Thoughts on a scandal

They're trying really hard, but it's getting increasingly difficult for conservative commentators in Saskatchewan to avoid blasting the stupidities of the provincial Sask Party and the federal Conservative Party -- how much kinder gentler thousand points of light spin can they construct?
In today's Star Phoenix column, John Gormley did manage to insert a gratuitous swipe against the NDP for "allegedly" finding the tape and while he ended with a Limbaugh-esk flourish against Pat Atkinson's so-called "drive-by smear" of Brad Wall aka Chester -- as though the scandal was the fault of the people who revealed the tape rather than the people who made it -- really, I didn't think his heart was in it.
Someday soon, he's just not going to be able to stand it anymore -- someday soon, I'm going to tune into his radio show and hear him thundering "What were they thinking? How dare they? Are they ignorant or arrogant or both?" and he's going to be talking about the federal Conservatives or the provincial Sask Party, and I will just have to pull over and call.
When it comes to Tom Lukiwski's homophobic slur, I agree with Michelle Hugli's commentary. To imply it was all just youthful immaturity doesn't cut it, considering he was 41 years old at the time:

Lukiwski has a lot more to do to get beyond this. Like answer the question: WHY do these comments not reflect who you are today? What's changed? And if he can't answer those questions, then that's an answer in itself.

And while Brad Wall's Ukrainian farmer bit will tarnish his image, and deservedly so, I thought the more revealing and meaningful part of the tape was its anti-union attitude, for which no elected person has apologized. Says Larry Hubich:

"Clearly this government's labour relations strategy is based in a deeply held, irrational dislike of unions and their leadership."

Yeah, that about sums it up, I think.

Priceless!

A great story from the Rev:

Todd and his father were avid outdoorsmen . . . One weekend he and his father had been out on an early morning duck hunt and had bagged several birds. As the junior partner in the operation, Todd, then about 17, was stuck with the chore of cleaning the ducks. So he dug in, plucking the feathers, lopping off the heads and feet and gutting the half dozen or so birds.
When a knock came at the front door, he went to answer, hunting knife in hand and spattered with gore from the quarry he was preparing for the table. . . . It was a pair of middle aged ladies with the inevitable copies of The Watchtower.
Being a staunch agnostic and always ready for a good argument, Todd flung open the door and barked "What the hell do you want?" . . . Time, Todd told me later, slowed to the pace of molasses dripping uphill in February.
He stared at the Jehovah Witnesses. The Jehovah Witnesses stared back at him, briefly.
Mindful of his bloodspattered shirt and the big, bloody knife in his hand, Todd simply grimaced and the servants of Jehovah decided that it would be a good idea to give their witness elsewhere, immediately, if not sooner, and decamped in considerable haste.
Hilarity ensued. And ten minutes later when the police cruiser arrived, Todd, his sister, his father and his next-door neighbor who had allowed the panicked Witnesses to use his telephone were still sitting on the front porch roaring and holding their sides. When the constabulary were given the full picture, they were hard pressed not to take part in the merriment.
The Witnesses never darkened Todd's door again.

I won't be able to answer the door again without thinking of this.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving blog

Today's Nelson Moment is this one - Blog loses Wall backing over comments:

Premier Brad Wall distanced the Saskatchewan Party from a popular right-wing blog Tuesday over controversial comments posted about inner city Saskatoon.
Wall told reporters that the Saskatchewan Party would remove from its own website an endorsement of Wall from Saskatchewan-based Kate McMillan of smalldeadanimals.com.
Saskatchewan Party MLAs have referenced the website approvingly in the legislature in the past but Wall said that would likely not occur in the future.

Well, I should hope not. But little does he know that the winged monkey hordes have now been let loose. Here's what she said that was so offensive:

Following the government's cancellation of $8 million in funding for the Station 20 West project in Saskatoon's core, McMillan posted on her blog suggesting "economic stimuli" for the area to get a private sector grocery store.
These included "put the cap back on the used needle . . . failing that, share it with your friends. It's a quicker solution to your problem anyway."
She also suggested "cross your legs" and "put down the spray can." McMillan later posted "try not vandalizing every business still standing in your neighbourhood, try not selling your ass up and down the street in front of the doors. Try parenting your sticky-fingered brats."

