Who da thunk it!

I hadn't realized wingnut republican congressperson Michelle Backman has become pro-choice

"That's why people need to continue to go to the town halls, continue to melt the phone lines of their liberal members of Congress," said Bachmann, "and let them know, under no certain circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions."

Face Plant

Well, I tripped and fell yesterday, over a speedbump in a parking lot when I was carrying groceries and not watching where I was going, and my nose got to the ashphalt first but my glasses broke the rest of my fall, so to speak. This morning I could get a job as a circus clown -- I don't need a fake red nose -- at least only one eye is blackened.
I now understand the term "face plant" better than I ever thought I would. It only hurts when I laugh...

Delusions of grandeur

Diaper-wearing Senator David Vittner thinks that he can destroy the Canadian health care system by permitting US citizens to buy drugs in Canada.
Commenter Maryl says

Canada points and laughs. And laughs some more. And falls down on the floor, gasping for breath.
Can we get back to you when we've regained the power of speech?

Great line of the day

Steve quotes Daniel Veniez:

“The Conservative party and its leader are permanently angry,” he goes on. “That’s an ingrained part of who they are and what they represent. On a visceral level, they remain a protest party and have turned themselves into a protest government. They manage by negatives and are genetically incapable of inspiring hope or thinking big. They attack, assassinate character, tell lies, lower the bar on public discourse, and engage in tactical and divisive wedge politics and governance. The tone, strategy, and culture for this government are established by Harper, a cheap-shot artist and cynic of the highest order.

A nut too far

So the world's bestest justice system (tm) would execute an innocent man because judicial privilege trumps actual truth? I think the Christian right wingnut Scalia supporters are going to have a hard time swallowing this one:

“This court has never held,” Justice Scalia wrote, “that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

Great line of the day

Talking about the the assault rifles at Obama's meetings, Rev Paperboy comes up with a new twist:

Imagine the reaction of the teabaggers and town brawl activists and other Glenn Beck fans if a dozen shotgun-toting neo-Black Panthers came and stood outside the president's next town hall meeting to show support for Obama.

Some fun, eh?
Actually, of course, that would be the very last thing Obama would want to see happen.

Twix is off my chocolate list

Well, I guess I won't be buying Twix chocolate bars anymore.
If there is one feature in modern advertising that I do not understand, it is ads that portray the people who use the advertiser's product as asshats or idiots.
Maybe the people who work at ad agencies secretly hate the companies who have hired them to create advertising, so they come up with the stupidest and most offensive commercials they can.
Takes one to know one, I guess.

Bring on the spotlight

On Saturday, cabinet ministers Jason Kenny and Peter Van Loan overturned the deportation order for Burmese asylum-seeker Nay Myo Hein (shown here with his wife Haymar Zin).
And basically, they did it because of the news coverage:

The widely publicized case may have been noticed by Burmese officials, who might target him for criticizing the "totalitarian regime," Kenney said.
"Under normal circumstances I would not have intervened. We face a lot of cases like this, but this is extraordinary, quite exceptional. It's very rare," he said.
"We wouldn't want to return someone to face persecution or punishment. It is a chance we were not prepared to take."

So the more publicity cases like this receive, the better.

Let's focus

After months and months of flap about "single-payer" and "public options", not to mention the stupidity of "death panels" and "pulling the plug on grandma" and "socialist medicare", isn't everyone getting a little tired of talking about the United States health care system?
Particularly irrelevant now, I think, are people who are still wanting to discuss the overall shape of health care reform and how it really should be done differently yada yada yada.
Here's where its at: In 30 or 40 days, the members of Congress are going to be voting on something. Whether it will include a “public option” is the only real issue left, and whether enough Democrats will vote for it to pass it is the only real question.

All of the people in this video are getting seniors discounts now

Woodstock was 40 years ago this weekend.

