Brilliant

Now here's a really terrific idea to save the health care system a lot of money-- don't screen people for diseases.
See, because so many of those screening tests are just wasted, really, because so many of the people tested don't actually have the disease. It's just so much more efficient, dollar-wise, to wait until people are coughing up blood or keeling over screaming in agony, and THEN test them for testicular cancer or breast cancer or diabetes or heart disease, because its almost for sure then that they've really got it.
And of course, when those people die young, now that REALLY saves the system a lot of money.

Gay pride editorials

I think Canadian arts organizers can say bye bye to all those other grants which had been given to gay organizations across the country, now that these are also going to be on the Religious Right target list. This government has never cared a nickel about Canadians who don't vote for them, like all those artsy types with their galas and all that.
Here's a round up of today's editorials on the Cons anti-gay agenda. Basically, the editorial writers cannot believe that the Cons still think this way -- they keep asking Harper to straighten things out.
But he won't.
Because they actually do think this way.
The Saskatoon Star Phoenix editorial demands an explanation for Brad Trost's anti-gay pandering:

Either Mr. Trost was ignorantly counting on his comments made to an interest group website not getting wide publicity or he felt that he had the backing of the Conservative caucus in making pronouncements that once again shine a bright beam into the dark corners of the party's ideological anteroom, but surely this isn't what Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants as he contemplates the likelihood of a fall election.
. . . Ms. Ablonczy did nothing wrong in treating the Pride Toronto application like any other, instead of flagging it for the attention of the likes of Mr. Trost, who seem to think the Conservative MPs only represent a segment of the population when they get to Parliament, not all Canadians. Most citizens of this country have long accepted that gays are part of the mainstream society, as the popularity of events such as the pride parades across Canada demonstrates.
. . . it's time that Prime Minister Harper explains what's going on . . . At a juncture, when the Saskatchewan government is trying to tiptoe its way around gay rights and a racially motivated attack on a black man in British Columbia is making headlines, the last thing Canadians need is for their governing Conservatives to be seen regressing to the days when a Reform MP justified putting "ethnics and gays at the back of the shop."

The Toronto Star ignores all the lying about how Ablonczy's removal wasn't connected to the Pride dustup:

Apparently without fear of reprimand, a member of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's cabinet can produce an economic statement filled with fictitious forecasts (Jim Flaherty), tell Toronto to "f--- off" (John Baird), leave a classified document behind at a TV studio (Lisa Raitt), get caught on tape describing cancer as "sexy" and dissing a colleague (Raitt again), and make bad jokes about listeriosis (Gerry Ritz).
But let a minister dare to hand out a cheque to the organizers of Toronto's annual Pride Week and . . . she is cut off at the knees.
Tourism Minister Diane Ablonczy is the victim here. She has been publicly humiliated and stripped of responsibility for distributing funds from the government's $190 million Marquee Tourism Events Program after Pride Week received a $397,500 grant.
A major fixture on Toronto's calendar, Pride Week clearly fits the program's criteria as "an annually recurring world-class event that is well established (and) generates significant levels of tourism and aims to attract a significant amount of international media attention to Canada as a tourism destination."
Pride Week has also evolved from a form of political protest to a celebration, with mainstream politicians joining the parade. But social conservatives in Harper's caucus, who have not evolved themselves, cried foul over Ablonczy's grant to Pride Week.
. . . It says much about Harper that he felt obliged to kowtow to caucus members who have not yet entered the 21st century.

And the Globe and Mail also editorializes about the Cons homophobia:

What appears to have irked some Conservatives is that Ms. Ablonczy treated the pride funding as just another announcement, rather than flagging it to colleagues and higher-ups as potentially controversial. But Pride Toronto is one of the biggest annual tourist draws in the country, with last year's festival reportedly earning $91-million in tourism revenue. It was previously named the country's best festival by the Canadian Special Events Industry. There is no suggestion that there was anything improper about its funding application, which met all criteria laid out in the MTEP guidelines.
When gay Canadians were fighting for civil rights, Mr. Trost's claim that Pride is "more political than touristic in nature" might have been valid (although it was certainly a cause worth fighting for). But now that those rights have been achieved, and gays and lesbians widely accepted into mainstream society, Pride is much more a celebration than a protest. Its centrepiece parade is not to everyone's taste, but it nevertheless draws hundreds of thousands of revellers, many of them heterosexual. Insofar as this year's event had a political focus, it was mostly to draw attention to the terrible human-rights abuses faced in other countries - abuses that the vast majority of Canadians would condemn.
The Conservatives have come a great distance in setting aside concerns that they will allow the social conservatism of some party members to dictate government policy. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has shown little appetite for pursuing that agenda, would be wise to make clear that it is Ms. Ablonczy, not Mr. Trost, who speaks for the government.