Now, that's a bit much for somebody who doesn't even live in Saskatoon. So please feel free to never to come into the city again --
Saskatoon doesn't need this kind of attitude. The Star Phoenix story continues:

Wall said the comments were "beyond the pale."
"Those are intolerant and unacceptable remarks," he told reporters, adding that the government has a firm commitment to the province's core urban neighbourhoods despite its reservations about the Station 20 West project.
The comments -- and the Sask. Party's relationship to the blog -- was raised in a member's statement by the Opposition NDP Tuesday.
Saskatoon Massey Place MLA Cam Broten praised Wall for his actions.
"The comments were quite hurtful, quite ugly," he told reporters. "We recognize that people have a right to free speech but comments like that don't need to be given more credibility by having an association with the premier of the province."
McMillan, who is not a member of the Saskatchewan Party, said her comments were "hyperbolic" but she stood by them and believes many provincial residents share her opinions.
She said Wall's condemnation of her comments on Tuesday were "predictable" given "today's politically correct atmosphere."

Well, maybe your friends still think Saskatchewan is just Mississippi North, but everyone else has moved on. Well, except for David Ahenakew, who feels the same way as Kate does, but about different people.

If a protest happens and the media doesn't cover it...

When we were talking the other day about the Dirty Fucking Hippies and the Vietnam War protests, my son asked me why there hadn't been protests against the Iraq War.
I said there had been -- 30 million people, the biggest anti-war protests in history -- but the media in the United States and Britain just mostly ignored them. The media had to ignore them because the protests just didn't fit into the comforting media narrative about the (then) imminent Iraq War, about how absolutely justified the war was and how the leaders had to protect the people from those awful weapons and how the protests really had no legitimacy because they were just a bunch of commies.
And now Media Bloodhound reports that Big Media is STILL ignoring these protests.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is listening, did it make any sound?

Nobody does it better

Flying penguins found by BBC, who also reported on the spaghetti harvest story fifty years ago.

Great photo of the day

The photo shows a surrender in Iraq. But its Iraqi police in Baghdad, and they're surrendering to the Mahdi Army (Al Sadr's militia.)
Somehow, I don't think this is quite what the Bush administration had in mind.
(From Juan Cole Informed Comment)

Great post of the day

Robert Parry writes about the madness of US media and government group-think:

. . . In the news media, there were specials, including a much-touted PBS Frontline two-parter on “Bush’s War” which followed the mainstream line of mostly accepting the Bush administration’s good intentions while blaming the disaster on policy execution – a lack of planning, bureaucratic rivalries, rash decisions and wishful thinking . . .
Remaining outside the frame of mainstream US debate was any serious examination of the war’s fundamental illegality....
The cumulative effect of this willful conformity and this informal censorship has been to engender a form of collective madness at the decision-making levels of the US government -- and within the upper echelons of the news media.
But it is a flexible form of insanity in which reality is alternatively banished – as it was in the early phases of the Iraq War, from WMD "mushroom clouds" through "Mission Accomplished" – and then is brought in for retooling when matters get too far out of control, when the jarring gap between the official line and the truth starts to destabilize the national political consensus.
In listening to the measured tones of the Frontline narration – not to mention the well-dressed ex-government officials and the well-spoken mainstream journalists – I was left with the feeling that a new synthetic “reality” was being lowered in to replace the older discredited version.
It was as if the bloody madness that President Bush inflicted on the people of Iraq – aided and abetted by many witting and unwitting American accomplices – was being drained of its crimson hue and stripped of its human horrors.
Forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead and maimed. Forget the innumerable lives destroyed and the millions displaced. Forget the bizarre forms of torture at Abu Ghraib and the widespread mistreatment of detainees at other Iraqi prisons.
After all, we were being told, the war’s architects were honorable and reasonable men and women who were trying to do the right thing, but sadly they were undermined by bureaucratic inertia, back-biting and, yes, incompetence. It was just one big SNAFU.
But, with a few changes here and there – a new general or two, a tweaked counter-insurgency strategy, some more US soldiers and a bit more patience – everything will work out just fine.
No need for national guilt. No need for accountability. No reason to purge the editorial offices of leading newspapers and TV networks. No reason to talk about impeachment or war-crimes tribunals for committing the "supreme" crime against world peace. No need for any of that.

