Great line of the day

The Editors writes about whether torture memo writer John Yoo should be investigated at Berkley:

...A matter of little consequence to the average American: whether Prof. Yoo picks up his paycheck from Berkeley or Liberty University, or whatever Home for Temporarily Inconvenienced Wingnuts would happily scoop him up. But probably a matter of consequence to the administration, who - unless they want to rebrand their university as Liberty West Coast Satellite Campus - might not want their most recognizable faculty member having as his primary field of expertise “concocting legal sophistries to undermine the foundational values of western civilization.” Perhaps also of concern to alumni, who might feel less inclined to cut large checks to their alma mater if their Golden Bears sweatshirts started inviting questions about whether they played home games at Abu Ghraib (football fans can be very cruel). The student body might have an interest in this matter, as would, I imagine, faculty and staff at other UC campuses, and even the taxpayers of California, who might wonder if they wanted to be so openly associated with a person who scuttled around the dark corners of an administration whose human rights record invited comparisons to the Soviet Union - asserting, for example, that the President had the right to crush the testicles of children in order to compel or punish their parents. So it could matter to more people than you might think whether Prof. Yoo gets to practice his craft in decent society, or whether he has to join the other crackpots and undesirables in the shadow reality of wingnut academia, where Jesus rides a dinosaur and the Moonies pick up the tab and the vast liberal fascist secularist conspiracy doesn’t give a fuck what utter bullshit you get up to so long as you stay down in your fucking hole. The thing about the Universe is that it likes to align itself harmoniously. I suspect there’s a way of putting things in order here.

Emphasis mine.

The "harm reduction strategy" is actually reducing harm

Is the Conservative government's drug war ideology worth the death of one drug addict a year? I guess we'll find out soon.
The Gazetteer alerts us to the likely closure of Vancouver's safe injection site, called InSite, because the federal conservatives just can't allow such a progressive approach to dealing with drug addicts.
Nope, illegal drug users should have to shoot up by themselves in dirty alleys, like they've always done. Its the Conservative way.
The government's report on InSite says they have dealt with hundreds of overdoses and haven't lost anyone. The report also indicated that statistical analysis of overdose deaths demonstrated the safe injection site likely saved the life of one drug addict a year.
So that will be the cost of closing the site. But it's pretty clear that Health minister Tony Clements is gearing up to toe the party line against the "harm reduction" strategy represented by projects like InSite -- conservatives have been trashing the harm reduction approach for years with no evidence.
In his National Post interview Clement said:

....the government's new drug strategy is focused on stopping drug use, rather than just ensuring it occurs in a safer way.
"Our harm reduction is accomplished through enforcement, our harm reduction is accomplished through prevention, our harm reduction is accomplished through treatment," said Mr. Clement.
"The best way to reduce harm is to get addicts off drugs and to provide the supports for that addict."

Well, well, quel suprise -- that's exactly what the drug injection centre does.
In the government report, buried in the tables at the end, there's a fascinating little nugget:

Among a sample of 1031 service users recruited between Dec '03 and March '05,185 (18%) reported that they began a detoxification program during a follow-up period with a median duration of 344 days. More rapid entry into detoxification programs was associated with at least weekly use of the service and contact with the facilities addiction counsellors (Wood et al., 2006c). Further analysis using retrospective and prospective database linkages with local detoxification services and residential programs indicated that the opening of INSITE was associated with a 30% increase in detoxification service use and a subsequent increase in rates of initiation of long-term addiction treatment and a decreased injecting at INSITE (Wood et al., 2007)

In other words, the InSite drug injection service has resulted in a signficant increase in the number of drug users trying to get off drugs -- at least I think a 30 per cent increase in detox admissions is pretty darn significant. This is exactly what the safe injection site was supposed to do.
Isn't that what Harper and Clement want?

Harped!

