What did I miss?

Turned into the week from hell at work -- sorry for the lack of posts.
One of these days, I'm going to retire and then western civilization will crumble, I'm sure.
So what could I have blogged about this week but didn't?
Well, of course, Teh Mulroney -- his fabled Irish charm is just so last century now, isn't it? Of course, money laundering and bribery and income tax evasion aren't particularly attractive traits.
Then there is the Great Isotope Shortage -- its interesing, isn't it, that the so-called Liberal hack is still employed while the actual Conservative hack is gone already.
And more election horserace coverage from the United States -- all this inside baseball stuff about their primaries is endlessly fascinating to Americans and just endless to the rest of us.
And speaking of baseball, the Mitchell report strikes me as just a little overblown -- and I get the impression that many sportswriters, who know BS when they hear it, are angry that the testimony of a batboy would be treated like gospel. Just goes to show that there are Curveball-types everywhere.

Leadership?

After ducking and bobbing and weaving and kowtowing to George Bush and trying to sabotage the whole conference, Canada grudgingly accepts Bali deal. Then our very own Fearless Freep, John Baird, demonstrated a firm grasp of up-is-downism when he said:

“There is a certain price of leadership, and I don't apologize for that.”

I guess the kind of leadership he is talking about is the lead-from-behind kind.

Cranky

I try to avoid being a cranky old fart who goes around muttering about the good old days, but does everyone else hate Firedoglake's new format as much as I do?
The main page is chock-full of blue "read more" boxes and half the time I can hardly find the bylines of the authors I like and the beautiful photos that used to appear on the main page and draw you into the articles have mostly disappeared and please, please save me from any more website "communities" that I have to "join" and...
Oh, time for a coffee, I guess ...

Shop 'til you drop

Whew! Its not easy, singlehandedly keeping the Canadian economy going. But I keep trying...
Time to relax with three of my favorite Christmas videos -- enjoy!
First, the funniest version of We Three Kings ever done:


Next, the bells do Carol of the Bells


Finally, the oddest couple who ever sang together, from the oddest Christmas Special ever made:

Great line of the day

Digby on presidential candidate "character" issues -- first, she recalls Bush saying the CIA shouldn't give an accused terrorist any pain medication for a broken leg, then she continues:

...there is ample evidence that the Republican candidates for president this time, in different ways, have all shown a similar penchant for a nasty, simple-minded meanness or outright sadism. But the press is ignoring that once again in favor of predigested GOP spin which explores in detail such character revelations as Clinton's "brittleness" and Obama's "aloofness" and Edwards' "inauthenticity." Never mind the people who say they want to start deporting massive numbers of people because they are all diseased criminals or those who want to "double Gitmo." As far as the press is concerned, their biggest problem is figuring out which ones are the most Christian.

Emphasis mine.

The operative word is "control"

Chet at Vanity Press highlights this story about a deaf man who was tased by police because he couldn't hear their commands.
I noted one aspect of this story that I thought very significant -- the police explained their taser use by saying "The first few minutes getting control of the scene are very, very important."
And that's the key word - " control".
If you look at the recent stories about use and abuse of Tasers, it seems to me that they are not being used anymore just for safety or protection, or to deal with hysterical psychotics, or because police felt endangered. Nope, now they're just being used to control a scene -- the doctrine seems to be, if someone doesn't respond immediately to being yelled at, then tase 'em! That'll teach 'em!

Great line of the day

Joe Biden:

“Are you telling me a president who is briefed every single morning, who is fixated on Iran, is not told back in August that the tentative conclusion of 16 intelligence agencies in the United States government said they had abandoned their effort for a nuclear weapon in ’03?” Biden said in a conference call with reporters.
“That’s not believable,” Biden added. “I refuse to believe that. If that’s true, he has the most incompetent staff in … modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”

Emphasis mine. Of course, its not necessarily an "either-or" situation -- could be that Bush WAS told AND that he is incompetent.
I liked this line of Biden's too:

Bush told reporters earlier Tuesday that he was made aware only last week of a National Intelligence Estimate that described the stop to the Iranian nuclear program.
“I love presidents who parse words,” Biden said in response. “The NIE didn’t get written until a week ago.”

The 'Shorter' version would be: Depends what the meaning of "lie" is.

