This is really neat!

From Cute Overload! :)

If the link doesn't work, go to Youtube here

Funniest lead ever

Read this lead sentence:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed not to let politics dictate his government's decision on the future of the Afghanistan war on Friday ....

And laugh your ass off.

Smart-ass answers

My husband got these in an email today:

THE 6 BEST SMART ASS ANSWERS OF 2006

It was mealtime during a flight on American Airlines. “Would you like dinner?” the flight attendant asked John, seated in front. “What are my choices?” John asked. “Yes or no,” she replied.

A flight attendant was stationed at the departure gate to check tickets. As a man approached, she extended her hand for the ticket and he opened his trench coat and flashed her. Without missing a beat, she said, “Sir, I need to see your ticket not your stub.”

A lady was picking through the frozen turkeys at the grocery store but she couldn’t find one big enough for her family. She asked a stock boy, “Do these turkeys get any bigger?” The stock boy replied, “No ma’am, they’re dead.”

The cop got out of his car and the kid who was stopped for speeding rolled down his window. “I’ve been waiting for you all day,” the cop said. The kid replied, “Yeah, well I got here as fast as I could.” When the cop finally stopped laughing, he sent the kid on his way without a ticket.

A truck driver was driving along on the freeway. A sign comes up that reads, “Low Bridge Ahead.” Before he knows it, the bridge is right ahead of him and he gets stuck under the bridge. Cars are backed up for miles. Finally, a police car comes up. The cop gets out of his car and walks to the truck driver, puts his hands on his hips and says, “Got stuck, huh?” The truck driver says, “No, I was delivering this bridge and ran out of gas.”

A college teacher reminds her class of tomorrow’s final exam. “Now class, I won’t tolerate any excuses for you not being here tomorrow. I might consider a nuclear attack or a serious personal injury, illness, or a death in your immediate family, but that’s it!” A smart-ass guy in the back of the room raised his hand and asked, “What would you say if tomorrow I said I was suffering from complete and utter sexual exhaustion?” The entire class is reduced to laughter and snickering. When silence is restored, the teacher says, “Well, I guess you’d have to write the exam with your other hand.”

Asymmetric warfare

I have a prediction: the next thing we're going to hear from the Harper government is how the suffering by these torture victims, like the suicides in Guantanamo, is actually just another example of asymmetric warfare so that the Taleban can demoralize the Canadian people!
First, the Harper government wanted us to believe these prisoners weren't really being tortured at all. Alisonwrites:

...we'll just pause here for a moment to recall that Harper and Stockwell Day have both stood up in our Parliament and insisted that the reason detainees - hell, let's just call them prisoners from now on, shall we? - claim to be tortured is because the Taleban trains them to do so to trick us.
One guy had no toenails left. That's really quite the trick.
Dion and Layton were slagged as traitors in the HoC for even suggesting that the allegations be looked into.

Now, when the stories of torture have been substantiated, the Harper government is wrapping itself in the flag to avoid answering questions about the prisoners:

...Lawyers for human-rights groups are fighting that argument in one of two court cases against the federal government. One quipped Thursday that the government was conflating national security and national embarrassment.
Graham repeatedly sprang to his feet in objection as human-rights lawyers attempted to ask a military witness – Brig.-Gen. Andre Deschamps – about the detainees.
Some of the questions that remained unanswered Thursday:
– Where are the detainees?
– Who has them?
– How many are there?
– How many are actually enemy combatants and how many are civilians who have helped the Taliban?
– How many have disappeared?

No doubt the government is protecting us by not sharing these unpleasant and uncomfortable details -- if, indeed, they actually know any of these answers. Dave sums up what this whole miserable story shows the Canadian people about our government.:

They are right-wing authoritarians and they would rather chew off their own arms than admit a mistake.
And they expect us to believe them when they tell us how things are going in Afghanistan.

