Cheap shot

Now that the so-called "cheap shot specialist" of the Commons, Peter Van Loan, is public safety minister, we're reading stories about Education professors being denied entry to speak at academic conferences -- the day before the Obama inauguration. Great timing, guys.
That'll sure convince the Obama administration that Canada is a place they want to do business with, won't it.

To see ourselves as other see us

It's always interesting to read about your city from the viewpoint of someone who had never been here before.
Pretty positive article, except she seemed a little surprised that the hotel was so nice. And of course she mentioned the cold -- and boy, has it ever been cold lately. But its finally warmed up now.
You know, we have large numbers of university students coming here from semi-tropical countries and they must be absolutely stunned at their first winter here. But one thing I tell them -- once you realize that you can live quite happily in Saskatchewan summer and winter, then you can live anywhere in the world, because weather simply will never be a factor to you again.
When we lived on the west coast, we met people who actually could not live in any other part of the country because they were so afraid of winter. So their careers were really truncated as a result.

MIA

Steve looks back on what the Harper government has done for the last seven months to deal with the economic crisis:

. . . in the face of an economic storm, our government has been AWOL . . . when I hear talk from the likes of Baird about "quick action" and recognizing the gravity, the proud record of pre-emptive measures, it's worth remembering- 221 days of a Parliament completely AWOL, during the worst economic crisis in at least a generation. . . . where was the Government of Canada during the crucial time? Either on holiday, forcing an election, proroguing Parliament or spending all their energy trying to kill political opponents. That's it, while Rome burned. A disgrace, by any measure.

One of the notable observations about the self-pitying Bush speech last night was that Bush thinks he should get a gold star just for showing up.
Well, Harper hasn't even done that.

Beware the donut of choice!

So Krispy Kreme is offering a free "donut of choice" in celebration of the Obama inauguration.
And there's a group of wingnuts saying this means Krispy Kreme is pro-abortion.
I wonder when they will realize that nobody is going to take this kind of stupidity seriously anymore?

It's really a cookbook

As I read Digby's post about how conservatives still worship Ayn Rand's 50-year-old novel Atlas Shrugged, I started to wonder -- has anyone ever told them "It's a cookbook"?

Great line of the day

Mr. Sinister predicts that the Tory budget will be a magical mystery tour:

The Tories will present a beautiful budget (think Stalin's 1936 Constitution), full of beautiful promises and wads of cash, never to be seen or heard from again (until the next election when they will be reannounced).

That was then, this is now

There was a 1979 episode of MASH on tonight, the one where BJ and Hawkeye are trying to protect a North Korean spy from being interrogated by a South Korean officer who, it is rumoured, tortures his prisoners -- much to BJ's horror and Hawkeye's disgust.
Hawkeye calls him a son-of-a-bitch, the first time these words were ever heard on TV. That's how strongly Americans used to feel about torture.
You can now laugh ruefully and shake your head.
As Avedon Carol says:

The thing about torture, you see, even though it's always gone on, is that we used to recognize it as something so bad you never admitted if you did it. You knew that no decent human being would approve. And you knew that it would be bad for us if we went around bragging about torturing people.

Yes, it has been.
Eight more days.

Stupidest article so far this year

I quit subscribing to Newsweek in the 90s when they did a cover story about angels.
The news was that we were all supposed to clap louder.
Now Newsweek has a cover story about devils -- or one in particular. They now apparently think that Dick Cheney was right. They think Obama should validate their Cheney-worship by running and hiding and quaking in fear and torturing people and setting up a personal justice system to jail people without evidence, just the way lovable old Dick did.
But this time, they think Obama should tell Congress about it all and get them to pass laws allowing him to do whatever he wants.
Yea, that'll happen!
Clap louder, why don't you?

Shorter

Shorter Glenn Greenwald:

Old bums exit there; new bums enter here.

