It is to laugh

After my day down in the dumps yesterday, today's news is something to laugh at.
First we find out that the FBI in San Francisco thought they could find terrorists by tracking Falafel sales.
Then we find out that the Swiftboat authors are suing their publisher. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch, could it? As Jane Hamsher says, this is simply awash with irony.
Kevin Drum has finished his Golden Wingnut Award contest and Hinderaker won!
And what IS it with Liberal politicians and golf? Remember this? And this? Well, the Gazetteer has the newest scoop.
And then I found this, too:

Great line of the day

Digby just quoted another Chris Matthews' Teh Stupid, and then in the Comments, Michael Scott says:

Tweety, Pumpkinhead, et al. make Ted Baxter look like Edward R. Murrow.

Ha!

Outrage fatigue

I've reached some sort of nadir of outrage today
First, it looks as though the Saskatchewan [ie Conservative] Party will win big in the provincial election on Wednesday, which will be ballyhooed as a victory for the right wing and which actually will be nothing of the kind. Saskatchewan isn't turning to the right, but too many of us are just tired of a government that can't seem to come up with any exciting or even mildly interesting ideas anymore. The NDP delivered a flyer to our house today showing the disembodied head of Brad Wall floating over the prairie next to the disembodied head of Grant Devine, the Great Pumpkin meets the Wizard of Oz.
Then I read Dave's You are now entering the Reform Agenda, about why we should be outraged at Harper's decision that he can't be bothered going to bat for Canadians he doesn't like:

...the moral relativism now being employed by Harper and Day ... not only violates the rule of Canadian law, but makes Canadians expendable if the circumstances do not fit with the Harper/Day agenda - an agenda which, under a Conservative Party banner, they have been trying to camouflage.

So we'll all be waving bye-bye to Mark Emery, Michelle Rainey, Greg Williams,Omar Khadr, and anybody else of whom our new moral overlords disapprove.
Then I read Glenn Greenwald summing up the most recent Bush Administration outrages:

. . . we're at the point where a belief in due process, press freedoms and basic restraints on government and military power demonstrate a hatred for America and its freedoms. A belief in those principles constitutes "siding with the enemy." Only by joyously affirming the power of the Government to detain people for life with no charges, to break laws enacted by Congress, to spy on Americans with no warrants, to torture detainees, and to arrest war journalists and hold them for years can one prove one's loyalty to the country.

And finally I read a terrible story at Sadly, No! about how a bunch of Free Republic posters stalked a dying voting rights activist -- and turns out this was only one of several stalking incidents of this type.
All I can ask is this: what kind of people are they?
Or perhaps Winston Churchill's question is a better one:

What kind of people do they think we are?

Because Churchill continued:

Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to preserve against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

Remember remember the 5th of November

Scott Horton describes the new view of Guy Fawkes.

Great line of the day

TBogg writes about Blackwater:

. . . it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to foresee a future when Blackwater becomes the go-to company for a government that requires plausible deniability (nudge nudge...say no more) . . . imagine if you will, a Third World country with an "insurgent problem" that can be sufficiently labeled as Communist or this Millennium's flavor of the day: Islamofascist. For a price, Blackwater will be there to train your secret police in counter-intelligence operations, provide logistical support, weaponry, manpower, and yes, that special something that falls short of the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function.
Or not.
Blackwater is going to be the Wal-Mart of Death.

Emphasis mine.

Great post of the day

Others here and there have said this too, but not so succinctly as Matthew Yglesias:

As long as we're all worried about Hillary Clinton and the 'gender card' we do realize that about 75 percent of the 2004 race between John "I've killed people" Kerry and George "no you're a windsurfing frenchman" Bush was a series of efforts to play the gender card, right?
It's actually stunning how much of the erstwhile foreign policy debate is primarily an argument about the size of the debaters' dicks.

Shorter

Shorter Conservative house leader Peter Van Loan:

"By forcing Mulroney to pay the income tax he owed on the Schreiber payments, it is Canadian taxpayers who have suffered for the Liberal vendetta against Mulroney!"

Shorter Harper:

"If you force us to hold an inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber payments, then we will also have to question something or other that Liberals did that otherwise, of course, we would shut up about!"

Sorry

Sorry for the lack of blogging -- as well as a cold, I now also have cellulitis in my leg so the doctor tells me I will have to spend several days resting, lying down.
As Nelson says, smell you later!

