The latest on Abu Ghraib

Another huge story from Seymour Hersh about General Taguba who investigated, honestly, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses. And then spent the next three years watching his career go down the tubes while his Pentagon and Defense Department superiors repeatedly lied about what had actually happened.
Though Abu Ghraib may be considered as old news, there's a lot in this story that is new. Here's an incident from Taguba's first meeting with Rumsfeld:

At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

And there is evidence of abuse that has never been made public:

. . . the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.

Another new element in this story is that Taguba was actually prevented from investigating any one other than the privates and corporals who were guarding the prisoners -- the orders given by CIA and higher-level military, and their actions, were out-of-bounds:

Taguba eventually concluded that there was a reason for the evasions and stonewalling by Rumsfeld and his aides. At the time he filed his report, in March of 2004, Taguba said, “I knew there was C.I.A. involvement, but I was oblivious of what else was happening” in terms of covert military-intelligence operations. Later that summer, however, he learned that the C.I.A. had serious concerns about the abusive interrogation techniques that military-intelligence operatives were using on high-value detainees.
. . .
Abu Ghraib had opened the door on the issue of the treatment of detainees, and from the beginning the Administration feared that the publicity would expose more secret operations and practices. Shortly after September 11th, Rumsfeld, with the support of President Bush, had set up military task forces whose main target was the senior leadership of Al Qaeda. Their essential tactic was seizing and interrogating terrorists and suspected terrorists; they also had authority from the President to kill certain high-value targets on sight. The most secret task-force operations were categorized as Special Access Programs, or S.A.P.s.
. . .
The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”—in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’ ” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ”
. . .
A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams “had full authority to whack—to go in and conduct ‘executive action,’ ” the phrase for political assassination. “It was surrealistic what these guys were doing”

And what did Bush know? Hersh says:

. . . Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command.

But Bush wasn't just failing to deal with the abuse, he was actively cheering it on. Maybe Hersh forgot the creepiest line in the 2003 State of the Union speech, when Bush said:

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

Because they're dead. Sounds sorta familiar, doesn't it?

Very strange

During one of the recent Democratic debates, Barak Obama made some remark to Wolf Blitzer that a question about English as a national language was unnecessarily divisive and meanspirited. I thought this was a brave attempt to challenge both a meta-narrative and journalist prejudices. Hey, maybe this guy's different!
Then today Obama produces two press releases that insult East Indians and call Hillary Clinton "D-Punjab".
And earlier this week Obama's legal advisor said Scooter Libby should be pardoned.
So who is this Obama guy really?

I read the news today, oh boy

"Incompetent"? Moi? You can always tell when a Democrat has said something true. The Republicans get simply furious.

Scooter Who? Now that Scooter is actually supposed to go to jail, and now that the judge made it clear that he is going to jail for lying to investigators and obstructing justice, watch for all those Scooter supporters to start backing away -- particularly as they realize that their hero Scooter could save himself from jail by testifying truthfully about Cheney's petty, ridiculous and creepy campaign to trash Joe Wilson. Today the judge not only said Scooter should go to jail, he also called shame on all of those people who spent the last week whining and bullying. He described the threatening letters and emails he had received and he slapped down the law professors too:

Walton: With all due respect, these are intelligent people, but I would not accept this brief from a first year law student. I believe this was put out to put pressure on this court in the public sphere to rule as you wish. [Reggie pissed]
Robbins: These 12 scholars believe this is a close question.
Walton: If I had gotten something more of substance from them, maybe.

Ouch!

Don't they think we'll notice? At some point, won't Canadians realize who is to blame for the problems the Conservatives are having in running the government?

We can always take the bus, I guess So Canada's very own no-fly list is going to be implemented next week -- just in time for the summer holiday season. Oh, yeah, that oughta work real smooth!

Great line of the day

From Scott, talking about the federal budget. First, Scott reminds us of Flaherty's budget speech:

"the long, tiring, unproductive era of bickering between the provincial and federal governments is over"

Then Scott reviews all the recent bickering:

I wonder if Flaherty really believed what he was saying when he said that now infamous line in his Budget speech. Harper still has not held a First Ministers meeting with the provinces 18 months into his “new government” mandate. Besides the aforementioned Budget squabbles, you also have several provinces objecting to Harper’s proposed piecemeal Senate “reform”. Relations between provinces and the feds were never this bad under any recent Prime Minister that I can think of - not Chretien or Martin, and not even Trudeau or Mulroney in the midst of their constitutional crises.
You’d almost think Harper and the Conservatives were doing this on purpose to try and prove that Canada is ungovernable. They’re doing a fine job of showing that right now, and most of it is of their own doing.

Emphasis mine.

Great post of the day

Television writer Ken Levin on what would have happened if THE SOPRANOS were on a major network:

The finale would be at least two hours.
There would be a one hour clip show hosted by Bob Costas preceding it.
There would be live coverage of the cast party on the network’s local 11:00 news. It would be the lead story even if Hurricane Katrina hit that day.
There would be a little animated promo swooshing across the bottom of the screen after every commercial break of every other prime time show on that network for two weeks. A little gun would shoot a little mobster. The blood would spell out SOPRANOS.
Also, on the bottom of the screen there would be a little countdown clock for a month leading up to the finale.
The cast would be on that network’s late night talk show. If the network didn’t have a late night talk show they would create one just for this purpose.
An online contest would offer prizes if you guessed who would be whacked and when. That way you could watch the final episode and play along at home.
They would spin off Janice. Coming in September: WIDOW WITH CHILDREN.
They would insist that Tony’s mother return despite the fact that the actress who played her has died.
They would NEVER EVER EVER allow an ambiguous ending.
They would want the following changes in the last scene. Meadow should drive a Ford because that’s who is sponsoring. She should have no trouble parallel parking because Fords are easy to parallel park. The restaurant must be TGI Fridays – also a sponsor and much more colorful. The threat should come from a singing waiter wearing a straw hat, suspenders, and hundreds of fun buttons. A secondary threat should be an Arab terrorist with a scar. The Arab should pull his gun. The waiter should point his banjo (which is also a semi-automatic rifle). It looks like Tony, Carmela, and A.J. are done for it. Final commercial break. We come back just as Meadow bursts in the door with an Uzi and blows the bad guys away. Meadow, it seems, has just come from dance class and is wearing nothing but a hot leotards. Tony says, “That’s what I get for going to Fridays on Tuesday.” The family shares a laugh. Meadow sits down. Everyone hugs and declares their love for each other. Carmelo calls out, “Can we get ANOTHER waiter?” They laugh. One more hug. Long fade out, as music swells – Dino’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head”. Fade out. Your local news is next.
So if you’re still pissed at David Chase for the way he really ended the series just think of the alternative.

Well, yeah, when you put it that way...