A willing collaboration

Over at Antiwar.com, journalist Jon Elmer gives us a round-up of Canada's involvement in the Iraq War: Canadian General Takes Senior Command Role in Iraq

. . . Brigadier-General Nicolas Matern, a Special Forces officer and former commander of Canada's elite counterterrorism unit, will serve as deputy to Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin III, incoming commander of the 170,000-strong Multi National Corps-Iraq beginning in mid-February.
Matern is the third Canadian general to serve in the command group of Operation Iraqi Freedom. . .
42 Canadian tanks and armored personnel carriers left Edmonton last week destined for Fort Bliss, Texas to participate in pre-deployment training exercises with the US Army before a summer rotation in Afghanistan. A Department of National Defense press release characterized the training as "massive," with more than 3,000 Canadian soldiers taking part in Exercise Southern Bear.. . .
The April 2007 Iraq Reconstruction Report lists Canada as the fourth largest importer of Iraqi oil. Industry Canada records that total Canadian imports from Iraq have risen from 1.06 billion dollars in 2002 to 1.61 billion dollars in 2006, making Iraq second only to Saudi Arabia as a Middle Eastern source for Canadian imports. . .
In 2003, Canada pledged 300 million dollars in aid and reconstruction in Iraq. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has helped train more than 30,000 Iraqi security forces in neighboring Jordan, and has had top level advisors operating within the Iraqi interior ministry. As well, Canadian frigates continue to operate alongside the US aircraft carriers in the Arabian Gulf that are a primary staging platform for bombing raids in Iraq.

And here's some interesting tidbits about Brigadier General Matern:

Matern's Special Forces background is seen as an asset. "He comes in with a unique set of skills," Col. Bill Buckner of the 18th Airborne told the Ottawa Citizen. "We're the home of the airborne and the special operating forces, so he fits in very nicely to this warrior ethos we have here."
Matern was a commander in the secretive commando unit, Joint Task Force-2, before being promoted to deputy commander of the newly created Canadian Special Operations Forces Command.. . .

Its startling to see how deeply involved we really are with this immoral war.

Why should they have all the fun?

So the Bush administration lied 935 times to justify sending American troops to war in Iraq.
Now I guess it's our turn, as the Harper administration tries to justify keeping Canadian troops at war in Afghanistan.

Laughing her right into the White House

The guy who started this once worked for Richard Nixon.



He thinks it just so witty.
He's going to print this on a bunch of t-shirts and sell them. Ha!
And if enough yahoos are photographed during the Republican convention wearing these t-shirts, then every woman in America will vote for Hillary, and for every other Democrat she can find.

Welcome to Gitmo North

Alison catches us up on the newest cross-border initiative, the "Server in the Sky". Admirably, she refrains from usint the cliched term "Big Brother". But I will not, because that is what it is.
Not to worry, the FBI says the intention of exchanging all sorts of personal data on citizens is "to catch the worst of the worst".
Now, where have I heard that term before?

Great line of the day

Digby refutes the new media meme that Democrats who vote for Hillary must be racists:

It's not all that hard to figure out that older voters would vote for the person who is running on "experience" just as it's not surprising that younger voters would vote for the man who promised "change." . . .
The people who don't like blacks are in the party where there are none.

Emphasis mine.

Reading the tea leaves

I'm not so sanguine about Nick Burns leaving the State Department as Steve Clemmons and West End Bound.
Burns was apparently one of the strongest voices against Cheney's plan for war with Iran. And he's leaving voluntarily? I don't believe it. Combined with the overinflated Strait of Hormuz dust-up, and Defense secretary Gates acting hard-done-by and the continuing promotion of the idea that the Iraq War has been won, I'm starting to wonder whether ducks are being lined up here.
Bush and Cheney have only one more year to save the world.

I read the news today, oh boy

Well, I see New Brunswick has now closed the barn door. As a parent, I was so angry last week when I realized that people knew about how dangerous these vans are, they've known for years, yet instead of hiring a bus and a driver for these after school game treks, instead of billeting kids overnight, or instead of playing during the day on the weekends, the school let the coach drive along a slick, dark highway in the middle of the night in the middle of the winter -- all for the sake of saving a few bucks "for the children".

