Here come de judge

Ross at The Gazetteer reports that the Insite safe injection site has been saved. Thanks, Ross, for letting me know about this sensible judge's order:

Mr. Justice Ian Pitfield of the B.C. Supreme Court granted users and staff at the popular but controversial facility known as Insite a permanent constitutional exemption from prosecution under federal drug laws.
. . . The fate of the facility in the heart of Vancouver's drug-ravaged Downtown Eastside had been up in the air over fears that federal Health Minister Tony Clement would withdraw its legal exemption at the end of June.
. . . [Justice Pitfield] rejected arguments from the federal lawyers that drug use was a matter of individual choice and it was up to the government whether addicts at Insite should be immune from prosecution.
“Society cannot condone addiction, but in the face of its presence, it cannot fail to manage it, hopefully with ultimate success reflected in the cure of the addicted individual and abstinence,” Judge Pitfield said.
“Simply stated, I cannot agree with Canada's submission that an addict must feed his addiction in an unsafe environment when a safe environment that may lead to rehabilitation is the alternative.”
. . . Once an individual is addicted to injection drugs, they are no longer using them for recreation, Judge Pitfield said. Their addiction becomes an illness that needs treatment.
He compared their plight to alcoholics and those hooked on cigarettes, problems recognized by society even though the substances are legal.
“Society neither condemns the individual who chooses to drink or smoke to excess, nor deprives that individual of a range of health care services,” Judge Pitfield reasoned.
“I cannot see any rational or logical reason why the approach should be different when dealing with the addiction to narcotics.”

Absolutely. I wonder if Harper will dare to appeal this to the Supreme Court?

New links

I added some new links to the old blogroll, and switched some others around. Check them out.
It was relatively easy to revise this time -- I deleted bloggers who went ballistic over Hillary's clumsy statement on Friday. Anyone who hates Hillary so much that they could think she would promote assassination is infected with Rush Limbaugh's Vince Foster Syndrome and is off my reading list for now.

UPDATE: Ootpoot, as requested, your links are back, and better than ever. Look right...

Great line of the day

In the Comments to Tristero's post about gay marriage, Niko explains how straight people are affected:

How does the marriage of 2 people of the same gender you never met hurt YOUR marriage?
Well, shucks!
That works just like:
When a sea-cucumber down 347 feet in the north Pacific ocean rolls over 35-degrees to its left side...A car in South Dakota won't start.
Just like that.
Easy explanation, clearly understood by ALL Conservatives.

Overturning the rock

When you overturn a rock, worms writhe and leggety black things scuttle out.
Glenn Greenwald overturns the telecommunication company lobby records and lots of politicians writhe and scuttle.
The US wiretapping telecom scandal was never really a democrat vs republican issue, but rather a case of money trying to bury the truth about US wiretapping.
Truth has won a few battles, but money may still win the war.

Bambi vs Godzilla?

Interesting to read the British New Statesman magazine analysis about why Hillary is losing -- they seem to be surprised that Obama is actually a ruthless competitor:

Hillary Clinton (along with her husband) is being universally depicted as a loathsome racist and negative campaigner, not so much because of anything she has said or done, but because the overwhelmingly pro-Obama media - consciously or unconsciously - are following the agenda of Senator Barack Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, to tear to pieces the first serious female US presidential candidate in history.
"What's particularly saddening," says Paul Krugman, professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton and a rare dissenting voice from the left as a columnist in the New York Times, "is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the . . . way pundits and some news organisations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent." Despite widespread reporting to the contrary, Krugman believes that most of the "venom" in the campaign "is coming from supporters of Obama".