Somewhere there's music

The great Les Paul died today:



Les Paul & Mary Ford How High the Moon

Secret stories

In comments to my previous post, Dr. Dawg points out that he doesn't believe the comforting little story that Paul Dewar was told about how Suaad Mohamud was really a liar and her problems in Kenya were actually all her own fault.
It sure served its purpose, didn't it?
It shut up everyone in official Ottawa for months. Even now, only Ontario premier McGinty and MP Joe Volpe have come forward.
After Chretien's experience with the Khadrs, no politician wants to go to bat anymore for someone who, embarrassingly, might turn out to be unworthy.
But funny how this is sounding more and more like what happened initially to Mahar Arar -- a "secret" story being passed around official Ottawa that the aggrieved citizen was actually really guilty as charged but of course we can't actually tell this to the media or the Canadian people because they might sue or something, but just trust us, would we lie to you?
UPDATE: And Dan MacTeague.

"Five cases of passport fraud a week in Nairobi"

In another post about the Mohamud case, Dr. Dawg provides original information which explains the story behind the story about why Canadian consular officials in Kenya were so convinced that Suaad was scamming them.
Dawg describes a memo he received from the assistant of NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar explaining what the NDP was told about had happened at the end of May at the Nairobi airport:

There's not a mention of Mohamud on the NDP website. I am aware that my own MP and friend, NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar, who did yeoman work on the Abdelrazik affair, raised the Mohamud matter with DFAIT. Judging from correspondence I received, however, it seems that Foreign Affairs was able to snow the NDP enough to dampen any enthusiasm it might have had to pursue things further. This was what Paul's assistant wrote to me (and told me was not confidential):

Ms. Mohamud was initially stopped by Kenyan officials because her photos did not match. When Ms. Mohamud originally arrive at the airport a photo was taken of her by Kenyan immigration officials and when she arrived at the airport to depart the person who presented Ms. Mohamud passport did not match either the passport photo or the airports entry photo. That’s when CBSA was contacted to investigate. Foreign Affairs and CSBA have conducted four separate investigations and she has failed each one including the visual photo matching tests, extensive interviews, etc. Fingerprints were requested by Foreign Affairs in the hopes that they might match sets in Canada but to date there are no prints on record with CIC or any other agency or police department. Consular services are not being provided to the woman who presented herself as Ms. Mohamud because she is not a Canadian citizen.
I was also informed by DFAIT that CBSA deals with on average 5 cases of passport fraud a week in Nairobi and they have a well developed manner of investigating these types of cases. I have put in a similar request for information from CBSA to make sure their story matches the one I received from DFAIT.

So I think this story explains why official Ottawa -- Conservative, NDP and Liberal -- have not been supporting the Suaad Mohamed case. I hadn't heard anything before about the number of cases of passport fraud Canada is seeing in Nairobi, nor about the photo taken of Suaad when she arrived in Kenya in early May. If this story is true, no wonder Canadian officials would have thought it wasn't really her at the airport in May.
But there are two things I don't understand:
First, in all these cases of passport fraud, how is the person whose passport has been used by someone else ever going to get back into the country -- was the next step for the real Suaad do pop up at the Commission to claim her passport had been stolen overseas?
And now, after the supposedly fake Suaad was stopped at the airport and interviewed and arrested, but then had all this other ID, and was DNA-tested, and it was proven that she actually was and is the real Suaad, why can't anyone admit that a mistake was made?

She's kidding, right?

I can't believe Suaad Mohamud doesn't want to leave as fast as she can:

After waiting for so long, Ms. Mohamud feels like she's now being pushed out too quickly. She doesn't think she will be ready to leave until next week. Once her case has been cleared, she is determined to collect bail and repay her friends before she leaves.
“I have to get that money back,” she said. “They just leave me here for three months and now they come rushing like go, go, go. I have lot of things to take care of.”

Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Maybe this is just the kind of mixed-up blabber that people say sometimes, or that journalists say they say. But it doesn't make sense that she would want to stay in Kenya until they refund the bail money.
This story is getting stranger by the day.

Dog day

For dogs and all of us who love them, August 11 was St. Satchmo Day.