What Digby says

about banning tasers:

I've written many times about tasers. I honestly don't understand why people are so complacent about the fact that we are allowing the police to torture citizens into compliance, completely based on their own judgment and with no threat of sanction. Even if you kill someone with one, the authorities defend you.
This is a barbaric practice that should be ended. I know they can be a useful tool if used correctly. But they've been out there for years, there has been ample evidence of abuse and torture with them, and nothing gets done. At this point the police have lost the benefit of the doubt --- they refuse to adhere to strict guidelines and always rush to defend the psychos who happen to get caught using them for no good reason. They've left no choice but to ban them.

Simple answers to simple questions

Christie Blatchford asks In the end, will the price we pay in Afghanistan be worth it?
No.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.

Eat what you want

I agree with this article -- Go ahead, kids, eat your cake first.
My husband and I came from the usual post-depression era food nazi families, and we have dealt with being overweight our entire adult lives.
For my kids, I decided to serve them healthy meals and a daily multivitamin, and let them decide what and how much they wanted to eat -- no pressure, no pestering, no "you have to try it" rules, no cajoling, we didn't focus on their food intake at all, and we never adopted the "your mother worked hard to cook this meal so you'd better eat it" attitude. We adopted the philosophy that their bodies were their own, to eat as they wished. And if they wanted something to eat before dinner, sure -- have some carrot sticks or a cracker or whatever. If they didn't like what I cooked, fine, have a sandwich instead.
Neither of my kids had allergies, so we didn't have to worry about monitoring food intake due to this -- though I think my son may have had a dairy sensitivity, but he stopped drinking milk when he was a toddler so he grew out of it I think.
They each went through food phases -- at one point my daughter wanted kraft dinner all the time; my son called himself a "meat-atarian" when he was a teenager -- but today they are both normal weight, they keep in shape, they both love salads and don't particularly like desserts, and they can both cook.
So, the kids are alright. And as a side benefit, this approach also saved my husband and I a lot of needless stress -- parents already have a long list of things we must argue about with our children, so why add food to the list?

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum

Over at Corrente, in a comment to Lambert's post about how Obama is already in control, bringiton describes the new reality in American foreign policy:

There has been a vacuum in American foreign policy and international relations for some time now. . . the rest of the world is heartily sick of it and has stopped talking to George and Dick. At the last several international conferences, our President has been shunned publically; there are photo after photo showing him sitting alone staring off while all around him other leaders are engaged with each other in conversation.
That smart-ass simpering cocaine and alcohol addled inarticulate dime store cowboy embarrassment that we’ve all grown to loath is not an act; that is GeeW, right out front and real, and nobody wants to put up with him anymore. Even Maliki, the tenuous prime minister whose status in office, and indeed his very life, depends on the continued support and good will of 150,000 of the most dangerous military troops on Earth who are occupying his country, jumped at the chance to defy and rebuke both Bush and McCain at the first opportunity for a face-to-face sit down with Obama. . . .
Since the outcome of the Democratic primary became clear, Maliki has stood up to Bush on the oil contracts, on the status of forces agreement, on insisting that a “time horizon” be negotiated, and has now embraced Obama’s proposal for a major forces troop exit at 16 months . . . The negotiations for the future of Iraq are now being conducted between the Prime Minister and a US Senator, who is not even his party’s official nominee as a candidate for the presidency.
The same thing with Karzai in Kabul . . . For years Karzai has called for more troops, more reconstruction, more infrastructure advancement, and those calls have been echoed by every military commander in country and every UN and NGO relief organization on the ground. Bush has done nothing but make one mistake after another in Afghanistan, again perhaps deliberately and perhaps not, but the net result is another disaster. Karzai is also now talking directly to and openly negotiating with Obama, another head of state in another critical situation who has abandoned any pretense of wanting to deal any more with the actual President of The United States. . . .
In the longer term . . . it is not a good thing on principle for anyone other than the Chief Executive or his delegate to be making these kinds of agreements – and agreements they are. . . .
In the short term it is beyond horrific that the sitting President has so completely alienated the entire world and all of its leaders . . . Obama has stepped into the void left Bush and Cheney to seize the power representing America in both Afghanistan and Iraq. So far, and I say this with fingers crossed, he has succeeded in negotiating agreements with Maliki and Karzai that conform to what needs doing, get out of Iraq and clean up Afghanistan. Sounds good, but then one never knows what will actually happen once he is in office. Still, it seems to me that having an adult take charge is probably better than simply leaving a void. The Plutocrats handed the remote control for the Imperial Unitary President Monster to Bush, an untreated coke-head alcoholic, and Cheney, a victim of multiple strokes in the last stages of cardiac failure; the boys lost it, big surprise, and now Obama has picked it up.
. . . Just to be sure we have this in perspective; Obama is not the first non-President to assume such a role. Ronald Reagan was conducting secret, unauthorized foreign policy negotiations, in direct contrast to the best interests of America and American citizen hostages, while he was running for the office. Obama, at least, is being open about it and thus far appears to be moving things in the direction any sane person would want. Woodrow Wilson’s second wife, Edith, took on the role of gatekeeper for him after his stroke and kept him isolated from the Vice President and his Cabinet, selecting what issues were presented to him and relaying his decisions to others; or at least her interpretation of his wishes. Obama, at least, is an elected United States Senator.
This isn’t a good deal for anyone, but it isn’t entirely unprecedented either.