This actually explains something I had noticed for months -- I kept reading Hillary supporters saying they would happily vote for Obama if Hillary lost, while Obama supporters were characterizing her as the evil spawn of Satan.
The article explains why this happened, though it dives a little too far down the rabbit hole:

But Obama himself prepared the ground by making the first gratuitous personal attack of the campaign during the televised Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate in South Carolina on 21 January, although virtually every follower of the media coverage now assumes that it was Clinton who started the negative attacks. Following routine political sniping from her about supposedly admiring comments Obama had made about Ronald Reagan, Obama suddenly turned on Clinton and stared intimidatingly at her. "While I was working in the streets," he scolded her, ". . . you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart." Then, cleverly linking her inextricably in the public consciousness with her husband, he added: "I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes."
One of his female staff then distributed a confidential memo to carefully selected journalists which alleged that a vaguely clumsy comment Hillary Clinton had made about Martin Luther King ("Dr King's dream began to be realised when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964") and a reference her husband had made in passing to Nelson Mandela ("I've been blessed in my life to know some of the greatest figures of the last hundred years . . . but if I had to pick one person whom I know would never blink, who would never turn back, who would make great decisions . . . I would pick Hillary") were deliberate racial taunts.
Another female staffer, Candice Tolliver - whose job it is to promote Obama to African Americans - then weighed in publicly, claiming that "a cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements" and saying: "Folks are beginning to wonder: Is this an isolated situation, or is there something bigger behind all of this?" That was game, set and match: the Clintons were racists, an impression sealed when Bill Clinton later compared Obama's victory in South Carolina to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 (even though Jackson himself, an Obama supporter, subsequently declared Clinton's remarks to be entirely inoffensive).

This anecdote reminded me a bit of the Cheney bait-and-switch, when Cheney would feed stories to the New York Times, then describe how the Bush administration policies were justified because of the stories in the New York Times.
But that unpleasant comparison aside, to me this mainly goes to prove that Obama vs. Hillary wasn't exactly the Bambi vs Godzilla match that the media seemed to think it was.
Now, Hillary has done herself no favours at all, pulling stunts like the 3 am phone call ad ["Hi, is Bill there?"] instead of apologizing for her Iraq War vote -- those misjudgments were all her own, not Obama's fault in the least. But this article reassures me that maybe Obama knows perfectly well there are no rules in a knife fight. He won't win the presidency unless he is prepared to fight for it.
The article continues

Obama and Axelrod have achieved their objectives: to belittle Hillary Clinton and to manoeuvre the ever-pliant media into depicting every political criticism she makes against Obama as racist in intent.
The danger is that, in their headlong rush to stop the first major female candidate (aka "Hildebeast" and "Hitlery") from becoming president, the punditocracy may have landed the Democrats with perhaps the least qualified presidential nominee ever. But that creeping realisation has probably come too late, and many of the Democratic super-delegates now fear there would be widespread outrage and increased racial tension if they thwart the first biracial presidential hopeful in US history.
But will Obama live up to the hype? That, I fear, may not happen: he is a deeply flawed candidate.

Oh, really? Well, he seems to be doing just fine against the originally unstoppable Clintons.
Personally, as I have said before, I am sad to see Hillary losing, mainly because I have been afraid that Obama couldn't win a presidential election
But in a perverse way, this article actually made me feel a little more confident that Obama has what it takes to win.
Hey, has anybody noticed how many stories you are reading these days about McCain's bad temper? And his flip flops. And how old he is?
Gee, I wonder why.

UPDATE: Regarding the latest flap, I pretty much agree with this -- read the comments, too.

Setting the bar low

Brodie out, Giorno in:

As chief of staff to Harris until 2002, Guy Giorno became known as the 'intellectual heart' of the premier's office.

Oh, Ontario will be so impressed with this move -- apparently there wasn't much competition for either the "intellectual" or "heart" aspects in Mike Harris's office, was there?

"The sheriff is a ...."

Chet alerts us to this New Republic article by John Judis which basically says Obama is winning the Democratic nomination because he is black and therefore "historic":

. . . having realized that Obama was going to be a genuine rival for the nomination, she and her campaign decided to go negative on him. They did the usual thing politicians do to each other: They ran attack ads taking his words somewhat out of context . . . But there a was difference between her doing this to Obama and McCain's doing it to Romney--a difference that eluded Clinton, her husband, and her campaign staff. . . . Obama, too, was, and is, history--the first viable African-American presidential candidate. Yes, Hillary Clinton was the first viable female candidate, but it is still different.

