Does anyone think Palin's a good choice?

Alison deconstructs the CBC's attempt to be "fair and balanced" in A mighty wind blows up the arse of the CBC.
My question to the CBC is this: to "balance" Heather Mallick, where are they going to find a Canadian who actually thinks the Republican choice of Bible Spice AKA Cariboo Barbie as a Vice-Presidential candidate was a good one?

"Mr. President, I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed"

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note quotes former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski on what the plan was for the President to handle a nuclear strike during the Cold War. I found this chilling, particularly because Brzezinski and everybody around him thought it would actually be possible to plan for something like this, and to assume everybody would be calm and rational and orderly:

. . . one of my jobs was to coordinate the president's response in the event of a nuclear attack. I'm not revealing any secrets, but it was something like this: We would have initial warning of an attack within one minute of a large-scale launch by the Soviet Union. Roughly by the second minute we'd have a pretty good notion of the scale and the likely targets. By the third minute, we would know more or less when to anticipate impact and so forth. By the third minute, the job of the national security advisor was to alert the president that this was ongoing, that we have this information. And the president then decides how to respond. It begins to get complicated immediately. If it's an all-out attack, the response is presumably easier. You just react in total. But suppose it's a more selective attack. There are choices to be made. The president is supposed to weigh the options. How will he react? There's an element of uncertainty here. In any case, the process is to be completed roughly by the seventh minute.. . . By the seventh minute, the order to execute had to be transmitted and whatever we decided had to be carried out. Roughly by the 28th minute, there's impact. That is to say, you and your family are dead. Washington's gone. A lot of our military assets are destroyed. But presumably, the president has calmly made the decision how to respond. We're already firing back. Six hours later, 150 million Americans and Soviets are dead. That is the reality we lived with. And we did everything we could to make it as stable, as subject to rational control, as possible.

Of course, nobody anticipated having the president who would just continue reading My Pet Goat for seven minutes...

StealthCon II: The Stealthening

Here's my StealthCon update for today, to add to the four from BC already hunted down by RossK and the nine more listed by the Liberals here.
In Comments, Penlan reports this one:

The Con in my riding, Perth-Wellington, in southwestern Ontario, has also been a no-show for all-candidate debates. It's Gary Schellenburg.

while Mound of Sound adds:

Nanaimo-Alberni, incumbent Reform/Alliance/CPC James Lunney isn't even putting up more than a few campaign signs.

At The Galloping Beaver, Dave reports on the Kamloops Thompson Cariboo riding, where StealthCon candidate Cathy McLeod is refusing interview requests from local media.
And Dave, in reply to your musical tribute to the StealthCons, how about this one?

It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well

Here's the only possible response to this this pathetic publicity stunt:


Why would we not be at all surprised to see Bible Spice and the odious McCain campaign turn a pregnant teenager's wedding day into a media circus?

StealthCons

RossK at The Gazetteer is tracking all of the Conservative candidates who seem to have disappeared. He calls them "StealthCons". Our list so far:
Saanich-Gulf Islands Gary Lunn
Vancouver Island North John Duncan
Chunklets doesn't know whether Edmonton-Spruce Grove Rona Ambrose is a StealthCon yet, but he points out that her Events Calendar ends abruptly on Sept. 22.
And here in Saskatchewan, we think North Battleford's Gerry Ritz may have actually discovered the formula for invisibility because the newspapers aren't finding him anywhere.
Here is Ross's definition of a StealthCon:

A StealthCon is a Harpertronic conservative candidate who ducks the media and especially the public. Their most egregious acts of stealthitude occur when they subvert democracy completely by refusing to show up at all candidates meetings where the voters, instead of watching ads on the TeeVee actually head out the door in an effort to find out, via their own eyes and ears, what they will (or will not) be voting for. We first became acutely aware of the StealthCons that walk among us during the invisible Mar 2008 by-election candidacy of Deborah Meredith in Vancouver Quadra. And here's the thing......Ms Meredith almost won. Thus, despite the jocular, snarkoleptic tone of these posts, this is no laughing matter.

Any other contributions?
UPDATE: The Liberal party website lists "a litany of Conservative candidates who have declined to participate in all-candidates debates and/or refuse to speak to media at all":

Jilian Saweczko in Parkdale-High Park
Health Minister Tony Clement in Parry Sound-Muskoka
Christina Perreault in Toronto-Danforth
Gloria Kovach in Guelph
Immigration Minister Diane Finley in Haldimand-Norfolk
Dave Tilson in Dufferin-Caledon
Michelle Hunter in Wascana
Helena Guergis in Simcoe-Grey
Environment Minister John Baird, representing Ottawa West-Nepean, has refused to participate in an all-candidates debate hosted by the City of Ottawa.
A debate sponsored by the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario on October 8 is being rejected by the Conservatives.
Hull-Aylmer Conservative Candidate Paul Fréchette was a no-show [on Ottawa CBC's morning show] to discuss the issues on air with other local candidates.

So its quite obvious this refusal to participate in democratic processes is not just an idiosyncrasy of a few candidates but rather an expression of deliberate Conservative party policy.
I wonder if Canadians will realize that the Conservative party holds them in contempt?

