Creepy

Boris asks Dear Leader what the fuck is wrong with you?

. . . there is no excuse for the way you've carried on since you first found office. "Tapes"? Seriously man, you're a thug. . . . You nursed your grievances and rage and let them putrify and corrupt you like Annakin Skywalker.
Really, it must be hard to hang on to that kind of anger.

I keep remembering Rick Mercer's story in December about the Potemkin supporters, Conservative staffers who were sent to 24 Sussex to cheer when Harper drove past.

Mr. Harper, by all accounts, actually believed that the young people were there of their own accord and represented a groundswell of love and support for his actions. Staffers in the Prime Minister's Office know that he is easier to handle when being applauded and not questioned.

Lord save us from another prime minister with borderline personality disorder.

Tricky Dicky North

Talk about fiddling while Rome burns, Harper is listening to Iggy-tapes while Canada goes broke.
Steve V calls his post about this "Harper Unplugged" but I think it's more like Harper Unhinged.
A BCer in Toronto posts Ignatieff's response -- Employment Insurance claims are up, stimulus funds aren't being spent, we're got a $50 million deficit, and our Prime Minister is chortling about listening to tapes? Yes, its definitely Nixonian, as Iggy says:



Then again, maybe Harper could learn something by listening to Iggy -- you may have heard he was at Harvard?
But actually that crashing sound reverberating across the country is not just Harper burning, its the other shoe dropping.
Now we understand why the Conservatives started running those ridiculous attack ads about Ignatieff -- they were trying to push him off-balance before the news got out about the deficit.
Didn't work.

Shorter

The lesson Harper is learning from the isotope crisis:

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Do do that voodoo that you do so well.

Here is Sebastian's voodoo which won the fifth competition of the NFB in association with Cannes Short Film Corner and YouTube. Four short films were posted on YouTube for voting through May.



Check out the others, particularly Reach. Thanks to Drawn for the link.

Towel Day

In memory of Douglas Adams, today is Towel Day. Globe reporter Matt Hartley quotes what the Hitchiker's Guide says about towels:

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough."

It is important to know where one's towel is.
And don't panic!

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.