October 15?

It is, I think, a terrible mistake for Obama to give the Republicans six months, until October 15, to torpedo his health care bill — they may be dumb, but they’re not stupid.
If the Democrats actually succeed in giving Americans some kind of guaranteed health care, the voters will be grateful forever. So Republicans will move heaven and earth to prevent Democrats from doing this.
Now, a sensible Republican party would join with the Democrats in passing this bill, so they could take credit for it, too. Maybe this is what Obama thinks they will do if they have six months to think about it. But these guys are too dumb, and too entangled with their own anti-government ideology. Besides, Rush Limbaugh wants Obama to fail, and making sure health care reform fails will be his highest priority.
It’s going to be a long summer.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Cordell Barker, the creator of The Cat Came Back, is showing his newest at Cannes
Here's the classic:



Here's the NFB website.

Have you no shame?

Oh for pity's sake, Mr. Prime Minister.
Stop whining and pontificating and ducking and weaving and just do the right thing.
I don't like Omar Khadr either, but he is a Canadian citizen.
Bring him home.

Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in

You know how during the Bush administration whenever there was something going on that didn't make sense, it always turned out to be worse than you could ever have imagined?
Its a nightmare that just won't end, because it's happening AGAIN.
One thing that didn't make sense about the Bush administration using communist and vietnamese torture techniques was that these weren't actually aimed at gathering information but rather at provoking false confessions.
But now we find out that the Bush administration actually wanted false confessions all along::

Having realized that there really was no evidence of a Saddam/Al Qaeda connection (and later that there were no WMD in Iraq) they had to come up with some false information that they could spin. The best way to come up with false information ... is to torture it out of people.

Monsters.

Playing with dolls

I hadn't heard about this ridiculous Michael Coren column about how unwomanly female soldiers are until I read about it over at Galloping Beaver. Dave and the Rev say just about everything that needs to be said about this sexist drivel.
The only additional point I want to make is this:
I've been dealing with this kind of dinosaur attitude all my life, where some men, and some women too, think it is chilvalrous and they are doing women a favour by preventing us from going into dangerous or lonely or physically demanding careers like construction workers, police officers, firemen, forestry workers, ambulance drivers, doctors, veterinarians, long-haul truckers -- or soldiers.
Consciously or unconsciously, they see women as Barbie dolls -- women aren't real people, we are just gender objects. People who think this way use words like "pretty" and "sexy" to describe young women, and words like "frumpy" and "bitchy" to describe older women -- the words don't actually describe us as individuals but only as how we look or how we relate to the men in our lives. We are really nothing but bit-players in the real world, the world where men do the real work.
The tip-off that we are dealing with another dinosaur is this: inevitably, somewhere we always find a mealy-mouthed, head-patting line about how very very special it is to be a woman because we bear the children and isn't this just the most important "job" of all!
The coda is, so just shut up about all this stupid equality stuff, and go cook something delicious like only you ladies can! And since you're in the kitchen anyway, can you iron me a shirt for tomorrow?
This attitude toward women was so ingrained in our society that many people didn't even realize they had it until they first heard the doctor riddle.
I wonder if Coren would get it even now?

Grear line of the day

Digby on the torture memos

It was bloodlust, plain and simple. They gave themselves permission to become barbarians.

And everyone from Bush and Rumsfeld and Condi and Colin Powell on down started lying about Abu Ghraib in April 2004 and have never stopped:

That we now have even more proof they consciously sent these SERE techniques to Iraq to "Gitmoize" it --- a country which we invaded under false pretenses and which had not attacked us first --- takes these crimes to yet another level. If nothing else, allowing a bunch of low level grunts to pay the price while the men and women who gave the orders publicly pretended they were appalled at the behavior they themselves had sanctioned, makes all arguments that these leaders shouldn't be held accountable completely untenable.

S & M Republicans

There's something very S & M about Republicans these days.
They spent the last eight years knuckling under to George Bush whenever Karl Rove cracked the whip. And now that Bush and Rove are gone, they're submitting to Rush Limbaugh. It's like they just can't be happy unless they're made somebody into the party dominatrix.
And come to think of it, the Conservatives under Harper aren't much better, are they? Its odd to see so many grown people enjoying being ordered around.