Great line of the day

From Saskboy, wondering why Canadians aren't questioning Harper's lack of an economic plan:

People should be asking themselves if they can afford to stick with the party and leader who still denies that Canada is headed for the same economic problems as the United States

Yes, that pretty well sums it up, doesn't it.

Cry me a river

An innocent man spends 23 years in jail and now we're supposed to feel sorry for the hurt feelings of the prosecutor and the lead detective when the prisoner's mother got mad at them.
Yeah, really.
The lengthy Inquiry into the David Milgaard conviction for the 1969 murder of Gail Miller has concluded there was no coverup, just a series of unfortunate mistakes.

Wall Street Underpants Gnomes

Turns out that Wall Street was actually populated by Underpants Gnomes in nice suits. Here's the Underpants Gnomes business plan:
1. Collect underpants
2. ?
3. Profit
Maybe step two will turn out to be the $700 billion American government bailout.
No wonder Atrios has been calling all this the big shitpile. Here's an example of the kind of crap that was happening, from Good Math, Bad Math : Economic Disasters and Stupid Evil People:

It gets quite a bit stupider when you look at the details of some of these deals....[such as] one loan package issued by UBS. They had one bundle of about 20 billion dollars of loans that they resold as bonds. They bought 'insurance' on it from a much smaller investment firm, whose total assets (that is, every bit of money that they had any plausible claim to be able to raise) was 200 million dollars. Think about what that means: the guys insuring those 20 billion dollars of loans had absolutely no way of covering them: the insurer couldn't possibly ever pay off the loans they were insuring if they failed. But on the paper that got the loans their high-quality rating, it said that they were fully insured. So there's no way in hell that if those loans failed, the insurers would be able to pay up, and the folks selling the insurance knew it, and the folks buying the insurance knew it. But they just assumed that somehow, this would all work out.

And thanks to the Republican bail out plan, it may.

Great line of the day

At Canadian Cynic, psa writes Big Steve, Working Stiff:

Stephen Harper, plump and soft as a double roll of Cottonelle. A man who has spent his entire adult life, after leaving school with a degree in economics, either as a spoiled politician or as a spoiled ideologue in the loving embrace of a right wing think tank. Stephen Harper. A man who is unlikely to ever develop a callus on his hands unless it comes from clutching pennies. This twee, over-fed poofter has the little salted nuts to look into the lens of the camera and portray himself as one of the "ordinary, working people".

The "Toronto Street Gangs" Pander

Several bloggers and other critics have noticed that Harper's so-called crackdown on teenage criminals doesn't really make sense because the crime statistics show that crime is down.
So when something doesn't make sense, then you have to look for the story behind the story. And in this case, I think it's recent Toronto street gang shootings. I think the Conservatives are just trying to give their Toronto candidates something they can promote when they're campaigning -- so they don't have to answer questions about income trusts and crumbling city infrastructure.
Christie Blatchford's column is actually sort of a test case that the Conservative strategy may work.

Stephen disses Laureen

Stephen, if you're tired of looking after the kids, you should really just talk to Laureen about it instead of getting mad at the whole Canadian arts community.
Yes, its true. While Stephen is trying to score cheap political points by promoting division and distrust between all us so-called "ordinary folk" and all those supposed arty snobs with their elitist "galas", Laureen is gallivanting around:

. . .to the National Arts Centre gala on Oct. 4. (Singer Tony Bennett is the big draw this year.) In fact, she's the gala's honourary chair and has been for several years. And she really gets into it, helping to personally decorate the NAC foyer for the event. She's always dressed beautifully and once again, John Baird, a Tory incumbent candidate from Ottawa and the Environment Minister, has agreed to be her date. Her husband never goes; he stays home and looks after the kids at their taxpayer-subsidized mansion on Sussex Drive

Philistine!

It's our duty

In the Hinzman war dodger court case, the Crown attorney argued:

"It is not really for us to pass judgment on a military code in a foreign country"

What? But of course it is. If Canada doesn't do this, who will?
It is the duty of Canadians to make exactly this judgment before we send anyone back to a country where, it was claimed, he will be treated more harshly by the military because it was the Iraq War he spoke out against.
I'm glad that the judge did not agree with the Crown attorney. Hinzman and his family are staying, at least for now.

Great line of the day

Mike Whitney: Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Paulson is to finance capitalism what Rumsfeld is to military strategy.

Via Sideshow.

Liberals closing or widening the gap?

Nanos has the Tories up by five percent, while Harris has the Tories up by 16 per cent.
Nanos has the Liberals closing the gap, while Harris has the Tories increasing their lead.
I agree with what Warren Kinsella says:

I and many other hacks – red, blue and orange – believe CP and MotherCorp are going to be embarrassed, come Election Day, by the Harris-Decima numbers they’re trumpeting day in and day out. The gap is not that huge; there is no bloody way the Tories have that kind of a lead.

Debit cards were nice, weren't they?

Well, debit cards were nice while they lasted, weren't they?
But it seems like there's just too much risk now to keep on using them.
I got a call from my bank one Saturday in June that my debit card had been cut off -- I guess somewhere I had used it, there was a fraud problem. So I had to dash into the bank and get a new one, and a new PIN.
Darned lucky that I wasn't sitting in an airplane that Saturday morning, on my way to somewhere expensive.
So ever since, I've been trying to use more of that other stuff -- oh, you remember that stuff -- whadaya call it....oh yeah, cash!