Huh?

So now the US intelligence agencies think Iran shut down a nuclear weapons program four years ago. Well, sounds like that's that, doesn't it? Problem solved...
Not so fast -- here's the National Security Advisor's reaction:

Mr. Hadley said the latest intelligence estimate was ' positive news' and called for even tougher sanctions on Tehran. 'The international community has to turn up the pressure on Iran — with diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure — and Iran has to decide it wants to negotiate a solution,' he said.

Why, exactly, would "even tougher sanctions" be warranted? What on-going problem are they supposed to be negotiating" a solution" to?

NFB animation for free

I guess this happened a year ago, but I just found out about it -- the National Film Board has 70 of its best animated short films posted on line -- so go enjoy Blackfly, The Big Snit, The Cat Came Back, The Sweater, Wind, etc. etc.

Do you recognize this?

Winter is here with a vengeance I guess.
I was just talking to my daughter who is spending her first winter in Toronto and they woke up to about 3 feet of snow, and some fellows on her block were complaining this afternoon that the city hadn't plowed their street yet.
Yes, you read that correctly -- within 12 hours of the snowfall, the expectation was that their residential street would be plowed.
And it was, later this afternoon.
Boy, things are sure different "down east", aren't they?

Great line of the day

Dave at The Galloping Beaver writes about the Ontario Deputy Coroner who is going around to conferences on Taser's dime to promote Tasers and the "excited delirium" myth:

Dr. Cairns might also want to tell his next TASER International hosted conference how many people who supposedly suffered from "Excited Delirium" actually survived.
Or is it only a condition found in dead people?

Emphasis mine.

"Surgical" strikes

It has happened again -- NATO has mistakenly killed another 14 civilians in Afghanistan:

The victims of the episode on Monday night were all Afghans who were working for $5 a day, Mr. Jalali said. His company has been contracted to build 273 miles of road in 10 Afghan provinces, and the major contracts are with the American military.
Mr. Jalali said he thought the accident happened because the foreign military either lacked information or had incorrect information.

I keep reading all this stuff about "surgical strikes", promoting the idea that technology makes it possible to target only "the enemy" and not the good guys -- but then we see hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians getting killed.
Do any doctors actually perform surgery with wild, broad, and bloody swipes of the scalpel?
Reminds me of the Doc in Logan's Run:

Henry Luce is rolling in his grave

Time magazine has flubbed it.
I remember how shocked I was when I found out that the United States government couldn't recognize communist China until Time magazine publisher Henry Luce died.
That's how powerful Time magazine once was.
Now, they can't even get a smear campaign started properly.
The idea, I think, was to tarnish the FISA legislation now being considered by the US Congress -- so that the telcom companies can avoid legal responsibility for tapping thousands of phone calls without warrants -- by promoting the libel that the legislation would "protect terrorists".
But a couple of bloggers, Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Singel, have spotlighted this blatant, stupid lie and forced Time to disavow it, as well as hammering any other media outlet that picks it up -- the Chicago Tribune has also had to run a correction.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

"Politically Correct"

Chet writes about the post-modern and Politically Correct "movement" which actually wasn't much of anything, really -- just played one on TV, so to speak.

...the reality of the whole "PC" thing depends on where you were and when... There really were no common experiences of this stuff as far as I can tell, just scattered individual ones. What seems fairly certain to me, at any rate, is that while pomo and PC were not in and of themselves imaginary, the idea that there were actual movements based on these things was imaginary, and was used as a fear tactic by right-wing politicians and journalists for a surprising length of time.

That was my own experience, too -- of course, I went to university in the Stone Age, so this discussion brings to mind that old pre-modernist Shakespeare, who described "a custom more honour'd in the breach than the observance" -- that seems to describe "Politically Correct" rather well.

Rider Nation

The boys won it! And its been a long time coming:

"We have a saying in Saskatchewan," said Roughriders offensive lineman Gene Makowsky. "Tough times don't last. Tough people do."

Kerry Joseph gives his mother the game ball.


Johnson stepped up --his three key interceptions won the game.


And Fantuz was fantastic.
We heard it was being called the Banjo Bowl, but I don't mind -- some banjo! some bowl!


Saskboy has The Night Before Grey Cup.