Chet and Bob Somerby and lambert and others are criticising this article for its explicit sexism.
But I want to note something I find even more disturbing about this article.
Implicit in it is the idea that Obama's candidacy is enough -- that making Obama the Democratic nominee would give America an egalitarian stamp of approval, demonstrable proof that America isn't racist anymore, no siree, but of course actually electing him is unnecessary, in fact unthinkable, oh no, that would go too far.
Judis writes about Obama as though he is an historical artifact:

Race is the deepest and oldest and most bitter conflict in American history--the cause of our great Civil War and of the upheavals of the 1950s and '60s. And if some voters didn't appreciate the potential breakthrough that Obama's candidacy represented, many in the Democratic primaries and caucuses did--and so did the members of the media and Obama's fellow politicians. And as Clinton began treating Obama as just another politician, they recoiled and threw their support to him.

It is a subtle message, but clear -- that Americans can all feel like they're struck some kind of blow for equaity just by supporting Obama's candidacy, with no need to actually elect him as President
In fact, Judis explicity lets everyone off the hook with the blithe statement that to win in November Obama would have to "capture enough of these white working class voters" -- and of course those no-account "working class" types wouldn't be worrying about proving themselves not to be racist so they can just go ahead and discriminate, that's OK and its all Obama's fault if he can't get their votes ....
In fact, the implicit attitude toward Obama in this article reminds me of Samuel Johnson's attitude about women preachers:

"Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Just as the sexism displayed by many in the media and by many pundits and bloggers has sickened me over the last couple of months, so also will the racism we are already seeing, particularly from people like Judis who don't think they are racists at all.

Reality check

Ian Welsh comments about the risk that Obama is taking in pushing way the bloggers and the so-called Second Tier campaign groups:

. . . Obama had best win, because he's telling a lot of people (not just bloggers) "I don't need your help". And when you look at state rather than national polls, y'know what, he's currently losing to McCain. When you tell people to shove it, you don't need their help, failure is not an option.
Say what you will about Clinton, but I don't know anyone who thinks she'd be choking off money to independent small-d groups, or freezing out constituencies she doesn't control. The blogosphere went mostly Obama, but Clinton kept her outreach.
*shrug* I'll support Obama, of course, and tell folks to vote for him, and so on. So will every other prog-blog, even the hard-core Clintonistas. But he'd better win or he won't have a lot of friends to cushion him in his fall from grace.

What will the Obama campaign do to get people like Ian Welsh onside?
And Avedon Carol and Lance Mannion and James Wolcott and Bob Somersby and Lambert and Paul Krugman and, I think, Digby,and all of the other hundreds of thousands of people who heard Obama's speeches and decided to support Hillary, or at least who kept saying they could support either?
These people aren't going to leap onto the bandwagon. They don't see Obama as the Second Coming and, having been burned in 2004 by the shut-up-and-don't-criticize-Kerry meme, they will speak up this time if they think Obama is handling some issue badly. I hope someone in his campaign will be reading what they say -- they could prove to be Obama's most important reality check

Little Saddams

The priceless part of this story is that the US military is just creating a bunch of neighbourhood Saddam Husseins, and they don't even seem to realise it:

. . . doing business with the gunmen, whom the U.S. military has dubbed Sons of Iraq, is like striking a deal with Tony Soprano, according to the soldiers who walk the battle-blighted streets, where sewage collects in malodorous pools.
"Most of them kind of operate like dons in their areas," said 2nd Lt. Forrest Pierce, a platoon leader with the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment. They shake down local businessmen for protection money, seize rivals for links to the insurgency and are always angling for more men, more territory and more power.
For U.S. soldiers on the beat, it means navigating a complex world of shifting allegiances, half-truths and betrayals.

Wow -- just wow

75,000 Rally in Portland for Obama:



And here are some of the comments at the Washington Post blog:

I am 47 years old and have never been so excited about a presidential race. Obama brings vision, change, and a love of America with all it has to offer from his one in a million perspective. I truly believe that we are looking at not only history in the making but at the next president of the United States

Holy cow!! I watched the rally on CNN and they didnt span the crowd once. Well, it doesnt change anything I bet, the American people can see through the media smoke screen. Go BO our moment is now

The crowds at Obama rallies are truly impressive--people from all walks of life, all demographic groups. He is a leader who inspires us to be a better, more united nation. Most politicians talk about what they want to do when they are elected-- he talks about what we the people will do together with his leadership. Obama really can transform the electoral map-- moving beyond the slice and dice politics of the past couple of decades.

