Great line of the day

Comment from DennisSCMM to TBogg's post about the mutual admiration society that is John McCain and Washington Post columnist David Broder:

In the good old days that both of them yearn for, McKrusty and Broder would, at this point in life, have both been smothered or stranded on an ice floe. They demonstrate that the custom is not without merit.

We're finally going to England!

Roger Miller - England Swings


Yes, on Saturday we're flying off to Merrie Olde England -- first London, then Edinburgh, for two weeks in all.
This was the trip which I had to cancel two years ago because of my car accident.
My sister has us all organized for day trips to Stonehenge and Stratford and Windsor Castle and Jack the Ripper's London and all that, and we also want to see the Imperial War Museum -- oh, and mustn't forget Westminster Abbey, the Tower of Big Ben, the rosy red cheeks of the little children...
My own posting on the blog will be light -- maybe a few photos if I can -- but I'm honoured to say that Dave from Galloping Beaver, Skdadl from POGGE and Dr. Dawg from Dawg's Blawg will all be posting some of their usual great stuff here while I am gone.

Immortality

There are 2,400 George Carlin videos on YouTube. with more than 700 posted today. Its a kind of immortality, I guess. He left us so much to remember.

Giving birth is not a choice issue

Shakesville has a skreed by a woman who has never given birth about how pregnant women have the right to give birth whatever way they want to -- turning it into a "choice" issue.
Sorry, no, it's not.
The only thing that is important in childbirth is a healthy baby.
The ONLY thing.
Nothing else matters -- the mother's experience, her doctor's opinions, her midwife's opinions, her husband's participation, whether or not she uses drugs, whether or not she uses technology, etc etc -- all of this is completely irrelevant to whether she has a healthy baby or not.
I get pretty hot about this issue -- my daughter would have died in childbirth if I hadn't been in a hospital and if I hadn't listened to my doctors -- who were quite candid about not knowing what was wrong and why my baby's heartbeat kept falling and why my labour was not progressing normally, but advised that I have a c-section.
Turned out the cord was wrapped around her neck, and was too short. If I had tried to give birth vaginally my daughter would have been severely brain damaged, if she had lived at all. I might have died, too, of course.
Then I had a neighbour tell me how sorry she was -- SORRY?
My daughter was alive and healthy. Nothing else mattered then, nothing else matters now.
Nothing else.

Snakes in a .....

Dawg's Blawg has progressive politics, Cherniak covers the latest from the Liberal party HQ, Galloping Beaver covers all things Canadian military, and I rely on TBogg for when I need some bassett blogging.
Nice to see that Shakesville has also found its niche.

Oil? Perish the thought!

We in the global so-called West can talk all we like about how our wars of choice in the Middle East are not about oil, but we cannot possibly be surprised when the people of the Middle East do not believe us.

Great line of the day

From Rev Paperboy:

The creationists sometimes try to pin the massacres, holocausts and pogroms of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot on atheism and their own misinterpretation of Darwin's theories as a justification of "survival of the fittest" -- when the real cause of these horrible events, and indeed most of the evil that men do, is the "true believerism" the notion that one is righteous that brooks no doubt, no reconsideration in the face of evidence that one's thesis is not airtight. It is that sort of inability to admit errors or tolerate dissent that leads to everything from the Iraq war to religiously driven fatal child abuse and deadly neglect.

I'm baaack!

So what did I miss?
Oh, just the destruction of the American Constitution -- no biggie.
I think MoveOn had better think twice before it dismantles its political outreach mechanism -- they may find that, even with an Obama adminstration, they still have something to say.

Away til Sunday

And I am having computer trouble so its hard to post -- I'll try, though.
I'm going to a conference in Windsor -- looking forward to seeing that city.

Great line of the day

Glenn Greenwald:

Threatening Americans with obliteration unless they support authoritarian and war-making hysteria ought to be the most discredited idea there is. But there is Newt Gingrich, invited on Face the Nation to opine, because he's a very Serious and important Ideas Man. As but one example, here's Time's Liberal Pundit Joe Klein, chatting with Hugh Hewitt about Gingrich:

I've always really respected Newt, because he's a man of honor, and he is a
real policy wonk, and he really cares about stuff.

That's how most media stars talk about Gingrich, as he wallows in his never-ending dreams about American cities being vaporized and how the only way we can prevent that is if we relinquish our Constitution -- or at least just small parts of it such as the First Amendment and habeas corpus -- and start more wars. That's squarely within mainstream American political discourse.

