Saturday Morning Cartoon

"Yoiks and away!"

Thanks for the nomination

Thanks, Alison, for the nomination as Best Feminist political blog over at A Creative Revolution's The Canadian F-word Blog Awards.
It is truly an honour to be nominated in this category.

Things I didn't know

I didn't know that CBC Radio had an interview show about bands playing in Toronto.
I didn't know that Willie Nelson was on tour with Billy Bob Thornton's band.
I didn't even know that Billy Bob Thornton HAD a band.
Well, now I do.
It's sort of painful to watch someone I formerly admiredact like a jerk and screw up both their acting career and their music career in one little interview.
But I guess drugs will do that to you.
UPDATE: Buh-bye

Great line of the day

From TBogg

Sometimes it's hard to believe that these people are the end result of the fastest sperm in the load.

Shorter

Shorter Glenn Greenwald:

Old bums exit there; new bums enter here.

How to play golf

A good walk, spoiled.

The Globe and Mail should be ashamed of itself

Oooh, that Barak -- sooo scary!!!
The Globe and Mail should be ashamed of itself, putting John Ibbitson's ridiculous, ideological smear job against Obama on its front page -- illustrated with hammers and sickles, no less.
Wanna-be Villager Ibbitson lashes about with all sorts of labels -- socialist, interventionist, activist -- but nothing sticks.
He quotes those models of balanced bipartisanship like Mike Huckabee and the Hudson Institute and the National Review, all in service of his premise that Obama shouldn't be trying to change America.
He also rewrites history to conform to his storyline:

The best and the brightest is how author David Halberstam dubbed those who advised Mr. Johnson and John F. Kennedy before him. They believed they could win the war in Vietnam while reshaping health care, education, housing and civil rights —the Great Society, it was called.
But they didn't know what they didn't know, as former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld liked to say. They failed to appreciate the complexity of the issues, and they paid the price in quagmires.
Is Mr. Obama leading us into a domestic Vietnam? Is the ambition and complexity of his agenda bound to overwhelm an administration that has taken on more than any White House could possibly handle?

Actually, this is wrong -- Johnson's Great Society did not fail at all, in fact much of what he did is still benefiting America -- the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, federal funding for education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, urban renewal.
Where he failed was with Vietnam, but that failure was so massive that it overshadowed Johnson's successes.
Ibbitson does at least talk to Howard Dean, who derides the premise that Obama is doing too much:

"I hate to ruin your article, but I think that's a ludicrous proposal."

That about sums it up, John.

Great line of the day

From Dr. Dawg, about what we could now describe as the Trial of Robert Dziekanski, AKA the Braidwood Inquiry:

We may learn later today of Braidwood's response to Hira's motion to access certain records pertaining to Dziekanski's past. I'll provide an update if and when it becomes available.
In the meantime, let me observe once more that it would be salutary if we could get similar access to the records and past behaviour of the four RCMP officers who killed him. As it is, only the victim has been on trial this week.

Emphasis mine.
UPDATE: The Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette are also disgusted with these sleazy RCMP blame the victim tactics.

My question

A couple of years from now, the final Canadian soldier will die in Afghanistan -- maybe he'll be number 135, or number 150.
And will Canadians feel he died in vain? Yes, I'm afraid we will.

NAFTA - letting the cat out of the bag

Stephen Harper indulged in a bit of a mixed metaphor during his interview with Chris Wallace -- implicitly acknowledging that NAFTA wouldn't fly with Canadians if we were negotiating it today:

WALLACE: Finally, briefly, if I may, sir, candidate Obama talked a lot last year about reopening NAFTA, renegotiating our trade agreements. Now that he is President Obama, has there been any serious move in that direction?
HARPER: Well, what President Obama said to me is he's concerned about the labor and environmental aspects. Those were side agreements in the original NAFTA agreement. He'd like to see ways that those are more comprehensively incorporated into the main body of NAFTA.
We're not [opposed]* to doing that, provided we don't open the whole package, because I think it would be hard to ever put — ever get the cat back in the bag if we tried to renegotiate the thing.

Once that cat is out, he ain't goin' back...

*note that the transcript said "we're not closed (ph) to doing that " but in the context, I think it is probable that Harper actually said "we're not opposed to doing that"

Great line of the day

Bob Cesca pinpoints the stupidity of wingnuts who wanted to negate Earth Hour by turning on all their lights:

. . . crank up your utility bills if it'll make you happy, wingnuts. It's your money.

The Earth Hour website also has photos and video about last night's event around the world.

One for one

Ending two-for-one sentencing credit may be controversial but anything that attempts to remove artificial distortions from the justice system is likely a good thing.
One of the rationales for "crediting" convicted prisoners with more time from their remand time is that people in remand centres have no access to rehablitation, counselling or recreation programs. So, the solution to that is to provide remand centres with rehabilitation, counselling and recreation programs. Another rationale is that prisons will be more crowded if sentences are longer. So, I guess we'll have to build more prisons. The stupidest reason I've heard for not passing this law is that it removes judicial discretion. Huh? The two-for-one sentencing credit wasn't discretionary either. And don't most of our laws already specify a particular sentencing range for a particular crime? But the best reason for removing the credit is that apparently lawyers were starting to use it as an excuse to delay trials and game the system. So, all in all, the credit has to go.

Ugly

I have been feeling a little more optimistic about the economy lately. But next week is the end of the first quarter of 2009. And Calculated Risk explains why the financial news isn't going to be very good:

A little story ...
Imagine ACME widget company with a steadily growing sales volume (say 5% per year). In the first half of 2008 their sales were running at 100 widgets per year, but in the 2nd half sales fell to a 95 widget per year rate. Not too bad.
ACME's customers are telling the company that they expect to only buy 95 widgets this year, and 95 in 2010. Not good news, but still not too bad for ACME.
But this is a disaster for companies that manufacturer widget making equipment. ACME was steadily buying new widget making equipment over the years, but now they have all the equipment they need for the next two years or longer.
ACME sales fell 5%. But the widget equipment manufacturer's sales could fall to zero, except for replacements and repairs.
And this is what we will see in Q1 2009. Real investment in equipment and software has declined for four straight quarters, including a 28.1% decline (annualized) in Q4. And I expect another huge decline in Q1.
For non-residential investment in structures, the long awaited slump is here. I expect declining investment over a number of quarters (many of these projects are large and take a number of quarters to complete, so the decline in investment could be spread out over a couple of years). And once again, residential investment has declined sharply in Q1 too.
When you add it up, this looks like a significant investment slump in Q1.

School Daze

The school district does not contest that Ms. Redding had no disciplinary record, but says that is irrelevant.
“Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules,” the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, “only that she was never caught.”

Whenever we might be tempted to romanticize our school days, we read something like this and the real memories all come rushing back. Gag me with a spoon.

Tit for tat, so to speak?

Steve catches the Kitten Whisperer scratching backs.
Hey, that reminds me...