Canada is worth it

So I was thinking just yesterday how glad I was that we weren't going to be insulting our fellow Canadians by reenacting the Battle of the Plains of Abraham this summer.
Then today along comes this story whining about how Quebec City is losing tourist money this summer because a town in New York State is reenacting some other battle at Fort Niagara.

A New York town should be the big tourism winner after the National Battlefields Commission's decision to cancel plans to re-enact the Battle of the Plains of Abraham this summer. . . .
More than 2,500 people will take part in the depiction of the Siege of Fort Niagara, where French defenders of the garrison at the mouth of the Niagara River surrendered to the British on July 25, 1759.
Youngstown is across the river from Niagara-On-the-Lake, Ont.
Horst Dressler, president of the Quebec Historical Corps, says history buffs have thrown their support behind the Fort Niagara re-enactment.

But then we find out that this reenactment isn't exactly ground-breaking, in fact they do it every year:

Eric Bloomquist, programs manager at Fort Niagara, says the re-enactment typically draws about 10,000 visitors every year, but he expects upward of 15,000 this year.

Meh! Its a small price to pay for Canadian unity, I think.

Comedy Network is Teh Suck

Isn't it annoying that every time a Canadian wants to watch a Daily Show clip embeded in a news story we're get told disdainfully that Big Brother doesn't allow it.
Instead, we are supposed to find the link to the Comedy Network and then we have to find the link to the Daily Show and then we have to search through all of the clips to find the one we were interested in.
If we can even remember by then what it was...

Great line of the day

One of the best things about the internet is being able to find great writing whenever I want to. I searched for writing about Canada Day and found Peter T. Smith in the Fredericton Telegraph-Journal about Canada Day and being Canadian:

I think our sense of being Canadian comes as much from a shared set of values as it does from contact with our cultural institutions. I think we're also in the process of developing a new incarnation of our national myth.
John Ralston Saul made a compelling argument late last year in A Fair Country that we're not English or French or modeled on any European tradition at all, but rather we're essentially an aboriginal culture. Aboriginal culture, Saul contends, is marked by peaceful but unresolved tensions between groups and an ever-expanding circle than embraces everyone. 'We are a Metis civilization,' he asserts, because that was what we were for most of our history, before we embarked on a century and a half of constitutional debates and trying to settle issues that should remain dynamic.

Conspiracy theory

So the Minnesota Supreme Court has now managed to delay the Al Franken Senate seat decision until the very end of June.
And now the US Supreme Court is on vacation until September.
So if the Minnesota Supreme Court rules that Franken was elected, and if Minnesota Governor Pawlenty signs the certificate of election, and if Norm Coleman then appeals to the SCOTUS ...
well, well -- apparently the summer Justice on duty could issue a stay to prevent Al Franken from being sworn in. So Al Franken would remain in limbo for the rest of the summer and into the fall.
And apparently the summer Justice on duty is Samuel Alito.
Oh, I'm sure its just another crazy conspiracy theory....

Cheering

Finally Iraq is cheering the American military.

Simple answers to simple questions

Independent review of the Royal Canadian Mint's records shows accounting glitch is unlikely – so how did $19-million of the precious metal disappear?

Somebody stole it.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.

Death becomes him

Here's a trite observation but I'll make it anyway.
Last week, Michael Jackson was the scum of the earth, a pedophile and a self-absorbed, self-destructive spendthrift who had wasted his talent. Comeback? You've got to be kidding!
Today he is a tragic figure, a winsome boy genius cut down in his prime by the cruelty of celebrity. Comeback? Woulda been the greatest concerts EVAH!
Sad, isn't it, when someone basically lucks out by dying -- Elvis, Dianna, and Marilyn also come to mind in this respect.

Dyke March

My daughter wasn't able to be there this year, so here's some Toronto Sun photos of the Dyke March today.









The Pride Parade is tomorrow.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom

Slow news day?

Canadian Press is reporting that July 1 is on Wednesday this year.
This just in -- next year it will be on Thursday.

Pretty soon you're talking about real money!

A billion here, a billion there -- pretty soon you're talking about real money!*
The Defense Department ended up releasing the Afghanistan war costs today -- and golly gosh darn it, they just couldn't quite get those figures out before Question Period went on vacation, oh well, better luck next year.
But here's the question anyway --if the Afghanistan mission is really ending in 2011, as Harper quickly announced during last fall's election campaign, why are we going to be spending $150 million $943 million $1.47 BILLION in Afghanistan for 2010-11, and $178 million $779 million in 2011-12?
As Dave says, the new figures

shine a nasty bright light on something they really don't want you to know - same mission; different description.

Don't cry for me Argentina

And thus, "hiking the Appalachian Trail" joins "wide stance" in the new folklore of America.

Let him rot

The Canadian government wants Canadian courts to let Canadian citizen Omar Khadr rot in Guantanamo because it's not the job of the Canadian government to protect Canadian citizens:

Ms. Mueller said the Crown rejects the view that it is legally required to protect Canadians under the Charter of Rights when they face charges outside of the country.
“There is clearly no duty to protect citizens under international law,” Ms. Mueller told the court.

God keep our land glorious and free.

Iran

The War Nerd thinks the protests in Iran are going to fizzle -- the young people are sick of the regime but aren't strong enough to overthrow it. He makes this comparison:

magine Iranian Islamic tv covering, say, a classic culture-war US election like Nixon in 1972. You’d see Persians in expensive turbans blanket-covering every demonstration, every love-in (well, maybe not those so much), every draft-card burning…and then the US government announces that Nixon just stomped McGovern in the biggest landslide ever. Who’d believe it? That is, unless you knew that for every loud camera-hog hippie you saw on tv there were about a hundred fat nobodies wishing Kent State was a daily event.
Until those Ahmedinajad silent-majority hicks start tweeting, we’ll never have a clue what they think. And like Nixon’s people, or Forrest’s dragoons, they’re not really the Twitter type.

Great line of the day

On a radio program yesterday, a former Republican congressman was advising a 62 year old retail clerk with diabetes that her health insurance problems would be solved if she could go out and find herseif a job with a big employer. Oh, yeah, lots of big companies are hiring 62-year old clerks now.
And on Limbaugh's program today, Mark Steyn was apparently nattering on about whiney seniors who don't want to pay for their own prescription drugs.
So here's what Digby says about these two:

Conservative politicians and their wingnut welfare queens are just a bunch of heartless, rich jackasses, basically, always have been. But people are no longer quite so sanguine that they're going to get the chance to be rich, spoiled jackasses too so these lines don't read quite as hilarious or as "common sense" as they used to. A public servant telling some 62 year old retail clerk that she needs to stop bellyaching and find a job with a big employer so she can get health care is so "let them eat cake" that I can hardly believe he said it. And some overpaid creep calling senior citizens who are living on a thousand dollars a month "spoiled" is just asking for the guillotine, which in America is a metaphor for a tax rate of 90% on any fatuous wingnut gasbag who has the nerve to say something like this after what they've done to this country.

You know, what amazes me is this: the Republicans are searching high and low for an issue that will make them popular again with the American people. Its staring them in the face -- in the 2010 midterms, one party is going to be able to call themselves "the party that fixed American health care" and its not going to be the Republicans.