He's baaaak!

I think Jean Chretien just announced that he's back and he's pissed off.
Gomery and Martin kept him out of the last election campaign, but I don't think he'll be sitting out another one -- which is good because Dion needs all the help he can get.
I wonder if Harper will still keep threatening an election now? Noni Mausa at Galloping Beaver notes some of the strange stuff that Harper has been focusing on lately:

...like most leaders about to be toppled, he appears to be moving to get a few things done before he asked to hand back the keys and the garage door opener for 24 Sussex Drive.
With many governments there is a rush of legislation for the greater good as the lame duck begins his descent -- election funding laws, for instance, or amnesties. We rightly value our government for the wide array of services it provides -- is Harper acting to put some more in place?
Not as far as I have seen. Instead, he has pulled out his machete. The cuts to funding and programs are underway, and weirdly prominent among them are huge cuts to the tiny federal budget supporting the arts.

And here's some more weird news about Conservative candidate recruitment:

In what a cynical observer might suggest is an attempt to tighten any potential future legal challenge to the party’s now notorious in-and-out scheme – which it maintains is entirely legitimate under existing election law – Tory hopefuls are now required to agree, in advance, to any “reasonable financial arrangement” with the party to provide “campaign services” before they will even be permitted to run for the nomination. They also aren’t allowed to talk about it before, during or after the fact, since they also have to sign a non-disclosure agreement that covers the entire candidate selection process.

Well, that'll attract the best and the brightest, won't it? Harper is just so bullheaded about Elections Canada he will distort and demean the party's whole candidate recruitment process just to cover up what the party is doing.

Jerk of the day

Man sues Columbia over women's studies program
If he wants to start a men's studies program, he can go right ahead.
Oops, sorry, not necessary -- that already describes just about every history class before 1950 . . .

He needs our compassion

I think the Canadian Medical Association should diagnose Health Minister Tony Clements as suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. He is utterly obsessed with closing down Insite.

What Billmon says

Billmon gives us excellent analysis on how the United States and NATO have backed into the Russia-Georgia War:

. . . it’s a pretty strange world where the sworn goal of US diplomacy is to put the country in a situation where it may have to go to war with another nuclear power (or back down ignominiously) to defend the sanctity of borders drawn by Josef Stalin and Nikita Krushchev. Leaving aside the raving hypocrisy (Kosovo, Iraq) it’s an alarming sign that the national security and foreign policy elites of this country – in both parties; and not just among the lunatic neocon fringe – are totally out of control. British analyst Anatol Levin (one of the more perceptive of the realists) describes it a case of "profound infantilism":

In the United States, the infantile illusion of omnipotence, whereby it doesn’t matter how many commitments the United States has made elsewhere—in the last resort, the United States can always do what it likes.

Personally, I see it more as a case of the bureaucratic imperative run amok: The national security state is doing exactly what it was designed to do, but without any of the external checks and counterbalances that existed during the Cold War – the war it was originally created to fight. The domestic political system, meanwhile, has atrophied to the point where it’s simply an afterthought – a legislative rubber stamp needed to keep the dollars flowing. With no effective opposition, the machine can run on autopilot, until it finally topples off a cliff (as in Iraq) or slams into an object (like the Russian Army) that refuses to get out of the way.

Read the whole thing.

Great post of the day

John Cole at Balloon Juice writes about how the Chinese are just going to have to wait their turn in the Nazi-stakes:

... Quite simply, there is no time allocated for the Chinese to be called Nazis right now. The Iranians were the Nazis for the previous six months, now the Russians are scheduled to be the Nazis until the elections in November. We will take a break from international Nazis during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and reserve the term for relatives, in-laws, people who re-gift, and secular humanists and the ACLU and anyone else Bill O’Reilly decides is an enemy of Christmas.
Maybe we can work the Chinese into the schedule sometimes in January. I will get with the Weekly Standard and find out.

From Crooks & Liars.

The ownership society

What do Frankie Valli, ABBA, Chuck Berry, Orleans, John Mellencamp, Jackson Browne and Mike Myers all have in common?
They don't like it when John McCain tries to steal their stuff.

Wolf plays with bear cubs

Lone Wolf vs Sow Grizzly with cubs for Elk Carcass



One of our dogs used to play with our cat in exactly this way -- snatching at her tail when she turned her back, then running away. Needless to say, the dog found it more amusing than the cat did.

Corner What?

So the Tories are slashing arts funding while approving a TV porn channel.
I guess we know where the Corner Gas cast will be finding work next, eh?
I can think of a number of "Corner ___" titles, actually . . .

Spoiled teenagers

Its embarrassing and appalling to find out that the RCMP reacted like spoiled teenagers to Canadian outrage about the Dziekanski killing -- hyperbolic complaints about "being crucified", childish threats never to talk to the media again, whining about how Canadians are just a bunch of ingrates, its just not fair, they're so mean to us...sounds like the lunch room at high school.
And I agree with the Globe and Mail:

The coziness between Taser International and the police stinks.

