Somebody needs to bring the clown home, strap him into a chair and unplug his telephone until the end of November.The poor baby was so mad at the press coverage of his NATO trip that he wouldn't speak to reporters on the way home.
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.
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.I won't be able to answer the door again without thinking of this.
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.
Premier Brad Wall distanced the Saskatchewan Party from a popular right-wing blog Tuesday over controversial comments posted about inner city Saskatoon.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:
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.
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.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 --
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."
Wall said the comments were "beyond the pale."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.
"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."
. . . 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 . . .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.
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.
Tell it, Zack!
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.
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.
Withdrawing financial support for the project was not a political decision, [Health minister] McMorris insists.Oh, sure.
"...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.
...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.Read it all.
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.
Well, what straw can I grasp at today?This is getting embarrassing.
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."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.
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.
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.As if this isn't depressing enough, I've been reading the testimony at the Winter Soldier hearings about Iraq (h/t The Rev).
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.
Anyone who votes for McCain in November is voting for war with Iran. It's that simple.
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?