Just a little oopsie

RCMP "sorry" for inaccurate remarks on Dziekanski incident

Sgt. Lemaitre arrived at the police station at 6.30 a.m., was briefed by a fellow Mountie and watched a portion of a video of the incident that had been shot by a bystander.
But many details subsequently released by Sgt. Lemaitre were wrong, and the spokesman did a string of interviews in the next couple of days that repeated the errors . . .
On the witness stand, Sgt. Lemaitre insisted these erroneous statements were honest mistakes on his part. He was handed this information from a fellow Mountie, Corporal Dale Carr, the media spokesman for the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, which handles serious crime.

Hmmm, now what does this remind me of?

Shorter

Shorter Jack Layton to Stephen Harper

Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who.

Sending a message

Just as the Wilson leak was a message to the CIA from the Bush administration that agents' careers could be ruined overnight if they were disloyal, now so the Harman expose is a message to Congress from the CIA that political careers can be ruined overnight if they start investigating what was really going on during the Bush administration.

Final exam

When you heard this news

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

was your first response "Oh My God!" or "Fuck, yeah"?
Putting aside the cruelty, illegality and futility of what the CIA was doing in the name of protecting America, the torture memos are also a personal test for all of us of just how civilized, humane, moral and decent we really are.

Off the record

Glenn Greenwald writes about the sycophantic practices of Washington journalist Mike Allen in letting an anonymous Bush smear-merchant trash Obama "off the record". About the same incident, Andrew Sullivan writes:

Allen is allowing a member of the administration that broke the Geneva Conventions and committed war crimes to attack the current president and claim, without any substantiation, that the torture worked. He then allows that "top official" to proclaim things that are at the very least highly questionable. What journalistic standard is Allen following in allowing such a person to speak anonymously?
And how much lower can he sink in craving buzz and traffic?

And here's another anecdote about a Washington villager who thought he could stop reporters from attributing remarks he made in a public forum to a thousand people merely by retroactively declaring his public appearance "off the record".
It reminds me of George M. Cohan's song about FDR, "Off the Record", as sung by Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy:

Check the price tag

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has produced a very interesting report on how much we benefit from public services.
And the answer is that we each benefit to the tune of about $17,000 a year, plus or minus. This is the value of all of the public services provided to each of us by Canadian governments at the federal, provincial and municipal levels -- that's schools, hospitals, medicare, cleaning snow off the streets, and all the other stuff that governments do for people.
Poor people benefita little more, rich people a little less, but the range isn't that large.
Two of the results I found most interesting.
First, when ideologues try to pit Canadians against each other by implying that our social welfare system gives disproportionate and unfair benefits poor people or brown people or immigrants or disabled people or people with children, well, this just isn't true. Over our lifetimes, we all benefit relatively equally:

. . . seniors derive significant benefit from personal transfer payments like Old Age Security, the Guaranteed Income Supplement and the Canada/Quebec Pension Plans. As they age further, they realize increasing benefits from the health care system.
Families with young children will tend to benefit relatively more from the health care system, whereas families with older children will tend to benefit from the public education system to a greater extent than other types of families.. . .
Canadians draw remarkably similar levels of benefit from public services in the aggregate over their lifetimes, although the specific types of public services that are the source of that benefit vary over their lifetime.

So much for wedge issues.
And second, we've got to stop slobbering like Pavlov's dogs every time a politician waves a tax decrease our way.

. . . public policy debate over taxes without reference to the public services impact of tax cuts is like shopping without looking at the price tags. Just as some Canadians can afford to shop without looking at price tags, some Canadians’ incomes are high enough that they can buy into tax cuts and remain confident that their private gains will be greater than their public services losses. But the vast majority of Canadians can’t or shouldn’t shop without looking at the tags.

Strange days indeed

Somebody told me there'd be days like these.
The Indians scored 14 runs -- in the second inning!
The pitcher now has an earned run average of 34.5. He said "I'm going to keep trying to work things out in the bullpen." Yeah...

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century!