I have seen more and more of this kind of analysis lately, I think, as more people edge toward the truth, as the unthinkable becomes thinkable, as more appear to realize that the invasion of Iraq was simply wrong.

Driving

I read somewhere that there is one belief that unites all Canadians -- we all think we are above-average drivers!
Not true, of course (except for me).
Saskboy found Zack's rant about Saskatoon drivers:

If you are making a right turn under one of these signs it means you have your own lane to turn into. DO NOT STOP. I can't emphasize this one enough. . . . Perhaps this is a new sign to Saskatoon but sweet zombie jesus it is not difficult to understand. It means shut up and drive. Do not stop and think about it just go. Be kind to the people behind you and just drive. I don't know how I can make this any simpler. . . .
This brings us to merging. For fucks sake don't stop at the end of a merge lane. You are asking to be removed from this world by a fast moving truck. Also do not merge way below the speed of traffic. This seems to be difficult for anyone over 25. You NEED to be going the same speed as the faster traffic in order to safely and smoothly merge into it. Again this is not a complex concept. Learn to love your gas pedal and just put the hammer down.

Tell it, Zack!

Is this what you voted for?

What a stupid, short-sighted decision:

Earlier this week, the Saskatchewan Party government admitted it would no longer hand over the $8 million once intended for the $12-million to-$14 million development in Saskatoon's inner city. The NDP had approved the funds for Station 20 West, which would house a low-cost dental clinic to train senior dentistry students, a medical clinic, public health and counselling clinics, a co-operative grocery store and other community organizations.

And given all the Sask Party's fumbling around about how much the project would have cost and how much had been raised, it was quite obvious that nobody in the Sask Party cabinet had actually studied the project at all or talked to anyone about it before they canceled it. Somebody told them it was just a grocery co-op.
They put about as much thought into this one as they did into the cancellation of the pulp mill deal.
Here's the funniest line in all of the news stories:

Withdrawing financial support for the project was not a political decision, [Health minister] McMorris insists.

Oh, sure.
"An NDP idea? Gotta kill it!"
They just couldn't stand to admit that an NDP project was a good idea.
UPDATE: Ah ha! Maybe it was a west-side landlord who is the source of the complaint. Wall is quoted in one of the news stories with this justification of canceling the project:

"...we'd be competing with grocery stores, competing with others who are already renting now to community clinics in the area"

Now, everybody knows the complaint about 'competing with grocery stores' in the area is ridiculous because there has not been a grocery story in the area for more than a decade. But there are landowners who rent to other businesses -- did one of them get worried that his tenants would move? Did one of them decide that, instead of fixing up his property so he could rent to someone else, it would be easier just to phone up the boys in Regina to get the project killed? The Star Phoenix should check out who owns the property whose tenants would have moved to Station 20.

Great post of the day

Via Sideshow, I found this great post by Lance Mannion on liberals and reality:

...one of Liberalism's virtues is that it is pragmatic, not ideological or even idealistic. Liberalism is and has been about recognizing and adapting to, and when called for making corrections to, reality, that is to the world as it actually is and to people as they actually are. Most of Liberalism's successes over time have required making people see what is really going on, as opposed to what they wish was going on or what they are being told by the ruling class is going on. Liberalism is first and foremost an insistence on freeing people from their own deluded and demented thinking. It is a demand that people give up their prejudices and their vain and self-centered illusions and deal with the facts of life.
One of the facts of life is that times change. Conservativism is based on the belief that this is always a bad thing and must be resisted when it can't be ignored. In other words, conservativism is a lot of wishful thinking.
But the American Right is not conservative. It is reactionary. It doesn't want to deny that times change. It wants to turn back time. Conservativism is a mild delusion. Reaction is an outright madness . . . I don't know exactly why the News Media Elites have decided to treat this madness as a legitimate point of view, but they have, and since they have they have put themselves in the bind of sounding "liberal" every time an actual fact escapes their lips.

