Some photos I liked

Anak, a 31-year-old Orang Utan, holds her five-day-old baby Apie in her arms in Ouwehands Zoo in Rhenen, central Netherlands.


Andy at rest: Andy, one of three lion cubs sits in his basket at the Serengeti-Park in the north-western German town of Hodenghagen.


Gaza beach : A Palestinian rides a camel as people enjoy a day at the beach in Gaza City.


A man plays with his daughter next to the Kukulkan pyramid at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza.

Good news for barley farmers

The Wheat Board was supposed to lose its monopoly over barley marketing as of August 1. Now, a federal court has stopped this change:

A court decision has derailed, at least temporarily, the federal government's plan to strip the Canadian Wheat Board of its monopoly on western barley sales.
Federal Court Judge Dolores Hansen ruled Tuesday the Tory cabinet overstepped its authority earlier this year when it passed a new regulation to allow farmers to sell their barley independently.
"I conclude the new regulation is ultra vires (beyond cabinet's power) and of no force and effect," Hansen wrote.
The judge sided with supporters of the wheat board, who argued any changes to the board's monopoly must be made via a law passed in Parliament - something that could be blocked by the opposition.

Not only could be, but would be.
The disingenuous aspect of the issue is this: the federal Conservatives keep saying that 62 per cent of farmers voted for 'marketing choice". But did they? Not really. While just over one-third of 30,000 barley producers voted that the Canadian Wheat Board should retain the "single desk" (ie, monopoly of barley marketing), only 14 per cent of producers said the Board "should have no role in marketing barley." In other words, a large majority of barley producers want the Canadian Wheat Board to continue handling barley. But in reality, without their monopoly the Board actually couldn't do it.
Here's why. The CWB is not a grain company like, say, United Grain Growers or the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. The CWB doesn't own or manage elevators, nor does it manufacture or process a product. It doesn't actually "make a profit".
So here is how things would work if the CWB continued to purchase barley from farmers. It would probably repeat what happened from 1935 to 1939 when there was "dual marketing" for wheat -- for the Board, it wasn't pretty:

The result of a voluntary CWB or dual market was that when the initial payment turned out to be above the world price the CWB got all the wheat and paid farmers the difference between the "world price" and the initial payment. When the initial payment was lower than the "world price" the CWB got no wheat and the trade received all the wheat and hence all the profit.

So without a monopoly, why should the CWB continue to purchase anyone's barley at all? They would just lose money.
As a non-lawyer, the Canadian Wheat Board Act seems pretty clear to me -- Part Five says that the jurisdiction of the Board can be extended to Oats and Barley by Cabinet regulation, but that excluding wheat or barley from CWB jurisdiction is to be done by Parliament. And the federal court judge basically said this too, if I understand her statement correctly.

Good kitty

Alison connects the dots on Stevie's newest hobby snapping photos of himself withlittle kitties. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Let's just hope the cute little guy (the orange one) doesn't turn into any of these:

It's Wizard of Oz time

Hmmm... didn't the Wizard of Oz turn out to be just a little man hiding behind a green curtain?
The Washington Post is describing the situation between Iran and the United States as a new Cold War, complete with a "Green Curtain":

The Bush administration is now adapting the tactics of the last Cold War to the new one. In the 1940s, the Soviet Union lowered its Iron Curtain to shore up communism in Eastern Europe and prevent penetration from the West. The former Kremlinologists now running U.S. foreign policy, such as Rice and Gates, are trying their own version, with a Green Curtain designed to cut off the bloc of Iranian-linked radicals and protect U.S. allies in the Middle East . . .

But it sounds like they won't be finding a Yellow Brick Road any time soon:

The basic U.S. premise -- isolating regional foes behind the Green Curtain -- is in trouble even among Washington's closest allies. "The United States is trying to define the main line of confrontation as the extremist camp versus the camp of moderation, a division which does not exist," Pillar said. "It may be reflective of our rhetoric and the way Americans see the world, but it is not reflective of the realities in the Middle East."