The only thing that bringiton missed was that our very own Yo Harper is still BFF with GeeW. Isn't that special?

Great line of the day

skdadl puts her finger on the problem with Obama's more-troops-for-Afghanistan pledge -- The unbearable inevitability of U.S. foreign policy:

Obama is more socially enlightened than the other guy. He is many other good things domestically more than the other guy. But in international affairs he will be sitting atop an unstoppable tragic juggernaut that is already controlling him more than he will ever control it. Well: they are unstoppable internationally until the rest of the world finds the sense and the courage to stop them.

Duck rescues

I love stories like this one and this one and this one.

Guts

Obama makes a 3-point shot

One of the things that made me a Hillary supporter was when she had the guts to take that shot of whiskey -- can you imagine what would have been said if she had choked on it?
Now in front of American troops, Obama takes a 3-point shot and makes it -- can you imagine what would have been said if he had missed?
I know this is trivial and essentially meaningless in the larger scheme of things, but I'm glad he did it.

New links

I fiddled around with my Blogroll again and added some interesting new links. Check them out.

Great line of the day

From Chet at Vanity Press But But But the Libruls!!!:

. . . this is what drives me nuts about [the Harper] government: seeing everything through their own partisan lenses is all they ever seem to do. As far as I can see, they have never, except nominally, settled into being the Government of Canada; they are always and only the Conservative Party, and all they seem to care about is hating the Liberal Party . . . At this point, I'd just like to see an actual government, please.

Seven stages of shame

Bit by bit, the United States is edging toward the realization that they are wrong.
Not wrong like the Democratic Party was "wrong" when it didn't nominate Edwards or Dean. Not wrong like Karl Rove when he didn't show up to testify before Congress.
Nope, I mean wrong like Nazi Germany was wrong, wrong like the KKK was wrong. Wrong morally and legally and strategically and in every other way. The conduct of the Bush administration in their so-called War on Terror, and the complicity of their political and military leadership, is finally triggering a gag reflex.
We've been reading about this stuff in the lefty blogs for years, of course, but now the major US media are starting to publish articles about war crimes and worldwide condemnation of US behaviour. If the seven stages are Disbelief, Denial, Bargaining, Guilt, Anger, Depression, and Acceptance, I think the US may now be getting closer to Stage Four.

Thanks

I wanted to note my thanks to Dr. Dawg, Dave, and skdadl for the posts they made to CathiefromCanada while I was away. They are fine bloggers all, and not surprisingly the site visit stats have increased!