This guy almost have more power than the president. If he runs the country the way he has run his campaign, America will be a force respected around the world again.

Oh, I hope Hillary is wrong -- I guess I'm afraid she's right but oh how I hope she is wrong. I hope Obama is the kind of leader that America deserves to have.

Wingnut Creed

The Editors at Poor Man on Tweety's argument with the right-winger who kept screeching "he's an appeaser" about Obama, without actually knowing what that meant at all:

It’s all like this. Everything is just like this. Some blank young person who has memorized a 5″x7″ index card of focus group-approved phrases, yelling, yelling, yelling over everyone. And you can say what you want, and be as right as you want, but he’s going to keep yelling, and yelling, and yelling until you get sick of it, and at the end of the day everybody knows that Barack Obama goes to secret Muslim church. Everything is like this. An election won’t fix it. This rules the world.

When I had wingnuts infesting my comments, I observed they would just keep parroting the same phrases over and over, regardless of context or relevance.
I guess its easier than thinking.

BFF? Not so much

I see what skdadl means -- while the New York Times is burying the news about the Saudi-US deal about "civilian nuclear technology" -- whatever that is -- other non-US media are headlining it - VOA News - Bush in Saudi Arabia for Nuclear Deal.
I also noted this illuminating paragraph about US- Saudi relations now, as said by John Alterman from the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

'This relationship has been unalterably changed partly by the events of September 11, partly by what's happened in Iraq, partly by a Saudi sense that the United States isn't nearly as competent as they thought,' said Alterman. 'And while there is no alternative to the United States, there is suddenly a need to hedge against U.S. incompetence. That changes the whole way these meetings go, and it changes what happens when the U.S. president says I really need you to do this.'

Hmmm - the rest of the world is taking steps to protect itself from US incompetence -- so who is actually holding who's hand now?

Great line of the day

Tom Englehart writes Welcome to the Age of Homeland Insecurity:

. . . Osama bin Laden and his scattering of followers may be credited for goading the fundamentalist leaders of the United States into using the power in their grasp so ... stupidly and profligately as to send the planet's "sole superpower" into decline. Above all, bin Laden and his crew of fanatics will have ensured one thing: that the real security problems of our age were ignored in Washington until far too late in favor of mad dreams and dark phantoms.

Via.

Hillary fights on -- and makes points

Hillary says -- its the map, not the math.

"I believe I will win; I believe my opponent could win."

Just like the Canadian popular vote doesn't matter in our first-past-the-post constituency system, so also the US popular vote doesn't matter either, its the electoral votes.
Here are the latest electoral vote maps.





Here's some state-by-state analysis.
Now, I don't believe that women will stay home, however disappointed they may be if Hillary is not nominated -- Hillary has said she will work her heart out for Obama and I believe her.
And its a long time until November, and maybe Obama can inspire enough new voters in those red sttes to turn them blue -- provided they actually turn out and provided all the GOP voter repression laws actually allow their votes to count.
But even Cokie Roberts makes sense.

You can't pick your battles, only your side

Federal Judge Rules That Students Can’t Be Barred From Expressing Support for Gay People:

“Standing up to my school was really hard to do, but I’m so happy that I did because the First Amendment is a big deal to everyone,” said Heather Gillman, a junior at Ponce de Leon High School and the plaintiff in the case . . .
According to students, problems began in September of 2007 when a lesbian student tried to report to school officials that she was being harassed by other students because she is a lesbian.
Instead of addressing the harassment, students say the school responded with intimidation, censorship, and suspensions . . .
Ponce de Leon High School’s principal David Davis admitted under oath that he had banned students from wearing any clothing or symbols supporting equal rights for gay people. Davis also testified that he believed rainbows were “sexually suggestive” and would make students unable to study because they’d be picturing gay sex acts in their mind. The principal went on to admit that while censoring rainbows and gay pride messages he allowed students to wear other symbols many find controversial, such as the Confederate flag.

Another example of the unsought battles that turn ordinary people into heroes.
These 16-year-old students didn't want to be adversaries with their school administrators, but once the battle was thrust upon them, they didn't back down. As I have said before, "You don't get to pick your battles, you only get to pick your side":