The progressive blogosphere is suitably derisive. At Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy says:

We had the clever idea of ending several decades of successful containment of Iran by cleverly transforming Iraq from Iran's biggest regional counterweight into a chaotic failed state "led", if that is the right word, by people with close ties to Iran. In the process, we even more cleverly pinned our troops down right where Iran could get at them, and gave them every incentive to do what they could to keep us tied down there by hinting that as soon as we were finished with Iraq, it would be time to take down Teheran. We can't get out unless the Maliki government succeeds, and so even though it is led by Shi'as and friendly to Iran, we are funding and supporting it, and trying to do so without empowering Iran, which is, um, impossible. At the same time, we are trying to contain Iranian influence in the region and mollify our increasingly nervous Sunni allies by by selling lots and lots of weapons -- $20 billion worth -- to the delightful government of Saudi Arabia. But guess what? Saudi Arabia is arming -- of course -- the insurgents who are fighting against the Maliki government -- the very same government that we are trying to prop up!
This is what comes of having idiots in charge of our foreign policy.

I think this "Green Curtain" stuff is just another attempt to inflate the Bush administration's petulance and warmongering into some kind of Clash Of The Titans, so that Bush can continue to pretend to be Churchill rallying the Free World to defeat the Heathens, while Cheney plays William Stephenson.
All the Serious Beltway Pundits and Reporters will take all this Green Curtain stuff very Seriously, of course.

Great line of the day

Mikhail Gorbachev:

Gorbachev, who presided over the break-up of the Soviet Union, said Washington had sought to build an empire after the Cold War ended but had failed to understand the changing world.
“The Americans then gave birth to the idea of a new empire, world leadership by a single power, and what followed?” Gorbachev asked reporters at a news conference in Moscow.
“What has followed are unilateral actions, what has followed are wars, what has followed is ignoring the U.N. Security Council, ignoring international law and ignoring the will of the people, even the American people,” he said.

Great line of the day

Scott Tribe updates us on the Conservative accountability reforms:

. . . this was another dog and pony show designed to try and curry favour with voters from Deceivin’ Stephen’s bunch by giving the impression of doing something to clean up politics in order to get that vaunted majority. In truth, the Conservatives have discovered they like appointing their friends and partisans as much as anyone else, and have made sure so far they aren’t hampered from doing it.

Emphasis mine.
Now personally, I never did think this election promise about making political appointments on merit rather than on party affiliation would ever actually be enacted.
An existing government that wins reelection might be able to get away with making some "bipartisan" appointments, but when a new party takes power, there is a pent-up demand from hundreds of their nearest and dearest friends and partisans for all those plumb government appointments, and no political leader can afford to just ignore their own supporters. Putting it politely, one could say that of course a government is going to appoint people who already have demonstrated they support the new government's goals.
Putting it crassly, a politician has to dance with the one who brung him.
But Scott is exactly right that voters wanted a different approach. They actually thought they might get it with Harper.
Fool me once...

Go crazy? Don't mind if I do

So now they're saying that smoking pot increases the risk of mental illness -- what, are they nuts?

Chicken Little-In-Chief

So the Bush administration has been ignoring the US wiretapping laws for the last six years.
They have been wiretapping illegally -- because, I think, no judge would have given them a warrant for the data-mining approach they were likely using, nor would any judge have approved listening in on journalists and Democrats and foreign diplomats, all of whom have been labelled by the Bush administration as terrorist sympathizers and fellow travellers, and if you think that label was just for show, well, what planet have you been living on?
But Bush and Cheney couldn't be bothered changing the US law, even though a compliant Republican Congress would have approved anything they wanted.
Now, its been a pretty bad July so far for the Bush administration -- the Abu Gonzales mess, the immigration bill collapse, the vote coming up to restore habeus corpus to the Guantanamo prisoners, and now the Tillman fragging.
So they're trying one more time to play the "terrorism" card -- once more into the breach, dear friends, once more.
Bush will announce in his Saturday radio address that he wants Congress to revise the surveillance legislation right away, immediately, right now. After six years of no action, its just so urgent now that Congress does what Bush wants in the next six days.
I think Bush and Cheney are trying once again to distract Congress and the media with something new and shiny, in the hopes that everyone will start talking about how important it is that the surveillance law be changed and that the Democrats are traitors if they don't go along.
But I don't think President 27 Per Cent can pull this off now. Not anymore.
So the sky is falling? Again? Yawn...