Jumping off the bus

General Wesley Clark is the first to go.

Advice from The Editors

The Editors nails it -- Who’s just like Hitler today?

. . . I have no doubt that there are very well-considered legal and moral arguments about how Russia has done a terrible thing, and I’m sure the World Police and International Relations Jesus will spurred into action by their eloquence and power. Similarly, I’m sure Russia doesn’t give a fuck, and Russia has the under-appreciated advantage of actually existing.
. . . on this foundational level - the simple playground realities of power politics - Georgia fucked up horribly. THOU SHALT NOT PICK FIGHTS THOU CAN NOT POSSIBLY WIN is a fundamental precept one needs to appreciate before any thrilling arguments about how things ought to be . . . I feel bad for Georgia, as - in my all-encompassing benevolence - I feel bad for losers everywhere, but I still can’t help noticing that they are among those who weren’t being very practical about their situation.

The Editors also has some advice for Europe

think very seriously about making formal NATO promises to countries who can’t protect themselves and like to pick fights with Russia.

and for Russia

They’ve successfully neutralized the Georgian Menace, so I’m sure they’ll sleep easier for that, and also demonstrated their ability to repel the not-really threats posed by countries with small, hand-me-down military forces. It depends on how Russia sees its place in the world, I suppose. If they are trying to get the Soviet Union back together, this would be the first step - though its not clear that things would turn out any better than they did last time. If they are trying to join the West, or at least have a cordial working relationship with it, they probably want to wind this thing down quickly.

Smaller stick

Digby on the defeat of America in the Russia-Georgia War:

. . . most people over the age of nine learn that issuing a bunch of threats and failing to carry them through --- or following through and failing to succeed --- is a recipe for people to stop taking you seriously. Bush and Cheney (and now McCain) have made a fetish out of sabre rattling for the past eight years and the results have been, shall we say, less than stellar. The US has shown that its volunteer military, while valiant, is undermanned and overstretched, its intelligence services are willing servants of political manipulators and its leadership is dishonest, immoral and incompetent. It's understandable that somebody out there would think that now is the time to make a move.

The nine-year-old analogy is apt.
Looking back at the past two decades, its clear that both Bush 1 and Clinton knew that America's stick wasn't actually as big or as utilitarian as the American voters believed. They could never say this to the American public, but their power was based on a nuclear arsenal they couldn't actually use and a military which could win tough wars but had neither the expertise nor the political will for oppressive occupations.
The neocons and the Pentagon, on the other hand, actually believed all the hype about how America could do anything it wanted. In the end, against both the new "enemy" in the Middle East, and the old "enemy" in Russia, the neocon overreach has resulted in the rest of the world not taking America seriously anymore.
I hope they don't nuke somebody just to get even.

Olympic spirit

Canadian cyclist Martin Gilbert has the true Olympic spirit.
He had to train in his garage, and now his bike is broken:

. . . He wouldn't be in this position if any of the three Canadian manufacturers he contacted before leaving had only agreed to supply him with a bike.
The best they offered was to sell him one at cost, which would still set him back several thousand dollars.
British cyclists, in the meantime, arrived at the Olympics with prototypes designed by Formula One racing team McLaren . . .
Along with teammate Zach Bell of Watson Lake, Yukon, Gilbert's selection to the national team was contested before the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada.
He only got the final go ahead a month before the Games began.
While waiting for the verdict, the Chateauguay, Que., native trained in his garage and at a exterior velodrome in Bromont, Que., about 85 kilometres south of Montreal.

Canada was too cheap to get him a good bike. And he trained IN HIS GARAGE!
But he's in China for us. And he's still proud to represent us there.
Oh, if anyone deserves a medal at these Games . . .

They should be ashamed of themselves

The United States should apologize to the rest of the world for treating innocent people this way.
We can laugh all we like about Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh and their anti-immigration rants, but the way the United States is treating immigrants now is shameful and disgusting.
"Give me your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", yeah sure, and we'll treat them like dirt and throw them in jail and let them die.
Olbermann said that what Homeland Security did to Hui Lui Ng was murder. He was right.

“ ‘I don’t have much time to live,’ ” his sister said he told her in a call from Rhode Island Hospital in Providence. She said the doctor warned that if the family came to visit, immigration authorities might transfer her brother. Three days passed before the warden approved a family visit, she said, after demanding their Social Security numbers. Late in the afternoon of Aug. 5, as Mr. Ng lay on a gurney, hours away from death and still under guard, she and his wife held up his sons, 3 and 1. “Brother, don’t worry, don’t be afraid,” Ms. Zhao said, repeating her last words to him. “They are not going to send you back to the facility again. Brother, you are free now.”

Olympic priorities for 2012

Canada always debates its priorities for Olympic funding but now I have the answer -- pick the two sports which have finals on the first days of the Olympics! Then in 2012 Canada will win a medal early and we won't have to endure any more "the sky is falling" commentary like this -- and wouldn't that be great for all of us!