Read it all.

Spike and Chester are at it again

Well, here's some news: Harper prefers cordial premiers.
Oh, I'm sure he does.
Whenever I read a news story about how chummy Harper and Wall are, the image that comes to mind is this one:

Shorter

Shorter Hillary:

Well, what straw can I grasp at today?

This is getting embarrassing.
I want to continue to respect Hillary, win or lose, but she's making it increasingly difficult.

"Darkening shadows"

This is Cheney's newest ominous-sounding term when he is trying to make ominous noises about how everyone he doesn't like in the Middle East -- Iran and Syria and Hamas - are really to blame for why things aren't going very well there. But the term is a useful one for recent happenings.
Today's news started with the story that Iran was the designated goat for yesterday's Green Zone attack -- though now they've walked that story back and are just blaming the attack on "Iranian-backed Shiite militia factions".
Associated Press is quoting Al-Sadr militia commanders as saying they are getting weapons from Iran:

The Mahdi Army, believed to number up to 60,000 fighters, was battered by U.S. troops in a series of battles in 2004. But the militia appears to have regrouped and, according to commanders, is ready to respond to "provocations."
According to the three commanders, the militia has received fresh supplies of weapons from Iran — contradicting repeated Iranian denials that it is supporting Iraqi militias.
The weapons, the commanders said, included rockets, armor-piercing roadside bombs and anti-aircraft guns that could be effective against low-flying helicopters.
Additionally, they said an infusion of cash from Iran has been spent on new communication centers equipped with computers with Internet connections, fax machines and mobile satellite telephones.

Now, the militias could point to internal Iraqi politics as the reason why they need all this stuff. But certainly it could also be used to attack US troops.
Which seems to be what the US has in mind again -- now that they've passed the 4,000 milestone, what's another thousand? They probably can't possibly reach the 5,000 mark before the election in November anyway.
After a year where America bought itself some peace in Iraq by paying off their Iraq enemies, the US now seems to have started up hostilities once again.

The latest rumblings in the Mahdi Army are provoked by the belief that the Americans and their Iraqi allies abused the cease-fire by conducting raids that have targeted hundreds of al-Sadr's backers and aides.
Militia commanders told The Associated Press they viewed the arrests as a move by Shiite rivals to deny them a prominent political voice. They also cited al-Sadr's statement this month that his cease-fire did not preclude his followers from self defense [which] gave them the nod to take on their adversaries . . .
"They don't seem to realize that the Sadrist trend is like a volcano," Abdul-Hadi al-Mohammedawi told worshippers Friday in Kufa, referring to the Iraqi government and its U.S. backers. "If it explodes, it will crush their rotten heads."
Leaders of the Sadrist movement are calling on supporters to protest the arrests by closing their shops and businesses.
The call was heeded Monday in at least two predominantly Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad . . .
Police said Mahdi Army militiamen have also issued general strike orders in three other areas of southwestern Baghdad and in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of the capital.
"This civil disobedience may be called for in the rest of Baghdad and maybe in southern provinces if the government does not free our detainees" . . . between 2,000 and 2,500 Mahdi Army militiamen have been detained since the cease-fire came into force.

As if this isn't depressing enough, I've been reading the testimony at the Winter Soldier hearings about Iraq (h/t The Rev).
And let's wrap up with another round of What Digby Says. She says it rather well:

Anyone who votes for McCain in November is voting for war with Iran. It's that simple.

The push for war

A new book by a Chilean diplomat describes how the Bush administration tried to push other countries into supporting the Iraq war.