And Kelly McPharland at the National Post notes:

One of the more peculiar tendencies of Stephen Harper's government is its need from time to time to engage in ill-conceived, self-defeating, politically senseless demonstrations of its ideological virility, as if seized by the need to let the world know that -- polite as it has learned to behave while running the country -- it still has some pretty stupid ideas.. . . Mr. Harper was never going to win a lot of votes in left-wing Toronto, but if he'd set out to deliberately offend the city and supply his critics with material to use against him, he couldn't have done a better job. All the billion-dollar subsidies to transit systems, and the tight-smiled photo-ops with Dalton McGuinty, are a waste of time if the Prime Minister is going to insist on feeding the misconception that Tories are troglodytes...

But Kelly, its NOT a misconception.

Worst case scenario

About the Toronto Gay Pride Parade tourism grant brouhaha, Hedy Fry is asking Harper for an explanation:

“At best, this is another Conservative MP making rogue, homophobic comments while attacking a cabinet colleague – actions which are grounds for caucus dismissal,” said Vancouver Liberal MP Hedy Fry. “At worst, Mr. Trost is the only MP willing to admit his government’s discriminatory new tourism policy on record. Only Prime Minister Harper can clarify how far this intolerance extends within his government – and he needs to do so now.”

The explanation is that the Conservative Party is populated by a bunch of homophobes.
Apparently the PMO staff got all in a snit when Minister Ablonczy had her photo taken with drag queens following the grant announcement in June. Oohhh, queens, so icky!

Can anyone today imagine Stephen Harper or any member of his cabinet or his caucus agreeing to act as grand marshal of a gay pride parade, the way Joe Clark did for the Calgary parade in 2001?

Of course, Gay Pride has some standards when it comes to asking people to be grand marshals of its parades. These days neither Harper nor his caucus members would be asked, so I guess there's no problem.
Here's some of the photos from the Macleans' website of this year's pride parade in Toronto. The Ontario Progressive Conservatives were there:


as was Iggy and company:


According to the LifeSiteNews.com news story in which Brad Trost revealed the Conservative party's homophobic reaction to the federal tourism grant, the Toronto Gay Pride Parade is "notorious"for "full frontal nudity and public sex acts by homosexuals", but I couldn't find any of these photos on the Macleans website.
Darn it.

UPDATE: A commenter on the Macleans site says: "I can see why the Cons regretted supporting this event. It looks like everyone had fun."

Great line of the day

From James Howard Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation:

When the time comes when we do look back to understand what went wrong, I think we'll see that the Woodstock generation went off the rails in 1980, with the election of the actor, Ronald Reagan, who really established the idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply pretending.

Redneck hicks part deux

Not all the redneck hicks are in Saskatchewan.
Some of them have now moved to Ottawa.

Good riddance

Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.

Thus begins Joseph Galloway's obituary for Robert McNamara, coward.
I will never forget how angry I was to find out a few years ago that McNamara had turned against Vietnam in 1967 but hadn't had the courage to speak out then, when it would have made such a great difference and possibly saved tens of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese.

She's no Oprah

Josh Marshall writes about Palin's not-yet resignation:

. . . given the thundering derision that has greeted her decision and exposure as a quitter of gargantuan proportions, is it possible she'll reconsider? After all, if she's resigning, why doesn't she just resign? Why wait until the end of July?
Again, I don't think it's likely. And I can't fathom a scenario in which it was planned all along. But remember we're dealing with a deeply erratic and probably mentally unstable person who does lots of completely whacked things at the drop of a hat.

