Traffic circles

It's both ends against the middle.
Alison writes about how American wingnuts like John Birchers and Swift Boaters and Minutemen are attacking the Security and Prosperity Partnership -- and as a result, American progressives are taking the equal and opposite reaction by minimizing it.
Chet Scoville (formerly The Green Knight) summarizes the whole SPP history and controversy here.
The problem, of course, is that while Canadian progressives are worried about our social programs, our economy, our treaties, our independence -- in fact, our whole damn country -- the American wingnuts aren't thinking much about us at all.
It's the Mexican part of SPP that scares them -- just another manifestation of their hysterical "illegal brown people are flooding into our country and taking all our jobs" schtick.
Canada isn't really on their horizon at all -- we are just a bunch of weak-kneed lefties who let the 911 terrorists in. The American wingnut attitude toward Canada is summed up by this quote, reportedly from Tucker Carlson:

[Canada]"is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving … he’s nice but you don’t take him seriously."

Fear of Mexicans is a dominant theme of the 2006 announcement about the Coalition to Block the North American Union:

. . . [the partnership] would erase U.S. borders, replace the dollar with the "amero," and lead to unlimited immigration . . . the "Trans-Texas Corridor" is designed to function as a NAFTA super-highway, opening Mexican ports with Red Chinese goods from Mexican trucks and trains to move north into the center of the United States. . .

No wonder American progressives are reluctant to make any common cause with these guys.
The Americans on both sides of this divide also have a strange obsession with the "NAFTA superhighway" aspect, as if the only way that a "partnership" could be achieved between the United States, Mexico and Canada is with an actual road.
Even the progressive commenters to Chet's post demonstrate this misconception. The wingnuts envisage convoys of rattletrap Mexican semi-trailers roaring northward full of shoddy Chinese toys, while the progressives ridicule SPP as a flap about road construction.
But one American commenter on Alison's site is still very reassuring, even on that point. Orc, who blogs at This Space for Rent -- about trains and bees and other interesting stuff -- reminds us of a crucial fact:

. . . don't forget that the SPP is ... being planned by a collection of conservative governments here; modern conservatives don't build, they pillage and destroy, and I have the highest confidence that the new highways will dissolve in a whirlpool of embezzled funds.

Demoted in plain sight

Hmmm -- I suspected Harper was trying to hide something in plain sight.
When I saw last night that Canada's Gnu Government(c) had produced a 45-page press release about the cabinet shuffle, I wondered if there was something buried in those pages. This time, Harper's press release included a list of cabinet committee memberships, which his February 2006 cabinet announcement had ignored.
Well, surprise surprise -- turns out there WAS something more.
Finance minister Jim Flaherty has been bumped from the leadership of the treasury board and economic growth committees. Is this a significant demotion for Flaherty? Yes, I think so. While the Budget sets overall directions once a year, it is at Treasury Board (now vice-chaired by Rona Ambrose) where the day-to-day decisions are made about whether ministers will have the money they want for their departments, and it is Economic Growth (now chaired by David Emerson) which sets key economic development policies.

Great line of the day

There's a new interview in Der Spiegel with the US ambassador to Iraq who expresses how disgusted he is with the idea that the American military should leave Iraq. Digby ripostes:

The moral failure was in invading Iraq. It was the original sin from which all these horrors have sprung. To even imply that the majority of Americans who now want to rectify that terrible decision by removing ourselves from the situation will be morally responsible for this mess is an outrage.
I love these lectures and feelings of "disgust" coming from people who apparently still maintain that it was perfectly fine to ignore international law and invade a country for no good reason and turn it into a chaotic hellhole. No moral culpability required for that, no admission of guilt, but lots and lots of sanctimonious posturing about how we will have blood on our hands if the US admits its mistake and withdraws. The obtuseness of that position takes my breath away. We already have so much blood on our hands that it's dripping into everything we touch.

Emphasis mine.

Blame game

Obama sez:

Not all the nation's ills can be blamed on President Bush, Democratic candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday . . .

Well, yes. I suppose we can also blame the millions who voted for him.
Actually, of course, Obama has a point -- Americans have to get beyond the politics of personality and start evaluating presidential candidates based on what they want to do and how likely they are to be able to do it.
Which is particularly difficult with a press that love to report on personality because its so much easier than actually reading policy statements and doing some research -- yes, actual research! -- to determine how realistic the policy statements actually are.
Your typical national media reporter seems to take the Calvin-and-Hobbes approach to research:

Calvin: I've got to write a report for school. Bats. Can you imagine anything more stupid? Heck, I don't know anything about bats! How am I supposed to write a report on a subject I know nothing about?! It's impossible!
Hobbes: I suppose research is out of the question.
Calvin: Oh, like I'm going to learn about bats and then write a report?! Give me a break!