Countdown has a regular feature called "Bushed" which gathers up all of the Bush adminstration scandals. Now Galloping Beaver's Boris pulls all the Harper outrages together for us -- I guess you could say we're Harped:

1. Attacks on the very institutions that support democracy and public safety in this country. Elections Canada, CNSC, etc.
2. Legal attempts to neuter the Official Opposition outside of parliamentary means.
3. Attempts the legally enshrining the consolidation of immigration control into the PMO.
4. Attempts empowering the PMO with regulation of cultural expression.
5. Directing populist, inflamatory, and fundamentally dishonest accusations of anti-Semitism at the Opposition.
6. A party with a membership linked to all manor of extreme religious and social conservative groups.
7. Public Safety Minister. Title, proto-Orwellian.
8. Public Safety Minister with past associations with far-right fascists.
9. Attempts at rigid information control.
10. Message control in extremis. Firing of any civil servant that could potential counter party propaganda.
11. Party styles itself as party of the armed forces.
12. Pursues policies that put the armed forces at centre stage.
13. Frames debate over foreign policy in nationalist, militarist terms.
14. etc.

Well, as least there is one thing that people are laughing about -- the $100 a month Harper daycare benefit.

Great post of the day

Lance Mannion talks about what he wants to see happen by 2016:

....Look at what FDR did and look at what he did wrong and look at all he wasn't able to do.
Now tell me.
What did you think President Hillary Clinton was going to be able to do?
What do you think President Barack Obama will manage to accomplish?
I'll tell you what. I won't be satisfied but I will be glad (and amazed) if at the end of eight years these things are done:
The war in Iraq is over.
We have a federal regulatory system that doesn't let tainted meat into the supermarkets and allow poisoned toys to wind up in the hands of our children.
Our Justice Department is a department of justice and no longer the legal legbreakers for the Republican Party.
We have at least one more even moderately liberal judge on the Supreme Court.
We have something close to affordable, universal health insurance.
We have made some strides towards reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and slowing global climate change.
. . . more than it matters which one is in the White House, Clinton or Obama, it matters who is in running the show in Congress. . . . We don't need a great sailor at the helm.
Just a captain who can follow his own nose and a crew willing to put their backs into it.
We're the crew.

The only thing Mannion missed that half the crew wants the boat to sink.

Great line of the day

I can agree with all of Egalia's statement:

She is the women's candidate. She represents us. She is opening doors for us. In the short span of her historic presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton has taken a lifetime of venomous misogyny and she has taken it for all of us. If she has not reawakened the long dormant feminist movement, no one can. If she wins, we win.

Except for the very last sentence:

If she loses, we lose.

Nope, not even close. Hillary Clinton is an admirable woman and a fine candidate, and I am sad to see her going down to defeat. But women have lost before and will lose again and there is no larger defeat here. It's not "women" who are losing the nomination, its just Hillary.
Still, I know how Egalia feels -- I remember when Flora MacDonald lost ...

Her turn

Yeah, I figured it would be her turn next. Oh, well, maybe she can go on Oprah or Ellen or Jon Stewart or something and talk about her cookie recipies.
UPDATE: I am being derisive of the American media here, not of Michelle Obama, who is an extremely impressive person.
Hey, if Barak Obama gets elected president, maybe Michelle will run for Senate in 2016 and then for President herself in 2024!
DOUBLE UPDATE: And they're after his dog, too.

Stupid questions

Sask politician quits as premier's legislative secretary after sexist comment

Mike Chisholm of the Saskatchewan Party quit that position Thursday after referring to NDP member Deb Higgins as "dumb bitch" during debate in committee. ..."I'm certainly sorry that I said it. I'm sorry that I even thought it and I apologized to the member and I apologized to the house. I don't know why I said it."

Then he offers his own explanation:

"I guess I'm just human."

Nope, it's because you're an asshole.

Donut Nazi

Remind me never to go to Tim Horton's in London, Ontario:

Lilliman, who said she had aspired to become a supervisor, was fired by what Tim Hortons head office called an overzealous manager after giving away [a Timbit] - retail value 16 cents - to the infant on Tuesday.
The three-year employee, who makes $9.05 an hour and pays $750 a month in rent, was called into a backroom the next day and made to sign termination papers that read 'terminated for giving baby product without paying,' she said.

But it sounds like there are some nice people in London anyway.

As she left the store in tears, a stranger handed her $40, saying someone had once done him the same favour when he was fired from a job, Lilliman said.

There are no rules in a knife fight

See, this is what worries me about Obama -- could he possibly be so stupid as to give up his enormous fundraising advantage with individual donors, just so he can get a few style points from election reformers?
Yes, apparently -- Obama Floated Idea Of Voluntarily Capping Donations.
In an election campaign, there are no points for style.

Lists

I could have given you a short list of the things that I don't like about Hillary Clinton and about Barak Obama. But at the top of Obama's list would be some of his supporters. This seems to be a fairly common observation among the Hillary-bloggers.