Yes, this scenario had occurred to me as well -- and I think it is actually quite likely that she will change her mind again, particularly if the job opportunities down south aren't materializing.
Basically, she is a popular "public figure" but as an employee, she would be a train wreck -- her only real career opportunity now is some sort of media gig, but she doesn't have the management skills to run her own TV show or the maturity to listen to somebody else's direction.

Pay2Play

Miss Manners could have told her -- you don't charge admission to your own party, you just don't!
It's become known as the Pay2Play scandal, that plan by the Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth to charge admission to a series of dinners in her home so that lobbyists could snuggle up to politicians and journalists.
Weymouth has now sort-of apologized, though her true regret seems to be only that she was just terribly, terribly misunderstood.
Reminds me of that joke "We've already established what you are, we're just haggling about the price."
I know nothing about Weymouth except what I have read in the last few days, but I suspect Weymouth wanted to be as influential in Washington as Katherine Graham was, without spending 30 years to do it. So she came up with the idea of hosting these parties as her quick way to become Washington's queen. It might have worked, too, if she hadn't also been trying to make money off them -- it wasn't only her own staff she was selling access too, but also all those supposedly influential politicians and Obama staffers who were going to be the Fearless Freep act that those lobbyists were paying to see.
I don't think the Washington Villagers will forgive this tackiness, and nobody will be coming over to the Weymouth house for dinner any time soon.

Sunday morning cartoon

So I missed Saturday, so sue me.
But really, sorry about that. Here's two for one:
Saskboy points to this great site of the 25 greatest Calvin and Hobbes cartoons ever.

And, in honour of my summer holidays starting and a bunch of projects I want to get done:

This just in

Proof positive that Rush Limbaugh IS a big fat idiot!

Redneck hicks

Thumbs up to a move by the provincial government to seek advice on the issue of same-sex weddings and civil marriage commissioners.

Would the writer of this Rawlco Radio news story be so pleased if the province was intending to let marriage commissioners use religious grounds to refuse to perform marriages for Aboriginal people? Or Jews? Or Catholics? Or Ukrainians?
The message from our provincial government to those marriage commissioners who don't want to perform gay weddings should be this: that any Saskatchewan marriage commissioner who doesn't want to officiate at some marriages has the right to do so -- just resign as a marriage commissioner.
But Brad Wall's Saskatchewan Party government wants to maintain Saskatchewan's international reputation as a bunch of redneck hicks. They think its OK to send a message to gay people that the government of Saskatchewan regards them as second class citizens.
Come to think of it, that means they ARE a bunch of redneck hicks, aren't they?

Revenge of the activists

So this is why Palin resigned?

Asked why Palin was stepping down as opposed to finishing her term (which ends in 2010), the [head of the Republican Governor's Association] cited pesky bloggers and activists as the reason.

Sure, we called her Bible Spice and Cariboo Barbie, but ... wow, just wow -- I just didn't realize us bloggers were so influential!
Not to mention all those activists that the Republicans laughed at during the presidential campaign as such wimps. Who's laughing now?
And apparently Palin still thinks she could be president, when she runs away from a few bloggers?
Actually, of course, this whole story stinks like a three-day-old Alaskan King Crab. Stay tuned.

What a great photo

From the Ottawa Citizen


Canada Day fireworks above Parliament Hill. Photo by Mike Carroccetto, The Ottawa Citizen

Great line of the day

From DougJ at Balloon Juice:

I can’t help but be struck by the contrast between the outpouring of sympathy for people who put money in an investment scheme they didn’t understand and the outpouring of contempt for people who took out loans they didn’t understand. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Madoff’s victims are wealthy and white, while subprime loanees are (inaccurately) seen as mostly poor and black.

Bring back 9-11!

Were there any Londoners who missed the Blitz after World War II? Any Russians who pined for another Stalingrad? How about Cambodians reminiscing about the good old days of the Killing Fields?
Yet there are wingnuts in the United States who want thousands of innocent Americans to die in another 9-11 attack, just so they can feel like warriors again.
Following is the most bizarre exchange I think I have ever read:

Michael Scheuer: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It's an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.
Glen Beck: Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.

Fiendishly clever, these terrorists -- they drive Glen Beck and his ilk around the bend by NOT ATTACKING!
Keep up the good work.