Here's a scandal waiting to go boom!: Bad results kill drug studies

Of the 74 studies that started for the 12 antidepressants, 38 produced positive results for the drug. All but one of those studies were published.
However, when it came to the 36 studies with negative or questionable results, as assessed by the FDA, only three were published and another 11 were turned around and written as if the drug had worked.

So are half of the research studies for new drugs actually poorly designed? Or were the researchers prevented from publishing by the terms of their research contracts? Either way, its outrageous.

And let me get this straight -- its not the torture of Canadian citizens itself that is wrong, its the document that labels the US as a nation that tortures people. Thanks, Maxime, for clearing that up for us.

So the United States is trying to get people spending money by sending them money to spend. Dare I say, doesn't that seem sorta socialist? So why don't they just provide health care -- that would save people hundreds of dollars every single month?

And looking at the Republican turnouts in the South Carolina primaries in 2000 and in 2008, a difference of something like 150,000 people, one could conclude that "none of the above" came in first this time.

We coulda been a contender!

Kent Austin is gone and as much as everybody wishes him well and all that, what I also say is, damn it all anyway!
We needed him a lot more than Ole Miss did.
We may be a small pond, but here he was a pretty big fish. At Ole Miss, not so much. For someone who hasn't played ball in the US for 20 years, I have some doubts about this as a career move. But what do I know about football administration anyway -- if he wanted to get to the NFL someday, it wasn't going to happen for him here. And I guess the time to offer a CFL coach a job in Mississippi is in January.
So Austin goes from running the show here:


to not running the show here:


So next November instead of looking forward to the Grey Cup, Austin will be looking forward to the Egg Bowl.

Well, then, do it yourself

Yes, I read the LA Times story about how the United States knows how to do it right in Afghanistan, while Canada and Britain and the Netherlands are doing it wrong, and I knew it was self-serving crap.
What I didn't know was WHY it was crap -- had to wait for Dave to enlighten us. And he does -- Gates knows nothing of counter-insurgency. MacKay supports him.

Gates was throwing a temper tantrum because things in Afghanistan are little better now than they were in 2002. What he won't acknowledge is that the fault lays squarely with the Bush administration for screwing up the job in the first place.
MacKay, instead of demanding that Gates come out and clarify his words, sucked up to him because there's nothing more important to a Conservative than a Republican.
There is something interesting out of this little US-spits-on-allies episode though.
Apparently all the sunshine the Harperites continually attempt to blow up everyone's ass about how so much progress is being made in Afghanistan is pure crap.
If the US SecDef is concerned that NATO forces don't have a grip on counter-insurgency operations it's because the insurgency is alive and growing.
That MacKay is a liar and remarkably stupid isn't worth getting into. But Gates needs to be taken to the woodshed. The reason a counter-insurgency operation is so difficult to mount is because that's not what is being fought. The Bush administration never did secure Afghanistan properly. The distraction with Iraq robbed the Afghanistan occupation of the necessary troops to do the job.
And as for not knowing how to deal with an insurgency, I would suggest Gates and his pet puppy MacKay do a little light reading. I do believe the British wrote the book on counter-insurgency operations.

[cough - Northern Ireland - cough]

Great line of the day

Glenn Greenwald on journalisming:

Ponder how much better things would be if establishment journalists -- in response to being endlessly lied to and manipulated by political officials and upon witnessing extreme lawbreaking and corruption at the highest levels of our government -- were able to muster just a tiny fraction of the high dudgeon, petulant offense, and melodramatic outrage that comes pouring forth whenever their 'reporting' is criticized.

Oh, such a special little province!

Well, isn't that nice? Harper thinks we're a winning province -- not a bunch of losers anymore.
Why do I feel like I've just been patted on the head and given a lollypop?