---

Calvin: Hello, Susie? This is Calvin. You know this report we're supposed to write for school? Yeah. My topic is bats. What's yours? Elephants? Hmm. Well, are you going to the library to look up elephants? You are? Great! While you're there, could you research bats too and make copies of all the information you find, and maybe underline the important parts for me and sort of outline it, so I wouldn't have to read it all?
Hobbes: How'd it go?
Calvin: I really loathe girls.

---

Calvin: I think we've got enough information now, don't you?
Hobbes: All we have is one "fact" you made up.
Calvin: That's plenty. By the time we add an introduction, a few illustrations, and a conclusion, it will look like a graduate thesis. Besides, I've got a secret weapon that will guarantee a good grade! No teacher can resist this! A clear plastic binder! Pretty professional looking, eh?
Hobbes: I don't want co-author credit on this, OK?

Personally, I favour Barak Obama and John Edwards in the US presidential race.
Hillary would likely be able to do the job OK, too, I guess, but my problem with her is that she hasn't yet been able to tell anybody why she wants to be president. Obama wants to change politics in America and Edwards wants to change the American economy -- either one would be a worthwhile achievement.

Simple answers to simple questions

Back in April, regarding the oft-noted "we didn't have time to read it" excuse for another US Patriot Act outrage, I asked whether everyone in Congress has read the Patriot Act NOW?
Apparently not.

Well, aren't we glad that THAT's over!

Thanks to Dave at The Galloping Beaver, we know now that we can just forget about global warming.
See, there was some temperature data which measured the "hottest year on record" in the United States and it turns out the data was wrong -- by 0.1 degrees -- so as a result 1998 is NOT the hottest year on record, it was 1934, so now all the wingnuts are declaring that global warming is nothing to worry about anymore.
Well, that's a relief, isn't it?
We know we can always take the word of Mark Steyn over any actual scientist.
Of course, Dave is still concerned -- what a worrywart...

More photos I liked

Too busy to blog much, but here are more photos I liked:


Two-day-old baby giraffe Inge nuzzles her mother Elli, in Tierpark Berlin zoo August 3, 2007.


The cutline for this AFP photo just says "Tingo and Magda"





These are both from the Cute Overload website, Pups section, and I couldn't resist sharing them.
Somebody might suspect that we are wanting a new puppy, and somebody would be right ...

Let the finger pointing begin!

This story -- New RCMP boss helped censor Arar report -- is infuriating. I though Elliot was supposed to clean up the RCMP, not go along to get along.
I hope Commissioner Elliot realizes, very soon, that he is no longer a civil servant sworn to protect his Minister at all costs. Now, as RCMP Commissioner, he is sworn to protect the public "without fear, favour or affection of or toward any person".
Usually, these are not competing interests. But occasionally they are.
That his first announcement was an admission of censoring the Arar report was not an auspicious beginning:

“Given what we now know about what they are trying to suppress, it's obviously a concern that the person who is now accountable for the RCMP took such a limited view of the public's right to know about the errors and mistakes committed by the force,” said Lorne Waldman, a lawyer acting for Mr. Arar.
...“The fact that the new RCMP commissioner appears to have been involved in this process is going to pose a challenge to him as he tries to demonstrate that he's turning a new page at the RCMP,” said NDP Leader Jack Layton.
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said in an interview that “the key point for me today is not Mr. Elliott, it is which ministers decided on this unacceptable level of transparency for the Canadian people.”

The finger pointing between the civil servants and the politicians about who actually made and approved the deletions has already begun. First, Elliot said

“I was certainly involved in the process leading to that decision, but that decision was a decision taken by government"

Then a spokesperson from Stockwell Day's office said:

“senior officials from various departments” decided to block out the passages before the government signed off on the recommendations."

So basically, we've got an "I didn't do it" game going on here.
But wait, there's more!
To explain why the deletions were made -- apparently its because we don't want the CIA and the FBI mad at us -- some supercilious fop "official" formulates one of the dumbest analogies I've ever heard:

Foreign intelligence is not viewed as fundamentally different from any other borrowed good or service. For that reason, Canada is wary of passing along secrets it gets from other sources, or even pointing to those sources.
“If you borrow your neighbour's pickup truck to haul a load to the dump, you don't give the keys to the kids to go for a Slurpee at the 7-Eleven,” said one official who declined to be identified. “Intellectually, it's not a difficult concept to grasp.”