In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war . . . In the days after the invasion, the National Security Council's top Latin American expert, John F. Maisto, invited Mu¿oz to the White House to convey the message to Lagos, that his country's position at the United Nations had jeopardized prospects for the speedy Senate ratification of a free-trade pact. "Chile has lost some influence," he said. "President Bush is truly disappointed with Lagos, but he is furious with Fox. With Mexico, the president feels betrayed; with Chile, frustrated and let down."

So can we imagine what Bush thought of Canada? And can we also appreciate how extremely important it was that Canada also stood up to US pressure and refused to support the Iraq War?

You kids get off my lawn! and other signs of racist senility

Canada just doesn't "get" the United States about race. I don't deny we have racists in Canada, of course, but we have worked hard in this country, as a country, to eliminate systemic racism in our institutions and our attitudes, and we try as a society to identify and celebrate our diversity.
When observing the United States, on the other hand, I have often been surprised that they don't appear to do much of this. Not as a society or as a group -- their Affirmative Action programs were one of the few government attempts to mitigate the impact of racism in areas like schooling and employment, and now they have now been happily dismantled. American society seems to tolerate, even encourage, a level of racist discourse and racist behaviours which, if it happened in Canada, would bring about outrage and royal commissions.
So it is instructive to read Glenn Greenwald's latest post , in which he quotes this horrible bit from a right-wing blog:

I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. . . .

Oh, the horror, the horror -- to play loud music! to wear long shirts! How can any decent [ie, white] person be expected to deal with such unmitigated awfulness?
And then this cranky old man goes on to talk about how all the good darkies should be speaking out and if they don't, why, they themselves are just as guilty of such awful things

... you've just given life to the suspicion that black people in America are, and have long been, a fifth column -- unanimously hating the very country that has afforded the highest standard of living ever achieved by black people in human history. We're teetering at the edge of believing that you're a secret society, a massive collection of sleeper cells just waiting for your chance to do serious harm to the rest of us. You've made it possible for us to believe that. Because you're never outraged by what the worst black people do. Because you continue to make excuses for what should be inexcusable to everyone.

Note all the egregious insults -- that white America "gave" black people a living rather than blacks and white contributing to building the economy together, that all black people hate America, and he thinks being a cranky old fart is some kind of achievement -- and focus just on the language of the last bit, which made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. He's using terrorist terminology to describe his fellow citizens, whose only transgression appears to be disagreeing with his own taste in fashion.
One of Greenwald's commenters picked up on the same point:

Don't be fooled into thinking that this applies only to African-Americans. The sense of threatened tribalism is at the root of movement conservatism, and always has been. This is why it was so easy to sell most of white America on the Iraq war. Polls showed that 2/3 thought that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, or at least close ties to AlQ. . . . Take almost any one of their "thoughtful" screeds about Islam and do a global search/replace from "Islam" to "niggers" and the text becomes instantly recognizable. This racist energy had for a long time been at least partly directed towards "the Communists" but now that it isn't it is pretty much clear that Islam is now the designated nigger.

Greenwald continues:

There is no better phrase to describe the animating feature of the modern Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox News conservative faction than "threatened tribalism." The belief that they are good and pure, yet subjected to unprecedented systematic unfairness and threatened by some lurking Evil Other against whom war must be waged (the Muslim, the Immigrant, the Terrorist, the Communist, the Liberal, the Welfare Queen) is the centerpiece of their ugly worldview.
The sentiments expressed here by Instapunk are now most commonly expressed towards the New Enemy -- the Muslim -- but the Wright episode is a nice reminder of how seamlessly it gets directed towards a whole host of other threatening, bad groups. Hence the blithe application of the term "sleeper cells" to black Americans. That's what coalesces them and justifies everything. What matters is that there be some scary, malicious group about to harm them and America. The identity of the particular scary group at any given moment is really secondary.

Writers like Greenwald do Canadians a favour, by showing us what attitudes we need to watch out for here, and nip in the bud whenever we see it, before it flourishes like it has in the States.