Dog-blogging

Here are our two dogs -- who obviously think the bed belongs to them.

Conspiracy theories

Dave Johnson alerts us to the top 10 conspiracy theories of the religious right. Here's some of the best:

- Al Gore working secretly with global warming folks to take over the Unites States [and would that it was true!]
- Hillary Clinton working secretly with Janet Reno to form a lesbian plot to destroy Christianity
-the United Nations placing secret codes on the back of national highway signs to reveal the locations of believers so the new world order could persecute them.
-the Holocaust was really a big conspiracy hoax and most of the Jews who were supposed to be killed in Europe were actually walking around in New York City [this is an old one]
- Lucifer was behind the Supreme Court ruling in Topeka, Kansas regarding school integration.
- on the back of a 1993 box of Kix Cereal was a map teaching children about how the U.N. will divide up the United States

I have sometimes thought that the attraction of conspiracy theories, at the core, is the hope that somebody, whether the UN or the phone commpany, is actually in charge. It may be too frightening for some people to think that all of the craziness and chaos of the world is actually just random accidents - we are complusive about searching for patterns, aren't we?

How to respond to a right-wing smear

Best Bitch Slap EVAR:

"Please crawl back under the rock you came out from."

White trash

This is why Obama should have laughed off Rev Wright.
Hillary would have.
She would have just snorted "That's a minister for you, always preaching hellfire and damnation. Of course I'm not responsible for anything a minister says!"
But Obama didn't do that. He accepted the Republican frame that he was tied at the hip to the preacher in his church. He took it all seriously.
So now here we go again -- this time with a white guy, a Father Michael Pfleger, who belted out a mean-spirited, ugly, gratituous anti-Hillary skreed last Sunday at good old Trinity United:

. . . We must be honest enough to expose white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head.
I said before I don’t want this to be political because, you know, I’m very unpolitical (mocking tone, huge laughter).
…When Hillary was crying (gesturing tears, uproarious laughter from audience)–and people said that was put on–I really don’t believe it was put on.
I really believe that she just always thought ‘This is mine’ (laughter, hoots). ‘I’m Bill’s wife. I’m WHITE. And this is mine. And I jus’ gotta get up. And step into the plate. And then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama.’ And she said: ‘Oh, damn!’ WHERE DID YOU COME FROM? (Crowd going nuts, Pfleger screaming). I’M WHITE! I’M ENTITLED! THERE’S A BLACK MAN STEALING MY SHOW. (SOBS!) SHE WASN’T THE ONLY ONE CRYING! THERE WAS A WHOLE LOTTA WHITE PEOPLE CRYING!

Obama can't laugh this off now, that ship has sailed.
So Obama has now released the usual deeply disappointed statement, and Pfleger has issued the usual blame-the-victim non-apology apology:

I regret the words I chose on Sunday. These words are inconsistent with Senator Obama's life and message, and I am deeply sorry if they offended Senator Clinton or anyone else who saw them.

Gee, don't overdo it, eh?
No doubt we'll be seeing this video again and again.
And every time white Americans see it the subtext will be, Obama thinks you are white trash. Not exactly the message he wanted his campaign or candidacy to promote.

"Haven't you been busy"

From the CBC:

Couillard talked about having tea with the prime minister's wife and meeting U.S. President George W. Bush at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.
She said Bush approached Bernier and her in a corridor and, glancing at her, jovially told Bernier, 'Well, well, well, haven't you been busy.'

Nice to see the high moral tone that Bush has brought back to government. At least he didn't leap at her and start rubbing her shoulders.
And Alison is calling it Cleavage-gate:


But remember, it's not the sex, oh no, not at all...

For Your Eyes Only

Now everybody is asking why Bernier could have mislaid those secret papers for so many week without anybody noticing. It's simple. His long-suffering staff never actually gave this clown any secret papers -- they just stamped EYES ONLY on government press releases, knowing he wouldn't read them anyway.
Jason Cherniak sums up the real scandal about the Maxime Bernier affair -- that he wasn't fired long ago for all the screw-ups in his ministeral performance:

The Liberals demanded that Maxime Bernier be fired for a long list of reasons:

- suggesting to reporters that Kandahar Governor Asdullah Khalid be replaced. He was quickly forced to retract those comments and acknowledge that Afghanistan, as a sovereign country, must make its own decisions;
- his mishandling of the case of Brenda Martin, a Canadian left stranded in a in Mexican prison for two years;
- his failure to take a leadership role (or indeed any role) in the international effort to ban the production and use of cluster munitions;
- his abandonment of key foreign affairs files to other ministers - Afghan detainees (Peter MacKay), death row inmates abroad (Stockwell Day), the proposed sale of the Radarsat 2 satellite system (Jim Prentice), the Brenda Martin case (Helena Guergis), a summit of foreign affairs ministers of Arctic nations in Greenland (Gary Lunn); and,
- his failure to respond to any of the recent international crises in Pakistan, Kenya, Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe.

These were all good reasons. But, apparently, they were all well within the expectations of Prime Minister Stephen Harper from a minister of foreign affairs. Instead, Maxime Bernier was forced out because he left top-secret documents with his girlfriend who had connections to the Hell's Angels.
The Liberals saw this coming. They have been demanding that Mr. Harper look into the relationship between Mr. Bernier and his companion for some time now. They understood that while ministers are obviously allowed to have private lives, they also need to be smart in who they spend their time with.

But he wasn't smart about anything else. So it's not surprising.

Shorter

Shorter Scottie McClellan:

I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that Bush was such a liar!

You know, its amazing.
Us lefties have been saying for eight years that the Bush administration is full of liars, that they lie all the time, that they would rather lie than tell the truth.
And now numerous reasonably-intelligent people who worked inside the Bush administration are reporting how surprised and upset they are to find out that they were being lied to all along.
What on earth did they think was happening?
Over at Balloon Juice, Tim F. talks about the how the later the memoir-writers leave it, the more tattered their reputations will get:

It’s like a game of musical chairs where every seat has a rusty tack on it.

You say you've never heard of Fred Astaire?

Boing Boing introduces this video mash, Fred Astaire dancing to Michael Jackson:

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.