No wonder the inventor of this allegory "declined to be identified" -- did he think Maher Arar's freedom, citizenship, dignity and future were the "load taken to the dump" or the "Slurpee"?

Great line of the day

On the 2008 Democratic Presidential candidates, Jill from Brilliant at Breakfast writes:

. . . the Gore vigil points out the weakness in the Democratic field. Progressive Democrats in particular are terrified. We're terrified because we are faced with a party that seems to want to lose. . . bipartisanship now means "Do it the Republican way", as we saw with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid's disgraceful performance in dealing with the FISA legislation last weekend.
John Edwards, despite his aw-shucks demeanor and his preposterously youthful appearance, really is the one guy who's shown the stones to take them on. Hillary gives lip service to it, but someone who's hobnobbed with Rupert Murdoch can't be trusted to not buy into "Do it the Republican way." Obama, having been mentored by Joe Lieberman, talks about "changing the tone", but doesn't seem to realize that the tone CAN'T be changed. Chris Dodd has found his voice a decade too late. Only John Edwards is out there telling the Republicans to go fuck themselves -- and that is why there is this concerted effort to destroy his candidacy. Even Schaller has bought into the meme of the inevitability of an Edwards collapse.
It's very disheartening to watch the process play out this way and watch the Democrats getting ready to fall into the trap once again. Does anyone honestly believe that President Hillary Clinton will get us out of Iraq, keep us out of Iran, put Israel's feet to the fire on human rights, stop the relentless march of American jobs to Bangalore and elsewhere, AND institute not just universal health INSURANCE, but national heath CARE? If so, they're as deluded as those who think that Mitt Romney's sons are doing their part for the war effort.

Emphasis mine.

Who says there's no good news in Iraq?

Sounds like some businesses are booming.

"..where they can have their way with him"

Reading the just-revealed sections of the Arar report demonstrates the James Bond Syndrome in action -- the perverse idea that it is just so very sophisticated to take a casual, dismissive attitude toward torturing people, that its all just part of today's international espionage game, that there's nothing actually immoral or illegal about tormenting an Enemy of the State, that the stories they blurt out between screams is the truth and nothing but the truth, and that if Canada wants to play with the big boys then we have to play by their rules.
Read this section from Page 245 (formerly redacted section shown in bold) for a demonstration of this attitude:

In October 2002, CSIS officials knew that the United States might have sent Mr. Arar to a country where he could be questioned in a “firm manner.” In a report to his superiors dated October 11, 2002, the CSIS security liaison officer (SLO) in Washington spoke of a trend they had noted lately that when the CIA or FBI cannot legally hold a terrorist subject, or wish a target questioned in a firm manner, they have them rendered to countries willing to fulfill that role. He said Mr. Arar was a case in point.
On October 10, 2002, Mr. Hooper stated in a memorandum: “I think the U.S. would like to get Arar to Jordan where they can have their way with him.” Mr. Arar’s whereabouts were unknown at the time.

The terminology here makes me sick - "questioned in a firm manner", "where they can have their way with him" They're talking about torture, but they don't appear to care. Neither, apparently, did the CIA.

Here we go again

U.S. pounces on export surge

. . . U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab this week accused Canada of shipping too much lumber to the United States, and hence violating a bilateral agreement aimed at ending the long-running dispute.
Ms. Schwab launched arbitration hearings, which Canadian officials insist they are confident of winning.

Yeah, well, since when has being wrong ever mattered to the elephant next door?

Learning from the Bush administration

Wondering why you missed the news?

Three weeks ago, late on a Friday night, the military released a report into the friendly-fire incident in which one Canadian soldier was killed and 30 others wounded after an American A-10A attack plane accidentally strafed members of the Royal Canadian Regiment at Ma'sum Ghar.