Nuts

So today John Bolton says that starting an illegal preemptive war of choice against Iran "is really the most prudent thing to do" and it would teach the Iranians a lesson.
I'll just bet it would.
As Josh Marshall says, just another example of John Bolton's keen strategic thinking. In Bolton's world, bombs apparently don't deliver ordinance or death anymore, they just deliver messages.
So, of course, does the phone. And without causing any pictures like this:


Iran is pretty direct about sending its own war messages, thank you very much. Like the message in this Robert X. Cringely story:

. . [while in Teheran in 1986 for another story, Cringely] decided to go see the [Iraq-Iran] war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.
It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.
Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.
Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world.

And Bolton thinks they'll get all fluttery about a US bombing raid?
I don't know how badly the Iraqi soldiers were demoralized after this incident -- the Iran-Iraq war continued another three years and Saddam didn't care -- but I can't believe that most soldiers wouldn't be completely devastated at being told to make war on children.
Oh...yeah...

Today's Nelson Moment

Ha. Ha.

[Conservative MP and former Heritage minister]Oda spent nearly $17,000 on limo rides in her party's first 15 months in office, according to receipts obtained by the NDP ...about half of that amount was never proactively included in publicly disclosed ministerial travel and hospitality expenses.

You know what's going to happen next

Hillary may have ecked out a win in Indiana but she needed a big win to show momentum and she didn't get it.
Her speech sounded like a concession speech.
So say she announces tomorrow or the next day that she is pulling out. We can just predict what will happen next -- remember all of Obama negatives which Hillary supporters were supposed to be racist for even mentioning? Well, after a one-day honeymoon, suddenly all of this stuff will be just so terribly important as the poor poor voters struggle to evaluate Obama's character, so it wil be just so terribly legitimate for the media to cover it, not racist at all, and it will be wall-to-wall Obama Swift Boat time, everything from Obambi to flag pins to secret Muslim to why does Obama hate Israel? to will Joe Lunchbucket vote for someone who can't bowl? to how cosy is he with Chicago land developers to -- wait for it -- this pastor named Wright.
I hope Obama learned a little from Hillary and just laughs in their face.

It's not a bug, it's a feature

A reader at Talking Points Memo describes what I like about Hillary's campaign:

By being a 'fighter' and playing to the lowest kind of populism (and wow do we hate it), Hillary is showing that if she were somehow to get nominated, she'll run exactly the kind of stay-on-the-offensive campaign that will force mistakes from McCain and make it more likely that she'll win in November. She's also making it clear that Obama will never run that kind of campaign.. . . Obama, by contrast, will run a high-minded campaign and may well win on merit. And he'll always be on the defensive. As I said, I favor him Obama a wide margin. But I favor a Democrat over a Republican by an even wider margin.
The upshot: I'll happily support Hillary if she 'steals' the nomination. . . . It's not about fighting back. It's about taking the first shot. She won't let them get their Swift Boats in the water to start with. . . . yes, it'll be very very ugly, cue the 'Unity12' theme music and hand-wringing by the delicate. But I think we're in for ugly no matter what, because they're not going to stop. We may as well engage or get used to losing.

The longer Hillary stays in, the more chance she has to win the nomination. And the more I see about how poorly Obama is handling things -- could he do anything stupider than not coming out in support of lower gas prices? -- I am less confident that he could win a general election.
I don't care how many economists have opined against lower gas prices -- Hillary knows exactly how many economists have ever been elected President.
Obama doesn't seem to get it -- he's running for office, not chairing a graduate tax seminar.
I used to think that Americans hated Republicans so much the Dems could run a turnip and it would win.
But I'm not so confident now. The Republicans are absolutely desperate to win this election, because if they don't they're all going to jail. The Democratic margin is going to have to be overwhelming to withstand the Republican push-back. I'm not sure Obama can do it. But Hillary can.

Great line of the day

From Lance Mannion:

The Working Class includes the 56 year old master electrician making sixty grand a year who can rewire your house blindfolded and who served in Vietnam and whose first vote for President was for George McGovern.
The High Information Creative Class includes the 23 year old C-student junior high school math teacher making twenty-five thousand a year who's working one chapter ahead of his students in the text book and who met his current girlfriend at his mega-church and of course they're both saving it until marriage.
We live in an interesting country.