Teh Gay

In Canada, there have been more than 12,000 gay marriages since 2003. Apparently the country is going to fall apart any day now. Did you know that gay marriage means we have to support separatism in Quebec? Yep, just like the wingnuts have been telling us all along, gay marriage = the end of Canada. It says so in a book.
And here's more -- It's all because (The Gays Are Getting Married):

That popping sound you hear is the bubble bursting

French banker Jerome Guillet at Daily Kos describes the slow motion economic train wreck which is occurring in the US financial markets now. He concludes:

As the bubble unwinds (or pops), it is essential to make it clear that it should not be workers, or taxpayers, that end up paying for the recklessness of the financiers, and that those that gorged on the good times should bear the pain of the new, leaner times . . . The focus on financial profits over industrial ones, unable to provide the same instant returns, has skewed the economy ever more towards financial services rather than other "real" activities (except the finance fuelled construction sector). That may not prove to have been the most sustainable policy.
Altogether, the politics of individual greed over those of a collective future need to be blamed.

Ninjas!

Alison sends us to the Lolcat Bible, which was originally posted on Scarlet Words where I also found the Algorithm March, and this version is with Ninjas:



Don't ya just love the Internets!

The lone and level sands stretch far away

Check out the videos at this site -- The World Without Us - Alan Weisman. It's sort of chilling, in the "My name is Ozymandias" sense.

Are we there yet?

No, not yet.
I think bloggers need to stop talking about impeaching Bush and Cheney and start talking about what exactly they have done wrong.
Half of the population of the United States did not vote for Bush and Cheney in either 2000 or 2004. Some statistics would appear to indicate that a quarter or more of Americans would now support impeachment.
But there will be no groundswell of support until a majority of people can see what illegalities have been committed. So far, its still sort of vague -- did they violate the FISA Act with the NSA wiretapping program? Did they violate the Geneva Conventions when they approved torture and rendition? Did they deliberately lie to start the war with Iraq?
But Bush and Cheney did it all with the cover of Executive Orders, they got some tame lawyer (AKA the Attorney General) to provide supporting opinions, and they even got some degree of Congressional support, back when Congress was majority Republican.
So the "high crimes and misdemeanors" still need to be identified and defined.
Nixon tried to cover up a crime (the Watergate break-in). Clinton lied under oath. In both cases, these were individual actions; they were done by the President without any legalistic "cover"; and they were done for a personal benefit -- neither Nixon nor Clinton could claim they did what they did to protect the nation. Also, it was pretty easy for the average person to understand what could be called "criminal" about these actions.
With Bush and Cheney, while their stupidity and incompetence and cowardice certainly disgust many Americans, this may not be sufficient to make a clear majority support impeachment. The specifics of the case have to be spelled out.

Stunts

This sounds like a stunt to me.
If the issue of allowing human rights complaints against band councils has been a problem since 1977, why the sudden rush to recall MPs to deal with it right now, over the summer?
Oh, yes, I forgot -- fall election coming up...

Great line of the day

Over at Canadian Cynic, pretty shaved ape expresses some shrill cynicism (quel suprise!) about our defense minister's recent Declare-Victory-And-Leave announcement:

"O'Connor was responding to new poll numbers that suggest support within Canada for the deployment is dropping while opposition is rising . . . During an appearance on CTV's Question Period that aired Sunday, O'Connor said those numbers are largely due to Canadians' lack of clear understanding of Canada's successes in Afghanistan, as well as the challenges faced there."

After half a freaking decade of action, as the mission steadily deteriorates and the liberation slowly decays into ineffectual occupation, as the will and patience of both the Afghan and Canadian populations erode, we just don't understand that our troops have Tim Horton's coffee. And according to big Steve our military just keeps getting better and better with every flag at half mast. Shame that Gordon O'Lobby can't seem to present a clearly understandable picture of our "success". So buck up anyway, whiners.

Hey, does anybody else smell a fall election being plotted?