Good jobs and job security

Seems sort of obvious, doesn't it -- nobody's buying nothing until we aren't afraid of losing our jobs. At Daily Kos, Devilstower tells the politicians just what kind of "stimulus" people need:

Just a hint to those planning economic stimulus: a one time payment isn't going to get people to spend. A tax cut isn't going to get people to spend. Not when conditions are like this.

The accelerating job loss — more than one million jobs have disappeared in just two months — suggests that the recession will last at least into early summer, making it the longest since the 1930s. The severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s each lasted 16 months, the current record.

Good jobs and job security -- that's what will get people to spend.

H/T Scott. Basically, what we need are more unions.

I have an idea to end the Ottawa bus strike

The CP story that the Ottawa transit strike is continuing says this:

It is not clear what the next step will be to end the strike.

Well, Ottawa, here's an idea -- instead of city leaders and federal politicians indulging in wishful thinking about how the rank and file will solve the problem by breaking their own union, and about how the labour relations board will solve the problem by declaring bus drivers as "essential", why don't they just try negotiating in good faith?

Meaningless cruelty

Gitmo will go down in history as a demonstration of how a callous bureaucracy based on unjust authority will devolve into meaningless cruelty.
The Miami Herald report that30 men in Guantánamo are now being force-fed:

Washington lawyer David Remes, who represents 17 Yemenis, said some of his clients launched the latest hunger strike after Yemeni Salim Hamdan went home in November, a month shy of completion of his 66-month prison sentence.
"They've actually gone ballistic at the fact that Hamdan, who was convicted of supporting terrorism, was released and they, who have been charged with nothing, continue to languish there," said Remes, who met with clients before Christmas . . .
Long-held detainees, most held without charge since early 2002, were "elated" that Hamdan was leaving the prison camps, Remes said.
But, "that doesn't mitigate the perverseness of the situation. If an ordinary detainee knew that all you had to be [was] Osama's servant to get out, a lot of them would have fabricated confessions that they were Osama's servant."

Great line of the day

Digby describes a recent incident in Oakland, CA where a transit policeman shot and killed an unarmed man -- the man was under arrest with a bunch of his rowdy friends at a subway station, all were sitting on the floor, some of others had been handcuffed. The man is sitting with his hands in the air, lipping off at the transit police, when one of the transit cops just pulls out his gun and shoots him.

Officials have not said whether the officer intended to shoot Grant. One source familiar with the investigation said BART is looking into a number of issues, including whether the officer had meant to fire his Taser stun gun rather than his gun. Alameda County prosecutors are conducting their own investigation, as is standard in officer-involved shootings.

I wouldn't be surprised if he did. The police use their stun guns on people who are already on the ground and offering no threat all the time. It's no wonder that one of them would get confused and just start shooting people in the same position. They have no sense of what constitutes a real threat anymore.
See, the problem isn't the form of gun they use, a stun gun or one with bullets. It's that they use any gun on people who are already down.

Emphasis mine.

Oh, for crying out loud

We have another cause celebre, folks. It's so-called "third hand smoke" -- its the residue that smokers have hanging around them after they come in from outside, where they had a cigarette.
I think we could actually call this "Memories of Smoking", like President's Choice products.
Here's the first study about it -- well, its not exactly ABOUT it. After we read a lot of stuff about about how carcinogenic smoking is, we find out that the "study" was about whether anybody THINKS that this "third-hand smoke" is bad for children. Surprise, surprise, turns out some people DO think so. So the study didn't actually study the smoking residue itself, nor any impact it might actually have on anyone's health. And rather than concluding that "third-hand smoke" is somehow dangerous, it could just as well have concluded that the health police now have one more way to demonize people who smoke.

Be still my heart...

Pearl-clutching from the Washington Post:

To some staunch conservatives watching President Bush relinquish the reins of power to President-elect Barack Obama, a few too many ardent liberals are now crashing the gates.
Some well-known Democratic activists are advising Obama on how to steer federal agencies . . . Conservatives fear that some of these Obama transition advisers are too far left on the political spectrum and are a sign of radical policies to come.

Oh, if only it were true. Well, I guess we can always hope.