Bullying Omar

The Omar Khadr interrogation is pretty sad, isn't it. First, they try to get Omar Khadr to implicate himself:

"Let's just be honest with each other this one time," said a Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent. . . He urged Mr. Khadr to reveal his role in the deadly battle in Afghanistan, saying the teenager should have run away from the fight.
But Mr. Khadr said that at age 15, he was "too young" to quit the fundamentalist fighters to whom his father — an al-Qaeda suspect — had entrusted him.
That prompted an angry retort from the CSIS agent. "You're not too young; you're a man," he said.
He added: "Your dad dropped you off there for a reason … you think it's fine what you did."
"I didn't do anything," Mr. Khadr replied. "What did I do? I was in a house."

Then they try to get him to implicate his family:

When Mr. Khadr breaks down on tape, a Canadian agent is heard telling him that the solution to his pain is talking. "We can't protect you if we don't know what it is you have to say," he said. The CSIS agent added that if the detainee truly cared about his family he would talk, so that "other members of your family … don't end up as the same situation you are in."

The worst part of the article is this:

The last shots, taken after the Canadian agents left the room, show Omar Khadr putting his head into his hands and weeping.

Ooh, scary, isn't he?
So this is what Canada is reduced to in the War on Terror, trying to bully a teenager. Good thing they weren't interviewing him in Alberta.

Shorter

Shorter New Yorker cover controversy:

We don't understand why all you lefties don't get the joke. If we had drawn Obama eating watermelon and Michelle wearing an Aunt Jemima headscarf, that would have been simply hilarious, too!

What I learned on my summer vacation

We haven't done much travelling really, not outside North America.
Now that I have spent ten days in London and four in Edinburgh, speaking to numerous cab drivers in both cities, I am an expert on all things United Kingdom -- or at least just as much of an expert as most journalists think they are following similar trips!
What I found reassuring was how much we are all alike -- the pervasive worldwide American culture, with Starbucks on every corner everywhere -- but also our newspapers are full of basically the same concerns, politics and jobs and kids and crime and the economy and celebrity scandals and Bradjolina's babies. And the people were all just as busy as we are with working and raising families and shopping and walking the dog.
I also treasured the uniqueness and differences -- absolutely expert fearless drivers, department stores that are a maze of interconnected rooms, paving-stone sidewalks, news-agent greengrocers, delicious pastries, decorative flourishes on just about every building, streets created out of alleys, tiny neighbourhood pubs, "private" parks, statues everywhere, light switches that flicked down for on and up for off . . . and just the sheer age of it all, compared to Saskatoon (where the very oldest house is just 125 years old).
So, I don't have any great insights or philosophies, but it will take me a long time to absorb it all. I guess that's what travel is all about.

Home sweet home

After 24 hours in transit, I am shouting "home at last, home at last, thank God Almighty we're home at last."
I have concluded that these large airports, like Heathrow and Pearson, are just beyond any human scale now.
There should be a sign above their entrances, Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.
Sweating thousands clump along endless corridors toward their mythical airline gate, now harassed by airline staff at desks in the hallways who demand to see boarding passes or passports or both, then emerging into another vast hall of chaos where serpentine lines must funnel through yet another security checkpoint - sometimes shoes off, sometimes laptops in a basket, sometimes not -- then up another escalator and down yet another grey corridor.
The tedium is relieved only by muttered complaints about people who ignore the "stand on the right, walk on the left" convention.
As we were pell-melling through Heathrow to make our flight, I found myself pushing a 12-year-old boy who had stopped at the end of an moving sidewalk to look at something interesting. "You can't stop, you have to keep moving!" -- sort of a motto for today's airport, I guess.
We experienced the usual airport horror stories, culminating in this one -- when another pell-mell effort finally got us to the gate for our last Air Canada connection, from Toronto to Saskatoon, we were told our seats had already been cancelled because our luggage could not possibly have made it.
So we sat in Pearson for the next three hours waiting for the next flight.
And of course, our luggage was waiting for us when we finally arrived in Saskatoon.