Shatner-watch

Last week, Canada's own William Shatner was in Chicago, of all places.
Nope, not at Yearly Kos. He was at Transvision 2007, which Roy informs us, will help us live forever provided we like doing it in silicone.
Personally, I have wanted to try some of the new silicone cookwear, which is "colorful, nonstick, stain-resistant, hard-wearing, cools quickly, and tolerates extremes of temperature" -- though perhaps it is a somewhat different kind of silicone that the Transvision people are proposing freezer-wrap my personality.
Anyway, back to William Shatner, who is, after all, Canada's own. A reporter for New City Chicago describes Shatner's appearance:

...as the minute hand moves a good half hour beyond Captain Kirk’s scheduled time of arrival, it’s clear that an excited anticipation has swept over the growing crowd. And while the audience only swells to fill half the small Field Museum auditorium, it’s still noticeably larger than for any of the day’s previous presentations. Finally, a speaker approaches the stage to introduce the man of the hour, and after a short, bizarre video featuring a "Star Trek"/James Bond mash-up to transhumanist lyrics like "We can live forever and make everything better!" Shatner takes the stage.
It doesn’t take long for his cool demeanor and slight self-deprecation to get the audience laughing, and it provides a welcome shot of levity into an otherwise far-too-serious afternoon. Whereas speakers like Philippe Van Nedervelde warned of futuristic Unabombers who would blow the planet to pieces with nanotech nukes—and then went on to propose the use of microscopic cameras to perpetually monitor the population and preemptively exterminate "dangerous" individuals—Shatner keeps it lighthearted (and a lot less horrifying). "Why should any of you care about a science-fiction series?" he asks the crowd before coming up with his own response: "This whole vision of the World Transhumanist Association…very Trek-like."

When you think about it, how many other keynote speakers could have come up with that connection?
And if reading this post made you regret missing the whole speech, maybe you need to take The Standardized Should I Stalk William Shatner Test.

Getting Iraq right was simple

I have to say, I am getting very impatient with the wailing and gnashing of teeth over how very, very hard it was, in the fall and winter of 2002-03, to make the right decision on Iraq and to realize that the US invasion of Iraq was a bad decision.
It was, I think, an easy decision -- for three reasons:
First, though Iraq's leader was a murderous meglomaniac, his regional ambitions were completely contained by economic sanctions and the no-fly zones. Hussein even agreed to let the UN weapons inspectors back. They couldn't find anything much.
Second, Iraq had not attacked the United States or Britain or Israel. No nation has any right to launch a preemptive war, not without compelling evidence of immediate threat. And that's what the United Nations was set up to evaluate -- thus we reach the third point. In spite of the worldwide sympathy and support given to the United States after 9/11 and in spite of all the diplomatic pressure exerted around the world by the US and Britain, not even a significant minority of the UN Security Council were willing to support war on Iraq. If you can't get the UN to support you, that's a pretty big clue that something is wrong.
Therefore, ipso facto and quid pro quo, the war was a bad idea.
Michael Ignatieff wrote an article in the New York Times exploring why he was wrong about Iraq, and both Brad DeLong and Matthew Yglesias have critiqued it.
Ignatieff first looks at why he made the mistake of wanting to invade Iraq. Turns out, it was all Harvard's fault:

In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

But Yglesias notes that many actual academics opposed the war. It was the neocon "scholars" of the AEI and the Weekly Standard who pushed it:

The war's foci of intellectual support were in the institutions of the conservative movement, and in the DC think tanks and the punditocracy where the war had a lot of non-conservative support. People with relevant academic expertise -- notably people who weren't really on the left politically -- were massively opposed to the war. To imply the reverse is to substantially obscure one of the main lessons of the war, namely that we should pay more attention to what regional experts think and give substantially less credence to the idea that think tankers are really "independent" of political machinations.

Delong takes issue with Ignatieff's definition of "academic" thinking:

I think what Michael Ignatieff is talking about is not an academic mode of thought but a student mode of thought--a not-too-bright-student mode of thought. A not-too-bright student achieves success by (a) figuring out which book on the syllabus is favored by the instructor, (b) taking that book to be the gospel, and (c) regurgitating large chunks of that book on the exams and in the papers.

Getting back to Ignatieff's article, he also asks why Bush made the mistake of wanting to invade Iraq. Turns out it was all the fault of his own ego:

I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.
Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound.
People with good judgment listen to warning bells within.

But the "warning bell" rang for me, and for the world, when the United Nations wouldn't support it. The United States and Britain should have listened. Chretien got it right:

The White House said Friday it wants Saddam Hussein ousted even if Baghdad disarms, a stand that immediately provoked a sharp response from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who said the United States can't just wander the world changing regimes it doesn't like.
Mr. Chrétien, on an official visit to Mexico, reacted with dismay when told of the White House's unflinching insistence on regime change. The demand was stressed by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who said the administration's goal is "disarmament and regime change."
"Myself, I think that the consequences can be very grave when we go for a change in regime," the Prime Minister said in French. "... When are we going to go elsewhere? Who's going to be next? ... This is a very dangerous concept."

Yes, and it still is.