Why does anyone listen to Newt ("Cry-baby") Gingrich? Well, I suppose he makes as much sense as John McCain -- which isn't saying much because the Republican level is pretty low now, isn't it.

Great line of the day

NYT columnist Frank Rich writes about myth and reality in the American election campaign:

The ludicrous idea that votes from Clinton supporters would somehow make up for McCain defectors is merely the latest fairy tale brought to you by those same Washington soothsayers who said Fred Thompson was the man to beat and that young people don’t turn up to vote.

And remember how we kept hearing about how sexy Fred was, and now everybody just loved Mitt's shoulders, and how everything was good news for Rudy Guiliani? And remember how Bloomberg was going to announce any day now and this would cut the Democrats off at the knees? In reality, I think Bob Barr is going to be cutting McCain off at the knees.

This will be a problem

Glenn Greenwald writes about the increasing level of hysterical right wing fascism-- talk show host Laura Ingraham saying that the Bush administration should just ignore US Supreme Court rulings, while talk show host Michael Reagan says anybody who believes that the Bush Administration was responsible for 911 should just be shot outright :

... people like Laura Ingraham and Michael Reagan are crazed and absurd figures, but they have large audiences. There is a sizable portion of this country's population that has been fed a steady diet of ideas of this sort for years, a view of Government and political power that prevails in the worst tyrannies on the planet. The Leader has the right to break our laws. He should defy court rulings that enforce constitutional guarantees. The Government has the right to put people in cages for life with no process. People should be imprisoned or shot by virtue of the views they express.
As the Right comes to accept that their political movement lies in ruins -- as evidence of their rejection by the country becomes too compelling to ignore -- the desperation and frustration level increases and much of this rhetoric will become more extreme (note that Ingraham cited the President's low popularity ratings as a reason why he should ignore the Supreme Court's ruling; National Review's Andy McCarthy on Thursday suggested that in response to the Court's ruling, we should take all of the Guantanamo detainees and just slaughter them en masse). Having millions of citizens inculcated over many years with truly deranged, extremist tripe of this sort -- and Fox just announced that Ingraham would have her own show beginning next week -- obviously has consequences. We've seen just some of those over the last seven years, and the reaction is likely to intensify as that movement grows more impotent and marginalized.

Sometimes I think the US is heading toward some sort of cataclysm.
Politics in a democracy has a normal range, an ebb and flow -- we see this in Canada where the Liberals give way to the Conservatives who give way to the Liberals -- but where individuals including politicians still have a respect for government and where government has a respect for its own standards and traditions. Thus, however much I dislike Harper for his policies and his budgets, for example, I can give him the credit he deserves for actions like the residential school apology; however much Harper disagrees with the NDP he can still meet with Jack Layton to talk about issues like this. I think this is the kind of respect for each other and for the common good which Barak Obama is trying to achieve when he talks about making Washington less partisan.
But I wonder if this can still be done in the States or have they already moved too far away from civilized politics. Greenwald says their movement is in ruins, but millions of people in the States are still apparently so far down the rabbit hole that their only moral arbiter is whether the Bush administration is for something or agin it. These people want Bush to have a third term, and will happily vote for John McCain to provide it.
There is nothing more important to these people than their own personal safety, and they think they have made a bargain with Bush that he can do whatever he wants as long as he keeps them safe.
It's called a Faustian bargain, and generally it doesn't work out very well.

An extraordinary event

The apology will be seen as a very significant achievement of Harper and the whole government.

Bishop Mark MacDonald, the national indigenous bishop of the Anglican Church of Canada, said he was pleased with the government’s apology. "I’m going to be processing it for a long time," he told the Journal. “It was an extraordinary event and I was very happy with what I heard and
moved by what I heard and I’m filled with all kinds of emotions. So it will take me a while to process it but I thought it was an
extraordinary day and one of the best days of my life."


It is amazing what a difference a sincere and humble apology can make.
Canada is being noticed around the world for doing this -- from the Sydney Morning Hrald to China Daily

Wasn't that Mulroney?

Spokesblob update:

Jason Kenney, Conservative secretary of state for multiculturalism, shot back the Liberals have a "secret" plan to impose a "multi-billion-dollar tax on just about everything for Canadians."

Yeah, and I hear Dion is going call it the GST.
Oh, wait...

One success for the Bush administration

They have raised bullshit to an art form.