Youtube du jour

From Cute Overload!:) via Enchidne:

Great line of the day

From John Cole:

Jules Crittenden, journamamamalist and serious person, attempts to cut Glenn Greenwald down to size . . . by attacking Glenn’s website art. And sadly, I am serious.
If the right-wing meltdown continues any faster, I predict that by the end of the week, prominent right-wing bloggers will be standing in public, unshowered, singing re-written verses of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” with silly insults (Glenn has the cooties, Glenn has the cooties) wearing only Hello Kitty diapers, an American Flag, and an Islamofascism Awareness Week sticker all the while balancing orange traffic cones on their heads.

Emphasis mine.

Protests

I have an awful cold so I haven't had the energy for much blogging. Here are the photos from yesterday's Iraq war protests in a large number of US cities.
And if you are cynical about anti-war protests, well, join the club -- even the march organizers aren't pretending that a protest will stop the war. But NOT protesting will certainly not end the war either. At Alternet, march organizer Leslie Cagan says this:

...she understands the frustrations that have come from people who've been marching and opposing this war for years with little positive response from our government. "Some people are fed up with protests but are even more fed up with the war," said Cagan. "We have few vehicles to express our opposition, and we need to use every one we have. We'll never know the lives we may have saved or the destruction we may have prevented that resulted from our previous anti-war protests. But I do know that the minute we stop, things will get worse."

Los Angeles:

The Los Angeles march was led by Vietnam War activist Ron Kovic.

San Fransisco:




Chicago:




Philadelphia:


New York:




And in Seoul:

Great line of the day

From an email received by CNN's Jack Cafferty:

"Remember the 60's?" wrote one Baby Boomer. "Well, they're back. Only this time it's not a decade. It's the age on our driver's licenses."

Hate-typing

I had not heard of a case like this before:

A Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has ordered a Calgary woman to stop posting hate messages against minority groups on a U.S.-based white supremacist website. The commission fined Jessica Beaumont $1,500 for posting messages that hold Jews, gays, lesbians, Chinese, blacks, aboriginals and other non-whites up for hatred or contempt.

Oh, can't you just hear the radio shows on Monday as they chatter about this?
While I can also sympathize with the argument that hate speech laws could be used to silence dissent, thus far they have been used to society's betterment, I think -- and anything that might cause a bigot to think twice before posting rants about Jews "driving White Canadians into extinction", even in the privacy of their own home, can't be all bad.

Election update

I'm starting to think that the question of this election is not going to be how many seats will the NDP lose, but rather, how many seats will they keep?
So far Brad Wall is doing an excellent job of keeping the more shall-we-say 'controversial" Sask Party ideologues out of the public eye -- you know, the ones who don't think crown corporations should be profitable, who reportedly once called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms "garbage" , who think TILMA is just a great idea, who don't support the PA pulp mill deal, etc.
The Sask Party platform is full of pointless micromanagement -- they're going to "work with school boards" to "increase healthy food options in schools" -- as well as pointless union-busting -- they're going to set up a "Premier's Council on Health Care Workplace Issues" which is supposed to discuss issues like the ratio of full-time to part-time staff and other "work-related issues that affect health care providers." Oh, and they're going to "work with the federal government" to "secure a Saskatchewan Energy Accord modeled on the Atlantic Accord, or its financial equivalent" -- yeah, that'll happen.
Meanwhile, here's the NDP presiding over the best Saskatchewan economy in the last quarter century, and they brought us Al Gore and the Rolling Stones and the Junos and the Geminis -- and they don't get no respect. The Sask Party frames the NDP as tired and old, and the NDP platform comes across that way -- when a party has been in power 16 years, it can't really blame its predecessor anymore and it doesn't really have a good answer to the question of why they didn't do it already?

Great line of the day

From Chris Floyd, writing about increasing so-called 'collateral damage' in Iraq:

...For what the air campaign, and the "offensives into neighborhoods," are really saying is brutally frank:
"We invaded your country under knowingly false pretenses . . . We destroyed your infrastructure, we destroyed your society, we destroyed your history, we enthroned extremist militias to rule over you, we tortured your sons and fathers in the same hellhole that Saddam used, we killed a million of your people and drove millions more from their homes. And we intend to stay here for as long as we like, in the vast 'enduring bases' we are building on your land. Now if you don't accept this, if you keep shooting at us and trying to make us leave, then we will go on bombing your families in their homes, we will go on killing your women and children, until you stop."

Emphasis mine.