I love the internets

Amazing

Politics has consequences

A public health blog, Effect Measure, reports on what is going to hamper the US response to the swine flu pandemic:

There is another relevant fact that should be mentioned here. CDC [Centre for Disease Control]is an agency on organizational hold, with an Acting Director. As public health professionals they are doing a heroic job, but they depend on DHHS [Department of Health and Human Services] , of which they are a part, for building government-to-government relationships. Those relationships suffered badly during the Bush years, with the result that Mexico had a better and more comfortable connection with Canada than the US. So why hasn't the Obama administration righted the problem? Because, among other things, there is still no Secretary of DHHS. Obama's nominee, the highly capable administrator Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, has had her confirmation held up by Republican ideologues playing abortion politics.
If ever there was a time when we needed strong leadership at DHHS, this is it. Playing politics has consequences.

Stage 3

This swine flu spread is pretty scary, isn't it. I've been reading up on the WHO website and we are now considered to be at Stage 3.
Stage 4 is the kaboom stage.
Sounds like all we can really do is wash our hands lots and stay away from large public gatherings.
Some people are buying surgical masks, I guess, but unless the person wearing the mask is the infected person, I'm not sure of their utility -- with SARS, it was determined that heatlh care workers were being infected by breathing the air that was getting around the side of their surgical masks, so they might as well not have worn them.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who voted in the Canadian F-word Blog Awards at Creative Revolution. The winner in my category was Womanist Musings -- congratulations, Renee!
And thanks, again, Alison at Creekside, for nominating me.

Memories

Considering how poor the memories of RCMP officers apparently are, its amazing they can still testify in court cases, isn't it?

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.