Glad to hear it

Whenever I read about some new conspiracy theory about how somebody is secretly running everything behind the scenes, I think "Well, thank heavens SOMEONE is in charge of this mess!"

Afghanistan mission?

John Cole has a question about Afghanistan:

What exactly are we doing over there? And I’m not saying that seizing the things that makes the Taliban go is a bad thing, just that it is hard to figure out what our big plan is in the region. Drug seizures in a region renowned for opium production just seems kind of whack-a-mole.

As soon as you find out, John, please let the rest of us know, because Canadians have been asking that question for the last six or seven years.
For a while there, early on, in late 2001 and 2002, it did seem as thought the Afghanistan war had some sort of purpose. But that was a long time ago, before it turned into some kind of War Lite with interminable "raids" and "sweeps" and drones killing wedding parties and roadside bombs blowing up young Canadian and American soldiers for no reason anyone can still remember.

Its a wonderful town

My daughter just called as she was walking through Times Square in New York, where it is Fleet weekend so there are sailors all over the place. Reminded me of this great number:

Great line of the day

Josh Freed asks Obama -- Hey, Mr. President! What did Canada ever do to you?

What next? Will you build an Ice Curtain between our countries and jam our TV stations in the U.S. - to prevent Rick Mercer making fun of you? Search and seize our hockey teams at airport security and confiscate their skates?
It's time Americans learned the truth about Canada, instead of the jokes they hear from late-night comics.
. . . So President Obama, hear this: We're not going to take it anymore!
Open that border and shape up - or ship back that made-in-Canada BlackBerry right now.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

For a change of pace: W - O - P - I - G

Guantanamo nation

I was glad to hear Obama say he intends to close Guantanamo, but I just hope is isn't turning the United States into Guantanamo North:

Has the Obama administration really endorsed the reality of preventative detention -- an American gulag, indefinite imprisonment without trial . . . [and that] there exist human beings in this world who could be indefinitely held without trial under the authority of the president of the United States

Marc Ambinder describes the so-called "indefinite detention" plan as Obama's "rubicon" -- like when Julius Ceasar illegally crossed the Rubicon River, after which he was irrevocably committed to invading Rome.
But actually, this is an event horizon, the crossing point where it becomes impossible to escape falling into a black hole.
Because Obama doesn't want to do this illegally, like Bush and Cheney did. No, perhaps even worse, he wants it to be legal. He wants Congress to pass a law giving him the authority to arrest people and put them in jail forever, without ever having a civilian judge or a jury of ordinary people hear the evidence against them and find them guilty of anything.
Governments have tried this type of thing before. There's a name for it.
If Congress approves such a law because they're so pants-wetting terrified of a few dozen Muslim fanatics, they will undermine their own Constitution and the whole concept of a nation based on laws.
Because, after all, once this military commission structure is up and running, why should they stop with just a few Muslim traitors? The Cheney administration believed that Democrats were traitors too. And journalists. And judges. So why wouldn't this administration or the next also become convinced that Republicans were a danger to society? And maybe bankers, too. And aren't drug dealers and Mafia dons also threatening the nation? Not to mention murderers and thieves. Its just so much easier to throw them all in jail without bothering with that messy and expensive and unreliable trial stuff . . .

Justice League of America or whatever

Here's the latest news from Washington:

Seeking to quell fears of terrorists somehow breaking out of America's top-security prisons and wreaking havoc on the defenseless heartland, President Barack Obama moved quickly to announce an Anti-Terrorist Strike Force headed by veteran counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer and mutant superhero Wolverine. Already dubbed a 'dream team,' their appointment is seen by experts as a crucial step in reducing the mounting incidents of national conservatives and congressional Democrats crapping their pants.
'I believe a fictional threat is best met with decisive fictional force,' explained President Obama. 'Jack Bauer and Wolverine are among the very best we have when in comes to combating fantasy foes.' Mr. Bauer said, 'We're quite certain that our prisons are secure. Osama bin Laden and his agents wouldn't dare attempt a break-out, and would fail miserably if they tried. But I love this country. And should Lex Luthor, Magneto or the Loch Ness Monster attack, we'll be there to stop them.'

Or, if it's Bigfoot, let's get Sgt. Preston on the case too, because he always gets his man. On, King! On, you huskies!

Audit fatigue

Oh, here we go again.
I have become increasingly tired and cynical about the self-aggrandizing crusades of Canada's auditors general, at the federal and provincial levels, always wanting more and more investigations of smaller and smaller amounts of money.
Too often, their reports demonize legitimate political spending decisions, terrorize the civil service, and always seems to conclude by demanding for themselves more staff and wider authority. Journalists love them, of course, because those juicy scandalous stories of mis-spent tax dollars practically write themselves.
But in the grander scheme of things, MPs expense accounts are actually pretty small beer. Especially compared to what Ottawa should be investigating -- those billions of extra dollars being collected for employment insurance premiums when EI is actually benefiting fewer and fewer unemployed people. Now THAT'S a scandal.

Mulroney's legacy

Christie Blatchford sums up Mulroney's responsibility for what has happened:

. . . no one forced him to go [to the meeting with Schreiber], to take the envelope, to put it in a safe at his home and keep it there.
Everything else may be someone else's fault, but this wasn't.
. . . In 1965, the magnificent British band The Kinks had a hit with a song called A Well Respected Man about a fellow who actually wasn't. Every time I saw the “Right Honourable” before Brian Mulroney's name on my TV screen yesterday, the song played in my head. That's his legacy, I'm afraid.

And here's the song:



Update: Allison channels The Walrus:

"O weep for me," the Muldoon said:
"For all of it is lies."
With sobs and tears he socked away
His 2 million dollar prize,
And held his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

Supreme news

With today's news that the US Supreme Court is going to review the conviction of Conrad Black, it was timely to read this Jeffrey Toobin article about US Chief Justice John Roberts:

After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

The word to describe this man is "toady".
This is a man who, as a district court judge, figured out a way to excuse the police for arresting a 12-year-old girl for eating a french fry on the subway.
As Obama himself observed when he voted against confirming Roberts as chief justice “It is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak”
I think Conrad Black can book his flight.

Get over yourselves

So now the police in Laval think they need to handcuff people who don't immediately obey their instructions.
Who elected them king?

Great line of the day

Dave at the Beav talks about Rex Murphy's realization that the Harper government is just going around in circles:

. . . like a kid who is completely enthralled by the bright, shiney, toy electric train when he first opened the box, Murphy has become tired and fed up with the fact that it's the same thing, going around in a circle, and he can't seem to find any track that will fit to make it bigger and better.
The Harper party will always be like the little toy train on a circular track: capable of very little and simply repeating its route.

Emphasis mine.

Watching his words

So Brian Mulroney says nobody asked him exactly the right question in exactly the right way a decade ago, so of course he didn't mention those hundreds of thousands in cash forced on him, just FORCED on him, by good old whatshisname, some guy he had coffee with a few times.
Don't you just hate it when that happens?
So what did Mulroney say today that we should all be parsing?

"I never asked him for a nickel in my life."

Nope -- it was a dollar, all 225,000 of them.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Odds my bodkins

What could be better?

Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and Harry James do Sing, Sing, Sing